Counternarratives (30 page)

Instead I said, “I was living in Chicago for a few years then I decided
to come back home. I posted my bond to stay here, have been working steadily and
decided to settle down.”

“Chicago,” Sawyer said, looking at Huckleberry, “sounds like our old
friend has gone and got pretty fancy on us. What do you think about that, Huck?”

“I been as far south as Mississippi and over to Louisville, Kentucky but
I never been to Chicago myself,” Huck replied.

“All kinds of things going on up in Chicago,” Tom said.

“Jim ain't said nothing about all that, just that he been there and come
back here,” Huck said.

“Some go to Chicago and get ideas,” Tom said.

The angles of that face, like broken porcelain, pulled apart and
recombined until I almost did not recognize him. “Well, sounds to me like Jim is
keeping himself out of trouble, and the worst thing for anybody these days is
getting caught up in all that trouble, getting involved with people like Lovejoy or
Torrey or that new agitator writer Mrs. Stowe what likes to stir up a whole heap of
trouble too.”

I remained silent, thinking I should tell these two that two years ago,
I consulted the omens and auguries, which told me that I should head down to St.
Louis, perhaps continuing on to Kansas or Oklahoma territory, so I said goodbye to
my children, promising I would write them every other week and send money for food
and books and clothes, and goodbye to Sadie May, who could move to Timbuctoo with
her new lovers for all I cared so long as she did not take my children there. I left
Chicago first thing in the morning to walk back and hitch my way to my native state,
though this time with my papers on me, saying James Alton Rivers, free in all places
and at all times, determined nobody, LaFleur or anyone else, was going to put me
under bond. Eventually I reached the city after crossing around the Indian mounds in
Cahokia and lodged with my half-brother Ezekiel, who had been manumitted and left
Hannibal first second he could, running around with the last name Carillon after the
family that had held him, though I eventually convinced him to change it Rivers too.
Through him I secured a job cleaning up and doing repairs on a tavern building owned
by an older gentleman named Mr. Wallace Wallace, who had gained his freedom in the
1830s and was said, because of his silver eyes, to be the unacknowledged son of one
of the oldest families in the county. Soon I was running that tavern since Mr.
Wallace Wallace had so much other business, involving numbers and cards and
palliatives, and sometimes ladies and studs, to attend to. There was a good number
of those white men in the city who liked the delights that Mr. Wallace Wallace
provided, but you always have to be careful when you get too deep in the cut with
those kinds of folks, because you can turn up like Mr. Wallace Wallace, with his
silk ties and ruby studded pocketwatch and silver eyes and pearl-handed pistol,
which he did not hesitate to brandish if needed, floating face down in the Des Peres
River, with no cut at all.

You could say Mr. Wallace Wallace left a welter, I want to tell these
two, if you are trying to be both cruel and truthful, but he had fathered a number
of children by different wives and girlfriends, some free and some still in bondage,
some on the Missouri side and some over in Brooklin, right next to East St. Louis,
and I heard tell that he had left another brood all along the river far north as
Minnesota from the time he gained his papers up till now. As it was, I spoke to
several people of the kind who could resolve the question of the building's title
while I took to running the tavern, though I had to finagle to get it into my name.
As soon as I did I sold it to a white man who planned to tear it and every other
building on the block down so he could throw up a warehouse, since in those days
white people from every corner of their world, some from all across the free states
and some from the Southern states, some from Ireland and some from Germany, were
showing up as if the wind brought them, and they like to make money and take care of
each other and that tiny tavern was in their way. I took the money, which was more
than a servant's wages, and bought another tavern cheap from a man leaving for
Kansas, even closer to the river near the railroad tracks on Sycamore, from the roof
you could even see Duncan's Island where they carried out executions and lynchings.
Ezekiel painted the sign with my name on it, Rivers Tavern, and I got down to
business, always making sure that I watered down the liquor and allowed few tabs or
overnighters, borrowing only when absolutely necessary, and I eventually found myself and
Ezekiel a pistol each, mine nesting in the back of my trousers, to ensure nobody
rolled us, though I regularly paid off the police and a representative of my ward's
alderman every other Thursday, always in the morning and a few cents more than they
asked for, which meant I never had any trouble, no trouble at all.

For all my success in business, I have never had any luck with women,
which I would never dare share with these two, and the first one I took up with in
St. Louis, just to have a woman more so than I really liked her, had something going
with another woman at the same time. I broke it off but she sent the second woman to
come talk to me, saying they could make accommodations if I could. The way it
happens in the Bible the man would take several wives and not the other way around,
but this woman, Augustine, had a way about her that could bend you to her will. The
woman who came calling, with her tight curls and skin as black as mine and her limp,
was named Louisa, and I ended up moving in with the two of them and Augustine's two
girls who were halfway to adult age and not so amenable to their mother's guidance,
especially since she was too caught up with her own business, a sure disaster when
dealing with young people. Louisa was interested in learning about healing and
reading the signs, and after a while I found myself growing quite fond of Louisa
herself, and she confessed she had told Augustine she'd better keep me on as soon as
she laid eyes on me, so she could get to know me, with my shoulders of coal and
hairy legs and skillful way around a bar and a ledger book, and I found myself taken
with this short skinny woman with skin the color of midnight and lips always parted
as if posing a rhetorical question and her love of books, midnight eyes, and that
leg broken during her bondage and never properly set, and that was how all that
began. Still I warned her we ought to be careful, not just because of Augustine, who
it turns out had other things happening on the side herself and was fine to let us
have our own, but with her girls, and because of the law which saw fit to jail or
send people down the Mississippi who didn't follow the rules and conventions.
Louisa, in her fashion, said several weeks later, having joined me in running the
tavern, don't worry about all that, we live in a frontier area, nobody cares about
what we're doing, and if the law comes we can always flee west and request to live
among the Indians, and there's nothing the law could do to us then.

Instead I said, “My business, Huckleberry, is just working hard and
living my life, and I don't know nothing about no Lovejoy or Torrey”—though I knew
good and well who they both were, what free man didn't know the names of the
abolitionist heroes—“or the Mrs. Stowe lady”—and who in the last year hadn't ever
heard of her or her book?—“and I haven't ever even considered going west.”

Huckleberry nodded, but Sawyer was watching me closely. He said nothing
for a while, until I moved to take my leave and walk away. As soon as I stirred he
laughed, more a cackle than an expression of humor, leaned close to me and said
loudly, as passersby looked on, “You'd better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good
thing we know you but you walking these streets like they belong to you, and they
don't to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so you watch
it, cause the time'll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had
enough.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder as he said this, and I thought to cock
him cold in his wire-lipped mouth, but I did not want to do anything to lose my
tavern or my freedom, so I said, “I hear that, Tom,” and he said, losing his laugh,
though Huckleberry was almost smiling now, “You call me Mr. Tom Sawyer, Sir, old
man,” and I said, “YesMissTomSawyerSoilMan,” so fast it wasn't clear whether I'd
left out the “Mr.” or the “Sir” or added the “Old Man,” and he looked hard at me,
almost smiling, reminding me in a firm, cold voice, “Boy, I'm warning you, you had
better watch yourself.”

Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a
quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he
wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep
out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is about ready to break wide open,
and I sure don't want to see you get swallowed up.”

I told him I would not get involved in any such things, though I was
going to do whatever I wanted within reason especially if it was going to ensure
that no other person would ever be enslaved, and not a single thing except maybe
death was going to swallow me up or see that happen to me, certainly nothing
involving him or that other one. I offered the two my good wishes and farewells, not
moving yet watching as they walked away, Sawyer's head and arms gyring like a
nickelodeon picture, Huck nodding but never glancing back, until they vanished into
the horizon near Mill Creek.

I never came across either one of them over the next few years, not even
once, then the war began so perhaps both had moved away to some other place, Sawyer
to Nevada or Oregon, where some of the local people were heading, Huckleberry to
Kansas, or perhaps they had already headed off to fight on the Confederate side.
There was a pressing question about which way Missouri would go since Governor
Claiborne had sided with the insurrectionists, then General Lyon came and the
Germans faced down and fired on the insurrectionists, all those scrubby Dutch with
their rifles from the federal arsenal, though nobody I knew could believe white
people would fire on other white people en masse like that. But they did and that
was only the opening of the war here, as well as the sum of the fighting, at least
for the people who stayed in St. Louis. By this time Johnny O. had come to live with
me, and at first didn't take so well to Louisa, though he stayed with us for about a
year, finding work down on the levee with all the steamboats bringing goods to
provision the troops, and in his off-time studied the healing arts with me when I
wasn't working the bar. He fell in love with a girl who was still bound to a family
out in Bellefontaine, so I gave him money to go back to Chicago, so she could become
free and they could marry. He left late one night and I was wrecked to see him go,
but he wrote to tell me that after being stopped by the river patrols they got
through, and he wrote me letters every other week, like I used to do with his sister
and him, promising he was going to come back and fight.

Right around the middle of the summer of 1863 the army announced that we
could sign up, at the Schofield Barracks, and though I was over 40 now, 46 to be
exact, I felt it was my duty to contribute directly to the struggle, though I was
sure they would say, Mr. Rivers, you are far too old, but rumor was an old black man
had been the first casualty when the battles began in Washington, so if he was
willing and able to serve why couldn't I, and I walked over there anyhow. Louisa
protested my decision but, without conceding that what I was doing was right, agreed
to stay in town and run the tavern while I was gone. It tore me apart to say goodbye
to her, us never having left the other's side since we had taken up house together,
but I knew both from all the signs at my disposal and deep in my core that at war's
end I would walk through that tavern door and see her standing there.

They took me and we, the First Missouri Colored Troops, men mostly young
but some old from in state and some from points north, west and south, mustered out
not long thereafter, and I will tell the reporter about all of this, about each
battle from the time we crossed the Meramec, then headed to Helena, and the entire
journey, with every battle and firefight all the way down to Texas, but only once I
have finished telling him about the second time I saw that face, which was after we
had already reached Los Brazos de Santiago, near Brownsville. Have you ever noticed
how on the decisive day the light comes through the trees a certain way, how the
patterns of the future reveal themselves as a ghost language and you got to do more
than just pay attention but use all the knowledge and wisdom you have ever gained to
interpret it? Because I had been studying on just that when Sydnor, from my company,
ran right up to me hollering, all out of breath, “Colonel talking about how despite
the cease-fire we might scrap it up one more time with the rebels,” repeating
himself until Bergamire and the rest of them closed his trap with their glares. I
listened to him since the light that morning was not shining like on the morning
that I chose to cross the Mississippi with Sadie May and the children all those
years before, the sun's beams not drawing a path to the shore, not touching and
catching and caressing the bluewood branches there in Texas just so, though in
Hannibal it had been crab apples and cherries, the gleaming dressing the leaves with
its omens and auguries, printing clues in shadowed patterns in the grass and soil
you just needed to discern if you could, because the real test is always to go
beyond mere guessing to following the map the world around you sets forth.

Soon enough here came Anderson, stomping over from the area of the
officers' tents, grinning broadly like the lottery man had called his name, but
unlike Sydnor he knew not to mess with me when I was studying on something, so he
stood beside me as my eyes followed the light's shafts down into the greenery,
tracing it with my fingers, smelling it, listening to the aftersounds and the
silence enfolding it and only then did he utter anything, only when he was pretty
sure I was done, Sydnor watching me too until he couldn't sit no more and hurried
over to hear what Anderson had to say. Excuse me but what news you got for us, Pop
James? is what this young man, once in bondage yet who knew how to write out notes
like a schoolmaster and recite chapter and verse from the Bible and Longfellow
without mixing up a single word, and who behaved like a gentleman when he spoke to
an elder like me, asked me.