Flight to Canada (2 page)

He and Judy traveled a lot. Now they were in the Ashanti Holy Land. Their last trip out they had brought back some serpents. They had given Quickskill the whole first floor of their Castle. It was airy and had big spacious rooms. Mountains, meadows, and the Atlantic Ocean could be seen through the windows. Quickskill would write Uncle Robin’s story in such a way that, using a process the old curers used, to lay hands on the story would be lethal to the thief. That way his Uncle Robin would have the protection that Uncle Tom (Josiah Henson) didn’t. (Or did he merely use another technique to avenge his story? Breathing life into Byron.)

Raven has the Richmond newspaper spread out in front of him. Princess Quaw Quaw has been arrested carrying a fifteen-foot balance pole, two American flags at each end, while walking on the steel cables of the Golden Gate Bridge. In the photo, crowds were hurling pellets at the officers for interfering with Quaw Quaw’s act. She was beginning to become an international event, and the media speculated about her every action. She was becoming the female Blondin, a characterization she resented. “Why don’t they call him the male Quaw Quaw Tralaralara?” she once protested in an interview.

This is not to say that she became a media bug. She insisted on her privacy and occasionally there were photos of her wandering about her husband’s yacht, nude, wearing sunglasses, as he docked off Trinidad, Majorca or Sausalito.

The note she had left Quickskill on the dresser of the Eagle Hotel had read merely, “Gone South,” with her signature scrawled underneath.

He had sent a note to her in care of her agent:

Dear Quaw Quaw Wherever or Whoever:

Maybe one day people of your class will realize that people of my class must grovel, worm and root our way through life fending off the bad birds so we’ve little time to take those we love under our wing. And that we become like mythical Goofus birds, invented by lumbermen I think, who fly backwards and build their nests upside down. We get smashed and our endings are swift.

And she wrote back:

Dear Raven:

And I thought our people were bad, worshipping Bears, Turtles, Ravens, Coyotes and Eagles, but your people worship any old thing or make an “object of reverence” of just about any “new things,” as in that HooDoo expression you once taught me, “Only Ghosts Hate New Things,” and then that morning I saw you, in our berth, on the steamer, Lake Erie mumbling before it, the typewriter was sitting there and seemed to be crouched like a black frog with white clatter for teeth. You thought I was asleep.

And it went on that way until one day she signed a letter “See you soon.” And that was that. She’d be back. She always came back. And they always had quarrels about “the human condition,” as her Columbia Professors would say.

“Flight to Canada” was the problem. It made him famous but had also tracked him down. It had pointed to where he, 40s and Stray Leechfield were hiding. It was their bloodhound, this poem “Flight to Canada.” It had tracked him down just as his name had. The name his mother gave him before she went away into the Fog Woman. It had dogged him. “Evil Dogs Us.” Yes, indeed. His poem flew just as his name had flown. Raven. A scavenger to some, a bringer of new light to others. The one who makes war against the Ganooks of this world. As quick on his opponents as a schooner on a slaver. “Flight to Canada” had given him enough mint to live on. “Flight to Canada” had taken him all the way to the White House, where he shook hands with Abe the Player, as history would call him.

He had never gotten along with Uncle Robin in slavery, but away from slavery they were the best of friends. He would try to live up to the confidence Robin had in him by writing a good book. “You put witchery on the word,” Robin said. He would try to put witchery on the word.

Uncle Robin had turned down an offer from Jewett and Company of Boston’s best-known writer and had put his story in the hands of Quickskill: “Now you be careful with my story,” Robin said. “Treat that story as precious as old Swille treated his whips.” They both knew what that meant.

Bangalang came into the room from the kitchen. She was about to leave to return to the Frederick Douglass Houses where she and her husband lived. His carriage was outside waiting for her.

“Is there anything else I can get for you?” she asked Quickskill.

“No,” he said, and then, “Bangalang?”

“Yes, Quickskill?”

She had gotten a little grey. They had all gotten a little grey.

“Do you hear from Mammy Barracuda and Cato the Graffado?”

“Last I heard, she sang before the last reunion of Confederate Soldiers. They—”

“What happened, Bangalang?” She’d begun to laugh.

“She sang a chorus from ‘Dixie.’ Well, I have to tell you when she got to those lines that go ‘Will run away—Missus took a decline, oh / Her face was de color of bacon-rine-oh!’, the old soldiers took Mammy on their shoulders and marched her out from the convention hall. Cato was leading the parade like a cheerleader, I’m telling you. Well, if you need something else, there’s an apple pie in the kitchen.” She turned and walked out.

Curious. Even in the Confederate anthem there was a belle fading away and losing her color. What was this fascination with declining belles in the South? What was the South all about? I’ll have to include all of this in my story, Quickskill thought.

Quickskill drank his coffee. He had a swell. His belly was up again. He spent so much time in thought, he forgot about his stomach. That was the writing business all right. He’d been writing since he could remember; his “Flight to Canada” was to him what blacks were to old Abe.

“Abe Lincoln’s last card or Rouge et Noir” was the caption under the wood engraving printed in
Punch
magazine. It showed Lincoln beating a Confederate with his ace of spades. Inside the card’s black spade was the grinning Negro. The engraving was by Sir John Tenniel, a Royalist. He’d have to write all of this in Robin’s story.

Raven was the first one of Swille’s slaves to read, the first to write and the first to run away. Master Hugh, the bane of Frederick Douglass, said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he’ll take an ell. If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write. And this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”

Master Hugh could have taught Harriet Beecher Stowe a thing or two.

*
Sometimes spelled Griffado.

P
EOPLE DON’T KNOW WHEN
the Swilles came to Virginia, and the Swilles ain’t talkin. Perhaps that’s why they live behind those great gates one reaches through mossy land and swamps full of so many swine that Swilles’ land has been named Swine’rd, Virginia.

According to the family records we do have, we know that the first Swille, a zealous slave trader, breeder and planter, was “indescribably deformed.” He did his business from the tower of a Castle he built on his grounds, said to be the very replica of King Arthur’s in the Holy City of Camelot, the Wasp’s Jerusalem, the great Fairy City of the old Feudal Order, of the ancient regime; of knights, ladies, of slaves; of jousting; of toasting; Camelot, a land of endless games. Seeing who could pull the Sword out of an anvil of iron. Listening to the convoluted prophecies of Merlin the Druid. Listening to Arthur and his knights, so refined and noble that they launched a war against the Arabs for the recovery of an
objet d’art,
yet treated their serfs like human plows, de-budding their women at will; torturing and witchifying the resistance with newfangled devices. Dracula, if you recall, was a count.

Arthur was England’s Alfonzo of the Kongo, the Pope’s native ruler who saw to it that the “heathen art” was destroyed. He was John Wallace of Hydaburg, the Christian native who persuaded the Tlingits to “cut down and burn” the great totem poles of Klinkwan. Arthur, whose father, Uther, according to Tennyson, was “dark,” even “well-nigh black” and so “sweet” some took him to be “less a man.”

Arthur made war against the Saxons and the old Druid gods who are depicted as monsters in his Romance. His descendants came to his America and made war against the gods of “Indians” and Africans.

Camelot became Swille’s bible, and one could hear him in the tower, giggling elflike as he came to each new insight; and they heard him dancing as Camelot, a fairy tale to most, became for him an Anglican Grand Design.

After Swille “crossed over,” his dream was taken up by Swille II, Rockland Swille, hero of the Battle of Buena Vista in “Mr. Polk’s War.” This Swille became “afflicted,” when he returned to Swine’rd, with an “inexplicable malady.” His wife was shut up in a sanitarium after witnessing what became known as “Swille’s malady” in the secret books of the old medical library, shelved so far back in the cavernous stacks.

His son, Swille III, was named Arthur because by that time a group of intelligent Virginia Planters had organized a branch of the Circle of the Golden Dawn and one of its notions was that the “Coming of Arthur” was at hand. (In certain books, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, also an Anglican, is referred to as “Our Arthur” or “The South’s Arthur.”) This group of Planters held meetings at a private Richmond club called the Magnolia Baths and was said to have exerted considerable influence during the proceedings of the secret Montgomery Convention where the plans for the Confederacy were drawn.

Arthur Swille received the licentious Hedonist Award for 1850 and was known in London and Paris circles as a gay blade, until he returned to Swine’rd to manage his Family’s great fortune after Swille II had mysteriously “pined away.”

This Swille, Swille III, Arthur Swille, obeyed no nation’s laws and once flogged Queen Victoria, a weekend guest at his English Country Manor, after a copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
turned up in a search of her room.

Others say it was because Victoria refused to sell Swille III a barony; according to insiders, Victoria stuck to her guns, moaning, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” grunting, “Europe is not for sale, Mr. Swille,” as Swille’s stud, Jim, brought the lash down upon the red striated back of the Queen of England. A proud day for the British Empire.

Security is stiff on the Swilles’ ground. Patrollers, called “paddies” by the slaves, reconnoiter the slave quarters.

Some say it’s due to Swille’s bitterness about the unfortunate and untimely death of his son, the anthropologist, whose head was returned to him in a box, covered with what a biopsy revealed as cells from a disgruntled crocodile.

The Snake Society went on satellite television to take credit for it, and added an especially grisly sidelight to a most heinous crime by joking that the head was covered with crocodile regurgitation because Mitchell was too rich for the crocodile, and that the crocodile just kinda laid around on the banks these days, wearing Bloomingdale shades, and was calling himself Aldo the Gourmet Crocodile.

It was reported from the Castle that Swille fired a pistol into the television set when he heard that, and in reprisal immediately ordered the execution of the North American crocodile in such a fiendish manner that by 1977 there will be only eighteen North American crocodiles left. Excuse me, twelve.

To add to this general mood of dolor and dread, three slaves—40s, Stray Leechfield and Raven Quickskill—have vanished.

T
HE MASTER’S STUDY. ARTHUR
Swille has just completed the pushups he does after his morning nourishment, two gallons of slave mothers’ milk. Uncle Robin, his slave, is standing against the wall, arms folded. He is required to dress up as a Moorish slave to satisfy one of Swille’s cravings.

“Robin?”

“Yessir, Massa Swille.”

“What are the people down in the quarters saying about those kinks who took off with themselves?”

“Don’t get down to the slave village much any more, Massa Swille. After you and Cato the Graffado put out directions that none was to tarry there, I tain’t. We were gettin all of our information from Stray Leechfield, the runner, but now that he’s … well, after he …”

“Yes, you don’t have to say it, Robin. He’s gone. Stray Leechfield, 40s and [voice drops] Quickskill. They contracted
Drapetomania,
as that distinguished scientist Dr. Samuel Cartwright described in that book you read to me …”

“Dysaethesia Aethipica,
Mr. Swille?”

“Exactly, Robin, that disease causing Negroes to run away. Of course, I’m not a sentimentalist. I won’t sleep until they’ve returned. I mean, I’m the last man to go against science, and if a slave is sick, then he must be rejuvenated—but I just can’t permit anyone to run over me like that. The other slaves will get ideas. So, even though they’re sick—they must be returned.”

“But suppose they paid you off. Would you try to recover even then?”

“Look, Robin, if they’d came to me and if they’d asked to buy themselves, perhaps we could have arranged terms. But they didn’t; they furtively pilfered themselves. Absconded. They have committed a crime, and no amount of money they send me will rectify the matter. I’d buy all the niggers in the South before I’d accept a single dime for or from them … Quickskill, I’ll never be able to figure out. Why, he ate in the house and was my trusted bookkeeper. I allowed him to turn the piano pages when we had performers in the parlor, even let him wear a white wig—and he’d give all of this up. Well,” he said, pounding on the top of his desk, “they won’t get away with it. One thing my father told me: never yield a piece of property. Not to a man, not to the State. Before he died, that’s what he told me and my brothers.”

Dressed in his robes, Swille reaches out his hand, which embraces a wineglass. Uncle Robin walks over to the spirits cabinet, returns and pours him a gobletful, goes back to his place. Uncle Robin knows his place—his place in the shadows.

“Robin, what have you heard about this place up North, I think they call it Canada?” Swille says, eying Robin slyly.

“Canada. I do admit I have heard about the place from time to time, Mr. Swille, but I loves it here so much that … that I would never think of leaving here. These rolling hills. Mammy singing spirituals in the morning before them good old biscuits. Watching ‘Sleepy Time Down South’ on the Late Show. That’s my idea of Canada. Most assuredly, Mr. Swille, this my Canada. You’d better believe it.”