Hunting Midnight (54 page)

After murdering Master Edward and the others, Crow had probably put a pistol into Mr. Johnson’s hand in order to fool the white authorities. It seemed equally possible that he had left the bodies bound and bloody, just where he had murdered them. Whoever was in charge of the investigation might have
concocted
the version of events that had been printed in the
newspaper
to prevent fear on the part of the white citizenry, just as Morri had said. In that case, Crow would be hanged, and most likely in secret.

But if he had planted all the clues and convinced Lily and the other slaves to say nothing, then the police might have believed him innocent. He might even have comforted Mistress Kitty in her grief.

LVI

P
uzzling over the article and the events at River Bend with Morri did wonders for my sense of having some choices in life – and of having the strength to plan for my future.

Violeta’s downturned glances in my presence gave me to understand, however, that she feared my newfound vigor. That she, too, might have preferred our relationship to take a friendlier and more honest course – that she was at the mercy of emotions she did not well understand – never occurred to me.

Despite the evidence from my previous visit, I failed
completely
to understand that Violeta simply did not speak her mind. If I’d reflected carefully on our days together as children, I’d have seen this as consistent with her character. Likely, the desire to unburden herself to others had been beaten out of her, first at her home in Porto, and later in England.

The need to secure productive labor for the River Bend refugees soon eclipsed my personal concerns. To be of help to them, I gathered my courage to leave my room for more than a few hours at a time at the beginning of our fourth week of freedom. It immediately became plain to me that most of them were in need of a routine. Parker in particular had taken to drink and often came home cursing. Morri took me aside on my first day downstairs and told me how once, after an evening at a raucous tavern, he’d clouted Christmas-Eve right across her face,
blackening
his wife’s eye. I realized that I had to act swiftly and that to help them find work it would be necessary to show my empty coat-sleeve in public. That Morri and the others had – in some vague but determined way – been waiting for me to come down
and offer my help from the very start became only too obvious to me. I gained considerable respect for their patience and tact with me.

I passed the next days taking our River Bend guests around to shops and warehouses, endeavoring to find them steady work. Nearly always we received the same false smiles and swift refusals. I remember in particular the owner of a dry-goods store on Wall Street whom I tried to convince to offer work to
Hopper-Anne
, whose English was exceedingly good and clear. Not only did he stare at my missing arm, but he also had the cheek to say, “My customers do not expect to be waited on by a Negress, no matter how fair her skin might be or how nearly white she can talk.”

For better or for worse, losing an arm had diminished none of my Highland temper, and I roundly lambasted him for his hypocrisy.

After a time, it became only too apparent to me that my finding all the former slaves honest work was going to prove impossible. Fortunately, they understood this sooner than I did and took matters into their own hands.

Through the friendships that Hopper-Anne, Lucy, and
Christmas
-Eve made at St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church, they were soon able to find work for Parker, Randolph, and
Backbend
, as stevedores for Harkness & Co., a private shipping concern on South Street. Hopper-Anne was contracted soon afterward at a black-owned bakery on Chambers Street, and Christmas-Eve and Lucy started as scullery maids at Spear Tavern on Broadway.

Violeta offered invaluable assistance to the rest. She sat at her desk in her sitting room and composed a moving letter soliciting advice from Francis Lemoyne, the eldest son of the old man she had cared for. Though he harbored a lingering resentment over her inheritance of the house we were encamped in at present, he nevertheless contacted some Quaker farmers he knew and
succeeded
in obtaining offers of work for all the former slaves of River Bend who wished for a life in a rural setting.

In the end, all but Morri and Randolph seized this
opportunity
. Randolph decided to remain as a stevedore in New York
with his children, and we were soon able to find them a suitable flat on Bowling Green.

“No way I’m ever going back to a life of field work,” Morri told me. “You know, John, life doesn’t get much better than getting away with saying no.”

Several days later, Morri came home singing and panting at the same time. She was so electric that she went hopping around the sitting room. While I puffed on my pipe, she told me that on one of her walks through the city she’d met the headmaster of the Church Street School for Negro Children, a former runaway named William Arthur. “He told me I could start giving reading and writing lessons right away! He doesn’t mind that I don’t speak so perfectly. Or that I’m not much older than the children. He doesn’t mind one drop!”

After we’d drunk a wee glass of port wine to her success, she sat on the arm of my chair and squeezed my hand hard. Her face was scrunched up tight, as though she had a big secret to tell me.

“What?” I asked.

“I’d like for you to adopt me, John, but only on the condition that if my father returns, he can adopt me back.”

I received the first of my mother’s replies to my letters during our seventh week in New York.
John,
she wrote, the nib of her pen having scratched through the paper with irritation,
if
you
do
not
tell
me
precisely
the
nature
of
your
“mishap”
in
South
Carolina
in
your
next
letter
(to
be
written
today!
),
then
I
promise
you
I
shall
show
up
on
your
doorstep
uninvited
and
give
you
a
lecture
of
a
kind
that
you
have
never
heard,
but
plainly
ought
to
have!

A few days later, while I was still pondering how to write of my injury to my mother, Backbend, Lucy, Hopper-Anne, Scooper, Parker, Christmas-Eve, Frederick, Sarah, Taylor, and Martha boarded carriages in front of Violeta’s house for the journey sixty miles north to two Quaker farms located near the town of Southeast. They would earn good steady wages and their
children
would be able to attend a local schoolhouse. The Quakers –
who by now seemed to represent to me the possibility for
goodness
in our world – had generously agreed to help them build cottages as well.

As their carriages departed, I heard Morri humming “Barbara Allen” to herself. I joined her for a verse. Thankfully, this was to set me thinking seriously again about how to find Midnight.

LVII

I
n all my weeks of anguish I had hardly forgotten Midnight, but rereading his letter in New York had convinced me that he must have had a vision of his own end – a Mantis-dream.

I see now that – even more than the loss of my arm or Violeta’s distance – this passive acceptance of his death had made my weeks of solitude so grim. I have discovered that my times of greatest misery have always been related to a feeling of defeat, and I have nearly always found my way back to health by beginning a new campaign.

So, with Mother’s gold coins and what was left of my savings, I decided to publish a request for Midnight – or anyone knowing of his fate – to write to me. I would place these advertisements in newspapers all over the United States, from New York to the western territories, every week for as long as it took to receive a reply. Of course, even if he was still alive, I could not be sure that he was in the habit of reading news of any sort, but there was every likelihood that he knew someone who was.

Morri was eager to help write our announcement, which we finalized as follows:

Seeking
Midnight,
Samuel,
or
Tsamma.
We
saw
you
from
afar
and
we
are
dying
of
hunger.

Anyone
with
information,
please
write
to
the
Gemsbok
care
of
Senhora
Violeta,
73
John
Street,
New
York.

I
have
found
a
beautiful
feather
that
you
thought
was
lost
to
you
forever
and
have
it
safe
with
me.
Go
slow.

We did not wish to put anything in the announcement about River Bend or mention Morri’s name, fearing the attention of slave-traders who might wish to kidnap her.

The second part of my plan was to become my most important work in America. I decided to compile a list of slaves and freed blacks in South Carolina, along with their residences. Later, I would add the other states of the South. This seemed essential to me, for whenever the great destruction of slavery finally came, in five years or fifty, those who had been in bondage would face the near-impossible task of finding brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children who had been lost to them for many years. They would desperately need such a list.

It was a huge undertaking, and I knew it would take many years and enormous effort to be even close to complete. Even so, the more I thought of the plan, the more exciting it became.

To create my list, I knew I would need hundreds of
correspondents
from all over South Carolina – people willing to survey the slaves, freed blacks, and mulattos in their vicinity and write down their full names and locations, as well as those of their kin.

The Quakers would help, I was quite sure, as indeed they have. And among the congregation of Jews in Charleston, I have so far found several industrious and generous souls as well.

My first correspondents were Isaac and Luisa, naturally enough. I wrote to them shortly after I received their letter, giving them an account of our escape, and they have so far provided me with one hundred and twelve names and locations.

Census reports have indicated that at least two hundred and sixty thousand Negroes are held in bondage in South Carolina alone, and so I plainly have much work in my future. But I am neither deterred nor daunted. The list will grow exponentially as more people learn of it. All of nature itself is on my side in this battle, I am certain.

On November the Fourteenth, a week after the former slaves departed for upstate New York, I signed Morri’s adoption papers. As I was not an American citizen, this procedure was handled through the British Embassy. She decided to register herself as Memoria Tsamma Stewart, which I thought a splendid and unique name. To celebrate, she and I took a ferry boat to Brooklyn, where we dined at a waterfront tavern that admitted
Negroes. I drank a wee bit too much whiskey to celebrate, but Morri guided me safely back to our ferry boat.

I had kept away from the Church Street School till then in order to avoid embarrassing her, but I now decided to make a fatherly inspection of her place of work. Sitting at the back of her classroom, the pride I felt in seeing her free and useful confirmed to me that I had not been wrong in going to watch her.

While listening to her children read aloud a fable by Aesop, I felt Midnight’s presence next to me. I could see him grinning like a mad fool.

After visiting Morri’s school, I ceased questioning whether losing my arm had been a just sacrifice for her freedom. Seeing the little ones flocked around her, tugging on the bright crimson dress I’d bought for her, I stopped comparing miseries, as she herself had advised. I am grateful for that, for at one time I thought my selfishness would be my undoing.

Other events also conspired to restore me to full and honest vigor, the first of which was completely unexpected.

I still had not written back to my mother explaining my injury. This cowardice, combined with my longing for my daughters and my uncertainty as to what would now be best for them, plunged me into a sudden spiral of despair and insomnia. I locked my door and would allow neither Morri nor Violeta inside. I smoked too much and made myself sick. What I did not know was that Violeta had another key. She let herself into my room before dawn on the Nineteenth of November, while I was smoking Papa’s pipe like a fiend, and announced, “I can bear our struggle no longer, John. If you promise to say nothing afterward about what has taken place between us or what you wish to happen in the future, I shall lie with you now.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, sensing both our destinies turning around this moment.

“Yes,” she replied.

I walked to her, hope and gratitude in my heart. Kissing her lips – as I’d wanted to for more than two decades – sent such an electric charge through me that I felt myself tugged out of my own body.

To be with her meant everything to me; I was at the center of the world. There, deep down inside our union, my lost arm was not so burdensome a handicap as I had thought.

Afterward, she lay her head against my shoulder and drifted off to sleep.

At length, I thought of Francisca. She seemed so very different from Violeta; they were women born under constellations
guarding
separate territories of the night. Perhaps it was that, more than anything else, that made me believe my wife would not begrudge me any happiness I might now find in my new life.

I stroked Violeta’s hair while she slept, as I’d always desired. The simple movement of my fingers calmed me, and the soft feel of her made me believe that I’d finally reached home. I knew now that all would be well between us.

Indeed, over the next weeks, our relations were everything I’d hoped they’d become. We went for long walks into the northern wilds of Manhattan Island, watching blue jays, kingfishers, and other birds more unfamiliar to me. She collected fire-colored oak leaves, and I bought her flowers. We munched chestnuts in the parks and chased each other up the staircase. For the American holiday of Thanksgiving she prepared a turkey with cranberry preserves. For a sweet, she made me
rabanadas,
as my mother had taught her. We never discussed what had taken place between us because there was now no need. In the silence of our bed at night, it seemed to me we’d finally made up for Daniel’s death. Our union was a triumph over betrayals, madness, gravestones, and forever good-byes. It was proof that resurrection was possible. Perhaps it was even another miracle.

I was not sure if Violeta could have a child at this late date, but when we merged in the night I desperately hoped that she could.

The second event to spur my personal renewal was my decision to begin making tile panels and pottery again, and for this purpose I had the small shed at the back of Violeta’s garden cleared. I purchased a secondhand potter’s wheel and tile-making tools.

Centering a pot with one hand proved not nearly so difficult as I had imagined, and within a few days I was able to make modest
bowls, plates, and jugs. I also finalized my sketches for a tile panel of field slaves I wished to make, though I found that without my arm I did not yet have the stamina for such an ambitious project.

I finally sent a letter to my mother and daughters explaining that I wanted to stay in New York and requesting that Esther and Graça come as soon as possible. I apologized for disrupting their lives yet again and would explain all upon their arrival. About my arm, I said only that I had received an injury while in the South, but that it was nothing to be concerned about; my American physicians had pronounced me in fine health. I had not yet found Midnight, I said, but I was now fully engaged in the hunt once again.

By now, I understood that I was fond of Violeta in a way that went far beyond declarations of passion and gestures of affection. In a vague way, I knew we were made of different elements, but that seemed all the better, as though our alloy would prove stronger than any purity.

One day when we were out walking, I broached the subject that had been consuming me for so long. “Violeta, I’d like to have a child – to start a new family with you in this youthful country.”

She went pale. I sat her down on the nearest stoop and squatted next to her. “What is it? I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I am, John. It’s just a shock. Give me a moment.”

“If you’re worried about my daughters, I’m sure they’d love having a baby brother or sister. Though we mustn’t allow them to choose the name,” I said with a laugh. “They prefer all the worst ones.”

She reached up with her hand to touch my mouth, and I kissed her fingertips. She said, “Enough, John, let us talk about it later. I’m just too stunned right now to speak.”

I reasoned I’d give her a day or two to adjust to the idea before speaking of it again. The next evening, however, Morri and I
were obliged to dine at the home of William Arthur, her headmaster. Violeta had asked to be excused, as relations between her and Morri were still a bit tentative. We returned home much earlier than we’d expected, as Mr. Arthur was an early riser and was always in bed by ten o’clock.

Finding Violeta absent from the sitting room, I took the stairs two at a time to our bedroom, planning to dive upon her, but she was not there. On intuition, I went to the window of the room in which I’d previously slept. I discovered her sitting in her garden, swathed in a black Portuguese mantilla. In her hands was the tabletop Daniel had carved for her just before his death. She was sobbing.

I ran down to her, but nothing I could say or do would stop her tears.

“Please tell me what’s wrong – is it Daniel? I often think of him too, you know.”

Looking away from me, speaking in Portuguese, she said, “I do not love you, John. Not as you would wish. Not like I loved Daniel.” She reached a trembling hand to her mouth. “I never shall, you see, so we must never have a child.”

“Then why … why did you come to me?”

“It was the only way to rid us both of the angry resentment that had developed between us. It was the only way to help you.” Gazing up at me with eyes full of sorrow, she said, “I warned you that you ought not to fall in love with me. I did everything I could to show you that.”

I understood then that she had kept so much distance between us because she did indeed wish to save me from herself. In an odd way, she had been more generous through our weeks of
disappointment
than she had been in sharing her bed with me. There had been no true complications between us from her point of view; she had simply never loved me.

I stood up, sensing my life spinning slowly to a stop. But I was not angry or even sad. Though it was a paradox, I felt both hollow and very heavy. I felt that I was composed of all the thoughts I’d had of her over the last twenty years – all my prayers and wishes. I was very tired – of myself most of all.

“You did indeed warn me,” I told her in a voice of stone,
unwilling to break down. “I genuinely thank you for that. And for trying to help. I see now what a dilemma I put you in.”

I pressed my dry lips to her cold cheek and glided up the stairs as a specter. From my room, I watched her sitting in her garden for more than an hour. Then she went inside, leaving the tabletop on her bench. Staring at it through that forest of dark weeds, imagining my face as Daniel had carved it, I saw how I’d never wanted to understand the plain truth of our relationship. Even as a lass she had told me that I could hope for nothing more than friendship.

When she returned to her garden, it was with a long knife. My heartbeat jumped and my eyesight dimmed; I was sure she was about to take her own life.