The Water Dancer: A Novel (21 page)

I began to feel a shift in the temperature of things.

“I know well the methods and reputation of Corrine Quinn. They are not my methods, Hiram, no matter their aim.”

Raymond shook his head now and looked to the ground. “This ritual burial, the hunting, the chasing, it is all abhorrent to me. In that spirit, I am compelled to say that you are owed an apology. I feel that what was done to you, no matter the aims, was wrong.”

“It was not you who did it,” I said.

“Yes, but it is my cause. It is my army. And while I cannot balance Corrine’s accounts, I can tend to my own. And it was wrong, not just on her behalf, but to our cause”—and here Raymond paused a moment before looking back at me—“no matter what power may beat in your breast.”

“I understand,” I said. “It is nothing. I understand.”

Now Raymond took in a deep breath. “No, Hiram,” he said. “I do not think you truly do.”

“I know more than you give me credit for, Hiram,” Bland said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean, I knew it all. I knew about Sophia, all about your feelings. It is my business to know. And that is why I know not just how you felt then, nor just how you feel now. I also know exactly where Sophia is being held.”

“What?” I said. My head throbbed with almost the same force it had throbbed last night.

“We had to know,” Bland said. “What kind of agents would we be if we didn’t know exactly who you ran with and what became of them?”

“I asked Corrine,” I said. “She said it was out of her power.”

“I know, Hiram, I know. It was wrong. I can’t defend it. I can only tell you what you must already know—that when you are operating as Corrine Quinn does, on the other side of the line, the math is different. It has to be. You were part of that math.”

I screened out the headache and said, “Where?”

“Your father’s place. Lockless. Corrine prevailed on him to take Sophia back.”

“But you didn’t get her out? All the power held by your Underground and you…”

“Virginia has its rules. We took what we could from them. We could not take it all.”

“And so that’s it,” I said. “You’re going to leave her to it?”

“No,” Otha said. “We don’t never leave nobody to it. Ever. They have their rules. And by God, we got ours.”

“Hiram,” Raymond said. “We don’t mean to just offer you an apology. It is not just words we bring, but action to match them.”

“You see, we don’t just know where Sophia is,” Bland said. “We know precisely how to bring her out.”

F
OR THOSE NEXT FEW
days, walking the streets of Philadelphia, or at work with chisel and lathe, at work forging the letters and passes, I thought of little else but Sophia. I thought of her water dancing by the fire. I saw us under the gazebo, trading the jar of ale. I remembered her long fingers, brushing against the dusty furniture in the workshop. I thought of us down by the gulch and I, very badly, wished I had embraced her there. And I thought of all the possibilities of a life up here—of a family of our own, of gingerbread memories, and daughters who sang after dinner, and long walks by the Schuylkill. And I wanted badly to show this world to her, wondered what she would make of it all—the trains, the crush of people, the omnibus—all of which were, day by day, more and more familiar.

Two weeks after I was taken by the man-catchers, I was summoned out to Raymond’s home across the river. He met me on the porch and told me he was alone. His wife and children were in the city, and I gathered from the look on his face that this was by design. There were always so many secrets.

We went into the home and climbed up to the second level, where he reached up and grasped a metal ring, attached by a hinge in its wooden housing in the ceiling, and pulled gently, until the ceiling opened up and a ladder slid down. We then climbed up the ladder, into the rafters of the home. Raymond walked to a corner where I saw several small wooden crates. He selected two. We carried them back down out of the rafters, closed up the ceiling again, and took them down to the drawing room.

Raymond opened the crates and said, “Have a look, Hiram.”

Reaching in, I found an assortment of paper, correspondences with fugitives—filled with kind words, familial reports, and grave intelligence on the movements of Ryland’s Hounds, the plots and intrigues of the Slave Power, and most often, requests for the liberation of relatives. I saw that he marked those that he had acknowledged and those he hoped to. There was great value in these papers, and he had crates of them, much to be learned about the actions of our enemies, but should our enemies ever acquire them, much to be learned of our own. In the wrong hands, countless agents would be exposed.

“The stories here are beyond anything anyone could ever believe—even those of us who are actually party to them,” Raymond said. I was still filing through them, amazed at the array. It seemed that there was a testimony from nearly everyone who’d ever run from the Task and been rescued by the Philadelphia station. It occurred to me that my own interview with Mary Bronson likely was contained there. “It is good to remember why we do what we do. I have worked with agents of all persuasion and I cannot say that they are moved by the purest of motives.”

“Possible that none of us is pure,” I said. “Possible we all got our reasons for doing what we do.”

“Indeed,” Raymond said. “Can I say that without the connection of my family, I would be here right now? Involved as I am? Of course not. And family is what we promised you, is it not? Your beloved Sophia—who ran with you, in a manner not so different from all those stories contained in my files, indeed, not so different from my very own parents.”

“Somewhat different,” I said. “We never got to a point of seeing things clear. We were very young. It’s odd to say it as such, I know. Ain’t even been a year since I was captured. But there was something there, something we were nursing that I do believe would have bloomed into family. But maybe not. Maybe I imagined it all.”

“Well,” he said. “At the very least, you are owed a chance to find out.”

“I believe so.”

“It is not the simplest of matters, this business with Sophia. But you have been toyed with too much, Hiram, and so I will make the statement concerning you directly and then give you the rest of it after.”

I took a deep breath, preparing myself.

“We have yet to make contact with her—it is a delicate matter, as you can imagine, one that will require some time. But Bland has devised a plan for her conduction. Indeed, he has volunteered to handle the thing personally. But there is a complication here—not with Sophia, but with us. You have caught us at a particular time, as we are occupied with another operation,” he said. “Otha has spoken to you of his wife?”

“Lydia?” I asked.

“Yes, Lydia. And not just Lydia but their children…my nieces and nephews. It has long been our plan to see them out. Otha appeared to us as though out of a dream. We had thought him lost. But through fortune and the grace of God, he returned to us. And as happy as he has been to be back among us, and as happy as we have been to have him, we are not whole.

“Lydia is in Alabama. Her owner has defied all our entreaties to pay for her freedom. And worse, we believe those entreaties have only raised his suspicions and made him watchful. Lydia and the children are truly in the coffin, Hiram, and with each day there, the coffin closes a little more.”

“I understand,” I said. “Everyone—but everyone in their time.”

“Yes,” Raymond said. “Everyone in their time. But there is more still. This operation is not just personal, but costly. We need someone to assist Bland, someone to ensure he can leave for Alabama at the appropriate time.”

“Of course. It’s why I’m here.”

“No, this is personal. This is not the Underground as you understand it, and this is certainly not Corrine. There are those who would object to this and so I need you to understand—this is of your own free will. Indeed if you cannot help us in this, we will still proceed with the rescue of your family. As I’ve said, it is my feeling that you have endured more than what was just. We do this for you as a way of bringing matters into balance, no matter Corrine’s feelings on things.”

“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “This ain’t really Corrine’s sort of deal. She is a good woman, I think. And they are, no doubt, in a good fight. But what I have seen up here, what I have seen of your momma, your cousins, your uncles, ain’t just the fight. I have seen the future. I have seen what we are fighting for. I am thankful for Corrine. I am thankful for the fight. But I am most thankful to have seen all that is coming.”

And now here, I did something very curious—I smiled. And it was an open and generous smile, one that rose up out of a feeling with which I was so rarely acquainted—joy. I was joyous at the thought of what was coming. I was joyous at the thought of my role in this.

“So I am in, Raymond,” I said. “Whatever that means, I am in.”

“Excellent.” Raymond smiled and said, “And you’re welcome to remain here as long as you like with these correspondences. As you saw, there are more upstairs. My wife will return soon and the children in the afternoon, but don’t let that stop you. Explore as you need. May we never forget why we do this, Hiram.”

I spent the rest of that day lost in Raymond’s files, as thrilling as any
Ivanhoe
or
Rob Roy.
In the evening I joined the family for dinner and accepted an invitation to stay the night and thus continued my reading by lantern-light. I left the next morning after a small breakfast. I felt myself unbalanced by all that I had so quickly consumed, for it was only now, through those files, that I came to understand the great span of the Underground’s operations, and the lengths to which its clients had gone to escape the Task. There in my hands, in those files, legends came alive—the resurrection of “Box” Brown, the saga of Ellen Craft, the flight of Jarm Logue. These stories were incredible, and taken together they gave me some sense of why Raymond and Otha would dare such a thing as a liberation up out of the Alabama coffin. They had dared so much already. In Virginia what mattered was immediate and invisible. And while Raymond would not wish these files to be exposed to the world, not just then, the safety of a free state made him bold. Freedom was what mattered to him. Freedom was his gospel and his bread.

Leafing through the pages, I felt the stories come alive before me. I saw them as though I was right there, so that on the walk to the ferry, on the ferry itself, and then all the way to the Philadelphia station, legions of colored people, panoramas of their great escapes, overlay the geography, so that I saw them all before me, saw them coming up from Richmond and Williamsburg, from Petersburg and Hagerstown, from Long-green and Darby, from Norfolk and Elm. And I saw them fly from Quindaro, to take haven in Granville, then bed down in Sandusky, and rejoice just west of Bird in Hand, not so far from Millersville, a small pass to Cedars.

And I saw them fleeing with Irish girls, absconding with mementos of lost children, running with salt pork and crackers, running with biscuits, flying with cuts of beef, inhaling the last of the master’s terrapin soup, taking drags of his Jamaican rum, and then out into winter, thoughtless and shoeless, but freedom-bound. Black maids running with dreams of holy union, running with double-barreled pistol and dirk, so that when confronted by hounds, they pulled out, yelling, “Shoot! Shoot!” They fled with young children dosed into slumber, with old men who shuffled out into the frost, who died exposed in the wood with these words on their lips: “Man made us slave, but God willed us free.”

And in all of these words, and each of these stories, I saw as much magic as anything I’d seen in the Goose, souls conducted as surely as I was out from its depths. And I saw them coming up on railroads, barges, river-runner, skiff, and bribery coach. Coming up on horseback over hard snow and March melting ice. They were fitted in ladies’ dress and came up, in gentry clothes and came up, in dental bandage and came up, in sling and came up, in rags not worth the laundry lady’s washing, but came up. They bribed low whites and stole horses. Crossed the Potomac in wind, storm, and darkness. Came up, as I had, driven by the remembrance of mothers or wives sold south for the high crime of standing contrary before lust. They came up devoured by frost. They came up with tales of hard drinkers and overseers who took glee in applying the lash. They came up stowed like coffee in boats, braving turpentine, scarred and singed by salt-water anointing, guilt-racked for finding themselves so broken that they should bow before their own flogging, for having held their brothers down under the master’s lash.

In the stories that day, I saw them running out into the forest, clutching a Brussels carpet bag, yelling, “I shall never be taken!” I saw them boarding ferries, singing low and only to themselves:

God made them birds and the greenwood tree

And all has got their mate, but soul-sick me.

I saw them that day at the Philadelphia docks, praying, “Hide the outcast, betray not him that wandereth.” I saw them wandering on Bainbridge and crying for all their dead, those who had taken ship for the final harbor from whence none shall return. All of them came to me, from the papers, from the memories, all of them drawn up from Pandemonium, up from Slavery, up out of the jaw of the Abomination, up out from under the juggernaut’s wheels, singing before the sorcery of this Underground.

The following evening, I went to Micajah Bland. I was still shaken from being stolen off the streets of the city. I analyzed everyone from afar. When people walked close behind, I stopped to let them pass. Low whites of a particular style and dress became particularly suspicious to me, as hounds so often drew allies from their ranks. And there were low whites all over Philadelphia, indeed they were the largest class—and they were found especially near Bland’s home, by the Schuylkill docks. There were coloreds here too. I stood catercorner from Bland’s house, watching for a full ten minutes. I saw a shabbily dressed colored man dart out of the row house next door. He moved down the hot street with speed, and right behind him I saw a colored woman chasing and yelling all manner of vulgarity. And then behind her an older black woman yelling after and giving chase, and finally two little colored girls standing in the doorway wailing. I thought that I might should do something, and then the older woman—a grandmother perhaps—returned and shooed the little girls inside, the door still open.

I had heard stories of coloreds like this, different than Raymond and his family, living penny to penny, beaten and run off jobs for daring to apply themselves to that which was held to be “white man’s work.” I had not noticed them at first because it was the relative opulence of all the other coloreds that struck me. But watching there, across the street, I remembered that Otha had warned clients of the Underground of this fate, for these coloreds were usually runaways themselves, men and women who made no connection with society, with certain churches, and thus found freedom hard upon them. And it occurred to me then that this fear that I felt, this study I put on every face, was their lifetime and worse, for if they were caught by the hounds, no Bland would rally to them.

As for the man himself, I found him at home expecting me. A young woman answered the door, smiled, and then called out his name. She introduced herself as Laura, and mentioned that she was Bland’s sister. It was a modest house—one of the better ones in the quarter but not as nice as Raymond’s or the White family home on the other side of the river. But it was clean and well-appointed.

We shook hands and there were the usual pleasantries. I felt a deep relief at having completed the small task of walking to Bland’s home unmolested. And having done that, I was now aware of a gnawing impatience to set upon the work of freedom for Lydia, and thus, in turn, freedom for Sophia,
my Sophia.
She existed in my mind not as one with her own notions and ideas but as an idea herself, a notion herself, so that to think of
my Sophia
was to think of a woman for whom I possessed a true and a sincere feeling, but, too, was to think of
my dreams
and
my redemption
. It is important that I tell you this. It is important that you see how little I knew of
her dreams,
of
her redemption.
I know now that she had tried to tell me, and I, who so prided himself on listening, simply could not hear.

At all events, this was the spirit, anxious and rash, that I brought to Micajah Bland, so that no more than five minutes after taking my seat I said, directly and abruptly, “So how we gonna do it?”