Walk Through Darkness (12 page)

The person set the metal plate before William, placed the candle next to it, and squatted a few feet away. He was dressed as any sailor, in dark breeches and a cotton shirt, but it was to his strange, angular face that William’s attention was drawn. His lips were a dark pucker below his nose. A series of black lines cut diagonally across his cheeks, scars or tattoos it was hard to tell. Despite the intensity of his visage, William felt no threat from it.

“Eat,” the man said. In a single word his voice conveyed its
foreignness. It was spoken from the front of the mouth, just the play of the tip of his tongue on the backs of teeth.

William felt for the plate. Steam rose up from it and slipped across his features. He couldn’t smell it, but he knew what it was when he took a mouthful, hominy. He ate several mouthfuls, slowly, remembering how to eat. Before long, he forgot the man in front of him. He felt the food slide into his mouth and move around his teeth and slip down inside him. It woke a life down there that had been dormant for a long time. After he had scraped the plate clean of hominy he noticed the strips of meat lining the edge.

“Is venison.”

William’s head snapped up.

The man repeated the word. “Ven-ni-son.” He smiled and nodded his head, asking if William understood. He motioned with his hands, a pronged gesture that looked to William like that of a rabbit jumping. But then the man held them above his head, creating strange limbs there with his fingers. When William still looked confused, the man dropped his hands and thought. Eventually, he said, “Doe.”

“Doe?” William said. “Oh, you mean to say ‘deer.’” He had never eaten venison before. He tasted it. It was richer meat than he would have imagined, and thicker than seemed possible from such lithe animals. He glanced back up at the man’s grinning face. He seemed to be waiting for a response.

The man nodded and then asked, with no preamble or change in the expression on his face, “Who Dover?”

For a confused second it felt like the man had pulled the name from his head, had somehow robbed him of it. But as he stared he saw no guile written across his features, no evil intent, no sorcery. He simply asked a question and awaited an answer. William remembered that he had screamed her name on deck. He must have heard it then. “She … She’s my woman.”

“Your woman?” the other said, teasing out both words as if
further meaning could be deciphered by saying them slowly. He nodded and said no more.

William continued eating. His seething anger was gone. It lingered back at the far wall of his conscious mind, but his thoughts were clear. Perhaps the food had helped. He wanted to ask this man who he was, what he was doing on this ship. Somehow—and it was not just because of his color—he seemed out of place. He seemed to hold serenity within himself, a peace with his physical body and patience with the quiet moments he was spending here in this dark cell. William decided he would speak again when he had finished the meat.

But just as he did so the man scrabbled forward in his squatting position and scooped up the plate. He motioned that he would leave the candle, and then he paused beside the door, looking at William once more. “The captain is here,” he said. He stepped out of the door, and the white man appeared in his place. He must’ve been standing just outside the whole time.

The captain entered the cubicle and set a lantern down near the door. The black man handed him a bottle and two wooden goblets. The black man glanced at William and then, at a nod from the captain, pulled the door fast behind him, leaving the two men alone.

The captain looked at the boards beneath his feet, taking some time before lowering himself down to sit. He shifted around into several positions before settling on one, legs folded before him, back straight. The captain watched William for a few moments, taking in his face and clothing, body and then face again. He pursed his lips as if to comment on his appearance but then thought better of it. He uncorked the bottle and filled the two goblets. “I am sure you are thirsty,” he said. “I have taken the liberty of bringing some wine for us to share. I’ve nurtured a great thirst all day.” He placed one of the containers within William’s reach, then tilted his own and drank.

William didn’t respond. He fixed his eyes on an area of shadowed
darkness, trying to calm his heart, the pulse of which he felt in his palms.

The man wiped his mouth and took note of this. As he replenished his goblet he began to speak. He talked in that odd, meandering voice of his. He first detailed the weather of the past few days, then discussed the winds and how they favored them, even described the sheet lightning he had seen dancing across the distant sky the night before. William barely took in a word of it, waiting instead for him to get around to what he really had to say, some decision about his fate, some news of when he was to be handed over. But, if the man did have such news to disclose, he was slow in getting to it.

“What do you think of Adam?” the Captain asked, indicating with a nod that he referred to the black man beyond the door. “I bought him, you know. He is as free as any man now. I paid silver for his liberty off the coast of North Africa. A trader in Tunis approached me, you see. I had been drinking, searching for amusements. I did quite a bit of this in those days. It gives a traveler heart, and we need heart in foreign lands. But, as I was saying, my mind sought amusement, and this trader made it known that he had boys to sell, boys who could be used for whatever purposes a demented mind might think of.” He paused and studied William. “I was curious, you see. The trader said he was taken from a pirate ship off the coast of Madagascar, but he may well have lied. I don’t even think Adam knows where he was born. In any event, he had suffered horribly in his short life. Not worked the way you may have been, but used for a different purpose. The trader had him stripped, and put on display each portion of his body. He was made to bend and contort and … It was very degrading, for both of us. I paid the boy’s price without haggling over it. I took him out of there, not to use as that trader suggested but to walk him to freedom. Do you understand why I did that? Some acts of men degrade all of mankind, not just the individual. I had watched as that boy was made to
display himself, and that was a crime in its own right. I had the silver, and I sought to absolve us both. I was clear headed when I did it, and I shall never doubt it was one of the better actions of my life. He is not a slave, I tell you. He is free to go where and when he pleases. That he stays with me I consider a blessing of sorts. He and I have spoken many hours together. He is a good listener, and I am one who seems to need to talk. As I have just proven.”

The captain smiled and tilted his goblet. “Please, do have a drink.” He lifted William’s goblet and handed it to him. “I speak of Adam because he spoke of you. He observed you on deck, and he’s of the opinion that you are falsely accused. He says you are not a murderer, not yet at least. I would like very much to hear you speak it with your own voice. Speak to me, for the moment, as a free man. You are afloat on the sea, not bounded by the laws of your home state at present. So speak to me.”

William said nothing, just stared at the wine and the vague reflection on its surface.

“Your reluctance is understandable, of course,” the captain said. His somber expression showed that he acknowledged no humor in this understatement. “My wife always thought that I was insensitive. She said I pushed my nose where it need not be. But I have always argued just the opposite. I push my nose because I am overly sensitive. I ask questions because I have some interest in my fellow humans. Do you not think the world would be a better place if more men acted in the same manner?” He paused for an answer. When he got none he mumbled, “Not that I hold myself up as a model to other men … Do you know that we were boarded in Virginia? And again yesterday along the Eastern Shore. The first time we had no idea you were aboard, and the searchers were halfhearted in their examinations. Yesterday was a different matter. I don’t know why I did it, but I denied your presence aboard the boat. My first mate, Barrett, nearly collapsed with anger. It is fortunate for both of us that,
despite his failings, he takes orders as a sailor should. And as sailor myself, I should attend my ship.”

The captain rose and dusted the seat of his trousers with his hands. He picked up the lantern and opened the door, pausing in the corridor. He glanced back in at William, who still sat with the goblet in his hands. “Soon I will ask you of Dover,” he said. “Please consider this.”

With that, he closed the door, and William was again in darkness.

T
HREE
As the trail grew colder, Morrison began to prowl the Negro quarters of any town that had a population large enough to merit such a section. He tried as best he could to engage the Negroes, both slave and free, in useful conversation. This proved largely impossible. The black faces never lifted toward him. They stared at the ground, spoke in monosyllables and seemed to misunderstand each question he posed to them. And yet from the fringes of their company he heard them exchange a free and animated flow of words between each other. They told jokes, exchanged threats and insults, all spoken with tongues nimble as rabbits. At least, until they spotted the white man among them and fell dumb.

Morrison wanted to tell them that he had once walked and conversed and mingled in every way with people of their many colors. He would have explained that he had worked beside them in his early days in this country. He would like to have spoken to them of his brother, who had recognized the Africans’ humanity before he had and who had taught him so many things in the short span of his life. It was his brother who returned to their shared room one night with a black man’s blood on his fingertips. He had taken to night wandering, for he was finding it hard
adjusting to this land and said he hated staring at the walls. Only exhaustion helped him. The best way to produce it, he found, was midnight rambling. On this particular evening, Lewis burst into the room with his hands held out before him, begging Morrison to wake, beseeching him to light the flame, light the flame. He was thick with mud up to his knees and across his chest and arms and even up into his hair. But he ignored this. It was his hands and the manner in which they were fouled that troubled him. He held them close to Morrison and asked him did he see it? Did he see the blood? Did he know that this was a land of blood, that it flowed in the streets like mud? The elder brother calmed the younger and got him to tell his tale.

It was a forlorn night, damp with the residue of spring rain. Lewis walked it alone until he turned onto a lane and saw the three men at the far end of it. He would have stopped and slipped away before they saw him, but he was propelled on by the desire not to look criminal. He quickened his pace and carried on toward them. One of them held a torch, while two others went to work on a fourth man, a Negro whom Lewis had not seen at first. The moving light of that torch rendered a scene of surreal barbarity. The black man crouched on all fours, while two of the men beat him about the head and back with short clubs. They pushed him low into the mud and stamped upon his back. They lifted him up and punched him one after the other. His blood mingled with the mud and their hands had difficulty grasping him. This drove them to new furies. One of the men hefted his rifle up to shoot him. But he changed his mind, grasped it by the barrel and swung it at full length in a wide arc. It hit the black man at the apex of its swing, the stock end catching him across the face. It shattered his cheekbone and sent his body sprawling in pursuit of his flying teeth. He lay there in that outstretched position, sinking into the mud.

As they turned to go the man with the rifle fixed his eyes upon Lewis and studied him as if noticing him for the first time. The man’s features were boyish and smooth. He nodded and half-smiled. You know what they say, he said. A nigger’s a halfpenny to kill and a halfpenny to bury. He motioned to the half-submerged form in the mud. Figure this
here one’s a full cent. With that, he turned and walked away, rifle over his shoulder, pointed up at the sky, his gait loose and contented.

The younger brother stood for a long time, staring at the Negro’s form and watching the brown stuff closing around him, as if the earth were accepting back its own. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t make sense of the rifleman’s handsome face, not with the vision before him. He could find no way to explain it, no plotting for how he had stumbled upon this and what course of events had brought it about.

Then the man moved. It was no great motion. It was little more than an exhaled breath, but to Lewis it was proof that he still lived. He pushed his way toward him through the mud. He rolled the man over, slipped his open palm beneath his neck and tried to stay his lolling head. The man opened his eyes. The bloody mud parted and two orbs of smooth moisture reflected back the starlight in the clearing sky. He looked at Lewis with an expression that he was at pains to describe. There was no emotion in it. It was not sadness or fear or resignation. It was none of these. His eyes were two questions, and Lewis knew he had failed to answer. And that was all. At some moment those questions turned to hollow notes that never changed pitch or tone but simply went on. The man’s eyes stared up at him but they did not see any longer. They did not blink and did not move. They were dead things and no longer portholes to the man’s being, the bare materials of life without the substance.

Lewis slipped away and walked home with trembling steps, sure once again that this was all wrong. This place was not their home, and yet … Mute the colors and wash them out and cast the world in a different cadence … Do that, and this country was not so different than the one that had created the brothers. And that was the thing that truly frightened him.

As he held his sobbing brother, Morrison knew that he didn’t cry simply for that unknown black man. He cried for any such moment for any person. He cried for the things we do to each other and because the eyes of that stranger in death were no different than the eyes of his loved ones. It was memories such as these that Morrison would have shared
with the dark people he met now, confessions he would make to the ears of black men only. He would’ve told them of the next time his brother came home with tales of a colored person, a woman this time, a tale of joy instead of sorrow. But as he walked the backcountry roads of Maryland posing his questions, he spoke of none of these things. Such a dialogue was impossible. Words alone could not bridge the gap between him and these people. Perhaps only actions could. This was, after all, the true test of the mission before him.