Walk Through Darkness (20 page)

His eyes roamed over the writing desk on the far wall. It was so neatly arranged, quills and paper and letter opener all in their assigned places. It reminded him of a child’s desk from long ago,
a memory he had not recalled for some time. From there his gaze roamed over the titles of the bookshelf, words that his mind registered complete but without meaning, as if he was pronouncing the words of a language he didn’t understand. He stepped forward and trailed a finger over the spines of the old volumes. Without noticing that he was doing so, he placed his fingertip atop one of the books and pulled it toward him. He turned and moved absently about the room, flipping through the book page by slow page, feeling the brittle paper against his fingertips, smelling the musty fragrance that, once again, conjured distant memories. He still didn’t try to decipher the words, but simply let his eyes drift over them, drawn toward them with a pull he could neither reject nor acquiesce to. He marveled at how strangely right the book felt in his hands, like a tool long absent but never forgotten, a face remembered, an apple cradled in a palm.

He wasn’t sure how long he stood staring at the ink and parchment, but he was startled when he caught sight of himself in the floor length mirror at the other end of the room. He stared at the man there—a naked creature with a book opened in his hands—with all the shock he would have shown if he had stumbled upon a stranger in that posture. He snapped the volume shut, feeling like he was intruding into another world, some sort of museum into which he had wandered uninvited.

T
WO
A storm awaited the clipper at the mouth of the Bay. The ship took the waves at an angle, cutting into the ramps of water so that the lip of some crests spilled across the deck. Water surrounded the craft like a boundless mass of moving flesh. Each time he looked upon it Morrison discovered anew the great beast upon whose surface
they intruded. Salt was all about him, in the water and in the air, in his clothing and dripping down from his hair, that black-gray cap plastered to his skull. The captain urged him into shelter, but Morrison remembered the damp internals of ships all too well, the smells down there and creaking breath of it, cramped beams bowed with the weight of the sea pressing against them. No, he chose to face the beast with his eyes open. He stayed on deck, sitting cross-legged near the midpoint of the ship, with the hound close at his side.

Around him the crewmen shouted one to another, their words whipped before the wind, portions of commands and entreaties, calls only half completed and more urgent for it. He heard them and felt all the elements at war around him and understood his tenuous position within all this motion. But still he didn’t abandon the deck. Closing his eyes, he grabbed the dog about the collar with one hand and twined his other within a coil of rope secured to the deck. He let the spray wash his face and tried as best he could to empty his head of all thought. He pushed away his memories of his first Atlantic voyage, of all the death he saw in the hold of that decrepit ship. He beat those images back, but in their place other memories materialized and would not be denied. Visions played upon his eyelids like silhouettes cast by candlelight, and it was here that he saw the woman’s face again, beautiful and dark as it had been all those years before.

He had first met her in the spring of his twenty-seventh year. She appeared on his younger brother’s arm, his new love, his partner there for the entire world to see. He nodded to her, wished her well and pretended that he didn’t truly see her. He tried not to notice the slow beauty of her eyes, black pebbles pressed home with an artist’s fingers. They had touched on him so patiently, as if she were taking him in completely, looking to the back of him and turning him over and reading him. He tried not to give words to the images she conjured in him, like that her skin was the texture of the Bay’s sandy beaches, down below the water-line, where the receding tide pulls the grains taut and smooth. He pretended that this was not the perfect hue for human flesh, the color God must have intended. He didn’t let his eyes settle too long upon the fine
bones of her neck. And having looked once, he tried to ignore the rich pucker of her lips, the moisture of her tongue, the flesh of ripe fruit. To him she was sin incarnate, and it shot him through with a host of emotions, not least of which was jealousy.

Alone with his younger brother Morrison berated him. What was he thinking? This woman was not for him. She was marked. She was property. She could never be his equal in the eyes of men or God, not in this nation or in any nation known to civilized man. Had his mother given birth to him for this? So that he might venture from home and singe his blood with that of servants? Had he no shame? He spit the questions out with all the venom he could muster, and he half-believed them himself. He had taken on this country’s prejudices and tried to make them his own as he would make the country itself his own. But for the first time Lewis did not heed his older brother. He listened to his questions and gazed at him and spoke little and cryptically when he did. Who are we to name God’s accursed? he asked. Who are we?

Through the summer of that year Morrison watched Lewis build a home for the woman. This young one did not seem so timid anymore. He might still be a dreamer and poet, but he had the fortitude to create a life against all advice. He built their strange home with his own hands, with pilfered and salvaged lumber. He took parts regardless of their normal function and shaped them to suit him and created a mushroom of a house, part of a living tree, a thing so odd men laughed in looking upon it. Even Lewis found it humorous, but in a different way than the others. When he led the woman to it he gave it to her with all sincerity. He was like a servant to her, ever faithful, ever laboring, hearing and seeing little of the world except her. This too infuriated the elder brother, though at the time he had misunderstood just why.

Morrison opened his eyes upon the drenched creation that was the world. How had he and his brother turned out so differently? They were of the same blood, born of the same parents and shaped by the same land. They had been orphans together. Yet one of them had created a version of humanity unique to him. He had found a way to bless his life with love and had pushed all else aside, while the other had turned him-self
solely to death. If only that blessed life hadn’t been so short, Morrison thought. If only he had no hand in destroying it. And if only he had recognized that the sin he saw upon that woman was the fault of his eyes, a sickness of his own heart and not a brand upon her at all. He looked down and ran his hand across the canine’s wet back. The dog’s tail thumped the deck in response. The man was grateful for it, more than she could ever know.

T
HREE
Redford lay the chart across the floor and motioned the couple close. Dover slid from the couch to her knees, though William only inched forward a little, taking his view from a distance. Redford traced the lines of North America with the tip of his letter opener, drawing the Atlantic coastline, the shapes of the states, the border with Canada, and even describing what he knew of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains and the long coastline of California. Dover followed every motion with anxious eyes. She nodded as he spoke, her lips slightly parted, although it was hard to tell whether this was in thought or from the constant strain her body was now putting on her. In posture, William held himself aloof from the lecture, but his eyes were actually as keen as Dover’s, his attention as rapt on the man’s words. He was just determined not to show it.

“It really snow all the time up there?” Dover asked.

Redford chuckled. “The climate is harsh, but not as harsh as that. The summers are as mild as you could want. And the land’s rich. This isn’t a matter of trying to pack the Negro off to Africa or Haiti or some such place where they’re likely to die from fever or hunger. This is good land, good enough to attract
shiploads of Europeans, English and Scots and French. They’re all trying to find a better place, just like you are.” He looked up and smiled at William, who returned the gesture coolly.

William’s vision slipped past him, on to the map and then away from that to Dover’s knees, her hands folded there, the fingers of one hand resting atop those of the other. “What about all them white folks?” he asked. “If all them white folks heading there they ain’t gonna want us. How’s that gonna be any different than the mess we got?”

Redford smiled. “Not all white men are devils incarnate. We both know that.”

“They don’t gotta all be devils. But you put enough of them together and times get thin—then it’s the niggers who gonna lose out. Maybe you don’t understand that like we do.”

Redford heard this soberly; his smile faded. “I sometimes forget the evil place that you’ve just come from, but I understand that it must have warped your faith in other men terribly.”

“What?”

“Look, William,” Redford said, a newly sprung tension trembled at one corner of his lips, “I may live in the North. I may be free, but I’m still a nigger in this country. Don’t propose that I’ve never felt the burden of my race.”

“You never been in chains, have you?”

William and the man were facing each other now, standing toe to toe. There was something in both of their postures that hinted at aggression: the tremor on Redford’s face, the way William’s shoulders bunched in toward his neck, as if the words he spoke were pushed up from the muscles of his back. Dover watched them, still seated, her hands held as before but her eyes moving from one man to the other as they spoke.

“No, I haven’t,” Redford said. “Perhaps that’s why I know that the world is much larger than what you’ve been allowed to see.”

“I’ve seen things.”

“Okay, then I’m talking about myself, not you. It is not possible
for me to be Negro and a free man and Christian in good faith if I ignore my brothers in bondage. Slavery binds us all, lowers us all and makes beasts of us. I fight for your freedom because I want to guarantee my own. If I offend you somehow it’s not intentional, but I would happily offend a man to aid his freedom.”

A knock on the door yanked all three of their heads up in unison. A moment passed in silence, only eyes moving, snapping from face to face around their triumvirate, darting away to the door and to the window and to the closet. Then the knock came again, three raps of the knuckles, calm, evenly spaced, with no clear message encoded in their rhythm. Redford flipped the map closed and handed it to Dover. He motioned for the couple to silently remove themselves to the bedroom. They did so, although the floor came alive beneath them, creaking and protesting their gentle steps.

The couple slipped into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. They stood facing each other, so close that Dover’s round belly touched William’s. Her gaze was hard to read. It was frank, as was her way, but whether that frankness hid reprimand or not was hard to say. William, for his part, set his lips and stared back, hardly blinking. They stayed that way, hearing nothing of note until the outside door closed, a motion that shook the house, like an exhaled breath strong enough to jiggle the bedroom door in its frame. William reached out and took hold of Dover’s hand, an unconscious gesture that broke the spell between them.

The door sprung open. Redford stepped in and grasped William by the forearm. “It’s okay. That was a messenger from Mr. Ferries. We’ve found you a safe haven.”

That evening allowed William and Dover their first solitude since their reunion. Dover told her mistress that she was attending a prayer group. Redford was engaged till late in the night,
meeting with the man who had offered William a hiding place. The couple was left alone in the tiny set of rooms, the air charged with an energy that might have been euphoric, but was tense and difficult instead. Their proximity created a tension neither knew how to quell. It showed in both their gestures. She was steady and calm in her actions but never fully opened herself. He was shy of her eyes, fretful and hungry for motion. He paced the room, looking at her only with passing glances. It wasn’t meant to be like this, he thought. This wasn’t what had pulled him from Kent Island and propelled him through each successive hardship. He should wrap her in his arms the way he had imagined. He should run his hands over her belly and push his fingers through the folds of her dress and touch her naked flesh. He should be swelling with the pent up desire that he had woken with on so many mornings. He should stand before her naked and complete and masculine, as she had asked him to do so often. And yet the thought of that was almost unimaginable now. He didn’t know where to start, how to break down the barrier between them and set things right again. When he spoke he did so in a voice he barely recognized, with an anger he wasn’t even sure he felt.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “Him out there talking to some white man. Don’t know if I can abide it. How’s that gonna do us any good? What white man ever did you a turn?”

“Your captain took care of you,” Dover said. She sat on the sofa, studying the flame of the oil lamp on the table before her. A ripple in the glass shield cast a dark ribbon on her face. It bisected her features diagonally through cheek and eye, rendering her in a surreal composition, as if the two halves didn’t quite fit together to make a whole. “Redford knows what he doing. He’s a good man, and you’ll just have to trust him.”

William strode to the far corner of the room, turned and watched her from the safety of that short distance. He brought his feet close together and backed his shoulders up against the
two diverging walls. “I gotta trust him?” he asked. “And what about you? You trust him?”

“Course I do.”

“Course you do. How’d you meet him, anyhow? He ain’t like no colored man I know.”

Dover explained that she had met him at church. She had been more active religiously since coming north. A Negro church was one of the only places she felt at home. There she was surrounded by Negro voices and smells and sights, stuck shoulder to shoulder with people she almost felt at home with. Redford had been born a free man, she said, the child of a minister father and an abolitionist mother, both of whom had come up from slavery by means she wasn’t aware of. His father built a congregation within a thin-walled church. His mother urged him to set the sights of his holy wrath on the injustice suffered by those still enslaved. They did not forget where they came from or how tenuous their liberty was.

“Least that’s what Redford told me. Said they the ones taught him all the important things he knows. That was a goodly time back, though. They dead now. Seem like since they passed Redford felt the calling that much more, calling to help people, I mean.”

William was quiet for a moment, watching her, glad that she didn’t turn toward him. He pressed his palms against the wall and felt the dry grain of the wallpaper. “Dover, tell me the truth, he been after you?”

The woman’s eyes didn’t lift from the lamp, but something in her expression soured. “As big as I am? Come on now, don’t embarrass yourself.”

“You saying he wasn’t after you? Or you just not answering the question?”

Dover exhaled an exasperated breath and turned toward him. For a moment she seemed ready to chastise him, but in taking him in her expression softened. “Let’s not talk about it. Whatever
mighta happened didn’t. You’re here now. That’s what matters.”

“If something mighta been then it mighta been … And if that’s the truth we got us something to talk about.”

“William …” Dover shook her head, sighed and took her chin within her fingers. Some things were better left in silence, she said. Least it seemed that way to her now. She was a changed woman. Perhaps not the woman he used to know. Life could quiet even the loudest voices. Things pile one upon another and sometimes you look at yourself and wonder who you are and how you became so. She said this quietly and let it sit for some time. But as William stared at her and his questions yawned unanswered she finally took them up. The answer was yes. Red-ford had proposed that the two of them get together. He offered it in the manner of an honorable man, knowing that she was pregnant with another man’s child. He said he would’ve raised the child as his own without a second thought about it. He would’ve helped her get free for good. Would’ve lived with her as man and wife.

“Yes, William, he did make that offer. That what you wanted to hear?”

“And how’d you answer him?” William asked quietly. He was afraid of the question but he asked it anyway because he had to. He needed to know how, or if, she had answered the man or whether his arrival had interrupted what she might have said. It occurred to him like a sudden inundation just how much his appearance had spun turmoil into her world.

“Gave him the only answer I could or would,” she said. “Told him no. I answered him some weeks ago and that was that. You can’t blame me for thinking on it. I didn’t know I’d see you again. All I knew I was gonna be raising this chile on my own, with no family around. He gave me something to think on. You can’t blame me for that.”

“Didn’t say I blamed you. Just wanted an answer.” William
peeled himself from the wall and stepped forward. He was silent for a moment. Without his being aware of it, the heat of anger had fled him completely. When he spoke his tone was resigned, so quiet that he might have been talking to himself. “All the time I been thinking bout how far I walked, the things I been through to get to you. Didn’t hardly think about the confusion I’d be bringing to you. Running with the law behind me, bringing all that hate with me and closer to you. All I really did was put you in danger.”

Dover’s hands settled over her knees, which she cupped within her palms. She breathed a few slow breaths. “William, sit down. Sit down next to me.” She waited as he did so, then slid an arm around his back and turned into him. “I ain’t treated you right since you got here. I’m sorry for it. We’re both of us in a mess. But don’t think for a minute that I don’t love you and want you here. I do. I just didn’t expect it. Hadn’t even let myself dream it. When I saw you, part of me filled to the top with joy. Other part of me sunk down with the fear of it all. Not just cause of the danger you talking bout, but cause I don’t know if I can take losing you again. That’s the thing, William. If I pull you in close to me I’ll never be able to lose you again. That’s a frightful thing. Slaves ain’t supposed to think like that.”

The two sat some time in silence. William wanted to speak but when he cleared his throat he felt the emotion contained there and was shamed even though he knew there was no shame in it. He would’ve told her that he understood her completely and felt the same. There was nothing for them to do but to put slavery behind them and be bound only by each other. The anger within him was only partially anger and the rest was fear, longing, desire. He would’ve told her this but he knew she understood it already, for this distance between them was no real barrier. It never had been. It was the tension of an evil world. Between them was something greater and she was right—it need not all be uttered aloud.

Dover took him by the wrist and placed his hand against her abdomen. His hand would’ve trembled if hers hadn’t held it in place. He knew why she did this and put all of his attention in his palm. But still it was a shock when he felt the movement, one quick rumble, like a stomach growl amplified and made physical. It was so sudden, unexpected even though he had awaited it. It came again. And there was beneath his palm a moment of pressure that he understood as the crook of a limb rotating, as an elbow or a shoulder or the heel of a tiny foot. He whispered God into their presence, strange for the words came without his calling them. How great the burden of this; how large the promise. He thought then that he would do all and everything possible to see that little heel touch down on free earth and that it never wore an iron anklet.