Walk Through Darkness (3 page)

T
HREE
On William’s third day of flight it began to rain. The first drops fell just after dark. Big, pebble-sized jewels that thumped against the leaves above his head. He felt them through the thin material of his shirt and on the knees of his trousers and down his shoulders, then on his hands as he pushed branches out of the way. It was pleasant at first, these cooling touches of moisture, but it was soon overdone. These first were messengers of the horde to come, and come they did, with wind and thunder. Before long every inch of him was drenched. Cold seeped into his pores and dribbled down his back and collected at the corners of his lips and in the spaces between his toes. The woods became a sleek, water-black maze of limbs and protrusions and thorns.

Later that night he slipped and fell and doubted he had the power to rise. He had been more fatigued before and that wasn’t the issue. Nor was it the wounds that creased his back, for he was too numb to feel them. It was that nature seemed so intent on beating him down. He was surrounded by an enormous world in which he was entirely alone. How great an ordeal had he let himself in for? Without his being aware of it, one of his hands slipped across his abdomen and through the opening of his shirt. He sought out an object sewn into the inside of the garment and thereby hidden from view, a tiny disk of metal no larger than a coin. This he held between his fingertips, pressed tight, a comfort though he was barely aware of the action.

He hardly noticed the rising of the sun, though its light brought some faint hues back to the world. He rose and trudged on. The rain didn’t let up that day nor the next evening nor on
the day following. He moved through a dripping world just beyond the margins of human society over miles of geography he had never viewed on map or chart. The Bay and its many arms thrust themselves into his path, making it into a half-terrestrial, half-marine route. Stands of reeds threw up impenetrable walls nearly twice his height. He skirted the edges of them, running a palm over the coarse shoots like a child might over fence slats.

There were more than a few mishaps in those early days. There were farms stumbled upon and dogs set to barking and landowners calling out into the night, shotguns in hand. There were passing horsemen in the woods, fields sprinted through beneath the moonlight, and country lanes that he dared to follow for short distances. There was the grunting progress of an unseen animal that kept pace with him through one entire night’s travel. And there was the girl-child in a barge floating past his shoreline hiding place one afternoon. She picked him out among the undergrowth and studied him, her blond head cocked to one side, rainwater dripping from her nose and chin. She had only to whisper a word to the men that piloted the vessel to bring down upon him a hail of bullets and indignant rage. And yet she didn’t. They floated on into the haze, were swallowed by it, and that was all.

Eventually, the rain abated and the heat returned. He passed within sight of a city, smoldering like a fire recently doused. He circled around it in a wide arc that put him into a landscape of an altogether different temperament: rolling hills, farmland, and ruinate stretches that had once been forest. Great swathes of woodland had been hewn for fuel or lumber and left a wasteland of stumps. Some of these were of enormous girth, flat plateaus atop which bizarre lichens grew, tiny wax statues topped with plumes of red. Between the stumps the forest tried to re-create itself. In some patches it was on its way, but in too many others the plant life was a tangle of sumac and ragweed and vines woven together like so many thorny snakes. It took
him two nights of travel to circumnavigate that city and three days on he still fancied he could see its glow tainting the night sky.

He spent one evening in the hollowed-out corpse of an ancient oak. He stepped inside the thing, followed by a swarm of mosquitoes so numerous he gave up on swatting them. He stood surrounded by the shell of the tree; the sky above him framed in a single circlet. The smell of decay was thick in the cramped space. Its essence seeped out of the wood like oil, tainting every sweaty quadrant of his body. Strangely, he found these sensations comforting. They reminded him of Dover. Something about the place made him imagine running his fingertip down her bare back, drawing a line in her flesh, a track left in the wake of his touch that the skin forgave in passing. Their intimate moments had been that much more fragile for the proximity of others. They had whispered, murmured and moaned only for each other. He used to speak with his mouth brushing against her ear, the scent of her hair filling him. She would taste him with the tip of her tongue. She said she loved the sweat of him, that she wanted him most when he was ripest, for then he seemed that much more a man. Sometimes she would run her hands across his sweaty shoulders. She did this as if she were cleaning him, but he knew that she wanted his scent on her, a reminder of him that she could carry with her.

One morning near the end of his second week of flight, William halted near a narrow lane in the woods. Some fifty yards from it, he paused and squatted in the bushes, waiting to see what type of traffic the road might carry, if any. The path meandered off to the east, vanishing into the trees; to the west it rose up a gentle hill and dropped out of sight. He sat for twenty minutes without anyone passing. He had just decided to cross the road and carry on when a motion stopped him. A man, marked first by his prominent headdress, crested the western rise and came
down the trail at a brisk pace. It was a white man, and though he propelled himself by the power of his own two feet, he was clothed in the garb of the gentry. William froze. His first thought was how tenuous his situation was. Here, yet again, was a moment of providence. If he had stepped forward a few moments earlier … If, at any time, for any reason, God and circumstance conspired against him … He had to be more careful still. He pressed himself low to the ground. It was from there, with his nose touching the leaves of the forest floor, that he noticed the man wasn’t alone.

A Negro boy trailed behind the man. He was tiny, barefoot, and dressed only in the rough shirt of childhood, his legs and feet bare. His steps doubled to keep time with the man’s. He was anxious in this work, his full attention focused on the back of the man’s thighs, on timing his own steps and not letting himself fall behind. William saw something frantic in the child’s motions and he wondered what particular variation of the slave’s curse this child was living. Had he been sold away from his mother? Was this his first day with a new master? Or did he even remember his mother? Was this man and his whims all the child had to anchor him to the world? He was too young to do much work, but one never knew what type of service a white man might require.

William felt his insides knot. This one image filled him with the fear of fatherhood. It was one thing to suffer a life of slavery oneself, but to bring a child into this world, into all of its dangers and indignities … The thought of it was enough to keep him still long after the man and boy had disappeared down the path. The image of the two lingered long in his mind, bringing back memories of his own childhood, his old owner, dead some years now but not forgotten.

Howard Mason had generally been considered a good master. He didn’t push his slaves beyond the limits of their endurance. He didn’t beat them overly, break up families permanently, or
take liberties with the female servants. He was a much-avowed man of learning and of God, who tried hard to live by Christian principles. He sustained his family’s finances upon the lifeblood of some fifty to sixty slaves, but he did so with the permission of his God. Or so he believed. He found this consent within his religion’s text, as he explained to William two days after his eighth birthday.

Mason had ridden up to William and greeted him cordially, an act which set the boy trembling from his knees right down to his bare feet. He had heard it was the boy’s birthday, and he offered him a present, a large, golden apple. It was no small feat for a Negro to make it through to a good working age, he said. William was a fine boy for doing so. He dismounted, left his horse to graze and directed the boy to sit down at the base of a boysenberry tree. He bade him to eat his apple.

William fumbled with the fruit. He went so far as to bring it up to his mouth and to test the skin against his teeth, but he didn’t bite into it. He could barely keep his hands from shaking, and he feared that any action, even chewing, would somehow betray him. He sat on the verge of flinching every time the man moved, however innocent his gesture: raising a hand to shoo away the flies, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket, a phlegmy clearing of his throat. He had never experienced his owner in such proximity. Mason’s odor was almost overpowering. A fragrant powder wafted up out of his clothing, an irritating substance like pollen. It was all William could do to hold the apple near his face and keep from coughing.

Mason cracked open a book and read of the world’s creation, of the darkness that had been upon the lifeless void and how God filled it with light and life and water and all the creatures that roamed the earth. He read some of the story of the first human couple. Then he skipped forward and told of the evil that so soon came to rule the land and the flood that God sent to cleanse it away. He told of Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and
Japheth, from whom all the people of the world were descended. He paused and studied the boy for a moment. He dabbed his brow with his handkerchief and asked if he recognized the Truth contained within this book? Did he know that it had been written at the command of the one and only God of all creation? Did he understand that its doctrines were the Word of the Lord and that they could never be doubted, for in doubting was sin and in sin was eternal damnation?

William mumbled, “Yessuh.”

“Is that ‘yes, sir’ meant to encompass everything I have read thus far?
Everything?”

William hesitated. He wasn’t sure how to answer. The man wanted to hear that he understood, didn’t he? Or did he want to hear that he didn’t understand? He wasn’t sure which way to respond, and it didn’t occur to him for a second to answer truthfully. “Suh?” he said, casting the word somewhere between a statement and a question.

“Do you … Well, I mean to say, do you …” Mason exhaled in an exasperated way that set the boy’s heart beating even more rapidly. “It is a lot I ask of you, I know. Just the other day I had a conversation with a learned man from Virginia, who swore that it was useless to instruct Negroes in biblical truths as the race was biologically and morally incapable of true comprehension. I disagreed. I need not trouble your mind with the intricacies of it all, but no harm can be done by trying to convey to you some simplified version of the principle points. Not to mention, as I told the gentleman, that you and your race have a place in here.” He punctuated his statement by jabbing a finger into the open book. “Yes, you do. And that is just what we’ve come to discuss. Let me see …”

William felt an ant bite into his big toe. He let his eye drop down to study it, just for a second, then tried to focus his gaze into the empty space just before his face.

“And Noah began to be a husbandman,”
Mason began.
“And he
planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. And he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’
” Mason held up a finger as if he expected William to interrupt him. “
And he said, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.’
”

The man closed the book. “And from those three men all the people of the earth are descended. I and my kind from Shem and Japheth; you and yours from the accursed Ham. You see, Ham’s descendants …” He opened the book again, found the proper page, and read a long list of names that meant nothing to William. When he concluded he explained that those were the nations of Africa, from whom William was descended. “Your blood is not completely Negro, that is true, but you should be proud of it anyway. Some say that the Negro is not even a man, is another form of being entirely. I, however, cannot dismiss the words of the Lord. You and I are both descended from one of the Lord’s chosen. My race, however, is blessed with mastery of the world, while yours is assigned a place just beneath me. Each race has been ordered in such a way to allow them to shine. You do see the logic in this, don’t you?”

William nodded and mumbled, “Yessuh.”

This was the divine rule of things, Mason explained. When this order was upset chaos was loosed upon the world. Think of all the so-called free Negroes in Maryland. Did they live wondrous lives with that freedom? Did they prosper and grow rich and satisfied the way the better of the white men did? Of course not, for such were challenges beyond their capacity, and it was
the evil of the northern white man which led them to spread such fiction. He picked out a particular former slave as an example, a man whose freedom was purchased by another free Negro. For him, liberty only led to the basest of degradation. He took to theft and developed hungers that he hadn’t known as a slave. He insulted white women and acquired a taste for liquor. He roamed the streets like some pariah of biblical times. Before long he was found dead, hung by his legs from a tree, his head bashed into mush by clubs, genitals severed from his body so that they were no longer a threat to female virtue.