Walk Through Darkness (6 page)

But then he realized that Oli was standing just beyond the white man, a few feet away, hat mounted once again above his mass of hair. William tried to focus on him, but his image wavered before him, real enough to render identity but no details. He was standing there, not chained at all but just standing, watching. William thought of his knife, but knew in an instant that it was gone.

“Oli, see that there’s a space for this one in the wagon.” The white leaned in closer, lowering his face down to within inches of William’s. “Sorry to wake you like this. I know it ain’t civilized, but we got some distance to cover to get us back to camp. You may be a little cloudy right now on the particulars of what’s transpiring here, but I’ll tell you this much so there’s no confusion bout it. You’re plum in the shit, boy. Hope you enjoyed your taste of liberty, cause it’s over. Finished and done with. It’s as official as Waterloo. You’re back to bondage. My nigger Oli made sure of that.”

The man didn’t try to make William rise. Instead, he just dragged him by his feet. William’s shirt rode up his back, the undergrowth
of ferns and twigs scratching across his skin. It wasn’t a long journey, however. The wagon was near at hand. The two men hoisted him and dropped his dead weight alongside boxes and crates and a soft thing that he slowly realized was the carcass of a deer. The wagon moved off, weaving its way through the trees for a few minutes, then dropping down into a steadier route of even grooves. He realized that they hadn’t camped in the wilderness in which he had thought they had. A road ran just over the next ridge, no more than a quarter mile from where they’d slept. It was on this road they now traveled.

As the morning passed and his head cleared, William’s eyes searched the wagon for a weapon or some sort of key, anything that he might turn against his captors. He even considered the antlers of the deer itself, wondering how much force it would take to snap one off, imagining the bloody damage such an instrument could inflict. But the two men had left nothing that he could really use against them. So he devised plans wherein he used his bare hands as weapons, his fingers like prongs to gouge out the white man’s eyes, his fists like mallets to smash the bridge of that black man’s nose. But his hands were cinched so tightly together that they soon went numb. They ached with a strange, gnawing pain, and try as he might he could not free them. Each time his schemes came back to the same conclusion. It was useless. He was caught, and it was all his fault for being such a fool.

Eventually, he gave up on escape and just lay in the bed of the cart through the afternoon, on one side and then the other, then upon his back. He turned again and again from thoughts of Dover, for he felt they might drive him mad. He watched the canopy pass above, the designs cast there and the play of the light through the dusted underbellies of the leaves. One of the deer’s hooves marked the edge of his vision. It rocked in gentle circles just strong enough to upset the flies that tried every few moments to land on it. That dead limb became an animated creature,
complete of itself, its movements a diatribe directed at the sky. Occasionally, Oli’s head appeared. William knew his features, but he felt that he was looking at a stranger that somehow wore a familiar face. His hair still bunched in wild curls beneath his hat, but he didn’t smile anymore. He looked William over with the impartial eyes of a doctor checking a patient’s condition. Satisfied, the head would disappear without ever speaking.

Camp that night was a cluttered scar in the forest, a jumble of cooking supplies and stray tools. The white man built up a fire, laying a complete tree across the kindling. The green wood hissed and spat as the flames charred its midsection. Oli yanked William from the wagon and pulled him to his feet. He led him a little distance away and made him sit against the base of an oak tree. He ran another length of chain through his wrist irons, around his torso and then around the tree, securing it with another padlock. He didn’t speak through any of this, and one would barely have recognized this taciturn jailer as the same talkative companion of the day before.

William sat with the weight of the new irons heavy on his thighs. Just as Oli began to turn away, he said, “Every damn thing you said to me was a lie.”

Oli nodded and chewed this over. “Lied some, yep.”

“Were you never a slave?”

“Oh, for damn sure I was. Twenty year of my life. Mostly like I told you. A slave till Mr. Wolfe done bought me.” He glanced toward the white man. “Bought me when wouldn’t nobody else have me. Now we partners. He treat me all right. He the first one ever did.”

William stared at him, his features tense, trembling with anger. His hands itched to leap forward and pound the stupid expression off the other man’s face. He only held himself back because he knew the chains would hold fast and he would look like a greater fool for the effort.

“What you looking so evil for?” Oli asked. “We all gotta
work. I just done chosen mine. You got caught up in it. It’s you own damn fault. You the one couldn’t hold your liquor.”

William spat.

The moisture fell short and Oli ignored it. “Reckon you’ll just have to go back to working for massa. Ain’t nothing you ain’t lived through before.”

“It ain’t about that! Don’t give a damn bout working. I’m talking bout something else, bout a whole life …” William caught his breath and looked down at his wrists. He blinked, and with his eyes still closed he said, “You ever think I wasn’t running from something, but
to
something?”

Oli watched the man for a moment before answering. “Can’t give too much thought to that. Way I see it, you’re just one nigger in a hundred. Each one of them hundred got they own woes. Each one got they own special reason why I should give a good Goddamn bout them. But how many a them would spare water for me? Tell me that. How many a them? This here’s a hard time we living in. Ain’t even the hardest if you believe the Bible. We all gotta do for ourselves. Reckon my doing took issue with your doing, but that’s the way the Lord seen fit to arrange it. Niggers could say the same bout white folks. Womenfolk could say the same bout men. That’s the way it is, and I tell you what … I’m one humble nigger. Ain’t bout to change the way of the whole world. Just staying alive. And you’re doing the same. Member who chucked the rock at who. Member which one of us done pulled a knife on the other. You memo-rate that, cause I sure as shit am gonna.” With that, he spun and strolled away toward the fire ring and the company of the white man.

The wagon traveled all the next day through a poor district of ramshackle buildings. Some of the structures perched at the edge of the road as if intent on impeding the infrequent traffic. Of the ones that sat at a distance, they tended to be cluttered
with abandoned implements of iron and wood, pieces of things that never formed a whole but which seemed necessary features of the homesteads. Canines roused themselves from the underbellies of shacks, lifted their heads and called out. Toward dusk they paused in a town composed of two stone buildings fronting each other on either side of the road. Wolfe climbed down and bought a few supplies in the general store. William sat in the back of the wagon, returning the hard gazes of the people who walked past. Wolfe was back in a few minutes, and they were off again at a pace brisker than before.

With the town still on the horizon behind them, Wolfe stopped the wagon, climbed down, and moved around to the rear of it. The wide brim of his hat cast his entire face in shadow, but the sunlight reflecting up from the roadside lit his features with a strange underlight. He chewed tobacco, an action that set all the sharp components of his face to motion. He waved a piece of paper before William, then motioned that he should take a look at it.

William stared at the man.

“You probably can’t read, can you?” When William still failed to respond, Wolfe sent a stream of brown spit sideways from his mouth, cleared his throat and began to read the notice. His voice was halting, although so too was the style of the notice. “Says here,
‘Runaway, from my plantation on the night of June 2, a mulatto named William, aged about 22 years, about five feet ten inches high … Had on when he went away a fancy-made cotton shirt, pantaloons and boots, some touched by the whip upon his back in due response to his overproud behavior … will make for a free state … also may try to contact a Negro woman … Twenty dollars will be given for securing the above mulatto … I dearly wish to get him again.’
”

Wolfe ran his fingers across the front rim of his hat. “What I’m pointing out to you is that we got ourselves a crossroads here. Should I, one—return your ass to the care of Mr. St. John Humboldt and collect myself that twenty dollars … Normally,
I wouldn’t mind doing that, but I’ve had some dealings with that man before and they left me a little sour on him. He don’t honor his word, is what I mean to say. Plus, that’s a few extra days haulage to get you there. Or should I drop you at a friend’s over in Baltimore, a slaver I do business with on occasion? He’s got a shipment heading southwest end of the week, and I bet he would pay me the same as Humboldt without causing me half the time or trouble. He would move you out so fast Humboldt would never be the wiser. What do you figure?”

“Humboldt don’t own me.”

“He don’t?” The man checked the notice from several angles. “Who does then?”

“Why you asking me? Ain’t asked me nothing fore this.”

Wolfe smirked. “Just think it a kindly gesture on my part. I have my moments, you see. Anyhow, Humboldt filed the notice. You want I should take you back to him?”

“Rather you kill me.”

The man thought this over. He shoved his fingers in his mouth and worked the wad of tobacco there. He pulled the leaves out and studied them. “Well, no, it don’t say nothing about payment for a dead nigger. That wouldn’t do me no good.” He flicked the tobacco away and spat out the remainder of the leaves. Only when he was satisfied that his mouth was clear did he again look to William. “Fine. Humboldt can go screw himself for all I care.” He crumpled the notice and tossed it into the bushes.

They camped about four miles from the town and were on the move again before sunup the next day. William slept little during the night, but in the early hours he found himself lulled by the movement of the wagon. He fell asleep as the sun rose, and only awoke when the wagon trundled to a halt. The day had grown heavy. The sky was overcast with a haze of gray that floated just above the building in front of which they had stopped. From the roadside it was an innocuous frontage of red brick, with a stone archway that at first seemed more like an alleyway
than an entrance. It might have been a post office or some such structure of local government.

Oli prodded William down from the wagon. They walked through the archway and down a dark stone corridor. They passed several doorways and another branch of the hallway that was filled to the roof with clutter. They paused outside a small room in which Wolfe was already seated and conversing with two men. One of these came out and put William through a cursory inspection: eyes, teeth and breathing. A moment later he was on the move again. Another white man took over from Oli. He pushed William before him to the end of the corridor, through a small courtyard open to the sky. In turn, he passed William on to another man behind a locked gate. From there, William shuffled forward into the confines that were to be his temporary home. He turned and looked behind him, as if he expected some farewell from Oli and Wolfe, but the two were nowhere to be seen.

The walls of the enclosure were some twenty feet high, rimmed across the top with shards of glass that reflected the sun in jagged, multihued shapes. All else was shades of brown: the skin of the men and women in all of that color’s various permutations, the dirt of the floor and the ragged earth tones of the captives’ simple clothing. What little shade there was to be had was cast by the eastern wall. Under this, the majority of the slaves huddled, a couple dozen in number and of both sexes. Some stood leaning against it, a few sprawled out beneath it, but most just sat within the line of its protection, watching William. Their faces were lean and sunken, hair matted and speckled with bits of dirt and twig. In these sorry details they were no different than many field hands that he had seen. It was their eyes that were different. They were eyes driven mad by the tedium of waiting, by days spent in chains contemplating a future bondage, without even the distraction of work or family or nature to ease their minds.

William stood in the center of the enclosure. The gate
clanked shut behind him and a silence fell over the place, broken by the muted friction of his chains as he stood. He felt all those eyes on him. For a moment they seemed as strange and unfamiliar as the eyes of white men viewing him on the auction block. Having exhausted the bare spaces of the walls, he dropped his gaze to his wrists and the iron that bound them, as if all of his problems hinged on those links of metal.

He might have stood like this indefinitely, had not a movement roused him. He looked up. One of the slaves rose from his prone position and propped himself up on one elbow. He motioned with his cupped hand. He said something, so softly that at first William didn’t make it out. He thought on it and the fading words ordered themselves in his mind. The man had asked him over, had instructed him in simple words, to come get some shade. With that simple phrase and gesture William saw them anew. He realized that he recognized them all. He might not know them by name or face or blood relation, but they were his people after all. They wore the same chains. He walked toward them and took his place among them.

S
IX
Morrison and the hound sailed from Kent Island aboard a thirty-foot whaleboat. They were the only passengers and formed, along with the skipper himself a crew of three. The vessel was open to the air like an enormous canoe, with a single mast sunk into its center. It was a slow craft by design, but tacking against a weak breeze it made hardly any progress at all. Man and dog watched the far shoreline appear and disappear, seeming, through the passing of hours, to actually be getting farther away. A haze settled across the water and features that were once clear became less so. Toward the late afternoon the
skipper gave up on sail power. He asked Morrison to bend his back at one of the oars while he worked its twin. The work was strange to Morrison. It fatigued his back and shoulders in a way that he was not accustomed to, and their progress was as slow by oar as it had been under sail. The hound watched the men’s exertions with opinionated eyes.

Once ashore Morrison looked back across the water at the far shore. He thought, and not for the first time, that if the fugitive had in fact swum for freedom he had probably found it at the Bay’s murky bottom. Annapolis had changed since he had left the place years ago, and he didn’t find the house he was looking for until that evening. He stood before it, contemplating the lights in the windows, studying the wealth signified by the well-kept gardens, the white façade and the black faces of the servants who passed by the windows. He thought about making his inquiries just then, but decided against it.

That night he stayed in a tiny room in a tavern near Church Circle, a place that brought back memories he didn’t care for. He tied the hound outside and heard her barking late into the night. He purchased a bottle of whiskey and drank it down entire and lay on his bed with the ceiling spinning above him. He fumbled in his bags and came up with the crumpled letter. As he read it over, the words moved on the page, reordering themselves, incoherent. He mumbled that he should just burn the thing and be done with it, just burn it and get on with his sorry life. But he could not make himself rise to carry out the wish.

He woke up with a head like a metal drum and all the world pounding upon it. The letter was pressed to his chest, crumpled further but not destroyed. He gathered his things and greeted the hound and was again at the gate to the same estate by eight in the morning. He halloed the house, spoke his request and got an audience with the widow herself. She answered his questions shortly, only addressing them at all because runaways were an ever present scourge upon the institution of slavery and all efforts must be made to staunch the flow. Or so she said. She even proposed calling for the woman in question, but Morrison stayed her. Better he just get the woman’s description. Better that he follow her unbeknownst.

And that’s just what he did. The woman left the house via the back entrance. The tracker gave her a good lead and blended his own progress with that of the other pedestrians. He nearly lost her once, when a wagon blocked his path and he missed which avenue she had chosen from a choice of three. He chose one at random, picked up his pace, and found that he had chosen correctly.

The walk took a little over ten minutes, but in that space of time one world merged into another. The large houses disappeared, as did white faces and swept roads and any inkling of grandeur. The woman wove her way into a territory of decrepit shacks, largely empty as the occupants were at work. Stray dogs came out to address the hound and the man kicked them back, all the while keeping an eye on the woman’s form. She stopped at a hut that was little different than the ones near at hand, constructed from materials that had seen better days in other structures long ago. An old woman appeared in the doorway. A swarm of bandy-legged children followed her, clothed in shirts that hung down to their knees. Morrison could just hear the woman’s voice, not the words but the mirthful flavor of them. She bade the young woman to enter.

Morrison motioned for the dog to follow him into hiding. Together they found a place of thick shrubs just off the path that afforded a decent view of the house. They had scarcely settled down in the bushes when the hound grew agitated. Her nostrils flared and quivered and her eyes darted about the woods along the far end of the house. Her front legs pawed the ground before her as if she could rake the object of her interest closer. Morrison had seen this before and knew that she had caught the fugitive’s scent again. He shushed her quiet, for he hadn’t thought it would be this easy. When the dog continued, he slapped her flat-handed on the head and tightened his grip on her collar

The woman reappeared within a quarter hour, shouting a goodbye over her shoulder. On this second appearance Morrison experienced a strange sensation, a sensation he rarely felt as his life was so solitary, and one he shouldn’t have felt for this woman for they had no relation between them. The woman carried the same bundle and walked the same way as before, but somehow she looked different. She moved with a grace
he hadn’t noticed before. He found himself wondering if she bore any resemblance to her sister, thinking that if she did then he could understand the fugitive’s ardor. He watched her to the distance.

In his attentive gaze he forgot the hand over the hound’s muzzle. Feeling the pressure released, the dog tried to pull the man forward. But he held on a moment longer, his eyes fixed to the point at which the woman had disappeared. He almost wished he had reason to talk to her, but she had already led him back to the trail and so she had served the use he had required. The hound craned her neck around and bared her teeth. The man watched the space where the woman had vanished and still did not release the dog. It was not the first moment since he had entered the Bay region that he had hesitated in his mission. But he could not turn away from this and he knew it. He flexed his fingers. The hound lurched from his grasp, loud and hungry and anxious, again on the runaway’s scent. Morrison rose and followed. He was on the trail again.