Walk Through Darkness (7 page)

S
EVEN
The pen’s mortar walls and hard-packed floor caught the day’s fury like an oven. William sat baking, his body—like those of all the captives—covered in a film of sweat and salt and dirt. Through the hottest hours of the day they did little more than swat at flies, watch the progress of the clouds and scratch at insect bites. Though their jailers were rarely seen, they were somehow a constant threat. The only noticeable lookout was the guard posted on the balcony of the main building overlooking the pen. He was sometimes visible, looking down at them with disinterest, but most often he propped his feet so that they alone were in view from below. They fed the captives corn-flour gruel, a tasteless, textureless substance. To drink they
all shared a bucket of whiskey-tainted water that was refilled several times throughout the day. The alcohol was added for its antiseptic qualities. For William, the faint taste of it brought up a roiling nausea that was hard to contain. They also had to share a single toilet—a large basin set in the center of the compound. Men and women alike were made to squat above it, in plain sight of all, open to the sky above.

Despite the languid stupor of the day, it was impossible not to make eye contact with someone, not to nod a greeting or maybe even to voice a question. By this means William came to know those around him. The man who had called him over was a Louisiana slave named Lemuel. He had been sold four times in his life: twice in the confines of the Delta, once up into Delaware as a result more of gambling debts than of a business transaction, and then to the slave traders who now owned his life and future works. He guessed that the figure would rise to five very soon. He only hoped that he didn’t end up anywhere near his birthplace, for it was a place no slave would want to see twice. His life in that swampy delta had been one of constant hardship, labor unending, heat and insects and cruelty, a life of cane and cotton that marked the seasons in catalogues of the dead.

“I wouldn’t wish it on any man,” Lemuel said. He sat beside William, with his legs crossed before him. His eyes were the same reddish brown as his skin, and they tended to move slowly, settling on one object and studying the full shape and function of it before moving on. He had a crescent of a scar above his eyebrow. It was an old wound, swollen like a brand scar. He sometimes touched it when he spoke. “Not even my worst enemy. You ever seen a thing bit to death by skeeters?”

“No.”

“I have. I’m telling you, stay clear of them swamplands.”

“You don’t mean a person, do you?” William asked, the image of a man covered in pinpricks already fixed in his mind.

“Didn’t say a person. Just said a thing. But if it could happen
to a thing it could happen to a man too. We ain’t all that different. Now don’t take me the wrong way. There’s a beauty down in that country too. I remember sometimes lying up at night, listening to the God-almighty racket of frogs, one louder than the other, smelling all the smells what come to you when it’s dark. Yeah, there’s a beauty in some of that. Just in listening. In tasting the world and breathing it in. That’s true, but I’d just as soon not set foot back there again, all things considered.”

One of the others was a runaway named Dante. He had been caught well into Pennsylvania, on soil some called free but which gave him no protection. A pack of hounds had ripped the flesh of his forearms and left the wounds raw and oozing. He sat near enough to share in the conversation, though his thoughts always began and ended in tragedy. He seemed to have given up the will to live, and made no attempt to swat away the flies that plagued him. William watched him askance, finding it difficult to look at him, but harder still not to. His eyes were drawn again and again to the man’s wounds. He shooed the flies away when he could, although he did this covertly, as he somehow sensed the man would be annoyed to be the subject of pity.

There were two among them who kept to themselves. They made an odd couple, although no one thought it wise to comment on this. The more noticeable of the two was a giant of a man named Saxon. He was naked from the waist up. His britches were torn down the backside in a manner that exposed his privates to the world when he walked. His body was a thing to be marveled at. He must have weighed twice as much as any of the others, and he bore the weight evenly distributed about his frame. The muscles around his neck bunched and quivered when he moved. The flesh around his shoulders and biceps was scarred by stretch marks. The other man was quite inconsequential in comparison. He was a mulatto, honey-complexioned, with short legs and a slight pouch-belly despite his otherwise lean form. He and Saxon shared only each other’s company. They spoke in low
tones that seemed so foreign as to be another language. At moments they were as still as statues. Other times they rose up from the ground, smacking parts of their bodies with the palms of their hands, striking out at the air as if warring with swarms of unseen insects.

They were a mystery to William, until Lemuel explained that they were Gullah people from the Sea Isles of the Carolinas. They lived isolated lives of incredible labor. They’d formed a culture unique unto themselves, with their own language, their own customs, their own blending of Christian and Moslem and tribal African faiths. It was said that they practiced black arts as powerful as any Haitian magic, blood rituals that called upon the undead to aid the living. Watching those two, William could well believe it. He found, despite himself, that he was curious about what they might know, what tools of evil they might have at their disposal.

“Now, I ain’t saying there was never a good body come off them islands,” Lemuel said, “but they got they own ways and not all of them ways is Christian. Listen at night and you’ll hear them trying to work themselves up a voodoo to get themselves free. It never has worked, far as I can tell. But they sure keeping the faith. Whatever faith they got.”

William watched the two men. They sat on the other side of the pen, touching at the shoulder, eyes closed and heads tilted up toward the sun. “Wouldn’t turn the Devil down,” he said, “not if he could get me outta here.”

“You wanna be careful getting in bed with Satan,” Lemuel said. “Tell me this, you ever met a white person you thought belonged in Heaven? You haven’t, have you? Maybe some child, but that’s not what I’m talking bout. Talking bout a full grown adult. Man or woman, don’t make no difference. Ain’t many of them getting to Heaven, not by my tally. If them white folks ain’t in Heaven where is they?” The man pulled his eyes away from the two men and set them on William.

“Hell, I suppose.”

“That’s what I make of it, too. They in Hell. Now, do you want to spend forever with a bunch of evil white folks? It’s hard enough just living this life in they company. Naw, I wouldn’t get in company with the Devil. There’s got to be a better way. It’ll be shown to us one day. How’d you get yourself up in here, anyway?”

William lowered his head and studied the ground. Just the act of the man’s asking reminded him of Oli, of his own loose tongue and the events that followed. He tried to answer the question vaguely, saying he was running and done got caught. But Lemuel pushed him for details. William answered one question at a time, and in so doing soon found himself well into his own story, one that seemed long and sordid already, blurred between dream and reality and plagued by mistakes.

When he concluded, Lemuel sat for a moment nodding his head. “Well, you done made a mess of it,” he said.

That wasn’t the response William had expected. He tried to think of some way to refute the statement. He picked a twig and bent it into a strained curve. Finally, he just said, “You can go to hell.”

Lemuel took this statement seriously and answered in a different tone than before, softer, more open. “Don’t think I’m littling you. That ain’t my intention. You living a world a pain and I know that pain. All us round here know it. I ain’t littling you. I’m just saying you slipped up. Had freedom in your path and first chance you got you gave it away for a meal and a little whiskey. It hurts, don’t it? That’s some expensive whiskey—the kind that costs a man his freedom.”

William snapped the twig and tossed the two ends away. “Don’t tell me what I lost. You don’t know the first thing bout it. You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever gotten a child in a woman.” He made to rise, but the older man stayed him with an outstretched hand.

“Now, that there—I’ll tell you what it puts me in the mind of,” Lemuel said, “the time Abram asked God why he didn’t have no children and what was to become a him being childless. Come on now, sit yourself. Ain’t gonna harm you just to listen. Now, Lord took Abram outside and told him to look up at the sky and count the stars. Said,
‘Look now toward Heaven’,
and if he could count all them stars then he would know how many children would come from him and how fruitful his seed would be on into eternity. I’d tell you the same, I would. I say look up and when you see them stars know that you too go on. They your children, and your children’s children and on like that. You may never put your hands on them and pull them to you in this life, but you can look up and know they out there waiting for you and some day you’ll be together with them. That’s what I do. Cause, nigga, I got more children out in the world than I can number on my fingers. And not one them would know my face to call me papa.”

William stared at the man. “Don’t know whether you’re coming or going,” he finally said.

Lemuel grinned. “That’s right. That’s the way I like it. Keep em all guessing.”

William didn’t rise again, but he did turn away from Lemuel and sat with his back to him. From this angle his eyes fell on a pregnant girl. She was tiny, with a child’s round face, still incomplete in her body’s development. As with Dante, William tried not to look at her, but his eyes kept wandering back to her. She sat within the shadow of a tiny alcove, a space offered to her in kindness. But she was never comfortable. Her belly seemed to be the center of her, all thoughts and pain and emotion contained in that great swelling. She rolled her body from one side to the other, sat up and then lay down, all the while squinting out at the world.

Later that evening he lay listening to the rhythm of the girl’s moaning. It began slowly and almost faintly enough to ignore.

But as the dusk faded into night and the moon rose her cries did as well. The compound was as still as ever it had been. Even the two Sea Islanders were silent and motionless. This evening, it seemed, was too sacred for the invocation of spells. Into this calm the woman’s calls rose up and reached out like open hands. They grabbed the listeners by the throats and held them until the moments of agony passed. The light of the new moon was so bright, and William’s senses so heightened, that he could see the girl and the women who attended her. She stood with a woman at either arm. She hung between them in the peaceful moment, limp and breathing. But when the contractions returned her body tensed from head to toe and she bowed with the wave rolling over her.

Dante, sitting nearby, said, “That baby gonna kill her.” He sat with his damaged arms cradled in his lap, but his eyes were fixed on the girl, watching every second of her labor. “You think she all right?”

“She all right,” Lemuel said. “You never heard a woman give birth before? It’s always a God-almighty pain.”

“But she just a little thing,” Dante said. “Big boy-child might bust her. My momma died in the bearing. Not me but the child after me. Got stuck up in there the wrong way. I remember the night it happened. Was a summer night like …”

“Hush, boy,” Lemuel hissed. He touched his forehead with his fingertips, found the scar and then pulled his hand away, as if he were checking that the old wound was still there. “We don’t need to hear that mess. Not right now. You set your mind on better thoughts than that.”

They were still for a few minutes. As if invited by their silence, another contraction took hold of the girl. The muscles of her bare arms stood out as she clenched her aids; the contours of her neck flexed when she tilted her head to the sky; her teeth glinted like tiny weapons raised against the night. William didn’t speak, but he found the display just as disturbing as Dante. It was
hard to imagine Dover going through such pain, frightening to think that in life there was always the threat of death. He wondered who the father of the girl’s child was. It was clear he wasn’t within this pen. But what sort of man was he? Had he loved that girl-mother as one does a wife, or had he simply used her?

For all of the noise and pain the girl’s labor was actually quite short. William didn’t see the conclusion of it. Clouds hid the moon and the women circled the girl, blocking out his view. He turned his eyes to the sky and tried not to listen and not to think and not to care. But then the moment came and the woman’s cries stopped and silence lingered, a thing as black as the night and as full of danger. Then a new cry floated up into it, that new being’s plaintive call, its high-pitched, trembling complaint. When that moment came tears appeared and crept from the corners of William’s eyes and fell to the ground. He felt for that woman, for that child, for the small part of God’s heart that allowed for such moments, a feeling which he didn’t name but which was as painful as it was joyful. He was full to the brim with an emotion just kinder than rage, and with a longing for his own loved ones, the desperate hope that someday he might hear the same cries and know that in them he was perpetuated. In this he was not alone, and his tears were not alone.