by Alyssa Cole
His hand rested on the hilt of his knife; she’d seen him search it out reflexively many times as he strode ahead of her. He looked to and fro, vigilant as he had been since they’d started out. It struck her then, the reality of the situation—he hadn’t been ignoring her all this time, or punishing her—he’d been on alert. He’d been afraid.
After the Yanquis had taken her father, they hadn’t stopped visiting his daughters. They’d come more often, free to use Villa Sanchez as a base now that the Rebels had been driven to the next town and the head of house was gone. Every time she’d heard the hooves of their horses approaching, Janeta would be seized by panic. Her sisters’ fears were more corporeal, as the soldiers in blue made more pressing and overt romantic overtures, but Janeta was also constantly aware that at any moment they might discover that it was her who passed their information to the Rebels. At any moment, her family and friends might discover that her father had paid for her crimes—that she’d let him—and her family would expel her as she’d always known they would after Mami had died.
Had Daniel been trapped in that awful mist of fear for their entire journey? She remembered the scars on his back. Was he ever free of it?
“Here.” She handed him the canteen.
“Is it rum or water?” he asked apprehensively. He looked around as if each shadow thrown by the half-bare trees might hide some threat, and Janeta’s heart squeezed painfully in her chest. He was looking in all the wrong places; the actual danger stood just a foot away from him, offering him a drink and wishing this damned war had never drawn either of them into its gears.
“I think you could use some liquor, to be honest, but it’s just water.” He nodded, and she watched as his lips parted and he tipped the water into his mouth, how his throat worked and droplets spilled down his beard. Warmth flowered in her, despite the cold breeze rushing through the forest as if pushing them to continue their journey. She pulled her gaze away from him.
“I will try to walk faster,” she said as he handed her back the canteen. “I hadn’t considered the danger we’d face before even reaching our assignment.”
He grunted in acknowledgment, and they set off again.
“We’re headed to Cairo,” he said eventually. She glanced at him, catching sight of how his full lips thinned as he frowned. “There’s a large contraband camp there, where they hold folks who’ve escaped into Illinois.”
“Contraband? Slaves?”
“Not anymore,” he said, either not understanding her slipup or correcting it. “They’re free people, coming here with the idea that people up North might treat them better.”
Janeta was caught in the whiplash of her own belief and Daniel’s cynical worldview. “Of course, their lives will be better. They can no longer be enslaved. They are free.”
Daniel glanced at her, his expression making what he thought of her words clear.
“Not being enslaved is the very least thing these people are owed, and even that is not guaranteed,” Daniel said. “The whites here aren’t exactly welcoming them with open arms. The newly freed leave the camp on trains and are deposited in towns with hostile people who don’t want freed Negroes living among them. Some Negro men recently settled in a town they weren’t supposed to because of some law they knew nothing about.”
“What happened?” Janeta asked. The bitterness in his tone had already given her an answer, but it made no sense. Back home, the Rebels had talked of all the darkie lovers up North, how they were weak and pathetic because they let Negroes do as they wished. Janeta had always wanted to disappear during those conversations. Instead, she had lifted her chin haughtily and laughed more loudly than was necessary with the men during those conversations. Afterward, she’d stare into her mirror wondering what they saw when they looked at her.
Daniel took her arm and guided her around a hole she would have tripped into, as her eyes were on his face and not the ground. He dropped it immediately. “What happened? The same thing that happens to our people everywhere in this godforsaken country. They were arrested, tried, and convicted of breaking the Black Laws. As punishment, they were sold back into slavery, auctioned off to the highest bidder.”
Janeta’s throat went tight. “No.”
Her mother had been free. She was free. Those men had thought they were free, and they’d had their hopes for the future ripped away from them. Their own government, supposedly fighting on their behalf, had sent them back into slavery. After Mami had died, Janeta started having nightmares in which Papi took her down to the cane field and told her she must earn her keep. She’d awakened sick with betrayal and fear every time. That nightmare was a reality in this strange country.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “For a while before the Proclamation, Union soldiers would even return runaways to their masters. If there is one hard truth every Negro in this land must face, it’s that many of our countrymen would rather see us dead than free.”
“That can’t be true. Don’t you think most of the Southerners fight not for slavery, but for freedom from taxes and the like? Like George Washington and those men.”
That was another favorite topic of the plantation owners who’d gathered in her family’s parlor. They’d said over and over again that the South only wanted freedom from tyranny, and they were adamant that it was nothing more than that, no matter what slanderous, yellow-bellied Northmen said.
Daniel gave her a narrow look. “They fight to keep slaves and the profit they make from slaves. Like George Washington and those men.”
His tone showed that he thought her a fool, and Janeta felt like one. She was ashamed and confused. Because what Daniel said made sense, but Papi had said the war wasn’t about slavery. Not really. That the North just wanted to take control of the South and its wealth. And the Yanquis who had shown up had done just that in Palatka, taking over homes and demanding food and drink and all manner of things. Papi had told her that the Confederates were just trying to protect what was theirs, as they tried to protect their assets in Cuba from Spain. He’d made it sound so reasonable, though she had seen many an unreasonable thing since her departure.
“You are from the North and were born free, yes?” she asked
“I was,” he said flatly.
“And you feel you were treated no better than a slave?”
He stopped and looked at her not with anger or disgust, but with sadness. “Should that be our standard of a good life? Being treated better than a slave?”
Janeta’s body was taut with fear not because she was afraid of him, but because she didn’t know how to answer. She shook her head slowly.
“I lived a much better life than any slave, I imagine. I was a law clerk, a respected man from a respected family. I might have lived a long and happy life never knowing that I was in chains, too.”
“I’m sure a person working in the cane field might take offense at your comparison,” she said, and was pleased to elicit surprise from him. She was tired of feeling foolish, tired of the way everything Daniel said was in direct opposition to what she had been taught. He couldn’t be right about everything, could he?
She remembered the road through the field on the plantation in Santiago. So many dark bodies, sweating and chopping in the hot sun as Janeta and her family passed by in their covered coach. She’d once seen a girl who looked so much like her, but slightly older, carrying a parcel of cut cane down the road.
“She looks like me, Mami!”
Her mother hadn’t looked out to where Janeta pointed with a pudgy finger. “No, she doesn’t.”
“Will I have to work like her one day?” she’d asked. Her mother, sitting with her chin up and her eyes locked ahead as she always did when they passed through the cane fields, had turned and grabbed Janeta by the jaw. The touch was so unlike Mami’s usual loving caresses that tears of shock had sprung immediately to Janeta’s eyes.
Her mother’s dark skin was usually unlined, but her brow had been furrowed and lines had bracketed her frown as she stared i
nto Janeta’s eyes. “Never. Nunca en la vida, comprende? You aren’t like them. I made sure of that. Never compare yourself to a slave again.”
Janeta had started to cry, not understanding what she had done wrong. She still didn’t understand. She didn’t understand Daniel, either. She’d been free, and had never suffered because of the color of her skin. Not much, anyway . . . had she?
Daniel scoffed. “My privilege isn’t lost on me, but neither is this fact: a life that can be disrupted, ruptured, and ruined for the sole offense of the color of your skin is not freedom by any definition. But that is the lot of every Negro in the United States. It’s the lot of every Native who’s had their land snatched and their tribe decimated. We can be intelligent, we can accrue wealth, we can strive to make this country better, and lose everything at the whim of some pale sir or madam. It doesn’t even require much effort on their part. That’s the worst of it. They don’t even have to try hard to ruin us.” He turned from her then and started walking. “I knew you were the questioning sort, but it seems I overestimated your intelligence.”
Janeta stood where she was, still caught in the riptide of his words. She wanted to follow him, but the tug of his ideas had dragged her deep into uncharted territory.
“No, you don’t get to just dismiss me like that.” Her legs were carrying her toward him now, her frustration propelling her. She grabbed his arm and he whirled quickly, shaking her off.
“You studied law. You learned about the laws behind slavery, and government. I have some education, but not—not in that area. If I ask you a question and I’m wrong, that’s fine. If you don’t want to answer, that is fine, too. But I’m not a bad person for not knowing all of these things. I am not American.”
“You are a Negro,” he said.
“I am Cubana, descended of slaves and conquistadores,” she retorted. “And I am not the only one ignorant of how things work in other countries. What is truth here is not truth everywhere.”
Daniel sighed heavily. He looked tired—so tired that she knew the next words out of his mouth would be an apology.
“I’m sorry,” he said. She was ready to accept his apology, but then he continued. “Sorry that you think language and culture create deeper ties than the common journeys our ancestors made across the Atlantic, crammed into the filthy holds of ships. That’s a language, too. If you can’t speak it yet, then you are lucky. If you refuse to learn it, then you have no business with the Loyal League.”
Outrage and shame coated her like the grime that had built up over her long journey, and a familiar frustration filled her. Her family had told her who and what she was so many times it had become reflex. “You are a Sanchez. That’s all that matters.” When she’d left Palatka, following Henry’s instructions and searching out Loyal League members, she’d been told, “You’re Negro, and that’s all that matters,” and that was if people bothered to say it nicely. Why did it have to matter at all? Why couldn’t she just be Janeta Sanchez?
Still, she couldn’t help but think on his earlier words.
“Slaves to cook for them. Slaves to clean for them. Slaves to fuck.”
Her mother had been a slave. Her father had owned her mother. Yes, he had married her after his first wife died, but what had she been to him before that? Her parents had spoken little of the time before their marriage, though her mother had not shied away from boasting of how she’d won over Don Sanchez. The how of the courtship hadn’t been elaborated on, and Janeta had embellished things in her imagination. Her mother had been beautiful, and her father had been enchanted by that beauty.
But now Janeta thought about how it had been impressed on her that she was not like those people who toiled for them day in and day out. That her mother was not like them. That she must never confuse herself with them because they were lower than her. How had a courtship commenced when her mother had been bound to her father’s household, when slaves could not leave or protest their treatment without punishment? How had her mother been different, and how had her father known?
Slaves to fuck.
Janeta didn’t want to think of it. She had never wanted to. Her father had loved her mother, and her mother had loved him. Eso fue todo. She couldn’t imagine anything as unseemly as what Cumberland had insinuated. But she hadn’t been able to imagine a great many things until she’d left Palatka.
They walked on in silence, and soon they began to encounter more people in the road. Slaves. Slaves who had escaped.
The family slaves had never spoken about their feelings with her, obviously, and she hadn’t ever asked. When her mother had been alive, she’d told Janeta that she made sure they were treated well because she had been one of them, though if she’d had any friends amongst them she never acknowledged it. Janeta had always been told that the slaves on the Santiago plantation and in their household were happy. But if they had been happy, why had there been guns to prevent rebellion? Why had there been a whipping post? Janeta had once been curious about such things, but eventually had just accepted it as the way things were.
“It seems I overestimated your intelligence.”
Her thoughts were a jumble as an area crowded with tents and people came into view.
“Welcome to Cairo,” Daniel said, finally speaking after ignoring her for miles. “If you want to educate yourself, you could find no better place for instruction.”
She looked away from Daniel and took in the people they passed: two men talking jovially; a father throwing his child up into the air and catching him. A little girl who sat on the ground, sucking her thumb as tears streamed down her face.
She tore her gaze away. She needed to focus. She didn’t need an education; she needed information, and hopefully a telegraph line.
“Why are we here?” she asked.
“The question every modern man asks himself,” Daniel said, gaze fixed ahead of him. He was a big man, and people moved out of his way, as if they could sense the pent-up rage inside of him. Or perhaps they felt the same since they’d all been recently enslaved, too—why wouldn’t they be angry? Why hadn’t she thought they should be?
“Cumberland.”
He didn’t answer. Could he suspect? Could this be a trap?
Janeta’s gaze darted about. People watched them as they walked, obviously eyeing their clothing and shoes and demeanor. Fear shivered up her spine. She’d been told for years that she was different from slaves because she was civilized, and they couldn’t be trusted not to act like savages. Would one of them hurt her? Like Papi always warned?
She felt suddenly ill, not from fear, but from the thoughts filling her head—thoughts that had been purposely forced into her mind by family and friends who said they were trying to keep her safe. To do so, they’d pointed out repeatedly how the people who looked like her were less than, childlike, unable to control their impulses or take care of themselves.
She looked at the people around her. A woman smiled in her direction. A little girl hid behind the woman’s skirt and peeked around it cautiously before being swung up into an embrace by a man who was likely her father, given their matching smiles. Janeta didn’t really think these people would hurt her, did she? Her mother had once worked out in the fields, like many of the people before her. Janeta could have been the child of any of these people, could have been—
She walked directly into Daniel’s back, and he turned and looked down at her. She expected annoyance, but his expression was flat. She could feel how tense his body was in the moment before he stepped away.
“Sorry,” she said.
She was overwhelmed, but he looked ready to crack like a coconut under a machete.
She reached out and touched his arm. He bristled but didn’t pull away.
“Is it hard for you? Being here?”
“You and your damned questions,” he growled.
“This is what detectives do,” she said gently. “They ask questions, and they try to help if they can.”
“You really are terrible a
t this if these are the questions you choose to ask,” he muttered.
He was right—she wasn’t asking the questions that she should be. Not at all. She had nothing to give Henry yet, even if she did find a means to convey information. Worse, she didn’t feel bad about it. She should have been racing to get him something, anything to help her father, but she found that the thought of telling him about Daniel or the other detectives she had met gave her vertigo.
Papi, I’m sorry.
“Yes, it’s hard,” Daniel huffed out. “Because most of these people have suffered far, far worse than I ever have, and for far longer. And yet they still laugh and smile. They still have hope. It’s a reminder of my own weakness.”
Weak? Is that how Cumberland saw himself? His hand moved to rest over hers on his arm, and for a moment she thought he would take her comfort and was strangely glad of it. Then he firmly pulled her grip away from him and dropped her hand.
“It’s also a reminder of my resolve,” he said. “The fate of all these people rests in the hands of the Union. We must help the Northern forces win, Sanchez, because our loss is greater than the loss of a nation. It’s a condemnation for our people.”
Janeta’s throat constricted. He was staring at her, his brown eyes reflecting his intense conviction. For a moment, she was sure he knew, sure he was simply toying with her. If he wasn’t, how could he so easily undermine her resolve?
“Yes,” she said. “We must free those we hold dear from unjust imprisonment. That is my sole purpose.”
He held his gaze on her, and Janeta found that she could not look away, though she wanted to. There was turmoil in his eyes, and something that held her fast and made it hard to breathe. Daniel had said he believed in nothing, but there was a purpose in him that belied that claim. A drive that couldn’t be fueled only by empty rage. He was a detective because he wanted to do good for his people. Their people? And she had been sent to stop him from doing that good.
