by Kathi Appelt
After reading Lenny’s e-mail, Soleil feels a little better, which of course makes her think about . . .
Cade.
She reaches up to her throat and tugs on the tiny gold cross. “All the ways of the Lord are loving and faithful.” The words of King David echo in her ears. The little cross is warm between her fingertips.
And then she looks at the honey bear jar on her wrist. She was surprised that her parents didn’t object. She had saved up her babysitting money, and after much discussion, which included not only the perils and pain of tattoos, as well as the infinity of them, her dad had taken her to a place called Tattoo-Lize, where she watched with both terror and amazement as the artist engraved the soft skin of her wrist with the image of a honey bear.
She wanted to whimper at the burn of it, but instead, she chewed on the inside of her mouth and breathed hard until it was finished. The soreness of it has almost vanished, just a small tenderness, really.
It makes her think about Tyler and the miracle of the honey bear jar. And she can’t help but think that there is some kind of miracle about Cade, too. But what that is, she hasn’t a clue.
Buffalo Bayou
HOUSTON
She’s not greedy, the bayou, but she has a hankering for coins. She collects them from every realm. Pass your plate and drop one in, pray for the fish and oysters.
Ask her in your sweetest voice, she is reluctant to hand over even one.
Pennies, dimes, coppers, silver pesos, gold dollars with the face of Sacajawea on one side, silver dollars with the face of Lady Liberty. She loves how they spin and roll in her wavy current until at last they settle into the silt, and how they throw off flickers of light when the sun hits them just so.
The bayou is particularly fond of the coins that come with wishes. She isn’t wild about granting wishes, but she understands their yearnings. After all, the tug of a wish is not so different from the pull of gravity, its longing for redemption.
Above all, she appreciates the rare buffalo nickel. There might be a thousand of them, buried in her bed. Maybe more.
She’s not telling.
Achsah
HOUSTON, REPUBLIC OF TEXAS
1845
The Republic of Texas had little in the way of silver and gold. It never minted any coins. It did issue a paper bill called “star money,” for the small star printed on its face, but it never held much value, could hardly be redeemed.
In Achsah’s pocket, there were no coins, no pesos, no dollars, no star money. The only thing she carried was a marble figurine that fit in the palm of her hand, given to her by the boy she walked beside from Alexandria to Natchez. How many times had she run her fingers over it, held it tightly until, warmed by her hand, it felt almost alive, as if the small O for its mouth was breathing in and out? It was her very own secret. She had never shown it to anyone, not a single soul.
She knew it would not buy passage on a boat from Houston to Galveston and then on to Mexico. She wasn’t sure she could part with it anyways.
The papers, the ones that claimed her free to go, signed by the Captain himself, she had stuffed inside her blouse, and she hoped they were staying dry enough to keep from being ruined by her own sweat. She’d surely need them for passage out of Galveston.
Achsah’s stomach ached from emptiness. She had given most of the food to the girls, taking only a few bites for herself.
All night they had trudged along this shoreline, had grasped the low-hanging vines to steady them in the slow-moving current that pushed against them, while they walked in the muddy water. In all those hours, they had not encountered any snakes or alligators. The same wasn’t true of the mosquitoes. Every inch of their exposed skin was covered in bumps. All three of their faces were swollen from a thousand bites, and the thick, motionless air rang with the insects’ poisonous high-pitched songs.
Finding the Lady was her only chance. If she and her daughters could get to the Lady, they might make it.
Achsah knew exactly where she was. Not far at all, and closing in—she was sure of it—were dogs and a slave hunter and her own weary self, her legs weak from walking in water and mud. There were also two little girls, tired and scared. Mary Ann. Juba.
They were hers and nobody else’s. Like the figurine. So many times she had gripped it, gripped it hard. Times when she had to bite her lip to keep from shouting, times when she had to smile to keep from crying. She had gripped it tight, just as she had when she gave birth three times, refusing to scream, swallowing her big fear, bearing down on the pain that tore through her body.
She had waited for this, for the Captain to keep his promise, and nobody, no one, was going to take her girls away from her.
Just look at them.
Juba, quick on her feet, quick to pick up all the things that Achsah had taught her, like keeping her head bowed when the Captain was in the room, like how to boil a kettle of tea, like how to hem a skirt and how to split kindling for the kitchen fire. Juba had been born on a winter’s morning, just as the sun showed itself above the clouds. And just like the sun, she was round faced and steady. Quiet, too, like the moon. Achsah could rely upon her older daughter.
Mary Ann, still small, just outgrowing her baby ways, even though she was old for that, three after all. She was more restless than her big sister. All the time, she babbled and chattered. Little singer. Little bird. Not so serious-minded as Juba.
They were her girls. Hers. Even the bayou could tell her that.
As the trio pushed through that quiet, dark water, the stars in the deep sky showed themselves between the branches of the thick wooded cove, the fog haints rose into the air and whispered to her, Achsah, take your babies and run.
The Marble Carver
LONG SWAMP VALLEY, GEORGIA
1839
Give us Georgia after the long march, after the thin boy and his people were forced out of their mountains and all they knew, when the marble lay there untouched, quiet, just as it had when it formed on the bottom of the ancient sea floor, pressed down by water and ice, pressed first into limestone and then into marble. Metamorphic. Silent. Rising up through the receding waters until it sat just beneath the Georgia dirt, waiting. Waiting for a new carver.
Then give us Etienne Bel James. He arrived in New Orleans from Nova Scotia. One day while working in a blacksmith shop, over the pounding of metal on metal, he overheard mention of a vast field of marble in the mountains of Georgia, and as soon as he could, he managed to make his way there. It couldn’t be said that he was a particularly gifted artist, but he had a good eye, and it wasn’t long before he had a thriving trade, engraving headstones and carving statuary.
It also wasn’t long before he realized that he needed a helper. So Etienne decided to make his way to the slave market at Forks of the Road, near Natchez. It was a long week of travel astride a horse.
He had never before thought of himself as a slaveholder, but he needed someone who could help lift the heavy marble and spend the long hours polishing and sanding until the marble turned translucent and soft, as if it were lit from within. A slave would be cheaper than a hired hand.
Luck was with him that day, on the banks of the Mississippi. A new coffle had arrived from Alexandria. Right away, he noticed a tall, lanky boy. Despite his gangly frame, the boy stood with his shoulders back, his face forward. It made no difference to Etienne that he was not yet fully grown.
So Etienne haggled with the slave agent, and for forty-five dollars he was handed one end of a chain, the other being a collar around the boy’s neck. A fair price, he thought.
Etienne spoke French, but the boy did not. When he asked about his name, the boy didn’t answer. In fact, the boy would never tell him his true name anyway. Everyone who had ever known it was gone to him. Either died along the trail, or resettled to Indian Territory. But Etienne needed to call him something. So he renamed him: Luc. A simple name. After the gospel.
And as was the custom with slaveholders, he bestowed his own
last name on him: Bel James. He had a bill of sale, and the last name ensured it. Then he reached down and pulled the boy up behind the saddle on the back of the horse, and together they set off.
It was slow going but steady. A week later, dusty and saddle-sore, they arrived back at Etienne’s homestead, with his small cabin and his workshop, and when the boy—now Luc—realized that he was back in the marble mountains where he had grown up, he started shaking. For a moment he thought he was being tricked, that maybe he was going to be forced to start all over, to return to the trail again, to ice and snow and horses that dropped dead while harnessed to their carts.
The shaking overwhelmed him, and he felt the horse underneath him begin to shake too. Neither of them seemed able to stop until Etienne grabbed him and pulled him down. The boy slumped onto the ground. Etienne threw a blanket over him and left him there, chained to a tree. For three days, the boy slept like that, shivering, until at last he finally sat up.
The landscape was so familiar that he cocked his ears and listened for the voices of his mother and his father and his sisters and brother. Their absence was so large that he felt as if the hole of their not-being might pull him down and smother him. He turned his face toward the whisper of the pine needles, but there was still nothing, not his family, his friends, no one he knew. Only Etienne, the man who had paid for him at the slave market at Forks of the Road. He was the only one who seemed to know that the boy was real.
And though Etienne knew he was taking a chance, he unlocked the collar and tossed it aside. The boy might run away, and he wouldn’t blame him if he did. But the chain would likely not have stopped him anyways. Instead, he showed the boy, now Luc, the small room beside the workshop where a clean pallet of straw was set out for him to sleep on, and a small stove with a supply of wood stood ready to keep him warm.
Luc realized he could leave, run. This was where he had grown up, after all. He knew where to find the shallow caves of the panthers, and the deep dens of the black bear, all tucked away; but he also knew that his freedom would be short. If he weren’t attacked by a panther or bear, he’d likely be caught again. Maybe he’d be returned to Etienne, maybe he’d be sold to some other owner, someone who might just call him boy and beat him until there was little skin left on his back. He’d seen the scars of former runaways as he walked in the coffle to Natchez. Men, women, even children, their backs crisscrossed like maps of rivers, rivers that ran with their very own blood.
No, he wouldn’t leave now. And besides, once in a while, sometimes, when the moon bounced between the branches of the night trees, he could close his eyes and hear his true name, whispered amid the clattering of the pine needles. Mountains, it seems, have long memories, and these Georgia mountains remembered this boy.
And so that’s the way it was. Etienne taught Luc everything he knew about carving marble. He showed him the techniques and artistry that he had been taught in France before he moved to Nova Scotia. And in return Luc showed him what he knew, what had been passed down. And as the years passed, the boy became the truer artist, even though he never, not once, carved his true name into his work, and as far as anyone knows, only the mountains remember it.
Give us a tall, thin boy who carved figures out of the Cherokee and Etowah marble. Some the size of a thumb, others the size of a person. Tie one to a cart bound for Texas.
Give us the Lady.
Zorra
HOUSTON, TEXAS
SATURDAY
It was a thief who stole Zorra from her thicket in the Laguna Atascosa with its cottonwoods, stole her away from the coyote and its evening lullaby, shot her with a dart that made her sleep and sleep and sleep, and shoved her into a wooden pen that was built for a different animal, not an animal with wide paws for climbing and sturdy legs for pouncing and a spotted coat that changed shades with every stride.
Not for Zorra. Leopardus pardalis. Honored cat of the Moche people of Peru. Citizen of the valley, where the Rio Grande sliced her habitat in two.
And now that pen is tilting, leaning on its wooden legs that stand in the rising water of the bayou. The water pushes, pulls, pushes, pulls. It makes a swirling eddy as it bumps against the banks and eats away at the mud that holds the pen.
Zorra curls into a tight ball, every muscle tensed. And every once in a while, something in the water—maybe a log, maybe a tire, maybe a capsized boat—bumps against the legs and shakes her pen.
The haints of the water churn too. Zorra, they call. Zorra. The bayou is coming for you.
And Zorra, wild with worry, spins in her tiny cage, overturns the empty metal bowl, cries into the foggy night, her voice raspy, and then she feels a huge and solid bump. The wooden legs beneath her cage, rotted from standing in water for such a long time, buckle, and the pen, unmoored, sways in the air for a full five seconds, then crashes into the bayou.
Zorra, cry the water sprites.
Hold on, they call.
But Zorra doesn’t hear them. It seems that terror has made her deaf. And so does the water that rushes into her cage.
Buffalo Bayou
HOUSTON
Let it be said that the bayou, she of many names, could also be called a collector. Scour her muddy shelves and you will find:
• wedding rings—both tossed and lost
• guns and bullets and spent shell casings
• watches with Mickey Mouse and Road Runner faces
• bracelets and earrings and cuff links and Cross pens
• measuring spoons and silver forks
Look again, and there will be:
• transistor radios
• Game Boys
• more guns, and many more
• Princess phones
• cell phones
• boom boxes
She gets a kick out of all these things, each one a gift. But once in a while she gets the urge to purge and so gives something up. Take the wheel, for example. It’s tall, fifty-six inches in diameter, with spokes that are twenty-two inches in length. The hub was hand carved, not turned on a lathe. It’s a beauty of a wheel, made by a master wheelwright, circa 1840.
All these rains have churned up the mud on the bottom, where she’s kept it for more than a century, almost two. Enough, she’s decided. So she has tossed it onto the banks, where no one who finds it will know its true story. Not a single person alive today will recall that this wheel once had three matching partners that rolled underneath a wagon all the way from Georgia to Texas with a carved marble statue in its bed, wrapped in a tarp and fastened with sturdy rope. No one will remember that.
But the bayou does. She never forgets.
James Morgan
HOUSTON, REPUBLIC OF TEXAS
1845
Born and bred in Tennessee, the son of a mercantile grocer, James Morgan who learned his trade so well that in the year of 1829, when he was only twenty-one, his father gave him a large amount of cash and enough supplies to establish a business in Austin’s Colony in the Mexican territory of Texas. He didn’t travel alone. He brought his brand-new wife, his infant son, and five wagons loaded down with supplies, with two slaves to drive each wagon.
When Texas became a republic, he was given a headright grant—that is, a grant given to heads of families who weren’t African or Indian. It was a “first class” headright of one league and one labor: 4,605.5 acres.
His headright bumped against the Brazos de Dios, just upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, where he could easily ship goods in and out of Galveston, the largest city in Texas. The land was prime for cotton and sugar, so that was what he grew.
Soon he started a cattle herd with a handful of longhorn cows driven north from the Rio Grande. Sturdy creatures, with horns that spanned five feet or more.
And he raised slaves, too. From Cuba and Barbados and the southern states, he imported them and then bred them like any other livestock—horses, cattle, hogs. They said that James Morgan had an eye for the Negroes, knew which of the men could withstand the brutal
heat, and which of the women could work for hours under the Texas sun, who could boil the laundry and hang it out, keep the kitchen garden, nurse his babies. His babies.
It was also said that he was good with children, that his mellifluous voice carried over the water of the Brazos and sang the seagulls to sleep, that he had a thousand stories to tell, especially stories about his heroism in the fight against Mexico. White, black, brown, he liked children, some better than others. He regaled them with stories about his exploits, about how many Mexicans he had shot and killed.
He had served in the Texian Army, right beside Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto, the battle that finally defeated Santa Anna. Texas was no longer part of Mexico. No longer did it answer to the half-African, half-Mexican president of Mexico, Vicente R. Guerrero, or any of the leaders who followed. Mexico could go ahead and set her slaves free. But not Texas. Texas could keep hers. And James Morgan did. He kept every one.
But there were two who he had been promised, the daughters of Achsah. Mary Ann. Juba. There was enough of the Captain in them that their skin was paler than their mother’s; their hair was paler too, and not as curly. They would bring a high price as lady’s maids; they could serve in the household of any well-heeled family. A genteel wife would be happy to show them off. A genteel man would appreciate them for their pale, their tender skin.
Mary Ann. Juba. He had no intention of selling them. But he had been robbed. Achsah had taken them, and so far the hunter with his dogs had not tracked them down. So far.
Achsah
HOUSTON, REPUBLIC OF TEXAS
1845
Mexico. Achsah needed to make her way to Mexico. Mexico meant freedom. It had been two nights of slogging through the muddy water, and two days of trying to sleep in the arms of trees and underneath the brushy vines. Two of each since the Captain died. Surely they should be getting close by now, but the bayou seemed endless, especially as they were traveling by night, when it was impossible to judge the distance.
