by Zakes Mda
The next day the boys were summoned to the big house. The lady of the house was sitting on the porch drinking tea with cake like some fancy English lady. Despite the heavy fur coat she was wearing the boys didn’t understand why anyone would want to have tea and cake outside in cold weather like that. But they put it down to the eccentricities of the rich. Indeed she had developed strange habits ever since she started reading Godey’s Lady’s Book to which she subscribed ostensibly for the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, which were occasionally published in the journal, but in reality for the tips on womanhood and for the elaborate colorful fashion plates that were beginning to influence the way she dressed. Of course, the hoi polloi of Fairfield Farms would not have known what inspired her current refinement, piety and purity.
Even as she sat in the porch she was idly paging through the journal. She raised her head and smiled at the boys as they stood uneasily in front of her. She asked Nicodemus if he enjoyed his newly assigned duties, and he hesitated to answer, thinking that he would be deemed a lascivious little bastard if he openly expressed joy at being a stud. The lady, however, egged him on, and told him that he must not be ashamed of his wonderful job with all the opportunities and perks it provided, including a special diet on mating days. But he must enjoy it while it lasted because if ever he decided to cross her for any reason whatsoever, he would not be a stud anymore but would find himself being the object of furious bidding at some auction in a faraway state where he would never again see his friends, the boy he regarded as his brother and the woman he believed was his mother. It was therefore wise to keep his mouth shut about things that had nothing to do with him.
And then she turned to Abednego and complimented him on his good looks and on the fact that he now had a girlfriend. The young man couldn’t imagine how Madame Fairfield knew about the girlfriend and was visibly shaken. The lady of the house giggled naughtily and assured the boys that she knew everything that happened on her plantation. She had eyes everywhere, she said, and no one could hide from her. Another thing that she knew, she said boastfully, was that Abednego was supposed to be auctioned with the last stock that The Owner had taken to Charleston, but she intervened and asked her husband to sell other stock instead. She had that kind of power, she said, to decide on the fate of everyone on the plantation. It was important for Abednego to always bear that in mind in whatever he did or said. If ever he got tempted to talk about things that were none of his business it would do him a load of good first to recall what she was telling him at that time.
“Know where your girl is?” she asked.
“Don’t know, ma’am, haven’t seen her for a while.”
“Know why?”
“Don’t know, ma’am.”
She had been rented out to a bordello in Charleston. A sudden rage flashed across his eyes, but he was wise enough to contain it. The lady of the house was looking at him very closely, with a playful smile on her thin lips and in her tired eyes. The boys knew that this was not a game at all. The Owner had started a new venture of renting out his white slaves to bordellos in the neighboring cities. It was usually those girls whose wombs were stubborn and defiant despite many attempts at mating them with the best of studs. If they could not produce future stock for the markets they were good only for the bordellos, which was a way of earning more money for the plantation.
Slave breeding was a long-term investment. It required patience before one could reap the benefits. It took many years for the stock to mature and be ready for the market. Unlike cotton or tobacco or even cattle and hogs. The Owner had reached a stage where he now had a steady annual flow of stock and was enjoying good profits. But he could not be expected to absorb the losses caused by white women he had bought so expensively, yet who were proving to be unable to bear children. He even suspected that some of the barrenness was self-inflicted. The women had to earn their keep and the bordellos were a sure-fire way.
After observing the squirming and fidgeting boys for a while she daintily sipped her tea, gave them each a piece of cake and sent them on their way. Although this was the best currant and cornmeal cake they had ever seen, it tasted like dust and Abednego couldn’t bring himself to swallow his. He felt angry and powerless when he imagined what was happening at that very moment to his girl in Charleston.
That night it snowed quite seriously and the Abyssinian Queen sat on a stool in her cabin waiting for the boys. The sewing matriarchs, now blind with age, had long gone to bed. But she would not sleep before she allocated the boys dreams for the night. It had been her practice since they were little to give each one a dream to dream every night before she herself sank into a dreamless sleep. So it was that she waited and waited and waited.
About midnight she began to suspect that something was wrong. The boys never stayed out that late. When they had plans to sneak away and visit friends or to play outside in the moonlight they always came to the house first for the evening meal and then for the allocation of dreams because they knew that their mother liked to sleep early.
She worried that something had happened to them, but she never suspected that they had carried out a daring escape. They would have said goodbye to her before the flight, wouldn’t they? They would not be so foolish as to escape in the middle of such a viciously cold winter. Dreading what she would find, or perhaps not find, she went out and searched the hollow of the ghost tree. The quilt bundles were gone. The boys would not be coming back. Something must have happened to hasten their escape and they obviously did not confide in her because they knew that she would persuade them to postpone the flight for a better season. She wept softly and prayed for their safety.
It was the season that worried her more than the escape itself. She feared the boys would not get too far. They would be forced back by the weather or by the slave chasers. It was indeed difficult even for the sciolist to come to terms with a winter escape. For instance, what would the boys eat when the dried fruit ran out? If the sciolist had made the boys escape in summer or at least in fall they would trap all sorts of wildlife that was plentiful in the region. They would also eat the cherries and blackberries that grew wild on the mountainside and were ripe in the late summer and early fall. In the late fall deer breed and become stupid. They fall prey to mediocre hunters. The boys would feast on venison. They would survive on the acorns from the red oaks and the pecan-tasting nuts from the giant hickory trees—all of which were good to eat for both squirrels and humans. They would even devour the squirrels themselves.
But in winter, what is there to eat? This was not the boys’ immediate concern as they trudged in the deep snow, with the sciolist as the Spirit that must guide them to safety now that he has acquiesced to a winter escape. Their steps were slow and labored because of the bundles they carried; and the oversized boots and three pairs of old stockings each boy wore; and the rags they had wrapped on their hands and around their legs under their britches; and the balaclava-like hats crocheted by their mother the previous summer; and the women’s corduroy coats they wore—handed down to their mother by the lady of the house years ago when the Abyssinian Queen was still a much favored occupant of the big house.
At first the boys walked in a southerly direction for they had no knowledge of the world beyond the plantation. The map that their mother had stitched on Abednego’s quilt was not helping that much since its cardinal points were rather confusing. Nicodemus had the feeling that they had misread the map and they argued about it. After failing to come to any agreement they decided that the map would not be of any use to them. The quilt would only be good for keeping them warm and also as a keepsake in memory of their mother—not only because it was a gift from her, lovingly made especially for this occasion, but it also retained her peculiar life-affirming scent even though it had spent months in the heart of the ghost tree. The sampler too: it continued to exude her odor, despite the fact that not so long ago she had washed it with lye soap after it had become dirty from staying in the heart of the ghost tree for too long.
It was like their mother was with them throughout the journey.
They walked in the night with the snow piling to cover their tracks after them.
The snow should not have bothered to cover their tracks. When their escape was discovered—a result of Nicodemus’s failure to appear at the mating bays the next morning—slave chasers and their dogs were dispatched to hunt them down and bring them back dead or alive; preferably alive so that a long and excruciating punishment yet to be devised could be meted out to them as an example to the rest of the slave community. The chasers headed north; for no one imagined that escaping slaves would go southward, moving deeper into slaveholding territory. Dogs failed to detect their scent. It was covered by the snow. And after a day of scouring the neighborhood and beating up every black person they came across demanding that they tell where the fugitives had gone, the slave chasers returned without the boys.
The Owner took his anger out on the Abyssinian Queen. Everybody knew that this would happen. That was why in the first place the boys had been very reluctant to escape. They knew that vengeance would be taken on her. She had known it too even as she egged them on. She was prepared to sacrifice and be tortured for their freedom. When she thought they were getting too comfortable in the world into which they were born she would take out the sampler and use its designs as prompts in her improvisation of stories about freedom. Stories about the joy they would know at Berlin Crossroads and the ultimate unlimited freedom they would enjoy in Canada, or Canaan as she fondly called it.
She talked of Berlin Crossroads a lot ever since the plantation grapevine—courtesy of the slave stealers who had come in the night the previous summer—brought it to her attention that a settlement by this name had been established somewhere in the middle of Ohio, in Mercer County, by Virginian Africans who had purchased themselves out of slavery. Nicodemus’s father was one of the free residents of Berlin Crossroads. After manumission he had settled on the outskirts of Cincinnati for some time, and then joined the Virginians who left Cincinnati in the mid-1830s to establish the thriving community. For a long time the Abyssinian Queen dreamed that one day the man would return and purchase the boys from The Owner. When that did not happen she encouraged them to escape and find Berlin Crossroads.
When their mother described Berlin Crossroads it was as if she had been there herself. She talked of the gardens that grew all kinds of vegetables and of orchards with the sweetest fruit that no one at Fairfield Farms had ever tasted. The kind of fruit that grew only on the old continent. She had visited the place in her dreams, she told them, and it was beckoning them with utmost urgency. The boys did not really want to hear of this urgency, not only because of the reasons mentioned already—namely, Abednego’s new love and Nicodemus’s new job—but they wanted to postpone as much as possible the punishment that they knew would be doled out to the Abyssinian Queen. They had heard of people who had been cowhided to death for aiding and abetting fugitives, and did not want that to happen to their beloved mother.
She was, indeed, cowhided. Under the very hickory tree that had witnessed the previous beating. Madame Fairfield personally supervised the cowhiding by the burly mulatto men in the absence of The Owner, who decided to find another urgent business engagement that could not be postponed just at that moment. As the whip cut the Abyssinian Queen’s bare back the lady of the house reminded her of how she once messed up her wedding after she had gone to great expense to make her happy. The Abyssinian Queen knew this would be coming, for the lady of the house always reminded her of the botched wedding whenever she was angry with her. Madame Fairfield never forgot that wedding, even though she had organized many others after that—house slaves being married off to other house slaves either from Fairfield Farms or from neighboring plantations.
The Abyssinian Queen’s blood drew maps of red on the virgin snow and everyone thought she was going to die. But she was stubborn. She was determined not to die before a blue fly brought her the good news that her children had crossed the River Jordan safely. For days she lay on the mat in the cabin, the blind matriarchs nursing her festering wounds.
Follow the North Star: the sampler reminded the boys. But they could not locate the guiding star because the sky was devoid of stars that night. The stars were all nestling under a thick gray blanket, hiding away from the cold. The boys turned eastward and walked slowly and with difficulty through the night. Dawn found them on the banks of a big river. The River Jordan, they thought. They had reached the River Jordan. They sat on its snowy banks and wept. They so much wanted to wade in the water, so as to lose whatever evil spirits were following them from Fairfield Farms. Evil spirits never traveled over water. That was part of the wisdom their forebears brought from the old continent. But wading would also lose their scent for the dogs, for they did not know that the chasers had taken the wrong direction and returned to the plantation without any luck. They had no idea that after cowhiding their mother, Madame Fairfield had sent the chasers out again to look for the boys for she did not believe they would get far in that kind of weather, and threatened the chasers that if they came back without the boys it would be their bodies’ turn to taste the rawhide. Or she would dispose of them in the most abominable manner possible. The chasers knew that was no idle threat. Although they were an almost-white breed of mulattos, they were slaves nevertheless, and could easily find themselves in deep trouble if they crossed the lady of the house. The fact that it was difficult to sell men who could easily pass for white on the open market would not stop her from getting rid of them to some unscrupulous and cruel master in a private exchange, where they would surely lose the aristocratic status they enjoyed at Fairfield Farms.
The boys were blissfully ignorant of all this as they considered how they would cross to the other side. A sheet of ice covered the river. But it was thin enough for them to see black water sluggishly flowing under it. They threw rocks to break the ice and open a path for them to cross. They took off their boots, pants and stockings and waded in the icy water. With chattering teeth they playfully sang the spiritual: Wade in the water, wade in the water, children. Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water.
After crossing the river they found a branch with which they removed the snow near an oak tree to uncover the leaves on the ground. After removing the top leaves they took a layer of dry ones and piled them on the tinder of dried punky wood particles that they carried in Nicodemus’s bundle. When the sparks from the flint landed on the tinder Abednego blew on it gently until it burst into flames. The pith on the oak leaves made them burn very hot. The boys warmed themselves and dried their clothes.
A large blue fly appeared and hovered above their heads. There was no doubt that this was the fly they had first seen at Fairfield Farms just before they began their journey. That afternoon they had gone to feed their mother’s milk cow—a symbol of The Owner’s compassion in allowing those who were owned also to have the satisfaction of owning something albeit as custodians, for everything and everyone at Fairfield Farms was truly owned by The Owner. As they caressed the cow, bidding it farewell and asking it to pass the message to their mother that they meant her no disrespect by escaping without her knowledge, it egested a big lump on the ground. A fluorescent blue fly, almost as big as Abednego’s pinkie, appeared from nowhere. A fly in the middle of winter was an unusual sight, let alone its size and color. It buzzed around and sat on the steaming cow dung. Then it buzzed over their heads and they tried to swat it off, until it flew out of the stable. Now here it was again. It had obviously followed them. Nicodemus got the bright idea that perhaps the fly was their guardian angel, the Spirit that would lead them to safety. Abednego got the bright idea of naming it Massa Blue Fly. It buzzed around for a while and then flew away.
As soon as blood began to flow in their limbs again they extinguished the fire lest it invite the slave chasers from Fairfield Farms or sundry slave hunters who were always out looking for bounty. They put on their britches, stockings and boots and once aga
in trudged on. They had walked for a few hours when they came across a giant sycamore. They knew at once that it was even older than the one in front of their mother’s cabin. Most likely it was over a hundred years old, or even two hundred, for its hollow heart was so big that a whole family could live there. Indeed the ghost tree knew what the boys did not know, that over the years families of runaways had taken refuge inside its trunk, some even staying for days on end. From the dry manure on the floor the boys knew that the tree had been used in the past to house animals.
The boys transferred the contents of the crazy quilt to the sampler. They cuddled up together for body warmth, wrapped themselves in the crazy quilt and slept. They planned to sleep for the whole day, waking up only to nibble at the dried fruit and take a swig of water from their flask. But by midday sleep was gone. Nicodemus decided to while away time by playing his flute, against the advice of his brother who feared that it would call the attention of the enemy. What enemy could there be, since they had already crossed the River Jordan? Nicodemus wondered. Even across the river there was no safety, the brother reminded him, since they had been warned that Ohio would be crawling with slave hunters. But Nicodemus was addicted to his flute. He continued to play, albeit softly.
The flute did call someone’s attention: a white boy and his dog on a journey of their own. He immediately identified them as fugitives but assured them that he would not betray them. After all, he himself was a fugitive of some kind, running away from a drunken and abusive father to the succor of aunts who ran a small farm on the western borders of Fairfield Farms. They learned from him that what they had crossed was the Kanawha River and not any River Jordan. They were not in Ohio at all but were still in Virginia. Ohio was in the northerly direction. To figure out the north they would have to look for the moss on the trunks of the trees. It tended to grow on the northern side. The boys were troubled and disappointed by the news that they were still in Virginia, but that taught them to be smarter next time.
