“No, I’m from Texas.”
“You don’t say? Long ways off, the Texies. Young Jim Noble, he went down there, ’bout two years back. Ever run across Jim?”
“I reckon not.”
“No.” He considered me, the sharp, sleepy little eyes peeping out under the frayed straw brim. “Would that be Tom Little’s wagon you drivin’? Seems I know that broken spoke—an’ the horse.”
For a moment my blood ran cold, and I stopped my hand from going to the pistol in the back of my belt.
“Well, it was Tom Little’s wagon,” says I. “Still would be, if he hadn’t loaned it me yesterday. When I take it back, it will be his again, I guess.” If I’d stayed in that country, and learned to whittle with a Barlow knife, and chew tobacco, I’d have made president.
“That a fact,” says he. “First time I heerd o’ Tom lendin’ anything.”
“Well, I’m his cousin,” says I. “So he didn’t mind lending it to me.” And I whipped up and made off.
“Good for him,” calls the yokel after me. “He might ha’ told you the road to Memphis, while he was about it.”
By George, it rattled me, I can tell you. When we were out of sight I conferred with Cassy, and she agreed we must press on as hard as we could go. With every loafer in the county weighing us up, the sooner we were clear the better. So we pushed on, and might have made it next day if I hadn’t had to rest the horse—spavined old bitch she was. We had to sleep another night out, and the following morning we left the cart beside a melon patch, telling a nigger to mind it for us, and walked the last mile into Memphis town.
It was a fair-sized place, even in those days, for half the cotton in the world seemed to find its way there, but to my jaundiced eye it appeared to be made entirely out of mud. It had rained from first light, and by the time we had walked through the churned-up streets, and been splashed by wagons and by dam-fools who didn’t look where they were going, we were in a sorry state. But the crowded bustle of the place, and the foul weather, made me feel happier, because both lessened the chance of anyone recognising us.
Now all that remained to be done was for me to sell a runaway slave and arrange for us to get out of town without any holes in our hides. Easy enough, you may think, for a chap of Flashy’s capabilities, and I’ll admit your confidence wouldn’t be misplaced. But I wonder how many young chaps nowadays, in this civilised twentieth century, would know how to go about it, if they were planked down, near penniless and with their boots letting in, on a foreign soil, and asked to dispose of a fine-strung mustee woman whose depression and nervousness were growing steadily as the crisis approached? It takes thought, I tell you, and a strong grip on one’s own gorge to keep it from leaping out.
The first thing was to find when the next sale was, and here we were lucky, for there was one in the market that very afternoon, which meant we could do our business and, God willing, be out by nightfall. Next I must inquire about steamboats, so leaving Cassy under the shelter of a shop porch, I ploshed down to the levee to make inquiries. It was pouring fit to frighten Noah by now, with a howling wind as well, and by the time I tacked up to the steamboat office I was plastered with gumbo to the thighs and sodden from there up. To add to my difficulties, the ancient at the office window, wearing a dirty old pilot cap and a vacant expression, was both stone deaf and three parts senile; when I bawled my inquiries to him above the noise of the storm he responded with a hand to his ear and a bewildered grin.
“Is there a boat to Louisville tonight?” I roared.
“Hey?”
“Boat to Louisville?”
“Cain’t hear you, mister. Speak up, cain’t ye?”
I dragged my collar closer and dashed the rain out of my eyes.
“Boat to Louisville—tonight?” I yelled.
“Boat to where?”
“Oh, for pity’s sake! LOUIS!—” I gathered all my lung power “—VILLE! Is there a boat tonight?”
At last he beamed and nodded.
“Shore ’nough, mister. The new Missouri. Leaves at ten.”
I thanked him forcibly and ploughed back up town. Now all that must be done was render myself and Cassy as respectable as possible and go to work with our hands on our hearts. The first part we managed, roughly, in the back room of a cheap apartment house which I hired for the day; my good coat, which had been thrown over my head when I left Greystones—a prodigious stroke of luck that, for it had Spring’s precious papers sewn in the lining—was sadly soiled, but we made the best of it, and rehearsed the final details of our plan. I was in a sweat about how Cassy would slip away from her new owner, but this she brushed aside; what made her grit her teeth to stop them chattering was the thought of mounting the slave block and being sold, which seemed strange to me, since it had happened to her before, and didn’t involve any pain or danger at all.
She was to run late that evening, make her way back to the apartment house, knock at my window, which was on the ground floor, and be admitted. I would have clothes for her by then, and we’d make our way to the levee and go aboard the Missouri as Mr and Mrs James B. Montague, of Baton Rouge, travelling north. In the dark it should be simple enough.
“If I do not come—wait,” says she. “I will come in the end. If I don’t come by tomorrow, I’ll be dead, and you will be able to go where you will. But until then I hold you to your word—your pledged promise, remember?”
“I remember, I remember!” says I, jittering. “But suppose you can’t run—suppose he chains you up, or something. What then?”
“He won’t,” says she calmly. “Be assured, I can run. There is nothing hard about running—any slave can do it. But to stay free—that is the impossible part, unless you have a refuge, a protector. I have you.”
Well, I’ve been called a few things in my time, but these were new. If she’d known me better she’d have thought different, no doubt, but she was desperate, and I was her only hope—a hellish pickle for a girl to be in, you’ll agree. I strove to calm my fluttering bowels, and presently we set out for the slave market.
If you’ve never seen a slave auction, I can tell you it’s no different from an ordinary cattle sale. The market was a great low shed, with sawdust on the floor, a block at one end for the slaves and auctioneer, and the rest of the space taken up with the buyers and spectators—wealthy traders on seats at the front, very much at ease, casual buyers behind, and more than half the whole crew just spectators, loafers, bummarees and sightseers, spitting and gossiping and haw-hawing. The place was noisy and stank like the deuce, with clouds of baccy smoke and esprit de corps hanging under the beams.
I’d been scared stiff that when I entered Cassy for sale there would be all sorts of questions, cross-examination, and the like, which I wouldn’t be able to answer convincingly, but I had been fretting unduly. I believe if you entered a Swedish albino at a Memphis sale and swore he was a nigger, they’d stick him on the block, no questions asked. That auctioneer would have sold his own grandfather, and probably had. He was a small, furious, red-bearded man with a slouch hat, a big cigar, and a quart bottle of forty-rod in his coat pocket which he sucked at in between accusing his assistants of swindling him and bawling to everyone to give him some sellin’ room.
When I entered Cassy he hardly glanced at her bill of sale, but spat neatly between my feet and asked me aggressively if I was an underground railroad agent who’d thought better of convoying a nigger to Canada and decided to sell her off for private gain.
The crowd round him all haw-hawed immensely at this, and said he was a prime case, which relieved my momentary horror at his question, and the auctioneer said he didn’t give a damn, anyhow, and where the hell was Eli Bowles’s nigger’s papers, because he hadn’t got them, and they’d drive a man out of his mind in this country, what with their finickin’ regulations, and would they get the hell out of his way so he could start the sale? No, he wouldn’t put up Jackson’s buck Perseus, because he was rotten with pox, and everyone knew it; Jackso
n had better put him out to stud over in Arkansas, where nobody noticed such things. No, he wouldn’t take notes of hand from any but dealers he knew—he’d enough tarnation paper as it was, and his clerk just used it to confuse him and line his own pockets, and he knew all about it, and one of these days wouldn’t he make that clerk’s ass warm for him. And, strike him dumb, but his bottle was half empty and he hadn’t even started the sale yet—would they git out from under his feet or did they want to be still biddin’ their bollix off at two in the morning?
And more of the same, all of which was mighty reassuring. I left Cassy to be herded off with the other niggers, and got a place by the wall to watch the sale, which the little auctioneer conducted as if he was a ring-master, pattering away incessantly, and keeping up his style of irascible confusion all the time. The crowd loved it, and he was good, too, taking an occasional swill at his bottle and firing his comments at the lots while the bids came in.
“See this here old wench of Masterson’s, who died last week. Masterson died, that is, not her. Not a day over forty, an’ a prime cook. Well, y’only had to look at the belly Masterson had on him; that’s testimony enough, I reckon. Yes sir, it was her fine cookin’ that kilt him—now then, what say? Eight hunnert to start—nine, for the best vittles-slinger ’tween Evansville an’ the Gulf.” Or again: “This buck of Tomkins, he sired more saplin’s than Methuselah—that’s why they call him George, after George Washington, the father of his country. Why, ’thout this boy, the nigger pop’lation’d be only half what it is—we wouldn’t hardly be havin’ this sale today, but for this randy little hero. There was talk of a syndicate to send him back to Afriky to keep the numbers up—now then, who’ll say a thousand?”
But there was someone there who knew more about raising prices than even he did, and that was Cassy. When she took the block, after a whispered conference with the auctioneer, he went on about how she spoke French, and could embroider and ’tend to growing children or be a lady’s maid or governess and play the piano and paint—but it was all sham. He knew what she would be sold for, and the mob kept chorusing “Shuck her down! Let’s get a look at her!” while she stood, very demure, with her hands folded in front of her and her head bowed. She was pale, and I could see the strain in her face, but she knew what to do, and presently when the auctioneer spoke to her she took off her shoes and then let down her hair, very carefully, so that it hung down her back almost to her waist.
That wasn’t what they wanted, of course; they yelled and stamped and whistled, but the auctioneer got the bidding up to seventeen hundred before he nodded to her, and without a change of expression she shrugged her shoulders out of the dress, let it slip down, and stepped out as bare as a babe. By gad, I was proud of her as she stood there like a pale golden statue, in the dim light under the beams, with the mob goggling and roaring approval; the price ran up to twenty-five hundred dollars in less than a minute.
At that there were only two bidders left, a fancy-weskitted young dandy in a stove-pipe hat with his mouth open, and a grey-bearded planter in the front row with a red face and big panama hat, who had a little nigger boy behind his seat to fan him. I reckon Cassy got another thousand dollars out of those two, all on her own. She put one hand on her hip—twenty-seven hundred; then she put her hands behind her head—three thousand; she stirred her rump at the dandy—thirty-two hundred, and the planter shook his head, his face sweating. She looked straight down at him, grave-faced, and winked, the crowd yelled and cheered, and the dirty old goat slapped his thigh and bid thirty-four. The dandy swore and looked sulky, but that was the bottom of his poke, evidently, for he turned away, and Cassy was knocked down to the other, amidst whoops and cries of obscene advice to him; he’d better send his wife away to visit her folks in Nashville for a spell, they shouted, and when she came back she could give him a decent burial, for he’d have killed himself by then, haw-haw.
“Wish I’d a wench like that every day,” said the little auctioneer, at paying-out time—you never saw such a heap of gold coin on one dirty deal table. “I’d make my fortune. Say, if you’d given me time to advertise proper, we’d ha’ had four, mebbe five thousand. Where d’you git her, Mr—eh—Howard?”
“As you said, she was a lady’s maid—at my academy for gentlewomen,” says I gravely, and the crowd in his office roared and clapped me on the back and offered me swigs from their bottles; I was a card, they said.
I had no opportunity to see what happened to Cassy after she came down from the block; her buyer was obviously a local man, so presumably she wouldn’t be taken far. For the hundredth time I found myself wondering how she was going to make her escape, and what I would do if she didn’t come before steamboat time. I daren’t leave without her, for fear she’d split. I would just have to wait, jumping at every shadow, no doubt. But in the meantime I had plenty to occupy myself with, and I set off for town, well-weighted down with my new-found wealth.
It was the deuce of a lot of cash to be carrying—or so I thought. I didn’t know America well then, or I’d have realised that they don’t think twice about carrying and dealing in sums that in England would be represented by a banker’s draft. Odd, in such a wild country, but they like to have their cash about ’em, and don’t mind killing in its defence.
The first thing I now did was to repair to the best tailor in town and buy myself some decent gear, and from there I made for a dressmakers, to do the like for Cassy. I’ve never numbered meanness with cash among my many faults, and I do like my women to have the very finest clothes to take off, and all the little vanities to go with ’em. There had been just north of three thousand dollars left when the auctioneer had taken his commission—a man could do worse than be a slave-knocker, it occurred to me—and I made a fine hole in them with my purchases; I spent probably twice on Cassy what I’d spent on myself, and didn’t grudge it; the Creole woman who ran the shop was in a tremendous twitter, showing every gown she had, and the deuce of it was I could see Cassy looking peachy in every one.
In any event, I had two trunks full of gear which I ordered to be delivered to the levee, labelled to go aboard the Missouri that evening, and took only enough clothing away with me for us to look respectable when we went aboard. While I was doing my buying, I had the dressmaker send a nigger to buy the tickets—God, the tiny things that change one’s life; if I’d gone in person, all would have been different. But there—he brought them back, and I stuffed them into the pocket of my new coat, and that was that.
The business of sitting back like a sultan, buying all the silks and satins in sight and gallantly chaffing Madame Threadneedle, had put me in excellent fettle, but as the afternoon wore away I began to feel less bobbish. My worries about Cassy’s escape returned, and brandy didn’t drive them away; I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything, and finally I went back to my mean little room and busied myself removing Spring’s papers from my old coat and stitching them into the waist-band of one of my new pairs of pants. After that I sat and chewed my nails, while seven o’clock went by, and then eight, and outside the rain pattered down in the dark, and I envisaged Cassy being overtaken in some dirty alley and hauled off to a cell, or being shot climbing a fence, or pulled down by hounds—give me leisure in my fearful moments and my imaginings can outrun Dante’s any day.
I was standing staring at the candle guttering on its stand, feeling the gnawing certainty that she’d come adrift, when a scratching at the window had me leaping out of my skin. I whipped up the sash, and she slipped in over the sill, but my momentary delight was quickly snuffed when I saw the state she was in. She was plastered from head to foot with mud, her dress was reduced to a torn, sodden rag, her eyes were wild, and she was panting like a spent dog.
“They’re after me!” she sobbed, slithering down against the wall; there was blood oozing through the mud from a cut on her foot. “They spotted me slipping out of the pen, and like a fool I ran for it! Oh, oh! I should have waited! They’ll rouse the section … find us … oh,
quick, let us go now—at once, before they come!”
She might, as she said, be an experienced runner, but she wasn’t up to Flashy’s touch. “Steady, and listen,” says I. “Keep your voice low. How far behind are they?”
She sobbed for breath. “I … don’t know. They lost me, when I … doubled back. Oh, dear God! But they know I’ve run … they’ll scour the town … take me again …” She lay back against the wall, exhausted.
“How long since you last heard ’em?”
“Oh, oh … five minutes … I don’t know. But they have … dogs … track us here …”
“Not on a night like this, they won’t, and certainly not through a town.” My mind was racing, but I was thinking well. Should I bolt and leave her? No, she’d talk for certain. Could we make the boat? Yes, if I could put her in order.
“Up,” says I, and hauled her to her feet. She sagged against me, weeping, and I had to hold her up. “Now, listen, Cassy. We have time; they don’t know where you are, and every hunt in Rutland couldn’t nose you out here. We can’t run until you’re clean and dressed—we’d never get aboard the boat. Haste won’t serve—when Mr and Mrs Montague step out on to that street to go to the levee, they’ll go nice and sedate.” As I talked I was already sponging at her with the wet cloths I had ready. “Now, rest easy while I get you shipshape.”
“I can’t run any longer!” she sobbed, “I can’t!” She tossed her head from side to side, crying with fatigue. “I just want to lie down and die!”
I went on towelling her, cleansing away the filth, whispering urgently all the while. We would make it, I told her, the boat was waiting, we were rotten with money, if we kept calm and went ahead without flinching we were bound to win free, I had bought her a wardrobe that would take Canada by storm—yes, Canada, I told her, the freedom road—an hour from now we would be steaming upriver, safe as sleep. I was trying to convince myself as much as her, as I sponged and dried away frantically, with one ear cocked for sounds of approaching pursuit.
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