Perish from the Earth

by Jonathan F. Putnam

  “Do you know the only thing worse,” I said to no one in particular, “than having a captain who’s skimming the profits from your boat?” I didn’t wait for an answer. “It’s not having a captain at all. Which Lincoln’s just arranged for me.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Lincoln jovially, raising a glass. I did not join his toast.

  “I’m sure you’ll figure something out, Joshua,” said Martha. “Tomorrow’s soon enough. For tonight, let’s enjoy Mr. Lincoln’s victory.”

  “Tomorrow’s not soon enough,” I said. “In fact, I’m going back on board the ship right this moment. I have to make sure no one tampers with the books and records. To say nothing of the cash box. Who’s even watching it at this point?”

  “I’m sure it’s not that urgent,” said Lincoln, grabbing at my arm.

  But I wriggled free of him, and stepping over the still-sleeping form of Avocat Daumier, I marched out of the grog shop and toward the levee. Lincoln and Martha followed close behind. The night was dark and blustery. We soon came upon the War Eagle, tied up at her berth, her stacks quiet.

  “See!” I shouted as I hurriedly walked the unguarded gangway. I decided to start with the captain’s office. We went up the stairs to the hurricane deck and along the promenade. I charged into the barbery and came to an abrupt halt. The candles were burning in Pound’s office, and three voices were raised in animated discussion. As they heard us enter, Nanny Mae, Hector, and Sary stepped out toward us, reacting to our appearance with a surprise equal to ours at theirs.

  Simultaneously, each group asked the other what business it had, in this place, at this hour.

  “This is my ship,” I thundered.

  “This is our ship,” Hector replied in his deep growl, gesturing to Sary with a sweep of his muscular arm.

  “How could you do that today?” cried Sary in the same throaty, feminine voice I’d heard earlier in Ryder’s basement. She looked accusingly at Lincoln. Her eyes were dry but streaked with tiny red lines.

  “An innocent man shouldn’t die for a crime he did not commit,” Lincoln said.

  “So another innocent man is sent to die in his place? While millions more suffer every day without recourse?” I was shocked at the chambermaid’s boldness, and I could see that even Lincoln was taken aback.

  Hector and I opened our mouths to join the argument when Nanny Mae banged her cane against the floor. “Silence!” she commanded. And everyone obeyed.

  Nanny Mae turned to Sary. “Now that they’re here,” the old woman said, “I think they should hear the truth. One of the two men whom you cherish above all else has made an incredible sacrifice for the other. Tell them.”

  “Two men?” said Martha.

  “Shhhh. It’s her story. Listen.”

  All eyes turned to the chambermaid. At her full height, she was nearly as tall as me, and she rose to it now. Her carriage was erect and her bearing was strong. She showed no self-consciousness about being at the center of all of our attention.

  “I had just turned fourteen,” she began. “Master Roman sent for me, and I thought it was going to be both of them, him and the mistress, with some question about the well-being of the children. But it was just him, alone in his smoking room . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “How terrible,” murmured Martha. She put out her hand to rest it on Sary’s bare arm.

  “It was terrible,” Sary continued. “The first time, and the second and the third. But I realized there was nothing I could do about it, not if I wanted to remain alive, and I made a kind of silent peace with it. My brothers were much younger then, only nine and ten, and I didn’t tell them. What would have been the point? Every Negro man and woman on the plantation was suffering their own deprivations, each of them, in their own way.”

  Telesphore Roman was following his father’s example even more than he knew, I thought. There was a giant knot in the pit of my stomach. Lincoln was leaning against the wall, listening intently. His gray eyes were hooded, and his face was pale.

  “The mistress was the first one to notice my condition. She slapped me so hard, my face bruised, and she told me I was lewd and foolish for allowing one of the field boys to spread my legs. It wasn’t for another few months that she realized the truth. Master Roman refused to be in my presence once he realized my condition. Which was a relief, of course.

  “The day Newton was born, the mistress showed up and ordered the midwife to take him to the swamp and leave him there to die. For some reason, that never happened. I’ve always thought Master Roman must have intervened. But the mistress got her way too. Two months after I’d given birth, Pemberton told me he’d sold me down the river. He always did the mistress’s bidding when he could. I never got the chance to say good-bye to Newton. The only thing I managed was to tell my brothers to keep watch on my baby. And then I was dragged away in my chains, wailing the whole way to the levee. I was sure I’d never see him again.”

  Sary started weeping softly, and Martha embraced her. Nanny Mae looked on. As always, I found myself unable to fathom her thoughts. At length, Sary took a deep breath and continued.

  “I made a new life in New Orleans, although the loss I felt never went away. Mistress Duparc allowed me to work for my own account on Sundays in Faubourg Marigny. That’s where I met my captain. He offered to buy my freedom at once, but I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to do it all on my own, with my own earnings, and eventually I did.”

  At this, the giant Hector nodded his head with great enthusiasm. “She is a wise woman,” he said. “She understands truth. Freedom cannot be given by others. I learn this lesson for myself after I am impressed into Spanish navy. There is only one path to freedom. It runs through here.” He pounded his heart with a closed fist.

  “The first time I steamed aboard my captain’s ship,” continued Sary, “and we went past Roman Hall, I got sick. I couldn’t stop vomiting for a week. I hadn’t realized it would be so difficult to be so close to my son. I vowed to Hector then”—she exchanged nods with the Spaniard—“that I’d see him again. But I didn’t tell my captain. I’d never told him about Newton.

  “Earlier this year, on the first run of the season, when the War Eagle was docked in Memphis, a free ferryman named Limus passed word to me—”

  “We met Captain Limus!” exclaimed Martha.

  “He’s a good man. Brave beyond belief. He passed word to me that a few Negro men had managed to get away from Roman Hall and were hiding out in the swamp bordering the river. Limus asked if we could help transport them to the North. I begged my captain. I knew him to be a man of mercy. He has been his whole life. So I threw myself on his mercy. I told him about my brothers and about Newton. He knew the dangers he’d be undertaking, for himself and all of us, but he also knew I wouldn’t rest until I’d saved my son.

  “In the end, my captain agreed we could take one freedman per northbound voyage. Limus arranged for them to be loaded on board as freight, in a trunk, each time we stopped in Memphis. My captain made sure the wharfboat master wouldn’t open up the trunk to look inside.

  “From talking to them, I learned that conditions at Roman Hall were worse than ever. Much worse. Cotton prices were falling because of the Panic, and Pemberton and young Master Roman were beating the field boys mercilessly to get them to produce more and more every day. I told Limus to pass word back to my brothers that they should escape if they possibly could and that they should bring Newton with them. He’s fourteen now himself, and I knew he’d be bearing the full brunt of the lash. Indeed, I expected Mistress Roman would make sure Pemberton’s lash fell on him harder than anyone.

  “My brothers made it eventually, and we carried one and then the other. But they’d left without Newton. They told me Pemberton was singling him out for special attention, always with his eyes on him, and often his lash. They told me there was no way Newton would ever get away from the plantation.”

  Lincoln suddenly stood up straight, alert, and said, “So Captain Pound managed to get
into Roman Hall himself on a rescue mission.”

  Sary nodded gravely. “I asked my captain to sacrifice himself, is what it amounted to, and he did. Willingly and without complaint. There will never be another man so great and so full of mercy.”

  I was listening so closely to Sary’s story that I often found myself forgetting to breathe. I had to admit it was hard to dispute her description of Pound. I thought of my father’s description of Pound, with which I had agreed so heartily upon first meeting him. A thoroughly odious man. There was nothing to do, I thought as I listened now, but to acknowledge that sometimes experience causes you to reexamine your beliefs, even deeply held ones.

  “My captain learned from the shipboard artist that there was to be a weekend gathering at Roman Hall, and he went. When he drove away in his carriage at the end of the gathering, Newton was hidden underneath some blankets. When they got back to the boat, my captain said he feared that man Jones had seen them, but I assured him we’d be all right. It was certain that Pemberton was suspicious, though, because he ended up on the deck for that voyage.

  “When I first saw Newton, I had to bite down on a rag in my mouth to stop from screaming for joy. I told him he’d never once left my thoughts. We cried many rivers of tears together. And I told him we were going to get him to freedom in the North.

  “We managed to keep him away from Pemberton for the whole voyage, and as we left St. Louis and started steaming for Alton, I felt sure we were clear. But then Devol got greedy with the monte and Jones lost everything. When he shouted out his threat in the salon, I knew exactly what it meant. Hector and I talked and we agreed—we had to get Newton off the boat right away.

  “We had been unloading the trunks here in Alton. The old woman”—she nodded at Nannie Mae—“arranged for them to be taken to a warehouse along the river used by Mr. Lovejoy. He helped the freedmen go farther north. After the monte, my captain steamed up into sight of the warehouse, and Hector and I got Newton from his hiding place and told him he was going to have to swim for it through the darkness. We told him to find Lovejoy, and he’d send him the same place he sent my brothers—his uncles.

  “Just as Newton was about to jump off the edge of the deck, Jones showed up. It was terrible. He was drunk and raving and came at us. Hector and I shoved him away, Newton dove into the river, and Jones staggered backward and hit his head on one of the metal posts holding the netting of the guards. At first we thought he was merely unconscious, and we managed to drag his body inside a doorway. I went and found my captain. That’s when they discovered—”

  “He is dead,” said Hector. “Very dead. He is not breathing. His heart is at rest. So we send him overboard to lie in peace on the bottom of the river.”

  “We never meant for Mr. Bingham to be blamed,” continued Sary. “Truly we didn’t. But when we learned he’d been arrested and put on trial, there seemed to be no way to help him without exposing ourselves—and everyone we’ve gotten out.”

  “What did you say to Pound yesterday that convinced him to return to the courtroom?” I asked Nanny Mae.

  “I told Richard it was him or Sary,” she said. “Him or Newton. Him or all the freedmen who’ve been helped this season. Him or all the others who might be helped in the future. There are others at Roman Hall. And elsewhere. Too many others.”

  I thought immediately of the lame boy whom Telesphore had whipped among the pegs. And I thought of the woman who lived in the third cabin on the left in the Roman Hall quarters. And I found myself feeling glad that Lincoln had managed to free Bingham without disrupting the scheme along the river.

  “When I talked to my captain in the basement of the courthouse, after he’d done it, I told him he should have chosen me,” said Sary. “He said he was old and ready to go. He said he only needed to know I’d remember his love, and that was enough for him.”

  Sary started crying again and Martha comforted her. I turned to Lincoln and said, “Now we know why Lovejoy was interested in the case. I wonder if he was going to tell us any of this, the night he was killed.”

  “I told him not to,” said Nanny Mae. “I told him you couldn’t be trusted, Lincoln. But Elijah believed until his last breath in the potential of mankind for redemption. He hoped that hearing Newton’s story, and Sary’s too, would make you understand that we can’t wait patiently for gradual change. Not when our fellow human beings wake up every morning in bondage.”

  “I’m moved by your story,” said Lincoln, nodding at Nanny Mae and Hector before his gaze came to rest on Sary. “And I wouldn’t like to think that Lovejoy died in vain.”

  CHAPTER 41

  The winter of 1838 was the coldest in living memory. Navigation on the Upper Mississippi closed on December 12, when the ice floes made safe passage impossible, and did not reopen again until March 27. In the meantime, steamboat owners huddled by their fireplaces, counted their losses amid the ever-worsening nationwide Panic, and hoped desperately they’d still be afloat when the ice finally cleared.

  Fortunately, I’d been able to engineer a sale of the War Eagle shortly before the close of navigation, so Judge Speed was spared the agony of being one of those ship owners brooding by their hearths. The new owner drove a tough bargain, but eventually I achieved a price sufficient to allow my father to pay off most of his loans to the banks of Louisville. In exchange for extricating him from his personal financial panic, I got Judge Speed to agree he would not take on further debt without consulting me. A page had turned in my relationship with my once all-powerful father, and Farmington had—for the time being, at least—been saved.

  Others were not so lucky. Winter struck especially hard the unfortunate inmates confined to the unheated cells of the Illinois State Prison, perched on the Alton cliffs above the Mississippi. Many were laid low by illness, and seven of the twenty-nine men who’d been confined at the start of the season did not live to see the river reopen. One day in late February, the Sangamo Journal reported that one of the deceased inmates was a former river captain by the name of Pound.

  Martha and I spent the winter together in Springfield, tending to the counter of my general store during the days and trying to make each other laugh beside a roaring fire in the great fireplace in the back room of the store during the long and dark evenings. Whenever I got cross, I threatened to send her home to our parents, but I was further and further away from making good on the threat. The simple truth, which she knew as well as I, is that we needed each other too much to be apart.

  Meanwhile, the legislature was not in session that winter—it met only every other December in those days—and Lincoln was generally around Sangamon County as well. He tended to the routine business of his law practice, drawing up a complaint for a larceny case one day, writing out a declaration and praecipe on another, taking the deposition of a complaining witness on yet another. The circuit was finished until springtime, and he was in the nature of a regular town lawyer.

  Yet the events in Alton weighed heavily on Lincoln’s mind, and he often mused about them as we lay beside each other in our bed those cold winter nights. In late January, he was motivated to organize his thoughts and speak publicly about them. It would not be for the last time.

  I did some thinking those long winter nights as well. Sometimes as I stared at the roaring fire in the back room of the store, I thought I could hear the crack of Telesphore’s whip and the screams of the helpless boy tied up among the pegs. I still believed that the notion of immediate emancipation for all was folly. But I recognized the fortitude shown by Sary and Captain Limus, by Sary’s brothers and Newton, and the courage shown by Lovejoy and Pound and others who risked their lives so that strangers could breathe the air as free men.

  Finally, when all hope seemed lost, spring came. The snows melted and the ice thawed. Word reached us in Springfield that navigation on the Mississippi would soon reopen. And I made one more trip to Alton, as I had a final debt to pay.

  I had promised the new owner of the War Eagle that I wou
ld steam on the maiden voyage of the new year. The ship had started its first run of the season farther north, near the Des Moines Rapids, so it had a full complement of passengers aboard by the time it reached me. As the ship glided with the current toward where I awaited it on the Alton levee, bathed in the soft light of the early April evening, it felt like a prodigal friend, coming home at last.

  I went on board and smelled the familiar wood and brass and carpeting, and it was as if I’d never left. I went straight to the salon. I was greeted there by a tableau at once as familiar as the back of my hand and at the same time bracingly new.

  The new owner of the War Eagle sat on a modest chair just inside the door to the salon, her knitting work in her hands. I leaned down and kissed Nanny Mae’s weathered cheek; she patted the top of my head familiarly. I knew she planned to spend most of the season at her perch in the Franklin House, monitoring the river and all persons traveling along it. But like me, she would not have missed this maiden steaming. And I suspected that if any escaping bondsmen from the hot southern states were able to find their way to freedom in the cold north during the coming year, at least they would not lack for knit woolen jerseys to keep them warm.

  The new captain of the War Eagle stood proudly by Nanny Mae’s side, his face crisscrossed with scars, his hair newly tidy and slicked back, and what I had to imagine was the largest captain’s coat ever fashioned draping his body with grace. I shook Hector’s enormous hand and wished him every good fortune on his new posting. I had no doubt, I told him, he would do Captain Pound proud.

  A tall, light-skinned Negro woman with a brown headband stood not far from Hector, her eyes darting around the room, keeping a careful eye on the entire scene. There was a thin chain around her neck from which dangled a single golden ring. She did not acknowledge me, even when I looked in her direction.