Chasing the North Star

by Robert Morgan

  “I leave you two for a minute and look what you do,” Miss Linda said.

  “Put on your clothes and come with me,” Mr. Wells said. Jonah obeyed. He couldn’t look at Prissy or Miss Linda. His hands shook as he slid on his overalls and tied his shoes.

  “Didn’t mean to do nothing bad,” Jonah said.

  “Come with me,” Mr. Wells said. Mr. Wells didn’t seem at all angry or upset. He was calm as if he was asking Jonah to bring him a newspaper or carry in more wood. He told Jonah to walk in front of him down the stairs and around the kitchen to the back porch.

  “I don’t want to send you back to your master,” Mr. Wells said.

  “No, sir,” Jonah said. “Thank you, sir.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you either,” Mr. Wells said.

  “Yes, sir,” Jonah said.

  Mr. Wells was so calm, Jonah began to hope he wasn’t going to do anything bad to him. When Mr. Williams whipped him, Mr. Williams had been furious, with his face red and his eyes glaring. Mr. Wells didn’t seem at all mad. “Go into the barn,” Mr. Wells said.

  Just as Jonah stepped into the gloom of the barn beyond the well, he heard a scream from the second story of the house. It was Prissy screaming. Jonah stopped in his tracks, but Mr. Wells ordered him to keep moving.

  As soon as Mr. Wells closed the barn door behind them, he told Jonah to turn around. Quick as a flash Mr. Wells grabbed Jonah by the balls and squeezed. Pain roared through him like a hundred fires. It was the worst pain he’d ever felt. He screamed without knowing he was screaming. Mr. Wells squeezed him tighter and Jonah trembled and peed on himself.

  When Mr. Wells let go, Jonah was so weak with pain he fell to his knees on the floor.

  “Won’t never do it again,” Jonah gasped.

  “I can send you back to South Carolina, or I can teach you a lesson,” Mr. Wells said.

  “Please, please, please,” Jonah said, not sure what he was asking.

  Mr. Well dragged him to a platform where hay had once been piled, and tied Jonah’s hands to the slats of a stall. He bound Jonah’s feet together and tied the rope to a post on the opposite wall. Then he left Jonah lying there on the boards, bound hand and foot.

  Jonah listened as someone drew water from the well, and then he smelled smoke. Through a crack in the barn wall he saw a fire had been started under the washpot. Was Mr. Wells heating water? Was he going to scald him? Was he going to pour boiling water on him? The pain in Jonah’s crotch didn’t go away. He wondered if Mr. Wells was going to do something to him there. White men were said to castrate Negroes. The barn door opened and Mr. Wells brought in two buckets of water and set them near Jonah. They appeared to be cold, for he saw no steam rising from the buckets. Was Mr. Wells planning to drown him?

  Mr. Wells brought in two more buckets of cold water. He appeared to be gathering every bucket on the place. He brought in a dishpan and a small canner, all filled with water. He set the vessels in a row, not six feet from Jonah. Last Mr. Wells brought in two wooden buckets of steaming hot water. And then he came back with a small tub of hot water, and a watering can that breathed a fog. After closing the barn door he unbuttoned Jonah’s overalls and pulled them down to his feet, and he unbuttoned Jonah’s shirt and pulled it away.

  “You must learn your lesson, Ezra,” Mr. Wells said, as if he was commenting on the weather.

  Mr. Wells poured water from a wooden bucket all over him. The water was not hot enough to burn him, but it made his skin glow. Mr. Wells poured it slowly and gently. Jonah winced and his skin stung a little, as if inflamed. Mr. Wells poured the water over him carefully once, and then again. If he expected to burn Jonah he failed. But the skin on Jonah’s chest was hot. I can take this, Jonah said to himself. Mr. Wells poured hot water over him again, and the heat made Jonah almost sleepy. He was sweating and the pain in his groin made him sweat more. Then Mr. Wells picked up another bucket and dashed it on Jonah’s chest and belly. The pain was so awful it took Jonah a second to realize the hurt came from cold water. A sick blue lightning shock of pain flashed through his bones, and he released a scream of pain that shrieked from far behind his head. It was worse than the pain from his squeezed balls. It was like some pain from both the beginning of time and the end of the world. The cold water sank through him and he couldn’t jerk away. The cold water was a madness and blindness that attacked his spine and his brain and made his bones want to crack.

  “Please!” he screamed. “Please don’t do it again.”

  When Jonah stopped screaming, Mr. Wells began pouring hot water on him again. He poured slowly to make the skin glow again. The warmth felt good. The heat opened all Jonah’s pores. Mr. Wells paused and lit a cigar and then puffed it while he poured more hot water on Jonah’s chest and belly. The hot water stung but felt comforting compared to the blaze of the cold water. Jonah wondered if Mr. Wells had put ice in the cold water buckets.

  When his skin was glowing again, Mr. Wells lifted another bucket of cold water and dashed it on Jonah’s chest and belly. This time Jonah screamed in anticipation, and when the water licked him with its white cold flames, the scream continued, reaching up through the top of the barn to the sky and beyond to the North Star. His scream was so loud he could no longer hear it, and his eyes stung with the effort of the scream.

  When Jonah stopped screaming, Mr. Wells said, “Are you going to listen to Miss Linda?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jonah gasped.

  “I don’t want to send you back to South Carolina,” Mr. Wells said.

  “No, sir.”

  Mr. Wells picked up a bucket of hot water to begin pouring it again on his stomach and chest, but Jonah knew he couldn’t stand any more. He begged Mr. Wells to stop. “I do anything,” Jonah sobbed. He’d die if Mr. Wells dumped cold water on his chest again.

  “Have you learnt your lesson?” Mr. Wells said.

  “Yes, sir, I have,” Jonah cried.

  “Have you learned it real good?”

  “Yes, sir, I learned it real good.”

  Mr. Wells held the bucket of hot water as if trying to decide what to do. Jonah prayed he wouldn’t splash him anymore.

  “You don’t have a bruise or a cut on you,” Mr. Wells said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Nobody can say that I hurt you or tortured you,” Mr. Wells said. “Your skin is not burned or cut in any way.”

  “No, sir.”

  Mr. Wells carried all the buckets out of the barn except one. “Clean yourself,” he said as he untied Jonah’s hands and feet, then tossed him a feedsack to use as a washcloth.

  Ten

  Angel

  After the Goat Man and I ate the peppery mush and tomatoes and roastnears, I brought him another bucket from the river, and he washed the tin pans and the pots and the lids we had eaten on.

  “Let me stay the night,” I said. I didn’t want to go back in that boat and I was scared to start walking in the dark. He smiled and said something in his strange talk.

  “I just want to sleep here tonight,” I said and leaned my head against my hands like I was going to sleep. He shook his head and jabbered and ran to the wagon and pointed inside. When I looked under the canvas, I saw a little place between boxes with a blanket on the floor and a rolled-up canvas for a pillow.

  “No, no,” I said and shook my head and pointed under the wagon. “There’s where I’ll sleep,” I said. He nodded his head quickly and turned away.

  As it got darker I sat by the fire while the Goat Man took pieces of bread to the goats. He petted each goat and talked to it like you would speak to a child at bedtime. You’d think the goats were his little children, or his wives. I couldn’t tell which, because I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  Then I heard horses galloping in the distance and getting closer. And with a jolt I thought maybe they were looking for me. What if they had caught or killed Jonah and were now coming for me? I thought of running off into the woods, but that wouldn’t do any good, because the Goat Man
could point in the direction I’d gone.

  It was still in the July night because the spring peepers were gone and the crickets and katydids hadn’t started yet. Master Thomas used to say it was so still in a July night, you could hear the cornstalks groan as they stretched. The river whispered and slurped far below and the hoofbeats grew louder, but the Goat Man didn’t seem to pay them any mind. It came to me that he acted the way he did because he couldn’t hear anything. If he looked at your face he could tell what you said. And he talked so funny because he couldn’t hear what he said, even if it was regular words. He was completely deaf.

  I hadn’t seen the road and didn’t know exactly where it was, except I knew it probably ran close to the river, down the river valley. As the horses got nearer I scrunched down by the fire little as I could make myself. The Goat Man started to sing to the goats, just as three horsemen came out of the dark and stopped. They had rifles across their saddles.

  “We’re looking for a runaway nigger,” one yelled at the Goat Man. The Goat Man took off his hat and bowed to them.

  “He robbed a store up the river,” another rider shouted. The Goat Man spread his arms to say he didn’t know anything.

  “Is that your girl?” the third rider said and pointed at me.

  The Goat Man smiled and pointed at me and jabbered in his strange tongue.

  “He don’t know nothing,” the first man said and started to turn his horse.

  “Goat Man got him a gal,” the second rider said and laughed. As they rode off into the dark, I loved the Goat Man for helping me and protecting me. He acted like I was his slave and the riders weren’t even suspicious. He was a strange old man who couldn’t hear anything, but I was so grateful he could do whatever he wanted with me. When he threw a blanket on the ground for me to lie on, I expected he would get on it with me. I had no choice but to let him take his reward for helping me and feeding me.

  But instead the Goat Man climbed into the wagon, and I lay down on the blanket underneath and watched the fire die. I thought he might be taking off his clothes and would climb out and lie with me, but he didn’t. Next thing I heard was the Goat Man snoring in the wagon. I lay there a long time listening for horses, listening to the river murmur and goats munching weeds. Dew fell out of the air and stuck to my cheeks, and I wrapped the blanket around me tighter. I wondered if the Goat Man was too old to have any use for me. Or was he the kind of man that didn’t care about women? Or did he belong to some kind of religion that taught him to stay away from women? The only thing he seemed to love was the goats.

  Next morning I woke before the old man, and I roused myself to go look for sticks to start a fire. I figured if I made myself handy, the Goat Man might let me stay with him and travel with him. I knew he went back and forth, north and south. Traveling with the Goat Man might be a way to get to the North, even without Jonah.

  When I came back with an armful of sticks, the old man got up and stood facing the sun and read from a little black book. It looked like a Testament, but I don’t think it was. The markings were different from any print I’d ever seen. I couldn’t read back then anyhow, but I could tell those letters were different. He was mumbling his prayers or saying the words in the book.

  I started a fire and climbed down the bank for a bucket of water. The Goat Man put away his little book and took a coffee grinder from the wagon and ground up some coffee beans. When the coffee started boiling, it filled the clearing with its smell. He got some grits and poured them into a pot of steaming water. Then he got some cornmeal and spread it on a plank for the goats.

  As I sipped the black coffee and ate hot grits I saw what I had to do. “Goat Man,” I said, “let me travel with you for a while.”

  He smiled and didn’t say anything.

  “I can help you look after things,” I said. “I can wash dishes and steal eggs out of henhouses and taters out of cellars.”

  The Goat Man looked like he was thinking. He seemed to be confused, like he couldn’t think what he wanted to say.

  “I can carry water from wells and springs,” I said. The old man looked around like he didn’t want to answer me, and he didn’t know what he wanted to say. He looked back at the goats browsing on the weeds and brush.

  “I can help with the goats,” I said. “I can harness them up and feed them and bring them water.”

  The Goat Man smiled and nodded.

  “I can tend to the goats while you sharpen knives and scissors and fix pots and buckets,” I said. The Goat Man smiled because he saw I liked his goats. He nodded, which meant I could go with him. Before the sun got above the trees I washed the pots and cups, and then we started out on the road that ran along the bluff over the river.

  IT WAS A DIFFERENT thing to travel with the Goat Man. He gave me a colorful scarf to tie around my head, the kind of cloth that must have come from overseas, with purple and gold and green, all shiny and soft. I wore the scarf tied around my chin and hoped nobody would recognize me. I hoped they’d think I was a gypsy or Melungeon, or maybe an Indian. My skin was light enough so I could look like an Indian. Mama would never tell me who my daddy was, but I knew he must be a white man. Eli had whispered to me one time my daddy was Mr. Thomas’s nephew that stayed at the Thomas Place one time, but he wouldn’t tell me any more.

  The first house we stopped at was off in the hills, away from the river. The woman there must have seen the Goat Man coming, or heard the bells on the goats, for by the time we stopped in her yard she had brought knives and scissors out to the porch, and a dishpan with a hole in it and a bucket with the handle torn off. The Goat Man got out his files and hammer, the stone wheel he used to whet blades, and he lit his solder torch. I helped bring the tools from the wagon, but once he started to work on the porch, I wandered around the place. At the side of the yard was a well with a roof over it, and a washpot where the woman washed clothes. There was a woodpile and a woodshed, and a chicken house by the pine woods.

  I stepped into the pine woods to relieve myself, and smelled the musty smell pine needles have in summer. And when I came out of the woods I glanced through the window of the henhouse and saw nests along the wall with big brown eggs in them, the kind of eggs laid by red hens. One nest was so close I reached through the window and took two eggs and put them in my pocket. The eggs were still warm.

  The lady of the house, when I got back to the front porch, told me to take a bucket and pick some fresh beans in the garden. But just then she saw one of the goats had got into her sunflowers, and I had to run and drive the goat out of the yard. The Goat Man shouted, and though I couldn’t tell what he said, I knew he meant for me to stay by the wagon and keep the goats out of the lady’s garden.

  While I tended to the goats, the lady herself took a bucket to the garden to pick the beans. And when the Goat Man finished sharpening the knives and scissors and soldering the dishpan and fixing the handle of the bucket, she gave him a quarter and the bucket of beans. The Goat Man smiled and bowed to her and put his tools back in the wagon. The woman was happy with his work, and he was happy with the quarter and green beans. And I thought: this is the way the world works, or is supposed to work, away from the Thomas Place. We help each other and live by helping each other. We live by trading, work for money and fresh beans. It seemed so simple. But it is the way things work, when they work, trading one thing for another. I felt the eggs in my pocket, but I wasn’t ashamed I’d taken them. I’d kept the goats away from the flowerbeds and sunflowers. Two big brown eggs were my pay.

  But as we walked along the road and my feet got sore from stepping on rocks and around puddles, I thought how nice it would be to have a place of my own where I could grow flowers, any kind of flowers, and a garden where I could grow potatoes and beans and peas, and tomatoes and sweet corn and squash. When I was on the Thomas Place, I hated to work outside in the garden and fields and wanted to stay in the big house where it was cool and clean. But walking along the road mile after mile with the goats and the Goat Man,
I wanted to get far as I could from the Thomas Place, but I wanted more than anything a piece of land that would be my own. At the end of my travel I wanted to stop and grow things to eat and make pretty things to wear. I craved a place where nobody could tell me what to do.

  And then I thought: no colored girl is going to have such a place, not in a long life, even if she got to freedom. And then I thought: even if you get to freedom, you’ve got to have a man. There’s no way to have a place without a man. So I had three problems, to get to the North without being caught, get my freedom, and get me a man to help me. Angel, you are far from all three, I said to myself. But it did me good to think on that, and remember the white woman’s flowers and her hens in the chicken house by the pine woods laying those big brown eggs every day.

  But the Goat Man was not pleased that I took those eggs. When we stopped for the night and I showed him the eggs, he shook his head and said something angry; I didn’t understand him at all, because we didn’t have anything for supper but mush and green beans, and milk from the goats.

  “We can boil the eggs,” I said to him.

  But he shook his head and waved his arms. When he went to milk the she-goats, I put on water to boil the eggs and cook mush in one pot and green beans in another. And when we started to eat the mush and beans, he still wouldn’t touch an egg. He seemed afraid of the egg, so I ate them both, and it was a mighty good supper with coffee white with goat milk.

  The Goat Man didn’t look at me while he ate and it came to me why he was so mad about the eggs. I saw he traveled all the time up and down the country, north and south, and he didn’t steal anything from people because he wanted to be welcomed everywhere. If he stole, they would be afraid of him and drive him away. As it was, he took their quarters and green beans and sweet potatoes. Traveling with the goats, he depended on their friendship and trust as he traded work for their tomatoes and squash. If they didn’t trust the Goat Man, they would drive him away and boys would beat him up and steal his wagon and his goats. So he didn’t steal anything. That was how he’d lived so long, traveling up and down all over the place. Watching the Goat Man, I kept learning something about how to live. But even so, I knew I was colored and running away, and I was a woman.