by Esi Edugyan
I had not gone ten paces when I reached a large rock. I climbed over it, and found myself crouching in a bright pool of lantern light.
“Is that you, finally?” said a voice.
It was Titch.
The space was low, too low for standing—a long, narrow chamber dug out of the earth and shored up with timber on the sides and across the ceiling. The floor too was built of boards, and looked dry enough. Seated at the far end with the lantern between them were Titch and Mister Edgar, and two runaway slaves.
I knew what they were at once. You will wonder how I knew them with such certainty. But what sort of mistake can a boy make who has lived his life among such people, and never dared dream of freedom himself, but heard the rumours, the whispers, the mutters at night of escapes? I knew them by the whites of their eyes and the tremble in their fingers; I knew them by the stillness of their shoulders, as if their very breath did not belong to them.
“Come, Wash, come closer,” Titch said quietly, waving me close. “We have much to discuss and little time to discuss it.”
Frowning, I crept slowly forward. There was a slop bucket in one corner and the smell coming off it was foul. I saw two satchels and a roll of bedding against the far wall. I saw the way the two runaways looked at me, suspicion and pity intermingled. And though I felt strangely ashamed, I stared boldly back at them, powerful men both, with thick necks and scabbed knuckles.
“They are leaving tomorrow night,” said Titch quietly, seeing my gaze. “This is Adam, and this Ezekiel.”
The two runaways said nothing. Ezekiel was shorter and thinner, with tired, kind eyes; his companion had about him a rougher look, as though a nasty hand had only ever been offered to him. He stared at me with a hardened expression. I did not speak. I looked now questioningly at Titch, now at Mister Edgar.
“They will be in the north before the month’s end, Wash,” Titch continued. “Free men. Men with their lives ahead of them. They will be in Upper Canada, and that will make them British subjects.”
“Well,” the sexton said, “not exactly. Rather, an act was passed some years ago—any enslaved person who reaches Upper Canada will be freed upon his arrival.”
“You are a smuggler,” said I. I had heard the stories on Faith Plantation of a certain distillery in Bridge Town, the rumours that the barrels contained more than just rum. We had given it little credence. Big Kit would snort and laugh and scowl. “Oh, them white folk is just so eager to help they poor black property out this life, I don’t doubt it,” she’d say with a twist of her mouth.
Titch leaned forward, a light frown on his face. “It is a great risk, of course. Adam and Ezekiel are in immediate danger also. They are being hunted even now.”
I regarded them with interest, wondering at Titch’s sober tone. Ezekiel kept his head lowered, his eyes fixed on his scuffed shoes. But I knew he would be a man of intensity and courage, simply by the fact that he had made it this far. Adam had a hardness in his eye, as though he had killed before. I had known a man like that at Faith, a leather worker whom we all believed had murdered a housegirl. That leather worker was found with a knife in his chest one morning down by the well.
Titch cleared his throat. “It seems surely a risk worth taking,” he said. “Does it not? Wash?”
And then I understood. But I did not want to. “What are you saying?” I asked.
“Lower your voice, boy,” said Mister Edgar. He glanced uneasily at the tunnel behind me.
I paid him no heed.
Titch regarded me a long moment. “I am telling you to go, Wash, to save your own life.”
I stood there surprised, not speaking.
Titch shook his head. “I am going north, Wash. To the Arctic.”
“But—”
“I will never be satisfied until I find out what happened to my father. See his resting place with my own eyes.” He paused. “Wash, listen to me. Do you understand what all this is?”
I only stared at him. I had thought we would continue our journey together. “I’m not stupid.”
“Of course not.”
“You are telling me if I don’t go with them I will likely die.”
The runaway Ezekiel raised his face at this, and the pity there made me flush hotly. Still, I could not stop myself. “But it doesn’t have to be so. I do not have to die.”
“He is my brother, Wash. So long as you are with me, he will be near. And he will not relent, he is too proud. Your best chance is to disappear among the Loyalist communities, in Upper Canada. Among your people.”
I glared at the two runaways, as if this were their doing. I recalled suddenly something Big Kit had said—that free men had total dominion over their choices; that they controlled every aspect of their lives. Nothing happened that they themselves did not sanction.
I met Titch’s eye boldly. “If I am a Freeman, then it is my choice where I go.”
“It is.”
“Even if that means hiding in the Arctic.”
Mister Edgar glanced at me in puzzlement.
I suppose I believed there to be some bravery in this choice. I suppose it struck my boyhood self as an act of fidelity, gratitude, a return of the kindness I had been shown and never grown used to. Perhaps I felt Titch to be the only sort of family I had left. Perhaps, perhaps; even now I cannot speak with any certainty. I know only that in that moment I was terrified to my very core, and that the idea of embarking on a perilous journey without Titch filled me with a panic so savage it felt as if I were being asked to perform some brutal act upon myself, to sever my own throat.
I stayed firmly seated on the boards, grim, resolved. Titch gave me a pained look, obviously taken aback, confused by my choice. But he did not say any word more.
5
WAS THAT a turning point? Not an evening since that fated night in Virginia have I not revisited the choice. What would my life have looked like had I gone with those men? What happened to them, in the end—did they use their freedom wisely or foolishly? I do not know what fate met Ezekiel and Adam, what they left behind, whom they dreamed of as they slept at night, or if such longings dulled or faded with the years. I know for myself they have not. I miss all those I had once known as friends. And there are few of them still alive.
Titch and I returned to Norfolk from Mister Edgar’s churchyard the following morning. There seemed little sense in remaining, and Titch was eager to find a charter heading to the Arctic basin.
It was anger I felt, betrayal. I could not have said it at the time, so strange was the sensation to me. But I did not speak to Titch the entire journey back to Norfolk, nor would I meet his eye. I understood he had been seeking safety for my person, some assurance of my deliverance. And yet to my boyhood sense of justice it felt like a casting off. I chafed at the idea that he desired to rid himself of me, I who had been his most faithful companion. An outlandish conclusion in retrospect, perhaps, but you must remember that I had been raised on chains and blood, suffering for even an unmeant kindness. And into that life had walked Titch, and he had looked upon me with his calm eyes and seen something there, a curiosity for the world, an intelligence, a talent with images I had until then been unaware of. I did not know what lay on that route to Upper Canada with those men; I had already some notion of what a life with Titch could be. It was a choice. I had only moments. I made it.
Would I choose so again? Well, now that is a question. I will only say that if I have acquired any wisdom from Big Kit, it is to live always with your eyes cast forward, to seek what will be, for the path behind can never be retaken.
We sought our passage north and were eventually taken aboard the Calliope, a vessel of some lesser tonnage than the Ave Maria but newer in her fixtures. She was captained by a man called Michael Holloway, no slaver but still with a strong code of distinction between Negroes and whites. He had been born and raised in Chatta
nooga, with little good to say of the place. He was short, but stocky and bullish. He did not drink and kept instead always a steaming snifter of tea by his side.
His second, a fellow named Jacob Ibel, was strangely free of the captain’s prejudices, though the men had been close since boyhood and indeed were raised in the same street. He spoke to me as if I were a human being and often came in search of me to play whist and pinochle. He had a thick black moustache and a very pale, grey mouth, as if his lips suffered for sunlight. I liked him very much but did not trust either man.
Before boarding their ship, Titch had us stop to purchase clothing, provisions and equipment with money given him by Mister Edgar. We set sail two days later by light of dawn, under the push of a strong wind. As we stood at the railing, the ship groaning mournfully from port, I noticed on the boardwalk the figure of a short-statured man there, staring out at the boats, at me.
He was portly and fat-bellied, his light brown hat battering softly across his forehead. He wore an impeccable dark suit of clothes and though his eyes were blurred by the distance, I imagined them cruel, hawkish, without mercy. My breath caught in my chest; I gave two quick tugs at Titch’s sleeve. By the time Titch leaned out over the wet railing to see, the man had already turned into the crowd.
* * *
—
WE WERE CLEARING the chop of American waters, working our steady way north, when the sun at last rose fully. Titch and I were accommodated in hammocks. Though I did not ask, he explained that the captain had accepted his offer of substantial payment to make a detour in their plans and drop us at an outpost in Hudson Bay. He grinned at this, his eyes bright, his lips crooked, and I found myself, however reluctantly, smiling back.
And so what followed was the long, languid rising and falling of the vessel, day after day, as we continued our journey north. It did not occur to me that some part of Titch despaired to discover his father alive, or that he might be frightened of Mister Willard. I trusted him yet, for I was still but a boy. I believed that only in his keeping would I be safe.
Was it happiness I began to feel, unexpectedly, as we set out from Norfolk? All around us lay the green swells of the ocean, and the swoop of white seabirds in our wake. The high sails crackled with the wind, and the days, the days were still fine and not yet what they would soon become.
* * *
—
WE WERE somewhere off Labrador, in black waters, when Titch at last raised the question.
“Is it not early in the season to be sailing north?” he said one day, at luncheon in the captain’s quarters. It was, as always, the four of us: Captain Holloway, Mister Ibel, Titch and myself. The captain had softened somewhat and would now suffer my presence, though I was never invited to speak and it was clear my burns disturbed him still. It was Mister Ibel who always addressed me, in his mild, laughing way. We had been sailing into colder climes some days now and the sun was low in the sky. I had taken to wearing all three of my shirts and a thick coat provided by the bosun at all times, even while I slept.
“Early, aye,” said the captain, cutting a bulb of sausage. “We aim to be the first in these waters.”
Titch took a sip of rum. “I know very little of such matters, gentlemen. But I do understand the ice retreats haphazardly. Is it quite safe?”
“I never heard of a reward without a risk,” said Captain Holloway. “Did you ever hear of a reward without a risk, Ibel?”
“I never did,” said Mister Ibel.
There was the rasp of knives on plates. Titch shook his head. “What sort of expedition is it, gentlemen, that you are embarked upon? If I may inquire?”
“It’s a no-business-of-yours sort,” said Captain Holloway.
Titch nodded. “That is true.”
“I think it hardly matters now, Michael,” said Mister Ibel. He furrowed his brow. “We are at sea. Surely it hardly matters.”
The captain stroked his beard, scowling.
“We are seeking the wreck of a whaler,” Mister Ibel said abruptly, taking his friend’s silence for agreement. “The Magnolia Lion. She was crushed in the ice off Baffin Island some two Novembers ago.”
Titch expressed no surprise. “But surely it will not still be there? Surely the ice has carried it north?”
Captain Holloway narrowed his eyes. “So you know how the ice moves, do you?”
Titch shook his head. “Only that it moves. I do not know the currents.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Mister Ibel. “The crew unloaded the barrels before they set out. They took them to a small island near the wreck and buried them under a shelter. The oil will be precisely where it was left. Islands do not move, Mister Wilde.”
“Aye,” said Captain Holloway.
Titch smiled, a quick, happy smile. “Then you gentlemen will do very nicely for yourselves, I expect. It might prove a most profitable undertaking.”
“We aim it to be so,” said Captain Holloway.
“An old man came to my attention, more than a year past,” said Mister Ibel, “a man with an unfortunate swelling in his knee. He was, it seems, an old friend of my father’s. Also a seaman, he was. He had been trapped in the snows and suffered a severe frostbite. His toes had already been taken from him. This man, this Mister MacBane, was a Scotsman shipped out of Yorkshire on a whaler, the aforesaid Magnolia Lion. He told me of the wreck, and of the oil, stranded in the white wastes, and of its worth. I thought no more of it.”
“Until…” prompted Captain Holloway. He waved a rough hand at his friend.
“Until I was summoned to his bedside. His leg had grown worse, had grown septic from an injury suffered in a public house one night. Mister MacBane was dying; I could see this at once. He was attended by an ancient widow, a woman in black, his sister. Agnes was her name. I pitied him; I asked if there was nothing I could do for the man. She left me alone in their second room while she tried to speak to her brother, and it was there I noticed a curious handwritten map.”
“A map to the wreck,” said Captain Holloway.
“And to the barrels of oil,” said Mister Ibel. “Although I did not know it at the time. Agnes returned to me and saw me reading it. She told me of its import. She said she could explain the markings and that her brother, a navigator by trade, had kept a precise eye as they struggled south on the constellations. She said his map was accurate. She said any ship could find their way to the oil that knew where to look.”
“All this she offered to you?” said Titch, interested.
“All this she offered to me, with the condition that I concede a portion of the profits to her.”
“I should be very interested in his directions,” Titch said. “How did he annotate the stars in their seasonal displacements?”
“Oh, maybe we’ll just take out the map and give it over to you,” scoffed Captain Holloway.
Titch raised his shoulders in a shrug. “I have no desire for money.”
“Seven hells,” said Mister Ibel. “Everyone has desire for money, sir.”
“So you are sailing to the wreck,” Titch said. “You mean to steal the barrels?”
“Not steal,” Captain Holloway said sharply. “Claim.”
Titch raised an eyebrow.
“Aye, there’s the beauty of it,” said Mister Ibel. “The insurance is already paid out. The company’s men can’t claim it now.”
“But would it not belong to the insurance company, then? By rights?”
Captain Holloway snorted. “Not by the laws of salvage. It’s a wreck. Any vessel can collect flotsam and jetsam.”
“Do barrels of good oil stacked under a shelter count as flotsam?” asked Titch.
From the expressions on their faces I did not think it likely.
“You are missing the cardinal point, Mister Wilde,” said Mister Ibel with a dry smile. “Let them try to collect it f
rom us. We shall have them sold at a profit before any claim can be made.”
“And that claim wouldn’t be worth the shit in a gull, neither,” said Captain Holloway, grinning.
“A lengthy court dispute, to what end?” agreed Mister Ibel.
“Well,” smiled Titch, taking up a last piece of hardtack from his plate. “I should think we are exceedingly lucky to have met with you, then. First ship of the season indeed.”
And he took a great happy bite of the hardtack and sat crunching it, smiling at each of us in turn, immensely satisfied.
* * *
—
THE AIR CLENCHED to ice, stinging our cheeks. It began to pinch. Sailing, we glimpsed in the passing black waters eerie, exquisite cathedrals of ice. I had not ever seen ice before, not in its immensities: I stared into the refracted light like a creature entranced. How beautiful it was, how sad, how sacred! I attempted to express the awe of it in my drawings. For it felt very much as though we were leaving the world of the living and entering a world of spirits and the dead. I felt free, invincible, beyond Mister Willard’s reach. We sailed past the mouths of glaciers; enormous, violent bergs were calving, rocking in the foaming water. We sailed slowly along those channels, half in dread of some underwater collision.
Whales surfaced, snorting thick gusts of spray then sliding back under the cold waters. I walked the deck, dressed heavily in all I had brought, clapping my hands for the cold, a small black boy bundled until he was quite rotund and waddling. The sailors laughed and called me their penguin and their mascot, and when Mister Ibel showed me an etching of a penguin in a book, I too laughed.
On our third week out from Norfolk we passed a battered brig sailing southward. Mister Ibel muttered some quiet imprecation, and Captain Holloway spat, but we did not slow down, did not hail them. Titch explained they would have wintered over somewhere in the Bay and would now be eager to return to warmer waters.
