She began to sob.
“You cannot know the guilt I’ve felt all these years,” she moaned. “Forgive me. Forgive me, John. Please … I cannot go on without your forgiveness.”
I sat up and kissed the top of her head.
“Now it’s my turn to beg,” she said. “I need to hear you say you forgive me. I need to hear those words.”
“I forgive you, Mama. And I love you. The bad times are gone now — all gone.”
“But they’re not, John. Midnight is a prisoner! And as long as he remains so, it will never be finished. Not even for your father, though he’s been nearly fifteen years in his grave.”
*
Mother’s confessions might have been expected to give me a sense of completion about the past, of finally understanding why our family had come apart. Instead, they left me feeling desperately fragile. In consequence, I insisted on spending every waking minute of the following three days with my daughters. A grave error it was; living at such close proximity, we fought over nearly everything — over their desire to take tiny sips of my beer, whether the cold rain called for a warmer bonnet …
Three days before my carriage ride to Portsmouth, this fever of anxiety broke. I had ordered the lasses to the sofa and asked if there were any questions that they needed answered about their mother before my departure. I grew furious at their reticence to speak, which I took as an affront to Francisca’s memory.
“Well, have neither of you anything to say?”
They groaned, plainly thinking me daft. Calm down, I could hear Francisca telling me. So I sat with my eyes closed. After a time they came and clung to me.
Thinking back to Graça in her mother’s arms, her skin all wrinkled, then seeing this same child in front of me … I apologized for being so difficult with them over the previous few days. I kissed them all over their faces, which made them laugh. After a happy conversation about trifles, we all felt much better and I encouraged them to go off with Aunt Fiona, chasing them giggling out of the house with my growls.
Over the next days, we had no more quarrels. Each of the kelpies came to me separately to have her hair brushed, a task their mother had always done for them.
When I begged Mama’s forgiveness for my sour mood, she said, “Don’t you think I understand that it is worry that makes you so ill-tempered? John, I shall be here for you no matter what you find in America. You and your daughters will always have a home with me in London.”
*
Before I left, Mother handed me a waistcoat of gold and black stripes that she had sewn in secret, asking me to put it on to show her the fit.
“I have sewn fifteen golden sovereigns into the lining,” she said, giving me a wink. “Just rip it open when you need them.”
I felt for them. “You are very kind, Mama, but I have enough money for my voyage.”
“Not for that, son. I told you: I am counting on you to ransom Midnight — no matter what it costs.”
*
I’m afraid I created quite a scene at the carriage taking me to Portsmouth. The possibility that this was the last time I would ever see any of my family again left me inconsolable.
“Come home soon, son,” Mama told me, doing her best to smile. “And worry not for the girls.” She pressed my hands into her cheeks, then kissed them. “I shall turn them into fine English ladies.”
“Lord, I hope not,” I replied, which made us all laugh.
“Give my love to Violeta. Tell her that my prayers have always been with her, poor girl!”
“I shall indeed. Thank you for all you have ever done for me.” As I understood that she wished more than anything to participate in my effort to redeem our past, I said, “Your golden coins shall set Midnight free.”
We looked into each other’s eyes. I do not know what she saw, but I saw years of shared history — I saw Daniel and Violeta, Fanny and Zebra, Francisca and the girls. I saw Midnight. Most of all, though, I saw my father.
“May I have your blessing?” I asked.
“You don’t need that. You’re a man now.”
“But still — ”
“John, of course you have my blessing,” she said, kissing me. “You make me proud — you always have.”
Aunt Fiona wrapped me in her arms and said, “Do not fear, your girls have fine characters and will not come undone in London.”
I hugged her again, then approached my girls.
“Take good care of each other,” I begged them.
“You take care, Papa,” Graça whimpered.
I knelt and took one in each arm, wishing to remember their wonderful touch and scent for as long as I was gone. Esther started to cry.
“Listen,” I told her, “I shall return as soon as I can. I promise.”
“I know,” she replied glumly.
“And I shall expect your violin-playing to be much improved when I return. You are to practice at least two hours a day while I am gone.” I whispered in her ear, as though it were our secret, “Your grandmother will insist on Mr. Beethoven, but do not fail Mr. Bach.
“And, Graça,” I said, facing the dark, somber eyes of my eldest, “please don’t worry about me, I shall be fine.”
The girl nodded forlornly.
“Now, both of you,” I said cheerfully, “please heed what your grandmother and Aunt Fiona ask of you. I shall be home before you even have a chance to miss me, so do not be sad.”
Then we were off and I was alone, gripping Midnight’s arrow as though it might fly off of its own volition.
XXXIII
Midnight once told me that the moon, in full radiance, is female. But when it is cut by night into the form of a crescent, it is male. Then it is called nui ma ze, meaning small new moon. Also male are the ponderous clouds that speak to us with their thunder and that cast hail and lightning upon the earth. But the soft gray clouds that nourish the plants with their dancing rains are female.
As far as I can recall, we did not encounter a single female cloud at sea. We seesawed instead between battering storms and full sun. I began to think of the world as ruled only by male gods. Hence, by the time we arrived at the southern tip of Manhattan Island I knew this: that I had neither been meant to journey by sea nor live in a world where the natural forces were wholly male.
*
Coming in from open ocean, under that great dome of blue American sky, New York Bay was a splendid site. In my mind, I made a list: I shall walk on the earth. Smell flowers. Eat oranges. See the blue bird with a crest that Violeta wrote me about. And forget the indifference of waves.
The city of New York spread out across the island’s southern tip, but a dense forest blanketed the north. Soon we could make out brick houses and even carriages. To our right, on a broad peninsula, was another waterfront called Brooklyn. A few dozen people were standing there on a tall bluff. I waved to them, and three or four hailed me back.
The Saxony eased into a wharf jutting out from a bustling thoroughfare. We passengers cheered heartily at our final lurch. The emotion was such that many of us laughed through our tears.
Soon, the walkway to land was in place. I felt for Daniel’s talisman about my neck, then gripped Midnight’s arrow, picked up my bags, and rushed ashore.
I have made it to America,and I amcloser to Midnight! I kept repeating that exciting phrase to myself, picturing myself on one of Graça’s beloved maps.
The coachman for my hackney cab gave me his arm to help me up, as the world was still pitching and rolling. I handed him a paper on which I’d written Violeta’s address.
We passed leafy squares and many rows of fine trim houses as we rolled along in fits and starts, since there was much carriage traffic at this time of morning. Our route took us north into the interior of the island. After twenty minutes the driver called “Ho!” to the grays and tugged on their reins. We had arrived at Number 73 John Street. Violeta’s house was of handsome dark red brick. Its three floors rose to a steeply slanted slate roof.
I sat
my luggage down on the stoop and took a deep breath. Then, gripping the knocker — a brass ring in a lion’s mouth — I rapped on the door twice. I glanced upward just in time to see the curtains closing in the second-story window.
XXXIV
Nigger Fate
The men thought that Little Master Henry was going to be a diamond of compassion compared to his murdered papa. But the women and girls knew different, and we were proved right. As soon as he got his hands on River Bend, the Little Master started drinking fierce as fire and whipping everything in sight.
It was an open window that started him toward his grave, the way I look at it. Mistress Holly was of the notion that the icy wind that reached him that night must have come all the way from Canada. I hardly ever found myself agreeing with her, but this case was an exception. Up there in Canada was where all the Negroes were free, and I reckoned they had vengeful winds for taking the lives of the likes of Little Master Henry. At least, I sure as hell hoped they did.
This one particular night, the Master’s carriage came across the Big Bridge at a couple hours past midnight. He’d been at a party at Comingtee Plantation thrown by Mistress Nancy Ball. We all called her Captain Nancy owing to how she enjoyed lashing her slaves with her ivory-handled whip.
Little Henry was so drunk that he must have lifted open his window to get some air into his whiskey-fogged chest. He didn’t remember a thing about opening it, but that didn’t mean much, since he didn’t recall tripping on the stairs up to the piazza either, or vomiting into his washbasin. But Crow saw both of those things just as plain as day, and even emptied the basin into the lime pit, so we know they happened. Besides, none of the white folks wanted to consider who else might have lifted up his window, because that would have meant somebody had a plan.
I figured it didn’t matter much who opened that window because, however it happened, the wind rushed inside as if it had been waiting for weeks. Then it curled its icy fingers down around his throat, so that by the next morning he had a bad cough and a burning fever. Over the next few days, the fever got worse and the Little Master grew crazy with it. It was a spell, just like one of his father’s.
It was my father who watched after Little Master Henry. He lifted cups of brewed dogwood berries to his lips to ease his chills and made him breathe in the steam rising off boiled peach-tree leaves to cool his fever. After two weeks, he was able to stand on his own two legs. And as soon as he was able to walk down the stairs, he started giving orders again in that squeaky voice of his, just like he’d never been ill. And the very first order he gave was that he was sure as hell not granting any freedom to Samuel, his daughter, or any other uppity niggers with Yankee dreams in their heads, no matter whether they had brought him back to life or not.
You see, Papa had asked him for our freedom in exchange for keeping him out of the arms of death.
A week after Little Master Henry denied us our chance to be free, he took ill again real bad. Papa tried everything on that boy, all sorts of brews and potions that only he and I knew about. But nothing he worked up did any good.
Every evening I brought the Master his lemonade, just like I did his father. By now he couldn’t keep down even a spoonful of Indian mush. He was all bogged up. If you ask me, his refusal to give us our freedom was the cause of that. And there was nothing in any curing book that was going to get that sort of mud-minded evil unstuck.
One night, I carried his lemonade to his door and found it locked. I was afraid to wake him up in case he’d dozed off. So instead of knocking, I stood there like a spider in its web for a time, just waiting and wondering. Then I shuffled off to Mistress Holly’s room. When I told her about her son’s door being locked, she took the key from her drawer and shouted for Crow to fetch my papa. This time, no one ran off for Mr. Johnson the overseer, since we couldn’t believe that so young a man as Little Master Henry might be dead. He was only twenty-four, after all. And he was a white man. By that I mean he had powers over life and death that we didn’t have.
Papa said thank you for being given the key, then clicked the door open. And just like three months earlier, we discovered that our Master had a blade stuck in his neck, right above the collarbone.
The young man died on November the Twenty-Second of 1820 — just in time for Thanksgiving, a few of the more evil among us said.
I guess you might say we aren’t ever prepared for death to come looking for anyone we know. I learned that when Mamma was ill. Though she was feverish for three weeks, I never once let myself think she was about to leave us behind. The shock nearly chased my spirit clean out of my body. Papa’s as well. He didn’t say a word for four months.
You can say what you want about Mistress Holly, but she had a big fondness for her son. I think that he was the only person she really loved. So we reckoned she’d start wailing something awful. Not a one of us expected that terrible silence when she crept on over to her son and lay her head in his bloody lap. His eyes were still open, but she didn’t reach up to close them. She didn’t want him dead forever.
For the first time in my life, I felt bad for a white person. After Dr. Lydell had come and gone, I tiptoed in to Mistress Holly in her room and asked real nice if I might bring her some lemonade with a few of the almond biscuits that Lily had made. She looked up from her bed with eyes so red that I thought she’d rubbed her dead son’s blood into them. I got a fright. She glared at me as if I had laughed at her. In the meanest voice I’d ever heard from her, she said, “You get your black feet out of my room, nigger girl, or I’ll have you peeled, pickled, and quartered.”
*
When a planter is murdered in South Carolina, all the white folks start shivering nearly all the time, even when they’re sitting right up close to their hearths. Because they know the killing might have been the work of a Negro wanting freedom. Like Mr. Denmark Vesey. He was the preacher who was hanged for trying to start an uprising in Charleston back in 1822. He once even came to River Bend, and you could feel that big power in him. “Like black lightning,” Papa described him, by which he meant a whole lot of things, I’d guess.
So with a few hundred thousand Negroes thinking about vengeance every night, it was no wonder that the white folks didn’t sleep none too peacefully. They figured that once we got started it was only going to stop when the last of their race was lying in a Charleston street in a puddle of his own blood, being picked by vulture birds. And they were likely right.
This death meant something else besides. It was proof of a terrible curse having been put on River Bend. No one said that any louder than Mistress Holly herself. She hardly got dressed anymore. Most of her time she sat in her dressing gown in her room, losing at solitaire and consoling herself with rum.
Life gets stuck repeating itself from time to time, I guess. Mr. Johnson didn’t bother measuring the distance from the window to the ground this time, since the Big House wasn’t made of rubber and couldn’t have gotten much higher or lower. As for the ladder, it was locked in the First Barn and only Mr. Johnson had the key.
Twenty-four feet from the window to the ground … Little Master Henry dead at twenty-four years old … Lily, Weaver, and some of the other slaves believed this coincidence was proof that we were finally getting some divine justice in South Carolina.
Mr. Johnson got powerful furious at us for not knowing who did it, but he didn’t whip anybody. He was waiting to see who the new master would be before working himself up. Maybe he was frightened of the killer ghost that might be haunting River Bend, as well.
Whatever was in his mind, I guess he started making plans right about then to leave River Bend with Mistress Holly. Crow overheard him talking about that with her not two nights after her son’s death.
This time, South Carolina justice found a culprit, though we only knew it three days after the fact. In the story we heard, a runaway slave named Hilton had been caught by a patrol while he was fording the East Branch of the Cooper River near where it meets French Quarter Cree
k.
The hounds might have lost his scent but his shoe had come off in the mud of the riverbank. You might say that his destiny got stuck with him right there. Nigger fate, my mamma used to call it — I mean, things like your shoe coming off at the worst moment. She was the one person I ever met who could spot that nigger fate the moment it targeted its falcon eyes on you.
We heard the report of what happened from Crow, who got it from Aunt Bessie. Hilton had been dragged nearly drowned out of the river by the patrol. Finding a silver watch in his pocket, they said it must have been Little Master Henry’s. No nigger could get himself such a pretty thing without stealing it.
After they lynched him from a big old oak tree, they cut him down, tied the rope around his legs, and dragged him by horse all the way back to Cherry Hill. They rode across five or six miles of ugly roads gouged with stones, so that by the time they discarded him in front of his poor mamma’s cabin, every last bone in his bloody face had been broken.
I guess you could say that motherhood has got to be the bravest thing of all, since she knelt by his body and tried to put him back together.
I can’t think of anything more evil than to do that to a man and show him to his mamma.
Nobody in the patrol knew or cared that the silver watch had been a present from his father, Papa Lucius.
My papa told me that men like them only listened to Hyena and did his bidding. Papa talked like that sometimes. Most folks at River Bend didn’t understand him, but I did.
A few days later it rained all night, and Papa danced out front of the Big House till dawn. He got so sopped and tired that I thought he’d just fall right down in the mud. He closed his eyes when I held him in my arms and whispered, “I’ve got to make sure they don’t take the dances from us too.”
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