by Wayne Grady
SELECTED WORKS BY WAYNE GRADY
Fiction
Emancipation Day
Nonfiction
Breakfast at the Exit Cafe
Tree: A Life Story
Bringing Back the Dodo
The Bone Museum
The Great Lakes
The Dinosaur Project
Technology
Copyright © 2018 Wayne Grady
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Grady, Wayne, author
Up from freedom / Wayne Grady.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 9780385685115 (softcover). ISBN 9780385685122 (EPUB)
I. Title.
PS8613.R337U64 2018 C813’.6 C2017-906803-2
C2017-906804-0
This book is a work of historical fiction. Apart from well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Cover and text design: Lisa Jager
Cover images: (man) Vicky Martin/Arcangel Images Limited; (waves) Marzufello/Shutterstock
Interior image: (bird) Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book, the British Library
Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.1
a
For Tamsey’s great-great-great-great-granddaughters:
Faye, Myra and Noelle.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave.
—Francis Scott Key, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” 1814
Contents
Cover
Selected Works by Wayne Grady
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: May-August 1848
Part Two: September 1848-November 1849
Part Three: March-May 1850
Part Four: June-October 1850
Part Five: October-November 1850
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
PART ONE
MAY–AUGUST 1848
When the sun come back,
When the first quail call,
Then the time is come:
Follow the Drinking Gourd
1.
Virgil Moody waded a little ahead of the others as they scouted the Rio Grande east of Fort Paredes. The south and north banks were Mexico, but nobody owned the river. They’d heard General de Ampudia was moving the Mexican army north from Monterrey, intending to cross at Las Anacuitas, and General Taylor wanted to know how many they were and what condition they were in. So far they’d heard Ampudia had from six hundred to a thousand permanentes, with another two hundred infantry coming up to join them, no artillery that anyone knew of, maybe a couple of twelve-pounders. There weren’t more than a few hundred Americans at Fort Texas, militiamen like Moody and mostly untrained and badly provisioned volunteers. On patrol that night, splashing behind him, were Stockton Smith, Charlie Warburn, Walt Murdale, Willard Pickart and Jed Baker, with Lieutenant Endicot Millican, their excuse for a captain, bringing up the rear. None of them had any faith in Millican. They went along with him when it didn’t mean anything, but when he walked them down open roads or across fields, even in the dark, Moody knew that when the fighting started, they’d follow their own inclinations and to hell with Millican. Moody thought it was safer at the head of the line. He didn’t want any part of whatever went on behind him.
They happened upon the Mexican patrol at first light, a hundred yards north of the river in what the Texans claimed was the Republic of Texas. The Mexicans were so sure of their right to be there they were cooking their breakfast on open fires, smoke all over the place. The men could smell their damn fish frying. They got down on their bellies and crawled through the underbrush to a ridge above the camp. They saw the Mexicans’ horses tied beside a small arroyo, the silver buckles on their saddles and bridles twinkling through the trees: regiments from San Luis de Posto or maybe San Miguel de Allende, where the silver mines were. Cavalry, anyway, but these boys were careless. The patrol split into two groups without Millican saying a word, and Moody’s group edged along the ridge to the right. They’d each need to get off two shots, and they counted on the suddenness of their attack to give them time to reload. The Mexicans’ firearms, light, dependable East India Pattern muskets, were pyramided between the fires, more carelessness. These couldn’t be trained troops, they were acting like a hunting party out for a Sunday shoot. Their capitán was sitting on a fallen log, writing in a book. Will Pickart shot him. Moody shot one by the fire before he had time to jump up. Stockton missed his first shot and cursed. Moody could hear the others firing at the second group, and three bluecoats went down. The rest ran for their muskets. Moody reloaded and fired into them, but none fell. Then the Texans whooped and charged down the ridge with bayonets fixed. They had to watch their footing because of loose stones, but for a few seconds they weren’t afraid of death. Two Mexicans ran across the creek, and Pickart and Moody went after them. Will chased his down, and Moody ran his into a shallow arroyo, where the soldado turned, put his back against a tree and raised his hands. A boy no more than fifteen or sixteen, hatless, his uniform too big for him, sandals on his feet. There was a lot of indio in him, dark skin, arched eyebrows and the kind of straight, black hair above dark, fathomless eyes that made Moody think of lush forest and running water. Moody stood in front of him while the boy’s hands shook. He raised his bayonet, and Millican ran up behind him.
“Kill him!” he shouted at Moody. “Kill him, you fool!”
That was what he was doing, damn it. But he couldn’t go through with it. Maybe it was Millican telling him to, a man he didn’t respect. Or maybe it was because the boy was the same age as Lucas. But sticking a body was different from shooting at it from the top of a ridge. You had to look him in the eye, you had to hit the inverted V under the crossed bandoleras, you had to remember the twist that cut through the cartilage. Then you had to watch him die.
“Kill the bastard, Moody!”
“Brown said take a few prisoners,” Moody said, but they both knew he was stalling.
“We got two taken back at the camp,” Millican said. “This little bastard won’t know anything. Finish him off, and do it now. That’s a direct order.”
Moody looked at Millican, the whole war, his whole life, condensed into this moment. What if he killed Millican instead? He didn’t move, but he thought about it. Then Millican turned and ran back to the creek, and Moody looked at the Mexican. He was whimpering. He made a sudden movement with his right hand and Moody, startled, thrust the bayonet into his sternum so hard he pinned the boy to the tree. His feet lifted slightly off the ground and his eyes widened. He coughed once, as though he’d only had the wind knocked out of him, and finished raising his hand to his forehead, making the sign of the cross. Moody felt the rib cage settle onto the bayonet. He twisted and pulled, and the musket came away, leaving the bayonet st
ill stuck in the tree. The boy looked at him, the fingers of his left hand curled around the bayonet’s locking mechanism. Moody turned and left him.
“Nothing is forgiven,” his father used to say. “Some things are forgotten, but damn few. And nothing is ever forgiven.”
2.
When Virgil Moody returned to his farm on the Rio Brazos after the fighting, all he wanted was to sit on his porch with Annie and Lucas for a while, then plant some corn and cotton and not have to think about what he’d done and seen done during the war. The worst of the fighting had ended in April, when the army let the militiamen and volunteers go home to tend to their farms. He was back in time to get the crops in, and by the end of May the plants were setting squares, giving him reason to hope. But now, in July, it was too hot to do anything other than sit in the shade and watch the leaves wilt on the branches, and hope he’d watered them enough in June. The bolls opened dry and sharp, like sheep’s wool caught on hawthorns. The corn stood straight up and rattled in the wind. He had plenty of time to think but not the comfort to think clearly, and the Mexican boy and his father’s voice kept coming back, ambushing him where he sat.
Moody’s father said a lot of things and was wrong about most of them. For example, that owning slaves was a patriotic duty. He said the Constitution guaranteed it.
“Just put the biscuits out there in the sun,” he said to Annie. “I bet they’ll bake.” They were on the porch, their faces in shadow but the sun scorching their knees.
As a younger man he’d vowed he would never own slaves, never be like his father, but when he moved from Savannah to New Orleans, he’d taken Annie from his father’s plantation. He’d first seen her at his brother’s funeral, out at Plantagenet, in the kitchen house arguing with Sikey about something she didn’t want to do. She was small and tough as a boot, her voice not loud but with a driving force that made you look up, like the cry of a hawk. As he watched her, he knew that if she stayed at Plantagenet, she’d be dead in a month, either by Casgrain, his father’s overseer, a mean man with a fondness for the bull whip, to the ends of which he’d tied lead fishing weights, or from the yellow fever that was running through the plantations in Georgia and had already killed a thousand slaves and three hundred whites in Savannah, including his brother and two cousins. The kitchen house was hot and busy. Sikey didn’t have time to stand still and talk. She was a big woman, tall and filled out in places Annie didn’t even have. The top of Annie’s head barely came to the cook’s shoulder, and her hair was so wild that, beside Sikey, she looked like an angry cat standing under a tree. He stopped in the doorway, enjoying watching her follow Sikey about the kitchen, arguing and waving her arms, then he cleared his throat and asked if he might have a glass of cucumber water.
“Sumpin’ wrong wid y’arm?” Annie said, turning on him.
“What?”
“Y’all cane fetch y’own water?”
He looked at Sikey. “Annie one of the new Gullah girls,” Sikey said. “She be fine, by an’ by.”
Annie looked like she’d accidentally stepped on a snake. He nodded, and then fetched his own glass of water.
“Nothing wrong with Casgrain’s arm, either,” he said to her on his way to the door, but gently, more caution than threat. “As I’m sure you’ll find out soon enough, you keep that up.”
Her eyes narrowed. He stopped and turned to assess their depth, the way a jeweler might, and allowed himself to be caught in them. She started to say something else, but Sikey put a piggin of table scraps in her hands and told her to go out and feed the chickens. When Annie was gone, Sikey turned to him and shook her head. “She don’t want to work in the house, Lord bless and keep,” she said. “She want to work in the rice fields with her mam and the other Gullahs.”
“Well,” he said, watching Annie leave, the swing of her skirt, “she was right about my arm.”
Two days later, when he left to go back to New Orleans, he took Annie with him. He didn’t tell his father, just took her as he would a desk or a horse. No, he would have asked about the horse. He thought about taking her mam, too, and if Annie had insisted he might have, but she didn’t. He’d thought they both understood what they were getting into.
3.
“You crazy or what?” Annie said, looking at him sideways from her rocker on the porch. He started, thinking, not for the first time, that she’d been reading his mind. “Cook biscuits on a rock? You been out in the sun too long yoself.”
“No, I ain’t crazy. Go on, do like I said.”
It wasn’t an order: he knew by now how she took orders. Their first day in New Orleans, she’d walked around his house like a cat looking for a place to hide her kittens, which, as it turned out, was exactly what she was doing. There weren’t many such places. It was a Creole house on Burgundy Street, built in the old style, low, red brick with a corrugated tile roof and a veranda, or banquette, jutting out into the front garden, about as far from a Georgia plantation house as he could get. He’d bought it with money he made playing cards. In the parlor were his few law books, a writing table and two good chairs, and a small portrait of his mother, who had died when he was five, a miniature of the larger painting that hung in his father’s house. In his dining room was a glass cabinet that held his mother’s second-best china. The kitchen was in the back and, behind that, Moody’s bedroom, with a dresser and a bedspread and a stack of books beside the bed. There was a lean-to off the kitchen, with a door giving out into the back garden. After sniffing the entire house she’d retreated to that, coming out only when he called her, which was seldom, or when he was out, which was often. She did the shopping in Market Square on Sundays, when the plantation negroes came into town to sell the cabbages and fruit they grew on their own small plots, but he fixed his own meals; she washed the dishes and took what food remained back to the lean-to for herself. Moody would come home and find his bed linen changed, or the lamp wicks trimmed, or his boots brushed, but it was as though fairies had done the work. They lived in the house like refugees from hostile countries. He didn’t understand until it became obvious that, sometime before they’d left Plantagenet, she had conceived a child. It bothered him that he hadn’t guessed.
Gradually she grew less cautious of him, and less caustic. He wouldn’t say relaxed, but after Plantagenet, with its Big House and, out of sight of the ground-floor windows, the double row of zebra houses that formed a separate village for the slaves, the New Orleans house seemed as much hers as his. There wasn’t enough room in it for segregation. He never forced her to do anything. He talked to her about things, asked her if it was time to wash the curtains, or would she make pork chops for dinner, but he didn’t insist and she could easily talk around him. The curtains could wait until the rainy season was over, the butcher had better chicken than pork. He would nod as if to say, All right then. Whatever you think. He watched her belly grow from flat bean to summer squash, and he never once asked her whose it was. He was sure he knew, and he didn’t want to be told he was right. One night, after he’d been out playing cards, he came into her lean-to and climbed into her bed. There was no window, but the walls were thin and he could hear footsteps on the cobbled street outside, a dog bark, the clatter of a cab, and smell oleander and devil’s trumpet in the garden. He slept. When he opened his eyes in the morning, she was still there, as though he’d always slept there. He watched her sleep. He still had most of his clothes on. When she woke, he turned to her and put his hand on her summer squash, and asked her, “What name will you give it?”
“Lucas,” she said. That was a good name. He didn’t know anyone named Lucas.
“And if it’s a girl?”
“It ain’t a girl. My mam saw three spiders when she having me, and she had a girl. I ain’t seen one spider yet.”
After that, he moved her into his bedroom. He remade the lean-to for the child, cut a window in it so the child would see the fig trees and the palmettos and the orange blossoms hidden from the street by the tall board fence. W
hen it was dark, they sat on the banquette and listened to the sounds of the city. She grew. Lucas grew. Moody grew.
4.
“Put them out there on the bird rock,” Moody said, pointing to the large, flat stone in front of the cabin where they scattered corn in the winter for wild turkeys and grouse, to keep them away from the chickens.
“What for?” Annie said.
He knew that wasn’t how slaves talked to their owners. A slave would have said, “Yes, Massa,” and kept her thoughts to herself, and got down off the porch and put the goddamn biscuits out in the sun. But this was Texas, and Texas used to be part of Mexico, and Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829. And anyway, never in all the years they’d been together had she called him “Massa.” She’d never called him anything. He’d taken that as a good sign; Massa was his father, or maybe Casgrain. She got up and put the biscuit dough on the bird rock, then set a cast-iron skillet upside down over top of them, as if she were the curious one and that was the reason she was doing it. Moody didn’t mind. It would have worked, too. The biscuits didn’t rise, but they half baked. They would have baked all the way if they’d left them long enough, but it started getting late, and Annie took the biscuits inside and finished them in the oven. Moody stayed on the porch, content to have made his point, whatever it was.
5.
Moody had spent his childhood summers on Geechee Island, one of Georgia’s Sea Islands, where Plantagenet was, and his father’s two hundred slaves. Winters were passed in the family’s grander house in Savannah, where they had servants and gardeners and cooks instead of slaves. Slaves worked in the plantation’s cotton and rice fields. They were badly dressed, badly fed and badly treated. They belonged to the world of commerce. The Savannah servants, on the other hand, were associated with the family’s comfort and refinement; they were well trained, well mannered, some even surreptitiously educated. It was thought good to have a house manager who could read and do sums. House servants were considered almost part of the family. That Annie had preferred to be a slave on the rice plantation rather than a servant in Savannah, to continue working in the kitchen with Sikey, had baffled him. It was wrongheaded; she must not have known what she was turning down. He’d thought that by rescuing her from Plantagenet he was saving her not only from Casgrain’s bull but also from her own pigheaded ignorance. As soon as he’d laid eyes on her he knew that should she remain at Plantagenet, she would suffer for it; that if she would stand up to him, she would stand up to Casgrain, and she would be whipped for it until her mind was as blunt and numb as her body. He had seen it before. His father referred to his slaves as “head”; they were cattle to him. “I own two hundred head,” he would say, to avoid using the word nigger, which had offended his wife’s refinement. After she died he continued the practice, probably because he liked the sound of it.
