by Wayne Grady
And trouble always comes. If Millican caught Lucas with Benah he’d send him back home in a pork barrel. Moody asked Annie how she could have let it happen, Lucas out alone at night, a target for all kinds of things, even apart from Millican. He could be nabbed by a slaver and taken down to Galveston and sold. Even being seen by a white man could mean trouble; if anything went missing anywhere within ten miles, a farmer mislaid a pair of gloves, a horse run off, a child woke up crying, people would say they saw Lucas out that night, he must have been up to no good, and before you knew it a rope got thrown over a branch. Moody didn’t have to tell Annie any of that, she knew it better than he did. But he told her anyway.
“What you want me to do?” she said. “Chain him to the barn?”
“Didn’t you talk to him?”
“ ’Course I talk to him, da. He think shit flies don’t land on honey. You talk to him.”
“Me?” he said. “He’s your son.”
Annie threw her hands in the air. “But he your slave!”
That rocked him back, hit him in the chest like a mortar shell. It was a betrayal, her saying that. It wasn’t the first time the word had passed between them, but it had always been thrown in anger—Annie’s anger—and the word had always seemed to him to be leveled at him unfairly. He hadn’t bought her, he hadn’t fathered a child on her, he had never treated her or Lucas like slaves, or even thought of them as such. Had she? When Austin was handing out land in the Brazos Bottom, Moody hadn’t taken the four-thousand-acre sitio allotted to a family with slaves, as Millican had, he took what a single farmer was entitled to, six hundred and forty acres, enough for a good-sized farm but not so big it would require slaves to run. He’d wanted a small holding, a life of hard work but with time for sitting on the porch with Annie and Lucas, for reading at night, for Sundays in town. He’d studied law in New Orleans, and had had some idea of being a frontier lawyer, maybe helping Austin in his negotiations with the government in Mexico City. He and Annie and Lucas had been a family in New Orleans, they’d been a family here. And now here she was calling him a slaveholder.
The next morning, when Lucas was at breakfast and Annie was in the garden cutting onion tops, Moody sat across the table from him and said, “What’s this business with Benah, Luke?” It wasn’t the most judicious of inquiries, he knew, but it was man to man, not owner to slave. In lawyering it was known as the approach direct. It was supposed to elicit trust, not resentment.
Lucas shrugged. “She receiving me,” he said.
“She is receptive to your intentions?” Moody said for clarity.
“Yes.”
“What are your intentions?”
“We want to marry.”
“Marry,” Moody said. “You mean in a church, with a preacher?”
“There’s a man works for Millican will jump us over the broomstick.”
“What do you mean, works for?”
“All right, he’s a slave, but he’s also a preacher.”
“Do you think Millican will let you marry one of his servant girls?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“You’ll have to buy her from him.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“You can’t talk to Millican.”
“Why not?”
“Because Millican only talks to whites.”
“He thinks I’m your son.”
“Maybe so, but he doesn’t think you’re white.”
Lucas tore a corner off a loaf of corn bread, spread some middling on it and ate it. “So what happens?” he said.
“If you promise me you’ll stay home at night,” Moody said, “I’ll speak to Millican and see what I can do.”
“What can you do?” Lucas said.
“I’ll offer to buy Benah, and bring her here.”
“But then you’ll own Benah.”
“No, I’ll free her as soon as she gets here. One step at a time.”
“What about me? You free me, too?”
You already are free, he was about to say, but stopped himself. “You’ve always been free here, but now we’ll have to get you your free papers.”
“We? You’ll free Ma, too?”
Moody hesitated. Fatally. “We aren’t talking about your mother now,” he said. “We’re talking about you and Benah.”
“But will you free her?”
Moody drank a mouthful of coffee. “If she wants.”
“What do you mean, if she wants. Of course she wants.”
“Jesus,” Moody said. “I thought you two were happy here. What’s going on?”
Lucas stared at the table. “Why were you fighting the Mexicans?” he asked.
“What? Because they were fighting us.”
“That ain’t it.”
“When I signed up with Austin,” Moody said, retreating to the easy answer, “part of the deal was that if there was trouble with Mexico or the Comanche, I would fight in the militia.”
“I know that,” Lucas said, “but why were you fighting the Mexicans?”
“Because Texas was a state of Mexico, and we didn’t like the way they were treating us,” Moody said, feeling his way. “We wanted to be an independent republic.”
“So Mexico owned you,” Lucas said, looking up.
“Yes.”
“And you said to Mexico, ‘We don’t want to be owned by you no more. We want to be free.’ ”
Moody was quiet for a while. “Yes,” he said, “that’s what we told them.”
“And Mexico said to go to hell.”
“Yes.”
“So you fought Mexico to set yourselves free.”
“It was a bit more complicated than that,” he said, feeling out-lawyered. “But you’re right, essentially, that’s what happened.”
“Well,” Lucas said, “that’s what I’m saying to you.”
“I take your point. But I still need to fix it with Millican.”
“Now that Texas is part of the United States, we’re slaves again. You better fix it. This whole damn thing is your fault.”
“Not my fault, Lucas. I’ve been against slavery all my life!”
“That so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Then what are you to me?”
So, another betrayal. What was happening here? “I’m your…” But he couldn’t finish the sentence. Whatever was catching in his throat, it wasn’t a word.
“When we lived in New Orleans,” Lucas said, speaking more gently, “I kept asking Mam if you were my father. I thought that’s what you were. She always said, ‘No, he ain’t your father. Your father in Georgia.’ ‘Then what is he?’ I asked her. She never said. It’s like there’s no word for what you are to me.”
There were tears in Lucas’s eyes, but he wasn’t crying.
“I always raised you like a son,” Moody said.
“Did you? Wouldn’t you have sent your son to school? Would you have even moved out here if you had a son? I mean a white son.”
“Yes, of course I would have. I’d have done the same for him as I did for you.”
“Then do this thing for me now. Fix it with Millican.”
8.
After chores the next morning, he’d saddled Justice and ridden to Millican’s. It was warm for June. The cottonwoods had yellowed out and early-summer heat was releasing cicadas and crickets from the soil. He felt separated from it. He sensed the burgeoning in the air but didn’t feel it in himself. Millican’s corn was six inches high, the rows neat, the fields watered and weeded. His own corn was hand-spread, unevenly spaced. It grew just as well, for the most part, but it didn’t look as good and it was harder to weed and water. He started to blame the war. Polk. Even Austin. How far back did he need to go before he could blame himself? Not that far.
Lucas and this Benah must have been considering running off, but to where? Most runaways from Texas went south, into Mexico, or east, to the Atlantic seaboard and farther, to Haiti. Tales of runaways living in the lap of luxury in
Canada, where slavery had been abolished years ago, were also circulating in the South and had, of course, been loudly dismissed as pure fantasy by preachers and plantation owners. Free land, separate schools for negroes, paid labor, protection of the law, who could believe such things? Moody could. Slavery was slipping everywhere but here in the South. There’d been talk among the soldiers who’d come to fight for Texas from places like Tennessee and Virginia that the old ways were unraveling and new ways hadn’t been invented yet. Millican believed them, and the news had made him more adamant about keeping his slaves under the whip. By buying Benah, Moody would be rescuing her as he had Annie, but he couldn’t let Millican think that. He would have to say he needed a second kitchen hand. He’d put in an extra acre of cotton and needed Lucas in the field. He didn’t like the idea, he didn’t want to end up owning another slave, even for the short time it would take to set her free. He would manumit them both, as long as they agreed to stay close and work for him, but he wouldn’t tell Millican that, either.
He rehearsed the story as he rode. He would say he wanted his fields to be as well tended and free of burdock and goat weed as Millican’s. He wanted a big, white house and slave quarters. To be more like his father and Millican. He thought he might get six cents a pound for his cotton this year, which would give him two hundred and forty dollars, and he would offer that to Millican. He thought it was a good plan. He thought all his plans were good plans.
Millican invited him into his office in what he called the Big House and settled him in a chair across from where he had some papers spread out on a library table. Moody hadn’t seen him since Fort Brown, more than a year before, and the sight of the man still irked him. He had the eyes of a ferret. His fingernails were yellowed and pointed. He was wearing a white planter’s suit and had started growing side-whiskers. Maybe he thought they made him look dignified, but they only made him look more ferret-like. Beside the papers were a glass of whiskey and a pistol, as though he’d been expecting a long session of gloating followed by a break-in. He didn’t offer Moody any whiskey.
Moody told about him his idea of buying Benah.
Millican shook his head. “Now that we’re a state,” he said, “I have to petition Congress for permission to sell a slave. Even one. You ever petition Congress for anything? The bitch would be a grandmother before I heard back from them. We can work out some other kind of arrangement.”
“What kind of arrangement?”
“You don’t want Benah, anyway,” Millican said. “You want some field slaves.”
“I want to increase my holdings,” Moody said.
“Then here’s what you do,” Millican said, leaning forward in his chair. “I’ll give you four hundred dollars for Lucas. You take the money to Galveston, and you buy yourself two, maybe three field niggers. Two males and a mare. Or better yet, one male and two mares.”
“What? No!”
“Ain’t that what you said you wanted?”
“Yes, but I’m not selling Lucas! I’m offering to buy Benah!”
Moody thought Millican had mentioned four hundred dollars because that was what he wanted for Benah. Millican knew he would never sell Lucas, because Millican believed that Lucas was Moody’s son. This was a poker game, and Moody realized too late that he had tipped his hand.
Millican poured himself another whiskey. “I couldn’t think of letting Benah go,” he said, setting down the bottle. The whiskey sloshed in the glass like angry waves in a small harbor. “Congress or no Congress, Mrs. Millican needs her in the kitchen.” He looked at Moody. “All right,” he said, “five hundred for Lucas.”
“No,” Moody said. “I will give you two hundred and forty for Benah when I sell the cotton.”
“This is low,” Millican said, making a sour face.
Moody knew he’d lost. He was bidding now to save face. “Four hundred for Benah.”
Millican shook his head. “My offer stands.”
“Five hundred.”
Millican sat back and folded his arms over his chest.
Moody rose from the table, took up his hat and started for the door.
“I know what you want Benah for,” Millican called after him, and laughed. “Annie getting on, is she?”
9.
“Of course I said no,” he told Lucas and Annie that night at supper, but Annie set down her knife and fork and started shaking, like she could see into the future. “Millican’s a mean man,” he said. “I served under him, I know how weak he is, and there’s nothing meaner than a weak man.”
Lucas looked downcast. “Benah says he whips her.”
“Of course he whip her,” Annie said sharply. “You think he stop whipping her when you there? He’ll whip her and you, too.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said. “Maybe once.”
Annie sat back and shook her head. “He’ll whip you a hundred ways from Friday,” she said. “He’ll whip you any time he want to. And when he done whipping you, he’ll whip Benah in front of you. Maybe worse.”
“My father had an overseer like him, name of Casgrain,” Moody said. He looked at Annie and then away. “Casgrain would have whipped your mamma soon as look at her. That’s why I took her away from there.”
“I know,” said Lucas. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard that story. “And that’s why I got to take Benah away from Millican.”
“What that?” said Annie. “You and Benah planning to run off?”
“If we have to.”
“Lucas,” said Moody, “you’re smarter than that. You know what your chances are of getting away from here? You’ll have every blackbirder and pattyroller in Texas after you. You won’t get five miles down the road.”
“Let me go to Millican, then. I’ll take it from there.”
“I will not let you go to Millican!”
“Sell me to him and give me the money,” Lucas said. “You won’t be selling me, you’ll be buying my freedom. Actually, Millican will be buying my freedom, and Benah’s, too.”
Lucas’s innocence recalled to him Annie’s back in Sikey’s kitchen—Sumpin’ wrong wid y’arm?—and it momentarily broke his resolve. The words to a Creole song they had often heard in New Orleans came into his head: Pou la belle Layotte ma mourri ’nocent. For the beautiful Layotte I must die like a fool. For the beautiful Benah, it seemed, Lucas would put his fool head in a noose. Annie was holding her sides, rocking forward and back on her chair. He didn’t know what she was thinking. She was humming a song she had taught Lucas as a child, a song in a language Moody didn’t know. More distance.
“If you think I’m a slaver,” he said, “just wait until Millican has you.”
Lucas got up and left the house.
Moody knew he should go after him, bring him back and talk to him. But he sat at the table and stared at his hands. What was it? Stubbornness? Cowardice? But he told himself it was time for Lucas to go. He told himself he did nothing out of respect for Lucas.
“You lettin’ him go?” Annie said.
“He isn’t going anywhere,” Moody said. “He probably just went out to the barn.”
“No, he gone. You let him go.”
“He’ll be back.”
“No, he won’t!” she yelled at him, clutching at his shirt. “You fetch him back! You have to go get him, Virgil!”
But he didn’t. He’d convinced himself that Lucas was out at the barn with the bone, or down by the river, or taking a piss off the porch. That he would come back on his own. Annie got up and ran outside, and twenty minutes later when she came back inside she wouldn’t speak to him.
10.
That night he went to bed early, telling himself that Lucas had gone to see Benah and would be back home when he woke up. He’d checked the barn, he’d stood in the harness room with the bone for a time, noting its stillness and finality, feeling the enormity of his inaction. The sky had remained light until almost ten, and he lay in bed waiting for Annie. If he’d left her in Georgia, Lucas would have been gone long befo
re this, sold the moment he was weaned. He’d saved Annie from that, he’d done right by Lucas. He fell asleep in the dark and woke up an hour or two later in a panic, his heart pounding wildly, still alone. He got up and lit a candle, thinking Annie had fallen asleep in a chair, or couldn’t sleep because of Lucas. He thought maybe Lucas had come back and they were up drinking tea together, that she had talked sense into the boy and they could go back to living the way they had been. But she wasn’t anywhere he looked. He went outside and checked the porch, where it was cooler and he could hear the river, restless in its shallow bed of clay. He finally found her in Lucas’s room, curled up on his bed, sound asleep. She still had her clothes on. Her face was beautiful in the soft candlelight, and she looked more peaceful than he’d seen her in a long time, maybe not since New Orleans, when he would lean on his elbow in bed and watch her sleep, her eyes moving under their lids, afraid to touch her and pull her from her dream.
He put a blanket over her, careful not to wake her, to let her know he’d been there, then went back to his own bed.
11.
Early the next day a man rode into Moody’s yard and dismounted. Moody was in the cornfield, pulling weeds, but when he saw the dust on the road he started toward the house, thinking it was Lucas come back on his own, without Benah. By the time he got to the yard, whoever it was had ridden off again, and he saw Annie standing on the porch, holding a leather pouch. Moody knew what was in it, and Annie knew what it meant.
“Your thirty pieces of silver,” she said, tossing the pouch onto the table.
“That’s Lucas’s money,” he said. “I’ll give it to him, and he and Benah can get away.”
“First you make him a slave,” she said, “and now you make him a fugitive.”
So he hadn’t gone.
12.
He still hadn’t decided what to do about Lucas when, on the fifth of August, three days before the auction, he hitched up Max and Carlota and he and Annie started out to Boonville with six bales of cotton on the wagon. It was a forty-mile ride, mostly uphill. The thermometer read a hundred and six degrees. With three tons of cotton the horses couldn’t get up to much more than a walk, and in the heat even that exhausted them. They had to stop to water and rest the horses every couple of hours. Annie had barely spoken to him since June, and Lucas was as pigheaded as she was.
