by Wayne Grady
The foredeck was strewn with bollards and vents. He admired the thickly coiled hawsers, the way their ends were braided back along their shanks to prevent fraying, and the swaying gangway suspended on ropes over the prow. Barefoot crewmen scurried back and forth, tightening this, unwinding that, obedient to the bellowing boatswain, a red-faced Irishman who nodded brusquely to Moody as he hurried past. Moody looked up at the oncoming river, shielding his eyes from the sun glinting off the waves. More of the previous night came back to him, the first mate remarking that the river was so low they would be taking on a pilot at Ross’s Landing, just before Chattanooga. “There’s more exposed rocks, more sandbanks, more snags than in wetter seasons,” he’d said, “but the snag boats have been out and the main channel is cleared and mapped and marked with buoys. The pilot has been guiding boats up and down the Tennessee River his whole life.”
Moody had been a competent bouillotte player in New Orleans. He didn’t cheat, although he knew how. He could palm a card or spot an ace, but he’d decided that a ball in the temple wasn’t worth the risk, and he was a good enough player to win more often than not without resorting to trickery. He’d tried teaching the game to Annie, but she had shown so little interest in cards he’d given up. He hadn’t played at all in Texas, not even during lulls in the fighting when, between brushes with death, there’d been long stretches of idleness in Sarah Boggins’s tavern, during which the men gambled away their small sums, their saddles, their horses, their farms. By the time some of them died in battle they wouldn’t have had much to go home to had they lived. He’d avoided gambling because he didn’t want to be responsible for another man’s despair going into battle. He’d won last night, though, at least until he’d had so much to drink that he was playing recklessly, and even then had had enough sense to gather his winnings and excuse himself from the table. What happened after that was still a mystery.
At the stern paddle he watched the buckets, each one a plank eighteen inches wide and ten feet long, churning into the river behind the boat and glistening in the boat’s shadow as it rose, the mechanism giving off a blast of steam at the top of each revolution. It reminded him of the steamer that had brought them from New Orleans to Galveston. Annie and Lucas had remained below, in steerage, allowed above only for brief spells during the day. How Annie had fumed. Such rules had largely been ignored in New Orleans. He and Annie would walk along Rue d’Orleans openly together, Lucas rolling hoops on the brick sidewalk, or chasing pigeons ahead of them into Congo Square. On the ship, he’d told her it was only for a few days, counting himself virtuous for having noticed her anger, thinking she would appreciate the difference between his concern and the other passengers’ lack of it. Annie and Lucas were more to him than slaves: wasn’t he a fine chap? He had slept comfortably in his cabin, on clean sheets and in fresh air, while they, his adoptive family, suffocated below on straw mats and were fed gruel. But what could he have done? More.
He looked downriver at the mottled gulls swerving above the boat’s wake, landing and bobbing on the furrowed surface, their piercing cries like squeals from a paddle wheeler’s ungreased axle.
He completed his circumnavigation and came again to the door of his stateroom, where Henry, the ship’s steward, was leaning on the rail, casually observing the passing shoreline. Henry was well dressed for a steward, fingernails clean, hair neatly pomaded and brushed back. He wore a thin mustache, a mere black line on his upper lip. Moody had known his type in New Orleans. He stopped at the rail, and they listened to the sound of the engines coming up from below and mixing with the cries of gulls, the boatswain’s shouts and the wind whistling through the rigging far above their heads.
“Fine day, boss,” Henry said.
“Yes.”
“How you feeling this morning, sir?”
“Fine, Henry, fine,” he said. “Never been better, thank you.”
“I’m glad to hear it, sir. You were kind to me last night.”
“I was?”
“You gave me ten dollars.”
“I did?”
“Yes, sir,” Henry said, taking the bill from his pocket and showing it to him.
“Well, you earned it, Henry.” He now recalled the steward getting him to his stateroom, helping him off with his boots, placing a glass of water on the nightstand. Had he been that drunk? “Unlike me,” he said. “I just won it.”
“And you offered to do me a kindness,” Henry said quietly. “A favor.”
“A favor?”
“Yes, boss. Do you not remember it?”
“Remind me.”
“Tomorrow,” Henry said, “we be coming up to Chattanooga. Before we get there, the pilot boat will come alongside with the new pilot on board, and to take off the old pilot.”
“I see,” Moody said, although he was able to make nothing of this apparent diversion.
“There be soldiers on the pilot boat,” Henry continued. “They come on and take all the freeborn and freed men and women to be in the army. They call it ‘recruiting.’ ”
“Yes, I’ve heard something to that effect.”
“To dig latrines. To do laundry. Slave work, not army work.”
“Yes.”
“They don’t take anyone who already owned. Only freedmen, like me.”
“Ah,” Moody turned to Henry and squinted into the sun. “You want me to be your owner, is that it?”
“Yes, boss. You did offer to do so. You being the only passenger on board without a body servant.”
“I’ll help you. And maybe you can help me.”
“Anything I can.”
“I’m looking for a runaway,” he said. “A man about twenty years old.”
Henry’s expression started to go blank. Moody knew what he was thinking, that he was being asked to secure his own freedom by helping someone else be caught.
“I don’t want to bring him back,” Moody said quickly. “I want to help him get away. His name is Lucas.”
“I’ll ask around,” Henry said. “Lots of people come and go on the river.”
“Thank you,” he said. “So what do you want me to do?”
Henry grinned. “Take off your clothes.”
“My clothes?” He looked down at his shirt. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”
“I’ll wash them and try to get you some new ones. Maybe I can find you a hat and polish up them boots, too. No self-respecting servant let his massa out in public looking like you do. You’ll see, everything be all right.”
19.
At ten o’clock the next morning, Moody, barbered, brushed and clothed, was sitting in the lounge with the other passengers, the mill owners and planters and their wives and body servants. Henry had scrounged him a suit of clothes, complete with a fresh shirt and cravat and even a gold watch chain, sans watch, to drape across his midriff. In the tall, gilt-framed mirror affixed to the lounge’s central pillar, he was startled to see his father staring back at him, a fixed scowl on his face; his son, or maybe his horse or his walking stick, had let him down again. Henry stood behind him, dressed in a spotless white jacket and trousers, with white gloves and a blue bandana around his neck that matched the silk kerchief in Moody’s breast pocket. He would have looked overdressed at a masquerade ball in New Orleans. Henry had been unable to find him a good pair of boots. He pulled his feet under the table, where they were hidden by the low-hanging tablecloth. He knew how to deal with the army: the less explaining he did the better. His father scowled at the array of liquor bottles behind the bar. A few of the male passengers were already drinking, ignorant of or ignoring what was taking place elsewhere on the ship.
“We’ll pick up replacements a few miles above Chattanooga,” Henry said quietly to Moody, “them as had the presence of mind to abandon ship and go around. There’s always a few that don’t, though.”
The patrol leader, when he entered the lounge, was an elderly sergeant in the uniform of the Third Tennessee Foot, the yellow stripe on his trouser legs faded
almost to white and his tunic buttons tarnished except for the two directly beneath his chin. He wore a ribbon from the First Seminole War on his chest, and stood at the entrance, flanked by two privates, trying to establish an attitude of authority. He gazed about the room, his eyes halting at every black face in it, of which there were a dozen, men and women, all suddenly attentive to their masters and mistresses. No one seated on the chaises or around the dining tables stopped talking or drinking to acknowledge the soldiers’ presence. Moody kept his eyes on the sergeant, who, perhaps for that reason, or because of Henry’s flamboyant finery, crossed the room and stood at the table, looking down at Moody.
“Major Brant’s compliments, sir,” said the sergeant, giving a perfunctory salute, “and I would know the name of your servant.”
Moody turned to Henry. “Lucas,” he said in his best Georgia accent, “bring us two whiskeys, and none of that unwholesome rotgut they served us last night, mind you now.”
“Yes, Massa,” Henry said, bowing and moving off toward the bar.
“It’s ‘Lucas’ now, is it?” said the sergeant. “I believe when I saw him two weeks ago his name was Raleigh and he was the servant of a Louisiana gentleman by the name of Major Allenhurst.”
“Impossible,” Moody said.
“Why so?”
“No man can be both a gentleman and a major,” Moody said.
“Might I know your name, sir?”
“I doubt it.”
“I mean, what is your name, sir?”
“Moody,” Moody said, standing in the most insolent fashion he could manage, as his father would have stood to see around whatever obstruction had had the temerity to position itself in his field of vision. “And you are…?”
Moody watched permutations and associations parading behind the sergeant’s eyes. Moody, Moody, wasn’t there a…? Didn’t Colonel Fain’s daughter marry a…?
“What is your business on this ship?” he said.
Moody sat as Henry returned with two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. Henry removed the glasses, set them on the table beside Moody’s left hand and resumed his place behind Moody’s chair. Henry’s former master, Moody thought, must have been a card player.
“My business,” he said, raising one of the glasses, “is my business.” He drank the whiskey and set down the empty glass. “But I can assure you,” he added, raising the second glass, “it has nothing to do with army recruitment.” He tossed back the second whiskey and set the glass on the table beside the first. Henry put both glasses on the salver and returned with them to the bar.
“I believe your servant is a freedman, and as such is subject to conscription into the United States Army. We are at war with the Seminoles, as you know.”
“Not here, surely. The Seminoles are in Florida.”
“We are preventing their insurrection from spreading north.”
“Let us not dissemble,” said Moody. “I have been a cotton planter in Georgia, I have been a cotton planter in Texas, and am now, since you ask, a cotton planter in Alabama, and I know perfectly well why the army is eager to rid the country of Seminoles. For the same reason they rid Georgia of the Cherokee: because the Seminoles hold the only productive land left in the state, and we want it. It isn’t war, Sergeant, it’s commerce.”
“I’ll relay your sympathies to the major, Mr. Moody.”
“He already has my sympathies, Sergeant,” Moody said as Henry returned with two more whiskeys. “As do you. But you shall not have my servant.”
He raised a glass to the sergeant, surprised and more than a little dismayed by how easily Georgia planter manners had come back to him. The other gentlemen in the lounge, who knew for a certainty that Moody was not an Alabama cotton grower, some of whom may even have recognized his frock coat, were silent, ostensibly paying no attention to his charade, but Moody knew they were listening. Many of them would remember him from the previous night’s card game, and all of them knew Henry. The sergeant glared but pushed his claim no further. He seemed as aware as Moody was that he was playing a role in a preconceived farce. He leaned dramatically over the table and picked up the fourth glass of whiskey.
“To your good health, Mr. Moody,” said the sergeant, and drank.
20.
Moody found the atmosphere in the lounge awkward after the soldiers had taken their leave, as if the other passengers expected him to change back into his own clothes and start talking like a Texan again. He stood up from his table and walked out onto the foredeck. The vibration under his feet diminished as the Mary White slowed to tie up at the dock in Chattanooga to take on new passengers. The gangway settled on the dock, and Moody descended to look about for Lucas, although he had not much hope of finding him here. The army encampment was east of the settlement, down a dry, rutted road that followed the shoreline. No one came out of the guardhouse to challenge him at the gate. The camp itself was small, with a few permanent buildings for administration and officers’ quarters, a parade square with a faded Union flag on a pole at the center and, farther back, rows of white canvas tents for the lower ranks. A few soldiers loitered before the post office. Moody asked them about Lucas, and they looked suspiciously at him and shook their heads as if Lucas’s whereabouts were a state secret. He poked his nose into the mess tent, where half a dozen colored men were peeling potatoes and washing cast-iron pots. None of the men looked up, none of them was Lucas. He nodded to them and left. When the Mary White’s five-minute departure whistle blew, he gave up and returned to the dock. He was certain that Lucas wasn’t there; he had most likely gone up into the hills and was now in Knoxville, or somewhere beyond, in Virginia or Kentucky, where he would be hiding behind a false wall or under a load of hay or lumber. Moody boarded the ship with the new passengers, a few commercial travelers, a handful of soldiers on furlough, and stood again on the foredeck, gazing across the river at the hills above the old stockade, where the Cherokee had been held until their removal to Oklahoma. All that remained of them within the stockade walls were a few naked tepee poles and stone fire circles. As he looked, darkness settled over the scene like a curtain drawn slowly across an empty stage.
“That sure a sight, ain’t it?”
Henry had come quietly onto the deck and was standing beside and slightly behind Moody. He was still wearing his white frock coat and the blue scarf.
Moody nodded. “I’ve been thinking about what I said to that sergeant,” he said. “About how I couldn’t go along with the Seminole War because it was simply a way of freeing up land for cotton planters. It sounded good, but I was forgetting that the same thing happened years ago in Georgia. My father benefited from removal then, and I did, too.”
Although Annie hadn’t, he thought. Or Lucas.
Henry considered the stockade. “At least,” he said, “they didn’t make them pick cotton.” He turned to Moody. “Why do you think that was, Mr. Moody? The white man come here and find the place full of Indians they could beat down and turn into slaves if they wanted to, and instead of that they brung us over all the way from Africa to do that work. Why did they do that? I heard the government paid the Cherokee four million dollars for their land, and give them the same amount of land out in Indian Territory. What they pay us? What they give us?”
Moody made no reply; they both knew what had been given, and only Henry knew what had been taken away.
“I did ask about your runaway,” Henry said. “I asked the cook. The cook knows everything that happen on a ship.”
“No luck?”
Henry shook his head. “I’ll keep looking. Where he from?”
“Texas,” Moody said. “Like me.”
“I thought you was from Georgia,” Henry said.
“I’m from Georgia the same way you’re from Africa,” Moody said.
“Africa,” Henry said, looking past Moody at the stockade. “I ain’t never been.”
The ship’s horn gave an all-clear blast and the Mary White eased back into the dark river current to re
sume her torturous ascent.
“Well,” Moody said, “you’re still free. But I guess I didn’t make many friends today.”
“You made one,” Henry said, “and that’s one more than you had last night.”
“How long before we get to Knoxville?”
“Another thirty, forty hours.”
“What’s it like?”
“It a rough, dirty town, Mr. Moody,” said Henry, shaking his head. “Bigger than Chatt. Plenty of tippling houses. It got three tanneries, two churches and twenty-seven bars. But it has its good points.”
“What are those?”
“It a place where a black man might find some sympathy for his situation.”
21.
Three days later, the Mary White gently nudged the steamboat wharf below a long sign with KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE painted on it in white block letters. Moody looked up at the sun: a little after noon. The city above the wharf was quiet, as though everyone in it were hiding. Moody said goodbye to Henry, who had insisted on carrying his satchel down to the end of the gangway, and, leaving the dock, climbed into a coach with a half-dozen commercial travelers to be transported to the Knoxville Hotel. There was a scramble for the five rooms still available. Moody got one because he wanted it for three nights and paid his four dollars in advance.
“You have the room that was occupied by Jim Polk when he was governor of Tennessee,” the manager told him. “We ain’t changed a thing, except for the sheets.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Moody, signing the register. He asked the manager for directions to the address on Dr. Carson’s prescription slip. He had assumed it was that of a private home, but the manager looked at the address and then back at Moody.
