Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “It was a dark day for America when our antislavery Northern states discovered that it is cheaper to pay for labor than it is to feed and house the laborers.”

  Only nine miles of the canal from the White River to the city’s center had been completed when the state ran out of money, but it meant that Moody was able to tie the Pelican within walking distance of the legislature building, which sat on a patch of snow-covered grass planted sparingly with bare trees at the center of a ring road called the Circle. Other roads radiated out from the Circle like the spokes of a gigantic buggy wheel. Indianapolis was like a child’s drawing of a city; it looked good, but nothing worked. The defunct canal had been part of something called the Mammoth Internal Improvement Project; no one knew why it was called “mammoth,” unless it was because it was big. But Moody saw the irony in the name, because the project, like the animal it was named for, was extinct.

  In Paducah he’d been given the name of the Indianapolis Quaker who helped runaways: Solomon Kästchen, who lived on one of the ring roads behind the Masonic Temple. Moody and William walked to the address from where the Pelican was docked in ten minutes. The sign in the shop window said KÄSTCHEN’S GENERAL STORE, SOLOMON KÄSTCHEN, PROP. WE SELL FREE-LABOR GOODS ONLY.

  They went in and stood by the door until the little bell stopped ringing and their eyes adjusted to the gloom. Moody assumed that the man behind the counter was Solomon Kästchen, because the store didn’t look profitable enough to support hired help. Solomon Kästchen didn’t look all that profitable himself. He was tall and thin and mostly bald, with fine, whitish-blond hair feathering the sides of his head, and side-whiskers reaching almost to the point of his chin, stopping about an inch from each other, so close that Moody wondered why he didn’t just let them grow together, call it a beard and be done with it. He wore a threadbare woolen frock coat over a cream silk vest, a woolen shirt and gold-rimmed spectacles that gleamed in the weak light coming through the windows. Behind Kästchen were shelves crammed with all manner of dry goods, none of which had been made using slave labor: bolts of cloth, presumably not cotton; balls of frayed yarn; spools of silk thread and ribbons; gray-and-blue woolen blankets that reminded Moody of his army bedroll. The rest of the shop consisted of barrels of nails and staples, bags of flaxseed, flour, corn, crocks of honey. Farm and garden equipment hung from ceiling beams or leaned against the walls, and in the back a tack shop, with harnesses and bridles and metal bits and a couple of uncomfortable-looking saddles. Moody tried to find something he could buy. No guns, no tobacco, no liquor. It was amazing the things the store didn’t have. He figured Kästchen would count himself lucky if two people a week came in and bought something. There were jars of penny candies on the counter, none of them made with sugar. Kästchen watched Moody and William eagerly as they approached the counter, Moody with a spool of fishing line and two hooks.

  “Twenty cents,” Kästchen said, “or I could sell you the fish for ten.”

  “I’ll take the gear,” Moody said, “and tomorrow I’ll sell you eight fish for a nickel each.”

  “You think like a Northerner,” Kästchen said, taking his money, “but you talk like a Southerner. Where are you from?”

  “Georgia,” Moody said.

  “Never been there,” Kästchen said, looking at William. “My father came here from Germany when I was a child.”

  “Do you miss Germany?”

  “I hardly knew it,” said Kästchen, “but yes, I am fond of what I do remember. In Germany,” he said, looking at William, “we didn’t treat people like animals.”

  Moody put his hand on William’s arm. “This here is William. I’m delivering him to you. Daniel Hornby in Paducah told us you would help him.”

  “Daniel Hornby?” Kästchen said. “Never heard of him.”

  “He said to ask you for a length of chain with five links to it.”

  “Did he now? And what would you do with a length of chain with five links?”

  “I would break it.”

  Kästchen nodded and looked at William with kindness. “Go up those stairs, my friend,” he said, indicating a set of steep stairs set into the corner of the shop. “Mrs. Kästchen will look after you.” To Moody he said, “You took a chance coming here in daylight. But it’s winter, not too many people about.”

  “We’ve come a long way,” he said, “all the way from Louisville.”

  “You have helped a great cause.”

  “Now I wonder if you can help me.”

  Kästchen favored him with a helpful expression.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  The helpful expression vanished. “We sell goods here, sir,” he said, “not people.”

  “I don’t want to buy someone, I want to find someone.”

  Kästchen regarded him blankly.

  “The man’s name is Lucas.”

  Kästchen’s eyes did not flicker. He didn’t look as though he were trying to remember anything. He spared himself and Moody the charade of rubbing his chin and scratching his forehead.

  “You disappoint me, sir,” he said.

  “Mr. Kästchen, my name is Virgil Moody. I’m on your side. I brought William today and I have helped many other fugitives cross the Ohio River to freedom. But I am looking for one fugitive in particular who is a personal friend of mine. He ran away because of something I did, well, because of something we all did, and now I would find him and help him get to where he wants to go.”

  Moody saw the man relenting. He came out from behind the counter, locked the front door and pulled down the window blind. Moody thought that locking the door wasn’t obviously necessary. Kästchen led Moody through a door behind the counter that gave into a small, cluttered, windowless office with a desk and two chairs, a medium-sized safe and shelves above it lined with thick ledgers and marble-edged account books. For a store that didn’t do much business, it seemed to require a lot of bookkeeping. Kästchen shut the door, sat at the desk and gestured toward a second chair. Moody sat across from him.

  “What is it you want?” he said, taking his spectacles off and polishing them with a handkerchief. Moody waited until he had put them back on.

  “I want to know if you remember a man named Lucas coming through here within the last few months. Young, smart, well built, light skinned, no marks on him. He would have come from Texas, but by what way I don’t know. Perhaps through Cincinnati, perhaps by way of Paducah. He might have been with a woman named Benah. I don’t want him back. I just want to know if he made it this far.”

  “Mr. Moody,” said Kästchen. “My wife and I have helped more than two thousand fugitives come through this city in the past ten years. We don’t ask them their names. We don’t ask where they come from. Most of them wouldn’t tell us anyway. It’s best that we don’t know. And we don’t talk to anybody about our activities, not even to other Friends. My wife’s sister lives in the city, and we do not discuss our activities with her, at least not in detail, and she is a Quaker. Indiana is, generally speaking, antislavery, but it is also antislave. Even those who support our cause, and help us with private donations from time to time, wouldn’t think of opening their doors to our unfortunate friends, let alone their hearts. If the mood in these parts changed tomorrow, as it very well could in these trying times, we and our activities would be denounced on every street corner and from every pulpit in the city. We’re immigrants, Mr. Moody. If they didn’t denounce us for being antislavery, they would denounce us for being anti-American. Even the Religious Society of Friends has disowned us, did you know that? They feel that the best way to achieve emancipation is through political channels, amendments to the Constitution, lobbying congressmen in Washington—most of whom, as you know, are Southerners. Everything above board, nothing that would hurt their chances of gaining sympathy with the population at large, and therefore with the people the population at large votes for. That is what, in this country, is called democracy. So you see, we have to be very cautious. Very cautious indeed.”<
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  Moody hadn’t known about the Society’s change of position, and he wondered if Rachel had. He imagined her alone in her farmhouse, or in the boardinghouse in Huntsville, at the mercy of people like the Judds without even the Society to turn to for support.

  “I appreciate your position, Mr. Kästchen,” he said. “I have to be cautious myself, though less so here than I was in the South.”

  “Do not assume you can be less cautious here.”

  “Two thousand saved,” Moody said, wondering how many of them he had ferried across the river.

  “The Society believes that helping a few thousand individuals into Canada is nothing compared to freeing four million with the stroke of a pen, but the way I see it, our few thousand will still be alive when the change comes, if it does, whereas if we didn’t help them, they almost certainly would not be.”

  “I’ll keep bringing you as many customers as I can,” Moody said, rising.

  “What is your interest in this man Lucas, if I may ask?”

  “His mother was a particular friend of mine. I promised her I would help him.”

  “I see.” But he sounded as though he had no idea what “a particular friend” meant. Neither did Moody.

  “If he did come through here, where would his next stop be?”

  Kästchen looked up in astonishment. “I cannot tell you that, of course,” he said. But at the door, he hesitated before raising the blind. “Mr. Moody,” he said, “if you ever happen to be in Newport, a village about sixty miles north of here, you might stop in to visit Mr. Levi Coffin. He’s a dear friend, and he owns a shop very similar to mine. All free-labor goods.”

  “Thank you.”

  Moody stayed on the Pelican that night. He lay awake for a long time thinking about Lucas and Annie. Lucas had been an inquisitive child, wanting to know what everything was for, what things did, how things worked. Maybe he’d wanted to believe that Moody was his father, but had Moody let him? They hadn’t talked about it, but he must have wondered how they had all come to be together, how the family worked. Moody assumed that Annie had explained things to Lucas when he was old enough to understand them. But he and Annie hadn’t talked about it, either. He thought of Lucas driving the team and wagon into the barn for the first time by himself, the nonchalant look on his face, and Moody watching him, trying not to grin. He thought of Annie kneading bread dough by candlelight, her sleeves rolled up and her golden-brown forearms sprinkled with flour. But after that the images grew progressively more sinister: Lucas standing in Millican’s yard, believing that servitude was the only way he could be with Benah, and not knowing what servitude meant. Annie saying she forgave him, but then dragging the bone from the barn down to the river. He had to stop himself from seeing the drag-marks in the sand. He sat up, lit a candle, thought about getting out of bed to make coffee and piss over the side of the boat. He heard drums in the distance, then realized it was his own heart pounding in his ears.

  He had James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth on the shelf beside his bed, and to calm himself he took the book up and opened it at random.

  “It is the little causes, long continued,” he read, “which are considered as bringing about the greatest changes of the Earth.”

  His was a little cause, finding Lucas, and it had long continued.

  39.

  The failure of Indiana’s mammoth canal and road-paving schemes meant there was still plenty of work for keelboat owners, and Moody found himself taking cargo regularly between Indianapolis and Terre Haute, a town in the western, less settled, part of the state, and bringing fugitives back with him as crew, whom he then passed on to Stationmaster Kästchen. He spent many happy evenings in the Kästchens’ apartments above the shop, where Catharina, Solomon’s wife, poured schnapps and set out small cakes and cookies, and joined in the conversations. The three talked at length about the changes taking place in the North: as more and more slaves were emigrating, as Kästchen quaintly put it, from the South, states like Indiana and Ohio were passing stiffer laws to keep them out, which the Kästchens saw as further evidence that the Society’s plan to convince politicians in Washington to abolish slavery was never going to work. Although he remained a Quaker in his heart, in his mind Kästchen was having serious misgivings about the Society’s right to dictate individual morality. He talked about the need to separate morality from religion.

  “Morality,” he said, holding the schnapps glass delicately between his thumb and forefinger, “is acting according to the dictates of your conscience. Religion is acting according to the dictates of your church. But when your church is in conflict with your conscience, as it must at times be, since conscience is individual and church is collective, then you must, you must, obey your conscience.”

  “What about your government?” Moody asked. “What if your conscience is at odds with your government?” Was it his conscience that had made him fight to free Texas from the Mexican government?

  “Still your conscience is your true guide.”

  “This is why Solomon’s father leaves Germany,” said Catharina. “After the defeat of Napoleon, everyone wanted to go back to the way things were, with thirty-seven little duchies, each with its own little monarch and its own little constitution. They want to stick their heads in the sand as if Napoleon had never happened.”

  “Thirty-seven little Strausses, ja?” laughed Kästchen. He stood up and retrieved a book from a set of shelves in the kitchen.

  “Disobeying your Society,” said Moody, “sounds like mutiny to me.”

  “Ach,” said Kästchen. “Catharina and I are both seditious by temperament, with our opposition to slavery. And look at you, aiding and abetting us.”

  He handed Moody the book he had taken down.

  “ ‘Theodore Parker,’ ” Moody read. “ ‘History of the Jews.’ ”

  “He writes that the so-called miracles recorded in the Old Testament were really naturally occurring phenomena, easily explained by modern science. The parting of the Red Sea, Aaron’s walking stick turning into a serpent. Moses getting water from a rock. Manna falling from heaven. All, he says, can be explained without recourse to magic and superstition. Beliefs that have endured for thousands of years crumble into dust when examined in the light of reason.”

  “You are Jewish?” Moody asked.

  Kästchen laughed. “Ja, we’re agnostic Jewish Quakers.”

  “ ‘All fails,’ ” Moody read, “ ‘and all fails equally.’ ”

  He recalled his conversations with Rachel and wished she were with him now, sharing his doubts, the way Kästchen and Catharina shared their convictions. He had felt, at the farm, like a schoolboy making fun of Schoolmaster God behind his back, hoping to impress a pretty girl in the classroom. Here was a more mature way of thinking. He even began to question Cuvier. “Fossil organic remains are the relics of a primeval world long since past,” Cuvier’s paper began, “proclaiming with a loud voice the instability of earthly affairs, and impressing upon the minds of those who seriously consider them, sentiments of piety and feelings of devotion.” But surely Cuvier’s conclusions were a direct challenge to piety and devotion. What was Cuvier up to? His own reading of Lyell and Hutton, and now of this Parker fellow, convinced him that Cuvier hadn’t taken his own argument far enough. Turning the accepted tenets of science on their heads, as Cuvier had, sowed the seeds of doubt, not piety. Scripture was quoted by slaveholders and anti-abolishers to defend the institution of slavery. If slavery was to be defeated, religion would have to be defeated first. And that would have to be done by men and women of conscience.

  “To sedition,” he said, raising his schnapps.

  40.

  He ferried dozens of fugitives from the Mississippi to Indianapolis, where he delivered them to the Kästchens, who passed them on to Levi Coffin. He talked to them as they helped him pole, listening to their stories, asking about Lucas. They didn’t talk about the conditions from which they had escaped, all too well known, but ra
ther about how they had come, the hardships of the road, the occasional bright spots: the crates they had squeezed into, meant for glass or machine parts; “Best to find one marked ‘Fragile,’ ” one said, “if you can read.” The wagonloads of lumber or coal; the train cars carrying pigs or chickens: “Burn your clothes after.” One woman spent seven days in the chain locker of a riverboat, in the point of the bow, buried under a stack of cordage and oakum. “A kind stoker brought me food,” she said, “until he killed when a boiler exploded.” Some just walked out of the woods and appeared to him like wraiths, half starved, half clothed, half eaten by deer flies, half crazed by fear. He took them all on. If they could work he handed them poles or set them to the bilge pump, if not he lay them on a cot in the hold during the day, carried food down to them after he’d tied up at night, or brought them up on deck if there was no traffic, talking quietly and keeping an eye out for lights. They were cautious at first, especially when they heard his Southern accent, but they were also desperate, and being from the South, he knew how to talk to them. He knew where they had come from, what they were running from: they were running from people like him. Or rather, he began to allow himself to think, from people who were like he used to be.

  None of them had seen or heard of Lucas. He was either too far north or too far south, too west, too east, too early or too late, too eager or too resigned. But he kept asking, and never stopped listening for the rustle of leaves beyond the light from the fire, or scanning the shore as he poled, only half expecting Lucas to emerge from the woods, brush the twigs from his shoulders and wave down Moody’s boat, like a New Orleans dandy hailing a cab. He bought a cabin near a town called Spencer, Indiana, where he planned to spend his winters, and wondered if it was big enough for himself and Lucas and Benah. Maybe he should add another bedroom? He stocked the larder for the coming winter with enough flour and beans and molasses for three.