Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  When he told Tamsey he was going to Spencer to collect a cargo of bricks to take to Indianapolis, and would like Leason to come along if he was willing, she asked him to take her to Spencer, too, so she could get copies of their free papers made.

  “Randolph say there a good lawyer in Spencer,” she said.

  “Cliffington Parker,” said Moody. “He’s from South Carolina, but he knows the law up here. He’ll help you sort out your papers, and tell you whether you need to pay the bond. Sarah doesn’t have free papers, does she?”

  “She say she don’t need them.”

  “She should have them drawn up anyway. Up here a person can never have too many papers.”

  In the morning, Sarah decided to go with them, to see the shops, she said, if Tamsey would comb her hair out for her on the way. “She like her hair straight when she in town,” Tamsey told Moody. “In Louisville she wore it part down the middle and hung in loops at the back. She say she look like a white woman, but to me she look like a horse at a county fair. Turned a few heads, though, including her own.”

  Sarah and Tamsey going to Spencer meant leaving Granville and Sabetha alone in Freedom. Granville had found a limestone bluff not far from the cabin, above a dried-up creek bed, and said it looked so much like where they’d found the giant salamander he was sure it held more like it. Muddy said he should take a look, but Tamsey told him to stick close to the house, fossils or no fossils.

  “What if Mr. Stokes comes with me?” Granville said.

  “And leave Sabetha alone in the cabin?” Tamsey said.

  Sabetha said that was fine, she just wanted to read. Tamsey sat at the table and tried to keep calm. She wanted everyone to stay where they were, to not move until she got back. “Muddy teaching you your figures,” she said to Granville, “and you can work on them when we gone. Sabetha am not to be left alone in this cabin, you hear?”

  “Is,” said Sabetha, not looking up from her book. “Not am.”

  Tamsey looked at Moody, but he stayed out of it. Tamsey placed some fried catfish and a loaf of bread under a damp cloth and told them she and Sarah would be back later that night, probably after dark.

  “At least we acting like a family again,” she told Moody as they walked down to the dock, and he remembered Lucas at Granville’s age. Lucas had never been much for books, but he’d been hard on Annie. Annie, though, had never turned to Moody for support.

  In Spencer, he left Leason to load the bricks into the Pelican while he accompanied Tamsey and Sarah into town, saying he had some business with Cliffington Parker, too. He assured them they would have no trouble in Spencer, there were plenty of negroes, some of them owned property and worked in the stores. There was no need to be nervous. “No one will even notice you,” he said.

  “Townspeople notice everything,” Tamsey said. “And anyway, I feel better if they notice us. That way they might notice us missing.”

  Spencer was built around a red-brick courthouse that sat in the middle of a grassy meadow with trees and shrubs growing in it, and paved streets making a square around it. Stores, a church and other buildings, all brick, shouldered on the streets like a bulwark against invasion. The streets radiating out from the square had large, dignified houses on them, and shade trees left standing here and there, oaks and elms. The shrubbery along the four paths leading through the square to the courthouse’s big, white double doors, one on each side of the building, were tinged with pale green. All four doors were flung wide open, like it was spring-cleaning day, and they could see people milling about inside.

  “I don’t see many coloreds,” Tamsey said. They were walking along the boarded sidewalk toward Parker’s office. “I thought you said there was lots of us.”

  There was hardly anyone outside the courthouse, black or white. A black man in a straw hat sat on a wagon parked in front of the hardware store. When they came up to him, he jumped down and removed his hat.

  “This is Cecil Fountain,” Moody said to Tamsey and Sarah. “He lives up Vandalia way, out past Freedom. He makes hog feed, and Leason and I haul it for him when we have a load of salt going that way.” He turned to Cecil Fountain. “Sarah is Leason’s wife,” he said.

  “Yes’m,” Cecil said, keeping his hat off. “I sell feed to Buzz Crawford, down to Terre Haute.” He shook his head and laughed and looked at Tamsey. “That Ol’ Buzzard Crawford, he the cussingest buzzard I ever met. That man butchering a hog is practically fratricide.”

  Sarah was quiet, as though she considered Cecil’s words a disparagement of her husband’s work.

  “Have you been up here long, Mr. Fountain?” Tamsey asked.

  “A fair while, yes. I was born on a pelican farm north of Baton Rouge,” Cecil said. “We raised pelicans and sold them downriver in New Orleans. Now I raise them here.”

  “Pelicans?” Sarah said. “Why would anyone buy a pelican, Mr. Fountain?”

  “For their feathers, ma’am,” Cecil said to Sarah. “To make hats.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Tamsey asked him how he came to Indiana. One day, he said, when he was ten, a white man snatched him off the pelican dock and locked him in a cabin on a steamboat, took him all the way north to Louisville, where he sold him to a hemp planter named Elijah Haynes.

  “I always wondered where the hemp bags I stuffed feathers into came from,” he said, “and after that I knew.”

  “My family is from Kentucky,” said Sarah. “The Franklins of Adair County.”

  “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” said Cecil. “My new massa, Massa Haynes, he wanted his two daughters to learn French, so I spoke to them in French every night, after I finished my work in the fields. ‘Voulez-vous promener avec moi?’ ‘Aimez-vous danser?’ Not that they’d ever be seen walking or dancing with me, but I could say anything I wanted to them as long as it sounded like French. I didn’t live in the Big House, but I was in it every evening, and them girls dressed me and fed me and Miss Haynes let me go to church with them on Sundays. The Methodists had a slave gallery in the back. One Sunday I met Mrs. Packenham, she the wife of the visiting Methodist preacher they had from Cincinnati, Ohio. When I told her my story she took me to Cincinnati, got me my free papers and put me on the ‘mysterious road,’ as what we called the Railroad in them days. That was winter, it was cold as a nun’s kiss and I didn’t want to go any farther north if I could help it, so I got off in Indianapolis. I shined shoes, I cut hair, I cleaned stables. I worked there ten years, saved my money, and then came here and bought my farm.”

  “You lived in Indianapolis?” Tamsey asked. “What it like?”

  “It like slavery without the privileges.”

  “But you had your free papers,” Tamsey said.

  “Nobody ask me for papers,” he said. “I was nearly grabbed a couple of times, but I got away. Now I keep a loaded pistol right up here under me,” he said, pointing, “in case I run into catchers on the road.”

  “You’d shoot a catcher?” Sarah asked.

  “No’m. The pistol for me.”

  Tamsey and Sarah said nothing to that. Moody thought it a good time to intervene.

  “After Cecil takes the feathers off the pelicans,” he said, “he dries the rest of the bird, puts it through a shredder, mixes the shred with some grain and sells it to Buzz Sawyer for hog feed.”

  Cecil Fountain beamed at them proudly.

  “Are there many other black families out where you live, Mr. Fountain?” Tamsey asked.

  “There’s plenty in Vandalia,” he said. “Not many here in town.”

  “Why that?”

  Cecil Fountain looked at Moody. “Not everybody treat us as good as Mr. Virgil here,” he said. “Some of ’em wishes we stayed in the South.”

  “We just passing through,” Tamsey said.

  “Some of us am,” Cecil said. “And some of us just too tired. I usually stay in Vandalia, but I need some more hemp bags. Mr. Harris inside, he say he sell me some but I have to wait to the end of the day, in case so
me white man wants them first.”

  “How many you need, Cecil?” Moody said.

  “All they got.”

  Moody went into the hardware store and bought a bale of hemp bags. He brought them out and lifted them into the back of Cecil’s wagon.

  “Thank you, Mr. Virgil,” said Cecil, looking nervously into the hardware store, where Harris was standing at the window, watching them.

  “Now you can do me a favor, Cecil,” Moody said. “You can wait for a while until these ladies are finished in Cliff Parker’s office, then you can give them a ride back to Freedom. I’ve got to go on to Indianapolis.”

  “Sure thing,” said Cecil. “I’ll just be waiting down the road a ways, under them trees.”

  Parker’s office was three doors from the hardware store. Parker was at his desk reading a book when they entered his office from the street. There was not much to indicate his profession: a desk and two chairs, a bench by the door that served as his waiting room, a low shelf behind him with more books than files on it, and a safe at the back with its door swung open, as though it had just been blown open. When they came in, he closed the book, keeping his finger in it, and stood up.

  “Good day, Virgil,” he said. “Looks like you brought me some business.”

  “These ladies need some papers copied,” Moody said. “Copied and notarized.” Parker said his scrivener was at lunch; they could come back in an hour, or he could make the copies himself if they were in a hurry. The fee was one dollar.

  “We’ll wait,” Tamsey said.

  “I’ll wait with you,” Moody said.

  “You don’t need to, if you got business elsewhere,” said Tamsey.

  “I don’t mind. I’ll need to take a copy of Leason’s free paper with me to Indianapolis. Maybe, Cliff, you could make an extra copy and I’ll just keep it on the Pelican.”

  He also wondered if Tamsey was going to ask Parker about free papers for Sarah.

  They sat on the long bench by the door, watching Parker as he wrote. He wore a cloth sleeve to protect his shirt cuff. With a ruler and pencil he drew a few light lines on a sheet of paper as guides, smelled his inkwell and tested the sharpness of his nib with his tongue. His pen scratched across the paper with a curious, insectile sound, like a cockroach in dry leaves. A pendulum wall clock above Parker’s bookcase ticked hollowly. Solomon Kästchen had one much like it in his parlor; he said his father had brought it with him from Germany. Moody wondered if he would soon be handing Tamsey over to Kästchen. He supposed he might ask her, but he didn’t want her to think about it. After a while, Sarah sighed dramatically, stood up and walked over to the notice board on the wall beside the door.

  “Oh, look, Tamsey,” she said, startling Moody from his reveries. Sarah had never called Tamsey by her Christian name, she’d always been Mam. “This is Owen County. I wonder if it’s named after Mr. Robert Owen.”

  Parker looked up from his work. “No,” he said, “it’s named for Abraham Owen, an officer at the Battle of Tippecanoe, against the Shawnee. He fought alongside William Henry Harrison.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sarah. “I do recollect that name.”

  “Which one?”

  Sarah turned back to the bulletin board. Moody and Tamsey exchanged glances. Moody was amused; Tamsey was furious.

  “In fact, this town is named for Captain Spier Spencer, who was also killed in the battle. Harrison won the battle,” Parker said, “so he got to be president. Owen and Spencer were killed, so they just got a county and a town named after them.”

  “Well,” Sarah said, “it feels like a connection to New Harmony, don’t it, Tamsey? And look at this.” She pointed to another notice on the board. “There’s property for sale, near Vandalia: two hundred acres of mixed hardwood and cedar for eighty dollars. We got eighty dollars, don’t we? We could buy our own land.”

  “Aren’t you going to Canada?” Moody asked, wondering what she was up to.

  “Where is Vandalia?” Sarah asked Parker.

  “About ten miles thataway,” he said, getting up and moving to the window, where Sarah joined him. He pointed, his arm nearly touching Sarah’s shoulder. “See that man on the buckboard out there? That’s Cecil Fountain. The land’s right next to his. You can ask him about it if you’re interested.”

  “We ain’t,” Tamsey said. “We’re going to Canada.”

  “I’ll go out and talk to him,” Sarah said. “I want to see the shops, anyway.”

  “We both go, then,” she said. “We be back shortly.” She looked at Moody, and he got up and followed them out onto the street.

  “What was that about?” Tamsey said to Sarah.

  “What was what about?” Sarah said.

  “Calling me my name,” said Tamsey. “Putting on airs for that lawyer. You never done that before.”

  “I thought it made you sound more dignified,” Sarah said.

  “Dignified?” she said. “It made me sound like I your servant. Don’t you ever do that again.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sarah said. “Do you, Moody?”

  This time Moody didn’t stay out of it. “She’s right, Sarah,” he said. “You sounded disrespectful.”

  “Well,” Sarah said, and marched on ahead of them.

  They let her go and returned to Parker’s office, where Moody led Tamsey to a chair and asked Parker to bring her a glass of water.

  “That sun can be terribly hot,” Parker said.

  “It ain’t the sun,” Tamsey said, fanning herself. “It the daughter-in-law.”

  Parker smiled. “Would you like me to keep the originals here,” he asked, “where they’ll be safe?”

  Moody nodded, and she said yes.

  Sarah came back and sat down on the bench as though nothing had happened.

  “If you’re interested in purchasing that land,” Parker said to her, “I’d be honored to take care of the legal aspects. I helped Moody buy his cabin in Freedom, and I think he found my work satisfactory?”

  “Very,” said Moody. “But I don’t think they’re interested.”

  “I’ll have to talk it over with my husband,” Sarah said, as if her husband were a grand duke and not the man whose free paper Parker had just copied.

  Moody walked with them to Cecil Fountain’s wagon. On their way, they passed a ladies’ dress shop that had a sign in the window, which Sarah pointed to and read out: “SALESLADY WANTED.” The shelves behind the window were stacked with finery: shawls, gloves, bonnets, even shoes.

  “When I came out here to speak to Cecil Fountain,” said Sarah, “I went in there and applied for that job.”

  Tamsey stopped walking so abruptly that Moody almost bumped into her.

  “You did what?” she said.

  “I don’t want Leason and me to be farmers,” Sarah said. “I want us to live here in town, I want our children to go to school.” Moody looked at her and thought it was the first honest words he’d had from her. “I want things, Mam. I want the same things white people have. There, I said it.”

  “But you ain’t white.”

  “I’m white enough.”

  “White enough ain’t white enough.”

  “Then why’d we leave the South?” Sarah said angrily. “I want our child to have things.”

  Tamsey stared at her. “You with child, child?” she asked.

  Sarah nodded. Tamsey clapped her hands.

  “How long you been?”

  “Hmm,” Sarah said, “I think almost four months.”

  “Oh, Lord,” Tamsey said, smiling at Moody and hugging Sarah. “Oh, Lord. No wonder you acting strange.”

  22.

  On their way back from Indianapolis, Moody and Leason stopped at Spencer to pick up supplies for the cabin. After securing the Pelican to the dock they walked up to town. They’d been two days in Indianapolis and three days on the river, and Moody was eager to get back to Freedom. So was Leason. Almost all they’d talked about on the trip was his coming fatherhood, a
subject about which Moody was both knowledgeable and detached. He felt he was learning more from watching Leason than Leason could ever learn from him.

  The two stopped at Parker’s law office. Parker had drawn up a contract for the regular supply of salt to Buzzard Crawford, in Terre Haute, a job Moody hoped to hand over to Leason by the end of the summer, if they were still there. The contract was Crawford’s idea. A handshake would have been good enough for Moody, but Crawford was expanding his meat-packing business and said his bank wanted to see some assurances on paper. That would be a Northern bank. In the South, a bank was a place where you kept your money so you didn’t spend it, and it lent you more when you did; up here, banks were businesses out to make a profit, or rather to take a portion of Moody’s profits. Maybe he should get Parker to draw up a contract between him and Leason, make Leason a full partner. He didn’t want to make the same mistake with Leason that he’d made with Lucas, but hoped he was past the point of being in danger of that.

  Parker had his feet on his desk and was reading the Indianapolis Daily Herald. “Congress is pressuring Taylor to sign Clay’s Compromise bill,” he said by way of greeting.

  “Zach Taylor won’t sign it,” said Moody. “I served under him in the Mexican War. He’s quiet, but he’s a tough son of a bitch, and he hates slavery.”

  “If the South takes over Congress,” Parker said, “it’ll force the North to send every last fugitive it has back into slavery. I worry Taylor will sign the Compromise if he thinks it’ll stop the South from leaving the Union.”

  “How’s the Compromise going to keep the South happy?” Leason asked.

  “The North wants the new territories Virgil here stole from the Mexicans to be slavery free,” said Parker, “and the South wants them to be slave states. The Compromise will let them decide the matter for themselves, whether they’re free or slave, so all the South has to do is make sure most of the settlers in them come from the South, so they’ll vote for slavery when the time comes.”

  “Can’t the North do the same thing?”