by Wayne Grady
“Was she light skinned?”
“Not light like Sarah, but yes.”
“Light as you?”
“About.”
“Do you know who her parents were?”
“Sabetha Franklin’s? She never said.”
“Could one of them have been white?”
“One of them could have been purple for all I know.”
He wrote that down. “That’s good,” he said. “We don’t have any laws against marrying someone who’s purple.”
“Look around you, Mr. Parker,” she said. “You ever see a fugitive didn’t have some white in him? Everybody got some white. Nobody know how much, but how much don’t matter.”
“It seems to matter to Sarah,” Parker said. “Was Sarah already born when you came to Shelbyville?”
“Yes, she the same age as Leason.”
“And Benjamin and Sabetha Franklin you say were old?”
“Older than me and James. I don’t know how old.”
“Does Sarah have any brothers or sisters?”
“Not that I know.”
“Could Sabetha and Benjamin have been Sarah’s grandparents? Not her parents?”
“It possible,” Tamsey said. “But she never said nothing about having another child.”
“Leave it with me for now,” Parker said. “I’ll make some inquiries and let you know what I find.”
He passed the pen to Tamsey and asked her to make her mark at the bottom of the last page. She took the pen and made a cross, “like the one the Lord died on,” she said, “only falling off to one side, like it might have looked after they took him down.” Parker read out what he wrote under it: “ ‘Thomasina Lewis, her sign.’ ”
“Are you planning to call Tamsey as a witness at the trial?” Moody asked.
“That’s a very complicated question,” said Parker. “As you know, blacks can’t be witnesses in a trial involving whites. But in this case, it hasn’t been established yet that Sarah is white. So I may be able to call Tamsey, if the prosecuting attorney doesn’t argue that that would be tantamount to admitting that Sarah is black.”
“She is black,” said Tamsey.
Parker sighed. “I’ll come out to Freedom in a few days,” he said.
“What for?”
“I want to see where Leason and Sarah live. And you and Moody.”
“Muddy live on his boat,” Tamsey said, looking at Moody. “Why you want to see where we live?”
“The prosecution is going to want to see it, so I need to, too. Will it be all right if I come out tomorrow?”
“I guess.”
6.
Parker came out in a light gig, like a Virginia dandy. Granville unhitched and dried his horse, a sleek roan Banker that Moody admired when he came onto the porch to greet the lawyer. Tamsey offered him coffee, and Moody took Parker next door to Stokes’s cabin while she made it.
The day was warm for September, and Stokes was on his porch, as usual, fanning himself with a newspaper. Leason was down at the Pelican, sweeping spilled flour out of the hold, and Sarah was helping him, so the three men had the porch to themselves. Parker took a cursory look inside the cabin, satisfied himself that the couple occupied a single room and a double bed, and came back onto the porch. “I’ll go down and look at the boat in a minute,” he said, “but I’ll wait until Leason and Sarah are finished.”
“Always a good idea,” said Moody, and Stokes laughed. “Any news of the trial?”
“No date yet,” Parker said, “but it looks like late fall. And it’s not going to take place in Spencer, as I’d hoped. The attorney general wants it held in Indianapolis.”
“Indianapolis? Why there?”
“Politics,” Parker said. “Right now, the attorney general is appointed by the governor, but after the Constitutional Convention in October, the feeling is he’ll be elected by popular vote, as will the governor, as will the sheriff. Attorney General Fritts wants to be elected, and he expects he’ll get more newspaper coverage if the trial takes place in the capital rather than in a little backwater like Spencer.”
“He figures it’ll be a big trial, then?” Moody asked.
“And he figures he’s going to win it handily.”
“I thought you said it was just a misdemeanor.”
“Well, it’s a race issue,” Parker said. “These things tend to get blown up.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Stokes said, waving his newspaper. “Big trials goin’ on everywhere. People bein’ stole, families flung in jail. I seen it before, never thought to see it up here, though.”
“You’re referring to the Crenshaw case?” Parker asked.
“That and others.”
“John Crenshaw,” Parker explained to Moody. “Runs a saltworks up in Gallatin County, Illinois, uses slave labor to work the furnaces. Pretty nasty work.”
“I know,” Moody said. “I saw saltworks in Virginia.”
“Apparently he also breeds slaves on his Hickory Hills estate and sells them down South. A while ago he sold a woman named Maria Adams and her seven children to a slaveholder in Texas, and Maria’s husband and her two brothers went after Crenshaw, beat him up pretty good and allegedly burned down the saltworks, which Crenshaw leased from the government. At first there was a lot of public pressure from local whites to have the grand jury indict Crenshaw for slave trading, but after the fire everyone just backed off. Instead, Charles and Nelson, Maria’s brothers, were arrested and charged with arson.”
“Do I need to ask what happened?”
“Crenshaw got off with a slap on the wrist, and Charles and Nelson went to prison. Maria and her children are still in Texas.”
“And the state prosecutor likely the next attorney general of Illinois,” said Stokes.
Moody nodded. “Better not tell Tamsey about this,” he said, looking at Stokes.
“Why not?” said Stokes. “They need to know what they up against. They’s a war on, Virgil. People bein’ captured and killed all over the place. Fugitives arming theyselves with hatchets and clubs and pistols, more catchers than trees in the woods. Tamsey and Leason and Sarah need to know that.”
“But this trial ain’t about catchers or slave breeders,” Moody said. “It’s about whether Sarah is white or black.”
“And you don’t think that’s about slavery?” Parker said mildly. “What do you think will happen if the jury decides Sarah’s black? How long do you think it’ll be before catchers show up here in Freedom, probably brought in by Pickering himself? They’re taking everyone they can lay hands on. I’m not sure I know what to argue at this trial.”
“You going to argue that a tree a mule.”
Moody turned and saw Tamsey standing at the end of the porch, silhouetted against the green morning light, holding a coffeepot and a plate of biscuits. He hadn’t heard her come up. There was a long silence.
Parker spoke first. “But what if the jury decides to call a tree a tree?”
Tamsey put the tray on the porch floor and went up to where Moody was standing. “Don’t you keep nothing from me, Virgil Moody,” she said gently. “This my life. Catchers come, they come for me and my children, not for you. I know you want to protect us, and I thankful for that, but you can’t protect us all the time. You can’t protect us if you not here, or if they twenty of them and one of you.”
“Two,” said Stokes. “Two of us. And Leason and Granville, that four.”
Tamsey smiled. “Lawyer Parker saying the whole state against us. This state, the next state, the state after that. How can you protect us? You remember the Alamo? That us. We the Alamo of Indiana.”
“Don’t forget me,” Parker said. “I’m in this with you, too.”
Moody put his hand on Parker’s shoulder. “You running for attorney general, Cliff?” he said.
Parker grimaced. “If I win this trial, I’ll have to run, all right. I’ll have to run for the hills.”
7.
The end of September came wi
thout a trial date set. On the last day of the month, Cliff Parker once again drove his gig out to Freedom. He tied his horse to the porch rail and came into the cabin in a rush of cold air, trying to appear calm. He sat at the kitchen table, took his hat off and set it on his knee.
“The date’s been set,” he said to Tamsey. “October 9.”
“So soon?” said Moody.
“We ready for it?” Tamsey asked.
“They want it to coincide with the Constitutional Convention, which starts on the seventh. There’ll be plenty of reporters in town.”
Tamsey shook her head. “Why are lawyers so bad at answering questions? We ready for it?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be,” said Parker.
“I take that as a no.”
8.
The letter came the day before they were set to leave for Indianapolis. Cecil Fountain dropped it off on his way to Vandalia. Moody took it from him and they talked about hog feed for a while, and when Cecil left he opened the envelope. In it were two sheets of paper. The first was from Frederick Heiskell.
“Dear Friend,” it began:
I hope this finds you well. The Enclosed came to us by way of the paper, from your father’s Lawyers in Savannah—they discovered your name in our pages and have asked us to forward the sad news to you on their behalf. Very sorry to hear of your Loss, and trust that should you again find yourself in or near Knoxville, that you will come by to see us. Brown and I are, alas, selling the Register in order to devote our remaining if not actually declining years more directly to the Great Cause of Emancipation (and me to run for the state legislature), but you will always find a welcome here.
Affectionately Yours, Fred (Heiskell)
He was conscious of Tamsey watching him as he read. “Sad news,” he told her. “I don’t know what it is, though.” Although he did.
The second letter, dated a month before, bore the imprint of his father’s law firm in Savannah, Messieurs Harley, Chase and Steele, informing him of his father’s death on the eleventh inst., which would have been September. Moody tried to think back to that day, to what he was doing when his father died. Was that the day he and Leason bought the handkerchiefs for Sarah? Or was it the day Pudge Pickering came out to Freedom looking for them? The letter went on to say that, since both his brothers and his mother were also deceased, the ownership of Plantagenet, the house in Savannah “and of their goods and chattels,” had passed to him.
Chattels. Cattle. He was a slave owner again.
“I’ll have to go to Savannah to settle this,” he said to Tamsey.
“What about the trial?”
“No, I’ll wait until that’s over.”
“What you do then?”
“Sell the land and free the slaves, I guess.”
“Free the slaves,” she said, a note of doubt in her voice.
“What do you think?”
“I thinking these days freedom by itself ain’t much of a gift. Leason and Sarah free. You be sending two hundred fugitives up here where they ain’t wanted.”
“What would you have me do?”
“Ask them what they want.”
“You mean, as I should have done with Annie?”
“Not just Annie,” she said.
He wrote to Messieurs Harley, Chase and Steele thanking them for their condolences, although there hadn’t been any, saying he would come to Savannah to settle the matter of his father’s estate later in the month. Meanwhile, he instructed the lawyers to remove Casgrain as overseer of the plantation, and to assume the running of it themselves until Moody was able to come to Savannah. He sealed the envelope with a grim but satisfied smile, thinking of how this information would be received on Plantagenet. But the thought of Casgrain running the plantation with a free hand was repellent. Even his father had had more humanity in him than that.
9.
Cecil Fountain was to come with them to Indianapolis on the Pelican, along with Stokes. He should have arrived the afternoon before their departure, so they could get an early start the next morning. When he hadn’t shown up by suppertime, Tamsey urged Moody to go to the farm to see if he was coming.
“I got a bad feeling,” she said.
“What do you think has happened?” Moody asked her. She often had bad feelings about things, and she was often right. She still looked for catchers before stepping out of the cabin. Since Zachary Taylor’s death in July and Millard Fillmore’s assumption of the presidency, things had become even worse for fugitives in the North. Fillmore was pro-slavery and had signed the Compromise bill in September, and even more catchers than usual had flocked into Indiana now that the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed. They walked openly down the streets of Indianapolis and even lounged in Spencer, and entire troupes of them camped in the woods throughout the state. No one was safe. An entire family, husband, wife and three children, living near Vandalia, had disappeared only a week before, and a woman and her child walking home from church, also near Vandalia, had been saved only when other members of the congregation rode up in a buggy and beat the catchers off. People were starting to carry guns and avoid traveling alone. Cecil Fountain lived alone, and his farm was isolated enough.
“Just go,” she said. “Look hard.”
Moody had been to the farm before, but it always surprised him to round the bend in the road and come upon cleared land populated by hundreds of large, white, big-throated birds, some perched in trees, others settled on fallen logs or walking about like turkeys in the wire-netted cage Cecil had built at the end of the swamp. The cage was big enough to house a circus, and the birds flew freely inside it—otherwise, Cecil had said, they lost their feathers and were useless to him. Odd, Moody thought, that Cecil made his living from the very things that would carry his living away from him. There was a large log barn beside the compound, and Cecil’s cabin set farther into the trees, slightly away from the swamp. Between the barn and the cabin were two or three smaller outbuildings: a toolshed, a windowless shack in which he plucked his birds, and another in which he dried and ground the pelican meat to make Buzz Crawford’s pig feed. Moody checked the barn first. Cecil’s wagon was there, and his two horses, a black and a roan, no hay or oats in their feed boxes. Moody fed and watered the horses and opened the door to the corral before walking up to the house.
“Cecil,” he called from the porch. “Cecil, it’s me, Virgil.”
There was a quality to the silence answering his call that told him the house was empty. He tied his horse to a post, removed the rifle from its scabbard and approached the cabin slowly. Inside, there were signs of a struggle, chairs overturned, crockery on the floor, a water bucket on the counter tipped over and the boards around the dipper still wet. It was the kind of disorder he and Tamsey had expected to see at New Harmony and not found. Moody had seen it before, in Mexico during the fighting, when whole villages had been emptied for some strategic reason or other. Cecil didn’t have much in the way of possessions, but what he did have had been messed with.
Moody went back outside and listened. Pelicans didn’t make much noise. This late in the season there were no mosquitoes, although he remembered from previous visits that the swamp was so alive with the insects in the summer that they sometimes killed pelicans, sucked the blood right out of them as they sat on their nests. “Pre-dried ’em for me,” Cecil would say. Moody’s horse snorted. A crow replied three times, then flew over the clearing, and Moody followed its shadow to one of the sheds. The door was barred from the inside and there were no windows. Someone had taken an ax to the door from the outside, though without success, the bright-yellow splinters in the dark wood almost but not quite deep enough to break through to the bar, as though whoever had yielded the ax had given up just before achieving his goal. The ax was lying in the dirt. Moody picked it up and finished the job.
At first he thought what he was smelling was rotting pelican meat, for this was the shed in which Cecil made his hog feed. But when his eyes became accustomed to the darknes
s, only slightly lessened by the open door, he saw Cecil lying facedown on the dirt floor, a pistol in his right hand and the right side of his skull rearranged. Three days, he reckoned; it must have happened the night he brought them the letter from the Savannah lawyers. Had the catchers been waiting for him, had he surprised them going through his cabin, drinking his whiskey, taking target practice at his birds?
He remembered a makeshift graveyard in the woods not far from the farm, where a number of men from a road-making crew had died of swamp fever a few years before. He hitched the horses to Cecil’s buckboard, carried Cecil out to it, threw in a shovel from the toolshed and tied his own horse to the tailgate. Before climbing up to the wagon seat, he went over to the large gate that formed one side of the pelican compound and opened it. A few birds waddled speculatively out, then a few more. Soon the whole flock had seen the open gate and come racing toward it, on the ground and in the air. Moody watched as dozens and then hundreds of enormous white birds, realizing their freedom, took to the air, barely missing his head, the thunderous tumult of their wings filling his ears and their exuberant tempest almost blowing his hat off. The birds circled above the farm for several minutes, getting their bearings, then headed south, toward their wintering grounds in Mexico.
With a sense of grim satisfaction, Moody watched them go, then returned to the corpse in the wagon.
10.
They tied up in Indianapolis on October 7, two days before the trial. They managed to secure a room for Leason and Sarah in a boardinghouse in the negro district. The rest stayed on the Pelican. Stokes would join them before the trial. To offset the gloom of Cecil’s death and their anxiety over the upcoming trial, Moody wanted to make the next two days as much a holiday as possible, as though they were spending a pleasant time in the capital before returning to their normal lives, all six of them, in Freedom.
