by Wayne Grady
“You think we staying in Indiana after this?” Tamsey said.
He hadn’t thought that far ahead, but yes, that’s what he would have said. Tamsey’s question made him realize that he’d been naive. From the day Leason and Sarah were arrested, though, Tamsey had known there was no winning this trial. Whatever its outcome, they could never again feel safe in Indiana.
He took Granville across the common to the Masonic Temple, where the Constitutional Convention was getting under way. “He’ll see democracy at work,” he said to Tamsey, who replied, “He already seen that.” They sat in the visitors’ gallery and listened to a discussion about whether the state or the county should be responsible for road maintenance. A few reporters lounged in the gallery, looking bored. One of them jokingly asked Granville what he thought about the debate. Granville told him that whoever built the road should also be responsible for repairs to it, that way the road maker would do a good job in the first place. The reporter said he’d heard more sense from Granville in two minutes than he had from the delegates all day.
“Emmet Burke, the Sentinel,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Glad to meet you, Mr. Burke,” Moody said, shaking it.
“I’m not covering the convention anyway,” Burke said. “I’m here to report on the trial that starts in a couple of days, across the street.”
“Oh?” said Moody. “What trial is that?”
“You ain’t heard?” asked the reporter. “Indiana v. Lewis and Franklin? Charge of fornication.” He looked at Granville and apparently decided he was old enough to understand the word. “It’s going to be a big one. State’s attorney arguing the case, and a Supreme Court judge is hearing it.”
“Fornication,” said Moody. “Ain’t that just a misdemeanor?”
“I covered the Crenshaw case in Chicago, you heard of that one, I guess. This is going to be bigger than that. It ain’t about who’s messing with each other, it’s about keeping all them goddamn fugitives out of the state so they don’t mess with us. Begging your pardon, son,” he said to Granville.
“What are you going to write about it?” Granville asked.
“Depends how it turns out,” the reporter said, and left to rejoin his colleagues.
Granville looked up at Moody. “You still writing to that Kentucky newspaper?” he asked, and Moody nodded. “You going to write about the trial?” Moody nodded again. “Whatever way it turns out?” And again, Moody nodded.
When Tamsey and Sabetha returned to the Pelican, Moody took Sabetha to Black’s Bookshop and bought her two books, a novel called Wuthering Heights, by Ellis Bell, and a book of poems by the Quaker poet he remembered reading at Rachel’s, John Greenleaf Whittier. He thought Whittier’s antislavery poems would lift everyone’s spirits, but they only reminded them of the horrors of slavery, and of the short distance they had traveled from them. “ ‘Gone, gone—sold and gone,’ ” Sabetha read aloud. “ ‘To the rice-swamp dank and lone, / From Virginia’s hills and waters; / Woe is me, my stolen daughters.’ ”
“Least we was wanted in Virginia,” Tamsey said.
It seemed there was no escaping the worry. When the children went to bed in the tent Moody had set up on the deck behind the Pelican’s cabin, Moody and Tamsey sat on the parlor deck drinking tea. It was a cool night, the stars crisp and sparkling above the quiet city. The captured canal water lapped incessantly against the Pelican’s flanks. Tamsey cupped her hands around her teacup for warmth and gazed in the direction of the Masonic Temple, the impermeable roof of which they could just see above the tops of shops and houses. Moody asked her about the boardinghouse she’d found for Leason and Sarah.
“A nice place on Indiana Avenue,” she said. “Sarah ain’t pleased it in the negro district, but that the only place they could both stay.”
“What about Leason’s suit?” he said. “Did you get him one at Kästchen’s?”
“Black wool,” she said. “He look good in it. Like he going to a funeral. Got a silk dress for Sarah.”
“Anything for yourself?”
“No, it don’t matter how I look.”
“You always look good. I don’t tell you that often enough, do I?”
“You never told me that at all.”
“It’s true.”
“We old, Muddy,” she said. “We too old fools together. That could be us they stringin’ up after the trial.”
“No one’s going to be strung up.”
“Or sold.”
“Or sold. How was Kästchen?” This was the first time Tamsey had met him.
“Friendly,” she said.
“He offer to send you all north?”
“No, none of that.”
“See? He knows you ain’t runaways, that’s why.”
“Not tonight we ain’t,” she said. “Who knows what we all be after the trial.”
She squeezed his hand and they went into the cabin. Tamsey slept, but Moody lay awake with a geology book for a while, reading about the steady, relentless reduction of everything to dust.
11.
The next morning, Parker met with Moody, Tamsey, Leason and Sarah in the state legislature building, in a small chamber in the back, down a long, dark corridor lined with photographs of the state’s past governors, where the clerks normally took tea but was empty now because everything council related had moved next door to the Masonic Temple, even though it wasn’t raining. Parker had lit a coal fire under the kettle, and gave them tea when they got there, and told them the trial was set to start at ten o’clock the next morning, which they already knew. He told Tamsey she and Moody should be there early to get a good seat.
“You’re expecting a crowd, then,” said Moody, thinking of the reporter he’d spoken to the day before.
“Democracy and justice on trial,” he said, “doesn’t happen every day.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Tamsey. “I would say democracy and justice on trial every day slavery exist. Every time a slave run away and a catcher take him, democracy and justice shrink a little. Least as I understand them words.”
Parker gave her a sympathetic look, then told Sarah and Leason to meet him in this chamber a half hour before the others.
“I’ve talked to Fritts, the state’s attorney general,” he said. “He’s firmly against my calling Tamsey up as a witness. Which means he thinks it will hurt his case. It’ll be up to the judge, ultimately. What do you think about it, Tamsey?”
“If it hurt their case,” she said, “I’ll do it.”
“It won’t be easy.”
“When has it ever been?” She didn’t look at Moody when she said it, but he knew that being with him wasn’t easy.
They were up the next morning before everyone else, before the sun, which was lingering below the horizon. Tamsey busied herself making food to take for their lunch. He’d bought a chicken and some potatoes at the market on their way back from the meeting with Parker, and she cooked them and made biscuits. When nine o’clock drew near and Leason and Sarah weren’t there, she let her mind fly off in a dozen directions at once. “They been caught,” she told Moody. “They gone off on Kästchen’s Railroad.” It was probably only Leason who skedaddled, she said. Sarah wouldn’t have gone with him, pregnant as she was, she’d stay in Indianapolis or maybe go to Philadelphia and raise her child white. “I hate thinking that, but the worse the thought, the truer it likely to be.” Stokes had told her about the couple who were tarred and feathered and cut up, she said, and she knew there would be some at the trial who’d done the tarring and the feathering and were hoping for another chance to have some fun.
“I don’t know what happen if we win, and I don’t know what happen if we lose,” she said.
“I know,” said Moody. “I worry that Parker will do his job and Sarah and Leason will win this case, but I don’t know what winning means. Proving Sarah’s black?”
“Like I said,” Tamsey said, “whatever happen, we have to leave Indiana.”
&nbs
p; After retreating to the cabin, Moody laid out the suit of clothes that Henry had procured for him on the Mary White. The clothes that had made him look like his father. They weren’t as white as they once were, he hadn’t worn them since that day, had even forgotten he still had them, but now that he had inherited his father’s estate, had literally become his father, wearing them seemed appropriate. Maybe it was time to admit to himself what he was. A white man in a world that was increasingly determined by the consequences of slavery. It was time for him to stop acting surprised and indignant whenever anyone suggested to him that the reason he hadn’t freed Annie or Lucas was that he had liked it that their relationship was based on ownership, that that was the way he’d been raised, and, hate it though he professed he did, it was the relationship he understood and felt most comfortable with. It had taken Tamsey, whom he in no sense owned, and who made him feel damn uncomfortable all the time, to make him realize that. He could no longer pretend that these plantation-owner’s clothes were a disguise; they were his sackcloth and ashes, from his straw hat down to his gray, buttoned spats.
He put them on. Before leaving the cabin, he saw Leason’s black hat, the one he’d brought with him from New Harmony. The one Granville told him Lucas had made. He put it on his head. It fit perfectly. Outside, on the parlor deck, Tamsey had the lunch packed in two bailing buckets, Sabetha was clearing the table and Granville was pacing impatiently back and forth along the dock.
“Leason and Sarah here yet?” he asked, just as Leason and Sarah themselves came strolling down the canal path as casually as two aristocrats out for a stroll to look at boats they might buy. Leason looked uncomfortable in his new suit, while Sarah’s silk dress made her look like she was going to church. A white church. Moody remembered Parker saying he hoped Sarah wouldn’t look too white at the trial, but her dark-blue dress made her skin look whiter than Jersey cream, and under her lace bonnet her hair was piled and pulled to the back of her head in the latest fashion.
“You’re wearing my hat,” Leason said to Moody.
“Do you mind?”
“Nope. Doesn’t go with my new suit.”
Walking to the courthouse next to Tamsey, Moody wanted to take her hand, but of course that was impossible. They let Leason and Sarah go on ahead, then hung back behind the rest as though they were going somewhere else and just happened to be on the same path.
12.
By the time they entered the courtroom, it was so full there were no seats near the front. He didn’t think Tamsey would like the weight of people’s eyes on her anyhow, and she would prefer to sit at the back. He found four seats together, and ushered Granville and Sabetha in first and sat beside Tamsey. Gawkers continued to file in. It was a big room: Indianapolis must have had a lot of Masons, and they all wanted in on this trial. Tamsey asked him quietly if he thought they all had buckets of tar and bags of feathers waiting outside, if maybe they’d acquired a taste for cutting and were looking to do some more of it. He said no, he didn’t think so, but there were some hard, clean-shaven faces around them. Etta Pickering was up at the front looking like the judge, jury and avenging angel all in one. But there were some friendly faces, as well. Stokes was there, and Moody nodded to him. Suddenly Tamsey poked him in the ribs and pointed to a tall black man wearing a long coat and a white shirt, a black felt hat resting on his lap. “That Brother Joshua,” she said. “What he doing here?”
“Somebody else survived New Harmony,” he said, which meant Lucas and Benah might have gotten away, too.
Granville started to get up to go over to him, but Tamsey held his sleeve. “There be time for rejoicing later.”
The bailiff came in and said, “All rise,” and everyone stood up, and the judge came in through a rear door when they sat down again. His name was Otis Amery. Parker had told them yesterday that he was a good man, honest and smart, which he said was a rare combination. He was a small, round man with a large, nearly bald head and full side-whiskers. He was reasonably assured of being elected to the Supreme Court, Parker had said, and so probably wouldn’t see this trial as a publicity stunt. The judge swept into the courtroom almost at a trot and sat down at a table at the front of the room as though waiting for his supper. Leason and Sarah were already sitting at another table, facing the judge, one on each side of Parker. All Moody could see was their backs and Sarah’s wavy black hair, Leason’s tight curls and Parker’s shiny-shouldered black coat. The latter was reading his opening remarks as if he’d never seen them before. The prosecuting attorney, Samuel Fritts, the man with ambitions to be elected state attorney general, sat at another table and gazed over the courtroom like a farmer over his crop. He looked tall even sitting down, and smiled at Judge Amery like they were old friends. He seemed to be saying, Let’s see if we can’t get this trial done before lunchtime.
13.
“Bailiff,” said Judge Amery, “will you read out the charge against the defendants?”
“I will, Your Honor. ‘The Grand Jurors for the State of Indiana, upon their oath, present that Leason Lewis and Sarah Franklin, on the first day of April eighteen hundred and fifty in Franklin Township in the County of Owen in the State of Indiana, and from that time to the time of finding this indictment, the said Leason Lewis being then and there a single and unmarried man, and the said Sarah Franklin being then and there a single and unmarried woman, did there and then and during all the time aforesaid unlawfully cohabit in open and notorious fornication, contrary to the form of the Statute in such cases made and provided and against the peace and dignity of the State of Indiana.’ ”
Amery looked at Parker. “Do the defendants understand the charges against them?” he asked.
“They do, Your Honor.”
“How do they plead?”
“Not guilty.”
“Both of ’em?”
Parker looked surprised. “How could just one of them be guilty of fornication?” he asked.
Careful, Cliff, thought Moody, as a ripple of laughter circulated in the room.
“Very well,” said the judge, “let’s get on with it. Mr. Fritts, what is the basis for the charge against the defendants?”
Fritts stood up. He was wearing a hundred-dollar suit with a vest that nicely showed off his gold watch chain, which gleamed as it looped from one side of his abdomen to the other and, unlike Moody’s, undoubtedly had a gold watch attached to the end of it. His white shirtfront was starched and his cravat carefully tied, Moody suspected not by him. Did he have a body servant? He looked the kind of man a planter would have over for dinner, whereas Parker looked rumpled and worried, like someone a horse trader might call in to arrange the sale of some yearlings. There was mud on his boots and it looked as though he’d forgotten to shave, and to brush his hair.
“Your Honor,” said Fritts, “this may appear, at first glance, to be a simple case of fornication, and little more than a joke to my esteemed colleague, Mr. Parker.” He bowed in Parker’s direction. “But in fact, Your Honor, Sarah Franklin has been charged with one of the most heinous crimes known to civilized society. I refer, of course, to the crime of having sexual congress with brutes.”
There was a murmur in the courtroom—no one seemed to have appreciated the precise nature of the charge as expressed by Fritts. Moody knew that this many people hadn’t shown up to witness a simple case of two people living together without being married. They knew that more was going on. Parker was prepared to defend Leason and Sarah against the charge of miscegenation. But what was this about brutes? Moody wanted more than ever to take Tamsey’s hand, but refrained.
Fritts turned and raised a restraining hand to his audience.
“Let the ladies in the courtroom stop their ears if they will, and if there be children present let them leave the room. For this courtroom is no place for the faint of heart, nor for those lacking in moral courage. This is not, in the ordinary sense, a crime against the person since, under the law as it now stands, at least one of the defendants is not a person.
Nor is it a simple crime against property. Nothing has been stolen, no one has been robbed or murdered. But this woman has most certainly committed an offense against humanity. Do not be misled, Your Honor, by the deceptive neutrality of the terms of the charge, that these two have been unlawfully cohabiting in open and flagrant fornication. That law was never formulated to describe the very contemptible act this woman has willfully committed. How could it have been? How could any decent-minded legislator have anticipated such a circumstance as this? Laws can only be drawn for things we can imagine might happen. If any two white persons, male and female, were discovered in cohabitation without benefit of clergy and outside the bonds of holy matrimony, they would be charged with exactly the same offense, and their sins, though egregious enough, would be answered with a fine and six months’ imprisonment, followed by a march to the nearest church. It would occasion a celebration. Law and order would be restored. In similar manner, two negroes living together in such an ungodly and unsanctified manner were so common a thing as to hardly warrant our attention, it would be almost amusing to us, like watching two children playing at house in imitation of their betters, or mongrel dogs coming together in a state of wild and natural innocence. They would be charged, make no mistake, but only to be gently corrected. But a white woman openly consorting with a negro man! No, Your Honor, no church, no law, no society can sanction such an act, for it is by its very nature unnatural, uncivilized, unholy, unthinkable—and unpardonable. And it is the duty of this court to punish what public morality cannot pardon.”
Moody looked at Leason, who had turned to Parker. This was worse than anything they had prepared for. Moody was used to seeing slaves being treated like animals, but he’d never before heard them publicly charged with actually being animals. Then he remembered how his father referred to his slaves as so many “head,” as though they were cattle. Beasts of burden.
