Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  Abigail Munson was thirty, I would have guessed, though the worry lines on her forehead made me consider that she’d had a hard life. Her eyes were clear and kind, and her movements – quick but careful – indicated that she was probably the mother of little children.

  Large, colorful maps of the American colonies hung on the walls in gilded frames, which I admired while she poured coffee into cups of crimson-glazed porcelain. When I lifted my cup to have a closer look, she said worriedly, “I do hope there’s nothing wrong.”

  “No, no – it’s just that I’m a tile-maker and potter. And your porcelain is lovely.”

  “What a kind thing to say, Mr. Stewart, thank you,” she said in her lilting voice. “My husband imported this set from France for me. It was one of my wedding presents.”

  Mrs. Munson took a dainty sip and then explained to me that Mr. Friedlander had been less than honest with me at first, owing to my manners and accent, both of which had been described to her as downright vexing. Thinking better of his judgment, he had then sent a clerk to her home to ask if he might give the Scotsman her name. She had agreed to see me, since she welcomed the chance to meet a foreigner and had nothing to hide. “Of late, we in the South have been so vilified in the Northern press that you will have to forgive us if we are less than fully hospitable.”

  “Most understandable, under the circumstances.”

  I explained the purpose of my visit and thanked her for seeing me. She was eager to have a look at my sketch. When I unfurled it for her, she said, “Why, I do indeed remember that face! Midnight, you say. I do not believe my father called him that.” She looked out her window to the garden. “Though I cannot recall just now. Samuel – might it have been Samuel?”

  “In Africa, he was called Tsamma. Perhaps it was changed to the European name most phonetically similar.”

  She leaned toward me, her eyes radiant. “I am sure now, it was Samuel. But it must be at least fifteen years ago.”

  “Seventeen, I believe.”

  “I was a girl when he came. My father needed an assistant. A friend of his suggested this man Samuel. As I recall, he was a mute. That was a shock to us all.”

  “Mute? No, the man I’m searching for spoke quite well. At least, when – ”

  I might have continued, but the possibility of his having had his vocal chords cut by slave-traders chilled me to silence.

  “I can see this is difficult for you. Would you like more coffee?” she asked.

  “No, thank you. Mrs. Munson, when your father passed away, Samuel was sold. At least, that was what I was told. Do you know where he was taken?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Or who purchased him?”

  “I don’t believe I was ever told.”

  “Would anyone recall?”

  “I have two brothers, sir, but they are both considerably younger. They were just boys. I don’t think either would know. But I will ask.”

  “I’d very much appreciate that.” Though I smiled, I was unable to hide my disappointment.

  “Mr. Stewart, I’m sorry I’ve been of so little help,” she said sweetly. “I wish there was more I could do.”

  “Is there anyone else you know who may have taken an interest in Samuel?”

  “I do not think so. He worked in the back room of Father’s workshop. No one saw him.”

  “And was he in good spirits, you’d say?”

  “Yes, I believe so. Though he kept to himself. He was able to write and often did so in a memorandum book. I remember that clearly. Once, he wrote me a poem. Though I cannot recall what it said. It was most unusual to see a Negro writing, as you can imagine.”

  “And the book he wrote in, do you have it?”

  “No, I’m afraid I must disappoint you again. I cannot imagine where it’s gone.”

  “I … I taught him to write.”

  “Did you?” she beamed. “How clever of you!”

  “He was the clever one.” I shaded my eyes with my hand to hide my emotion.

  She came swiftly to me as though to comfort a fallen child. In imploring tones, she said, “Oh, Mr. Stewart, no matter what you have been told, no matter what you have read, not all of us are dead to feeling with regard to the slaves. I myself have two good friends of the Negro race, more valuable than any other property I have ever owned. They have been of incalculable help to me in raising my children. Mr. Stewart, I beg you to understand. Many of us can plainly see that slavery is wrong not only for the Negro but for the white race as well. It is an evil.”

  When she dabbed at the corner of her eye with a lace handkerchief plucked from her sleeve, it struck me that she was acting – and had been from the very beginning.

  “The slave trade is a terrible thing,” she declared. “I believe that with all my heart. But it is too late for us.” She hung her head in sorrow and took a deep calming breath. “Slavery has been with us these past two centuries. It would be suicide to end such a tradition. In the North, there is industry and all the wealth it provides. Here, with our tobacco farms and small port, we could not make do without the labor of the Negro. That is what the editors of the North fail to comprehend.” She clasped her hands together as though to recite a fervent prayer. “We would perish without our traditions and our values. They are the ark we ride in. And yet the Northerners would wish to see us drown in a sea of blood. I do not believe that a Scotsman, of a race that has suffered for so long under the English, can see that as fair.”

  *

  Mrs. Munson agreed to send word to my boardinghouse of any helpful information that might be given her by her brothers. I left her house confused, wondering whether any of what I’d seen and heard had been genuine.

  That evening, rain came down in dark, thunderous sheets, fanfared by lightning. Closing my eyes and recalling the first time Midnight left our home in Porto to follow a storm, worry consumed me. I spent the next hour hunched over my desk, writing again to my children. I told them that Alexandria was a beautiful city with a handsome wharf and that I was doing well. I also apologized again for leaving them and said that I would be back as soon as possible. I wrapped up two pairs of filigree silver earrings that I’d purchased at a jewelry shop that afternoon – roses for Esther and bells for Graça – and placed them carefully in the envelope.

  After picturing them wearing my gifts, I began another note, this one to my wife:

  Dearest Francisca, I am in a land where I know no one and am besieged by doubts. The Americans mostly either lie to me or ridicule me, and I sometimes have no idea what their intentions are. In my nightmares I am unable to understand Midnight – or even myself. You once told me that you would come with me anywhere, and I wish you were here with me now. But we are so powerless to protect those we love. I see that now more clearly than ever, and it is what most scares me when I wake in the morning. Then, I feel …

  As I dipped my pen in my inkstand, it seemed pointless to add any more lines to a letter that would never be posted or read. I crumpled what I’d written and set my flint to it, then threw it into the fireplace and watched the flames separate me from Francisca again.

  *

  The next morning, the proprietress of the boardinghouse, Mrs. Van Zandt, suggested that I take my drawing of Midnight to the Slave Pen, where thousands of blacks were transported to Charleston and other Southern cities each year. “Though if you are looking for a nigger yourself,” she confided, “then you’d be better off at a private auction – the prices are much more reasonable.”

  I was expecting a prison of colossal proportions, but it was only a three-story brick building painted a dusty tan. Its side yards were enclosed by high whitewashed walls that were spiked on top with nasty-looking shards of glass. Though unable to see over, as they were a good ten feet in height, I could hear the subdued conversations of the Negroes awaiting shipment and the morose clanging of heavy chains.

  A slender, gray-haired man in striped trousers was standing in the doorway to the countinghouse, sl
icing a golden apple with a short knife. I introduced myself and learned his name – Coleman. He generously offered me a piece of his fruit, which I accepted. I then invented a story about Midnight designed to elicit a more positive reaction than I’d received from Mr. Reading: I was looking for a former servant of mine who had just inherited several hundred dollars from his father, a freed Negro who had been employed at my New York household. The man I wanted to find had been a slave in Alexandria but was sold elsewhere some seventeen years earlier. There would be a reward of fifty silver dollars for any person who might lead me to him. I asked if I might show Mr. Coleman my drawing.

  He pointed his knife toward one of the side yards. “Ya know how many nigger bucks I’ve sold in Alexandria over the last seventeen years? I’d wager fifty thousan’ or more. So Mr. Stewart” – and here he squinted at me as though peering into a beam of light – “ya don’t truly think I’m fool enough to remember your Midnight, do ya?” He smiled maliciously.

  “I was only hoping you might recognize – ”

  “We ain’t runnin’ no asylum, ya know.”

  “If you would do me the favor of just taking a look,” I said, unscrolling my drawing.

  “Ugly rascal,” said Mr. Coleman, cutting another slice of apple. Then he looked up into the sky, in no particular hurry to comment. “Don’t look like it, but we’ll have sun today. That’s a good thing.” Mischief was dancing in his eyes when he looked back at me. “Know why?”

  When I shook my head, he said, “You know anything ’bout turkeys, Mr. Stewart?”

  “Our neighbor had a turkey named Marigold when I was a lad. She was – ” I was about to say a sweet thing but realized he would only mock me. I said rather foolishly, “She was large.”

  “Well, Mr. Stewart, when it rains, your Marigold and all her friends point their heads up toward the sky and open their beaks. They’re so goddamned ornery and bone-stupid that they can drown that way.” He pointed toward the yard. “Niggers ain’t got any more sense than turkeys. You can quote me on that. Yesterday, with all the rain, we had one buck drown in the mud. Don’t ask me how. That’s how stupid they are. He lost me six hundred dollars or more. So, Mr. Stewart, it’s better for my business when we have sun. And it’d be better for you if you forget about your Noonday Bell. He’s long gone. Prob’ly drowned in some mud somewheres.”

  XXXIX

  My encounter at the slave pen so upset me that I marched away in my rage toward a horizon of trees in the distance. I soon reached a neighborhood where Negro families were living on their own, in squat houses separated by overgrown lots. Two young lasses – no more than four and seven, I would guess – were playing up ahead, the larger rolling a rusted metal hoop, the smaller skipping. Both wore pretty pink ribbons in their closely cropped hair. I realized with a jolt that I had not seen a white person in several blocks. Furthermore, I was being stared at by several blacks sitting on porches, and now even by the girls themselves.

  I walked toward the kelpies. Smiling, I said, rather too eagerly, “My, you two are lovely girls. Are you sisters?”

  They looked at each other, startled by my accent, most likely. The littler of the two dropped a smooth ivory pebble that had been hidden in her hand. Then, without warning, the larger girl shrieked at the top of her lungs. I jerked my hands up to protect my ears while she grabbed her sister’s hand and raced off. They ran to an old tilted house partially hidden behind a broad oak, fifty paces ahead. Once they’d reached the safety of the porch, the older one leaned over the railing and gave me a hard look. Her tiny sister, sucking her thumb, looked curious.

  After a moment, a wide-hipped woman wearing a blue head scarf charged out the front door. The older girl pointed at me as though I were a bandit.

  “Madam,” I called, “I was just asking the girls if they were sisters.”

  She made several furious hand gestures. Then she gathered up her children and marched into her house, banging the door closed. “You’s made an enemy of Aunt Carolyn Gold, so you’s in a right bit a twisted trouble.”

  When I turned toward this voice, my mouth dropped open: Standing on the rickety porch of a whitewashed house was an elderly woman in trousers and a waistcoat of homespun. Since she wore no shirt under the waistcoat, her bare shoulders and belly were plainly visible. I should have guessed her to be about seventy years of age, as her hair was gray and her posture stooped, yet her glassy black eyes were youthful and her cheeks as smooth as velvet. I found her stunningly beautiful, but alarming as well, rather as though she had materialized out of a long-forgotten dream.

  “She’s gonna work a deep spell on ya, chile – so deep ya gonna look up to look down. She once sank a ship in the harbor, and four men ain’t gonna tell us what it felt like ’cause their mouths ain’t never come up to the surface.”

  “I expect I ought to apologize to her.”

  “’Pologize? To that varmint?”

  She frowned and flapped a hand by her ear to chase away a fly. “Come on up here, chile,” she said, taking pity on me and waving me over. “Ya gonna need my help.”

  After kneeling to pick up the polished stone dropped by the younger of the two girls, I made my way up her stairs to her patio. She whistled and gazed on me admiringly. “You tall, young man – darn tall! I’m Mary Wright. But most ever’body jus’ call me Moon Mary. ’Cept my chil’ren.”

  I told her my family name was Stewart but asked that she call me John.

  “If ya don’ min’, I’m gonna keep the devil from snappin’ at me and call ya Mr. Stewart.”

  I placed the white pebble on the railing of her porch and asked if she’d mind returning it to the younger sister, explaining that she had dropped it.

  Moon Mary picked it up and sniffed it. “You saved this for her? Why ya carin’ what that girl leaves on some nigger street?”

  “Little girls drop things and invariably wish to have them back. I know – I have two daughters of my own.”

  “You’s in trouble, chile. ’Cause I don’t need much eyesight at all to tell me you’s a long ways from home, and you’s got that varmint Carolyn Gold conjurin’ powerful on ya, and she don’t take kindly to no one fright’nin’ off them princesses a hers. Now, I don’t us’ally meddle in nobody else’s business, but seein’ as how ya got yousself in a fix, and seein’ as how you returned that pebble … Wait right where ya are, chile.” She pointed a crooked finger at me. “And don’t you go fright’nin’ nobody else.”

  She stepped into her house, waddling a bit like a duck, and returned momentarily with a brown and white jug containing a pint of green liquid.

  “Drink this,” she said, handing the jug to me. When I asked what it was, she snapped, “Jus’ ya drink it, chile. ’Tain’t poison. Or would ya prefer helpin’ Carolyn Gold by doin’ nothin’, ’cause she don’t mind none if ya make her spell set inside ya easier.”

  I lifted her brew to my lips. It tasted sour. She snorted at my reticence. “Stubbornness done taken ya pris’ner, chile. Now, that’s just lemon and mint and a few other things b’sides. No spell can beat my med’cine once it’s grabbed a holda ya.”

  It was sugary, and there might have been pepper in it as well. It burned my throat.

  “Now, that wa’n’t so bad, was it, Mr. John?”

  “No, it was good in a way,” I croaked out of politeness.

  When I remarked that she was now using my first name, she snapped, “Never min’ that!” Snatching my hand, she spun me in circles four times, mumbling to herself in what must have been an African language. Finally, she had me bend down in front of her and pressed a finger into my forehead. Later, I discovered a dot of ashes there.

  “You’s lost, ain’t ya, Mr. John?” she said, squinting. “ ’Cause ya sure as hell look lost.”

  I told her what had happened at the Slave Pen, which obliged me to explain my hunt for Midnight. When I’d finished, she licked her lips as though tasting something good and said, “You’s gonna find him. I’m right sure of that.” When
I asked why, she said, “ ’Cause ya got a hole in ya. So ya ain’t gonna give up.”

  “And what if Midnight is long dead himself?”

  “I’ll tell you this, Mr. John, people find whatever’s there for them to find, if ya know what I mean. That’s the way this life works.” She slapped her belly and said, “If ya don’t mind me sayin’, you’s goin’ at this all wrong, chile – asking on King Street and at that hor’ble Pen. Them white folks ain’t gonna know where your friend Midnight is at. So ya gotta ask us right here where we live.”

  “This neighborhood of yours … do your owners let you live here in exchange for caring for their houses?”

  “We’s free here. This is the Bottoms.” To my bewilderment, she replied, “It’s simple, chile. Some of us have bought our freedom. Others were given it by their masters.”

  “Bought it how?”

  “From the work we do on Sundays.”

  “And this house of yours, do you own it?”

  “I bought it from the Quakers. They’s the ones that help us here.”

  “And you’re completely free?”

  “Well, I don’ know nothin’ ’bout completely. I got the papers, sure enough, but how can I be completely free when my babies ain’t? You know a Negro mother who’s ever that free?”

  She told me that of her three children, only her eldest son, William, had escaped slavery. He’d run away to Boston, where he worked as a cooper. She had not seen him in forty-three years and had not heard a word from him in fifteen. Her younger children, a girl and a baby boy, had been sold to a local slave-trader, who’d taken them to Charleston.

  “Might be as far away as N’O’leans by now,” she said.

  “If you haven’t been able to find them, then what chance do I have to find Midnight?”

  “Ya listen up, Mr. John. A white man with a mem’ry …” She whistled loudly and shook her head. “A white man with a mem’ry is a pow’ful creature. I can see now that you got Midnight right inside ya. He’s there. He’s protectin’ ya against the likes a Carolyn Gold and ever’thin’ else. I see him plain.”