Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  I thought of Midnight giving me his body heat when I had been made ill by Hyena.

  Then she said something I’ll never forget: “Don’ ya worry, Mr. John. Midnight left part of himself in ya. And you’s on a holy journey to find him. As sure as you were goin’ to Jerusalem to see Jesus Himself.”

  *

  So it was that I ended up showing my drawing around the Bottoms neighborhood that afternoon. The residents I spoke to were friendly, but no one recognized him. Hot and sweaty, I made my way back to the boardinghouse, where I doused myself from head to toe and shaved.

  After dozing off, I woke to flies buzzing in circles by my head as though searching for a way into my ears. The light outside was hazy. Sunset was settling in gold and pink. Bells soon tolled eight o’clock. I wondered if I would always feel so alone in America. Then I drank the water left in my glass and stumbled out to visit a tavern by the port, hoping that the cool breeze there might give me back my energy. In front of a clothing shop on Prince Street, two white men approached me, the older dressed in a fine ruffled shirt. The more youthful of the two was pale and blond, with bright blue eyes. He was just a lad, surely no more than twenty.

  “You must be Stewart,” the older man said confidently.

  With relief, I realized they must have been sent by Abigail Munson with some information about Midnight. Smiling with gratitude, I replied, “Indeed I am, sir. And you must be one of dear Mrs. Munson’s younger brothers.”

  I reached out my hand, but he did not take it.

  “Have you made plans to leave Alexandria yet?” he asked gruffly.

  “No, sir, I have not. And if you will excuse me …” I tipped my hat.

  The older man put out a hand to stop me. “Jim, you best have a go at him,” he said to the youth.

  At that, Jim punched his fist into my gut. Badly winded, I fell to my knees. A harsh blow to the back of my head introduced my face to the cobbles. I cannot say how long I was lost to the world, but I remember that a kindly white gentleman came to my aid and helped me to stand. My attackers had long since fled. Though my head was throbbing, I denied being in any discomfort, and I was grateful that no permanent damage had been done.

  Despite a certain dizziness, I trudged on to a tavern at the port, where I downed a bottle of poor-quality Madeira. After that, I staggered back to my hotel, hoping that sleep would rid me of my thoughts of defeat.

  *

  In the morning, still feeling fragile, I ate bread and warm milk at a nearby coffeehouse. Upon returning, Mrs. Van Zandt informed me that I had two visitors waiting in the garden.

  “One is a nigger buck, so you will have to meet him outside. I am sorry, but those are my rules.” She glared at me, plainly incensed.

  Standing on a brick patio at the back of the house was a broad-shouldered black man in a handsome green velvet coat. Talking in hushed tones with him was a thin, elderly white man in a worn linen shirt and trousers. They smiled as I approached, as though heartily relieved to see me. The black man was missing an earlobe, and his eyes were like yellow moons. He introduced himself as Hussar Morgan, and he had a very powerful handshake. The white man was named John Comfort.

  They knew my name already.

  “I’d ask you to my room, but Mrs. Van Zandt will not allow it,” I said apologetically.

  “We are aware of her rules,” Mr. Comfort replied. “Patience is an important virtue in Alexandria, as thee hath surely learned by now.”

  Seeing my surprise at his antiquated vocabulary, he explained that he was a Quaker.

  “May I see your drawing of Samuel?” Mr. Morgan requested. “I believe I may know him.”

  After retrieving my sketch from my room, I opened it for him eagerly. He studied it for only a few seconds, then said with assurance, “Yes, sir, that’s Samuel all right.”

  “Did he ever speak of me? Of John?”

  “No, I’m sorry, the man I knew was mute.”

  “You are the second person to tell me that, sir. But unless he suffered some terrible accident, it would seem impossible.”

  “Mr. Stewart, I assure you he never spoke in my presence.”

  “I believe you. It’s just that … Might a slave-trader have cut his vocal cords?”

  “No, I don’t think so. There was no scar on his neck.”

  “Thank God for that. Tell me, was he in good spirits?”

  “I did not know him well. He seemed – how shall I put it? – he seemed resigned. He was not sad, but if I were a religious man,” he continued, looking at Mr. Comfort, “I would say there was a piece of his soul missing.”

  “And do you know what became of him?”

  “After Mr. Miller passed away, Samuel was sold to a slave-trader – a local man named Burton, who worked for a dealer from Baltimore by the name of Woolfolk. Mr. Burton died … well, it must be over ten years ago. I was told at the time that Samuel had been forced aboard a ship bound for Charleston.”

  I asked, “How did you come to know him, Mr. Morgan?”

  “I was a gardener at the time for a wealthy family. Samuel would help me on Sundays. He was most fond of plants and flowers. And then, when this happened” – he flicked his finger at his missing earlobe – “he treated the wound for me.”

  “Did you meet with an accident, sir?”

  Mr. Morgan laughed and said it was a trifling story not worth repeating. His Quaker friend replied cryptically, “Alexandria is a town of many accidents,” and would say no more.

  “And if you will excuse my curiosity, how did you learn of my presence in your city?”

  “It was Moon Mary,” Mr. Comfort replied. “She asked that I help thee. And Hussar is an old friend.”

  Mr. Morgan handed me back my sketch. “If I may speak plainly, sir, you are not safe here. People are saying that you are an English mischief-maker and a fervent opponent of the slave trade.”

  When I explained my ancestry, Mr. Comfort said, “Scottish or not, I have taken the liberty of booking thee a berth on a ship leaving this very morning for Charleston. And I would beseech thee to consider departing sooner rather than later.”

  “If Midnight is not here, then there’s nothing to keep me. Thank you for looking out for me.” I handed both Mr. Morgan and Mr. Comfort cards on which I’d written Violeta’s address. “In the event you learn anything more of Samuel, please send a letter to me care of this friend.”

  “May thee find Samuel in Charleston,” Mr. Comfort said gently.

  Mr. Morgan seconded this wish, shook my hand, and added, “And may you find that he is no longer mute.”

  XL

  You’s Dead Even If You’s Alive

  After my papa disappeared and Master Edward Roberson had me abducted from River Bend in March, he had some white men take me to his brother’s infernal cotton plantation. It was up-country a ways, near Columbia, and I worked my fingers bloody there for seven of the slowest months in history. Those days and nights were made of warm molasses. And they had everything wrong stuck to them, including me.

  I worked right on through the first three weeks of harvest time, up till early September. I was smelly as a skunk most of the time – addlebrained too – because Papa was gone and Mamma was dead. And caring for cotton is even worse on your spirit than it is on your back.

  I learned then that sadness can get so powerful that it owns you even more than the Master does.

  Master Edward took me up there because he thought my papa might wait a couple of months for tempers to settle, then sneak back into River Bend to rescue me.

  I guess I couldn’t rightly see how bringing me to that plantation was going to foil Papa’s plans forever. Presuming he was still alive and had any. Because he’d surely find out where I was if he snuck into River Bend and asked any of the slaves. But I hadn’t given Edward enough credit for wickedness. What he did just about outdid even himself. Because he called all the house and field slaves together and told them in a solemn voice that I’d been rushed out of the Big House in the n
ight to a hospital in Charleston shivering like a poor little cricket. Then, three days later, with worry creasing everybody’s brows and Lily squeezing on that brass cross around her neck like it had my life inside, Edward put on the most grief-stricken face he’d ever made and told everyone I was dead from the ague.

  It might have been nice to have some soft velvet on the interior of my coffin, but I had to settle for a pine box. My friends put me in the ground in the slave cemetery down by Christmas Creek. Inside my coffin, Master Edward must have stashed my weight in dirt wrapped in cloth, and maybe some old cheese too, because everybody told me later that I’d stunk so bad that Crow and some of the others had to hold their noses. Edward refused to open the lid, which was nailed closed, because he said my body was eaten up something horrible by disease.

  This plan worked just like he hoped, because about two months later a mulatto man stole into River Bend one night when Master Edward was gambling in Charleston and asked after me. Two of the field slaves told him that I was dead from the ague and already buried.

  The mulatto crept in and out real quick, like a shadow at sundown.

  I hoped that my papa was still somewhere nearby and might have sent someone there to get me out, or, if he was up North and earning wages, paid someone to come rescue me.

  *

  Master Edward had me brought back to River Bend in the middle of September. He reckoned that my father, if he was hiding somewhere, had heard by now that I was dead. You could see in his flashing eyes how much evil pleasure it gave him to think that he had fooled everyone.

  After a couple of weeks at River Bend, he even let me start going again to Charleston to do our marketing and buy plants.

  You ought to have seen the faces on everybody when I came back to River Bend and got out of the carriage in front of the piazza. Lily ran out shrieking from the kitchen. “Morri girl, Morri girl!” She fell to her knees mumbling prayers, thanking the Lord for delivering me from death. Then she wrapped me in her big old hug, taking turns kissing her cross and me. When she let go, Weaver stared at me as if I was a ghost. I took his hand, and he let out one of his big laughs, lifting me up onto his back like I was a little girl wanting a horsy ride. When he finally let me down and I stopped laughing, he asked me what heaven was like, and if it was pretty up there. “Heaven?” I said. “Heaven ain’t got nothing to do with Middle Country South Carolina, best I can figure out. If it does, then I just as soon go to hell next time.”

  Later, when we were alone on the piazza, Weaver said something I thought pretty darn intelligent: “I guess when the white folks say you’s dead, you’s dead even if you’s alive.”

  *

  I reckon the truth can kind of sneak up on you slowly, just like tragedy. Because it took another four months back at home for me to see that getting clean away from River Bend wasn’t all I wanted. No, ma’am. Not when Master Edward could decide that any of us was dead, any old time he liked.

  I got some much bigger notions once we celebrated Lily’s sixty-fifth birthday. That afternoon, Edward the Cockerel bit into the slice of cake we’d saved for him and cracked a tooth on a ceramic shard. From his hollering and stamping around, we knew he was going to make good on his threats and find another cook. “I always said she was gonna poison me, that prune-faced nigger!” he kept on shouting. He might have had Lily whipped, but she ran off and hid down by Christmas Creek till he calmed himself down.

  When I asked her about her clumsiness the next day, she pointed to her eyes.

  “They’re getting worse?” I asked.

  “Morri baby,” she said, chomping on her gums, “I can jes’ see shapes outta de lef’ one. But de right one’s still pretty darn good, I think. You go on an’ test me now.”

  I stepped five paces from her and asked her how many fingers I was holding up. I wasn’t holding up any, mind you. She squinted for a while, then said, “Dree.”

  “Looks like that good right eye is doing all the seeing for you, sure enough,” I replied cheerfully.

  So it wasn’t much of a surprise when the new cook arrived one day. Her name was Marybelle. She was about twenty-five, I’d have guessed, skinny as a blade of grass, with a big smile that made you tingle. I liked her right away. True, she talked too much, but she was right observant. She came to the conclusion that all Lily needed was a proper pair of spectacles and she could go on cooking for another ten years at least. Marybelle had a good heart, and she put up with all our meanness over those first weeks without a single complaint. We treated her bad because of her coming to replace Lily, you understand.

  When you consider that she’d already had two children and that both had been dragged off to God knows where, you knew how strong that girl was just to keep on waking up every day. We never questioned her about where her husband was. Something in her face told us not to.

  When I asked Master Edward if I could take Lily to Charleston to purchase the spectacles she needed to keep from killing us with bits of pottery, he glared at me like I’d lost my senses. “Buy Lily spectacles? Morri, I ain’t gonna spend a penny more on that old sow now that Marybelle’s here. Not after all the money I just spent without any guarantee.”

  No guarantee of what? I wanted to ask, but he was angry and I kept quiet.

  Crow and I pieced together the answer to that question from all he overheard in the sitting room. And what we learned was that there was a sticky complication to Marybelle’s purchase. We might then and there have suspected something bad was going to happen, but I guess because she was still so new to us we weren’t considering her well-being just yet.

  Master Edward had paid five hundred and fifty dollars for her to a planter named Philip Fiore, but Mr. Fiore had the sale stamped without what Edward called “any warrant as to her soundness.” This was owing to his having bought her without such a guarantee himself. Not that he thought of her as damaged goods. No, sir. He swore that she was in darn good health except for the rheumatism in her left shoulder.

  But not six weeks after Marybelle started work in the kitchen, just about the time we stopped being cold to her for coming along to replace Lily, she began complaining of aches in her belly. I treated her with teas that helped some, but not enough. Lily thought she might have been with child, but she denied lying with a man over the past six months.

  I looked at Weaver when she told us that, because he was right sweet on her. He shook his head real quick to say that he hadn’t been with her in that way, though I could see he was intending it. He was a born rogue, that one.

  Marybelle moved in with me, into my little side room by the kitchen, so I could care for her. She was suffering most of the time something terrible and hardly ever slept. I don’t know how, but she kept on cooking the whole time for Master Edward, Mistress Kitty, and the children. She was a whole lot stronger than she looked, I’ll tell you that.

  Edward the Cockerel finally figured he’d better do something drastic if he was to save her. So he took Marybelle to Dr. Lydell over in Charleston. He brought her around to another physician, and then another. By the time all those white men were done poking and probing, two days of misery had passed and she was begging to come home to drink some more of my teas. Finally, after more pressing and pulling, those physicians told Edward she had two schirrous tumors in her ovaries the size of oranges.

  Nobody around here knew what a schirrous tumor was, but if they were as big as oranges we knew that Marybelle wasn’t going to be with us much longer.

  Dr. Lydell told Master Edward that Marybelle’s tumors must have been growing in her for at least a year, judging from their volume. What that meant was that by the time she’d been bought from Philip Fiore, she’d already been carrying them in her belly for a good long while.

  “That bastard Fiore!” Master Edward exploded. “I’ll get my money back or I’ll kill him.”

  No, he wasn’t about to stand for paying five hundred and fifty dollars for a nigger cook with rotting oranges inside her.

  But when he
demanded his money back, Mr. Fiore insisted on taking poor Marybelle to see two more physicians of his own choosing. They came to River Bend after examining her up and down to tell Edward what they’d found. Since Mr. Fiore was the one paying them, nobody was much surprised to learn later from Crow that they swore her tumors were brand-new. Even if that wasn’t the case, they held that no one could be sure how long they’d been in Marybelle without what they called a “pathological dissection.” And so Master Edward could not justly ask for his money to be returned. Unless …

  “Unless,” Edward the Cockerel went on to suggest, “you go ahead and do your dissection. Then you’ll see I’m right.”

  We listened to Crow tell us about the heated quarrel that they all then had and the decision that was reached. They were going to settle the matter by cutting open Marybelle’s belly and peering inside. Then they’d sew her up and send her on her way.

  Maybe we weren’t evil enough to understand. Because it turned out that they couldn’t leave the oranges inside Marybelle. No, ma’am, they had to take them out to inspect them.

  Instead of having to operate while Marybelle screamed and made a general fuss, they decided it would be much better to “put the poor nigger-girl out of her misery.”

  We only learned what they’d done after they’d murdered Marybelle. Likely it was arsenic, since that’s a word Crow heard Dr. Lydell use, though Crow called it senick, not knowing what it was.

  They dissected her still warm, according to Dr. Lydell. One surgeon from each side of the quarrel worked away at her belly with their knives. Marybelle had to be warm, you understand, so they could get the tumors out in a good state. Anyone who knows anything about doctoring would know that, they told Master Edward.

  In the end, both sides agreed that the tumors taken from Marybelle were too well-formed and had created too many other littler growths in her belly to have been there only for a couple of months. So in the end Mr. Fiore had to return to Master Edward his five hundred and fifty dollars, though he was allowed to deduct the dollar and a half it cost to haul away the shredded body. It had to be disposed of in a special place, because by now it was filled up with arsenic.