Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  In his letter to me, Isaac asked whether any of what was written in the article was true or if it was a concoction of the white authorities.

  I found it all a tangled confusion and read it over many times, as though it were in a foreign language. Morri showed greater insight, telling me that the authorities would never have wanted it known that there had been a successful escape from a plantation. Such tidings would have struck fear in all the white residents of the South. In consequence, the planters and police had fabricated this story. Better have it known that it was a simple crime of passion and avarice than a successful Negro flight to the North.

  “But how can they keep our escape a secret?” I asked her.

  “They can’t. But if they don’t admit it happened, then the slaves will think of it only as a rumor and the white folks as a damnable lie. I’d reckon that’s how all our history is going to be written.”

  It occurred to me then that similar unreported rebellions must have happened many times before, on plantations across the South. To this, Morri said, “I don’t expect there will be any record of any group of slaves having beaten them. Not a single printed page.”

  *

  So alert of mind did she prove on this and other occasions that I often shook my head in amazement at her being only fifteen years old. In my talks with her over the next few days about River Bend, I began to think of her as a friend – and truly her father’s daughter. Her presence, more than anything else, gave me back my true smile and voice, and I was pleased that when she looked at me now it was with affection.

  We talked quite a few times about what she wanted to do with her life. I favored finding her a private tutor in history, philosophy, music, and other essential subjects, with the end goal of preparing her for a university education. But she believed I was getting far ahead of myself. She said she wished for something simple: to earn her keep. She’d always enjoyed embroidering, and together we thought of the possibility of her making clothing on consignment, as Francisca had.

  I saw in her eyes that that would not have pleased her much. Thinking like Midnight, I said, “Just walk around the city. See what there is to see and it will come to you. I know it.”

  Then, while I had her fond attention, I risked yet one more tumble with my heart and told her that I was hoping to adopt her. As she might have agreed to this simply to thank me for helping her escape from River Bend, I took both her hands in my one, squeezed them tight, and said, “It would ease my mind to know I have followed your father’s instructions. As I think you know by now, I am not only greatly fond of you, but I admire you as well. But, Morri, you must not say yes unless it is truly what you want, even if your father would have desired it. I hasten to add that I shall never try to replace him in your heart – never. Think on it and tell me what you’ve decided in … let us say, a month.”

  Morri agreed, but in her eyes was the despair I’d provoked by speaking of her father as in his grave. I knew, however, that he himself had given me no other choice.

  *

  There still remained the question, of course, of who had committed the murders at River Bend. Separately, Morri and I came to the same conclusion: Crow.

  It had become clear to me over the course of my few days at River Bend that his spirit was not truly broken but hidden at most times deep inside him. After the slaves had escaped from River Bend, Crow must have taken his revenge.

  Yet the doors to the bedrooms of Big and Little Master Henry had been found locked after they’d had knives plunged into their necks. Without the key, how had Crow entered?

  Neither Morri nor I could answer that at first. But then I remembered the impressions of shells in clay he had shown me. I began to believe that he must have taken the bedroom keys from Big Master Henry or from Mistress Holly just long enough to make impressions in his molds, then had them fired by his blacksmith brother at Comingtee. Without my pressing him for information, Crow had told me that he’d also made impressions of silver dollars. I think he wanted me to guess the truth, so that those of us who escaped would know he had avenged himself.

  After murdering Master Edward and the others, Crow had probably put a pistol into Mr. Johnson’s hand in order to fool the white authorities. It seemed equally possible that he had left the bodies bound and bloody, just where he had murdered them. Whoever was in charge of the investigation might have concocted the version of events that had been printed in the newspaper to prevent fear on the part of the white citizenry, just as Morri had said. In that case, Crow would be hanged, and most likely in secret.

  But if he had planted all the clues and convinced Lily and the other slaves to say nothing, then the police might have believed him innocent. He might even have comforted Mistress Kitty in her grief.

  LVI

  Puzzling over the article and the events at River Bend with Morri did wonders for my sense of having some choices in life – and of having the strength to plan for my future.

  Violeta’s downturned glances in my presence gave me to understand, however, that she feared my newfound vigor. That she, too, might have preferred our relationship to take a friendlier and more honest course – that she was at the mercy of emotions she did not well understand – never occurred to me.

  Despite the evidence from my previous visit, I failed completely to understand that Violeta simply did not speak her mind. If I’d reflected carefully on our days together as children, I’d have seen this as consistent with her character. Likely, the desire to unburden herself to others had been beaten out of her, first at her home in Porto, and later in England.

  *

  The need to secure productive labor for the River Bend refugees soon eclipsed my personal concerns. To be of help to them, I gathered my courage to leave my room for more than a few hours at a time at the beginning of our fourth week of freedom. It immediately became plain to me that most of them were in need of a routine. Parker in particular had taken to drink and often came home cursing. Morri took me aside on my first day downstairs and told me how once, after an evening at a raucous tavern, he’d clouted Christmas-Eve right across her face, blackening his wife’s eye. I realized that I had to act swiftly and that to help them find work it would be necessary to show my empty coat-sleeve in public. That Morri and the others had – in some vague but determined way – been waiting for me to come down and offer my help from the very start became only too obvious to me. I gained considerable respect for their patience and tact with me.

  I passed the next days taking our River Bend guests around to shops and warehouses, endeavoring to find them steady work. Nearly always we received the same false smiles and swift refusals. I remember in particular the owner of a dry-goods store on Wall Street whom I tried to convince to offer work to Hopper-Anne, whose English was exceedingly good and clear. Not only did he stare at my missing arm, but he also had the cheek to say, “My customers do not expect to be waited on by a Negress, no matter how fair her skin might be or how nearly white she can talk.”

  For better or for worse, losing an arm had diminished none of my Highland temper, and I roundly lambasted him for his hypocrisy.

  After a time, it became only too apparent to me that my finding all the former slaves honest work was going to prove impossible. Fortunately, they understood this sooner than I did and took matters into their own hands.

  Through the friendships that Hopper-Anne, Lucy, and Christmas-Eve made at St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church, they were soon able to find work for Parker, Randolph, and Backbend, as stevedores for Harkness & Co., a private shipping concern on South Street. Hopper-Anne was contracted soon afterward at a black-owned bakery on Chambers Street, and Christmas-Eve and Lucy started as scullery maids at Spear Tavern on Broadway.

  Violeta offered invaluable assistance to the rest. She sat at her desk in her sitting room and composed a moving letter soliciting advice from Francis Lemoyne, the eldest son of the old man she had cared for. Though he harbored a lingering resentment over her inheritance of the
house we were encamped in at present, he nevertheless contacted some Quaker farmers he knew and succeeded in obtaining offers of work for all the former slaves of River Bend who wished for a life in a rural setting.

  In the end, all but Morri and Randolph seized this opportunity. Randolph decided to remain as a stevedore in New York with his children, and we were soon able to find them a suitable flat on Bowling Green.

  “No way I’m ever going back to a life of field work,” Morri told me. “You know, John, life doesn’t get much better than getting away with saying no.”

  *

  Several days later, Morri came home singing and panting at the same time. She was so electric that she went hopping around the sitting room. While I puffed on my pipe, she told me that on one of her walks through the city she’d met the headmaster of the Church Street School for Negro Children, a former runaway named William Arthur. “He told me I could start giving reading and writing lessons right away! He doesn’t mind that I don’t speak so perfectly. Or that I’m not much older than the children. He doesn’t mind one drop!”

  After we’d drunk a wee glass of port wine to her success, she sat on the arm of my chair and squeezed my hand hard. Her face was scrunched up tight, as though she had a big secret to tell me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’d like for you to adopt me, John, but only on the condition that if my father returns, he can adopt me back.”

  *

  I received the first of my mother’s replies to my letters during our seventh week in New York. John, she wrote, the nib of her pen having scratched through the paper with irritation, if you do not tell me precisely the nature of your “mishap” in South Carolina in your next letter (to be written today!), then I promise you I shall show up on your doorstep uninvited and give you a lecture of a kind that you have never heard, but plainly ought to have!

  A few days later, while I was still pondering how to write of my injury to my mother, Backbend, Lucy, Hopper-Anne, Scooper, Parker, Christmas-Eve, Frederick, Sarah, Taylor, and Martha boarded carriages in front of Violeta’s house for the journey sixty miles north to two Quaker farms located near the town of Southeast. They would earn good steady wages and their children would be able to attend a local schoolhouse. The Quakers – who by now seemed to represent to me the possibility for goodness in our world – had generously agreed to help them build cottages as well.

  As their carriages departed, I heard Morri humming “Barbara Allen” to herself. I joined her for a verse. Thankfully, this was to set me thinking seriously again about how to find Midnight.

  LVII

  In all my weeks of anguish I had hardly forgotten Midnight, but rereading his letter in New York had convinced me that he must have had a vision of his own end – a Mantis-dream.

  I see now that – even more than the loss of my arm or Violeta’s distance – this passive acceptance of his death had made my weeks of solitude so grim. I have discovered that my times of greatest misery have always been related to a feeling of defeat, and I have nearly always found my way back to health by beginning a new campaign.

  So, with Mother’s gold coins and what was left of my savings, I decided to publish a request for Midnight – or anyone knowing of his fate – to write to me. I would place these advertisements in newspapers all over the United States, from New York to the western territories, every week for as long as it took to receive a reply. Of course, even if he was still alive, I could not be sure that he was in the habit of reading news of any sort, but there was every likelihood that he knew someone who was.

  Morri was eager to help write our announcement, which we finalized as follows:

  Seeking Midnight, Samuel, or Tsamma. We saw you from afar and we are dying of hunger.

  Anyone with information, please write to the Gemsbok care of Senhora Violeta, 73 John Street, New York.

  I have found a beautiful feather that you thought was lost to you forever and have it safe with me. Go slow.

  *

  We did not wish to put anything in the announcement about River Bend or mention Morri’s name, fearing the attention of slave-traders who might wish to kidnap her.

  The second part of my plan was to become my most important work in America. I decided to compile a list of slaves and freed blacks in South Carolina, along with their residences. Later, I would add the other states of the South. This seemed essential to me, for whenever the great destruction of slavery finally came, in five years or fifty, those who had been in bondage would face the near-impossible task of finding brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children who had been lost to them for many years. They would desperately need such a list.

  It was a huge undertaking, and I knew it would take many years and enormous effort to be even close to complete. Even so, the more I thought of the plan, the more exciting it became.

  To create my list, I knew I would need hundreds of correspondents from all over South Carolina – people willing to survey the slaves, freed blacks, and mulattos in their vicinity and write down their full names and locations, as well as those of their kin.

  The Quakers would help, I was quite sure, as indeed they have. And among the congregation of Jews in Charleston, I have so far found several industrious and generous souls as well.

  My first correspondents were Isaac and Luisa, naturally enough. I wrote to them shortly after I received their letter, giving them an account of our escape, and they have so far provided me with one hundred and twelve names and locations.

  Census reports have indicated that at least two hundred and sixty thousand Negroes are held in bondage in South Carolina alone, and so I plainly have much work in my future. But I am neither deterred nor daunted. The list will grow exponentially as more people learn of it. All of nature itself is on my side in this battle, I am certain.

  *

  On November the Fourteenth, a week after the former slaves departed for upstate New York, I signed Morri’s adoption papers. As I was not an American citizen, this procedure was handled through the British Embassy. She decided to register herself as Memoria Tsamma Stewart, which I thought a splendid and unique name. To celebrate, she and I took a ferry boat to Brooklyn, where we dined at a waterfront tavern that admitted Negroes. I drank a wee bit too much whiskey to celebrate, but Morri guided me safely back to our ferry boat.

  I had kept away from the Church Street School till then in order to avoid embarrassing her, but I now decided to make a fatherly inspection of her place of work. Sitting at the back of her classroom, the pride I felt in seeing her free and useful confirmed to me that I had not been wrong in going to watch her.

  While listening to her children read aloud a fable by Aesop, I felt Midnight’s presence next to me. I could see him grinning like a mad fool.

  After visiting Morri’s school, I ceased questioning whether losing my arm had been a just sacrifice for her freedom. Seeing the little ones flocked around her, tugging on the bright crimson dress I’d bought for her, I stopped comparing miseries, as she herself had advised. I am grateful for that, for at one time I thought my selfishness would be my undoing.

  *

  Other events also conspired to restore me to full and honest vigor, the first of which was completely unexpected.

  I still had not written back to my mother explaining my injury. This cowardice, combined with my longing for my daughters and my uncertainty as to what would now be best for them, plunged me into a sudden spiral of despair and insomnia. I locked my door and would allow neither Morri nor Violeta inside. I smoked too much and made myself sick. What I did not know was that Violeta had another key. She let herself into my room before dawn on the Nineteenth of November, while I was smoking Papa’s pipe like a fiend, and announced, “I can bear our struggle no longer, John. If you promise to say nothing afterward about what has taken place between us or what you wish to happen in the future, I shall lie with you now.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked, sensing both our destinies turning around this moment.
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br />   “Yes,” she replied.

  I walked to her, hope and gratitude in my heart. Kissing her lips – as I’d wanted to for more than two decades – sent such an electric charge through me that I felt myself tugged out of my own body.

  To be with her meant everything to me; I was at the center of the world. There, deep down inside our union, my lost arm was not so burdensome a handicap as I had thought.

  Afterward, she lay her head against my shoulder and drifted off to sleep.

  At length, I thought of Francisca. She seemed so very different from Violeta; they were women born under constellations guarding separate territories of the night. Perhaps it was that, more than anything else, that made me believe my wife would not begrudge me any happiness I might now find in my new life.

  I stroked Violeta’s hair while she slept, as I’d always desired. The simple movement of my fingers calmed me, and the soft feel of her made me believe that I’d finally reached home. I knew now that all would be well between us.

  Indeed, over the next weeks, our relations were everything I’d hoped they’d become. We went for long walks into the northern wilds of Manhattan Island, watching blue jays, kingfishers, and other birds more unfamiliar to me. She collected fire-colored oak leaves, and I bought her flowers. We munched chestnuts in the parks and chased each other up the staircase. For the American holiday of Thanksgiving she prepared a turkey with cranberry preserves. For a sweet, she made me rabanadas, as my mother had taught her. We never discussed what had taken place between us because there was now no need. In the silence of our bed at night, it seemed to me we’d finally made up for Daniel’s death. Our union was a triumph over betrayals, madness, gravestones, and forever good-byes. It was proof that resurrection was possible. Perhaps it was even another miracle.

  I was not sure if Violeta could have a child at this late date, but when we merged in the night I desperately hoped that she could.