by Carl Waters
Behind her, men and porters carried luggage, finding pieces and moving them toward the opening of the lower deck. Tom, not wanting to be in the way, moved to the rail as well, thinking that he’d be best served helping this woman find her husband.
For, he thought, if he could help this couple have a chance to say farewell to one another, perhaps his soul would rest a bit easier about having left his own wife and family behind.
Staring out at the people on the shore, though, he quickly forgot to look for anyone in particular—not that he could have helped much, having no idea what Lucy’s husband looked like. There were so many people there, though, they nearly blurred together. There were those who were taking luggage to and fro, those who were disembarking from the ships, and those who were being handled as baggage themselves. Tom noticed two other boats in the port and could see that they were both doing a lively trade in trips for white men and women with their children. The women strolled by in their bright colors, with parasols propped on their shoulders, while the men ushered them along and the children chased after.
Separate from these worthy members of society he saw the traders towing and pushing and shoving at their gangs of slaves, each of the black folk chained and looking as though all hope was lost.
Here and there, he spotted black men laboring among the white workers of the docks, tying or untying ropes, gesturing for traffic to go this way or that, and even helping white ladies cross tricky bits of ground. Who were those people, he wondered, and how had they come here? What were their stories?
At the thought, he narrowed his focus. Was one of those men Lucy’s husband? How would he tell? He turned, thinking to find Lucy and ask her, but saw that she was gone from his side.
Moments later, he heard her start screaming.
He rushed back to where he’d seen her baby last and found the girl frantically sorting through the luggage and boxes there, her screams piercing the air around her.
“My baby!” she screeched. “My baby is gone!”
Tom, alarmed at the thought of the little one on his own, began digging through boxes and luggage as well, desperately listening for any sound of the child. Where could the boy have gone? Had he been knocked off his perch by one of the men roughly gathering luggage nearby?
Moments later—and far earlier than the hours the captain had promised—Tom felt the boat jerk, shudder, and then begin humming again. Looking out onto the water, he could see that they were in fact moving away from the port—already!—and back out into the river.
“We’re leaving,” he said, to no one in particular.
Lucy, hearing him, began shrieking anew. “They’ve taken him!” she sobbed. “Someone has taken him, I just know it!”
At that point, Haley appeared back on the scene, looking quite proud of himself and stuffing something into his pocket.
“Lucy,” said the trader, “your child’s gone. You may as well know it first as last. You see, I knew you couldn’t take him down South, and I got a chance to sell him to a first-rate family that’ll raise him better’n you can.”
The wild look of anguish and utter despair that the woman cast on him might have disturbed anyone else, but the trader only regarded the mortal anguish, her clenched hands, her suffocating breaths, with cool collection. Tom, on the other hand, could see the girl’s temperature rising and wondered if she might die right then and there, for she looked as though her head might spin off her shoulders at any moment. But she had stopped sobbing.
This shot, he thought, had passed straight and true through her heart, and no amount of crying was going to fix the way he knew she now felt.
Dizzily, she sat down, her slack hands falling lifeless by her side. Her eyes looked straight forward, but she saw nothing. All the noise and hum of the boat, the groaning of the machinery, mingled dreamily around them, but the girl looked quite calm. Hopeless.
“I know this comes kind of hard at first, Lucy,” said the trader, “but such a smart, sensible gal as you are won’t give way to it. You see, it’s necessary and can’t be helped!”
“Don’t, Mas’r, don’t!” said the woman, with a voice smothered in grief.
“You’re a smart wench, Lucy,” he persisted. “I mean to do well by you and get you a nice place downriver. And you’ll soon get another husband, such a likely gal as you—”
“Mas’r, if you only won’t talk to me now,” she said quietly. “For nothin’ you can say will bring me comfort,” the woman said turning away and burying her head in her cloak.
Once Haley was gone, Tom strode over and put his hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Know just how you feelin’, girl,” he said gently. “Been taken from my family as well. My own children, left behind.”
“Were they sold away from you, without any g’bye ?” she asked, her shoulders heaving.
Tom pursed his lips. “No, miss, they wasn’t. I was sold away from them.”
“But did you get to say g’bye ?” she asked again.
Tom, then, had to admit that he had said good-bye, and that he’d had nearly a week with his family before he’d been taken away. And now, looking down at a girl who’d lost the hope of her husband, her home, and her child, all within a few days, he thought that perhaps he’d been right this whole time. Perhaps the Lord had been watching out for him, after all, and had given Tom as much as He could within the bounds of the real world.
* * *
Tom had taken himself away from the girl and left her to her sorrow, and now sat on the floor, praying and thinking. To him, this was something unutterably horrible and cruel, because he couldn’t bring himself to look at it as just a trade. He couldn’t comfort himself the way Haley did—by saying that it was the best thing for the boy, or for the mother herself. His very soul bled for what seemed to him the wrongs done to the poor, suffering thing that lay like a crushed reed on the boxes.
He went back inside and drew near and tried again to say something, but she only groaned. Honestly, and with tears running down his own cheeks, he spoke of a heaven of love in the skies, of a pitying Jesus, and an eternal home. But the woman’s ear was deaf with anguish, and the palsied heart could not feel.
Night came on, and one after another the voices above of business or pleasure died away until all on the boat were sleeping and the ripples at the prow were plainly heard. Tom stretched himself out on a box, and there, as he lay, he heard smothered sobbing from the woman who had just lost her child.
“Oh! What shall I do? Oh Lord! Oh good Lord, do help me!” she cried.
He heard her crying to herself but knew that he could bring her no comfort, and so closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
At midnight, he woke with a sudden start. Something or someone had passed quickly by him to the side of the boat, and he heard a splash in the water. Moments later, Haley appeared at his side.
“I heard a splash,” he said under his breath. “Is everyone here? All my slaves present and accounted for?”
Tom shook his head, for he didn’t know, but one look around showed him that John and Albert were indeed in their places still.
When he turned and searched for the girl, however, he saw that she was gone.
He put the pieces together and realized what had happened. The woman, unable to bear the betrayal of her master, the loss of her husband, and then the loss of her son, had gone over the side of the ship to still her poor bleeding heart in the waters. Tom let out a sob at this terrible waste of life but had no time to think of it now, for Haley grabbed his arm.
“She’s gone into the water,” he hissed. “Quick, boy, get to the railin’ and look for her!”
Without waiting for an answer, Haley himself rushed toward the side of the boat, peering through the night as though he’d peel back the darkness to find the girl he believed belonged to him.
“Clever, likely wench,” he mumbled to himself. “Can’t have gone far. Sure she’s just below us, waitin’ to be rescued.”
Tom joined him at the rail and leane
d over the water, staring into it as well. But all was black, and he could tell with just a glance that there was no girl to be had there. The boat was moving quickly—more quickly than any girl could swim, at any rate—and they would have left her behind in seconds. Beyond that, he doubted whether the girl could swim at all. Or whether she’d had any will to do so. For it didn’t take a smart man to realize that she’d gone over the side with but one goal: death.
“She ain’t there, Mas’r,” he said quietly. “She gone under, and I ’spect she’s dead already.”
“She must be there!” Haley replied harshly. “I paid good money for that girl, an’ if you value your own life, you’ll find her!”
Tom lifted his eyebrows at this logic. He wasn’t an overly educated man, but he knew that if the girl had sought to die, then there would be no finding her. Regardless of what Haley thought of it.
“Where alive is that gal?” Haley muttered.
Tom, who had learned the wisdom of keeping counsel, did not feel as though he needed to say anything more than that he didn’t know.
Finally, and to Tom’s great relief, Haley turned away from the rail, calling it a bad job, overall, and walked slowly back toward the ladder. He didn’t seem as amazed as he might have, though, and Tom wondered how often the man had seen this sort of thing.
“Devilishly unlucky,” he swore. “That gal was nothing but baggage, anyhow! If things keep going this way, I won’t make a cent on this trip.”
Tom watched the man make his way up the ladder, thinking something else entirely—that he wished he could have saved the girl and showed her a happier way. Then he shook his head. The girl hadn’t wanted to be saved, he told himself, and no matter how much he’d wanted to, he doubted whether he could have broken through that particular wall.
20
George stalked the first two blocks of his walk home, his mind raging at the unfairness of the situation. He’d come all the way to Canada to work as a free man—to live his own life and make his own way—and then he’d gone out of his way to find a job that would use his talents to the best advantage. A job in a machinist’s shop, just as he’d always dreamed. He had come to this country with dreams and ideas of what he would build when he had the chance, and now he’d finally found the place, the tools, and the environment in which to do it.
And the man who owned the shop wouldn’t allow him to take part in any new machinery.
He jerked angrily to the side to get out of the way of a large family, and found himself up against the window of a dressmaker’s shop. He scowled anew at that, for it only served to remind him that his own Eliza—his wife, no less!—had spoken of working for a dressmaker and bringing money into the household herself.
“When she should be home taking care of our boy, and I should be out making all the money we need,” he growled, feeling far darker than he had that morning when he awoke.
Certainly he’d found the means to support the family, working with Mr. White, but at what cost? Would he be able to bear being in such a shop working only with broken-down contraptions for customers, rather than new creations from his own head? Sweeping, dusting, and no doubt doing other menial tasks such as scouring metal, when he should be working on new drawings and even building with his own two hands?
Once again, he found himself at a crossroads. Take the job and all that came with it, or stand on principle and wait for the opportunity that would truly satisfy him. Which would he choose? He turned sharply toward home and began striding quickly forward once again, as if the action would soothe his frantic mind. For he truly didn’t know which was right. He needed to support his family, and they must move from Jim’s house or begin pulling their own weight. That was the truth of the matter. But was he willing to sacrifice his own opportunities for that?
But as he walked, his mind did begin to grow calmer, and before long he started to think—actually think—about what Mr. White had said. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” he murmured to himself, remembering something that he’d read somewhere. That was exactly what Mr. White was saying—that doing the menial work would give him not only the time, but the motivation to think of new ways to do things. Better ways to do things. For he would be keen to move up from his position of cleaning, dusting, and fixing old broken machinery.
And furthermore, working with that old broken machinery would give him a chance to study the way things were made and why they were breaking. If he was dealing with machines that weren’t working the way they should, he would have the chance to figure out what had worn out or jammed or broken. And if he knew that, he realized, he would be able to improve upon it. Construct better machines—machines that they could then build and perhaps sell for more money. Once he proved himself, Mr. White would allow George to work on better projects. He’d very nearly promised to do so.
Abruptly George was reminded of thinking these same sorts of things in the hemp factory back in Kentucky. When Mr. Harris had first sent him there, George had spent weeks hating his life. There were weeks of cleaning the hemp by hand and staring at his bruised and bloodied knuckles every night, wondering if this was all life held for him. He had wondered if he’d die there, a man with nothing more to his name than the calloused and worn-out hands of a common slave in a hemp factory. He had hated the mind-numbing work, both for what it did to his body and for what it did to his mind, for he’d been more bored than he could have imagined, and that had added to his dissatisfaction.
But in the end, those long hours on the hemp line, when he’d had nothing else to think about, had led to his hemp-cleaning machine. He’d had hour upon hour to consider how it might be done and then to walk through the machine mentally, finding things that would and wouldn’t work and improving on them, or taking them out entirely. He’d had so much time to think that when he finally sat down to draw the thing and figure the measurements, he’d known them by heart. The drawings had been done quickly, and the building of the machine …
Well. That had taken little more than a day. He’d known it as well as the back of his hand, thanks to all the time he had to think.
Mr. White was right, he realized, smiling to himself. That crafty old man had seemed like a closed-minded tyrant when George first heard his plans, but now that he thought on it …
“The old man is on to something,” he said quietly, and his smile became a grin, and then a laugh.
Yes, he would do just fine in the machinist’s shop. And before long he would be inventing new machines. And then there would be no stopping him.
21
The next day flew by for George, who showed up bright and early at the machinist’s, ready to get started. Mr. White immediately put him to work in the back, cleaning the tools and extra gears, many of which had sat around for weeks and were gathering a fine layer of dust. As George cleaned, Mr. White went to work on a machine he was designing for cleaning a floor, made up of a handle for pushing and a circular mechanism with cloths. The two of them began talking over their work, telling their various stories, and before long George found out that Mr. White did indeed have grandchildren—seven of them. His wife had died years earlier. He’d been born and raised in Quebec and had never even been to the States. He protested vehemently against the institution of slavery, which he called historically untenable and terribly unfair.
George filed the first description away for later, when he had access to his journal, and launched into his own story. He’d never talked to a white man about his life as a slave before, but there was something about White that made him think he could trust this man. The way he listened, without judgment or complaint, made George feel as though he could say anything at all. When White did offer an opinion, comment, or question, it was well thought out and led George into deeper thought rather than anger or frustration. This was a new experience for him, and he reveled in it.
When the day was over, George was both surprised and pleased to find himself anxious to come back the next day and learn more. He’d not touc
hed a machine all day, but he’d handled tools and plenty of wood and metal and was beginning to feel centered again. That night he slept better than he could ever remember sleeping before.
* * *
The following morning, George walked into the shop to find Mr. White scurrying around busily, wrapping this and adjusting that, while taking short stops at the cash register to jot down a note or two, or rip a page out of the receipt book and stuff it into his pocket.
“What are you doing?” George asked curiously, wondering if they were expecting some important visitor.
Mr. White looked up as if he was surprised at the interruption. “Oh, it’s you!” he said with a smile. “Apologies, my boy, but I hadn’t expected you quite so early, and my old brain tends to forget that I’ve got a new body in the shop.” He looked down at what he was doing—tying string around a small package wrapped in brown paper—and laughed to himself. “It’s delivery day, to be honest, and we were so busy talking last night that I forgot that things weren’t prepared. I generally take one day to make all the deliveries, so that I’m out of the shop for only the one amount of time. But it means getting everything ready at once. Do you mind?”
And with that small warning, Mr. White began spouting out orders for George. Wrap this. Find that. Did we finish that machine? How about this one that needed the new spool? Is there a receipt for that?
George found himself rushing around the shop, trying to remember exactly what he had seen the day before, and if any of it matched the descriptions given to him by the machinist. He hadn’t worked on any of the machines himself, of course, but he’d seen them around the shop and was able to tell Mr. White where they were and if they’d been finished or were still in pieces. He wrote a number of receipts, based on the information Mr. White gave him, and wrapped a number of packages, both big and small, for delivery.
