Walk Through Darkness

by David Anthony Durham

  NINE The march began that Friday. The slaves’ chains were checked and rearranged in the morning light. William was bound by a short length of iron links between his ankles. His arms were likewise fastened together and connected by the wrists to Lemuel. They all wore collars that were chained to the persons in front of and behind them. They were forced to march in two groups of ten, shuffling close behind the person before them, with their arms tugged to the side by the pull of the person next to them. They were pushed to move quickly, but the chains hampered their steps and often somebody stumbled, causing momentary havoc in the lines. William struggled to keep from stepping on the ankles of the woman before him, but soon the woman’s bare heels were thick with congealed blood. Try as he might, he couldn’t help but kick her with the hard toes of his brogans.

  They were driven by five men: one who walked in front, three on horseback spread throughout the line, and one other who drove the food wagon. One was a Frenchman who spoke a languid dialect of Southern English, punctuated with French inflections; another was a stringy man from whose beard perpetual streams of tobacco-stained saliva dripped; the third, the man who drove the supply wagon, conveyed his thoughts primarily through profanity. The fourth driver was a tall boy with reddish hair. He pulled up the rear in silence and looked as though he was suspicious of all men, white or black. They were poor whites who took from this job a poor man’s pleasure—that of trafficking in the souls of those even less fortunate than themselves. They were quick to curse a slave’s slow progress, quick to cuff and to kick and to threaten. And they were thirsty men. They pulled hard on their jugs and came away from them squinting and blurry eyed from the alcohol they contained. William was sure that if it hadn’t been for the sweat and the toil of their work, each one of the men would have fallen down drunk from the amount they consumed. As it was, the drink only blackened their moods. They complained of headaches and damned the sweat that stung their eyes and sometimes stumbled over irregular ground, but they never tired of refilling their jugs.

  Among them, only the leader carried himself with a military bearing. He sat straight-backed in his saddle, rifle near at hand, watching all with eyes keen to seek out dissent in either the slaves or the drivers. If he tolerated the men’s drinking, it was because such was the way of these people. It was a drinking country, and they were the drinkers of the nation. He alone surveyed all with sober eyes, and this seemed enough to satisfy him. The slaves were bound and bound again. This journey was routine, the chattel below him not so different than other animals he might be asked to herd.

  The wagon driver sometimes fell behind them, but always passed them during the course of the day and had camp started for the evening. In what appeared to be a gesture of mercy, the young mother and her infant were allowed to ride in the wagon. The woman was naked from the waist up, chained by the wrists and fastened to eyebolts in the wagon bed. She was barely more than a child herself, with slim shoulders and small breasts that were round and taut with milk. Her eyes studied her baby, never lifting to meet the gazes of the other slaves or to take in the world as a whole. She sat cradling the child, nursing it, speaking to it in quiet tones that William couldn’t make out. He couldn’t see the baby, wrapped as it was in a stained cotton blanket, and he found himself longing to see the infant’s newly formed features. He wondered if a child born into such a world showed any sign of understanding it. Did he or she know what life held in store for them, or was it always to be a cruel surprise?

  By midday the voice of an older slave in the other group had become familiar to them all. He spoke encouraging words, hummed them almost, as if the simple directions he gave were hymns meant for a church gathering. He begged them to find a rhythm to their marching, to walk in time with one another, to feel the same breath within them and to share it between them. He urged them not to fight the march. “Lord no, don’t fight it. Don’t fight each other. Instead be the many limbs of a single being.” His words must have helped, for in listening to him William realized the day was passing.

  They camped that evening near a wooded creek well populated with frogs. The creatures set up a ruckus as the day dimmed and carried on long into the night, a croaking chorus with no discernible rhythm and yet somehow musical. The drivers, having doubly secured the slaves, plied themselves with even greater concentrations of liquor. They drained the whiskey keg straight into their tin cups and took the spirit undiluted. They bantered among themselves for some time, while the slaves sat just a few feet away, each hoping that the night would pass without further incident, each knowing that was unlikely. And indeed, before long the men’s revelry turned to distraction and desire. They chose a woman from among the slaves, unchained her and pulled her from the others. William looked away as they shoved her toward the back of the supply wagon. He set his head down, his temple flat on the dry ground, eyes open and staring out at a canted world. He was relieved when Lemuel began speaking, a low whisper but close enough to be heard.

  “One time …” the older man said. “This was back a good few years now. Had me an errand to do one afternoon.” His voice was softer now than William had ever heard it, though not from stealth. He didn’t speak as if he sought to conceal his words, but he seemed to have little breath with which to pronounce them. It was a cool afternoon, he said. He had come up a hillside and stood at the summit with the breeze against his face, the sweet kiss of it something he felt was meant for him alone at that moment. He dropped down into the next valley light on his feet, happy almost. And it was this joy that caused him to alter his normal course. He left the road and cut out through the woods, losing himself within the tree trunks. Only a momentary excursion, but one that reminded him of what it was like to experience the world with free eyes.

  “That’s how come I found them. Was three Negro boys and a girl.”

  He hadn’t known what they were doing at first, but as he drew nearer it became all too clear. They couldn’t’ve been no older than eleven or twelve. The boys had her pinned to the ground. From their seminude states it was clear that each planned to use her sexually. She struggled against them, but the boys were strong and fervent. One grabbed her by the hair and hitched up her skirt and fumbled to find his way into her backside. The sight sent Lemuel into a rage. He ran toward them and kicked that boy with a brogan hard into his face. He grabbed another and yanked his arm loose; tripped the last and sent him sprawling. Before he knew it he had a piece of half-decayed wood in his hands. He was lashing at the boys, throwing fists and jabbing, momentarily intent on killing them all, perhaps even the girl for the part she played in this.

  “There I was beating them,” Lemuel whispered. “Crazed about it. Like I wanted them children dead. Like the crime they was doing to each other was worse than any done to them. That’s how it felt.”

  But then, in the length of time it took for him to raise his hand in the air, he realized that even in this crime these children were each a victim. They were acting out scenes they’d witnessed before. They were using violence and sex as men had taught them, as much a part of the institution in which they were bound as chains and whips. They were criminals, yes, but in their crime they punished themselves. “And I knew they would hurt themselves like that forever. Not just them boys, I mean, but all of us. All of us that have to live with these things.”

  Lemuel was silent for a moment, but the pause seemed to make him uneasy. “So how do you live with that?” he asked. “Tell you what I do. I make for myself a string-together life. You take all the fine moments of your life. Eating honey from a cone. Cool stream water on your naked toes. Fireflies lighting a summer evening. Two children tagging and chasing each other. You take them fine moments and you pull them close and string them like a necklace of shells. In the bad times you hold on to them and remember all the reasons God gave you life in the first place. It’s what you hold onto that makes a life, so hold onto joy and let go the rest. Understand? Let go of nights like this, put it behind you and wait for the better times.”<
br />
  The two lay in silence, and before long that silence was once more punctuated by the sounds that Lemuel’s voice had blotted out. Sometime later, William felt the pull of the chains around his feet. They were yanked and shifted as the woman was refastened. He didn’t turn to look. He wanted to. He wanted somehow to reach out with his eyes and comfort her, but he didn’t trust himself to convey the message properly. Instead, he shut his eyes and prayed for sleep to numb him.

  He awoke later in the night and asked, “It’s what you remember that matters?” He was surprised at himself, but the question escaped him before he knew it. He wasn’t even sure that Lemuel was awake until the man answered.

  “That’s what I believe.”

  “Then which thing you remember better? Standing on that hill with a breeze on your face? Or the sight of them boys on that girl? You remember the joy or the anger?”

  The older man didn’t answer.

  The next day was a repeat of the one that came before, distinguished only because William had memories of that previous day and therefore this must be another. That evening they camped in a fallow clearing next to a cornfield. Bats appeared in the fading light, first a single bullet and then another, then a whole storm of them cutting the sky with their erratic, reasonless flights. Late that night he woke to a beautiful star-filled sky. He lay staring up at it, for a moment forgetting the discomfort of his fetters. He listened to the chorus of breathing around him. So many nasal voices exhaling up into the air, blending with the night calls of insects. It reminded him of Dover’s house, where, like now, bodies lay close to one another.

  When he first noticed the other noise he realized it had long been part of the night, a background sound indistinguishable from the rest and nearly disguised. But it was different. It was a quiet grinding, occasionally interrupted by the clink of iron on iron. He rose up on his elbow. His eyes went first to the guard on duty. It was the tobacco-chewer. He sat leaning against the base of a tree, a shotgun cradled in his lap. The brim of his hat shaded his face from the starlight, and for a moment William thought the man was staring at him. But as he didn’t move or respond in the slightest, William realized he was sleeping. The sound continued, a little louder now that his head was raised. He craned his body around and looked over toward Lemuel. That’s when he saw them. The two men lay half-prone. Even in the dim light he knew who they were: Saxon and his companion. They seemed to be engaged in some delicate work, the little one especially. He leaned in closer to the object than Saxon, and his shoulders moved backwards and forwards, like a man working with a tiny saw.

  As if feeling the touch of his eyes, the two men stopped their work. Their heads turned toward William in unison. There was little expression in their faces, neither threat nor surprise, nor any message that William could discern. He held their gazes for a moment, then looked away and lowered himself back down as if to sleep. A few moments later he heard the noise again.

  He closed his ears to it and looked up at the sky. He tried to think of nothing, but instead found himself thinking of many things: a flock of pigeons that had once darkened the sky from horizon to horizon in passing, a child from his youth who’d been his companion but was lost to him now, the shape of Dover’s back viewed from the side, with candlelight warm on her contours. He remembered all these things and many more, but eventually his mind settled on the limbs of the tree that had supported his childhood house. Nan told him that the tree house had been his father’s idea. That white man had dreamed it. He pleaded with Nan’s master for permission to build it, striking a bargain wherein he gave much of his own labor into the man’s service. He became a slave of sorts, so that he might live as man and wife with another slave. Though he knew little of housing construction, he set himself to the study of it. He couldn’t pay for proper lumber and made do with cast-offs from the mill. No two boards were ever of the same length or thickness. He accepted oak or pine or even lesser woods, and he used what tools he could borrow or rent. They were rough implements whose functions he learned or invented to suit his needs. He worked early in the morning and late in the evening, constructing around and into that great tree a strange, squat structure that seemed part of the tree itself. It was filled with cracks and weaknesses and was lopsided in a variety of ways. But for all that it did have its own charm. It didn’t take life too seriously, and yet it had as its central pillar a living tree so old it predated white settlement of the Chesapeake. Off to one side were the glistening waters of a harbor, and in the opposite direction lay the Bay itself. In summer what breeze there was found its way to the house, and in winter there was just enough shelter to break the force of the gales. The house suited Nan and she loved her white man for having been its architect. She used to tell her boy-child that if fate had been different he and his father would have fished together from the beach. On starlit nights they might have sat on the shore and watched the play of light across the water. If fate had allowed them a little peace, life just might have been tolerably beautiful.

  But William couldn’t feel the same way. As much as he loved his mother, he could not share in her adoration of this man. He had no image of him, no drawing or engraving. They had never spent those idyllic evenings fishing together. He was a man composed of nothing save Nan’s words. And on this her words were not enough. They lived in a world divided by race. Of course, he knew of many violations across the color lines, but these were crimes of lustful owners upon the owned. That was very different to the tale of love between the races that his mother claimed. There was nothing in it that he could twin with the world around him.

  William tried to roll to his other side, but was trapped by his chains and couldn’t complete the motion. He shook his head to clear it. Yes, he wanted the memory of that house, but he wanted nothing to do with the man who had built it. He lay there thankful that the man had died seven months after completing that house, starved to death by his own frozen jaw.

  Throughout the morning of the third day a haze hung in the shallow valleys. Only the insects seemed undeterred by the humidity Their calls rose with a staccato brilliance unparalleled by the visible landscape. They seemed not to belong to this land. Yet they were as integral a part of the countryside as the dust-fine dirt and the tilled fields and their distant workers. They marched through a town of slack-jawed inhabitants who watched the slaves pass from the shade of porches and storefronts. At the far edge of the town a white man sat in a wagon with an old Negro in the bed behind him. The Negro watched the group passing with somber eyes. Before they progressed he spoke words of encouragement and a reminder that the Lord awaits them all and will judge them all in their season and that patience and faith are the things He looks for foremost. The white man turned on hearing this, brought the butt end of his whip down on the speaking man’s head and commenced to beat him senseless. The coffle marched on.

  Around midmorning they climbed the bare back of a ridge-line and entered a woodland of crab apple and sugar maple. A few minutes into the shade the Frenchman, who walked ahead of the group by some fifty yards, stopped and stared at something at his feet. He lifted his rifle high, held it a moment, then slammed the butt end of it down on the ground. When the tobacco-chewer reached him, he reined in his horse, leaned over its shoulder, and peered down. The two exchanged some words. The first of the slaves bunched up behind them and slowed. The leader ribbed his horse forward a few steps, leaving William with a perfect view of all that was to follow.

  “What is it?” the leader called, but the others were not to have time to answer.

  The little man bound to Saxon twisted his wrists and shed the cuffs from both his hands. He reached for the chain attached to his neck and ripped it from his collar with one yank. From where William stood, it seemed he had rendered the iron of his cuffs suddenly molten, with no more strength than soft clay. It made no sense, such a simple action but one so profound in its effect. The links dropped into a swinging arch, free on one end. They were soon snapped taut by Saxon’s wrists, to
which they were still fast. The giant held his arms stiff-limbed before him and swung them up just as the tobacco-chewer turned. The links wrapped around the white man’s head and yanked him from the saddle. He hit the ground hard on his shoulder but didn’t come free of the stirrup. He dangled there with a leg entrapped and the horse in a frenzy. The white man’s head snapped and jerked with blows from the horse’s hooves. His hands slapped at the stirrup but could make no sense of it. An instant later he was hiding his face. The next his arms hung limp around him. The little one used the Frenchman’s moment of confusion against him. He was behind him in a second, even with his feet still bound, and he took him out at knee level, laying him flat on his back. William couldn’t see just what he was doing to him—crouched down as he was, staring wide-mouthed, full of terror and euphoria both—but he seemed to have the white man gripped about the neck. Another slave, the one who ate dirt, hobbled over to the two, pulling a portion of the line with him, and prepared to jump on the Frenchman’s lower body.

  The leader pulled his rifle from its scabbard and lifted it to sight, an action that inspired motion in all the slaves. They pressed themselves against the ground, squirming and pulling each other in chaotic directions and therefore moving nowhere. The leader’s first shot tore into the dirt-eater’s shoulder, taking with it the workings of the shoulder joint and leaving his arm dangling limp from what flesh remained. The boy stood stunned, staring at his injury, until another shot took him in the chest and ended all such contemplation. The white man was shouting out to all, white and black both, commanding order and action and calm. He might have prevailed even then, but Saxon swung his chains up into motion again. He was a good twenty yards from the horseman, but he moved with startling speed. He dragged those connected to his neck chain in his wake. The teen just behind him fought against him for a few futile seconds. Then he moved forward crouched just behind the big man, his eyes flashing with fear.