Soon Be Free

by Lois Ruby

  Heading up to the deck for a game of mumblety-peg, Will said, “We should get off in Cairo. It’s too risky going even the short distance to Paducah. Slave catchers are just itching to get their hands on the likes of Solomon.”

  James shook his head. “Paducah,” he insisted. “We’ve got it all worked out to keep Solomon safe beside us. We’ll do it after supper, when people wander out here on the deck. Does thee remember what to do?”

  Will nodded, but he sure didn’t look optimistic.

  • • •

  The utter perfection of the night helped. The moon was full and as yellow as butter. Stars hung from the sky like flickering Christmas candles. Lots of passengers had a yen to stroll in the moonlight, for there wasn’t a whisper of wind; the plan wouldn’t work on a windy night, of course. When a good crowd had assembled, James began to twirl in an ever-widening circle.

  “What’s the boy doing?” someone asked.

  “Do you suppose he’s got the Holy Spirit in him?” asked another.

  “More likely the devil.”

  James pretended not to hear them. He stumbled over to the railing and climbed to its ledge, which was just wide enough for his shoe. “Look, I can fly!”

  “Get down, you fool,” Will yelled.

  “Thee’s just jealous because thee can’t fly.” He pointed to an old dowager. “Lady, can thee fly?”

  “My word!” she shouted.

  “Mister, can thee fly? I mean, can you fly? I think not, none of you have wings. But I have.” James flapped his arms as the boat rocked gently.

  “Somebody send for the captain!”

  Two strong men carefully approached James, and not a moment too soon, because he opened his eyes and saw the black river swirling below, and his courage was slipping away. In slow synchronization, the men reached out and wrapped their arms around James’s legs until he folded over the back of one of them, flapping his wings like a crazed vulture. “I can fly! I can fly!”

  The captain appeared on deck, still buttoning his shirt. “What’s the ruckus?”

  Will said, “Captain, sir, I’m afraid my brother has slipped out of his head again. Does it every four, five days. It’s worse on full-moon nights like this. But, don’t worry, we’re taking him home to our pa.”

  “Look, Captain, I can fly! I can fly!” James shouted.

  “For God’s sake, calm the lad down,” the captain commanded.

  “Can’t,” said Will. “The only person on this boat who can talk to James when he gets this way is Solomon Jefferson.”

  “Well, where is the man?” asked the captain. “Bring him out here before this boy does mortal damage to himself and my boat.”

  “Sir, Solomon Jefferson is a black man. You don’t cotton to having black folks mingling with white folks on the Francie Mulryan.”

  “This is an emergency. Somebody locate that Negro.”

  And that’s how it happened that Solomon was allowed to stay in their cabin and by their side every remaining minute of the journey, until two days later when they docked at Paducah, Kentucky, and the real madness began.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SILENT SCREAM

  Shaking outside the bathroom door, I gasped when the door crept open a few inches and an arm reached out. Raymond Berk crooked his arm around my neck and slapped his hand across my mouth. He kicked the bathroom door open and yanked me inside. I stumbled across a heap of rubble on the floor. The claw-foot bathtub broke my fall with a punishing thrust to my stomach.

  Raymond twisted my arm behind my back. His breath was hot and wet in my ear. “Make a peep,” he whispered, “and I’ll snap your arm like a twig off an apple tree.”

  Maybe they don’t know Mom and Dad are gone. They can’t take chances. My eyes swept around the bathroom, scouting for an escape, a plan, anything. The whole linen cabinet was emptied on the floor—towels, sheets, Ajax, shampoo, toothpaste, toilet paper, bath mats, and a nubby old heating pad. They’d removed two shelves, which were stacked against the vanity, and now I saw that Mattie was crouched inside the closet, moving a large magnet inch by inch across the wall. She was listening to the wall sounds with a doctor’s stethoscope.

  Why did I waste my time with a jelly jar? I wondered while Raymond kept his hand clasped over my mouth. I should have been afraid; these were dangerous people, and I was very vulnerable in my Thoreau nightshirt that barely reached midthigh. But, instead of fear, I was boiling over with rage. How dare they do this to me! I felt my eyes smoldering at the scene around me.

  “Hold it. I think I hear something in here,” Mattie said.

  He had let up on my arm a bit, but now he tightened his grip again. “What did you find in our stuff, hunh, Ginger?”

  I shook my head. No, nothing.

  But Raymond didn’t believe me. “Me and Mattie are taking you out for a little adventure, Ginger.” He yanked on my hair. “Man, how I do hate red hair. Yup, a little moonlight river rafting. River’s pretty high after all these storms, eh?”

  His nails dug into my flesh. His other hand was flat against my lips. I worked my mouth open to catch a breath of air between his fingers and nearly heaved. I wanted to spit out the salty taste of his callused fingers. “Dad!” I yelled.

  He cocked his head toward the door. “I don’t hear anything, do you? When Mommy and Daddy stagger home and come in to see if Baby Ginger’s breathing, why, they’ll find just an empty bed.”

  He knew! I thought of that black river, water rolling, rolling.

  Mattie backed out of the closet and signaled for Raymond to check out her finding. Her broad face towered over mine. She wore a fruity perfume that made it even harder for me to breathe. She handed Raymond a pillowcase.

  He let go of my arm. I rubbed my throbbing shoulder and counted red nail tracks against the strained, bloodless white of my arm. But now he was snapping the pillowcase open. He meant to smother me! I backed toward the door, over the rubble, and slid down out of his grasp, like a greased pig.

  Raymond whisked the pillowcase over my head. I sucked it into my mouth, tasting lint and cool air. One of them tore a strip from a sheet and tied it around my neck, while the other one stuffed a wad of something thick into my mouth. No more cool air. Dry, dry mouth. I could hardly swallow.

  Dad! I screamed silently.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  March 1857

  NOT EVERYBODY GETS FREE

  They reached Paducah on a Sunday. James had heard from the captain (who’d been checking on him several times a day after his “mad” spell) that Paducah was named for some words in the Chickasaw language that meant place where wild grapes hang. He smelled the sweet fruit and longed to lie down in a grape arbor and let those juicy, purple marbles drop into his mouth.

  “We’ve got a greeting committee,” Will pointed out.

  On the shore hundreds of black people stood in silent clumps, some weeping, some waving kerchiefs, all watching something clattering down the road. James turned to get a better look. A black fiddler scratched out a mournful dirge on a violin badly in need of tuning. He led a solemn parade, a coffle of some forty or fifty men connected by short chains and all of them fastened to a long chain that draped between each two men. The clanging of those chains chilled James until he shivered, despite the hot Kentucky sun.

  Behind the men in single file walked a smaller group of women, tied wrist-to-wrist. Some had babies scissored on their hips; some young children walked among the women. Each person in the coffle was barefooted. A line of guards watched their every step and shoved them back in line if they strayed even a few inches.

  In horror, James asked, “Where are they going, Solomon?”

  “Being sold down the river.”

  “Where to?”

  “Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama. Places where cotton grows. Miz Lizbet told me about it,” he said bitterly. “It’s Kentucky’s pride to sell so many slaves South.”

  Will paced and sucked on sunflower seeds. “Well, why don’t they put u
p a fight?”

  Solomon gave him a sad stare. “Does it look to you like they’ve got a prayer of a chance? One falls, they all fall.”

  “They don’t have to go like sheep.”

  “You, Mr. Will, you’re a maverick. These folks have never had a chance to be anything but the flock herded by cruel overseers. But they do fight, sometimes. There are stories about men filing off their chains once they get on the boats and overthrowing some of the guards, but all it amounts to is a big stir. When all the bodies are counted, the rebels end up back in chains. Hunh-uh, this isn’t the time to fight. You got to get to them when the odds are in their favor. You understand odds, Mr. Will. I saw you stacking up chips at the poker table. We got to play our cards right to get those folks free over in Owensboro.”

  Will nodded.

  “So all these people are here to say good-bye to their friends?” asked James.

  “Their husbands and fathers and sons. Those sisters tied together? Those are their daughters and wives. Owners, they don’t care if a family gets busted up, the mother goes to a plantation in Alabama, the daddy stays in a hemp factory in Kentucky. To them it’s no different from pulling away pups just been weaned.”

  James imagined Solomon, his friend, chained to a dozen other men and led barefooted away from the people he loved. James would be standing on the sidelines with his family and the Olneys, who were the closest folks Solomon had to a family, and even Miz Lizbet, all of them standing by and just letting this terrible thing happen. Well, Ma wouldn’t have. He remembered her saying that nobody owns another human being. And yet these folks were being sold and shipped off like livestock.

  Solomon had the wall of his back to James, and James wasn’t sure why. Was it grief? Shame? Anyway, he honored Solomon’s privacy, until Will spit out a mouthful of sunflower husks and said gruffly, “Come on. We’ve got ninety miles to Owensboro.”

  First they had to repack, because they couldn’t haul Ma’s basket trunk all that distance. Most of the food was gone except for some chicory coffee and the hard biscuits and a bar of chocolate. James had pitched the clotted milk into the Missouri when it started smelling rancid.

  They stuffed clothing and blankets and cups and a pan and the remaining odds and ends into pillow slips, and what flashed through James’s mind was the image of those Eastern immigrants’ possessions strewn all over the dock. Solomon and James each tied a pack to their back, but Solomon’s was twice the size of James’s. He regretted being such a runt when the job called for a strong back and broad shoulders.

  Will still had his small rucksack, from which he pulled everything in the world he needed as if it were a magician’s hat. Now he spread the map out before them. “Look here, we’ll ford a shallow place across the Tennessee River, clip the top of Marshall County, cut across Livingston, shave the northeast tip of Caldwell, head north and east through Hopkins County, cross the Green River at Livermore, and then it’s a straight shot north and east into Owensboro. Won’t take us but four or five days if somebody with a wagon takes pity on us a time or two.” He squinted at the sun, stuck a licked finger up to judge which way the wind was blowing, and led them to the McCracken-Livingston county line. “Trust me,” he said. “I’m just as good as a Delaware Indian scout leading a man west to all that gold just waiting to be found.”

  Four or five days! Impossible, James thought. Why, he’d spent the first twelve years of his life in the comforts of Boston. He wasn’t fit for tramping across Western terrain. But, on the other hand, Will seemed so sure of himself. Then again, Solomon tensed into a tight rope every time the eyes of a white man settled on him.

  Maybe they should have just taken their chances on the Francie Mulryan and sailed all the way up the Ohio to Owensboro. No, too dangerous. Solomon had heard from some of the men and women on the boat that the deeper you got into Kentucky waters, the more dangerous it was for black folks. They’d just have to stay alert, as Pa had warned, and choose their friends carefully.

  Will never seemed to tire. At night, when James and Solomon were ready to make camp and fry a fish or a rabbit Solomon had snared, Will wanted to forge on ahead. So Solomon enticed him to sit around the campfire with stories of slaves who’d made free.

  “Sometimes people escape on steamboats just like the Francie Mulryan. There used to be a law in North Carolina, over on the coast, that all vessels heading north, they’d be smoked out at the end of the trip.”

  “Why’s that, Solomon?”

  “Think about it, Mr. Will. You pump that boat with smoke after the passengers are out, and whoever’s hiding in cargo or under a deck or in the boiler room, he’d suffocate, sure as the sun rises.”

  The fire crackled and sent sparks into the black night, and James fell into the rhythm of Solomon’s story, so like Miz Lizbet’s.

  “Two men, their names were Abram Galloway and Richard Eden, they thought they’d outsmart those boat patrols. They made themselves hoods, or maybe gunnysacks, big enough to slip over their heads and shoulders, tying at the waist with a drawstring. They had them some gourds of water and towels. When the boat patrols were ready to smoke out the ship, Abram and Richard would press those wet towels to their noses and mouths so as not to burn out their lungs.”

  “They survived the smoke?” asked Will.

  “Didn’t have to. It turned out the boat never did get smoked out.”

  “Good,” James said.

  “What happened was worse. Richard and Abram, they stowed away in the cargo deck with barrels of turpentine. Ever breathe turpentine?”

  “Sure, plenty, when my pa and I clean our guns,” Will said.

  “Out in the fresh air, you can breathe. Where these men were, it was close, hardly any air, and with every breath, they pulled in those turpentine fumes. It all but sucked the blood right out of them.”

  “But they made it, right?” Will asked impatiently.

  “Well, sure they did. You think I’m going to tell you about the failures, Mr. Will? Soon as they swallowed some fresh Northern air, they were okay. Went on to Canada. Amen.”

  James chuckled. “You’ve been around Miz Lizbet Charles too long.”

  “Not long enough,” Solomon said sadly.

  They listened to the fire and the crickets awhile, until Solomon began again. “And talking about breathing, three other men, they tried their luck on a steamer. A black steward gave those men a hand. He was a slave himself, hired out to the steamship company by the owner. He hid the three in the boiler room. They had to lie down on the hot floor. There was barely room to move, no light, stingy bit of air, and blazing heat. They couldn’t turn this way or that, for fear of frying their skin on the boilers that burned coal and wood to fuel the ship night and day. The whole trip they breathed nothing but coal dust, until their lungs rattled like they had gravel inside them.”

  Will asked, “You telling us they survived, too?”

  “They did. Came out of that place in Philadelphia covered with coal dust. Only thing is,” Solomon said, laughing, “it was raining hard that day, and the dust turned to a mud plaster on their faces and bodies. Just imagine how they must have looked.”

  “Bet they wanted a bath first thing,” James said.

  “Hunh-uh. Water, first thing, then some bread, and then a bath. Even an ox has got to eat and drink,” Solomon said.

  “You got any more stories?” asked Will.

  “Hundreds. Miz Lizbet told ’em to me by the hour while we took each other through the fever. I heard a lot more on the Francie Mulryan. There’s Miz Margaret Garner. She ran off from a plantation in Covington, Kentucky. Swore to kill all four of her children before she’d let them be taken back into slavery. She went to trial for one of the murders.” Solomon stopped, and James knew he’d not tell another word of the story.

  “So? Tell us what happened,” Will urged.

  “No, sir, I changed my mind, because it didn’t have a happy ending for Miz Margaret Garner. Not everybody gets free and clear.”

 
; Chapter Twenty-Three

  AIR!

  Raymond Berk was still tapping the walls of the closet, but Mattie had me on the floor, up against the bathroom door, with her beefy leg flung over me and both my arms in her grip. Her thick strawberry perfume nearly made me heave.

  I sucked the pillowcase in and out until it was soggy, but I couldn’t expel the washcloth they’d jammed into my mouth. And then I heard, “Squawk! Squawk! Brrrook!” That was Firebird’s protest when Dad threw the sheet over his cage each night. They were home!

  I began thrashing around, throwing my head against the bathroom door, and Mattie didn’t have enough hands to hold me still.

  “Dana?” It was Dad’s voice coming up the stairs.

  Mattie froze and whispered, “Raymond, get out of the closet,” but she didn’t loosen her grip on me. I strained to hear Dad in the hall.

  “What’s going on in there, Dana? Sounds like you’re trapping a wild animal.”

  “Mmmmn, mmmmn,” I yelled from deep within my throat.

  I heard Raymond back out of the closet and thrust the window sash up.

  “What about me?” Mattie protested. “Leave me here holding the bag?”

  Raymond must have had one leg over the windowsill when Dad rattled the doorknob. “Dana? You okay?”

  “Uhhhhh!”

  “Hold on, baby. I’ll get the key.”

  The key box opened with such force that keys flew off their hooks and clattered against the wall.

  Then I heard my mother bounding up the stairs. “Jeffrey? What’s going on?”

  “Dana’s got trouble.” A skeleton key clicked in the lock. Mattie’s grip tightened around me as she thrust our combined weight against the door. But Dad and Mom had panic and adrenaline on their side, and they forced the door open.