The first winter Lil cried herself to sleep most nights, though she had no idea why. She was happy that Papa had someone to hold and whisper to. She liked to watch Rabbit molding his myth-creatures out of blue clay from the dug cellar. She knew that being adult meant coming together like that in pleasure and pain. Still, she cried, as quietly as she could.
By the second winter, some things had changed. She felt strange stirrings in her own body that summer, as if invisible limbs were stretching in preparation. On her chest she watched in consternation and satisfaction as her breasts swelled around the blossom-heads she’d always known. Her leg-bones ached with growth. Luc’s eyes fastened like beads on hooks to the bumps on her chest as she whirled and gambolled at the edges of his wretchedness. After, she would feel sorry, contrite, and furious at her own innocence, her inability to read what lay inside Luc’s manic glance, what feelings shot uninvited through her own increasingly alien flesh. That winter as she lay above Papa and Birdsky, she took their smothered, muted, ambivalent passion and made her own translations in all the languages she had learned till now. Perhaps in the weird adult world they inhabited they were as happy as she, though not once did they hear the open descant of her joy when the lovers in her dreams, however vaguely, meshed and grew harmonic.
Lil was watching the bees in the basswood near the house. Birdsky’s mama was sick so she and Rabbit were gone for a while. Lil was annoyed that Old Samuels had not come around for days and days. She was alone. Maman had asked her to stay over, but she was ashamed to be too near Luc. Here she wasn’t really lonely, but with the chores done, she was a little bored. The bees, however, were up to something. They were gathered into a single, swarming blob that rolled and oozed, then miraculously began to lift itself into the air. It staggered, gained momentum and rose against the sky. Lil followed the swarm with her eyes, and was about to move after it to see where the new home might be when she heard a twig crack behind her.
A bear? No, the tread was too light, too cautious. Curious, she turned to the tree-line in front of the cabin, saw nothing, and waited. She was about to set off after the homing swarm when, quite distinctly, she heard a human sigh – the exhalation of someone either utterly exhausted or stunned by despair. She scanned the underbrush, more than curious now. Nothing moved. No more sounds.
“Who’s there?”
Silence. Breathing, then, constricted but deep. A man’s. A large man’s.
“You hurt in there? You want me to come in after you?”
Panic, very clear – to the left, behind the wild raspberries picked clean by the starlings. Lil walked in that direction. She was not afraid, though the fixed intensity of her stare might have suggested so.
“I won’t hurt you. I’m Lil. See, I’m just a girl.”
She heard the body turn over. It was down, in the twitch-grass, and struggling without energy to rise. Lil moved quickly through the raspberries into the afternoon shadow of the tree-line. The figure had collapsed face-down, its head in the shade, its shoulders and body in the sunny grass. The body was motionless except for the steep breathing.
No sign of injury or wounds; no blood. The man, for so he definitely was, was clothed in rags, mere strips of cloth that might have been a shirt and trousers. No shoes at all; the feet were blistered and scarred. And the man was incredibly dirty; he must have slept in ploughed fields. Through the holes in his shirt Lil saw what appeared to be further scars on the back, like livid vipers twisted in some foul congregation.
The entire body began to tremble, the way a child’s lower lip might just before it bursts into tears. For the first time Lil was a bit scared. Maybe he had some terrible disease, cholera or something. She saw the sweat bead and quiver on his almost bare shoulders. Holding her own breath, she gently touched his arm to bid him turn over. “Please, sir, let me help you.”
“I’se past help,” came the voice, fatigued yet vivid and deep. Wearily, one limb at a time, the man rolled over in the grass. He was not dirty. He was black.
3
“His name’s Solomon Johnson,” Papa explained. “He run away from us soon as we touched shore.” Papa shook his head slowly. “Wouldn’t believe he was in Canada; he thought we was attemptin’ to trick him.” He was talking more to himself than to Lil, who sat rigid beside him. She was certain of this when he muttered, “Poor bugger…”
Lil filled his mug with coffee from the dipper. Papa had not told her much that afternoon when he came home to find the black man in his bed being tended to by Lil. But it was more than she had ever heard before about what he had been doing on all those ‘hunting’ trips. Papa and some men from the township had rowed Mr. Johnson across the River in the moonless dark. He was ‘a slave’ Papa said, to be pitied, but here, once he got safe to Chatham, he would be free forever. Right now some bad men were chasing him, trying to take him back to his chains. Lil tried to imagine chains that could bind a human limb; all she could picture was the teeth on the muskrat trap, like a skeleton’s smile.
After talking a long time with the black man, Papa helped him to his feet and led him outside and around the cabin to the root cellar. Lil followed, certain from Papa’s movements that he wished her to. They descended the little steps. Papa held up his hand. They stopped. Then he reached down and pulled the platform that served as a floor up on its hidden hinges. Without hesitating the black man stepped into what appeared to be a black pit. He disappeared. Lil shuddered. Suddenly the flare of a match shot across the darkness. The flickering, homey light of a candle revealed before them a miniature bedroom about five-by-six by six-feet high. A pallet with blankets served as a bed. There was a stool and a sort of bench to hold the candle or other necessities.
The black man looked up at them, exposing his huge, sad eyes. Then he smiled the wildest smile Lil had ever seen. “How c’n I thank yo’all?” he said.
“Lil here will bring you your food. You can stay up here long’s nobody comes ’round. You need somethin’, you just tap on this here wall,” Papa said, demonstrating.
“If’n you doan mind, suh, I prefers to stay down here. Down here I feels safe.”
Papa didn’t reply. He turned to leave. “I got a sturdy lock on this shed door,” he said. “Lil’s gonna lock it every time she brings you what you need. Nobody’ll get in here. You’ll be safe here. I gotta go to Chatham, to the Committee. Won’t be more than a day or so. We’ll work out a safe route once we know where those bastards are or when they’re gonna go back where they belong.”
“I’se gon’ stay right here, mistuh Cor’cran, suh. I’se gon’ be all right now. I be no more trouble, no suh.”
“I’ll be back in two or three days. You just keep your hopes up, Mr. Solomon Johnson. My Lil here will take good care of you.”
The black man peered past the candle at his temporary abode.
“Jus’ like home,” he said.
Papa showed Lil how to put the key in the lock and open it. In an hour the sun would be draped and dying on the western tree-line. It would be dark down there, not like the shadowed, shifting, motley dark of the woods under the stars, but the opaque, impenetrable pitch of the rabbit’s den, day or night, with only the intermittent trembling of the ground above to mark the predator’s advance.
“You’all got dat lock on now?”
Lil was charged with excitement. Never had anything so interesting happened to her before. She felt trusted. She wanted to throw her arms around Papa and kiss him like a grown-up. She wanted to make him coffee and sit with him near the fire and listen to him tell all the stories she knew were stored up inside his head, stories of the strange country he and Mama had fled, the brothers and sisters and cousins she knew he must have there still, all of them with faces and lives and tales to be told in front of fires. She wanted to learn more about the black men they rowed over the River, and what this slavery was, about who these Yankees were, and why some of them, like the bastards chasing Solomon, were so bad. Lil realized, with a deep sigh, that she wasn’t eve
n sure what ‘bad’ really was, though both Mama and Maman had used the word liberally. And she had a feeling – preparing some cold beef, greens and biscuits for Solomon’s supper and watching Papa walk toward the trail that led south – that she was about to find out a lot more about it.
Papa reached the road, visible through the trees from this angle, but instead of wheeling left he paused and looked up the line as if he were waiting for someone to catch up. Even from this distance Lil saw the tell-tale sag of the shoulders, the large bearded slouch to the right – the jauntiness, the intensity of purpose which this afternoon had sharpened his glance and given an edge to every action, was gone. Just like that.
Lil recognized the voices hailing Papa long before the figures emerged as silhouettes against the fading light. This time, though, the Scotch cousins were accompanied by a third man who – despite his powerful, squarish slope – trod a respectful distance behind his betters. An official of some kind, Lil thought. Old Smoothie linked his arm with Papa’s, and together the entourage continued at a ruminative pace towards Chatham.
I’ll never tell anyone he’s down there, thought Lil. Ever.
Two days passed with no signs of Papa. Lil rehearsed how she would talk and what she would say when Old Samuels or one of the LaRouche boys came over. No one showed up. The sun shone. The bees settled nicely in their new hive. Lil and Solomon had the homestead to themselves.
The first two or three times that Lil brought around his food, Solomon said nothing except “Who’s dat?” at the first rattle of the key in the lock and “Thank yuh Miz Lil, ma’am,” his eyes downcast or averted.
“Why don’t you eat up here? The sun’s comin’ through.”
Solomon, below, devoured his food noisily.
“I can fetch a chair from the house, with a back on it.”
The tin plate with the spoon undeployed appeared through the trap-door. “Thank yuh Miz Lil, ma’am.”
“Did you like the pickles, Solomon? Maman and me made them last fall. Maman’s been all the way to Chatham. A long while back.”
A hand, seemingly detached, reached up and pulled the trap-door down like a mouth snapping shut. Reluctantly Lil gathered the utensils and with difficulty locked the outside door. She could feel him straining to hear the comfort of its click.
“Tell me what it’s like in the United States.”
“Well, Miz Lil,” Solomon replied, finishing the last of the dills from his noon dinner and settling back a little on Papa’s chair. “Yuh wouldn’ wanna go dere, no ma’am. It’s an ebbel place, a wicked, wicked place – ’da debbel hisself doan go dere, no how.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Cain’t talk ’boud dat, Miz Lil. Jus’ cain’t.” He looked at the cellar floor.
“It’s nice in Chatham. Maman says they got brick houses there. And board sidewalks. And schools for little children.”
“Sound’s if’n yuh been dere yuhself.”
“And, Maman says, plenty of dark people like you.”
“Long’s they ain’t no slaveholders dere, Ol’ Solomon be happy.”
Lil was so used to asking many questions and getting few answers that she barely noticed that as the afternoon eased westward and Solomon showed no inclination to escape, she was doing more talking than she ever had (except when Rabbit avidly trailed her every word and move around the farm, and that didn’t count, though it helped). It appeared that Solomon was a good listener. Every once in a while in mid-sentence she would toss a glance in his direction only to find him alert and gazing wondrously at her as no one before ever had. Ever. Even his habitual sadness and the animal jumpiness seemed to abate, at least to Lil’s satisfaction.
So she told him about all the things she knew that were interesting and that he might need to know when he got his freedom down in Chatham. He got a royal earful about the LaRouche’s and the war against the Yankees, about Old Samuels and his miraculous all-day pipe; about a baby being born in the green undergrowth just like that, with blood splattered so far it looked like red-trillium day; about the quilting bee at Maman’s last summer when the Frenchman drank too much hooch and dressed up like a priest in one of Maman’s black slips and scared Maman and the ladies out of their wits so she was barely able to hit him on the head with the skillet, ruining a whole pan of perch; and of course she told him about the trip to the Reserve, and he paid particular attention, she warranted, when she described the odd behaviour of the Southener and the sad behaviour of the old Pottawatomie, though she brightened up her tale by ending with the antics of Sounder and a brief demonstration of the dancing she herself had participated in by special invitation.
“Now you tell me a story,” she said with a gentle urgency.
“Solomon jus’ like to listen, Miz Lil, ma’am. I’se accustomed ta jus’ listenin’. A body get used to it, he do.” She thought she caught the vestige of a twinkle in his eye.
“But how am I to get to know a person if they don’t tell about themselves,” Lil said.
“Nothin’ ta tell. My life ahead of me, missy. Got nothin’ behind me ’tall. My Mama tell me ta say ‘Satan, get thee behind me!’, an’ I reckon I’se ’bout to do jus’ dat.”
“But you was born. You had a mama and a papa. You lived somewheres.”
“Had no papa, no ma’am; had me a wonderful mama, but no papa ebber come round us. No suh.”
Lil was puzzled, but Solomon failed to elaborate.
“Why’d your mama give you a funny name like Solomon?” she said.
“T’ain’t funny ’tall,” he said. “Come right from da Bible. Doan yo’all know da Lord’s Book in dese parts? What kinda place I come to?”
“What kind of place did you come from?”
“Hertford County, Norf Carolina, nigh Murfreesboro,” he said as if responding to an interrogator. “Work fer Mastah Cartwright dere. In da fields. I’se his slave, all da time.”
Lil ached to know more but prompt as she would she could get little more out of him. Indeed all the sadness and original suspicion poured back into his face and demeanour as soon as Lil switched from telling to querying.
Lil was tired of telling. “I told you everythin’ interestin’ I can think about Canada. An’ you don’t tell me nothin’ about yourself. You think that’s fair?”
Outside, thirty feet back in the bush, branches cracked and broke underfoot. Solomon had the trap-door half way up when Lil said: “It’s just the wild pigs.”
“Yuh sho’ of dat?”
“I’m sure.”
“Better be hunkerin’ down anyways. Your Papa be ’long real soon, I ’spect.” But he sat down again in the chair.
“Are you never gonna tell about yourself, Solomon?”
He looked up, directly at her. “Most things I gots ta tell’s awful sad, little missus.”
“Then tell only the good parts,” Lil said.
Solomon paused as if considering the import of that remark.
“Like I done,” Lil said.
Later that day after a shared but quiet supper, Lil reached over to pick up the plate and mug. Solomon’s left hand lay on the stool beside them. Lil let the petal of her right hand whisper to the ebony one. Solomon jerked his entire body back as if he’d been lashed. The plate and cup clattered on the platform.
When Lil recovered from the shock, she said “Are you hurtin’ there, Sol?”
Solomon could not reply. He was trembling head to toe: a cottontail before the weasel struck blood.
“I’ll let you be,” Lil said.
As she turned the key in the lock, she heard him squeezing into his ground-hole.
On the third morning he took his breakfast only after Lil had retreated. But at noon with the bright midsummer sun lancing into the upper cell and setting the dust adazzle, she found him seated in Papa’s chair looking sad but recovered. She stood watch as he went into the woods to relieve himself. On the way back he scuttled like a crab across the twenty feet of open space, not knowing whether to look ahe
ad or behind or everywhere at once. Lil wanted to leave the slatted door ajar to catch as much as possible of the noon sun but she closed it as soon as he hurried past her. He sat down – embarrassed, ashamed, seething with irresolvable passions. Sweat sizzled on his brow until he got his desperate breathing under control. Lil did not leave. Nor did Solomon retreat to his burrow.
After a while he ate. Lil had brought her own dinner with her. They ate together. The tea was cold but refreshing in the heat. When the huge black man lifted the mug to his lips and tossed his head back, he seemed to drown the room with his presence – his substance and shadow, the dark roots of his birthground. In contrast, Lil’s porcelain arms seemed to float free from their trim body like swan’s wings over a carbon pond. Lil’s hair was for a moment indistinguishable from the sun’s.
“Where’s your wife?” Lil heard herself say.
Solomon looked up in disbelief. Terror and wonder passed simultaneously over his face. Lil could see plainly that he wanted to tell her the story of his wife and their grief, that he was overwhelmed with the need to confide and the need, at last, to trust someone enough to share with him the full horror and inhumanity of his ordeal. But he did not. It would be many years later before Lil would understand why he didn’t, when she herself would withhold full knowledge from the innocents before her.
Solomon held his gaze steadily on Lil. Tears washed out of his doe’s eyes, but did nothing to erase the indelible pain and the memory of pain. The anguish harboured and held back in all two hundred pounds of red flesh and white bone was released into the beleaguered face, the stunned eyes for whom, ever after, laughter would be a form of betrayal.
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