Walk Through Darkness Read online

  Later that night he slipped and fell and doubted he had the power to rise. He had been more fatigued before and that wasn’t the issue. Nor was it the wounds that creased his back, for he was too numb to feel them. It was that nature seemed so intent on beating him down. He was surrounded by an enormous world in which he was entirely alone. How great an ordeal had he let himself in for? Without his being aware of it, one of his hands slipped across his abdomen and through the opening of his shirt. He sought out an object sewn into the inside of the garment and thereby hidden from view, a tiny disk of metal no larger than a coin. This he held between his fingertips, pressed tight, a comfort though he was barely aware of the action.

  He hardly noticed the rising of the sun, though its light brought some faint hues back to the world. He rose and trudged on. The rain didn’t let up that day nor the next evening nor on the day following. He moved through a dripping world just beyond the margins of human society over miles of geography he had never viewed on map or chart. The Bay and its many arms thrust themselves into his path, making it into a half-terrestrial, half-marine route. Stands of reeds threw up impenetrable walls nearly twice his height. He skirted the edges of them, running a palm over the coarse shoots like a child might over fence slats.

  There were more than a few mishaps in those early days. There were farms stumbled upon and dogs set to barking and landowners calling out into the night, shotguns in hand. There were passing horsemen in the woods, fields sprinted through beneath the moonlight, and country lanes that he dared to follow for short distances. There was the grunting progress of an unseen animal that kept pace with him through one entire night’s travel. And there was the girl-child in a barge floating past his shoreline hiding place one afternoon. She picked him out among the undergrowth and studied him, her blond head cocked to one side, rainwater dripping from her nose and chin. She had only to whisper a word to the men that piloted the vessel to bring down upon him a hail of bullets and indignant rage. And yet she didn’t. They floated on into the haze, were swallowed by it, and that was all.

  Eventually, the rain abated and the heat returned. He passed within sight of a city, smoldering like a fire recently doused. He circled around it in a wide arc that put him into a landscape of an altogether different temperament: rolling hills, farmland, and ruinate stretches that had once been forest. Great swathes of woodland had been hewn for fuel or lumber and left a wasteland of stumps. Some of these were of enormous girth, flat plateaus atop which bizarre lichens grew, tiny wax statues topped with plumes of red. Between the stumps the forest tried to re-create itself. In some patches it was on its way, but in too many others the plant life was a tangle of sumac and ragweed and vines woven together like so many thorny snakes. It took him two nights of travel to circumnavigate that city and three days on he still fancied he could see its glow tainting the night sky.

  He spent one evening in the hollowed-out corpse of an ancient oak. He stepped inside the thing, followed by a swarm of mosquitoes so numerous he gave up on swatting them. He stood surrounded by the shell of the tree; the sky above him framed in a single circlet. The smell of decay was thick in the cramped space. Its essence seeped out of the wood like oil, tainting every sweaty quadrant of his body. Strangely, he found these sensations comforting. They reminded him of Dover. Something about the place made him imagine running his fingertip down her bare back, drawing a line in her flesh, a track left in the wake of his touch that the skin forgave in passing. Their intimate moments had been that much more fragile for the proximity of others. They had whispered, murmured and moaned only for each other. He used to speak with his mouth brushing against her ear, the scent of her hair filling him. She would taste him with the tip of her tongue. She said she loved the sweat of him, that she wanted him most when he was ripest, for then he seemed that much more a man. Sometimes she would run her hands across his sweaty shoulders. She did this as if she were cleaning him, but he knew that she wanted his scent on her, a reminder of him that she could carry with her.

  One morning near the end of his second week of flight, William halted near a narrow lane in the woods. Some fifty yards from it, he paused and squatted in the bushes, waiting to see what type of traffic the road might carry, if any. The path meandered off to the east, vanishing into the trees; to the west it rose up a gentle hill and dropped out of sight. He sat for twenty minutes without anyone passing. He had just decided to cross the road and carry on when a motion stopped him. A man, marked first by his prominent headdress, crested the western rise and came down the trail at a brisk pace. It was a white man, and though he propelled himself by the power of his own two feet, he was clothed in the garb of the gentry. William froze. His first thought was how tenuous his situation was. Here, yet again, was a moment of providence. If he had stepped forward a few moments earlier … If, at any time, for any reason, God and circumstance conspired against him … He had to be more careful still. He pressed himself low to the ground. It was from there, with his nose touching the leaves of the forest floor, that he noticed the man wasn’t alone.

  A Negro boy trailed behind the man. He was tiny, barefoot, and dressed only in the rough shirt of childhood, his legs and feet bare. His steps doubled to keep time with the man’s. He was anxious in this work, his full attention focused on the back of the man’s thighs, on timing his own steps and not letting himself fall behind. William saw something frantic in the child’s motions and he wondered what particular variation of the slave’s curse this child was living. Had he been sold away from his mother? Was this his first day with a new master? Or did he even remember his mother? Was this man and his whims all the child had to anchor him to the world? He was too young to do much work, but one never knew what type of service a white man might require.

  William felt his insides knot. This one image filled him with the fear of fatherhood. It was one thing to suffer a life of slavery oneself, but to bring a child into this world, into all of its dangers and indignities … The thought of it was enough to keep him still long after the man and boy had disappeared down the path. The image of the two lingered long in his mind, bringing back memories of his own childhood, his old owner, dead some years now but not forgotten.

  Howard Mason had generally been considered a good master. He didn’t push his slaves beyond the limits of their endurance. He didn’t beat them overly, break up families permanently, or take liberties with the female servants. He was a much-avowed man of learning and of God, who tried hard to live by Christian principles. He sustained his family’s finances upon the lifeblood of some fifty to sixty slaves, but he did so with the permission of his God. Or so he believed. He found this consent within his religion’s text, as he explained to William two days after his eighth birthday.

  Mason had ridden up to William and greeted him cordially, an act which set the boy trembling from his knees right down to his bare feet. He had heard it was the boy’s birthday, and he offered him a present, a large, golden apple. It was no small feat for a Negro to make it through to a good working age, he said. William was a fine boy for doing so. He dismounted, left his horse to graze and directed the boy to sit down at the base of a boysenberry tree. He bade him to eat his apple.

  William fumbled with the fruit. He went so far as to bring it up to his mouth and to test the skin against his teeth, but he didn’t bite into it. He could barely keep his hands from shaking, and he feared that any action, even chewing, would somehow betray him. He sat on the verge of flinching every time the man moved, however innocent his gesture: raising a hand to shoo away the flies, pulling a handkerchief from his breast pocket, a phlegmy clearing of his throat. He had never experienced his owner in such proximity. Mason’s odor was almost overpowering. A fragrant powder wafted up out of his clothing, an irritating substance like pollen. It was all William could do to hold the apple near his face and keep from coughing.

  Mason cracked open a book and read of the world’s creation, of the darkness that had been upon the lifeless void and how God filled
it with light and life and water and all the creatures that roamed the earth. He read some of the story of the first human couple. Then he skipped forward and told of the evil that so soon came to rule the land and the flood that God sent to cleanse it away. He told of Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, from whom all the people of the world were descended. He paused and studied the boy for a moment. He dabbed his brow with his handkerchief and asked if he recognized the Truth contained within this book? Did he know that it had been written at the command of the one and only God of all creation? Did he understand that its doctrines were the Word of the Lord and that they could never be doubted, for in doubting was sin and in sin was eternal damnation?

  William mumbled, “Yessuh.”

  “Is that ‘yes, sir’ meant to encompass everything I have read thus far? Everything?”

  William hesitated. He wasn’t sure how to answer. The man wanted to hear that he understood, didn’t he? Or did he want to hear that he didn’t understand? He wasn’t sure which way to respond, and it didn’t occur to him for a second to answer truthfully. “Suh?” he said, casting the word somewhere between a statement and a question.

  “Do you … Well, I mean to say, do you …” Mason exhaled in an exasperated way that set the boy’s heart beating even more rapidly. “It is a lot I ask of you, I know. Just the other day I had a conversation with a learned man from Virginia, who swore that it was useless to instruct Negroes in biblical truths as the race was biologically and morally incapable of true comprehension. I disagreed. I need not trouble your mind with the intricacies of it all, but no harm can be done by trying to convey to you some simplified version of the principle points. Not to mention, as I told the gentleman, that you and your race have a place in here.” He punctuated his statement by jabbing a finger into the open book. “Yes, you do. And that is just what we’ve come to discuss. Let me see …”

  William felt an ant bite into his big toe. He let his eye drop down to study it, just for a second, then tried to focus his gaze into the empty space just before his face.

  “And Noah began to be a husbandman,” Mason began. “And he planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done to him. And he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’” Mason held up a finger as if he expected William to interrupt him. “And he said, ‘Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.’”

  The man closed the book. “And from those three men all the people of the earth are descended. I and my kind from Shem and Japheth; you and yours from the accursed Ham. You see, Ham’s descendants …” He opened the book again, found the proper page, and read a long list of names that meant nothing to William. When he concluded he explained that those were the nations of Africa, from whom William was descended. “Your blood is not completely Negro, that is true, but you should be proud of it anyway. Some say that the Negro is not even a man, is another form of being entirely. I, however, cannot dismiss the words of the Lord. You and I are both descended from one of the Lord’s chosen. My race, however, is blessed with mastery of the world, while yours is assigned a place just beneath me. Each race has been ordered in such a way to allow them to shine. You do see the logic in this, don’t you?”

  William nodded and mumbled, “Yessuh.”

  This was the divine rule of things, Mason explained. When this order was upset chaos was loosed upon the world. Think of all the so-called free Negroes in Maryland. Did they live wondrous lives with that freedom? Did they prosper and grow rich and satisfied the way the better of the white men did? Of course not, for such were challenges beyond their capacity, and it was the evil of the northern white man which led them to spread such fiction. He picked out a particular former slave as an example, a man whose freedom was purchased by another free Negro. For him, liberty only led to the basest of degradation. He took to theft and developed hungers that he hadn’t known as a slave. He insulted white women and acquired a taste for liquor. He roamed the streets like some pariah of biblical times. Before long he was found dead, hung by his legs from a tree, his head bashed into mush by clubs, genitals severed from his body so that they were no longer a threat to female virtue.

  Mason studied the downturned face of the young boy searching for the effect of his words. “That would never happen to one of my Negroes. That will never happen to you. You are protected so long as you are faithful to me. You will always be protected from the anger of other white men, from the poisons spread down from the north and from your own baser nature. I take your welfare as a matter of honor. Understand?”

  “Yessuh.”

  “Good. I have always been very happy with you, William. You are a fine boy despite the misfortunes of your parentage, and I trust you will always obey me as you should.”

  Three days later William was hired out to the family of an Annapolis shipbuilder and his life of toil began. In truth, he saw nothing akin to logic in the man’s words. As a boy of eight he didn’t try. He sat there wishing that the interview would end, knowing that his mother would ask him about it later, angry at himself because he knew he couldn’t lie to her. It wasn’t until much later, when he heard such theories repeated, that he sought to make some sense of them. He never did. He wasn’t even sure that he understood what Ham’s crime had been in the first place. Was Ham cursed for seeing his father’s own depravity? Why would God honor the wishes of a drunk, a man that woke groggy from overconsumption? Was it simply that Ham had looked upon him and saw him as he really was, while the other sons turned their eyes away? Was he cursed for knowing the truth about the man from whom the entire world was descended?

  The beginning of his third week as a fugitive found William a lean, ghostly version of his former self. His food was long gone. He had to tighten the cord that held his trousers up. His face took on the gaunt qualities attributed to the starving and the holy. His eyes retreated back into his skull. The flesh of his nose became a thin veil over the contours of the bone and cartilage beneath it. He was taken by a hunger he had never known even in his worst days, then pushed beyond it to a numb place that was the backside of hunger. Strange visions assaulted him. Or perhaps he was seeing normal things but only now finding them strange. One morning he awoke with several millipedes curled into balls and sleeping within the crescent of his body’s heat. Another afternoon he leant to drink from a stream, but paused with his hand cupped above the water, shocked by the sight of an enormous, spotted spider gorging itself on a fish twice its size. And one evening while paused to survey the land ahead, he looked down to find a half-dozen daddy longlegs climbing up his trousers.

  He was also struck with occasional bursts of prophecy. He had dreams in which whips fell from masters’ hands and writhed as serpents on the ground, scenes of white men engaged in the most desperate acts of self-flagellation, glimpses of tails poking through trousers like the curled barbs of swine. There were visions of Dover as he had last seen her, memories so distant he distrusted them. She appeared to him in a fractured prism of images, a mosaic in which each part of her appeared with a singular clarity. The ringlets of hair curled against the base of her neck. Her eyelids flickering as he pleasured her. The slack weight of her breasts against his cupped palms. Her canines pressed against her bottom lip in anger. He awoke once to the image of a young girl spinning away from her playmate, her head thrown back in laughter. Though it had not been a dream of Dover, it brought her to mind. He always remembered her sternness and strength, but that girl brought back a memory of her laughter as well. She had a
wonderful laugh, a joy that came from low in her throat and rose up through her body with a physical force that tossed her head back. Yes, she had quite a laugh, but she had shared it rarely, at unpredictable moments.

  Though his mind was full of images, it didn’t mean he lowered his defenses. One evening, in the small hours of the night, he realized that he was being followed. He didn’t see his pursuer, but he knew someone was behind him, just out of view. He doubled his pace. He climbed into a wild land measured by tree-lined ridges and sectioned by streambeds. He dropped down into a ravine and fumbled his way over boulders and through water-pocked rock slabs. He tried to manifest his fear in motion, to feed off the adrenaline building within him. But by the time he mounted a wide plateau of white pine his apprehension had mixed with anger. The person was still following him, a shadow that he couldn’t shake free. So he decided to change his tactics.

  He jogged into the fragrant pine forest, bent over beneath the branches. The dawn light was just strong enough to bring out the colors and textures of the pine’s rough skin. He chose one of the trees at random. He grabbed at the dry nubs of the broken, lower branches, wrapped his thighs around the trunk and cinched his heels against it. He heaved himself upward until he found another handhold. In this painful way, he inched up the lower portion of the trunk. When he got his arms around a sturdy branch, he kicked a leg out to the side, hooking the branch with his ankle. He straddled it in a second, and the very next he was reaching for the branch above. The pine allowed for easy climbing after that, the branches spaced as if for just such a purpose. He perched on a branch halfway up the tree, stilled his breathing, and waited.