Walk Through Darkness Read online

  He might have stood like this indefinitely, had not a movement roused him. He looked up. One of the slaves rose from his prone position and propped himself up on one elbow. He motioned with his cupped hand. He said something, so softly that at first William didn’t make it out. He thought on it and the fading words ordered themselves in his mind. The man had asked him over, had instructed him in simple words, to come get some shade. With that simple phrase and gesture William saw them anew. He realized that he recognized them all. He might not know them by name or face or blood relation, but they were his people after all. They wore the same chains. He walked toward them and took his place among them.

  SIX Morrison and the hound sailed from Kent Island aboard a thirty-foot whaleboat. They were the only passengers and formed, along with the skipper himself a crew of three. The vessel was open to the air like an enormous canoe, with a single mast sunk into its center. It was a slow craft by design, but tacking against a weak breeze it made hardly any progress at all. Man and dog watched the far shoreline appear and disappear, seeming, through the passing of hours, to actually be getting farther away. A haze settled across the water and features that were once clear became less so. Toward the late afternoon the skipper gave up on sail power. He asked Morrison to bend his back at one of the oars while he worked its twin. The work was strange to Morrison. It fatigued his back and shoulders in a way that he was not accustomed to, and their progress was as slow by oar as it had been under sail. The hound watched the men’s exertions with opinionated eyes.

  Once ashore Morrison looked back across the water at the far shore. He thought, and not for the first time, that if the fugitive had in fact swum for freedom he had probably found it at the Bay’s murky bottom. Annapolis had changed since he had left the place years ago, and he didn’t find the house he was looking for until that evening. He stood before it, contemplating the lights in the windows, studying the wealth signified by the well-kept gardens, the white façade and the black faces of the servants who passed by the windows. He thought about making his inquiries just then, but decided against it.

  That night he stayed in a tiny room in a tavern near Church Circle, a place that brought back memories he didn’t care for. He tied the hound outside and heard her barking late into the night. He purchased a bottle of whiskey and drank it down entire and lay on his bed with the ceiling spinning above him. He fumbled in his bags and came up with the crumpled letter. As he read it over, the words moved on the page, reordering themselves, incoherent. He mumbled that he should just burn the thing and be done with it, just burn it and get on with his sorry life. But he could not make himself rise to carry out the wish.

  He woke up with a head like a metal drum and all the world pounding upon it. The letter was pressed to his chest, crumpled further but not destroyed. He gathered his things and greeted the hound and was again at the gate to the same estate by eight in the morning. He halloed the house, spoke his request and got an audience with the widow herself. She answered his questions shortly, only addressing them at all because runaways were an ever present scourge upon the institution of slavery and all efforts must be made to staunch the flow. Or so she said. She even proposed calling for the woman in question, but Morrison stayed her. Better he just get the woman’s description. Better that he follow her unbeknownst.

  And that’s just what he did. The woman left the house via the back entrance. The tracker gave her a good lead and blended his own progress with that of the other pedestrians. He nearly lost her once, when a wagon blocked his path and he missed which avenue she had chosen from a choice of three. He chose one at random, picked up his pace, and found that he had chosen correctly.

  The walk took a little over ten minutes, but in that space of time one world merged into another. The large houses disappeared, as did white faces and swept roads and any inkling of grandeur. The woman wove her way into a territory of decrepit shacks, largely empty as the occupants were at work. Stray dogs came out to address the hound and the man kicked them back, all the while keeping an eye on the woman’s form. She stopped at a hut that was little different than the ones near at hand, constructed from materials that had seen better days in other structures long ago. An old woman appeared in the doorway. A swarm of bandy-legged children followed her, clothed in shirts that hung down to their knees. Morrison could just hear the woman’s voice, not the words but the mirthful flavor of them. She bade the young woman to enter.

  Morrison motioned for the dog to follow him into hiding. Together they found a place of thick shrubs just off the path that afforded a decent view of the house. They had scarcely settled down in the bushes when the hound grew agitated. Her nostrils flared and quivered and her eyes darted about the woods along the far end of the house. Her front legs pawed the ground before her as if she could rake the object of her interest closer. Morrison had seen this before and knew that she had caught the fugitive’s scent again. He shushed her quiet, for he hadn’t thought it would be this easy. When the dog continued, he slapped her flat-handed on the head and tightened his grip on her collar

  The woman reappeared within a quarter hour, shouting a goodbye over her shoulder. On this second appearance Morrison experienced a strange sensation, a sensation he rarely felt as his life was so solitary, and one he shouldn’t have felt for this woman for they had no relation between them. The woman carried the same bundle and walked the same way as before, but somehow she looked different. She moved with a grace he hadn’t noticed before. He found himself wondering if she bore any resemblance to her sister, thinking that if she did then he could understand the fugitive’s ardor. He watched her to the distance.

  In his attentive gaze he forgot the hand over the hound’s muzzle. Feeling the pressure released, the dog tried to pull the man forward. But he held on a moment longer, his eyes fixed to the point at which the woman had disappeared. He almost wished he had reason to talk to her, but she had already led him back to the trail and so she had served the use he had required. The hound craned her neck around and bared her teeth. The man watched the space where the woman had vanished and still did not release the dog. It was not the first moment since he had entered the Bay region that he had hesitated in his mission. But he could not turn away from this and he knew it. He flexed his fingers. The hound lurched from his grasp, loud and hungry and anxious, again on the runaway’s scent. Morrison rose and followed. He was on the trail again.

  SEVEN The pen’s mortar walls and hard-packed floor caught the day’s fury like an oven. William sat baking, his body—like those of all the captives—covered in a film of sweat and salt and dirt. Through the hottest hours of the day they did little more than swat at flies, watch the progress of the clouds and scratch at insect bites. Though their jailers were rarely seen, they were somehow a constant threat. The only noticeable lookout was the guard posted on the balcony of the main building overlooking the pen. He was sometimes visible, looking down at them with disinterest, but most often he propped his feet so that they alone were in view from below. They fed the captives corn-flour gruel, a tasteless, textureless substance. To drink they all shared a bucket of whiskey-tainted water that was refilled several times throughout the day. The alcohol was added for its antiseptic qualities. For William, the faint taste of it brought up a roiling nausea that was hard to contain. They also had to share a single toilet—a large basin set in the center of the compound. Men and women alike were made to squat above it, in plain sight of all, open to the sky above.

  Despite the languid stupor of the day, it was impossible not to make eye contact with someone, not to nod a greeting or maybe even to voice a question. By this means William came to know those around him. The man who had called him over was a Louisiana slave named Lemuel. He had been sold four times in his life: twice in the confines of the Delta, once up into Delaware as a result more of gambling debts than of a business transaction, and then to the slave traders who now owned his life and future works. He guessed that the figure would rise to five very soon. He o
nly hoped that he didn’t end up anywhere near his birthplace, for it was a place no slave would want to see twice. His life in that swampy delta had been one of constant hardship, labor unending, heat and insects and cruelty, a life of cane and cotton that marked the seasons in catalogues of the dead.

  “I wouldn’t wish it on any man,” Lemuel said. He sat beside William, with his legs crossed before him. His eyes were the same reddish brown as his skin, and they tended to move slowly, settling on one object and studying the full shape and function of it before moving on. He had a crescent of a scar above his eyebrow. It was an old wound, swollen like a brand scar. He sometimes touched it when he spoke. “Not even my worst enemy. You ever seen a thing bit to death by skeeters?”

  “No.”

  “I have. I’m telling you, stay clear of them swamplands.”

  “You don’t mean a person, do you?” William asked, the image of a man covered in pinpricks already fixed in his mind.

  “Didn’t say a person. Just said a thing. But if it could happen to a thing it could happen to a man too. We ain’t all that different. Now don’t take me the wrong way. There’s a beauty down in that country too. I remember sometimes lying up at night, listening to the God-almighty racket of frogs, one louder than the other, smelling all the smells what come to you when it’s dark. Yeah, there’s a beauty in some of that. Just in listening. In tasting the world and breathing it in. That’s true, but I’d just as soon not set foot back there again, all things considered.”

  One of the others was a runaway named Dante. He had been caught well into Pennsylvania, on soil some called free but which gave him no protection. A pack of hounds had ripped the flesh of his forearms and left the wounds raw and oozing. He sat near enough to share in the conversation, though his thoughts always began and ended in tragedy. He seemed to have given up the will to live, and made no attempt to swat away the flies that plagued him. William watched him askance, finding it difficult to look at him, but harder still not to. His eyes were drawn again and again to the man’s wounds. He shooed the flies away when he could, although he did this covertly, as he somehow sensed the man would be annoyed to be the subject of pity.

  There were two among them who kept to themselves. They made an odd couple, although no one thought it wise to comment on this. The more noticeable of the two was a giant of a man named Saxon. He was naked from the waist up. His britches were torn down the backside in a manner that exposed his privates to the world when he walked. His body was a thing to be marveled at. He must have weighed twice as much as any of the others, and he bore the weight evenly distributed about his frame. The muscles around his neck bunched and quivered when he moved. The flesh around his shoulders and biceps was scarred by stretch marks. The other man was quite inconsequential in comparison. He was a mulatto, honey-complexioned, with short legs and a slight pouch-belly despite his otherwise lean form. He and Saxon shared only each other’s company. They spoke in low tones that seemed so foreign as to be another language. At moments they were as still as statues. Other times they rose up from the ground, smacking parts of their bodies with the palms of their hands, striking out at the air as if warring with swarms of unseen insects.

  They were a mystery to William, until Lemuel explained that they were Gullah people from the Sea Isles of the Carolinas. They lived isolated lives of incredible labor. They’d formed a culture unique unto themselves, with their own language, their own customs, their own blending of Christian and Moslem and tribal African faiths. It was said that they practiced black arts as powerful as any Haitian magic, blood rituals that called upon the undead to aid the living. Watching those two, William could well believe it. He found, despite himself, that he was curious about what they might know, what tools of evil they might have at their disposal.

  “Now, I ain’t saying there was never a good body come off them islands,” Lemuel said, “but they got they own ways and not all of them ways is Christian. Listen at night and you’ll hear them trying to work themselves up a voodoo to get themselves free. It never has worked, far as I can tell. But they sure keeping the faith. Whatever faith they got.”

  William watched the two men. They sat on the other side of the pen, touching at the shoulder, eyes closed and heads tilted up toward the sun. “Wouldn’t turn the Devil down,” he said, “not if he could get me outta here.”

  “You wanna be careful getting in bed with Satan,” Lemuel said. “Tell me this, you ever met a white person you thought belonged in Heaven? You haven’t, have you? Maybe some child, but that’s not what I’m talking bout. Talking bout a full grown adult. Man or woman, don’t make no difference. Ain’t many of them getting to Heaven, not by my tally. If them white folks ain’t in Heaven where is they?” The man pulled his eyes away from the two men and set them on William.

  “Hell, I suppose.”

  “That’s what I make of it, too. They in Hell. Now, do you want to spend forever with a bunch of evil white folks? It’s hard enough just living this life in they company. Naw, I wouldn’t get in company with the Devil. There’s got to be a better way. It’ll be shown to us one day. How’d you get yourself up in here, anyway?”

  William lowered his head and studied the ground. Just the act of the man’s asking reminded him of Oli, of his own loose tongue and the events that followed. He tried to answer the question vaguely, saying he was running and done got caught. But Lemuel pushed him for details. William answered one question at a time, and in so doing soon found himself well into his own story, one that seemed long and sordid already, blurred between dream and reality and plagued by mistakes.

  When he concluded, Lemuel sat for a moment nodding his head. “Well, you done made a mess of it,” he said.

  That wasn’t the response William had expected. He tried to think of some way to refute the statement. He picked a twig and bent it into a strained curve. Finally, he just said, “You can go to hell.”

  Lemuel took this statement seriously and answered in a different tone than before, softer, more open. “Don’t think I’m littling you. That ain’t my intention. You living a world a pain and I know that pain. All us round here know it. I ain’t littling you. I’m just saying you slipped up. Had freedom in your path and first chance you got you gave it away for a meal and a little whiskey. It hurts, don’t it? That’s some expensive whiskey—the kind that costs a man his freedom.”

  William snapped the twig and tossed the two ends away. “Don’t tell me what I lost. You don’t know the first thing bout it. You wouldn’t talk that way if you’d ever gotten a child in a woman.” He made to rise, but the older man stayed him with an outstretched hand.

  “Now, that there—I’ll tell you what it puts me in the mind of,” Lemuel said, “the time Abram asked God why he didn’t have no children and what was to become a him being childless. Come on now, sit yourself. Ain’t gonna harm you just to listen. Now, Lord took Abram outside and told him to look up at the sky and count the stars. Said, ‘Look now toward Heaven’, and if he could count all them stars then he would know how many children would come from him and how fruitful his seed would be on into eternity. I’d tell you the same, I would. I say look up and when you see them stars know that you too go on. They your children, and your children’s children and on like that. You may never put your hands on them and pull them to you in this life, but you can look up and know they out there waiting for you and some day you’ll be together with them. That’s what I do. Cause, nigga, I got more children out in the world than I can number on my fingers. And not one them would know my face to call me papa.”

  William stared at the man. “Don’t know whether you’re coming or going,” he finally said.

  Lemuel grinned. “That’s right. That’s the way I like it. Keep em all guessing.”

  William didn’t rise again, but he did turn away from Lemuel and sat with his back to him. From this angle his eyes fell on a pregnant girl. She was tiny, with a child’s round face, still incomplete in her body’s development. As with Dante, Wi
lliam tried not to look at her, but his eyes kept wandering back to her. She sat within the shadow of a tiny alcove, a space offered to her in kindness. But she was never comfortable. Her belly seemed to be the center of her, all thoughts and pain and emotion contained in that great swelling. She rolled her body from one side to the other, sat up and then lay down, all the while squinting out at the world.

  Later that evening he lay listening to the rhythm of the girl’s moaning. It began slowly and almost faintly enough to ignore.

  But as the dusk faded into night and the moon rose her cries did as well. The compound was as still as ever it had been. Even the two Sea Islanders were silent and motionless. This evening, it seemed, was too sacred for the invocation of spells. Into this calm the woman’s calls rose up and reached out like open hands. They grabbed the listeners by the throats and held them until the moments of agony passed. The light of the new moon was so bright, and William’s senses so heightened, that he could see the girl and the women who attended her. She stood with a woman at either arm. She hung between them in the peaceful moment, limp and breathing. But when the contractions returned her body tensed from head to toe and she bowed with the wave rolling over her.

  Dante, sitting nearby, said, “That baby gonna kill her.” He sat with his damaged arms cradled in his lap, but his eyes were fixed on the girl, watching every second of her labor. “You think she all right?”

  “She all right,” Lemuel said. “You never heard a woman give birth before? It’s always a God-almighty pain.”

  “But she just a little thing,” Dante said. “Big boy-child might bust her. My momma died in the bearing. Not me but the child after me. Got stuck up in there the wrong way. I remember the night it happened. Was a summer night like …”

  “Hush, boy,” Lemuel hissed. He touched his forehead with his fingertips, found the scar and then pulled his hand away, as if he were checking that the old wound was still there. “We don’t need to hear that mess. Not right now. You set your mind on better thoughts than that.”