Other Earths Read online

  So we had no real shelter—just some shade and a moment’s peace.

  I used the time to put a fresh handkerchief on Percy’s wound and to bind it with a strip of cloth torn from my own shirt.

  “Thank you,” Percy said breathlessly.

  “Welcome. The problem now is how to get back to the carriage.” We had no weapons, and we could hardly withstand a siege, no matter where we hid. Our only hope was escape, and I could not see any likely way of achieving it.

  Then the question became moot, for the man who had tried to kill us came around the corner of the barracks.

  “Why do you want to make these pictures?” Elsie asked yet again, from a dim cavern at the back of my mind.

  In an adjoining chamber of my skull a different voice reminded me that I wanted a drink, a strong one, immediately.

  The ancient Greeks (I imagined myself telling Elsebeth) believed that vision is a force that flies out from the eyes when directed by the human will. They were wrong. There is no force or will in vision. There is only light. Light direct or light reflected. Light, which behaves in predictable ways. Put a prism in front of it, and it breaks into colors. Open a shuttered lens, and some fraction of it can be trapped in nitrocellulose or collodion as neatly as a bug in a killing jar.

  A man with a camera is like a naturalist, I told Elsebeth. Where one man might catch butterflies, another catches wasps.

  I did not make these pictures.

  I only caught them.

  The man with the rifle stood five or six yards away at the corner of the barracks. He was a black man in threadbare coveralls. He was sweating in the heat. For a while there was silence, the three of us blinking at each other.

  Then, “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” the black man said.

  “Then you shouldn’t have aimed a rifle at him and pulled the trigger,” I said back, recklessly.

  Our assailant made no immediate response. He seemed to be thinking this over. Grasshoppers lit on the cuffs of his ragged pants. His head was large, his hair cut crudely close to the skull. His eyes were narrow and suspicious. He was barefoot.

  “It was not my intention to hurt anyone,” he said again. “I was shooting from a distance, sir.”

  By this time Percy had managed to sit up. He seemed less afraid of the rifleman than he ought to have been. Less afraid, at any rate, than I was. “What did you intend?”

  He gave his attention to Percy. “To warn you away, is all.”

  “Away from what?”

  “This building.”

  “Why? What’s in this building?”

  “My son.”

  The “three million” in Percy’s title were the men, women and children of African descent held in bondage in the South in the year 1860. For obvious reasons, the number is approximate. Percy always tried to be conservative in his estimates, for he did not want to be vulnerable to accusations of sensationalizing history.

  Given that number to begin with, what Percy had done was to tally up census polls, where they existed, alongside the archived reports of various state and local governments, tax and business statements, Federal surveys, rail records, etc., over the years between then and now.

  What befell the three million?

  A great many—as many as one third—emigrated North, before changes in the law made that difficult. Some of those who migrated continued on up to Canada. Others made lives for themselves in the big cities, insofar as they were allowed to. A smaller number were taken up against their will and shipped to certain inhospitable “colonies” in Africa, until the excesses and horrors of repatriation became notorious and the whole enterprise was outlawed.

  Some found a place among the freemen of New Orleans or worked boats, largely unmolested, along the Gulf Coast. A great many went West, where they were received with varying degrees of hostility. Five thousand “irredeemably criminal” black prisoners were taken from Southern jails and deposited in a Utah desert, where they died not long after.

  Certain jobs remained open to black men and women—as servants, rail porters, and so forth—and many did well enough in these professions.

  But add the numbers, Percy said, even with a generous allowance for error, and it still comes up shy of the requisite three million.

  How many were delivered into the Liberty Lodges? No one can answer that question with any certainty, at least not until the evidence sealed by the Ritter Inquiry is opened to the public. Percy’s estimate was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000. But as I said, he tended to be conservative in his figures.

  “We were warned there was a family of wild men up here,” I said.

  “I’m no wilder than I have to be,” the gunman said.

  “I didn’t ask you to come visit.”

  “You hurt Percy bad enough, whether you’re wild or not. Look at him. He needs a medic.”

  “I see him all right, sir.”

  “Then, unless you mean to shoot us both to death, will you help me get him back to our carriage?”

  There was another lengthy pause.

  “I don’t like to do that,” the black man said finally.

  “There won’t be any end to the trouble. But I don’t suppose I have a choice, except, as you say, sir, to kill you. And that I cannot bring myself to do.”

  He said these words calmly enough, but he had a way of forming his vowels, and pronouncing them deep in his throat, that defies transcription. It was like listening to a volcano rumble.

  “Take his right arm, then,” I said. “I’ll get on his left. The carriage is beyond that ridge.”

  “I know where your carriage is. But, sir, I won’t put down this rifle. I don’t think that would be wise. You can help him yourself.”

  I went to where Percy sat and began to lift him up. Percy startled me by saying, “No, Tom, I don’t want to go to the carriage.”

  “What do you mean?” the assailant asked, before I could pose the same question.

  “Do you have a name?” Percy asked him.

  “Ephraim,” the man said, reluctantly.

  “Ephraim, my name is Percy Camber. What did you mean when you said your son was inside this barracks?”

  “I don’t like to tell you that,” Ephraim said, shifting his gaze between Percy and me.

  “Percy,” I said, “you need a doctor. We’re wasting time.”

  He looked at me sharply. “I’ll live a while longer. Let me talk to Ephraim, please, Tom.”

  “Stand off there where I can see you, sir,” Ephraim directed. “I know this man needs a doctor. I’m not stupid. This won’t take long.”

  I concluded from all this that the family of wild Negroes the landlady had warned me about was real and that they were living in the sealed barn.

  Why they should want to inhabit such a place I could not say.

  I stood apart while Percy, wounded as he was, held a hushed conversation with Ephraim, who had shot him.

  I understood that they could talk more freely without me as an auditor. I was a white man. It was true that I worked for Percy, but that fact would not have been obvious to Ephraim any more than it had been obvious to the dozens of hotelkeepers who had assumed without asking that I was the master, and Percy the servant. My closeness to Percy was unique and all but invisible.

  After a while Ephraim allowed me to gather up my photographic gear, which had been scattered in the crisis.

  I had been fascinated by photography even as a child. It had seemed like such patent magic! The magic of stopped time, places and persons rescued from their ephemeral natures. My parents had given me books containing photographs of Indian elephants, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the natural wonders of Florida.

  I put my gear together and waited for Percy to finish his talk with the armed lunatic who had shot him.

  The high cloud that had polluted the sky all morning had dissipated during the afternoon. The air was still scaldingly hot, but it was a touch less humid. A certain brittle clarity had set in. The light was hard, crystal
line. A fine light for photography, though it was beginning to grow long.

  “Percy,” I called out.

  “What is it, Tom?”

  “We have to leave now, before the sun gets any lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passed through that town. Some rural bone-setter, probably, a doughty relic of the mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.

  Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was, “We’re not finished here yet.”

  “What do you mean, not finished?”

  “We’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see Ephraim’s son.”

  Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.

  I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices? (Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?

  “What is his name?” I asked. “This son of yours.”

  “Jordan,” he said.

  I had married Maggie not long after I got back from Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put into my business. But there was a vogue among young women of the better type for manly veterans. I was manly enough, I suppose, or at least presentable, and I was authentically a veteran. I met Maggie when she came to my shop to sit for a portrait. I escorted her to dinner. Maggie was fond of me; and I was fond of Maggie, in part because she had no political convictions or fierce unorthodox ideals. She took the world as she found it.

  Elsebeth came along a year or so after the wedding. It was a difficult birth. I remember the sound of Maggie’s screams. I remember Elsebeth as a newborn, bloody in a towel, handed to me by the doctor. I wiped the remnant blood and fluid from her tiny body. She had been unspeakably beautiful.

  Ephraim wore the key to the barn on a string around his neck. He applied it to the massive lock, still giving me suspicious glances. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm as he did this. He slid the huge door open. Inside, the barn was dark. The air that wafted out was a degree or two cooler than outside, and it carried a sour tang, as of long-rotten hay or clover.

  Ephraim did not call out to his son, and there was no sound inside the abandoned barracks.

  Had Ephraim once held his newborn son in his arms, as I had held Elsebeth?

  The last of the Liberty Lodges were closed down in 1888. Scandal had swirled around them for years, but no sweeping legal action had been taken. In part this was because the Lodges were not a monolithic enterprise; a hundred independent companies held title to them. In part it was because various state legislatures were afraid of disclosing their own involvement. The Lodges had not proved as profitable as their founders expected; the plans had not anticipated, for instance, all the ancillary costs of keeping human beings confined in what amounted to a jail (guards, walls, fences, discipline, etc.) for life. But the utility of the Lodges was undisputed, and several states had quietly subsidized them. A “full accounting,” as Percy called it, would have tainted every government south of the Mason Dixon Line and not a few above it. Old wounds might have been reopened.

  The Ritter Inquiry was called by Congress when the abuses inherent in the Lodge system began to come to light, inch by inch. By that time, though, there had been many other scandals, many other inquests, and the public had grown weary of all such issues. Newspapers, apart from papers like the Tocsin, hardly touched the story. The Inquiry sealed its own evidence, the surviving Lodges were hastily dismantled, and the general population (apart from a handful of aged reformers) paid no significant attention.

  “Why dredge up all that ugliness?” Maggie had asked me.

  Nobody wants to see those pictures, Elsebeth whispered.

  Nobody but a few old scolds.

  It was too dark in the immense barracks to be certain, but it seemed to me there was nobody inside but the three of us.

  “I came here with Jordan in ’78,” Ephraim said.

  “Jordan was twelve years old at the time. I don’t know what happened to his mama. We got separated at the Federal camp on the Kansas border. Jordan and I were housed in different buildings.”

  He looked around, his eyes abstracted, and seemed to see more than an old and ruined barracks. Perhaps he could see in the dark—it was dark in here, the only light coming through the fractionally open door. All I could see was a board floor, immaculately swept, picked out in that wedge of sun. All else was shadow.

  He found an old crate for Percy to sit on. The crate was the only thing like furniture I could see. There was nothing to suggest a family resided here apart from the neatness, the sealed entrances and windows, the absence of bird dung. I began to feel impatient.

  “You said your son was here,” I prompted him.

  “Oh, yes, sir. Jordan’s here.”

  “Where? I don’t see him.”

  Percy shot me an angry look.

  “He’s everywhere in here,” the madman said.

  Oh, I thought, it’s not Jordan, then, it’s the spirit of Jordan, or some conceit like that. This barn is a shrine the man has been keeping. I had the unpleasant idea that Jordan’s body might be tucked away in one of its shadowed corners, dry and lifeless as an old Egyptian king.

  “Or at least,” Ephraim said, “from about eight foot down.”

  He found and lit a lantern.

  One evening in the midst of our journey through the South I had got drunk and shared with Percy, too ebulliently, my idea that we were really very much alike.

  This was in Atlanta, in one of the hotels that provides separate quarters for colored servants traveling with their employers. That was good because it meant Percy could sleep in relative comfort. I had snuck down to his room, which was little more than a cubicle, and I had brought a bottle with me, although Percy refused to share it. He was an abstinent man.

  I talked freely about my mother’s fervent abolition-ism and how it had hovered over my childhood like a storm cloud stitched with lightning. I told Percy how we were both the children of idealists, and so forth.

  He listened patiently, but at the end, when I had finally run down, or my jaw was too weary to continue, he rummaged through the papers he carried with him and drew out a letter that had been written to him by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

  Mrs. Stowe is best remembered for her work on behalf of the China Inland Mission, but she came from an abolitionist family. Her father was the first president of the famous Lane Theological Seminary. At one point in her life she had attempted a novel meant to expose the evils of slavery, but she could not find a publisher.

  Percy handed me the woman’s letter.

  I have received your book “Every Measure Short of War,” the letter began, and it brings back terrible memories and forebodings. I remember all too distinctly what it meant to love my country in those troubled years and to tremble at the coming day of wrath.

  “You want me to read this?” I asked drunkenly.

  “Just that next part,” Percy said.

  Perhaps because of your book, Mr. Camber, Mrs. Stowe wrote, or because of the memories it aroused, I suffered an unbearable dream last night. It was about that war. I mean the war that was so much discussed but that never took place, the war from which both North and South stepped back as from the brink of a terrible abyss.

  In my dream that precipice loomed again, and this time there was no Stephen Douglas to call us away with concessions and compromises and his disgusting deference to the Slave Aristocracy. In my dream, the war took place. And it was an awful war, Mr. Camber. It seemed to flow before my eyes in a series of bloody tableaux. A half a million dead. Battlefields too awful to
contemplate, North and South. Industries crippled, both the print and the cotton presses silenced, thriving cities reduced to smoldering ruins—all this I saw, or knew, as one sees or knows in dreams.

  But that was not the unbearable part of it.

  Let me say that I have known death altogether too intimately. I have suffered the loss of children. I love peace just as fervently as I despise injustice. I would not wish grief or heartbreak on any mother of any section of this country, or any other country. And yet—!

  And yet, in light of what I have inferred from recent numbers of your newspaper, and from the letters you have written me, and from what old friends and acquaintances have said or written about the camps, the deportations, the Lodges, etc.,—because of all that, a part of me wishes that that war had indeed been fought if only because it might have ended slavery. Ended it cleanly, I mean, with a sane and straightforward liberation, or even a liberation partial and incomplete—a declaration, at least, of the immorality and unacceptability of human bondage—anything but this sickening decline by extinction, this surreptitious (as you so bitterly describe it) “cleansing.”

  I suppose this makes me sound like a monster, a sort of female John Brown, confusing righteousness with violence and murder with redemption.

  I am not such a monster. I confess a certain admiration for those who, like President Douglas, worked so very hard to prevent the apocalypse of which I dreamed last night, even if I distrust their motives and condemn their means. The instinct for peace is the most honorable of all Christian impulses. My conscience rebels at a single death, much less one million.

  But if a war could have ended slavery . . . would I have wished it? Welcomed it?

  What is unbearable, Mr. Camber, is that I don’t know that I can answer my own horrifying question either honestly or decently. And so I have to ask: Can you?