Yonder, p.12
Yonder, page 12
Torches placed along the perimeter of the clearing pushed the shadows back into the surrounding trees. After allowing a pair of fiddlers to enter the rough circle we’d formed, we joined hands. The musicians touched off the event with subtle bowing. A wistful tune floated up from the fiddles, a soft wave of sound that enveloped us like a caress. We waited, taking it all in, each of us using the moment to remember Milton, some kind word or gesture that warmed our hearts. When the fiddling slowed and the melody faded to a faint refrain, I stepped forward.
“Sistren, brethren,” I said. “Shall we hum?”
We pursed our lips and released the common sound first forged in the bellies of ships to overcome our mismatched tongues, tongues that came from dozens of villages in Africa. Silent Mary’s hum was most powerful of all, a lively purr providing a richness of expression her silence routinely denied. It felt at such times that we could move the earth with our vibrations: bottomless, resonant, and so much older than ourselves. Then we shifted to a lower frequency, and a handful of Milton’s celebrants took turns testifying against a backdrop of handclaps and rattling bones.
Two women spoke fondly of Milton’s dancing. Hum, hum, clap.
Cato praised his timely wit. Hum, hum, clap.
“With his drawings, he showed me Canada,” Zander said. “Africa too.” Hum, hum, clap.
A space opened between hum and clap, and Margaret urged William to walk through it. Hesitantly, he entered the ring.
“Some of us believe Milton’s on his way back to Africa,” he began, “where he will find rest in the loving arms of his Ancestors. Others think he has returned to the clay from which his Creator formed him.”
William turned to Margaret for reassurance. She smiled at him and nodded.
“For all of us,” he continued, “one truth is certain: he will no longer have to struggle alongside us, here in the hell that Thieves made.” William paused, as if he had more to say. Apparently he thought better of it, for he shook his head and left the circle. Margaret took his hand, and Cato clapped him on the shoulder.
I took the ensuing lull as my cue to resume. Raising my voice, I encouraged us to move from mourning to movement, from grief to joy. Every time I swayed the crowd, a voice would ring out in response, confirming my point.
“Milton is not lost,” I said.
“No!”
“Milton is not finished.”
“That’s right!”
“Milton is not departed.”
“I see him still!”
“Milton is not broken or bent or bowed.”
“Preach!”
“What he is… is free.”
“Well!”
“Free, sistren and brethren! Free from all this. For Milton, every morning from now on will be a great getting up!”
The entire circle took up the chant: “Free! Free! Free!” We repeated it until we reached a fever pitch, our voices strained with excitement. Unwinding the white strips from our bodies, we let our sadness float to the ground. Women kicked their heels above their heads. Men twisted and flexed. In a whirl of laughter, wild notes, and hallelujahs, we shook and cried. Cried and shook. The fiddlers took up their instruments again and committed to furious bowing, sawing at the strings in a frenzy. The bone-clappers rattled a staccato accompaniment. Little Zander, bellowing and sprinting, flipped end over end, backward and forward, forward and back. We could have celebrated Milton’s freedom until dawn if not for the swift rush of time. Sunrise was not far away. The fields would not wait.
At my signal, we slowed our movements, allowing our rhapsody to cool to manageable warmth. After affectionate goodbyes and the clasping of hands, Milton’s mourners departed with haste. Though they had obtained passes for this night, many had a ways to go. No longer muted by fiddling and humming and jubilant shouts, the regular sounds of night reemerged to claim the clearing. Margaret lingered, helping me to gather the white strips that had been strewn about in our delirium. As she placed the last remnant in my pouch, she turned to me. William stood close by, waiting for her.
“Preacher,” she said, “what if God is a Thief?”
I had the feeling she was asking for William as much as for herself.
“I want God to be bigger than Thieves,” I told her. “I want God to be bigger than all of this.”
“And is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Margaret looked into my eyes, first one and then the other, as if her staring might give greater clarity to my words.
“Yet you believe,” she said.
“Yes.”
“What good is in that?”
“Maybe none. But there’s no harm in it either.”
“You got a strange faith, Preacher.”
“It’s a strange world, is it not?”
She considered this. A half smile formed on her lips, suggesting she was satisfied. “Indeed it is,” she said.
She moved away, but William appeared in front of me before she had completely turned her back. He regarded me with his usual intensity, not cruelly but with no special kindness either.
“You’re supposed to have all the answers,” he said. It felt like an accusation.
I chuckled and strapped my pouch across my shoulder. “I wish it were only that,” I told him. “I don’t even have all the questions.”
Margaret
When I had seven harvests behind me, I got this habit of staring down the road, waiting for my mother to come back from wherever she was sold. Standing in the yard, I came to know every clod and pebble of the lane leading away from the farm. I could mark the point at which the heat turned to ribbons that waved above the ground, the way the grass grew on both sides of the path, and the movement of shadows as the hours passed. I imagined my mother’s voice in every gust of wind stirring the landmark oak that leaned above the turnoff to my Thief’s lands, could hear her whispering through branches arching over every horse and wagon that traveled underneath. As months turned into years, I kept on hoping that the swirls of dust kicked up by hooves would magically uncoil to reveal my mother, walking toward me with arms outstretched and a smile on her face. No commotion behind me, not even the threat of danger, could sway me from my post. More than once a kindly Stolen adult swooped me up and carried me away from likely punishment as I kicked and screamed in protest. It took me four harvests to get over this tendency, and to this day I can see things at a distance better than things that are near me.
Goldwood was the only farm I had known before coming to Two Forks, having arrived there while still in my mother’s belly. It belonged to Elbridge Hooper, who received much of his wealth through his marriage to a pleasant widow named Abigail. She entertained few guests other than her brother, Jeremiah, whom she loved fiercely. As for Elbridge, he favored being on horseback to standing on the ground. He was fond of sitting tall in the saddle and watching over his captives as they labored, but he never dirtied his own hands. His brother-in-law was helpful in this regard. Jeremiah was a nuisance, but his bent for farming made it easier for Elbridge to put up with him. What we knew of the Hooper family came from the Stolen laboring in the main house. From them we learned that Elbridge spared most of his kindness for his beloved daughter, an only child with about twenty harvests behind her. With the young lady recently married and moved away, he spent his days taking long solitary trips beyond his estate into neighboring territories. He had just returned from such an outing when the trouble began, troubles that Elbridge could have avoided, it was said, if he had simply bothered to get off his horse every once in a while.
The yard was full of active Stolen. I was working on the trash gang, pulling weeds, when the door to the main house flew open. Jeremiah rushed across the threshold, dashing down the veranda steps with Elbridge running after him. He’d managed only a few strides before Elbridge brought him down.
“Take your hands off me!” Jeremiah yelled.
“Not until you’re dead!” Elbridge yelled back.
Even with just seven harvests behind me I had seen men go at it like hounds. But in every instance they had been Stolen, sometimes fighting because their Thieves forced them to. In other cases, the fight had started because of a quarrel over a woman or something as simple as an ear of corn. Never, however, had I seen two Thieves dressed in fine clothes tussling in the dirt. The mistress of the house, fluttering like a hen, wailed from the veranda. Neither Elbridge nor Jeremiah was much of a fighter, and neither was in the springtime of life. Mostly they just tore each other’s collars and mussed each other’s hair. Four or five Stolen men, all of them better with their fists, watched them from a distance. The mistress hollered for them to do something, but they knew better. They found new tasks until the Thieves wore themselves out, stumbled to their feet, and staggered inside.
The details quickly reached the quarters. Elbridge had discovered what some Stolen had already known: his wife had been having relations with her own brother and had been doing so for more than twenty years. At dusk, I played with the other children, taking turns at jumping rope and making up stories for our topsy-turvy dolls. All the while, we listened to the chatter of the adults who watched over us from their cabin stoops. They said things like “right under his nose!” and “all their lives!” The laughter died down as the sky grew dark, and the jokes gave way to more personal concerns. What, if anything, would happen to Goldwood? What would happen to us?
If my mother was uneasy, she didn’t share her worries with me. After feeding and washing me, she sang my favorite lullaby until I fell asleep.
Hush-a-by and don’t you cry,
And go to sleep, little baby;
When you wake you shall have some cake
And ride a pretty little horsey.
You shall have a little canoe
And a little bit of a paddle;
You shall have a little red mule
And a little bitty saddle.
The black and the bay, the sorrel and the gray,
All belong to my baby.
So hush-a-by and don’t you cry
And go to sleep, little baby.
It was the last night I spent in her arms. Her face has faded from my memory, but her voice lingers.
* * *
In the main house, a quick bargain had been struck by lamplight. As Elbridge glared sternly from the porch and Abigail wept somewhere within, Jeremiah left early in the morning, escorted by a pair of hired men and taking with him a company of Stolen that included my mother. Our parting was fierce and terrible, a desperate embrace before my mother was coffled and tethered behind a wagon. The air rushed from my body as I strained against the arms that conspired to hold me back. While my sobs and urgent prayers joined the others erupting all around me, Jeremiah’s procession continued down the road that would hold my gaze for years to come.
I did more staring than crying as I grew, not having much time to feel sorry for myself. Nor, of course, did I have the maternal breast on which I had once pressed such sadness. What good was weeping with no mother to rock me gently and offer tender words?
I continued to toil at Goldwood for another seven harvests until Elbridge was found dead, slumped over in his saddle. His will bequeathed Two Forks, another of his estates, to his daughter, the skittish young lady whose bloodline had by then become an open question. I was sent there along with several others to serve her and her husband, a man named Cannonball Greene. When I arrived, they had been married for nearly ten years and together controlled three farms and ten thousand acres. I soon learned that in the quarters Mrs. Greene was known, with no hint of affection, as Screech Owl.
She rarely appeared during my first years at Two Forks, and I seldom had reason to venture near the main house when she did. When I came to make my home with William at Placid Hall, I saw her most often during her regular trips to the family graveyard, where three small plots held the remains of her fallen children. Screech Owl’s frailty and hardship in childbirth had resulted in infants who never lived to see their first harvest. It was only when glimpsing her private mourning that I ever felt something like tenderness toward her, for I had a notion of the burden she shouldered.
Long before William came into my life, I had learned to grasp both sides of my situation, to consider that perhaps somewhere my mother had been looking down a similar lane, a dusty, winding path that would lead to me. There was such loss, such emptiness in that possibility that no part of being a Stolen mother or daughter seemed to offer any reward; either way, one wound up losing. As for being a daughter, I had had no choice in the matter. But as I grew up and womanhood came despite my every effort to delay it, I resolved, as did many Stolen women, that I would never give birth, never be yanked from the arms of a child and dragged down a road that she would fix her eyes on for years after. To our dismay, we soon learned that we had no say over our bodies and what could or could not be done with them. If bringing forth new life meant I could stay with William I was willing, even eager, to do it.
I hadn’t known that Stolen men worried in the same way that women did until I met William. In most men, the craving for women’s flesh outweighed every other concern. But while William’s appetite was strong, he managed to keep it under control. His restraint, at first a marvel to me, began to unsettle me enough to keep me awake nights. Although he often argued otherwise, I didn’t need him to remind me that few Stolen ever had a chance to finish life with the mate they started out with, let alone with one they had chosen, that the odds were against us regardless of Cannonball Greene’s unsteady whims. It was true, I knew, that even fewer of us got to see our children grow up. Milton’s dying before getting to know his daughter, Silent Mary’s lifelong silence after losing her child, William’s own obsession with the dead children he had encountered long ago—all of these things only made him more wary. At the same time, he was troubled to know that Greene saw our slowness at making a baby as a failure that needed solving. Distracted, he agreed to accompany me to the homegoing without quite realizing what he’d consented to.
He didn’t know I had acquired a distraction of my own. After watching Sarah leave with Holtzclaw, Ben sent Clarence away and presumed to walk beside me back to the quarter. I tried to stop him in his tracks by assuring him I had no interest in his company.
“No matter,” he told me, leaning in close. I feared for a moment that he was preparing to swipe my face with his disgusting tongue. “Boss Greene told me I’m next in line if you and Billy Boy keep coming up empty.”
A fierce pain seized my chest, making it hard to breathe. “What do you mean?” I asked him.
“You know,” he said. He grabbed himself. “You know what ‘next in line’ means, I’m sure. One shot is all I need, although you’ll be wanting more than that. I’ve got more sap than a sweetgum.”
I moved to slap him but he caught my wrist.
“Careful now,” he warned.
“William will kill you,” I said.
“And Boss Greene will skin him directly,” he said with a grin. “Or else sell him away. Where will that leave you?”
“Not with you,” I said, tearing myself from his grip. “Never with you.”
Ben chuckled. “You go on ahead, mind yourself. Big Ben’s more patient than you think.”
He left no telltale bruise upon my flesh, but his nasty words got under my skin and lodged there like a hornet’s barb. Still, I managed to nearly forget them during Milton’s homegoing. With William beside me, I lost myself in the singing and shouting. The brief audience with Preacher afterward also made me feel better, but only for a while. By the time we returned to our cabin a nagging nervousness began to grow in me, rising and swelling until it became a desperate yearning.
In the wee hours, I took William into my arms, determined to make him finish what he started. I rubbed his back while he moved inside me. “I’m standing over yonder,” I whispered.
“I’m on free soil. Nothing between you and me but open ground. No whips, no Thieves, no hounds out for our hides. Just grass and sunlight and warm gentle breezes. Run to me,” I urged him. “Take my hand. Run until you can’t run anymore.”
He took my hand and together we moved in great strides, until he crossed over.
William
I was glad I had gone to Milton’s homegoing, although I didn’t intend to admit as much to Margaret. Singing and dancing will never be among my favorite pastimes. Yet I was drawn to the raw feeling that seemed to flow among all the participants; the event produced in me a powerful happiness I had seldom felt. I still had my doubts about Ransom. I had long thought him self-important and full of secrets, and possibly even a spy for Greene. However, during a brief moment to myself in our cabin the next day, I recalled the good words he had spoken. He had said nothing that struck me as odd or deceitful. Besides, I had no disagreement at all with his insistence that Milton was indeed free. I was also pleasantly surprised that he readily confessed to not knowing everything, or even knowing whether what he believed was true. I noted his kindness toward Margaret, which seemed to come from honest affection and nothing more. I got a notion that perhaps we had more in common than I was prepared to admit. I had long been accused of believing in nothing, but my days—and nights—with Margaret so awakened my spirit that I feared it would weaken me and lead to my undoing. While I placed no stock in the muttering of sevens or begging a god who lived in the sky, I had nonetheless come upon a tremendous faith. I believed in her. I believed in us.
