I Got to Keep Moving Read online

  Cretia and Jube were sitting cross-legged side by side.

  “We’ve had it hard,” she said, “from a baby up.”

  She told him about her mother’s life in freedom in St. Thomas, and about her own life. She went on and on in the flickering light but all he could think of was moving through the dark after Cretia’s Gal and being with her and dreaming about freedom they would run away to one day, e’en if they had to move through the darkness with her clinging to him; he was feeling freedom just thinking about it. Cretia saying she understood, she understood how he felt, could feel how he hurt because she had hurt, just like him. Telling him to let it go. Let the past be the past. Let it fall away like petals from a stem, let it go, or it would forever hold him down, telling him to be proud of the way he had learned to walk the dark. Be proud of the way he could help flowers grow. She was rubbing his hand and she was crying and he was crying, and they were crying together and he was breathing, breathing as if it were his first breath, as if he’d been slapped, had the breath slapped in him, and she was rubbing his hand, and he was breathing, and his face was wet but he was not crying any more, and his head hung down, almost to his lap, and he was breathing, just breathing, not crying, not hurting, his eyes closed, sleepy, and she was rubbing his hand, and he was as tired as he had ever been. She put something in his hand, smooth, round, and cold, and he clenched it in his fist. A bead.

  Was that what she had given Cretia’s Gal? He wondered as he slumped sideways and laid his head in Cretia’s lap . . .

  &

  Cretia did not sleep.

  Cretia looked up, as if she had been called. Not snappish like from M’s Esme, but soft, like a butterfly, or a whiff in the air. She eased Jube onto the floor and moved to and opened the door. Listening. Alert. Trying to still her mind and concentrate amongst all the confusion of the past day. She closed her eyes against the night darkness and inhaled deeply, holding it as she felt her blood in her veins. She exhaled, thinking of rippling water. Lifting her face, eyes still closed, thinking of her mother, thinking of star glint. Motionless for a moment. Listening. For something beneath the night stillness, something softer than the silent pulse of growing, and sleeping for renewal . . .

  She opened her eyes.

  She nodded.

  Yes, she thought.

  She breathed easier.

  But she did not sleep . . .

  . . . Jube slept.

  Dreamed honeysuckles. Growing out of his chest, and dogwoods sprouting from his mouth, red, orange, yellow, purple, and pink, and roots growing from his hair his fingers and toes and running away, faster than Bryce’s dogs, to connect with roots growing from Cretia’s Gal, and he thinks her name, and for a flash Cretia’s Gal is there: a butterfly glimpse as she, darting from one room to another, smiles like the North Star. It is like the sugary dance of candy on his tongue, and he thinks her name, and she hears him in camellias and evergreens.

  But when he awoke he lay with his head in Cretia’s lap, the bead in his fist, and Cretia’s Gal was there, but Cretia’s Gal was gone.

  3

  Macready

  Caledonia Plantation, Mardalwil County, Alabama, Saturday, April 1, 1854

  West of Highland House, in the field, the hands hollered as they worked. Beneath their feet the chopped and plowed-under stalks left from last season’s cotton harvest were sharp, the lumps of upturned earth were cool, and the worms, whole or plow blade-severed, were fat and slimy.

  It was dark in the distance as it was overhead. Macready the overseer, or the grieve, as Goodsire called him, was anxious to get in the last day of plowing before the rain in the low rolling clouds began. As in the first days of every planting season, Macready thought, the field hands hollered like a sea of churning and whirring storm-stirred Atlantic brine.

  &

  The hands, in the endless cycle of another day too slow and work too long and hard, felt their joints and bones balk at acceptance of the rote drudgery. They hollered as they toiled under the watch of Macready, the man who worked for the man who had the papers on their life and labor, labor and life, and Beasley, Macready’s deputy. Beasley, short little bastard, carried a long skint sapling, stunk like hell, and raised a whelp the size of a rope. Like a well-trained herding dog, working opposite Macready, circling, keeping an eye on them for the least little signs or signals of slacking.

  Knowing neither of the men cared any more about them than a duck cared for a turnip, or than they cared for the work or the men. So to keep from falling down weeping, or taking off running, or standing there and losing their minds, they did their best to combat the senseless reality of it by doing what Macready and Beasley heard only as hollering.

  Macready had taught them a song, a sea shanty—Patty, Get Back, his before Caledonia days on the sea.

  Adieu my fair young maidens,

  Thousand times adieu

  We must bid goodbye to the Holy Ground,

  The place that we love true.

  When they sang it he barely recognized the tune the way they stacked voice on voice and drug it out and broke it up.

  We’ll sail the salt seas ov’r

  But return again for sure

  To seek the girls that wait for us,

  In the Holy Ground once more.

  It unnerved him but pleased him, because, he thought, the louder a hand hollered the more work he would do.

  &

  The Bottom hands hollered across and along the furrows and the fields, one to another, or just shouted out unthinking snatches of what weighed most on their backs and hearts at that moment. Their bondage, exhaustion, and longing for leisure were the subjects least directly expressed. Instead, the little annoyances, chips off the big block, were the difficulties foremost in their mouths if not on their minds. There were complications of love making, aching for lost ones, remembered slights, spites, nosiness, messages, bad times, and the good times at frolics. Their hollering was of no one type; it took no one form, just anything to keep them from being too, too, too dissatisfied.

  The overcast morning fit their mood. The promise of rain, with its likelihood of being a downpour, or teem, or pour, as Goodsire said it, that would stop the work, would mean one more day of labor gone. One more day till all their days was gone. For their part they did not care if the pour came and did na stop falling until it drowned the world and ev’ry breathing creature with flesh, feathers, or fins, creeping, trotting, flying, or swimming.

  &

  And if there was a beginning, as if it really mattered, but for simply a place to mark, it was here, in their slow contentious and continuously steady cycle, like mill mules circling, sun to sun, season through season, grinding, monotonous, unavailing. They followed the ruts in the land. They hollered.

  Arguing in their own minds, and with each other, with no more than a look or a nod or snatch of words as to how long it was going to be before Macready was going to have to signal to little Beasley to go and ring the bell to stop the work because of the coming rain and let them go on to the Bottom. It was going to have to be more than coming rain, it had to be a pour, and it would be, and the order would have to be given and the work stopped and they knew it. That was the kind of pour was coming. Ev’ry hoe hand, plowman, and water boy among them could read them clouds same as Macready could cipher a column of figures. And come this here kind of pour coming nothing Macready nor Goodsire nor no other white man could do to stop it. The hands took some satisfaction (though scant) in that.

  Macready could feel them dragging, dull, and ferocious as they slumped, shiftless, slow, and mean in their gray homespuns. Damn them. The first day of the new season and already he wondered how he would be able to continue to stand the sight of them. Deceptive. Resistant. The hope of the threat of rain slacking them just enough to satisfy their animal stubborn need to be contrary without provoking him much more than they did simply by their blank, hangdog faces, empty except for their accusing, downcast eyes. They could be at once cowering and willful.
Always testing, always wanting to get something without benefit of labor, as if they were somehow, by wordless contract, bound to have it.

  Macready, overseer, or grieve, Goodsire’s Scottish word for him. Responsible for the maintenance and well-being of all hands, livestock, property, crops, and Goodsire’s other interests on the Caledonia plantation. Sitting above them on Goodsire’s sorrel stallion, and thinking how what he does is as delicate a craft as a watchmaker’s. Each little piece of the mechanism has to be exact, in tune, to keep the instrument ticking right along. He nodded at the appropriateness of his analogy. How to keep them ticking right along—when to apply hard discipline, when just a firm hand will do, when to read their natural sullenness for what it is, like with Goodsire’s spirited sorrel between his legs, when to ease off, loosen the reins a bit and seem to let them have their way.

  And, he thought, he was likewise a captive, languid, stubborn, slogging, collared by contract for two more years, through the same mud-slime as them.

  &

  The clouds, as bloated as drowned pigs’ bellies, seemed no higher than the treetops.

  Eph, the jyner-carpenter, tilted his head back and sniffed at the air.

  “Macready’s harness ready?” Odum, who had just huffed up the hill, asked Ashe.

  Ashe pointed to the wall where he had hung the repaired harness.

  “Had to wet your throat before the rain, huh?” he said, scraping at his chin with the back of his hand.

  “What you gabbing about?” Odom asked.

  “Where you got it hid?” Eph was standing in the smiddie’s doorway.

  “Better gargle you some clove and peppermint water ’for you see Macready,” Caesar said.

  “He smells that alcohol on you, he might send you back out following a mule’s ass in them fields.”

  “Don’t worry ’bout me picking cotton. I picked all the cotton I’m picking. Macready told me that his self.”

  “And did he na tell you to na let him catch you drinking Red Stick’s swamp water, too?”

  “You do na know what he told me. And you better hope this harness fixed like he want it, or he’ll be up here to see you three jackanapes his self.”

  “He do na like it he know where we at,” Eph said. “And tell him do na get in the water he do na want to get wet. Now go on yonder finish slopping your cousins.”

  Odum looked at them and shook his head. He hefted the harness to his shoulder as he moved back toward the hog pens.

  &

  The rain was steady now, and would only get heavier and more intense. But it would be awhile, Macready decided, before he sent Moon running to ring the quitting bell. Instead he hummed along in his head to the babel of shanty-like laments and lilts they sang and shouted as they sloughed forward in their duties. The tunes and fragments reminded him, with a shudder as it did daily, of those sung by the long laboring crew of the Buenos Aires sailors, him among them, that caused at the same time the churning and whirring in his lowest bowel.

  &

  We do the work. When we do na work, work do na get done. Would na much get done today they nodded, smiling. Their field hollering over for the day.

  &

  As they were heading for the quarters, a boy brought a message from M’s Esme at the big house for him to come, there was a child to be punished, and bring all of the hands to witness it.

  &

  Macready came. Dripping. Dour as the day.

  They went: motley, sodden. Grudging.

  The paths muddy, the grass slick.

  Trudged up from the Bottom in twos and threes and random clots and clusters, nigh, they hoped, the chafing end of a galling day.

  What had this to do with him?

  It would be different if Goodsire were here, he thought. This was a household infraction, for Jonis to handle, but hiding his irritation, he accepted without question his involvement and the justice of it. The gal had to be punished. Aye. For causing her mistress hurt. Simple as that.

  He could have reasoned to Goodsire that as dark-mooded as the hands already were, gathering them all back out of their cabins, in the rain, for them to witness the whipping of a child, was an inconvenience that would not pay long-term dividends. But it was what she’d ordered. And therefore it was his job, as it would be, according to the contract, signed and witnessed between Charleton Kimbrough, of the first part, and Michael (Mick) Macready, of the second part. And the sooner the stupid business was begun, the sooner done.

  Macready knew the whipping would not be the end of it. For the next several days, at least, it would be on the field billies like a stink. Already unsettled by the rain and the prospect of its continued disrupting of their routine, they would, as if there was one mind among them, drag and grumble and give as little as could be offered without severe consequence. It would be another planting season bad begun.

  All for a lesson to a child.

  This, the whipping of negroes, among the sundry chores named in his contract; to perform all duties and services as required of a good grieve or overseer. He was responsible for everything, every coming and going, every facet of the control and managing of the property and Caledonia. It was his responsibility to rise before them and retire after them, and preside in between, with all necessaries guaranteed by him. Their labor, feeding, fitness, and confinement. His responsibility. Personally guaranteed. The maintenance and protection of all buildings, and property and fences, and the care and condition of all tools, livestock, and poultry. For the deliverance of a profitable crop.

  With every intention to fulfill this portion of his duties, his mind had already leaped ahead to imagine laying the leather on her only enough to raise a couple of welts, without cutting the dark skin so it oozed red along the ridge, only enough to cause the whelp to writhe and whimper; enough for M’s Esme, watching from the upstairs window, to be satisfied that he had personally performed another of his duties guaranteed to be performed by the conditions of his contract. Signed and witnessed.

  But when she looked back over her shoulder at him as if wondering was there anything she could do to hasten this along, there was a glint from her eye, causing a whip-snap memory flash. A deep nicking, razor-sharp liquid flick that bit to his quick. Then a sudden dazzling of lightheaded recognition of the moment: the whip, the cries for mercy, the gush of his blood geysering through his body and brain, which in that instant he took for the sounds of rushing water. With M’s Esme looking down from her window, like Sir Edward Handy-Webster, Captain, looking down from the fore deck of the slave ship Buenos Aires.

  The earth rolled beneath him, the ocean of his blood roaring again in his ears, and then, the whip handle as blistering in his hand as if white hot from Caesar’s forge. Macready did not swoon, but if he had not been so well prepared for it by previous distant and recent occurrences, he would have: where a sudden shift in the breeze, or a sound of a wheel against the axle, like that of a ship’s rigging, or the snatch of a field-billie’s song that echoed one of a ship’s crewman, would cause him to start, or turn, or break into a sweat.

  Beasley stood a distance from him, on watch, like a good guard dog. Moon the black driver beside him.

  Macready head-motioned him forward and Beasley sprang forth with the eagerness of a retriever after a gunshot, Moon a couple steps behind.

  The whip moved from a trembling to an eager hand. Do it, Macready said, as he walked away from their eyes: from the gal’s, Cretia’s, Mistress Kimbrough’s, Beasley’s, from all of theirs.

  &

  Macready’s sleeping dog stirred a growl-groan in its furred throat.

  Its master, his pipe clenched in his teeth, sat in the black of his cabin. He chewed a leaf of peppermint, trying to soothe the rumbling in his gut caused by the memory that had surged back in him like the gastric repeat of cold collards.

  Macready knew what it was to be whipped. The scars that laced his back were testimony. The Master at Arms on the Buenos Aires had cited the 23rd Psalm as they sailed in the Atlan
tic sun, and he snapped the leather lash against Macready’s young back. Cretia had seen the scars after the snake bit him, and she sucked the poison from him and then stood over him, her hand held forward, palm up, and said what she said.

  Mr. Botkin, the Master at Arms, was born mean enough, they whispered, to spit out his sweet mother’s milk and call her a whore, which she likely was, they whispered. For a lifetime he had marinated in the juice and brine of the devil’s own black puke. All hands heeded and were still inadequate to the task of the Buenos Aires, a slaver out of Senegambia, which weighed anchor and set out that August for a Caribbean course. An undermanned ship with an overloaded hold: a combination ideal for profit, and for anarchy. The Buenos Aires was manned by a dog’s dinner of old jacks, green boys, sops, sots, lubbers, misfits, and malcontents as ever swung in a hammock or from a yardarm. It was the least proportion of them had any sea experience.

  Macready, fifteen, an able-bodied boy among them. In full flight from the constraints of Round Stone Bog. He was barely schooled in letters, social intercourse, church, civics, or the sea, with no more than an idea of how to distinguish the ship’s magazine from the mess from the capstan, or fo’c’sle from the maintopman, or midshipman from the mawser, windlass, or keelson.

  The first night under sail he awoke to the lurch and roll, lurch and roll to find a knot on his noggin the size of a coal lump, sick to his stomach on the rotgut grog freely served to fatten him up for the kill: shanghaied for lackey labor.

  You bloody bastards, Mr. Botkin announced to the line of groggy boys and men in a forced formation on the foredeck, you have been pressed into the service of the Woodman & Brainbridge Company to deliver this load of African negars to St. Thomas. At the end of the voyage you will be paid and given free passage to the homeport of your choosing. In the meantime th’r’ill be order and discipline in the manner of true seamen. Do as you’re ordered in a lively fashion and no harm will come to you.

  In the name of a taut ship, no transgression or misstep was tolerated. No excuse accepted. Daily discipline of ridicule and corporal punishment was administered. The distribution of Botkin’s wrath was as equally dispensed as it was random in its monsoon-ugly mood and intention. He had simply to whistle and two or more of his knot of crew thugs set upon point and the offender without explanation or restraint. Complaints of maltreatment whispered to officers, all of which reached his ear, were revenged by additional lashes.