I Got to Keep Moving Page 4

  The crew was little better treated or thought of than the cargo of Africans, who were dealt with like a kennel of snarling mad dogs that could only be kept at bay by foot, fist, blunt instrument, chain, or lash.

  Mr. Botkin’s every move was sanctioned by the sorry son of a bitch of a captain, one Edward Handy-Webster, uncle-in-law of Sir Charles Woodman, equal partner of Woodman & Brainbridge Co.

  Profit from the sale of the black and woeful cargo was the voyage’s purpose. Overhead was kept to a minimum. The cargo, from their confinement in the hold, cried out in desperation in a ceaseless chorus of howls and moans.

  Portions of victuals, not fit for the maggots that infested them, were barely above subsistence level. Working hours were at Mr. Botkin’s whim, and shifts tested reason and human endurance.

  And after a few days at sea the heavens heard their cries, and an easterly blow advanced with it clouds and darkness and covered the good ship Buenos Aires like a cloak, and broke, flooding open its nether gate in answer. And the terribleness of it whipped the air and whirled the ocean, and the water pelted down. All that night, in the midst of the strength of the suck and swell of the sea, the Buenos Aires was tossed and battered as if it were no more than a shuttlecock. And as the waves chucked them up and swallowed them, only to vomit them forth again, the crew whined and prayed, and the blacks, battened, their air vents covered by tarpaulin, pled in muffled moans. And he, Macready, screamed his agony and curses as furiously and fruitlessly as they. Not for mercy, not for relief, nor e’en as a call for an answer or accountability, but simply out of the choice-less necessity of it. At least to scream and struggle would be the final sign of a short life lived.

  But at the end of the long night, with the coming of the light on the water, there was barely a ripple. The cargo of captives were assembled and accounted for. And notice was taken that during the roar a corner of the tarpaulin, lashed down over the air vents as a precautionary measure, had torn loose from its mooring. On the one hand it had allowed some below to breathe and thereby escape suffocating, but it had also caused many, chained in the hip-deep water, to drown.

  Macready, ordered down into the hold, pulled back. Mr. Botkin, driven madder by the fear and frustration, accused him of being less than a man, humiliated him, sentenced thirty lashes, and a combination of brine and pepper to be rubbed into his wounds. The count was ten when Macready relented, descended into the hot, rotten smell of the hold to unlatch and pass up the dead.

  The creak and chafe of the ship’s timbers, and the sway and slosh of the sewage of sea water, shit, sweat, snot, piss, tears, vomit, slobber, and blood awash in the vessel’s bottom, were the harmonic undercurrent of the Babel of African simpering and moans.

  Down.

  A makeshift mask covered his face, yet the stench was a simultaneous blow to the budge of the nose and to his gut. Among the drowned he sought to unshackle were those that he guessed had willed themselves dead, and the suicides, their necks wrapped around with their chains. The living, in their grief, their anger, their illness, with their infections, ulcers, and whip-and self-inflicted wounds where they had gorged and torn at each other, their debilitation, their thirst, dysentery, diarrhea, their melancholy, were like scorpions in a box. As he crab-walked about the carpet of their slick black bodies, some, foaming at the mouth like mad dogs he’d seen in Surrey alleys, bit and snarled at him. He could not imagine Hell itself was any hotter, or its claustrophobic constraint closer, or its conditions more callous. He feared, with faint hope of help from above, that if he fell or fainted he would surely be eaten alive.

  The gag and shudder of it, hundreds of kilometers inland, and a decade and a half later, were still branded on his brain. It still snatched him shivering and sweaty from sleep, or stroked him with its cold hand to lie moaning enfolded in its body’s embrace. Its rhythmic inhaling and exhaling matching his.

  4

  Eph

  Caledonia Plantation, Sunday, April 2, 1854

  Usually Jonis awoke with a start before the roosters rose and cats crept in from the night, even before the others had risen to haul ashes from the cookhouse, empty the chamber pots, and build the fires, and so Aunt Amelia, heavy-eyed and dour, could set the coffee brewing. One second Jonis would be asleep the next he’d be as wide-awake and alert as a coon at the first hound’s yap.

  So

  Jube was up even before Jonis. They boy placed the long-stalked Atamasco lily on the dewy spot where Cretia’s Gal’s had lain, her back welted, skin slick with rain.

  Jube knew from watching and from being told long ago by Jonis, you did not get to be and then stay the grieve, the head house servant, by lulling and scratching your way awake in the morning. For the head of house to do his job for the master and for the benefit of the other servants, it was essential to be able to gather together bits and pieces of information—fact and figures, rumors and snatches of overheard conversation, looks, nods, moods. You needed all of that in order to be out-thinking your whites before they opened their eyes.

  So

  Cretia who had not slept stood outside M’s Esme’s door. Listening. She made a deliberate noise.

  The sound that came back to her was like the sudden scurry of a scalded cat, followed by worried stirring. Cretia tiptoed away down the servants’ back stairs.

  Jube noticed Jonis was alert as usual as he told Aunt Amelia to have Sophy set the table (because Cretia’s Gal was gone), then went about his regular Sunday morning routine.

  So

  Damnit.

  The aftertaste of the Cretia’s Gal news had moved like maggots or mealy worms through the grain of predawn and burrowed in the breakfasts of the hands in the Bottom. It had set the bile boiling in their bellies like hot lye bubbling in a wash kettle. It was barely daylight and they had to be mad already.

  And now, their mood smut-black, they waited for Beasley. The little man who was in charge, because of McCready’s absence. He was wasting their time by trying to get them strung out single file, like Christmas popcorn on a string, instead of just passing out their weekly damned draw of damned rations of fatback, molasses, and a little damn meat.

  Any one of them could run it better. Hell, even Odum had more control over his pigs while slopping them, far as that went.

  Shit.

  Was not like this when McCready was doing it. McCready did it as he sat up on his sorrel, letting them lay about if they liked, while he checked them off in the ledger, a tick mark by each name, as Odum meted out their allotment through the smokehouse door.

  At the pace it was going this morning it be time to hand out Christmas rations if Beasley, the fool, did not change his mind and nub-legged ways.

  And ahead of them still stood the drudge of a Sunday of ditches and dredging and damming trying to drain the rainwater first from the fields and then the Bottom. And there was still their own Sunday work to be done.

  Damnit.

  So

  Ashe and Caesar knew Eph was going to be mad, mad as a bottled hornet set on a sunny stump. Mad at Cretia’s Gal’s lashing. Mad at McCready who’d snuck the child off to sell her, mad at M’s Esme for sending her off in the middle of the storming night to the broker in Mardalwil County’s courthouse.

  Cretia’s Gal was gone, and they had not even gotten to wave goodbye. Aye, they knew. They understood why Eph would be mad.

  They were too.

  Cretia’s Gal was gone.

  Was stole off.

  Middle of the midnight storm.

  Stole off to the courthouse to be sold off.

  Stole off to be sold off on the nigger-trading block.

  Would the young Highland House widow woman who pounded at the piano and whacked at the weeds sell them off piecemeal and on a moment’s whim too?

  And whose chickens was it yet to do the roosting?

  Oh, aye, there were chickens to come home and roosting to be done. Cretia’s Gal was gone, but they knew it was not over, and wondered what Cretia was going to do. />
  They wondered what it was all going to mean, and worried how much they would suffer before the last egg was hatched.

  They wondered.

  They worried.

  So

  In the yards of the Bottom, young’n’s Little Fred and Oscar sang back and forth and splashed in the mud.

  “Ain’t you hear that mournful thunder?”

  “Roll from door to door.”

  “Did not it pour?”

  “Pour!”

  Punctuating the end of each line with a foot stamp in the mud.

  “Ain’t you hear that mournful thunder?”

  “Roll from door to door.”

  “Ain’t it pour?”

  “Pour!”

  “Ain’t it pour last night?”

  “Last night . . .”

  “Pour!”

  “Ain’t you hear that mournful thunder?”

  “Roll from door to door.”

  “See that fork-ed lightning?”

  “Lash from tree to tree?”

  “Calling home all lost children.”

  “We’ll get home by an’ by.”

  “Boy, did not it pour.”

  “Pour!”

  “Did not it pour last night?”

  So

  With his rock-steady hand as practiced as the river’s flow Eph shaved a curl of pinewood from the plank he held between his knees.

  “I’m going to tell you why you’re mad,” Odum said to Eph.

  As was usual for a Sunday morning the mechanics were gathered outside Ashe’s blacksmith shed. What was unusual was Odum’s tongue was flapping loose as the wings on a northbound goose, and his breath was smelling like the bottom of one of the peat-reek jugs he kept hid about the Caledonia.

  He might be the main nigger at hog-killing time, and a high-stepper when McCready was around, but right then the crew—Ashe the smiddie and his assistant Caesar—thought, if Odum did not be careful with Eph the carpenter, Caledonia was about to lose its biggest fool.

  They couldn’t reckon what was giving Odum his false courage. Eph had already given Odum a lesson on the danger of letting his peat-reek-loosened tongue flap till it loaded more on his wagon bed than his axle could haul. They had thought getting jumped on had taught Odum to put a permanent hasp on his mouth when his throat was wet from that peat-reek.

  It was the time Eph put it on Odum, so much so until McCready, the grieve himself, had to pistol-whip Eph off of the Caledonia hog man.

  Not long before that Eph had lost his mind over Mae Lil, his woman on Hutchinson’s Plantation. Odum got drunk and started gabbing about Mae Lil. Eph’s jumping on Odum was the first sign that Eph had found his mind again.

  Eph’s mind left him when Mae Lil died trying to birth her and Eph’s baby. She died and the baby died, and when the word of it reached from Hutchinson’s Plantation, Eph lost his mind and quit. Quit everything. He did not refuse to be jyner-carpenter any more than he refused to gab or eat or follow orders. He just did not because he did not have a soul to care, or a mind to tell him to. Did not have enough mind even to respond to McCready’s lash. And stayed like that until that morning the peat-reek set Odum’s tongue loose and McCready had to break it up by almost splitting Eph’s head open with the butt of his pistol. Was Eph had come within an ace of killing Odum. Was Cretia had to nurse both of them back to health.

  With Cretia’s Gal gone, Ashe and Caesar could see Eph had bad things on his mind. What they couldn’t see was why Odum couldn’t see it too, plain as day. They couldn’t reckon what had got wrong with Odum would make him think gabbing about Cretia’s Gal being took off to the courthouse to be sold would set any better with Eph than that other time gabbing about Mae Lil who had died. But sure as it was going to rain some more, Odum was determined as a terrier after a rat.

  “I’m going to tell you why you mad, sure,” Odum repeated to Eph. “You mad because now ev’ry-body know Cretia’s medicine ain’t worth a fart. Her working up to Highland House and had ev’ry-body scared of her. Even had Goodsire and McCready tipping around her. But come to find out she did not have enough mojo to keep her own child from being took to the courthouse and sold.”

  Ashe and Caesar wanted Eph to do or say something. But he just kept looking off in the direction of the river and the gray of Red Stick’s swamp across it.

  Odum thinking, Eph think he so good a builder, sure, he too good to be a slave. Got these other two fools thinking it too. Said, “And if hers ain’t nothing your’ ain’t nothing neither. Since she’s the one give you your mojo.”

  Eph looked up, but he didn’t look at Odum.

  “Ain’t that why you mad.”

  Eph was looking off now toward the distant stretch of cotton fields in the overcast morning sky. As if he was surveying Caledonia section by section.

  Ashe and Caesar waited.

  “What about Cretia’s Gal? Do not she mean nothing to you?” Eph asked Odum, but still not looking at him.

  It was not much but maybe he was leading to something.

  “What I care?” Odum said. “Her head was ne’er going to lay on my pillow.”

  “I ain’t gabbing about laying with her. That’s all Goodsire and McCready was waiting on. That’s all she was going to be for them, to tote their slops in the day, and some dark goodie in the night.”

  “She was not flesh of mine,” Odum said.

  “She was bright as a bumblebee,” Eph said. “Tickled me to see her buzzing about. It was like they hadn’t yet touched her. Like she was still ours.”

  “Ours,” Ashe repeated.

  “Seeing Cretia’s Gal buzzing about put it in my head this ain’t the only place or way for me to be,” Eph said.

  Odum told him, “Well you better get that out your head.

  Eph asked, “Do not it ache your heart she’s gone?”

  “Ain’t nothing a nigger among us can do,” Odum said.

  Eph picked up a curled pinewood shaving that lay at his feet. “You just do not know,” he said. “But you will when I come back again.”

  Odum laughed. “Come back?”

  “Stop what-ever I’m doing,” Eph said, “and come back, see the hands lined up all around watching me throw dirt in Goodsire’s face as he’s being lowered down.”

  “Do not you know you got to go some-where before you come back?” Odum told him.

  Eph had been some-where, Asch thought. And everybody knew it. He had been to Hutchinson’s Plantation hadn’t he? Many nights. Had gone the first time in the daylight to deliver a table he made to be sold to Hutchinson. McCready took the table and Eph with him in the wagon. That was when Eph first saw Mae Lil. Soon after started going to be with her at night. Many believed Cretia made him a mojo for him to get past Beasley’s crew of Jack, Henry, and Moon, and the rest of the area’s cadre of night patrollers and whatever other bogle-ghosts or witches there was in the night to stop him and the other plantation hands from escaping or roaming free.

  Some believed Eph would have gone whether he had Cretia’s mojo or not. However, he went. When he wanted. And he and Mae Lil made a baby. And everybody knew it. And McCready flogged him for it. And Eph went some more anyway, and Mae Lil soothed his wounds.

  “But all that was before,” Odum argued. Back when Cretia still could make a mojo that had some power ahind it. Cretia’s Gal getting took off to the courthouse to be sold showed that those days were as long gone as last week’s grits.

  They watched as Eph, his head down, began walking in a slow circle under the workshop roof’s overhang.

  “Only way we get to go off is through the courthouse,” Odum signified, “and that’s to be sold off—like Cretia’s Gal. And ain’t no coming back from there!”

  “You forgot you can run off,” Ashe said.

  Odum laughed. “Y’all heard Mr. McCready say, sure as sunup, he’d let Beasley shoot a nigger with running on his mind.”

  “McCready or Beasley shoot ev’ey nigger thinking about getting the rabbit foot,” Caesa
r said. “Goodsire be out of bullets before he out of niggers.”

  Eph circled slowly, almost dragging his feet.

  “And you see it ain’t stopped Eph,” Ashe said. “Nothing McCready said did not stop him. Flogging did not e’en stop him.”

  Caesar laughed and nodded his head.

  “That’s right,” Ashe said.

  “So,” Odum asked, “you telling me you getting ready to go somewhere?”

  “Odum,” Eph said, still walking, but as if they had not been gabbing all along and he had suddenly thought of something, “do not you feel like going some-where some nights?”

  Odum was surprised by the calm, sincerity, and directness of the craftsman’s tone. He thought of the time he had gone out one night, and shuddered remembering the screeching and hollering bogel-witch that had chased him until he almost run himself to death. He had never told them about that.

  He shook his head.

  “But do not you want to go some-where, because you ain’t satisfied here?”

  “I got my place with a pallet in the Bottom. That’s all the where for me to go.” Odom paused.

  It did not seem enough.

  “Same as Ashe and Caesar,” he added. “Same as you.” He laughed and looked to the others to join him. They didn’t. “All other times I’m here, doing this work. Same as you.”

  “You just think I’m penned up here with you ev’ry-day,” Eph said. “E’en just this minute here I got freedom on my mind.”

  “I think you here because I see you here. Mr. McCready sees you here too. Would if he was here,” he corrected himself.

  “He would not see me here not more,” Eph said. The quiet way he said it shushed them all.

  “Cretia say you can be looking at the river and think you seeing it, but what you think you looking at is gone before you can blink.”