Walk Through Darkness (13 page)

F
OUR
When the captain returned he didn’t ask about Dover. Instead, he talked at length of the strange things he had seen at sea. He spoke of storms that in their fury beggared belief, of calms that left one feeling the world had died along with all the living beings in it. He told of a creature from the deep reaches of the ocean, a many-limbed thing with a beak for a mouth and an eye so big around that both the captain’s palms failed to cover it. He spoke of flying fish in the Caribbean, flocks that came so thick across the deck that his men once dove for cover, fearing that the ocean was throwing up silver daggers against them. He said the sea was abundant in its bounty at times, munificent out of all reasonable proportion. But it could also be frigid and bleak, callous and utterly indifferent to mankind. It was a strange love affair he had with the sea, a lifelong marriage of sorts.

William sat listening, his fingers around the goblet, rubbing the wood of it with his thumbs. Perhaps the dark chamber that they shared helped call images vividly to mind, internal colors and motions and panoramas. Or perhaps it was the cadence of the captain’s voice, so controlled and even, words pushed like pearls of thought, things with their own undeniable life. Or
maybe it was just that William’s mind hungered for distraction, for contact with another human, for dialogue, even though dialogue had gained him so little in the last few weeks. For any or all of these reasons he was entranced by the white man’s words. He lost himself in them while they were together, and they lived on when the captain departed. He saw daggers thrown up from the sea, placed his hands across that great creature’s eye, watched the sun burn its way into the rim of the world. All of this without leaving the low chamber of the ship.

Their third meeting followed much the same pattern, except that the captain tried to shift the discussion over to William. Where had he come from? Had he fled a wicked owner? Had his life been the living hell the captain imagined slavery to be? Was he true to this Dover? Was their relationship a marriage of sorts? William didn’t answer except in gestures, mute requests that he not be questioned. He wanted to listen, but he still couldn’t get himself to speak. To open his mouth was to reveal everything. It didn’t seem possible to utter words without betraying all of his troubled history. The man was asking him about the forces that shaped his life, the agony and the wonder both. There was no middle ground in talking of such things. He could give all or nothing. So he asked for more silence.

The captain turned the conversation to thoughts of his wife. She was of Irish stock, he said, so fair of complexion that her skin was almost translucent. Though frail of health and temperament, she bore him two children, a son and daughter. The son was bright, red haired like his mother and, like her, somewhat fragile. His daughter, Esther, had more of the seaman’s blood in her. She was so impetuous that she had never crawled. She had climbed up onto her spindly legs and stumbled about the world like it belonged to her. It was strange, he said, to think back to those precious moments. Painful to think of all the time he spent on this vessel, moments that would have been better spent in the company of those three loved ones.

“I remember one summer afternoon walking with Esther,”
the captain said. “We’d been some time wandering the grounds of an estate in Baltimore, and found ourselves far from shelter as storm clouds began to build. To get back we decided upon a route through the woods. It was thick with bracken, thorny bushes and the like. It was difficult, and I was soon of a temper. I slashed out at the bushes, for they seemed to knit themselves against us. They snapped back at me and scratched my face and returned each of my aggressive gestures in turn. I was working myself into quite a state, beyond all reason, the sort of anger one only directs at inanimate objects. Then Esther called to me. I turned and met her gaze. She looked at me, pity in her eyes, and said, ‘Father, be courteous, or the forest won’t know you from a ruffian.’ She pushed past me and led the way forward, no curses, no slashing. She just slipped through the vegetation like one might through a crowd of civilized people. It was most remarkable, a grown man following his daughter’s lead through a wood. I thought her very wise that day, and time has not dimmed the impression. She shaped me in that moment, and I’ve never quite trod the earth in the same way since.”

The ship creaked in the silence following the man’s story. William shifted where he sat, rotating his wrist so that the iron lay against a different portion of his skin. He realized he had forgotten his chains for a few moments. Strange, for he had rarely ever done so before. He had even slept with the knowledge of his bondage in his dreaming mind. But here, for a few moments, the captain had lulled him into forgetting.

The tallow candle sputtered and smoked as it neared death, and the captain leant forward to light another, a small nub left over from the previous day. “A man who doesn’t know the joy of fatherhood is a poor man,” he said. “A man who has not been challenged by fatherhood’s trials is a weaker man than one who has. I learned from my children, much more than I ever wished to. They are all three years dead now. My wife, my son and daughter … all taken by consumption. They were taken when
I was at sea. Consecrated and given over to the Lord while I sailed a favorable wind up from the Sea Isles. To me they are remembrances. To me they are as they were, as I would have them be. This is my grand delusion, but I learn from it still. I never asked you, do you have any children?”

William thought the question over before deciding to answer. He ran his fingers over the coarse, damp grain of the wood below him. “I don’t know,” he said, just three words but enough for him to know that he had committed himself.

The captain looked puzzled, but only for a second. An expression of embarrassment washed across his features. “I understand. I forget the barbarities of slavery.”

William knew that he didn’t understand, and it suddenly mattered to him that he did. “What I mean to say is I might have a baby now … I mean, I ain’t seen Dover to know.”

Ridges stood out on the white man’s forehead. He touched his bulbous nose with his fingers. He looked ready to inquire further, but he didn’t. It was just this silence that encouraged William onward. He didn’t look at the white man. He tilted his head and kept his eyes on the shadowy beams above them, but when he spoke he did not hesitate.

“That’s why I ran off,” he said. “Found out she was carrying my baby. She woulda been carrying it for months before I heard of it. When I found out nothing was the same, couldn’t never be the same again. I had to get back with her. Couldn’t just go on living. That’s why I ran, Captain. I didn’t do it just for my own sake. I sure didn’t kill nobody. I’m just trying to get back with Dover and that child.” He paused and inhaled a long breath, as if he hadn’t done so since he began speaking. He could hear the yells from the men on deck, strange for he had never heard them before. “I dream of her all the time. Every time I close my eyes, seems like. It almost don’t seem right … How much I think bout her.”

“That’s love,” the captain said.

William glanced at him, trying to read the man’s face but finding it no different than before. He didn’t address the comment directly. “In them dreams she sometimes carrying our child. But them times she always at a distance. The far side a field. On the shore when I’m in a boat. That type a thing. I never have seen that baby’s face. Seen the shape of it, but never have looked on it properly.”

“And do you want to see that young one’s face?”

“More than anything else that’s what I want.” He hadn’t known that he believed this before he said it. The words almost surprised him, how easily they slipped out of him, how fully formed and undeniable. Yes, he yearned to reunite with Dover. Yes, he hungered for freedom, for vengeance. But these paled in comparison to a bone-deep longing that he couldn’t explain, that began and ended and went on forever in the possibility of that child. To look upon that face, to kiss that face and to know that child was he and Dover made immortal, to see that child walk and to hear it speak the wisdom of innocence: these were all the things he wanted. He had never known it as completely as he did at that moment. “It’s a hard thing to reckon on,” he said.

“Yes, it will be that,” the captain said. His gaze drifted away from William and hovered somewhere in the space between them. He wrapped his fingers around the wine goblet and lifted it, testing its weight and the give of his wrist in supporting it. “I have been wondering if you would tell me something of your plans? How would you make a life for yourself if your labor was to be your own? The land to which you were running is a much freer one than the one you came from. But it is not without its share of snakes as well.” The captain changed position and drank the rest of his wine. “What do your people think of Northerners?”

William picked up his own goblet when the other man slapped his down. As if prompted by the question, he took a
quick sip, choked on it and spent a moment coughing. “I … I don’t know, suh.”

“Sure you do. Have you not passed all your life thinking about it?”

William made as if to drink again, but thought better of it. Despite himself, he came close to answering the man. It was hard to refuse his questions. He almost responded that yes, every slave child hears of the free North, hears tales of the white people called “abolitionists,” a word they all knew but rarely said aloud, and never within the hearing of white men. But what are they other than distant notions that the childish mind conceives of fanciful images? Perhaps they glow with a light of holiness that no Southerner has. Perhaps they float above the earth and look sadly to the south. Perhaps they have wings. He had imagined them as all of these things. Yet he had met more than one Northerner in his life, and they had seemed no different than any other white men. They ate the same food and shat the same stink, and more than once a visiting businessman had bedded down with one of the house servants and spent his lust the same as any Southerner. He had no delusions about Northerners, but he didn’t try to explain this to the Northerner questioning him.

“The South sticks to their ways because they pay, my friend,” the captain said. “There is little more to it than that. And the North … Well, different things pay up here, that is all. Most Northerners are no more moral than your former masters. They are just different. An accident of circumstance. My brother once stayed with a Southern gentleman in Savannah. On his return he told me in detail of the rituals of his stay. His room was tidied and swept and the bed turned out in preparation for him. He told of the maid—and he did not fail to notice how comely she was—and the way she met him in the evening with a wash basin. She would bend and take off his shoes and make sure his every need was cared for. In the morning, when he rose from bed she was there again, sliding his slipper onto his foot before
it touched the ground. When he spoke, she listened. When he commended the dawn for its beauty, she agreed. In everything, she was his servant; he was her master.” The captain turned and looked at William. The man’s eyes were intent, gentle, his lips glistening from the wetting of his tongue. “My brother is a good man, but he found this short stay quite intoxicating. No Northerner has that sort of luxury, no matter how rich he is. It’s the grandest of delusions, and that is why the South will never give it up except by blood.”

For a long moment after this statement William was unsure what he meant. Only after studying the man’s face did he understand that he meant white men’s blood. And this was a more frightening thing yet. White blood taken by white hands, for the sake of black people? It would never happen. William stared at him, wondering if he was crazy, for no sane man would speak thus to a slave.

The captain returned the stare. His face held its frank expression as though at a test of wills. They shared the silence a moment, then the man cleared his throat and spoke on. He pitched his voice a little lower, with a hint of resignation, but he still didn’t look away or soften his visage. “When you stowed away, you brought more than just your person into my ship. I thank you for it. It was good that we spoke, but this will be our last meeting together. This afternoon we entered the Delaware. It is a full moon tonight and, as my crew knows these waters well, we will sail for a few hours after dark. There’ll only be a few men on deck, and I’ll keep them occupied as much as possible. During this time you will make your escape.”

William’s eyes flicked away from the man and then back, as if he had disappeared and then rematerialized in the space of a second.

“Don’t look at me with awe, William. You’ve held things back from me and I from you. I’m no great man. I’m no altruist. In my youth I aided the slave trade. In my manhood I gave vent to
desires that shame me. Now, in riper age I must live with the memories of my mistakes. This is just one act I offer you. But I won’t mislead you. This hardly amends a life ill spent. I wrestle daily with the question of whether that’s even possible with a million acts of kindness. I wonder if they even are acts of kindness when I can’t stop thinking about my own soul and the old sins that stain it.” He stretched out his hand. “Go find your loved ones, and do a better job with them than I did with mine.”