The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (46 page)

Did I think I could have saved that child? No.

But his voice hurt me every time it came back to me, and I thought Thomas might have handled the whole incident more coolly and to better effect. Oh, Thomas! It seemed as if he pressed me hugely now, as hugely as ever he had alive.

A man and a boy who were coming out to hoe their field found me lying in the trees. When they had gotten to within a few paces, I sat up and put my hat on straight. As they were neither frowning with suspicion nor grinning with mischief, I suppressed the urge to run. The man came over to me, peered into my face, and poked me on the shoulder. He said, "You all right, boy? You’re on our land, I reckon. An’t got nothing fa ye. Best be gettin’ on."

I got my feet under me and went to stand up, but I couldn’t quite make it and fell back. The man pushed his hat to the rear of his head and gave himself a scratching, and the boy came over and stared down at me. He was a year or two younger than Lyman.

"Well, now," said the man. "Harley, run git yer ma." I closed my eyes. He raised his voice. "Tell her ta fix somethin’ up fer this boy. He looks done in!"

And so it was that I came to spend the morning at the Elton farm, home of Burley, Harley, and Opah. Opah did bring me some mush with butter and milk in it, and she and Harley did take me back to their small house, but fortunately, I was so rank after over a week in the same clothes, with no bathing or washing facilities, that Opah refused to come near me and banished me to the barn with a towel and a lump of soap when I wouldn’t let her take my hat or my jacket. A bit later, Harley appeared with a bucket of warm water, and then he ran off to help his father with the hoeing I had interrupted. I carried the bucket around to the side of the barn away from the house, and I washed my face and my short hair, took off my jacket and washed my neck and my arms, took off my shoes and stockings and washed my feet. Opah’s cow and chickens watched me carefully, and a dog came, also, and sat at a distance, gazing sometimes at me and sometimes at something afar. I said as little as possible, croaking as low as possible, and they did what they were supposed to do, gave up intercourse with me as profitless. Toward noon, I turned the bucket upside down and set a dollar on the bottom, held down with a piece of a brick, then I set off across the fields again, toward the road. My feet were flaming. When I got there, Master Philip and his slave child were so gone that I could almost tell myself that they had never been there but had been figments of an early-morning dream.

Revived, I continued on my way toward Independence, and by late afternoon, the swelling of traffic unmistakably revealed that I was approaching that famous metropolis of the west. Independence is older than Kansas City or Lawrence by some twenty years, in fact looks to be of an age with Quincy, though differently built—no high bluff above the river and dark woods behind, but instead wide streets set in open, gentle hills, so that you feel the open spaces of the west are at hand, and all you need do is begin your journey. The streets were full of outfitting shops and emporia of every variety. Livery stables were everywhere, their yards full of horses and mules. I couldn’t help letting some of the grays, especially, catch my eye, and it was easy to go from that to imagining that Jeremiah was only stolen, that he might turn up here of all places, but I kept walking. Lyman kept walking. Lydia gawked at everything—houses, low white fences, flower beds and blooming roses, ladies in buggies with their children beside them, the dark faces of slave women in kerchiefs, with yoked buckets over their shoulders, chatting at the town wells, folks of all ages and types, old and young, black and white, tall and short, rough and gentle, going in and out of buildings of all sorts, or idling at corners, chewing on their seegars or spitting into the street. Even after Kansas City, coming into Independence was like reentering the world. I could stop here, refresh myself, change into a dress or—

I turned in to a men’s haberdashery, opening the door before I quite realized what I was doing. There, by pointing and croaking, I managed to purchase two shirts and a collar, as well as two pairs of stockings. Then, a ways down the street, I went into an eating establishment, and did just what I had done on the steamboat and in Kansas City: my dollar paid, I filled my plate as quickly as I could with everything close at hand (a piece of beefsteak, some beet pickles, corncakes and corn pudding, a piece of bread, some sliced cabbage, and a peach), and I wolfed it all down willy-nilly until I couldn’t contain another morsel. This place wasn’t so rough as some others; there were women here, but I ate like a man now, half through trying and half through habit—that is, I leaned over my plate, I wiped my mouth with my sleeve, I ate quickly and with a hearty appetite. I ate, in fact, as if no one were watching me (ladies always behaved as if someone were watching them, and more often than not, someone was, if only a sister or a friend), and when I was finished, I lolled in my chair and looked around, as if it were my prerogative to watch without being watched. Then I pushed my chair back with a scrape and sauntered outside. I did not, however, make use of the spittoon, as did most others; even for the sake of my masquerade, I could not enter so deeply into manly habits as that!

After supper, I made my way through Independence, turning south and traversing residential districts of considerable pretensions. It was well known in the west at that time that some Mormons made their home in Independence; not the same group that caused so much trouble back in Illinois and went to the great desert with handcarts, but Mormons nonetheless. I kept a curious eye open for some, but there was no telling. I’d heard that they didn’t hold with slavery; perhaps some of the folks I saw passing in the streets unaccompanied by Negroes were Mormons. Well, it was a way to keep my eyes open and my feet moving. In my new stockings, both pairs, my boots were almost comfortable. I was well beyond Independence by midnight.

There is a rhythm to any long walk, I discovered, or rather, there is a rhythm, but there is also a movement. The rhythm is the beat of one’s footsteps on the road, their steadiness denoting progress. When I was tired or discouraged, I took solace from that beat—my legs seemed to work of their own volition. There were times when I thought my feet couldn’t take another step—my soles throbbed, or my boots rubbed my heels and toes raw, or the very bones ached—but somehow my legs walked me through those times: after a while, whatever had hurt no longer hurt but was deliciously quiet. Above this beat were the larger movements of the walk—morning, noon, nighttime, but also country and town, solitude and company, calm, boredom, fear, lively interest, discouragement. Sometimes I was thoroughly at home in my male costume, a boy marching along. Other times, my costume seemed to grate over me, or stand away from me, or interfere, and I was acutely aware of myself inside it, almost as if my person were trying to separate me from it. Yet other times, everything about me that I had been thinking of, including pain or discomfort, fell away. Here was something: there were times I was so fatigued that I didn’t think I could walk five more steps, and then, a moment later, I would be suddenly afraid and find myself almost running. And after that, I would be less tired rather than more. Truly, there was so much to discover in such a walk that you could not discover it all the first time. I got well away from Independence before I settled down for the night by penetrating a large haystack in a field and pulling some of the hay down over me. I reckoned that I would make Blue Springs sometime the following day, as it was not so far from Independence to Blue Springs as it was from Kansas City to Independence.

Under the hay, I lay awake, even though only moments before I had been stumbling about half asleep, looking for a spot to sprawl. I yearned to remove my boots, which were heavy and constricting, even though I knew that I would pay tenfold in the agony of putting them on again in the morning for the relief of taking them off right then. If I took them off, my liberated appendages would swell overnight so that putting them on again would be a time-consuming agony. If I left them on, only the first twenty or thirty steps would be especially painful. I had decided ahead of time what I would do and how it would be, but now that I was lying under the hay, I seemed to be all feet, and all of me was crying out to be released.

Over all of that long day—all of those new scenes and new folks—lay the pleas of that slave child. The Eltons, who had no slaves, who had given me food, and water for washing, had seemed to bely that child’s very existence, and after that there was Independence and more food, and all the miles between the early morning and this late night. My feet, of course, ached a constant assertion that there was no room in my thoughts for any idea other than boot removal. But nevertheless, in the quiet, fragrant, hidden darkness (I couldn’t even see the moon through my covering of hay), the child’s voice pierced me again, made me wonder what "could not" meant. I was certain that I could not have saved that child. On the other hand, I was carrying my pistol in my bag, and I knew how to use it. I had shot more than a few turkeys, which are much quicker and more suspicious than a man is. Had I kept a level head and not run off, had I reconnoitered instead of panicking, I might have gotten into some sheltered spot, loaded my pistol, and confronted Master Philip. In retrospect, I saw that Master Philip was a buffoon and a bully. A little courage on my part would have surprised and routed him, would it not? Lyman, of course, could not do such a thing, but so early in the morning, there had been no one around. With no one around, Lyman was in abeyance, wasn’t he? Only Lydia was truly present, and she might have figured something out.

Well, I could only put my cowardice down to my femininity. There was the great shame of it. When all was said and done, it was Lydia who had panicked, Lydia who had run off, Lydia who hadn’t the wit to do anything else but seek a hiding place. The west was full of men, and of the stories of men, who confronted bullies. That was practically the normal course of western acquaintance: man meets bully, man endures bully, man pulls a pistol out of his hat and subdues bully, man and bully become boon companions. How, indeed, did Lydia plan to confront Samson and Chancy, whoever they were, having so thoroughly caved in to Master Philip? Such questions eventually drove out all thoughts of my boots, but neither was there much hope of sleep. I saw that all I could do was grip Thomas’s watch as tightly as I could and vow to do better, whatever that was.

Were I honest with myself, I would have to wonder why I had taken up the abolitionist cause. Thomas, of course, had made it attractive, so perhaps I had taken it up as a way of being courted. That afternoon with Frank in the creek at Roland’s farm had changed forever my perception of Thomas, as there was such a mysteriously knowing verve in the way he’d passed that money to Frank and caused Frank to pass it to the man in the cave. I had found so much charm in that that I had never even spoken of it to Thomas but cherished my secret feelings like a talisman. Perhaps I hadn’t wanted to hear a more mundane explanation of the incident. At any rate, we had so quickly set out for Lawrence, and so quickly taken up with our friends there, that I had gotten to be an abolitionist by reflex and, my sisters would have said, out of pure contrariness, as well ("just like Miriam"). Ah, well, my sister Miriam. When she was alive, I’d known of her abolitionism, of course, as it was the source of so much family dissension, but I hadn’t cared all that much about it. Yet, after her death, I had let it come to be her defining feature for me, the thing that helped her, from all of them, love me. Possibly that was it. Such a plain young woman as myself could find love only among abolitionists....

And then, in K.T., we abolitionists had been so hated, so stupidly, venally, cruelly, and ridiculously hated, that there was honor in being an abolitionist. For all their foibles, my friends there had been kindly, hard-working folks. I hated those who hated them, even hated the enemy more for my friends than they hated the enemy for themselves. But I couldn’t, in all honesty, look upon that as a virtue. I had become a hater, the sort who wanted to hang, shoot, dismember, clear out, and otherwise dispose of those who wanted to hang, shoot, dismember, dear out, and otherwise dispose of me. That was what my abolitionism had amounted to in K.T

But abolitionism was about slavery, after all, and the evidence of the Master Philip incident was that I hadn’t many instinctive feelings about slavery. I had been slow to act because I had been slow to feel. Master Philip and the child had played out a little scene for me, and even in my fear, I had watched it as comic rather than as tragic. Only afterward did that child’s voice come back to me as the voice of my conscience, you might say. I knew what I should have done only by surmising what Thomas would have done, and by then, of course, it was too late. It wasn’t just having to hide among my enemies that made it hard to be an abolitionist in Missouri; it was also having no friends.

The sun was well up and my nest hot and dusty before I awoke the next day. There was little relief in the open, either, as it was a hot, thick day, with clouds piling in the west. By Thomas’s watch it was past midmorning. I felt achy and vague, still full from my very heavy meal the night before, and also extremely thirsty. I had not picked a spot near water, and there were no streams nearby, so I made up my mind to approach the house I saw across the road. I must say that I was daunted, as it was one of those large places with columns, constructed of whitewashed brick, that was set back on a lawn. As I trudged toward the veranda, a pain seemed to lift up through my neck into my head, lodging itself in two burning points at the back of my skull. I grew dizzy, paused, took my hat off, and put my head between my knees for a moment, got clear again, and resumed trudging. About ten yards from the house, I realized that I had left my case under the hay. I let out a groan and dropped to the grass. Going back to get it, and going on to the house without it, seemed equally impossible.

The green lawn stretched away on all sides. As I lay down within it, it grew as large as a prairie, seeming to run to the horizon, as a prairie did, and to end only in the same sort of threatening clouds that had so recently oppressed me with their torrential, fiery tempests. This lawn gave me such a lonely feeling, such a feeling of general abandonment, that I started to cry and therefore had to pull my hat over my face. The pain in my head, which had subsided somewhat, was now matched by pains elsewhere, the source of which was utterly mysterious to me, unless they were the evidence of some sort of general collapse of my soul and body under the pressures of grief and exhaustion. The darkness inside my hat gave me some relief, though, and as I lay there gripping Thomas’s watch, I did feel myself swoon away.