Counternarratives (29 page)

The next few days I undertook my usual tasks, including trips to
purchase twine and paint brushes. I also assisted Ulysses and the others in rigging
the bigger balloons Professor Lowe was putting on his boat, or “aircraft carrier” as
Mr. Edward called it, which would soon venture down the Potomac. Every chance I
could I reread the letter from Jonathan, struggling not to drift off into a daydream
and end up injuring myself with a snapped cable or dropped tool. Mr. Edward
continued his preparations, but a hour before mess, he asked me to take dictation
for a brief letter, with the quill and ink, to his former professor at the Lawrence
Scientific School, Dr. Joseph Lovering, about possible study in Berlin. To stop
thinking about Philadelphia and the letter and my family, I engaged in my count-ups
and downs, and even convinced Mr. Edward to play several rounds of Takeaway using
twigs, he winning three games and I two. It was a relief that night that Nimrod
joined Ulysses and me for supper, even staying over almost till next morning's bugle
call. A few nights later, on the eve of the next early morning observation, I could
barely fall asleep at first and tossed fitfully, hearing what sounded like thunder
though I reckoned it was in my dream, but it wasn't exactly a dream, nor a
nightmare, I couldn't see anything and attempted to speak it, describe it, to
myself, but I couldn't, my mouth wouldn't open, there was a hand or hands over it,
on me, holding me, heavy as an ironclad, down, I was sinking down into the earth and
I fought whoever it was holding me hard as I could, I fought them off and leapt up,
yawning, no one was there, Ulysses was still curled under the blanket, snoring. I
kept yawning as I scrubbed myself in the cold October morning air before I headed to
where Mr. Edward slept. I fished out my letter, reread it, at the same time
wondering where Dandy was, somewhere here in Washington, in Baltimore, had he gone
there? back in Philadelphia, had he ended up in Buffalo or Boston, wondering how I
could see him again, send him a note.

I collected Mr. Edward and his bag, heavy with various items, and walked
with him to the balloon. No one else was there. The sky was as gray as gneiss and
the balloon, inflated the night before, was twisting about at the neck in the chilly
wind whipping around us. I considered asking whether he would be ascending today,
but he preempted me with, “Ah well, Professor Lowe hasn't arrived yet,” and then
“the wind is blowing north-east, north-north east, or maybe it's southeasterly,” and
then “I need to check the altimeter, which should be perfectly calibrated, and also
just ensure the telegraph wires are still connected.” He handed me his notebook but
did not move. He remained where he was, staring at his bandaged right hand, patting
his pockets, lifting his left hand to his face, and said: “Theodore, do you have my
pipe and glasses?” I shook my head then felt around in the full bag I had brought
from his room. He and I both had packed a great deal, but neither the pipe nor
glasses were in there. “Mr. Edward, Sir, I can go back and look for them,” I said,
and proceeded to head to his tent, but he stopped me with his good hand and said,
“You've never been in the balloon before, when you drop my bag in there, why don't
you make sure the altimeter is lashed, the main valve is tight, and the telegraph
wires are connected.” I stood there looking at him, since what he said made no
sense, I wasn't supposed to go anywhere near the baskets, but he continued, “You
know exactly how they are supposed to look.” Of course I had wanted many times to
climb in the balloon basket, had even thought of hiding in there the first time Mr.
Edward was to go up, but on the other hand, I knew my doing so was forbidden. Most
of the white men could not set foot in that basket, and certainly neither Ulysses
nor I had permission.

I had never defied him, but I said, “Mr. Edward, Sir, I don't think I'm
supposed to get near that basket, Professor Lowe especially might get very cross.
I'll gladly go get your pipe and glasses.” He assured me, “
Neddy
—and
Professor Lowe won't mind your being in there for a second or two. Really,
Th
eodore, I'll be right back, I think I know where I left
them.” I nodded, but nevertheless hesitated and began to say, “Mr. Edward, we can
wait till you come back,” but instead, watching him walk back to his tent I took
slow but steady steps toward the basket, and climbed in. I set his bag down,
reviewed the altimeter, which was securely knotted, and the valve, tight as a balled
fist, but when I bent to inspect the telegraph wire I tripped and fell against the
edge of the basket—

—While out of the corner of my eye I see someone, a white man, darting
from behind a shed toward where the rest of the balloons are lying in assembly, and
I experience this strange sensation like the ground is moving, like time is slowing
and I see Mr. Edward, bespectacled, pipe in his mouth, advancing toward me, running
but not running, yet simultaneously moving farther away as he's crying out, “Oh my
heavens, no, Theodore,” and my first impulse, after realizing I don't understand
what is happening, is to scream as the basket hooks upward to my left, then my
right, my jaws snapping open, my eyes beading on the pale pattern and elaborate
housing of the vast silk globe above me, I want to scream back at him, at anyone
who's nearby that I'm up the air, I'm flying, I want to holler even if just to
myself about how it's not at all like I had imagined, how my weight is dwindling to
nothing, how gravity is flipping upside down, time stalling to a standstill, how my
stomach is twisting itself into tiny knots catapulting themselves into my throat,
and Mr. Edward, I can hear him clearly now, is screaming, “Who cut the cables? Oh
stars, somebody cut the cables,
Th
eodore—”

—And I feel something jerking on one of the cables, and peer over the
edge to see him trying to hold on with his bad hand, and here come Professor Lowe
and Ulysses and Mr. Steiner and Mr. Starkweather and Patrick, almost all the others,
they are jumping and reaching for the ropes and Ulysses is hollering, “Jump, Red,
I'll catch you, little brother, jump,” and Mr. Edward is crying out, “No,
Th
eodore, tie yourself to the inside of the basket, and
don't stand too close to the edge.” I'm thinking to myself this really is flying,
I'm flying, the wind humming against the balloon's surface and the basket, and I
notice for the first time beside me a metal flask, which may or may not be empty,
two white flags, attached to metal poles the length of my forearm, bound by knotted
waxed cording, as well as the rope descending from the valve over the balloon's
closed hole, and I hold onto one of the coils of additional rope and wire ringing
the rest of the basket walls and remember to tie myself to the hook in the floor,
and I also remember to check the altimeter and telegraph transmitter, and from the
bag grab Mr. Edward's notebook, though I remember pretty much everything he has been
saying about aeronautics and balloons and flying since we got here—

—While all around me the sky is churning between silver and
mother-of-pearl, and below the rigid grid of the federal capital, circling it on all
sides verdant countryside, the hills and meadows, the farms and homesteads, the
bends of the ochre river, some of it Virginia and some of it Maryland, one direction
straight to Pennsylvania and the other to the Carolinas, one to the Atlantic Ocean
and the other to the Bull Run and Blue Ridge Mountains, I can barely hear Mr.
Edward, Ulysses, and the others calling out to me, their voices growing ever more
distant, “Theodore,
Th
eodore,” and I sit in the center
of the basket as it grows colder, knowing now that I am tethered to nothing at all,
the basket and me now in a free float, a drift, a soar—

—And I stand and remember, can see out there all the forts and
encampments and troops massed like tumors along the river banks, the ramparts and
howitzers armoring the hills, the works teething at the edge of the foliage, the
terrible danger snaking through the vast green and brown rolling land, and I feel
something not quite fear and not quite elation, I can't put a name to it, I try to
utter it but cannot, I place my hand on the valve string, then reach over and check
that the sandbags are in place, pat my winter coat, feeling not only the weight of
my papers and my pocketwatch but my heart, when my throat finally relaxes as if
something, sound, will issue from it, to say
Mama,
and
Jonathan,
and
Horatio,
and
Neddy,
and
Ulysses
, and
Nimrod,
and
Daddy Zenobia Zephira Lucius Professor Lowe President Lincoln,
Hansome
, somebody
HELP ME
, but only the gas hisses in assent as I
pull on the string, as I open my mouth even wider and remember to—

RIVERS

W
hat I'd like to hear
about, the reporter starts in, is the time you and that little boy . . . and I
silence him again with a turn of my head, thinking to myself that this is supposed
to be an interview about the war and my service in it, from the day I enlisted
despite being almost a score years too old, having several mouths to feed, and
running a tavern under my own name a grasshopper's jump from the riverfront, to the
day we were sent by wagon and train down to Brazos de Santiago, where we launched
the fight that ended on that spring day, ten years ago, along the Rio Grande on the
meadows of Palmito Ranch, which, we learned later from a scout we captured from the
other side was the final battle in the first great war for
our
freedom, or
between the states as they like to call it these days, so I ain't about to devote a
minute to those sense-defying events of forty years before.

Yet the mere mention of that boy's name, one I seldom think about,
not even in dreams or nightmares, retrieves the sole two times since those years
that I saw his face. That first time the name and face had become molded to the
measure of a man, still young and with a decade before him but rendered gaunt and
taut by struggles unknown to me and perhaps to that writer, also from Hannibal, who
had made him, both of us, briefly famous. That face with its narrow angles and sharp
agate eyes, with the sandy tufts of hair now framing it at the cheeks and chin, that
glanced past me on Chouteau near the Pacific railroad tracks as I passed it and that
other one I knew so well, on my way back to the public house where I worked, near
the waterfront, ten years after that voyage down the Mississippi—my folly, when I
could have crossed with my wife of those years, and my children, then still little,
right there at Alton, and made my way east and we all would have been truly free—ten
years before the conflagration that would cleave the country in two.

The other face, the Sawyer boy's, froze as it glimpsed mine, and when it
had passed several steps beyond me said loudly to its companion, “Whoa, Huck, I
think that was your old boy from Hannibal!” and then, “Old buck, hold up, now,” and
“Ain't you Jim Watson, you, that keeps on walking without stepping to the side when
you see two gentlemen approaching, like you ain't heard one of 'em call out your
name?” So I paused and turned around, and faced them. There they were, Huckleberry,
now in his early 20s, and Sawyer, same in years, both taller than me now, still lean
in their youthful frames, each one looking from their clothing alone fairly
prosperous as so many were during those charging years, though in Huck's mien I
could see that all the gold they had gotten from that mess in the caves had not
alleviated whatever inner torments afflicted him. “Well, now,” Sawyer said, brushing
the sleeves of his worsted suit coat as he approached me, Huck behind him, “I should
have figured we would come across you one day down here.”

“Howdy now, Jim,” Huck said, and extended his adult hand.

“Howdy, Huckleberry, howdy, Tom,” I answered, tipping my hat ever so
slightly and taking his palm only momentarily in mine.

Sawyer leaned against a stile and proceeded to tell me all about
himself, how he was working during the day in the law offices of Judge Thatcher's
brother and after spending a year at Centre College in Kentucky and another at the
University of Virginia, President Jefferson's school he proudly pointed out, he was
studying law at night at Reverend Eliot's new seminary not far from here, though he
reminded me neither he and Huck had to work and that I certainly should not have
forgotten why. He told me he had traveled down the Mississippi on a steamboat
several times, including by himself, all the way to New Orleans, which is where he
thought he might eventually settle if he didn't stay in St. Louis, since the culture
and people down there appealed to him, and that he would probably write about it all
when he was past the bar and in an equitable position. He kept talking for a good
while longer but I confess that though my eyes never left his mouth I rapidly quit
listening.

After Sawyer had finished his personal resume he spoke about Huck, who
he said had gotten himself some schooling too up in Cambridge, Illinois, near Rock
Island, where he had gone to stay with some distant relatives of his late father's,
and between stints in the cooler for “minor infractions,” which he did not detail
and about which I wasn't going to ask, he said that Huck liked to sample a little of
every kind of job. Tom chuckled as he spoke, Huck for his part peering off into the
roadway, as though he was searching for a way out of the story Tom was telling and a
new path into himself. Such a “river rat,” Tom continued, his words bubbling with
laughter, Huck was that he now served as an assistant foreman in the river salvage
company run by Captain Eads. Just before this new position, Huck, Tom concluded, his
laughter evaporating like mid-morning dew, had just returned from Kansas. “He went
out there to see what the troublemakers were up to, the ones from New England and
the East and Iowa and here as well, who want to overthrow centuries of civilization
and take away our way of life and liberty and tell us what we can and cannot do and
own.”

I said nothing, looking intently at him and then at Huck, who finally
said, “This winter I gone out to Lawrence, which is a good ways past the state
border. I got up to a few scrapes but nothing serious,” and then, “I don't think old
Jim wants to be bothered with hearing about any of that.”

“Hearing about it and us ain't no bother to Jim,” Tom said, and trained
his gaze on me.

“All the same, he don't want to hear some scuffle with a troublemaker.
He sure looks like he been minding his business and it's good to see him.”

“Thank you, Huck,” I said, and nodded at Tom, who frowned.

“He ain't got no business that's more important than what we're doing,
does he?” Tom said. “Can't be likely, can it?”

“Not certainly,” Huck said, and when Tom turned away from him, he
shrugged his shoulders for me. “Then again I don't know nothing about his business
these days.”

“When did you get yourself down this way?” Sawyer said, his razor lips
cutting me a smile. “Cause I reckon soon as you knew you had got your freedom we all
woke up to find you gone.”

I thought to tell the boy that although once Huck and I got back and I
learned Miss Watson's will had freed me, a man in town, La-Fleur, and his brothers,
all later to take up arms for the Confederate cause, would come into the stables
where I worked and keep on making jokes about selling me back into bondage since
Washington had cut off the trade and our bodies were a premium further south down
the Mississippi, so I planned out resolving the matter once and for all by crossing
to the other side, practicing a number of times when I knew the tide was low, since
I knew how to swim and even a blind man in a blindfold behind a high blind wall
could see Illinois from Hannibal. One night when I was waist-deep in the water I had
to remind a white patrolman strolling the levee I was emancipated and showed him my
papers which I kept in a waterproof metal locket that hung around my neck, though
they were also on file down in the main courthouse of Marion County, Missouri, and
he said he ought to lock me up just for talking so freely, like I was equal to a
white person, but since I had belonged to the late Miss Watson, God Rest Her Soul,
he would let me go, which I knew well enough to nod to, before I crept carefully
back to my little room in the black section of town, and resolved even more to
flee.

I thought to say that I had sworn to my then-wife Sadie, who had taken
up with another man when she thought I had murdered that white boy, Huck, that I
would buy the children's freedom and hers, which I intended to hold fast to, but
when I told her I was leaving she convinced me to take her and our children with me,
though I was not about to bring her new man along, she could send for him later, and
as for my children, at that time there was only two of them, Elizabeth, who was deaf
and mute, though sharp as a whipsaw, and Johnny, who looked like a little me, and I
was going to fetch them to their freedom soon as I had gotten settled in. When all
the signs confirmed the time had come I brought us to the farthest end of the levee,
where I had identified a raft I would commandeer, and we stuffed all our necessities
in one small sack and a canvas traveling bag I borrowed from the stables where I
worked, I say borrowed since I eventually mailed it back, postage paid, and I could
see Sadie was looking around as if that man of hers was going to steal away with us
so I told her she could go with me and the little ones or continue in her bliss with
him. I was prepared to carry those children on my back like St. Christopher all the
way to the other side, and her too if it came to that, but not her lover, yet we
reached Illinois easily on that cool spring night, landing far north of where the
main docks in Alton were since I knew there were patrolmen to ensure none of us made
it, and I had been warned to watch out for a notorious Negro who would run
straightaway and alert the white constable, but that Rastus wasn't anywhere to be
found.

I thought to say I did spot the person who knew where to take us and put
us on a wagon bound straight north along the river for Quincy, where Dr. Eells
lived. We spoke in what they call our
gibberish
but to us it was a language
full of secret keys, and that person guided us to another person, in these days
despite the daily terror against us we are still free and I can tell the truth
because nobody can prosecute them or punish them now, so I can say they were both
colored women, the first one carrying herself in disguise like she had no home in
the world and the second was clothed like a male night watchman's assistant. The
second woman guided us to the wagon that brought us to Dr. Eells. Have you ever
tried to keep a small child from laughing or crying because your life depended upon
it? Have you ever hid with a spouse and two children, which was actually two too
many for Dr. Eells, and I had to cajole him not to turn us away, recounting at least
twenty times for him how I was already manumitted but explaining the danger my wife,
since that she still was, and my poor children, faced, so for a week I implored him
in his attic, which is where we stayed, mostly lying down in silence until he would
come to question me periodically, because the slavecatchers particularly trolled
that city, which was notorious for harboring fugitives, and I was sure the people
who had laid claim to Sadie and the children, along with her spurned male friend,
had sounded an alarm.

I thought to recount that finally after dawn on a Sunday a white woman
came to Dr. Eells' house seeking the cargo to Elgin and points east, and Dr. Eells
stowed us all under a false floor which my wife was convinced would be our coffin
until I reassured her that was the only way we would be able to travel while eluding
the catchers' grasp. We traveled in that shallow grave on metal wheels for what felt
like days, riding the worst roads I imagine exist in the state of Illinois, though
it was not even a whole twenty-four hours, and we stopped in a roadside grove along
the way for water and to relieve ourselves and eat some cold porridge with walnuts
and hardtack biscuits, then returned to our hiding place and when we climbed out we
were in the city of Chicago, which was an impressive sight, to say the least, far
more impressive than Hannibal, though Chicago wasn't even as pretty or built up as
old St. Louis back then, and so not as impressive as it is today.

I thought to narrate that there is where we settled, and as soon as we
could I made sure Sadie and the little ones each got their Certificates of Freedom
from the State of Illinois, Cook County, as I got mine, making sure mine read James
Alton Rivers, since I kept the name I had always been known by but added the town
where I first breathed in real liberty, and since we had finally reached the other
side of the big snaking muddy river which had been the dividing line our whole lives
up until then, our long bondage on the one side in Missouri and that goal we sought
on the other, then we crossed the Illinois River which we had reached at Peoria, and
finally the forking river in Chicago which takes you out to the sea-like lake, and I
didn't feel a single shred of remorse for having dropped the name of Miss Watson,
since she wasn't no great mistress or lady anyhow. I had to learn to say Mr. James
Alton Rivers instead of just Jim as white folks always called me, or Jim Watson,
which everyone had taken to saying, like this Sawyer boy now, just as Sadie had to
learn to say Sadie May Rivers, May the middle name she took to acknowledge the month
that we arrived, though she was not so fond of the last name Rivers, and kept
calling herself simply Sadie May, and Elizabeth went by Bessie Amelia Rivers, to
honor her late baby sister, Amelia, who died in infancy on that farm off Bear Creek
where she was born, and Johnny, whose middle name became Obi after my grandfather I
never met named Obi, who was a pure African they used to say, as well as the old
faith I had kept alive, even in Hannibal, was quickly saying Johnny O. Rivers
without missing a beat.

I think to conclude to the Sawyer boy and Huckleberry, all adulted now,
that I keep that certificate at all times and in all places against my chest in a
leather pouch I bought for myself and it reads
JAMES ALTON
RIVERS, FREE PERSON OF COLOR
, a resident or citizen of the State of
Illinois, at all times in all places, and entitled to be respected accordingly, in
Person and Property, at all times in all places, in the due prosecution of
his—my—concerns, at all times in all places, signed with the Seal of said Court, at
Chicago, on the 23rd of November in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred
and fifty-two, and I have carried it all the way up to and through the time I
returned to Missouri, settling here in St. Louis since I was not ever going to set
feet again in Hannibal if I could help it, and even when some of the Hannibal people
including those LaFleurs have happened upon me down here there is not a thing they
could say or do because I had the states of Missouri, Illinois and the federal
government on my side, though I've always made sure to have an escape route and a
safehouse on the other side of the river ready to flee to given the trials the
courts are putting Mr. Dred and Mrs. Lizzie Scott through.