Dance on the Wind (51 page)

Yet it wasn’t until de Soto asked too much of his hosts by demanding Choctaw women to warm the beds of his soldiers that the tribe finally revolted. They drove the Spanish back to the banks of the great river. As the terrified
soldiers and priests fled from the forests that seemed alive with an enemy behind every tree, the Spanish left behind their holy vestments, their eucharistie ornaments, even their sacramental wine. Suspicious, the Choctaw broke the clay jars used in the white man’s ceremonies, letting the fragrant crimson fluid soak into the ground. Every bit like that wine the priests had blessed, de Soto’s blood was soon to seep into the mud, and there beside the Mississippi the governor of Cuba lay down to die, his anonymous bones to rot for all of eternity.

It took nearly two hundred years more until a European culture would again dare to settle in the Mississippi Valley. By 1716 the French had come up from the West Indies to establish an outpost close by the White Apple Village of the Choctaw. Like the Spanish, the French were Catholic, bringing with them their own black-robed priests in charge of the vestments, sacraments, and wine. With only a brief interval when the British assumed temporary rule over the great river valley, the Spanish next took over under Governor Galvez just prior to the coming of the Americans in 1795. That same year the first steam-powered cotton gin arrived on the lower Mississippi. Already the Natchez District had proved itself as good a region as any other in the south for the growing of tobacco, sugarcane, and corn. Now it prepared to stand head and shoulders above the others in cotton.

To the north, east, and south of Natchez sprang up the great plantations scoured from the canebrake and cypress swamps. Great houses were raised, fields were cleared from the bayous, and roads blazed. All of it accomplished on the backs of the African slaves brought to New Orleans on tall-masted ships, auctioned on that great, bloody block of misery in the market square, then hauled north into the wilderness, not quite able to understand they were now the property of one of those wealthy landowners.

More than an hour later Beulah returned, the four corners of a scrap of blanket suspended over her shoulder to form a pouch. Coming awake in the dark and the cold, Titus moved with the other three boatmen into a tight circle as the woman set her bundle at her feet, then sank beside it.

Beulah pulled apart the corners, exposing two clay jugs, and said, “I got you fellas some tafia.”

Titus watched Ovatt pull the cork from one of the jugs and sniff it before turning the jug up to drink. He asked, “What’s tafia?”

“Rum.”

“But it’s better’n that Monongahela we drunk all the way downriver,” Root said, smacking his lips as he handed the second jug to Kingsbury.

“Try some,” Ovatt suggested, giving the first jug to Bass.

It truly tasted sweeter than the American backwoods rum, and well it should—as it was made of the finest sugarcane in the French West Indies.

“What else you get us?” Kingsbury inquired, fingering a slab of something dark. He brought it to his nose for a sniff.

Beulah said, “You’ll like that.”

“I bet I will,” the pilot replied, and took a bite.

“Salt meat fried in bear’s oil,” she told them. “Enough for you all to have a goodly portion for supper.”

For the most part they drank their tafia in silence, using it to wash down the seasoned meat and what biscuits she could find to purchase. At the same time, Kingsbury made it clear none of them were to drink enough to hobble them when it came time to push on through town. Overhead more clouds rolled in, shutting out the stars completely as some of them dozed on their full bellies.

It was near the middle of the night when Kingsbury tapped on the sole of Bass’s moccasin. The others were awake, dusting and shifting their clothing, shivering in the cold. Beulah stood at the edge of the brush, waiting expectantly.

“Like I told you, Hames—I figure you can keep to the edge of the woods until you get to the north side of town, where we’ll pick up the Trace.”

“There by Kings Tavern?”

With a nod she continued, “Place ain’t as dangerous as it might be. ’Pears there’s a train of slavers pushing through. They gone and chose to make a night of it at Kings Tavern.”

“Slavers?” Ovatt asked. “Jesus God!”

“Wagons and cages and such?” Kingsbury asked intently, ignoring Heman’s grumbling.

“Yeah,” Beulah replied. “The place is packed with wagons. Men was all over the yard, in and out. Though most of ’em gone inside to the fires when it got cold.”

“We’ll keep to the woods,” Kingsbury said, turning to the other three men. Then he led them out.

Snatches of wild, bawdy music joined discordant singing, the shrieks of drunken women, and the bellows of drunken men, along with the crashing of clay ware and the cracking of furniture—all a river of sound pouring from the low shanties and shacks that bordered the river itself here in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. Where they could, the five pilgrims kept to the shadows and the sodden, quieter ground along the timber.

In reaching Kings Tavern they found the low-roofed saloon and brothel nearly hidden behind the many wagons parked haphazardly in the wide, muddy yard, every tongue down and teams staked out to graze nearby.

Kingsbury halted them as they all came abreast at the edge of the timber and studied the scene. “The first step home is just on the far side of that tavern, fellas.”

“I say let’s be putting this hellhole behind us right now,” Beulah whispered.

“Me too,” Ovatt agreed. “I’d like to reach Concordia Lake afore the sun comes up.”

Looking at Root, the pilot said, “We’ll push right ahead.”

Then Kingsbury moved out of the solid wall of shadows into the cleared yard, hurrying toward the first wagon. As they did, a half-dozen dark human forms took shape from the floor of that wagon, rising one by one cautiously to peer out at the travelers with wide eyes yellowed bright as a new moon in their black faces. As the other boatmen and Beulah joined him, Hames slid down the sidewall, stepped over the long tongue, and darted to the next wagon, coming to a rest closer still to the side of the tavern. When the other four reached him there by a wagon near the back corner of the saloon, the pilot said,
“Keep against the back wall. There’s a kitchen door there—but I’ll lay good money they got it closed tonight.”

“Cold enough,” Root grumbled.

Kingsbury inched toward the front of the wagon, peering around it as a solitary, silent figure sat up inside the last of three cages that filled the wagon’s bed. Hearing the movement, seeing the huge shadow blot out some of the hissing torchlight that filled most of the wagonyard, Titus looked up, finding the slave’s hands gripping the bars of his cage, pressing his swollen, bloodied face against them.

Bass looked away, then immediately looked again at the slave. A big man from what he could see in this light. Bald-headed too. Titus’s breath caught in his throat as he stood, hearing the others shuffle off beneath the patter of the incessant, icy rain.

The slave had on only the tattered remnants of a shirt, clearly cut to ribbons across his shoulders and back by a recent whipping. Unsure at first, the big man slowly reached out one arm toward the white youngster, opening his palm. For a long moment Titus stared down at that lighter skin, then peered back at the man’s face.

“Help me, boat-man.”

Titus stumbled back. That voice: it was the goddamned Negra from Annie Christmas’s gunboat!

“Don’t you see me, boat-man?”

“I … I see you.”

“Help me. Get me away from these bad men.”

Just a quick look over the rest of the wagons in the yard filled with their cages of human chattel told Bass enough. “Y-you’re going to work the fields.”

“I dunno,” the man replied, pulling his arm back into the cage and letting his head sink between his shoulders. “Know nothing ’bout that.”

A voice rose softly from the cage next to his, and the big man whispered something in reply.

“What’s that?” Bass inquired, his suspicion aroused. “Who’s there?”

“Them others—they tell me we off to work the cotton for our new owner.”

“But you was … you belonged to Annie Christmas.”

He nodded, pressing his face close to the bars once more, one eye all but puffed shut. “White woman sold me two week ago. After big fight with you, boatmen.”

“She tell you why?”

“First she say she kill me—but she say a big man like me get her lots of money. So she sell me to work for the man who put me in this cage. Take me north to his home.”

“She got rid of you after the killing at her boat?”

He nodded, his face a dark shadow within the dancing, torchlit shadows of that rainy night. “Say I no good to her no more—no good can keep her from trouble. Annie’s whores get kill’t. She get hurt. Her man friends get killed. She say her Negra man no good no more. Wanna kill me—but she sell me. Gonna get too much money for me.”

“Titus!”

Bass turned, finding Kingsbury and the rest crouching at the corner of the tavern. The pilot hissed his name, waving him on. Titus turned back to glance over his shoulder at the man in the cage, starting to go, but got no more than a step when he turned to say something more to the slave.

At that moment an angry, frightened Kingsbury jutted out his jaw and issued his stern order, “C’mon, young’un! Ain’t no time to dawdle!”

“Wait here,” Bass whispered at the cage.

His ebony brow creased in bewilderment; then he smiled broadly and shrugged. “I h’ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

As Bass slipped in among them back in the shadows of the tavern, Root demanded, “What the hell you doin’?”

“That there’s the Negra from the gunboat,” he tried to explain with a gush, his mind whirling madly.

“Annie Christmas’s place?” Kingsbury asked.

“Yep. Said she up and sold him—”

“Leave his black ass be!” Root grumbled. “Bastard’s where he belongs.”

“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt agreed. “That skinhead savage nearly could’ve killed us.”

Bass wheeled on Heman, saying, “That’s just why he’s in that cage, don’t you see? Annie Christmas sold him
’cause he didn’t kill us like he could’ve when he had the chance. Kill’t us all, like she wanted him to.”

Kingsbury scratched a louse from his beard, brought it out, and cracked it between his fingernails. “What the hell that mean to us?”

“Let’s break him loose.” Bass suggested it, suddenly as astonished as the rest that he had even considered it, much less uttered the words.

“B-b-break that Negra loose?” Ovatt sputtered in amused disbelief. “C’mon, boy! No more of this nonsense. We gotta be walking home.”

“None of you don’t help me,” Titus argued, “I’ll do it myself—”

“You can’t do that!” Kingsbury said. “That Negra’s some man’s property.”

Titus felt himself growing angry as he asked, “Just like he belonged to Annie Christmas, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But if you’d had the chance that night, you’d gone and killed that property on the gunboat, wouldn’t you?”

“Damn right we would,” Reuben growled.

Titus grinned a little. “Ain’t a bit of difference to my thinking ’tween you kill a man’s property, or you let it go. Either way it ain’t his no more.”

“What you’re talking about’s stealing!” Ovatt cried, and was immediately shushed by the others. Quieter, he said, “You just don’t steal another man’s Negra, like you don’t steal his horse, or his cow!”

“We ain’t stealing,” Bass protested, wagging his head, desperate for some way to make them understand. He pointed at the cage. “We’re just letting him out to go off on his own. That don’t make us thieves.”

Inching up before Bass, Beulah asked, “It true what you said about that big black Negra not killing none of you in that gunboat when he had him the chance’t?”

“Ask Kingsbury, any of ’em here,” Bass replied. “It’s the certain truth.”

She turned on the pilot. “Hames, less’n you wanna tell me that the boy here’s lying ’bout that gunboat fight—you best get ready to stop me too.”

“Stop you?” Kingsbury asked, the pitch of his voice rising. “Stop you from what?”

“From helping Titus here set that there Negra loose.”

“Jesus God!” Ovatt screeched, throwing his head back in disgust. “We can’t do this! We gotta get outta Natchez afore any folks see us and make for trouble—”

“Shuddup!” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping a hand across Ovatt’s chest as he leaned toward the woman. “Listen, Beulah. I ain’t setting no darky free what belongs to another man.”

“Don’t need you,” Beulah said. “C’mon, Titus. You got your knife?”

“Yes’m.”

“G’won ahead of me,” she directed, shooting Kingsbury a scorching look. “I’ll be on your backside all the way over yonder to that wagon.”

Bass took off, hearing her moccasins scratching the gravel and dry grass as they darted for the wagon. He ground to a halt on that fine-grained, yellowish-brown loam and glanced up at the prisoner, holding a single finger against his lips for silence.

The slave nodded, his eyes growing wide, a sliver of white evident above his chin as his lips pulled back over crooked teeth. Bass yanked his knife free from its scabbard and climbed up the hind, off-side wheel, holding on to the wagon’s sidewall to steady himself as he stuffed the knife blade into the old padlock’s keyhole. Twisting this way and that so hard he was afraid he would snap off the tip of the blade, he finally turned in frustration.

“Ain’t working!” he whispered to the woman.

At that exact moment they heard voices, low and rumbling, around the far side of the tavern. Footsteps on the loose gravel. He dropped from the wheel as the woman slid beneath the wagon bed. Crouching down beside the wagon, Titus glanced up at the slave, frantically motioning him to get down. Instead the black man stared off in the direction of the voices as they hailed one another. One set of steps moved away. And a pair of boots scuffed right toward the wagonyard.

Bass was backing slowly, slowly, still bent at the waist when the voice caught him.

“What the hell are you doing by that goddamned wagon?”

Bass stood, whirled about, realizing the knife was still in his hand. He watched the man’s eyes drop to the knife blade gleaming with a dull sheen in the flickering torchlight that continued to hiss in the falling mist. Those eyes began to smile as they climbed back to Titus’s face.