Dance on the Wind (53 page)

“Then there ain’t nothing else we can do but we send him back,” Ovatt said.

“That ain’t no better’n trying to leave him,” Kingsbury argued.

“If we ain’t gonna send him back, or leave him—I got me an idea,” Reuben declared. “I say we take him north—”

“We ain’t taking him north!” Ovatt repeated.

“I’m telling you we ought’n take him north and
sell
him!” Root declared.

The woman settled beside the youth. “How you feel about that, Titus?”

“Why you asking him?” Kingsbury demanded.

“I figure the Negra belongs to Titus—”

“That buck Negra belongs to him?” Ovatt whined.

Reuben snorted. “Craziest thing I ever heard of!”

Beulah paid them no heed and continued, “Belongs to Titus because Titus is the one busted the Negra free.” Turning back to the youth, she repeated, “How’s that set with you? Taking him north to Kentucky where you can sell him.”

For some time he stared at the fire, then looked at the slave, then back to the flames again, rolling it over and over in his mind. At that moment he regretted not paying more attention to his schooling, figuring it might well have given him the capacity to resolve his dilemma. Finally,
Bass said, “I ain’t got no place to take him I get back there.”

“You got a home,” Root disagreed.

“Not no more,” Titus said, fearful of the responsibility. “I’m going to Louisville.”

“Take him with you,” Kingsbury said.

Wagging his head, unable to sort it all out, Bass admitted, “Don’t wanna take no Negra slave ’long with me.”

“Then you just sell him when we get back to the Ohio country and be done with it,” Ovatt suggested.

“I … I don’t rightly know how I feel about that.”

Root asked, “Ain’t your people got any slaves?”

“No. My family ain’t never had any. Work the land all ourselves … all by themselves.”

“Maybe they can use a slave now,” Kingsbury tried to add cheerfully.

“Said I ain’t going back home,” Titus told them firmly. “I don’t want no slave. Can’t use him.”

“Sell him!”

“No!” Titus snapped at Root, his fist clenching in frustration.

“He’s just a god-bleemed Negra—”

“He’s a person!” Titus interrupted.

All three boatmen erupted in roars of laughter.

Kingsbury said, “This Negra? A person? Listen, son—that’s money sitting right there. Like a good milch cow. Or a breeding stud. Just look at him! He’ll bring you top dollar. Every planter from here to Kentucky’ll wanna get his hands on him to breed with their Negra bitches. Have ’em strong li’l suckers to do the fieldwork in the years to come.”

“Said I ain’t gonna sell him.”

“Then we’ll sell him for you,” Root said.

“He ain’t yours,” Titus snapped. “He belongs to me.”

“So what the hell are you gonna do with him?” Beulah asked.

“I s’pose I’ll turn him loose.”

“He’ll just follow us … till some law catches him.”

Titus was worried again. “Then what?”

“If they don’t kill him while’st running him down,
they’ll sell him off,” Kingsbury said. “No two ways about it, the man’s going for money, even if you turn him loose.”

“’Cept if you make him a freedman,” Beulah suggested.

All four men turned to her, stunned. Then Titus looked at the slave. “A freedman?”

“That means you let him go legal, so he ain’t no man’s slave no more,” she explained. “Means he’s on his own from there on out.”

Turning now to the stranger in their midst, Titus asked in a quiet voice, “You wanna be free to go your own way?”

He smiled. “Go with you.”

Wagging his head, Titus explained, “No man’s slave. Go where you wanna go, on your own.”

The yellowed eyes slowly widened, as if he were struggling to make sense of it in his mind, translating, forming words like sturdy nets to capture the concepts.

“Me come across the big water … way down river,” he started. “Big boat. Big boat many die. Me so sick come to river. Down in Orlins Town they sell me to Annie. She learn me fix whiskey, rum, brandy too. Help Annie’s women. I not help Annie’s women, she sell me. You take me now. Me go with you.”

“Not no more,” Titus replied adamantly. “Free man.”

“Go home?” he asked the youth.

“That’s across the ocean,” Beulah answered. “Too far. You can go anywhere, make a new life for yourself.”

“Go work anybody else now?”

“No,” Titus said, sensing the warmth of something spreading inside his chest. What it was, he could not put a name to. “Work for you … what, do you have a name?”

“Hezekiah, she name me.”

Beulah asked, “Your mama?”

“No. My mama far away,” Hezekiah said sadly, his eyes misting as he stared off into the night. “She die when men come to village and take all people to big boat. Chains.”

Titus asked, “Who give you the name Hezekiah?”

“Annie give me.”

“Then that’s what your name’s gonna be,” Titus declared. “Hezekiah Christmas.”

A broad smile brightened the slave’s face like a crack in burnt, blackened wood. “Like Annie name. Christmas.”

“You like it?” Bass inquired.

“Like it, yes. Hezekiah Christmas.”

His mind burned with possibilities as he said, “Now, soon as we get someplace where I can have folks write us up a paper says I’m freeing you, from then on you’ll be a free man.”

“Goddamned shame,” Root grumbled. “Negra buck like him’d brung us his weight in coins, I’d wager.”

“Just hope he ain’t gonna be trouble to us,” Kingsbury grumped.

“He ain’t,” Titus vowed, hoping it was a promise he could keep.

“That’s a long goddamned walk,” Ovatt said.

“He’ll help out,” Bass explained, then looked at the slave. “Pay for his keep.”

Hezekiah nodded, handing his empty cup to Beulah.

“You done?” she asked.

“More?”

Beulah smiled and took his cup to lean over the kettle. “My, but you are a hungry one.”

“Just look at the size of him,” Ovatt said almost under his breath. “Bet he eats as much as a goddamned plowhorse.”

North by east they pushed on the following morning, making for the Choctaw Agency on the Pearl River,
^*
the heart of the Choctaw nation.

Only nine years before, General James Wilkinson had concluded a treaty between the tribes and the federal government that would allow passage through their lands. Four years later in 1805 the tribes agreed to establish and maintain a handful of settlements along the trail. While the first leg of the journey north from New Orleans to Natchez was one of relative ease due in large part to the frequent and comfortable way stations, once on the
Natchez Trace, however, the “stands,” as those half-dozen wilderness way stations were known across the next six hundred miles, were something altogether different: really nothing more than a few ramshackle cabins and tumble-down huts offering the crudest accommodations. Not a single town in all that distance. Only three Indian villages, a ferry at the Tennessee River, and two squaw men’s cabins provided the only measure of civilization and company in that wilderness.

While the Trace did indeed serve as a mail route and was of some small military purpose for the infant nation, it remained of limited commercial importance. From the time of the Revolution until the coming of the steamboat—which one day soon would easily push its way upstream against the might of the Mississippi and the Ohio—the Natchez Trace was primarily a route for returning flatboatmen. Coming downriver, theirs had been a journey by shoal and suck and thunderous rapids. Walking north would present a man far different perils.

“Ain’t near so bad making for home in wintertime like it is,” Heman Ovatt said at their night fire several days later. “Summer’s trip be the one what can kill a man with bad water, the fever and malaria, and all sorts of other bloody fluxes.”

“Mosquitoes and gnats,” Reuben Root joined in. “In that sticky heat they’ll suck your blood and make you so sick you wish you was dead.”

“Them’s the only things you don’t have to worry about come winter like this,” Beulah snorted. “But going north, you’re still bound to run into poisonous snakes—the likes of cottonmouths and copperheads.”

“Only on the warm days,” Kingsbury advised.

“I know ’nough ’bout ’em,” Titus replied. “Sunny days you just gotta be watchful for the places them snakes is out to lay around and warm themselves.”

Root trembled as if cold water had been poured on him. “What I don’t like is them panthers crying in the night out there. Sounds just like a woman, wailing for help.”

Night after night it had been the same for Titus. Awakened from a fitful sleep by the cries from all manner
of shapeless creatures out there in the dark. He’d lie wide-eyed for the longest time, his back slid up to Hezekiah’s, hoping to share their warmth and Bass’s two blankets, as he listened to the night-things come into voice out there in the swamp.

Day after day it was to be the same for them as well. Up before first light to chew on the cold remains of last night’s supper as they rolled their blankets, tied their few belongings over their shoulders, then trudged on across the frosty bayous and skirted the great, stagnant pools encircling the base of each cypress tree, intent on covering as much ground as they could, what with the few hours of daylight the winter granted them.

Every morning the others let Titus lead off, followed closely by the runaway slave. Kingsbury would follow with the others after a few minutes, wanting to assure that they would not frighten off any of the game Bass might run across throughout the day. Most evenings Titus provided fresh game for Beulah to cook over their supper fire. But every now and then they failed to hear a gunshot as twilight came down and the temperature dropped. It was then they would have to content themselves with what they had saved of last’s night meal and hope that something would cross the youngster’s path come the morrow.

Far beyond the Natchez District they emerged from the interminable bayou, at the edge of which stood the Chickasaw Agency,
^*
where the footpath grew worse. Below their feet the soil had become gravelly, eating away at their boots, chewing up Titus’s moccasins, requiring nightly repairs and patching.

“They call this part of the road ‘the Barrens,’” Ovatt declared that first night the landscape changed so drastically. “From here on out to Tennessee, the trail gets a mite rough.”

Bass poked at a blister on his heel with the point of his knife and asked, “Can’t imagine how it’s gonna get any worse.”

The following day they reached what most travelers
considered the halfway point of the Natchez Trace: Mclntoshville, named for an early Scottish trader who had come to the Chickasaw to trade but stayed on to father his own dynasty. More commonly known as Tockshish Stand
^*
to the tribe and travelers alike, the village lay some 310 miles from Natchez—the first such village a wayfarer passed in all that distance from the Mississippi. Not another sign of civilization, not one mail carrier, merchant, or party of traders.

From Tockshish the path did grow worse, threading in and out from open woods to sparse sections of inhospitable prairie as the ground rose, becoming more bushy and broken as they ascended the divide that would take them to the Tennessee River, still eighty miles beyond. Up, then down, the Trace led Titus through that unforgiving wilderness, as he listened through each short day only to the sound of his moccasins on the pounded earth, perhaps the haunting crackle of the dried cane as it shook, troubled by the winter wind.

There were times Titus stopped—not so much to rest his feet or to catch his breath—but for no other reason than to turn around and listen, hoping to catch the sound of Hezekiah coming up the trail behind him, or to turn around atop a hill and look back, hoping to spot the boatmen and Beulah, plodding along beneath the cold, gray, monotonous sky that each day offered them.

Already December was growing old. Just how old, he had no way of knowing for certain. The way things looked now, he might well be seeing in the new year still caught in this wilderness. A new year, and with it his seventeenth birthday. That afternoon he knocked a turkey cock out of its roost in the bare branches of a beechnut tree. While it wasn’t the finest feast he had provided them, the meal filled their bellies as the gloom of winter’s night closed its fist around them.

“We should be drawing close to the Tennessee,” Ovatt declared as he picked his teeth and wriggled his feet close by the fire’s warmth that night.

“Keep your eye peel’t tomorry,” Kingsbury said, turning to Bass. “The trail takes you down to the river crossing.”

Titus asked, “We gonna have to ford it?”

“Time was, a riverman had to ford it,” Kingsbury replied. “Not no longer. Years back a Scotch feller named Colbert come to trade among the Chickasaws and saw him the chance to make a nice living.”

“King of the roost, that one is now,” Root added.

Kingsbury nodded. “Married into the tribe, built him his ferry, and set himself up right nice.”

Ovatt rubbed his hands together, teeth gleaming in the firelight. “Got him a mess of handsome daughters too!”

“Half-breeds they are,” Root explained with a wink.

“Still as handsome a woman as you’re likely to meet along the trail,” Ovatt declared, then suddenly turned to Beulah. “Pardon me, ma’am. Not meaning that you ain’t a handsome woman … just, that—well, considering you and Kingsbury, see?”

She grinned and dropped her eyes. “I took me no offense, Heman.” Then turned to Bass. “You just watch yourself there at Colbert’s Ferry, Titus. Them half-breed girls got Injun blood in ’em, and there’s no telling what they’ll do when they see a likely young man such as you come round.”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you,” Beulah said. “Don’t you go and run off into the woods with none of ’em.”

“They’ll just as soon slit your throat as wet your honey-dauber,” Root grumbled. Then apologized: “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s me and my awful manners again.”

“What Reuben says is right,” the woman explained. “They’re the sort won’t think twice ’bout lifting a man’s purse or knocking him over the head for his money. They ain’t looking for your hand in marriage.”