Poe shadow (40 page)

The man’s unhurried steps came closer. He entered the coach, which as yet had no roof. Standing above me smiling, with a sudden and bold motion he kicked my cane away from the coach. Though I still had a grip on one end, the other end, which I’d been using to cling to the carriage, was displaced, and now I found myself dangling. Each time I tried to grasp the back of the carriage, with cane or hand, my pursuer joyfully kicked harder. Feeling the knots of this horrid lasso tighten fatally around my throat, I propped the hook of the cane into the widest spot between the rope and my neck. Meanwhile, I flailed with my feet; but the few inches between the bottom extremity of my body and the floor simply could not be reduced.

To be hanged to death, by a carriage! I could almost share my murderer’s ghastly smile at my fate.

As I hung suspended there, I gripped my cane tightly with both hands in a sort of hapless, hopeless prayer. I held it so tightly that the pores in the wood would later leave a white trail on my moist palms. Squeezing my eyes shut, I was surprised to suddenly feel the cane giving way, as though in my hands were the strength of four men. The middle section had jerked out of its place. The cane, as I quickly appraised, was actually made as two separate parts, joined together in the middle. In the gap I could see the gleam of shiny steel.

I pulled harder and found that the entire top half of the cane was a sheaf, slipping right off. There, hidden underneath, was a sword. A sword two, no, a full two and a half feet long when unsheathed!

“Poe,” I whispered, with what might have been my last breath.

At once I sliced the bond off my neck, swinging as I was freed onto the back of the carriage, which I grabbed with my free hand.

The first thing I saw when I looked up was the Frenchman perched on the top of the carriage chaise, peering curiously. In his confusion at the sight of my weapon, he had let his pistol dangle at his side. With a powerful yell, I swung the sword above me. It caught the side of his arm. Then, my eyes closed, I pulled the sword back and plunged the weapon forward again. He released a shrill scream.

I fell to the ground, landing on my back. My boots were propped against the back of the chaise. The rogue, wild and pale, hollering terribly from his wound, widened his eyes as I pushed hard with both legs. The half carriage went rolling across the room and, one of its loose wheels slipping off its axle, spilled over on top of him like a giant tomb. A piece of the carriage severed one of the nearby pipes, sending a burst of steam sizzling into the chaos.

I pushed myself to my feet and returned the sword into its sheath. But the violent thrill of the triumph could not lift me home or sustain me; my exhaustion and my aching leg combined to inhibit me from moving hardly ten feet from the building before falling down. I leaned heavily on the cane that had saved my life, worried that one of the rogues I had escaped would find me in this weakened condition.

There was a rattling at the door of the warehouse, which I had just closed a few moments before, and a frightful moan.

“Clark!” I heard my name shouted from within my daze. It sounded like it was coming from a great distance, but I knew it was near.

Perhaps it was terrible fear, or the throbbing in my body, or the utter fatigue coming over me; perhaps it was from a combination of everything. As a hand reached me, I surrendered almost peacefully, feeling a heavy blow strike the side of my head.

NOISES OF INFORMAL
conversation merged into one faraway hum. The scene grew clearer in my vision. Men drank wine and beer, and the smell of chewed tobacco filled my nostrils with an unpleasant sting. Trying to sit straight, I felt myself restrained around the neck. The room seemed identical to the tavern in Ryan’s hotel, as it might have looked the afternoon Poe had arrived there. I thought about the unfriendly stares of the Whigs of the Fourth Ward across the street from Ryan’s, and sat straight up despite a wave of dizziness.

As a small group of men walked past some candles, I saw they were all colored—indeed, the groggery was populated with black men and a few brightly clothed young women, and I now could see that the windows were in a different arrangement than at Ryan’s. The easy intermingling of the sexes called to my mind Paris more than it did Baltimore. Around my shoulders, which had felt as though they were in some sort of immovable straitjacket, was actually a stack of heavy, warm blankets.

“Mr. Clark. You look better.”

I turned and saw the black man who had diverted one of the rogues during the chase.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Edwin Hawkins.”

My temples throbbed. “Was it one of them who hit me?” I asked, stroking the side of my head.

“No, you weren’t hit just now, but it probably felt like you were. As you ran from the carriage warehouse, you keeled right over before you made it more than a few yards. You hit the side of your head on the pavement before I could catch you. I brought you here so they wouldn’t find you. The one chasing me had given up after we passed under a streetlamp and he could see he was after the wrong man, but I’d wager he could still be searching.”

“Did I kill that man in the warehouse?” I asked, remembering the events with chilling horror.

“He came out looking for you, and he fell down too. He looked cut pretty bad. I sent word for a doctor to treat him—you don’t want murder on your head.”

I looked around the room guardedly. The grogshop was in the rear of a black grocery. It was the sort of place, in Old Town localities like Liberty Alley, that the press often complained should be prohibited for its evil influences on the poorer classes and its instigation of riotous conduct. Two light-skinned black men were conferring confidentially in the corner, one occasionally throwing a glance in my direction. I looked on my other side. I did not wonder when I saw more suspicious gazes. I was not the only white man here, as there were several whites of the poorer classes sharing tables with black laborers. But it was quite obvious I was in some sort of trouble.

“You are safe, Mr. Clark,” Edwin said with remarkable tranquillity. “You need to be out of the rain for a while.”

“Why did you put yourself at risk for me? You do not even know me.”

“You’re right, Mr. Clark. But I did not do this for you. I did it for someone I did know,” he replied. “I did this for Edgar Poe.”

I looked over the hard angles and handsome features of the face before me. He was perhaps a few years past forty and had enough lines in his face to be older, but there was a younger, or at least more restless, gleam hidden in his eye. “You knew Edgar Poe?”

“Before I was freed, yes.”

“You were a slave?”

“I was.” He studied me and nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Poe’s slave.”

More than twenty years earlier, Edwin Hawkins had been a house slave for a relative of Maria Clemm’s. Mrs. Clemm, called Muddy, was Edgar Poe’s aunt and later, when Poe married her young daughter Sissy, would become his mother-in-law. Upon the death of Edwin’s owner, the slave’s deed and title had fallen to Muddy, then a resident of Baltimore.

Around the same time, Edgar Poe had recently withdrawn from his position as sergeant major in the army at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, certain now that he would be a poet after having completed an epic lyric, “Al Aaraaf,” from his army barracks. The struggle to secure his military discharge had been long and frustrating, as Edgar Poe had needed consent from two equally strict parties: John Allan, his guardian, and his military superiors. Having finally accomplished this, Poe was now residing temporarily with Aunt Muddy and their extended Baltimore family. Eddie, as he was called by most people then, had enlisted in the army as Edgar A.
Perry
(the young slave had overheard Poe tell Muddy to watch for mail addressed to that name), initially having hoped to end all ties with Mr. Allan, who refused to support Poe’s desire to publish his poetry.

Now, though freed from Allan’s demands and from his army service, Edgar Poe had no money and no help to earn his place in the world.

Muddy, a tall, nurturing woman of forty, opened her home to Eddie Poe as though he were her son. He seemed to Edwin the style of man who liked exclusively to be around women. Overwhelmed with family illnesses in the household, Muddy asked her nephew to take the newly inherited slave and act as her agent in Edwin’s sale. Soon Poe made an arrangement to sell Edwin to the family of Henry Ridgeway—a black family—for forty dollars.

I expressed my interest in the details of this arrangement. For a strong young male slave, Poe might have received five or six hundred, possibly more.

Edwin explained: “Our legislature tries hampering the freeing of slaves by making the process costly, so they don’t look like they’re disturbing our domestic economy. Mr. Poe and his aunt did not have that sort of money. But there is no law to prevent a free black family from purchasing a slave, and no law requiring a minimum sale price. Selling a slave cheap, maybe for the price of the lawyer’s fee, to a free black owner was another way to free a slave—a way to free me, as Mr. Poe did in this arrangement. It also meant I could stay in Baltimore: not a perfect city, but my home. There are men among my people who own their wives and children as slaves, for the same reason.”

“Poe did not write much about the slavery question,” I said. “He was not a writer for any abolitionist causes.” In fact, it had always seemed to me that Poe had never liked causes at all, automatically believing them hypocritical. “Yet he did this in your situation, forgoing hundreds of dollars, at a time when he was entirely poor and without support.”

Edwin replied, “It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man
does
that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.

“I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I’ll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described.”

“The flower? Was that
you
who left it?”

He nodded. “I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole.”

“But where did you run to once you left the flower?”

“It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting.”