Soon Be Free

Epigraph

What Happened and When

1 Firebird House

2 A Leg to Stand On

3 Skeleton Key

4 Will in the Shadows

5 Walking on Egg Yolks

6 No More Talk of a Dead Body

7 Too Much History

8 Cockleburs

9 Caught!

10 Miz Lizbet's Legacy

11 Trap

12 Dred Scott

13 Hound Dog PJ's

14 A Surprise Passenger

15 Samuel Straightfeather

16 Delaware Woman

17 No Hula Hoops

18 The Cutest Thang!

19 Ronald McDonald Curls

20 The Father of Waters

21 Silent Scream

22 Not Everybody Gets Free

23 Air!

24 Promised Land

25 The Fire-Eater

26 One Goes, We All Go

27 Ernie's Bait Shop

28 Wicked Wicker

29 Tonganoxie

30 The Crunch of Footsteps

31 Flat as a Cockroach

32 The Old Man Is A-Waiting

33 Floating Feather

34 An Old Goofer

35 Gift of Feathers

36 The Devils in the Cave

37 A Politically Correct Indian

38 Rats and Ambrosia

39 Bo Prairie Fire

40 Shprintze's Calico

41 Lulu

42 Dawgs

43 Elder Brother Won't Come

44 A Pair of Conjurers

45 Hollywood Extravaganza

46 A Dang Good Forgery

47 The Delaware Project

48 A Moral Dilemma

49 Whereas and Heretofore

50 Lane's Chimneys

51 The Missing Treaty

52 Stung by the Love Bug

53 Time and Mother Earth

54 Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

55 New Time, Old Time

56 Kansas Territory

57 Home at Last

58 State of Kansas

59 Who Knows?

For Jocelyn Charlotte Ruby, my window to the future

We'll soon be free,

We'll soon be free,

We'll soon be free,

When de Lord will call us home.

My brudder, how long,

My brudder, how long,

My brudder, how long,

'Fore we done sufferin' here?

It won't be long,

It won't be long,

It won't be long,

'Fore de Lord will call us home.

—from an old Negro spiritual

There are dozens of names and dates in this story, which takes place both in 1857 and today. Time jumps in the blink of an eye. Maybe this will help.

* means an actual historical date; all others are fictional.

1809
Samuel Straightfeather is born.

* 
1818–1829
By treaty, Delaware Indians are forced out of their homeland in the Delaware Valley ever westward, until they're resettled in Kansas Territory on a reservation of 2 million acres.

* 
1820
Missouri Compromise allows for Missouri to be admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Slavery is prohibited from the Louisiana Purchase at the line of 36°30' north latitude, except in the state of Missouri. Thus, slavery is illegal in Kansas Territory.

1822
Jedediah Morrison is born (Bo Prairie Fire's great-great-grandfather).

1844
James Baylor Weaver is born in Boston.

1847
Callie Biggers is born in Kentucky.

* 
1850
(Second) Fugitive Slave Law is enacted, declaring that runaway slaves must be recaptured and returned to their masters. The new law affirms the principle of
once a slave, always a slave,
reaching back many generations.

* 
1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act establishes two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and repeals the Missouri Compromise. Under the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the question of free state or slave state status is left to voters in those states. This act upholds the principle of
once free, always free.

* 
1854
Lawrence is founded in Kansas Territory, as is Leavenworth.

* 
1854
United States treaty with the Delaware Indians reduces the two-million-acre reservation to 275,000 acres, comprising a strip on the north bank of the Kansas River ten miles wide and extending forty miles to the west. This treaty and its repercussions are still being disputed today.

* 
1856
James Buchanan is elected the fifteenth president of the United States.

1856
Miz Lizbet Charles dies in Lawrence, Kansas Territory.

* 
1857
After an eleven-year court battle, the Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms
once a slave, always a slave
and declares that no slave or descendant of a slave can be a U.S. citizen.

1857
Fictional treaty between U.S. and Delaware Indians is signed and lost.

* 
1858
Gold rush begins in western Kansas Territory, now called Colorado.

1859
Homer Biggers celebrates his fortieth birthday.

* 
1861
(January 29) Kansas Territory becomes the State of Kansas.

* 
1861
(April 12) U.S. Civil War / The War Between the States begins.

* 
1865
(April) Civil War ends when General Lee surrenders.

* 
1866
Delaware Indians are forced out of Kansas and resettled in Indian Territory (now called Oklahoma), among the Cherokee Nation.

1896
Samuel Straightfeather dies.

1920
Bo Prairie Fire is born.

I ask you, why do weird things always happen to me? Mike says it's because blazing redheads are an anomaly of nature, so we're natural magnets for weirdness. He's got a point. Like, not long ago, when we were renovating Firebird House into a bed-and-breakfast, I found a skeleton hidden in a little room upstairs. I followed those bones back into the past and found out that this drafty, creaky old house was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Not only that, but a runaway slave, Miz Lizbet Charles, had died more than 140 years ago, right here, probably right where I'm sitting this minute.

Mystery solved, right? Hah! Next thing I knew, on a night when there was barely a laser beam of moonlight, a man was snooping around with a flashlight and a shovel in my backyard. It had rained a lot, the yard was a swamp, and the man's boots were ankle-deep in loamy mud.

Now, a normal person would have run for help, but not a blazing redhead. Besides, mud was squishing over my sneakers, so I couldn't have run very fast,
anyway. I slogged up behind the man and yelled, “My father's a police captain, you know.” Actually, he's a history professor, but this fact wouldn't impress a serious intruder with a shovel and knee-high mud boots.

The man tumbled forward at the sound of my bellow, and the flashlight flew out of his hand and sank into the bog.

He scrambled to regain his balance. His shoulders were no broader than my friend Jeep's, and he had a sort of caved-in look to him, as if he'd had some terrible disease as a child. “I lost my keys,” he said, scraping mud off his shirt and pants. They were the high-waisted, plaid kind of pants my uncle Tom used to wear, according to the faded Vietnam era photos from the seventies.

This man's clown pants were held up with suspenders as wide as chalkboard erasers. Tucked into them was a red flannel shirt buttoned to his chin. You'd think he was ambling in from hoeing the south forty.

“I'm supposed to believe you lost your keys in my yard?”

“Dog ran off with them in his mouth. It's not your business, girl.”

“Yes it is, it's my house.”

“Wasn't always,” he muttered.

“Oh, this is about Miz Lizbet, isn't it?” There'd been lots of publicity since I'd found that skeleton
upstairs. All of Lawrence—probably all of Kansas—knew how the famous architect James Baylor Weaver had lived in this house when he was a boy, and how his family had harbored runaway slaves until Miz Lizbet died here. “You're looking for something that belonged to her, like you're from a museum or something?”

He took off his glasses and blew on them, polishing them on his shirt. “Now, why would I want some hairpin or button from an old slave, answer me that?”

“Lots of people do, people who are interested in the Underground Railroad.”

“I'm not interested.”

“Well, then, it's got to be about James Baylor Weaver.”

“Never heard of him.”

Something in his tone made my blood pump faster, and without his granny glasses, his eyes were hard as bullets. “What
are
you looking for, mister?”

Instead of answering, he sloshed past me and started toward a black Ford parked in front of the house. At first he'd just seemed comical sinking in mud in that weird getup. But then he patted his pockets, and a chill rippled over me when I heard the jingle that told me he hadn't been looking for his keys after all. What did he want in my yard? And had he found what he was looking for?

The old Ford sputtered and cranked, giving me
plenty of time to memorize the Kansas license plate before the man sped away.

Spring rains in Kansas can be fierce. They send earthworms leaping to their death over the side of a culvert. So when I say puddles and mud, you get the picture. Diamonds of light filtered through a lattice wall around the back porch, showing me the man's flashlight beached in the mud with its nose sticking out as if it were gasping for breath. I pulled at it against the resistance of the sludge and swiped the slimy flashlight down my flank. This tells you what an elegant wench I am.
Wench.
Mike's word.

Polished up, the flashlight revealed a plastic stick-on label hanging by a glob of glue:

Beneath it was an address in Kansas City, Kansas, about forty miles away. Looked like I'd have to figure out a way to drag Mike to Kansas City. Who's this Mike I'm always talking about? Well, he isn't exactly my boyfriend, since he's a full three months younger than I am, and besides, my parents would break out in festering, oozing hives if they thought I had a boyfriend at the tender age of thirteen. Mike's an experiment in progress, still rough like a lump of coal that might just polish up into the Hope Diamond. I'm checking him out carefully as a potential love object when I get to be a
freshman, but at this point I can tell you he's no James Baylor Weaver. Sally and Ahn and I, we are all sort of in love with James-at-twelve, even though we know that he grew up and died eighty years before we were even born.

Come to think of it, Mike does have one distinct advantage over James: Mike's still breathing.

Two days before James's thirteenth birthday, the snow finally let up, and he opened the door to a boy with one leg and a crutch that dug inches into the snow because he leaned his weight that way.

“Will Bowers, mercy, what's happened to thee?”

“It's plain cold out here, James Weaver.” Will's voice cracked with weariness.

A wave of stinging air sucked James's breath away. “Well, here, let me take thy kit bag.”