The Water Dancer: A Novel (23 page)

I
T WAS NOW THE
end of summer, the slow season for rescues, so that we would have had little to do but await news of Bland’s mission. But fortunate for us, the time coincided with an annual gathering of all those who made legitimate and open war against slavery—concerned citizens who through the journals, oratory, and ballot fought for abolition. We in the Underground fought a secret war, covert, mystical, violent, but were quietly allied with the open one, and the August meeting was the only time when our two factions, hailing from across the country, could meet. The prospect of a reunion with Virginia, with Corrine, filled me with apprehension. After Bland’s departure we began to make our preparations and two weeks later we were off, Raymond, Otha, and I, aboard a private stage, so that as Bland now made his way south, we endeavored to make our way farther north, into the mountainous region of New York.

I was coming to understand that Raymond and Otha fought on both fronts of the war, were leading lights among the abolitionists while keeping their hands in the darker business into which I had been drawn. No station east of the Mississippi conducted more coloreds into freedom than those brought through Philadelphia. Adding to that fame was the odyssey of Otha from the depths of Alabama, from the depths of orphanage, into the waiting arms of his family. But on the second night of our carriage ride, we were joined by one whose regard outstripped us all. Moses.

I now knew her not simply as a creature of legend, but through the many exploits detailed in Raymond’s files. Still, when she stepped into the coach carrying with her the air of all her adventures, I was so dazzled I barely managed a greeting. She exchanged warm pleasantries with Raymond, nodded at Otha, and then held her gaze on me.

“How you holding up, friend?” she asked. It took a moment before I remembered that when she’d last seen me, I was recovering from Ryland’s assault.

“Well,” I said.

She had with her a walking stick, as she did that same night I’d seen her out in the woods, and now, in the daylight, I could see that it had across its body a series of carvings and glyphs. She saw me studying the thing and said, “My trusty walking stick, stripped from a branch of the sweet gum tree. Goes wherever I do.”

The coach rolled on. I found it incredibly difficult to not stare. Even without her power of Conduction, she was the most daring agent on the Underground. I had seen enough of the world, had read enough of Raymond’s files, to know that hers was a soul scarred, but not broken, by the worst of slavery. And I thought then back to my burial in the hole, the time in the jail and those nights when I was hunted as prey. Perhaps I needed it. Perhaps I had to see more of it, to know for myself how low and evil it all really could be. Raymond called this woman Harriet, a name she claimed to prefer over all her other titles. But still he gave her all the respect a soldier might give a great general, answering all her questions while posing few of his own in return, waiting upon her constantly though she rarely requested anything.

A day later, we rolled into the Convention, a campsite nestled in a cleared field, not far from the border with Canada. The land belonged to one of the great benefactors of the Underground, who it was said had plans to resettle a community of coloreds here to task only for themselves. Rain had come a day before our arrival, and as we unloaded from the coach, we sloshed in our brogans. The three of us claimed a space on the outskirts of this camp, toward higher ground, and then dispersed, each to his own way.

I looked out and saw mud-streaked tents extending to the edges of the woods, and then, walking amongst them, saw conventioneers in humor and debate, and then in the larger tents, I saw orators of reform preaching their cause from makeshift platforms. The orators loved spectacle, and seemed to be vying with each other to bring followers to their cause. I waded through the throngs of listeners and paused before a white man in calico breeches and top-hat, who just at that moment was weeping uncontrollably into the sleeve of his coat. Through his tears, he told a tale, which held the audience rapt, of how rum and lager had stripped him of his home and family, until all he had were the clothes in which he was now dressed. And he was resolved, he said, now recovering himself, to remain garbed in this same costume until the curse of spirits was purged from the land.

I walked farther. I stopped before a crush of people and watched as two women, both in overalls, with shaven heads, declaimed on the rights of women to appear with all the freedoms of men, in all the same spheres. And as the women went on, their pitch and volume grew, until not even the gathered audience was spared, for the women now asserted that until we too resolved to take up the cause of suffrage, in this very assembly, we were partners in that vast conspiracy to pillage half the world.

And this pillage continued, I realized, moving farther to still another tent, where a white man stood beside a silent Indian in traditional dress. And the white man spoke of the great depredations he had seen, the iniquitous lengths these Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians would commit themselves to, in the name of land. And by then, I well knew what would be done upon that land, how the sin of theft would be multiplied by the sin of bondage.

Farther along I went, until I caught sight of a line of children who stood behind a man raging against the factories of this country. The children had been sold into drudgery by parents who could no longer afford them, until they were saved by the beneficence of the society the man represented. Solely through these efforts of charity, the children would be bound to school and rescued from the evils of capital. And farther still, I found that this argument was cousin to another made from a trade unionist, who insisted that the titles of all factories should be stripped from their luxuriating owners and given to those who toiled in them.

And still farther was another related argument made that day, that the factory be rejected in total, that society be condemned a dead letter, and that men and women organize themselves in new communities where all worked together and owned everything in common. And even this was not the pinnacle of the Convention’s radicalism, for at the farthest edges of camp, I found a spinster who insisted that I and everyone rebuff even the bonds of marriage, which was itself as a kind of property, a kind of slavery, and ally myself with the doctrine of “free love.”

It was late morning now. The sun beat down out of the cloudless August sky. I wiped my brow with my jacket sleeve, and sat for a moment on a tree stump away from the fray of conventioneers and tents. It was all so much—an entire university out on that green. New ways of being, new ideas of liberation, now intruded upon me. Only a year ago, I would have rejected them all. But I had seen so much now, so much beyond even all that I had beheld in my father’s books. Where did it end? I could not tell, and this fact both pained me and filled me with joy.

When I looked up, I saw a woman just older than me, standing at the edge of the camp area from where I had just emerged, regarding me closely. When our eyes met, she smiled and approached directly. She had a delicate light brown face, framed by thick black hair that flowed down her cheeks and then to her shoulders.

I stood out of respect and her smile now disappeared. She surveyed me from head to foot, as though trying to be sure of something, and then she said the last thing I expected to hear.

“How are you, Hi?”

Had I heard this elsewhere, under other circumstances, it would have been a relief, for I would have been filled with thoughts of home. Immediately I began shuffling through a deck of questions, uppermost being how this woman had gotten hold of my name.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all gonna be all right now.” Then she extended a hand and said, “I’m Kessiah.”

I declined her greeting, but she continued on, registering no insult.

“I’m from your place—Elm County, Virginia. Lockless. You don’t remember me. You remember everything, but you don’t remember me. It’s all right. I used to look after you when you were a baby. Your mother would leave you with me when she had to—”

“Who?”

“Your mother—Momma Rose, we called her—she would leave you with me. And the way I have heard it, you know mine—Thena is her name. She lost her children some years ago. All five of them sold on the racetrack of Starfall, sent off to God knows where. But I am here now with the Underground, and I have heard that there was one who was here too, who came up just as I did, and I have heard that that one is you.”

“Can we walk?” I asked.

“We surely can,” she said.

I led her farther away from the Convention toward that outer portion of the green, on higher ground, where we had tied up our coach and pitched our tent. I helped her into the seat and then climbed up and seated myself next to her.

“It’s true,” she said, looking straight ahead. “It’s all true. I can tell you how it happened if you like.”

“I most certainly would like,” I said.

“Well, it’s as I told you, you know? I’m Thena’s baby—her oldest one. We lived down on the Street and I have some fond memories of that time. My daddy was a big man in those days, a headman on the tobacco team, and that is to say he was about as big as you can be when you was Tasked.

“We had our own house at the end of the Street, set off from the others and bigger too. I thought this was all on account of my daddy and the high esteem in which he was held by those up top. He was a hard man. I do not remember him speaking much, but I recall that when the Quality came down to address him they spoke with him in a kind of respect that they accorded no other tasking man.”

And Kessiah paused here, and a look of realization came over her. Then she said, “Or perhaps that is all in my mind. Perhaps it is the memory of a child, trying to recall things as I would have liked it to have been. I do not know. But I do have it that way, I tell you. I remember the games we used to play. I remember the marbles. I remember the ball and string. I remember playing the Knight and the Whistle. But mostly, I remember my momma, who was as warm and lovely a woman as I ever did know. I remember Sundays, just laying up in her bosom—all five of us—like kittens. My daddy was a hard man, but I think I knew even then that something about him had protected us, that he was doing something, or had done something, for all of us to have that cabin, set off at the end. We had our own garden out back, our own camellias. And that was my life.”

Kessiah was looking out over toward the tents we had just left, lost in a reverie. I was lost in my own, remembering Thena all those years ago, puffing on her pipe and recalling that man she loved, Big John. It seemed incredible to me that this Kessiah could be their daughter, could be here of all places.

“But I got bigger and was soon put to work—at first carrying water out to the folks in the field, and then after that in the fields myself. But I did not mind, all my friends were there too and I was close to my daddy. It was hard labor, that I knew, but I was always inclined to hard labor, it’s what put me here on the Underground. But back then my world was the fields and the Street, and the Street is how I knew you, Hi, and knew your mother and knew your aunt Emma. On weekends the older folks would go down to the woods for their little dances and would leave me to watch over the babies, and you was one of those. I am not so surprised to find you here. You were always different. You just watched, watched everything, and I was thinking when I spotted you up here how you have not changed, how you were just watching. It is my blessing to find you, to meet you again out here, so far from the Task.

“It was such a different time, and it amazes me, shames me almost, to say that I was happy back there, but I do believe I was, for a time, and I recall when the feeling changed. It was when my daddy fell. Fever, you know. That hit my momma hard. She was still warm as ever, but she was so grieved. Would cry every night and call us to her, ‘Come in and rest with your momma,’ she would say, and we—all of us kittens—would lay there with her and she would just cry, and all of us would cry with her. But I tell you, Hi, this was nothing measured against what was coming. Least when my daddy passed, we had each other. But, well, soon we ain’t even had that—was like all of us passed from each other, like all of us died and was damned to a different hell.”

Kessiah now turned to me and said, “They say you knew my momma, a little.”

I nodded and intended to say no more, for I could not yet bring myself to fully accept the story. But I could see Kessiah regarding me with expectant eyes. An expectation I knew well.

“She was not exactly as you say it here,” I said. “But I believe it was the same woman. And more I believe she had reason to be as she was, as I knew her. But I don’t think that much matters. What matters is that she was good to me. That, for me, Thena was the best part of Lockless.”

Kessiah cupped her hands and brought them to her face so that they covered her nose and mouth and she cried gently and quietly.

And then she said, “So you know about the racetrack?”

“I do,” I said.

“Imagine that. All of us, my brothers and sisters, taken out there and sold. Do you know I never saw them again? Do you know how hard I have tried to find them? But there are so many gone, Hi. Like water between my fingers. Gone.”

“I…I know,” I said. “I did not always know. But I know now. Your mother, she tried to tell me. But I did not always know what it meant to be handled as such. But I am seeing it now.”

“They used to say your daddy was a white man.”

“He was,” I said.

“Didn’t save you, did it?”

“No. Don’t save none of us.”

“No, it don’t, and I am here before you only on a chance. Most of mine was taken Natchez-way, but I was carried off up to Maryland and put to work out in the timbers, and not so long after, I met this man, Elias, and we took a shine to each other. Elias was a freeman who worked for his own wage and he planned to buy me off so that I might live free too.

“Timbers was hard labor, but I found me another family. I refashioned myself for that new life, formed myself around that man, and I got to something close to happy. I knew that I could never again be a girl. And I knew that I was marked, very harshly, by what had come before. But I found something, and just when I did, Hi, I tell you they endeavored to put me right back on the block. But I had something for them this time, you see. I had married into a family of a particular sort, and among that family there was the one who you know as Moses.”