The Water Dancer: A Novel (34 page)

We made our share of changes over the next week. We moved, all of us, out of the Warrens and down to Thena’s old cabin in the Street. It was where we felt our safest, and all it meant for me was that I would rise a bit earlier in the morning to get to my father in time for my duties. We did not leave Thena alone. Sophia took up the washing and I assisted as I could on Sundays, hauling up the water, gathering the wood, and wringing the laundry. Thena was mostly back to normal after a week. But the terror of that assault changed her, and for the first time in all my time of knowing her I saw true fear on her face, fear of what could happen remaining there at Lockless. And that was when I thought of Kessiah, and knew that the time of redeeming promises had come.

Thena was not my only concern. I learned later, through my father, that Nathaniel had never returned from Tennessee, despite his summons, and had been delayed by some urgent business. What that might be I could not know. But I thought that perhaps his intentions for Sophia might well go beyond what I had previously conceived. And I was not the only one thinking this.

Sophia said, “You ever think about me going that way?”

We were up in the loft, staring through the darkness up at the rafters. Caroline was asleep between us, while down below, on the ground floor, Thena snored softly.

“I do,” I said. “Especially lately.”

“You know what I hear?” she asked.

“What?”

“I hear things are different in Tennessee. Hear that it’s far from this society and there are different customs, and there are white men there who take colored women like man and wife. And I been wondering bout Nathaniel and his particulars, for instance the desire that I make myself up like…”

She trailed off as though working her way through a thought, and then said, “Hiram, is that man grooming me for something? Is it his intention to get out of custom, and finally install me as his Tennessee wife?”

“Is that what you want? Tennessee?” I asked.

“Is that what the hell you think I want?” she asked. “Don’t you know by now? What I want is the same thing I have always wanted, what I have always told you I wanted. I want my hands, my legs, my arms, my smile, all my precious parts to be mine and mine alone.”

She turned toward me now, and though I was still looking at the ceiling I could feel her looking directly at me.

“And should I feel a need, should I desire to give all that to some other, then it must be my own need, my own desire to do as such. Do you understand, Hiram?”

“I do.”

“You do not. You can’t.”

“Then why do you keep telling me?”

“I am not telling you, I am telling myself. I am remembering my promises to myself and to my Caroline.”

We lay there in silence until we fell asleep. But I forgot none of the conversation. The time was so clearly now. I had performed my duties well, keeping Hawkins informed. And more, I had opened the secret of Conduction for myself. I felt it now time for Corrine Quinn to make good on her portion of the bargain.

Holiday came upon us. It was to be a lonely time. The Walker clan would not be returning that year, and with Maynard gone my father now faced the prospect of the blessed season all alone. But Corrine Quinn, having grown closer and closer to him, relieved his lonesome situation by coming to Lockless with her own retinue—this time much larger than merely Hawkins and Amy. They were trusted cooks, maids, and other caretakers. And too Corrine brought a collection of cousins and friends to entertain my father, who was now up in age. And this ensemble pleased him greatly, for there was a rapt audience before him eager to hear the tales of old Virginia.

It was a charade, of course. Every one of these cooks, caretakers, and cousins was an agent—some whom I’d known from my time training at Bryceton and others who’d worked out of the Starfall station. The plan was now clear to me. As Elm County declined and fell into obsolescence, and the Quality quit the country, in the crawl-space left behind, the Underground would ply its trade, expanding its war. Looking back now from the prospect of years, I confess myself filled with admiration. Corrine was daring, ruthless, ingenious, and while Virginia lived in fear of another Prophet Gabriel or Nat Turner, what they should have feared was right in their own home, in the garb of ladyhood, the model of fine breeding, porcelain elegance, and undying grace.

I could not see the genius of it, not at the time, for we were, even if united in our goal, too much committed to opposing routes. The tasking men were people to me, not weapons, nor cargo, but people with lives and stories and lineage, all of which I remembered, and the longer I served on the Underground, this sense did not diminish but increased. So it was that day, at the closing of the year, when I insisted on what must be done, that we stood at opposite ends.

We were down by the Street. Our story was simple—Corrine had desired a tour of the old quarters and I was her guide. So I had escorted her down from the main house and we made small, insignificant talk, until we cleared the gardens and the orchards and found ourselves on the winding path to the Street.

“When I came back to Howell’s, it was on the promise that a family would be conducted north,” I said. “The time for that conduction is now.”

“And why now?” she asked.

“Something happened here a couple of weeks ago,” I said. “Somebody got after Thena. Took an axe-handle to her head and then busted up her quarters. Took all the money she had been saving from the washing.”

“My Lord,” she said, and a look of real concern broke through the mask of ladyhood. “Did you find the villain?”

“No,” I said. “She don’t remember who it was. Besides, the way people are moved in and out of here these days…tough to tell. I know more of this crew you have brought with you than of the people who work here every day.”

“Should we investigate?”

“No,” I said. “We should get her out.”

“But not just her, right? There is another—your Sophia.”

“Not mine,” I said. “Just Sophia.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Corrine said with a faint smile. “How much have you grown in one year? It truly is a marvel. You really are one of us. Forgive me, it is a thing to behold.”

She was regarding me in amazement, though I now think she was not so much regarding me in that moment as regarding the fruit of her own endeavor, so that it was not I who amazed Corrine so much as her own powers.

“Do you yet remember?” she asked.

“Remember?”

“Your mother,” she said. “Have your remembrances of her returned yet?”

“No,” I said. “But I have had other concerns.”

“Of course, forgive me. Sophia.”

“I am worried that Nathaniel Walker will call her title, call her down to Tennessee.”

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Sophia said.

“Why?”

“Because I made arrangements with him a year ago. In one week, her title will revert to me.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Corrine gave me a look of bemused concern.

“Don’t you?” she said. “She’s had his child, hasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you understand,” she said. “You are, after all, a man yourself, a simple creature of severe but brief interests, subject to seasons of lust that wax and wane. As is your uncle, your man of Quality, Nathaniel Walker. And now that he is in Tennessee, he has an entire field for his passions. What would he need of Sophia?”

“But he called on her,” I said. “It was not but two weeks ago that he called on her.”

“I am sure he did,” she said. “A souvenir, perhaps?”

Corrine Quinn was among the most fanatical agents I ever encountered on the Underground. All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia.

I had not put it together like this in that moment. What I had was not logic but anger, and not anger at the slandering of something I owned, but of someone who held me upright in the darkest night of my life. But I did not vent this anger. I had been practicing the mask long before I met Corrine. Instead, I simply said, “I want them out. Both of them.”

“There’s no need,” said Corrine. “I have title to the girl, and so she is saved.”

“And Thena?”

“It’s not time, Hiram,” she said. “There are a great many things in the works, and we must take care to not endanger them. The powers of Elm County are diminished and every day we grow stronger, but we must take care. And I have done much already that might arouse suspicion. There is the fact of what we have done at Starfall. There is the fact that both of you ran, that the girl ran. Did she tell you I looked after her?”

“She did.”

“Then you must understand. There is too much to contend with at once. If we were ever figured out, so many would suffer.” She had dropped her mocking tone and was now on the verge of pleading. “Hiram, listen to me,” she said. “Your service to the Underground has been of great value. Your reports on your father have opened up possibilities we had not even considered. Even if you never master Conduction, you have proven yourself more than worth the risks we took in bringing you out. But we have much to balance and consider. What does it look like for me to take the title of Nathaniel Walker’s consort, only for her to immediately disappear? And this woman Thena has made an enterprise out of the washing. Will people not wonder when she suddenly stops coming around? We have to be so very careful, Hiram.”

“You made a promise,” I said.

“Yes, I did,” she said. “And it is my intention to keep it. But not just now. We will need time.”

I locked on to Corrine with a hard gaze. It was the first time I had looked at her without the respect that Virginia demanded. She was not being unreasonable. In fact, she was correct. But I was hot over her mocking of Sophia and there were my own feelings and shame at having delivered Sophia into outrage all those times, at having left Thena to run, and then left her again to be assaulted, at my mother who was sold, who I could not protect, who I did not avenge. All of that roiled in me and it shot out in the look I now put upon Corrine.

“You cannot do it,” Corrine said. “You will need us, and we will not consent. We will not put ourselves to the sword for your brief and small infatuations. You cannot do it.”

And then a look of recognition bloomed across her face until it covered the whole of her visage in horror, and she understood.

“Or maybe you can,” she said. “Hiram, you will bring hell upon us all. Think. Think beyond your emotions. Think beyond all your guilt. You have no right to endanger all who might be so rescued. Think, Hiram.”

But I was thinking. I was thinking of Mary Bronson and her lost boys. I was thinking of Lambert under the Alabama ox and Otha presently tracking cross the country for the freedom of his Lydia. Lydia, who endured all outrage for the chance of family.

“Think, Hiram,” she said.

“You told me freedom was a master,” I said. “You said it was a driver. You said none can fly, that we are tied to the rail. ‘I know,’ you told me. ‘And because I know, I must serve.’ ”

“You know I am not without sympathy,” she said. “I know what happened to you.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You can’t.”

“Hiram,” she said, “promise me you will not doom us.”

“I promise that I will not doom us,” I said. But the word-play put no folly upon her, and the less said about our remaining interview the better, for I hold her, all these years later, in the highest respect. She was speaking in full faith and honesty. And so was I.

I
WAS OUT THERE ON
my own now, and if Conduction was to be achieved, it must be done by my hand alone. And it seemed to me that there was no longer any avoiding the facts of my departure. I would have to tell them both—Sophia and Thena. I decided I would tell them each separately, for my confession to Thena involved matters far greater than the Underground. So I would start with what I thought was the simpler of confessions—Sophia.

Thena had begun to have nightmares, we thought from her attack. And so we got in the habit, on difficult nights, of leaving Caroline down below with her to sleep on her bosom and calm her. And it was such a night as this when I felt it was time.

“Sophia,” I said, “I am ready to tell you for what and I am ready to tell you how.”

She had been looking up into the gabled rafters, and now she rolled over, pulled the osnaburg blanket over herself, and turned to me.

“It’s about where I been,” I said. “About where I was and what happened when I was there.”

“Wasn’t Bryceton,” she said.

“It was,” I said. “But that was just the start of it.”

Even in that darkness, I could see her eyes, and they were too much for me to take. I rolled over so that my back was to her. I breathed in deep, and then breathed back out.

And then I told her that I had, in the time I was gone, seen another country, taken in the easy Northern air, that I had awakened when I wanted and moved as I pleased, that I had trained in to Baltimore, walked through the carnival of Philadelphia, and driven through the uplands of New York, and that I had done this all through my affiliation with that agency of freedom known only to her in whispers and tales—the Underground.

And I told her how it had happened, how Corrine Quinn had found me, how they had trained me at Bryceton, how Hawkins and Amy were in on the ruse. I told her how Georgie Parks had been destroyed, and how I had been party to that destruction. I told her about the family White, how they had loved me, how they had saved Mary Bronson, how Micajah Bland had given up his life. I told her how I had met Moses, how Kessiah had survived the racetrack, how she remembered Thena, how I had promised to conduct Thena and how I now planned to conduct her too.

“I promised to get you out,” I said. “And I mean to keep that promise.”

I turned back over, and I found those eyes waiting for me. There was a kind of deadness in them now—no shock or surprise, no emotion betrayed.

“That why you come,” she said. “To keep your promise.”

“No,” I said. “I come back because I was told to.”

“And had you not been told to?” she asked.

“Sophia, I thought of you all the time up there,” I said. I reached over and stroked her face with my hand. “I worried for you, worried for what they might have done to you…”

“But while you were worrying,” she said, “I was down here. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing what had happened to you. Not knowing anything of that woman Corrine’s intentions.”

“She got your title from Nathaniel,” I said. “You ain’t going to Tennessee.”

She shook her head and said, “And what am I supposed to make of that? You come back with this tale, and I do believe it, I really do, but Hiram, I know you, I do not know them.”

“But you
do
know me,” I said. “And I am sorry for how it has come down, but I have heard you now, I have heard all of what you were saying from the start. And I understand that it is not just you, but Caroline. I am getting you out. Thena too.”

“And what about you?” she said.

“I am here until told otherwise,” I said. “I am part of this now. It is bigger than me and my desires.”

“Bigger than me too,” she said. “Bigger than this girl who you said was your blood.”

There was a long silence and then Sophia rolled over again, so that she was staring at the rafters.

“And you still ain’t said how,” she said. “I told you I needed a how.”

“How, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah, how,” she said.

“Come on,” I said.

“What?”

“You said you wanted to know how. Well, you wanna know or you don’t?”

By then I was climbing down the ladder. At the door I put on my brogans and wrapped myself in my fear-no-man coat. Looking back, I saw Sophia gazing at Caroline, still snoring lightly on Thena’s bosom.

“Come on,” I said.

We walked along that route that had now become sacred to me. I had been practicing, experimenting as I could with the powers and reach of memory, so that when we arrived, minutes later, at the banks of the river Goose, I felt myself in control.

I turned to Sophia and said, “You ready?” To this she rolled her eyes and shook her head. I took her hand, and in the other hand I clutched the wooden horse.

And then I guided her down toward the banks, and as we walked I spoke of that night, that last Holiday when we were all there together, and more than spoke it, I felt it, made it real to me—Conway and Kat, Philipa and Brick, Thena all wrathy in front of the fire—“Land, niggers,” she said. “Land.” And I remembered, then, Georgie Parks, Amber, and their little boy. And I remembered the free ones—Edgar and Patience, Pap and Grease. And no sooner did I think of them than I felt Sophia jump with a start, and squeeze my hand, and I knew then that it had begun.

There was a bank of fog covering the river, and over top of it we saw them—phantoms flittering before us, in that ghostly blue, the entire range of them who had been there on that Holiday night. Georgie Parks was on his jaw-harp, Edgar at the banjo, Pap and Grease were hollering, and all the rest circled and danced around the fire. We could hear them, not in our ears, but somewhere deep beneath the skin. It seemed that the bank of fog was alive, for its wispy fingers seemed to move in time with the music, seemed to stretch toward us and, on beat, gently induce us to join.

It was a simple thing to accept the invitation—all that it required was a squeeze of that wooden horse. When I did this, those same fingers shot out, took hold of us, jerked us forward and released us. I felt Sophia stumbling, and grabbed ahold of her hand. When she’d recovered, she looked back at me stunned. And then when we looked out forward, we saw that the forest was in front of us, and the river, the bank of fog, and the phantoms were behind. Looking back across, we could see what happened—we’d been conducted across the river to the other side.

Looking down, we saw the blue tendrils of mist retreating off of us, and we heard the music picking up again, louder and louder—Georgie still on the jaw-harp, Edgar with his banjo, while the rest of them hollered and danced, and again we saw the fingers of fog reach for us, beckoning us with the beat. Now I pulled the wooden horse from my pocket and held it aloft—and it glowed blue in my hand. And I looked to Sophia and then I squeezed again, and the mists shot out, snatched us up, and pulled us to the other side of the river. When we were released, Sophia stumbled and fell. I helped her up and we turned again and heard the music rising and saw, again, the fingers of fog beckon.

“It’s like dancing,” I said.

And I squeezed again, but this time, Sophia leaned into the fog with all her weight, giving in to it, riding it, so that she landed firm on her feet. I squeezed again and we were again conducted. Squeezed again and were conducted. Squeezed again and were conducted. Then, thinking of my old home with Thena and all my days there, and what it had been to me through all those years, I squeezed again and the blue tendrils snatched us up, and this time, when they released us, we found ourselves right back there on the Street, and as the fog retreated, the last image we had was of a woman water dancing, a jar on her head, dancing away from us until, with the most incredible grace, she angled her head so that the jar slid down, and reaching up she caught the jar by the neck, laughed, drank from it, and offered it up to someone unseen as she faded away.

When we returned to the cabin, Sophia climbed up to the loft. I tried to follow but collapsed back in a heap and crash so loud that I woke Thena.

“Hell are y’all doing?” she yelled.

“Just out for some air,” Sophia said.

“Air, huh?” Thena said skeptically.

Sophia reached down and helped me up the ladder, and when I got to the top I collapsed into a dreamless sleep. I awoke early the next morning and dragged myself through my tasks.

The night following, we were there laid out in the loft as usual, in our late-night conversations.

“Where’d you first see the water dance?” I asked.

“Don’t even remember,” Sophia said. “Where I’m from, everybody do it. Some better than others. But they start us on it young down there. It’s tied to the place, you know?”

“I don’t,” I said. “Never knew where it came from.”

“It’s a story,” she said. “Was a big king who come over from Africa on the slave ship with his people. But when they got close to shore, him and his folk took over, killed all the white folks, threw ’em overboard, and tried to sail back home. But the ship run aground, and when the king look out, he see that the white folks’ army is coming for him with they guns and all. So the chief told his people to walk out into the water, to sing and dance as they walked, that the water-goddess brought ’em here, and the water-goddess would take ’em back home.

“And when we dance as we do, with the water balanced on our head, we are giving praise to them who danced on the waves. We have flipped it, you see? As we must do all things, make a way out of what is given. Ain’t that what you done last night? Ain’t that what you say you do? Flipped it. It’s what Santi Bess done, ain’t it? She all I could think about when we came back up out of it last night. That king. The water dance. Santi Bess. You.

“ ‘It’s like dancing.’ Ain’t that what you said? It’s what Santi Bess done. She ain’t walk into no water. She danced, and she passed that dance on to you.

“And that’s why they came for you, the Underground,” she said.

“Yep,” I said. “I had done it before, but not of my own deciding. And they had caught wind of me, and had been watching me. And then after Maynard, well…”

“That’s how it happened, huh? That’s how you come up out the Goose. That’s how you taking us up out of Lockless.”

“It is,” I said. “But there is a problem, one I do not yet quite have figured. The thing works on memory, and the deeper the memory, the farther away it can carry you. My memory of that Holiday night is tied to Georgie, and it’s tied to this horse that was my gift to him and his baby. But to conduct y’all that far, I need a deeper memory, and need another object tied to that memory to be my guide.”

“How bout that coin you used to always carry?”

“Yeah, I done tried that. It can’t carry me far enough. One thing to cross a river. Whole nother to cross a country. Gotta be deeper.”

Sophia was quiet for a moment and then she said, “That’s quite the power. Gotta be that you are a man of some importance to this Underground.”

“That’s what Corrine say.”

“And this is why she won’t let you loose.”

“It’s more than that,” I said. “But that is the larger part of it.”

“So then, Hiram,” she said. “What is your intention toward me, toward my Caroline? What is our life to be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I figured I’d get you set up somewhere. And I could see y’all from time to time.”

“No,” she said.

“What?” I said.

“We not going,” she said.

“Sophia, it’s what we wanted. It’s why we was running.”

“ ‘We,’ Hiram,” she said. “ ‘We,’ you understand?”

“I would like nothing more than to go with you, to leave it all back here. But you must see why I cannot. After all I have told you, after what I have shared of this war that we find upon us, you must see why I can’t leave.”

“I am not telling you to leave. I am saying that we, my Carrie and me, we are not leaving without you. I have lived here so long watching these families go to pieces. And here I have formed one, with you, with a man who is, as you have said yourself, blood of my Caroline. She is your kin, and I know it is a horrible thing to say, but I am telling you, you are her daddy, more of a daddy than that girl would ever have.”

“You know what you saying?” I said. “Do you know what you are walking away from?”

“No,” she said. “But one day I will and when I do, I will know it with you.”

I felt in that moment something low and beautiful. Something born down here on the Street, and all the Streets of America. Something nurtured and birthed out of the Warrens. It was the warmth of the muck. It was the relief of the low-born. The facing of the facts, the flight from Quality, the gravity and excrement of the true world where we all live.

I turned away to sleep and felt Sophia pulling close to me and slipping her arm underneath mine, until her hand found the warm, soft part of me.

“You know you chaining yourself to something here.”

And for a while the only answer was the soft warm breath on the back of my neck, and then she said, “Ain’t a chain if it is my choosing.”

The next day, Thena and I went out on our route, collecting the washing. And then we spent the next hauling up the water and tubs, beating the jackets and trousers and then hanging them in the drying room down in the Warrens. Sophia was not with us, pleading illness on behalf of Caroline. But there was no illness, it was part of our plan, one that was ill-thought, for now, at the end of the day, with our hands worn and our arms exhausted, Thena was ornery at her absence.

“What is wrong with her, Hi?” Thena said. We were walking slowly back down to the Street. The sun had faded long ago and we moved like shadows down the path, past the orchards and through the woods. “I wish you had chosen a girl with more back to her. That Sophia don’t know nothing about work.”

“She work just fine,” I said. “She worked for you while I was gone.”

“If that is what you must call it,” Thena said. “Way I see it, she only start really doing it once you was here. How you gonna make a way with a woman like that, Hi? All that’s put on a man’s life, how you gonna get it done with a woman who only work for show? When I was young, I outworked every man on the home-place, every one, even mine. I was terror in the tobacco fields, and I kept house too. Of course I sometimes wonder what it all got me—cracked over the head and robbed of my little stack of freedom. So maybe that girl know something I do not.”