O DEATH

In that year, the South was Redeemed, and with President Hayes having already removed Union troops, something had to be done, for surely nothing good awaited CK Howard and his young family with the return of Democrats to office. Like other black men throughout the Delta, CK had traveled north from his home in Merigold to be part of the meeting in Clarksdale. The hall was packed, bodies pressed against one another, the air heavy with their dank smells and desperation. They listened eagerly for some sign or direction.

“Eighteen hundred an seven-nine spell calamity for colored folk!” boomed the minister.

“What we spose to do?” a voice from the crowd called out.

“I live in Mississip my whole life,” said another man, which elicited a rumbling of support. “My family here!”

The minister nodded, and waited for quiet. “But this place is set to return to Hell in no amount of time.” He paused. “And if we stay, we die. Whether a return of the lash or the crush on our soul, don’t much matter to white folk who feel they been wronged these years last.” At that the crowd erupted, neighbors turning to one another while others shouted across the room. “Now, hold on,” he pleaded. “God, I’m here to tell you, will show us the way. The Almighty will lead us out of Egypt, this I promise.”

“He sure got them words together,” CK said to his neighbor.

“Need more than words,” the man said quietly, and then, as if boiling up unexpectedly from some hidden place inside him, he shouted at the dais, a voice so strong with intention that it swiveled the heads in the room his way: “What God gon do for us, preach? What, I mean to ask you, He gon do?”

In subsequent meetings, throughout the final months of 1878, they would debate the religious and secular implications of the change in political winds—whether it was a sure signal of a coming millenarian End or only the formal institution of an already understood way of life—but when the arguing died down the only consensus remained fear of what lay ahead, and so they turned their attention toward what was to be done. There would be talk of Liberia, of chartered ships that would take them to Africa, of petitioning the president to establish a Negro state somewhere in the territories, of staying and trying to strengthen Republican turnout in the next election. There would be talk of Kansas, the “Eden on the Prairie,” of Pap Singleton and the Negro settlements in Hodgeman and Grant counties.

CK didn’t know what to do. Merigold was his home, and while most of his kin had passed or already left Bolivar County in the years after the war, it wasn’t easy to imagine living anywhere else. But he had his own young family to think about now, his wife, Mil, and their baby, Rachel. He prayed on it nightly, as always, waiting for God to provide some direction, and then one day, coming home from the ginner where he’d taken the last of his unseeded cotton for the season, CK came across the circular, a crumpled handbill lying on the ground. He picked it up and read the advertisement for a newly established town in Kansas whose name was almost familiar, though he’d never once left Mississippi.

“Nicodemus,” he said, as he continued walking toward the farmland he rented from a white planter, the tracts where he raised his cotton and where he lived in a small wooden shack with his wife and daughter. He said the name again and felt the incipient rush of near recognition he’d often experienced as vision, a sure sign from God. There was Nicodemus of the Bible, of course, the Pharisee who visited Jesus and later helped Joseph of Arimathea bury His body. But that wasn’t the source of the name’s mysterious known-ness. Something else, he knew. Slowly, as he read over the leaflet the way his mother had taught him—“Negro colony on the banks of the beautiful Solomon River”—the words started to come back to him. A song he remembered singing as a boy, before the war, bent over sack and bail in the fields alongside his now-dead mother. That was it: a song about a slave who died speaking of the coming freedom and asked to be woken when it came. Wake Nicodemus, he hummed to himself. Wake me up at the first break of day. He heard those words now as a commandment from his God—it was a sign—and he knew now for certain where he’d take his young family. Wake me up for that great Jubilee.

Over a year earlier, and five hundred miles away in Kentucky, Talmen Fore had first heard talk of Nicodemus from a man named W. R. Hill, who showed up at Lexington Baptist one Sunday unannounced, whiter than a dogwood in bloom. He claimed to be a minister from Indiana, but land spec seemed the only thing on his mind that day. The audacity—the sheer effrontery—of that white man, talking Kansas, talking all-black towns! Life for the colored man in Kentucky wasn’t as bad as it was in the Lower South, Talmen knew, but that wasn’t saying much. He had a home for his wife and two children, and drew mostly regular pay as a carpenter. But his house was small and the rent high, and he wasn’t allowed to join the new white carpenters’ union, which left him taking what he could get from poor folks on his side of town. It was better than it had been before the war—that strange contradiction of being bound to a master in a slave state that had chosen not to secede, that had somehow fought to preserve the Union—but the thought of their own town seemed a danger even to dream. Hill was stubborn in his persistence, however, and preacherly in his delivery. The more he spoke, the more his claims persuaded: rich black sandy loam. Wild horses aplenty. Forests of elm, willow, hackberry, and sycamore for building. Five dollars gets you there by rail and cart. The government was practically giving away land.

And so in the summer of 1877 the initial group of thirty struck out for Kansas, packing all they could—food, pans, clothing, chairs, blankets, tools—first onto the train, where the other passengers inspected them with a skeptical curiosity, and then onto the wagons that took them the last of the way across the arid plains of northwestern Kansas to their new home on the south fork of the Solomon River. It was flat and arid, so different from the wooded hills of central Kentucky, so different from what the white minister had claimed. And yet it was land, theirs for the taking, so they sent back word to Lexington with enough encouragement to spur a second group of three hundred, which included Talmen and his family. They arrived in September of that year, too late in the season to plant and harvest, and had to weather the tough winter in holes they’d burrowed into the hard ground. At night the men huddled in those dugouts with their families, using dried manure to coax a small fire, and stole out in the mornings to surrounding towns to look for work that might see them through to spring. There was nothing. The nearest mercantile center was thirty miles away, at the railhead in Ellis. The soil was parched, nary a horse to be seen, and the only tree for miles was the occasional cottonwood. Disillusioned, over sixty families returned to Kentucky. A posse formed, searching for that liar, W. R. Hill, who’d promised Eden and sold them a desert, and the fearful white man had to sneak out of town under a wagoner’s bed of hay.

Things got so bad that winter they nearly starved and were saved only by a group of Osage Indians, returning from their winter hunt in the Rockies, who shared some of their meat with the settlers. At last the third and final group from Kentucky, a lot of almost 150, appeared on the horizon one evening in early March of 1878, looking to Talmen, who was sick and tired, like souls returning to claim their earthly vessels. But their fresh teams of mules and oxen, their new farming implements and provisions, proved to be their salvation.

Even then, however, there were only five harnessed teams to share among their growing numbers, so Talmen broke an entire acre of that heavy soil for wheat-planting with a single spade, wearing it down to a nub. His only help was his eldest, Rawl, a lank boy who at thirteen was already two inches taller than his daddy. It was hard work, with the men in the fields till dark and the women at home with the children and elderly, cooking and gathering dried bones on the prairie to sell to dealers to grind into fertilizer, but there was satisfaction in their self-determined labor, in the emergence of their young town. And for Talmen nothing more spoke to that hard-won hope than after that long winter’s thaw when his wife, Eugenia, despite the inauspicious conditions, birthed their second son. One of Nicodemus’s firstborn, he was a handsome little boy. They named him after Talmen’s father, Isaiah.

After coming across the circular, CK had worked hard to convince Mil they needed to leave, of the surety of his sign from God. He paced around their one-room shack, repeating the preacher’s words, talking calamity and exodus, and Mil resisted leaving what was her home too, but finally she relented. So that March of 1879, a year after the final group from Kentucky arrived in Nicodemus, when the ground had thawed and there was the first warmth in the air, when normally CK would have been preparing to seed his fields, they gathered up what little they could carry and made their way south out of Bolivar County. They were still young yet, barely twenty-two, with little weighing them down beyond Rachel. Mil carried the baby and CK shouldered a large pack—some bedding, clothing, a few pots, chipped plates, and of course his Bible—to Greenville. They arrived after two long days of walking and set up camp on the banks of the Mississippi, where they would wait for a steamer that would take them north. They were not alone. Though some of the initial excitement had faded and many had decided to stay and try their luck with the Democrats, plenty of people were still looking to get out if they could, and more and more joined them on the river. Soon, as the days wore on with no boats yet to stop, what had started as a few solitary campsites had turned into a roiling tent town of fleeing colored families.

Steamers coming north from Natchez and Vicksburg passed regularly and every time one neared, folks would run to the banks and shout and wave and watch as it went on its way. “Why you spose they ain’t stop for us?” CK said to Mil as he watched another steamer paddle past.

“You know better than to ask after such foolishness,” Mil said from inside the tent, where she was feeding Rachel. “They think we got no money.”

“Can’t fault them their intelligence, then,” he said, removing his hat and wiping at his brow. Mil laughed in that way of hers—as if it surprised and then embarrassed her—and CK squatted to peek into the tent. “How’s my little queen doing?” he said.

“Rachel hungry, that I know.”

“Yessum, sure is,” he said. “She need strength for the journey He set us on.”

But as more and more boats passed, unwilling to pick them up, the mood on the banks turned grim. Their desperation grew as food dwindled, and soon some of the men were talking of taking a boat by force and others of giving up. At an impromptu meeting CK tried to urge caution, telling them to have faith, that soon enough one would stop.

“Faith sound good from a preacher’s mouth, but it ain’t taking us out of Mississippi,” a man said.

“Ain’t a preacher,” CK said. “I share my crop, same as you.”

Another: “We been out here near three weeks. We’d do better to go back home than starving on these banks.”

“No, sir,” CK said. “We must believe.”

“Believe all you want,” the man angered. “You think you ain’t a nigger just cause you leave Mississip? Even this place you keep on about—Nigger Demus.”

“Nicodemus,” CK said with a calm certainty that only stoked the man’s fury.

“A nigger here, nigger in Kansas. Nigger everywhere,” he said. “I’m going home, is all I know. Me and mine. The rest of you know better, you’ll do the same.”

The man walked off in a huff and CK decided to let him be, turning his attention to the others. “Just a little longer,” he said, sweeping across the row of skeptical eyes circling him. “The Lord will give us safe passage, I’m sure it.”

Though a few families did turn back, most stayed, crowding along both sides of the river now. However, a few days later, when still no steamer had stopped, a white man showed up on the banks, speaking of jobs at a nearby plantation. “There’s work if you want it and you’re willing,” he said. “I need a few new hands.” Several followed and later that day another man, black this time, showed up alone. He called himself Dulcet, and in his hand he carried a small length of sugarcane. CK asked where he was from.

“Up north. Holly Springs.”

“Hill country.” CK nodded. “What you doing in the Delta?”

“Work,” said Dulcet, tapping the sugarcane against the palm of his left hand as he spoke. CK could make out a thin row of holes along the object’s smooth rounded curve.

“You play?”

“I blow me some cane here and again.” When CK asked for a song, Dulcet said he wasn’t in the mood and put the fife in his back pocket. He’d just been fired from a nearby plantation.

“Man from there come by earlier. Took some of ours.”

“He got your people on the cheap,” Dulcet said, telling of how he’d been talking—just talking—to some of the others about better wages. “Hadn’t even said the word strike, but word got back to the foreman.” He paused, looking around at all the families on the banks. “He knew you all was out here—everyone’s talking about it in the towns—so he fired me,” Dulcet said, snapping his fingers. He took a quick swig from a clear bottle that seemed to leap out of his pocket. He offered it to CK, but he declined, so Dulcet took another furious swig. The burn of that rotgut whiskey filled up the space between them.

“You alone, then?”

“My wife and kids still there.”

“You left your family?” CK said.

Dulcet’s plan was to come back for them once he had a place set up in Kansas. “They say there’s land plenty there.” CK tried to imagine leaving Mil and Rachel behind in Mississippi, but that required a desperation he couldn’t summon. Dulcet turned the bottle slowly, watching the crest of the alcohol lower and rise. “Barely let me say goodbye before he run me off.” He looked like he might shout at the sky, but then just as quickly seemed to shake the thought away with another drink. “They think we got as much claim to money as their damn mules and gins. We built their wealth and receive nothing for it!”

Dulcet’s words were starting to slide into one another, so CK set a steady hand on his shoulder and led him to the tent where Mil was frying pone and bacon rind in the kettle over a fire. Afterward they let him stretch out on their quilt for a tossing, angry kind of sleep.

It wasn’t long after Dulcet showed up that a steamer finally stopped and with it came a wild outburst of hoots and hollering, those first sounds of joy on the banks. It was almost April and CK was lying on his back in the tent, Bible facedown on his chest, enjoying the balmy weather. Though his eyes were closed, he wasn’t sleeping. He was thinking of Nicodemus. If he thought hard enough, he could see it, that city on the plains. There were sturdy houses of plank and rock, not all of them big, yet none small. And a main street, with several stores, a post office, and a hotel. Not fancy, just enough. And all around those buildings were cattle farms and fields of wheat and corn and soybeans, stretching far enough to test the keen of one’s eye. And there was the church, so big as to fit all the people of Nicodemus, who would come each Sunday to sing and pray, and feel love and fear in the presence of the Lord. He could hear them—Glory be, glory to our Savior!—and he and Mil and Rachel were there with them, faces turned up toward the sky, singing. But now Mil was calling his name, folding back the flaps of the tent. “Wake up, CK! Ain’t you hear? A steamer come. For us.” He kept his eyes closed and when she came to shake him, he opened them suddenly and reached for her. She startled and let out a little scream. She wrangled from his grasp—“Got half a mind to get on that boat without you”—and hurried from the tent, but CK stayed where he was a minute longer, enjoying the wonderful soreness in his stomach and lungs as his body worked to quit that laughter.

In Lexington, Talmen had learned his trade from his father, whom he’d followed around all those years before the war, carrying tools, watching. It was a handy skill, and Eugenia urged Talmen to build a wooden one-room where she and a few of the other women could carry out lessons for the children in town. For years before she and Talmen married she’d taught at a school in Lexington and she championed the importance of education for their children.

“We got a school,” Talmen said.

It was true. Eugenia and some of the other women took turns holding class in their dugouts using books borrowed from William Kirltey, one of the few who owned any books.

“Ain’t a proper place for a child to learn.”

“Ain’t a proper place to live either,” said Talmen.

Their first dugout had been a flat recession in the ground, covered by a thin layer of wood, that had flooded easily in the spring rains. Next time they burrowed into the south side of a low-rising hill so that the slight slope would provide easy runoff for rain and ice melt. They’d taken strips of the thick prairie sod, gathered after plowing, and cut them into blocks, which they used to build up decently insulated walls to the six-foot-high ceiling. This dugout, a single small cavelike room, was vastly better than their first, but it was nothing like their home in Lexington, which wasn’t fancy but at least it had been above ground with several rooms where a person could be alone if he wanted. Over a year into their Kansas experiment, most people were still in the ground. Some had been able to build sod houses, and there were even two made of limestone cut from nearby quarries. But the builders of those homes, S. P. Roundtree and Thomas Baldwin, were town fathers and men of means. Talmen resented their comfort, when even Z. T. Fletcher had to run his general store, which was generally out of everything, from a dugout.

“You soft-skulled if you spect me to build a school when we living in a hole.”

“School first, above ground,” Eugenia insisted. “We have a baby now and he and every other will have his schooling.”

Trees were harder to come by on the plains, however, and trading for lumber was costly, but when the issue was raised at a town meeting, the vote passed near unanimous. Talmen huffed about it some, but soon he and Rawl were meeting with a dozen or so other men late in the evening to discuss plans for the new schoolhouse. It was the busy sowing season and they could come to it only after a long day working the land, so they’d gather in the failing light of spring and work a few hours more, returning to their dugouts and families in the dark, with eyes so heavy they could barely finish supper. At night Eugenia threw hot ashes from the fire on the dirt floor of the dugout to deter the vermin and once she had seen Rawl and their daughter, Jesse Mae, to bed, she would join Talmen, who was often already asleep. Between them young Isaiah would rest, his swaddle dampened to keep away fleas and bedbugs. With their children almost full-grown, how Isaiah’s arrival had surprised them. Their family had been one thing for so long and now so quickly was another.

“Talmen,” she whispered one night in bed.

“Mmm,” he answered, eyes closed.

“You doing good. You doing right about this schoolhouse.”

“I’m doing it for you,” he said.

“No, Tal,” she said. “You doing it for Isaiah. For all us. You doing it for Nicodemus.”

Imagine: To have left your home in Mississippi, packing all you could carry onto your back and languishing on the banks of a river for nearly a month, watching as others gave up and turned back, only to find safe passage with hardly a fare to offer, having to rely on the kindness of a white steamboat captain who said he couldn’t pass up any longer folks in such utter want, and then sailing on a few more days, nearly starving in the dank hull of the ship—to endure all of that guided by what felt in the darkest moments like a singular, quixotic compulsion—only to finally arrive in St. Louis to find thousands of others just like yourself.

What was going on?

CK stepped off the steamer asking that very question aloud. He walked along slowly with Mil and the baby, absorbing the sound and motion of a city far larger than any he’d ever seen. So many colored folks, all crowding around the boats. Some women and children sat somberly at fires while men walked around, either with great purpose or none at all, content to loaf on the levee. The group that CK had come north with, half a hundred or so, moved cautiously in mass, pulled slowly by the current of the city’s bustle. A white man in a gray suit approached them.

“Just arrived? Where you folks coming from?” he asked, pencil and paper in hand.

“Mississippi. Every corner, sir,” CK said. “I from Bolivar County. Merigold.”

The man wrote that down, nodding. It was warm that April afternoon, and sweat matted strands of his brown hair sloppily across his brow, giving his otherwise smart appearance a hint of dishevelment.

“Where you all headed?” He looked up, meeting CK’s eyes for the first time.

“Kansas,” CK said.

The man laughed.

“What so funny bout that?” said Dulcet.

The man shook his head, amused. “All of you going to Kansas. Amazing.” With that, his disposition seemed to change, losing its brusque urgency. He waved his pencil at the teeming streets. “I’ve been reporting on it for the papers. Never seen anything like it. Kansas Fever, they call it. Negroes from all over the South—Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas even. All heading for Kansas.”

“All them?”

“Every the last. Each thinking the government is gonna give him land and money just because Kansas was free-soil during the war. No plan whatsoever beyond getting to Kansas. Do that and everything will be okay, they think.” He shook his head, apparently pleased to inform them of their misadventure.

“We ain’t refugees seeking free houses,” CK said. “We emigrants from that young hell behind us.”

“They call you exodusters,” the newspaperman said.

“We workers,” said Dulcet.

“So you two led this group from,” he said, pausing as he scanned his notes, “Bolivar County?”

“Ain’t no leaders but from above,” CK said. “Every black man’s a Moses now.”

“I like that,” the man said, repeating CK’s words as he wrote. They left him standing there, writing on his paper, and took in the city. While whites looked on from inside large store windows, blacks mingled in the street in a surprised kind of stupor. After talking with some of the people they passed, CK was able to corroborate what the newspaperman had said: folks had come from all over, and everyone did seem to have their sights set on Kansas. Steamers were arriving, unloading more and more people, but none were boating them on to Kansas yet. Stuck once again, there wasn’t much to do but wait and worry and trust that God would deliver them soon enough. They took up residence, like most others, at the Eighth Street Baptist Church, which had opened its doors to these weary travelers. In the crowded basement of that church, people talked, people slept, people grew hungry, people preached the Word, people gamed, people stole, people gossiped, people argued, people cared for the sick, people crowded around when the bread and stew vats came out, people told stories, people played games with the children, people ventured outside into the city to look for work, people returned at night, and others never came back. Everyone waited.

The trouble started when the whites from nearby towns stopped doing business. They’d been quite welcoming at the start, willing sellers and traders when Nicodemus men would hitch up carts and journey to one of these towns—Stockton, Ellis, Bull City, Hill City—for necessities. So in that April of 1879, when Talmen traveled to Ellis, he was surprised to find no one willing to trade for flour, meal, or the extra lumber they needed for the schoolhouse. He went from store to store, to the folks with whom he usually did business, who politely told him they were out of stock, and then to the others, more hostile, who called him names and told him to go on and leave already. It was there in Ellis that Talmen got first wind of the exodus.

“Word out of Kansas City is that St. Louis is overrun with coloreds,” Mr. Ryer said when Talmen asked what gave. Ryer had always been friendly to him, and he and Talmen often spent a few idle minutes talking on the back steps of his store.

“What that got to do with us?”

“They say they’re coming for Kansas.”

“That so?” Talmen said, scratching the grayed stubble on his cheek. “And that has folks here worried, huh?”

Ryer said nothing.

“Don’t know nothing bout black folk coming from the Lower. We from Kentucky.”

“I know of it.”

“We not trying to take nothing from y’all,” Talmen said. “Just a spot for ourselves. No harm to no one.”

“Look, we never had any problems with you and yourn, but that don’t make some here less scared they’re gonna be run off by coloreds who want their land. Bad enough with Indians to worry of.” Behind the store, away from the main drag, was Ryer’s small house, nice-looking, and beyond that was a standing of white oak and sycamore. From where Talmen stood, perspective shrunk even the tallest of these trees to a size he could imagine felling and carrying home across his shoulders, but he knew the reality was that the great oak would crush him if he ever tried something so foolish. “I understand, believe me,” Ryer continued. “But you’re speaking to the clear of mind, Talmen. Those newspapers speak to the scared.”

Talmen turned his attention away from the trees to Ryer.

“Can’t you spare us nothing?”

That evening Talmen returned to Nicodemus with what little Mr. Ryer could afford to part with, some cottonwood lumber prone to warp and a sack of poorly milled grain they’d have to parch or boil. It was nearing dark and he figured Rawl to be at work on the schoolhouse, but when Talmen passed by the site on his way into town none of the other men had seen him. It was only when Talmen returned home that he found his son standing outside the dugout, throwing dirt clods at the hillside.

“What’s wrong?” Talmen said.

“It’s the leastest.”

“Isaiah?”

“Yes, sir,” said Rawl. “Dr. Newth, he here.”

Talmen looked at the door of the dugout, a well-fitting cover of thick oak that he’d traded for in a scrap shop in Stockton, painted a faded orange by its previous owner.

“Ain’t well, Mama say. In his breathing.”

The door fit snugly into the sod-walled entranceway but could be removed with a little effort, as Talmen did now, entering the dugout, where he found his Jesse Mae cooking supper over the sod fireplace. Eugenia was rocking the child, a crinkle of concern in her brow. She was standing near the cottonwood center pole that supported the ceiling. She could stand up straight, but Talmen and Dr. Newth had to stoop. The doctor was white and had recently moved to town, as had two other white men who were trying to build stores. It had caused a little concern, but at five hundred to three, it was safe to say it was still an all-black town. And truth be told, they were fortunate for Newth’s arrival. Lucky was the frontier town that could claim a doctor. He was a morose man, however, an unfortunate disposition for a man in his trade. He’d just said something to Eugenia and was closing the top of his small cowhide bag, grimacing.

“What’s wrong, Genia?”

She shook her head, the sick child at her chest, shushing Talmen for quiet.

When stuck and waiting in a place not your own, CK found, it was hard not to succumb to the feeling that you were living the same day over and again with little prospects for change. So he and Dulcet tried to keep busy, venturing into different parts of the city to look for work, while Mil tended to Rachel and commiserated with others at the church. They split up to cover more territory. CK worried over Dulcet, who sometimes showed up with a few coins and other times with just an awful burn on his breath. But CK did what he could. He knocked on doors, looking for jobs, and when turned away went to another. Every now and then one came through. A few Indian pennies to wash store windows or split wood, make a delivery of some sort to the other side of town. He tried to save for passage to Kansas—they’d left Mississippi with little more than twenty dollars, which had mostly evaporated—but now it seemed they might be stuck in St. Louis forever. People he spoke to in the streets were scared. There was talk that the city was so swamped by refugees they’d all be forced onto boats that would take them back south. As was his way in dark times, CK would smile, maybe place a steady hand on the dithering soul’s shoulder, and tell him to keep his faith strong. Everything would be okay. If they questioned how he could be so certain, he’d say, “Because I’m washed in the blood of our Savior.” Some grew angry, not wanting to hear any talk of a god that had allowed shackles all those years. Even Dulcet grew tired of his increased speechifying. One day when CK tried to talk to him about Noah’s slothful inebriation after the Flood, Dulcet called him foolish for believing in a white man’s god after what they’d been through. Stunned to hear such words from his friend, CK could only rejoin, “I’ll pray for God to turn your heart.”

“How long you pray for the white man to turn his heart?” Dulcet said. “Long enough your knees broke?” They weren’t leaving because of God, he said; they were leaving because a black man couldn’t get a fair shake in the South, and to illustrate his point he told a story of how before the election he’d worked to get blacks to turn out for the Republicans. “Guess word got around,” Dulcet said, “and one night we get some visitors at our home. Bulldozers, threatening to make a good nigger out of me if I don’t quit talking about the election. And course I don’t, so they come back and set my house on fire.” He looked hard at CK. “Burned it to the ground. My home. That’s what this about. That’s why we leaving.”

CK reached to place a hand on Dulcet’s shoulder—“I’m sorry, friend”—but Dulcet stormed off in a huff, shaking his head at the bitter memory, and his return later that evening to supper with CK and Mil seemed to seal an unspoken agreement not to discuss the matter any further. Theirs was an argument that could not be resolved, CK knew. It could only be reconciled in light of their common end: getting to Kansas was what mattered. Still, it gave CK pause, not doubt but confusion: How could anyone ignore God’s hand in this miracle of common struggle and purpose? They were alive, together, out of Mississippi, on their way to a better life.

Which was not to say CK didn’t welcome information that steadied his belief. All that waiting in the church had turned him into quite the gossip, always asking after the latest news. One evening on his way back to the church after having spent the day sweeping out stables, he bumped into that newspaperman again. CK recognized him immediately in that same gray suit. It had been two weeks since the day they arrived and the man didn’t seem to remember him. CK introduced himself, asking if he’d heard anything new.

“John Barns,” the man said, shaking CK’s hand. “Mayor’s put a stop on boats carrying coloreds to the city.”

“Any talk about steamers leaving for Kansas?”

“Talk of steamers all right,” he said. “But not to Kansas. Steamers back south, is the rumor. Townsfolk here are fed up, and planters in the South are sending labor agents to bring coloreds back to the plantations.”

“Heard talk of that,” CK said, kicking idly at a small rock near his boot.

“Free passage back, they’re saying.”

“Don’t think many will take up that offer.”

“You know something I don’t?”

CK smiled. “Why we wanna go back to Egypt when we done made it out alive?”

John shook his head, a look of bemused confusion. “Sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry for you people.”

“Don’t need either from you,” CK said, his voice sharpening in a sudden flash of anger, which John seemed not to register.

“What can you tell me about the church where you’re staying? What’s it like in there?”

“I could tell you everything.”

“Go on, then.”

CK looked at the ground, coughed into one hand, and held out the other, until John removed a few coins from the small pocket of his vest and dropped them onto his palm.

CK said, “Obliged,” and proceeded to describe what he and his family had experienced the last few weeks in the basement of the old church. Or selectively describe, rather. CK painted a pretty picture for John, people cooperating and helping one another, which had been true when they arrived, but lately with tensions rising there had been a lot of arguments, a few that had turned into fights even. He mentioned none of that now. He told him of his friend Dulcet, who played a mean fife that he carried in his coat pocket, entertaining the children with melody and song. As CK spoke, John wrote quickly on his small book of papers. When CK finished, he looked over at John’s hurried hand. It looked like a bunch of chicken scratch, mysterious in its illegibility.

“What was it you did back in Mississippi, anyway? You preach?” asked John.

“Nah, ain’t much for speaking the Word,” CK said, “but I hear it in my head all right.” He told him that, like most in Bolivar County, he’d farmed.

“Good profession,” said John.

“Difficult where I come from,” CK said. “Sharecrop, tenant-farm.” He told of how the landowners charged high rents and drew up contracts that made sure they kept the profits when cotton prices were high and the renters took on the debt when they were low, making it impossible to get out of the contract, unless you wanted to go to jail. John wrote none of this down, just listened as he looked out at the water, and when CK finished he said nothing. The two stood silently as the boats rocked calmly in the water, going nowhere. CK enjoyed talking in the warm evening.

Not ready to return to the church yet, he pointed at the newspaper under John’s arm and asked, “How you learn that?”

“My daddy wrote for the papers,” John said. “Guess I got it in the blood.” He smiled, and as if wanting to show off his latest work he unfolded the paper and held it out between the two of them. The headline across the top read “DARKIES DUPED BY FALSE PROMISES!” and John folded it up again.

“What that say?” CK asked, smiling.

John hemmed.

“Just fooling,” CK said. “I know what it say.”

Again John said nothing.

“You come find me when you ready to write about why we really on this river,” CK said and left.

When the boats finally began to leave for Kansas, first they carried the exodusters who could pay, and only then did the relief board raise enough money from private donors to transport those without fare. It was early one morning that CK woke to Dulcet tugging on his arm.

“CK, they here,” he said.

CK struggled into wakefulness, shaking his head, rubbing at his eyes.

“The steamers,” Dulcet said. “They leaving for Kansas soon.”

“What? How you know?”

“Saw a man outside running through the street. Asked where he was going. Said he, ‘The boats.’ Said I, ‘What boats?’ Said he, ‘Kansas.’ Thought he was lying, so I said, ‘How you know?’ Pushed me, said, ‘Get out the way. They filling up and not about to wait a minute longer.’ So you know what I do? I goes and gets us three vouchers for passage. Now what you say to that, CK?”

Dulcet slapped him on the shoulder with the vouchers, smiling, proud of himself.

“Time is it?” CK said.

“Before dawn yet. What you wondering after time for? I’m telling you we need to go. We leave for Kansas today.”

“What you doing in the street before dawn?” CK said.

People were rousing from sleep around them.

“You want to stay, fine,” Dulcet said. “Me, I gon catch that boat.”

Talmen and Rawl gathered up all the dried manure they could find, trying to keep as much of that prairie coal on hand so the fire stayed stoked. Eugenia and Jesse Mae took turns holding little Isaiah close, hoping the warmth of the dugout would sweat the cold from his lungs. Folks came bringing what food they could manage, to ask what could be done, but there was little to do beyond praying for the child.

Back in Kentucky they’d lost three children before their second birthdays, so Talmen was no stranger to death. Sometimes he felt as if it followed him, a constant specter. Death, stay away, he told the shadowy haunt. Get behind me, Death. Talmen needed the boy to survive. Born together, his son and the town seemed connected, their fates intertwined, and in the same way the town needed to survive through difficulty so too did the boy. Talmen tried to stay with Eugenia, but she said the best thing he could do was to make sure the wheat crop delivered on time. So during the days, Talmen and Rawl tended to plowing and sowing the wheat, trying to do the impossible: to drive away thoughts of the sick child, to keep their hands and minds on the plow as it burst through the earth and scattered the loose layers of topsoil.

The only time they took Isaiah out of the dugout all week was to go to a meeting so the sick child could receive his blessings. There were three churches in town, one African Methodist Episcopal and two Baptist, all of which met in dugouts except their own Mount Olive, which had recently built a sod house that sat fifty. As they took their seats in church, a neighbor in their pew, Mrs. Baldwin, leaned over and whispered to be sure to come to her place afterward. The Baldwins’ large stone house hosted the after-church potluck that had become a weekly tradition. These were crowded affairs with people filling the house so far to excess that oftentimes the gathering extended out the front door to the porch and into the yard. For Talmen the kindness of the gesture was always tarnished by its reminder that most everyone else was still living in the ground. He didn’t much care for Thomas Baldwin anyway, a loudmouthed man full of brag, who thought his money turned conjecture into fact. Talmen usually preferred to go straight home after church, but then again, Eugenia and Jesse Mae had been cooped up inside the dugout all week with Isaiah, and his and Rawl’s only reprieve was long days in the field.

“Can’t we just stay a bit?” said Jesse Mae, who was friends with the Baldwins’ youngest daughter, Mercy.

“Might be good for the boy, some fresh air,” added Rawl.

Eugenia looked at Talmen, awaiting his verdict. They were all itching to escape that dugout, Talmen included.

And so they went to the stone house and said grace before victuals and sang a few hymns on a well-tuned piano Mercy had just about mastered. Afterward, people sipped coffee and milled around, catching up on farming and family. Talmen had to admit, it felt good to have a nice meal and spend a few hours outside the oppressive dugout. He wasn’t much for talking, so he relieved Isaiah from Eugenia’s arms and carried him to the kitchen, keeping his boy close to the stove, an unpopular spot in the April warmth that left him eavesdropping on conversations in the other room and trading an occasional word or two with someone sneaking back for seconds or thirds.

Beyond the usual pleasantries of planting and the weather, most of the talk that night was about the exodusters. A few months back, a group of fifty had arrived in Nicodemus from Mississippi, and they’d been welcomed. However, no one knew then that their arrival presaged the current deluge of emigrants coming north, this spectacle that the papers covered in such detail, and now folks in Nicodemus were none too pleased to be associated with that desperate rabble, especially given how difficult it had made business with their white neighbors. It was true. Talmen had seen them grow even stingier since his last visit with Mr. Ryer. Construction on the schoolhouse had all but halted until they could find a mill willing to trade for more lumber. But listening to Baldwin rail against the refugees—with a strength of voice aroused by being in the comfort of his own home—Talmen doubted how different their own situations had been. They hadn’t been driven from their homes, of course, but hadn’t the settlers of Nicodemus relied on charity—from the Osage Indians, from kindly whites and sympathetic blacks in near and distant towns—to get them on their feet, to give the town even the possibility to succeed? But men like Baldwin could afford to have short memories. The following week, in response to the stories of exodusters burdening towns and services throughout the state, Baldwin would forward a vote at the town meeting, calling for the end of all appeals for outside help, which would pass overwhelmingly. From then on, Nicodemus would survive or perish by her own hand.

Talmen grew tired of the debate, and he and Eugenia and their children left soon after to get Isaiah home for an early bed. But that night Isaiah’s breathing worsened and Talmen cursed himself for having taken the child from the dugout. He felt so helpless, watching his son shiver in Eugenia’s arms as they waited on Dr. Newth, knowing as he did a father’s sad truths of love and death.

They arrived in Wyandotte County aboard the E. H. Durfee on April 14, a date CK would never forget, for that was the day they finally set foot in Kansas. The excitement built as they neared the wharf and the steamer’s great paddles slowed, its tall stacks puffing their final plumes of smoke into the overcast sky. A light rain had begun. People gathered their families and pushed to the railings to see what free soil looked like. There was crying and then singing as they made their way down the gangplank: “Oh, Kansas! Oh, sweet Kansas!”

Across the water, bustling on the Missouri side of the river, lay Kansas City, and Dulcet stuck his thumbs under his armpits and shook his fingers wildly, saying so long to Missouri and the South, drawing a big round of laughter. There on the waterfront others gathered round, embracing in the rain. Soon everyone, religious or otherwise, was holding hands and kneeling. “It’s raining on us now,” a loud, ministerial voice called out, “but today that’s water from the good Lord given to a free people.”

“We made it,” Mil said, holding the swaddled Rachel in her arms.

“Not yet,” CK said. “Nicodemus is my beacon. Nicodemus is where I’ll lay my head.”

In anticipation of the exodusters’ arrival a relief board had been formed and word was Governor St. John himself was pledging help for the refugees. Till then it was more waiting, and so it was again that they huddled into the crowded confines of a church, this time African Methodist, and bided their time. Strange that you could arrive in Kansas—the very idea of which meant change, a new life—and still be doing the same thing. CK chuckled to himself, musing that first evening as he sat with others around a stove, watching the coffeepots start to boil. Members from the relief board came to visit in the following days with plans to ship refugees to various towns throughout the state so that no single location bore the burden of taking on thousands of so destitute a people. Some took trains to Lawrence and Topeka, others to Hodgeman County. CK, Mil, and Dulcet waited for word on passage to Nicodemus.

The warm weather filled up the church with the stench of sweating bodies and soiled clothing, so they took to sleeping outside, underneath the raised Wyandotte train depot. Word finally came in early May that there would be no direct passage to Nicodemus—the relief board wouldn’t send migrants to a place so newly established and distant that they hadn’t had a chance to inspect the conditions. That night CK, Mil, and Dulcet conferred about their options under the train depot.

“Figure we can work some and come up with the fare for passage ourselves. Might take a little while,” CK said. “You don’t have to come, Dulcet. You didn’t sign on for no Nicodemus. You can settle yourself anywhere. Bring your family up once you got a place.” Dulcet considered this as Mil nursed Rachel, her back to them, nodding at her husband’s words.

“You all kin to me now,” he said. “Course I coming with.”

“All right, then,” CK said with a force that betrayed the relief he felt that his friend would join them.

During the days, Mil would rest in the depot’s shade with Rachel, listening to the footsteps of expectant travelers scuttling above them every time a train rumbled into town, and CK and Dulcet would set out early in the morning to look for work. CK had some luck at a nearby farm, and Dulcet would try his hand across the water in Kansas City, and they would come back at night tired, crawling under the train depot for supper. Sometimes Dulcet would regale them with stories of the things he’d seen that day in the city, and other times he’d tell them about his family, missing them so. Often he’d blow on his cane late into the night, a dirge or a dance, as his mood dictated. While Mil brought food from the fire, CK and Dulcet would pool their earnings, placing the coins inside the leaves of CK’s Bible.

“Tell me about Nicodemus,” Dulcet said one night after dinner. He lay back and stretched out, folding his arms behind his head. The smoke from the dying fire snaked lazily in the darkening night. CK turned to Dulcet, tucking his legs under himself.

“I’ll tell you bout Nicodemus,” CK said, raising his hands. “It’s a colored town, course you know. Started a short while ago by folk from Kentuck.”

“That’s fine and good, but is there work?”

“Plenty that.”

“Worked for a colored man for a spell,” said Dulcet. “Had a plantation outside Holly Springs. Weren’t much different than working for the white man.”

“Not this,” CK said, sitting up so that he was kneeling now. Mil had set Rachel to bed and was clearing the plates, running river water over them before drying and placing them in the pack. “Every man has a home and a farm to hisself,” said CK. “No landlords, no bosses.”

“Run by us?”

“It’s the truth,” he said. “You work your fields for yourself.”

“That don’t sound half bad.”

“Half bad?” CK said, tossing a piece of tinder at his friend. “You hear what I say, Dulcet? You gon have a home. Your own farm. To bring your family back to.”

“Now you’re talking,” Dulcet said, bracing himself on his elbows. “And we gon be neighbors?”

“Right next door,” CK said. “We supper together each—”

“What you know about Nicodemus?” Mil said as she took a seat by the fire. “You never been.”

It was true; beyond his vision he knew little else but what he’d seen on the handbill he still carried in his pocket.

“I seen it,” CK said. “Through my God’s eye. He show me.”

Mil looked away.

Dulcet lay back down, laughing a single, satisfied laugh. “I gotta give it you, CK,” he said. “You ain’t know nothing about this town and you act like you fit to be mayor.” He laughed again, but quieted quickly. After a moment’s pause, he asked, “Tell me what else about Nicodemus.”

CK moved his hand slowly before him as if making a careful brushstroke: “It’s a beauty like never you saw.” Dulcet was starting to believe, he could tell.

“What else?”

“Well, now, you listen,” CK began and told Dulcet of the song about Nicodemus, the slave who prophesied freedom and spoke that truth to others. They talked a long time that night, and their excitement carried them out of bed early in the predawn and for several days after, anxious as they were to raise enough money for train fare. They continued to do so until the morning CK woke to find Dulcet gone. He put on his shoes and hustled through town, checking saloons he was too timid to enter and other debauched places where one could lose money so quickly. Nothing. Later CK returned to the depot, ducking under the platform, and met Mil’s eyes. Neither said a word. She was holding the Bible and opened the cover. The money was gone. Inside lay the fife. It was light out now, and in the spot of dirt where Dulcet had lain, CK noticed something: a one-word apology, written in the shaky script of a finger dragged through dirt.

The axe had been his father’s, but Talmen borrowed the wagon from a neighbor. With Rawl driving, they set out, and when he asked where they were headed, Talmen told him to keep on, saying only, “Outside town a ways.”

When they arrived at the oak grove, Talmen dismounted and stood silently a moment, taking in the sight of those tall hardwoods. “How many you figure we need?” said Rawl.

Talmen walked toward a tree, measured it up, and swung quickly, lodging the axe deep in the wood. “Just one.” Talmen spoke softly.

“Why ain’t we taking more? Sure could use it.”

“Now move the wagon over yonder some. No telling which way this gon fall,” said Talmen, taking another swing. “When it do, you head that horse, hear? Don’t let him spook.”

“But why ain’t we take more?”

“Son, I need you to hush now.”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Rawl was full of questions tonight. Nervous, Talmen figured. Maybe he sensed what his father was up to, that this was no unclaimed spot of land, and that the owner of the claim was white, and, further, that the owner was Ryer, a man who’d been nothing but pretty good to Talmen. And here he was stealing from him so brazenly. Talmen looked over at the house, certain any moment light from a kerosene lamp would illuminate a window. I’ll take what I need, he imagined telling Ryer as he labored to bring down the tree, whether you trade or not. You see what you done to me. Perhaps he would tell Rawl later, try and explain the things a desperate man will do, but for now he didn’t care to account for himself. Right now he just needed silence, a demand Rawl met, so that the only sound that passed between them was the hollow crack of the axe. When the oak fell, Talmen chopped half of it into smaller lengths that could be loaded into the wagon and left the other half where it lay.

“But what about—” said Rawl, looking at the abandoned portion.

“Leave it be.” Talmen placed his axe in the bed of the wagon and climbed into the cab. “Let’s go.”

That night, while everyone was asleep in the dugout, Talmen sat outside in the warm early-summer night, stripping bark. He worked late, using the axe and saw to secure enough wood to fashion the top, bottom, and sides that would be needed. It was green, unseasoned wood, but it would have to do. No time for a visit to the mill that might have no time for him. All those years of watching and helping his father build houses, fences, and floors, but never once something so small. He had to trust his eyeballed measurements to be correct. He sat alone on a stool in the starlight and hum of cicadae, his hands resting on the rough denim of his overalls. He wasn’t finished, but it was quiet now, and the hammer-and-nails work he had left would wake his family. He would finish in the morning, but for now he just sat there a long time thinking, listening, being still.

Word later came that the mayor of Leavenworth himself had climbed aboard the Joe Kinney to stuff a wad of bills in the captain’s hand, begging him not to leave any more of these wretched people in his town. “Take them on to Atchison, please,” the mayor was rumored to have entreated. Of course CK and Mil knew nothing of it at the time, lodged as they were with the others in the hull of the towing barge. They’d pieced it together only later, when they exited the steamer and walked the banks of the Missouri, met by the cold stares of Atchison townsfolk who were not pleased to see Leavenworth’s refuse on their shores.

“Morning, folks,” CK said, tipping his hat to the crowd as he and the others carried what was left of their belongings from the steamer.

“Go on back where you come from, why don’t you,” a voice called out.

CK smiled pleasantly, a calculated gesture of obliviousness that he’d often used to deflect hostility. “Fine day here in Leavenworth,” he said, as he helped an old woman struggling to carry an armful of blankets from the ship.

“Ain’t Leavenworth ground you standing on, nigger,” the voice in the crowd called again. “You’s in Atchison here. They don’t want you, and us neither.”

“Atchison?” CK said, and slowly the pieces started coming together.

Earlier that morning, after Dulcet disappeared with their money, Mil had fumed, cursing his name.

“I don’t understand,” CK said in a monotone daze. How could a friend who called himself family just up and disappear from your life? Leave you in such a bad spot?

“That darn fool is drinking away our money and you know it.”

“No, ma’am,” CK said. “He went back for his kin, I’m sure it.”

“Believe what you will,” she said. “Fact is, that money’s gone.”

“He’ll meet us in Nicodemus,” he said, but his words failed to convince even himself.

“How we gon get to Nicodemus now?”

She was right, and as he thought about that money—nearly enough to secure rail tickets—CK’s befuddlement dissipated, stoking a slow-burning resentment he struggled neither to voice nor to dwell upon, if only for Mil’s sake. Instead he’d made like such a thing could just be shrugged off, saying with new resolution: “We move on.” Having little desire to stay in a place that now seemed haunted by Dulcet’s betrayal, CK went to the relief board and looked into their options. One of the last free-passage boats, the Joe Kinney, was set to leave for Leavenworth later that very morning, and a man on the board said it was a town where one could find steady work. And so he boarded the boat with his family and a new optimism that was almost convincing until now, when they’d arrived in a town that hadn’t been their destination.

Those first few days in Atchison were long and without prospect. Just summer heat and hunger. Here there were no relief boards or wealthy donors, and local blacks seemed consumed by a growing indifference to the boatloads of needy refugees who so regularly appeared. CK and Mil had arrived with nearly three hundred others, and many were in a bad way. The hard travel had taken its toll in pneumonia and measles, and their clothes had become little more than rags. There was worry they might even carry yellow fever, so the local authorities concerned themselves with quarantine followed by expulsion, arranging for ships and trains to take the indigents elsewhere. They’d been so overrun with exodusters the last month, they were losing all patience and goodwill. This was not a matter of skin color, the mayor said repeatedly. This was a matter of economics, and Atchison simply couldn’t afford to keep giving away food and the like. So it was back to the basement of another crowded church, hoping the hostility would fade, and eventually, as more and more people were transferred, it did, dissolving into mean disregard. CK and Mil took turns ministering to the sick and elderly, praying, listening as they spoke. “Ain’t no Kansas I heard about,” said a bone-thin older man, too sick to travel, one night as he lay on his pallet by the fire. CK sat beside him, Bible open on his lap. “Jayhawkers and John the Brown ain’t even a memory. ‘Eden on the Prairie’ ain’t even a dream no more.” CK raised a tin cup to the man’s lips but he shook it off. He was in pain, knew he would soon die, and said he wasn’t scared. O Death, be kind to him, thought CK. He’d seen men unafraid of the end and he hoped he could muster the same resolve when Death came for him. But while that would not be the end, lying in the arms of his Savior was something he wasn’t yet ready to court.

While most accepted transportation back to Wyandotte or Topeka, CK looked into passage to Nicodemus. The steamer to Atchison had brought them north of Wyandotte but no farther west, leaving them three hundred miles from their destination. A railway would suffice but was costly. He thought of Dulcet, imagined him in a bar, smiling over a bottle of brown liquor, as he captivated others with stories of his journey out of the South. CK carried on an imagined conversation with him as, again, he looked for work. Maybe now Dulcet would stop his scoffing and understand how hard it was to live in a godly way. The lost company of his friend, however, paled now beside the loss of that money. In these times the only salve for CK was Nicodemus. When he felt that wrath come upon him, he’d start to sing “Wake Nicodemus,” but now the song was less affirmation of his vision than a guard against succumbing to disillusioned anger.

Defying CK, Mil sought work as well, determined as she was to get out of Atchison. She took up washing and laundering linens for a few families, carrying out the tasks with Rachel on her hip or at her feet. After a few days, CK found steady work in a grain elevator from a man named Roberts, who lived outside of town. Roberts worked right alongside his hired men, putting in a full day, too. He seemed to like CK, and one day as they descended the steps of that towering elevator, along with another man Roberts referred to as “Germany,” he offered to let CK stay on as long as he wanted. “You’re the hard kind of worker I could use around here,” he said. “Ain’t that right, Germany? We could use us another two, three like CK.”

“They take our jobs,” Germany said, his voice heavy with the accent of his home. They were the first words CK had heard him speak beyond the uh-huh grunting that shoveling grain necessitated. He was older than CK, bespectacled, and did everything with an air of agitation, whether hauling heavy grain sacks into storage or wiping a smudge from the lens of his glasses with a handkerchief from his back pocket. He repeated himself, Germany did, and set out in the opposite direction, before turning back to say he would see Roberts tomorrow morning, nodding curtly.

This made Roberts laugh. “Don’t pay him no mind. He thinks he’s white, is all.” He took a rag from his denim trousers and dabbed at his forehead, repeating his offer to CK. “Black, white, don’t much matter to me, so long as you carry your weight.” CK thanked him, but remained resolute on leaving for Nicodemus after he’d raised enough money for train fare. “Whatever suits you,” Roberts said, and they continued on in the direction of his farmhouse. “That was the problem with the others, you know,” he said a few seconds later. “No workers. Most of your bunch seemed content to wait on charity.”

“Plenty willing to work,” said CK, feeling comfortable enough with Roberts to speak openly. “But some are sick, need care.”

“Whatever they are, they ain’t working.”

Later CK wanted to explain what he knew Roberts could never understand: what it felt like to make this journey together, up from where they came from. To suffer sickness and hunger, waiting on boats, penniless, packed into different churches, always being separated or sent to another town. Whether you’d ever spoke a word to them or not, the ones who’d made it this far were as much family as your true-blood kin. But those words wouldn’t come to him in the moment. All he could say was: “Well, we here now.”

“Yeah”—Roberts smiled, his face mottled from the long day—“can’t argue that.”

“And now they sending us to every town under a Kansas sky.”

“Except the one you want.”

“Yes, sir,” CK said. “Nicodemus.”

“Ah, Nicodemus.”

It was Roberts who set CK on the idea of hitching a ride on a supply wagon headed west. “Take a little longer, but cheaper than waiting on that rail line,” he said. “Get you closer, too.” Roberts went so far as to make inquiries, and toward the end of May, CK and Mil had raised enough to buy passage with a husband-and-wife freighter team whose name CK never troubled himself to learn.

“Can take you as far as Bull City,” the husband said. “Got a delivery there, but then we head south, on to Hays. That’ll put you close, though. You can catch another freighter from there. Probably walk it even. Ain’t but some miles.”

“Might could, yes sir,” CK said, taking the money from his pocket and handing it to the man. “Much obliged.”

They set out from the livery stables in the early morning, CK and Mil cramped in the back of the covered wagon with Rachel, while the husband and wife sat side by side in the cab, driving the team of horses. During the long bumpy days CK played with Rachel, dandling the wide-eyed child—so bewildered by the newness of everything—on his knee as he told tales about what lay ahead in Nicodemus. Sometimes Rachel would coo in response, and he’d say, “I’m telling the truth, my little queen—I swear on it,” which sometimes elicited a laugh from Mil in that way CK loved to hear. Tired though they were, deliverance was near.

In the evenings the husband would lead the horses to the trough of whatever town they were passing through and CK would start the fire, while Mil and the wife fixed supper. They ate quietly, though sometimes the white couple indulged CK’s joviality, grinning at a joke or story, as if despite themselves. At night CK and Mil removed their belongings to make room for the couple to sleep and would spread their dusty blanket on the ground beneath the wagon, lying down in the warm night with Rachel soughing restlessly between them.

There was a small one-foot rent in the tarpaulin covering that had been rigged to shelter the back of the wagon from which CK liked to look out at the passing land, baffled by the way the landscape of Kansas seemed to change right before his eyes. The way the open prairie went from rolling and tall-grassed in the east to flat and short-grassed the farther west they went along those desolate high plains. Strange that a place was actually made up of so many different kinds of places. Wasn’t so different from Mississippi when he thought of it, though. He’d rarely left Bolivar County but heard tell of the hill country up north, the sandy gulf to the south, the riverboating east, and the tall piney woods between. And of course there was the burnt-black soil of his own Delta, that gorgeous floodplain between the Yazoo and Mighty Miss. He imagined the underwater humidity of syrupy summer days, the clouds of cotton dotting the horizon in all directions interrupted only by the occasional stand of pecan trees or bald cypress. When he felt the pangs of homesickness, CK would sit and stare for long stretches, humming to himself.

                  ’Twas a long weary night,

                  we were almost in fear,

                  that the future was more than Nicodemus knew.

                  ’Twas a long weary night,

                  but the morning is near,

                  and the words of our prophet are true.

On the day before they arrived in Bull City, their wagon came upon a long train of Indians, maybe a hundred or so, making their way across the plains. There were a handful of white men in blue tunics on horses directing the scattered group, as if herding cattle.

“Something’s wrong with Rachel,” Mil said to CK, whose back was turned as he looked out the small window at the strange scene.

“Look at this, would you,” he said as he chewed on wild garlic leaves to quench his thirst. He’d seen some Choctaws in and around Bolivar County, but these folks were different, and there was something of the spectacle about them now. They were barely clothed—next to naked, by God—with expressionless faces like beaten leather. A wretched lot, if ever CK had seen one. They walked slowly, in no hurry, it seemed, to arrive at their destination.

“You hear what I say, CK?”

Still he didn’t turn, just reached a hand back to shake Mil’s leg. The noisome smell of garlic filled the hot wagon and she wafted a piqued hand as she joined him to see what he was fussing about.

She looked on, punctuating her silence with a little tthit click in her mouth.

“Look at them, would you,” he said. “Ain’t they terrible-looking as anything you ever saw? Where you spose them redmen going?”

“Wherever they being put,” Mil said, returning to her spot wedged up against a few large sacks of cornmeal. CK tried to imagine where that might be. Where would you go when forced from your home, not knowing your destination? Would you wander forever? “Baby’s hot,” Mil said, hand to Rachel’s head. “I been trying to tell you.” CK said nothing, still watching as their wagon left the dismal procession behind, thankful his family knew where their journey would end.

He moved close to his wife, raising two fingers to his daughter’s head. “Fever? You sure?” he said skeptically. He took Rachel in his arms.

“You think a mama don’t know?”

He rocked the child gently, inspecting her. He didn’t realize he was smiling until it had eased from his face. He could feel the warmth inside his daughter. Couldn’t be, he thought. Not after what they’d been through. No. He passed Rachel back to Mil. “She feel fine to me,” he said.

One of the first ordinances they’d come to decide as a community was to outlaw liquor in Nicodemus. Talmen had never been one for more than the occasional drink, but he craved the tang of that Kentucky corn liquor and was glad he’d snuck a bottle in his clothes truck. He didn’t care who knew, either. Damned if anyone was going to say he weren’t allowed a drink after losing Isaiah. The night of the funeral, so besot, he walked through town with the bottle in hand. He made his way to the unfinished schoolhouse and went inside. There was no door and the floorboards were warping, a combination of rain-soak and the inferior lumber they’d had to use. There were still some tools lying around, as if any day they might be able to go back to work when the neighboring towns eased up their embargo. He set a hand on the sawhorse, running a finger along the smooth wood. He took a big slug of whiskey, and stared up at the sky through the unfinished roof. Those stars. Slowly he moved to the doorway and leaned against the frame, looking out into the distance. The stone house. Baldwin. It was the only home you could see from there if you didn’t know that all around it, barely noticeable below ground, were cramped dugouts full of families. He imagined taking his hammer to every corner of that stone house. He indulged the vision for some time, taking occasional pulls from the bottle as he watched himself chipping away at it until the home was no more than a pile of chalky limestone. His sadness had become anger, and soon that anger tired him. He lowered himself to the floor and fell asleep right there in the door frame, the same spot where Rawl would find him the next morning after Eugenia sent him out to search for his father. She wasn’t one bit happy when they returned home, Talmen propped up by Rawl, sweating his drink. She took the bottle and poured out the last of the whiskey right then, giving him the meanest eye she could muster.

In the days that followed, Talmen didn’t do much of anything. When Rawl rose early to head out to the fields to prepare for the coming harvest, Talmen slept late and spent the long afternoon hours beneath a cottonwood not far from the banks of the Solomon, where they’d buried Isaiah. It hectored him, Death. It was cruel and it was unrelenting.

After a few days Eugenia came upon Talmen sitting in the shade of the tree, staring a few yards away at the wooden cross he’d fashioned bearing his son’s name. She spoke, and when he didn’t answer, she lowered herself to take a seat beside him.

“Tal,” she said, placing a hand on his leg. They’d hardly spoken twenty words since the funeral—not because of any anger or reproach, but because not speaking of it had been their way of carrying on in the past. But here he was, underneath the cottonwood tree. “What’s wrong that you have to sit up here all day?”

“You know why, Genia.”

“Your heart is heavy,” she said, rubbing her hand over the leg of his overalls.

“I can’t leave it behind.”

There was a long silence, and they both looked out at the water, a slight breeze passing over them. Last born, first to die, he thought. The awful imbalance of it all.

“Isaiah, he gone, but you still here. Your family still here. We need you.” Talmen didn’t say anything. “And the wheat will be coming in soon and you know Rawl can’t do it all hisself.”

“Eugenia,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and when he added nothing else, she spoke: “Your heart can sore and you can father. Don’t have to favor one to the other.”

Talmen looked at the river, silent for a long moment, and then said, “Go on and leave me be a little longer.”

“Okay, a little longer then,” Eugenia said, but she stayed where she was until Talmen finally moved to stand, giving one hard exhalation, and together they made their way back to the dugout.

The freighter team let them off at the limits of Bull City, the mister—reins still in hand—tipping his cap to CK, and pointing in the direction of the Solomon River. “Bless you, folks,” CK said, and watched as the couple made their way into town to deliver their meal and molasses.

Mil said, “We should take her to a doctor now. Here.”

“Our girl’s fine. We all are—we almost there.”

They were so close. He could feel it.

“How you know there’s even a doctor in Nicodemus?”

“Of course there is. I seen it in my vision.”

“You seen it.” Mil looked away, making that clicking sound again in her mouth. “I’m taking her to town now, CK.”

“No you ain’t,” said CK. “You’re my wife, you’ll do as I say. God start us on this journey together and we gon finish it so. Ain’t nothing wrong with any of us that can’t be made right in Nicodemus.”

CK turned in the direction of the Solomon and began to walk. After a brief pause he heard Mil’s footsteps and they continued on until they found the river, and CK stooped by the banks to ladle a hatful of cool water. Slowly he rose and brought some water to Mil and Rachel, and they said nothing to each other for a long time afterward. That night they made their way a little farther on before camping on the bank. Eventually the river would lead them to Nicodemus. The contents of the pack had dwindled on this long journey, having shed some weight at each stop along the way. CK built a fire and set on the coffee, thinned and watery. After trying in vain to catch a jackrabbit that was too elusive in its jagged quickness, they settled for nibbling on the last of their stale bread.

“How she doing?” he said, nodding at Rachel. Their first words in hours.

“What you care?” she said, and pulled Rachel’s blanket up so that it covered her neck. It was a cool night and colder still near the water. They slept underneath a quilt with the heat from Rachel’s body providing additional warmth. They set out early in the dawn, unable to sleep after the baby began her crying shake. They walked all that morning and stopped in the early afternoon in the shade of some trees. CK eased into the shallow part of the river, dunking his hat under and spilling a refreshing pool over his head.

“We almost there, I can feel it,” he said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Mil was sitting on the ground, leaning against the trunk of a tree, catching her breath. She looked tired and hungry and said nothing. CK filled the tin cups from the pack and brought water to her. As he waded out again, he looked down into the river, seeing the occasional fish swim past his legs, and there he stood while Mil and Rachel took a short nap, splashing around, trying to catch dinner until his fingers brushed against the tail of a medium-sized trout and brought him headfirst and all the way under, soaked. He resurfaced, shooting a thin stream of water out of his mouth, and smiled at Mil, who’d woken in the commotion. “Shoot,” he said. “Nearly had him.” Mil regarded him, then looked away into the distance.

So they walked and walked, all afternoon, nibbling on the last handful of coarse grain and seed CK had relieved from the freighter’s shipment.

“How far we?” said Mil.

“We close.”

“How close?”

“Closer. I can feel it.”

“Quit your feelings already!” she said. “I’ll tell you bout feelings. How bout feeling scared for our daughter? For us starving on this river?”

“We close, love. Soon, we gon arrive and see what Nicodemus saw—”

“And what happened to Nicodemus? Huh? Where he end up? He still dead, ain’t he!”

Dust caked to Mil’s dress, the damp red handkerchief tied round her head. She moved Rachel to the other side, easing the weight on her right hip. Rachel began to cry. Mil bounced her gently and when that failed to calm the child she turned around and undid the knot holding up the top of her dress.

“The Lord will take care of us,” CK said. How old and weary he felt shouldering the pack.

“That so,” Mil said over her shoulder. “He spoke to you, did He?”

“When’d you take on the doubting of Thomas?”

She turned back to face him again.

“And He gon take care of Rachel?”

“She washed in the blood, same as us. God been with us the entire time,” said CK, exasperated. “Wouldn’t have made it this far if He weren’t.”

She pulled the baby away from her breast and turned her so CK could see his daughter’s face. “He with her now, is He?” Rachel was shaking, opening her mouth as she searched for the nipple. “He the one made my milk dry up?” Mil held Rachel with both hands before her bare chest, unashamed of her top-nakedness.

CK moved close to her. He said, “God wouldn’t have us come all this distance only to take her away.”

“He done more mysterious things than that.”

In one fluid motion—CK’s hand darting to the back pocket of his trousers—he grabbed Dulcet’s fife, drew back his hand, and brought it down within a few inches of Mil’s face. She grimaced but held Rachel firmly, suspended in the air between them. He’d never struck his wife. “That what you want?” he said, drawing the cane away. “You gon drive me to lay hands on you, you know that.”

“Go on, then.”

He spun left and threw the fife into the water, where it made a light splash, momentarily bobbed, and was gone, taken by the slow pull of the current. He shouted, long and loud, and kicked futilely at the dirt. Mil said nothing. Her breasts, once plump and full, hung low and limp, their roundness gone, leaving depressed folds of extra skin. He took hold of Rachel so Mil could collect herself, but she didn’t let go. She held her gaze as hard on him as was her grip on Rachel.

“I want you to remember this,” she said.

His eyes fixed on her chest and now he saw the bite marks, the missing part of her left nipple that was nothing more than a bloodless, pink sore. “Cover yourself, love,” he said softly, and finally she let go.

It was during that long afternoon and evening that CK finally succumbed to the fear and doubt. His daughter was sick; he couldn’t believe otherwise any longer. What would become of them if they didn’t soon find food and shelter, a doctor? We are washed in the blood, he told himself. He had led his wife and child across the country in search of a place whose existence the grim reality of the journey seemed to test. Had the sign been false? Maybe he’d misremembered the song. Maybe there was never any prophecy. Had the Lord really shown him Nicodemus—those visions that had led him all this way—or had he affirmed his faith only to achieve the end he desired? Washed in the blood. He was so tired. Maybe people were never meant to leave their homes. Home, he thought. It had been over three months since they left, but it felt so much longer for what they’d been through. Bolivar County. How lonesome he was to see Mississippi again. I am washed in the blood.

Those summer nights allowed them to work past ten, and Talmen and Rawl spent the first few weeks of June bringing in the early wheat harvest. They walked that sea of gold with scythes in hand, reaping the stemmed wheat that they would later separate from the chaff, tie into bundles, and cart off to millers and granaries. It was the busy season, and Talmen was thankful for it because the intense labor kept most thoughts, baleful and otherwise, at bay. Mostly he felt tired or hungry, and those, when he considered such matters, weren’t bad things to feel if you knew they could be relieved.

One Sunday night, about eight o’clock, Jesse Mae came running out to the fields. She usually brought them a late supper about this time, and he and Rawl would eat standing up, rushing the food into their mouths before returning to the last few hours of work. But from the sight of his daughter now, breathing so hard, he could see something was the matter. By the time she arrived, she was bent over, trying to catch her breath, and could only muster: “Something happening at that stone house.”

Talmen dropped his scythe and began to walk the half mile at a brisk pace. His children followed. He knew Jesse Mae had been at the Baldwins’. On Sundays during the harvest, while he and Rawl worked, Eugenia would take Jesse Mae to church and to the after-gathering. Often Jesse Mae stayed late into the evening, learning piano from Mercy.

“We was practicing our scales when a man come to the door and they started arguing and . . .”

“Go on,” Talmen urged, but she struggled to keep up with his long strides and had trouble getting anything else out.

They arrived to take their place in the growing crowd half-circling the stone house. There was an awful commotion of some sort, but Talmen couldn’t see anything from the back. He stood on his tiptoes and when that didn’t help he pushed to the front, and that’s when he saw the two men wrangling in the dirt. Thomas Baldwin and someone he didn’t recognize. They were rolling on the ground, drumming fists into each other’s middle, positioning for leverage. For all the struggle the town had endured, there’d been little quarreling since settling—a couple of fistfights, one of them a contest between ministers arguing over Bible interpretation—and it was as if no one knew what to do, transfixed as they were by the sudden explosion of violence in the calm summer night. These watchers, Talmen realized as he looked around, were from neighboring dugouts. Mrs. Baldwin shielded Mercy from the scene, screaming for someone to do something, but no one said a word or made a move to break up the fight.

“You no-count criminal—you rotten vagrant!” Baldwin yelled, pinioned by the silent stranger. There was a woman with a child in her arms, pulling on the man’s shoulder, pleading for him to stop. He shook her off, drew back his fist, and quickly struck him over his right eye. Baldwin groaned and rolled onto his side. Then a strange thing happened. The man looked back at the crowd and just sat there as Baldwin regained his wits and started to hit back, repaying the blow a dozen times over. It looked as if he were letting Baldwin hit him, until he finally tipped over and sprawled in the dirt. Baldwin stood over him and kicked his side. He looked at the crowd and screamed, “He tried to break into my house!” He kicked the man again and the stranger’s wife cried, trying to bat away his boot. “They exodusters! You see how they are!”

Absent a word, Talmen pushed past the bystanders into the moonlit stretch of dirt where the beaten man and his family lay. Baldwin was possessed of an untethered rage that seemed like it might swing Talmen’s way when he stepped between him and the fallen man. Talmen waited for him to make a move, raising his clenched fists. They looked at one another a long second, silent, before Baldwin’s face turned from craze to confusion.

“What you doing?” he said.

Talmen looked around at all the eyes trained on him, dropped his hands, and then knelt by the stranger. His eye was swollen shut, blood on his gums and lip. The woman’s crying had petered out into a hard kind of breathing. She looked at Talmen, her eyes open wide with uncertain expectation. Talmen helped raise the man to his feet.

“You saw him hit me, Talmen,” Baldwin said, and then he turned to the crowd as if to plead his case: “I said they’re exodusters! You hear me? They the ones soiling our name.”

“Hush your meanness,” Talmen said.

“Don’t let them get away! They’d be strung up where they come from for what they done.”

“No one’s doing nothing yet,” said Talmen.

He led the strangers into the crowd, parting the mass of onlookers, who made no moves other than to step out of the way, and in that moment it was all human silence outside the stone house, just the sounds of the earth at night around them. Talmen took them to the dugout, propelled only by an instinct that this was the right and only course. Eugenia, too, seemed to be guided by that same unseen hand, going right to the sod fireplace to prepare food at the strangers’ appearance. She sent Jesse Mae to the well to draw water and Rawl to call on Dr. Newth.

CK and Mil sat by the fire, she dabbing at his face with a wet rag as he stared into the blue of the flames, wincing when she touched directly on a sore.

“My daughter,” Mil said. “She sick.”

Eugenia was at the stove boiling beans and salt pork, mixing biscuits in the excess grease and gristle of their earlier supper. “Doctor’s on the way,” she said. Soon she fixed them a plate and when she set the food before them, she said, “May I?” and motioned at Rachel. Mil handed the baby to Eugenia and took up her plate.

“You gon be right better soon. Just you hang on,” Eugenia said as she looked at the child.

Mil watched the older woman handle her baby as she forked food rapidly into her mouth.

“Is it yellow fever?” Mil said.

Eugenia said she felt the fever in the baby and looked hard at her coloring for jaundice, but it was tough to tell there in the night.

“We’ll see what Dr. Newth say.”

Talmen looked on from a stool in the corner, thinking about what had happened. He’d wanted Baldwin to make a move, so he’d have an excuse to crush him the way he’d once imagined crushing that stone house. It was that desire more than anything else, he knew, that had propelled him forward, not some sense of righteousness that wouldn’t stand for seeing a stranger beaten to death in such lawlessness. He didn’t even know whether this man deserved defense; he still hadn’t said so much as a word.

“Gonna tell us about it already?” Talmen said.

The man sopped his plate clean, then stood, half bent over so as not to hit his head on the ceiling. Talmen motioned at him to follow and removed the orange door to let the dugout cool down.

Outside, CK saw a man heading their way.

“That the doctor?” he said. “He white?”

“Let the man do his job,” Talmen said. “Follow me.” When CK didn’t budge, Talmen assured him they’d come back soon, and CK relented. Talmen led him to the river, where they took a seat under the cottonwood. “My feet,” Talmen said, removing his shabby boots. “Darn near rubbed raw from walking that wheat stubble all day.” He rose and went to put his feet in the river, sighing heavily as he looked up above him. It was full dark and the stars shined bright in the vast sky. A grave silence had taken hold of CK, but he seemed to listen as Talmen—not knowing what to say to this mute man—spoke. “You exodusters, huh?”

CK nodded.

“Know about long journeys myself,” Talmen said, and told of his family’s move to Nicodemus, recounting in great detail that first long winter and how they’d been saved only by the Osage and the arrival of that final group from Kentucky last year.

Hearing this unlodged the words that finally allowed CK to speak: “Where everybody at? Where the town? All the buildings—the houses, the church and school?”

“Got a church, not too far,” Talmen said. “We working on a school, but ain’t finished.” He lifted his feet out of the water, one at a time, and let the air send a cool shock through them before dunking them under again. “And people, they all around.”

“Where at?”

“In the ground, most of them. Like us.” Talmen pointed out the faint wisps of smoke from fires in the distance mingling up into the night.

“In the ground, like a prairie dog?”

“Ain’t for long. We gon build us a soddie after next harvest.”

“Ain’t like I thought.” CK shook his head. “Ain’t like I thought at all.”

“We a young town.”

CK considered this a moment: “I spose living free in the ground’s a might better than where we come from.”

“The Lower?”

CK nodded. “Mississip.”

“Had a bunch arrive from there after last winter. Couple months back. February. Group of fifty thereabouts.”

“From Mississippi?”

“Sure enough. They settling in right fine.”

CK thought of the handbill. So he hadn’t been alone in this pursuit. “Wish we’d caught on with them. Didn’t leave till March.” He recounted the story for Talmen, of the arduous trek, of the waiting and the hunger, of the relief he’d felt earlier at having finally reached Nicodemus, and of how quickly it turned to disappointment and rage. When they had arrived, he and Mil approached the first house—the only house—they saw, whose bright fireplace seemed to bode well. “They was even hymning beautiful songs at the piano,” CK said, “and I thought, being Sunday, how rightly to hear our Lord’s name praised first thing.” He’d knocked, asking that they might come in for some food and medicine for Rachel. Baldwin seemed pleasant enough, he said, but the kindness in his eyes disappeared when he found out CK and Mil were part of the exodus.

“Turned away by one of our own,” CK said. “After what we been through?” He shook his head. “That broke me open with wrath I never felt before.”

“You hit him first?”

“I did. I lost myself for a time, and when I seen what I done—”

“That’s why you stopped when you had him licked?”

CK nodded. They were quiet for a minute before he finally said, “I’m a wicked man. This journey weren’t meant for no child. If she don’t make it . . .”

“You hard on yourself,” Talmen said, still standing in the water. He looked over at Isaiah’s grave, near invisible in the dark, thinking he might confide some of the hard things he still felt but thought better of it. There would be time for talking. Now he reckoned they better get back to the dugout to hear what Dr. Newth had to say. Talmen put his boots back on and the two men walked quietly. People weren’t likely to take to this young man’s family for a while, least of all Baldwin, Talmen knew, and he decided he’d let him work the harvest until he got set up on a claim of his own. He thought this was a kindness he could muster, but the idea soured as he looked out at the smoke from a distant dugout. He remembered the numbers the newspapers had quoted, thinking originally they were an exaggeration to scare white folks, but now he wasn’t so sure. What if they were right? What if there were thousands of exodusters?

“How many you reckon come north with you?” he said.

“Us?” said CK. “Ain’t figures for that kind of number.”

“Where they at?”

“All over Kansas. Some went back south.”

All over Kansas, Talmen thought. Maybe they could care for a family or two, but what would they do if that many people came their way? The town would never survive. He looked around him, again focusing on that smoke, and imagined its haze as the dust kicked up from the feet of a thousand weary souls, all coming for Nicodemus.

As they neared, CK could see into the dugout through its uncovered entrance. In the firelight Mil stood next to the dour doctor, who was inspecting Rachel. Talmen entered, but CK stopped at the doorway. He turned around. In the distance, he watched the smoke rise slowly from those holes in the ground, like signs from the great fire below. “Nicodemus,” he said, testing whether something would happen, but there was no voice, no vision, no song. “Nicodemus,” he whispered again, and nothing came. The name meant nothing anymore but this. He felt alone out there in the coming of full dark, so he turned around and stooped to enter the dugout, surrendering himself to the will of what would come.