That man there is a blood man. He stands at the edge of the Kentucky hills where they slope to the prattling river, imagining his children and their children not with his mind, but with the will of his body inclined toward freedom. He has come from the heart of Kentucky, a place that boasts one slave for every white man, and he is one of those slaves, or so they tell him, though he won’t be for long.
He is an independent man and enterprising, though never formally educated, a man solitary and suspicious by nature, with no friends but his mother, who died in the spring of this very year, so the yoke of love has been lifted from him, his spirit now free to make his body free. Hate and desire bear him aloft from the outskirts of Paris like a seedling on fresh wind seeking fertile ground. He leaves his master’s farm on a Saturday with a pass to attend a dance at a farm in Winchester in the company of ten other bondsmen, but when they reach the fork in the road that turns south toward Clark County, he takes his leave without a word, slipping from their jovial pack and disappearing into the woods. He cinches sacks of crushed Indian turnip around his calfhide brogans to throw off the scent and then crashes deep into the undergrowth of shrubs and thorny bushes. He knows of the famed railroad—all but the most ignorant backwoods slaves know of it—but he long ago decided to seek no help, none at all, refusing to follow another, black or white of any political persuasion, because he will be a man who makes his own way.
His first night is pure and blinding panic, sure the bloodhounds have been loosed, sure there are white men behind every oak tree, every maple. He remembers a nursing woman he had known as a child, one who ran off only to be hounded against a tree where the dogs ripped the breasts from her body; she had lived long enough to be whipped with the tooth side of a handsaw. Now, in fear of patrollers, he steers clear of the road to Mason County and Maysville, and won’t travel as far east as the Lexington–Cincinnati road, and on that blessed day when he arrives in the Queen City, he won’t go knocking on the door of Mr. Coffin’s Grand Central Station. He considers himself unschooled but not reckless—he won’t seek the aid of a strange white man, no matter his reputation. No, he’ll go straight to Bucktown and throw his body and his soul down on the charity of the first black church he sees: there is no safe place in this world, but a black church is the closest thing. His mother taught him that.
He plunges into the nocturnal edge of the county, racing a desperate, diagonal line north, hoping, if chance and property lines favor him, to emerge at the river a full day’s walk to the east of the city, a good distance from the Lexington–Cincinnati road. As he stumbles along in the dark, he clings to the rock-strewn streams that branch along the forest, where cold, plush water gurgles up from the soil, and for two hours becomes lost in a labyrinthine terrain of towering limestone hallways, which veer this way and that beneath the black rooftops of the trees. Eventually freeing himself, he passes along a series of tended pastures, just a dark wraith along the split rail fencing, an unsafe passage to be sure, but no other humans are about in the deep of the night. All around him, the dark forest is alive, vital, a black lattice before a white moon. Things unseen touch his face in jest and curiosity. Every step of the way, the owls question his route, his choices, his odds, and the night critters speechify and debate, but never once does he hear the clipped voices of white men or the brute, pitiless baying of distant hounds. He stays the course until the break of the next morning, when he climbs a sugar maple and expends a jittery, sleepless day at the tangent of limb and trunk, staring wretchedly into the vast green canopy.
Then night again, and no aid, no friend, only the North Star to conduct him. He walks on and on, eating only small bites from a satchel containing fatback, hogmeat slices, and crumbling cornpone. Two more days and his overshoes of turnip have fallen away, his hair is peppered with bits of leaf like green ash, and he has lost weight he didn’t have to spare. He begins then to traverse during the day, still fretful, almost forty miles from Lexington now, and safer, he knows, but desperate to cover more ground. The waking world seems to have changed in the four days since he has seen it. The light is shocking and the land is fertile with late summer—the bright corollas of flowers, the winding vines loping tree to tree, the cool and pungent drafts of pine, ginseng here and chanterelles there and everything covered with a green, fair moss like verdigris on copper. He eyes the beauty with bitterness; yes, he thinks, this whole world ain’t nothing but a bad penny, keeps turning up and going to mold.
In the muddled brew of his worry and overwhelming fatigue, he grows careless and the next morning stands accosted by a tiny white woman in a stove-black bonnet so enormous and overhanging, he can only see the tight sphincter of her mouth as she says, “Nigger, I got eggs.”
He’s half-asleep and so surprised by her sudden appearance that, despite the instincts of his legs, he doesn’t run, his eyes locked on the eggs she’s carrying in the gaping pockets of her tattered linsey-woolsey pinafore. She reaches down and holds out three eggs to him without ever once looking him in the eye.
She says, “Now, my husband he preciated the niggers, but I ain’t concerned if they live or die. Still my husband preciated em, so I give em to ye to have. Here now.”
With care and fleet glances in all directions, he takes the three eggs from her hands; they’re the color of boiled chicory with new milk. “Grateful, missus,” he whispers.
“Tain’t no difference to me,” she says. “If they hang ye or hightail ye back to Africkay, tain’t no business of mine. Them’s fresh eggs. They’ll keep.”
He runs then, cradling the delicate, knocking eggs in his shirt until he reaches a distance of a mile or more, and when no one seems to be following, he cracks the eggs and drinks them down. Then he moves on through what he hopes is the center of Harrison County, and on that very same afternoon, after having not seen anyone in four days except the woman with the eggs, he spies a second woman—this one from the back and from such a distance, he just watches her creep shakily along for a breathless minute before he realizes she’s colored. He can hear her crying now from where he stands, but he makes no sound at all, resolving to melt back into the undergrowth and shield himself from her eyes; he can afford no joiners, least of all a woman. Then she turns jerkily, suddenly, like a deer that senses rather than hears its predator, and he sees that her belly is as big as a sugar kettle and now her black eyes are on him. Deep as coal rocks, full of lustrous tears. She reaches out one hand to him, her mouth aslant: “Help me! Help dis poor gal!”
He takes a step backward from her call, but he can’t look away, and she comes forward a few broken paces. He is set to run, one foot behind him, his weight ungrounded, a bird preparing for flight.
“Help me! Help us get north!”
Warily, he whispers, “You got to shift for your own self.”
“Please, mistah!” she pleads. “You talk fine, I can tell you a smart nigger. Help dis ignorant gal and dis here baby get dey freedom!”
He rears back in distaste and manages one deliberate step backward, but she stumbles forward, grasping up his shirtfront now in her dirty fist; her touch is what he had most wanted to avoid, even more than her desperate voice. Her distended belly is inches from his. Her eyes burn into him. “Iffen you leave us, dey gone kill us. Dey gone kill dis baby.”
No, no, no, Scipio wants to scream in frustration and anger—unwind the clock, unspool time—but these eyes, this belly … sweat springs up beads on his forehead and upper lip. He wants to curse every step that brought him to this particular spot. All his effort was for him alone! He eyes her angrily and tries to press back his conscience, but it’s no use. In another instant, the thing is done and they are a pair, Scipio plowing through the woods at a frightful, angry pace; the woman drying her tears and skipping along despite her bulk, her rounds of thanksgiving and gratitude devolving into pleas as she falls back now and again with Scipio saying only, “Keep up.” And when they stop at a burbling spring to drink, she whips off her headrag and falls to her knees, saying, “Praise de Lord for … what dey name you?”
“My name ain’t no consequence.”
She blinks. “I’s Abby and dis baby gone be name Canada when it come. I’s gone live in dere, I is.”
“Listen here now,” Scipio says, “I’ll take you two days and then you got to aim east on your own and walk to Mason County. There’s a man there what got a yellow barn. He’ll skiff you across the river to Ripley. He’ll know you by the password ‘Menare.’ I promise you that’s the truth. But I ain’t going there. I got my own plan to swim that river, and I can’t be shaked from it.”
“I’s gone where you’s gone,” she says.
“You ain’t doing no such,” he growls.
“I is!” And to this vehemence, he doesn’t know what to say, he can only glower at her and then they walk on for another day, she at his heels like a bulky terrier, pestering and questioning him and thanking him again and singing and moaning until he feels sure she’s soft in the head and he regrets her more and more each step of the way. Finally he whips about and, with a finger to her face, says, “Don’t talk, don’t ask, don’t touch! Just follow!”
And Abby does follow, gradually quietening and walking with her forearms cradling her enormous belly like saddle straps to hold it secure. Scipio is at first grateful for her silence, but once or twice as they walk during that second day, he glances back and sees silent tear-trails tracking through the grime on her face. It gives him pause, he thinks of his mother. It slowly destroys his resolve.
That night when they’ve sat down side by side, preparing for sleep under the spread arms of a tree, Scipio takes up his case again, but gentler this time.
“Listen here, Miss Abby,” he says. “In the morning, you got to strike out for Mason County on your own. I aim to swim the river and you can’t swim it with that belly a yours. You hear?”
“I can swim,” she says, staring at him mulishly.
He rears back. “God almighty, gal!” The wick of his impatience is lit now. “You gone and lost your mind? What kind of crazy gal runs off when she needs to be laying in? I planned this escape nigh on three years, choosing the month, the day, the very hour, and I won’t have no crazy gal getting me shot on the riverbanks with Canaan right there in my sights!”
Scipio expects her to begin crying again, an act which seems nearly as natural to her as speech, but she just hangs her head for a long minute, like she’s studying deeply on his words. He begins to wonder whether she’s even understood him when she says, so quietly does he have to strain to understand her, “My mammy name me Abby. I am taken from my mammy when I’m age thirteen. I never forget de day. My mammy she done wrapped up my nubbins in a old linen rag so nobody see em, but de speclator come and he seed I got de age on me and he teared me from my mammy and I never forget, she say, ‘Be good, Abby, don’t give em no cause to whup you,’ and I ain’t never done no such. I never seed my mammy anymore. Well, dat speclator man take me to Lexington and he stand me up on de Cheapside block. He den tear off my woolens and de mens come and look and pinch and de speclator cry me off. Dis one man, he pay twelve hundred dollar for me. Ignorant nigger I is, I thinks how lucky I is, a rich man gone pay dat kind a money for me, he gone take right good care a me.”
Abby stops, she seems not to know what to do with her hands as she speaks, pressing them into her hair now, which is wild and unkempt, her rag long fallen away. She will not look at Scipio, she just rocks her knobby hands into her hairline.
“Well, come find dat white trash man ain’t rich,” she says bitterly. “Don’t know how he paid dat kind a money. He only had him three niggers and only one dem’s my age and he done make me de wife a all three.”
Scipio makes an involuntary jerking motion with his hands. He almost asks her to hush, but she continues on.
“Now, here he don’t make me work in no field like I’s expectin, no, he lock me up in dis quarter, ain’t no bigger dan a root cellar and ain’t got no window. He lock me on dis bed with one chain on de wrist and one on de ankle and den dey come messin with me and sometime de Marster he watch de niggers mess with me and den he mess with me. I don’t know how long I’s livin dere, den I get swole up big and he say, ‘You gone have you a baby, Abby,’ and I got de amazement cause I don’t know nothin and den dat baby get borned. Den he let me out and I gets de run a de place, cause he figure if I got a baby, den I ain’t gone run. And he right. I ain’t gone run.”
She looks at Scipio then and she appears crazy to him and he wishes all over again that he could have avoided her somehow, or left her along the way. Cruel as it is and against his own will, he wishes she were back where she’d come from, but still he utters no word.
She says, “Den I seed he got him a Missus. A Missus! Why he messin with a nigger gal when he got a Missus? I don’t never understand. But dey both am mean as devils. Dey chained de niggermens to dey beds at night and dat Missus she whupped em in de morning with a leather switch out a pure devilment. Forty lashes ever day. Dey ain’t never run, cause de Marster say he kill em if dey do and dey knowed it de truth. De Marster have him a old nigger name Perry and one day Perry say, ‘I’s too old, you can’t make me work no more, I’s got to rest,’ and de Marster, he say, ‘Dat sound all right, you slowin down,’ and when Perry turn away, de Marster crack him over de head with de hoe he holdin and drop Perry stone dead. De Marster make de niggers wait to bury him five days and den without no stone. So us all knowed dat true.
“Now, on dis farm don’t a body never visit, no preacher never come, no family never come, just us all de time shiftin for usselves. Well, I gets a string a babies and when dey six or seven year old de Marster, he sell each em away for de money and I ain’t even say no, see, I pray God dey get sold to a good white man. I knows dey’s lots a good white folk in de world like my mammy’s Marster. He ain’t hardly whupped on his niggers and only when dey deserved it.
“But—but den it finally happen. I gets me a white baby and den de Missus know de Marster messin with me and she open hate on me all de time. She pullin my hair and lashin me and de Marster tell her, ‘Quit,’ but den she just do it when he ain’t dere. It am a misery. Dis bout de time my Sarah die a de fever and I only got William who age six and my white baby, Callie. Den one terrible day I brings de sheets in de house for pressin and I fetch de iron out de fire and I got—” She screws up her lips, her whole body shaking.
“Hush!” Scipio whispers, fear and horror curdling in his belly. “Quit talking now, Miss Abby.”
Abby raises up her eyes. “Oh Lord, dat day I got Callie on my arm and she cryin and William, he complainin like he hungry and needin fare or some such and I leave de iron on de sheet and it burn a big black mark. And de Missus, she see dat mark and her face get real funny and Callie squawlin and den de Missus say, ‘Hush dat nigger chile!’ and den she reach over and pick up dat jingling iron and she strike dat hot iron against my baby Callie so hard she break her head in. I never forget how it jingle. My baby don’t even cry, she only open her broke mouth like she a baby bird, her face ruint and broke in and she gasp just like dat and shake oncet and den she die in my arm. Right dere in my arm. Oh God, Lord—I so pained I runs out de house and de Missus wailin to de Marster what she ain’t meant it and he come a-runnin and a-shoutin.”
Scipio has lost the will to quiet her, unable to take his eyes from her stricken face.
“I runs through de yard with my poor Callie and I can’t make no sense a nothing and I screams and I don’t know what, but finally I understands my baby dead and I gots to bury my baby, but my William, oh Lord, my William, something done shaked loose in dat little soul. He snatch my Callie away from me and hold her like he got a nubbin for milkin and he singing to her, and den he cryin and he make like he playin and talkin to her, and de Marster, he come sneak up on him, but William see him and stop and screech like he done lost ever wit, ‘Go away you ugly nigger! God hate you, nigger!’ He callin de Marster nigger, he so distracted, and de Marster, he start to cryin too. Den he smack my boy so hard he fall and de Marster bring me my dead Callie. Den William, he runnin and skippin bout like a dog gone ill and de Marster tell me, ‘You ain’t nothin but bad luck, Abby. Dis here baby dead and now your son, he gone plum crazy. I done lost one thousand dollar dis day.’ And den he done gone off and leaved me to bury my baby gal. I buried her with dese hands. But I ain’t seed where William runned off and I never seed my William anymore. I gone lookin in de woods for him dat evening, and I heared him talkin nosense but he runned away from me, and two days later one a de other niggers come on him in de deep part a de creek where he drownded. Dey all suspicioned de Marster drownded him, but I disbelieve dat. I disbelieve dat! God, I pray my son done put hisself away like a good boy and ain’t let dat dirty white trash hold him down one instant! I heared once God don’t favor de man dat put hisself away, but I disbelieve dat. You hear me? I disbelieve dat! God got righteous mercy if dey six year old!”
She weeps openly and loudly and Scipio scoots over through the dry, rustling leaves, reaching around her, but not to embrace her, only to clamp one dry hand over her mouth. “Hush,” he says. “Hush your mouth. Don’t make no sound now.”
She sobs against his hand, staring up into the blank sky at something beyond his eyes. With an utterly lost feeling, he looks around them at the butternut trees, at the stones, the dumb soil, all the while holding her, rocking her. He keeps that hand on her mouth, feeling a deep burn in his soul, and finally, when he senses that her tears are only coming harder and won’t ever abate, he says, very quietly, “Hush now, hush. Let me tell you something what’ll make you feel better. I got a story for you. This a story about a young buck named Scipio. Miss Abby, you know who that is?”
Her chest still heaving, Abby shakes her head against his hand, her brows drawn in wretched sorrow. “That’s me, you understand? My mother, she named me Scipio. Now, when Scipio was just a young buck, he was mighty good friends with Master’s son, named Richmond. Richmond and Scipio was running all over the place, through the fields, up the road, and all in the great house. Being friends with Richmond, Scipio didn’t never get whipped, cause he never made no trouble, and he got some education on the sly. Nobody learned him to read, but he listened to the white folks talk and he learned plenty that way. He figured enough to know that the black folk was property in Kentucky but free in Ohio, and that got him to thinking. Got him to thinking hard. Now, Scipio’s mother was the cook for the great house and Scipio, he was brung up to do the carpentry. The years passed until Richmond was near bout a man, sixteen or so, and four years older than Scipio. Richmond begun watching Scipio’s mother and then one day he tried to interfere with her. Now, Scipio’s mother wouldn’t tolerate that kind of treatment from a pup and she slapped him away. But Richmond thought he had got the right to Scipio’s mother! Richmond was so mad then, he put a wedding gift fire poker in the quarter Scipio shared with his mother. All the great house was searching for that fire poker and when they found it in the cabin, they raised revolution. They intended to whip Scipio’s mother. So what you think Scipio done?”
Abby blinks and tugs his hand from her mouth. “What you done?” she whispers. He grins angrily, feeling strangely loose from his old self, almost disembodied; he has never told this story to a soul. His life has always depended upon it.
“Why, I hollered, ‘I done it!’ and then what you think happened?”
Abby is silent, saucer-eyed, but her tears have stopped.
“Why, they whipped Scipio heaven high and valley low and then they poured brine on his back and then they done it all over again with the stock end of the whip. But don’t you worry, Miss Abby—the story don’t end there. Don’t you believe that Scipio wanted revenge? Oh, yes, he did, you know he did. But he couldn’t get no revenge on Richmond, cause that was too easy to figure. No, Scipio decided he was gonna work revenge on the whipping man, that dumb overseer, who ain’t had no sense a smell and was half-blind in the one eye. That man was just mean as a snake. So Scipio waited real patient for his chance. He waited three long months, counting every minute. Now, he knowed his way all around that great house and he knowed the overseer smoked a ivory pipe alongside Master every Thursday evening in the front parlor while they talked the business. Well, Scipio done made a show of acting real sorry and sad and like that, but when nobody was in that great house, he sneaked in there with gunpowder he stole from the gun cupboard, and he packed that gunpowder in the overseer’s pipe nice and tight under the tobacco. It smelled real strong, but the overseer, he ain’t had no sense a smell at all. See, Scipio just sealed it good and tight and he ran back to the quarter and for a whole day suffered the awfulest fear that maybe he packed the wrong pipe and Master was fixing to blow hisself up instead, but no, come the next evening, there was the biggest bang from the great house and all the colored folk and all the white folk, they was running all over the yard, the Missus was hollering and they took that bleeding, jaw-busted overseer near sixty miles to a special doctor down in Perryville and he stayed gone nigh on seven weeks. When he come back, he hadn’t had no tongue, his head just crooked as a scarecrow’s, and nobody was the wiser, but they all knowed he was the most ignorant white man there ever was, packing his own pipe with gunpowder. And, sure enough, he also knowed he was the most ignorant white man there ever was, cause he whipped on the wrong nigger, but he done whipped on so many, he ain’t even knowed which one.”
Laughter erupts from Abby, a piercing bright sound of delight before Scipio clamps his hand down on her mouth again, saying, “Hush!” but she’s laughing, her breasts heaving, her belly shaking, and he has to cover his own mouth with his free hand, because he too begins to laugh; he’s laughing so hard it rocks him, but he also thinks of his mother dead and cold in the ground, who used to say to him, “You my onliest love and de whole world ain’t no count if you ain’t in it,” and he can’t tell whether his tears are laughter or despair, they burn his eyes like acid just the same.
In the morning, their laughter has echoed away, and he doesn’t mention Mason County again, or the skiff, or her need to veer east. They resume their northward trek, Scipio in the lead. He pushes ahead with renewed vigor, passing through open pasturage at times, sensing—knowing—that the river is not far now, not if they have covered close to ten miles a day, what would have been twelve or even fifteen without a pregnant woman at his side. But that is no matter now. Because of her story, or perhaps because of his, she stays close to him, sometimes grabbing out at his shirt when she stumbles or trips, but he doesn’t seem to mind; she’s broken him. Scipio will keep them safe. He will conduct them to the far side.
At midday, as he’s gathering berries for them, she makes a deep, chesty sound, what he initially mistakes for singing under her breath, but when he turns, she’s bent and hesitant, sweating, her hands spread for balance in the air. When he goes to her, trouble on his brow, she straightens up and blanks her face, says, “I’s fine. Walk on, Scipio.”
On the last day of their walking, the land grows increasingly hilly and curvaceous, much more so than Scipio had expected. No more obliging fields with forest enclosure, but hikes so steep that Scipio is hauling Abby up the inclines and her whole body trembles with the effort. She speaks no words today, as if every faculty she possesses, including speech, is sacrificed for this last consuming effort and it is the last, because at the break of the hill, she stumbles into Scipio, who has stopped suddenly. Through a natural window in the trees, they spy the Ohio River down below, that dark dividing line made by God but named by men, and they are standing at the watershed where all of life flows north to freedom. Scipio raises his arm and points and she peers around his shoulder with a hard sigh. He realizes with some dismay that though he can see the red brick and smoke of Cincinnati to the west, they are some distance from the city and there’s nothing to be done about it. They’ll swim from the bank directly below them.
He searches the northern slope of the hill, where sweet gum, mulberry, and beech trees congregate in clusters, until he finds a thick limestone berm, where the hill just begins its precipitous, gravelly fall to the river. The thin, level space is sheltered by the broad cordated leaves of plants so tall on their scapes, he initially mistakes them for trees. A mass of verdant foliage encases the ledge, making a cool shelter there.
He says, “This is where we gonna spend the night. I aim to wake you when it’s still dark, and then we gonna climb down and swim. Save your strength, Miss Abby.”
She nods her head and Scipio detects the sharpening of fear in her eyes as she contemplates the hillside and the rustling river far below, but when he sits under the leaves, she follows his lead meekly and is almost instantly asleep, snoring gently, though fitting and starting, her mind darting here and there just beneath sleep’s surface—he recognizes the motion, because he sleeps like that too, his spirit riven by fear. His brief dreams are like jars shattering. For twelve days, he has lived in terror. He shudders, turning his head away from Abby’s bedraggled, restless form and huddling deeper into himself, feeling not just weary but crippled in his pained exhaustion, so that if a patroller were to point the snout of a rifle into their leafy hut, Scipio would be altogether unable to run, or even rise. But they are well hidden in the foliage and though he can just spy the quick river below, the vegetation shuts out the light, forcing an early evening in their bower, over which evening slowly descends: First, a crepuscular smudge at the edges of eastern time and the sky is brushed with crimson and damask, then shadows are knit from the darkest remnants of day, the dark sprawls, daybirds mourn and nightbirds vivify, bony egrets sweep along the tributaries of the river and their flapping wings sound like brown paper crinkling, and bank swallows burrow in the dirt banks, the falling light is gay laughter in another room, the waterside plants hang sorrowful heads from slender petioles, the river speaks in low, brooding tones, the river is a coal seam exposed in a hollow, the river is black velvet unspooled from its bolt, the river is a vein opened, the river is decay, every fine line grown indistinct in the gloaming. A bird trills from the southern shore and the northern shore echoes the call, near intimates but never intimate, now a single lush billow of wind suggests rain and a muggy wet woolen is tossed over the shoulders of the land, the river valley swaths herself in wedding gauze, misty evening hums, this is a shroud or a mother’s shhhhhhhh, a droning prayer, this river is a lullaby and a dirge, this river is a promise made in daylight but upheld by night, and soon there will be no color because the night is coming on and nameless animals now call roll for the absent overseer and beneath the crenellated edge of the dew-soaked plants, Scipio’s eyes are draping shut against his will. But the crooning of a mourning dove or a mockingbird—the latter so infinitely variable, who can distinguish them—pierces the air and starts him from his momentary rest. He forces a final reconnoitering glance at the river, which holds one last fistful of scattered light, and he thinks, it ain’t so wide after all, and then he grasps the absurdity deep down in the marrow of his bones, how this very night the mask of slavery will be lifted from his face by geography, this arbitrary fact of twelve hundred feet, this quarter mile God laid down for beauty’s sake. Your humanity depends upon the ground beneath your feet. You cannot straddle this river. You must choose a side.
Later, he wakes from fitful sleep in the dark but forces himself to be still, waiting for that precise moment when the night has grown late but the morning star is yet to rise. He waits and waits, until he can’t bear it another minute, and then he wakes Abby. She comes to with a soft cry.
“We got to go now,” he says, and they slip out from under the shelter of the plants into the dark, which presses them from both sides. They are suddenly electric with wakefulness. Hand in hand, they navigate the descent to the flat plane of the river, stumbling on exposed roots and the frangible soil of the hillside, the slippery spots where exposed limestone is slick with dew and the scat of animals that passed here just hours before. Through masses of tangled vegetation, Scipio catches brief snatches of the river, and he knows it is the river only because it is blacker than any other black in the night. Just as planned, he has arrived on a moonless night so there is no light to play on the water, or to light their figures for any patrollers who might be waiting and watching.
Abby cries out suddenly and Scipio whips around to shush her, but she is doubled over, gripping her belly with fingers that appear carved from stone.
“Miss Abby!” he whispers, but she doesn’t reply, doesn’t move. “You close? You can’t cross with no baby pains!”
Still doubled, Abby grapples for his shirt and grips him firm to keep him from leaving, but he has no intention of leaving, no intention at all. He can’t run away from this woman. He has a vision of them crossing, it’s firm in his mind now like a story told to him a long time ago, a story which he now believes with all of his heart.
Abby rises up to her full height and, for once, she isn’t begging: “I telled you I’s crossing dis night. All my chilluns gived me de pain for three days fore dey come. Dis de same, and I’s swimming.”
“Miss Abby, you’re fixing to drown if you cross this river with the pains.”
She breathes through her nostrils rapidly, shoulders quaking, but fixes him with a wide-eyed stare, which is only half-wild. “Iffen I pain, den you hold me up. You hear?”
He stares at her a moment, then says, “Miss Abby…”
“You hold me and dis here poor baby up.”
“Yes.”
“Move den,” she orders, and they move down the last stretch of oak-clogged hill, which slopes to an alluvial flat pierced with branchless, leafless tree stumps like fat spears in the ground, and finally, sweaty with effort and fear, they stand at the edge of the moving water and Scipio is staring down at the great cinereous boulders scattered on the beach as if a kindly god has placed them there for a man and woman to hide alongside. Abby says, “Thank you, Lord, I’s brung to de River Jordan and I’s gone wade in de water. I’s never gone be de slave a de white man no more, only de slave a God.”
Scipio turns his head from words so distasteful to him. He whispers only, “Pray this river to carry us across.” He knows it will—look how low and still it is, waters pulsing easily with the river’s own calm, even breath. He can already feel his ball-and-chain spirit becoming no heavier than a feather. The patrollers are just a fading nightmare of childhood, the speculators too, the great house, and his life there, even the death of his dear mother. And see there, in place of that old dream, how near stands the opposite shore, night eliding distance, so a man can reach out strong swimmer’s arms and almost touch it.
He’s been wasting time gawking; he hunts hurriedly around the shadowy shoreline for driftwood and finds, instead, the moldering remains of what might have been a rowboat’s stern—he guesses from the angle of the sawn edge of the wood in his hand. Very little of it remains.
“Now swim with this in the crotch a your arm,” he says, and wedges it awkwardly into Abby’s damp armpit. Then he unties his tattered, sand-caked brogans and leaves them on the shore; he does not want to wear the shoes of slavery on the other side.
He grasps up Abby’s hand, says nothing more, and guides her stealthily from boulder to boulder, both of them slunk down low, though she can barely bend with her protruding belly. She grunts audibly as she walks.
The Ohio River is icy cold and in a moment it swallows them whole. Only their heads show and he thinks, Carry us, carry us, carry us, carry us, and then the rocky bed swoops away from under their feet, the hungry current carrying them as they plow through its eddies, both of them good, strong swimmers, though Abby slower because of her bulk. Scipio, slightly ahead, fastens his eyes on the black tree line on the far side, the river itself hastening him there, the current sweeping him closer to Ohio, closer to the dream, closer to Bucktown and a church of brethren who will help him, closer, closer now, ever closer. They cross the midway point of the river, the only sound their own labored breathing.
“Oh,” Abby says once, somewhere behind him.
“Hush,” he whispers back, plowing on with wide, chopping strokes.
“Oh,” she moans, and then her voice is full of water. There is a brief thrashing sound, another gasp, and she slips below. She doesn’t cry out again, but her hands crash once more on the surface like the sound of two oars smacking, and Scipio tears his eyes from his salvation and ceases his powerful swimming to look back, only to find the white ructure she’s made on the surface of the water. He drifts for a moment in pure panic, unsure what to do, pulled powerfully between two worlds. Then with an involuntary cry, he swims back to her. Once again Abby finds the surface, and he sees for one moment her panicked eyes in the faint light of the moon, and he will never forget the sight of her desperation. Then she slips below. She fights against the swamping weight of the water, thrashing violently, striving for its glistening black surface, but her body clamps in on itself as if the child were struggling mightily within her. Her legs draw up suddenly in a wrenching spasm, and her arms whip wildly about and spin for purchase until she finds Scipio’s leg, which she grips with all the life force bestowed upon her by right of her own birth. Without warning, she yanks him beneath the surface, and with blind horror, Scipio kicks downward. Quick as lightning, guided only by instinct, his foot finds her belly. Her hands release, and like a stone, Abby drops away.
Now Scipio fights for the shore as if the devil himself were after him. He’s weeping in horror and drinking the river as he goes, sick with panic and making no effort at all to conceal his passage but only trying to escape death, which would drag him with its iron shackles down to the bottom of the river. He crashes desperately through the sucking current until he finally feels the stony riverbed beneath his bare feet and lurches out, stumbling like a drunk among the rocks and fallen branches. On the bank, he looks like a madman, his hair matted and soaked with the spit of the river, his jaw loose, his eyes horribly wide. He touches his face with a shaking hand as if startled to discover that he is alive, but God, she is dead and he has killed her! He whips around once in disbelief to face the water. How he has longed for this moment since he was a child and now … The river is speaking to him, its words a curse. He stumbles back, away from the sound. Ten steps and the words are a mere prattle. Ten more and the prattle is a whisper. Ten more and the whisper is just a river flowing silent and black, no more dangerous than fiction, no more true than myth. Trembling, he whips around toward the thousand firelight twinklings of Cincinnati a mere mile to the west. His broad, white-latticed back is a curtain drawn on the crude festival of the South. But oh, reader, now Scipio has found something worse than slavery, and will live fifteen more years trying to forget it. There are tales that are remembered and tales that are forgotten, but all tales are born to be told. They demand it; the dead become tales in order to live. Their eternal life is in your mouth.