THE INNOCENT CHILD of five slipped away. Anthony stirred. Layer by layer, he returned to his miserable time of manhood in the year 1854. He found himself with the ones who had seized him this night on Brattle Street. They had cuffed his hands with irons connected by chains. How had they done that?
But I was daydreaming, Anthony thought. He lifted his hands to look at the chains. They felt so heavy, he let them drop. “Wish all this was a dream, like that vision of when I was small,” he told himself. It was more like a nightmare. Chains!
The leader of the men introduced himself. “Call me Asa Butman,” he said. “I am Deputy United States Marshal and known for catching runaway property!”
The guards, growing rowdy, guffawed, and Asa smiled. “I caught a slave named Thomas Sims back in fifty-one,” Asa said, “and I held him in this very same room as I holdin’ you, Burns.”
Anthony mumbled, “You said you arrested me for stealing.”
Asa chuckled, then stopped when he saw Burns’s shockingly maimed right hand. The skin over the protruding bone was drawn tight and shone like satin. Asa assumed, as did everyone who saw the hand, that the slaveholder, Charles Suttle, had abused him horribly.
Anthony saw Asa’s eyes on his hand but didn’t try to explain what had happened. For a fleeting moment he recalled the accident that had injured his hand when he was about thirteen. The awful memory paled next to the shuddering fear he faced now, and his thoughts raced over the events leading to his capture.
After work that day he’d been following Coffin Pitts over to the church pastored by Reverend Leonard Grimes, where Mr. Pitts was deacon. The church was new, and was known locally as the church of the fugitive slaves in Boston. Anthony had refused to go at first because he felt he had no right. He wrote to his church in Virginia seeking a formal release from its communion so that he would be free to join Reverend Grimes’s church. But his Virginia pastor refused, saying that Anthony had disobeyed God’s law by running away from his master. He was “excommunicated,” the pastor had written, “from the community and fellowship of the church.” Therefore, Anthony could join no other church, ever.
Back home Mars Charles had let him preach. Now he would be as nothing in the eyes of God.
I should have gone on with Deacon Pitts in the first place, Anthony thought. We had left the shop for the day. I had started home. And if I hadn’t had a change of heart and followed after him, there would have been the two of us. Maybe then the guards would have feared to take me.
I oughtn’t to have written my church.
For he had written to his brother there in Virginia; the authorities must have got it out of his brother where he had gone.
Yes, and I am here in jail as proof.
Over the course of the evening, Asa Butman and his guards were friendly enough. Anthony appeared listless, although he listened to Butman’s every word.
“Ever you hear tell of the Fugitive Slave Act?” Asa Butman asked him, leaning close. The guards listened.
Anthony raised himself slightly, blinking as though his brain was muddled. He knew how to pretend to be dull minded whenever it was to his advantage to hide himself and his feelings from the buckras.
“Now try to stay awake, Anthony,” Butman said. “Ya see, it’s like this, m’boy. It is ‘Anniversary Week’ here in Boston city. The ab-o-litionists—thems against slavery—and the woman suf-fra-gists—after the vote for womens—and the rest of them kind is having their yearly conventions.
“Every boarding place is crowded up,” Asa went on. “When what happens? Two upstanding gen’mens from Virginia, Colonel Charles F. Suttle and his slave agent, Billy Brent, ride right into town and set themselves up in style at the Revere House hotel. Now it’s dangerous for them here with Boston full of their enemies. But by Gawd, m’boy, not one ab-o-litionist was looking the right way!”
The guards snickered, then laughed outright. “And we took you, m’boy, right off the street, right under Deacon Pitts’s nose! And we had a right,” Asa said. “That Fugitive Act means a runaway can get captured in any free state—even Massachusetts.”
“Hear, hear!” said the guards. They gave Butman light applause, for it was obvious he was showing off for Anthony.
“All the slave owner needs,” Butman continued, “is to supply a affi-davit saying who is the one wanted. In your case, you!
“Then the U.S. Commissioner, Judge Edward Loring, the speaker there at Harvard Law School,” Asa said, “he issues a fugitive slave warrant. It was given me by the Marshal, and I is the one arrests you.”
The guards applauded wildly. “And we helped him, we did,” one of them joined in. They were the posse comitatus, so named in the slave act as aiding the commissioner and the marshal in the execution of their duties. The marshal had assembled them and paid them well to help him keep the peace. All were lowlifes and petty thieves, the only kind of men who in 1854 would take on the task of capturing runaway slaves.
“Well, I reckon that Fugitive Slave Act fixes it for all you runnin’-away kind,” continued Asa. “ ’Cause now the Commissioner can issue a certificate to send you on back where you come from.” He grinned. “The Commissioner gets ten dollars if he convicts you, but only a fiver if he acquits.”
Anthony listened. He felt sick inside. Asa’s words broke his heart.
They will take me back! Anthony thought. There’s law against me. Lord, I’m lost.
“There you have it, m’boy,” Asa said to him.
Anthony shrank in his shell, speaking to no one.
“Come on, m’boy,” Asa told him. “Have a drink and some food on me. Oh, don’t take on so! It ain’t half bad. You’ll go back and take your whippin’ and ole Colonel will forget all about it!”
But Anthony knew that if he went back, things would not go well for him at all. He dared not dwell on what would happen.
Where is Deacon Pitts? Does he not question where I be? Anthony wondered. And good Reverend Grimes? Oh, no. I did tell the deacon I wasn’t coming to church. He never knew I followed him. Never saw me taken there in the dark. No one knows I’m caught!
Anthony cringed. He let his mind drift away on the floating pain inside him. And discovered the boy Anthony again, the innocent child.