A raven pecked at the ground near John’s feet.
It cawed, and another raven dropped from the sky and walked toward John as if looking for signs of life. John’s face was devoid of pain and worry as he lay covered in his shroud.
John’s arms started moving again, grazing the ground.
The ravens jumped back, startled. They flew away.
John felt a round object. He squeezed it, feeling moisture in his hand.
He picked it up and looked at it, but his vision refused to allow him to decipher what he was holding; it was as if he were trying to focus while being submerged in a vat of milk. He sniffed it. That sense wasn’t working, either. He took a small bite of the wizened peach, then another, and another, until he stripped off every piece of fiber that was attached to the pit. His dark eyes grew lighter.
After a while, he stood up against the tree. As he regained a modicum of strength, he realized that he had the capacity to dread again. He thought about his mother and reached in a pocket and took out the rusty locket that contained a few strands of her hair. He cleared his throat to prepare himself to say something: “I’m sorry I left, Mama—”
Douglas tapped him on the shoulder.
A bolt of anger shot through John seeing Douglas chew on a luscious peach.
“Why’d you do that?” John asked.
Douglas didn’t answer as he was still gnawing on the peach. He retrieved another peach from his back pocket and started chomping through that one, too, with a satisfied and relieved look on his round, cinnamon-colored face.
John wanted food and demanded an answer: “Where’d you get that?”
“There’s a peach tree behind that building,” he said, pointing to the old, weather-beaten clapboard building.
John picked up his haversack and willed himself in the direction of the building where he saw a grove of peach trees several feet behind the building. He wolfed down nine peaches, but as he started his tenth, he felt the onset of nausea from devouring the lashing of peaches so fast. He ate it anyway; after his ordeal, it was no time to waste food.
“You going to be all right, fella?” Douglas asked. “You can’t be a baby out here. You gotta find a way to be strong,” he said pointing to John’s heart. Otherwise, you ain’t gonna last.” He paused then continued, “Your mama trusted me to go with you on this here trip south. You can turn around and go home—you be by yourself because I’m keep going.”
While John lay in his trance-like state under the beech tree, he’d imagined himself back in Richmond, his mother smiling, knowing that he was still working for the Billingslys.
But now that he regained his faculty, he knew that while his fate on the road to Alabama was uncertain, he also knew that his fate in Richmond would end in one way: with him dead.
“Wonder what’s in there?” John asked, pointing to the ramshackle building.
John sniffed the air. “I smell smoke; think it’s coming from there,” he said pointing.
Their eyes met as if they had hatched the same plan.
They stepped out of the peach grove and stopped near the perimeter, searching and listening for anyone who could bring them harm. Seeing and hearing nothing, they collected their nerves and dashed to the building, and John quickly opened the lopsided door. Douglas spied a sack of grain and used it to prop open the door to allow a skosh of daylight into the windowless building.
Different sizes of slabs of cured hog meat hung from hooks that were attached to overhead beams. The smoke emanating from the hickory wood in a makeshift fireplace was just about exhausted. Douglas had once worked in a slaughterhouse and knew at once the fortune that had just befallen them.
No one could see them in the smokehouse, but they couldn’t see if anyone was coming in their direction. Quick action was needed to allay deepening anxiety. John spotted a small red wagon in the back. “Let’s use this wagon to carry the meat. We gotta get out of here.”
Douglas donned a black leather apron that sat on the large butcher’s table.
“Hurry up!” John whispered.
Douglas grabbed a slab of meat with both arms, allowing it to rest on his torso, then slowly and gently put it in the wagon as though he were putting a baby in a crib. After filling the wagon with five giant-size slabs of ribs and bacon, he told John, “Grab that skillet, that cleaver, and the bowie knife on the table.”
“Yeah, boss,” John said as to acknowledge Douglas’s leadership role in this instance.
“Give me the cleaver,” Douglas said as he pulled the meat wagon toward the door.
John put on his haversack, stepped outside of the smokehouse, and ran to the safety of the grove of peach trees; he’d act as a sentry. He paced back and forth in between the trees, looking for someone who could impede the theft operation. He called to Douglas, who appeared in the door frame gripping the handle of the wagon with one hand and the meat cleaver in the other.
John held up his right hand with palm facing forward, signaling Douglas to wait for his command to leave. Nervously, John glanced around a few more times to make sure there were no signs of possible danger. Satisfied it was safe for Douglas to move, he nodded and waved rapidly.
Douglas caught the signal and pulled the wagon, heavy with fresh slabs of meat, as best he could. John waved again, this time with added emphasis; he stomped his right foot to tell Douglas to pick up the pace, and just as Douglas did, the handle on the wagon twisted in his hand. The top slab of meat fell onto the ground, and the wagon righted itself with a twist of the handle by Douglas.
Although he had expended a lot of energy by the time he reached the peach grove, there wasn’t time to rest. They were too close to the crime scene and needed to move on. They took turns pulling the wagon, stopping about two miles away, surrounded by switch grass, redwood pine, and assorted maple trees.
They rested before setting up a kitchen. John collected branches and brush to use for fire to cook. Douglas made a makeshift rack to place the skillet on. When the meat that Douglas had selected was cooked, John’s eyes grew brighter with each chew of the smoked ribs and bacon.
With their bellies full again, the decision whether to move on or get rest was made for them. They’d set up camp by their kitchen and hoped that no one would trail after them. And even if they did, they’d decided to either beg for mercy or find a way to kill anyone who dared stop them on their ultimate destination.
Patches of moonlight peeked in between the canopy of trees. They sat with their backs resting against elm trees about eight feet opposite each other.
John did not have many contemporary friends in the slave cabin neighborhood. He spent most of his time working for the Billingslys; hunting; improving his reading, writing, and language by reading books his school and others had given him and the dictionary Monsieur Billingsly had given him; and talking to the pastor who believed John was a fast learner. He tended to be a loner and enmeshed himself in solitary activity, like wading in Blue Pond, or fishing and hunting.
John gazed at Douglas’s face, studying it as though he was determining whether Douglas was a friend or foe. In reality, he was neither—he was a companion that Ann had asked to shepherd her boy to Mount Hope. Perhaps that would change later, John thought, but for now he’d just have to trust his companion.
With each step away from Richmond, John was learning more about his companion: he knew Douglas liked to crack his knuckles; he knew Douglas snored; he knew Douglas liked to laugh when he farted. But he really didn’t know much about what kind of man he was.
Determined to get to know Douglas a little better, he’d decided to listen to the rhythm of his words, judge the veracity of his stories, and observe the movement of his body, at least as much as his seventeen-year-old mind would allow.
Douglas removed his gray socks and black brogans. He looked at his swollen feet and began to massage them with his hands to relieve the pain. He was not muscular in build but stood on oak tree legs that powered the rest of his body. He was about a head taller than John, not counting his tall mop of uneven and thin, curly black hair.
John stood up and moseyed a few feet from where he would sleep, pulled down his dark brown corduroy pants, and drained his bladder. As he pulled up his drawers and pants, he smelled an unpleasant odor that he thought was coming from his groin area. He scratched himself with his left hand, then lifted that hand to his nose, not wanting to believe he’d identified the source of the odor. “Whew!” he said, shaking his head.
Douglas watched, laughing. He reached inside his haversack, retrieved a tin container, and tossed it to John.
“What’s this?”
“It’s for the problem you having with your privates,” Douglas said, still laughing.
John opened the container and took a whiff of the white powdery substance. He arched his eyebrows.
“Just take a little bit and put it down there.”
John’s eyebrows stayed raised.
“It’s crotch powder. You’ll smell a lot better.”
John tossed the powder to Douglas and plunked down where he’d sleep. The light from the moon shined on John’s smooth, unblemished, youthful face. The sclerotic coating of John’s eyes was as white as fresh fallen snow, but there was a fear that resided in his eyes that revealed a scared young man who was on the road many miles away from his mother, traveling with some stranger, someone he hardly knew.
It was high time for him to know the inside of Douglas. “Mama mentioned something about how you needed to leave Richmond; something about you wanting to go to Alabama. Is that true?”
“Yeah. I got people there.”
John detected there was more to Douglas’s answer. “But why leave Richmond?”
Douglas told John that he had been born in the middle of the War, as far as he knew. His mother’s sister later told him that his mother died just after giving birth to him, which he was told later was the day Lincoln freed the slaves. He knew nothing about his father. His aunt raised him until she died when he was nine years old, whereupon he was bounced from house to house, staying with people who were willing to care for him as a lodger. And now he was bouncing around again, this time with John. Douglas had had to fend for himself since he was nine years old.
Back in Richmond, Douglas had just purchased a few pieces of fruit from a huckster who’d set up his pushcart on a street corner. With his bag of fruit in his hand, he turned around and accidentally bumped into a young white girl behind him. The girl stumbled backward, losing her balance, but didn’t fall. Douglas told her he was sorry, apologizing profusely while looking around to see what danger he’d brought to himself. He saw no one who would report him. He thought he’d escaped danger, only to learn that the girl’s father heard about it because a white man who had seen Douglas around town had witnessed it.
The girl’s father was furious that his daughter didn’t tell him about the assault. Although the girl had no interest in being embroiled in a legal proceeding, her father wanted to see that the colored boy understood the gravity of his transgression. Douglas was arrested on assault charges. He was released from custody and expected to appear at his trial, but he figured there was no need to wait for something that was sure to go against him; a jail stint would crimp his plans to go to Alabama.
Douglas’s situation was not new to colored men. The South had formed the cult of sacred Southern womanhood and with the end of slavery and the beginning of Negro freedom, Southern whites had intensified their belief in the fixed formula that required the affirmation that Southern womanhood had to be protected against colored men. Thus, any colored man who mocked the formula by looking at, gesturing to, or touching a white woman often risked a trial with a foregone jury verdict. If for some reason the justice system didn’t work as intended, then justice for the accused colored man was often left to the offended white man.
“Man, that’s some story. No wonder you needed to leave,” John said.
“Ann said something about you may be in trouble with the boss man,” Douglas said, referring to Billingsly. “That true?”
John’s heart skipped a beat and he heard strange sounds stirring in his belly. He wondered what his mother really knew. He bowed his head and sent out a silent message: “Mama, if you can hear me, know that I didn’t kill her.”
Since Douglas had shed some light on his travails, John figured it was his turn. Perhaps it’d serve as a bonding moment to trust each other. Or if fate saw otherwise, Douglas would use it against him at some point. He rolled the dice and opened up to Douglas, telling him that he needed to flee because Monsieur Billingsly would surely sic his henchman and hounds on him for killing Madame Billingsly, the virago of Richmond who had tormented him.
“Did you?” Douglas pressed.
“No. I’m not crazy. She fell down the stairs in her house.”
“What’d you mean?”
“I was walking down the steps in front of her, and she accidentally fell on top of me.”
Douglas guffawed. “You touched a white woman?”
Douglas’s crack caused John to picture Madame Billingsly partially clothed under the elm tree where she used her position of authority to compel John to touch her. A pensive look took hold of his face.
“Something wrong?” Douglas asked.
He couldn’t tell Douglas about what happened under the elm tree. “No,” he said, shaking his head.
John emitted a big yawn. Douglas didn’t ask any more questions.
They soon fell asleep, rose at dawn, packed their haversacks with an abundant supply of peaches and smoked bacon, and trudged south.
Although Richmond faded into the distance with each step, thoughts of Ann and the Billingslys stayed parked in John’s mind, one beset growing shame and guilt.