Ann had made it a habit of not going to sleep until John had returned home from work or wherever else he’d been. Tonight was no different.
She sat at the wonky kitchen table looking through a magnifying glass, struggling to read bits and pieces of last week’s Richmond Dispatch under the lantern’s dim light. Although she could only read the simplest of words, she delighted in asking others the meaning of a certain word. As she finished scratching out m-u-n-i-c-i-p-a-l on crumpled foolscap, she heard footsteps at the front door.
No sooner had John opened the door, Ann said in a soft voice, “It’s late, John; where have you been, son?”
“Nowhere, Mama; just out.”
Ann looked at the pine box in John’s left hand. “What’s in that box you holding?”
“Just some fishing tackle.”
He was getting irritated with the questions, but he knew he’d have to remain calm, despite his whirling mind and aching stomach.
“Okay, son.” She looked at the rifle John held in the other hand. “Where’d you get the rifle?”
He was ready with another concocted answer. “Old Man Wilkins gave it to me. He said it was for my birthday. Told me to shoot some rabbits with it.”
She looked at him askance, and John was troubled by it. He didn’t like lying to his mother, but there was no choice.
She touched his forehead, which was dappled with beads of sweat. “Son, you … your head’s warm.”
Another question and more irritation. He didn’t answer.
Noticing an odor on his mouth, she sniffed twice. “What’s that smell?”
He ignored the question again. He still had the nasty taste of bile lodged in the back of his mouth.
Her eyes drifted downward, stopping at the hole in his pants.
He realized what she was looking at. He sat down at the kitchen table as the weight of her questions and eyes was too much to bear.
Ann put a lantern on the kitchen table, then poured him a dipper of water, hoping it would erase the foul odor emanating from John’s mouth.
He had rehearsed it on his run home from Billingsly. He had now sawed off the chains that bound him to Richmond. It had to be said: “Mama, you told me that I’m a man and that I’ll be moving on soon. That soon is here.”
“I know, son,” she said quickly, failing to grasp what John meant by here. We can talk about it tomorrow. It’s late; go to bed. I’ll fix you a nice breakfast in the morning. I’ll make your favorite—fried apples.”
John couldn’t wait until the morning to talk about it. Nothing could change his mind. The sooner he left the better. He had to escape Monsieur Billingsly, who’d have lots of questions for John, as Billingsly knew John had wide access to the mansion while he worked there. “Ma, it’s not safe here for me. I need to leave.”
He’d never told her about ever feeling his safety was in jeopardy. He had to get to the bottom of it. “Tell your mama what’s the problem, son.”
His departure time was set; Tyrone was scheduled to return to Billingsly in two days from his business trip. “Just trust me, Mama. It’s best that I leave.”
Given John’s age, Ann suspected that John’s departure had been coming; that didn’t mean she was prepared to accept it. She emitted a cry for help from the Lord, as she often did when in pain.
She felt the familiar twisting and harsh pang in her stomach. John failed to ease her mind as to the reason he felt he needed to flee. She’d be prepared to accept it if she had more notice and they had talked about it over time. She was losing her family once more, and she had no control over it. She thought of how she had sobbed for weeks after Moses had been sold to a slave owner in Kentucky, how she had lost her will to live after losing her twin daughters.
“Where will you go?” she asked haltingly, her voice cracking.
Although he had imagined this day would arrive in one form or another, he never developed a plan. “Just go; don’t know where,” he said with a bewildered look on his face.
“Son, can’t you wait a few days?”
His dark and foreboding eyes spoke for him. He was leaving, and his mother couldn’t talk him out of it, not for a week, not for a day.
As John had done no planning, Ann thought of something to help with his impending departure from the only place he called home.
Douglas popped in her mind. Douglas had once told Ann that he wanted to move to Alabama to live with an older half brother. He was a handyman around town, someone who had demonstrated exceptional carpentry skills. He was a few years older than John. He’d helped build the tiny addition to Ann’s cabin that had later served as John’s bedroom. She allowed herself to believe, along with her prayers, that Douglas’s maturity would help them in their travels. Like Moses in the Bible, Douglas would shepherd John to some promised land.
“Douglas been talking about leaving Richmond to go to Alabama. Maybe you can go with him. Your Mama would like that.”
John nodded to acknowledge that his mother was scared and that she had just offered a good piece of maternal advice.
“If you make it to Alabama, try to find Cousin Riley.”
“Who’s Cousin Riley?”
“I saw Cousin Riley a few times on old man Windsor’s plantation. My mama called him Cousin Riley. Don’t know why we called him Cousin Riley. I just figure we related somehow. Heard he was sold down the river years ago.” She paused, then added, “Last I heard, he’s somewhere near a place called Mount Hope. “If you find him, son, that be good for you; maybe we share his blood. You hang on to that hope.”
“I wish I could have met your mama. Tell me her name again.”
“Esther. She was a quilter; they say the best one in all of Richmond. She made that quilt you use to stay warm at night. I wished she had lived long enough to see my handsome boy.”
John smiled and the darkness that lived in his eyes and heart began to dissipate.
Ann gave more information about John’s grandmother. “I remember Mama telling me not to upset the white man. She didn’t want the white man to sell us like they sold Cousin Riley. I remember Mama saying she heard he ended up in Mount Hope after being sold to another slave owner.”
“When was he sold to another slave owner, Mama?”
“Don’t know. Thinking sometime before the fighting started.”
John had no siblings, and no cousins, aunts, or uncles that he knew of. This Cousin Riley was an unknown putative familial bond. Ann was his sole family. The possibility of finding someone who was related to him, of seeing someone else who had some of his blood, excited him. “Describe him, Mama?”
“Can’t recall too much about him. He’s years ahead of me. I do remember Mama telling me that he has a long, nasty scar on his right cheek. Mama said Windsor cut him with his fishing knife because Cousin Riley sassed him.”
“You never told me these things.”
“Lots of things I ain’t told you. Some things just too painful for a child to hear.”
“Mama, I’m not a child.”
Ann protested. “You my child.”
k
Early the next day John and Douglas sealed the deal—they were going to Alabama, everything be damned; they’d leave around dusk to get a head start on Billingsly and his hounds that John thought would be sure to follow.
Ann hated to see John leave; he’d just turned seventeen, young enough to need his mother’s protection and advice, yet old enough to start his own life, his own family, like she did at a young age. She was sixteen and Moses was twenty-one when they jumped the broom on Windsor’s plantation.
After John had finished the breakfast Ann made for him, she kissed him on the right cheek, then squeezed him tightly.
John went to his room and sat on his bed. He adjusted the light in the lantern on a stand, then put his head in his hands. His heart was laden with guilt from the wreckage he had left behind at Billingsly, but he knew there could be no turning back. Whatever lay in front of him was worth the risk of staying alive. He was ready to test his wings, even given the circumstances, and hoped his mother’s abiding love would keep him going.
He broke his contemplative mood by packing his haversack with a few clothes, Billingsly’s pocket watch, and sundry things he thought he’d need for his uncertain trek. Ann had told him she’d give him some of his favorite victuals for the trek. After a half hour of packing, a small, blue-gray mouse crept warily up to John’s feet and began sniffing his brown brogans. John picked up the mouse with his right hand and stared at it, feeling the mouse’s heartbeat, wondering if he were old enough to leave his mother. He raised the mouse to his nose, able to feel the vibrissa tickle his nose and hear the faint whistle of his breath as he looked in the mouse’s coal-black, beady eyes, hoping for confirmation that he was doing the right thing by leaving Richmond.
He bent down and shook his hand to dislodge the mouse; it settled on the dirt-stained pinewood floor. The mouse continued to sniff at John’s feet even as John walked around his eight-by-ten-foot bedroom. John knelt down on his knees and cupped his left hand, and the mouse settled comfortably in his warm hand. It was best for the mouse to move on, just like him. He set his new friend loose in a large crop field several yards from the cabin, hoping that the mouse, like himself, would be able to survive a new life.
He returned to his bedroom and removed the flasks from the pine box, shoved the box under the bed, and put the flasks inside his haversack. He rubbed his hands across the brocade of his grandmother’s green-and-white, floral-patterned quilt, which had kept him warm for so many nights, as though he were trying to caress his grandmother’s spirit, asking her if the course he was about to set out on was the right one. He shook his head several times; he had to leave.
Standing up, he hefted his haversack over his right shoulder feeling its weight, wondering whether he could carry the freight on a long and uncertain journey. He abruptly took the haversack from his bag and tossed it on the bed, lifted the flap, and retrieved the flasks from one of its pockets.
The engravings were enigmatic to him. As if to make them appear more discernible, he traced his right hand over one of them. They meant nothing to him. He had claimed his prize at great sacrifice only to have no understanding of its value. He espied a small muslin poke sack in the corner of his room and placed the flasks in it. He pulled the hemp strings tight and put the poke sack in his haversack.
With the .22-caliber rifle in his hand, he stood in the door frame watching Ann rock in a rickety rocking chair.
As if she heard him standing behind him, Ann said, “Son, something on your mind?”
He stepped quietly in front of Ann. “Ma, don’t be afraid to use this,” he said with his left arm outstretched, the rifle a foot away from her.
Ann had no use for such a weapon. “I ain’t never shot nothing. Don’t plan to start.”
“Okay, Mama, but it’ll be in the cockloft in case you ever need it.”
He worried about his mother, who had always taken care of him, his sisters, the Billingslys, people of all stripes, caring little for herself, asking little in return. She was all magnolia and no steel. It made sense why she couldn’t harm anyone.
Ann stopped rocking. She struggled to get up. John helped her stand, and she led him to the front porch where John helped her sit. She patted the warped floorboard for John to sit next to her.
It was a warm and still May night, a propitious time to leave. Douglas would be coming soon. And Billingsly would soon return home to discover his dead wife; he’d return with questions for John and Sam and anyone else who could possibly shed light on Laura’s death.
“Mama, what’s my name?” he asked, looking with his head down while he tapped a loose plank with his left foot.
Before she could respond, John pointed to the meteor shower racing across the sky.
“Beautiful, like my son’s heart.”
Bile percolated in John’s esophagus when he heard his mother’s praise.
After the shower grew faint, Ann rested her head on John’s shoulder and said, “Your name John Moses.”
“No, Mama, I mean my last name. Don’t I need one?”
Ann paused. She thought of the Windsor name, the surname of the man who’d owned her as chattel. “Reckon you do, son. I was told they attached Windsor to my name. Then Billingsly got on there, too. You want Billingsly?”
“Never will I take that name!”
“What if I need to find you some day? Someone’ll need to know your name.”
John scratched his head; he was stumped. He conceded that his mother had a point, so he decided to accept it for now. “Okay, Mama, for now.”
“Good, son. That make your Mama happy. Maybe you change it later.”
“You’ll know, Mama.”
She wagged her narrow, right index finger at him. “That be right by me, son, but don’t you dare mess with John Moses. Them my names I gave you.”
“No, Mama, I won’t touch John Moses.” He paused then said, “I’ll make it back someday for you to tell me about Moses. I know he’s not my pa. I just want to know why he was so special to you, that’s all.”
Ann wiped the tears with the back of her weathered hands. “Yes, someday.”
Ann tried to rise from her seat on the porch, but the arthritis in her back forced her back down. John stood up and helped lift her to her feet. “That’s my boy—handsome and strong.” She stopped in place, held her back with both hands as to try to settle the throbbing pain. Satisfied that the pain had diminished, she grabbed John’s hand, and they toddled slowly inside their cedar log hovel.
John kissed his mother on the cheek. She threw both arms around him, and hugged him for about two minutes, squeezing him tight.
“Let me look at your face,” she said as she pushed away from the embrace, only to see fear in her son’s eyes. She straightened his galluses, then tucked his shirt in his trousers and retied his twine rope belt.
She sat in her rocking chair and began singing:
Steal away, steal away
Steal Away to Jesus!
Steal away, Steal Away home
I ain’t got long to stay here
My Lord, He calls me
He calls me by the thunder
The trumpet sounds within-a my soul
I ain’t got long to stay here
Green trees are bending
Po’ sinner stand a-trembling
The trumpet sounds within-a my soul
I ain’t got long to stay here.
“Mama, you’re singing that song again.”
Ann replied, “I know. It’s a song I first started singing years back when I was a slave.”
“But Mama, you are not a slave anymore.”
“I know, son. Your Mama was happy when Father Abraham gave us freedom.”
It was a somber song to John, just one more thing that made him detest slavery, a life he never experienced, but saw wreckage from every day. “You’ve been singing it a lot, Mama.”
“I started singing it more after your sisters left.”
“But I’m not dead, Mama.”
“I know, you as lively as ever. But you the only family I got left now, and you going away, far away, to find a better life somewhere.”
“I’ll come back for you, Mama,” he said, desperate to tell her about how he’d try to return to look for the fortune buried on the Billingslys’ property somewhere. He’d make it all right for her someday. She’d have a better house, better clothes, good food to eat, and more. But the thought quickly became too distasteful. He knew how Ann felt about the Billingslys.
“Lord willing, I’ll be here waiting.”
But she knew she couldn’t count on it. So many dangers lurked ahead of him, she figured. She was left with the heavy hope that she raised him well and he would do well for himself someday, somewhere. She didn’t have much of anything to give to John to take with him but her counsel, which she’d giving him since he was old enough to understand it.
“Son, you remember when you was younger, we walked to the polls so our people could vote? Pastor Jeremiah told us that it’s our duty to vote. Kept saying we citizens of this country. You was about ten years old, I reckon.”
“Yeah, I remember. It was cold when we walked all that way; my feet got cold. I remember when we got there some fools called us nasty names.”
She knew he may not be able to foresee the future per se, but she hoped he’d find a way to help enable it. “Wherever you call home someday, I want you to vote, son. We free now, and you got the right to vote. Teach your children and grandchildren to vote. We need to be counted. Make your voice heard; do something in the community for your people.” Ann had more instructions for her son. “You gonna see a lot of things on your trip down south—good and bad. Just trust in the Lord; he’ll see fit to get you there.”
She then thought of the times that she’d been belittled by slave owners and other people who crossed her way. Her son had to handle things differently than how she’d handled them; she wanted her son not to allow people to run over him. “No one can make you feel less than a man if you don’t allow it.”
She realized she wanted something from her sole remaining offspring, something that she no longer had, a family. “Son, it’s just me, you, and the Lord now. When you leave, I will cling to the Lord; he won’t abandon me. Someday, and you’ll know when, you find a good woman and have lots of children, you hear me?”
“I’d want someone like you.”
Ann allowed her lips to form a slight smile.
Ann rarely smiled. Laugh lines found no place on her face. It was like the nerves surrounding her mouth were frayed, preventing her from smiling or laughing.
“Mama, why don’t you smile more often?”
“Not much to smile about.”
She wanted him to remember her history because it was his, too. “I told you a lot about our family, the life I had before you came along. Don’t you ever forget these things. Carry them with you. They make you a better man. To remember where you came from is a part of where you going, son. You hear me?”
John nodded several times.
Then, for the first time that John could recall, Ann flashed him an enormous smile, revealing a mouth beset with a slight overbite and crooked teeth. He closed his eyes like a camera shutter to imprint his mother’s smile in his brain, an image he’d hope would last a lifetime. But he knew that beneath Ann’s smile lay a long rip current of despair.
He stared at the strands of Ann’s hair that hung from her ubiquitous tignon. It came to him in an instant. He decided to take a piece of his mother with him on his long journey. “Mama, I want a piece of your hair to take with me.”
Ann felt her hair, moving her left hand around her head, feeling the strands of hair not covered by the tignon.
She smiled again, but this one was not so wide. John returned the smile.
She went to her bedroom and used her sewing scissors and cut off a small piece of her hair from the back of her head. She opened a small drawer and removed a rusty locket that someone had once given her. She opened it and placed her hair in it.
“Here,” she said, handing John the rusty locket holding her hair in it.
John smiled and put it in his pocket.
John knew Ann would soon find out about Laura; he debated with himself yet again whether to tell her what happened.
“Mama, even in this mean world we live in, I never killed anyone in my life. Had no reason to.”
Ann narrowed her eyes in bewilderment, then gave John another piece of counsel. “Bible say to guard your heart. Do that.”
She reached over and grabbed John’s left hand and prayed as he sat on his bed next to her.
Her soul was in retreat once again, and her heart sank with the heavy burden of losing yet another member of her family. Her head was hangdog, and her eyes welled with tears as she continued to sit on the bed.
But before John and Douglas would flee, John had scouted Billingsly to see if there was evidence that anyone had been there. Each step toward Billingsly had increased his dread; the bile that rose in this throat could not be stifled, and he vomited the rabbit stew, corn pone, and biscuits Ann had made for him. The area around Billingsly was eerily quiet except for the horses and cattle that moved about. He saw a farmhand in the distance who was milking a cow. John had never seen him inside of Billingsly, so he dismissed the thought that a farmhand knew something about the mistress of Billingsly lying lifeless on the floor. John had thought for a fleeting moment about returning to the scene of the crime to move the body to a less conspicuous location or even placing her in the comforts of her king-sized bed. But he knew he would not be able to stomach looking at her again, all caused by his theft.
As he turned to return to his slave cabin to prepare to leave in a few hours, he heard the clacking of hooves off in the distance. He panned the area and descried a stagecoach cruising toward Billingsly.
Damn.
He sprinted home, collected his things and Douglas, and began running quickly to escape his executioner. Ann wasn’t there and he couldn’t say goodbye for the last time.
Damn.