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FROM The Kenyon Review
Think I heard the angels say,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
Stars in the heaven gonna show you the way,
Follow the drinkin’ gourd.
—Black American folk song
After escaping from slavery in Alabama, he went back willingly into the bleak, macabre world of slaves once again. Five years ago, in 1850, he’d fled the nightmare of bondage, with his wife, Adele, traveling by night from Mobile to Kentucky. It had been a hellish journey marked by weeks of hiding, disguises, last-minute escapes, and name changes. But after reaching Paducah, Kentucky, he kept moving and established himself in southern Illinois as a versatile craftsman based on the skills he’d learned as a bondsman. His name was Christian Fowler and, as Thoreau had written five years earlier about living in Walden, Fowler had developed during his thirty-five years as many “skills as fingers on the hand.” He was a saddlemaker and carpenter, a barber and a cook. Of course, he was still a wanted man in Alabama, a fugitive with a $200 bounty on his head. There were padderolls and soulcatchers eager to collect that money if he showed himself anywhere near his old master’s place. But why in the world would he do that? He had slipped away from bondage—the whippings, the sound of the daylight horn calling him to work—and built a decent life for himself from scratch. It was funny to him sometimes how slave owners could never understand why black people ran away. Their doctors even concocted a disease to explain this behavior—drapetomania, a sickness that supposedly made slaves flee their shackles and chains. Others just saw runaways as criminals—as people who had stolen themselves from their masters. At any rate, he was safe from all that in Illinois, and now Adele had given him two fine sons. Just the same, he had to go back to his borning ground, because never a night passed, as he and his family enjoyed the relative freedom of their new home, that he didn’t have survivor’s guilt and screamed himself awake when he saw in his dreams the faces of those family and friends he’d left behind when he cut dirt from the plantation of Captain William Boswell.
This would be his last trip. That was what he promised Adele. No more placing himself in danger after he guided to freedom her cousin Ida, a young woman around eighteen—perhaps two or three years younger—with chestnut-brown eyes, a mole beneath her ear like a grain of pepper, her hair arranged at the back in broad basket plaits, and her one-year-old baby, Sara. They’d been traveling light for weeks through backcountry that smelled mucilaginous and faintly sweet, through villages and tobacco fields, bringing only a little food, and Fowler carried his double-barreled shotgun, his bowie knife, and a canteen filled with old orchard to steady his nerves. As always, he followed that reliable beacon in the night—the Big Dipper stars that were shaped, if you looked at them carefully, like a wooden gourd pointing to the pole star. “I’ve always been lucky,” he’d told Adele when he left to rescue her cousin. “The North Star ain’t ever let me down. And God takes care of me.”
But maybe not this time.
When they reached Mississippi, they’d covered a little more than half the distance to their destination, and he realized something was stalking them. Two men, soulcatchers, were a half mile away, taking their time so as not to startle their prey, giving the runaways a little breathing room to relax and let down their guard before taking them by surprise. And he knew these two bounty hunters. Oh, yes, he even knew them by name. They were brothers, Caleb and Joshua Weems. He could smell them on the wind the way a rabbit did a hound. Now and then he could see their campfires. And they were good, those two, cagey and ruthless. The best manhunters in Alabama, who knew how runaways thought—it was rumored they had a little Negro blood, had at one time themselves been slaves—and they, with their savage tempers, had littered this landscape with slaves that resisted capture, wasting their lives like water. They’d done this ancient pas de deux together before. The eternal dance of death between the hunter and the hunted. They were in his dreams or—more precisely—in his exhausting, emotionally draining nightmares since he escaped from Captain Boswell.
Not far away, Fowler saw, off to his left, a lichened, twelve-stanchion barn, large, dark, and imposing, floating in the mist. He waisted Ida’s short body with his free arm and guided her and the baby there over stumps and mudholes, miry places in thigh-high weeds, and brush-whipping tree branches. The entrance to the abandoned barn was boarded over. Fowler tore away the planks of plywood, pulling so hard the muscles in his neck bulged, and cutting his right hand on a rusty, square nail. Inside, the air felt tight, dead. Old farm equipment covered in gossamer-thin cobwebs was everywhere, as was an odor of musty hay and straw and old oats gone bad in their bins. The place was quiet as a temple, its silence floating hither and yon over old horse collars, sawhorses, scrap metal, and lumber. He could hear Ida moan from a corner where she’d sat down in her heavy, homemade buckram skirt and was rocking the baby back and forth. She asked him if the men following them were going to take Sara and her back to Captain Boswell.
“No, honey.” His voice was waxy, unused in hours, hoarse. “I won’t let them take you back there.”
Her eyes searched his face. “What about you?”
“We’re going to wait here until them men are gone. But you have to keep that baby quiet. If she starts crying, they’ll know right where we are.”
“I think she’s hungry,” said Ida. “I can try to feed her.”
She undid her blouse and turned her back to him. He was touched by her modesty and decided to step away as she breast-fed the baby, moving cautiously, his arms stretched wide. Night pressed against the window, but the hazy mist had distilled, and he had a good view of the direction death or anything nocturnal might come in the darkness. Pieces of that same darkness were clinging to his congested mind. He could feel how tired he was of running, how light-headed from hunger. The gash where he’d cut his bloody hand throbbed. He needed rest. The temptation to just lie down in darkness, close his eyes, and let his mind sleep forever was overwhelming. But he remembered that new life, the home he’d made in Illinois, the caring woman whom he loved more than his own life. And their beautiful children, William and Zachary, whom he loved beyond measure and prayed they would grow up free, knowing nothing of slavery in a place where you could go-as-you-pleased, a world so much better than the one he and Adele had somehow survived every day—even though, like a soldier, he still felt the trauma of once being enslaved. The damage, the fear of being recaptured, was still there like scar tissue. And a feeling that he didn’t deserve freedom if everyone wasn’t free, or maybe that being free was temporary, an illusion, and might be snatched away from him at any time. These thoughts, he knew, were mad. No one should suffer them. That was why he came back for Ida and baby Sara. But they would never know freedom and an end to the madness if a crying Sara gave away their location. For an instant—and it was an instant that made him hate himself—he remembered in the hindmost corner of his mind how Captain Boswell was oftentimes fond of quoting a poet named William Blake, whose words now trumpeted through his thoughts: Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires. That thought made his scalp crawl. If it came down to that, did he have the grit for silencing the baby—forever—to save Adele’s cousin and himself? From the satchel slung over his shoulder, Fowler removed the canteen, then took a long pull, shuddering as the whiskey plunged down his throat pipe into his belly like a burning wire. Strong drink erased the image of infanticide in William Blake’s poem from his mind. Drink dulled the pain in his hand and made veins stand out on his temples. He, the hunted, lumbered back toward Ida, feeling the darkness like a blind man, fighting his terrible exhaustion, found with a painful crack the edge of a mule’s harness with his shin, suppressed the urge to swear, and kept his eyes to the left of her, because she was still trying to nurse a mewling baby who might at any moment let fly with a cry that would condemn them both again to beatings and chattel bondage.
“You gotta keep her quiet, okay?”
“I’m tryin’.” Her voice was shaky. “But she’s teething, and I think she caught her death ’a cold. You know, from all the nights we had to sleep on the ground when the weather was wet. Here, feel her forehead.”
She lifted the baby toward him. Sara was burning up beneath his fingers. He took the canteen from his satchel and handed it to Ida. “Spread some of this on her gums. That might he’p to quiet her some.” Then he said, looking into her eyes, “There’s something else—something really important—I need for you to do for me. You remember that song I taught you? I want you to sing it for me. Real soft. Just whisper the words to me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t question me.” He drew his mouth down, and looked hard at her. “I have my reasons.” Then he cut the sudden harshness in his voice by half when he saw how Ida’s face, like those of everyone who lived enslaved, always relaxed into a beautiful yet fragile mask of sadness. “That song will save your life,” he said. “Please, just sing it.”
And so she did, her voice soft-breathing, gently singsong, so beautiful a contralto, controlled and clear, that it lifted him out of himself, reminding him of how his wife often sang as she worked, and he almost forgot the life-or-death urgency behind his need to make sure she got every word right. “Sing that last part again for me, all right?”
“All right.” She lifted her head. “The river bank will make a mighty good road / The dead trees show you the way / The river ends between two hills / There’s another on the other side / Follow the drinkin’ gourd where the great river meets the little river.”
“Good. Very good.”
Just as he took a little heart at this, as something in him relaxed, as he started to think with a smile of getting back home, there came from baby Sara a cascade of chest-shattering screams that filled the barn, filled the night outside, and filled Fowler’s ears like explosions. It felt to him as if she cried for an eternity, and he stared—just stared—helplessly at the child as Ida tried to quiet her, unbuttoning her blouse again, revealing her small, pear-shaped, brown-nippled breasts—this time Fowler didn’t look away. But he was coiled up inside, his teeth grating, silently trying to will the child into silence, thinking, Be quiet, be still, noticing only now that his right hand had picked up a clump of wood from the floor to silence her squall. Was he about to kill the child? He couldn’t tell. But Ida finally got the baby to suck. The wide-ribbed barn was quiet again. He let the wood slip from his hand.
He stepped back to the window, his knees feathery, and sat there like a statue with his head tipped and shoulders crushed down for a long, long time, emptied of hope. Emptied of all thoughts of himself. Everything was simple now. Had the hunters heard those high-pitched, earsplitting screams? He was certain-sure they had. There was no way to repair what the baby had done, no more than he could unring a bell. Like as not, the slave catchers were on their way. He was dead already. And he knew what he had to do. What any righteous, right-thinking person in this situation would do. It was time to dance again with devils. After gathering himself together, he opened his satchel. Silently, he removed two shells. Silently, he carefully examined his shotgun, snapping both triggers and checking the firing pin before loading both barrels and closing the breech. And silently, he waited, there at the window, where the moon was an hour higher since he’d last looked at the sky, feeling peace, a kind of gallows serenity he could not describe, as if suddenly he could accept and welcome whatever came, that he had no fear and was equal to any task, no matter how difficult or distasteful it might be. He grasped the shotgun by its carved pistol grip, the stock placed under his arm against his body, the butt pushed into his armpit. As he pressed the barrels more firmly against his left leg, his thoughts lapsed to a line from John 15: Greater love hath no man . . . but the words broke off when he heard away in the night the breathing of horses. He could feel his face stretch at the sound, then sure enough, he caught a glimpse of two travel-stained, spectral shapes materializing out of the mist. Fowler shot a glance toward Ida, one finger pressed to his lips. When the men dismounted from horses with rags tied to their hooves—a gray Medley and the other an Appaloosa—he could see, in a splash of silver moonlight, Caleb Weems, husky, hairy-necked, ponderous but quick as a trout, his head rammed forward, craning his neck to cock a look toward the barn door, and right behind Caleb was his toad-like, bandy-legged, jug-eared older brother, Joshua, with hair like moldy hay, carrying an owlhead pistol, half of him covered by a horseman’s cloak white from road dust, both of them advancing toward the barn like wolves. Ida was standing now, holding her daughter on her hip. Over his shoulder, he flung a whisper to her, No matter what comes of me, no matter what you see next, follow the North Star.
Then he waited, his teeth set, bone against bone, as Joshua noisily blew his nose in his hand and in a roosterish voice told Caleb to check the barn. Waited, being now the trapper and the trapped, as the barn door creaked on its hinges. Now it opened, and Fowler made a hissing intake of breath. It opened, he saw Joshua step inside, and the hunted blew the hunter to kingdom come. He bolted outside, clambered over Joshua’s shattered body, and, his chest pounding, rammed the stock of his shotgun against the side of Caleb’s head. He ran south, swift as a deer. Ran so hard he felt he was nothing but legs and burning lungs.
After a moment, his running slowed to a few steps and he stopped, facing round, pausing to make sure an enraged Caleb, bent on revenge for his brother’s death and not thinking clearly, was pursuing him. When he saw the hunter closing the distance, he—the hunted—smiled bleakly. If something happened to him, if he could not outrun or outwit Caleb, then his argument was that he had known happiness and freedom before—let that do—and Ida and her baby would know it now, because “Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd” was much more than a song. It was a black American charm with back-and-hidden instructions in every stanza. A coded message only Negroes on the run could know. A detailed map for someone to follow to freedom. The first river was the Tombigbee, which would take them to Mobile Bay. The two hills were Woodall Mountain and a smaller one at the highest point in Mississippi. Earlier, he’d marked the dead trees with charcoal as a sign. The ribbon of river on the other side was the Tennessee. Its left-hand side would take them to the Ohio River and to Paducah, Kentucky, where his wife, Adele, would be waiting. Yes, he thought, as he started to run again, so fast his feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground, yes, they would be fine. And that meant, one way or another, he would be fine, too.