EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I rose, drew up water for the washing, and cleaned myself. Walking up to the white palace in those small hours, I thought of all the pieces that had been assembled before me, the bread-crumbs along the road. I thought of that old African king, who had flipped it, and danced into the waves, as my grandmother had done, and with the water-goddess’s blessing danced his people back home. And what did it mean that I saw my mother there that night with Maynard, dancing on the bridge, patting juba, dancing over and under the water, flipping it?
Even if Thena came around and decided to go, it would take a powerful memory to move her. So that morning, after serving my father breakfast and taking him out for a survey of the property, while he rested in the parlor, I walked up into his study, where he kept his correspondences, and scrawled a few lines in care of the Philadelphia Underground. I had to be careful, of course. I made use of a local alias and directed my missive to one of our safe-houses on the southern docks of the Delaware, and by code and misdirection let it be known to Harriet what I would now be attempting. I do not know what I then expected. And more, I did not know, even with family in the balance, what side Harriet might take in the struggle. But she had said that should I find myself in need, I was to make it known. And I had done so.
With that done, I went and collected my father and went with him through his various correspondences—almost all of them now originating in the West. His eyes and hands had by then grown much too weak, so I read them aloud, took down his responses, and then prepared them all to be sent out. When that was done, we walked back to his room and I helped him change into a suitable set of work clothes. After this, I went down into the Warrens and changed into my overalls, and met him in the garden out behind the house and together with spade and fork we worked until the sun had just begun its descent. We walked inside, changed again, and then I served my father his afternoon cordial, and, as was his tradition, he soon fell fast asleep. It was now time.
I walked upstairs and then into my father’s study, and looked at the mahogany highboy and thought back again with shame to Maynard’s game of rummaging among things that were not his own. It was an absurd shame—nothing in this house, on this land, indeed on this earth, could be called the rightful property of Howell Walker. And yet, being Quality, being a pirate, this never stopped him from laying claim. It was only natural that Maynard do the same. Perhaps I should too.
When I pulled at the small bottom drawer and saw the ornate rosewood box, its silver clasps gleaming, I cannot say I knew what was inside. But when I rubbed my hands over the top of the box, I sensed that should I choose to open it, nothing could ever be the same again. And so it was.
What I saw was a necklace of shells, and in an instant I was sure that it was that same necklace that I had seen the night my brother died, shaking from the neck of the dancer, shaking from the neck of my mother. And what I did now was bring the necklace to me, reaching behind my own neck to put it on, and when the hook-and-eye clasp locked into place like a lost jigsaw, a wave rippled out through my fingers, through my wrists and arms, into the deepest part of me, so that I stumbled back. When I regained myself, I knew that the wave, which was only then subsiding, was the force of memory. The memory of my mother. And now, all that I had known as the words of others formed into portrait and pictures. The fog and smoke of my years blew away, so that I saw my mother in her full form, in all our short years together, and too, I saw her end, and I saw exactly how that end had come and I saw precisely who had brought it about.
I tell you, it took all of my restraint to not rush down those stairs and into the garden where the spade and fork were still planted in the cold ground, pull them out, and relieve my father of that brief splash of life that remained in his mortal vessel. And that I did not is only testament to what I felt then at stake, to those whom I loved, who I then knew were counting on me to remember, and to remember I had to live.
I closed the box and shoved it back into the highboy. Then I tucked the necklace of shells under my shirt. I walked back downstairs and saw that my father was now awake, and looking out the window I could see that evening was upon us. It occurred to me then that what felt like mere seconds had been much longer. I went out to the kitchen and saw that my father’s meal was being prepared and remembered that he was not to be dining alone that evening. I walked up the first course—bread and terrapin soup—and found waiting there at the dinner table with my father Corrine Quinn. She never betrayed anything that evening, but at the end, as they repaired to the parlor for tea, she mentioned to me that she believed Hawkins wished a word with me.
I walked outside and down to the stables, well anticipating what he would have to say. Hawkins was tied to the Virginia Underground and thus to the word of Corrine Quinn. It was her figuring, no doubt, that if she could not stop me, perhaps someone who had once seen the world as I had would make me understand. It was now late. The air was crisp and cold. A bright moon hung high in the sky. I found Hawkins seated inside the chaise, puffing on a cigar. When he saw me, he smiled and held out his hand to offer me a seat.
“I know why you here,” I said. “Ain’t nothing you can say to change what’s coming.”
“Huh,” he said. Then he reached into his pocket and said, “My only notion was to offer you a cigar.”
“That ain’t your only notion,” I said.
“Naw, it’s not.”
He handed me the cigar.
“My feeling is that I have been hard with you,” he said. “It is by virtue of my position, but it is also by cause of what I have seen and how I come to the position. You understand that me and my Amy, we were pulled out by Corrine, yes?”
“I do.”
“And you know that we was at Bryceton before she came.”
I nodded.
“Then I guess all I want you to know is how much hell passed on that place. It was not the normal, small stepper. It was not just the Task. Edmund Quinn was the meanest white man this world has known, I am convinced of it. And you see how it is now? You see how Bryceton put on a face whenever the Quality is about? Look like Virginia of old, don’t it? And then when they are gone we are back to our business.
“Bryceton always been that way—two-faced—but Edmund Quinn’s business was different. Many years I watched him pose as a man of God and honor, toasting at the socials, sending his money to the alms-house, money made off our backs. Forgive me, Hiram, but I cannot speak of what he did. What I will say is that it was such that I would have done anything to be out from under him, to save me and mine from that man’s wrath. And that chance only came from Corrine Quinn.
“I am thankful for Corrine. I truly am—thankful for what she done for my sister and me, and for all and every soul that come through the Virginia Underground. Ain’t too much I would not do in her service, for it was her plotting that rid us of that demon and, more, put us upon this new task of ridding the greater Demon he served.”
Hawkins leaned back and puffed on his cigar so that the tip glowed orange against the dark and wisps of white smoke flowed out.
“So when she come to me and say that one of our own, who was brought out of the Task, as so many have been brought out, was now planning to go against her, to go against us, and she ask me to speak to him and prevail upon him with truth and wisdom, I could only oblige.”
“Ain’t no point,” I said. “You don’t know what I seen.”
But he kept talking as though I had not spoken.
“I seen a lot of folks come through that Virginia station, and man, do they ever and always bring they troubles right along. Nothing ever go as it should on rescue. You seen it yourself. Bland into Alabama. That fellow who brought his girl with him last year. You know what I mean. It never play out like you draw and figure it. And when you out here in the field, it can be hard on you when folks do not act as you need them.
“Take you, for instance. What we heard was that you would be the one. You would open the door. You would snap your finger or twitch your nose and whole plantations would vanish.” Hawkins laughed to himself. “Ain’t quite work out as such.”
“I have tried,” I said. “I have done—” But once again he talked through me.
“But I think this is the lesson in it all. We forget sometimes—it is freedom we are serving, it is the Task that we are against. And freedom mean the right of a man to do as he please, not as we suppose. And if you have not been as we supposed, you have been as you were supposed to be.”
Now Hawkins was silent for a moment and we sat there and smoked, the cool crisp wind blowing through us.
“I don’t know what you done seen, Hiram. I don’t know what happened to them folks you bent on bringing out. And I would like to tell you, very much, that what you are doing is not what I would do. But I cannot speak as such in any righteous way, for who can say what I would have done to bring myself out, to bring out my Amy? You are free and must act according to your own sense. Can’t be according to mine. Can’t be according to Corrine.”
“Don’t matter none,” I said. “Look like they don’t want out anyway.”
Hawkins laughed quietly.
“Yes they do,” he said. “Everybody do. Ain’t a matter of if they want out. All want out of this. It’s just a matter of how.”
That following Sunday, I met Thena early that morning to deliver the washing, which was folded and boxed in crates. We did the rounds in silence, and when I returned the chaise and tied up the horse, she walked off without a word. I followed her up into the tunnel and found her in her old room, where she’d been living for the past week.
“Well?” she asked sardonically, looking up at me.
“So that’s it, is it?” I said.
“Seem like it.”
“All right,” I said, and walked down to the Street. But the next day when I came up for my dealings with my father, she was waiting there just before the secret staircase that led out of the Warrens into the upper house. I could see by the lantern-light that she had been crying. When she saw me, she shook her head and wiped her cheeks.
“It is a lot to put on anyone, Hi. It is a weight. A whole other Task.”
“I know,” I said. “I have seen it all now, remember it all now, and I know.”
“Do you?” she said. “Because I do not think you do. I think you know your end of it, which is the end of the child stripped from the bosom. But do you know the other side of things? Do you know how hard it was for me to love you as I did, Hiram? To be in that space again, after what had been done to my Silas, my Claire, my Aram, my Alice, and my Kessiah. It was so very hard. But I seen you up in that loft, looking down, and I knew that mines was never coming back, and yours was never coming back, and if we had nothing between us, at least we had that.
“And I did love you, Hi. I did go back into that room. And when you left me there, when you run off with your girl, I cried myself to sleep every night for a month. I was so very afraid for what they would do to you. I could hardly believe it. I had lost another one—but not even to the Task. And so it must be me. Something in me that push everything I love away. It tore me up, something awful. Then you come back, except you do not come back alone. You come back with stories, stories from that room where I was violated and trespassed upon. And now you are telling me that I have to go back.
“What will I say to her, Hi? What will I be? What will I do when I look at her and all I can see are my lost ones?”
Her head was in her hand and she was weeping softly and quietly. I pulled her to me and put her head in my chest and we held each other there, and so began the countdown of our last hours at Lockless.
We could have in no way remained, not at Lockless as it was, nor at Lockless as we believed it to be becoming. Sophia had protections now, the protections of Corrine, who for whatever her demerits had always been true to her word. But for Thena, the advance of age and the assault upon her propelled matters forward in my mind. My father was by then so much in the dealing and trading of his people, doing all that he could imagine to stay afloat and dodge the debtors that seemed to swarm all around him. He could not continue as such, and he would not, though I did not know that then. But even if I had, there was a promise I had made to Kessiah and I was determined then to make it good.
I waited two weeks for some reply from Harriet. But receiving none, I deduced that I could expect no assistance, a fact to which I could muster no rage nor disquiet. I had been with the Underground only a year, and knowing the intensity of the work, I understood the need to preserve allegiances. I was on my own then, an Underground station all to myself. I had done it in the smallest way on the banks of the Goose, but to conduct as the old African king, as Santi Bess, as Moses, seemed fantastic. I had my memories, though. All of them. And I had the object by which I hoped to focus the energies of those lost-found years.
Our last night all together was the coldest of that season. It was a Saturday, so picked because it would give a day for me to recover myself and be back at my duties on Monday, arousing no suspicion. We gathered together what we would then have considered a feast—ash-cake, fish, salt pork, and collards. We ate quietly together and then sat in the cabin, where Thena had returned. And now Thena amused Sophia with stories of her own youth, and much laughter passed on this account. And then the hour came upon us. There was a hurried goodbye. I told Sophia to wait for me back at the quarters, and were I not back by dawn for her to look for me down by the riverbanks.
Outside the cabin, I looked up into the night, which was big and clear, the moon bright as a goddess, the stars all her progeny, all her fates and dryads and nymphs, spread out across the cosmos. Then I held Thena’s hand and walked with her out from the cabin, through back-paths of the woods, the earth snapping and crunching beneath us, until we were at the banks of the river Goose. I had not told Thena what to expect. I did not know how I could. All she knew was that I had found the route of Santi Bess and that Sophia had testified to its truth. So it was understandable that right here Thena, holding tight to my hand, stopped in her tracks, and when I turned to her, I saw that she was looking up, and when I followed her stunned gaze, I saw that the night sky that had, moments before, been so big and bright, was now obscured by clouds. Wisps of white fog were now coming up off the river, which was only evidenced by the sound it made gently washing up against the shore. The necklace of shells was warm against me.
And on we walked, taking a southern route along the banks, until the wisps rising gently off the river began to congeal into a stew of fog, and over top of it all, we saw, looming in the darkness, the bridge that had carried so many of us Natchez-way. We had gone the back way to avoid Ryland, which, even in its diminished and infiltrated capacity, still haunted the county. Now we circled around, until we were at the bridge’s approach, and looking out, I saw that the fog had thickened so that it seemed the clouds had fallen and enveloped everything. But not everything, for in the distance rising up from where the water must have been, or where the water used to be, I could see the blue glow of halos all around, ringing out like memory, and I now felt the necklace burning underneath my shirt, burning bright as the North Star. I pulled the thing out so that it was over my shirt.
It was time.
“For my mother,” I said. “For all the so many mothers taken over this bridge from which there can be no return.”
And then I looked at Thena, and I saw now she was softly illuminated in blue light emanating from the necklace of shells.
“For all the mothers who have remained,” I said, with one hand clasping hers and the other on her cheek. “Who carry on in the name of those who do not return.”
I turned back to the bridge now and began to walk, and as I did saw the tendrils of fog lapping over the bridge and the blue lights dancing softly in the distance on what would have been the far end, though I knew that night that no such end would be our destination.
“Thena,” I said. “My dear Thena. I have told you much about me, but I have never revealed the essence of all that has guided me, for all of it has been for so long tucked away, hidden in a fog as thick as what surrounds us. It had to be as such, for I was too young to bear what happened, too young to survive with the memory.
“You know that my mother is Rose. And my father is Howell Walker. I was the product of their outrageous union. I was not alone. My brother, Maynard, was born two years before me, to the lady of Lockless, and it was believed that his blood carried all that was good and noble of the old place and he should someday make for a wise and careful heir, for the blood was magic, science, and destiny. But I defied the blood, and so defied destiny, and I think now, knowing all I know, that it was my lost mother who made it so.
“For so long I could not see, could not remember, but I see it all now. Her bright joyous eyes, her smile, her dark-red skin. And I remember her stories of the world that was, stories brought across from water, stories she would share only at night, before bed, if I had been a good boy that day. I remember how the stories glowed in my mind, how they filled our nights with colors. I remember Cuffee, who tucked the drum into his bones. And Mami Wata, who lived in that paradise under the sea, where we would all arrive, after our Task, and find our reward.”
And now the fog gathered around us, and I felt the bridge disappear under my feet. Thena still had my hand, and I could feel the heat pushing out from the shell necklace all around me, and the waves that once marked the river were quiet and low.
“But Cuffee, with the drum tucked into his bones, was in the now time, in the midst of the Task. And my mother had the drum beating in each and every one of her bones. There were stories when she danced, maybe more true than stories in her words. I remember her patting juba with her sister Emma, how the shell necklace would shake, how the jar of water stayed fixed upon her head. And those were the good years, good years, under the Task. But the Task is the Task, and I do believe my mother, my aunt Emma, danced as they did because they knew what good there was could not last.”
And at this, they came, the phantoms that I had seen flittering about that fateful evening. They were all around us, and I could see that it was Holiday, a Holiday I remembered, when I was five, and it was still the high times of Elm County, and Howell Walker had sent demijohns down to the Street. And down near the bonfire, I saw them, my mother and my aunt Emma, trading dances back and forth. I stopped here and watched, for though the moment was conjured up by me, I wanted to savor it, but when I tried, I saw them begin to fade from me, fade like mortal life and mortal memory, and I knew that I must keep telling the story.
“The world changed. Tobacco fell. I remember the strange men with their worried faces. I remember the soil now hard and the old manses along the Goose left to possums and field-rats. And I remember that there were fewer uncles about; that cousins were off on long jaunts that did not end. And I remember how we were conducted over the bridge, off to Natchez. And I remember because I was there.”
And now, where the phantoms had once danced before us, we saw that these same men and women were walking before us, and where they had once worn looks of great joy, there was now sorrow, and a longing in their eyes deep as the river itself, and where their arms and their legs had once been dancing, I saw now that from ankle to wrist they were chained.
“I remember my mother kneeling at my bedside, waking me, and carrying me off into the night. And for three days and nights we lived out in the forests among the animals, sleeping by day and running by night. And all she would say to me was that we must go, ’fore we end up like Aunt Emma, and though I was young then, I understood that my aunt Emma had been sold. If we could get to the swamps, that was her aim, to get us there to get us away, for she could not run across the water like her mother.
“But they ran us down, Ryland did. Caught us and brought us back. And we were held in their jail in Starfall. I was there with my mother, and I could not wholly understand. And so lost was I that when my father came, I truly believed he had come bringing salvation. He was so soft, Thena. He held his hand on my cheek, and when he looked at my mother, he was pained.
“ ‘Why did you, go?’ he asked. ‘What have I ever done to push you so?’
“But there was only silence in my mother’s regard, and when he asked her again, still she would not speak. And I saw then that his pained look twisted into a rage, and what I then knew was that my father’s pain was not for my mother, nor for me, but for himself. For my mother had seen him, had seen through all the noble facade, and she knew what he was—this was what her flight meant—that she understood, that he would sell her, as sure as he would sell her sister, as sure as he would sell his own son.
“My father walked away and my mother understood. She took the necklace of shells from her neck and handed it to me and she said to me, ‘No matter what shall happen, you are remembered to me now. Forget nothing of what you have seen. I am soon a ghost to you. I have tried, best I could, to be as a mother should. But our time has now come.’
“And then my father came back with the hounds and they pulled me away from her, yelling, crying, pulled me from my mother and left her there to be sold off, while I was to be taken back to Lockless.”
And now, for the first time in our journey, I experienced Thena as a weight upon my arm. It was the oddest thing—as though some force were trying to pull her from my arm and drag her back into the hole. The words I spoke were a power. We did not so much walk as float across the fog. I felt the heat in my chest and the blue shine of light pushing out. I could not let go.
“We returned to Lockless with a horse, for that is what he traded Rose for. He had taken my mother from me. But it was not enough. He took my memory of her too, for when we left, my father in more rage than I had ever seen in him, he took the shell necklace from me. And I ran from him. And the next morning I ran down to the stables, where I saw the same horse my mother had been traded for, and there by the trough of water, I felt my first inclination of what I give to you now—Conduction.
“I sat there in the stables crying. An ache filled me until my skin tore apart, my bones popped from their sockets, and my small muscles ripped at the tendons. I clinched to hold myself in. But a wave roiled through me, carried me out the stables, past the orchard, past the field, back to my cabin.
“The pain of memory, my memory so sharp and clear, was more than I could bear, so that this one time, I forgot, though I forgot nothing else. I forgot my mother’s name, forgot my mother’s justice, forgot the power of Santi Bess, of Mami Wata, and turned my eyes to the great house of Lockless.”
Now a ripping feeling overtook my body, and Thena was such a weight that I felt as though my arm would be torn away, and all around me was fog and blue light.
“So many…so many gave me the word…but they could not give memory. They could not give story…”
My words were halting before me now. And I felt us sinking back…sinking into something, into the fog.
“But I shall remain…and Sophia shall remain…And the child, Caroline, shall know the North Star, which…”
And then I had no words. The heat in my chest stamped them out and I felt as though we had been hurled from a cliff. And as I fell a sheaf of memories fell around me like leaves in yellow September. I am eating ginger snaps under the willow. Sophia is passing me the demijohn. Georgie Parks is telling me not to go. I am falling down.
Then a voice came from out of the fog, for as the light dimmed in me, I could see another—green and bright—call out from the distance.
“…which holds that no man shall spread his net in the sight of birds, which we are, Hi, though we were taken from our aerie and installed in the valley of chains.”
Then I was floating, again. Thena had my hand.
“What is this?” she yelled into the fog.
The green light came closer and answered, “It is Conduction, friend. It is the old ways, which shall and do remain.”
I looked into light and saw her there, Harriet clutching her walking stick, and holding her other hand was, my God, Kessiah.
“I am sorry for the late hour, Hiram Walker,” said Harriet. “But it took some doing.”
I could not speak. I felt her words were a rope from which I now dangled. I looked to the way where Harriet had come. I saw, amidst the fog, the Delaware docks.
“It’s all right, baby boy,” Kessiah said. “Go back. We have her now. It’s all gonna be all right.”
There was more, I assure you. But I cannot describe the fatigue and pain that was then upon me. I would like to give you some final notion, some look upon Thena’s face at the reunion with her daughter, recovered from among the lost. But I was then falling again, tumbling, amidst all the memory of my life, tumbling back through years, through Micajah Blands and Mary Bronsons, tumbling through my many lives, through free lovers and factory slaves, tumbling past Brothers White, tumbling back into the world.