A Light to My Path (11 page)

“Where do you think,” William said angrily. “Back for more slaves. This is what Massa does for a living. Some folks trade cotton or tobacco, our massa trades slaves.”

The long journey around Florida by steamship, then up the coast to Virginia took a few weeks. They stopped in dozens of ports along the way to refuel or change ships, but since Coop hadn’t purchased any slaves yet, Grady had plenty of time to practice his fiddle. Sometimes he would hear a new tune while he attended Coop in the ship’s salon or in one of the many hotel lounges they visited. Grady would hum it over and over in his mind, memorizing it, then he would try to pick out the melody on his fiddle when he returned to his quarters. He was becoming quite good, and he knew it. But sometimes he would catch William watching him with an expression on his face that Grady couldn’t quite read. It wasn’t jealousy or disapproval—it was as if William knew something that Grady didn’t.

“What’s wrong?” Grady asked him one night. “Why’re you always looking at me that way when I play?”

“No reason,” he said with a shrug.

“This bothering you? Want me to stop playing?”

“No. I’m used to it.” William’s frown deepened. “The slave Massa Coop had before you played that fiddle, too.”

A shudder passed through Grady when he saw the grim expression on William’s face. “What happened to him? Massa sell him?” Grady asked. Their eyes met for a moment before William looked away.

“Reason he’s gone ain’t got nothing to do with playing the fiddle,” he finally said.

Grady found no comfort in his answer. William’s uneasiness made him afraid—and certain that he was hiding something. “Why didn’t he take this with him?” Grady asked, holding up the instrument.

“That fiddle belongs to Massa Coop, not him. Now quit asking me questions.”

One afternoon as their ship steamed into yet another port, Grady looked out of the porthole in Massa Coop’s cabin and saw the familiar steeple of St. John’s church pointing above the trees.

The stately capitol building came into view on the hill, then he recognized Tredegar’s Iron Works sprawled near the shore. They were landing in Richmond. He was home.

Tears blurred Grady’s vision, but he quickly blinked them away, unwilling to miss a thing. He heard William gathering all Massa’s belongings together and setting the bags near the cabin door, and Grady knew he should be helping. But he couldn’t tear himself away from the view. Maybe Mama or Eli or someone he knew would be waiting for him at the dock. Maybe he’d be allowed to go home and see them tonight and tell them all the things he’d seen and done. Wouldn’t they be surprised to hear him play the fiddle?

“What’re you staring out that window for?” William asked. “There’s work to be done.”

Grady scrambled to help with the luggage, eager to be ashore all the sooner. It seemed to take forever for the ship to ease close to the dock at Rockett’s Wharf, longer still for the gangway to be secured so the passengers could disembark. Grady stood at the rail, longing to race over to Broad Street and run up the hill toward the church. He had ridden that way in the carriage with Eli dozens of times, and he knew exactly which street to turn down in order to get home. He could picture Caroline’s Big House on the corner, Eli’s garden and the stables behind it, the loft above the kitchen where he used to live. He ached to set foot on shore and run. But as the first passengers began to disembark, he slowly became aware that William was eyeing him, studying him carefully as if trying to read Grady’s thoughts.

“This is where you come from, ain’t it,” William said slowly. “Richmond, Virginia.”

Grady didn’t answer. Suddenly William dropped Massa’s suitcases to the deck and gripped Grady’s arm.

“Don’t do it, boy!” he said in a low, angry voice. “Don’t be a fool!”

Tears filled Grady’s eyes in spite of all his efforts to stop them. It was impossible not to think of his mama or to long for home. He was so close, only a few dozen blocks away.

“You carry the bags,” William ordered. He hefted a third satchel in his left hand so he could keep his grip on Grady’s arm with his right hand.

Grady bent to lift the heavy suitcases and strained to carry them. By the time they went ashore, hailed a carriage, and loaded everything on board, Grady’s arms ached from his burdens—and from William’s grip. He saw William whisper something to Coop, and Massa ordered the driver to go to the slave pen, first, instead of the hotel. William led Grady inside and locked him there for the night—in the same pen where his long imprisonment had begun. William went to the hotel with Massa.

Coop spent a month in Richmond, purchasing slaves, but Grady remained locked behind bars the entire time. Little by little, the cage filled with angry, bewildered, despairing people. Their stories matched his own—they’d been cruelly ripped from their homes and their families and left to wonder what would become of them, or if they’d ever see their loved ones again. Every time Coop locked a new slave inside the pen with Grady, it brought back his own pain and the memory of the terrible day he’d been torn away from his mama. Grady knew exactly what lay ahead for all of these people, and the knowledge made him sick at heart. William had brought the fiddle to him, but Grady wouldn’t allow himself the comfort of playing it. His rage slowly swelled and grew as if it were a living thing, planted inside him. The knowledge that he would have to bear a lifetime of watching his fellow slaves being bought and sold filled him with despair. He couldn’t live this way. But Grady was a slave, and there was no hope of ever being set free from this life until the day he died.

When Massa Coop finally sailed from Richmond with his load of human cargo, Grady couldn’t look back at the city that had once been his home.

That afternoon, Massa Coop stood in the center of the hold beside Grady and William, surveying his cargo. “It seems like it’s getting harder and harder to find first-rate slaves these days,” Coop said. “We’ll have to fix up this bunch, William. Get Joe to help you so he learns how to do it.”

“Yes, Massa.”

“What’s he making us do now?” Grady asked after Coop had left.

William gestured to a middle-aged, gray-bearded man slumped against the bulkhead. “See him? He’s looking too old. Massa can’t get a good price if folks think his working days is about over. Get a bucket of water and some soap. His whiskers are gonna have to come off.”

Grady spent the next few hours, while on route to their first port, helping William shave beards and mustaches off all the men whose whiskers had turned gray. Then they rounded up all the men and women with gray threads in their hair so William could give them short haircuts. He showed Grady how to brush boot blacking through their hair, afterwards, to dye it black. Few of these slaves knew their real age, so William instructed them how to answer if a buyer asked how old they were, always making them as young as he dared. Helping Coop get rich through this deception made Grady heartsick.

“Get your fiddle tuned up and ready, Joe,” Coop ordered when they reached their first port. “You’re going to do some playing for me.”

Grady obeyed, taking the fiddle out of the case and tuning the strings for the first time in weeks. He wondered if Coop planned to hire him out for parties the way he’d hired out Beau in New Orleans, or if Grady would have to perform in Coop’s hotel room while the planters drank bourbon. He hoped he’d be hired out. Better to fiddle for white folks than help Coop sell slaves, even if Coop would be keeping all the money Grady earned. But instead of taking Grady to the hotel, Coop led him down to the slave pen and locked him inside with all the others.

“All right, play something lively,” Massa Coop ordered. “William, get these Negroes on their feet. I want them singing and dancing and looking happier than this by the time my customers arrive or you’ll all feel my wrath. Every one of you.”

Grady stood frozen in shock as he watched Coop stride away, unable to believe what he’d been asked to do.

“You heard him. Start playing,” William told Grady.

“I don’t want—”

“Did anyone ask if you want to?” William said fiercely. “Massa knows you can play, and by heaven you’ll play! He ain’t whipped anyone in a good long while, and he’s just itching for a reason to. I’m making sure it ain’t me—and you better make sure it ain’t you. Now, play!” William turned to the other slaves, gesturing angrily. “Rest of you gonna start dancing and looking happy, if you don’t want a beating.”

Grady wanted to smash the instrument against the wall. It had been his sole source of joy and pleasure, but Coop had suddenly turned it into a means of torture. He felt duped—conned into learning to fiddle and blinded to the true reason why. But now that Coop knew he could play, Grady didn’t dare refuse, whether he felt like it or not.

He lifted the instrument with shaking hands and played one of the first tunes Beau had ever taught him, hating the sound of the bow as it grated against the strings, hating the feel of the fiddle beneath his chin, hating what Coop was forcing him to do. This was what the slave before him must have done. Grady finally understood the grim knowledge he had read on William’s face as he’d practiced all those months.

All that day, Grady had no choice but to play song after song, repeating his small repertoire of tunes over and over while the slaves danced, until all of Massa’s customers had come and gone. By the time Grady finished the afternoon’s work, his entire body was shaking with rage. But even then his work wasn’t finished. He was forced to swallow his anger and accompany William to Coop’s hotel where their massa spent a long evening playing poker with three other gentlemen. It was very late, the stars shining in a midnight sky, when the poker game ended and Grady walked back to the slave pen with William for the night.

“Why didn’t you warn me?” Grady demanded, finally giving voice to his rage. “You knew he was gonna make me play for them—you knew! Why’d you let me practice and learn how if—”

“Shut up!” William gave Grady a shove, knocking him off the sidewalk into the street. “If Massa ever find out I warned you not to learn that fiddle, he’d whip us both. Don’t you understand that yet? Don’t you understand that one wrong move and our life ain’t worth a nickel? Just shut up and do whatever he says! Don’t matter what you want, and it don’t matter what I want.”

“I hate this life,” Grady mumbled.

“Well, nobody’s asking your opinion.”

The slave pen was several blocks from the hotel, but William seemed to know the way by heart, weaving through the maze of back lanes and warehouses near the docks. No one guarded them, and although they passed a few carriages and pedestrians, no one seemed to notice the pair of slaves walking freely through the streets.

“Ever think about running away?” Grady asked quietly. “Be easy enough to do, with you knowing your way around all these cities like you do.”

William glared at him, then looked away. “Ain’t worth taking a chance.”

Grady saw the slave pen ahead and all his pent-up frustration swelled inside him again. “I hate Massa Coop! I hate working for him this way! You and me are helping them filthy white men when we ought to be helping our own. Must be something I can do to make Massa sell me along with the rest.”

“Don’t be a fool,” William spat. “This is a good life compared to field work on a plantation. We’re getting plenty of food, wearing decent clothes, the work ain’t that hard. As long as we’re careful and nobody try to escape, we’ll be fine.”

“But I can’t stand this anymore! And now, making me play the fiddle …” His throat choked with rage. “How can you live this way?”

“Being sold is worse. Why do you think these folks is always so upset about being sold South? Talk to the ones that come off the plantations, sometime. Ask them what that life is like. Then you’ll know how good you have it.”

“This ain’t a good life. I don’t want to be working for Massa Coop no more. I know he’ll whip me if I try and run, but maybe if I make him mad enough he’ll sell me afterwards.”

William halted and spun Grady around to face him. Fear filled his eyes. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you ever be doing that! He won’t sell you, boy. He spent all this time training you, and he won’t ever forgive you if you betray his trust and try and run off. He’ll whip you until you die!”

A chill ran through Grady, but he pushed his fear aside. “I don’t believe it. He paid good money for me, and I know how much Massa hates losing his money.”

“No, sir! You came cheap because you’re so young. You had no skills before Massa’s teaching you. He ain’t selling you, boy, so get it out of your head.”

“There must be some way to get free …” Grady mumbled.

William gripped his shoulders, shaking him. “You want to know what happened to the slave Massa have before you? Massa killed him! He whipped him to death because he try and run off!”

Grady battled a surge of nausea. It was easy to imagine Coop being carried away in such an act of violence, a grin of triumph on his face. But as shocking as the truth was, Grady’s stomach rolled with hopelessness, not fear.

“That’s why I don’t try and run,” William said. “I seen what Massa done to him. He made me stand right there and watch him die.” William shoved Grady forward again, and they walked the last dozen yards to the pen in silence. A guard dozed on a chair near the gate. William woke him up and asked to be locked inside.

“What was his name?” Grady asked as they settled down to sleep in the inky darkness.

“Huh?” William asked gruffly. “Whose name?”

“The slave Massa Coop had before me. The one who played the fiddle.” The man Coop had killed.

“Joe,” William said hoarsely. “His name was Joe … same as you.”

Chapter Seven

Charleston, South Carolina 1857

“I never rode on a boat before,” Kitty said with a nervous laugh. She felt giddy with excitement and more than a little scared as the steamer chugged down the Edisto River toward Charleston. All the familiar sights of Great Oak Plantation—the only home Kitty had ever known—disappeared as the ship rounded a bend. “The floor sure is wobbly, ain’t it, Missy Claire?”

“It’s called a deck, not a floor,” Missy replied. She seemed bored with their journey to Charleston and impatient to arrive. But, then, Missy had been to the city before; Kitty hadn’t.