Chaneysville Incident (66 page)

“She told them how she spent the first years after she learned the truth angry, troubled, hating more and more, hating not just the white man who came but all whites, and eventually, all men; not showing it, not even really feeling it, but rather feeling nothing, none of the stirrings that young girls are supposed to feel. Young men courted her—she was pretty and, more important, light-skinned—but found her cold. Not innocent and proper—they would have expected that—not even timid or prudish, but cold.

“She told them how, when she was eighteen years old, still a virgin and disinterested in becoming otherwise, she discovered a kind of passion; she met a man named William Still, the son of a woman who had twice escaped slavery, once by purchase, once by flight, the second time leaving two young sons behind. She saw how Still felt guilt at not having been one of them. She admired the way he used that guilt, dedicating himself to helping those who ran away. And she joined him, seeing in the work they did a chance to pay back for the struggle she had not had. The work helped her, brought her into contact with people who knew slavery, and from talking to them, she had come to understand how her mother might prefer genteel prostitution.

“And so, she told them, it became possible for her to know true passion, to love the man who came in the spring of 1850, offering to give Still what seemed amazing sums of money for the work of the Underground Railroad, providing Still would make efforts to foster and encourage the escape of slaves, especially women and children. Still was wary, but she saw the brilliance in the man’s plan, and the daring in it. And she saw the dedication and determination in his eyes. And so she began to work with him, to plan with him, adding her ideas of detail to his broad outlines. She worried that he would reject her, because she was a woman, and because she had not known slavery. At first he did; but not, it seemed, for those reasons. It seemed he had reasons of his own. And so she went about the community, asking about him, finding that he was a man who had come, it seemed, from nowhere, probably from slavery, and who had become a spokesman of sorts, a respected man of property, and that his wife had been killed by a white man’s hand and he had given his money away and disappeared, coming back years later with a hardened face and a wagon full of whiskey. By then he had come to accept her, to respect her, and the plans were no longer his plans amended by her, but plans created by both of them. And so it made sense that she would fall in love with him, that she would give to him the virginity that she had not so much been keeping but simply not been interested in losing.

“The plans, she told them, grew. Their love had grown. The man went back into the hills to make his whiskey. She worked on alone, except for the rare occasions, once, twice, when he would come to her for a night, or two nights. Then they planned how, when spring came, they would make their first trip south. But the time came when she knew that was never going to happen. Because she discovered she was with child.

“She had, she told them, cried when she knew. For by then she knew how much she needed to go, to make final payment for the debt she felt she owed. But she knew that by the time he was back it would be too late—her condition would show. But unless she went, unless she made that final payment, she would never be right for herself, or right for him. So she went alone, to steal away a few to freedom, and in doing it, buy her own.

“But, she told them, she had been a long time paying. For in southern Virginia, on the banks of the Nottoway River, she was taken. One of the women she had exhorted to flight betrayed her and the three others she had already enticed away, and all of them, betrayed and betrayer—the woman’s master judged she had not spoken up as quickly as she should have—were sold.

She had been taken, she said, to Alexandria, and brokered by the firm of Franklin & Armfield, and later transported to New Orleans, where she was purchased, at a premium because of her light skin, by a young blade, the son of a rich planter, who wanted her for a concubine. But she escaped that fate by avoiding the consummation until her pregnancy was impossible to ignore, and then telling the young man and his father that the child was fathered by a man as black as the ace of spades. Neither of them believed her. But they dared not take the chance that a light-skinned woman, known to be the concubine of a planter’s son, would produce a dark child. And so they put her to work in the fields.

“And then, she told them, she had paid the price in truth. She learned what it meant to be a slave: to rise in darkness and go to bed in darkness, to have the entire daylight of her life the property of someone else; to buy nothing, not only because she had no money, but because it was against the law for her to carry out even so simple a transaction; to hide her knowledge of reading and writing, to stand and listen to the master and his son, using words she was not supposed to know, discussing her fate and not be able to show anything; to do exactly what she was told in the way that she was told, to forget she knew better ways; to eat coarse food and drink brackish water; to beg permission to void her own waste; to see the man who had wanted to make her his plaything approach on horseback and, even though she had thwarted him, to lower her eyes and look only at the mud on his boots; to accept, when he chose, for no better reason than that he chose, the sting of his crop.

“That, she told them, had not been so bad. But in time she gave birth to her child, and then she really came to understand what slavery meant. Because there was nothing she could do for him. She could nurse him and protect him, but only so long as the Master willed it. She realized that she was her son’s only protection, and that her only protection was to appear to accept slavery.

“And so she had adopted the poses of slavery. Covered the light in her eyes with drooping lids, the intelligence in her mind with halting speech, the aching in her soul with loud professions of belief in the tenets of the perverted Christianity that was fed to the slaves like corn meal and fat meat. She accepted her role: she was a woman and a slave, and such women take men and bear children, breed for Massa; she took a man and had two girls, covering the longing in her heart with the pumping of her thighs. And as a reward for her diligence, she was taken from the fields and placed in the house.

“That, she had said, had been her downfall. Because she looked back at the fields and was thankful to the Master for taking her from them; in feeling that, she accepted his right to put her where he chose. And as soon as she did that, she became truly a slave. She found her new role, her new status, obscenely comfortable. She gave her mind only to the care of the Master’s house and the children that were, in reality, the Master’s property, and she gave thanks each day that he did not sell them, or her, or her man. She stopped longing for a life of freedom and for the man she had left, not because she had forgotten either, but because she had forgotten herself; she had forgotten how to long for anything. She went through her days, doing her tasks without hatred, without bitterness. She no longer needed to hide anything, because there was nothing in her to hide.

“And then one day the Master had died. That was not a terrible thing, but it made a difference. Because now the son was the Master. She saw him eyeing her, knowing that he did not desire her as he once had, but that he still hated her. And she saw him eyeing her son, the child who, by his lightness of skin, signified her triumph of deception.

“And so, she told them, she had begun to reject slavery. It had not been easy. For she was surrounded by people, black and white, who thought of things a certain way. The wrong way, she knew, but she had forgotten what the right way was, was not sure that she had ever known. And so she began to practice. She practiced remembering all the things she had allowed herself to forget: her mother, the life she had led, the man she had loved. She was unfaithful to the man who, in normal society, would have been her husband, not with her body, but with her mind, thinking, when he came to her, of the other man, trying to remember how
he
had touched her, what
he
had said to her, what
he
had wanted of her, thinking of it as infidelity because fidelity was a concept denied the slave. She went through each day outwardly unchanging, doing exactly what she was told to do in exactly the way she had been told to do it, but thinking what she would have done, how she would have done it, had it been her choice. She practiced defiance, putting dirt and bits of soap and manure in the food she cooked for the whites, thinking of things to say to them that could have been taken two ways. At the same time, she worked at appearing the model slave, better than before, anxious to please, bright and cheerful, but she worked at not believing her own deceptions, at keeping close to her mind and heart the things she really thought and felt.

“It had, she told them, taken months to throw off the servile habits of action and thought. And as she pushed those habits away from her she came to appreciate more the other slaves, those who had been born into slavery, who had never known anything else, to realize how difficult even the smallest act of defiance must have been for them; not so much to do it, but to simply
think
of it. She began to listen to the others talking in the evening, not passing the time as she had before when she was thinking as a slave, but listening to them, searching among them for the strongest, the most determined, those who might run with her. When she found them she encouraged them, allowed them to encourage her. She needed them. Because she was still not sure she could do what she had set out to do.

“But one night she had become sure. It was a midsummer night, she said, bright and clear, and she had been sitting in front of her cabin, her head tilted back against the logs, looking up in the sky, trying to recall the things she had learned about navigating by the stars. She had gone through the constellations, naming them, remembering their mythical significances: the Scorpion; the Twins; the Goat; the Archer; the Great Bear, the Small Bear…and then she saw, not a constellation, but a single star. The North Star. Saw it not twinkling fitfully but shining bright and clear and steady. And then she knew she
could
do it; all she needed was the will.

“And so, she said, she began to work at strengthening her will; she started taking risks. She stole from the kitchen, taking food and utensils, a kettle, a skillet, a cup, hiding them in the woods; taking a table knife and working, at odd moments, to grind it to a sharp edge and point, hiding it in her own cabin, knowing that if it was found there she would be flogged, sold, perhaps killed. She took to slipping about the house, listening at doorways, sneaking into the Master’s study and reading his letters, learning his plans, stealing books from his library and reading them and then, rather than returning them, burning them, creating, in that shrinking inventory, the thing that would give her away eventually if her will should falter.

“But it did not. She made her final selections from among her fellow slaves, choosing not the young women who spoke angrily but lowered their eyes and bent their necks when the Master approached them, who made themselves seem smaller and softer when any man approached, and not the young men who bragged of acts of defiance, who claimed to have spoken sharply to the overseer, to have told him this and that, but who struck out with their fists, not at the overseer, but at each other and at their women and their children. She rejected them. She rejected the others too, the ones who feigned illness, who hid from work, who looked constantly for ways to rise in the plantation hierarchy. Instead she took the ones who were quiet, who calmly went about their business, doing their assigned tasks with more diligence than was required, who accepted praise with no joy, who bowed their heads when they had to but who never lowered their eyes. She did not choose the strongest of body, she chose the strongest of mind, the strongest of spirit. An old man, a young girl already with child, a childless woman.

“And then she had taken the final risk; she revealed herself to them. She placed her future in their hands, because she realized that, in some ways, she still thought like a slave, still believed the things the slavemasters had told her, that her brothers and sisters were incapable of their own salvation, happy to live the life of indecision, unwilling to give it up, ready to betray anyone who would force them to make any decision at all; and she knew that if she would win her freedom, she would have to reject the white man’s truth. And so she took the final step in her own liberation. Then she waited, going through the days in constant anticipation of the moment when they would come to her and take her and she would know that she had been betrayed.

“But she had chosen well; she was not betrayed. And so, she said, when she saw a letter to the Master discussing the sale of a young boy of nine, quoting a price of ten dollars a pound, she told the others the time had come. And then she told her man, not saying she was going, saying only that she was afraid that her son would be sold, asking what he would do. The answer was clear: nothing. And then she said she might take the child and run away, telling him in the night, watching him the next day, knowing that he was troubled, waiting for him to decide, knowing already what he would say, knowing because she knew what kind of man he was, but having to wait for him to make his choice.

“Then her voice had grown quiet, her eyes had seemed to reach out and embrace the flames, as she told how she gave the signal, telling the others that this was the night by the song she sang as she came down from the house—ʻSteal away, steal away, steal away to Jesus’—and how she waited through the evening meal, waiting for her man to speak, and when he did not, lying beside him, thinking. And how he had spoken, finally, telling her that she did not need to worry, that he had spoken to the Master, that the Master had promised not to sell the boy. She said she did not believe that, that she had made up her mind, that she would run. He said that he would stop her. And she told him that he would not, that he was not enough of a man to stop her, waiting to see what he would do. He accepted it. He said that she would never make it alone. She said she was not alone, that there were others. And he said nothing for a long time. And then he asked their names.