Flight to Canada (17 page)

“All right,” Quaw Quaw said. “I’ll come too.”

Jack laughs. “Okay, go with him. Be pursued by nigger-breakers, ‘paddies,’ Hays and Allen bloodhounds. Do you know that bloodhounds bite? They can eat five or six pounds of meat per day, and they’re not too particular about where it comes from, either. The woods are full of alligators and rattlesnakes. Panthers. That’s how your life will be. Afraid of the cop who stops you for speeding or running an intersection. Hiding in the bushes, depressed when the sky is overcast and you can’t see the North Star. Somebody always on your tail, and you know, Quaw Quaw, it’s hard to tell what you are.”

Quaw Quaw removes her hand from Quickskill’s and moves back a few bewildered steps.

“You’ve always complained about your lack of identity.” Jack goes on. “What do you think life with him will be like? They’d mistake you for a Negress of hazy origin. You’d have to scrub floors to keep him out of chains.”

“Stop,” Quaw Quaw says, placing her hands over her ears.

“Do you think it’ll be any different in Canada? The free population is getting too big. There have been incidents. Grave incidents. Students from the West Indies manhandled. Fugitives stoned. Canadian parents refusing to send their children to school with ‘coloreds.’ And have you ever heard of the Mounted Police? Vicious. After those huskies, you’d welcome the bloodhounds. Like wolves. They catch the flesh and won’t let go. They have mean habits. And don’t let the Prime Minister fool you. He may throw a Potlatch once in a while, but he’s still a white man. He sees himself as a white man in a white man’s country.”

“Race,” Quaw Quaw said. “Always race. You and Quickskill always boxing yourself in. What does race have to do with it? People are people.”

“Don’t listen to him, Quaw Quaw,” Raven cried. “Pirates have always undercut our dreams. Canada is beautiful. I hear that on some of the Canadian freeways trucks aren’t even allowed.”

Quaw Quaw walked to the table. She poured herself a glass of red wine.

Quickskill turned to Jack. “You try to worm your way out of all situations with your forked tongue. You and your graphs and your video charts that show your inventory immediately. It’s
unearthly,
the way you hold sway over the American sensibility. They see, read and listen to what you want them to read, see and listen to. You decide the top forty, the best-seller list and the Academy Awards. Breaking the legs of your rivals, making them offers they can’t refuse. Yes, you’ve moved up from looking for buried treasure of dubious value, Yankee Jack. Though I’m a fugitive slave, I’m still a better man than you. The hardships I’ve had to overcome. My mother sold down the river. My father broken for spitting into the overseer’s face. The whippings, the floggings.”

“That’s not what the revisionists are saying. Don’t forget, I read the
New Republic.
”

“Revisionists. Quantitative historians. What does a computer know? Can a computer feel? Make love? Can a computer feel passion?” Quickskill tears off his shirt. “Look at those scars. Look at them! All you see is their fruit, but their roots run deep. The roots are in my soul. What does a fucking computer know about that?”

“Do I look like a hairdresser to you? I’m a real man. This arm. Do you see this arm?” the pirate says, pointing to where a real arm used to be. “What do you think caused that? The Indians got ahold of me. They cut off my arm.”

“You think that’s manly. Huh? You think that’s manly. One day I outwitted thirteen bloodhounds.”

“Preposterous.”

“I did. Thirteen bloodhounds. They had me up a tree.”

“That can’t be. I’ve studied the history of bloodhounds since the age of William the Conqueror, and that’s just a niggardly lie.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it’s just a niggardly lie.”

“Why, you—” Quickskill rushes around the desk and nabs the pirate, lifting him up.

They begin to struggle. The pirate delivers a stunning blow to Quickskill’s jaw. Quickskill comes back with a thunderous right uppercut, sending the pirate reeling against the boat’s rails. Quaw Quaw begins to scream. The pirate comes off the rail with a crushing blow to the forehead of Quickskill. Stunned, Quickskill shakes his head, and before the pirate is about to follow through, knocks the wind out of him with a short, savage right to the stomach, and then … a splash! They stop. Quaw Quaw is nowhere in sight.  

They run to the direction of the splash and look over the rail. Quaw Quaw is swimming, moving away from the ship, in the treacherous rapids of the Niagara River.

Her clothes were in a small pile next to their feet. They yelled after her until their voices became hoarse. They yelled that mournful, pining Chloe yell. Chloe. Originally the haunting moan of the slave seeking his lost wife—Chloe.

T
HE PIRATE WAS SERVING
Quickskill out of a silver champagne goblet. Quickskill was sitting at the table, staring straight ahead.

“Now we’ve both lost her,” said the pirate matter-of-factly.

“You haven’t lost anything. What was she to you, Jack? Something you could sequin and polish. A subhuman pagan you sent to Radcliffe to learn to appreciate twelve-tone music when her people’s scales were more complex, to appreciate nature poetry when her people were one with the bear and the fish and the mountains and the waters, to appreciate uptown classical painting when one totem out front was as good as anything inside.” Quickskill watched Jack take a sip. “You can always write her off as a loss, like all the other items you ship out that get damaged or fall from trucks onto the freeway.”

“No, you’re wrong, Quickskill. I have emotions too. That’s what’s wrong with your argument. You think you’re the only one with heart, with soul. I have feelings. I am not desensitized. I love her, in my own way. That night when I first saw her and captured her during the raid on her father’s village, she was a beautiful treasure to me. And there was great opposition to our marriage. From both sides. I had to send out thirty stereos and fifty mink coats to cool out the gossip. And I didn’t object to her affairs. I knew that her blood wasn’t like mine: cold, Anglo-Saxon. She had a different temperature and often, well, I was too busy. But you … Whatever you had going between you, it was too deep.”

“Well, it’s late. Maybe I’ll climb into a canoe and go back to Buffalo. Stay in the Eagle Tavern for the night. Head out to Canada tomorrow.”

“You can’t return.”

“Why?”

“Swille’s men are all over town. They’re in cahoots with the Buffalo Anti-Subversive Squad. A.S.S. Those fat men you see hobbling up and down the aisles taking notes and talking into walkie-talkies at anti-slavery meetings. They’ll certainly lock you up in the Erie County jail for the night. Then take you back to ’Ginny. You don’t want to go back to ’Ginny, do you? I understand that the worst torture a black can get is ‘Virginia Play.’ Isn’t that what they call it? ‘Virginia Play.’ I’ll take you across. This yacht has a thirty-thousand-dollar motor.”

“You know, Jack, you’re not such a bad guy. What’s wrong with you? Why are you … I mean, so mean. Raiding villages. Plundering …”

“I was young then.”

“But even now. Why do you tie up things so? Not permitting a free flow of ideas.”

“Somebody’s got to do it. Emerson, Thoreau, Greeley. Soft white men. Swille had his points. I used to admire him. But now he’s behind. Still thinking that he can maintain his empire through flogging and killing. It’s made him depraved.”

“You’re telling me. He has this private projection room where he shows films of slaves being tortured, pilloried, castrated, and he and his guests sit around sipping black milkshakes; it …”

“You see.” He goes over, picks up the phone and orders one of his men to begin the journey toward Niagara Falls, Ontario.

“Would you like something to eat, Quickskill? Lasagne? Crêpe cannelloni? Besciamella? I have some fine pastas I can order up.”

“No, thanks.”

They finally reached the other side. A man was waiting to canoe Quickskill to the banks. Yankee Jack had phoned ahead. Raven put his gear over his shoulder. He picked up his suitcase.

“Well, this is it.” The pirate extended his hand.

Quickskill looked at it. “I don’t think so. Thanks for the ride, but if I ever meet you on free ground, I’m going to kill you.”

The pirate chuckled. “Have it your way.”

Quickskill climbs into the canoe. The man prepares to row to the shore.

“One more thing,” the pirate says. “I read your poem ‘Third World Belle.’ It was a giveaway. One thing, though. You said I buried her brother in a sealed-off section of the Metropolitan Museum. Wrong. It was the Museum of Natural History. One of the board members, an old friend, Captain Kidd, had called me in to be a co-consultant on an Oceanic exhibit they were giving. Well, her brother rushed past the guard and into the board room to complain about a statue they have outside of Theodore Roosevelt sitting on a horse while a black slave and an Indian are obsequiously kneeling next to it, like the President’s children. He said it was paternalistic. He said something about its being racist. He had a shotgun, and … well, we couldn’t have him waving that thing around. We had to, ah, subdue him, and I guess we used a little too much force. We didn’t want to carry out the body before all of those milling visitors and so we stuffed him and put him downstairs in the lower floor. He’s there now, standing in a huge log boat next to a shaman figure.”

Quickskill wasn’t listening. The boat began to move toward land. Soon Quickskill would be free. But he was too tired and depressed to greet this prospect with joyful exclamation of former slaves who reached this moment of Jubilation.

“While they were on my vessel I felt little interest in them, and had no idea that the love of liberty as a part of man’s nature was in the least possible degree felt or understood by them. Before entering Buffalo harbor, I ran in near the Canada shore, manned a boat and landed them on the beach … They said, ‘Is this Canada?’ I said, ‘Yes, there are no slaves in this country’; then I witnessed a scene I shall never forget They seemed to be transformed; a new light shone in their eyes, their tongues were loosed, they laughed and cried, prayed and sang praises, fell upon the ground and kissed it, hugged and kissed each other, crying, ‘Bress de Lord/ Oh! I’se free before I die!’ ”

R
AVEN QUICKSKILL WAS SITTING
on the terrace of the Queen Victoria Gardens Hotel in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. He had to wait for a while to get a seat. He was looking out on the indescribable American Falls. It was the closest spot to heaven on earth. People of all races, classes, descriptions seemed to be there, dangling their feet on the walls overlooking the slopes, which ran down to the two-lane highway and to the rails where people of all ages looked out at the wonder, the terrifying rapids below. Was all of Canada like this? Then he saw it. The crowd looked up.

He could make out some kind of figure in the mist. It was a figure on a tightrope. The figure seemed to be carrying a banner. Later he was to learn that the tightrope was eleven hundred feet long, one hundred and sixty feet above the water. People closed in about the railing for a closer look. The patrons of the hotel rose from their seats and went down the slope to look, too. He joined them. He was curious. People were shoving each other to get to one of the telescopes that one could employ, near the rails.

He found an empty one and looked through. It was a woman. She was in Indian clothes. She was coming across Niagara Falls: She was walking on a tightrope across Niagara Falls!

Sam Patch must be rolling in the grave, he thought. A woman doing this. She was doing what no man had ever done. She was coming across, backward. Quaw Quaw! He could tell it was she because he knew her backward quite well. It could be nobody else’s backward but hers. Carrying the banner, she did a somersault. The crowd gaped and murmured. It said
Ahhhhhh.
Later she said she would have made two omelettes, breaking the eggs in midair, but she figured that would be too anti-suffragette. All the way up in the air, doing housework. She kept coming across the tightrope as the crowd on both sides grew hushed. It even seemed that the Falls had hushed. It was an “eerie quiet.” Would she make it?

Of course, now he understood what she meant. Blondinist. He had thought it was some new rebellion game invented by the
Emancipation Bugle.

Blondin. French tightrope walker. “The Little Wonder.” Jean François Gravelet. Walked above the Falls on a tightrope in 1859. She had done him better. Her feat was like her life, between the American and Canadian Falls with a gorge underneath. They argued all the time, but this they had in common. He was the raven.
Ga! Ga! Gaaa! Ga!
They both were capable of producing cliff-hangers, as she was now.

She reached the other side and the crowd went wild, joining hands and jumping about, whistling, stomping their feet. Automobiles were honking, policemen were blowing whistles. She had reached the other side and was coming down.

He could then read the banner she carried:
Quickskill, I love you.

L
ATER THEY WERE DINING
in the Victoria Gardens restaurant. She had gone upstairs to her suite to change, a difficult feat because the lobby was crowded with the press and with people from television and radio. The Canadian police had to help her to her room. He waited for her downstairs in the restaurant. Finally, when she appeared again, she was wearing a grey somber-striped Happi coat made of sheared weasel, which she had bought on impulse from the money collected when the hat was passed among the spectators. People had made movie offers. Book contracts were proposed. She turned them all down, telling the people that she was an “artist” and that she was “pure” and that she “didn’t want to sell out.”

Now it was quieter. People only glanced their way from time to time. They were alone. She was telling him her adventures, which occurred after she dove into the Niagara.

“Well, I swam and swam, and it was getting very dark and there was a fisherman. He noticed me and he asked if I wanted to be pulled out of the water. He said if I continued, I’d be swept over the falls. Well, my mind wasn’t into that, I was just swimming. I didn’t have any destination in mind; I heard the roar in the distance, but I didn’t know it was Niagara Falls. Then it occurred to me, I had a chance to do Blondin one better. I would walk the tightrope across Niagara Falls backwards. Well, the fisherman provided me with some blankets. He was very nice about it. He got me to the shore and hailed a cab for me. I came to this hotel and got a suite.”