Lily's Story (9 page)

So she told him about all
the things she knew that were interesting and that he might need to
know when he got his freedom down in Chatham. He got a royal earful
about the LaRouche’s and the war against the Yankees, about Old
Samuels and his miraculous all-day pipe; about a baby being born in
the green undergrowth just like that, with blood splattered so far
it looked like red-trillium day; about the quilting bee at Maman’s
last summer when the Frenchman drank too much hooch and dressed up
like a priest in one of Maman’s black slips and scared Maman and
the ladies out of their wits so she was barely able to hit him on
the head with the skillet, ruining a whole pan of perch; and of
course she told him about the trip to the Reserve, and he paid
particular attention, she warranted, when she described the odd
behaviour of the Southener and the sad behaviour of the old
Pottawatomie, though she brightened up her tale by ending with the
antics of Sounder and a brief demonstration of the dancing she
herself had participated in by special invitation.

“
Now you tell
me a story,” she said with a gentle urgency.

“
Solomon jus’
like to listen, Miz Lil, ma’am. I’se accustomed ta jus’ listenin’.
A body get used to it, he do.” She thought she caught the vestige
of a twinkle in his eye.

“
But how am I
to get to know a person if they don’t tell about themselves,” Lil
said.

“
Nothin’ ta
tell. My life ahead of me, missy. Got nothin’ behind me ’tall. My
Mama tell me ta say ‘Satan, get thee behind me!’, an’ I reckon I’se
’bout to do jus’ dat.”

“
But you was
born. You had a mama and a papa. You lived somewheres.”

“
Had no papa,
no ma’am; had me a wonderful mama, but no papa ebber come round us.
No suh.”

Lil was puzzled, but Solomon
failed to elaborate.

“
Why’d your
mama give you a funny name like Solomon?” she said.

“
T’ain’t funny
’tall,” he said. “Come right from da Bible. Doan yo’all know da
Lord’s Book in dese parts? What kinda place I come to?”

“
What kind of
place did you
come
from?”

“
Hertford
County, Norf Carolina, nigh Murfreesboro,” he said as if responding
to an interrogator. “Work fer Mastah Cartwright dere. In da fields.
I’se his slave, all da time.”

Lil ached to know more but
prompt as she would she could get little more out of him. Indeed
all the sadness and original suspicion poured back into his face
and demeanour as soon as Lil switched from telling to querying.

Lil was tired of telling. “I
told you everythin’ interestin’ I can think about Canada. An’ you
don’t tell me nothin’ about yourself. You think that’s fair?”

Outside, thirty feet back in
the bush, branches cracked and broke underfoot. Solomon had the
trap-door half way up when Lil said: “It’s just the wild pigs.”

“
Yuh sho’ of
dat?”

“
I’m
sure.”

“
Better be
hunkerin’ down anyways. Your Papa be ’long real soon, I ’spect.”
But he sat down again in the chair.

“
Are you never
gonna tell about yourself, Solomon?”

He looked up, directly at her.
“Most things I gots ta tell’s awful sad, little missus.”

“
Then tell
only the good parts,” Lil said.

Solomon paused as if
considering the import of that remark.

“
Like I done,”
Lil said.

L
ater that day after a
shared but quiet supper, Lil reached over to pick up the plate and
mug. Solomon’s left hand lay on the stool beside them. Lil let the
petal of her right hand whisper to the ebony one. Solomon jerked
his entire body back as if he’d been lashed. The plate and cup
clattered on the platform.

When Lil recovered from the
shock, she said “Are you hurtin’ there, Sol?”

Solomon could not reply. He was
trembling head to toe: a cottontail before the weasel struck
blood.

“
I’ll let you
be,” Lil said.

As she turned the key in the
lock, she heard him squeezing into his ground-hole.

O
n the third morning
he took his breakfast only after Lil had retreated. But at noon
with the bright midsummer sun lancing into the upper cell and
setting the dust adazzle, she found him seated in Papa’s chair
looking sad but recovered. She stood watch as he went into the
woods to relieve himself. On the way back he scuttled like a crab
across the twenty feet of open space, not knowing whether to look
ahead or behind or everywhere at once. Lil wanted to leave the
slatted door ajar to catch as much as possible of the noon sun but
she closed it as soon as he hurried past her. He sat down –
embarrassed, ashamed, seething with irresolvable passions. Sweat
sizzled on his brow until he got his desperate breathing under
control. Lil did not leave. Nor did Solomon retreat to his
burrow.

After a while he ate. Lil
had brought her own dinner with her. They ate together. The tea was
cold but refreshing in the heat. When the huge black man lifted the
mug to his lips and tossed his head back, he seemed to drown the
room with his presence – his substance and shadow, the dark roots
of his birthground. In contrast, Lil’s porcelain arms seemed to
float free from their trim body like swan’s wings over a carbon
pond. Lil’s hair was for a moment indistinguishable from the
sun’s.

“
Where’s your
wife?” Lil heard herself say.

Solomon looked up in disbelief.
Terror and wonder passed simultaneously over his face. Lil could
see plainly that he wanted to tell her the story of his wife and
their grief, that he was overwhelmed with the need to confide and
the need, at last, to trust someone enough to share with him the
full horror and inhumanity of his ordeal. But he did not. It would
be many years later before Lil would understand why he didn’t, when
she herself would withhold full knowledge from the innocents before
her.

Solomon held his gaze steadily
on Lil. Tears washed out of his doe’s eyes, but did nothing to
erase the indelible pain and the memory of pain. The anguish
harboured and held back in all two hundred pounds of red flesh and
white bone was released into the beleaguered face, the stunned eyes
for whom, ever after, laughter would be a form of betrayal.

There was no need to
tell. Solomon’s pain was enough. Lil looked straight through it and
saw in a single second, in one terrible tableau, the entire
narrative of his travail. Whether she fell into a trance and
dreamed it whole or whether Solomon himself entered that dream to
relate his story in the wordless epigrams of that state, she never
knew. She only knew what she saw, and would never forget. She saw
Solomon’s master, that worthy of Hertford County, glorying in his
notoriety as a ‘nigger-breaker’, daunted by the very presence of a
young man named Solomon whose stamina and moral courage were a
threat to a whole way of life, to God’s ordained ordering. She saw
him stripped and lashed a hundred times, roped to stanchions like a
steer, his skin flayed to make him utter cries that never came,
till the master himself slashed his head open with his cane,
breaking it even though it was a gift from his daughter, and when
he could not break the black man’s spirit, he had him measured by
the smith for fetters that tore open his flesh till scab healed
over ruptured scab, scars multiplied over scars, and out of
desperation, despair, longing for some kind of ending, he fled into
the woods, dragging his chain with him, and found some unexpected
measure of contentment among the foraging mammals and the morning
birds who sang as sweet in hunger as in plenty. She felt the shock
of his betrayal at the hands of a coloured man who didn’t need the
ten dollars, and wasn’t present when the gang of white boys trailed
him through the swampland and just before the dogs got him put a
bullet through his thigh and dragged him, hounds lapping up the
spoor of blood behind him, back to his master, who, chagrined, sent
him off to the auction block to be sold to the killing grounds of
New Orleans, but landed instead in Memphis, Tennessee, where he
suffered two years of ordinary slavery; no beatings, no starvation,
just minute to minute humiliation, labour dawn-to-dusk, nights of
muscle-ache, mosquitoes, sexual gropings paralyzed by fatigue,
brutalized by congestion, contiguity and the absence of hope. She
felt the momentary joy of their union when Solomon gathered Mary to
him and together they struggled to keep their love private and
aimed, somehow, towards a farther day, until one morning in March
he was hauled away without warning to the slave-pen in mid-town to
be groomed for auction. Filled with a rage and terror beyond even
his own imagining he battered his way through the roof of the cell
and dragging his chains with him leaped from the roof into the
featureless dark below. He was running as he struck the ground,
straight back to his master’s, which saved him of course because
the guards did not even put the hounds’ noses in that direction. So
Solomon in the mist of the dawn slipped into a blacksmith’s shop at
the edge of town, stole a rasp (he later returned through his
benefactors) and filed off his chains. He found Mary – beaten a
hundred times with the elm paddle – ready to run anywhere, to
Canada, to Heaven, to the tender fires of Hell itself. She saw then
in rapid sequence the six-week’s trek to the North, a hundred and
thirty miles through swamp and bush, the bloodhounds giving up
after a week, Mary having to be carried much of the way, food
running out, the swamps disgorging mosquitoes and adders, the
bounty hunters alerted, watching all exit points as owls wait so
knowing in the dark, until at last with spring dawning on the Ohio
they crossed into Cairo and were found dazed and despairing in a
field by a white man who said, ‘Come with me.’ And so, as Lil saw,
they were fed, rested, and pointed to the next village up the line,
the string of safe houses that would eventually, past the North
Star itself, end in a sanctuary known only as Canada. Between each
town, though, lay the bush of southern Ohio and Illinois, and when
the night skies clouded over, North was elusive, they staggered
off-course, slept by day in caves or hollow logs, sometimes daring
to follow the sun, coming to the edge of an unknown village
(Sparta? Centralia?) dozing in its own hearth-smoke, so peaceful,
so welcoming as domestic voices carried into the sunrise. Many
times they sat on a hill looking down for hours on end, too
terrified to knock on the first door, too starved to head back into
the bush, till at last Solomon would walk up to the kindest-looking
white gentleman he could find and say, ‘I’se lookin’ fer mas’
so-and-so livin’ on such-and-such street,’ and wait, heart
hammering for the response that spelled life or death. More than a
dozen times was this scene re-enacted, and each time Solomon’s
voice failed him worse than the previous time till it was often
only the look in his eye that prompted the reply, ‘You a runaway?
Come with me.’ Until that day in Centralia when, exhausted after
getting lost and heading as far west as the Mississippi River,
threading their way back by starlight, living and eating and
sleeping like animals, they collapsed at the doorstep of their safe
house. To find two children there who seemed kind and well
accustomed to such occurrences, giving them food and salves for
their scrapes and bites and telling them to rest until their Papa
returned. Lil shuddered as she saw the boy slip out of the house,
the reward notice in his hand while the girl sat on her pink
bedspread and wept. Then Mary’s screams, as if she were being
dragged into Hell still alive, woke Solomon but by the time he got
to the window Mary was already being carried by a posse of
bounty-men towards the railroad station where she was bound, gagged
and slung aboard a south-bound train like a piece of stray baggage.
Solomon, out of instinct, was into the bush in a minute, lost his
pursuers easily and arrived at the station in time to see the train
pull out in a cloud of soot that took ten minutes to settle into
the silence at the centre of Solomon’s heart. He took little notice
of the man who found him there and arranged to have him put aboard
a cattle-car on the Illinois Central headed that night for Chicago.
They were very kind to him there, consoling, holding out the bitter
promise of freedom only two or three days away. It was decided to
send Solomon by the lesser-used northern route via rail through
Schoolcraft, Lansing, almost to Port Huron before which town he was
smuggled off, numb and submissive as if he were placing his body
gratefully into the hands of a caring undertaker, and led through
the forest to a secret point on the St. Clair River and thence
rowed across to the liberated shore he greeted with dismay and a
terror unadulterated by fear, memory or hopelessness. Dashing
straight into the bush as if it were composed not of separate trees
but a monolithic weld of blackness, he gave himself up to the dark
at the heart of the world.

A
s Lil was leaving,
she snapped the lock shut but did not loop it through the hasp on
the door-frame.

4

L
il, thinking it was
Papa, was half-way across the dooryard towards the road before she
stopped to stare at the pedlar. It was not Lame Peter, from the
north.

“’
Afternoon!”
he called jauntily, tying the donkey’s halter-rope to a nearby
birch and ambling towards her.