The Triumph of Grace (26 page)

"Over there!" someone else called. "I see them!"

"Go! Now!" Sunba ordered from behind. And he was gone.

Cabeto stopped and stared back into the darkness. He could see nothing.

"What do you want with us?" Sunba yelled.

Now Sunba's voice, too, came from down by the river. He was running in the opposite direction from Cabeto and Grace.The horses turned and galloped after him, thundering wildly through the brush.

Something crashed. Two voices rose up together in angry shouts. Accusations, it sounded like. Furious demands. Wild threats.

A gunshot rang out.

The first man screamed, "No! No . . . ! What have you done?"

At the same moment, Cabeto cried, "Sunba!"

Grace grabbed Cabeto's arm and strained to hold him back.

The voices by the river bellowed with angry shouts.

"You fool!" the man with the deep voice yelled. "You stupid fool! Freedom fighters and abolitionists are everywhere. If you've gone and killed a freed man, they'll be after us!"

"Go! Go!" the first man ordered. "Leave the others!"

The horses galloped off in the opposite direction. Then all was silent.

"Sunba!" Cabeto cried again.

He pulled away from Grace. Fighting his way through the darkness, Cabeto headed back toward the river.

"Sunba!" Cabeto's voice was wild and frantic. "Where are you, Sunba? Answer me, brother!"

Grace ran, too, and sobbed out Sunba's name. Cabeto was already far ahead of her. Grace tried to feel her way in the dark, but she stumbled in the thick brush. She turned away toward the river. Where the berry vines met the river, she kicked up against something, and she knew.

"He's here!" Grace called. She fell to her knees and lifted Sunba's too-still head into her lap. "Oh, no! No, no!"

Just as Cabeto reached Grace's side, the brush seemed to come to life. Unfamiliar arms took hold of Cabeto and pulled him away, even as he shrieked and fought.

"I be Canaan, brother," said a deep, rolling voice. "Come away. Please, come away. We'll see to him."

At first Cabeto fought against everyone. But the deep voice continued to roll words of comfort and assurance. Grace soothed him, too. Finally Cabeto hushed his screams and stopped fighting.

A woman who called herself Hetty took Grace's arm and led her to the closest of the unpainted houses. Canaan and Cabeto followed, and several other men came after, carrying Sunba's body.

Cabeto, dazed and confused, asked, "What happened?"

"Mister Peters done got you," said Canaan. "He do it all the time. Pulls someone across the river so nice and friendly. But he tells the slave catchers about it and collects their money, and they be ready and waitin' on this side."

"But we have papers," Grace said.

"It don't matter," said Hetty. "The catchers still pay him."

"We thought . . . if we was in Pennsylvania—" Cabeto began.

"No, sir," said Hetty. "No, you not be in Pennsylvania. You be in Maryland. You still be in slave country."

"Sunba saved our lives," Grace said as she wiped at her tear-streaked face. "He called to the slave catchers and led them away from us."

"He did love you," said Canaan, "That's what the Good Book say."

Grace looked at him in confusion. "What?" she asked.

"The Good Book say no man can love more than that," Canaan said. "Than he lay down his life."

T
he next morning, Canaan hitched a donkey to his cart and took Cabeto and Grace far up the road until it ended at a wide river. He forded the water in the wagon, expertly searching out the shallowest places. On the other side, Canaan continued on until he crossed the state line into Pennsylvania.

"Many colored people be up here," Canaan said as he bid the two farewell. "Pennsylvania folks don't much like slavery.You be safer here than most anywheres else."

Grace and Cabeto walked north, right along the road and in the middle of the day. Mostly they walked in silence. When they did talk, it was not of Sunba. Cabeto couldn't bear it.Grace sneaked glances at her husband as they walked together.His limp was bad and growing worse. A gray pallor had settled across his face.

"We could stay in Pennsylvania," Grace suggested. "Other colored folks live here. We could settle in with them. Canaan said white people look more kindly on colored folks up here."

Cabeto shook his head. "We could never rest easy," he said in a voice flat and weary. "Tolerated ain't the same as free."

So they walked on. Every night they judged their path against the bright star, and with the dawn, they walked.

One afternoon, a white woman offered them a meal of ham and beans, but they had only started to eat when she heard her husband's carriage roll up to the house. She shooed them through the back door quick enough and out to the garden, and she pointed them away through the tall corn. With just a little food in their stomachs, they were off again.

Grace and Cabeto slept in the brush that night, the same as they did most other nights. But the nights were definitely growing cooler, and as they traveled it was pleasant to occasionally be offered a mattress for the night, or even just a warm pile of straw in a barn.

"My, my, but you look dreadful!"

Grace gave a guilty start. Plump red apples scattered across the ground had attracted her over the rail fence. Now she was caught, her skirt filled with the apples.

"Oh . . . I am just . . . I was only—" Grace stammered.

Grace looked guiltily at the small, gray-haired woman who stood in the adjacent garden, a large basket clutched in her hand. Grace had not seen her on her knees, pulling up turnips and carrots.

"Don't worry yourself about those windfall apples," the woman said with a gesture to Grace's skirt. "You are welcome to them. Only, it looks to me that you could do with a good bit more than just wormy apples."

Grace mumbled her apologies and started to back away.

"Please, come into the house," the woman said. "My sister Louise has a pot of venison stew simmering over the fire and a round of freshly baked bread just out of the oven."

Grace hesitated.

"Don't tell me that doesn't sound good to you," the woman said with a smile.

When Grace still held back, the woman said, "It just may be that Louise and I can be of further assistance to you. Are you alone?"

"No," Grace said. "My husband . . . he is out by the road."

"Do give him a holler," the woman said. "Surely he is hungry for venison stew, too."

Fanny and Louise Pentecost. Those were the names of the two sisters. Their father had built the house, they said. It was roomy and comfortable, and before darkness fell, they offered Grace and Cabeto more than venison stew. They poured warm water into a washtub so the two could clean away the travel dirt, and Fanny showed them to a feather bed where they could sleep the night.

"I believe I have an extra dress about your size," Fanny said to Grace. "It is blue with yellow and white flowers. Would that suit you?"

Grace looked down at the tattered dress in which she had walked all the way from Charleston, South Carolina, to Pennsylvania, and smiled appreciatively.

Grace and Cabeto were not the only guests in the Pentecost sisters' house. Two colored men, August and Sim, occupied the room next to theirs. Fanny Pentecost introduced the newcomers to them at supper.

Neither Grace nor Cabeto was in much of a mind to talk.But they need not have worried. August most certainly was.

"The halls of freedom is proclaimed to all the world from these here United States," he said between spoonfuls of stew."All the world exceptin' for the African race, that is."

Grace and Cabeto looked at each other. Cabeto reached for another piece of bread.

"Conflictin'. That's what I would say of this here country's high-soundin' words," August continued. "There surely is no freedom for a colored person here."

"Dese good ladies has been mighty kind to us," Cabeto said.

"Yes, and I would not speak a word against them," said August. "But kindness, now . . . that ain't freedom, is it?"

Grace shifted uneasily. Cabeto resigned himself to his bread.

"What I say is this—every sober-thinkin', hard-workin' colored man in this country ought to leave and head for Canada," August stated.

Grace set her mug down on the table and pushed back her chair.

"I do thank you kindly for the supper, Madam Pentecost," Grace said. "By your leave, I ask that you graciously excuse me now, for I really am quite tired."

But Fanny's reply was not to Grace. It was to August.

"While your observations may not have been made with the greatest delicacy, sir," she said, "there is truth in what you say. Colored people often come along this road. Some of them are hungry and dirty, and look as though they have been traveling for a very long time. Sometimes they intend to do exactly what you suggest—continue on to Canada. Yet that is not so easy a task as some would imagine it to be. A river must first be crossed. On the other side, still more land lies between them and their goal. When they get close to the waterway that divides the two countries, slave catchers lie in wait, so it is not easy to get safely through to the boats. And, of course, there is the tiresome matter of the high cost of passage."

Grace stared at Fanny Pentecost.

Panic passed over Cabeto's face, too, and he looked around for a way to escape just in case it was called for.

"But many good people in Pennsylvania stand ready to assist such travelers," Fanny quickly added. "Is that not so, Louise?"

"It most certainly is so, Fanny," said Louise. "You and I are willing to assist. So are the goodly fellows who transport travelers through the gauntlet to the boats. And the merchants who carry folks hidden in their wagons. And those who look the other way when it is time to collect the fare on the boat."

"Why?" Grace whispered. "Why would all those people do such things?"

"Because there are those here who believe the colored race in the United States should live with the same freedoms the white race enjoys," Fanny said. "Many of us long to see that day come."

For two days and nights, Grace and Cabeto stayed with the Pentecost sisters, as did August and Sim. The outside doors stayed closed and the windows shuttered against prying eyes.On the morning of the third day, a man with his hat pulled low over his face—a man introduced only as Robert—hustled all four of them into his carriage, and he drove the horses on a three-hour ride to the lake crossing. No sooner had Grace and the men alighted than an energetic man in work clothes stepped forward. He nodded to the men and tipped his hat to Grace, and he signaled to a woman in a grove who was busily shepherding three young children. The woman and children immediately moved to join him.

"Your boat passage," the man said as he handed each of the four a slip of paper. "Follow us and do as we do."

Once on the boat, August and Sim drifted away to sit apart from the white family. But Grace and Cabeto stayed with the man and his wife throughout the journey. The couple's two little boys scrambled around together on the deck, but Mary, their young girl with golden curls, sat up straight and tall.

"I'm afraid of the water," Mary said to Grace.

"Oh, don't be!" Grace assured her. "Many wonderful adventures happen on boats."

"Have you been in a boat before?" Mary asked.

"Oh, yes!" Grace said. "One time, I—"

Suddenly Grace thought about August, and how much he talked. So instead of finishing her sentence, she asked Mary's father, "What is Canada like, sir?"

"A British colony," he said. "Although until a few months ago, it was actually French. Now, however, it is firmly under English law."

"And there are other people there . . . like us?"

"Oh, yes," he said. "Many hundreds, I should say. Brought in as slaves, they were. No more, though. Slaves cannot be brought into North Canada now."

"It is truly a land of freedom, then?" Grace asked.

"I do not know," the man replied. "I pray it is. I also pray that our land will one day be a land of freedom."

When they arrived in Canada, August and Sim promptly set off for the city of Toronto. But Grace and Cabeto headed for the countryside, where they were welcomed into a community of others who had escaped from slavery. Already the northern night winds blew up a chill. Cabeto and Grace set to work piling up branches they intended to use to build themselves a temporary shelter. But before they had gathered enough, men began to trickle over their way, saws and hammers and knives in hand. Women came, too, bearing baskets of vegetables from their gardens and apples off their trees, and parcels of dried meat and cured ham.

Cabeto chose the site for their house—a grove of oak trees, nestled under a shady canopy of leaves.

"You doesn't need cover from the sun up here," Daniel, a muscular man with one drifting eye, pointed out.

But Cabeto insisted it would remind him of times worth remembering.

"Come to the meetinghouse on the Lord's Day, won't you?" Calliope asked Grace. "Daniel preaches for us."

Grace smiled. "I am partial to preachers," she said. "We surely will do that."

Cabeto wanted to immediately prepare a garden beside the house, but Daniel laughed and said no, not in Canada with winter on the way. Instead, Cabeto accompanied the men to the stream, where he caught many fish, and he went with them to hunt for rabbits. He joined the men around the community fire, and under their tutelage he worked for days in the smokehouse.

Grace gathered walnuts and wild onions and herbs, and she gratefully received the plump squash and potatoes and carrots that Calliope and the other women gave her to store away for the cold weather.

"The winter is the hardest," Daniel said. "But it won't last forever."

One day the green leaves began to fade and change. In days, it seemed, the woods were a sudden blaze of yellow and gold and red. Cabeto hurried to report this to Daniel.

"Something is happening to the trees!" Cabeto exclaimed in alarm.

"Enjoy the sunshine while you can," Daniel told him."Winter is not far away."