TransAtlantic (6 page)

—Thanks, mister! Thanks!

Douglass took a handkerchief to his shoulder. The child had left a long stream of snot along the arm of his coat.

HE HAD NOT
imagined Dublin this way at all. He had envisioned rotundas, colonnades, quiet chapels on the street corners. Porticoes, pilasters, domes.

They passed through a narrow arch into a chaos of men and women. They were gathered for a meeting in the shadows of a theater house. A redheaded man stood on top of a silver keg, barking about Repeal. The crowd swelled. Laughter and applause. Someone responded with a shout about Rome. The words volleyed back and forth. Douglass couldn’t understand the accents, or was it the language? Were they speaking in Irish? He wanted to descend the carriage and walk amongst them, but Webb whispered that there was trouble brewing.

They continued down a havoc of backstreets. A woman carried a tray of kale on a string over her neck, trying in vain to hawk the exhausted green leaves.

—Mr. Webb, sir, Mr. Webb, y’r honor!

Webb broke his own rule, handed her a small copper coin. She ducked away into her headscarf. She looked as if she were praying over the coin. A few coils of hair escaped, damp and coarse.

Within seconds they were surrounded. Webb had to force the carriage through the crowd of stretched hands. The poor were so thin and white, they were almost lunar.

A LADY ALONG
George’s Street gripped her umbrella as the carriage passed by. A newspaperman who happened to glimpse him wrote afterwards that the visiting Negro looked rather dandy. An audacious whore on the corner of Thomas Street shouted that she would laugh at his best and whistle for more. He caught sight of himself in a shop
window and froze the picture in his mind, stunned at the opportunity for public vanity.

THE STORM MADE
the carriage list sideways. Douglass looked for a crack of light in the clouds. None came. Rain fell more steadily now. Gray and unrelenting. Nobody seemed to notice. Rain on the puddles. Rain on the high brickwork. Rain on the slate roofs. Rain on the rain itself.

Webb entreated him to sit below where he could dry off. Douglass descended. The seats inside were made of soft leather. The handles were brushed bronze. He felt foolish, cowardly, warm. He really should sit outside, bear the brunt of the weather, like Webb. He stamped his feet, opened the neck of his coat. His body steamed. A puddle grew at his feet.

Up near the cathedral, there was a break in the rain. The city opened with afternoon sunlight. He climbed out and stood on the pavement. Children were jumping rope, calling rhymes to one another.
One-Eyed Patrick Walker, met a girl, begat a daughter, the girl she turned to dirty water, one eye ’tain’t your fault, sir
. They crowded around him, touched his clothes, removed his hat, pushed their fingers through his hair.
Magpie, magpie, sitting on the sty, who oh who has the dirty greedy eye?
They laughed at the feel of his hair: tall, bushy, wiry, uneven. A young boy shoved a twig in the mass of curls, ran off, whooping. A girl tugged on the end of his coat.

—Mister! Hey, mister! Are you from Africa?

He hesitated a moment. He had never been asked the question before. His smile tightened.

—America, he said.

—Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue, he won’t pick me and he won’t pick you!

The youngest amongst them was no more than three years old. His chest was bony. Leaves were tangled in his filthy hair. A fresh wound underneath his eye.

—Come on and jump with us, mister!

The rope twisted and twirled in the air, slapped in a puddle, rose again, kicked up water drops as it twirled.

—Give us sixpence, will ya?

He was wary of the mud that already dotted his overcoat. He glanced down at his shoes: they would have to be cleaned.

—Please, mister!

—Ah, come on.

A boy spat on the ground and ran off. The girl coiled the rope, gathered the other children together, stood them at attention, instructed them to wave good-bye. A few stray youngsters followed the carriage until they fell away, hungry, tired, sopping wet.

The streets grew quieter the closer they got to Webb’s house. A man in a peaked blue hat walked along, firing up the streetlamps until they glowed, a small row of halos. The homes looked warm and soft.

The cold had insinuated itself into him. The damp, too. He knocked his boot against the seat to warm his toes. Douglass longed to be inside.

Webb sounded the horn on the front of the carriage. Within seconds the butler had opened the door and was running down the steps with an umbrella. The butler splashed through a puddle and went towards Webb, but Webb said: No, no, our guest first, our guest, please. There was an odd smell in the air. Douglass still couldn’t figure out what it was. Sweet, earthy.

He walked quickly up the steps with the butler in attendance. He was brought to the fireplace in the living room. He had seen the fire the night before, but had not noticed what it was: clods of burning soil.

HE CRAWLED OUT
of bed to write Anna a note. He needed to be judicious. She could not read nor write, so it would be spoken aloud to her by their friend Harriet. He did not want Anna embarrassed in any way.
My dearest. I am in polite and capable hands. My hosts are witty, convivial, open. The air is damp, yet there is something about it that seems to clarify my mind
.

A loosening was taking place in his thoughts. Just the fact that he was not pursued, did not have to look over his shoulder, could not be whisked away.

On occasion I have to pause, astounded that I am not fugitive anymore. My mind unshackled. They cannot place me, or even imagine me, upon the auction block. I do not fear the clink of a chain, or crack of whip, or turn of door handle
.

Douglass laid aside his pen for a moment, opened the curtains to the still dark. No sounds at all. On the street, a lone man in rags hurried along, hunched into the wind. He thought then that he had found the word for Dublin: a
huddled
city. He, too, had spent so many years, huddled into himself.

He pondered the possibility of his own living room: Harriet reading the letter aloud, Anna in cotton dress and red head wrap, her hands folded in her lap, his children at the edge of her chair, poised, eager, confused.
I send you my unceasing love, Frederick
.

He tightened the curtains, got back into bed, stretched his feet out over the end of the mattress. His toes extended beyond the bed. It was something humorous, he thought, to include in his next letter.

ON A TABLE
, in neat piles, was the Irish edition of his book. Brand-new. Webb stood behind him, shadowed, hands folded behind his
back. He watched Douglass intently as he flicked through and inhaled the scent of the book. Douglass paused at the engraving at the front, ran his finger over his likeness. Webb, he thought, had endeavored to make him look straight-nosed, aquiline, clear-jawed. They wanted to remove the Negro from him. But perhaps it was not Webb’s fault. An artist’s error maybe. Some fault of the imagination.

He closed the book. Nodded. Turned to Webb, smiled. He ran his fingers once more along the spine. He did not say a word. So much was expected of him. Every turn. Every gesture.

He paused, took a fountain pen from his pocket, let it hover a moment and signed the first book.
For Richard Webb, In friendship and respect, Frederick Douglass
.

A measure of humility lay in one’s signature: it was important not to flourish the pen.

I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the large part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant
.

AT THE BOTTOM
of his traveling trunk he kept two iron barbells. Made for him by a blacksmith in New Hampshire: an abolitionist, a friend, a white man. Each of the barbells weighed twelve and a half pounds. The blacksmith told him that he had melted them from slave chains that had once been used in the auction houses where men, women, and children were sold. The blacksmith had gone around and bought all the chains, melted them, made artifacts from them. In order, he said, not to forget.

Douglass kept the barbells a secret. Only Anna knew. She had lowered her eyes to the floor when she had first seen them, but she soon grew used to them: first thing every morning, last thing at night. There was a part of him that still missed the days of carpentry and caulking: fatigue, desire, hunger.

He turned the key in the bedroom door, pulled the curtains across, locked out the light of the Dublin gas lamps. He lit a candle, stood in his shirtsleeves.

He lifted the barbells one after another—first from the floor and then high in the air—until sweat dripped down onto the wood. He positioned himself to watch himself in the oval looking glass. He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted—it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers, dragging his muscle to work, carving his mind open with idea.

He was in the fever of work. He wanted them to know what it might mean to be branded: for another man’s initials to be burned into your skin; to be yoked about the neck; to wear an iron bit at the mouth; to cross the water in a fever ship; to wake in another man’s field; to hear the jangle of the marketplace; to feel the lash of the cowhide; to have your ears cropped; to accept, to bend, to disappear.

It was his work to capture that through the nib of his pen. His billowy white shirt was covered in ink stains. At times, searching for words, he would hold the blotting paper to his forehead. Later, dressing himself for dinner—cravat, smoking jacket, cufflinks, polished shoes—he would glance in the mirror and find blue spots of ink smudged on his face. He was told by Webb that the Irish words for a black man were
fear gorm
, a blue man. He scrubbed his face, his hands, his fingernails. He looked at himself again in the mirror, lashed out, stopped short, his knuckles trembling at the glass.

He descended the curved staircase, stopped, bent down, shone the front of his shoes once more, using the wetted edge of a handkerchief.

The butler greeted him in the hallway. He could not for the life of him remember the man’s name, Charles or Clyde or James. A terrible thing, to forget a man’s name. He nodded to the butler, moved through the hallway, into the shadows.

Webb had hired a pianist to accompany the evenings. Douglass could hear the notes colliding in the air as he approached. He was fond of the standard fare—Beethoven, Mozart, Bach—but he had heard there was someone new, a Frenchman called Édouard Batiste who was said to be coming to Dublin to play. He would have to inquire: his life these days was much about having to inquire without exhibiting a lack of knowledge. He could not seem ignorant, yet he did not want to be strident either. A fine line. He was not sure where he could show weakness.

The essence of intelligence was to know when, or if, to expose even the heart’s deep need for instruction.

If he showed a chink, they might shine a light through, stun him, maybe even blind him. He could not allow for a single mistake. It was not an excuse for arrogance. It was a matter of defense. Webb, of course, could not be expected to understand. How could he? He was an Irish Quaker. Good-hearted, yes. But he saw all his efforts as pure benevolence. It was not Webb’s freedom that was at stake. It was Webb’s
ability
to be free. Webb himself had his own ideas about who was slave, who was not, and what it was that lay between them.

Small matter, thought Douglass. He would not let it poison him. The Irish had been so friendly. He was a guest. He had to remember that.

The butler pushed the door open for him. Douglass entered the drawing room with his arms behind his back, his hands clasped. He
felt it best to enter a room this way. Equal amounts of deference and aloofness in it. Not haughty. Never haughty. Just tall, full, solid.

It struck him: the sheer surprise of being here. A carpenter, a caulker of ships, a man of the fields. To have come such a distance. To have left behind his wife, his beloved children. To hear the sound of his shoes striking the floor. The only moving shoes in a roomful of men. His voice had now become his hands: he understood what it meant to be made flesh. An energy moved through him. He cleared his throat, but held back a moment. These were, he remembered, the members of the Royal Dublin Society. Creatures of high collars and groomed moustaches. They had an air of antiquity about them. He gazed out at them. The sort of men who had hung their swords above the fireplaces of their minds. He would wait to unleash his fury.

He stepped forward to shake their hands. Marked their names. Reverend Archibald. Brother Harrington. He would write them in his diary later tonight. These were the small matters of etiquette that he had to remember. The pronunciation. The spelling.

—It’s a pleasure to meet you, gentlemen.

—An honor, Mr. Douglass. We have read your book. A remarkable achievement.

—Thank you.

—There is much to learn from it. Much to admire in its style, even more in its content.

—You’re very kind.

—And is Dublin to your liking?

—It is livelier than Boston, yes.

There was laughter all around and he was grateful for it, the manner in which it allowed him to ease his body out of his stiffness. Webb guided him towards a deep chair in the center of the room. He glanced across to see Lily, the maid, pouring him a cup of tea. He liked his tea
with an extraordinary amount of sugar. His weakness: a sweet tooth. Lily’s face, half carved in light as she poured, sharp, pretty, alabaster. She glided across to him. Her cool white wrists. The china cup was very thin. It was said that this made the tea taste better. He could feel the cup trembling in his hands. The thinner the china, the louder the rattle.