Legends II Read online

  “A noble tale,” said Alvin. “I’ve seen that one in his book my own self.”

  “And you believe it?”

  “I do,” said Alvin.

  “I never said it wasn’t true,” said Cuz. “I just said it wasn’t the tale a man wants to hear when he’s spinning downstream on a flapdoodle flatboat in the midst of the Mizzippy mist.”

  Abe Lincoln ignored the near-poetic language of his companion. “So I was telling Cuz here that the river hadn’t treated us half bad, compared to what a much smaller stream done to the folks in that story. And now hereyou are, saving us—so the river’s been downright kind to a couple of second-rate raftmakers.”

  “Made this one yourself, eh?” said Alvin.

  “Tiller broke,” said Abe.

  “Didn’t have no spare?” said Alvin.

  “Didn’t know I’d need one. But if we ever once fetched up on shore, I could have made another.”

  “Good with your hands?”

  “Not really,” said Abe. “But I’m willing to do it over till it’s right.”

  Alvin laughed. “Well, time to do this raft over.”

  “I’d welcome it if you’d show me what we done wrong. I can’t see a blame thing here that isn’t good raftmaking.”

  “It’s what’s under the raft that’s missing. Or rather, what ought to be there but ain’t. You need a drag at the stern, to keep the back in back. And on top of that you’ve got it heavy-loaded in front, so it’s bound to turn around any old way.”

  “Well I’m blamed,” said Abe. “No doubt about it, I’m not cut out to be a boatman.”

  “Most folks aren’t,” said Alvin. “Except my friend Mr. Bowie here. He’s just can’t keep away from a boat, when he gets a chance to row.”

  Bowie gave a tight little smile and a nod to Abe and his companion. By now the raft was slogging along behind them in the water, and it was all Alvin and Bowie could do to move it forward.

  “Maybe,” said Arthur Stuart, “the two of you could stand at theback of the raft so it didn’t dig so deep in front and make it such a hard pull.”

  Embarrassed, Abe and Cuz did so at once. And in the thick fog of midstream, it made them mostly invisible and damped down any sound they made so that conversation was nigh impossible.

  It took a good while to overtake the steamboat, but the pilot, being a good man, had taken it slow, despite Captain Howard’s ire over time lost, and all of a sudden the fog thinned and the noise of the paddlewheel was right beside them as theYazoo Queen loomed out of the fog.

  “I’ll be plucked and roasted,” shouted Abe. “That’s a right fine steamboat you got here.”

  “ ’Tain’t our’n,” said Alvin.

  Arthur Stuart noticed how little time it took Bowie to get himself up on deck and away from the boat, shrugging off all the hands clapping at his shoulder like he was a hero. Well, Arthur couldn’t blame him. But it was a sure thing that however Alvin might have scared him out on the water, Bowie was still a danger to them both.

  Once the dinghy was tied to theYazoo Queen , and the raft lashed alongside as well, there was all kinds of chatter from passengers wanting to know obvious things like how they ever managed to find each other in the famous Mizzippy fog.

  “It’s like I said,” Alvin told them. “They was right close, and even then, we still had to search.”

  Abe Lincoln heard it with a grin, and didn’t say a word to contradict him, but he was no fool, Arthur Stuart could see that. He knew that the raft had been nowheres near the riverboat. He also knew that Alvin had steered straight for theYazoo Queen as if he could see it.

  But what was that to him? In no time he was telling all who cared to listen about what a blame fool job he’d done a-making the raft, and how dizzy they got spinning round and round in the fog. “It twisted me up into such a knot that it took the two of us half a day to figure out how to untie my arms from my legs and get my head back out from my armpit.” It wasn’t all that funny, really, but the way he told it, he got such a laugh. Even though the story wasn’t likely to end up in Taleswapper’s book.

  Well, that night they put to shore at a built-up rivertown and there was so much coming and going on theYazoo Queen that Arthur Stuart gave up on his plan to set the twenty-five Mexica slaves free that night.

  Instead, he and Alvin went to a lecture being held in the dining room of the riverboat. The speaker was none other than Cassius Marcellus Clay, the noted antislavery orator, who persisted in his mad course of lecturing against slavery right in the midst of slave country. But listening to him, Arthur Stuart could see how the man got away with it. He didn’t call names or declare slavery to be a terrible sin. Instead he talked about how much harm slavery did to the owners and their families.

  “What does it do to a man, to raise up his children to believe that their own hands never have to be set to labor? What will happen when he’s old, and these children who never learned to work freely spend his money without heed for the morrow?

  “And when these same children have seen their fellow human, however dusky of hue his skin might be, treated with disdain, their labor dispraised and their freedom treated as naught—will they hesitate to treat their aging father as a thing of no value, to be discarded when he is no longer useful? For when one human being is treated as a commodity, why should children not learn to think of all humans as either useful or useless, and discard all those in the latter category?”

  Arthur Stuart had heard plenty of Abolitionists speak over the years, but this one took the cake. Cause instead of stirring up a mob of slaveowners wanting to tar and feather him, or worse, he got them looking all thoughtful and glancing at each other uneasily, probably thinking on their own children and what a useless set of grubs they no doubt were.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t likely Clay was doing all that much good. What were they going to do, set their slaves free and move north? That would be like the story in the Bible, where Jesus told the rich young man, Sell all you got and give it unto the poor and come follow me. The wealth of these men was measured in slaves. To give them up was to become poor, or at least to join the middling sort of men who have to pay for what labor they hire. Renting a man’s back, so to speak, instead of owning it. None of them had the courage to do it, at least not that Arthur Stuart saw.

  But he noticed that Abe Lincoln seemed to be listening real close to everything Clay said, eyes shining. Especially when Clay talked about them as wanted to send black folks back to Africa. “How many of you would be glad to hear of a plan to sendyou back to England or Scotland or Germany or whatever place your ancestors came from? Rich or poor, bond or free, we’re Americans now, and slaves whose grandparents were born on this soil can’t be sentback to Africa, for it’s no more their home than China is, or India.”

  Abe nodded at that, and Arthur Stuart got the impression that up to now, the lanky fellow probably thought that the way to solve the black problem was exactly that, to ship ’em back to Africa.

  “And what of the mulatto? The light-skinned black man who partakes of the blood of Europe and Africa in equal parts? Shall such folk be split in two like a rail, and the pieces divvied up between the lands of their ancestry? No, like it or not we’re all bound together in this land, yoked together. When you enslave a black man, you enslave yourself as well, for now you are bound to him as surely as he is bound to you, and your character is shaped by his bondage as surely as his own is. Make the black man servile, and in the same process you make yourself tyrannical. Make the black man quiver in fear before you, and you make yourself a monster of terror. Do you think your children will not see you in that state, and fear you, too? You cannot wear one face to the slave and another face to your family, and expect either face to be believed.”

  When the talk was over, and before Arthur and Alvin separated to their sleeping places, they had a moment together at the rail overlooking the flatboat. “How can anybody hear that talk,” said Arthur Stuart, “and go home to their slaves, and
not set them free?”

  “Well, for one thing,” said Alvin, “I’m not settingyou free.”

  “Because you’re only pretending I’m a slave,” whispered Arthur.

  “Then Icould pretend to set you free, and be a good example for the others.”

  “No you can’t,” said Arthur Stuart, “because then what would you do with me?”

  Alvin just smiled a little and nodded, and Arthur Stuart got his point. “I didn’t say it would be easy. But if everybody would do it—”

  “But everybody won’t do it,” said Alvin. “So them as free their slaves, they’re suddenly poor, while them as don’t free them, they stay rich. So now who has all the power in slavery country? Them as keep their slaves.”

  “So there’s no hope.”

  “It has to be all at once, by law, not bit by bit. As long as it’s permitted to keep slaves anywhere, then bad men will own them and get advantage from it. You have to ban it outright. That’s what I can’t get Peggy to understand. All her persuasion in the end will come to nothing, because the moment somebody stops being a slaveowner, he loses all his influence among those who have kept their slaves.”

  “Congress can’t ban slavery in the Crown Colonies, and the King can’t ban it in the States. So no matter what you do, you’re gonna have one place that’s got slaves and the other that doesn’t.”

  “It’s going to be war,” said Alvin. “Sooner or later, as the free states get sick of slavery and the slave states get more dependent on it, there’ll be a revolution on one side of the line or the other. I think there won’t be freedom until the King falls and his Crown Colonies become states in the Union.”

  “That’ll never happen.”

  “I think it will,” said Alvin. “But the bloodshed will be terrible. Because people fight most fiercely when they dare not admit even to themselves that their cause is unjust.” He spat into the water. “Go to bed, Arthur Stuart.”

  But Arthur couldn’t sleep. Having Cassius Clay speaking on the riverboat had got the belowdecks folks into a state, and some of them were quite angry at Clay for making white folks feel guilty. “Mark my words,” said a fellow from Kenituck. “When they get feelin’ guilty, then the only way to feel better is to talk theirself into believing wedeserve to be slaves, and if we deserve to be slaves, we must be very bad and need to be punished all the time.”

  It sounded pretty convoluted to Arthur Stuart, but then he was only a baby when his mother carried him to freedom, so it’s not like he knew what he was talking about in an argument about what slavery was really like.

  Even when things finally quieted down, though, Arthur couldn’t sleep, until finally he got up and crept up the ladderway to the deck.

  It was a moonlit night, here on the east bank, where the fog was only a low mist and you could look up and see stars.

  The twenty-five Mexica slaves were asleep on the stern deck, some of them mumbling softly in their sleep. The guard was asleep, too.

  I meant to free you tonight, thought Arthur. But it would take too long now. I’d never be done by morning.

  And then it occurred to him that maybe it wasn’t so. Maybe he could do it faster than he thought.

  So he sat down in a shadow and after a couple of false starts, he got the nearest slave’s ankle iron into his mind and began to sense the metal the way he had that coin. Began to soften it as he had softened his belt buckle.

  Trouble was, the iron ring was thicker and had more metal in it than either the coin or the buckle had had. By the time he got one part softened up, another part was hard again, and so it went. It began to feel like the story Peggy read them about Sisyphus, whose time in Hades was spent pushing a stone up a mountain, but for every step up, he slid two steps back, so after working all day he was farther from the top than he was when he began.

  And then he almost cussed out loud at how stupid he had been.

  He didn’t have to soften the whole ring. What were they going to do, slide it off like a sleeve? All he had to do was soften it at the hinge, where the metal was thinnest and weakest.

  He gave it a try and it was getting all nice and soft when he realized something.

  The hinges weren’t connected. The one side wasn’t joined to the other. The pin was gone.

  He took one fetter after another into his mind and discovered they were all the same. Every single hinge pin was missing. Every single slave was already free.

  He got up from the shadows and walked out to stand among the slaves.

  They weren’t asleep. They made tiny hand gestures to tell Arthur to go away, to get out of sight.

  So he went back into the shadows.

  As if at a signal, they all opened their fetters and set the chains gently on the deck. It made a bit of a racket, of course, but the guard didn’t stir. Nor did anyone else in the silent boat.

  Then the black men arose and swung themselves over the side away from shore.

  They’re going to drown. Nobody taught slaves to swim, or let them learn it on their own. They were choosing death.

  Except that, come to think of it, Arthur didn’t hear a single splash.

  He stood up when all the slaves were gone from the deck and walked to another part of the rail. Sure enough, they were overboard all right—all gathered on the raft. And now they were carefully loading Abe Lincoln’s cargo into the dinghy. It wasn’t much of a dinghy, but it wasn’t much of a cargo, either, and it didn’t take long.

  What difference did it make, not to steal Abe’s stuff? They were all thieves, anyway, since they were stealing themselves by running away. Or that was the theory, anyway. As if a man, by being free, thereby stole something from someone else.

  They laid themselves down on the raft, all twenty-five, making a veritable pile of humanity, and with those at the edges using their hands as paddles, they began to pull away out into the current. Heading out into the fog, toward the red man’s shore.

  Someone laid a hand on his shoulder and he near jumped out of his skin.

  It was Alvin, of course.

  “Let’s not be seen here,” Alvin said softly. “Let’s go below.”

  So Arthur Stuart led the way down into the slave quarters, and soon they were in whispered conversation in the kitchen, which was dark but for a single lantern that Alvin kept trimmed low.

  “I figured you’d have some blame fool plan like that,” said Alvin.

  “And I thought you was going to let them go on as slaves like you didn’t care, but I should’ve knowed better,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “I thought so, too,” said Alvin. “But I don’t know if it was having Jim Bowie guess too much, or him trying to kill me with that knife—and no, Arthur Stuart, he didnot stop in time, if there’d been a blade in that knife it would have cut right through my throat. Could have been the fear of death made me think that I didn’t want to face God knowing I could have freed twenty-five men, but chose to leave them slaves. Then again, it might of been Mr. Clay’s sermon tonight. Converted me as neat as you please.”

  “Converted Mr. Lincoln,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Might be,” said Alvin. “Though he doesn’t look like the sort who ever sought to own another man.”

  “I know why you had to do it,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Why is that?”

  “Because you knew that if you didn’t, I would.”

  Alvin shrugged. “Well, I knew you’d made up your mind to try.”

  “I could have done it.”

  “Very slowly.”

  “It was working, once I realized I only had to go after the hinge.”

  “I reckon so,” said Alvin. “But the real reason I chose tonight was that the raft was here. A gift to us, don’t you think? Woulda been a shame not to use it.”

  “So what happens when they get to the red man’s shore?”

  “Tenskwa Tawa will see to them. I gave them a token to show to the first red they meet. When they see it, they’ll get escorted straight to the Prophet, whe
rever he might be. And whenhe sees it, he’ll give them safe passage. Or maybe let them dwell there.”

  “Or maybe he’ll need them, to help him fight the Mexica. If they’re moving north.”

  “Maybe.”

  “What was the token?” asked Arthur Stuart.

  “A couple of these,” said Alvin. He held up a tiny shimmering cube that looked like the clearest ice that had ever been, or maybe glass, but no glass had ever shimmered.

  Arthur Stuart took it in his hand and realized what it was. “This is water. A box of water.”

  “More like a block of water. I decided to make it today out on the river, when I came so close to having my blood spill into the water. That’s partly how they’re made. A bit of my own self has to go into the water to make it strong as steel. You know the law. ‘The maker is the one . . .’ ”

  “The maker is the one who is part of what he makes,” said Arthur Stuart.

  “Get to sleep,” said Alvin. “We can’t let nobody know we was up tonight. I can’t keep them all asleep forever.”

  “Can I keep this?” said Arthur Stuart. “I think I see something in it.”

  “You can see everything in it, if you look long enough,” said Alvin. “But no, you can’t keep it. If you think what I got in my poke is valuable, think what folks would do to have a solid block of water that showed them true visions of things far and near, past and present.”

  Arthur reached out and offered the cube to Alvin.

  But instead of taking it, Alvin only smiled, and the cube went liquid all at once and dribbled through Arthur Stuart’s fingers. Arthur looked at the puddle on the table, feeling as forlorn as he ever had.

  “It’s just water,” said Alvin.

  “And a little bit of blood.”

  “Naw,” said Alvin. “I took that back.”

  “Good night,” said Arthur Stuart. “And . . . thank you for setting them free.”

  “Once you set your heart on it, Arthur, what else could I do? I looked at them and thought, Somebody loved them once as much as your mamma loved you. She died to set you free. I didn’t have to do that. Just inconvenience myself a little. Put myself at risk, but not by much.”