At Fairfield Farms there were mulattos who had been bred so white it was impossible to tell them apart from the rest of the whites, and they were all slaves. As they were too white to sell easily on the open market, they served The Owner by being overseers and slave catchers.
The breeding of mulatto children who looked mulatto rather than white had become the core business of Fairfield Farms; hence the indispensability of the white female who had to mate with pitch-black studs. On many occasions the boys saw young white women receiving a good whipping for refusing to sleep with black studs. Nicodemus knew that one day he would be one of those studs and would be having a field day among specially selected females of all colors. Abednego, on the other hand, knew that sooner rather than later his head would be on the auction block.
The very thought made the Abyssinian Queen frantic and she intensified her performances. Taking her cue from the Monkey Wrench she packed provisions of extra clothes, dried fruit, ropes and knives for the boys, and had two bundles ready in case they had to take off without warning. Abednego’s bundle was wrapped in the crazy quilt and Nicodemus’s in the sampler.
But now her stories and songs included celebration, for the plantation grapevine had brought it to her that Nicodemus’s father had been manumitted in Kentucky, and had settled across the Ohio River in a community of free blacks on the outskirts of Cincinnati.
“Y’all gonna be free, my boys,” she told them. “One day y’all gonna cross the River Jordan to be with Nicodemus’s papa.”
3. Mediation
The ghost of Nicodemus takes me back to the city of Athens. I am sitting next to Obed, who is driving Ruth’s rusty GMC and is enthusing about his famous Native American forebear, Harry Corbett, who distinguished himself in this or that theater of the Civil War. He compares him to the strong and ancient sycamores, hickories and walnuts among which the truck is burping its way. I listen without comment, my squinting eyes fixed on a perfectly round sun floating like a big silver balloon above the black trees that are wading in fog. Its rays cannot penetrate the denseness. I wonder how Obed’s eyes are able to see through it since he is driving like a stuntman in a cheap movie chase scene even though only a few feet of the road in front of him are visible. To add to my discomfort the window on his side is half-opened — it is stuck and can’t roll up, he explains — and a crisp wind hits against my face. The smell is clean and fresh, but the chill pierces my skull with needles that leave me with a headache.
He is crunching on tortilla chips as he expresses his disappointment that the man’s name was Harry Corbett and not Singing Ankle or Coughing Horse or something “Indian” like that. He blames the white man for proselytizing among his forebears until they lost their names that were full of poetry and music so that today he is saddled with an “Indian” ancestor with a name like Harry Corbett. I remember that it was with great pride that Ruth told me when the two of us sat on the porch yesterday afternoon that Harry Corbett was a good Christian man who had done away with “them funny Indian names.” I also remember that when I sought assistance from the sciolist on how to deal with the ghosts of the past in rural America, he told me always to bear in mind one thing: memory thrives on transforming the past to palliate the present.
It strikes me that as he negotiates the sharp bends on this road to Athens: Obed is desperately negotiating his way along the paths of a foggy past to validate his present. He cannot let go, for the past is all he has. They can’t let go; he and his mother. Two sides of the same coin. Even as these thoughts run through my mind I am well aware that I am being judgmental. But I cannot help making these observations even though I have only spent four days with this family because the past is all they ever talk about with joy and pride in their eyes. Ruth told me yesterday as we sipped her homemade root beer: “There’s one darn thing they ain’t gonna take from us…our heritage.” Generations of mothers teach their children to be proud of their origins because, and she stressed this: “We’re everybody. One day the whole world will look like us.”
Perhaps that is why when others were posing as leprechauns, politicians and superheroes, Obed resurrected a ghost from the dramatis personae of his ancestry. And this, unfortunately, landed him in the trouble we are trying to resolve today. He doesn’t seem to be worried a bit about it, though, and would rather boast about Harry Corbett than focus on the plan I have been trying to outline for him to avoid a court case that will surely land him in jail. I wish I could wipe the bravado off his face and force him to face his situation, especially because it took me a lot of patience and persuasion to get the victim of his silly actions to agree to meet us today.
Yesterday I phoned the sorority on Washington Street and talked to Beth Eddy for a long time, begging her to withdraw the charges against Obed. It was in the spirit of the day, I pleaded. He had gone to the house with the sole intention of scaring the girls rather than for any sinister motive. It was an innocent prank that went awry.
After consulting with her sorority sisters she finally agreed to meet us, provided members of the Athens County Mediation Council were invited. Even if we were to convince her to withdraw the charges she would not do so without proper mediation, she said, for there should be some form of restitution for the indignity she suffered. She agreed to contact the mediation people when I explained that I could not do so since I am a stranger in these parts. I would not know how to go about arranging such a meeting. Then I had to persuade Obed to come with me this morning. He was not quite convinced, especially because I could not explain exactly what mediation entailed. I have no experience of it. It was only after I told him the chances of Ruth finding out about his arrest were very slim if we tried to resolve the case before it reached the courts of law that he agreed to borrow his mommy’s truck under the pretext that we were going to fix my papers — whatever that meant — in Athens.
“Much as I’d like to hear more about Harry Corbett I think we should talk about what you’re going to say to the girl,” I finally tell him, seizing an opportunity availed by a pause while he stuffs more tortilla chips into his mouth.
“Don’t you worry yourself, homeboy,” he says. “I’m gonna walk. And you know why I’m gonna walk? ’Cause I ain’t done nothing.”
“We are not going there to walk, Obed. We are going there to show remorse and to ask for forgiveness.”
“I’m damned if I ask for nobody’s pardon. It’s like saying I’m guilty. You don’t know these guys, man, they gonna nail my ass!” he screams.
“We don’t want a trial because they’re surely going to nail your ass if there’s a trial. We are going to beg Beth Eddy to withdraw the case, so you better humble yourself starting now.”
He throws a glance at me and smiles cynically, shaking his head as if he pities me for my ignorance. Obviously he has no faith in my strategy. I imagine what he is thinking: what does a stranger from Africa know about the workings of justice in America, which, judging from what he was hollering to the police when they dragged him away that night of the parade of creatures, has always been unfair to his people? He brushes his jet-black hair with his fingers, adjusts the rubber band on his ponytail and then, with the same fingers, reaches for the tortilla chips in a packet next to the gear shift. He shoves them into his mouth and then goes back to fiddling with his mane.