“Know why?”
“Don’t know, ma’am.”
She had been rented out to a bordello in Charleston. A sudden rage flashed across his eyes, but he was wise enough to contain it. The lady of the house was looking at him very closely, with a playful smile on her thin lips and in her tired eyes. The boys knew that this was not a game at all. The Owner had started a new venture of renting out his white slaves to bordellos in the neighboring cities. It was usually those girls whose wombs were stubborn and defiant despite many attempts at mating them with the best of studs. If they could not produce future stock for the markets they were good only for the bordellos, which was a way of earning more money for the plantation.
Slave breeding was a long-term investment. It required patience before one could reap the benefits. It took many years for the stock to mature and be ready for the market. Unlike cotton or tobacco or even cattle and hogs. The Owner had reached a stage where he now had a steady annual flow of stock and was enjoying good profits. But he could not be expected to absorb the losses caused by white women he had bought so expensively, yet who were proving to be unable to bear children. He even suspected that some of the barrenness was self-inflicted. The women had to earn their keep and the bordellos were a sure-fire way.
After observing the squirming and fidgeting boys for a while she daintily sipped her tea, gave them each a piece of cake and sent them on their way. Although this was the best currant and cornmeal cake they had ever seen, it tasted like dust and Abednego couldn’t bring himself to swallow his. He felt angry and powerless when he imagined what was happening at that very moment to his girl in Charleston.
That night it snowed quite seriously and the Abyssinian Queen sat on a stool in her cabin waiting for the boys. The sewing matriarchs, now blind with age, had long gone to bed. But she would not sleep before she allocated the boys dreams for the night. It had been her practice since they were little to give each one a dream to dream every night before she herself sank into a dreamless sleep. So it was that she waited and waited and waited.
About midnight she began to suspect that something was wrong. The boys never stayed out that late. When they had plans to sneak away and visit friends or to play outside in the moonlight they always came to the house first for the evening meal and then for the allocation of dreams because they knew that their mother liked to sleep early.
She worried that something had happened to them, but she never suspected that they had carried out a daring escape. They would have said goodbye to her before the flight, wouldn’t they? They would not be so foolish as to escape in the middle of such a viciously cold winter. Dreading what she would find, or perhaps not find, she went out and searched the hollow of the ghost tree. The quilt bundles were gone. The boys would not be coming back. Something must have happened to hasten their escape and they obviously did not confide in her because they knew that she would persuade them to postpone the flight for a better season. She wept softly and prayed for their safety.
It was the season that worried her more than the escape itself. She feared the boys would not get too far. They would be forced back by the weather or by the slave chasers. It was indeed difficult even for the sciolist to come to terms with a winter escape. For instance, what would the boys eat when the dried fruit ran out? If the sciolist had made the boys escape in summer or at least in fall they would trap all sorts of wildlife that was plentiful in the region. They would also eat the cherries and blackberries that grew wild on the mountainside and were ripe in the late summer and early fall. In the late fall deer breed and become stupid. They fall prey to mediocre hunters. The boys would feast on venison. They would survive on the acorns from the red oaks and the pecan-tasting nuts from the giant hickory trees — all of which were good to eat for both squirrels and humans. They would even devour the squirrels themselves.
But in winter, what is there to eat? This was not the boys’ immediate concern as they trudged in the deep snow, with the sciolist as the Spirit that must guide them to safety now that he has acquiesced to a winter escape. Their steps were slow and labored because of the bundles they carried; and the oversized boots and three pairs of old stockings each boy wore; and the rags they had wrapped on their hands and around their legs under their britches; and the balaclava-like hats crocheted by their mother the previous summer; and the women’s corduroy coats they wore — handed down to their mother by the lady of the house years ago when the Abyssinian Queen was still a much favored occupant of the big house.
At first the boys walked in a southerly direction for they had no knowledge of the world beyond the plantation. The map that their mother had stitched on Abednego’s quilt was not helping that much since its cardinal points were rather confusing. Nicodemus had the feeling that they had misread the map and they argued about it. After failing to come to any agreement they decided that the map would not be of any use to them. The quilt would only be good for keeping them warm and also as a keepsake in memory of their mother — not only because it was a gift from her, lovingly made especially for this occasion, but it also retained her peculiar life-affirming scent even though it had spent months in the heart of the ghost tree. The sampler too: it continued to exude her odor, despite the fact that not so long ago she had washed it with lye soap after it had become dirty from staying in the heart of the ghost tree for too long. It was like their mother was with them throughout the journey.
They walked in the night with the snow piling to cover their tracks after them.
The snow should not have bothered to cover their tracks. When their escape was discovered — a result of Nicodemus’s failure to appear at the mating bays the next morning — slave chasers and their dogs were dispatched to hunt them down and bring them back dead or alive; preferably alive so that a long and excruciating punishment yet to be devised could be meted out to them as an example to the rest of the slave community. The chasers headed north; for no one imagined that escaping slaves would go southward, moving deeper into slaveholding territory. Dogs failed to detect their scent. It was covered by the snow. And after a day of scouring the neighborhood and beating up every black person they came across demanding that they tell where the fugitives had gone, the slave chasers returned without the boys.
The Owner took his anger out on the Abyssinian Queen. Everybody knew that this would happen. That was why in the first place the boys had been very reluctant to escape. They knew that vengeance would be taken on her. She had known it too even as she egged them on. She was prepared to sacrifice and be tortured for their freedom. When she thought they were getting too comfortable in the world into which they were born she would take out the sampler and use its designs as prompts in her improvisation of stories about freedom. Stories about the joy they would know at Berlin Crossroads and the ultimate unlimited freedom they would enjoy in Canada, or Canaan as she fondly called it.
She talked of Berlin Crossroads a lot ever since the plantation grapevine — courtesy of the slave stealers who had come in the night the previous summer — brought it to her attention that a settlement by this name had been established somewhere in the middle of Ohio, in Mercer County, by Virginian Africans who had purchased themselves out of slavery. Nicodemus’s father was one of the free residents of Berlin Crossroads. After manumission he had settled on the outskirts of Cincinnati for some time, and then joined the Virginians who left Cincinnati in the mid-1830s to establish the thriving community. For a long time the Abyssinian Queen dreamed that one day the man would return and purchase the boys from The Owner. When that did not happen she encouraged them to escape and find Berlin Crossroads.