“Some go to Chicago and get ideas,” Tom said.
The angles of that face, like broken porcelain, pulled apart and recombined until I almost did not recognize him. “Well, sounds to me like Jim is keeping himself out of trouble, and the worst thing for anybody these days is getting caught up in all that trouble, getting involved with people like Lovejoy or Torrey or that new agitator writer Mrs. Stowe what likes to stir up a whole heap of trouble too.”
I remained silent, thinking I should tell these two that two years ago, I consulted the omens and auguries, which told me that I should head down to St. Louis, perhaps continuing on to Kansas or Oklahoma territory, so I said goodbye to my children, promising I would write them every other week and send money for food and books and clothes, and goodbye to Sadie May, who could move to Timbuctoo with her new lovers for all I cared so long as she did not take my children there. I left Chicago first thing in the morning to walk back and hitch my way to my native state, though this time with my papers on me, saying James Alton Rivers, free in all places and at all times, determined nobody, LaFleur or anyone else, was going to put me under bond. Eventually I reached the city after crossing around the Indian mounds in Cahokia and lodged with my half-brother Ezekiel, who had been manumitted and left Hannibal first second he could, running around with the last name Carillon after the family that had held him, though I eventually convinced him to change it Rivers too. Through him I secured a job cleaning up and doing repairs on a tavern building owned by an older gentleman named Mr. Wallace Wallace, who had gained his freedom in the 1830s and was said, because of his silver eyes, to be the unacknowledged son of one of the oldest families in the county. Soon I was running that tavern since Mr. Wallace Wallace had so much other business, involving numbers and cards and palliatives, and sometimes ladies and studs, to attend to. There was a good number of those white men in the city who liked the delights that Mr. Wallace Wallace provided, but you always have to be careful when you get too deep in the cut with those kinds of folks, because you can turn up like Mr. Wallace Wallace, with his silk ties and ruby studded pocketwatch and silver eyes and pearl-handed pistol, which he did not hesitate to brandish if needed, floating face down in the Des Peres River, with no cut at all.
You could say Mr. Wallace Wallace left a welter, I want to tell these two, if you are trying to be both cruel and truthful, but he had fathered a number of children by different wives and girlfriends, some free and some still in bondage, some on the Missouri side and some over in Brooklin, right next to East St. Louis, and I heard tell that he had left another brood all along the river far north as Minnesota from the time he gained his papers up till now. As it was, I spoke to several people of the kind who could resolve the question of the building’s title while I took to running the tavern, though I had to finagle to get it into my name. As soon as I did I sold it to a white man who planned to tear it and every other building on the block down so he could throw up a warehouse, since in those days white people from every corner of their world, some from all across the free states and some from the Southern states, some from Ireland and some from Germany, were showing up as if the wind brought them, and they like to make money and take care of each other and that tiny tavern was in their way. I took the money, which was more than a servant’s wages, and bought another tavern cheap from a man leaving for Kansas, even closer to the river near the railroad tracks on Sycamore, from the roof you could even see Duncan’s Island where they carried out executions and lynchings. Ezekiel painted the sign with my name on it, Rivers Tavern, and I got down to business, always making sure that I watered down the liquor and allowed few tabs or boarders, borrowing only when absolutely necessary, and I eventually found myself and Ezekiel a pistol each, mine nesting in the back of my trousers, to ensure nobody rolled us, though I regularly paid off the police and a representative of my ward’s alderman every other Thursday, always in the morning and a few cents more than they asked for, which meant I never had any trouble, no trouble at all.
For all my success in business, I have never had any luck with women, which I would never dare share with these two, and the first one I took up with in St. Louis, just to have a woman more so than I really liked her, had something going with another woman at the same time. I broke it off but she sent the second woman to come talk to me, saying they could make accommodations if I could. The way it happens in the Bible the man would take several wives and not the other way around, but this woman, Augustine, had a way about her that could bend you to her will. The woman who came calling, with her tight curls and skin as black as mine and her limp, was named Louisa, and I ended up moving in with the two of them and Augustine’s two girls who were halfway to adult age and not so amenable to their mother’s guidance, especially since she was too caught up with her own business, a sure disaster when dealing with young people. Louisa was interested in learning about healing and reading the signs, and after a while I found myself growing quite fond of Louisa herself, and she confessed she had told Augustine she’d better keep me on as soon as she laid eyes on me, so she could get to know me, with my shoulders of coal and hairy legs and skillful way around a bar and a ledger book, and I found myself taken with this short skinny woman with skin the color of midnight and lips always parted as if posing a rhetorical question and her love of books, midnight eyes, and that leg broken during her bondage and never properly set, and that was how all that began. Still I warned her we ought to be careful, not just because of Augustine, who it turns out had other things happening on the side herself and was fine to let us have our own, but with her girls, and because of the law which saw fit to jail or send people down the Mississippi who didn’t follow the rules and conventions. Louisa, in her fashion, said several weeks later, having joined me in running the tavern, don’t worry about all that, we live in a frontier area, nobody cares about what we’re doing, and if the law comes we can always flee west and request to live among the Indians, and there’s nothing the law could do to us then.
Instead I said, “My business, Huckleberry, is just working hard and living my life, and I don’t know nothing about no Lovejoy or Torrey”—though I knew good and well who they both were, what free man didn’t know the names of the abolitionist heroes—“or the Mrs. Stowe lady”—and who in the last year hadn’t ever heard of her or her book? — “and I haven’t ever even considered going west.”
Huckleberry nodded, but Sawyer was watching me closely. He said nothing for a while, until I moved to take my leave and walk away. As soon as I stirred he laughed, more a cackle than an expression of humor, leaned close to me and said loudly, as passersby looked on, “You’d better watch yourself, Jim, you hear me? Good thing we know you but you walking these streets like they belong to you, and they don’t to no nigger, no matter what some of you might think these days, so you watch it, cause the time’ll come when even the good people like me and Huck here have had enough.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder as he said this, and I thought to cock him cold in his wire-lipped mouth, but I did not want to do anything to lose my tavern or my freedom, so I said, “I hear that, Tom,” and he said, losing his laugh, though Huckleberry was almost smiling now, “You call me Mr. Tom Sawyer, Sir, old man,” and I said, “YesMissTomSawyerSoilMan,” so fast it wasn’t clear whether I’d left out the “Mr.” or the “Sir” or added the “Old Man,” and he looked hard at me, almost smiling, reminding me in a firm, cold voice, “Boy, I’m warning you, you had better watch yourself.”