I kept a two-shot pepperbox revolver under my dress, fully loaded, and I would’a busted in there and put both loads in his head right then, but for her look of liking the whole business immensely.
15.
Squeezed
I never said nothing to nobody about what I seen. I done my duties around the Pikesville Hotel like normal. Pie come to me a few days later and said, “Oh, sweetie, I been so terrible to you. Come on back to my room and help me out, for I wants to work on my letters.”
I didn’t have the spirit for it, to be honest, but I tried. She seen I weren’t shining up to her like normal, and got mad and frustrated and throwed me out as usual, and that was the end of it. I was turned out in a way, changing, and for the first time was coming to some opinions of my own about the world. You take a boy and he’s just a boy. And even when you make him up like a girl, he’s still a boy deep down inside. I was a boy, even though I weren’t dressed like one, but I had my heart broke as a man, and ’cause of it, for the first time I had my eye on freedom. It weren’t slavery that made me want to be free. It was my heart.
I took to spilling a little rotgut down my throat in them times. It weren’t hard. I growed up around it, seen my Pa go his way with it, and I went with it. It was easy. The men in the tavern liked me, for I was a good helper. They let me help myself to the suds at the bottom of their mugs and glasses, and when they found out I had a good singing voice, throwed me a glass of rye or three for a song. I sung “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Rebels Ain’t So Hard,” “Mary Lee, I’m Coming Home,” and religious songs I heard my Pa and Old John Brown sing. Your basic rebel was as religious as the next man, and them songs moved ’em to tears every time, which encouraged them to throw more happy water in my direction, which I put to good use, sousing myself.
It weren’t long before I found myself the life of the party, two sheets to the wind, staggering around the saloon, singing each night and tellin’ jokes and making myself handy the way my Pa done. I was a hit. But a girl in them times, colored or white, even a little one, who drinks and carouses with men and acts a fool, is writing an IOU that’s got to be cashed in sooner or later, and them pinches on my duff and old-timers chasing me ’round in circles at closing time was getting hard to take. Luckily, Chase appeared. He’d tried his hand at cattle rustling in Nebraska Territory and got broke at it, and he come back to Pikesville heartsick about Pie as I was. We spent hours setting on the roof of Miss Abby’s, drinking joy juice and pondering the meaning of all things Pie as we stared out over the prairie, for she wouldn’t have squaddly to do with neither of us now. Her room on the Hot Floor was for only those who paid now, no friends, and we two was clean out of chips. Even Chase, feeling low and lonely, tried his hand at getting fresh with me. “Onion, you is like a sister to me,” he said one night, “even more than a sister,” and he groped at me like the rest of them old-timers in the tavern, but I avoided him easily and he fell flat on his face. I forgived him course, and we went on like sister and brother from then on, my kidnapper and me, and spent many a night drunk together, howling at the moon, which I generally enjoyed, for there ain’t nothing better when you sunk to the bottom to have a friend there.
I would’a gone whole hog with it and been a pure dee bum, but Sibonia’s hanging brung more trouble. For one thing, several of them dead Negroes was owned by masters who wasn’t agreed to Judge Fuggett’s rulings. A couple of fistfights got started on account of it. Miss Abby, who had argued against it, got called an abolitionist, for she runned her mouth about it considerable too, and that caused more wrangling. Judge Fuggett quit town and run off with a girl named Winky, and reports that Free Staters was causing trouble down in Atchinson was becoming more frequent, and that was troublesome, for Atchinson was cold rebel territory, and it meant the Free Staters was making headway against the shirts, which made everybody nervous. Business at the hotel dropped off, and the town’s business slowed up generally. Work got hard to find for everyone. Chase declared, “Ain’t no more claims to be had around here,” and he quit town to head west, which left me on my own again.
I thought about running, but I’d gotten soft living indoors. The thought of riding on the prairie by myself, with the cold, the mosquitoes, and the howling wolves, weren’t useful. So one night I went to the kitchen and clipped some biscuits and a mug of lemonade and slipped out to see Bob at the slave pen, being that he was the only friend I had left.
He was setting on a crate at the edge of the pen by himself when I come, and he got up and moved off when he seen me coming. “Git away from me,” he said. “My life ain’t worth a plugged nickel ’cause of you.”
“These is for you,” I said. I reached in the pen with the biscuits, which was in a handkerchief, and held them out to him, but he glanced at the others and didn’t touch them.
“Git off from me. You got a lot of nerve comin’ ’round here.”
“What I done now?”
“They say you gived up Sibonia,” he said.
“What?”
Before I could move, several Negro fellers watching from the far side of the pen slipped over closer to us. There was five of them, and one, a young, strong-looking feller, broke off the pack and come over to the fence where I was. He was a stout, handsome, chocolate-skinned Negro named Broadnax who done outside work for Miss Abby. He was wide around the shoulders, with a firm build, and seemed an easygoing feller most times, but he didn’t look that way now. I backed off the fence and moved along the rail quick back to the hotel, but he moved quicker and met me just at the corner of the fence and stuck a thick hand through the fence rail, grabbing my arm.
“Not so fast,” he said.
“What you need me for?”
“Set a minute and talk.”
“I got to go work.”
“Every nigger in this world got to work,” Broadnax said. “What’s your job?”
“What you mean?”
He had my arm tight, and his grip was strong enough to snap my arm in two. He leaned against the fence, speaking calm and evenly. “Now, you could be sproutin’ a lie ’bout what you knowed about Sibonia and what you didn’t know. And ’bout what you said and didn’t say. You could say it to your friend here, or you could say it to me. But without a story, who knows what your job is? Every nigger got the same job.”
“What’s that?”
“Their job is to tell a story the white man likes. What’s your story?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Broadnax squeezed my arm harder. His grip was so tight, I thought my arm might break off. Holding my arm, he peered around to make sure the way was clear. From where we was, you could see the hotel, the alley, and Darg’s house behind the pen. Nobody was about. In normal times, three or four people would wander down that alleyway during the day. But Pikesville had thinned out since Sibonia died. That woman was a stone witch.
“I’m talking letters,” he said. “Your job was to come back and write Sibonia some letters and passes and be quiet about it. You agreed to it. I was here. And you didn’t do it.”
I had stone-cold forgot about my promise to Sibonia by then. By now Broadnax’s friends had slipped up to the fence behind Broadnax and stood nearby holding shovels, movin’ dirt, looking busy, but listening in close.