Moses said, “You go on, cause I got my eye on you. Got both my eyes on you.” He watched her go. “That mule be waitin for you in the mornin,” he said.
It was true, she thought as she stepped tentative feet onto the road, that the world had had eyes to see her, and even if the angels did take her now, the world would just reach up and pull her back. They don’t want you there, girl, so just come on back to us… She did not go far that night and turned around not long after passing the crossroads. The lane was all quiet but it was not as quiet as on all the other nights when her voice had been hoarse and her feet tired from all the walking and dancing. She entered her cabin and waited inside for the sound of it all coming to an end. Maybe if she had cared enough about everyone; maybe if she had shared; maybe if she had even believed that Delphie and Cassandra would want to go and sing to the angels with her. Nothing came but the sounds of her own heart and she went down to her knees and crawled to her pallet a few feet away from those of Delphie and Cassandra. Maybe she had waited far too long, and in waiting the train and the people had waved as they went by her. Who knew that there had never been enough time? Who knew that God had parceled out time the way Bennett and Moses parceled out the meal and flour and molasses? Thas gotta last so yall be careful how you eat… On the last plantation she had been on, a woman had jumped into the well, vowing to swim her way home. And she had done it, too, without a blessing from a mule kick. Why had she held back in just walking home? Now, that mule might want to take back his kick. You ain’t usin it, now give it here…
Two mornings later, Thursday, Caldonia told Loretta, who was to tell Zeddie, that she would supper with Moses in the kitchen. Loretta was not a woman to ask her mistress to repeat anything she said, but Zeddie wanted to know if Loretta was going around with ears too dirty to hear right. Loretta funned no one and when Zeddie saw she had the same face as on every morning, she said, “Tell her I get everything ready for her and the overseer.”
The meal was over and done with rather quickly because they did not talk. He had never sat at a table such as that one and had a full plate put before him. He had not known what to do and she saw this and took him away from the table.
They did not make love but he went back to the lane with the same amount of joy. He knocked at Alice’s cabin and took her outside, over to the side of the barn, and told her he was setting her free, that he had the power to do it. She said nothing and he laughed because he knew she was thinking this was an overseer’s trick. “You just be ready to go on Saturday night. Ain’t that a good time to go, Saturday? With all that lazy Sunday to go? Well, ain’t it?”
“I don’t know bout goin nowhere,” she said. “I’m just Alice on Marse Henry’s plantation, thas all I know. Marse Henry and Missus Caldonia Townsend in Manchester County, Virginia.”
He laughed again. “Henry dead. I put him in the ground myself and covered him up.” She could see that he was not the man fumbling and hugging himself in the forest, just one more sad sight as she mapped her way again and again through the night. No slave, not even the overseer, spoke the master’s name without calling him the master first, and Moses was doing that and not caring who in the night could hear him. Then he said, “And I want you to take my wife and boy with you,” and she began to feel that he was not just trying to trick her.
“Take Priscilla and Jamie? Take em, too?” The boy was fat and the woman was weighed down with worshiping her husband and her mistress.
He nodded. “Just take em along with you. Don’t say you don’t know what you doin. You ain’t foolin me goin all over Robin Hood’s barn, girl. I know you. I know what you been up to.”
“I ain’t been up to nothin. I’m just Alice, I told you. Over here on Marse Henry’s plantation in Manchester County, Virginia.” No one ever again drank out of the well the woman dove into to swim home. It had been the one used by the white people, and even after they had their new one dug, they wouldn’t let the Negroes use the well the slave woman swam home in. Every slave on the place wanted to taste the water that gave a woman the power of a fish, but the white people bricked over the well. Some said they poisoned the water before they did it.
“You listen after my words or I’ll see to it you never run around like you been doin.”
That night Moses told his family that he was sending them into freedom and that he would soon follow. “I don’t know how to get to freedom,” Priscilla said. “Me neither,” the boy said.
“Alice’ll take you, and yall can make a place for me.” Moses stood just inside the closed door.
“Alice? What is Alice, Moses? What is she? Her left hand would get lost tryin to find her right hand. What can Alice do?” Priscilla had been preparing to feed the hearth fire when her husband entered. Now she stood up with the wood pieces in her arms. The fire first wavered, then leaned toward the woman as wind came down the chimney and moved toward the bottom of the door.
“She knows more than you think, woman. She does. Now you just gon haveta trust me on this, Priscilla. You gon haveta trust that I can get yall to the other side.”
Priscilla said, “Lord, Moses, why you throwin us away like this?”
“It ain’t that,” Moses said. “I’m makin the way good for yall on this side, thas all I’m tryin to do.” Priscilla trembled and the wood fell from her arms. “Just trust Alice to know what to do,” he said.
“Why can’t you just come on with us now, Moses?” There was a chasm and he was telling her that it was an easy thing for her to jump, that she should simply make the jump to this freedom thing that wouldn’t even include him at first. He was not a good husband but he was all she had. Some women had no husbands or husbands off on another plantation, not right by them every night, breathing and fighting with the world in their sleep.
“Pa, you be comin long later?” Jamie said.
“I be there,” Moses said.
They said no more, but all the next day Priscilla tarried in her furrows and so Moses had to go to her and tell her to do right by her work. “I don’t wanna get after you again,” he said.
More than a mile from the plantation, that Saturday night, the four of them came to a stretch of woods that ended three miles later on William Robbins’s plantation. Alice had said nothing to Moses, but Saturday was a day many of the patrollers were liable to have been drinking. She did not know it but the sheriff paid them on Saturday, and while he didn’t forbid it, he didn’t like them working on Sundays, the Lord’s day, a day of rest. So the patrollers tended to start their Sundays way before Saturday midnight.
In the woods, Priscilla began crying. “Moses, why can’t you come now? Please, Moses, please.”
Alice stepped up to her and slapped Priscilla twice. Moses said nothing and Jamie said nothing. Who was this new woman, who was this Alice acting like this in the night? She said, “You just stop all that cryin right now. I won’t have it. Not one tear ever watered my thirst, and it won’t water yours neither. So stop it all right now.”
“It ain’t so bad, Mama,” Jamie said. “We can make it. See.” And the boy ran off for several yards and returned, then ran back and returned again. He stood running in place. “We can make it, Mama.”
“Heed that boy,” Alice said to Priscilla. “You better heed that boy. Moses, you hold off tellin long as you can.” In the dark of the woods, they could not see faces straight on, so the only way anyone could see a person was to stare at something just to the side. Only then did a face come clear. Alice looked at the tree next to Moses. “If they say they see you on the other side, then they know better than I do.”