“But no one did.” Georgie laughed loudly and asked, “You ever water dance, Hi?”
“Naw,” I said. “Wasn’t my thing.”
“Shame, shame,” Georgie said. “Shame to have all that beauty and not pass it on. And it was so much beauty back there. Beautiful girls. Beautiful boys.”
Georgie was finished eating by now. He set down his plate and blew out a long stream of air.
“And I think of all that beauty sometimes, how it withered in them chains….Man, I tell you, when I took up with Amber, I vowed I would get her out. Whatever it took, I did not care. I think I might well have killed a man to get her out, Hiram. Anything to not watch her…”
And Georgie pulled up there because I think he then realized the import of what he was saying, what it meant for me, and what it meant for my momma.
“And you are out now,” I said. “You have done it. You out.”
Georgie laughed quietly and then he said, “Ain’t nobody out, son, you hear? Ain’t no out. All gotta serve. I like serving here more than at some other man’s Lockless, I will grant you that, but I am serving, of that I can assure you.”
We sat there quiet for a few minutes. The voices out front subsided and I heard the front door close and then the back one open. Amber came out and took Georgie’s plate and then my own.
She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and said, “Georgie filling you with lies again?”
“Tough to tell,” I said.
“Mmmm-hmm,” she said, walking back into the house. “Watch him, I say. Watch Georgie. He is slippery.”
From Georgie’s back garden, I could see the far edge of the Goose River. The sun was now dropping low in the sky and clouds were calling up and the day grew cooler. It would soon be time. Maynard would be ready. So I decided to say something to Georgie Parks that would alter my life.
“Georgie, I feel that I must go.”
I think he caught the meaning, and then decided he did not, and said, “I guess so. Got to get back across the river, huh?”
“No,” I said. “I am telling you that I am getting up in age, and I am watching people disappear, carried off Natchez-way, and I can see the whole place going down. The land is dead, Georgie. The soil done turned to sand and they know it, all of them. I was just walking here and I seen a man knifed and a girl beat in the street. Ain’t no law. I like to think there was law once, the older folks speak of such a time, and though I have not known it, I can feel all the changes. A man is blooming inside me, Georgie, and I cannot shackle him. He know too much. He seen too much. He has got to get out, this man, or he cannot live. I swear I fear what is coming. I fear my own hands.”
Georgie started to say something, but I cut him off.
“It is said that you are a man of knowledge, that you know more than this little free quarter, that you are connected with people who operate in such things. I want the railway, Georgie. I want the railway out, and I have been told you know of such things.”
And now Georgie stood and wiped his mouth, and then wiped his hands on his overalls. Then, never looking at me, he sat down again.
“Hiram, go home now,” he said. “Ain’t no man blooming in you. It done bloomed already. This is who you are. This is your condition and if you is planning to change it, you must do it as I did.”
“Don’t work no more,” I said. “Ain’t no tasking man capable of out-earning Natchez.”
“Then your life is your life. And may I say it is a good one. Your only charge is that dumb brother of yours. Go home, Hiram. Get yourself a wife. And make like you happy.”
I did not answer. He said it again, “Go home.”
—
And so that was Georgie’s command and I followed it. But what I believed, right then, was that Georgie had lied to me, that he was as they had claimed him to be—an officer of freedom, of some other life, of an Oregon for a colored man. He had not even denied it, and so the matter to me then became simple—I had to prove to him who and what I was, that I could not, at that late hour, be talked out of it, and I was certain I could do this, and so as I walked back to Maynard and the chaise, back past the square, I knew that Georgie would help me, I knew that he would get me out, because there was no future here and I saw this even in my short walk back through the refuse of the day. There was trash all out in the streets. A man of Quality, whom I recognized by his garment, lay passed out face-down in manure while his compatriots, stripped down to the shame of their shirtsleeves, laughed at him. I saw torn hats and the flowers that once adorned them. I saw azure scarves in the street. I saw men tossing dice along the side of the pub, and then out front two cocks being fitted for the fight. This was their civilization—a mask so thin that for the first time in my life, I wondered what I myself had ever aspired to in those days back down in the Street, with my trick of memory, designing to catch the eye of the Pharaoh of Lockless, and not for the first time I saw that I had set my sights much too low. Because we in the Warrens lived among them, we knew first-hand that they took the privy as all others, that they were young and stupid, and old and frail, and that their powers were all a fiction. They were no better than us, and in so many ways worse.
Maynard was outside the fancy house with his fancy girl, waiting, and next to them I saw Corrine’s man again. Hawkins. Maynard was laughing at some joke, while Hawkins regarded him with a muted loathing Maynard was too drunk to detect. When Maynard spotted me, he laughed even harder, started toward me, and stumbled to the ground, taking the girl along with him. I helped the girl up, while Hawkins quickly moved to help Maynard, whose breeches and waistcoat were now soiled with mud.
“Goddamn it, Hiram!” he cried. “You suppose to catch me!” Indeed. I had always caught him.
“The girl is my own tonight,” he yelled. “She’s mine, goddamn it! Like I told them, Hiram! Like I told them all! Like I told all the girls!”
Then he looked over to the loathing Hawkins. “Not a word of this to your mistress, boy. Not one word. You understand?”
“A word about what, sir?” Hawkins said.
After a moment of squinting, Maynard laughed again. “Yessir, we gonna get along well, me and you.”
“Like family should,” said Hawkins.
“Like family should!” Maynard yelled, climbing into the chaise. I helped the girl in and then we were off, headed out the way we’d come in. But then, and who knows why, a moment of clarity struck him, a shame that had defied him all his life, and he ordered me back, away from the town square, out toward Dumb Silk Road. And so we left Starfall in this fashion, left the world as we had known it, for as I rode out of town and the buildings gave way to trees, bursting in gold and orange, as I heard the crows in the distance, the horse clopping in front, and felt the wind in my face, I knew that I had seen every inch of the only world I’d know. I knew how my span of days would end. Someday my father would pass on from this earth and what remained would fall to Maynard, and when that day came, I knew that all paths led to Natchez.
I rode out in thrall to those feelings of the past hours, the dream, the terror, the rage, the unending night, the sun of Sophia fading over the mountains, my lost mother and my aunt Emma. And too there was a want, a desire for an escape from Maynard and the doom of his mastery. And then it came.