“I ain’t surprised,” I said. “I still see Maynard, though I confess my recollections don’t have half the magic of your own.”
“Ain’t no magic, though,” she said. “Sometimes, Hi, sometimes…it is my feeling that she got away and left me with…”
Now she turned to me, breaking her gaze into the woods.
“He’ll never let me loose till I’m used up, you see? Then he’ll send me out of Elm somewhere, and take up another colored girl for his fancy. We really ain’t nothing but jewelry to them. I always known this, I think. But I am getting older, Hi, and knowing something is a far measure from truly seeing it.”
“Takes some time,” I said.
She was quiet again and for a few moments there was nothing but the gentle clopping of the horse along the road.
“You ever wonder about the rest of your life?” she said. “You ever wonder about young’uns? About any life that might be out there waiting for you?”
“Lately,” I said, “I wonder about everything.”
“I think of young’uns all the time,” she said. “I think of what it must mean to bring someone, a little girl perhaps, into all of this. And I know it’s coming, someday. That it ain’t even up to me. It’s coming, Hiram, and I will watch as my daughter is taken in, as I was taken in, and…I am trying to tell you that this all has me wondering about something else, about another life, past the Goose, maybe past them mountains, past…”
And her voice trailed off and she was looking off to the side of the road again, and I think now that this is how the running so often begins, that it is settled upon in that moment you understand the great depth of your peril. For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery, when it is they themselves who are savages, who are Mordred, who are the Dragon, in Camelot’s clothes. And at that moment of revelation, of understanding, running is not a thought, not even as a dream, but a need, no different than the need to flee a burning house.
“Hiram,” she said, “I don’t know why I come to you with this. All I know is you have always been one who saw more, who knew more. And then you met the Goose. We thought you was dead. You were there at the gates, and I watched you turn away and I wondered how a man could come back looking upon the world the same.”
“I know what you are speaking of,” I said.
“I am speaking of facts,” she said.
“You are speaking of goodbye,” I said. “And to where? How could we live, in any way, out there?”
She placed a hand on my arm. “How can you come up out the Goose alive and, in any way, still live here? I am speaking of facts.”
“You can’t even name it,” I said.
“But I can name this and every kind of life that will come after,” she said. “We could go together, Hi. You are read and know of things far past Lockless and the Goose. You must have some need of it. You must have found yourself dreaming of it, waking up now and again gripped in it. You must have some wanting to know all that you, all that we, might become out from under here.”
I did not answer. We could now see the great opening in the road that marked Nathaniel Walker’s place. I drove past this opening, and turned down a side path, which was our customary approach. I stopped the horse at the end of the path. Through the trees I could see Nathaniel Walker’s brick main house. I watched as a well-dressed tasking man came down the way. He nodded when he saw us, then motioned wordlessly for Sophia. She stepped out of the chaise and looked back at me. I noted, right then, that she had never done this before, instead she usually walked right on with her escort. But now she paused and looked back and what she said in that silence was something resolute, certain. And I knew then, looking at her, that we must run.
—
As I pulled away from Nathaniel Walker’s place, my mind now focused again on Georgie Parks. I must find him. I had known Georgie all my life and I understood that he might fear for me as a father fears for the son about to go off to war. I understood. Georgie had seen so many hauled down to the block and sent Natchez-way. I even sympathized. But still I had to run. Everything seemed to point me to it—the library volume, scheming Corrine and bizarre Hawkins, the fate of Lockless itself, always chancy, but now heirless, dire. And Sophia, who seemed to share in my desperation, in my need to see whatever lay beyond those three hills, past Starfall, past the Goose and its many bridges, past Virginia itself. You must have some need of it. I did. But the only route I then knew must be walked by the light of Georgie Parks.
The following Saturday afternoon, I worked on the drawers of a cherry secretary, and satisfied that they were again running easy, I washed, put on a change of clothes, and made my way to the home of Georgie Parks. I was not far into Starfall when I spotted Hawkins and Amy just outside the inn, both still in mourning black. They were distracted by their own conversation and did not see me, and so I kept my distance and watched Hawkins and Amy for a moment, before continuing on my way. I wanted no conversation, for their habit of picking at all the details of my life and my intentions had become intolerable to me. All of their questions gave way to other questions.
I found Georgie standing in front of his home, a short walk from Ryland’s Jail. I smiled. Georgie did not. He motioned for me to walk with him. We kept to the road for a bit, then turned off onto a smaller path where the town began to give way to the wilderness, and then took a dirt path, which brought us through some tangled green that opened to a small pond. Georgie said nothing during our short walk and now gazed at the pond for a moment before speaking.
“I like you, Hiram,” Georgie said. “I really do. If I was so lucky as to have a daughter about your season, you would be my only choice. You are smart. You keep your mouth where it should be, and you were more better to Maynard than such a man ever deserved.”
He rubbed his red-brown beard, turned and looked up into the trees. His back was now to me. I heard him say, “Which is why I can’t for the fact of things understand how a man such as you would come to my door looking for trouble.”
When he turned back to me, his deep brown eyes were simmering. “What would a respectable man like you want with this?” he asked. “And by what reasoning have you got it figured that I am the one who shall award it?”
“Georgie, I know,” I said. “We all know. Perhaps you have hid it away from the Quality, but we have always been smarter than them.”
“You don’t see the half of it, son. And I am telling as I have told you before—Go home. Get a wife. And get happy. Ain’t nothing over here.”
“Georgie, I am going,” I told him. “And I ain’t going alone.”
“What?”
“Sophia going with me.”
“Nathaniel Walker’s girl? Have you lost it? You take that girl and you might as well spit on that man. It is a high offense against any white man’s honor.”
“We are going. And, Georgie,” I said with only a hint of the anger I now felt in me, “she ain’t his.”
It was not only anger in me. I was nineteen, and a guarded nineteen who’d worked to feel nothing in this direction, so that when I did feel it, right there in that moment, when I did feel that I loved her, it was not with reason or ritual, nor the way that makes families and homes, but the way that wrecks them, I was undone.
“Now, let’s get one thing straight here,” Georgie said. “She is his girl. They all his girl, you get it? Amber his girl. Thena his girl. Your mother was his girl—”
“Careful, Georgie,” I said. “Real careful.”
“Oh, it’s careful now, huh? That’s what it is? You telling me about careful, son. They own you, Hiram. You a slave, boy. I don’t care who your daddy is. You a slave, and don’t think that just because I’m out this way, out here in this Freetown, that I ain’t some kind of slave too. And as long as they own you, they own her. You got to see. We are captured. Been captured. And that’s the whole of it. What you are talking here done got men a whole week in Ryland’s and beat within a prayer of they life. You have got a feeling in your heart and I respect it. I done felt it myself, what young man ain’t? But you almost died, Hi. You do this, and you will wish you had.”