I felt myself come back into myself, drop by drop, like a drained well filling back up. I stood up, and everybody clapped for me, then they died laughing when I offered an ironic bow. I think I may have done some dancing. I politely declined the fat rolled joint that Maryellen offered to me, not wanting to find out how cannabis would interact with olanzapine.
When I was sitting again it was at the kitchen table, and for the first time I noticed a very old white man. I could have sworn he hadn’t been there before, that I would have seen him, but on the other hand he looked like he’d been there forever, for centuries: pulled up close to the table in a wheelchair, dressed for a funeral, dark suit and thin black tie. Everybody else was drinking from cans and bottles, but his crooked fingers were splayed around a rocks glass containing only ice and the last clinging droplets of something dark and brown.
“Is that glass empty, son?”
“Sorry?” I had been looking out the window-the basement had a pair of high garden windows, letting in a peek of dirt-colored sky. I was wondering where exactly I was.
“It is rather dark in here, but I do believe my glass is empty.” His voice was a decayed whisper, still carrying its ancient and decorous southern accent. “I do believe that it is. Would you be so kind as to fill up that glass? You will find a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red in a cabinet beside the icebox.”
His watery eye was fixed on me. I found the whiskey and poured him out his glass.
“I appreciate it, young man. I do very much appreciate it.” The old white man sipped slowly and licked his thin, cracked lips. “I do not believe I have had the pleasure.”
“This man is named Elijah, sir.” It was Ada. She had materialized at my side, one hand on my shoulder. He craned his thin neck around to peer at her.
“Elijah?” he said, looking back at me slowly.
“That’s right, Counselor.” Ada looked at me carefully, and I said, “Yes, sir. Elijah.” And then, because it seemed like the thing to say, I said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”
“The honor…” He cleared his throat with effort. “The honor belongs entirely to me.”
His body had been incapacitated at some point, probably by a stroke. Half of him was slumped and slurred like a melting candle. He’s a hundred, I thought. He’s a thousand. He had the look of eternal old age, like he had been old forever, sitting pale and wraithlike in his old-fashioned wheelchair.
“Now, Elijah.” He gazed at me, licked the tips of his yellow teeth. “Now. You have embarked upon your journey. You are finding your way to freedom. The bad times are behind you, Elijah, but much uncertainty lies ahead. I cannot imagine…” Another pause, another elaborate throat clearing. “Cannot imagine how you must feel. But please know that here, boy, here in this home you are welcome. Here, there is…” He spread his arthritic fingers as wide as they would go. “Sanctuary.”
“Well,” I said, and then-what else was there to say?-“Thank you.”
“Yes, sir, Counselor,” said Ada on my behalf. “Elijah is on his way. On his way to the promised land.”
“God bless you, boy,” said the lawyer. “God protect you.”
And then just like that he fell asleep: tilted his head to one side, and his eyes clicked shut like a doll’s.
“Sir?” said Ada. “Mr. Russell?”
“Oh, he out,” said Marlon, easing past, a beer bottle in his fist.
“Yeah.” Ada patted the old man on his hand. “Think you’re right.”
“One of these times, you know, he gonna just die.”
“Hush your mouth,” said Ada. She smiled with undeniable tenderness at the lawyer as Marlon wandered away. “He’s right, though. He comes and goes. One of these days he won’t come back.”
The group was getting quieter around us: people talking in low voices, murmuring. Big Otis and little Maryellen had settled into the chair I was in before, she on his lap, cuddling close.
“We just tell him everybody’s named Elijah. Makes things easier is all.”
I scratched my forehead. “I’m supposed to be talking to him. That’s what they told me.”
“Well, go on,” Ada said. “Talk.”
I looked at the lawyer, then at her, and I saw that she was laughing, and I laughed, too.
“Yeah, how about that, huh?” Ada shook her head. She draped a blanket across the old man’s lap, eased a few strands of white hair out of his eyes. “But you try telling the Holy Ghost up there it’s a bunch of Negroes running the show.”
Cook had said much the same thing, laughing but not smiling, as we drove down Meridian Street to the monument: that Mockingbird mentality.
“So he…” I looked warily at the sleeping old man. “He owns you.”
She laughed again. She had a deep, musical laugh. “Yes, he does, Elijah. The house and the yard, everything and everyone in it.”
“You trust him.”
“Oh, we got to. Got to. Him more’n anyone. You heard of something called the Gulliver case?”
I had. It rang a bell. I knew this stuff. I looked at the old man again, trying to find familiar features under the layers of age. For a time I had become obsessed with the history of slavery law, studied all the Supreme Court arguments, memorized long chunks of decisions and dissents. Hospital Corporation v. Mississippi. Schools of Florida. Conroy v. Wilson.
Ada refreshed my memory on the Gulliver case. The PB in question, service name Gulliver, had been a Louisiana slave in service to a small farmer named Peabody, who took him to New York State for the wedding of a Peabody cousin. Gulliver was threatened by some local boys outside the nightclub, waiting for the wedding reception to end, and defended himself-ended up in federal prison on a gun charge. After he served his eight months, a local abolitionist group showed up to claim him before Peabody could, and then they sued for his freedom, making the sly argument that federal prisons were free territory, like national parks and landmarks, and that being housed in one for more than six months triggered the domicile clause: under the law, the boy had relocated, so the boy was free.
The New York circuit court agreed, and the Supreme Court might have, too, if not for the efforts of a silver-tongued lawyer from Alabama. One of these graceful southern gentlemen of the bar, with goatee and white suit and red suspenders-nothing like this haunted old husk across from me at the little table, withered hands clawed around his rocks glass.
“It was looking to be one of the landmark cases, you know?” Ada said. “A major blow to the possessor-travel rules. But then this firecracker lawyer rolls up out of the slave lands, talking about how-ah, what was it, now?-how it’s not the duration of the trip that matters but the…” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember. “Marlon? Hey, what-”
“Intent,” said the lawyer softly, opening one eye. “Not the duration of possession but the intent of the possessor that is determinative under the statute.”
“That’s right. That’s right, Counselor.”
The one eye fluttered shut again. The old man breathed softly, slowly, in and out.
“That did it. Supreme Court liked that,” said Ada. “Gulliver came home in chains. Peabody turned around and sold the man offshore.”
This thought brought me to a blur of sadness, a sour taste of regret. Everybody ends up somewhere. I thought of Martha, sitting primly at the Cotyledon Café. She must be gone by now. Long gone. I hoped so, and I hoped not.
Both of the lawyer’s eyes opened, small and inky and wet. He raised his glass. “To Gulliver.”
The slaves all raised their bottles, too, all together, and spoke in unison. “To Gulliver!” Then they drank and went right back to their conversations while the lawyer’s eyes slipped back closed.