"Yes, sir," he said, "I've searched everywhere from Mis-sissip to Alabam, from Timbuktu to Outer Mongolia."
"You crazy, boy?" I asked.
I was a little put off by his obvious lies.
He just stood there nodding and smiling until a sudden seriousness came into his face.
"Did a big white man with a mustache come around here looking for me?" the boy asked.
"Sho did."
"What did they say?"
"I don't think Mastuh liked that man too much," I said. "He told him that he'd tell him ifn he come across a lost slave, but I don't think he would really."
"Never say master," the copper-and-brass-colored boy said. "Not unless you are looking inward or up beyond the void."
Just hearing those words and seeing that bronze boy made my heart race faster than when I was trying to escape him. There was something about the way he talked to me, as if we had always known each other and now we were just taking up a conversation after a few days of being apart. For a moment there I almost believed that he really had been searching for me. For a moment I felt as if I had been found.
"Are you the nigger that Mr. Pike was looking for?" I asked.
"No master," he said. "No nigger either. No cur or demon or weed. Only life and firmament. Only fire and dark."
All his words became a little too much for my ears. I wanted him to make sense so I asked, "What's your name?"
The bright-eyed, slender boy looked puzzled a moment and then he looked sad. "They called me Son on the Barnes Plantation and Petey in the Lawrence cotton fields. Mr. London McGraw called me Two-step on a Virginia tobacco farm and on the Red Clay Plantation they named me
Lemuel. I've been called a thousand names over the years," he said. "But now, I think, my name is John, Tall John because your head only comes up to my chest."
"Well, Lemuel or John or Petey or whatever it is you wanna be called, we better get off'n this here path 'cause I hear Tobias's dogs comin'. He probably sniffin' 'round for you."
A most beautiful grin spread across the runaway slave's face. He grabbed me by the wrist and, with strength I wouldn't have believed his skinny arms could muster, dragged me through the underbrush and into the woods.
We moved quickly through the trees. My legs were pumping as fast as they could go but it didn't feel as if I were touching the ground with my feet. The slave who called himself Tall John was laughing happily but also as if he was relieved and restored.
We ran a zigzag path through the woods.
"Over this way!" he'd shout, and we'd change direction. "Faster!"
I can't say why I went so easily with the strange boy. Even though he was much taller than I we were probably near the same age. And, like I said before, it seemed as if I already knew him, that we had known each other in another place and time. I knew it was crazy but I had complete trust in the runaway who called himself Tall John.
We moved through the trees so fast that I couldn't mark which way we were going. It felt as if we were flying low like playing sparrows, but I knew that was just my imagination. I was running hard but it didn't make my breath come fast. My legs didn't get tired.
After quite some time of going like that we came to a cliff that looked out over a wide river. Giant herons and eagles flew up above. Down below I could see a she-bear and her two cubs sloshing through the shallow water, pawing the mud for some ort to sustain them in the summer heat. The sun was almost fully set and the sky was red with long black clouds hanging down. A lonely bird cried in the distance and tears sprang to my young eyes. I had never seen anything so beautiful, I had never felt so happy or at peace. I didn't know it at the time but that was my first experience of the feeling of freedom.
"Where is this?" I asked.
"White men named this place Winslet Canyon but the Indians have another name," Tall John said. "That she-bear down there thinks of it as the smell of fish and water with a hint of pine and cougar."
"How far is we from the plantation?" I wanted to know.
"Not far enough," the toffee-colored boy said, and then he added, "yet."
I squatted down at the edge of the ravine and devoured the vision with my eyes. It was so beautiful and serene. I wished that Ned could have been there or at least that he could have been buried there in the peaceful paradise that I never knew existed.
"They're looking for you, Number Forty-seven," the ' boy that called himself Tall John said.
"I don't hear nuthin'," I replied, not wanting to leave and not caring how he knew my name.
He grabbed me by the wrist again and said, "But they are calling. They sure are."
And then we were running again. Again I was floating above the ground, it seemed. Again I was moving ahead of the breeze. Before I knew it I was on the path and there before me stood Master Tobias, holding the leashes of his six slave-hating bloodhounds.
6.
The lead dog leaped at me and snapped her vicious jaws not a hand's span away from my face. I could smell her canine breath and hear the loud clacking of her teeth biting down.
Master Tobias yanked on his dogs' chains but they kept straining to get at me and Tall John.
"What's this?" the irate slave master said in a voice so frightening that I almost fell down from the weight of his words.
"He done arrested me, mastuh," the runaway slave Tall John said. He no longer sounded like the mischievous child I had met. "Arrested'ed me even though I wanted to run. He dragged me out the bushes and said that you was the mastuh and I bettah heed."
John let his head hang down and his jaw go slack. He stooped over and brought his hands together as if he were pleading. I had to blink at him because he no longer seemed to be the boy I had met less than an hour past.
Tobias, who was never at a loss for words in all the seasons I had known him, went silent and furrowed his brows. He looked from the runaway to me, and back again.
"Is that so, Forty-seven?"
"Yessuh," I said. I would have said so no matter what he had asked. I was so frightened of the slavering, snapping jaws of those hounds that all I could do was nod and say yes and hope that those big teeth didn't tear out my windpipe.
"Who are you?" Master asked the bronze cast boy
"They call me Tall John, your honor, suh. I was found in a cave near the Paradise Rice Plantation in South Carolina. They speculate that my mama must'a had me but then threw me down there so that the mastuh didn't kill both me an' her."
"You not Andrew Pike's runaway nigger from the Red Clay Plantation?"
"No, suh. Uh-uh. Naw. The Paradise Plantation burnt down and I was on a raft with Mastuh hisself tryin' to get downstream. But he got a terrible grippe and died and I been wanderin' in the wilderness evah since."
If I hadn't heard the boy describe Pike I would have believed his whopper. But as it was I kept quiet because I knew that what was going on was far beyond my control or understanding.
"So your master is dead and his plantation is burned down?" Tobias asked.
"Yes, suh."
"And how did the plantation burn down?"
"I think it was abolitionists," John said, bugging out his eyes. "Abolitionists and maybe injuns too. They burned down the master's house with all'a his family and then took the slaves and run. But I stayed with my mastuh because you know I loved him because he treated us slaves so good."
I had never seen a slave grease a white man like that. The lie was so bold that I was sure that Tobias was about to release the hounds to tear us both to shreds.