He had been a slave for eight years when slave stealers from Ripley, Ohio, secretly visited the region. As usual the message was relayed through songs, and the white slave, now adept at the ways of the slaves, was one of those who were able to escape.
The Tablers of Tabler Town welcomed a new resident, a craggy Irishman by the name of Quigley. The family employed the man as a farmhand, and in the evenings listened to his stories of slavery. He told them of his escape from Fairfield Farms assisted by the sons of the Reverend John Rankin of Ripley, Ohio, of the succor he received at the home of the same Rankin overlooking the mighty Ohio River, of the insistence that he wanted to proceed to Athens County and to find two Africans he regarded as his brothers though he had never met them, namely Nicodemus and Abednego, and of his final journey to Tabler Town as a fully fledged white man after he had spent about six months with the Rankins recovering from the scars of slavery.
He was not sure whether he actually experienced the journey to Athens County or whether he dreamed it. He remembered or dreamed an intersection where he had great difficulty turning onto the road that would lead him to Tabler Town. There were many wagons, carts and carriages that moved very slowly, blocking the road. There were also many people selling their wares and blaring bullhorns. Among them he saw his slave dressed like a Native American in a black hat and a Navajo blanket worn poncho-style. The slave looked quite different though, his formerly skeletal figure filled with glistening flesh. The slave walked among the people selling scrolls and cloths that were red and white in color. He dashed from one side of the road to the other showing his wares to people who were hurrying about. The slave approached Quigley and Quigley shouted, “Hey, you ninny, how much are those scrolls?” The slave said they were ten dollars. One year’s savings for a working man! Quigley felt there must be something about the scrolls.
“What are they used for?” he asked.
“As a room divider,” the slave said, stretching one so that the prospective customer could see its full length and breadth. The slave did not recognize his master, and the master did not reveal his identity.
Although Quigley thought the scrolls were too narrow to use as dividers he still bought one. One day he would have a bedroom of his own. And a wife. He was determined not to go back to his old life of whiskey, whores and gaming. He would use the scroll to demarcate his territory so that his wife would know which side was his and which was hers. He had become very territorial from his experience of sleeping in slave quarters.
When he stretched the scroll he discovered that it was very long. It was made of fluffy feather-like material. On it were symbols and figures. He did not know how he learned to decipher such inscriptions, but he read them and discovered that the scroll contained the story of his life — from his past to the present. He could actually read the very present — reading about himself reading the scroll. There were other symbols that he tried to decipher but with great difficulty. He assumed they contained the story of his future and of the generations that would emerge from his loins. But he could not be sure about this.
After this the only thing he remembered vividly was an early morning after a particularly rainy night. He was waiting for a flood to subside with a group of people who were on their way to Tabler Town and beyond. Even as he stood there he was not sure if he had experienced the crossroads incident or dreamed it. No one among the people waiting knew anything about any such crossroads anywhere in the region. Yet he still had the scroll with him.
If Quigley happened to be at his house when he told the story he would take out the scroll and show his listeners. They would marvel at the symbols and the figures and he would tell them what they meant. Right up to the time he was telling the story.
“One day I’m gonna know what the rest means, and when that happens I will tell the future,” he said with conviction.
The first thing he did when he got to Tabler Town was to seek out Nicodemus and Abednego. He found Abednego and wept when he learned of the death of Nicodemus. Quigley suggested to Abednego that one day they should set out to avenge Nicodemus’s death, in memory of the fellow Africans that they left behind at Fairfield Farms and of all those who had been captured and sold and tortured and killed.
At first Abednego thought this was just idle talk. He had never really entertained any thoughts of vengeance. He was happily married to one of Harry Corbett’s beautiful daughters and was immersed in his father-in-law’s experiments with growing pawpaw in his orchards. He spent most of his days sitting there, staring at the trees as if willing them to grow, sometimes talking to them, egging them on and promising them the world if only they would show a peep of flowers. This was beginning to show results. Trees that had been growing slowly in the five years since the enterprise was started were almost the height of a man and had bloomed. Later the leaves would grow compact and dense. The plants looked healthier than those that grew in the wild. There was reason to celebrate, for the challenge of growing pawpaw as transplants had been won.
These were the beautiful thoughts that occupied Abednego’s mind, not vengeance. The white man was not making sense, although Abednego suddenly felt ashamed that he had forgotten about Nicodemus while he established his new life in Tabler Town. But vengeance was not part of his makeup. He did not see how it would help his dead brother. Surely it would not bring him back to life. He doubted if his mother would have wanted him to commit such an act. To get rid of Quigley he promised him he was going to think seriously about it, and Quigley said that he was keen to help. He was still angry about what had been done to him and he had to take out that anger on someone.
Abednego heard for the first time from Quigley how the Abyssinian Queen died laughing and praising the Lord after the return of Massa Blue Fly. It was a good thing, thought Abednego, that she never knew that Nicodemus did not quite reach the Promised Land. She must have been surprised on reaching the Otherworld to find Nicodemus there, newly arrived as well. Or did the Abyssinian Queen arrive before Nicodemus? There was no way of knowing how long it took Massa Blue Fly to reach her.
As months went by a strong bond developed between Quigley and Abednego. They went hunting and fishing together. Sometimes they were brave enough to venture to Athens to watch college students play a new version of rounders called baseball. It was always dangerous to go to Athens because lurking behind the friendly face of a college town were the likes of William Tobias who were now resorting to abducting free blacks and taking them across the Ohio into slavery. Men like these were a law unto themselves. Since 1831 there were penalties for kidnapping free blacks, but that did not give any comfort to blacks because slave chasers were not deterred by such laws.
Abednego was the best man when Quigley married one of Harry Corbett’s daughters. People talked about the wedding for a long time, but not because it was particularly grand. On the contrary it was meant to be a quiet affair at the Methodist church. What people talked about was not how beautiful the bride looked, but how her uncle, Harry Corbett’s hothead brother, caused a commotion outside the church by preaching his own sermon denouncing what was happening in the church.
People generally dismissed the man as a rabid Indian nationalist who felt that the Negro had degraded and destroyed his Indian race by marrying into it, to the degree that it was no longer respected by other races — by which of course he meant by the whites. He also said that the Indian claim of the Tabler Town area as an ancestral land would be rejected by the state of Ohio on the basis of what he called mongrelization. But no one had thought that the man would also denounce a marriage between a daughter of the tribe and a white man. Was it because this particular white man identified more with the black people? Or did the man disburse his hatred equally without fear or favor? He had an audience too. Those citizens of Tabler Town who could not be accommodated in the small church had no choice but to listen to his sermon.