The pass itself was colder than the peaks and cliffs that towered above it, and in some places slubs of old, gray snow remained year-round. High, sheer walls of mossy rock rose up beside us and disappeared into the mists overhead, while below on the floor of the gorge we chopped, dug, and shoved, and when necessary laid down narrow log bridges to cross the gills and brooks and the peaty muskegs that abounded there. We would finish one arduous task of clearing and move on to the next bend in the path and instantly come to a new obstacle — a fallen, primeval spruce tree six feet in circumference, a head-high tangle of thick, twisted roots, a mudslide, a wall of enormous boulders — which we were obliged to cut or move aside when we could or, when we couldn’t, carve a pathway through lesser trees or around smaller rocks. Our simple intent, our one thought and standard, was to make it possible for a horse or a string of horses, by day or night in any season, to carry frightened, exhausted fugitives from slavery through to freedom. That thought drove and organized us, and as we worked we talked of little else.
At night, though, lying back on our mattress of layered balsam boughs, with the fire guttering out, we spoke of other things, naturally. Lyman and I had not been together like this for a long time, a sad time, which I regarded with considerable regret. But out here alone in the wilderness, as of old, we soon found ourselves speaking our innermost thoughts to one another once again, talking of our respective childhoods and early days, our hopes for the future, and our beliefs regarding all first things. Our lives in every way were significantly different, but in a paradoxical way, this let us know all the better how we ourselves might have lived, had Lyman been born white and I black. Despite our differences, Lyman and I regarded ourselves, except for race, as remarkably similar, the way that lovers often do.
This is a complicated and painful recognition for a black and a white man to make. On both sides, envy and anger get confusedly mingled with love and trust. And so it was with us. Or at least with me. I now knew, for instance, that my thwarted love for Susan was my love for Lyman gone all wrong, fatally corrupted by guilt and envy. I did not want to love her — I did not love her at all — so much as I wanted to neutralize my powerful feelings for Lyman. For they had frightened me: they were unnatural; they were the unavoidable consequence of a manly love finding itself locked inside a white maris racialist guilt, of Abel’s sweet, brotherly trust betrayed by Cain’s murderous envy.
We were on that third night out seated before our fire, after having eaten a supper of trout pulled from a pool in the trickling beginnings of the Au Sable and potatoes carried in from home, and we were speculating on the nature of the earth before the arrival of the plants and animals — whether it had been a warm planet, as some scientists were then claiming, or cold and covered with ice, as others thought, or whether the Bible was to be believed in this matter in a literal way, when so many self-professed Christians nowadays, even including Father, regarded its description of God’s creation of the earth as figurative and allegorical.
“Either way!’ Lyman said, “we know God created everything. The whole kit an’ caboodle. Question is, first time around, was it ice or was it fire? Did things heat up to get to where they are now, or cool down? With all that business about the darkness and the firmaments between the firmaments, it must’ve been ice,” he declared. “I’m holding out for a world of ice that God sets to slowly melting over the years, especially in the years since the birth of Jesus, as the Christian religion gets spread over the world. Starts way down in the Garden of Eden and moves out from there. Which is why the Bible comes from the desert anyhow. Egypt and all that. On account of it being close to Eden and it being already warm there first.”
Lyman’s accent had slipped to the South, as it usually did when we were at ease alone together and as I imagined it did when he was speaking only with black people. He slurred his vowels, dropped consonants, and let his grammar follow different, less logical rules and conventions than those that guided white people’s grammar. When he talked this way, which was his natural speech, I was often inclined to let my own speech drift over in unconscious mimicry, for it was to me an attractive way to speak — smoother and slower, softer and more intimately expressive than my own habitual pronunciation and grammar permitted. I envied its intimacy especially and longed to escape from the formality of my accent and the impersonal logic of my sentences. But whenever I heard myself trying it, I grew severely embarrassed, as I could not speak Lyman’s English without hearing myself in blackface. I felt like an inept imposter, an unskilled actor mouthing lines not his own.
Reluctantly, I would return at once to my accustomed manner of speaking, which had been influenced so profoundly by Father’s that, in the context created by Lyman’s fluency and ease, my words seemed to be coming from Father’s mind and my voice from his lips. Consequently, instead of sounding like an untalented minstrel showman making a mockery of Southern Negro speech, I sounded to myself like a tinny, nervous imitation of my old-fashioned Yankee father.
I have no idea of how I sounded to Lyman’s ears. If he envied the formality of my pronunciation and the rigorous, constricting logic of my grammar, he showed no signs of it. Merely, when amongst white people, he spoke in the manner of a poor, uneducated Southern farmer who was white also, and since he was, after all, a Southerner, it seemed authentic enough, at least to white people. Perhaps he was simply a better actor than I and could move from Negro to white speech without exposing the gap between his true and false selves. I, it seemed, could not, no matter how I spoke. Which is one reason why I so often chose to remain silent. Until now. When there is no one left to hear me but the dead, and you, Miss Mayo.
Lyman said, “There’s still lots of places around here, even, where the old, original world ain’t got warm yet. So you can still see how it was back in them olden days, if you wants to. Got ‘em close by, even.” He told me then of an ice-cave located not a hundred rods from where we sat. There were a number of ice-caves up here along Indian Pass, he said, which were known to the people of Timbuctoo and carefully avoided by them. “On account of them ol’ African superstitions an’ such. But they don’t bother me none. It’s older folks, mostly, who is scared to go inside. They warns you off ‘em like the devil live there. Ain’t nobody live there. Too cold, ‘specially for the devil;’ he said with a short laugh. “You wants to see one?”
I said sure, and we each stuck a pitchy pine-branch into the fire and, torches in hand, marched single-file into the darkness beyond our camp, moving uphill along a rocky rivulet. Soon we approached the sheer, high walls of stone that mark the highest point of the pass, where the trickling waters split and half the trickles run south and grow in time into the mighty Hudson and half run north and become the Au Sable and empty finally into the St. Lawrence. Here Lyman turned off the narrow path to his right and began to scramble uphill over riprapped rocks and tangled roots. I followed close behind.