In a huff, then, and puffed up with self-righteous relief, I left the crowded little house on Franklin Street and made my way downtown towards the dark, broad Connecticut River, where barges and sloops and Long Island coasters tied up at the docks, and their crews and the stevedores gathered in dim, smoky taverns. In and around these taverns and boarding houses there were women — women waiting for the company and pay of lonely men and boys who came ashore for a night or two, women waiting for the drovers and woodcutters from the hills of Vermont and New Hampshire to come in from the marketplaces of the town with fresh money in their pockets and reckless intentions in their hearts.
Women, women, women! The mere idea of femaleness made me mad with desire, although I knew not what it was exactly that I desired. Sex? Copulation? Simple, carnal love? All that, I suppose. All that. The very fact of it. But something else, too. I craved knowledge, knowledge of a sort that up to then I’d had no access to, and here I speak of the certain and unmistakeable smell of a woman, the touch of her soft skin, the flow of her hair across my hand, the sound of a woman’s whispered voice in my ear, even the sight of her naked body. What were these smells, touches, sounds, and sights like? I had never experienced these aspects of femaleness. But I knew they existed, and that small knowledge made me wildly desirous of the further, larger, and much more dangerous knowledge beyond.
It was a warm night, the April air thick with the smell of lilacs and new, wet grass. I strode along, determined tonight not to leave this river town without learning at least something of what I was sure I would miss afterwards — for the remainder of my life, as it seemed. For I still believed the Old Man then, believed him when he said that our move up into the Adirondack wilderness of northern New York would be permanent. And had accepted that, because of the blacks settled there, Timbuctoo would be our base for all future operations in the war against slavery. I was sure that my permanent, lifelong job would be to run the farm and tend the flocks, so that Father could preach and organize and fight, activities to which his character and temperament were so much more neatly adapted than mine. I felt that I had reached the end of a conscripted childhood and was about to begin a similarly conscripted adult life. But on this April night, for a few hours, at least, I meant to be a free man.
I saw several women and avoided passing each one by crossing the street to the other side. But then came one I could not avoid, and after I had passed her by with my habitually averted gaze, she called out, “Hullo, Red! Would y’ be needin’ company tonight?”
She was a girl, practically, I had glimpsed that much, and red-haired herself, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with bright white powder all over her face and a broad slash of painted lips and smudge-blackened eyes. She wore erratic scraps of cloth elaborately draped across her shoulders, wrapped, sashed, and pinned so as to suggest an exotic gown, although it was more a child’s motley costume than a woman’s dress.
I stopped and turned back to her, and she said, with a curl to her voice and a pronunciation that was noticeably Irish, “You’re a big feller, ain’t you, now.”
Because I could see that she was a child, she did not frighten me as a full-grown woman would, and I took a step towards her. “I’m… I’m only out for a walk,” I said. She was small and thin. Her head, covered with a crumpled black lace bonnet, came barely to my chest, the thickness of her wrist seemed not much greater than that of my thumb, and her waist was smaller than the circumference of my right arm.
When I approached her, she stopped smiling and stepped back from me into a bank of shadows that fell from a cut-stone retaining wall. We were down by the canal tow path, with the river passing in the darkness below and a cobbled street out of view above. I heard a horse clop past and the iron-sheathed wheels of a wagon. It was a lonely, dark, and dangerous place for a girl, even a girl such as she — perhaps especially for one such as she, whose purpose for being there was to solicit the attentions of men likely to be drunk or angry, men likely to regard her as disposable. More particularly, of course, she was there to solicit men like me — timid, passionately curious bumpkins, who would pay to use her, yes, but would not otherwise harm her.
I was useless to her, however, a waste of her time, for I had no more than a few loose coins in my pocket. Father, I thought, with more coins in his pocket than I, would try to save such a woman. He would lecture her on the evils of her ways and give her his last money and instruct her to go home and feed herself and her babes, if she had any. John and Jason were both recently married and, even if they had been as unattached as I, would have done likewise. I knew that I, however, had I the means, would only try to use her. I am confident that Father never in his life performed the sexual act outside the matrimonial bed (where, to be sure, he performed it frequently); the same for my brothers; but I, by contrast, even at the young age of twenty-four, still and perhaps forever too much the son and brother, could not imagine myself as husband, as father, as regular visitor to the marriage bed. And so here I was, where my father and brothers would never be, soliciting a prostitute.
Though I was a full-grown man, I wore my manhood like an ill-fitting costume — not unlike the way the girl before me wore her make-up and rags, her woman’s costume. We had met in the shadows of a high stone wall, two children ineptly disguised as adults. But where she had costumed herself as a grown woman in order to keep from starving or freezing to death, I was a child got up merely to accommodate the size and appearance and the startling impulses of a man’s body. But I was probably no more successful at disguising my childishness than she, and in a diminished sense, I, too, was in danger out here — a cull, easy prey to robbers, tricksters, confidence men and women, cutpurses and cutthroats of every stripe.
“I… I have no money!’ I said to her.
“Aw, come on, now, a nicely dressed feller like yourself?”
“Yes. I live not far from here. I’m just walking, out for a walk… as I said. I… I like to be by the river.”
“Then what d’ you want with me?” She took a further, backwards step into the deeper shadows, and I could not make out her powdered and painted face any longer.
“Nothing. Nothing. Just… I’m sorry, miss. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t scare me.”
“No?” I moved towards her, and she jumped awkwardly away, like a broken-winged bird, her parti-colored feathers all dusty and awry. I reached out with my right hand and placed it on her bony shoulder. Instantly, she ducked out from under it and turned her back to me, pressing herself against the cold stone wall.
“I won’t hurt you,” I whispered.
“You can’t touch me ‘less’n you pay.”
I reached into my pocket and drew out the few coins that remained, a gratuity I had received the day before from a Lowell merchant who’d had me haul five hundred weight bales of wool to his cart-copper pennies, enough for a single loaf of bread, no more. “Here, this is all I’ve got.” Looking warily at me, she half turned and opened her tiny hand; I passed her the coins, and they disappeared into her rags at once.
I peered down at my feet, embarrassed and unsure of what to do next, and when I looked up again, the girl had slid down along the wall and was about to bolt. “Hey, where’re you off to!”
“No place!” she said, alarmed, and stood stock-still, half hidden in the darkness.
“But you took my money!”
“Y’ don’t get much for coppers, y’ know.”
“But you were running off
“I was only movin’ out of the walkway some. C’m’ere, an’ be nice, mister. Don’t fret none, I’ll give you some of what y’ want, darlin’. C’m’ere, now,” she said to me in a lulling tone, as if she were trying to calm a large, frightened animal.