The door opened with little effort, and I closed it tight behind me. Eugénie and White had folded themselves into a tiny ball beside a mountain of crates. Both had hollered and wept themselves dry, and neither moved as I entered the room. I paid them no mind and, taking a silver flask, engraved with the initials “NDL,” which I knew she had filled with liquor from the cellar, I initiated my procedures, pouring a generous libation accompanied by prayers, drawing a circle around me with the wine, filling the washbasin with enough water that I could see my reflection. I sat beside it, formed a filigreed vane with the beads and closed my eyes. Before I could get too far into my imprecations, I heard a voice so tiny it almost sounded as if it were coming from another world. I opened my eyes. Eugénie had risen and planted herself right outside the circle.
“You spook,” her voice boomed, “I command you to get up and let us out of here. And you’re going to hitch up one of the horses right after you open that door. Did you forget you still belong to me? Now be a good heifer and do what I tell you!” I closed my eyes and continued my prayers, opening them only to peer into the water, onto which a variety of images, first two dimensional as in my drawings and then, as if looking into a magical screen in which life itself could be projected, took shape, color and form.
Nisi audiam no te exaudiam. The fragrance of fire taking wing through the bowers of trees fused with voices thundering just beyond the nearby pane to generate an effect not unlike a nervous system subjected to an intense and continuous shock. I trembled but pressed onward with my chant.
“Ma négresse,” the girl said firmly, though no longer screaming, and still outside the circle, “ouvre la porte maintenant.” White was yanking on the doorknob, but it would not budge. “Have you forgotten how close we once were? How you were ma pétite poupée? Ma chère, open that door.” On the screen before me I could see those days, she in her pastel lawn following me from room to room, interrupting my tasks with questions, demands, how she kept me up late and woke me before dawn, how she would extend her thin pink ankle just before I took a step, her chamberpot in tow, sending it and me spilling down the stairs, how she placed the knife to the small of my back and ordered me to prepare the wagon and stallion to carry her and her barely breathing mother to the port.
Build a castle on sand, even with lime, and it will eventually be a gift to the sea. I did not even have to raise my hand to drive the pictures from the water’s surface. Battering on the main door below began to resound all the way up to the ceiling above us.
“Carmel,” the child said, almost softly, though I could feel the blade in every word, “let us go. You can join us if you want to. Once we get to the Northwest Territory I might even set you free. Don’t you want to save yourself, don’t you want to be free?”
I thought about her offer for a second — seeing the three of us, they on the one aged gelding still on the grounds, and I on foot chasing behind them as they galloped off into the dark, then me helping her across the Tennessee as White and the sack of coins he had emptied from his father’s safes sank to its brown depths, and then me foraging on her behalf for something to sustain us as we proceeded through the land the Chickasaws still tenaciously had held onto, where she nevertheless would encounter her own people as well, as they had seeped like an underground leak from one end of this region to the other — but no longer. Instead, I rose and answered her, “Fòk mwen te manke w pou m te kap apresye w.” The door swung open, sweeping her and White out. I resumed my position and continued searching in the watery mirror, until I finally found my mother’s face.
A dialogue
Are you going to waste yet another opportunity to save yourself?
Didn’t I already tell you I refused to think of them as wasted opportunities to save myself, but rather as stages in my careful process of preparation.
So you are ready to take action?
Have you been so busy you weren’t paying attention?
Don’t forget who you are speaking to.
Don’t forget who you are speaking to.
I think I have finally come to appreciate your logic.
Perhaps, I find myself recounting to Phedra, Marinette and others, it will be left to the patience of someone more devoted to the genre of literature than I to record the noises that filled that hot and moonless night in Kentucky, or the taste that lingered on the tongues of the few survivors after the gunpowder stored beneath the printing press caught fire, or the particular stench of burning brick and plaster and ink fused with flesh and hair, or the feeling of being thrown far, far into the black air with nothing to halt your eventual fall back to the parched, grassless soil… I personally shall never forget how that scene — so distant from where I was then that it required all my powers to concentrate — reminded me of nothing less than a forget-me-not, white with bright scars of crimson and azure, holding fast like a last memory or reliquary of sorrows against the bluffs above a small, almost forgotten provincial island or inland colonial town.
II ENCOUNTERNARRATIVES
Knowledge is submarine.
I believe that if we have any notion at all of what has generally
been called human nature, it is because History, like a mirror,
holds up for our contemplation, an image of ourselves.
He never tires of the journey, he who is the darkest one,
the darkest one of them all.
THE AERONAUTS
Scream I holler to Horatio’s, Nimrod’s and Rosaline’s laughter, then they’re asking me to tell it to them again, though I plead how at this age I can’t hardly even remember my name. Horatio says, “Red, come on, just one more time cause you ain’t fooling us,” and I start with how it began six months before all that happened, round the middle of May, 1861, when I showed up for my job as a steward at the final Saturday of the spring lecture series at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. I had spent that morning toiling under my regular boss, Dameron, helping prepare for a grand dinner party he was catering for a Mr. Albert Linde, president of the Philadelphia Equitable Mutual Insurance Company, and was glancing up at the wall clock so often I nearly cut my thumbs off dicing rhubarbs. Dameron couldn’t afford an accident so he switched me over to kneading the bread and pie doughs, then had me stir the turtle soup stock. Finally he released me a little early with the promise that I’d be back promptly, at four o’clock. Dameron didn’t gainsay me earning a little extra from my side job, but he also had warned me more than once about my tardiness. Although I was no great cook, hated being in kitchens and hated even more ordering anyone around, catering was going be my profession, cause as my daddy used to say, “Anybody can cook a bad meal for theyself but rich folks always welcome help to eat well.”
I ran the eight blocks from Dameron’s to Orators Hall on Broad, where the Academy held its Saturday talks, and almost as soon as I slipped in the back door, I heard Kerney, the head of stewards, ringing his bell, calling us to order because the lecture was about to begin. I was completely out of breath but I immediately shucked off my dingy gingham trousers and brown cooking smock, and crammed myself into my uniform, which had belonged to Old Gabriel Tinsley till he came down stricken on Christmas the year before. The Prussian blue kersey waistcoat and trousers, still carrying his regular scent of wet cinders, were almost too tight on my thighs and backside. I mopped the sweat off my brow, knotted my gray cravat from memory, cause there wasn’t a mirror in the stewards’ dressing room, and hurried out to the main hall.