Richard Zimler - Hunting Midnight

Several days later, Morri came home singing and panting at the same time. She was so electric that she went hopping around the sitting room. While I puffed on my pipe, she told me that on one of her walks through the city she’d met the headmaster of the Church Street School for Negro Children, a former runaway named William Arthur. “He told me I could start giving reading and writing lessons right away! He doesn’t mind that I don’t speak so perfectly. Or that I’m not much older than the children. He doesn’t mind one drop!”

After we’d drunk a wee glass of port wine to her success, she sat on the arm of my chair and squeezed my hand hard. Her face was scrunched up tight, as though she had a big secret to tell me.

“What?” I asked.

“I’d like for you to adopt me, John, but only on the condition that if my father returns, he can adopt me back.”

I received the first of my mother’s replies to my letters during our seventh week in New York. John, she wrote, the nib of her pen having scratched through the paper with irritation, if you do not tell me precisely the nature of your “mishap” in South Carolina in your next letter (to be written today!), then I promise you I shall show up on your doorstep uninvited and give you a lecture of a kind that you have never heard, but plainly ought to have!

A few days later, while I was still pondering how to write of my injury to my mother, Backbend, Lucy, Hopper-Anne, Scooper, Parker, Christmas-Eve, Frederick, Sarah, Taylor, and Martha boarded carriages in front of Violeta’s house for the journey sixty miles north to two Quaker farms located near the town of Southeast. They would earn good steady wages and their children would be able to attend a local schoolhouse. The Quakers — who by now seemed to represent to me the possibility for goodness in our world — had generously agreed to help them build cottages as well.

As their carriages departed, I heard Morri humming “Barbara Allen” to herself. I joined her for a verse. Thankfully, this was to set me thinking seriously again about how to find Midnight.

In all my weeks of anguish I had hardly forgotten Midnight, but rereading his letter in New York had convinced me that he must have had a vision of his own end — a Mantis-dream.

I see now that — even more than the loss of my arm or Violeta’s distance — this passive acceptance of his death had made my weeks of solitude so grim. I have discovered that my times of greatest misery have always been related to a feeling of defeat, and I have nearly always found my way back to health by beginning a new campaign.

So, with Mother’s gold coins and what was left of my savings, I decided to publish a request for Midnight — or anyone knowing of his fate — to write to me. I would place these advertisements in newspapers all over the United States, from New York to the western territories, every week for as long as it took to receive a reply. Of course, even if he was still alive, I could not be sure that he was in the habit of reading news of any sort, but there was every likelihood that he knew someone who was.

Morri was eager to help write our announcement, which we finalized as follows:

Seeking Midnight, Samuel, or Tsamma. We saw you from afar and we are dying of hunger.

Anyone with information, please write to the Gemsbok care of Senhora Violeta, 73 John Street, New York.

I have found a beautiful feather that you thought was lost to you forever and have it safe with me. Go slow.

We did not wish to put anything in the announcement about River Bend or mention Morri’s name, fearing the attention of slave-traders who might wish to kidnap her.

The second part of my plan was to become my most important work in America. I decided to compile a list of slaves and freed blacks in South Carolina, along with their residences. Later, I would add the other states of the South. This seemed essential to me, for whenever the great destruction of slavery finally came, in five years or fifty, those who had been in bondage would face the near-impossible task of finding brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children who had been lost to them for many years. They would desperately need such a list.

It was a huge undertaking, and I knew it would take many years and enormous effort to be even close to complete. Even so, the more I thought of the plan, the more exciting it became.

To create my list, I knew I would need hundreds of correspondents from all over South Carolina — people willing to survey the slaves, freed blacks, and mulattos in their vicinity and write down their full names and locations, as well as those of their kin.

The Quakers would help, I was quite sure, as indeed they have. And among the congregation of Jews in Charleston, I have so far found several industrious and generous souls as well.

My first correspondents were Isaac and Luisa, naturally enough. I wrote to them shortly after I received their letter, giving them an account of our escape, and they have so far provided me with one hundred and twelve names and locations.

Census reports have indicated that at least two hundred and sixty thousand Negroes are held in bondage in South Carolina alone, and so I plainly have much work in my future. But I am neither deterred nor daunted. The list will grow exponentially as more people learn of it. All of nature itself is on my side in this battle, I am certain.

On November the Fourteenth, a week after the former slaves departed for upstate New York, I signed Morri’s adoption papers. As I was not an American citizen, this procedure was handled through the British Embassy. She decided to register herself as Memoria Tsamma Stewart, which I thought a splendid and unique name. To celebrate, she and I took a ferry boat to Brooklyn, where we dined at a waterfront tavern that admitted Negroes. I drank a wee bit too much whiskey to celebrate, but Morri guided me safely back to our ferry boat.

I had kept away from the Church Street School till then in order to avoid embarrassing her, but I now decided to make a fatherly inspection of her place of work. Sitting at the back of her classroom, the pride I felt in seeing her free and useful confirmed to me that I had not been wrong in going to watch her.

While listening to her children read aloud a fable by Aesop, I felt Midnight’s presence next to me. I could see him grinning like a mad fool.

After visiting Morri’s school, I ceased questioning whether losing my arm had been a just sacrifice for her freedom. Seeing the little ones flocked around her, tugging on the bright crimson dress I’d bought for her, I stopped comparing miseries, as she herself had advised. I am grateful for that, for at one time I thought my selfishness would be my undoing.

Other events also conspired to restore me to full and honest vigor, the first of which was completely unexpected.

I still had not written back to my mother explaining my injury. This cowardice, combined with my longing for my daughters and my uncertainty as to what would now be best for them, plunged me into a sudden spiral of despair and insomnia. I locked my door and would allow neither Morri nor Violeta inside. I smoked too much and made myself sick. What I did not know was that Violeta had another key. She let herself into my room before dawn on the Nineteenth of November, while I was smoking Papa’s pipe like a fiend, and announced, “I can bear our struggle no longer, John. If you promise to say nothing afterward about what has taken place between us or what you wish to happen in the future, I shall lie with you now.”

“Are you sure?” I asked, sensing both our destinies turning around this moment.