Richard Zimler: Hunting Midnight

I had been concerned about his seeing my mother for the first time, of course. And things were indeed difficult between them initially. I imagined that they would have much to talk about and would need many weeks to ease themselves into a new form of friendship. But there was time now.

I suppose I shall never be absolutely certain of what I desire for them. And sometimes when I see them together I still think of my beloved father and all that might have been.

I could not bear to be apart from Midnight that first afternoon as he spoke to us of his vanishing from River Bend. I sat close by his side and draped my arm over his shoulder. He kept his hand on my leg, which was a great comfort. Morri sat at his feet. All around was my family.

To our astonishment, the Bushman told us that the Indians were responsible for his disappearance. Way back in 1814, five Creek men had ridden in to River Bend, and in exchange for a fortune in hides, Big Master Henry had permitted Midnight to try to cure their dying healer. In this effort he was wholly successful, and this had, naturally enough, won him renown among the Creek clans in the South. Then, in December of 1820, the pregnant wife of a chief in the mountains of Georgia took gravely ill. This clan head was the son of the mighty chief whose healer had been cured six years earlier by Midnight. He dispatched a party to River Bend immediately, to exchange more hides for permission to bring the Bushman temporarily to Georgia. Times had changed, however. The Indians were losing power and territory every day. Dealing with them in a civil manner was no longer regarded as a necessary evil by the settlers and planters. Master Edward ordered the Creek emissary off his plantation and said that under no circumstances would he consider losing Midnight for even one day.

At this point, the Indians asked no more favors. Four warriors on horseback took Midnight on the Twenty-First of January from Porter’s Woods, as he was chasing honeybees flying to their hive. The men covered their tracks carefully and raced with him off to Georgia. They met no opposition along the way, particularly as they were heavily armed and rode across back trails used infrequently by whites.

Midnight stayed by the ailing woman’s side for more than two months, from her fifth to seventh month of pregnancy, treating her with essences and teas. Though he was unable to save her, he successfully delivered the baby, a boy. For this, the chief agreed to grant him safe passage out of slave territory.

First, however, Midnight insisted on rescuing his daughter. Wearing Indian garb, he was escorted back to River Bend by a party of twelve warriors. A scout of mixed black and Creek blood, who spoke fine English, stole into the plantation one evening and asked after Morri. This was the man who had been described to her as a mulatto.

As Master Edward had intended, the scout learned that Morri had died recently of illness. Midnight himself insisted on seeing her grave. Fooled by her wooden marker into believing that she was truly dead, possibly killed by Master Edward as revenge, he had the Indians take him beyond the borders of slavery, far into the wilderness that lay west of the Arkansas Territory. He no longer wished to live in the United States.

Midnight spent the next four years following the rains and the lightning in the mountains and deserts of the American Southwest, living as the Bushmen had for millennia.

“I went slow,” he told us. He smiled down at his daughter and caressed her hair. “And I grieved for my Morri in silence, without speaking for many months. But I went far. Then Mantis joined me, and together we rode between the toes of Eland, and it was very, very good.”

In the spring of 1825, longing again for companionship, he made his way to a ramshackle settlement of traders, trappers, and prospectors some forty miles west of Independence, Missouri, along the Santa Fe Trail. A Jewish hunter and fur trapper from Cincinnati named Mordecai Levi was astounded and pleased by his knowledge of Torah stories and invited him along on his excursions. Midnight had been living with Levi in a wooden cabin for four months when the old adventurer noticed a curious announcement in a copy of the Cincinnati Gazette sent to him by his elder sister. He had heard the Bushman greeting many times — We saw you from afar and we are dying of hunger — and knew immediately that an advertisement including these words could only have been intended for Midnight. He showed him the newspaper.

“You are a clever lad,” said the Bushman to me now, patting me on the knee and grinning. “I understood quickly-quickly just what you meant by the beautiful feather. I began walking that very day.”

“You walked the whole way here?” Mama asked.

“Indeed,” he said, grinning.

“It must be more than a thousand miles. In how many months?”

“Three. I walked slowly because the land is very, very beautiful and I knew that Morri was safe with John. As always, Mantis kept repeating to me, ‘Go slow.’” He laughed. “And I did. I wasn’t about to risk another twenty years of troubles getting here.”

Neither Midnight nor I could sleep that first night of reunion, so we sat together long after the others had gone to bed. When I asked him about his experiences as a slave, he considered his words for a long time.

“It’s something like a stone a day, John,” he finally said.

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t think I can explain all it meant to me, but for now I’ll just tell you this: The master hands you a stone every day, and you take each one from him and put it in your pocket. You do it very, very carefully, because you don’t want to make him angry.” Midnight pretended to receive a stone, then placed it in my palm. “But, John, pretty soon you run out of pockets. And you aren’t allowed to put them down, so what do you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You start swallowing the stones. Soon your stomach gets all filled up and you start feeling sick, so you lie down.” He rubbed his belly. “Just one day of rest, you think, and everything will be better. But the master keeps on handing you stones. Because he’s got his money invested in you and he’s decided he doesn’t want to wait even one day for you to get your strength back. You say no, because you think you can. So he whips you, which makes you confused-confused, since you don’t know how to live a life where you can’t decide anything. Not even Mantis can tell you how to do that. After a few months your spirit is so heavy with stones that it can no longer even stand up. So, being kind, you lie your spirit down. And you let it be covered by the stones, till it can’t breathe or move.”

“So you’re buried alive,” I said.

“That’s right, John, but only one stone at a time.”

When, later that night, I told Midnight that his being betrayed by my father seemed to make him different from the other slaves and his imprisonment even more cruel, he replied, “No, John, that’s not the way it was. I was exactly the same as them. Every slave has been betrayed. By his chief in Africa, who sold him for a few yards of cloth or a musket. By the white men who shackled him and brought him across the sea in the belly of their ship. By the plantation owners who purchased him and set him to work in the fields.” He spread his hands wide, then brought them together as though to gather in the entire world. “Even by this age we are living in, which permits these things to happen.”

“Is that why you do not hate my father? Why you can forgive him?”

“In part, though forgive is not the right word.”

“What is, then?”

He made clicking noises in his own language, which made me frown.