Zakes Mda - Cion

They walked in the night with the snow piling to cover their tracks after them.

The snow should not have bothered to cover their tracks. When their escape was discovered — a result of Nicodemus’s failure to appear at the mating bays the next morning — slave chasers and their dogs were dispatched to hunt them down and bring them back dead or alive; preferably alive so that a long and excruciating punishment yet to be devised could be meted out to them as an example to the rest of the slave community. The chasers headed north; for no one imagined that escaping slaves would go southward, moving deeper into slaveholding territory. Dogs failed to detect their scent. It was covered by the snow. And after a day of scouring the neighborhood and beating up every black person they came across demanding that they tell where the fugitives had gone, the slave chasers returned without the boys.

The Owner took his anger out on the Abyssinian Queen. Everybody knew that this would happen. That was why in the first place the boys had been very reluctant to escape. They knew that vengeance would be taken on her. She had known it too even as she egged them on. She was prepared to sacrifice and be tortured for their freedom. When she thought they were getting too comfortable in the world into which they were born she would take out the sampler and use its designs as prompts in her improvisation of stories about freedom. Stories about the joy they would know at Berlin Crossroads and the ultimate unlimited freedom they would enjoy in Canada, or Canaan as she fondly called it.

She talked of Berlin Crossroads a lot ever since the plantation grapevine — courtesy of the slave stealers who had come in the night the previous summer — brought it to her attention that a settlement by this name had been established somewhere in the middle of Ohio, in Mercer County, by Virginian Africans who had purchased themselves out of slavery. Nicodemus’s father was one of the free residents of Berlin Crossroads. After manumission he had settled on the outskirts of Cincinnati for some time, and then joined the Virginians who left Cincinnati in the mid-1830s to establish the thriving community. For a long time the Abyssinian Queen dreamed that one day the man would return and purchase the boys from The Owner. When that did not happen she encouraged them to escape and find Berlin Crossroads.

When their mother described Berlin Crossroads it was as if she had been there herself. She talked of the gardens that grew all kinds of vegetables and of orchards with the sweetest fruit that no one at Fairfield Farms had ever tasted. The kind of fruit that grew only on the old continent. She had visited the place in her dreams, she told them, and it was beckoning them with utmost urgency. The boys did not really want to hear of this urgency, not only because of the reasons mentioned already — namely, Abednego’s new love and Nicodemus’s new job — but they wanted to postpone as much as possible the punishment that they knew would be doled out to the Abyssinian Queen. They had heard of people who had been cowhided to death for aiding and abetting fugitives, and did not want that to happen to their beloved mother.

She was, indeed, cowhided. Under the very hickory tree that had witnessed the previous beating. Madame Fairfield personally supervised the cowhiding by the burly mulatto men in the absence of The Owner, who decided to find another urgent business engagement that could not be postponed just at that moment. As the whip cut the Abyssinian Queen’s bare back the lady of the house reminded her of how she once messed up her wedding after she had gone to great expense to make her happy. The Abyssinian Queen knew this would be coming, for the lady of the house always reminded her of the botched wedding whenever she was angry with her. Madame Fairfield never forgot that wedding, even though she had organized many others after that — house slaves being married off to other house slaves either from Fairfield Farms or from neighboring plantations.

The Abyssinian Queen’s blood drew maps of red on the virgin snow and everyone thought she was going to die. But she was stubborn. She was determined not to die before a blue fly brought her the good news that her children had crossed the River Jordan safely. For days she lay on the mat in the cabin, the blind matriarchs nursing her festering wounds.

Follow the North Star: the sampler reminded the boys. But they could not locate the guiding star because the sky was devoid of stars that night. The stars were all nestling under a thick gray blanket, hiding away from the cold. The boys turned eastward and walked slowly and with difficulty through the night. Dawn found them on the banks of a big river. The River Jordan, they thought. They had reached the River Jordan. They sat on its snowy banks and wept. They so much wanted to wade in the water, so as to lose whatever evil spirits were following them from Fairfield Farms. Evil spirits never traveled over water. That was part of the wisdom their forebears brought from the old continent. But wading would also lose their scent for the dogs, for they did not know that the chasers had taken the wrong direction and returned to the plantation without any luck. They had no idea that after cowhiding their mother, Madame Fairfield had sent the chasers out again to look for the boys for she did not believe they would get far in that kind of weather, and threatened the chasers that if they came back without the boys it would be their bodies’ turn to taste the rawhide. Or she would dispose of them in the most abominable manner possible. The chasers knew that was no idle threat. Although they were an almost-white breed of mulattos, they were slaves nevertheless, and could easily find themselves in deep trouble if they crossed the lady of the house. The fact that it was difficult to sell men who could easily pass for white on the open market would not stop her from getting rid of them to some unscrupulous and cruel master in a private exchange, where they would surely lose the aristocratic status they enjoyed at Fairfield Farms.

The boys were blissfully ignorant of all this as they considered how they would cross to the other side. A sheet of ice covered the river. But it was thin enough for them to see black water sluggishly flowing under it. They threw rocks to break the ice and open a path for them to cross. They took off their boots, pants and stockings and waded in the icy water. With chattering teeth they playfully sang the spiritual: Wade in the water, wade in the water, children. Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the water .

After crossing the river they found a branch with which they removed the snow near an oak tree to uncover the leaves on the ground. After removing the top leaves they took a layer of dry ones and piled them on the tinder of dried punky wood particles that they carried in Nicodemus’s bundle. When the sparks from the flint landed on the tinder Abednego blew on it gently until it burst into flames. The pith on the oak leaves made them burn very hot. The boys warmed themselves and dried their clothes.

A large blue fly appeared and hovered above their heads. There was no doubt that this was the fly they had first seen at Fairfield Farms just before they began their journey. That afternoon they had gone to feed their mother’s milk cow — a symbol of The Owner’s compassion in allowing those who were owned also to have the satisfaction of owning something albeit as custodians, for everything and everyone at Fairfield Farms was truly owned by The Owner. As they caressed the cow, bidding it farewell and asking it to pass the message to their mother that they meant her no disrespect by escaping without her knowledge, it egested a big lump on the ground. A fluorescent blue fly, almost as big as Abednego’s pinkie, appeared from nowhere. A fly in the middle of winter was an unusual sight, let alone its size and color. It buzzed around and sat on the steaming cow dung. Then it buzzed over their heads and they tried to swat it off, until it flew out of the stable. Now here it was again. It had obviously followed them. Nicodemus got the bright idea that perhaps the fly was their guardian angel, the Spirit that would lead them to safety. Abednego got the bright idea of naming it Massa Blue Fly. It buzzed around for a while and then flew away.