C. Morgan - The Sport of Kings

A voice says, Shhhhh

tell me a story where no one goes away

Shhhh …

tell me a story about me

Scipio says, Listen now:

That man there is a blood man. He stands at the edge of the Kentucky hills where they slope to the prattling river, imagining his children and their children not with his mind, but with the will of his body inclined toward freedom. He has come from the heart of Kentucky, a place that boasts one slave for every white man, and he is one of those slaves, or so they tell him, though he won’t be for long.

He is an independent man and enterprising, though never formally educated, a man solitary and suspicious by nature, with no friends but his mother, who died in the spring of this very year, so the yoke of love has been lifted from him, his spirit now free to make his body free. Hate and desire bear him aloft from the outskirts of Paris like a seedling on fresh wind seeking fertile ground. He leaves his master’s farm on a Saturday with a pass to attend a dance at a farm in Winchester in the company of ten other bondsmen, but when they reach the fork in the road that turns south toward Clark County, he takes his leave without a word, slipping from their jovial pack and disappearing into the woods. He cinches sacks of crushed Indian turnip around his calfhide brogans to throw off the scent and then crashes deep into the undergrowth of shrubs and thorny bushes. He knows of the famed railroad — all but the most ignorant backwoods slaves know of it — but he long ago decided to seek no help, none at all, refusing to follow another, black or white of any political persuasion, because he will be a man who makes his own way.

His first night is pure and blinding panic, sure the bloodhounds have been loosed, sure there are white men behind every oak tree, every maple. He remembers a nursing woman he had known as a child, one who ran off only to be hounded against a tree where the dogs ripped the breasts from her body; she had lived long enough to be whipped with the tooth side of a handsaw. Now, in fear of patrollers, he steers clear of the road to Mason County and Maysville, and won’t travel as far east as the Lexington — Cincinnati road, and on that blessed day when he arrives in the Queen City, he won’t go knocking on the door of Mr. Coffin’s Grand Central Station. He considers himself unschooled but not reckless — he won’t seek the aid of a strange white man, no matter his reputation. No, he’ll go straight to Bucktown and throw his body and his soul down on the charity of the first black church he sees: there is no safe place in this world, but a black church is the closest thing. His mother taught him that.

He plunges into the nocturnal edge of the county, racing a desperate, diagonal line north, hoping, if chance and property lines favor him, to emerge at the river a full day’s walk to the east of the city, a good distance from the Lexington — Cincinnati road. As he stumbles along in the dark, he clings to the rock-strewn streams that branch along the forest, where cold, plush water gurgles up from the soil, and for two hours becomes lost in a labyrinthine terrain of towering limestone hallways, which veer this way and that beneath the black rooftops of the trees. Eventually freeing himself, he passes along a series of tended pastures, just a dark wraith along the split rail fencing, an unsafe passage to be sure, but no other humans are about in the deep of the night. All around him, the dark forest is alive, vital, a black lattice before a white moon. Things unseen touch his face in jest and curiosity. Every step of the way, the owls question his route, his choices, his odds, and the night critters speechify and debate, but never once does he hear the clipped voices of white men or the brute, pitiless baying of distant hounds. He stays the course until the break of the next morning, when he climbs a sugar maple and expends a jittery, sleepless day at the tangent of limb and trunk, staring wretchedly into the vast green canopy.

Then night again, and no aid, no friend, only the North Star to conduct him. He walks on and on, eating only small bites from a satchel containing fatback, hogmeat slices, and crumbling cornpone. Two more days and his overshoes of turnip have fallen away, his hair is peppered with bits of leaf like green ash, and he has lost weight he didn’t have to spare. He begins then to traverse during the day, still fretful, almost forty miles from Lexington now, and safer, he knows, but desperate to cover more ground. The waking world seems to have changed in the four days since he has seen it. The light is shocking and the land is fertile with late summer — the bright corollas of flowers, the winding vines loping tree to tree, the cool and pungent drafts of pine, ginseng here and chanterelles there and everything covered with a green, fair moss like verdigris on copper. He eyes the beauty with bitterness; yes, he thinks, this whole world ain’t nothing but a bad penny, keeps turning up and going to mold.

In the muddled brew of his worry and overwhelming fatigue, he grows careless and the next morning stands accosted by a tiny white woman in a stove-black bonnet so enormous and overhanging, he can only see the tight sphincter of her mouth as she says, “Nigger, I got eggs.”

He’s half-asleep and so surprised by her sudden appearance that, despite the instincts of his legs, he doesn’t run, his eyes locked on the eggs she’s carrying in the gaping pockets of her tattered linsey-woolsey pinafore. She reaches down and holds out three eggs to him without ever once looking him in the eye.

She says, “Now, my husband he preciated the niggers, but I ain’t concerned if they live or die. Still my husband preciated em, so I give em to ye to have. Here now.”

With care and fleet glances in all directions, he takes the three eggs from her hands; they’re the color of boiled chicory with new milk. “Grateful, missus,” he whispers.

“Tain’t no difference to me,” she says. “If they hang ye or hightail ye back to Africkay, tain’t no business of mine. Them’s fresh eggs. They’ll keep.”

He runs then, cradling the delicate, knocking eggs in his shirt until he reaches a distance of a mile or more, and when no one seems to be following, he cracks the eggs and drinks them down. Then he moves on through what he hopes is the center of Harrison County, and on that very same afternoon, after having not seen anyone in four days except the woman with the eggs, he spies a second woman — this one from the back and from such a distance, he just watches her creep shakily along for a breathless minute before he realizes she’s colored. He can hear her crying now from where he stands, but he makes no sound at all, resolving to melt back into the undergrowth and shield himself from her eyes; he can afford no joiners, least of all a woman. Then she turns jerkily, suddenly, like a deer that senses rather than hears its predator, and he sees that her belly is as big as a sugar kettle and now her black eyes are on him. Deep as coal rocks, full of lustrous tears. She reaches out one hand to him, her mouth aslant: “Help me! Help dis poor gal!”

He takes a step backward from her call, but he can’t look away, and she comes forward a few broken paces. He is set to run, one foot behind him, his weight ungrounded, a bird preparing for flight.

“Help me! Help us get north!”

Warily, he whispers, “You got to shift for your own self.”

“Please, mistah!” she pleads. “You talk fine, I can tell you a smart nigger. Help dis ignorant gal and dis here baby get dey freedom!”

He rears back in distaste and manages one deliberate step backward, but she stumbles forward, grasping up his shirtfront now in her dirty fist; her touch is what he had most wanted to avoid, even more than her desperate voice. Her distended belly is inches from his. Her eyes burn into him. “Iffen you leave us, dey gone kill us. Dey gone kill dis baby.”