Tom Piazza - A Free State

“Thank you, sweetheart,” I say.

“I thought my name was Frances,” she says, walking away.

Who can explain love? All our children are gone, now, except for darling Fanny. If I had any illusions about spending more time alone with Addie, they have been subverted by the very energies that drew me to her in the beginning. She is on fire with the abolitionist fever, with which I am in complete sympathy, although other considerations demand a degree of moderation and perspective from myself, as I look toward a time in which I may be called to be President of the entire republic. Still, her single-mindedness in aiding fugitives, and even, upon occasion, hiding them for a brief spell in our basement, is to be admired and supported, and I do.

At any rate we have little enough time together, so I must have expressed some inadvertent displeasure, or at least reservation, when she informed me that there would be another “guest” taking up residence below our house for some unspecified amount of time.

“Ah,” I said. “Good.”

“You needn’t bristle, Bill. I doubt that he will be here long.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Is there any reason of which I’m unaware that we shouldn’t offer shelter to him?”

“Not at all.”

“There was a time when you would have expressed no reservations at all about aiding anyone who had suffered under the lash.”

“I am in complete agreement that we should help this one as well,” I said.

She regarded me severely for a long moment. “You would drive a sensible person to morphine.” She turned and started away.

“When will he arrive, dear?” I offered.

“Tomorrow,” she said, shutting my office door with no excess of decorum.

The fact is that I was in complete agreement, here. I merely had. . reservations. Yet when I would bring up my desire to spend more time alone with her, Addie would say, “Then why do you always run to Washington? Or Albany? Or Philadelphia?”

“My work takes me there,” I say.

“Then don’t begrudge me mine.”

She would have made a good attorney, God save us all.

I was always bedeviled by strange fancies. You can’t know what it is to present yourself constantly to the world as a figurehead of state, while inside you have as much imagination as any man. More! So while I greeted visitors, made speeches, drafted resolutions, plotted strategy, I also had visions of unexplainable things — sometimes they were merely whimsical: talking spiders, goats dancing. Colors often looked odd to me, as if they had distinct personalities. I thought of fires blanketing the horizon, bodies of the dead walking through smoke on a field. Songs played on strangely shaped instruments. There was a time, about which no one knows except Addie, when I had to take to bed for a week, overcome as I was with it all. These visions did not disappear, exactly, but rather I would say they retreated into place; I learned how to cohabit with them, and when they saw that I would make room for them they became less urgent, less threatening and shrill.

Often I would seek out one or another of our servants at such times. I found that a visit while they were doing a job they understood had a calming effect on me, as if it represented an unarguable degree of reality. I had always enjoyed visiting with my father’s kitchen help, and I enjoyed visiting with Ella when she prepared dinner. Nicholas and I never seemed quite to engender a rapport — he was a church man — but I enjoyed hearing Ella’s thoughts on politics and town gossip.

It was and is my firm conviction that the degree of civilization in a culture — practical, ethical, spiritual — is measured not by the grandeur of its edifices nor the extent of its land holdings but by the way in which those who hold and administer power treat those over whom they may exercise that power, whether it is a jailer with a captive, a parent with a child, or a lender with a debtor. If one has the upper hand in a situation, and uses it to exploit another to that other’s detriment, one cannot call oneself civilized. By that measure, perhaps, none of us can call himself fully civilized. Yet one may strive for that ideal, at least. Otherwise one’s career as a decent human being is at an end.

The young man was delivered to us just after nightfall, during dinner, on a very cold evening toward the end of November. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal the name of the Friend who had arranged for this and delivered him, but this Friend had indicated that the young man was quite unusual and articulate, had just run off from a Maryland plantation, and was reticent about going to Canada but had accepted aid in that direction after some convincing. He would put up in the basement room that we had fitted out for that purpose. I would imagine that we had harbored some two dozen fugitives there over the space of three or four years.

Before dinner, I asked Addie if our Friend had confirmed the passenger’s arrival that evening.

“Yes,” Addie replied. “He has a banjar and not much else.”

“A banjar!” I said. “We will have music, then.”

“Take this out back,” she said, handing me a slop bucket.

I loved the smell of woodsmoke in the biting cold. That sense of winter coming on, the quickening attention — I missed it all in Washington, with its moderate Southern climate. I disposed of the slops in their appointed place. On my way back to the house I saw a bright-red maple leaf on the walkway, almost perfect — remarkable, as the autumn colors had quite retired for the year — and I brought it inside as a late addition for Fanny’s leaf collection, which she kept in a large scrapbook I had purchased for her.

That evening, as we were having dessert, we heard a knocking at our rear door in a deliberate and familiar pattern. Addie glanced across the table at me and then excused herself.

“Well, Fanny,” I said. “We will have a new guest for a day or two. What do you think of that?”

“It makes me sad,” she said.

“Why ever does it make you sad, Fanny?”

“They have no home.”

My darling was not just sensitive but she was intelligent, and she had instincts for what was morally correct. I love her so. I did not know how to address this concern of hers. I also knew that my protracted absences weighed on her, as they did on Addie.

“Did you place the leaf in your album?”

She nodded. Ella brought in more coffee.

“All is going well?” I asked.

“They’re getting him settled,” she replied.

“You’ll bring supper to him?”

“Once they get him settled I will.”

“Why can’t he eat with us?” Fanny said.

“Darling,” I said, “he will be tired from his travels.” But the runaways never ate with us, even when they stayed for two or three days. This was Addie’s policy — something of an inconsistency, I thought, as she was such an ardent abolitionist. Yet I had learned over the years to let her manage her end of things without questioning.

At length, Addie reappeared and settled herself at her end of the dinner table, and Ella brought her some fresh coffee.

“All is well?” I said.

She nodded thoughtfully, and took a long sip of the hot coffee.

“What is wrong?” I said.

“Nothing is wrong,” she said. “You might go down and greet him yourself.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “I was waiting for you to finish getting him situated.”

“He is situated,” she said. “There is something unusual about him.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see for yourself,” she said. “I can’t put my finger on it.”

“What is his name?”

“He is called William.”

“Well,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll go downstairs and welcome him.”