Dance on the Wind

15

“We stick to the Catholic streets of Natchez,” Kingsbury whispered in the wavering shadows cast by the Spanish moss clinging to the tall cypress at the southern edge of town, “an’ I don’t mean the Irish Catholic streets, neither—we’ll be awright. Wait till dark to start through, and get on out of town afore light.”

The other two boatmen nodded, then looked at Bass. Grim-lipped, Titus nodded, sensing his Adam’s apple bob high in his throat as he did.

“We need us food, Hames,” the woman reminded.

Glancing now at her haggard features, Titus thought Beulah looked older than she probably was.

“Don’t you worry—we’ll get us food,” Kingsbury replied. “Do that, first whack.”

It was their nineteenth day since leaving New Orleans, well into December now, with the weather growing colder the farther north they bounced and jostled atop the tarped wagons hauling staples up a well-beaten road to Natchez, Mississippi.

Recognizing that they were nearing the outskirts of that settlement, Kingsbury bellowed out to the wagon master.

“You go ’head an’ get off on your own now—anywhere you want,” the teamster boss cried over his shoulder as he brought the leather straps down onto the backs of his plodding oxen. “From here on out only place I stop is in town.”

When they realized the wheels would keep on rolling, the wayfarers crawled to the sidewalls and leaped to the hoof-pounded trail where mud puddles lay crusted in ugly ice lace.

Fearing that someone might well recognize them from the killings aboard Annie Christmas’s gunboat, the five hid among the thick undergrowth at the edge of town. Not far away stood the first of the immense canebrakes, each shaft standing nearly thirty feet tall, measuring a good two inches in diameter. Nearby squatted a jumble of run-down shacks where a woman might well take in wash during the day and work at keeping her legs spread at night, all to provide for a growing brood of children. Even in this chill as a metallic sun sank in the west, children scampered and played near enough that Titus could not just hear them, but watched them through the timber and underbrush.

How these dirty, poorly dressed urchins reminded him of his own brothers and sister in earlier days, reminded him of Amy Whistler’s own siblings.

“I could use a drink,” Ovatt grumped. “Ain’t had much of any since’t we was at Annie’s place.”

“What’d that drinking get us?” Root demanded dourly.

Turning to Kingsbury in disgust, Ovatt asked, “Can’t we just move around these here shanties and get on through town?”

The pilot shook his head. “You two just hush. We’ll wait.”

“Maybeso I can find something for you fellas to warm up on,” Beulah declared as she started to rise.

“What you got in mind?” Kingsbury demanded, seizing her wrist.

“A little liquor for the bunch of you,” she replied, glancing down at the hand he held around her arm. “A little ain’t gonna hurt, will it, now?”

He let her go. “No, no hurt it be. A damn fine idea, you have.”

As Beulah stood and straightened out her skirts beneath that secondhand coat purchased in New Orleans, then moved off toward the town as nonchalant as could be, Titus leaned back against the trunk of a chinaberry. Above him in its branches hung gray moss suspended like winter’s own tatters, tormented by the chill wind. Only yards away the streets of Natchez this sunset were beginning to bustle with barkers and pimps and highly rouged women emerging into the coming night, along with an assortment of tame pigs and wild dogs, as well as more of those dirty, unclaimed children.

Beyond the last of the poor shanties, Bass watched Beulah reach the first of the low, broken, half-sunken plank sidewalks. She stopped, as if she wanted to wave back at them, then turned without a gesture and kept on until she disappeared into the gloom of those dark streets. Into the bowels of the wildest hellhole on the Mississippi River.

Whereas the French were the first to build there around 1716, establishing their colony some three hundred miles—or ninety leagues—north of New Orleans, it was the Spanish who first sent their military expedition to that part of the new world. Late in the summer of 1540, de Soto, governor of the Island of Cuba, traversed the plains out of the southwest before he crossed the Mississippi near the future Natchez, packing along his own Negro slaves. There the knight commander of the Order of St. James of Compostela made contact with the peaceful Choctaw Indians, who for generations had performed their own bloody sacrifices at their White Apple Village. De Soto marched on with his army to reach the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, then the Cherokee in turn. By and large a peaceful people, these natives did not at first resist the intruders, even when de Soto’s priests began attempting to convert them from their heathen ways. For such Christians come to save unclean souls, their mission became a simple matter of converting the savages or killing them.

Yet it wasn’t until de Soto asked too much of his hosts by demanding Choctaw women to warm the beds of his soldiers that the tribe finally revolted. They drove the Spanish back to the banks of the great river. As the terrified soldiers and priests fled from the forests that seemed alive with an enemy behind every tree, the Spanish left behind their holy vestments, their eucharistie ornaments, even their sacramental wine. Suspicious, the Choctaw broke the clay jars used in the white man’s ceremonies, letting the fragrant crimson fluid soak into the ground. Every bit like that wine the priests had blessed, de Soto’s blood was soon to seep into the mud, and there beside the Mississippi the governor of Cuba lay down to die, his anonymous bones to rot for all of eternity.

It took nearly two hundred years more until a European culture would again dare to settle in the Mississippi Valley. By 1716 the French had come up from the West Indies to establish an outpost close by the White Apple Village of the Choctaw. Like the Spanish, the French were Catholic, bringing with them their own black-robed priests in charge of the vestments, sacraments, and wine. With only a brief interval when the British assumed temporary rule over the great river valley, the Spanish next took over under Governor Galvez just prior to the coming of the Americans in 1795. That same year the first steam-powered cotton gin arrived on the lower Mississippi. Already the Natchez District had proved itself as good a region as any other in the south for the growing of tobacco, sugarcane, and corn. Now it prepared to stand head and shoulders above the others in cotton.

To the north, east, and south of Natchez sprang up the great plantations scoured from the canebrake and cypress swamps. Great houses were raised, fields were cleared from the bayous, and roads blazed. All of it accomplished on the backs of the African slaves brought to New Orleans on tall-masted ships, auctioned on that great, bloody block of misery in the market square, then hauled north into the wilderness, not quite able to understand they were now the property of one of those wealthy landowners.

More than an hour later Beulah returned, the four corners of a scrap of blanket suspended over her shoulder to form a pouch. Coming awake in the dark and the cold, Titus moved with the other three boatmen into a tight circle as the woman set her bundle at her feet, then sank beside it.

Beulah pulled apart the corners, exposing two clay jugs, and said, “I got you fellas some tafia.”

Titus watched Ovatt pull the cork from one of the jugs and sniff it before turning the jug up to drink. He asked, “What’s tafia?”

“Rum.”

“But it’s better’n that Monongahela we drunk all the way downriver,” Root said, smacking his lips as he handed the second jug to Kingsbury.

“Try some,” Ovatt suggested, giving the first jug to Bass.

It truly tasted sweeter than the American backwoods rum, and well it should—as it was made of the finest sugarcane in the French West Indies.

“What else you get us?” Kingsbury inquired, fingering a slab of something dark. He brought it to his nose for a sniff.

Beulah said, “You’ll like that.”

“I bet I will,” the pilot replied, and took a bite.

“Salt meat fried in bear’s oil,” she told them. “Enough for you all to have a goodly portion for supper.”

For the most part they drank their tafia in silence, using it to wash down the seasoned meat and what biscuits she could find to purchase. At the same time, Kingsbury made it clear none of them were to drink enough to hobble them when it came time to push on through town. Overhead more clouds rolled in, shutting out the stars completely as some of them dozed on their full bellies.

It was near the middle of the night when Kingsbury tapped on the sole of Bass’s moccasin. The others were awake, dusting and shifting their clothing, shivering in the cold. Beulah stood at the edge of the brush, waiting expectantly.

“Like I told you, Hames—I figure you can keep to the edge of the woods until you get to the north side of town, where we’ll pick up the Trace.”

“There by Kings Tavern?”

With a nod she continued, “Place ain’t as dangerous as it might be. ’Pears there’s a train of slavers pushing through. They gone and chose to make a night of it at Kings Tavern.”

“Slavers?” Ovatt asked. “Jesus God!”

“Wagons and cages and such?” Kingsbury asked intently, ignoring Heman’s grumbling.

“Yeah,” Beulah replied. “The place is packed with wagons. Men was all over the yard, in and out. Though most of ’em gone inside to the fires when it got cold.”

“We’ll keep to the woods,” Kingsbury said, turning to the other three men. Then he led them out.

Snatches of wild, bawdy music joined discordant singing, the shrieks of drunken women, and the bellows of drunken men, along with the crashing of clay ware and the cracking of furniture—all a river of sound pouring from the low shanties and shacks that bordered the river itself here in Natchez-Under-the-Hill. Where they could, the five pilgrims kept to the shadows and the sodden, quieter ground along the timber.

In reaching Kings Tavern they found the low-roofed saloon and brothel nearly hidden behind the many wagons parked haphazardly in the wide, muddy yard, every tongue down and teams staked out to graze nearby.

Kingsbury halted them as they all came abreast at the edge of the timber and studied the scene. “The first step home is just on the far side of that tavern, fellas.”

“I say let’s be putting this hellhole behind us right now,” Beulah whispered.

“Me too,” Ovatt agreed. “I’d like to reach Concordia Lake afore the sun comes up.”

Looking at Root, the pilot said, “We’ll push right ahead.”

Then Kingsbury moved out of the solid wall of shadows into the cleared yard, hurrying toward the first wagon. As they did, a half-dozen dark human forms took shape from the floor of that wagon, rising one by one cautiously to peer out at the travelers with wide eyes yellowed bright as a new moon in their black faces. As the other boatmen and Beulah joined him, Hames slid down the sidewall, stepped over the long tongue, and darted to the next wagon, coming to a rest closer still to the side of the tavern. When the other four reached him there by a wagon near the back corner of the saloon, the pilot said, “Keep against the back wall. There’s a kitchen door there—but I’ll lay good money they got it closed tonight.”

“Cold enough,” Root grumbled.

Kingsbury inched toward the front of the wagon, peering around it as a solitary, silent figure sat up inside the last of three cages that filled the wagon’s bed. Hearing the movement, seeing the huge shadow blot out some of the hissing torchlight that filled most of the wagonyard, Titus looked up, finding the slave’s hands gripping the bars of his cage, pressing his swollen, bloodied face against them.

Bass looked away, then immediately looked again at the slave. A big man from what he could see in this light. Bald-headed too. Titus’s breath caught in his throat as he stood, hearing the others shuffle off beneath the patter of the incessant, icy rain.

The slave had on only the tattered remnants of a shirt, clearly cut to ribbons across his shoulders and back by a recent whipping. Unsure at first, the big man slowly reached out one arm toward the white youngster, opening his palm. For a long moment Titus stared down at that lighter skin, then peered back at the man’s face.

“Help me, boat-man.”

Titus stumbled back. That voice: it was the goddamned Negra from Annie Christmas’s gunboat!

“Don’t you see me, boat-man?”

“I … I see you.”

“Help me. Get me away from these bad men.”

Just a quick look over the rest of the wagons in the yard filled with their cages of human chattel told Bass enough. “Y-you’re going to work the fields.”

“I dunno,” the man replied, pulling his arm back into the cage and letting his head sink between his shoulders. “Know nothing ’bout that.”

A voice rose softly from the cage next to his, and the big man whispered something in reply.

“What’s that?” Bass inquired, his suspicion aroused. “Who’s there?”

“Them others—they tell me we off to work the cotton for our new owner.”

“But you was … you belonged to Annie Christmas.”

He nodded, pressing his face close to the bars once more, one eye all but puffed shut. “White woman sold me two week ago. After big fight with you, boatmen.”

“She tell you why?”

“First she say she kill me—but she say a big man like me get her lots of money. So she sell me to work for the man who put me in this cage. Take me north to his home.”

“She got rid of you after the killing at her boat?”

He nodded, his face a dark shadow within the dancing, torchlit shadows of that rainy night. “Say I no good to her no more—no good can keep her from trouble. Annie’s whores get kill’t. She get hurt. Her man friends get killed. She say her Negra man no good no more. Wanna kill me—but she sell me. Gonna get too much money for me.”

“Titus!”

Bass turned, finding Kingsbury and the rest crouching at the corner of the tavern. The pilot hissed his name, waving him on. Titus turned back to glance over his shoulder at the man in the cage, starting to go, but got no more than a step when he turned to say something more to the slave.

At that moment an angry, frightened Kingsbury jutted out his jaw and issued his stern order, “C’mon, young’un! Ain’t no time to dawdle!”

“Wait here,” Bass whispered at the cage.

His ebony brow creased in bewilderment; then he smiled broadly and shrugged. “I h’ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

As Bass slipped in among them back in the shadows of the tavern, Root demanded, “What the hell you doin’?”

“That there’s the Negra from the gunboat,” he tried to explain with a gush, his mind whirling madly.

“Annie Christmas’s place?” Kingsbury asked.

“Yep. Said she up and sold him—”

“Leave his black ass be!” Root grumbled. “Bastard’s where he belongs.”

“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt agreed. “That skinhead savage nearly could’ve killed us.”

Bass wheeled on Heman, saying, “That’s just why he’s in that cage, don’t you see? Annie Christmas sold him ’cause he didn’t kill us like he could’ve when he had the chance. Kill’t us all, like she wanted him to.”

Kingsbury scratched a louse from his beard, brought it out, and cracked it between his fingernails. “What the hell that mean to us?”

“Let’s break him loose.” Bass suggested it, suddenly as astonished as the rest that he had even considered it, much less uttered the words.

“B-b-break that Negra loose?” Ovatt sputtered in amused disbelief. “C’mon, boy! No more of this nonsense. We gotta be walking home.”

“None of you don’t help me,” Titus argued, “I’ll do it myself—”

“You can’t do that!” Kingsbury said. “That Negra’s some man’s property.”

Titus felt himself growing angry as he asked, “Just like he belonged to Annie Christmas, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But if you’d had the chance that night, you’d gone and killed that property on the gunboat, wouldn’t you?”

“Damn right we would,” Reuben growled.

Titus grinned a little. “Ain’t a bit of difference to my thinking ’tween you kill a man’s property, or you let it go. Either way it ain’t his no more.”

“What you’re talking about’s stealing!” Ovatt cried, and was immediately shushed by the others. Quieter, he said, “You just don’t steal another man’s Negra, like you don’t steal his horse, or his cow!”

“We ain’t stealing,” Bass protested, wagging his head, desperate for some way to make them understand. He pointed at the cage. “We’re just letting him out to go off on his own. That don’t make us thieves.”

Inching up before Bass, Beulah asked, “It true what you said about that big black Negra not killing none of you in that gunboat when he had him the chance’t?”

“Ask Kingsbury, any of ’em here,” Bass replied. “It’s the certain truth.”

She turned on the pilot. “Hames, less’n you wanna tell me that the boy here’s lying ’bout that gunboat fight—you best get ready to stop me too.”

“Stop you?” Kingsbury asked, the pitch of his voice rising. “Stop you from what?”

“From helping Titus here set that there Negra loose.”

“Jesus God!” Ovatt screeched, throwing his head back in disgust. “We can’t do this! We gotta get outta Natchez afore any folks see us and make for trouble—”

“Shuddup!” Kingsbury interrupted, slapping a hand across Ovatt’s chest as he leaned toward the woman. “Listen, Beulah. I ain’t setting no darky free what belongs to another man.”

“Don’t need you,” Beulah said. “C’mon, Titus. You got your knife?”

“Yes’m.”

“G’won ahead of me,” she directed, shooting Kingsbury a scorching look. “I’ll be on your backside all the way over yonder to that wagon.”

Bass took off, hearing her moccasins scratching the gravel and dry grass as they darted for the wagon. He ground to a halt on that fine-grained, yellowish-brown loam and glanced up at the prisoner, holding a single finger against his lips for silence.

The slave nodded, his eyes growing wide, a sliver of white evident above his chin as his lips pulled back over crooked teeth. Bass yanked his knife free from its scabbard and climbed up the hind, off-side wheel, holding on to the wagon’s sidewall to steady himself as he stuffed the knife blade into the old padlock’s keyhole. Twisting this way and that so hard he was afraid he would snap off the tip of the blade, he finally turned in frustration.

“Ain’t working!” he whispered to the woman.

At that exact moment they heard voices, low and rumbling, around the far side of the tavern. Footsteps on the loose gravel. He dropped from the wheel as the woman slid beneath the wagon bed. Crouching down beside the wagon, Titus glanced up at the slave, frantically motioning him to get down. Instead the black man stared off in the direction of the voices as they hailed one another. One set of steps moved away. And a pair of boots scuffed right toward the wagonyard.

Bass was backing slowly, slowly, still bent at the waist when the voice caught him.

“What the hell are you doing by that goddamned wagon?”

Bass stood, whirled about, realizing the knife was still in his hand. He watched the man’s eyes drop to the knife blade gleaming with a dull sheen in the flickering torchlight that continued to hiss in the falling mist. Those eyes began to smile as they climbed back to Titus’s face.

“What you figure to do with that knife, son?” He took a step closer. “Hear me talking to you? Asked you what you doing here round my boss’s wagons! Up to no damn good, I’ll bet.” Then his tone of voice changed as he tugged back at his cuffs. “Looks like I’ll just have to box your ears, boy—teach you some goddamned propers about staying away from ’nother man’s—”

He hadn’t seen Beulah roll out on the far side of the wagon, nor had he seen her creep over the tongue and around the far corner of the wagon box. But there she stood now as the white man sank slowly to the icy ground, his eyes rolling back to their whites. Titus winced, sensing how the man’s head would be ringing something fierce when he woke up, what with the wallop Beulah gave his head with that piece of firewood.

“Forget that lock,” she ordered as she stood breathing heavy over the man who had crumpled near the hind wheel. “Get on up there and break that Negra free.” Then she shot the other three boatmen a glance. “All four of you owe this here black-assed son of a savage your lives. Every last one of you.”

It was as if they had felt the shaming sting in her harsh whisper like an indictment of their equivocation, maybe even their cowardice. Ovatt, Root, and Kingsbury joined Bass in clambering up beside the cage.

“Get me two big rocks,” Kingsbury ordered.

“You gonna smash it?” Reuben asked as he climbed down to gather up the stones from the wagonyard.

“Break it clean off,” the pilot answered. When the other two had a large rock held beneath the lock, Kingsbury raised his stone and brought it down with a loud, metallic crash.

“Jesus God! We’re gonna get caught for stealin’!” Ovatt cried.

“They’ll stretch our necks, Kingsbury!” Root gasped.

“Just hold that goddamned rock right there!” he demanded, bringing his stone up once more and down even more savagely.

The padlock fell free of the hasp with a clatter of metal on wood. Titus lunged between them, dragging the bolt from the hasp and yanking back the narrow cage door. Back in the corner, the slave hesitated.

“C’mon!” Titus yelled, reaching in to pull the black man’s arm.

Quickly the big man ducked, sweeping up his black Barcelona hat before turning his shoulders to slip sideways out the cage door. As he squeezed past, Titus saw the long bands of welt and bloody crust striping the slave’s back, visible only through the tatters and tears of what had once been a shirt. Those swollen wounds stood out in bold relief against the darker satin finish of the skin.

And numbers. A whole shitload row of numbers tattooed right on the goddamned back of that Negra’s shoulder.

Kingsbury was pulling on Beulah’s arm, urging her away from the wagon. Ovatt and Root were, already halfway back to the corner as Titus heard a groan from the ground. The black man leaped from the wagon and sprinted past Bass. Titus turned, watching the white man groggily pick his face out of the gravel, swipe the tiny stones and mud from his cheek, then shake his head.

Bass brought the stone down on the back of the man’s head with a crack loud enough that it seemed to echo from the wall of the tavern. Like an anvil the slaver dropped onto the gravel and icy mud with a grunt, arms sprawled, and lay still, his chest slowly rising and falling.

Bass stared a moment at the man, then looked at the others frantically signaling him on. Dropping the stone beside the slaver as if it had suddenly grown too hot to hold, Bass darted at a crouch for the shadows. When he reached the group, he felt his right hand yanked up, gripped as if between two fine-grained slabs of second-growth hickory, and squeezed in a vise as it was pumped. The others stepped back as the slave brought Bass’s arm up and down, up and down.

“Just like white men do, this shake,” he said, beaming. “Me thank. Me thank, so shake with you. You make me not go to Miss’ippi.”

Kingsbury came between them, gently prying Bass’s hand from the slave’s. “That’s fine now. Shoo, boy. Just be on your way.”

“I go your way,” he said, turning back to gaze at Bass.

“Oh-h-h-h, no, you ain’t!” Root snarled.

“Just tell him you gotta be on your way, Titus,” Ovatt implored.

“We … I gotta be going,” Bass said.

The bald-headed slave remained steadfast, reaching out for Bass again. “Me go with you.”

Kingsbury clamped his hands around the black man’s wrists, saying, “We ain’t going to Nawlins.”

“Good.” And he jutted his chin. “Never like Nawlins no good.”

“And where we’re heading, we sure as hell can’t take you!” Ovatt added.

“G’won, now,” the pilot demanded. “You’re free, and you better be long gone afore that white man comes to with a lump on his head and finds you gone.”

Kingsbury grabbed Titus by one arm, the woman taking the other as Ovatt and Root led the way, all of them looking back over their shoulder at the big black shadow standing there at the corner of Kings Tavern as they hurried into the brush and timber for the trailhead of the Natchez Trace.

Bass watched the man’s eyes as he hustled off, how red-rimmed they were despite the blackness of the flesh. Then he realized that the Negra had to have his own feelings. Likely he had cried in anger and frustration at first, what with being sold off and put away in that cage like he was. Then those tears eventually changed to slow, sad ones as he felt his world closing in, and him shut off from the rest of it, torn away from friends and family, separated from everything he had come to know and understand over his short time in this white man’s world.

And as he watched that black face disappear in the shadows behind him, along with the cold curl of the slave’s breathsmoke and the spitting-hiss of those torches outside Kings Tavern at the far edge of Natchez-Under-the-Hill, Bass figured he knew just how that felt.

By damn, he knew how it felt to have his own world ripped inside out.

From the Mississippi River the Natchez Trace pointed roughly in a northeasterly direction toward Tennessee for close to six hundred miles through Choctaw and Chickasaw country, ending up on the Cumberland River at a place called French Lick, in the last few years come to be known as Nashville.

Some early-day historians were already claiming this was the oldest road in the world, originally used by the beasts to cross ridges and rivers and high-flowing streams; later followed by the Indians who came tracking those flesh-bearing animals, long, long before the Romans ever dreamed of their famous Appian Way. Here in Mississippi country it was often known as the Chickasaw Trace. The Choctaw Path was the name given to the southern end, while the new American government, which had in mind to use the road in moving its mails, gave the Trace a grand and imperially democratic title: the Columbian Highway.

For Titus Bass and the rest who fled north into the wilderness that cold and misty night in December of 1810, there was nothing remotely grand nor glorious about the prospect of making their way on foot through the swamps and bayous, fording streams and ice-clogged rivers, ascending countless ridges and stumbling down countless more valleys, hoping they did not freeze at night, nor fall prey to any of the beasts, savages, nor white predators who murdered and robbed all along that narrow footpath pointing the way north—home.

Indeed, more so in the latter part of the eighteenth century than now, it had acquired the reputation of a robber’s road, a thoroughfare of the hunter and the hunted, prey and predator. Thrilling stories and splendid myths had already built up concerning the gruesome exploits of famous highwaymen along the Natchez Trace. The sort of brigands who painted their faces with berry juice and bark stain to appear like rogue Indians, for just often enough had the Chickasaw and Creek in fact swept down to make their raids on the long men and lean women who plied that lonely road.

All too often only a circling buzzard called attention to the fate of other, less fortunate travelers. Because they dared not leave evidence of their bloody crimes, some of the more barbaric of thieves ripped open the bodies of their victims, tore out the entrails, and filled the cavities with rocks to sink all evidence of their black deeds beneath the placid waters of the swamps and bayous. What with an alarming number of murders and short list of celebrated outlaws, by the 1790s the road was commonly known as the “Devil’s Backbone.”

Most everyone on the frontier was a sojourner in those days, pilgrims all: traders and tinkers, medicine peddlers and missionaries, contract mail carriers and even an occasional settler on the tramp south to find richer soil. And always, always there were the Kentucky flatboatmen. Few if any were ever compelled to cordelle and warp their boats back up the Mississippi and Ohio, against the mighty current. Instead, with their cargo auctioned and their transportation sold by the board, the Kentuckians found themselves again afoot, staring at the prospect of a long walk home before they would begin to make plans for another float downriver.

Even young Tom Lincoln from Kentucky had made his trip to New Orleans back in 1806, then plied his way back home on foot, vowing never to return to such a wicked wilderness. He kept his promise, found himself a wife, and began to raise a family—the father of Abraham, the hickory-thin rail-splitter.

By the end of that first decade of the nineteenth century, the road pirates were all but a part of the past—no longer anything more than scary stories used to frighten young children in their beds on a dark and stormy night. Most boatmen returning home from their long trek downriver did so without giving a thought to any real danger from banditti. While a few took north a fat purse, most came back to the Ohio River country homesick and foot-sore. The hapless handful might well take north the bitter fruit of their bawdy frolics with the many-hued whores: blindness and idiocy for their offspring.

That first day on the trail after leaving the fertile, loess bluffs at Natchez, Titus proved his worth to the rest by bagging a fat turkey cock then out in search of his own meal. They took turns plucking the bird then and there that afternoon beside the worn footpath, building a fire to warm their cold, wet selves as night came down and the sounds of the wilderness began to swell around them.

“We’re in Choctaw land now,” Kingsbury explained. “Been past some of their villages a time or two walking north. I knowed ’em to strap small bags of sand onto the heads of their babes to make ’em flat.”

Beulah placed her hand on her forehead. “They think that makes their skulls pretty?”

Indeed, the Natchez Trace penetrated the heart of what had once been a great wilderness ruled only by tribes warring over disputed territory. For centuries the route had been no more than a buffalo trail when the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee came to blaze their own short woodland paths that took a man from the shellfish shore of the Mississippi to salt licks of steamy woodlands, past river and stream and hunting ground until the tribes eventually joined each small section to form the great road.

It wasn’t until their third night out of Natchez at their camp on the Bayou Pierre River that the slave finally worked up enough courage to slip up on their camp and show himself at the far edge of the firelight.

“Figured you was out there,” Kingsbury stated in a matter-of-fact tone as the black man emerged from the shadows.

When they all wheeled about, Titus nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden sight of the slave. Staring up at him now, just as he had gazed up at him in that cage on the wagon, Titus thought the Negro seemed all the taller. Almost like a huge, ebony monolith.

“What the hell you doing, Negra?” Root growled, finding his voice after the fright the slave’s surprise appearance had given him.

The man eyed the butchered carcass of a white-tailed deer, his hand across his belly. “Hungry.”

“Ain’t got nothing for you!” Heman Ovatt snapped. “Just get on with yourself and be gone!”

“Here,” Titus said, standing on shaking legs. “I’ll share what I got with you.”

The others fell silent as Bass stepped toward the slave, holding out his tin cup. In it steamed hunks of venison and broth.

Snapping that two-cornered Barcelona hat from his head, he performed a quick bow, then snatched the cup from Bass and brought it to his face, where he sucked its contents down ravenously.

“There’s more here,” Beulah said, passing over what she had left of her portion.

As he ate, the boatmen argued over the slave’s fate as if the man weren’t even there, or at the very least completely deaf.

“Mebbeso we can sell him up to home,” Root suggested eagerly. “Big Negra like him—sure to fetch us a lot a money.”

“What the hell you need with more money, Reuben Root?” the woman demanded.

“Leastwise, it’d pay for what he’ll eat on the journey!” Kingsbury replied.

“You all sound like addleheaded fools,” Beulah scolded. She laid a hand on Titus’s shoulder. “It’s the young’un here feeding the lot of you. Ain’t costing you a damn thing.”

“Then I say we leave him,” Ovatt grumbled. “Can’t sell him—he ain’t gonna be worth nothing to us.”

“Don’t you remember? We already tried leaving him,” Kingsbury said. “You see what that got us.”

“Maybeso we can tie him up till someone else comes along and finds him.”

“No!” Titus said a little too loudly. The other three and the slave all turned in his direction, freezing in place. “No. You won’t want that done to you. A man tied up, he can’t protect hisself from the wild critters in these here woods.”

“Boy’s right,” Beulah agreed, rising to a crouch to ladle more of the venison soup from the brass kettle into the slave’s cup. “You’ll just have to figure out something else. You fellas are so damned smart, ought’n be real easy.”

With the way the disgruntled Root and Ovatt glared at Kingsbury as if to tell him to do something—and quick—about that sassy woman, the pilot could only shrug in helplessness.

Bass watched the slave suck at the stew, chewing up the big morsels of meat with his huge teeth. At each gust of cruel wind which sliced through that shirt torn to ribbons, the black man shivered, doing his best to cradle the tin cup in both hands to keep it from sloshing. Not knowing what prompted him to, Titus dragged up one of his blankets and draped it around the slave’s shoulders. Those huge white eyes in that shiny black face looked up at him in the middle of chewing a bite. A look of stunned gratitude crossed the man’s face as Bass turned back to his place by the fire.

“Then there ain’t nothing else we can do but we send him back,” Ovatt said.

“That ain’t no better’n trying to leave him,” Kingsbury argued.

“If we ain’t gonna send him back, or leave him—I got me an idea,” Reuben declared. “I say we take him north—”

“We ain’t taking him north!” Ovatt repeated.

“I’m telling you we ought’n take him north and sell him!” Root declared.

The woman settled beside the youth. “How you feel about that, Titus?”

“Why you asking him?” Kingsbury demanded.

“I figure the Negra belongs to Titus—”

“That buck Negra belongs to him?” Ovatt whined.

Reuben snorted. “Craziest thing I ever heard of!”

Beulah paid them no heed and continued, “Belongs to Titus because Titus is the one busted the Negra free.” Turning back to the youth, she repeated, “How’s that set with you? Taking him north to Kentucky where you can sell him.”

For some time he stared at the fire, then looked at the slave, then back to the flames again, rolling it over and over in his mind. At that moment he regretted not paying more attention to his schooling, figuring it might well have given him the capacity to resolve his dilemma. Finally, Bass said, “I ain’t got no place to take him I get back there.”

“You got a home,” Root disagreed.

“Not no more,” Titus said, fearful of the responsibility. “I’m going to Louisville.”

“Take him with you,” Kingsbury said.

Wagging his head, unable to sort it all out, Bass admitted, “Don’t wanna take no Negra slave ’long with me.”

“Then you just sell him when we get back to the Ohio country and be done with it,” Ovatt suggested.

“I … I don’t rightly know how I feel about that.”

Root asked, “Ain’t your people got any slaves?”

“No. My family ain’t never had any. Work the land all ourselves … all by themselves.”

“Maybe they can use a slave now,” Kingsbury tried to add cheerfully.

“Said I ain’t going back home,” Titus told them firmly. “I don’t want no slave. Can’t use him.”

“Sell him!”

“No!” Titus snapped at Root, his fist clenching in frustration.

“He’s just a god-bleemed Negra—”

“He’s a person!” Titus interrupted.

All three boatmen erupted in roars of laughter.

Kingsbury said, “This Negra? A person? Listen, son—that’s money sitting right there. Like a good milch cow. Or a breeding stud. Just look at him! He’ll bring you top dollar. Every planter from here to Kentucky’ll wanna get his hands on him to breed with their Negra bitches. Have ’em strong li’l suckers to do the fieldwork in the years to come.”

“Said I ain’t gonna sell him.”

“Then we’ll sell him for you,” Root said.

“He ain’t yours,” Titus snapped. “He belongs to me.”

“So what the hell are you gonna do with him?” Beulah asked.

“I s’pose I’ll turn him loose.”

“He’ll just follow us … till some law catches him.”

Titus was worried again. “Then what?”

“If they don’t kill him while’st running him down, they’ll sell him off,” Kingsbury said. “No two ways about it, the man’s going for money, even if you turn him loose.”

“’Cept if you make him a freedman,” Beulah suggested.

All four men turned to her, stunned. Then Titus looked at the slave. “A freedman?”

“That means you let him go legal, so he ain’t no man’s slave no more,” she explained. “Means he’s on his own from there on out.”

Turning now to the stranger in their midst, Titus asked in a quiet voice, “You wanna be free to go your own way?”

He smiled. “Go with you.”

Wagging his head, Titus explained, “No man’s slave. Go where you wanna go, on your own.”

The yellowed eyes slowly widened, as if he were struggling to make sense of it in his mind, translating, forming words like sturdy nets to capture the concepts.

“Me come across the big water … way down river,” he started. “Big boat. Big boat many die. Me so sick come to river. Down in Orlins Town they sell me to Annie. She learn me fix whiskey, rum, brandy too. Help Annie’s women. I not help Annie’s women, she sell me. You take me now. Me go with you.”

“Not no more,” Titus replied adamantly. “Free man.”

“Go home?” he asked the youth.

“That’s across the ocean,” Beulah answered. “Too far. You can go anywhere, make a new life for yourself.”

“Go work anybody else now?”

“No,” Titus said, sensing the warmth of something spreading inside his chest. What it was, he could not put a name to. “Work for you … what, do you have a name?”

“Hezekiah, she name me.”

Beulah asked, “Your mama?”

“No. My mama far away,” Hezekiah said sadly, his eyes misting as he stared off into the night. “She die when men come to village and take all people to big boat. Chains.”

Titus asked, “Who give you the name Hezekiah?”

“Annie give me.”

“Then that’s what your name’s gonna be,” Titus declared. “Hezekiah Christmas.”

A broad smile brightened the slave’s face like a crack in burnt, blackened wood. “Like Annie name. Christmas.”

“You like it?” Bass inquired.

“Like it, yes. Hezekiah Christmas.”

His mind burned with possibilities as he said, “Now, soon as we get someplace where I can have folks write us up a paper says I’m freeing you, from then on you’ll be a free man.”

“Goddamned shame,” Root grumbled. “Negra buck like him’d brung us his weight in coins, I’d wager.”

“Just hope he ain’t gonna be trouble to us,” Kingsbury grumped.

“He ain’t,” Titus vowed, hoping it was a promise he could keep.

“That’s a long goddamned walk,” Ovatt said.

“He’ll help out,” Bass explained, then looked at the slave. “Pay for his keep.”

Hezekiah nodded, handing his empty cup to Beulah.

“You done?” she asked.

“More?”

Beulah smiled and took his cup to lean over the kettle. “My, but you are a hungry one.”

“Just look at the size of him,” Ovatt said almost under his breath. “Bet he eats as much as a goddamned plowhorse.”

North by east they pushed on the following morning, making for the Choctaw Agency on the Pearl River,^* the heart of the Choctaw nation.

Only nine years before, General James Wilkinson had concluded a treaty between the tribes and the federal government that would allow passage through their lands. Four years later in 1805 the tribes agreed to establish and maintain a handful of settlements along the trail. While the first leg of the journey north from New Orleans to Natchez was one of relative ease due in large part to the frequent and comfortable way stations, once on the Natchez Trace, however, the “stands,” as those half-dozen wilderness way stations were known across the next six hundred miles, were something altogether different: really nothing more than a few ramshackle cabins and tumble-down huts offering the crudest accommodations. Not a single town in all that distance. Only three Indian villages, a ferry at the Tennessee River, and two squaw men’s cabins provided the only measure of civilization and company in that wilderness.

While the Trace did indeed serve as a mail route and was of some small military purpose for the infant nation, it remained of limited commercial importance. From the time of the Revolution until the coming of the steamboat—which one day soon would easily push its way upstream against the might of the Mississippi and the Ohio—the Natchez Trace was primarily a route for returning flatboatmen. Coming downriver, theirs had been a journey by shoal and suck and thunderous rapids. Walking north would present a man far different perils.

“Ain’t near so bad making for home in wintertime like it is,” Heman Ovatt said at their night fire several days later. “Summer’s trip be the one what can kill a man with bad water, the fever and malaria, and all sorts of other bloody fluxes.”

“Mosquitoes and gnats,” Reuben Root joined in. “In that sticky heat they’ll suck your blood and make you so sick you wish you was dead.”

“Them’s the only things you don’t have to worry about come winter like this,” Beulah snorted. “But going north, you’re still bound to run into poisonous snakes—the likes of cottonmouths and copperheads.”

“Only on the warm days,” Kingsbury advised.

“I know ’nough ’bout ’em,” Titus replied. “Sunny days you just gotta be watchful for the places them snakes is out to lay around and warm themselves.”

Root trembled as if cold water had been poured on him. “What I don’t like is them panthers crying in the night out there. Sounds just like a woman, wailing for help.”

Night after night it had been the same for Titus. Awakened from a fitful sleep by the cries from all manner of shapeless creatures out there in the dark. He’d lie wide-eyed for the longest time, his back slid up to Hezekiah’s, hoping to share their warmth and Bass’s two blankets, as he listened to the night-things come into voice out there in the swamp.

Day after day it was to be the same for them as well. Up before first light to chew on the cold remains of last night’s supper as they rolled their blankets, tied their few belongings over their shoulders, then trudged on across the frosty bayous and skirted the great, stagnant pools encircling the base of each cypress tree, intent on covering as much ground as they could, what with the few hours of daylight the winter granted them.

Every morning the others let Titus lead off, followed closely by the runaway slave. Kingsbury would follow with the others after a few minutes, wanting to assure that they would not frighten off any of the game Bass might run across throughout the day. Most evenings Titus provided fresh game for Beulah to cook over their supper fire. But every now and then they failed to hear a gunshot as twilight came down and the temperature dropped. It was then they would have to content themselves with what they had saved of last’s night meal and hope that something would cross the youngster’s path come the morrow.

Far beyond the Natchez District they emerged from the interminable bayou, at the edge of which stood the Chickasaw Agency,^* where the footpath grew worse. Below their feet the soil had become gravelly, eating away at their boots, chewing up Titus’s moccasins, requiring nightly repairs and patching.

“They call this part of the road ‘the Barrens,’” Ovatt declared that first night the landscape changed so drastically. “From here on out to Tennessee, the trail gets a mite rough.”

Bass poked at a blister on his heel with the point of his knife and asked, “Can’t imagine how it’s gonna get any worse.”

The following day they reached what most travelers considered the halfway point of the Natchez Trace: Mclntoshville, named for an early Scottish trader who had come to the Chickasaw to trade but stayed on to father his own dynasty. More commonly known as Tockshish Stand^* to the tribe and travelers alike, the village lay some 310 miles from Natchez—the first such village a wayfarer passed in all that distance from the Mississippi. Not another sign of civilization, not one mail carrier, merchant, or party of traders.

From Tockshish the path did grow worse, threading in and out from open woods to sparse sections of inhospitable prairie as the ground rose, becoming more bushy and broken as they ascended the divide that would take them to the Tennessee River, still eighty miles beyond. Up, then down, the Trace led Titus through that unforgiving wilderness, as he listened through each short day only to the sound of his moccasins on the pounded earth, perhaps the haunting crackle of the dried cane as it shook, troubled by the winter wind.

There were times Titus stopped—not so much to rest his feet or to catch his breath—but for no other reason than to turn around and listen, hoping to catch the sound of Hezekiah coming up the trail behind him, or to turn around atop a hill and look back, hoping to spot the boatmen and Beulah, plodding along beneath the cold, gray, monotonous sky that each day offered them.

Already December was growing old. Just how old, he had no way of knowing for certain. The way things looked now, he might well be seeing in the new year still caught in this wilderness. A new year, and with it his seventeenth birthday. That afternoon he knocked a turkey cock out of its roost in the bare branches of a beechnut tree. While it wasn’t the finest feast he had provided them, the meal filled their bellies as the gloom of winter’s night closed its fist around them.

“We should be drawing close to the Tennessee,” Ovatt declared as he picked his teeth and wriggled his feet close by the fire’s warmth that night.

“Keep your eye peel’t tomorry,” Kingsbury said, turning to Bass. “The trail takes you down to the river crossing.”

Titus asked, “We gonna have to ford it?”

“Time was, a riverman had to ford it,” Kingsbury replied. “Not no longer. Years back a Scotch feller named Colbert come to trade among the Chickasaws and saw him the chance to make a nice living.”

“King of the roost, that one is now,” Root added.

Kingsbury nodded. “Married into the tribe, built him his ferry, and set himself up right nice.”

Ovatt rubbed his hands together, teeth gleaming in the firelight. “Got him a mess of handsome daughters too!”

“Half-breeds they are,” Root explained with a wink.

“Still as handsome a woman as you’re likely to meet along the trail,” Ovatt declared, then suddenly turned to Beulah. “Pardon me, ma’am. Not meaning that you ain’t a handsome woman … just, that—well, considering you and Kingsbury, see?”

She grinned and dropped her eyes. “I took me no offense, Heman.” Then turned to Bass. “You just watch yourself there at Colbert’s Ferry, Titus. Them half-breed girls got Injun blood in ’em, and there’s no telling what they’ll do when they see a likely young man such as you come round.”

“M-me?”

“Yes, you,” Beulah said. “Don’t you go and run off into the woods with none of ’em.”

“They’ll just as soon slit your throat as wet your honey-dauber,” Root grumbled. Then apologized: “I’m sorry, ma’am. It’s me and my awful manners again.”

“What Reuben says is right,” the woman explained. “They’re the sort won’t think twice ’bout lifting a man’s purse or knocking him over the head for his money. They ain’t looking for your hand in marriage.”

“D-daughters,” Titus repeated, sensing that sudden animal urge cross his loins with a delicious electricity.

“Least seven or eight,” Kingsbury declared. “Less’n Papa Colbert’s married any of ’em off since’t last summer when we was through here.”

“Why would he go an’ do a fool thing like that?” Root demanded. “Them girls is the best he’s got to offer—’sides that river ferry.”

“Reuben’s right,” Ovatt agreed. “Men on the Trace allays look forrad to talking with them girls, dancing some with ’em, after hunnerds of miles of no womankind to speak of.”

“Wenches is what they are,” the woman said. “The devil’s own handmaidens.”

“Did you say dancing?” Titus asked, staring off into the distance.

Why, he had never been allowed to dance before. As much as music made his feet move, his folks had for all those years enforced a strong proscription against dancing during every visit to the Longhunters Fair, where he had always contented himself watching others jig and clog, reel and waltz to the merry music.

“Ah, hell,” Beulah groaned as she glanced over to find that faraway look in the youngster’s eyes. “Looks like we already lost this’un to that devil Colbert’s half-breed daughters!”

^* Present-day site of Jackson, Mississippi.

^* Present-day site of Houston, Mississippi.

^* Present-day site of Tupelo, Mississippi.