Then, “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” the black man said.
“Then you shouldn’t have aimed a rifle at him and pulled the trigger,” I said back, recklessly.
Our assailant made no immediate response. He seemed to be thinking this over. Grasshoppers lit on the cuffs of his ragged pants. His head was large, his hair cut crudely close to the skull. His eyes were narrow and suspicious. He was barefoot.
“It was not my intention to hurt anyone,” he said again. “I was shooting from a distance, sir.”
By this time Percy had managed to sit up. He seemed less afraid of the rifleman than he ought to have been. Less afraid, at any rate, than I was. “What
He gave his attention to Percy. “To warn you away, is all.”
“Away from what?”
“This building.”
“Why? What’s in this building?”
“My son.”
The “three million” in Percy’s title were the men, women and children of African descent held in bondage in the South in the year 1860. For obvious reasons, the number is approximate. Percy always tried to be conservative in his estimates, for he did not want to be vulnerable to accusations of sensationalizing history.
Given that number to begin with, what Percy had done was to tally up census polls, where they existed, alongside the archived reports of various state and local governments, tax and business statements, Federal surveys, rail records, etc., over the years between then and now.
What befell the three million?
A great many—as many as one third—emigrated North, before changes in the law made that difficult. Some of those who migrated continued on up to Canada. Others made lives for themselves in the big cities, insofar as they were allowed to. A smaller number were taken up against their will and shipped to certain inhospitable “colonies” in Africa, until the excesses and horrors of repatriation became notorious and the whole enterprise was outlawed.
Some found a place among the freemen of New Orleans or worked boats, largely unmolested, along the Gulf Coast. A great many went West, where they were received with varying degrees of hostility. Five thousand “irredeemably criminal” black prisoners were taken from Southern jails and deposited in a Utah desert, where they died not long after.
Certain jobs remained open to black men and women—as servants, rail porters, and so forth—and many did well enough in these professions.
But add the numbers, Percy said, even with a generous allowance for error, and it still comes up shy of the requisite three million.
How many were delivered into the Liberty Lodges? No one can answer that question with any certainty, at least not until the evidence sealed by the Ritter Inquiry is opened to the public. Percy’s estimate was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000. But as I said, he tended to be conservative in his figures.
“We were warned there was a family of wild men up here,” I said.
“I’m no wilder than I have to be,” the gunman said.
“I didn’t ask you to come visit.”
“You hurt Percy bad enough, whether you’re wild or not. Look at him. He needs a medic.”
“I see him all right, sir.”
“Then, unless you mean to shoot us both to death, will you help me get him back to our carriage?”
There was another lengthy pause.
“I don’t like to do that,” the black man said finally.
“There won’t be any end to the trouble. But I don’t suppose I have a choice, except, as you say, sir, to kill you. And that I cannot bring myself to do.”
He said these words calmly enough, but he had a way of forming his vowels, and pronouncing them deep in his throat, that defies transcription. It was like listening to a volcano rumble.
“Take his right arm, then,” I said. “I’ll get on his left. The carriage is beyond that ridge.”
“I know where your carriage is. But, sir, I won’t put down this rifle. I don’t think that would be wise. You can help him yourself.”
I went to where Percy sat and began to lift him up. Percy startled me by saying, “No, Tom, I don’t want to go to the carriage.”
“What do you mean?” the assailant asked, before I could pose the same question.
“Do you have a name?” Percy asked him.
“Ephraim,” the man said, reluctantly.
“Ephraim, my name is Percy Camber. What did you mean when you said your son was inside this barracks?”
“I don’t like to tell you that,” Ephraim said, shifting his gaze between Percy and me.
“Percy,” I said, “you need a doctor. We’re wasting time.”
He looked at me sharply. “I’ll live a while longer. Let me talk to Ephraim, please, Tom.”
“Stand off there where I can see you, sir,” Ephraim directed. “I know this man needs a doctor. I’m not stupid. This won’t take long.”
I concluded from all this that the family of wild Negroes the landlady had warned me about was real and that they were living in the sealed barn.
Why they should want to inhabit such a place I could not say.
I stood apart while Percy, wounded as he was, held a hushed conversation with Ephraim, who had shot him.
I understood that they could talk more freely without me as an auditor. I was a white man. It was true that I worked for Percy, but that fact would not have been obvious to Ephraim any more than it had been obvious to the dozens of hotelkeepers who had assumed without asking that I was the master, and Percy the servant. My closeness to Percy was unique and all but invisible.
After a while Ephraim allowed me to gather up my photographic gear, which had been scattered in the crisis.
I had been fascinated by photography even as a child. It had seemed like such patent magic! The magic of stopped time, places and persons rescued from their ephemeral natures. My parents had given me books containing photographs of Indian elephants, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the natural wonders of Florida.
I put my gear together and waited for Percy to finish his talk with the armed lunatic who had shot him.
The high cloud that had polluted the sky all morning had dissipated during the afternoon. The air was still scaldingly hot, but it was a touch less humid. A certain brittle clarity had set in. The light was hard, crystalline. A fine light for photography, though it was beginning to grow long.
“Percy,” I called out.
“What is it, Tom?”
“We have to leave now, before the sun gets any lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passed through that town. Some rural bone-setter, probably, a doughty relic of the mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.
Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was, “We’re not finished here yet.”
“What do you mean, not finished?”
“We’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see Ephraim’s son.”
Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.
I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices? (Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?
“What is his name?” I asked. “This son of yours.”
“Jordan,” he said.
I had married Maggie not long after I got back from Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put into my business. But there was a vogue
