Dead water

living as free men. . . .”

“As men who're free to be paid pennies because they don't dare ask for dollars,” said January. “Free to live in shacks on the outskirts of town because nobody will pay them much attention there. But yes, I guess it is easier than trying to make it all the way to Ohio.”

“More and more are trying it,” said Bredon. “As more and more laws are passed to control freedmen, to limit what free people of color can do. More and more rich men who make their living from slaves are getting scared. They keep pretending that once they get everything nailed down and set, things will go on as they have, with slaves in the slave states doing the heavy work and living like animals, and ignorant as animals, kept that way by men who don't dare let them learn to read.” His deep voice was level and quiet, but anger burned in the yellow wolf eyes.

“But things won't stay the way they are, no matter how hard the slave-holders try to make them. Thu tells me you were once a slave, sir.”

“As a child, yes,” said January. “My mother was bought by a wealthy sugar-broker who made her his mistress —that is the custom here. And as the custom is here, he freed me and my sister.”

“Then you don't remember slavery clearly?”

January said, “I remember it.”

There was silence then, in the deep shadows, silence like the hush of a Mississippi farm on a hot afternoon, like the dark stinking shadows of a slave-jail in Natchez.

“We need hideouts,” said Bredon at last. “We need places where runaways can come, until they can be taken north. We need places where they can sleep for a night, or two, or three. We need men—and women—who are willing to guide runaways on to the next stage; who are willing to take food to a hiding-place, or give clothing to help an escape.

“I watched you on the boat, Mr. January. I know you were pretending to be Sefton's valet, but it was clear to me who was doing the thinking. I watched you trailing that scoundrel Weems and Mrs. Fischer, and I watched you searching for the money Weems was supposed to have stolen. . . . Did you ever recover it? Thu tells me you found a key.”

“We recovered it,” said January. “And returned it to the Bank from which it had been stolen.”

Bredon nodded. “Good,” he said. “I'm glad you retrieved what was your own. I'm asking you to put your lives in danger. They hang white men for assisting runaways—slave-stealing, they call it—and for men of your own race it's worse. I'm asking you to put in danger the futures that you're trying to build for yourselves—the school Thu tells me you're opening for girls, the music that made for just about the only pleasure I had on that truly god-forsaken boat.

“But we need people with brains. We need people who are honest. . . . And we need people with houses.”

He gestured at the deep velvety dimness of the parlor, the gentle shadows thick in all the rooms where next winter—please God, thought January—a few more soft-eyed young ladies would study Latin and mathematics and history, would learn that there were other dreams in life than being beautiful and submissive so that they could become white men's mistresses.

“I won't ask for your answer right away,” said Bredon quietly. “I'm staying at the Verandah Hotel on St. Louis Street. There are others in the city I'll try and speak to as well. But think about it. You're some of the lucky ones, the ones who were given your freedom. One day, God willing, we will be able to strike down slavery root and branch, and eliminate it from this country. Until that time, we're trying to save those we can, one by one, soul by soul.”

He bowed over Rose's hand and extended his hand to January. January kept his own hand at his side and looked across at his wife.

The wife he had worked so hard to protect. The woman with whom he hoped to build as safe a life as they could make.

Rose's eyes met his, calm and gray-green, with the points of candle-fire multiplied infinitely in her spectacles.

This could ruin all we have. Take from us even what little we've fought to achieve.

She looked a question at him, and, after a moment, January nodded.

Then she smiled at Bredon, and said, “Are you sure you don't want to sit and have coffee? If . . .” She looked at January again, and again he nodded, more strongly now. “If we are going to be friends?”

After Bredon left, January found it hard to sleep. Beside him, Rose dropped off as usual within seconds of their final kiss—it was a source of never-ending wonder and annoyance to him that she could sleep with the uncaring ease of a cat, while he lay awake looking at the glowing shapes thrown by the night-light in its red glass bubble, listening to the mosquitoes whine beyond the cloudy gauze of the bar. Hearing, beyond that, the croak of frogs in the gutters outside, the unceasing throb of the cicadas in the trees.

Wondering just what the hell he'd let himself—and Rose—in for.

Five years ago Nat Turner had risen in revolt against the whites in Virginia: he and his followers had been captured, tortured, hanged. Since that time the merest whisper of revolt was punished, brutally for whites, and for blacks with the animal fury of terrors that the slave-holders would not even admit they felt.

Judas Bredon had risked his life to smuggle his fifteen runaways up-river to Memphis. At the time he'd realized what was going on, January had not even been certain he'd have the courage to do the same.

And now he was being asked to.

And had, God help him, agreed.

God help me, he thought again, groping out to the nightstand to touch through the mosquito-bar the blue beads of his rosary. Dear God, what have I done?

As if in answer to the question he slept, and dreamed of the Silver Moon again, and of young Mr. Purlie getting on the boat. Of Gleet's gloating voice saying, She's a beauty, ain't she?