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—”
