“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
