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
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!”
