Beulah paid them no heed and continued, “Belongs to Titus because Titus is the one busted the Negra free.” Turning back to the youth, she repeated, “How’s that set with you? Taking him north to Kentucky where you can sell him.”
For some time he stared at the fire, then looked at the slave, then back to the flames again, rolling it over and over in his mind. At that moment he regretted not paying more attention to his schooling, figuring it might well have given him the capacity to resolve his dilemma. Finally, Bass said, “I ain’t got no place to take him I get back there.”
“You got a home,” Root disagreed.
“Not no more,” Titus said, fearful of the responsibility. “I’m going to Louisville.”
“Take him with you,” Kingsbury said.
Wagging his head, unable to sort it all out, Bass admitted, “Don’t wanna take no Negra slave ’long with me.”
“Then you just sell him when we get back to the Ohio country and be done with it,” Ovatt suggested.
“I … I don’t rightly know how I feel about that.”
Root asked, “Ain’t your people got any slaves?”
“No. My family ain’t never had any. Work the land all ourselves … all by themselves.”
“Maybe they can use a slave now,” Kingsbury tried to add cheerfully.
“Said I ain’t going back home,” Titus told them firmly. “I don’t want no slave. Can’t use him.”
“Sell him!”
“No!” Titus snapped at Root, his fist clenching in frustration.
“He’s just a god-bleemed Negra—”
“He’s a person!” Titus interrupted.
All three boatmen erupted in roars of laughter.
Kingsbury said, “This Negra? A person? Listen, son—that’s money sitting right there. Like a good milch cow. Or a breeding stud. Just look at him! He’ll bring you top dollar. Every planter from here to Kentucky’ll wanna get his hands on him to breed with their Negra bitches. Have ’em strong li’l suckers to do the fieldwork in the years to come.”
“Said I ain’t gonna sell him.”
“Then we’ll sell him for you,” Root said.
“He ain’t yours,” Titus snapped. “He belongs to me.”
“So what the hell are you gonna do with him?” Beulah asked.
“I s’pose I’ll turn him loose.”
“He’ll just follow us … till some law catches him.”
Titus was worried again. “Then what?”
“If they don’t kill him while’st running him down, they’ll sell him off,” Kingsbury said. “No two ways about it, the man’s going for money, even if you turn him loose.”
“’Cept if you make him a freedman,” Beulah suggested.
All four men turned to her, stunned. Then Titus looked at the slave. “A freedman?”
“That means you let him go legal, so he ain’t no man’s slave no more,” she explained. “Means he’s on his own from there on out.”
Turning now to the stranger in their midst, Titus asked in a quiet voice, “You wanna be free to go your own way?”
He smiled. “Go with you.”
Wagging his head, Titus explained, “No man’s slave. Go where you wanna go, on your own.”
The yellowed eyes slowly widened, as if he were struggling to make sense of it in his mind, translating, forming words like sturdy nets to capture the concepts.
“Me come across the big water … way down river,” he started. “Big boat. Big boat many die. Me so sick come to river. Down in Orlins Town they sell me to Annie. She learn me fix whiskey, rum, brandy too. Help Annie’s women. I not help Annie’s women, she sell me. You take me now. Me go with you.”
“Not no more,” Titus replied adamantly. “Free man.”
“Go home?” he asked the youth.
“That’s across the ocean,” Beulah answered. “Too far. You can go anywhere, make a new life for yourself.”
“Go work anybody else now?”
“No,” Titus said, sensing the warmth of something spreading inside his chest. What it was, he could not put a name to. “Work for you … what, do you have a name?”
“Hezekiah, she name me.”
Beulah asked, “Your mama?”
“No. My mama far away,” Hezekiah said sadly, his eyes misting as he stared off into the night. “She die when men come to village and take all people to big boat. Chains.”
Titus asked, “Who give you the name Hezekiah?”
“Annie give me.”
“Then that’s what your name’s gonna be,” Titus declared. “Hezekiah Christmas.”
A broad smile brightened the slave’s face like a crack in burnt, blackened wood. “Like Annie name. Christmas.”
“You like it?” Bass inquired.
“Like it, yes. Hezekiah Christmas.”
His mind burned with possibilities as he said, “Now, soon as we get someplace where I can have folks write us up a paper says I’m freeing you, from then on you’ll be a free man.”
“Goddamned shame,” Root grumbled. “Negra buck like him’d brung us his weight in coins, I’d wager.”
“Just hope he ain’t gonna be trouble to us,” Kingsbury grumped.
“He ain’t,” Titus vowed, hoping it was a promise he could keep.
“That’s a long goddamned walk,” Ovatt said.
“He’ll help out,” Bass explained, then looked at the slave. “Pay for his keep.”
Hezekiah nodded, handing his empty cup to Beulah.
“You done?” she asked.
“More?”
Beulah smiled and took his cup to lean over the kettle. “My, but you are a hungry one.”
“Just look at the size of him,” Ovatt said almost under his breath. “Bet he eats as much as a goddamned plowhorse.”
North by east they pushed on the following morning, making for the Choctaw Agency on the Pearl River,* the heart of the Choctaw nation.
Only nine years before, General James Wilkinson had concluded a treaty between the tribes and the federal government that would allow passage through their lands. Four years later in 1805 the tribes agreed to establish and maintain a handful of settlements along the trail. While the first leg of the journey north from New Orleans to Natchez was one of relative ease due in large part to the frequent and comfortable way stations, once on the Natchez Trace, however, the “stands,” as those half-dozen wilderness way stations were known across the next six hundred miles, were something altogether different: really nothing more than a few ramshackle cabins and tumble-down huts offering the crudest accommodations. Not a single town in all that distance. Only three Indian villages, a ferry at the Tennessee River, and two squaw men’s cabins provided the only measure of civilization and company in that wilderness.
While the Trace did indeed serve as a mail route and was of some small military purpose for the infant nation, it remained of limited commercial importance. From the time of the Revolution until the coming of the steamboat—which one day soon would easily push its way upstream against the might of the Mississippi and the Ohio—the Natchez Trace was primarily a route for returning flatboatmen. Coming downriver, theirs had been a journey by shoal and suck and thunderous rapids. Walking north would present a man far different perils.
“Ain’t near so bad making for home in wintertime like it is,” Heman Ovatt said at their night fire several days later. “Summer’s trip be the one what can kill a man with bad water, the fever and malaria, and all sorts of other bloody fluxes.”
