Death Rattle

“I’d never’d been old at all, wasn’t for you.”

Bass felt his eyes brimming, his heart seized with a sharp stab of warm sentiment. “Then we’re even, Hezekiah Christmas.”

“Even?”

“Less’n you brung your Injuns down on them Mexicans,” Scratch declared, “me and the rest of these here horse stealers all be dead right now.”

Christmas’s eyes narrowed in a serpentine fashion. “My people hate Mexicans. Kill all them Mexicans we can kill ever’ time they ride into our mountains.”

The impact of just how close he had come to going under was hitting Titus. He declared, “You didn’t come along with your Injuns when you did, I’d be hash right about now. So how’d you know to come save me?”

With a gust of soft, contagious laughter, Christmas said, “Didn’t know it was you, Titus Bass! Didn’t really matter it was you neither. Like I said, all we was gonna do was kill ever’ Mexican we could get in our hands. But you being there was just something meant to be, Titus Bass.”

“Maybeso us crossing paths again after all these years was meant to be, Hezekiah,” Scratch declared with a toothy smile. “Way things was lookin’ with them Mexican soldiers ’bout to rub us out—your ol’ bare head was the sweetest sight I see’d in a long, long time!”

“Many’s the night I laid on my blanket, trying to fall asleep,” Christmas admitted, the look in his eyes gone soft again, “doing my best to figger out a way I’d ever thank you for setting me free from them slavers. An’ the farther I come—sailin’ way out to California—the harder it was gonna be to find me a way to square things between us. After while, I got to figgerin’ I’d live out the last of my days owing you for my life—”

“Great Jehoshaphat! If you didn’t square things back there in a big way, Hezekiah!” he interrupted as he laid his hand on the Negro’s bare, muscular forearm. “No more talk ’bout it, ever again … what I wanna know is when the devil you gonna tell me how you come to be out here so far away from where I last saw you on the banks of the Ohio?”

^* Dance on the Wind

15

“Just like you said for me to do, I gone west, down the Ohio,” Hezekiah Christmas explained. “But that country didn’t suit me so much. Folks there … they didn’t take to no freedman so good.”

“What’d you do?” Scratch asked. “Where’d you go when you found things weren’t so hospitable for you west of Owensboro?”

Hezekiah told how he crossed the Ohio, turning his nose east, pushing farther and farther north. He made a few pennies when and where people would pay him for his work. And when he no longer had any money to pay for his keep, or no white man would offer him his keep in exchange for a little work, Hezekiah slept out in the forest, or here and there stole a chicken and other victuals to fill his gnawing belly as he kept on searching for that place where folks would no longer regard him as nothing more than an ex-slave, not even so much as a freedman … a land where they would regard him only as a man.

“Never heard of New London,” Bass said after Hezekiah had explained how he made his way all the way to that seaside town in Connecticut. “What’s a man with a strong back like yours to do in such a place?”

“I went to sea,” Christmas said with a chest-swelling pride. “Cap’n Philbert. A good man, that one.”

On the Lady Jane, Philbert’s sleek, low-slung coastal packet, the crew made swift runs up and down the Atlantic seaboard. With their hold crammed full of goods from New England, they plied the coastal waters to those southern ports where they off-loaded, then filled up the belly of the Lady Jane once more with bales of cotton, tobacco, and even rum from the West Indies.

“For six years I learned every bump and dimple on the seaboard,” Hezekiah stated. “Then Cap’n Philbert, he was give the chance to sail a big, big ship out on the ocean.”

Philbert was offered more pay to command a massive, three-masted schooner that would make regular runs around the Cape Horn to California, beginning with that first season of 1819.

Titus watched the way a wistful look came over Hezekiah’s face as he talked about that maiden voyage of the Yankee Pride, plying the coast of South America and eventually tacking into the bay at San Diego, then sailing north to their next port where they put in at Pueblo de los Angeles. It was in that coastal village that Hezekiah fell in love with the Spanish ladies, and they with him.

“Valgame Dios! Way them wimmens stared at me with their big eyes, why—I don’t figger any of ’em ever see’d a Neegra afore!” Hezekiah confessed with a grin. “Truth be, I had eyes for one of them ladies my own self. But she was the wife of a soldier. He bought her fancy clothes and drove her around in a big carriage all the time. I’m sure he didn’t think much of his wife making eyes at no poor seafarin’ Neegra from America faraway. Malditos Americanos.”

He had decided California had to be the land of milk and honey—brimming with women, wine, and all manner of earthly pleasures. The freedman set his sights on putting down roots in California.

“I asked Cap’n Philbert for my leave—an’ he let me stay behind when the Yankee Pride turned south for the Cape and her home port. Even spoke for me at the Mission San Gabriel where one of them padres spoke a little American talk. They was to give me a home there, an’ a place to work for my keep too. The good father tol’t me how I’d have to work in the fields with the Injuns, sleep with ’em too. None of us got much food neither.”

Less than a year later, life in Spanish California changed forever. No longer were they a colony. Now they were part of an independent country. And nothing in Mexico would ever be the same again.

“After ’while, things wasn’t so good no more. I didn’t know where to turn for help,” Hezekiah continued. “A stranger in that land—no better off’n I was back in the South.”

The new Mexican governor heard of this strange black American and came to visit Christmas at the mission. From the very start it was plain that the governor was suspicious of the stranger. Here in the first days following their revolution, the Mexicans were afraid of their own shadows.

“But he said I could stay on at the mission for one year with the mansitos.”

“Mansitos?” “These here.” And Hezekiah gestured at the young men around him. “It’s what the Mexicans called the tame Indians.”

“After the year, what were you s’pose to do?”

Christmas wagged his head. “I was s’posed to be gone on a ship to America afore my year was up.”

Until the next ship arrived in the bay, the governor and the Franciscan friars declared the American would have to find gainful employment in the mission fields and vineyards with the rest of the poor mansos. But that ultimately meant he was slaving from dawn till dusk for two meager meals each day and a roof over his head in the Indian quarters every night.

“They was bound to do their best to turn me into a slave again,” he declared with a fury boiling just beneath the surface. “Un Americano, pero de mas cristiano de la santa fe catolica. I was American, but they was gonna do all they could to make me a good Catholic, like they was making all the mansitos into good Christians too.”

Then the first of the slaves decided to run off.

“But they was brung back the next day,” Christmas said. “And beat to an inch of their lives for it.”

The cruel whippings delivered by the army officers in collusion with the padres did not deter those Indians brave enough to attempt escape again.

“That second time they paid with their lives, and most of the rest got a bad beating just to show ’em who was the boss.”

Christmas tried his best to explain how he was coming to see these short, brown-skinned Indians as no different than his own people back in America. How the sadistic Mexican officers and those self-righteous Catholic friars were no different than the brutal slave masters back in the southern states. A bond had been formed.

Over time, Hezekiah helped one after another of the slaves escape for the hills. Some were caught and brought back alive. Others were returned to the mission tied over the back of a horse.