intended.
And this was how I took my mother's admonition to be my own man. What debts I owed her and my father seemed best discharged by relieving them of the burden of my keep, since I was clearly not fitting myself to reverse the balance. The notion that there was an emotional obligation on either side hardly occurred to me; I doubt if it did to them. Toward Agnes Jones I felt no debt at all.
A few months after my seventeenth birthday I packed my three most cherished books in my good white cotton shirt and, having bade a most romantic good-bye to Agnes, one which would certainly have consummated her hopes had her father come upon us, I left Wappinger Falls and set out for New York.
II. OF DECISIONS, MINIBILIES, AND TINUGRAPHS
I thought I could do the walk of some eighty miles in four days, allowing time to swap work for food, supposing I found farmers or housewives agreeable to the exchange. June made it no hardship to sleep outdoors, and the old post road ran close enough to the Hudson for any bathing I might care to do. The dangers of the trip were part of the pattern of life in the United States in 1938. I didn't particularly fear being robbed by a roving gang for I was sure organized predators would disdain so obviously unprofitable a prey, and individual thieves I felt I could take care of, but I was not anxious to be picked up as a vagrant by any of the three police forces, national, state, or local. As a freeman I was more exposed to this chance than an indent would be, with a workcard on his person and a company behind him. A freeman was fair game for the constables, state troopers, or revenuers to recruit, after a perfunctory trial, into one of the chain gangs upon whom the roads, canals, and other public works were dependent.
Some wondered why the roads were so bad in spite of all this apparent surplus of labor and were dubious of the explanation that surfacing was expensive and it was impossible to maintain unsurfaced highways in good condition. Only the hint that prisoners had been seen working around the estates of the great Whig families or had been lent to some enterprise operated by foreign capital brought knowing nods.
At seventeen possible disasters are not brooded over. I resolved to be wary, and then dismissed thoughts of police, gangs, and all unpleasantness. The future was mine to make as my mother had insisted, and I was taking the first steps in shaping it.
I started off briskly, passing at first through villages long familiar; then, getting beyond the territory I had known all my life, I slowed down often enough to gaze at something new and strange, or to wander into wood or pasture for wild strawberries or early blueberries. I covered less ground than I had intended by the time I found a farmhouse, after inquiring at several others, where the woman was willing to give me supper and even let me sleep in the barn in return for splitting a sizable stack of logs into kindling and milking two cows.
Exercise and hot food must have counteracted the excitement of the day, for I fell asleep immediately and didn't waken till quite a while after sunup. It was another warm, fine morning; soon the post road led, not between shabby villages and towns or struggling farms, but past the stone or brick walls of opulent estates. Now and then I caught a glimpse between old, well-tended trees of magnificent houses either a century old or built to resemble those dating from that prosperous time. I could not but share the general dislike for the wealthy Whigs who owned these places, their riches contrasting with the common poverty and deriving from exploitation of the United States as a colony, but I could not help enjoying the beauty of their surroundings.
The highway was better traveled here also; I passed other walkers, quite a few wagons, a carriage or two, several peddlers, and a number of ladies and gentlemen on horseback. This was the first time I'd seen women riding astride, a practice shocking to the sensitivities of Wappinger Falls which also condemned the fashion, imported from the Chinese Empire by way of England, of feminine trousers. Having learned that women were bipedal, both customs seemed sensible to me.
I had the post road to myself for some miles between turns when I heard a commotion beyond the stone wall to my left. This was followed by an angry shout and shrill words impossible to distinguish. My progress halted, I instinctively shifted my bundle to my left hand as though to leave my right hand free for defence, but against what I had no idea.
The shouts came closer; a boy of about my own age scrambled frantically over the wall, dislodging some of the smaller lichen-covered rocks on top and sending them rolling into the ditch. He looked at me, startled, then paused for a long instant at the road's edge, undecided which way to run.
He was barefoot and wore a jute sack as a shirt, with holes cut for his arms, and ragged cotton pants. His face was little browner than my own had often been at the end of a summer's work under a burning sun.
He came to the end of indecision and started across the highway, legs pumping high, head turned watchfully. A splendid tawny stallion cleared the wall in a soaring jump, his rider bellowing, “There you are, you damned black coon!”
He rode straight for the fugitive, quirt upraised, lips thickened, and eyes rolling in rage. The victim dodged and turned; in no more doubt than I that the horseman meant to ride him down. He darted by me, so close I heard the labored rasp of breathing.
The rider swerved, and he, too, twisted around me as though I were the post at the far turn of a racecourse. Reflexively I put out my hand to grab at the reins and stop the assault. Indeed, my fingers actually touched the leather and grasped it for a fraction of a second before they fell away.
Then I was alone in the road again as both pursued and pursuer vaulted back over the fence. The whole scene of anger and terror could not have lasted two minutes; I strained my ears to hear the shouts coming from farther and farther away. Quiet fell again; a squirrel flirted his tail and sped down one tree trunk and up another. The episode might never have happened.
I shifted my bundle back and began walking again—less briskly now. My legs felt heavy, and there was an involuntary twitch in the muscles of my arm.
Why hadn't I held onto the reins and delayed the hunter, at least long enough to give his quarry a fair start? What had made me draw back? It had not been fear, at least in the usual sense, for I knew I wasn't timorous of the horseman. I was sure I could have dragged him down if he had taken his quirt to me.
Yet I had been afraid. Afraid of interfering, of meddling in affairs which were no concern of mine, of risking action on quick judgment. I had been immobilized by the fear of asserting my sympathies, my presumptions, against events.
Walking slowly down the road, I experienced deep shame. I might, I could have saved someone from hurt; I had perhaps had the power for a brief instant to change the course of a whole life. I had been guilty of a cowardice far worse than mere fear for my skin. I could have wept with mortification—done anything, in fact, but turn back and try to rectify my failure.
The rest of the day was gloomy as I alternately taunted and feebly excused myself. The fugitive might have been a trespasser or a servant; his fault might have been slowness, rudeness, theft, or attempted murder. Whatever it was, any retaliation the white man chose could be inflicted with impunity. He would not be punished or even tried for it. Popular opinion was unanimous for Negro emigration to Africa, voluntary or forced; those who went westward to join the unconquered Sioux or Nez Perc were looked upon as depraved. Any Negro who didn't embark for Liberia or Sierra Leone, regardless of whether he had the fare or not, deserved anything that happened to him in the United States.
It was because I held, somewhat vaguely, a stubborn refusal to accept this conventional view, a refusal never precisely reasoned and little more, perhaps, than romantic rebellion against my mother in favor of my disreputable grandfather Backmaker, that I suffered. I couldn't excuse my failure on the grounds that action would have been considered outrageous. It would not have been considered outrageous by me.
I pushed self-contempt at my passivity aside as best I could and strove to recapture the mood of yesterday, succeeding to some extent as the memory of the scene came back less insistently. I even tried pretending the episode had perhaps not been quite as serious as it seemed, or that the pursued had somehow in the end evaded the pursuer. I could not make what had happened not happen; the best I could do was minimize my culpability.
That night I slept a little way from the road and in the morning started off at dawn. Although I was now little more than twenty miles from the metropolis the character of the country had hardly changed. Perhaps the farms
