By now I had been alerted to the seriousness of my wound by an incessant throbbing in my shoulder and elbow. My left hand had grown cold and my shirt was drenched with blood, but I couldn’t think about that now. We had to get away.
Parker, Crow, Frederick, and Taylor carried Weaver’s body to the gate of River Bend. Martha had said that she would much prefer for him to be buried outside the grounds of the plantation. The men took turns digging. By the river, the soil was easily dislodged. We buried him in his clothes, without a shroud. I said the Jewish prayer for the dead over him — the
With the rope we had left to us, we then bound the wrists of all the escapees. We started with the men and ended with the women, tying them tightly together, so that anyone seeing us on the road would believe that they were my prisoners.
I walked at the back. We would tell any patrols we met that I was marching them to Charleston for sale. I apologized to Morri for binding her, but she said, “If it gets me up North, you can put a bit in my mouth and brand me.”
Martha’s sobbing would not cause any suspicion, Morri told me, as it was not uncommon to see women crying on these forced marches to market.
And so we made ready to walk away from River Bend forever, leaving Crow, Lily, and Grandma Blue behind. Crow shook my hand and said, “Be very careful now, Mr. John.”
“And you go slow,” I told him.
In a solemn fashion, he closed the gate behind us, then headed back to the Big House with his arm over Lily’s shoulder.
After three miles, I was too depleted from loss of blood to go on. I remember Morri standing over me, but I could not take another step. My spirit had fled. I must have been delirious as well; I was sure I could hear Esther playing Bach on her violin.
Morri began speaking, but I could not understand her. I realized from her gestures that she wanted me to untie her, which I was only barely able to do.
There were many things I should have liked to tell her about her father just then, as I did not want to leave her with any unanswered questions after I was gone. But I did not have the strength. Instead, I told her about Mama’s gold coins sewn inside the lining of my waistcoat. She was to bribe whomever she had to in order to escape.
I instructed her to please apologize to my daughters and my mother for me. She was to simply leave me where I sat in the dirt, because I could not go on. And she was to take her father’s feather and not let it go.
She was begging me to keep going, but I told her that it did not matter. I was not sad. True, there was much I still would have liked to do, but I would make do with dying as well as I could — lying on my back and looking up at the Archer. All that concerned me now was that she find freedom.
After that I remember being seated with Benjamin and another man in his cellar. This other man had a long beard. He was reading to me from the Jewish mystical book, the Zohar. And what he said was this:
I asked him his name. He said it was Berekiah Zarco and that he had journeyed across three centuries to find me. All would be well. He would see me safely to the Promised Land.
Then he held his hand over me and began to whisper prayers, including the protective ones that Benjamin had given me when I’d last seen him in Porto.
LIV
An hour and a half into our journey, John started talking to himself. It was in Portuguese, so I didn’t get one darn word of it. Then he seemed to be speaking to his father, because he said the word
Later, when he stumbled, I discovered that his face was all sweaty and his eyes dull. Even just by the light of the moon, I could see him fading fast. I asked him if he wanted to stop for a while. I’d fetch him some water from somewhere. He didn’t hear me. He looked past me, and whatever he was seeing wasn’t anywhere near to South Carolina.
Then, after another mile, he fell on the ground, panting like there was a hole in his lungs. He said he couldn’t go on, that he was heavier than the whole rest of the world. I told him he was going to live if he’d just keep on going. Maybe I didn’t exactly believe that, but there are some times when you just got to give other folks encouragement. He said that he was not afraid of dying. He wished to just look at the sky and see my papa’s hunters. That would be enough. That and me making it up North.
The last thing he did before losing consciousness was thank me. It took me a whole day to realize that he was thinking just like my papa, and he wasn’t thanking only me. No, sir, I think he was thanking the world for everything he’d ever lived.
Some of the slaves were ready to leave him there, but I said I wasn’t taking another single step without him. “He may be a white man,” I told them, “but he’s got a memory. And that’s a precious thing I don’t aim on losing tonight.”
I undid everyone’s ropes, since that ruse was useless as dirt to us now. Frederick, Taylor, Parker, and Lawrence lifted John up and took turns carrying him two at a time. I don’t know how they did it, but those good black men carried him another seven or eight miles down the road.
No nigger fate blew the wind the wrong direction toward the patrols. No, sir. Not a single staring white face gaped at us from a gate or doorway. The planters were all either snoring away in their feather beds or up-country avoiding the sickly season. And sure enough, Captain Ott had kept his word. At Petrie’s Landing, three rowboats peered out of the marsh grasses at us like they’d been waiting forever for us to make up our minds to leave. Mimi ran to them and nearly fell in the water. I guess she wanted to make sure they were real. We all did.
We lay John on his back in the largest of the boats. His pulse was as weak as a whisper. I wished Papa was there to help him. Or at least to hold his hand while he died.
We rowed as fast as we could. Twice, our boat and one of the others got stuck in some mud. Then the boat that Backbend, Lucy, and Hopper-Anne were in hit something, popped a leak, and started sinking. They were screeching something awful. We rowed to them and pulled them in our boat before they drowned, but it was close. And maybe someone had heard them too.
Fifty yards from the
While the surgeon was operating on John in a small room below deck, we headed out to sea. John’s screams made me feel sick. Pacing outside the door where they were sewing him up, I had to sit right on the ground or risk falling over. A black sailor named Richardson, from a place called Hull, took me up to the deck, where I could breathe freer.
I guess those British folks had never seen so many black men, women, and children all together. They stared at us as if we’d been shipwrecked on a desert island our whole lives. And maybe they were right.
I sat by John’s bedside that night. I slept some, but I preferred being awake, because my dreams all seemed burnt at the edges.
He didn’t stir from his slumber, and I didn’t dare touch him, but I thought that if I whispered to him it might
