We did not wish to put anything in the announcement about River Bend or mention Morri’s name, fearing the attention of slave-traders who might wish to kidnap her.
The second part of my plan was to become my most important work in America. I decided to compile a list of slaves and freed blacks in South Carolina, along with their residences. Later, I would add the other states of the South. This seemed essential to me, for whenever the great destruction of slavery finally came, in five years or fifty, those who had been in bondage would face the near-impossible task of finding brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, and children who had been lost to them for many years. They would desperately need such a list.
It was a huge undertaking, and I knew it would take many years and enormous effort to be even close to complete. Even so, the more I thought of the plan, the more exciting it became.
To create my list, I knew I would need hundreds of correspondents from all over South Carolina — people willing to survey the slaves, freed blacks, and mulattos in their vicinity and write down their full names and locations, as well as those of their kin.
The Quakers would help, I was quite sure, as indeed they have. And among the congregation of Jews in Charleston, I have so far found several industrious and generous souls as well.
My first correspondents were Isaac and Luisa, naturally enough. I wrote to them shortly after I received their letter, giving them an account of our escape, and they have so far provided me with one hundred and twelve names and locations.
Census reports have indicated that at least two hundred and sixty thousand Negroes are held in bondage in South Carolina alone, and so I plainly have much work in my future. But I am neither deterred nor daunted. The list will grow exponentially as more people learn of it. All of nature itself is on my side in this battle, I am certain.
On November the Fourteenth, a week after the former slaves departed for upstate New York, I signed Morri’s adoption papers. As I was not an American citizen, this procedure was handled through the British Embassy. She decided to register herself as Memoria Tsamma Stewart, which I thought a splendid and unique name. To celebrate, she and I took a ferry boat to Brooklyn, where we dined at a waterfront tavern that admitted Negroes. I drank a wee bit too much whiskey to celebrate, but Morri guided me safely back to our ferry boat.
I had kept away from the Church Street School till then in order to avoid embarrassing her, but I now decided to make a fatherly inspection of her place of work. Sitting at the back of her classroom, the pride I felt in seeing her free and useful confirmed to me that I had not been wrong in going to watch her.
While listening to her children read aloud a fable by Aesop, I felt Midnight’s presence next to me. I could see him grinning like a mad fool.
After visiting Morri’s school, I ceased questioning whether losing my arm had been a just sacrifice for her freedom. Seeing the little ones flocked around her, tugging on the bright crimson dress I’d bought for her, I stopped comparing miseries, as she herself had advised. I am grateful for that, for at one time I thought my selfishness would be my undoing.
Other events also conspired to restore me to full and honest vigor, the first of which was completely unexpected.
I still had not written back to my mother explaining my injury. This cowardice, combined with my longing for my daughters and my uncertainty as to what would now be best for them, plunged me into a sudden spiral of despair and insomnia. I locked my door and would allow neither Morri nor Violeta inside. I smoked too much and made myself sick. What I did not know was that Violeta had another key. She let herself into my room before dawn on the Nineteenth of November, while I was smoking Papa’s pipe like a fiend, and announced, “I can bear our struggle no longer, John. If you promise to say nothing afterward about what has taken place between us or what you wish to happen in the future, I shall lie with you now.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, sensing both our destinies turning around this moment.
“Yes,” she replied.
I walked to her, hope and gratitude in my heart. Kissing her lips — as I’d wanted to for more than two decades — sent such an electric charge through me that I felt myself tugged out of my own body.
To be with her meant everything to me; I was at the center of the world. There, deep down inside our union, my lost arm was not so burdensome a handicap as I had thought.
Afterward, she lay her head against my shoulder and drifted off to sleep.
At length, I thought of Francisca. She seemed so very different from Violeta; they were women born under constellations guarding separate territories of the night. Perhaps it was that, more than anything else, that made me believe my wife would not begrudge me any happiness I might now find in my new life.
I stroked Violeta’s hair while she slept, as I’d always desired. The simple movement of my fingers calmed me, and the soft feel of her made me believe that I’d finally reached home. I knew now that all would be well between us.
Indeed, over the next weeks, our relations were everything I’d hoped they’d become. We went for long walks into the northern wilds of Manhattan Island, watching blue jays, kingfishers, and other birds more unfamiliar to me. She collected fire-colored oak leaves, and I bought her flowers. We munched chestnuts in the parks and chased each other up the staircase. For the American holiday of Thanksgiving she prepared a turkey with cranberry preserves. For a sweet, she made me
I was not sure if Violeta could have a child at this late date, but when we merged in the night I desperately hoped that she could.
The second event to spur my personal renewal was my decision to begin making tile panels and pottery again, and for this purpose I had the small shed at the back of Violeta’s garden cleared. I purchased a secondhand potter’s wheel and tile-making tools.
Centering a pot with one hand proved not nearly so difficult as I had imagined, and within a few days I was able to make modest bowls, plates, and jugs. I also finalized my sketches for a tile panel of field slaves I wished to make, though I found that without my arm I did not yet have the stamina for such an ambitious project.
I finally sent a letter to my mother and daughters explaining that I wanted to stay in New York and requesting that Esther and Graca come as soon as possible. I apologized for disrupting their lives yet again and would explain all upon their arrival. About my arm, I said only that I had received an injury while in the South, but that it was nothing to be concerned about; my American physicians had pronounced me in fine health. I had not yet found Midnight, I said, but I was now fully engaged in the hunt once again.
By now, I understood that I was fond of Violeta in a way that went far beyond declarations of passion and gestures of affection. In a vague way, I knew we were made of different elements, but that seemed all the better, as though our alloy would prove stronger than any purity.
One day when we were out walking, I broached the subject that had been consuming me for so long. “Violeta, I’d like to have a child — to start a new family with you in this youthful country.”
She went pale. I sat her down on the nearest stoop and squatted next to her. “What is it? I thought you’d be pleased.”
“I am, John. It’s just a shock. Give me a moment.”
“If you’re worried about my daughters, I’m sure they’d love having a baby brother or sister. Though we mustn’t allow them to choose the name,” I said with a laugh. “They prefer all the worst ones.”
She reached up with her hand to touch my mouth, and I kissed her fingertips. She said, “Enough, John, let us talk about it later. I’m just too stunned right now to speak.”
I reasoned I’d give her a day or two to adjust to the idea before speaking of it again. The next evening, however, Morri and I were obliged to dine at the home of William Arthur, her headmaster. Violeta had asked to be
