This Strange New Feeling Read online

  Jakes decided that he would just talk. He was sure Ras would drink in every word like a mule drinking water after swallowing the dust of the field all day. “Bet you didn’t know that the next state north of here is a free state.”

  Ras didn’t respond, but took another nail from his teeth and began hammering.

  “This here is Maryland,” Jakes continued, raising his voice above the sound of the hammer. “You go north from here and in four, five days of steady walking, you’re in Pennsylvania. That’s a free state. Not a slave in it. Lot of free colored people there. Some of them dress better than any white man, too.”

  Jakes glanced at Ras, but couldn’t tell if he was listening. But he continued, telling Ras about Philadelphia and New York and Boston. “Too many people in those cities for me. I like a small place, like Calais. Little bitty place, right on the border between the United States and Canada. Canada is a whole separate country. Fact is, Calais is the last town in these United States. You leave Calais, walk a couple of miles, and you’re in another country. Done it many a day.”

  Jakes talked about the winters when it snowed from October to May. “Sometimes the snow on the ground is taller than a man.”

  Every day Jakes thought of something else to tell Ras. “I don’t know what I like better—getting up early in the morning, taking my rifle, and going out to hunt deer, or going out to sit on a boulder and fishing in a fast-moving stream. And let me tell you, as far as I’m concerned there is nothing in this world better than the sweet soft flesh of a fish for good eating. Just thinking about it makes me want to get off this barn and walk all the way back to Calais right now.”

  When summer ended and the barn was finished, Jakes could only conclude that his words had bounced off Ras’s woolly head and disappeared in the air, because not once had Jakes detected even a flicker of interest. He never asked any questions, never smiled, never nodded or shook his head. Just took a nail from the side of his mouth and hammered it through a piece of lumber. If Jakes had wasted his breath talking to a chicken all summer, at least the chicken would’ve clucked every now and then.

  Well, he didn’t care. Why should he? Ras didn’t have any worries. He had a place to live, food to eat. Not like a white man, who had to get out and earn the money to put a roof over his head and food in his belly.

  No, Ras wasn’t dumb. Why should he want to be free like Jakes, free to starve, free to sleep in the woods, which he’d done many a night, and would do again probably. While Ras, dumb Ras, would have a house and a full belly.

  IV

  Ras reached his hand gingerly into the hot ashes and jerked out the cornmeal cake. He let it lie on the floor to cool for a minute before breaking off a piece to put in his mouth. He chewed slowly, frowning as he tasted the mushy, uncooked center. He considered returning the cornmeal cake to the embers, but was afraid that he would let it overcook this time. So he broke off another piece and let it slide down his throat.

  “Uncle Isaac?” he called softly through the dark interior of the cabin.

  The old man lay on his plank at the other side of the room, and when Ras heard a mumbled “What is it, son?” he knew that Uncle Isaac had fallen asleep. But he had to know.

  “Uncle Isaac? Have you ever eaten fish?”

  “Fish?” Uncle Isaac asked sharply, fully awake now. “What’re you asking me something like that for?”

  “You ever eaten any?” Ras persisted.

  Uncle Isaac rose slowly and moved over to the fireplace, where he sat down on the floor next to Ras. “When I was slaving on the Trent plantation in Virginia. There was a stream run right through the plantation and Master let us catch as many fish as we wanted.”

  “Did?” Ras asked, amazed.

  “I dream about that sometime, you know. I sure do. Master Trent let his slaves have their own garden, too.”

  “Did?” Ras repeated, unable to comprehend a slave master being so kind.

  “Son, me and Jessie would grow collard greens, spinach, carrots, and all like that. I hated it when Master Trent died and his son sold me and Jessie over here. Master Lindsay is one of the stingiest masters I’ve ever seen.” The old man shook his head in disbelieving dismay. “But that’s not what you asked me about. What you want to know about fish for?”

  Ras looked at Uncle Isaac as if he had never seen him before. Just think! He lived with someone who had actually eaten fish! “What did it taste like, Uncle Isaac?” Ras asked, his voice brimming with reverence.

  Isaac’s eyes were flooded suddenly with tears. “Don’t want to talk about it,” he said gruffly. “Don’t do no good to think about them days. It makes tomorrow harder when I think about yesterday.”

  “I bet it was good,” Ras said, his eyes shining.

  Uncle Isaac stood up abruptly, wiping his eyes vigorously. “Always did make my eyes tear when I sat too close to the fire,” he mumbled. “Believe I’ll go sit out in the cool awhile.”

  It was late, and as Uncle Isaac sat on the porch step, he could not hear a sound from the cabins lining the quarters. There weren’t even the dull yellow points of candlelight to be seen between the cracks of the cabins.

  He wiped at his eyes again, but that did not stop the tears or the trembling in his stomach as he remembered the look in Ras’s eyes. He’d had that look once. But there’d been Jessie to think about. And life in slavery with her was better than being a free man without her. So time passed, the look faded from his eyes, and the laugh grew. Laughing was a way of being free too.

  He supposed he’d been lucky. He and Jessie had never been sold away from each other. But the tears spilled from his eyes to trickle down his face, and behind the tears his eyes acquired a gleam that shone with the hardness of the sun on the blade of a hoe. And he wondered, as he had so many times, if it would not have been better if they had at least tried to run away.

  He knew that the three children Jessie birthed didn’t die because they were sickly. The way she cried told him the truth. Even after she was too old to birth babies, he would be awakened in the night by the sound of her crying in her sleep.

  She had smothered them babies with her own hands. He never saw one of them alive. Each time when the midwife called him in, the babies was dead. Looked big and healthy to him. Boys, each one of them. But they didn’t grow up to be slaves.

  He never said anything to Jessie about it and she never said anything to him. Sometimes, though, he would look at her while they were working in the field and her face would be so wet with tears, she looked like someone had thrown a gourd of water on her.

  The night Ras came to the quarters and found his mother had been sold away, Uncle Isaac didn’t ask Jessie and she didn’t say a word to him. She went to the boy and Uncle Isaac went to find straw for him to sleep on. Jessie stopped crying in her sleep. He was glad that the last five years of her life she didn’t have to cry anymore.

  Uncle Isaac wiped his face. Ras. He didn’t have a Jessie to change the gleam into a laugh. He was a good boy, but the crying and laughing seemed caught inside him, like a rabbit in a trap that would never be set free.

  Uncle Isaac chuckled. Fish. Then he laughed aloud and his deep voice seemed to rumble forth from some deep hole behind the stars. Fish! That was as good a reason as any for wanting to be free.

  Two

  I

  Thomas McMahon was a fat, bald white man who sweated profusely, summer and winter. Uncle Isaac had never seen him when he wasn’t mopping his round, slick head with a big red handkerchief and breathing noisily, as if he had just finished running five miles. Now, that would have been a sight!

  Yet of all the white men Uncle Isaac knew, Thomas McMahon was the one. It was more than a feeling Uncle Isaac had about him, though the feeling was important. McMahon was the only white man in that part of Maryland who didn’t own slaves. Uncle Isaac guessed that he still had about a hundred acres left from all he’d sold over the years, and he could’ve been a rich man if he had owned slaves. Yet except for the few acres h
e planted in tobacco, vegetables, and hay, his land was overgrown with trees and underbrush. And God was perhaps the only one who remembered the last time his house had been painted. The barn was beginning to lean as if there were a constant wind blowing against it. He was a strange man, but he was the one.

  Almost absentmindedly Isaac ran the tip of his forefinger over his thumbnail. It was as hard and thick as the blade of a plow, but it was the mind behind the nail that made the difference. It took a man like Uncle Isaac, who knew tobacco better than he knew himself, to look at a tobacco plant and know precisely where to cut the top with his thumbnail. That was what made the tobacco grow large, sometimes seven feet high with leaves six feet long.

  Uncle Isaac had heard white men offer Master Lindsay $2,000 for him. That was a lot of money for an old slave who did no heavy work. But Master Lindsay wouldn’t think of selling him. Isaac was allowed to hire himself out, though, to the other planters. However, he had to give half of what he earned to Master Lindsay. Uncle Isaac supposed if Jessie was still alive, he would’ve spent the money and bought chairs, a table, clothes, and food. But caring about such things died when she died. He kept the money in a sack that he hid behind loose bricks in the fireplace.

  As Uncle Isaac made his way through the woods that Sunday afternoon, he didn’t think what he would do if Mr. McMahon turned him down. There wasn’t another white he’d dare present such an idea to, not if he cared about his life. But when he remembered all the years he had used his thick thumbnail on Mr. McMahon’s tobacco, and how he always invited Isaac to sit in the shade of the porch and drink a big glass of lemonade and then talk all afternoon, Isaac knew. Thomas McMahon was the one.

  When McMahon looked up from the shade of the porch where he sat in his rocking chair and saw Isaac walk out of the woods, he wondered how old Isaac was. He looked as old and eternal as God, with the big white beard like clouds around his black face. But he walked as easily as any young man, and certainly more nimbly than McMahon had ever walked. Isaac had to be eighty if he was a day. Any slave who lived that long was not only strong but wise in the ways of a wicked and hard world. And that made Thomas wonder why Isaac was coming to see him on a Sunday afternoon.

  “Afternoon, Mr. McMahon,” Isaac said easily as he crossed the dusty yard the chickens had picked clean of grass.

  “Howdy, Isaac,” McMahon returned in his highpitched nasal voice, which reminded Isaac of a weak train whistle.

  Uncle Isaac stopped at the edge of the porch and the two men stared at each other for a moment. Thomas mopped his head with the big red handkerchief and looked into the dark eyes imbedded in the black face. He shifted uncomfortably, knowing it was insolent for a black to stare him in the eye like that. For an instant McMahon wished he was the kind of white man who would’ve knocked Isaac down for looking anywhere else except at the ground.

  “It’s strange to see you over here, Isaac,” he said coolly. “You took care of my tobacco a while back, as I recall.”

  “Yes, sir,” Isaac returned evenly.

  McMahon couldn’t withstand Isaac’s stare any longer, and he wiped his face with the big handkerchief to escape from those eyes. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing for me, sir.” Isaac smiled.

  McMahon wanted to be annoyed. Why didn’t Isaac just say what he wanted? But that wasn’t his way. He made you come to him, and despite himself Thomas McMahon knew he would.

  “Mind if I set down here on the step, sir, and rest these old bones?”

  “Sit if you want to,” Thomas returned gruffly.

  Isaac sat down, his back to the fat man in the rocking chair. “Your tobacco turned out right well.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Right well,” Isaac repeated. “You plant about four acres, don’t you, sir?”

  “You know that as well as I do.”

  Isaac ignored the ragged edge of annoyance in McMahon’s voice. He nodded slowly, and then turned and stared directly into the white man’s eyes. “I always thought it was strange that a man with as much land as you own wouldn’t plant thirty, forty acres of tobacco.” His voice was no longer casual, and his statement sounded like a challenge and rebuke.

  “I do all right,” McMahon managed to say, startled by the abrupt change in the conversation. “What business is it of yours?”

  Isaac smiled and turned back to stare over the field where the tobacco was growing. “It must’ve hurt you mighty bad when you had to sell off another twenty acres last year.”

  McMahon’s face turned even redder than its normal strawberry color. “What’s it to you?”

  “When you sold that land, I thought you was going to buy you some slaves for sure this time, and plant the hundred acres you got left in tobacco so you could earn some money to do you some good.”

  “You got some slaves you want to sell, Isaac?” McMahon asked sarcastically.

  Isaac laughed. “Now wouldn’t that be something? A black man with slaves to sell.” He laughed loudly, and just when McMahon began his tittering wheezy laugh, Isaac turned his whole body around and said firmly, “I got a slave I want to free.”

  McMahon felt his jaw drop, and the sweat slid off his head and down his face. “Are you crazy?” he gasped, wiping his face and neck nervously. “I could have you whipped to within an inch of your life if I told Lindsay what you just said.”

  “But you wouldn’t,” Uncle Isaac said with quiet confidence. “Not if I know anything about people.”

  “What—what do you mean?” Thomas McMahon asked, unable to hide his curiosity, believing in spite of himself that this old black man was about to answer for him the riddle his life had been.

  “It took me a while to understand it, Mr. McMahon,” Isaac said conversationally. “I’d think about you with almost two hundred acres of rich land, good land. And I’ve watched you sell off half of it over the years. And it didn’t make sense. I’d say to myself, ‘Now here’s a white man who could be one of the richest slave owners in the state of Maryland. But he scarcely lives better than poor white trash.’ So I asked myself, ‘Why would a man who could be rich deprive himself?’”

  “Well, you know so much. What’s the answer?” McMahon asked, with obvious forced anger.

  Isaac smiled softly. “Because he can’t bring himself to do what other men do to make themselves rich.”

  “Maybe,” Thomas allowed after a long pause. “Maybe,” he repeated, adding hurriedly, “But that don’t mean I’m a fool! I don’t know what you have schemed up, but let me tell you this. I don’t plan on going to jail for helping a slave get free. And that’s final!”

  Isaac erupted into a big laugh. “Jail? Who’s talking about jail, Mr. McMahon? I’m talking about New York.”

  Thomas stared at Isaac for a moment, and when he understood, a smile spread slowly across his chubby red face. He wiped his head and chuckled. “Isaac, if you weren’t so old and decrepit, I’d take a horsewhip to you for putting ideas in the head of an old, fat white man who’s never done much with his life.” He laughed. “You think it’ll work?”

  “I know it will, sir. I know it will.”

  The two men laughed until tears streamed down their faces, and then they laughed some more.

  II

  It was the last Sunday in September when Thomas McMahon gave a low whistle and the two horses jerked into motion, pulling the wagon filled with bales of tobacco. The sun was showing orange over the horizon as Thomas began his annual trip to New York to sell his tobacco.

  In past years he had dreaded this trip, necessitated by the dislike the other planters and poor whites had for a man who had freed the slaves he had inherited from his father. If he had known then how long they would refuse to do business with him, he might have kept the slaves. Forty years had passed, but they hadn’t forgotten.

  As a young man of twenty-two he’d only wanted to do the right thing. But what had been right for those blacks had been a disaster for his own life. He supposed he could’ve sold t
he plantation and moved North, but McMahons were known for being stubborn. So he’d stayed and gotten so fat he could scarcely fit into a rocking chair. It was as if he had been punishing himself for being different. Two hundred eighty pounds of blubber sitting on the porch and watching the weeds grow.

  Yet an old black man, as ancient as the Big Dipper and as wise as the earth that knew how to turn a tiny seed into a seven-foot-high tobacco plant, had seen something worthwhile in him.

  When he got back he would ask Isaac how he had managed to see beneath all the fat and know that Thomas McMahon hated slavery. Thomas had always believed that he’d freed his father’s slaves because he was too lazy to run a plantation. But he knew now that he hadn’t wanted to remember how his father had made him watch slaves whipped, or the light-skinned children who were his half-brothers and -sisters, though no one said so, or the day his father had taken him to slave auctions to teach him to judge “nigger flesh.” Thomas hadn’t wanted to remember, so he’d convinced himself that he was too lazy and set the thirty slaves free.

  This Sunday morning it was thirty-one. Thomas chuckled as he thought about the tobacco tied in bales in the wagon behind him. Even if he told someone, they wouldn’t believe that at the bottom of the wagon, wrapped inside a bale of cured tobacco leaves, was a young black man whom Isaac called Ras.

  III

  Ras stared through the window of his room in the white house on Center Street in Calais, Maine, marveling yet again at the snow piled high outside. Two months had passed since the night he had unrolled himself from the tobacco leaves outside the warehouse in New York City, where Thomas McMahon took his tobacco to sell. Only two months. It seemed like a life lived by someone else.