Authors: Zakes Mda
After a day and night of intruding on the serenity of white hills, of braving snowstorms and wind-blasted forests and of being over-awed by glacial waterfalls, the boys finally beheld the biggest river they had ever imagined. But its majestic waters were not flowing. The whole river was frozen solid. The low clouds absorbed the rays of the midday sun, giving both the heavens and the earth a uniform silvery color. Only the glacial surface of the river distinguished it from its banks and the hills. They walked down to the snow-covered boats anchored under the naked trees and waited for the night, lest they be spotted. But hiding was a futile exercise for they had to do something about the frostbite that was beginning to attack their fingers, toes and ear lobes. Abednego’s skin was beginning to get red around the ears, cheeks and nose, and Nicodemus was feeling some numbness in his fingers too. As usual they gathered oak leaves and used the last of their tinder to light a fire. Their stress began to dissipate as the blood in their bodies began to flow. They warmed their hands, feet and faces very slowly, and then wrapped their feet over and over again in dry rags. Then they put on their worn boots.
Abednego, still weak from the fever but feeling much better, expressed his surprise that they had reached the River Jordan but there were no chariots coming to carry them home, no band of angels coming to help them cross the River Jordan. No water flowing either. The river and its surroundings stood still and silent.
“It’s a good thing the water is frozen,” said the younger brother. “We gonna walk across the River Jordan.”
As he spoke Massa Blue Fly hovered above their heads, making irritating buzzing sounds and then flying away. That night the moon shone on the river, giving it a ghostly appearance, and the boys took the first few steps on the river. At first they hesitated, fearing that the ice would break under their weight. But they needn’t have feared: that winter of 1838 the Ohio River was frozen solid for two weeks. The ice was thick enough to support the weight of a horse drawing a carriage. Soon they were sliding on the ice; their worn boots performing the work of skates without much resistance. The boys had obviously forgotten about all their fears and were having a great time. Before skating their way to what they believed was freedom they became boys again and played on the ice. Even the weak Abednego was able to follow the bigger and stronger younger brother in tracing the figure eight. They played with the combination of their shadows and reflections cast on the ice by the moon. After drawing the figure eight over and over again in different directions and sizes Nicodemus followed his brother as he unsteadily zigzagged the Drunkard’s Path on the ice. Still the ghostly shadows and reflections followed. Making faces at them. Wiggling their way a few feet from them. And then coming close until their feet merged with the boys’. Until the boys were exhausted. Until they finally skated to the Pomeroy, Ohio, side of the river. There they lay on the snow for some time to catch their breath. And then they resumed their walk, climbing the steep hill away from the river.
They had crossed the River Jordan yet the terrain was not much different. They still had to cross gullies and frozen creeks, and had to climb hills and walk on precarious slopes—all undulating in the same rhythm. They still had to walk through naked clusters of woods. It was in the middle of one of these that the Spirit led them to a small log cabin. A skinny mule was roped outside under a thatched shelter. They were welcomed by an old hermit, perhaps over eighty years old, who was so senile he was not aware that the Revolutionary War came to an end sixty years before. He had lived in the woods as a fugitive from himself that long—meeting people once or twice a year to replenish those supplies he could not produce himself and to barter his corn and beans for clothes or the replacement of a dead mule. In all these transactions he stayed away from the communion of other men and women.
The hermit was nevertheless very happy to have his own niggers at last. He felt that he was getting places now that God had given him his own slaves. The fact that he was in Ohio where there was no slavery did not seem to register in his mind. The boys played along to humor him and to get food and protection from the elements while Abednego gathered more strength and recovered fully. Then they would follow the North Star to its conclusion in Canaan—after stopping for a while at Berlin Crossroads to pay their respects to Nicodemus’s father and to give him news of the Abyssinian Queen.
The boys spent almost two weeks in the hermit’s benign slavery. He helped in nursing Abednego back to robust health by giving him large amounts of blackberry root tea for his diarrhea. He had enough supplies and for the first time after weeks on the road the boys were able to eat cooked meals—mostly grits and boiled beans. Now that Abednego was strong again he was secretly gnawed by the fact that it was his younger brother who had had to look after him when it should have been the other way round. He was determined to prove himself this time, and would be sure to take a leadership role on the road to Canaan.
They bought their freedom from the hermit with the slave trader’s musket—in reality they were merely rewarding him for his hospitality—and went on their way. The hermit was sad to see them go, but was at least relieved that his old eardrums would be saved from Nicodemus’s nightly flute trills.
The Spirit took charge of their lives once more, as indicated by the occasional presence of Massa Blue Fly, who was nowhere to be seen in the two weeks they had succor at the hermit’s cabin. On one occasion the Spirit placed on their path a dead deer covered in snow and nicely preserved, perhaps for months or weeks depending on how long the place had been frozen like that. The boys roasted the meat on an open fire on the spot, had a feast, and then took some of it with them as they trudged the breadth of Meigs County. They had become reckless for they did not only walk in the night but at daytime too. Sometimes the Spirit placed them on top of a hill where they sledded down on pine branches. All the while Nicodemus held very tightly to his sampler and Abednego to the deer meat wrapped in the deerskin. Hills dressed only in snow alternated with white forests devoid of foliage, short-lived valleys of driven snow that suddenly became steep slopes, glorious summits and then sliding down again to deep gorges with frozen creeks. On one particularly steep hill they rolled down the slope, their sleds breaking to pieces and tumbling after them, until they got to a wooded valley. They nevertheless did not let go of their bundles.
They took a rest in the woods and Nicodemus played his flute, which he found relaxing and calming. They were startled by the approach of a huge black man in a double-breasted black frock coat, brownish canvas pants and black calf boots. He wore a woolen hat that protected his ears from the cold and his hands were in thick mittens. The boys were wide-eyed because they had never seen such a well-heeled black person before. Perhaps even snow-covered rolling hills yielded mirages.
Massa Blue Fly buzzed around with much ceremony, mocking the man’s attempts at swatting it off, and then flew away never to be seen again.
“What have we here?” the gigantic man asked, looking down at the boys.
He sized them up, and immediately recognized them as fugitives because of their dirty and tattered clothes. “Who said this ain’t no season for them runaways?”
They were thinking of dashing away when he grabbed them by the scruff of their necks and said: “Welcome to the Underground Railroad. Calm down. And next time remember it ain’t the smartest thing to play music if you trying to hide.”
They relaxed a bit when they saw that he meant them no harm.
His name was Birdman, he said, and he was an Underground Railroad conductor. He was always scouting around the woods for runaways, and then transporting them in his wagon to Underground Railroad stations in Athens. He would do the same for them and would place them in a safe house where they would get a thorough bath and fresh clothing. He discouraged them from any notion of trying to reach Berlin Crossroads in Mercer County, for that was far west on the Indiana border. The whole state was crawling with bounty hunters and slave catchers. They would surely be caught and sent back to Virginia for a reward before they got anywhere near Mercer County.
In Birdman the boys saw for the first time an African who was owned by nobody. They knew there were such Africans. They had heard that some of the slave stealers who covertly visited Fairfield Farms on occasion were free blacks, but they had never seen one with their own eyes.
They were surprised to hear that Birdman already knew about the escapees from Fairfield Farms and that Mr. David Fairfield was offering a substantial reward of five hundred dollars—instead of the normal two hundred—especially for his prime stud, Nicodemus. Birdman told them that he knew all this from the Underground Railroad grapevine, which was very effective indeed. Abednego felt insulted and slighted that The Owner did not consider him worthy of any such big reward on his head, even though he was supposed to have sired him. Oh, yes, people gossiped about his pedigree at Fairfield Farms until it reached his ears!
It dawned on the boys as Birdman spoke that the Underground Railroad was neither a railroad nor was it under the ground. The lines that he talked about were trails, the conductors were people like him, and the stations were safe houses. They were passengers, although they did not understand how they could be called that since they had actually looked for their freedom themselves up to that point and had not been ferried around like passengers.
Birdman was impressed that the boys had made it all the way on their own without any assistance from the Underground Railroad network. “Well, from now on you gonna be my passengers,” he said. “I am gonna look after you and hand you over to other conductors until you get to Canada.”
When he realized the boys were reluctant to let go of their Berlin Crossroads dream, he stressed once more: “Better you forget about Berlin Crossroads for now. No safe place for fugitives. Besides, it ain’t on your way to Canada.”
The boys were impressed that Birdman seemed to be so fearless that he operated alone on such dangerous missions. Many conductors, he told them, went around guarded by armed men. But he preferred to work on his own because he attracted less attention that way. Also he was able to escape easily from slave hunters and from the law, using wiles instead of force, unless it was absolutely necessary to use force.
Birdman led them to his wagon hidden in a gully where his two horses were feeding on the hay that was stacked at the back. He unloaded some of the hay to reveal a secret compartment on the wagon. Nicodemus would hide in the compartment. Abednego would dress up as a woman and wear a broad-brimmed bonnet. The gear was all there in the secret compartment. With his complexion he would pass as a white woman. Birdman would be her manservant. But first he would have to discard the deerskin and the meat since they would be well fed from then on. Nicodemus wondered why they had to go through all the subterfuge when they believed that they were now in a free state that did not have any slavery. Birdman explained to the boys that Ohio was not as free as blacks south of the river thought it was. In reality the Ohio River was no River Jordan and Ohio was no Promised Land. In this supposedly free state fugitive slave laws forbade the assisting of escaping slaves and the penalties were high. And of course there was always the danger of slave hunters, who operated with impunity in the southern areas of the state, where sometimes they even captured free blacks to sell in the neighboring slaveholding states.
Birdman rode with his secret cargo and his “white employer” through Meigs County into Athens County without raising any suspicion at all. Lying flat on his stomach in the false bottom of the wagon Nicodemus could hear the rhythm of the shod horses on the cobbled streets of the city of Athens. Abednego sat humped like the old lady he was supposed to be next to Birdman, who kept on reminding him not to stare at the sights and people in the street. In no time they arrived at an Underground Railroad station in East Washington Street, a red-brick building like most buildings in town.
The stationmaster was a middle-aged white man in a black frock coat and top hat and with well-nourished pink cheeks. He was a Quaker, Birdman told the boys as he ushered them into the house, with Nicodemus clutching his quilt bundle.
How come there was no quilt hanging out with the Log Cabin design for runaways to identify the house as a place of refuge? The house was known only to a few conductors, Birdman explained. The stationmaster had a strong suspicion—though he could not be sure of this—that the quilt sign was now known to some of the slave hunters. Sometimes they sent out well-paid black traitors who pretended to be runaways in order to uncover some of the stations. The Quaker man couldn’t be too careful who he welcomed at his Underground Railroad station.
“Quilts ain’t no use to no one no more,” observed Nicodemus.
On the contrary, Birdman corrected him; quilts still served an important function. They bound the individuals into a cohesive force, and reminded them of their duty to freedom. Abednego reminded his brother that indeed it was the designs that had inspired them to carry out the escape. The designs, Nicodemus agreed, had also given them general advice on how to conduct themselves on the road and what signs to look for in their quest for survival. The boys had to find their own way. The quilts could not be so specific as to act as a map to freedom. Quilts were like sayings, Birdman added, they were like adages and proverbs learned from the elders and were effective in jolting the people’s memory and in recording the values of the community for present and future generations. Quilt designs did not map out the actual route to the Promised Land but helped the seekers to remember those things that were important in their lives. They did the same work as spirituals. Like the stories the storytellers and the griots of the old continent told, whose rhymes and rhythms forced people never to forget them and the history they contained, the patterns and colors and designs and ties and stitches of quilts were mnemonic.