Cion (25 page)

If Quigley happened to be at his house when he told the story he would take out the scroll and show his listeners. They would marvel at the symbols and the figures and he would tell them what they meant. Right up to the time he was telling the story.

“One day I’m gonna know what the rest means, and when that happens I will tell the future,” he said with conviction.

The first thing he did when he got to Tabler Town was to seek out Nicodemus and Abednego. He found Abednego and wept when he learned of the death of Nicodemus. Quigley suggested to Abednego that one day they should set out to avenge Nicodemus’s death, in memory of the fellow Africans that they left behind at Fairfield Farms and of all those who had been captured and sold and tortured and killed.

At first Abednego thought this was just idle talk. He had never really entertained any thoughts of vengeance. He was happily married to one of Harry Corbett’s beautiful daughters and was immersed in his father-in-law’s experiments with growing pawpaw in his orchards. He spent most of his days sitting there, staring at the trees as if willing them to grow, sometimes talking to them, egging them on and promising them the world if only they would show a peep of flowers. This was beginning to show results. Trees that had been growing slowly in the five years since the enterprise was started were almost the height of a man and had bloomed. Later the leaves would grow compact and dense. The plants looked healthier than those that grew in the wild. There was reason to celebrate, for the challenge of growing pawpaw as transplants had been won.

These were the beautiful thoughts that occupied Abednego’s mind, not vengeance. The white man was not making sense, although Abednego suddenly felt ashamed that he had forgotten about Nicodemus while he established his new life in Tabler Town. But vengeance was not part of his makeup. He did not see how it would help his dead brother. Surely it would not bring him back to life. He doubted if his mother would have wanted him to commit such an act. To get rid of Quigley he promised him he was going to think seriously about it, and Quigley said that he was keen to help. He was still angry about what had been done to him and he had to take out that anger on someone.

Abednego heard for the first time from Quigley how the Abyssinian Queen died laughing and praising the Lord after the return of Massa Blue Fly. It was a good thing, thought Abednego, that she never knew that Nicodemus did not quite reach the Promised Land. She must have been surprised on reaching the Otherworld to find Nicodemus there, newly arrived as well. Or did the Abyssinian Queen arrive before Nicodemus? There was no way of knowing how long it took Massa Blue Fly to reach her.

As months went by a strong bond developed between Quigley and Abednego. They went hunting and fishing together. Sometimes they were brave enough to venture to Athens to watch college students play a new version of rounders called baseball. It was always dangerous to go to Athens because lurking behind the friendly face of a college town were the likes of William Tobias who were now resorting to abducting free blacks and taking them across the Ohio into slavery. Men like these were a law unto themselves. Since 1831 there were penalties for kidnapping free blacks, but that did not give any comfort to blacks because slave chasers were not deterred by such laws.

Abednego was the best man when Quigley married one of Harry Corbett’s daughters. People talked about the wedding for a long time, but not because it was particularly grand. On the contrary it was meant to be a quiet affair at the Methodist church. What people talked about was not how beautiful the bride looked, but how her uncle, Harry Corbett’s hothead brother, caused a commotion outside the church by preaching his own sermon denouncing what was happening in the church.

People generally dismissed the man as a rabid Indian nationalist who felt that the Negro had degraded and destroyed his Indian race by marrying into it, to the degree that it was no longer respected by other races—by which of course he meant by the whites. He also said that the Indian claim of the Tabler Town area as an ancestral land would be rejected by the state of Ohio on the basis of what he called mongrelization. But no one had thought that the man would also denounce a marriage between a daughter of the tribe and a white man. Was it because this particular white man identified more with the black people? Or did the man disburse his hatred equally without fear or favor? He had an audience too. Those citizens of Tabler Town who could not be accommodated in the small church had no choice but to listen to his sermon.

At the same time another sermon was being delivered in the church. Perhaps the minister thought it best to take advantage of the presence of people of color—who didn’t normally attend his church, but who had now gathered in great numbers for the wedding of this important community member—and preach a sermon on issues that had been bothering him. He was a liberal man, well-beloved by the colored community. So people gasped when he preached against the Underground Railroad. His grounds were that it worked against the attempt to keep the races separate in America. He emphasized that he was saying all this because he was a friend of the Negroes. It was in the interests of the Negro to keep the races apart. People knew that he supported the move started a decade or so before to send all black folks to Africa. He was active in collecting funds from the wealthier citizens and in staging fund-raising events to pay for their passages. If the Negroes married other races—be they races of European origin or Indian—they would see no need to return to their continent, and the continent would then be deprived of their skills and of the civilizing influence they would have on the hordes of savages still roaming naked in the jungles of that unfortunate continent.

Both the groom and his best man found the sermon disgusting, although it was not their first time to hear such ideas. They had read in newspaper articles where liberals—some of whom were even stationmasters of the Underground Railroad—were roundly condemning such communities as Tabler Town for promoting “the amalgamation between white and black races, which was not desirable and was not in the interests of the Negro.” What made Quigley mad was that the minister chose the occasion of his wedding to preach such garbage. It was obvious to him that the minister had agreed to solemnize a marriage between an Indian woman and a white man in order to use it as a platform to propagate his ideas. Or perhaps he approved of the “amalgamation” of whites and Indians but not of Africans and the other races. And he was saying all these things because of his brimming love for the black races of the earth.

Quigley felt that his wedding had been defiled and turned into a circus both by the uncle outside and the minister inside.

With the encouragement of his best man he went through the service with stoicism.

They had been inducted by Birdman. And for four years they had worked tirelessly as conductors of the Underground Railroad. They had crossed the Ohio River on many occasions to steal slaves on the other side. Or to assist those who had escaped up to the river to cross to freedom in skiffs. They had had close shaves with the law: decades-old slave laws stipulated that blacks were not permitted to reside in Ohio unless they could prove they were free. Abednego did not have any such proof. Nor did the countless fugitives they conducted to safety. In the very free state of Ohio it was a criminal offense to harbor blacks or to aid a fugitive. Once, Quigley had been kidnapped by a party from Stewart for the crime of aiding and abetting fugitives, and all in Tabler Town had been up in arms as a result. The Stewart folks had to release him. Slave hunters were fearful of Tabler Town as a result.

And now on this beautiful day here were Quigley and Abednego standing on the banks of the Ohio River at Gallipolis, looking helplessly as the steamboat took Birdman away. He had been captured in the woods in Meigs County. Quigley and Abednego suspected that William Tobias had something to do with it, although admittedly they had not heard of Tobias for some months, or even years. For some reason he was lying low. If it was not Tobias who captured their mentor, destroyed his old manumission papers that he used in Ohio to prove he was a legal black and dragged him to the steamboat in chains, then it was one or other of the slave hunters who were always lurking around, sniffing like bloodhounds and ready to pounce on any black they came across. They had taken to capturing free blacks to sell in Virginia or Kentucky. But most importantly, they were always on the lookout for Underground Railroad conductors, who were lucrative bounty. Everyone knew there was a big price on Birdman’s head. Even as Quigley and Abednego stood there, watching the steamboat sail away, shaking in anger, they knew that they were not safe at all for there was a two thousand dollar reward—money raised by plantation owners—for the assassination of the Underground Railroad operators.

The message came too late to them. They were working in their father-in-law’s orchard when a young rider came with the news that Birdman had been captured and was held hostage in a house in Athens. Without wasting time they took their guns and rode to Athens. They planned to invade the house and save their mentor. But they were too late. He was already being transported to Gallipolis. There was no time to go back to Tabler Town to warn their families that they would be away, perhaps for a number of days. In any event their wives and young children understood the nature of their work. They rode toward Gallipolis, hoping to catch the wagon transporting the captive even before it got to Pomeroy. They never did.

When they arrived in Gallipolis it was too late. The steamboat was already sailing away. Birdman was going to be sold as a slave in Kentucky. All they could do was to curse the steamboat captain. They knew him very well. They had often bribed him to take runaways to the Ohio side. The scoundrel worked both ways. He was sometimes bribed by slave hunters to take their captives to the Virginia side of the river. The bastard worked for the highest bidder.

Abednego and Quigley had on many occasions recovered abducted blacks in steamboats before they sailed away. It pained them greatly that they failed to recover their mentor.

In the weeks and months that followed the two men went on with their daily lives. Yet deep inside each one of them was a deep pain that could not be healed. Abednego gradually withdrew from the Underground Railroad and focused on the orchards and on experimenting with pawpaw. Quigley built a whiskey still and rode the countryside flogging his moonshine made of corn and wheat; or negotiating for the freedom of human property in exchange for great quantities of his potent whiskey with the Christianized Cherokees across the river who had adopted the European habit of buying and selling Africans. He was relentless in his quest for the freedom of others. He was also relentless in another quest: that of redeeming his soul. He became part of the Great Awakening, attending religious revivals that were sweeping the Appalachians, screaming the name of the Lord at nightlong Methodist and Baptist vigils without discrimination.

His active participation in religious revivals did not stop him from dabbling in the art of predicting the future using his red and white scroll whose inscriptions he continued to struggle to interpret. But he told people whatever they wanted to hear and therefore he spread happiness all around.

When he returned to Athens County from his quests he helped his good wife, who was now running a full-time Underground Railroad station on the outskirts of the city. Not only did he become an esteemed stationmaster, but he bore witness whenever it was necessary to do so. Black people could not bear witness in cases involving white people. Even free blacks who had been captured by slave hunters could not bear witness on their own behalf against their white captors. They needed a white person to testify on their behalf; otherwise they were denied legal protection. This, of course, emboldened slave hunters who defied the laws against kidnapping free blacks. Quigley always stepped forward to bear witness for the free blacks. He was such a regular at the courts that the judges derisively dubbed him a “professional witness” and placed little or no weight on his testimony.

In the evenings Quigley and Abednego sat on the porch of Harry Corbett’s house smoking their pipes. At these moments they did not speak much to each other. Only the smoke rings that floated above their heads spoke of their sorrow. At odd moments one of them would remember something from the very distant world of Fairfield Farms. Then they would ruminate about it. And after some more silence one would provide some piece of wisdom. Like when Quigley related some titbit from the Underground Railroad grapevine: Mrs. Fairfield was rumored to have manumitted her exotic slave and run away with him to Ohio. Since the runaway lovers could not feel safe anywhere in the state, they were en route to Canada. After digesting the news with a few puffs and a number of lazy smoke rings Abednego observed that the hunting season would provide particularly tasty deer that year.

One day, after a particularly long silence, Abednego jumped up and said: “We gotta do something!”