Come August, Come Freedom (4 page)

“I’m goin’ to Richmond,” Pa had told his family.

Ma could only nod. “Couldn’t make a better man than you, the Lord. You find a way back to me, Pa. Hear me? No better man.” Her hands had started to shake in fear and in rage. Ma considered whether she had the strength to seize the gun from Prosser’s man and strike him down.

If I kill the man now with my bare hands, will this be over or will it just be startin’? Could we make our way?

On the still-dark morning that Prosser’s man took Pa to Richmond, Gabriel had grabbed a hold of his father’s pant leg. That act had quelled Ma’s murderous thinking.

“I want to come with you, Pa,” Gabriel had begged, and Ma peeled her boy from his father. She saw then that she needed to be Gabriel’s mother more than she needed to slay a man.

Her husband had always told her, “I see the place in you that no man can ever harm. Not Prosser. Not his man. I belong there.” Pa knew that place. Pa. No one else.

Then Ma fell to her knees, too, and wrapped her own self around Pa. “I can’t stay without you; I don’t want to. You find your way back to me,” she said, again.

“I will, Ma. I will.” Pa had tried to lift her up, but Ma spread full out on the floor.

“I’m goin’ to Richmond now. I’ll be all right,” her husband had said. Pa kissed Martin and Solomon, and Ma. He put his lips to Gabriel’s ear. “Be brave, and you will be free, my angel-boy.”

While revisiting the memory of that horrid day, Ma had let the fire completely die out in their hut. Not a curl of smoke lingered; nothing to carry this memory away, so Ma stopped tugging on the taproot. She knew this one would only grow stronger.

What can a poor woman do, Lord?

She lifted her sleeping youngest son to the bed and took his place on the floor.

In the morning, she stood beside Prosser’s cart and watched Old Major and the bay mare take two of her sons away. She jogged along next to the cart, holding Gabriel’s hand through the bars.

Ma didn’t worry as much about Solomon.
Solomon follows, but Gabriel, he leads by his own mind. Trouble creeps along after a strong and willful boy like him. Pa would be proud. Lord, I am scared.

“Solomon, take care of Gabriel. Keep your brother safe,” she pleaded.

Ma ran faster to keep up and would not let go of Gabriel’s hand. “I don’t like Richmond,” she cried. “Come back to me.” Mr. Prosser urged Old Major to whip the bay mare away faster.

“I will, Ma. I will,” Gabriel called out to her, and then let go of Ma’s hand.

She prayed again.
Set your light upon Solomon and Gabriel, Lord, bring my boys home. Bring them home from Richmond and back to me one day.

GABRIEL DREW
in a deep breath through the space of his missing front teeth.
Richmond,
he thought.
Solomon and me must be mighty important, going to Richmond.

Since his birth at Brookfield, Gabriel had left the plantation only for worship or, sometimes, for a fish feast. Not once had Gabriel strayed from the countryside, and when he did travel to Young’s spring or Brook Bridge, he kept to the forest. Early on, Pa had taught him to avoid the roads because even those who held remit passes could still fall prey to the watch patrol. Even when he carried a permit, Gabriel was accustomed to hearing Ma or Pa or Martin shout, “Get to the woods!”

No matter how thick the trees or dense the brush, he wasn’t scared of the forest, and he told himself he wouldn’t be scared of Richmond, either. Still, in the cart Gabriel sat so close to his brother — so close — that Solomon hung an arm and a leg through the bars to find himself more room.

Both boys fidgeted to get more comfortable; Mrs. Prosser had dressed them each in Thomas Henry’s discarded clothing — itchy brown vests and knickers and well-worn buckle shoes that pinched their feet.

Pressed up against his brother, Gabriel watched Brookfield disappear from sight. The two-story white manor house with eleven front windows and east and west wings — each with its own brick chimney — was the finest man-made place known to Gabriel.

What will we see in the capital?
he wondered.
How long before we get there?

The way was worn into a road packed hard over time by travelers from the countryside and around the state, going to the city to trade or visit. The bay mare could have gotten the boys to Richmond on her memory alone, for she and Old Major traveled there regularly on business for Mr. Prosser. In just over an hour, the cart had traveled six miles along the winding, wooded trace from Brookfield into the capital. Occasional sweet blasts of honeysuckle — Ma’s favorite — perfumed the roadside. Each time Gabriel caught a whiff, his confidence in his surroundings grew.

Finally, Solomon pointed south to a low black cloud forming a long black line, just above the treetops. “There’s your Richmond,” Solomon said.

Gabriel’s eyes grew wide. “Is the city on fire?” He drew even closer to his brother, who pushed him off and said, “Coal, stupid.”

A coal cloud made of ash from chimneys and smithies and river mills draped the capital. The Richmond road was nothing but bare, fresh-cut earth; no rocks or brick led travelers from the woods into the unfinished city.

Richmond had been the capital for only six years, since Virginia moved it there from Williamsburg to keep its seat safe from the British during the war. Hands from all over the countryside now came to help build houses and cut new roads. Mr. Prosser had even hired out Gabriel’s brother Martin to work on the capitol building, for, like the city itself, the statehouse stood partly unfinished.

Gabriel thought Thomas Jefferson’s capitol, high atop Shockoe Hill, was much finer than Brookfield. All the land had been cleared around the white, rectangular building, with Roman columns that lined a sweeping portico looking out over the river.

My brother helped make this place, and now Solomon and me will build the city, too.

Gabriel stared at black men hammering the capitol roof alongside white and pointed out how others, together, rolled hogsheads of tobacco down the narrow Richmond roads. Soldiers of the public guard lazed about on the grounds, playing cards and slapping backs. Pigs and sheep wandered with no apparent purpose, content to follow along after whoever held the next probable meal, until some knowing hand prodded them back to their lowly places.

As Mr. Prosser’s gig rounded the bend and turned down past the capitol, a strong rain came up. Without a green grassy field or a fine floral garden to hold the earth in place, the dirt piles and loose rocks bordering the capitol square right away began to slide into the narrow road. Two long ditches had eroded along each side of the nearly done statehouse, and now rainwater rushed to fill them.

The shower had come up so fast that it caught the chattel and workers alike off their guard. The cows and sheep, pigs and chickens, that roamed the barren grounds scrambled over and up the ditches. They gathered on the capitol’s portico and huddled around its columns, depositing a muddy tangle of hoof- and footprints. Gabriel laughed out loud and wondered what the governor would think of the barnyard on the statehouse porch. Soldiers spilled from their barracks — parading across the capitol grounds in their long underwear — to snatch up the uniforms they had left spread out to dry on the hard clay that was now turning to muck.

Gabriel welcomed the rain; he turned his face up.
Maybe all this water will stretch out these shoes,
he thought, and he stamped his feet in the puddle collecting on the gig’s floor.

Two shackled oxen walked along so close behind them that Gabriel could feel the steam rolling out their nostrils on his legs. One of them grunted when Mr. Prosser’s mare stopped in the street to do her business. The men driving the oxen yelled, “Move it!” Then Old Major popped the mare to make her walk on.

Around the bend from the capitol, a black tavernkeep chucked a white man right out into the road. The hairy drunkard landed in a hole with a great splash that soiled Gabriel’s shirt, but Gabriel didn’t care. He watched the drunk man tuck into his knees and cover his head with his hands in fear of getting trampled by the beasts in the road.

It seemed to Gabriel that everyone in Richmond wanted to be in the road. And the road wanted to get to the river.

Even up on Shockoe Hill, Gabriel could hear the James River roaring below them. He stood up in the cart, expecting to see great, high falls. But the falls of the James made a shallow, descending staircase of rocks, rapids, and ripples that caused its waters to swirl and spray around two forest islands. Tobacco warehouses and flour mills clustered around the falls to harness the river’s power and send the city’s goods downriver and out to sea, out to the world.

As if they didn’t even mind the rain, some washerwomen squatted near Shockoe Creek with their baskets of laundry, quarreling with one another over who should do what to collect the now-drenched clothes and bedsheets that had been earlier laid out to dry across the grassy meadow below the market house. Gabriel saw no overseer to keep the peace or keep them quiet; the washerwomen went about their work, and they went about their fussing, too.

Gabriel breathed in deep. He smelled the familiar burn of sweet, rich leaves. “Tobacco?” he guessed.

Solomon scoffed. “Can’t you figure anything out for yourself?”

Gabriel elbowed his brother and scooted all the way to the other end of the bench. He saw how everyone and everything in Richmond had someplace to be.
Is everyone here free to work and walk where they please?
Gabriel wondered.

The youngest laundress, a girl no older than Gabriel, tried to shoo an old dog away before four dirty, wet paws could discover how freshly washed shirts make a fine, easy treasure to snatch. Drenched and matted, the dog cocked an ear and appeared to laugh at the washerwomen as it pounced and dragged a white sheet through a shallow freshet off the creek.

“Rascal!” cried the young laundress, but the mongrel had vanished with its prize to someplace hidden, dark, and safe in Richmond. The mutt should have made Gabriel homesick for Dog, or even Kissey, or Ma.

Instead, Gabriel thought of Pa.

And because he did not know for certain where Pa was gone away to, only that he had last been sent to Richmond, Gabriel could not stop himself, when the gig passed by the mills, from looking for his pa in the faces of the big men unloading grain sacks.

At the bottom of the hill, the powerful roar of the river excited Gabriel. He let himself imagine whether, if he kept still in the current, the bubbling white water might carry him all the way to his father, wherever that might be.

Along Main Street, Old Major sped up the cart to outrun the rain. The city people crowded together to cross the stone footbridge over Shockoe Creek. The mare forded the creek at the trot and doused the people good; the women squealed and the men cursed. Gabriel fell off his seat onto the floor.

“Get up!” Solomon barked, but held his hand out to help his brother. “Now, act right or they’ll throw you in there.” Solomon pointed to an open-air jail near the market house. A tangle of arms and faces reached through its bars. Prisoners waved their limbs in the rain, straining to wash clean what they could of their rank skin.

“What is that?” Gabriel asked.

“The Cage, of course. It’s where they keep people who can’t stay out of trouble. Pa told me so; he told me all about Richmond.”

No man in the Cage had even a square foot of space to himself. Some of the prisoners feigned sleep; others urinated between the bars and into the road. Gabriel tried not to look for Pa in there. He didn’t want any of those faces to be Pa’s.

Solomon scooted over close to Gabriel. “Look.” He pointed. “See those eyes watching you? Runaways. Troublemakers. Thieves.” Solomon whispered in Gabriel’s ear, “Careful in the city, Little Brother.”

Gabriel made himself turn away. “Ma said you’re supposed to take care of me,” he said, and he kicked Solomon in the shin.

Before Solomon could kick him back, the cart stopped in front of a wooden shack along the north bank of the river, below the white water and beyond the courthouse.