“Look ten years younger.”
Mammy Barracuda, lighting up a corncob pipe, makes a twirling motion with her finger. Ms. Swille, holding the hem of her dress, begins to spin about and model as the girls gape and sigh.
“Have yo butt down in the parlor when the gen’men begin to light up their cigars. All right, count off.”
Ms. Swille stands in the middle of the room. The other girls stiffen. With her hands behind her back, Barracuda inspects the woman. “Turn around, fool.” Barracuda grabs Ms. Swille and spins her around some more. She looks at the woman directly, eye to eye. She looks at the girls, and “marching like a grenadier,” she exits from the room. The girls scurry out like the corps de ballet, leaving Ms. Swille alone.
She begins to sob. There is a gust of wind. The kerosene lamps go out. There is a sudden chill in the room.
T
HERE WAS A FROST
on the Lake Erie steamer
The North America.
Quaw Quaw had gone inside the cabin to read. Raven stood at the rail gazing out across Lake Erie. The cold air was hitting him in the face. It felt good, and he was warm in an overcoat he had just bought with some of the “Flight to Canada” money; it was made of rare apaupala wool and was bear-brown. He was thinking about the kind of fashion he’d buy now that he was becoming a successful anti-slavery lecturer. A man came up. He had on a vest of “oriental” design. He carried a tall silk hat. Black kid gloves. He wore a black waistcoat. He carried a cane whose head was the head of a serpent.
“That’s some lake, huh? I’ve made this trip from Cleveland many times but I still can’t get used to its wonder.” He was distinguished-looking.
“Oh, are you commuting to a job in Buffalo?”
“No, not at all,” the stranger said. “I have been abroad, but nothing compares with the serenity of this lake, this peace. It has a special meaning to me. You see, I used to carry fugitive slaves to Canada from Cleveland and Buffalo.”
“Really,” Quickskill said, smiling.
“Those were the days, back in the forties. We used to get into some pretty tough scrapes with the claimants and coadjutors. They’d be watching the steamers for their goods. They were a pretty ignorant bunch, though. Sometimes we’d disguise the male slaves as women, and the female slaves as men, and they’d walk right past the suckers! Ha!”
“They were that dumb, huh? You must have had some pretty trying moments though.”
“We did. Once we had a run-in with a slave trader named Bacon Tate. He was after a couple named Standford who were living in Saint Catherine’s, Ontario, a delightful place. Well, he sent in some thugs to take them, and they were heading back across the Black Rock Ferry to the U.S. when me and some friends heard about it. We caught up with them and freed the Standfords. Well, old man Tate went and got the law, and before we got them on the boat, they caught up with us. Well, man, you should have seen the fight. Pistols going off. People clubbing each other. During the melee the Standfords escaped on the ferry. Ha! Never will forget that.”
“Those must have been exciting times.”
“Yeah, they were all right.” There is a far-off gaze in his brown eyes. “Where you heading?”
“Canada.”
“Vacation?”
“No, I’m escaping. I’ve booked passage on this steamer under a pseudonym. My master is after me.”
“You have to be kidding me, stranger. The war is over.”
“You don’t know my Master. He views me as something that belongs to him. The laws which apply to other slavemasters don’t apply to him. He’s the slavemasters’ slavemaster.”
“A real case, huh?”
“You can say that again.”
“Well, if I can be of any help, contact my agent. Here’s my card.”
It read
William Wells Brown, Anti-Slavery Lecturer, Writer.
“William Wells Brown.
The
William Wells Brown?”
“Can’t be two of us, Mr. … Mr. …”
“Quickskill.”
“Mr. Quickskill. What line of work are you in?”
“Why, I guess you might call me an anti-slavery writer, too, but I … well in comparison with your reputation, I … I’m just a beginner. I read your novel
Clotel
and … I just want to say, Mr. Brown, that you’re the greatest satirist of these times.”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Quickskill. I’m glad you like my books. What kind of stuff do you write?”
“I … well, my poem ‘Flight to Canada’ is going to be published in
Beulahland Review.
It kind of imitates your style, though I’m sure the critics are going to give me some kind of white master. A white man. They’ll say that he gave me the inspiration and that I modeled it after him. But I had you in mind … Mr. Brown, I don’t want to take up any of your time, but would you like to see one of my poems?”
Brown smiled broadly. “I’d love to, lad. Do you have it with you?”
“It’s in my cabin. I’ll be right back.”
Quickskill ran to the cabin, almost knocking down one of the lakers, he was so excited. He dashed inside. “Quaw Quaw! Quaw Quaw! William Wells Brown—” She was lying on the bed, sobbing. He reached for her arm.
“Don’t you touch me, Leave me alone. I was tired of reading Dickens and so I took your manuscript out of the suitcase. I read the poem. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone?”
“You loved him so, Quaw Quaw. I didn’t want to be the one. I don’t need to knock another man to gain a woman.”
“But … I’ve been with this man since I was fourteen. He raised me. Sent me to school. Paid my bills. I loved him. But if I had known …” She breaks into sobs, burying her head in the wet pillow.
Quickskill walked over to the dresser where the poem lay. He didn’t want her to learn about it this way. No, not this way.
Third World Belle
My Indian Princess
No one has the heart to tell
You, so I will
Your favorite pirate uses
Your Dad’s great-chief’s skull
As an ashtray
And sold your Mom’s hand-knitted
Robes to Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West Show
He buried your brother alive
In a sealed-off section of the
Metropolitan Museum
To you he’s a “heavy” aesthete
Born in ’27
While I am a native mind riding
Bareback, backwards through
A wood of words and when I stumble
I get my Ibo
*
up and hobble
like a bloody-footed slave
Traveling from Virginia to
Ohio and if I stumble again
I get my Cherokee up and smell
My way to the clearing
Your Apache temper snaps at me
Even before I open my trap
But I still love you my
Mountain-climbing woman with
A rope all around your waist
My rider of Killer Whales
I’m on a fox hunt for you baby
Got my black cap and red coat on
I’m on a fox hunt for you baby
Got my black cap and red coat on
Just like a coyote cassetting amorous
Howls
In Sugar Blues
I airmail them to you
In packages of Hopi Dolls
Ah ouooooool Ah ouoooooo!
*
Ibos: a fiercely proud African tribe who’d rather cut their throats than be sold into slavery.
M
OOOOTTTTHHHHHEEEEERRRR. MOOOOOTTTTTHHHHHEEEERRR.
“What can that be?” Ms. Swille said at the dresser, turning her head around.
Moooootttttthhhhhheeeeeerrrrr.
Then she saw a foot—no, not really a foot but some strange reticulated claw—entering the room from the wall opposite her. And then a clammy-looking hand … well, not exactly a hand. It was a human figure, but not exactly; the skin belonged to that of a crocodile, but the head—oh no—the head, it was Mitchell’s head. Mitchell, the anthropologist; it was his head.
“Mitchell, you’re supposed to be in the Congo. What on earth are you doing in that outfit?”
“I hate to greet you in this awful state, Mother, but, well, you see, I was killed.”
“Killed! My son! You were … they told me that you had extended your stay in the Congo. Killed!” She begins to sob.
“I know, Mom,” the creature says, now having moved to next to where she’s seated in front of the mirror. “They never tell you anything. But my body was never found. The Snake Society was mean, and they, well, they have some strange ideas about the supernatural. You don’t hear them longing for ‘hebbin,’ as the kinks call it here. They threw me to this crocodile called Aldo. He ate everything but my head … He …”
“Oh, oh, oh! No! Please, Mitchell, they didn’t.”
“You can’t blame them, Mom. They condemned me to go about in this outfit for eternity. It’s cold where I am. A cold-blooded place, as they say in Sacramento. The other side. Boy, are the smokes going to be in for a surprise. I had to tell you this, Mother; I know that even the little picks who remove the worms from the tobacco know more about what’s going on here than you do. The smokes do the same thing there that they do here, only overtime. The unglorious occupations. You see, they found out that I wasn’t really on an anthropology expedition but was checking things for Dad. Your husband, my father, is one macabre fiend. No wonder he has Poe down here all the time. Do you know what he did?”
“What did he do, son?”
“Sent my head to the National Archives and took it off his taxes.”
“Oh, son, did he do that?”
“I didn’t want to meddle in the internal affairs of the Congo. He had me spending my time making resources maps. All I wanted to do was bring back some shrunken heads for my museum collection. You know, the one uptown that Dad gave me.”
“I’m furious. Son, do you see me shaking? Do you see what a terrible state I’m in? That smoke, Mammy Barracuda, just makes my life miserable. I have no authority any more, and when I do exercise my functions she says things like ‘Dit out of my way,’ or ‘Dit out of my kitchen.’ She has some strange hold on Master Swille.”
“That’s not all, Mother. He has this film library. When his friends were riding high before the war, he’d invite them up here. He showed terrible pictures of slaves being tortured and killed. Close-ups of them biting each other’s ears off. His friends would watch this, drink Tennessee whiskey and eat box lunches. It was awful.”
“No, no, spare me.”
“And not only that. He flogged Queen Victoria. Yet she refused to give him a title.”
“What!”
“That’s when you were away in New York on behalf of one of the Beecher causes. He was in England on business. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited Dad for the purpose of his loaning England some money so that they could buy Burma. Well, Barracuda found a copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in her room, and Dad had her fettered before the whole establishment. Others say that the Queen refused him a barony. And Mom, Dad’s gotten mixed up with this Lord Gladstone who’s a friend of Marquis de Sade who is introducing some new pastime for the rich called Sadism.”
“What on earth is that, son?”
“Something to do with whips. But sometimes screws. Sadists have closets full of lashes. They trade fettering devices.”
“But we do that all the time down here, son.”
“That’s why Gladstone came out for the Confederacy.”
“Why … I don’t follow.”
“Gladstone is a leading Sadist. He’s into flagellation. He … he whips himself, Mother, tortures and beats himself.”
“Oh my God, you mean your father is mixed up with that outfit?”
“Yes, Mother. They want to make the South into their headquarters so that all of their followers can come here and practice their ways without being persecuted. They’ve referred to Virginia as the Sadist’s Canada. Well, they had the Queen of England whipped, Mother. The Sadists have about captured the Crown. They’re all over the world, whipping people in the name of England. Whipping. Screaming. Beating people for the Queen.”
“Zounds! What horrors!”
“Victoria’s old whale-white skin started spotting red. Then they blotched her, wringed her. And they stretched her. And Prince Albert stood there real dignified, Mother. Real dignified. And under so much stress. And speaking of stress, Mother, they brought in that stud, Big Jim. Mother, you know the one who goes about saying motherfuck a motherfucker all the time. Then it got kinky, Mom. Real kinky. They really needed that loan bad, but Dad didn’t get the barony. He’s now trying to get a circle of corrupt lords to persuade the Queen to bestow one upon him. He’s a saber-toothed guppy, Mom. Look at me. I have to go through eternity this way. You know, it’s hard to get crocodile skin clean, real hard. Dirt digs deep in the scales. I can’t control the tail. All I wanted to do was hunt some heads for my museum collection. Now look … I talk in this evil nasal twang.”
“Oh, son. I know what to do,” she said as the specter crept back through the wall.
Outside a thunderstorm began. It was thrashing across the sky. She thought she heard someone calling. A familiar voice. Echoing across the meadows. A sweet soprano voice.
A
T ONE END OF
the table, the top of which bore three white candles and a basket of fruit and flowers, sat, dining, Arthur. Swille. At the other, a man dressed in a Union military uniform. He was much decorated. His chest looked like a medal bed.
“… then Mudd took the wounded man in and bandaged him. Everything is proceeding according to plan.”
“Good. So no one can trace it to me?”
“We made sure of that. One of our men, posing as a marshal, shot him to death as he was running out of the barn. The newspapers are getting suspicious. You know, the story we put out that all the conspirators burned up in the fire.”
“Whitewash.”
“Nothing about whitewash. Just suspicious. We did it away from the TV cameras. Told the video people that we couldn’t guarantee their safety.”
“What about the woman who ran the inn?”
“Oh, she doesn’t know anything about you.”
“Good job, General. When do you think you can get Johnson down here to see me? The great Plebeian.”
“Ha ha. That was some speech he made at Abe’s second inauguration, huh?” He swallowed two tumblers of whiskey before he went on. “Lincoln was so mad. You should have seen Abe. He said if we allowed that son of a bitch to say another word, he’d fire the whole cabinet. Johnson’s having d.t.’s now. Says he sees Lincoln’s ghost. We have to get Jacobson to give him injections. They’re beginning to whisper in the Capitol. You know how the town talks. We listened in on one of Anderson’s lines, and he’s thinking about doing a column on it. The man has no class. The rude Tennessean. Got into a fistfight with a heckler.”