“Yessir, Mr. Cato.”
Cato, whistling, skips down the hall toward the kitchen. Uncle Robin stares after him. A stare that could draw out the dust in a brick.
A
BOUT A MILE FROM
the Great Castle are the Frederick Douglass Houses. This is where all the Uncles and Aunties who work in the Great Castle live. Inside a penthouse, in one of the bedrooms, Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy lie under the covers of a giant waterbed, watching TV. It is twelve o’clock midnight. Their children, whose freedom they’ve bought with their toil, are “Free Negroes” who live in New York. They send their parents money and write them letters about the good life up North. Robin and Judy know about the North from the conversations they’ve heard at the Swille table from visitors. They know that the arriving immigrants are molesting the Free Negroes in the Northern cities. They know that Harriet Beecher Stowe characterized the worst slave traders as being Vermonters. They know a thing or two and are proud of their children. Even though their children chastise them about their “old ways” and call them Uncles and Aunts and refer to themselves as 1900’s people. There is a bottle of champagne on the dresser. Robin and Judy are sipping from glasses. A panel of newsmen is discussing the Emancipation of the slaves.
Uncle Robin sighs. “Well, I guess Lincoln went on and crossed Swille. Swille was downstairs calling Texas when I got off duty a half-hour ago. I knew that Lincoln was a player. Man, he was outmaneuvering Swille like a snake. Me and him winked at each other from time to time. Ugliest man you want to see. Look like Alley Oop. When Swille brought out the Old Crow, Lincoln’s eyes lit up. You suppose it’s true what that Southern lady said about Lincoln being in the White House drunk for six hours at a time? I understand that Grant is a lush, too; what’s wrong with these white people?”
Aunt Judy’s thigh rubbed against his. Their shoulders touched. She took a sip of champagne. “You should see Ms. Swille. She drinks like a fish. Won’t eat. Look like a broomstick. I went into the room the other day and look like Mammy Barracuda had a half nelson on the woman. They stopped doing whatever they were doing, and I played like nothing was unusual. Then, later on in the day, Barracuda came into the kitchen, and we turned off the radio because we were listening to Mr. Lincoln’s address, but she caught us. She asked us did we know what Emancipation meant, and we sort of giggled and she did too. Then Barracuda showed us the Bible where it say ‘He that knoweth his master’s will and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.’ ”
“I never read it, but I figured something like that was in it.”
“She said that we were property and that we should give no thoughts to running away. She say she’d heard that 40s, Quickskill and Leechfield were having a hard time of it and that Quickskill had gone crazy and was imagining that he was in Canada. She said that she always knew Quickskill was crazy. As for Canada, she said they skin niggers up there and makes lampshades and soap dishes out of them, and it’s more barbarous in Toronto than darkest Africa, a place where we come from and for that reason should pray hard every night for the Godliness of a man like Swille to deliver us from such a place.”
“What’s wrong with that woman? Seem like the older she get, the sillier she get. In the old times people used to get wiser the older they get. Now it’s all backwards. Everything is backwards.”
“She treats that Bangalang like a dog. Whips her. Today for dropping a cake. Sure is a lot of whipping going on up there. They whips people when they ain’t even done nothing. They had a party the other night—the gentlemen from the Magnolia Baths, and they was whipping on each other too.”
“It’s the war, Judy. Making everybody nervous. As soon as old man Swille heard about the Emancipation you should’ve seen him. That cigar bout jumped out his face. He started cussing and stamping his foot. He called Washington, but they gave him the runaround. The boys in the telegraph office called him Arthur and made indignant proposals to him, so he say. Them Yankees are a mess. Well, the Planters have been driving up to the Castle all day now. Those Planters are up to no good.”
The bottom of her foot moved across the top of one of his. The top of his right thigh was resting on her hip. He was talking low, in her ear.
“Rub my neck a little, hon.”
He began to rub her neck.
She sighed. “That’s nice.”
“Did you hear what the runner up from Mississippi said?”
“What, Robin?”
“Say he saw Quickskill’s picture in the newspaper way down there.”
“Was it a personal runaway ad that old man Swille put in there?”
“No, it was something about a poem of his.”
“Oh, that must have been the poem I heard Cato discussing with Swille. All about him coming back here. I didn’t see him come back. Did you hear anything from the fields?”
“Nobody seen him here.”
“Say Ms. Swille showed him the combination to her safe.”
“That Quickskill. Boy, he was something.”
They both laugh.
“Remember that time, Judy, when he complained to Massa Swille that Mammy Barracuda would always serve his dinner cold and put leftovers in his meal?”
“Sometimes she wouldn’t even put silverware out for Raven.”
“She didn’t like it because he was Swille’s private secretary and sat at the table with the family.”
“She didn’t like anyone to come between her and Arthur, as she calls him.”
Aunt Judy turns to him and puts her arms around his neck, their abdomens, thighs, touching, her cheek brushing against his as she places the champagne glass on the table next to the bed.
“Want some more?”
“I’ll be drunk, Robin. I have to get up tomorrow at six and get breakfast.”
“One more. For the Emancipation.”
“Won’t do us any good. He freed the slaves in the regions of the country he doesn’t have control over, and in those he does have control over, the slaves are still slaves. I’ll never understand politics.”
Robin is sitting up, the covers down to his naked waist. He picks up the champagne bottle and pours.
“That’s Lincoln playing. Lincoln is a player. The Emperor of France’s secretary called up here and told Swille not to show up to that party for the royal people next week. Swille tried to get through to the Emperor, but the secretary refused, and when Swille called the Emperor by his first name, the secretary said to Swille, ‘Don’t you slave peddler ever be calling him that again,’ and hung up, in French.” They laugh. “Is Ms. Swille still on her strike?”
“Is she! Today she called me and Bangalang her sisters and said something about all of us being in the same predicament. Me and Bangalang just looked at each other.”
“She used to be so beautiful.”
“Wasn’t she so! The belle of the Charity Ball. Horse rider. Miss Mississippi for 1850, same time Arthur got his award.”
“When do you think they’re going to tell her about her son?”
“You mean how he got eat—Oh, that reminds me. I mean to tell you. Speaking of the dead. Well, Bangalang told us today that one of the children was out in the cemetery and they wandered into the crypt where that old hateful Vivian, Arthur’s sister, is, and that the child saw …”
“What … what she see?”
“As she said, she heard somebody talking and he went inside, and the child saw Massa Swille and the man had done taken off the lid from the crypt and was on top of his sister and was crying and sobbing, and that he was sweating and that he was making so much noise that he didn’t even notice the child and the child run away, and the child say he saw Vivian’s decomposed hand clinging to his neck.”
“That kid’s got to be telling a fib, Judy. I told you about letting those children play in the cemetery.”
“But, Robin, ain’t nothin in there but dead folks.”
A low moan of a solitary wolf can be heard.
“Oh, there go that wolf again. I hope he’s not out there all night again. Judy … Judy?”
Robin turns over and sees that his wife is asleep. They are back to back.
R
AVEN QUICKSKILL WAS SITTING
in a house with black shutters on Free Street in Emancipation City. It is an eighteenth-century schoolhouse he is “watching” for a few months. The owners, Sympathizers to the Cause, had left for a resort in another state, and knowing that he was a “fuge,” as a person of his predicament was called, had asked him to watch it. That’s the way it was in the fugitive life. Minding things for Abolitionists and Sympathizers to the Cause. They had left some plants, which he tended. And some cats. He was sitting in a rocker, reading a book about Canada, about the plentiful supply of gasoline, the cheap, clean hotel rooms that could be had in Toronto and Montreal; the colorful Eskimo sculpture that could be bought in the marketplace; the restaurants specializing in lobster; the scuba diving, the deep-sea fishing.
There was a knock at the door. He opened it on two men. They were dressed in blazers and wore grey slacks, black cordovans. They were very neat. One was medium-sized, the other, squat, short. The short one was carrying a briefcase.
“Mr. Quickskill?” the man with the briefcase asked.
“That’s me.”
“We have orders to repossess you,” said the medium-sized one. He sneezed. Removed a handkerchief and blew his nose.
Quickskill was thinking. It was three years since they had sent him a bill. He’d been moving ever since. They’d found him.
“Here’s my card,” the medium-sized man said, sneezing again.
“Have a cold?” Quickskill asked, reading the card. The card said
NEBRASKA TRACERS, INC.
“I have some vitamin C in the cabinet.”
“Hey, Harold,” the man with the briefcase said, “that might help. Vitamin C.”
“Would you gentlemen come in,” Quickskill said, escorting them into the room of Shaker furniture. They walked across the waxed hardwood floors and sat down. “Can I offer you something?” he asked, cool.
“No,” they said.
Quickskill clasped his hands on a knee, lifting his feet off the floor a bit. “Now, you gentlemen said that you were going to repossess me.”
“Your lease on yourself has come to an end. You are overdue. According to our information, Mr. Swille owns you,” the short one said, reaching into his briefcase. “Here’s the bill of sale. You see, Mr. Swille sees you as a bargain. Bookkeeper, lecturer, an investment that paid off. He’s anxious to get you back, and since there are a lot of invoices and new shipments piling up, he says a man of your ability is indispensable.”
“Uncle Robin is performing that function now. He needs Uncle Robin in the house. Robin’s overextending himself,” the medium one said. “He’s reading and writing now. Seems to have begun to assess his condition. One of the white house slaves, Moe, reported that the old codger had taken to philosophizing. Swille says he’s concluded that the missing invoices and forged papers will be ignored. He blames the whole thing on your misled humanitarian impulses.”
“And if I don’t want to return to Virginia, then what?”
“We’ll have no choice but to foreclose,” the short one said.
“Look,” the medium one said, “I hate doing this but … but it’s the law.”
“Even Mr. Lincoln said that what a man does with his property is his own affair,” said the short one.
“Yeah, Lincoln,” murmured Quickskill.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“You’re lucky, if you ask me. Why, that poem you wrote …” the short one said.
“How did you know?” It had been nearly three winters since
Beulahland Review
promised to publish it. Maybe Swille owned
Beulahland
too.
“Mr. Swille gave us a copy. You know, if we weren’t his employees, we’d circulate it ourselves,” the short one said.
“Regardless of the copyright?” the medium one asked.
“Oh, I forgot. That’s the law. We must obey the law, though he doesn’t come within the framework of Anglo-Saxon law. Justice Taney said that a slave has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.”
“Is it autobiographical?” the medium one asked Quick-skill.
“I’m afraid it isn’t,” Quickskill answered.
“See, I told you. They have poetic abilities, just like us. They’re not literal-minded, as Mr. Jefferson said. I knew that he couldn’t have possibly managed all of those things. Sneak back to the plantation three or four times. Know about poisons,” the medium one said. “That would have been too complicated for a slave.”
“You see, Mr. Swille, we’re students at a progressive school in Nebraska. We’re just doing this job to pay for tuition in graduate school. We’ve even read your poetry,” said the short one.
“You have?”
“Yes.
The Anthology of Ten Slaves,
they had it in the anthropology section of the library,” the medium one said.
“I’m a Whitman man, myself,” the short one said.
“Really?” Quickskill said. “Isn’t it strange? Whitman desires to fuse with Nature, and here I am, involuntarily, the comrade of the inanimate, but not by choice.”
“I don’t understand,” they said together.
“I am property. I am a thing. I am in the same species as any other kind of property. We form a class, a family of things. This long black deacon’s bench decorated with painted white roses I’m sitting on is worth more than me—five hundred dollars. Superior to me.”
“Fine thought. Fine thought. You see, I told you they can think in the abstract,” the short one said.
They were looking at the painting on the wall. Abraham Lincoln, armed with a gun swab, fighting the dragon of rebellion who has the face of a pig. A short pipe-smoking man has chained Abe’s leg to the tree of “constitutionality” and “democracy.” Lincoln became dictator after Fort Sumter. Told Congress not to return to Washington until the Fourth of July.
“Excuse me, I forgot the vitamin C,” Quickskill said.
“Of course,” the short one said. “Thanks for remembering.”
They picked up a copy of a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
As Quickskill walked into the bathroom, he heard the short one say, “I hear she made a pile on this book.”
Quickskill, the property, moved past the bowl, the sink, and to the window. He opened it quietly. He climbed out and jumped, landing on the ground of an alley. He went by the open window, ducking. The men could be seen talking. He started to run. It was easy for him to run, and he was fast. He had burned the fat from his waist running through the streets of Emancipation City. Nebraskaites. Nice, clean-cut killers. Human being-burglars. Manhandlers. Always putting the sack on things. Putting anacondas in the Amazon in a sack. Trapping a jaguar with dogs, then lassoing the jaguar from above, lifting the jaguar, then lowering the jaguar into a net. Sacking things. Jump on the armadillo from a horse and sack the armadillo. Well, they aren’t going to sack me, Quickskill thought. Nebraskaites. Now he understood Elymas Payson Rogers’ poem: