CONTRABAND
All was dark but for a single candle flame. The light mainly served to emphasize the darkness. Sounds gave shape to it, set it in motion.
A rustling, a muffled cry: “Ouch!”
A rustling, a whisper: “Hush up.”
The sounds, the words, and now your ears can see the shapes in the dark, though the dark has not lifted. And the skin can see also, see shapes by subtle changes in pressure and the waft of the faintest breath. The dark has people in it.
A whisper: “Mama, how long we been here?”
A whisper: “Jonah, count the marks.”
And Jonah feels with his fingers the marks he has made each time the upstairs woman brought food. Two marks. His stomach tells him that it is almost time for the third.
A whisper: “I count two, Mama. And we ought to get victuals soon now. That‘s three.”
The space smelled of sweat, earth, fresh-dug potatoes, human waste. The woman who brought food also replaced the slops bucket.
A whisper: “Can’t be much longer before we leave, Jonah.”
A whisper: “The lord knows, Mama.”
Later, which is how they measured time, you could hear footsteps and the rusty cellar doors screeched open. Light flooded the dug out room, revealing at last to the eyes the room’s inhabitants. Four people rose to their feet, a teen-age girl, skinny as a seedling, trembling like a leaf; a man with an ageless face but grizzled hair whom the girl hid behind; a young man who had not yet grown into his height; and a woman, also ageless, who held a sleeping child in her arms. This was Mama. She stood in front of the others. She was their speaker. She had served in the house, in the main house, and knew how to talk to white people.
Two white people came into the room instead of just the woman. A man carried an armload of clothes and a lantern. The woman carried a bucket of water in one hand and a bucket of what looked like stew in the other. No one spoke until the doors clanged closed.
The white woman spoke to the black woman. “Tonight is your night. The arrangements are made.” She set the buckets on a stack of firewood. “Eat up. We’ll tell you what to do while you eat.” The white woman took some clothing off of the man’s pile. “Make sure each of you gets some warm clothing.”
The four inhabitants of the cellar gathered around the buckets, taking turns dipping individual spoons into the stew and sharing a tin cup dipped over and over again into the water bucket. Behind them, their hosts began shifting a pile of potatoes. It was embarrassing to have these white people serving them food and emptying their slops and now laboring over the potatoes. Only Mama was brave enough to talk to them. She was spooning stew into the little one. They took turns running their fingers around the inside of the bucket, then licking off the stew they gathered in this way. Food was a hope in this underworld, this underworld of escape. They would eat every single drop.
This word, escape, and the name of the place to which they fled, freedom, thrilled through them, tingled, generated just enough allure to overcome fear. Now they got down to work with the whites--another novelty--and got the potatoes moved, and at the bottom of the wall there were two boards wedged against the wall with rocks. The white man and Jonah pushed the rocks aside and let the boards fall. Now they could all see it--a tunnel.
“It’s tight,” the white woman said. “But keep going. Keep going and you will be all right. You’ll come out in a corn field.”
The escapees watched the woman’s face, drew her words deep inside.
“You should see a string of white diapers hanging on the clothesline. If you don’t see the diapers, come back here.” She spoke directly to Mama. “You must see the diapers.”
Mama nodded and said, “No diapers, come back here.”
“Right. Walk as fast as you can to the clothesline and go into the barn.” She looked down at her hands. “That’s all I know. Just go into the barn.”
Mama nodded again. “Go into the barn. Yes.”
The white woman said, “Gather up a wrap and get going.” She helped Mama into a hooded cape. “Go with god. We will pray for your safe journey.”
“Thank you, ma’am. You have been kind to us and you didn’t have to be.”
“Yes, I did.”
And thus did four people and one child escaping slavery move under the town of Maple Hills and into the night. Mrs. Buttersby’s husband had already replaced the boards. She stooped and started shifting the potatoes back to where they had been.
LIBERATION SHE’LL BE
Mama Libby looked around her home and lowered her chin in a satisfied nod. The floor was swept. The cooking things were washed and stowed on hand-hewn oak shelves, firelight throwing the pocked bottoms of cast iron skillets into high relief on the wall by the hearth. It was all clean, but the smell of bacon and toasted bread had not been scrubbed from the room along with the soot and particulates that were the flotsam and jetsam of her rural neighborhood. The families who lived in this row of a dozen frame-built houses were workers--farmhands, drivers, mill workers, cleaners, street sweepers. Her own elderly father was a blacksmith, with Jonah 'prenticing. How different it was now for the fruits of his labors--coins and bills and good will--to come home from work with him instead of being usurped by white people who claimed to own not just the fruits of his labors but him also. He had been a piece of equipment subject to depreciation and resale like any other.
And the equipment was not invented yet to describe the equipment Mama had been in the white people’s wealth machine (vacuum cleaner, wash machine, sewing machine, dishwasher, Formula 409). And, oh yes, brood mare. Two of Mama’s children had been taken away, sold away from her for good cash money, one to South Carolina and the other in Mississippi, she thought, but she didn’t really know. She still carried the hope that someday maybe they could be together--someday right here in THIS world, right here in Battle Creek, Michigan, not on some shimmery-vague heavenly shore. She wanted to see them while they still had bodies to hug, hair to braid, hands to hold, laughter to share. She wanted to see their earthly selves and make sure they knew they were still a part of her. She sighed and took one more swipe at the dishpan with the hem of her apron.
As it often did, the sight of her own clean kitchen called out memories of other kitchens, other rooms. She remembered the clay-lined fireplace of her quarters (not home) on the white people’s property, remembered making the rice allotment stretch by cooking in the hulls of the peas she had cleaned for her owner’s dinner and adding in new greens from dandelions her father picked on his way home from the forge.
She remembered the vaulted plantation house kitchen with its immense brick fireplace, about as much floor space in the fireplace as in her slave quarters and the brick ovens and the water pumped right into the sink basin hewn from solid granite. She remembered rows of wooden buckets, rows of hams hanging from meat hooks, salt-skinned and solid, stacks of plates--everyday stoneware, company china, special event Limoge, and the worn wooden plates reserved for her and the other enslaveds.
And frequently, she thought of that dug out room with the one candle, smelling of slops and stew, perspiration, potatoes, and earth. The room of the shapes in the dark, the squeaking cellar doors, the narrow tunnel. She thought of the woman who brought food, who thought about the cold wind, who opened herself to the dangerous labor of furthering freedom.
Mama had renamed herself when she arrived in Battle Creek, into freedom. She introduced herself as Libby now and people thought it stood for Elizabeth, but really it stood for Liberation. And she gave her last name now as Shelby, which stood to her for “she’ll be.” Liberation she’ll be.” It brought a giggle into her throat to say it, a gorgeous feeling of sheer life, full life. Libby Shelby. She had always been called Maddy before freedom, a corruption of the word maid, not the name Madelaine.
Libby was working now as a teacher. She had taught herself to read by scheduling the cleaning of the nursery during the tutor’s visit. When the room cleared out, Libby would reverently touch the cloth reader, trace the half-erased letters on the slate. Learning to read was Libby’s first radical act, the first heavy door she dragged open for herself. She couldn’t get enough and started to sneak books and newspapers out from the main house--which would have demoted her to field work if she were caught--or to the auction block. Reading was how Libby learned about freedom--not the elusive, reached-only-by-death freedom of the songs and scriptures she knew, but real freedom in a a real place in real time. She started to dream, to have words for her dreams, to have words for her anger and her pain. By the light from a tallow candle, she taught her father to read, and her daughter--the only one of her children left to her--and to Jonah, who became part of their family. Now she was teaching her daughter’s child in the frame schoolhouse in town with the pot-bellied stove that gulped coal and the chalkboard of slate that stretched the whole length of the room.
They were four generations in that dugout basement room, four generations united in the goal to be free. They were all Shelbys now, Pa, Mara, Jonah, and baby Truth, named after Battle Creek’s famous resident Sojourner Truth.
Libby had backtracked as best she could to trace the path her family had taken to freedom. Every year on the anniversary of her escape, she trekked south a bit, through Michigan and into Ohio, to find the places and people who had helped her family escape. She had made it as far south as Lancaster, Ohio, but there the trail went cold. No one could tell her about that woman in the earthen basement or the clothesline of bleached diapers glowing in the night, or the horse and wagon that had waited in the barn that carried them onward to where they could be free. And she was scared to go closer to the Ohio river. The South had long arms for escapees. She would not go to the river.
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