A Dream of Daring (33 page)

Her eyes narrowed in
contempt as she recalled the incident.

“He was a thief and a destroyer,
but he pretended he was a saint. He was going to smash someone’s work and
future and make it sound noble. Well, that made me mad!”

Tom nodded as he listened
to the only person he had heard speak the truth about Barnwell. He wondered
about people like the senator who pose as benefactors while doing evil deeds.

“Markham was much cruder
and more honest about what he was doing.” She imitated the overseer: “He said,
‘If folks won’t need no more lackeys in their fields with this here
contraption, then they won’t need me supervisin’ them none neither.’ So he was
happy to destroy the invention. Besides, Barnwell offered to pay him, and he
grabbed the chance like a dog grabs a bone. The senator told Markham to make it
look like the slaves were up to mischief and stole the invention. Markham was
happy to do that; he even volunteered to line up the slaves and whip every one
of them for the imagined crime. He said they needed whipping anyway, and this
was as good an excuse as any. I huddled there in the coach, loathing the two of
them. Maybe I was just a ladybug, I thought, but a ladybug could fly and dance
on flower petals, while those two could only wade in the mud.”

Tom listened intently,
picturing the scene she painted and the paradoxes it implied, with the town’s
most distinguished citizen and its least wallowing together in the mud, and
with someone else—the ultimate outcast of all—the only one to recognize the
glory of his invention. Who did the dying age destroy more completely, he
wondered, its subjects or its rulers?

“Barnwell gave Markham
money and promised more when the job was finished. Then the senator walked
toward the window. He seemed to want to be sure that no one saw him give
Markham a purse. He was so close to me that I could hear him breathing. Then
the worst possible thing happened. He saw a patch of my dress and discovered me
there in the coach!”

The drama of the moment
was apparent on her face.

“The senator was furious!
He dragged me out of the coach. Markham told him I was lazy and given to
daydreaming. I was glad for that excuse, because I didn’t want the senator to
know that I understood the invention and I didn’t want him to smash it.”

Involuntarily, Tom’s eyes
swept over her. She seemed too distraught to notice.

“He ordered Markham to whip
me, then he left. Markham always carried a whip, so he took it out. He said,
‘This’ll teach you yer place!’ With Miss Polly no longer there to protect me,
he used that whip with great glee. He knew that I—a
slave—
thought he was
depraved, and he knew it was true. I don’t know whether he was more angry at
himself for being what he was or at me for seeing it, but he was merciless. As
that horrible whip hit my back, he taunted me. He said, ‘This’ll teach you to
look down yer snooty nose at me!’
 
”

Her cheeks reddened and
her forehead glistened with perspiration, as if she could still feel the
lashes. She paused to blot her face with a handkerchief she found in the dress
pocket.

“After the lashes, I
staggered out of the carriage house. My dress was untied and hanging off my
shoulder. I leaned against a statue, shaking from the pain. I pulled my hair up
to catch a cool breeze on my skin. I noticed a man, a stranger who was coming
for the funeral. He approached me. He saw my birthmark and was curious about
it. He wanted to look at it close up. This was so odd. No one had ever
mentioned the birthmark before. He frightened me, so I quickly tied my dress
and ran away! I rushed into the kitchen and up the ladder to the cook’s loft.
The cook helped me; she wiped away the blood on my back and gave me a clean
frock.

“The next thing I knew,
Senator Barnwell came looking for me. He grabbed me and threw me into a wagon.
I was afraid, so I resisted. He locked my hands and feet in irons and dragged
me away. He took me to Stoner’s Saloon at the docks. I knew what that meant.”

Her voice broke. She slid
down off the arm of the daybed into Tom’s arms.

“Why would he have me
beaten—I mean, why would he damage the goods—if he intended to sell me? He
seemed to have a sudden change of heart about keeping me. I don’t know why.”

“I do.” Tom thought of
Nash and the telltale birthmark he discovered. “I’ll explain that to you
later.”

“Barnwell sold me to a
disgusting man who was in the saloon, Fred Fowler. To my great misfortune, he
took a liking to me. Fowler was here from Baton Rouge. He was a gambler, and I
think he was here to collect money someone owed him on a bet. My one day with
him started and ended the same way . . .”—she dropped her
head—“with . . . rape.”

She buried her face in
Tom’s chest, her voice reduced to a whisper. His arms tightened around her as
he imagined himself beating Fowler to a pulp.

“To my horror, Fowler
said he didn’t have a wife to object to me! I couldn’t bear to think of what my
life would be like with him!”

“So that skunk Barnwell
didn’t sell you to a nice family after all!”

“Is that what he told
people?”

Tom stared
introspectively out the window, making other connections about the man who had
condemned the woman before him to a life of unspeakable cruelty. “Now I know
why nobody cried for him when he died. No slaves, no friends, not even his
family. They knew him. Everybody knew him. They wouldn’t admit it, but deep
inside, they knew he wasn’t worth any tears.” Then Tom turned back to her,
waiting to hear the rest.

“Of all my childhood
imaginings, there was one role, above all others, that I playacted in my mind
over and over. And that was how I would escape. Now, on that desperate day when
I was sold, Fred Fowler brought to a head all of my yearnings to make that
dream real. He took me up the bluff to Greenbriar, where he rented a room for
the night, a ‘purtier’ room than at the docks, for
us
, he said. My gosh,
I was horrified. It was like his wedding night! Later, as I sat there in his
room, with him drunk and passed out on the bed, I knew
this
was my
chance.”

The painful recollections
pulled her features into a silent cry.

“I felt so desperate that
horrible day. Miss Polly’s protection was gone. Barnwell was cruel. Fowler was
intolerable. I summoned my courage and made my plan.”

Her features flashed
before him the tumult of her feelings on that dreadful night. Her mouth tensed
in fear of her plight, yet her eyes held the hope of breaking free.

With her identity
revealed and the fear of Tom’s discovering her past now gone, her manner toward
him was changing. He was amazed at the transformation in a face that had been
unreadable to one that now flashed at him a range of emotions. He felt as if a
door had opened to a secret place he wanted to enter.

“And your plan
was . . . ?”

“Miss Polly had taken me
to Natchez several times to visit her cousin there. Once, the road we took was
flooded, so our coachman tried a less-traveled route, which passed through an
old Indian trail by Manning Creek. I memorized the route and imagined that I
would one day use it to run away. I figured that if I crossed the state line
into Mississippi, that might slow down anyone trying to catch me.”

Tom nodded. Greenbriar
was less than twenty miles from the Mississippi border, and Natchez was the
first major port city beyond that. With its interacting population of whites,
free people of color, and slaves, Natchez was a place where a clever runaway
might slip by unnoticed for a time.

“What were you going to
do when you reached Natchez?”

“I was Ladybug. I was
going to do what I had always done, only this time for real.”

A grin slowly formed on
Tom’s face as he realized what was coming.

“I was going to get the
cosmetics and outfit I needed to pose as a white woman, then buy a ticket on a
steamer headed to the North. With my hair cut short and pulled under a bonnet,
and with gloves and boots on, no part of me needed to show but my face. With my
English features and a little ivory face powder like Miss Polly’s, which I had
already sampled to see the effect, I thought I’d have a chance. I was going to
play the role of a lady, while being just a bug.”

He smiled at her
characterization, at the many paradoxes of the dying age, and at the question
raised in his own mind: If a burning desire to hold the deed to one’s life and
to break free of society’s paper claims was the measure, then of the women
around him, who was the true
lady
?

“I had a stash of money
from things I had produced on my own and sold in town over the years. And I had
a knife from Miss Polly’s kitchen that I had hidden with the money. I rehearsed
a story that I’d use on the steamer about who I was and where I came from. I was
going to feign illness and stay in my cabin as much as possible, but when I had
to converse with others, I was going to use my best manners, my best speech, my
familiarity with Natchez and its people from Miss Polly and her cousin, and my
knowledge of places and culture from my readings.”

He grinned at her daring,
and then his smile vanished as he thought of the part of her tale still to
come. “What happened next?”

She moved back, away from
the reach of his arms, and straightened her shoulders, bracing for an
unpleasant task and determined to get through it.

“I got Fowler’s horse
from the stable near his lodging. He had me bring the horse in earlier, so the
sleepy stableboy didn’t question me when I took it. I also grabbed a long rope
that I could use as a harness, because I was going to a place where something
else was in danger. It deserved to live too, and I had a plan for that to
happen.”

He realized that the
courage he had mistakenly attributed to Barnwell for defending his device
actually belonged to the woman facing him.

She continued, her voice
solemn.

“I went back to the
Crossroads. I dug up the knife and money I had hidden. Then I went to the
carriage house and looked inside the window. In the moonlight, I could see the
invention was still there. You see, Markham drank. I knew his habits; everybody
knew them. He was still at his cottage drinking. I had a chance to take the
invention away before he could destroy it. I opened the door, careful not to
make a sound.

“I discovered the top
wasn’t on the engine. It had been on that morning! I wondered how long it would
be before I could locate the inventor to let him know where his machine was. I
thought of the dirt that could get into the engine when I moved it. I thought
of the rain and leaves washing down on the new motor and the animals that could
nest in it if I didn’t put the cover back on. I struggled with the weight of
it, and it slipped out of my hands. It made a loud clang, and I hoped to heaven
that no one was around to hear it.

“Moments later, a lantern
shined in the shed and exposed me. I saw the senator at the door. He must’ve
heard the noise. With Miss Polly gone and the funeral over, I didn’t expect
anyone to be staying in the big house, so I was shocked to see him. I never
wanted to . . . meet up . . . with him,
but only to get my things and take the invention.

“The senator put down his
lantern. He lunged at me and smacked me. I stumbled and fell. He pulled me up
by my hair and smacked me again. He told me if I made a sound, he’d beat me to
a pulp. He said I had no business there, and I was going back to Fowler. I told
him Fowler raped me, but he said he didn’t care. He smacked me again and told
me to shut up; I was going back, and if I resisted, he would cut off the tips
of my fingers, one by one, until I stopped fighting him.”

Tom had heard of
mutilations like that used to punish slaves, but only on rare occasions and
only by unusually cruel masters. Now he learned that the town’s most
distinguished citizen had no compunction about resorting to that brutality.

Ladybug continued. “I
begged him not to take me back to Fowler. My defiance riled him, and he tore at
me again. He didn’t see the knife, which I had tied to my leg. As he came at
me, I pulled it out and plunged it into his chest. He made the most horrible
groan I ever heard, then he fell.”

She covered her face and
composed herself.

“I needed to have the
knife, so I pulled it out. I could feel it tearing his flesh.” She closed her
eyes in revulsion. “I tried to stay clear of the . . . blood.
I wiped the knife on his robe, and I managed to get the cover on the engine.
Before I got there, I had made a primitive collar and harness for the horse
with the rope. I thought it would hold because I was planning to go only a
short distance to the factory with the invention. So I swung out the rods on
the side of the machine that were there for pulling it, tied them to the rope
ends, and hauled the device away.”

He listened, stone-faced.

“I knew the old road
feeding the factory, so I took the tractor along it to stay out of sight. Once
I got to the North, I would find out who the inventor was and write to tell him
where I put his device. Surely he’d run a notice in a local newspaper, looking
for information about his machine. Or a news article would mention his name in
a report about the Barnwell . . . death. I would find a way
to learn the inventor’s name and address, I hoped.

“When I got to the
factory, I found the old block-and-tackle from my childhood. I think the
factory workers used it to move machinery around. When I saw it, I remembered
how it pleased me to lift large objects much heavier than myself, how it gave
me the only sense of power I ever had. I figured I could use it to hide the
invention. So I got the pulley system to the road on the ridge above the
factory, where I had left the invention; then I dragged it up the hill and
fastened it to a sturdy tree trunk. I hitched one end to the invention and the
other to the horse, and I was able to pull the device up the hill. When I
finished, I hid the pulleys in the brush up there.”