Paradise Alley (23 page)

And when he was ready, when he believed his little boat could withstand the ocean itself, he went up to the splendid house with the two-story veranda that the man who owned him kept on East Bay Street. There he sat in the kitchen where his mother and his sister worked. Eating the spare biscuits that they gave him, watching them slip quickly about in their simple white muslin dresses and yellow bandannas, baking ham and cornbread in the great brick ovens. While
outside, in the brick courtyard, he could see the thick palmetto trees, the light glinting and shifting as the servants threw open the windows to let the cool night breezes in.

They would be closed again just before dawn, he knew, to trap the night air, and hold it against the heat of the day. But by then he was already on his way, back down to the boatyard. There had not been any need even to say his good-byes, to utter words that might be overheard by prying ears. The women had understood why he had come, looking into his face, taking his hands in theirs. They had held him for just a moment—then slipped a few more biscuits, some more of the salty ham to him. Then he had walked down to the docks and casually pushed the little vessel he had made out into the river—so that all the other workmen in the shipyard and the white overseers thought Billy Dove had only gone to test another boat, the way he did all the time before handing them over to their new owners.

Only this day he had kept right on going, sailing on through the mouth of the harbor, past the great palmettos along the Battery. Past Fort Moultrie, and the five-sided brick citadel of Fort Sumter, its big black cannons trained out to sea. He kept sailing, past the oyster boats and the shrimp trawlers and the fishing schooners. Going all the way out to the limits of the harbor, then past. Watching the blue water of the open sea as it skimmed along beneath his rudder, looking back toward the harbor with its forts and its big, wavering trees, and all its fine pink and white and grey houses. Knowing that he would never see them again from the prow of a sailing ship, coming back from across the ocean, proud and happy and full of stories.

The first day out he sailed down to the Sea Islands, where he could stock up on water and hide in the high sweetgrass of the marshes until it was dark. After that he turned north. Sailing always by night, guiding himself by the moon and the North Star the sailors had taught him to pick out of the night sky. Staying close to the shore but not too close, for he had no charts—threading his way up through the barrier islands around Hatteras, and past the Tidewater. Eating as little as he could from the handful of oranges, the rounds of cheese and bread he had brought, anxious to beat the hurricanes up the coast before he had to go to land again.

But it took too long. He had to move carefully, even at night, looking
out for liquor smugglers or some blackbirder running with no lights, and all too delighted to pick up a young, skilled runaway to add to his catch. After a week he thought he might have made it far enough north, but he couldn't be sure. He had heard too many stories about runaways who had planned and provided patiently for years, and followed this star and that river until they were sure they had reached Philadelphia—only to come out of the wilderness and find themselves nabbed in the slave towns of Richmond or Baltimore, or Washington City.

After another week the food ran out, and he was down to a day of water in the little cask he had filled in the Sea Islands. The boat had begun to leak, for all his work, but he was still too chary to put into a port. Instead he went to shore along the loneliest beaches and estuaries he could find. Spending more precious nights running inland, deep into unknown country to steal from some stray farmhouse or another. Hoping no dog would sense his presence out by the sheep pasture, by the chicken house or the hog pen, or the root cellar.

He still could not risk sailing by day, so he would take down the frail detachable pine mast, pull the boat up in some stagnant cove. There he would find a hole, in a cave or under the roots of a dying tree and heap the dead leaves and vines up over himself as he slept. As if he might burrow right down into the earth, hidden from any wandering boy or dog. And in the morning he knew that he must look like some part of the forest himself, some half man, half spirit, crawling up out of the ground, covered with leaf and earth.

“Free or not free,” he would mutter to himself, crouching there on the wilderness floor, worried that he could hear someone, something, wandering far from the habited fields. Wondering about what he would have to do if it were a man, a woman? A child?

Free or not free?

He had decided in the end that having possession of his own self meant being free to drown if he so chose. He had set back out to sea, and hewed again to the North Star. Determined now, no matter how much he thirsted or hungered, that he would not turn back to land until he had reached free soil.

At first his luck held and he made good time. But then one afternoon he could feel the first of the hurricane winds, just tickling the back of his neck. Only a breeze still, no more than enough to rustle
the palmetto fronds back in Charleston, or sweep the first leaves off the well-rolled lawns of the great houses.

Behind them, though, he could feel a greater force, like the punch of a man's fist. The storms he had seen himself, building off the coast of Africa, picking up momentum as they swept across the Atlantic and up through the Islands—

All the rest of that afternoon, he turned his back to them and ran. Not daring to look back, though he knew the winds were there—shifting and capricious, as alive and willful as he was himself.

For hours he tacked as best he could—telling himself that at least he did not have to worry about the blackbirders, that nothing else would be out in weather like this. He even allowed himself to sweep in toward land when the winds called for it—close enough sometimes to see the little white-steepled towns, the redbrick houses, the men harvesting their fields.

It would be so easy still to turn in. To steer his boat to land, walk in among these people. Pay with his own money for shelter, food, warmth. Except that he could not. There would be no shelter for him anywhere along that land—and he turned his boat back on out, below the ravening clouds that had overtaken him.

The rain came first, falling in solid, suffocating sheets and threatening to swamp him at once. He had to rip another small hole along the rail, to let the water run through. But then the wind came up, fooling him, so that it almost pitched him out of the boat before he was able to haul in, then tie his ankle to the mast—tying anything else he could to himself, to the boat, with what rope he had managed to smuggle out of the yard.

He looked back over his shoulder again, though he thought the better of it—and there was the storm. The black clouds spreading over the sky, pinching out the sun. The ocean around him was suddenly quiescent—but there, on the horizon, he could already see the foaming water, the whitecaps racing after him like so many wild horses. There was a low boom, then a sound like a woman's shriek, and the storm was upon him.

He was plunged at once into total darkness. Riding the ocean now only by feel, the lurch and turn of his stomach, as the small boat swept wildly up and down the vast peaks and sloughs of the sea. The wind
blowing out his little sail, and threatening to tear it off, cracking the green pinewood of the mast. But when he leaned over to fold the mast in, a breaker took him instead—tossing him into the sea as casually as he might brush a fly off his cheek.

He floundered in the water, held to the boat only by the rope around his ankle, praying that the mast would hold. A wave smacked him back against the hull, battering his ribs and chest, then yanked him away, twisting the rope until he was sure his ankle would break. The next one smashed him into the boat again and only just failed to knock his brains out, his shoulder banging heavily against the stern.

Feeling his way along the side, he managed to grab hold of the rail by his fingertips, barely heaving himself up over the side before the next wave hit. Still, it smacked him flat on his face, sending him scrambling down the deck. Something cracked hard against his head, and he clung to it, keeping himself on board.
The mast,
he thought, though he could not tell for sure. There were only rough surfaces beneath his hands, and he no longer knew where anything was—where the boat ended, or where the water began—until he cried aloud in his futility, into the ravaging darkness.

Somehow, the boat stayed afloat. He clung to his mast and the rope through the night until at last the storm abated—the ocean becalmed as quickly as it had risen up. It wasn't the hurricane yet, just an advance squall, though when the sun rose, he could see that his boat was listing badly to port and the thin, whiplike mast had been beaten and snapped past any permanent repair. He trussed it up again with rope as best he could—deciding that wherever he was, he had to head back in to the pencil line of land just visible against the northern horizon.

That was when he had spotted the sail, between himself and the shore. It was a sleek brig, sharp as a hatchet blade, fighting its way south. Even as he watched it picked up a small southwesterly breeze and flew by him, not more than a hundred yards away. There were no flags, no pennants, not even a name that he could see. Just two square headsails and a gaff sail aft of the mizzenmast—all of them the same dingy, grey color. Sails so dismal that they would be nearly invisible at night, barely stood out even in the day against the grey fall skies.

A slaver?

He stared straight ahead as the ship passed, trying to seem as disinterested as possible, and after it went by, he did not look around for a long time.
Just some local nigger, out with his marster's boat—

They worked their way up the inland waterways, he knew, once they got up from the Indies and the slave markets in Havana. Trying to dodge the navy—and at the same time seeing what they could find. Prowling for runaways, maybe even snatching up a few dozen slaves from some coast plantation, if their master was not wary enough.

He would be a good catch.

He sneaked a look 'round under his armpit, while pretending to fiddle with the sail some more, hoping to see the grey sails receding on the horizon.

Instead, the brig had tacked about. She was coming directly toward him now, riding on the swift northerly winds. They would catch him within the hour, unless somehow the winds died down.

But the shoreline was receding, giving way on the port side to some broad bay or inlet.
But where?
Was he in the North? Or a slave state still, like Maryland or Delaware?

He would have to risk it, he knew. At least there would be a chance he could get to shore, get himself hidden before they put out a small boat to grab him. He tried to steer in toward the land—but the crude rudder he had fixed up was all but useless, smashed beyond repair during the storm. As long as he clutched the mast in place, he could keep ahead of the slaver for a little while more, but he could not get in toward the shore.

He tried to think what to do, searching for his knife. But it was gone, too, lost in the storm, and he began to curse. Knowing, then, that he had nothing that could make them kill him. That his only course if they caught him would be to leap into the ocean. Swimming down so far and so fast into the depths that there would be no way he could ever recover himself, could ever come up, even if he were weak enough to want to—

Or he could let them take him. Sell him off somewhere, and hope sometime, someplace, he would have the chance to escape again.

Free or not free?

The first grey fin cut through the water, just fifty yards off the port bow. It was just visible above the waterline, as grey and sharp as the slaver's sail, still coming on relentlessly behind him. He flattened himself
instinctively on the deck, as close to the middle of his small boat as he could get, following the fin with his eyes until it submerged as suddenly as it had appeared.

It is just looking, he told himself. But as he watched, another fin broke the water, then a third, and a fourth. He had been afraid of that, he could not remember ever having seen only one shark. Wherever he had sailed, there had always been a brood of them at once, snapping and lunging for anything that went over the side. Fighting each other in their eagerness to rip it apart, scraps of salt pork from the mess, but also whole buckets and glass bottles. Grabbing at anything in their frenzy—

Even now, the first shark he had spotted resurfaced, its open jaws snapping at a small barrel in the water that Billy hadn't noticed before. The barrel disintegrated at once, no more than a few staves left bobbing along the water, the shark submerging again with whatever his prey was.

But in its wake Billy saw that the water was full of debris. Besides the barrel there were smashed crates and lengths of rope, old fruit peels and moldy bits of bread, bones and crab shells. A small flock of gulls circled overhead, diving and picking carefully amid the sharks.
Of course, it was a current—

He hadn't noticed it before, in his preoccupation with staying ahead of the slaver, but there it was—clearly marked by its refuse. A current that excursion boats and steamers, yachts and merchantmen must regularly pick up, and follow into land. That was what the sharks and the gulls were following, looking for whatever they could snatch up from the wake of the boats. It didn't matter that his one poor sail was all but shredded, held together only by his bare hands. All he had to do was follow it in as well, and he could beat the brig to the shore, get in fast and close to the beach, where they would founder if they were not careful.

But how?
His rudder was gone. The current was only a few yards away, not more than a hundred feet, but he had no means to steer to it—

There was one way.
Slowly, reluctantly, forcing his feet and hands to move for him, Billy crawled to the end of the little craft. There he perched along the stern, gazing back at the grey-sailed slaver. It was still coming, already it had closed more than half the gap between them and there was nothing else for it.