Song Yet Sung (3 page)

—Put me down, the old woman said. Put me down, Linus. I can't go no more.

The giant Negro laid the old woman on the bank of the creek, turned around, gave Liz a long, angry look, then took off after the others, his huge frame slowly sloshing across the creek.

Liz approached the old woman who lay on the bank. In the daylight her face looked grey and streaked. Her eyes had bolts of red across each pupil.

—Good-bye, then, miss. I don't even know your name, Liz said.

—I got no name, the woman said. Whatever name was gived me was not mine. Whatever I knowed about is what I been told. All the truths I been told is lies, and the lies is truths.

—What's that mean? Liz asked.

The woman smiled grimly.

—I told you you was two-headed, she said.

Liz glanced at the others, whose backs were disappearing into the woods across the creek.

—Remember the code, the woman said. The coach wrench turns the wagon wheel. The turkey buzzard flies a short distance. And he's hidden in plain sight. The blacksmith is handling marriage these days. Don't forget the double wedding rings and the five points. And it ain't the song, it's the singer of it. It's got to be sung twice, y'know, the song. That's the song yet sung.

—I can't remember it all, Liz said.

—Keep dreaming, two-headed girl. There's a tomorrow in it. Tell 'em the woman with no name sent you.

—Tell who?

—G'wan, she said. Git.

—What you gonna do?

The old woman smiled grimly again.

—I'm gonna wait till y'all run off, she said. Then I'm gonna climb down this bank on my own time and lie in that water till my name comes to me. One way or the other, she said, I ain't coming this way again.

T
here were fourteen slaves, including five children, who walked out of Patty Cannon's attic the March morning that Liz had the dream that caused her escape. Six were caught within days, two of them died, including a child, but four made it to the clear, and those four spread the word through Dorchester County and its surrounding counties like wildfire: there was a two-headed woman, a dreamer, a magic conjurer, who killed Patty Cannon's Little George, busted fourteen colored loose, and commanded the giant Linus to her bidding. Just calling Big Linus to her side alone was a feat of magic, the slaves recounted, for he was an evil, clouded devil. Even his master was afraid of him.

So the story went, over those next ten days, from cabin to cabin, plantation to plantation, farm to farm, driver to driver, horseman to horseman: Patty Cannon of Caroline County, the trader of souls, who was so devilish that she and her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, built their tavern on the borderline of three different counties, two in the state of Maryland and one in Delaware; that way, when authorities came to arrest them, they simply stepped into another room and authorities were out of their jurisdiction—got outdone by a colored woman. For the slaves of Maryland's eastern shore, a peninsula lying between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean connected by a labyrinth of creeks and rivers, this glorious news spread from lips to lips like a wild virus, growing by leaps and bounds as it went. Jokes were formed. Poems created. Songs were sung. Entire escape scenes reenacted, copy-cat plots formed. The laugh rang from cabin to cabin, and also the silent wish, muttered beneath their breaths in the timber forests and oyster boats where they worked and sweated in the hot marsh, that the colored woman, the Dreamer, had boasted that she would lead Patty Cannon, who struck fear into the hearts of white men from Crisfield to Kansas, out to the Blackwater Swamp where the Woolman lived. Only the Woolman, they muttered to themselves, could do what the Dreamer could not. Only the Woolman, an escaped slave, never seen but rumored to live in Sinking Swamp past the old Indian burial ground out near Cook's Point, with his wild children who ate each other for breakfast and led an alligator named Gar around on a chain, only the Woolman could take that witch to the boneyard.

Patty Cannon herself heard all this four days after the escape, while sitting in her tavern in nearby Caroline County, Maryland, on the border of Seaford, Delaware, surrounded by her men and her son-in-law, Joe Johnson, a short man with a long scar from one side of his neck to the other. She was a handsome woman, tall and limber, whose broad shoulders, shapely round hips, and firm forearms were nattily fitted into a large dress on which she wore a pistol holstered to one hip and a hunting knife to the other. She listened in irritated silence as her only remaining legal slave, Eb Willard, a Negro boy of twelve, recounted it to her.

She listened silently, intently, fingering a glass of beer, while her crew, all young men, sat around the table watching her, waiting for her reaction. There were five of them altogether: Joe, Eb, Odgin Harris, Hodge Wenner, and Stanton Davis, whose last name she wasn't sure of. Stanton had used several, and she did not trust him. He was dark, swarthy, and looked, she instinctively felt, like he might have some Negro blood in him. That made him untrustworthy. She did not mind Negroes in her crew—in fact she preferred them for several reasons—but she liked full-blooded Negroes. Mulattoes, she felt, were deadly. She had nearly gotten smoked by one who'd served her in the past. She'd caught him red-handed stealing and he'd pulled out his heater, put it to her neck, and dropped the hammer on it, but it misfired. She beat him cockeyed and drowned him. The others, she felt, passed muster. She especially liked Odgin. He was young and hungry. Odgin listened to Eb's recounting with intensity. The young man understood the implications of it all. They had all, he knew, lost a great deal of money.

—Ought we to ride out to Cambridge City now? Odgin asked. That's where they're likely to be.

—No, we wait, Patty said. It's already done now.

Fourteen years of working in the business known as the Trade, roaming the marshy creeks, dark shores, and no-man's-land of Dorchester, Sussex, Talbot, and Caroline counties for the colored souls foolish enough to steal off for freedom, had taught her the value of patience, discretion, and a kind of political diplomacy. She had rid the area of its most vile subject, slave stealers, in the most imaginative way. She had taken their trade from them. No slaves were stolen in Dorchester, Sussex, Talbot, and Caroline counties simply because Patty owned the market. No slaves were freed by hated abolitionists or swiped from good, God-fearing landowners because, quite simply, if there was any stealing to be done, Patty Cannon was going to do it. Anyone who dared intrude on her territory or stalk her stomping grounds simply disappeared, because Patty Cannon would not allow it. Those slave owners with troubling Negroes simply made deals with her and the problem was quietly fixed. It made for strange bedfellows: a silent, complicit minority of landowners and a frightened majority of whites who did not own slaves and had no say in the matter. It was delicate business. Much of it depended on her ability to conduct business discreetly. A breakout from her tavern was not quiet business. The delicate, fragile line of unspoken rules that existed in a world of human ownership and the neighbors' knowledge of it, much of which depended on silence and discretion, had just exploded in her face. That, more than anything else, needed repairing.

And there was another problem.

Maryland's eastern shore was shrouded in myth and superstition. It was a rough, rugged peninsula, 136 miles long and 55 miles wide at the shoulder, shaped roughly like a bunch of grapes, veined with water throughout, filled with hundreds of thick swamps and marshlands, which at night seemed more dreadful than the retreats of the ancient Druids. It was rough, untamed land, populated by watermen, a breed of white pioneer whose toughness and grit made the most grizzled Western cowboys seem like choirboys by comparison. Farmers by summer, fishermen in winter, watermen were unpredictable, pious, gritty, superstitious, and fiercely independent. Descendants of indentured servants, stuck between servitude to powerful landowners and the mighty Chesapeake Bay, which often claimed their lives, they were beholden to no one. They did not like slaves. They did not like slave owners. And lately Patty had been hearing of a popular Methodist minister traveling around Dorchester County by boat, raising questions about the Godliness of slavery, infecting watermen with his ideas. Watermen were cowed by only two things, weather and God, and when they got on their hind legs about something, they were no small problem to contend with. Slaves, politicians, sheriffs come and go, she knew. But angry watermen could spell trouble, bringing in the authorities. Not the local ones—the sheriffs and constables she owned through fear and graft—but the big boys, the military boys, from Washington, the ones who could not be bought, who had long boats, big guns, and were foolish enough, even, to take on the watermen.

She turned to Eb.

—Where did you hear this, Eb?

—The regular places, the boy said. Bucktown. Cambridge. Old lady down at East New Market told me 'bout Big Linus. She seen him watering himself down at Muskrat Creek near New Market. Said he was the biggest nigger she ever seen. How come you never showed him to me?

Patty sat back and sipped her beer. She set the glass down slowly and spoke to the Negro boy calmly.

—What we gonna do about it, Eb?

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched the faces of her four men as she plowed the mind of her one remaining slave, the only key to redeeming the lost damage. Long experience running slaves taught Patty Cannon the true secret of success. Know your prey from within. She actually liked the colored. She trusted them more than she did the white man. They were predictable. They gravitated towards kindness. She could tell when they thought or did wrong, could read it in their faces. They were like dogs, loyal, easy to train, unless of course they learned to read, which made them useless. Patty herself saw no value in books. She only enjoyed reading the faces of men, particularly slave men, who were the most interesting read of them all. The ones whom she employed were selectively chosen, well built, finely sculpted, beautiful to look at, and able, loyal servants. They saw it as their duty to tend to her wants. She had no fear of touching them, even wrestled them from time to time, offering food, shelter, camaraderie, an occasional warm caress, and the sense of home. Her colored boys had never let her down. They were crude, distasteful at times, but they were honest, protective, and, when necessary, savage on her behalf.

She waited for the colored boy's response to her question, keeping an eye on the faces of the three men at the table. All but Stanton's were blank. His bore a hint of disgust that slipped across his eyes and disappeared behind a glum purse of the lips. Her instinct on Stanton, she decided, had been correct. He bore watching. Eb, watching her, blinked in confusion.

—'Bout you showing me Big Linus, you mean?

—No. About all them people who got out.

—Why, I wouldn't do nothing, Miss Patty, the boy said. I would wait it out. Big Linus won't be hard to catch. Every nigger for a hundred miles is scared of him. He got no horse and he got to eat, big as he is. The other ones, well, we just round 'em up. The ones that's caught by other white folks round here, they'll be returned to their masters. And the rest, why, seems to me there's three or four who'll turn up not too far off, since they got young'ns. Ain't no one gonna run too far west towards Sinking Creek with Woolman and his gator Gar out there.

—You think Woolman is real?

—Well, I heard tell of him plenty, Eb said.

—Have you ever seen him?

—Naw, Miss Patty.

—I been running these marshes for fourteen years, Patty said. I never seen him. Nor have I ever seen no alligator down at Sinking Creek, Sinking Swamp, or Cook's Point.

—So Woolman ain't real, then, the boy concluded.

—Let's hope he is, Patty said. We could get a good price for him.

The men sitting around the table laughed, except, she noted silently, for Stanton. He had not reacted at all since this news broke. He hadn't laughed, or joked, or showed any outward sign of distress at all, which on its face was nothing suspicious. They had, after all, lost a lot of money. At the moment, as far as they could tell, their investment—in fourteen slaves they had spent considerable time, money, and risk gathering for sale to the south—was wandering around the eastern shore, spreading bad news about her and, by extension, them. Of the four, only Hodge Wenner and her partner and son-in-law, Joe, were loyal enough to hold off without pay until she could recoup her losses. The other two, Stanton and Odgin, she decided, were ambivalent. That was deadly for her—and for them. Odgin, she knew, was ambivalent about everything: his wife in Kansas, his second wife in Delaware, his four kids scattered about. But Odgin, when under the gun, was a steady hand. He could shoot and ride, and he enjoyed slave hunting. He would hang on, she decided. Stanton, on the other hand, would probably not stick without being paid. He was the newest. He'd come recommended by a fellow slave runner named Primus Higgins up near Hooper's Island. Stanton was a waterman, the only one among them who could put a bungy—a hollowed-out canoe, often equipped with mast and sail—out on the rugged Chesapeake and not get them drowned, which on its face was enough not to kill him or dump him immediately, because she figured some of her escaped goods would most certainly take to the water, and her last waterman had given up the ghost four months before. The Chesapeake was treacherous business this time of spring; everyone on the eastern shore knew it. Late winter freezes and spring gales could push a bungy into rocks, sweep it out to sea, or simply dash it to bits. The bay, like the watermen who lived on it, was beautifully unforgiving and cruel, and like most eastern shore folks, she was wary of it. She decided to pay Stanton out of her pocket until this job was done, then jettison him later.

She patted Eb's head.

—Don't you worry about old Woolman and Gar, she said. We'll run 'em all down. And you'll ride with us this time. You about ready. Your own horse, pistol, everything.

Eb's face lit up.

—That's righteous, Miss Patty, he said.

—Go round up our horses, then.

The boy gazed at her with true gratitude, stepped back, kicked his heels in the air, and ran off.

She watched him go. Now that Little George was gone, he was her favorite. She had raised him from infancy, just as she had done Little George. She'd been training Eb to replace Little George for quite some time, though she hadn't the intention of putting him to work this early, largely because of his age. But his time had come. Little George had gotten too big for his britches anyway. Sex had destroyed Little George, Patty believed. She hadn't minded him impregnating the captured women—it made them more valuable—but he'd gotten obsessed with them, bringing them gifts, ravaging some until they were sick and useless. He had gotten off the track with that last one, blasting her in the head, then nursing her back to health. How stupid she was! She should have let her die and buried her behind the tavern, where several other formerly useless Negroes lay, gathering worms. But Little George had argued that beneath the blood and guts, there was a valuable, pretty colored face. Patty had let her greed win the day, and now she was sorry. The high-mannered wench had turned tables on him and cost her thousands. She was worth a lot of money, that last one. Patty had to bite her lip to keep the rage off her face when she thought of her. Liz was her name. The two-headed nigger.