“Solomon jus’ like to listen, Miz Lily, ma’am. I’se accustomed ta jus’ listenin’. A body get used to it, he do.” She thought she caught the hint of jest in his eye.
“But how am I to know a person if they don’t tell about themselves,” Lily said.
“Nothin’ ta tell. My life ahead of me, missy. Got nothin’ behind me ’tall.”
“But you were born. You had a mama and a papa. You lived somewheres.”
“Had no papa, no ma’am; had me a wonderful mama, but no papa ever come round us.”
“Why’d your mama give you a funny name like Solomon?” she said.
“T’ain’t funny,” he said. “Come right from da Bible. Doan yo’all know da Lord’s Book in dese parts? What kinda place I come to?”
“What kind of place did you come from?”
“Hertford County, North Carolina, nigh Murfreesboro,” he said as if responding to an interrogator. “Work fer Mastah Cartwright. In da fields. I’se his slave, all da time.”
Lily ached to know more, but prod as she would, she could get nothing further out of him. Indeed his original suspicion poured back into his face and demeanour as soon as she switched from telling to questioning.
Later that day, after a shared but quiet supper, Lily reached over to pick up the plate and mug. Solomon’s left hand lay on the stool beside them. Lily let the petal of her right hand whisper to the ebony of his. Solomon jerked his entire body back as if he’d been lashed. The plate and cup clattered on the platform.
When Lily recovered from her surprise, she said “Are you hurtin’ there, Solomon?”
Solomon could not reply. He was trembling head to toe, a cottontail before the weasel struck blood.
“I’ll let you be,” Lily said.
As she turned the key in the lock, she heard him squeeze into his ground-hole.
On the third morning he took his breakfast only after Lily had retreated. But at noon with the bright midsummer sun lancing into the upper cell, she found him seated in Papa’s chair. She stood watch as he went into the woods to relieve himself. On the way back he scuttled like a crab across the twenty feet of open space, not knowing whether to look ahead or behind or everywhere at once. Lily wanted to leave the cellar door ajar to catch as much light as possible, but she closed it as soon as he squeezed past her. He sat down – embarrassed, ashamed, seething with irresolvable passions. Sweat sizzled on his brow until he got his desperate breathing under control. Lily did not leave. Nor did Solomon retreat to his burrow.
They ate together. The tea was cold but refreshing in the heat. When the black man lifted the mug to his lips and tossed his head back, he seemed to drown the room with his presence, his substance and shadow. In contrast, Lily’s porcelain arms seemed to float free from their trim body like swan’s wings. Lily’s hair was for a moment indistinguishable from the sun’s rays.
“Where’s your wife?” Lily heard herself say.
Solomon looked up in disbelief. Terror and wonder passed simultaneously over his face. Lily could see plainly that he wanted to tell her the story of his wife and their grief, that he was overwhelmed with the need of someone to confide in and share the full horror of his ordeal. But he did not. Tears washed out of his doe’s eyes, yet nothing could erase the anguish harboured behind them. There was no need to tell. Lily looked straight through Solomon’s pain and saw in a single moment, the entire narrative of his travail. Whether she fell into a trance and dreamed it whole, or whether Solomon himself entered that dream to reveal his story, she never knew. She only knew what she saw, and would never forget.
She saw the master, that worthy of Hertford County who gloried in his notoriety as a ‘nigger-breaker’, challenged by the very presence of a young man named Solomon whose stamina and courage were a threat to God’s ordained order. She saw Solomon stripped and lashed a hundred times, roped to stanchions like a steer, his skin flayed to make him cry out his submission. When the master could not break the black man’s spirit, he had him measured by the smith for fetters that tore open his flesh till scars multiplied over scars. Out of desperation, longing for some kind of ending, Solomon fled into the woods, dragging his chains with him, only to be tracked by hounds and returned to his master, who, counting his losses, sent him off to the auction block. Solomon landed in Memphis, Tennessee, where he suffered two years of ordinary slavery: no beatings, no starvation, just dawn-to-dusk labour, nights of unrelieved muscle-ache, and the absence of hope.
Lily felt the momentary joy of union when Solomon gathered Mary to him and together they struggled to keep their love private and aimed, somehow, towards a better day. Then one morning in March he was hauled away without warning to the slave-pen in mid-town to be groomed again for auction. Filled with a rage beyond even his own imagining, he battered his way to an escape, returned for Mary, and together they ran. Lily saw then the six-week trek to the North, a hundred and thirty miles through swamp and bush, Mary having to be carried much of the way, food running out, the bounty hunters alerted. With spring dawning on the Ohio, they crossed into Cairo and were found dazed and despairing in a field by a white man who said, ‘Come with me.’ And so they were fed, rested, and pointed to the next village up the line, the string of safe houses that would eventually end in a sanctuary known as Canada.
Between each town, though, lay the bush of southern Ohio and Illinois, and when the night skies clouded over, North was elusive. They staggered off-course, slept by day in caves or hollow logs, spent nights guessing where the safe house could be found. Many times they were too terrified to knock on the first door, too starved to head back into the bush, till at last Solomon would walk up to the kindest-looking white gentleman he could find and say, ‘I’se lookin’ fer mas’ so-and-so livin’ on such-and-such street,’ and wait, heart hammering for the response that spelled life or death. ‘You a runaway? Come with me.’
Until that day in Centralia when they collapsed at the doorstep of their safe house. To find two children there who seemed kind and well accustomed to such occurrences, giving them food and salves for their scrapes and bites and telling them to rest until their father returned. Lily shuddered as she saw the boy slip out of the house, the reward notice in his hand. Mary’s screams woke Solomon but by the time he got to the window, Mary was already being carried by a posse of bounty-men towards the railroad station where she was bound and slung aboard a south-bound train like a piece of stray baggage. Solomon, out of instinct, was into the bush in a minute, lost his pursuers easily and eventually made his way to Chicago where he once again he had to put his trust in strangers. They were good to him there, consoling, holding out the bitter promise of freedom only two or three days away. It was decided to send Solomon by the lesser-used northern route, by rail through Schoolcraft, Lansing, almost to Port Huron where he was smuggled off, numb and submissive, and led through the forest to a secret point on the St. Clair River. Once delivered to the far shore, he bolted straight into the bush, beyond hope or memory or self-preservation, and gave himself up to the dark at the heart of the world.
As Lily was leaving, she snapped the lock shut but did not loop it through the hasp on the door-frame. How could she imprison him again?
Lily was half-way across the dooryard towards the road before she stopped to stare at the pedlar. It was not Lame Peter, from the north, as she expected.
“Afternoon!” he called jauntily, tying the donkey’s halter-rope to a nearby birch and ambling towards her.
Lily waited, uncertain. He was a wiry man, all legs and arms with a long neck and a tiny bobbing head that made him look a bit like a tom-turkey combing gravel for tidbits. His blue trousers, scarlet shirt and smudged yellow bandana shone in the hot, high sun. A cherry-wood valise dangled from two fingers of his right hand. When he saw that Lily was not about to move, he stopped a few feet away and set the case down.
“A mighty fine July afternoon it is, young lady.”
Lily waited, feeling she should say something customary.