He just had to find it.
The thing was, Mr. Coulton, in his bright yellow waistcoats, and his auburn whiskers, wasn’t like any white man Charlie had known. It made him think of that benefactor from his mother’s stories, all those years ago, that white man who’d helped his grandparents leave Jamaica. And when Mr. Coulton looked at Charlie all that long ocean crossing, in the lavish lower first-class cabin of the SS Servia, a steamship of dazzling brass fixtures and electric lights in the saloon and a hull that carved through the gray swells like a blade, the man really looked, not with disgust or anything, not in anger, not like he was looking for a rat to pulp. He just looked at Charlie like he’d look at anyone, at any person, that is, same as he looked at the ancient steward who delivered their hot towels each evening, or the red-faced boy who brought their ironed laundry, and Charlie, who all his life had learned to drop his eyes at the sight of a white man, and tremble, and wait for the lash, just plain didn’t know what to do with it.
They disembarked in Liverpool on a drizzling morning and Mr. Coulton took his own travel case in hand and they walked side by side up the hill through the rain to the railway station, water running into their collars, seeping into their shoes, impossibly cold, nothing at all like rain in the Delta or the sweeping river rains he’d always known, and no one looked at them askance, not even the police constable swinging his stick in the drizzle. And Mr. Coulton, with his whiskers and big raw-looking hands and bruised bowler hat, purchased two tickets heading south, for St Pancras Station, London.
As the railway carriage rattled and shunted and gathered speed and the rain flecked the windows, Coulton drew the compartment slider shut with a click and sat opposite, and swept off his hat and ran a hand over his balding head. Smoothed out the few hairs he had. Sighed.
All his life, Charlie had lived in dirt hovels in Mississippi, in crowded communal rooms, in the field rows themselves in high summer. He got clean in cool rivers on Sundays, before trudging the long six miles through dust to church. He’d owned only a single pair of shoes in all his years, and those shoes had gone from being too big to too small to being nothing at all.
White folk, it wasn’t just that they were rich, or talked however they wanted, or went wherever they wished to go. It wasn’t just their geldings and coaches and liveried servants. It was more than that. They walked through the world as if it was a place that didn’t have to be the way it was, as if it could change, the way a person could change. That was the difference, he’d always thought. He had to remind himself sometimes that his father must have been like that, too. And this man, this Mr. Coulton, who’d purchased Charlie a new set of clothes in New Orleans and paid for his meals and who talked to him calmly, quietly, asking nothing of him, this Mr. Coulton was no different in that respect. He just didn’t understand how everything he had could be taken from him, quick as lightning. How his life wasn’t worth a penny, once it was gone. He, too, was an innocent, when it came right down to it. Like any of them.
* * *
They’d been at sea for weeks; the train carrying them south toward London took a matter of hours. Yet the journey felt just as long. Everywhere Charlie looked he saw strangeness: deep green fields, stands of weird-looking trees, fence lines and sheep on distant hills like in a painting he’d seen once, stumbling into the courthouse in Natchez, right before his trial. Even stranger: everyone on the train platform, or shoving past in the narrow train corridor, was white, but they didn’t flinch from him, like happened back home. They just nodded, tipped their hats, went on past.
For the first hour Coulton sat with his eyes shut, his shoulders and yellow waistcoat jiggering at the rattling of the train. He wasn’t sleeping; Charlie could tell. They roared through tunnels—long clattering darknesses—then up out of the cuts, into gray daylight.
“Mr. Coulton, sir,” said Charlie at last. “Did anyone ever leave Cairndale? I mean, went away and was never heard from again?”
“Cairndale ain’t a prison, lad. You can leave it if you want.”
Charlie wet his lips, wary. “No, I mean … do you know of anyone who ever did?”
Coulton cracked one heavy eyelid, squinting in the light. “I never knew of a talent what wanted to leave it, once they got there,” he said. “But folk are free to go, if they choose. England isn’t much like your own country. You’ll see.”
Charlie watched him.
“London’s a right stew of folk. I seen every kind there. Oh, I don’t mean just the Cathays and the Moors and the like. I mean card sharps and cutthroats and pickpockets what’ll take a piece off you without your even feeling it. Aye. Heart of the bloody world, it is. And every bloody one of them is free to come and go as they please.”