Then it was time. The plantation was asleep, and all lights in the Quarters and the big house were extinguished. Yet through the hours, Rabbit clung to her mother, and Eliza Two had shaken off her poppy fog. Both twins were weeping. Aggie hissed, hush that fuss now. They had to go. Aggie’s resolve was crumbling, but she knew if her son remained, Nick would kill Master, and then he would be killed in turn. And Eliza Two might be sold down the river to New Orleans for even more abuse.
Aggie could not bear such losses. She turned to Rabbit, telling her, go with Nick. Yet Rabbit said, if Eliza Two and Tess would not leave, then neither would she.
And so, that night, only a young father would leave the plantation. And Aggie would be forced to make a terrible decision.
The Power in the Field
Since Nick was a little boy, he had added stones to the grave site he’d made for his father. Even after he was old enough to understand that Midas had not died, rather he had been sold away, Nick would carry a handful of stones to the place he had chosen in the slave cemetery. In time, he made a pattern with these stones, a symbol of his loss.
The night that Nick escaped Wood Place, he crept to the cemetery and chose a stone. He placed it in his pocket. Then he began to walk the road that passed the big house, the left cabin, and further on, past the general store. At that point, the road narrowed to a path. After some distance, he saw the mound rising, and the ramshackle cabin where Carson Franklin lived with his family in its shadow.
Then someone called Nick’s name. He turned, and there was Pop George, saying he’d come to lead him awhile. He’d lived on the plantation for so long, he knew the place pretty good. Pop George’s back had straightened, and in the dark, he looked to be a much younger man. His hand was strong and sure as he touched Nick’s shoulder. When they passed closer to the Franklins’ cabin, Nick tensed, for someone was sitting on the porch of the cabin, smoking. The ember was flickering red. Pop George touched Nick again, and whispered, stop. As they waited, the figure on the porch walked down the steps. Closer, until Nick could see the cigar that he took from his mouth, and that the figure was a man, but no taller than Nick’s twin girls. He bowed to Pop George, who told Nick he would leave him here.
We don’t lose track of Nick at this point when he leaves our land, but this is where we will finish telling his story. There were others in the south who escaped from slavery, who wrote the tale of their triumph in books commissioned by their abolitionist friends. They would recount the fear of cramming into boxes, enfolded by their excrement, as in the instance of Mr. Henry “Box” Brown. Riding in trains, passing for the white owners of slaves, if they were light enough, as the fair-skinned Mrs. Ellen Craft did, accompanied by her much darker husband, William. Running through the woods, the North Star above and moss and grass and leaves, tiny apertures of the journey stuck in their hair. We won’t tell you whether Nick lived or died, or whether he learned to read, or if he knew about Mr. Frederick Douglass, a former slave who found power in a root, the magic dug up from dirt.
Back then, Mr. Douglass’s name was Fred, and that root allowed him to resist. There were such battles in the Bible, where a root was not solid, but made of Spirit, given by an old man who had learned of it in his dreams. Or in the stories told by a mother, when a prophet flung his stone at a monster’s forehead and the monster fell. And the Word was changed. And the Word was knowledge. And the knowledge was a sound within the flesh, which may have been the Good Lord, or may have been dead ones in Africa talking across an ocean, or our people here on this side. Yet we know that in one of those tales, a man did rise tall in the field. And that man was renamed Mr. Frederick Douglass.
IX
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”
Which Negroes Do You Know?
I’d moved to the right side of a duplex, a place I’d rented sight-unseen in Acorn, North Carolina, when I decided to enroll in graduate school. The place was in the historic district of my university town, on a street of cozy, cute houses that approached shabby. My duplex was large, with tall ceilings, but with none of the bed-and-breakfast flavor I’d expected from the university mail-out I’d received before moving to town.