TransAtlantic by Colum McCann Read Free Book Online Page B

moment, opened the curtains to the still dark. No sounds at all. On the street, a lone man in rags hurried along, hunched into the wind. He thought then that he had found the word for Dublin: a
huddled
city. He, too, had spent so many years, huddled into himself.
    He pondered the possibility of his own living room: Harriet reading the letter aloud, Anna in cotton dress and red head wrap, her hands folded in her lap, his children at the edge of her chair, poised, eager, confused.
I send you my unceasing love, Frederick
.
    He tightened the curtains, got back into bed, stretched his feet out over the end of the mattress. His toes extended beyond the bed. It was something humorous, he thought, to include in his next letter.
    ON A TABLE , in neat piles, was the Irish edition of his book. Brand-new. Webb stood behind him, shadowed, hands folded behind hisback. He watched Douglass intently as he flicked through and inhaled the scent of the book. Douglass paused at the engraving at the front, ran his finger over his likeness. Webb, he thought, had endeavored to make him look straight-nosed, aquiline, clear-jawed. They wanted to remove the Negro from him. But perhaps it was not Webb’s fault. An artist’s error maybe. Some fault of the imagination.
    He closed the book. Nodded. Turned to Webb, smiled. He ran his fingers once more along the spine. He did not say a word. So much was expected of him. Every turn. Every gesture.
    He paused, took a fountain pen from his pocket, let it hover a moment and signed the first book.
For Richard Webb, In friendship and respect, Frederick Douglass
.
    A measure of humility lay in one’s signature: it was important not to flourish the pen.
    I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the large part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant
.
    AT THE BOTTOM of his traveling trunk he kept two iron barbells. Made for him by a blacksmith in New Hampshire: an abolitionist, a friend, a white man. Each of the barbells weighed twelve and a half pounds. The blacksmith told him that he had melted them from slave chains that had once been used in the auction houses where men, women, and children were sold. The blacksmith had gone around and bought all the chains, melted them, made artifacts from them. In order, he said, not to forget.
    Douglass kept the barbells a secret. Only Anna knew. She had lowered her eyes to the floor when she had first seen them, but she soon grew used to them: first thing every morning, last thing at night. There was a part of him that still missed the days of carpentry and caulking: fatigue, desire, hunger.
    He turned the key in the bedroom door, pulled the curtains across, locked out the light of the Dublin gas lamps. He lit a candle, stood in his shirtsleeves.
    He lifted the barbells one after another—first from the floor and then high in the air—until sweat dripped down onto the wood. He positioned himself to watch himself in the oval looking glass. He would not become soft. It was exhaustion he wanted—it helped him write. He needed each of his words to appreciate the weight they bore. He felt like he was lifting them and then letting them drop to the end of his fingers, dragging his muscle to work, carving his mind open with idea.
    He was in the fever of work. He wanted them to know what it might mean to be branded: for another man’s initials to be burned into your skin; to be yoked about the neck; to wear an iron bit at the mouth; to cross the water in a fever ship; to wake in another man’s field; to hear the jangle of the marketplace; to feel the lash of the cowhide; to have your ears cropped; to accept, to bend, to disappear.
    It was his work to capture that through the nib of his pen. His