Walk Through Darkness by David Anthony Durham Read Free Book Online Page B

stranger after all, and it felt good to talk to someone after all his time alone. He spoke of his home in Annapolis, of the various chores he worked at, of Kent Island and of St. John Humboldt. He admitted that the scars he wore across his back were fresh wounds, administered by Humboldt just before he ran away.
    “Came out after me in the fields,” he said. “This a couple days after I heard word that my woman had left Annapolis. Humboldt came out and asked why had my work slacked the last few days.”
    “What’d you say?” Oli asked.
    “Told him I didn’t know. Couldn’t recollect. Didn’t know what he was on bout.”
    “Bet that didn’t sit with him.” The small man passed the bottle.
    William took hold of it and lifted it straight to his mouth. He closed his eyes at the sting of the stuff, although already it wasn’t so sharp as it had been at first. He confirmed that his denial had not sat well with Humboldt. “Ain’t nothing I could’ve said would’ve pleased him. He wasn’t looking for no answers. Said healready knew what the problem was. I had myself a case of nigger love. That’s what he said, ‘Nigger love.’”
    “Hit it right on, didn’t he?” Oli asked.
    William cut him with his eyes, a warning but not a firm one. He handed the bottle back to him. Oli asked what happened next, but William shrugged it off. No surprise. The overseer had pushed him to his knees and rained blows of rawhide across his back. “He beat me,” William said. “Whatchu expect him to do?”
    “And he done all that damage? Made you bleed and all?”
    “Well … He ain’t the only one beat on me. I was there on my knees, this big white man above me, tearing my hide, cursing at me, talking bout the slave girls he’d had, bout the things he did to them. It put a rage in me. Not just the beating, but the way he was talking. I put out my hand and grabbed a hold of that whip. I knew just then that he was an evil son-a-bitch, and that I could’ve snatched the whip from his hand. Could’ve turned it on him and beat him down. Could’ve bitten off his nose and spat it back into his face. Could’ve done anything, I was so full of hating him.”
    “You do that?” Oli asked. “Bite him I mean?”
    “Naw. Just held the whip twined round my arm. Just held it ready. Just waited to see what he would do, and to see what I’d do. But he didn’t do nothing. Just had me get up and walk back to the plantation.”
    “He didn’t beat you no more after that?” Oli asked.
    “Naw.”
    “Didn’t? What’d you spook him? Put the fear of nigger in him?”
    “I said
he
didn’t beat me. But he got him this other boy a big slave named John, to beat me. Worked me over good. Near killed me, that beating. But when I woke up I had me a plan, and I done followed it ever since. So these here scars ain’t nothing I’m troubled about. They just the reminder of the day I got the sense beat into me and became my own man.”
    He held up his hand and motioned for the bottle. When he had drunk from it again, he went on to tell of his swim across the Bay, a feat which prompted Oli to call him the swimmingest Negro he had ever heard tell of. He told of his fatigue and of the rain and of the cold. It was easy enough to share these things, but he gave only a few scant details about Dover. When he fell silent and Oli rambled on, William recalled her face and the parts of her body he knew so well. It was unbelievable that he had once held her beside him and spoken to her of the casual events of life, that he had run his fingers over her features and placed his lips against her skin. It seemed stranger still that she had invested him with some similar affection, that she had touched him and whispered in his ear and invoked him to do things to her in lovemaking that he wouldn’t have conceived of otherwise. He tried to find solace in these moments, but he only grew more uncomfortable. Perhaps things had never been as he imagined. With the