What’d I do to deserve this mess, anyhow? Stuck here hiding in some wagon camp, dead of night, man chasing after me, wants to shoot me and dump me in the river?
Nothing. That’s what. Just like the old days. Young Missy starts her mean ideas to rolling downhill, sits back and waits for somebody to get smushed. Then she stands with her fat little hands behind her back, rocking on them round little feet, proud that she’s got away with it.
Not this time. Missy Lavinia can find her own way out of trouble.
I’m bound to get myself to the edge of town while it’s still dark, seek a place off the road to hunker down till first light. Can’t start for home till then. Colored folk traveling alone, there’s still plenty of riders working the night roads, same as the patrollers did back in the old times, keep our kind from going place to place, unless they’re doing business for white folk.
Peeking from the tarps, I look over the wagon camp to figure my best way out. Closer toward the landing, a flash of a man in a white shirt catches my eye. I pull back, in case he’s looking at me. Then I see it ain’t a man, just a set of clothes that’s been hung up in a tree branch to dry out overnight. The little cook fire underneath sputters down to coals. A wagon curtain is stretched across and tied to the branch, a net slung over it to keep off the mosquitos.
A big pair of feet pushes up against the net, flopped out sidewards.
The first part of my plan comes clear. I slip from my hiding spot, step soundless on the ground, and move through the patches of shadow and moon to that camp.
I take the hat that dangles there, change it for the one on my head, and try not to think about if it’s thieving when you take somebody’s hat but leave your own in trade for it. In case Moses, or the scarred man, or his workers are still hunting me, I’ll look different when I get on the road tomorrow.
My fingers fly up and down my shirt, undoing the bone buttons. I slip it off and reach for the stranger’s white one before the mosquitos have time to get after me. The collar hangs up when I tug, and even though I’m tall, I have to jump to get it loose without tearing. The branch snaps back and pulls at the man’s camp shelter, and he tosses on his pallet, snorts and coughs.
I stay still as the dead, waiting for him to settle, before I throw my old shirt on the branch and run off half-naked, carrying his. I hunker down in a stubble field just off from the camps to get dressed. A dog barks in the woods, and then another with it. Then a third. They sing the long, wavering song of a hunt. I hark to the days when the overseers and the patrollers rode the night with their tracking hounds, chasing after the runners that tried to hide in the swamps or head north. Sometimes, the runaways got caught quick. Sometimes, they’d stay out there for months. A few never came back, and we hoped they’d made their way to the free states we’d all heard of.
Mostly, the runners got hungry, or sick with fever, or lonesome for their people, and they wandered home on their own. What happened then depended on their marse or missus. But if a runner got caught in the field, the patrollers would let their dogs chew flesh from bone before dragging whatever was left back to the home plantation. Then everybody, the field hands and the house girls and all the little children on that place, would be stood out to see the poor, tore-up soul and watch the lashing that was to come.
Old Gossett never kept a runner. Always said if a slave wasn’t grateful to be fed good and not worked on Sunday except during sugar season, and kept in clothes and shoes, and not sold off from their family, he wasn’t worth having. Nearly all of the Gossett help had been raised on the place, but the slaves