have. Starts when you young, with but the barest sense of the world, but mayhaps even then, you got some sense that it is wrong. I know I did.”
What happened then was a kind of communion, a chain of memory extending between the two of us that carried more than any words I can now offer you here, because the chain was ground into some deep and locked-away place, where my aunt Emma lived, where my mother lived, where a great power lived, and the chain extended into that selfsame place in Harriet, where all those lost ones had taken up their vigil. And then I looked out and saw them, phantoms flittering, flittering like that baleful day out on the river Goose, and I knew exactly what the phantoms were and what they meant to Harriet.
So when I saw the boy off to the side of us, out in the mist, wrapped in spectral green, no older than twelve, I knew that his name was Abe, and I knew that he was among those gone Natchez-way, sent across “the river with no name.” And now I could hear Harriet’s voice again, in that deep place where the chain was anchored and rooted.
“You were not acquainted with this Abe,” she said. “But by the light of this Conduction, you shall know him right well. I regret that he will not be joining us on the way back. It is regrets of Abe that sent me to the Underground.”
Now the light of Harriet opened with some brightness, and I saw a path before us, across the water that was not water. There was no dock in the distance, but in and out of the darkness I saw the phantoms of Harriet’s memory—dancing about, as they would have been in that time when they were known to her. And as we approached and passed each one, the phantoms fell away.
“You know me well, friend,” she said. “I was made under the lash. I was only seven when Master Broadus sent me trapping varmints in the swamps. I might like to lose a limb out there. But I come back whole—out the cage, not the jungle. When I was nine, they call me up to the Big House and I was given the entirety of the parlor’s care. My errors were many. My mistress beat me, every day, with a rope. I began to think that this was God’s plan. That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.
“Now, for all my humiliations, the fact of it is that there was some corners of hell to which I, thankfully, received no invitation. I speak now of the crossing of the nameless, of the long walk to Natchez, the mournful march to Baton Rouge. I saw it all, friend. Why, my uncle Hark lost half an arm just thinking of the nameless, just watching them white men watch him a little too closely. So one morning he got up, and thinking how hard it’d be to sell a cripple, raised his axe with one hand, and gave the other hand over to the Lord. ‘I might be lame,’ Hark say. ‘But I shall not be parted.’
“Hark was uncommon. Most just took the walk, leaving in their wake wailing wives, broken husbands, and orphans. And then there was our boy Abe—whose wide wondrous face I see before me right now, easy as I did in that other life—a well-mannered boy who done only as he was told. His momma died in the birthing, and his daddy was long sold away. Whatever pains he felt over these partings, he never shared. He spoke only as a child should—when induced by elder folk—and these elders, knowing his pain, however hidden, were soft upon him.
“But for those who were hard, for those who worshipped the seven and nine, Abe was a caution. I tell you, friend, that boy could not be held. Would have made a hell of an agent, for he ran like he had the lungs of a lion. The moment Master Broadus even thought of correction, the boy would fly.
“Sometimes the headman would call us up to help hold him. We might make some motion as such, but in our hearts we were with Abe. You know what it is—the Tasked must take they victories as they come. And if you saw Abe, as we did, blazing through the wheat field,