soft tear rolled down Mary’s cheek. She gathered herself a moment and then brushed past me. “I swear, Robert, if this is a girl, I will find you, and I am telling you that this man, this Hiram and his high words, they will not save you.”
I felt I should look away. They deserved the moment, for there would not be another in some time. But thinking back on all that I said, thinking back on Virginia, thinking back on Sophia, I could not move.
Robert pulled her close. He kissed her warm and soft. “Not running to no girl, Mary,” he said. “I’m running for a girl, and that girl is you.”
That fight with Robert and Mary set us back some. Without it we could have done the trip across the backwoods, and been to Harriet’s parents’ place well in time for our departure. But now we must take the roads, which was not ideal. Harriet, prophet that she was, had foreseen this—I had the passes. So it was to the roads then. I was trusting to Robert, who now directed us to the home of their mother and father, Ma Rit and Pop Ross. Harriet had kept every portion of the plan in its own box so that should any of us be taken, none—no matter how beaten and whipped—would be able to sketch the full picture.
Robert was quiet for the first portion of the trip, reserving his words solely for directions. I let him be. Whatever my curiosities, the parting had been hard enough and I had no intentions whatever of asking him to relive it. But then it happened as it always does with me. At a certain point, Robert just started talking.
“You know the plan was to leave her, don’t you?” he said.
“Yep. And that’s precisely how it played,” I responded.
“Ain’t what I mean,” Robert said. “Plan was to leave her for good. For me to get on by my lonesome, and find a new life up in the North.”
“And your child?”
“Ain’t no child—not of mine at least. I know that. And she know that.”
We were quiet for a minute.
“Broadus,” I said.
“Broadus son,” Robert said. “Him and Mary bout the same age. Played together as kids. Then was parted, as we all are. I guess he had a thing for her even back then. And now a man, he thought he would make good on those feelings, no matter how fixed and honest Mary was. Maybe she felt the same. She surely ain’t stop him.”
“And how was she to do that?” I asked.
“Man, I don’t know,” Robert said in frustration. “How anybody do anything down here? But I am telling you, I’d be damned if I was gon be raising some white man’s child.”
“So you run then.”
“So I run then.”
“Broadus wasn’t bout to sell you, was he?”
“No, he was. I ain’t know when but he was. For a while I thought that might well be a relief from my position. I did not have any desire to see Natchez, but if it helped me forget Mary, and my humiliation, perhaps it was for the best.”
“A man being sold ain’t never for the best.”
“Yeah, I know,” Robert said. “Harriet and the family got to me, pulled me out of my despair. Told me that some other life might yet await me in the North. They ask about Mary and the baby of course, and I tell Harriet no way I’m going with some other man child. She ain’t like that, ain’t like that much at all, but I tell her either it’s gonna be new life in everything, or I’ll just take my chance with Broadus.
“But when time come to leave, when I really had to face up to what it mean to leave my Mary, I…I don’t know. Best I can say it is I got weak and started thinking maybe some of the old ain’t so bad. And then you come in and make your promise—”
“I’m sorry about that, I thought—”
“Nothing to be sorry about whatever. Fact is, you was saying what I was feeling. I can’t live without Mary. I don’t want no freedom that ain’t about some place with her….It’s just that child, raising some other man’s baby, it grind on a man in a kinda way….”
“Yeah, it do,” I said. And I felt it. I understood. But I also had begun to understand more, for I was thinking not just of myself and my Sophia and not just of