A fatter white man cleared his throat, and Jo watched the jiggle of his neck as he spoke. “We’ve been hearing about a new law being drafted by the South and the Free-Soilers, and if it was to pass, law enforcement would be required to arrest any alleged runaway slave in the North and send them back south, no matter how long ago they escaped.”
The men were all watching him, waiting for him to react, and so he nodded.
“My concern is for you and your mother,” Mr. Mathison said, and Jo looked over to the door where Anna had been standing just moments ago. She was probably back to the cleaning by now, worried about whatever it was Mathison had to say to Jo. “As runaways, you might have more trouble than Anna and the children, who are free in their own right.”
Jo nodded. He couldn’t imagine who would be looking for him or Ma Aku after all of these years. Jo didn’t even know the name or the face of his own old master. All Ma could remember was that Ness had called him the Devil.
“You should get your family further north,” Mr. Mathison said. “New York, Canada, even. If this thing passes, there’s no telling what kind of chaos it’ll cause.”
—
“Are they gon’ fire me?” Anna asked. They were sitting on their mattress later that night, after the children had all gone to sleep, and Jo was finally able to explain to her what Mathison had called him over for.
“No, they just want to warn us, is all.”
“But your ma’s old master died. Ruthie tol’ us, remember?”
Jo remembered. Anna’s cousin Ruthie had sent word from one plantation to another to a safe house and finally to Ma Aku that the man who had owned her had died. And they had all breathed easier that night.
“Mr. Mathison say that don’t matter. His people can still get her if they want to.”
“What about me and the kids?”
Jo shrugged. Anna’s master had fathered her, then set her and her mother free. She had real free papers, not forged ones like Jo and Ma Aku. The kids had all been born right there in Baltimore, free. No one would be looking for them. “Just me and Ma that gotta worry. Don’t you think about this none.”
As for Ma Aku, Jo knew she would never leave Baltimore. Unless she could go back to the Gold Coast, there would be no new countries for her—not Canada, not even Paradise if it existed on Earth. Once the woman had decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free. When he was a child, Jo would often marvel at the knife Ma Aku always kept tucked inside her wrapper, which she’d been keeping inside her wrapper since her days as an Asante slave, then an American slave, then, finally, free. The older Jo got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.
In the other room, Beulah started whimpering in her sleep. The child had night terrors. They came at unpredictable intervals: one month here, two days there. Some days they were so bad she would wake herself up to the sound of her own screams or she’d have scratches along her arms from where she’d fought invisible battles. Other days she slept still as death, tears streaming down her face, and the next day, when asked what she’d dreamed about, she always shrugged and said, “Nothing.”
This day, Jo looked out and saw the girl’s little legs start to move: a bend at the knee, an outward kick, repeat. Beulah was running. Maybe this was where it started, Jo thought. Maybe Beulah was seeing something more clearly on the nights she had these dreams, a little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn’t name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness. Beulah ran in her sleep, ran like she’d stolen something, when really she had done nothing other than expect the peace, the clarity, that came with dreaming. Yes, Jo thought, this was where it started, but when, where, did it end?
*
Jo decided to keep his family in Baltimore. Anna was too pregnant to haul up from the city to which they were all rooted, and Baltimore still felt safe. People kept whispering about the law. A few families even made moves, packing up and heading north for fear that the law would pass. Ol’ Bess who sold the flowers on North Street went. So did Everett, John, and Dothan, who worked on Alice.
“Damn shame,” Poot said the day three Irishmen walked onto the boat to replace them.
“You ever think ’bout leavin’, Poot?” Jo asked.
Poot snorted. “They gon’ bury me in Baltimore, Jo. One way or another. They gon’ throw my body down into the Chesapeake Bay.”
Jo knew he meant it. Poot always said that Baltimore was a great city to be a black man in. There were black porters and teachers, preachers and hucksters. A free man didn’t have to be a servant or a coach driver. He could make something with his own hands. He could fix something, sell something. He could build something up from the ground, then send it out to sea. Poot had taken up caulking when he was only a teenager, and he often joked that the only thing he liked better than holding a mallet was holding a woman. He was married but he had no children, no son to teach his trade to. The ships were his pride. He would never leave Baltimore.
And for the most part, everyone else in Baltimore stayed put too. They were tired of running and used to waiting. And so they waited to see what would come.
Anna’s belly continued to swell. Baby H was making itself known every day with ferocious kicks and punches to the inside of Anna’s gut. “H is gon’ be a boxer,” ten-year-old Cato said, resting his ear against his mother’s stomach.
“Nuh-uh,” Anna said. “There won’t be no violence in this house.” Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.
Agnes turned sixteen and took a job cleaning the Methodist church on Caroline Street, and Beulah relished her new role as oldest child in the house for the one hour of every evening before Agnes returned home from work.
“Timmy say he and Pastor John ain’t going nowhere,” Agnes reported one night. It was August 1850 and Baltimore had taken on a sticky heat. Agnes would come home every night with sweat licking at her upper lip, her neck, her forehead. Timmy was the pastor’s son, and every day Jo and the rest of the family were subjected to Agnes’s reports on what Timmy had thought, done, or said that day.
“So I guess that means you ain’t going nowhere neither?” Anna said with a smirk, and Agnes huffed out of the house. She said it was in search of some chocolate for the kids, but they all knew that Anna had struck a nerve.
Ma Aku laughed as the door slammed. “That child don’t know nothin’ ’bout love,” she said. Her laugh turned into a cough, and she had to bend forward to let the cough fall out.
Jo kissed Anna’s forehead and looked at Ma. “What d’you know ’bout love, Ma?” he asked, taking over the laugh where she left it.
Ma wagged her finger at him. “Don’t go askin’ me what I know an’ don’t know,” she said. “You ain’t the only one who ever touched or been touched by somebody.”
It was Anna’s turn to laugh, and Jo dropped the hand that he had been squeezing, feeling a bit betrayed. “Who, Ma?”
Ma shook her head, slowly. “Don’t matter.”
Two weeks later, Timmy came by the docks to ask Jo for Agnes’s hand in marriage.
“You know a trade, boy?” Jo asked.
“I’m gonna be a preacher like my daddy,” Timmy said.
Jo grunted. He’d been to a church only once since the day he and Ma Aku were kicked out for witchcraft, and that was the day of his own wedding. If Agnes married this preacher’s son, he’d have to go again for her wedding and then who knew how many more times.
The day they’d walked the five miles home from the Baptist church, after Jo had given Mirabel’s father the frog, Jo had cried and cried. Ma Aku had let him carry on for a few minutes, and then she snatched his ear up with her hand, dragged him into an alley, looked at him hard, and said, “Whatchu cryin’ fo’, boy?”
“Pastor say we was doin’ African
witchcraft.” He wasn’t old enough to know what that meant, but he was old enough to know shame, and that day, he was full up to his ears with it.
Ma Aku spit behind her left shoulder, something she only did when truly disgusted. “Who tol’ you to cry fo’ that?” she asked, and he shrugged his shoulders, tried to keep his nose from running, for it seemed to make her more angry. “I tell you, if they had not chosen the white man’s god instead of the gods of the Asante, they could not say these things to me.”
Jo knew he was supposed to nod, and so he did. She continued. “The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good? They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?”
Jo had finished crying, and Ma Aku scrubbed at the white salt stains along his cheek with the hem of her dress. She pulled him back into the street, dragging him along by the arm and muttering the whole time.
Timmy’s hands were trembling, and Jo watched them shake. He was a lanky, skinny boy with soft hands that had never been burned by hot pitch or callused by a caulking iron. Timmy came from a line of free folk: born and raised in Baltimore to parents who were also born and raised in Baltimore. “If that’s what Aggie wants,” Jo finally said.
The couple married the next month, on the morning the Fugitive Slave Act passed. Anna sewed Agnes’s dress in the night by candlelight. In the mornings, Jo would find her, bleary-eyed, blinking herself awake as she got ready to go to the Mathison house. Baby H was so big in her belly that she could no longer walk without waddling, her feet so swollen that when she shoved them into her work slippers they folded back out and over, like bread that had too much yeast and could not be contained by its pan.
The wedding was at Timmy’s father’s church, and all the female congregants had cooked a meal fit to feed a king, even though there were whispers about Timmy marrying a girl whose folks didn’t attend a church, not even the rival Methodist one across the street.
Beulah stood next to Agnes in a purple dress, and Timmy’s brother, John Jr., stood next to him. Timmy’s father, Pastor John, married them. He didn’t close the usual way, announcing the new Mr. and Mrs. and telling them to kiss, but instead had the congregation reach their hands out toward Timmy and Agnes while he said a blessing. And just as he spoke the words “And all God’s people said,” a little boy ran by the door of the church shouting, “The law passed! The law passed!”
And the answer, “Amen,” came muffled and insincere from some. From others, it didn’t come at all. A few began to squirm in their seats and one even left, getting up so quickly that the whole pew rocked, thrown, as it was, off-balance.
Agnes looked at Jo with a shadow of nervousness hanging behind her eyes, and he looked at her as steadily as he knew how. Then her fear melted away as the collective fear grew. Pastor John finished marrying the couple, and everyone ate the feast that Anna, Ma, and the rest of the women had prepared.
—
Within a couple of weeks, word came in that James Hamlet, a Baltimore runaway, had been kidnapped and convicted in New York City. The white folks wrote about it in the New York Herald and in the Baltimore Sun. He was the first, but everyone knew there would be more. People began moving up to Canada by the hundreds. Jo went to Fell’s Point one week, and what used to be a sea of black faces against the backdrop of the blue-green bay had turned into nothing. Mathison had made sure Jo’s whole family had their free papers together, but he knew others with papers too, and even they had fled.
Mathison spoke to Jo again. “I want to make certain you know what’s at stake here, Jo. If they catch you, they’ll take you to trial, but you won’t get any kind of say at all. It’ll be the white man’s word against no word at all. You all make sure you carry your papers at all times, understand?” Jo nodded.
There were rallies and protests throughout the North, and not just among the Negroes. White people were joining in like Jo had never seen them join in about anything before. The South had brought this fight to the Northern welcome mat, when many of them had wanted nothing to do with it. Now white people could be fined for giving a Negro a meal, or a job, or a place to stay, if the law said that Negro was a runaway. And how were they to know who was a runaway and who was not? It had created an impossible situation, and those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.
In the mornings, before Jo and Anna went off to work, Jo made the children practice showing their papers. He would play the federal marshall, hands on his hips, walking up to each of them, even little Gracie, and saying, in a voice as stern as he could muster, “Where you goin’?” And they would reach into the pockets Anna had sewn onto their dresses and pants, and without any backtalk, always silently, thrust those papers into Jo’s hands.
When he’d first started doing this, the children would burst into laughter, thinking it was a game. They didn’t know about Jo’s fear of people in uniform, didn’t know what it was like to lie silent and barely breathing under the floorboards of a Quaker house, listening to the sound of a catcher’s bootheel stomp above you. Jo had worked hard so that his children wouldn’t have to inherit his fear, but now he wished they had just the tiniest morsel of it.
“You worry too much,” Anna said. “Ain’t nobody lookin’ for them kids. Ain’t nobody lookin’ for us neither.” The baby was due any day now, and Jo had noticed that his wife had become crankier than ever, snapping at him for the tiniest of things. She craved fish and lemons. She walked with her hands on her lower back, and she forgot things. The keys one day, the broom the next. Jo worried she would forget her papers next. He’d seen her leave them, rumpled and worn, on her side of the mattress one day when she went to the market, and he’d yelled at her for it. He’d yelled at her until she cried. Bad as he felt that day, he knew she would never forget again.
Then one day Anna didn’t come home. Jo ran to the room to see if she’d left her papers again, but he couldn’t find them anywhere, and he heard Anna’s sweet voice saying, “You worry too much. You worry too much,” in his ear. Beulah came home with the rest of the kids in tow, and Jo asked if they had seen their mother.
“Is Baby H comin’, Daddy?” Eurias asked.
“Maybe,” Jo said absently.
Then Ma Aku came home, her hands massaging the nape of her neck. It didn’t take long for her to survey the room.
“Where Anna? She said she was gonna get some sardines before comin’ home,” Ma said, but Jo was already halfway out the door.
He went to the grocer, the corner store, the fabric shop. He went to the fish market, the cobbler, the hospital. The shipyards, the museum, the bank.
“Anna? She ain’t been by today,” said one after the other.
Then, for the first time in his life, Jo knocked on a white man’s door at night. Mathison himself opened the door.
“She ain’t been home since mornin’,” Jo said, his throat catching on the words. It had been a long time since he’d cried, and he didn’t want to do it in front of a white man, no matter how the man had helped him.
“Go home to your kids, Kojo. I’ll start looking for her right now. You go home.”
Jo nodded, and in his dazed walk home, he began to think about what life would be like without his wife, the woman he had loved hard and long. Everyone had been keeping up with what was becoming known as the “Bloodhound Law.” They’d heard about the dogs, the kidnappings, the trials. They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid? Jo didn’t want to accept what he was already starting to know in his heart. Anna and Baby H were gone.
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—
Jo couldn’t stand by and wait for Mathison to look for Anna. Mathison may have had all the wealthy white connections a person could want, but Jo knew the black and the poor immigrant white people of Baltimore, and at night, after he had finished working on the ships, he went out to talk to them, trying to gather information.
But everywhere he went, the answer was the same. They had seen Anna that morning, the day before, three nights ago. The day she went missing, she’d been at Mathison’s until six o’clock. After that, nothing. No one had seen her.
Agnes’s new husband, Timmy, was a good artist. He drew up a picture of Anna from memory that looked as close to her as any Jo had ever seen. In the morning, Jo took the picture to Fell’s Point with him. He got on every last boat in the shipyard, showing people Anna’s face drawn in heavy charcoal.
“Sorry, Jo,” they all said.
He took the picture onto Alice with him, and even though all the other men already knew what she looked like, they humored him, studying the picture carefully before telling Jo what he already knew. They hadn’t seen her either.
Jo took to carrying the picture in his pocket while he worked. He lost himself in the sound of mallet hitting iron, that steady rhythm he knew so well. It soothed him. Then, one day, when he was getting the oakum ready, the picture slipped out of his pocket, and by the time Jo caught it, the bottom edges were soaked in pine tar. As he worked to get it off, the tar stuck to his fingers, and when he reached up to wipe sweat from his eye, his face shimmered with it.
“I gotta go,” Jo said to Poot, waving the picture frantically, hoping the wind would dry it.
“You can’t miss no more days, Jo,” Poot said. “They gon’ give yo job to one of them Irishmen and then what, huh? Who gon’ feed them kids, Jo?”
Jo was already running toward dry land.
By the time Jo got to the furniture store on Aliceanna Street, he was showing the picture to every person he passed. He didn’t know what he was thinking when he shoved it in the face of the white woman coming out of the store.