DADogwill bite
A Thief at night.
EAnEagle’sflight
Is out of sight.
FThe IdleFool
Is whipt at School.
Gilbert was no fool. He was a good student, always aware that each lesson with Louisa could be his last. There wasn’t a law against Black folks reading, and plenty of people could, but ever since Gabriel Prosser had been tried and hanged, learning like the kind Louisa was offering Gilbert had gotten harder to come by. Word was Gabriel Prosser could read and write; that he’d managed to plot a slave rebellion—without hardly ever leaving Brookfield—was a testament to the power of the pen.
Once Gilbert knew his letters, the whole world cracked open. There were words everywhere he looked. Advertisements for spices and ready-made pants and runaway slaves practically shouted at him as he walked down E Street; old playbills stared up at him from mud puddles; even his own pass, which Pete Goode wrote out for him annually and which Gilbert took care to keep in a leather sleeve, transformed before his eyes.Let my servant man, Gilbert Hunt, pass and repass without hinderance or molestation,until the thirty-first day of December.Gilbert realized, turning the piece of paper over in his hand, that there was nothing magic about the words that kept him out of the clutches of the slave patrol. They were just words like any other, but what the white man counted on was men like Gilbert not knowing any of them.
In church, Pastor Courtney was in the habit of printing his most hair-raising sermons in these fancy little pamphlets that the white folks in the congregation took on their way out the door. Gilbert had never dared take one, but now he kept a stack of them under his mattress, and he marveled at the fact that he could relive the good man’s fire and fury any time he felt like it. Once he got good at reading big, long sentences, he removed eleven shillings from his pouch and bought himself a Bible at Thomas Ritchie’s bookshop. He felt guilty spending money that had been earmarked for the purchase of his own freedom, but he told himself that being able to talk to God was also going to help him get where he was going. When he opened that Bible to the back page and wrote his name in it, and then later added Sara’s alongside it, he didn’t know if he’d ever felt more proud.
Gilbert tries to think of something to say that will ease the pinched expression on Maddie’s face. “Maybe Missus Elizabeth stronger than we think. Now that she’s married to the general.”
Maddie arches her eyebrows real high and gives him a longmmmmhmmm.
“Where he at?” Gilbert asks Maddie.
“Home now. But Sylvie had to go dig him out of some grog shop.”
“I was surprised I didn’t see him at the green. Figured Missus Elizabeth would have sent for him first thing.”
“He was so drunk, he’d have been liable to fall in the fire hisself.”
Gilbert just shakes his head. There is no accounting for white folks.
“Go on home,” she says in as firm a voice as she can muster. “Sara ain’t coming back down here tonight.”
“I want to help her.”
“You get thrown in the birdcage, and it won’t help her one bit.”
Gilbert looks out the window, squinting at the dark sky. “There’s still a little more night. I’ll wait.”
Maddie reaches across the table and pats his hand. “You’re a good man, Gilbert Hunt. The Lord’s gonna reward you in the next life, if not in this one.”
CECILY
The night is half donebefore Cecily hears the soft fall of her mother’s footsteps approaching the cabin. Moses is still awake, and the moment Della is inside, Cecily can hear him pepper her with questions. “Where’s Cecily?” and then, “Papa ain’t with you?”
Della hushes him, then says, “Missus Price gave him permission to go looking for her. They sure to be back soon.”
Cecily can’t bear to think of her papa arriving at the theater green and taking his first look at that building. When he sees the fire and how big it burns, he will know there is no hope. Will he shout her name anyway? Race around the building, the way Elliott did? She can’t picture it. Neither of her parents are the type to perform their grief for a bunch of strangers.
Cecily hears Moses ask about Maria, but Della is done answering questions. Through the cabin’s thin walls, she hears her mother tell him to sleep, then she sits down heavy on the bed.
Moses can’t stop himself. “They ain’t dead, are they?”
Cecily stands with her ear pressed against the cabin wall, straining to hear her mother’s reply. But Della has begun to cry, and her words come out garbled.
All Cecily wants to do is hurry around the side of the cabin and up the steps, throw open the door, and shout:Here I am! I’m fine! See?But she tells herself to be patient. Della won’t sleep tonight, but Moses likely will, and Cecily wants him in dreamland before she tiptoes over to her mother’s side of the bed. Her brother is thirteen this year, and he considers himself a man, but Cecily can’t see burdening him with a secret this big. It will be better for him to think her dead than for him to be interrogated by Elliott or Master Price and for either of them to find his answers wanting.
When enough time has passed and Cecily is sure Moses is asleep, she tiptoes around to the side of the house. For a while, she sits watching the doors of the other cabins, until she is convinced everything really does lookshut up tight. Then she takes a deep breath, climbs the steps to her parents’ cabin, pushes the door open, and slips inside.
