Good Dirt

Messages

Messages

W illis didn’t want to have to run again.

After landing in Massachusetts, he went to sea three more times, reveling in the cut of the air against his skin and that feeling that looking off the deck of a schooner could leave in his heart, a sense that the world was much larger than the one in which he had been forced to grow up. But the work at sea was dwindling, and it was mostly the whaling that was open to Negro men. Willis needed work, but he knew he wasn’t cut out for the hunt. He believed he might perish if he boarded another whaler.

Fortunately, Willis’s growing attachment to his wife and the arrival of their first child made it easier for him to stay on land, in the house that Aquinnah’s parents had built. Aquinnah stitched clothing instead of sails and helped her parents with their farming. Willis used his skills as a carpenter and worked with a local wheelwright, but soon he started his own enterprise doing fancy painting around town. He put designs on signs and wagons and buildings and such, and it brought him great satisfaction to know that the same compulsion to draw that once led Willis to be whipped as a child now provided a source of income.

It had started quite by accident. Willis had taken to decorating the front entrance to their home, covering the space between one step and the other with flowers, then moving on to the balustrades and porch railing. He painted the flowers he’d seen in the meadows nearby. The pink-petaled mayflower, the bright yellow trout lily, the raucous violet of the hepatica. The house he shared with Aquinnah and her parents was not the type of abode that would normally cause a person to stop and look, but stop they did as Willis continued to paint whatever hecould.

“That’s a very interesting design you have there on your wagon,” Reverend Arundel said one Sunday as members of his congregation stepped out of the church and gathered around. Rather than decorate his cart with flowers, Willis had gone back to his earlier inspiration of seafaring themes. His lowly one-horse cart bore a seascape with a sailing bark on frothy seas. Willis had painted the vessels heading toward the shore, with the city shown in the background. His designs grew in popularity and became quite lucrative.

But Willis was still Willis, even though he went by the name of Edward Freeman in public. The ships that came north from the Carolinas and Washington, D.C., were bringing worrisome stories of a new law aimed at people like him who had escaped slavery. There was muttering all around about people in free states being taken away in greater numbers, and then confirmation of a worsening situation came by way of his stoneware jar.

By then, the jar made by Moses, standing on the floor just inside the Freemans’ kitchen, had become known as a safe place to leave notes and other items that would not be seen except by those who knew to go looking. Sometimes, the missives came by way of regular visitors. At other times, a stranger would come to the stoop at their front door and ask for a cup of water. That was the code. Aquinnah would push the jar with her foot and use it to hold open the door. Then she would turn her back while fetching a cup of water or coffee and a bit of bread. Once the visitor was gone, Aquinnah would reach her hand into the jar to see what had been left behind.

The riskiest delivery had been a letter from an enslaved woman in the South to her freed husband, but most missives were disguised as everyday objects. A blue hair bead, a knife, a wooden toy, and the message that brought Willis to tears: a small plate with cobalt glaze on one side, inscribed with a large letter F and a tiny flower on its bottom. Willis recognized Moses’s hand and understood it to be a greeting from the man who had once been married to his sister Flora. That night, he showed the plate to his wife and talked about Moses and Flora and Old Joe, and even Betsey. He laughed. And then he wept. Moses had foundhim.

But this meant that someone else with less loving intentions might do the same.

True, there were free men and women, both black and white, who were willing to help, as well as members of the native tribes. But the risk of separation from his family was greater than ever. A visit from Reverend Arundel confirmed this.

“Can I offer you a bit of sweet tea, Reverend?” Willis’s wife said when the reverend stopped by one day unannounced, and without his wife.

“A cup of water would do just fine, thank you.”

This was the sign. Aquinnah turned her back as she asked after the reverend’s wife and children. Once he had finished his water and was gone, Aquinnah reached one arm down into the jar and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was an announcement, of the kind posted in public places.

Caution! Colored people… it began.

Aquinnah read on. Police officers and watchmen in Boston had been empowered to take colored people into custody under the Fugitive Slave Act and were acting, in effect, as slave catchers. It could only get worse. Her eyes began to swim with tears. She steeled herself for her husband’s departure. The best option was for Willis to leave for the Canadian border without his family. Aquinnah, who looked more like her mother’s people than her father’s, would stay behind, working and tending to their young son and her parents as though nothing had changed. If anyone came looking for Willis, she would say that he was away for work.

Later that week, they filled a sack with provisions and Willis planned a route. Before daylight the next morning, he pulled open the door of his home and looked out onto the shimmer of dew in the waning moonlight. Caught a whiff of calamint and clay. He turned back to look at his wife and her parents, then looked down at Moses’s jar. He did not want to go, not now that he had found himself a family. He did not want to let go of what was in his heart, not again. He dropped his sack to the floor and sat down at the kitchen table.

“No, this is what we’ll do,” said Willis. They could afford to purchase more acreage, he said. Add a barn and study room among the trees to the west. If it came down to it, he could hide in one of the outbuildings or even run, but not now. Willis would earn his living from there. He could build wagons in addition to painting them. And in the winter he could make sleds. Yes, he told Aquinnah, he would stay, and they would have more children, and raise them together.