Finding Aquinnah
Finding Aquinnah
B ecause the love between a daughter of their tribe and an African slave was not a desirable thing, they drove the man off their land. He was no longer a slave, by then. They had bought the African, along with other goods, from his European enslaver, then freed him to work among their people, as was their way.
They believed that the risk of being captured and enslaved again would help to keep the African loyal to their tribe and useful to their territory. He was a skilled worker. He built canoes and all manner of things from wood. And he was a strong young man in a tribe where so many of their own had been killed. Later, they would see that it had been inevitable, the visceral pull between the stolen son of a faraway king and the daughter of their chief.
When, in 1829, the chief’s daughter saw her father cast out the man whose child she was already carrying, she chose to follow the thrown-away man north into that fearsome world beyond the community where she had always lived. She knew that she would never return. She understood that she might not survive. But the kindness of strangers would give her hope.
A farmer with skin the color of oak found the young couple hiding in his barn. They were muddied and shivering and clinging to the side of a cow for warmth, looking more like a bundle of cloths than two people.
“What is this?” the farmer called. He watched the gathering of rags pull closer to the beast, as if to hide among its teats.
The farmer was a rarity in those parts, a country-born former slave who had purchased his own freedom, then acquired the land on which he now worked.
“You cannot stay here,” he told the couple. But he gave them a cup of broth and bread and sent them on their way with a sack of provisions, a glass bottle filled with cow’s milk, and a list of instructions to help them reach safety.
“Don’t go that way,” he said, pointing to the northwest. “Never go that way. Go toward the coast but stay inland.” He handed them a small piece of wood with an X burned into it and told them where to stop next. There would be a wagonmaker who could help. There would be another man with a canoe. All they had to do was show the right people that piece of wood. The wrong people would think nothing of it.
The more dangerous things became, the more generous they found people to be. They hadn’t realized that there were so many free men and women, including the pale ones, who were inclined to help. The world beyond the confines of the woman’s tribe was confusing. But it was a world where she and her man might be able to raise their child.
They did not speak of their past, though anyone could see they’d been running. The daughter of the tribe refused to say the name of her people, but the couple found another tribe up north whose elders understood where she had come from. Some of their ways were similar to hers, though not all. Still, they welcomed the young foreigners into their community, as was their way.
Massachusetts was frigid. The smell of the sea a shock. They found themselves seeking outside work in a raucous place with streets of stone filled with odors of brine, whale oil, and horse manure. But there was work to be found at the docks and in the stables and workshops. The husband made the acquaintance of men who looked like him but who hailed from Cape Verde or Barbados or England, while the wife sewed sacks and other materials, eventually growing skilled in the making ofsails.
One day, a large sailing ship approached the shore after more than twenty months away. It was ragged, but laden with oil and wax and baleen from the whales that the crew had slaughtered. One sperm whale, one blue, and two bottlenose. A foul-smelling, but essential, cargo. The seafaring men, their faces creased and caked from exposure to the elements, told stories of the enormous creatures they had fought and conquered. But three of their mates had been lost. The young couple did not want that life for their children.
In time, the wife and husband would purchase a plot of land farther inland, though they would keep their ties to the port. They would teach their children to make sails and pots and tools of use to the men who traveled at sea. They would take their wagon to the coast when necessary. They needed to remain flexible. They had found a place with good dirt, but they could not be sure of holding on to it.
But first, the daughter of the tribe gave birth to a baby girl in the ancestral lands of another people, just as her father and the rest of her family were being forced off their own land. They were made to leave the place where her people had been rooted and cross the great river, along with many others, toward a vast territory where, legend had it, the winds could rise up like monstrous spirits and suck entire wagons into the air. Her mother and one of her sisters would die along the way, but she would never know this.
All over America, the winds of change were rising up like those dust monsters and sweeping through people’s lives. But the runaway couple’s children would manage to remain where they were born, in a place that, years later, would come to be known as Refuge County. One day, their firstborn daughter, now a young woman, would meet a sailor who was running from his past, much as her parents had escaped theirs. He would stop at the workstation where she sat stitching sailcloth and look at her like a thirsty man drawn to water.
His name was Edward Freeman, he told her. But once they were married and living within the walls of the cabin where she had grown up, he would tell her to call him Willis. And he would call her Aquinnah. It was a favored name with the tribe that had sheltered her parents. Willis liked the sound of her name, but sometimes, he would simply call Aquinnah wife, because the idea of having found a woman who had chosen to make a family with him pleased him so.