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On a grey morning in March 1850, a colored slave named Liz Spocott dreamed of the future. And it was not pleasant. She dreamed of Negroes driving horseless carriages on shiny rubber wheels with music booming throughout, and fat black children who smoked odd-smelling cigars and walked around with pistols in their pockets and murder in their eyes.
They were nearly caught twice, the last by inches, the four saved by a white farmer’s wife who warned them at the last minute that a party with horses, dogs, and rifles awaited them nearby. They had thanked the woman profusely and then, inexplicably, she demanded a dime. They could not produce one, and she screamed at them, the noise attracting the slave catchers, who charged the front of the house while the women leaped out the back windows and sprinted for Ewells Creek.
she felt her face folding into the blank expression of nothingness she had spent the better part of her nineteen years shaping; that timeworn, empty Negro expression she had perfected over the years whereby everything, especially laughter, was halted and checked, double-checked for leaks, triple-checked for quality control, all haughtiness, arrogance, independence, sexuality excised, stamped out, and vanquished so that no human emotion could emerge. A closed face is how you survive, her uncle Hewitt told her.
She was a handsome woman, tall and limber, whose broad shoulders, shapely round hips, and firm forearms were nattily fitted into a large dress on which she wore a pistol holstered to one hip and a hunting knife to the other.
Maryland’s eastern shore was shrouded in myth and superstition. It was a rough, rugged peninsula, 136 miles long and 55 miles wide at the shoulder, shaped roughly like a bunch of grapes, veined with water throughout, filled with hundreds of thick swamps and marshlands, which at night seemed more dreadful than the retreats of the ancient Druids. It was rough, untamed land, populated by watermen, a breed of white pioneer whose toughness and grit made the most grizzled Western cowboys seem like choirboys by comparison. Farmers by summer, fishermen in winter, watermen were unpredictable, pious,
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Hmm. Might be an anachronism here, though I will give McBride benefit of doubt, but was Ocean City founded yet by 1850?
Reading the newspaper these past six months had given her the clear notion that the eastern shore was a sieve for runaway slaves, a sponge for freedom seekers, sucking them out of the woods of Virginia, North Carolina, and points south like a bilge pump. And her slaves, she knew, could not be that oblivious.
Men, she thought bitterly. They run the world to sin and then wonder why the world wakes up every morning sucking sorrow.
Some historians contend that no black codes were used in the Underground Railroad, but fortunately, the musings of scholars never stopped writers from drawing plot, content, and character from disputed history to power the muscle of their imaginations. Gone With the Wind, which was required reading for my daughter’s 2006 ninth-grade Honors English class, portrays blacks as babbling idiots and bubbleheads. I recall no current literary wave challenging that author’s license to loose her imagination. We Americans like our mythology.
This book is largely out of my imagination, though some elements and characters are based on the real ones. Patty Cannon, the so-called handsome slave stealer of Caroline County, Maryland, was real.
