The boat was about a hundred feet long. It had white sails hanging from three masts. He led me down into the hold, which smelled of fresh lumber. But there was none in there. There were saws of all sorts, and bags of nails and horseshoes and hammers, and four fine saddles and saddle bags. There was work going on, where this man came from. That much was clear to me.
He introduced himself as Captain Robert Wilson of Oakville, Canada West. He asked me if I had eaten recently. I had not.
“That’s a good thing. I’ll feed you when we get across the lake. But it’s blowing out there, and I bet you haven’t been out in rough water before.”
I allowed that I hadn’t.
“I’d advise you to see to it that nothing more goes into your stomach for the time being. I’m going to have to ask you to stay down here. Out of sight. Have you heard of the Fugitive Slave Act, my lad?”
I wouldn’t have admitted it to a man who stole Negroes. But this man was different. He was saving me. He was about to sail me across Lake Ontario. “I know of it,” I said.
“Then you have some sense of what they could do to me, for aiding and abetting in your escape. So until it’s safe, stay down here in the hold. It won’t be but an hour or so. If you absolutely must be sick in my schooner, please have the decency to use that bucket over there. I’m going up. Work to do. We’ll set sail soon. You’ll be a free man by the time you’re eating supper.”
I hoped that supper in Canada West tasted better than cornmeal mush, which I never wanted to eat again.
Up above me, I heard scraping, and heavy steps, and the jingle of metal on metal. There were two blankets in the hold. I rolled up one like a pillow, and stretched out on the other, and went to sleep. Quick, heavy, hard footsteps woke me up. I thought the slave catchers had found me. I bolted upright. The door to the hold opened. Light poured in, where before it had only trickled through cracks in the door. Down came another black man. Led by Captain Wilson.
“This is a first for me, gentlemen. Two of you in one trip. We are leaving in minutes. Keep your voices low, and use the bucket if you must.”
My fellow traveler had brown, bulging eyes. He had a stutter. He recoiled, as if I, another black man, might actually spit on him. He had no shoes, and an open, running sore on the top of his left foot. He was a year or two my junior. He looked in worse shape than I was. I wondered how he had made it all the way north.
“P-P-P-Paul Williams,” he said. “Come from Virginia.”
“Langston Cane,” I said. “Maryland. Though I was born in Virginia.”
He drew his knees up to his chest, and commenced rocking. “You’re going to be all right, friend,” I told him. “You’re on your way to Canada.”
“I’m so tired and sore I could lie down and die,” he said.
“Then I’d have to lift you out of here, and I’m too tired for that, so do me a favor and stay alive, brother.”
He smiled at me. His three front teeth were missing. It looked like a recent blow, for his gums were bloody. “Got nothing to eat, and nowhere to sleep, so I guess we got nowhere to go but up.”
The door to the deck opened again. Down came a black woman. She was no fugitive. She was dressed to work. She was a strong-looking woman. I saw muscles in her neck. I’d never seen muscles in a woman’s neck before. Her hands looked strong, too. She had a full bosom, and lean but full hips, and fast brown eyes. She was a few shades lighter than I am. She was a fine-looking woman and she knew it.
“You two are the sorriest-looking pair I’ve seen in weeks,” she said. She had a throaty voice. I felt the faintest stirring in places long forgotten during my weeks of flight.
She told us her name was Matilda Tylor, and that she was a deckhand and the cook. “But I won’t be feeding you. The captain says he’s sick and tired of runaways throwing up on his schooner.” Mattie leaned closer to us. “If he likes you, he’ll feed you on the other side!” The cook scampered upstairs.
The trip took most of the day. I went up on the deck after we’d been sailing for an hour. It was cold out on the lake, and windy, and I couldn’t see the other side. The water was blue and gray, and I didn’t like it. It slapped the hull till I grew sick of the slapping, and then it slapped some more. I went back down in the hull and stretched out. I slept for an hour or two, and woke up feeling in desperate need of air. The lurching about was still bothering me. Up I went to the deck, and stayed there until the harbor was in sight.
“What’s Oakville like?” I asked Matilda.
“I call it Nicefolksville,” she said. “They’ll nice you to death.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see, brother. You’ll see.” With those words, Matilda walked over to the mast, her behind round and rolling. She was putting it on display for me. I watched her climb up the mast. Up, up, up, she went. Up to the top. I stood under her and attempted to ascertain, without appearing to do so, the color of her undergarments. I believe I detected the color gray, but then she came down so quickly and with such rapid leg movement that all I could notice was the rustling of her petticoats, which occasionally showed themselves as a leg bent into a right angle at the knee.
“Give it a try, brother. I’m just a woman, right? If I did it, it must be easy.”
She didn’t leave me much choice. Matilda had just done it and had surely done it a hundred times before and was watching me right now. So I climbed that mast. I climbed thirty rungs. Looking down made me want to be sick, but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. I looked way off, rather than straight down. I looked out at Oakville drawing near. I saw a large creek snaking down to the lakefront. I saw a schooner under construction, another being unloaded, and horses pulling wagons to harbor. I saw vast patches of cleared land, and thick stands of trees. And then I looked down. Big mistake. The mast creaked. It swayed an inch or two, in the wind. My stomach heaved. It heaved, and heaved, and heaved, and all I could do was hold on to the mast like a baby to its mother, and tip my mouth down and to the side and hope that I didn’t soil myself or anyone below with all the heaving, and tell myself that the schooner had been sailing for years and that its mast wouldn’t likely topple now, at this very moment, with me monkeyed foolishly to the highest rung. I held on, since I had no intention of falling off the mast and cracking open my head on the deck below. Shouts rose up to me. “Get down. Get down from there. Are you a fool, man? Get down off my mast.” I waited until my stomach ceased heaving, and closed my eyes, and climbed the thirty rungs back down to the deck. I wanted nothing other than a bed to put my head on.
“Matilda,” Robert Wilson said. “Clean that up, please. You sent him up that pole in the first place. You know better than that. The man’s never been on a boat before.” The captain tossed me a rag. “Clean yourself up.”
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“You were doing fine until you had to keep up with her,” Wilson said.
“Does she have a man?” I asked him.
Matilda was heading off to get a pail and some cleaning rags, and I thought she was out of earshot. But she wasn’t.
“If you got a question about me,” she said, “why, stranger, you can just ask me directly.”
“I was just asking if you had a man.”
“Not at this moment in time.” She turned and walked off, and the captain winked.
Upon landing on the shores of Canada, Paul Williams made a sight of himself. Down on his knees, rolling in the water and sand and debris from the Oakville harbor, calling out, Lord Almighty, Lord Have Mercy, and so forth.
Personally, I was dirty enough, after four weeks of running, and I didn’t care to get any of that sand or water on me. And as for the Lord — well, if it made Paul Williams feel better to think there was one, that was fine with me. But I think the Bible is just a scheme to keep Negroes from slitting their masters’ throats. I read the Bible. It says, “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.”
Oakvil
le was a prosperous town, full of huge oak trees. They had so many oak trees that they made a business of cutting them down and sawing them up and sending them across the lake.
Paul and I helped Mattie and three deckhands and three men from shore unload the schooner. That took the better part of three hours. I was bone tired. And I was hungry. But I was in Canada, and I was free, so bone tired and hungry didn’t matter. When we finished, Captain Robert Wilson asked us to walk with him to his home. I asked if he was a Quaker, and he laughed and said no, a Presbyterian.
It was slow going because of the mud on the roads. Captain Wilson had his trousers tucked smartly into boots that came almost to his knees, and he seemed not to mind leaping over a puddle here and stepping around oozing mud and horseshit there. We walked up a steep hill from the harbor. Navy Street, which we came onto, looked like a fairyland. Houses spaced neatly apart. Stone foundations, painted wood walls. Neat, small windows with many small, square panes of glass. Finely sculpted doors, brass doorknobs. Horse-drawn wagons pulled by steadily, drivers calling out to Captain Wilson, many in that same, sing-song, womanish voice with which he spoke. Where I came from, men didn’t put such music into their talking voices. Up here, men and women chattered like birds. Many were out on the roads, dodging the potholes and mud, women hoisting up their skirts when necessary. I saw some black folks, too. Some looked our way, nodded gently, and kept at what they were doing. None of the Negroes seemed to lack employment. They carried buckets, drove horse teams, opened doors to sweep dust into the street.
Captain Robert Wilson lived close to the harbor, in a fine two-story house that sat on a foundation consisting of slabs of gray-brown stone. Later, I would learn that it was shale, pulled from the bed of Lake Ontario. The walls were painted yellow. I tapped one as we stood at the door. “Pine,” the captain told me, “cut down not two miles from where we stand.” I noticed, as we were heading in, one or two gaps in the foundation. They were just big enough for a brown rat. The captain asked us to remove our shoes in a mudroom just inside the side door, walked us into what he called a guest room, which had a proper bed, and told us to put our things down, which took all of a moment, since I had but one bag, and Paul Williams had nothing at all.
He indicated that we were to clean ourselves in the washroom, down the hall. Paul whispered questioningly in my ear, “The man want us to wash wid water inside dese walls?” and I nodded. The captain, who must have heard, repeated that it was all right to clean ourselves in the washroom, and that it was meant for that. He said he would put some clean clothes out for us. He said he kept extra clothes around. We weren’t to be bashful. The clothes were donated by church people in town. In fact, many of the extra clothes had been donated by colored people. So we weren’t to be bashful, because the clothes had been no expense to Captain Wilson. When we were clean and clothed, we were to come out to the kitchen, where we would talk, and break bread. “You talk,” Paul whispered, when we were left alone, “and I’ll break de bread.”
We made a mess of it. I had no experience with bathing inside a house. Also, I could not find the water, at first. There was no bucket on the floor, none in or near the tub, none left outside the bathing room. Finally, I noticed, up above my head, some thick planks holding up some sort of round container, made of brick. I climbed up on a chair and got a look inside — water. How was I supposed to get it down from there? At that moment, the captain knocked on the door. “Don’t be shy. This is one of the first houses in Oakville to get rigged up like this,” he said. “You must turn on the taps. See those taps attached to pipes at the end of the tub? Turn them. One is for cold water, the other hot. Be careful, though, with the hot. It will burn you. You must mix it with the cold in the bathtub.” It seemed like a lot of trouble to me. The notion of just standing under the stars and splashing water onto oneself from a pail seemed far more sympathetic to my senses than all this work of tubs and brick containers and burning water from lead pipes. Also, it was difficult to catch the meager trickle that came from the pipes and to splash it on myself with the vigor necessary for a proper cleaning. Anyway, I did what I could, and mopped up the spilled water with my dirty clothes, and soon enough I was dressed and sitting in Robert Wilson’s kitchen. Paul Williams, my friend, had skipped the bathing entirely.
I had imagined that a large, big boned, and confident man would have a wife of the same making. But she was a timid piece of work, with a pointed little chin and pale blue eyes cast downward, and no more hips or chest, it seemed, than a man. “Gentlemen,” she said, as we took seats around the table. The captain’s wife lifted a cauldron of beef and potato stew from where it hung suspended above a fire, and served it to us in large bowls. It is hard to do justice to the taste of that beef and potato stew. The potatoes were soft and ready to crumble, and the beef came apart readily in my mouth. There were bits of carrot, and onion, and all of it swam in a rich brown juice that I mopped up, following the captain’s example, with fat chunks of bread that we tore, as needed, from a large, brown loaf. It was probably ordinary stew, but to me, after three weeks of flight, a lake crossing, a foolhardy climb to the top of a schooner’s mast, and a few hours of work unloading the schooner, eating this first meal in freedom was an experience I shall carry to the grave. Now, in the twilight of my years, I remember Robert Wilson for many things, but I remember him most fondly for bringing us into his kitchen and eating with us on that first day of mine in Canada West. I ate three bowls of the stew. Paul ate four. We all had plenty of water, which tasted as fine and as pure as water has ever been.
Captain Wilson told us a few things as we ate. He said he expected us to make our own way as had the Negroes he had helped before us. We were free to spend the night, and to break bread with him in the morning. But after that, we were on our own. There was plenty of work in Oakville, if we wanted to stay here. There was work in the harbor, work in town, and harvesting work on nearby farms. He expected us to find work that same day or the next, and to make living arrangements through our employers or through other Negroes on the street, and he expected us to be upstanding citizens of Canada West from that point forward.
Captain Robert Wilson was up at dawn.
I met him in the mudroom, just inside the side door. Here, he left his muddy shoes and boots, and donned lighter shoes for inside wear.
“I didn’t expect to see you up so early,” he said to me. “Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Fine. My wife will fix you breakfast. Eggs, bacon, bread, coffee. She’ll give you a packed lunch, as well. That ought to be enough to keep two enterprising young men going. If I were you, I’d head to the corner of Colborne and Dundas streets. Be there before eight o’clock. They’re looking for men to work on the plank roads.” “Plank roads?” I said.
“Roads, made of planks, to help people driving teams of horses. If you ask me, it’s complete nonsense. Plank roads will break down faster than they can make them. But no matter. They’re offering work, and you should take it. Some of the men are being put up in tents and the like, north of town. I’d see about getting in on that. You can make some money and not worry about finding a place to live for a few weeks.”
“Where does Mattie live?”
“Matilda? She lives with the Smith family. Has a room there. Works for them, when she isn’t working for us. A number of the Negro women live with some of the better-off families. Do you have experience as a butler?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. There’s a Negro chap by the name of Christopher Columbus Lee working as a butler for the Chisholm family. That’d be a darn sight easier on your back than putting down plank roads. But given as how you haven’t any —”
“I catch rats,” I told him.
Captain Wilson scratched his reddish hair. He grunted, and opened the door. He looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “Can’t say that’ll get you far.”
“I caught two in your schooner yesterday. Wasn’t going to say anything. Just
threw ‘em overboard.”
“Fiddlesticks. You were too busy losing the contents of your stomach to be catching any rats.”
“I caught three in your house during the night.”
“Let me advise you about something. I care about you Negro people. That’s why I help you. I tolerate you considerably more than most people you’ll run into. So listen to what I’m telling you. You won’t get ahead, here, by exaggerating. People in Canada West don’t like braggarts. They don’t like a lot of talk. They like people who will do what they say they’ll do. I won’t judge you for talking up a lot of nonsense at six in the morning. I know you’ve been through a lot. But I’d hold my tongue until I had a sense of this place, if I were you.”
I brushed past him, opened the side door, and pointed to the ground just to the right. He poked his head out the door and saw three brown rats laid out flat. I was thankful that they were a decent size. No less than three-quarters of a pound each. “You caught those?” He saw me nod. “Let’s bury them quickly, before my wife sees them. You’ll send her into a complete panic. How’d you catch them?”
“I pegged one with a stone, and trapped the others. You’ve never tried trapping rats in this house, have you?”
“No.”
“I could tell. Your rats went for traps, this time. But rats are smart. They won’t go for that, for long.” “Did you get them all?”
“Not a chance. You’ve got twenty rats in and around this house, at least.”
“Can you get rid of them?”
“I’ll make a deal with you. Give me one week to figure out this town, and to find myself a place to stay. During that week, you let me eat and sleep here. I don’t need a lot. I won’t eat you out of your house. One good meal a day will be enough. In that time, I’ll clean out your rats. And then I’ll be gone. And Captain Wilson?”
“Yes?”
“Let my friend stay here, too. He’ll go work on those plank roads this morning, and he’ll pay what you need for room and board. But give him a week to settle in. He needs it even more than I do. He’s a little shaky. He spent half the night crying out in his sleep. I’m not complaining. If he hadn’t been so beside himself, I wouldn’t have been kept awake. And if I hadn’t been kept awake, I wouldn’t have thought about your rats. And if I hadn’t caught those rats, I wouldn’t — “