White Doves at Morning

Abigail looked over Jean-Jacques' shoulder at the raindrops striking against the glass.

"You're a problem of conscience for me," she said.

He turned around and squinted his eyes to show his incomprehension.

"I took advantage of your resentment toward Ira Jamison," she said.

"When this is all over, who you t'ink is gonna come out on top?"

"The Union," she replied.

"Remember who hepped you," he said.

But the rum on his breath belied his cavalier attitude. If they were caught, his fate and that of the two white men who fed the boiler belowdecks would not be an easy one. At best they would be sent to a prison where the convicts were literally worked to death. But chances were they would never make trial and would die on a tree.

Nor would the fate of Flower Jamison be much better-. Although Abigail had never witnessed an instance of branding or hamstringing herself, she had heard stories and had known slaves who turned to stone if they were questioned about the scars on their bodies.

But when she tried to imagine her own fate, she realized once again her risks were like those of a rear echelon officer in a war. Slavers might hate her; a bounty hunter could spit on her skirts; and a newspaper editorialist could refer to her as "Miss Lover-of-all-Darkies." But if they didn't respect her, they respected money, and they knew her family had been rich, at least at one time, and her father had been the friend of United States presidents from both the North and South and had served at the side of Jefferson Davis in the War of the Mexican Cession. It was doubtful she would ever die on a tree or experience the touch of a hot iron on her back.

Flower was sleeping with her head on her chest, the hat she had woven from palmetto leaves quivering from the vibration of the engines. Her face looked troubled, as though she had walked through a spiderweb in her dreams.

Abigail squeezed her hand.

"You're the bravest person I've ever known," she said.

Flower's eyes opened like the weighted eyelids on a doll.

"Brave about what?" she asked, unsure of where she was.

"We're almost there," Abigail said.

Flower smiled sleepily.

"My gran'mama never thought she could be free. I cain't believe this is happening, Miss Abigail," she said.

The river was blanketed with rain rings now, the moon buried deep in clouds, like a pool of scorched pewter. Jean-Jacques steered his boat past a lighted plantation home on a bluff, then rounded a bend where the land flattened and the river had risen into groves of willow and gum trees and out in a field a trash fire was burning inside the mist, the sparks fanning over the water.

Jean-Jacques blew out his breath and looked through the glass at the canvas that was stretched across the deck, swelling in the wind and tugging against the ropes that held it, canvas that in reality sheltered nothing except a few crates of tools and plowshares. He reached into his shirt and lifted a religious medal to his lips and kissed it.

"Lord, if you cain't forgive me all my sins, just don't remember them too good, no. Thank you. Amen," he said.

He steered the boat close to shore, until the overhang scratched against the gunnel and the top of the pilothouse, then shut down the paddle-wheel while his boatmates slipped the anchors on the bow and stern. Curds of yellow smoke rose from the trash fire burning in the field. A black man walked through the trees toward the boat, the fire bright behind him. He stood motionless on the bank, squinting at the darkened windows in the pilothouse.

"That's my uncle!" Flower said, and ran out on the deck.

"Why don't she yell it at them people in that plantation house back yonder?" Jean-Jacques said.

"We'll be back in a few minutes. It's going to be fine," Abigail said.

Lightning rippled through the clouds over the river. Jean-Jacques' face looked dilated, his eyes like black marbles. He pulled the cork from a green bottle and drank from the neck.

"Miss Abigail, my heart done aged ten years tonight. Get back quick with them colored people. Don't make me grow no older, no," he said.

"Fifteen minutes. You'll see," she said, and winked at him.

She and Flower went down the plank the boatmates had propped against the bank and followed Flower's uncle up an eroded coulee through a stand of gum trees. The mist was gray and damp, like a cotton glove, the air tannic with the smell of dead leaves that had pooled inside stagnant water. The coulee led like a jagged wound through a sweet potato field, steep-sided, thick with ferns and air vines, the soft clay at the bottom laced with the stenciled tracks of deer and possums and raccoons.

Lightning jumped between the clouds, and Abigail saw perhaps two dozen adults and children sitting down on each side of the stream at the bottom of coulee, their faces frightened, their belongings tied inside blankets.