So, yes, he was not unacquainted with the chaos of the Colonies. But this was a different matter entirely: This was someone he was coming to know, with whom he had spoken and laughed, and in whose arms he now lay, the both of them unclothed.
“But you don’t sound like you’re from the Colonies,” he said at last, and at this, to his relief, Edward laughed.
“No, I don’t—but I have lived here for many years,” he said.
Slowly at first, and then in a rush, his story emerged. He had arrived in the Free States, to Philadelphia, as a child. The family had lived for four generations in Georgia, near Savannah, where his father had been a schoolteacher at a boys’ school. When he was almost seven, though, he had announced that they were to leave on a trip. There were six of them: he, his mother, his father, and his three sisters—two older, the third younger.
David calculated. “So this would have been in seventy-seven?”
“Yes. That autumn.”
What followed was a typical escapee’s tale; before the war, the southern states had disapproved of the Free States, but did not adjudicate their citizens’ movements through the nation. After the war, however, and the south’s subsequent secession from the Union, it became illegal for those in the Free States to travel to the south, now renamed the United Colonies, or for the Colonists to travel north. Yet many of the Colonists did so anyway. The trip north was arduous, and long, and was generally made on foot. Common wisdom suggested that it was safest to move in a group, but that group ought not number more than, say, ten and ought not contain more than five children, as they tired quickly and were less likely to remain calm in the case of a patrol’s appearance. One heard dreadful stories of aborted attempts: of children being torn, wailing, from their parents and, it was rumored, sold to local families to work as farmhands; wives being separated from their husbands and forced to remarry; imprisonment; death. The worst stories were of the people like them, people who came to the Free States in hopes of living legally. Not long ago, Eliza’s guests had been two men, recently arrived, who were traveling with their friends, another couple, from Virginia. They were less than half a mile from Maryland, whence they would carry on to Pennsylvania, and had stopped to rest against an oak tree. There they lay, in each other’s arms, but just as they had begun to relax, they heard the first hoofbeats, and immediately leapt to their feet and began running. But the second couple was slower, and when they heard the cries of their friends as they fell, the first couple did not turn back but instead ran harder and faster than they had ever dreamed themselves capable. Behind them, closer and closer, drew another set of hoofbeats, and it was only by meters that they made it across the border, and only then that they turned, and saw the patrol, his face obscured by his hood, pulling tight on his horse’s reins, skidding to a halt, before raising his rifle at them. It was illegal for a patrol to cross the border in order to claim an escapee, much less kill one, but everyone knew that it took only a single bullet to render that law useless. The couple turned and ran again, with the horse’s whinny echoing in the air behind them for what seemed like miles, and it was not until the next day, once they were safely in the state’s interior, that they allowed themselves to weep for their friends, not only because they had imagined beginning their lives in the Free States together but because everyone knew what happened to people like them who were caught: beatings, burnings, torture—death. Telling the story in Eliza and Eden’s parlor, the men had wept again, and David, like everyone else in attendance, had listened in spellbound horror. That night, back at Washington Square, he had thought of how dearly blessed he was to have been born in the Free States; how he had never known and would never know such barbarism as those gentlemen had endured.
Edward’s family had been alone on their journey. His father had not hired a smuggler, who, if he was trustworthy (and some were), greatly improved your chances of a successful escape; they had not traveled with another family, which was preferable because it meant one couple could sleep while the other looked after the children. From Georgia, the trip required around a fortnight, but by the end of the first week, the weather had grown chilly, and then bitter, and the family’s food reserves were nearly depleted.
“My parents would wake us very early, at daybreak, and my sisters and I would forage for acorns,” Edward said. “We couldn’t risk building a fire, but my mother would pound them into a paste, and we would eat it mashed atop hardtack.”
“How awful,” he murmured. He felt foolish—but there was nothing else he might say.
“Yes—it was. Most awful for my younger sister, Belle. She was only four and didn’t understand that she had to be quiet; she only knew she was hungry and didn’t know why. She cried and cried, and my mother had to hold her hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t give us away.”
Neither of his parents ate breakfast or lunch. They saved their remaining food for dinner, and at night, the family would huddle together for warmth. Edward and his father would try to find a copse of trees for them to sleep in, or at least a gully, and they would cover themselves with leaves and branches, both to protect themselves from the wind and to try to conceal their scent from the patrol’s dogs. What was worse, Edward remembered thinking, even then—the terror or the hunger? Both defined his every day.
When they finally made it to Maryland, they went straight to one of the centers a friend had told Edward’s father about, where they remained for several months. Edward’s father taught classes in reading and mathematics to some of his fellow escapees’ children; Edward’s mother, a skilled seamstress, repaired damaged clothes, which the center took in to earn its residents a pittance. By spring, they had left the center and had embarked upon their travels once again—a difficult but less arduous journey, since now they were at least in the Union—this time to the Free States, where they continued northward to New York. Here, in the city, Mister Bishop had eventually found work at a printing press (there being a certain prejudice in the Free States and the Union against the educational standards of people from the Colonies, meaning that many learned escapees found themselves in reduced circumstances), and the six of them had settled into a small apartment on Orchard Street.
Still, Edward said (and David detected a note of sincerity, of pride, in his voice), they had most of them done well for themselves. His parents had died, carried away by the flu of ’90, but his two older sisters were both schoolteachers in Vermont, and Belle, a nurse, lived with her husband, a doctor, in New Hampshire, in Manchester.
“Indeed, I am the only failure,” he said, and sighed, dramatically, although David sensed that Edward in some way believed this to be true, and that it troubled him.
“You are not a failure,” he told Edward, and pulled him closer to his body.
For a while, they were silent, and David, his chin resting atop Edward’s dark head, traced patterns on Edward’s back. “Your father,” he said, at last, “had he been like us?”