Flight to Canada Read online

  Quickskill couldn’t forget the telegram: “For your poem ‘Flight to Canada,’ a witty, satiric and delightful contribution to American letters, we invite you to a White House reception honoring the leading scribes of America.”

  Walt Whitman was there. He had written a poem called “Respondez,” in which he had recommended all manner of excesses: lunatics running the asylum, jailers running the jail. “Let murderers, bigots, fools, unclean persons offer new propositions!” And now, here he was as Lincoln’s guest in the White House.

  In the same poem he had written: “Let nothing remain but the ashes of teachers, artists, moralists, lawyers and learned and polite persons.” I guess he was talking about himself, Quickskill thought, because there he was, as polite as he could be, grinning, shaking the hands of dignitaries.

  Whitman had described Lincoln as “dark brown.” Whitman was accurate about that. He stood in the corner for most of the party, sniffing a lilac.

  There were a couple of anti-war scribes that Quickskill recognized. They were from New York. There was a large anti-war movement in New York. In fact, New Yorkers were seriously considering a proposal to secede from the Union for the purpose of forming a new state: Tri-Insula—Manhattan, Long Island, Staten Island. Some of the New Yorkers were cussing loud, dropping their ashes on the White House rug and picking fights with people.

  Raven felt woozy. The night before, flying down to Washington, he had shared a little ale in one of the taverns down on Vesey Street frequented by the anti-slavery, or “free,” crowd. He hadn’t gotten much sleep.

  He clutched his stomach where the pain grabbed him. He began to sweat all over. It must have been the rich lunch they had thrown for the visiting “scribes,” as they called them. He was never too hot on French food. He could even eat slave-ship food: salt beef, pork, dried peas, weevily biscuits. But French food always made him sick.

  Lincoln’s wife Mary was wandering about the room. She was dressed in a white satin evening gown trimmed with black lace. Some military man was escorting her. She shook hands with writers coolly. Todd Lincoln tapped him on the shoulder. It was Todd Lincoln. Rumor had it that he was a bigger lush than his old man.

  “Anything wrong, Mr. Quickskill?”

  “Oh, nothing, Mr. Lincoln, I …”

  “You know, I enjoyed the poem ‘Flight to Canada.’ You really laid that Swille planter out. Such wit. Such irony. You’re a national institution.”

  “I … I …” He was about to collapse.

  “Something is wrong?” Todd hurried over to where Lincoln was discussing something with Mathew Brady and whispered in his ear. They looked over his way. He was trying not to make a scene. Lincoln said something back. Todd returned to Quickskill.

  “Dad said you could lie down in his bedroom. He never uses it anyway.”

  “You mean the Lincoln bedroom?”

  “Sure, think nothing of it.”

  14

  IT WAS SIPPING FROM a glass of wine and listening to the radio. Some new group with a fife, drum, flute. A lot of snare—rap-a-tap tap. Nice. It puts the glass back on the rosewood rococo-revival table. It is lying in the bed that matches the table. It feels better, and now its head is swimming, not from the sickness, which has left, but from the occasion. It is lying in the President’s bed, just as in “Flight to Canada” it bragged about lying in Swille’s bed. The poem had gotten it here. The poem had placed it in this place of majesty, of the great, talking and drinking with the creative celebrities of the country.

  The poem had also pointed to where it, 40s, Stray Leechfield were hiding. Did that make the poem a squealer? A tattler? What else did this poem have in mind for it. Its creation, but in a sense, Swille’s bloodhound.

  It put its hands behind its head and was lying in the soft pillows and clean sheets. There was a noise in the hall. It heard one man talking loud, and the other in a high-pitched squeaky voice—the President.

  “But you told me that I ought to get some culture, and so I decided to try to win over the intellectuals in the Eastern establishment who’ve constantly written Op-eds about my lack of style; now that some of them are here, they are commenting on the beauty of my prose, in between drinks. That’s a favorable sign, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t care, Lanky,” Swille said. “That shine is my property. I paid good money for him, and you yourself, you said …”

  “I know, I know. But, Mr. Swille, if you bag him, would you mind carrying him out the back way? If it reaches the newspapers that a fugitive was taken from the very White House, the Radical Republicans, the Abolitionists and the anti-slavery people will call for my impeachment.”

  Quickskill rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t returned to the house for fear of running into the Tracers. He took a sparsely furnished apartment in the Manumit Inn. His bed was a bunk with institution sheets and blankets. That was some dream. The dream was accurate, too, for those who could read dreams. Three years since the Emancipation Proclamation, and it wasn’t doing him any good. Swille was an empire unto himself, the Uncrowned King of America, as they were beginning to call him. Swille’s law, that’s what the Nebraska Tracers cared about. Swille wasn’t in the international editions of the Tribune. In fact, Swille wasn’t in the newspapers much at all any more, since Lincoln had proclaimed Emancipation. Rumors were coming from behind the huge sinister walls of Swille’s Castle that the old man had cursed Lincoln’s name and was said to be acting in an “inappropriate manner.”

  People didn’t know whether Ms. Swille was dead or alive.

  The South was in shambles after Sherman’s march. Sherman said that he would “make Georgia howl,” and Georgia had howled indeed. The only people Quickskill could convince that Swille was after him were 40s and Leechfield. Leechfield seemed flippant about the matter. Did he actually believe that Swille would accept money from him?

  Quickskill went to the window. He didn’t see any Southern license plates on the cars. Maybe it was safe. They seemed like gentlemen, but what would they do next? He’d heard of fugitive slaves put in trunks, sacks, in the back of wagons, blindfolded, gagged as they were returned to their Masters. Some were put on trains and others were brought back in elegant buggies in which the slaves were entrapped. Watch out for elegant buggies.

  The South is strange. Some of the slaves are leaving the plantations, and some do not desire to leave at all. They are even following the Mistress from town to town. Strange indeed. A mystery.

  Quickskill turns on the radio. That Union station in nearby Detroit is playing some patriotic music. It couldn’t have been a Union band. The Confederate bands sounded snappy, tight, measured, and played with precision. They were playing this song called “Dixie” with the strange lyrics. The Union bands were rag-taggle.

  He dressed and went to the neighborhood of the house he was watching. There weren’t any cars in front. He put his collars up about him and walked past the house. Nobody was inside. He went up to the porch, picked up the mail, which was always marked Forward Please, it seemed. There was some junk mail and another letter on some stationary made of expensive cloth. It was from Beulahland Review. He had sent in a poem; but that was three years ago. They wrote they were going to publish his poem, just as the Nebraska Tracers had said. Hey, they didn’t tell him all of it. Two hundred dollars. Two hundred dollars! He could go to Canada. He leaped into the air, throwing his hand behind his head, clutching the letter. Gooooodddd Daaannnngggg! Goooddddd Leeeeee. He was going to CANADA.

  Back at Manumit Inn he was lying in bed, daydreaming about himself and some fine suffragette dining on a terrace of a hotel, gazing at the American Falls, and he was about to say, “You’re the most beautiful fan I’ve run into.” The phone rang. He picked it up.

  “Quickskill?” It was Carpenter. He recognized the voice. Carpenter built red barns and log cabins.

  “Yeah, Carpenter. How did you know I was here … ?”

  “These two dudes from Nebraska was at your house, and they said you’d gone to th
e john and didn’t come back. They said they’d figured you’d be at the Manumit Hotel and asked me to tell you not to make things difficult. What did they mean by that?”

  “Skip it, Carpenter. What’s up?”

  “I’m going to Canada, so I thought I’d throw a little jubilee party.”

  “You too? My poem, I won a poem, I mean my poem is being published. They’re going to give me two hundred dollars. Soon as I get the check, I’m leaving.”

  “Great! Maybe I’ll see you there. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Well, be sure to come to my party. We begin at about seven.”

  “I’ll be there.” He hung up. Carpenter could go and come back. He was a free Negro, and had been free for some years. He had what they called a “viable” trade. He had bought the freedom of his mother and his wife. Free. Quickskill thought about it. A freedom writer, never again threatened with “Ginny.” His poems were “readings” for him from his inner self, which knew more about his future than he did.

  While others had their tarot cards, their ouija boards, their I-Ching, their cowrie shells, he had his “writings.” They were his bows and arrows. He was so much against slavery that he had begun to include prose and poetry in the same book, so that there would be no arbitrary boundaries between them. He preferred Canada to slavery, whether Canada was exile, death, art, liberation, or a woman. Each man to his own Canada. There was much avian imagery in the poetry of slaves. Poetry about dreams and flight. They wanted to cross that Black Rock Ferry to freedom even though they had different notions as to what freedom was.

  They often disagreed about it, Leechfield, 40s. But it was his writing that got him to Canada. “Flight to Canada” was responsible for getting him to Canada. And so for him, freedom was his writing. His writing was his HooDoo. Others had their way of HooDoo, but his was his writing. It fascinated him, it possessed him; his typewriter was his drum he danced to.

  15

  CARPENTER NOTICED HIM AS soon as he entered the house. He left the circle of guests around him and ran up to Quickskill.

  “Man, I can’t wait. I’m going to hit all the spots in Toronto. I got this fine suite reserved for me in the King Edward Hotel. It’s advertised in The New York Times. ‘A Gracious Tradition’ it says in the ad. I’m going to get me a good night’s sleep and get up and order me some breakfast. I’m going to have me some golden pancakes and maple syrup, bacon, sausage, ham—I’m going to have all three. Then I’m going to have some marmalade and a big old glass of grapefruit juice. That’s how I’m going to start out. Then I’m going to take in the sights. Up there the Plantation House is just something on display at the Toronto Museum. Don’t have to worry about who’s my friend and who’s my enemy, like it is here. Anybody might turn out to be crazy, I’m always mistaken for a fugitive sl—I … I …”

  “That’s all right, Carpenter. You know, I’ll be joining you soon.”

  “When you coming up?”

  “Soon as I receive the check from the magazine.”

  “Man, I’m glad. I didn’t know that writing paid.”

  “Yeah, well …”

  “Hey, Quickskill, I did a poem once. Maybe you’d look at it. It’s not as professional as your work but maybe you can introduce me to one of them big-time editors and …”

  “I’m busy right now. Maybe when I get to Canada, maybe then.”

  “Yeah, sure, Quickskill. There’s plenty of time. Think I might crowd out your gig, huh, Quickskill?”

  “Sure, Carpenter, sure.” Quickskill managed a weak smile. There was always an air of condescension in the way free slaves related to fugitive slaves. Especially the ones from Louisiana. He was never able to figure that out. The slavemasters in Louisiana often freed their sons by African women. Some of these children became slave owners themselves. But some of them in Emancipation, seeing that there was some money to be made in anti-slavery lecturing, often mounted the platform and talked about their treatment from hickory whips, lashes made of rawhide strands, so convincingly, it was difficult to tell the real sufferers from the phony ones. Carpenter wasn’t like that, though. He had a trade. He could find work anywhere.

  “Look, Quickskill,” Carpenter said from that round face which exuded warmth and friendship, “come on in and make yourself comfortable. What did you bring?”

  “I brought some Paul Lawrence Dunbar cuisine.”

  “Out-of-sight, man. Take it into the kitchen.”

  Carpenter returned to his guests. Quickskill entered the parlor in Carpenter’s shotgun house.

  They were playing some kind of old-style Spanish dance; the women were wearing flowers behind their ears and doing fancy dips and turns, while the old men wore their mellow California hats, slanted. There was some bending back and some elegant freezes going on; weaving of invisible nets with fingers. Some of the local Native American poets were there too, standing in a huddle, drinking Coke. In the dining room men were standing around a table, smoking cigars and discussing the Emancipation.

  They began to smile when they spotted Quickskill laying down his contribution to the slave food that was on the table. Dunbar food: wheat bread, egg pone, hog jaws, roasted shoat, ham sliced cold. He had brought some Beaujolais, which he placed down next to the dishes of meat, fish and the variety of salad with Plantation dressing. Somebody else had brought John Brown à la carte—boiled beef, cabbage, pork and beans. The bottles of champagne looked chilled and ready to pop their tops.

  He returned to the main room, where the guests were dancing. Leechfield was in the middle of the room doing a mean Walk-Around with this long-legged stack of giggles, who was dancing around like a tranquilized ostrich. Quickskill recognized her as the Abolitionist principal of the Free High School. Due to her New England Abolitionist ideas about education, some of the slave children had become, under her influence, surly and unmanageable, wouldn’t mind their parents and referred to themselves as the future; 1900s people, they were calling themselves. Leechfield, a little grey in his beard and with those squint devilish eyes, was enjoying himself. He hopped into Chicken Wings and ended it up with some dance they were doing called the Copperhead. His partner was trying to keep up, bouncing about and moving her bony elbows like a mutant ape.

  The front door opened, admitting a new guest: Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara. She was the frontier dancer, an accurate-shooting, limb-wriggling desperado; tear a man’s nose off. She could put the palms of her feet on the top of your bush, so limber was she. She was extremely good doing limber things. She wore Western boots, denims. She recognized Quickskill and began that smile that made you feel that the top of your brain pan was coming off. You could put the tip of your tongue along the roof of her mouth and feel like Pinocchio inside some soft whale, spouting and leaping in the Atlantic. She could stand ten feet away from you and make you feel that she was all over you. She was a real mountain climber. She was popular on the college circuit, performing Indian dances.

  She approached him, hips moving like those of a woman who swims fifty laps a day and subsists on bananas and yogurt. “Quickskill,” she said, in one of her Anglicized sentences, “it’s so nice to see you. It’s been such a long time. Fort Thunderbird?”

  Fort Thunderbird was where the fugitive slaves obtained their Emancipation papers as soon as they arrived in Emancipation City. It was a complex of buildings called “Jack’s Plaza,” built by her husband, Yankee Jack the pirate, or rather consultant on trade routes and compiler of shipping logs, as his business card read. He was somewhat of a hero in these parts because of his condemnation of those pirates who pirated human cargo. He was even more indignant over the fact that they kept bogus logs so as to deceive the British Navy. He considered them to be untidy. He was a respectable pirate, and so he only dealt in things like distribution, abandoning taking over trade routes and shanghaiing ships as crude. He also dabbled in jewels, gold and real estate.

  He was dedicating his life to building Emancipation City, a refuge
for slaves, Indians and those who committed heinous acts because society made them do it. This Wordsworth reader, connoisseur of good wines, good theatre, good art and other finer things of life was known around these parts as the Good Pirate. And when he took as his bride Quaw Quaw, cultured performer of Ethnic Dance, finer than Pocahontas, sturdy as the Maid of the Mist—actually married this Third World belle, since heathen women were available to pirates under any condition the pirate wanted—when he actually put a ring on her finger, there was a celebration for days. Neighboring tribes attended. And when his church objected to this marriage between a Christian and an Infidel, he closed the church down, so to this day there’s no church in Emancipation City, just various temples of different religions where people wander in and out. Some are near the city parks, others right downtown. He was a worldly pirate, but Raven Quickskill had learned how to read between the lines in his job of preparing slave invoices. He had something on this pirate. Something … something awful! Something everybody knew but Quaw Quaw. No one had the heart to tell her. Quickskill had written an unpublished poem about it. A rare “serious” love poem for him.

  When Raven first came to town, he checked in at the general store where the registration was going on; he could see the pirates’ castle on a mountain overlooking Pirates’ Plaza. It was a replica of Crevecoeur (heartbreak), the slave fort built by the Europeans on the coast of Guinea. After having his papers signed, he bought some stamps, writing paper and typewriter ribbon. He then decided to take a tour of the slave castle. The tour cost a penny.

  He got lost from the main tour group and mistakenly entered an upstairs room, where Quaw Quaw lay in an old French bed underneath a canopy. She had her knees drawn up and was reading a chapbook. The poems of a New Englander. They were about lobsters, aunts and religion.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. I got lost from the main tour,” Quickskill said.