Dead water - Barbara Hambly [136]
January said, “That's why you went down to see the Silver Moon off? To say good-by?”
“To kiss her,” said the Queen. “An' to put my Word on her, though she don't believe it no more; just to see her once more. Her master, he sell her to that Irish as a maid for his popotte, and they all promise, we won't sell her, we make her a good maidservant. . . . But she's afraid. And I'm afraid. I know I'll never see her again, not in the flesh. Sometimes I felt her scared so bad, scared one night. . . . But that mornin', as I was cookin' in the kitchen, her fear came on me so strong, I near fainted. And I put my head down on the table an' I see her in the dark, trapped an' scared, with things fallin' on her an' the water comin' in. . . . An' I see you. And I thought . . .”
Her few white teeth shone in a wry crone's grin.
“. . . I thought, Lord Baron Cemetery, don't let that hex take hold on him now! You went back for her,” she finished with tears swimming silver in her eyes. “You went back and you didn't have to, you didn't even know for sure she was there. But my girl, she's alive now 'cause of you. She's walkin' to freedom 'cause of you. So I put blessin' on your house, blessin' wherever you walk. Blessin' to guard you, whatever you do.”
January said softly, “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
And the little old woman winked at him, and he stepped aside to let her totter down the stair.
To himself he reflected, as she hobbled away into the half-lights and whispers of the warm, still dawn, that if he was going to start working with the Underground Railway, he was certainly going to need all the blessings he could get.
He turned, and went back into the dim sanctuary of his home.
STEAMBOATS
The steam-driven packet-boats that plied the waterways of America in the 1830s were hardly the “floating palaces” of the post–Civil War era; they, and the craft of steamboating, differed even from those of the late 1850s immortalized in Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi. At the time of my story, the era of fancy wooden gingerbread trimmings, gilded antlers on the smokestacks, plush cabin furnishings, and calliopes lay a decade or two in the future. Even the steam whistle had yet to be invented.
Before the post-War era of the railroads, steamboats were the workaday backbone of commerce and transportation. They were plain, generally only two decks high (only later was the “hurricane” deck surmounted by the topmost “texas” deck), and resembled barns set on rafts. If they were primarily white, like later steamboats, it was only because whitewash was cheap. Staterooms were minuscule, and in the high-water periods of the cotton and sugar harvests, every square foot of deck-space was likely to be taken up with cargo: freight was given priority, and passengers came in a poor second. During the high-water months most commerce was done by the side-wheelers—larger, more powerful, and more maneuverable. Only in low water—or in shallower waters of lesser rivers and bayous—did the smaller stern-wheelers like the Silver Moon come into their own.
I have tried to describe what steamboat travel must have been like in the 1830s, when the Mississippi River was innocent of locks, flood control, uniform levees, or any variety of snag-clearance (or safety regulations for steamboat passengers). Even before the Civil War, railroads had begun to undercut the steamboats' monopoly on freight and to disrupt uninhibited navigation with bridges.
COLONEL DAVIS
In the summer of 1836, when Dead Water takes place, Jefferson Davis was twenty-eight years old and just embarking on a career as a planter at Brierfield on Davis's Bend of the Mississippi. He had been widowed less than a year before by the death of his young bride of three months, Sarah Knox Taylor (called Knox), the daughter of his former commanding officer—and future President—Zachary Taylor. Davis