The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [192]
The man was grinning, showing clearly the effects of tobacco—his few teeth were brown as nuts—and behind him, a little dark head bobbed up, and a high voice said, "He Massa Philip!" then dropped down again. Master Philip spun around, his whip held high, but the child had disappeared. The shaft of the whip came down rather ineffectually on the canvas, then Master Philip spit into the road, raising a puff of dust. He turned around on the seat and faced me again. I had gotten a few yards off by now, maybe twenty, and I was walking fast, though every step was agony in my large, heavy boots. Over the night, my feet had swelled, and numerous tender spots from the day before now burned against the heavy leather as if I had no stockings on at all. But I hastened forward, looking for a break in the brush to slip through, out of the sight of a man who appeared to me possibly mad and certainly threatening. He whipped the mule into a trot and closed the distance between us. I stumbled and dropped my bag, which fell partly open, necessitating sufficient delay so that the mule came up beside me again. I looked at the man and began backing away. He said, "Now, boy, I notice about you that you an’t got no manners. Here I am, your elder and better, no doubt, and I asked you a question, and you an’t answered it but just croaked at me like a duck. Round these parts we know a thing or two about a thing or two, and I’m guessing you to be a stranger, and an unfriendly one at that. You some G— d— abolitionist, or something?"
I didn’t say anything but turned and attempted to hurry away. A curve in the road now revealed a break in the fence across the way, and I thought if I ran I could get there and off into the field. I doubted whether Master Philip had enough interest in me to pursue me off the road. Nevertheless, he did whip up the mule to a steady trot, and they came on behind me. At the break in the fence, the mule was practically on top of me, Master Philip was haw-hawing to beat the band, and I was able to duck around in front of the animal, waving my arms and brandishing my bag in the mule’s face, so that he threw up his head and came to a halt, toppling the man out of the wagon into the dirt. I slipped through the opening in the fence, hearing but not seeing Master Philip pick himself up with a torrent of curses. From the back of the wagon came high-pitched yelling: "Massa Ablishinist! Save me! Tak me ’long, Massa Ablishinist! Don’ leave me wid Massa Philip! Tak me! Tak me!"
I ran across the field as far and as fast as I could, never looking back but hearing both the screaming and the cursing until they blended into one sound and then were lost in the other sounds of an August morning. When I stopped at last, out of breath and ready to drop, I couldn’t be sure that I actually saw the wagon and the mule, nor did I care, as my pulse was pounding so hard in my ears that that itself made me afraid, and a kind of red cloud seemed to be closing over my sight from both sides. I staggered into the shade of a stand of hackberry trees and knelt down, resting the top of my head on the cool earth. I closed my eyes.
Perhaps I crouched in that position for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, not unmindful of Master Philip but too overwhelmed by my own exertions to make much of him. Then I came more to myself and peered about. He was nowhere to be seen. I spied some deeper shade and crawled to it, and only then did I recall the pleas