Occasionally they pass other groups, all of them bent on errands of mischief. Everyone pretends not to see everyone else. They fall on the neighborhood farms, removing gates, taking down snake fences, making off with carriage wheels, harvesting heads of cabbage and stacking them into pyramids like cannonballs. They come across one of their own horses, loosed and with a cabbage tied to its neck.
Asia walks between John and Sleeper as they approach Stephen Hooper’s cabin. John is just saying something about the profusion of stars, when he suddenly shoves Asia to the ground, throws himself over her. Asia hears the sharp sound of a rifle and slowly understands that Stephen Hooper is peppering them with buckshot.
John’s hat has been blown from his head.
The shots continue, striking rocks and mud, echoing in the still night. Little Susanna Hall begins to cry. “Am I shot? Am I shot?” she asks her brother Pink, who kneels to wrap his arms around her, rocks her gently, and says that she is not. No one has been shot.
When firing ceases, John rises slowly and retrieves his hat. “I’ll remember this, Hooper,” he shouts. “Count on it.”
Sleeper helps Asia up, asks anxiously if she was hurt in the fall. She’s too angry to know for sure. As a black man, Hooper is not allowed to have a gun. “He had no provocation,” Asia says, forgetting his dead dog, incapable of understanding what a black man might feel, living alone in a remote cabin, and seeing a mob of people coming silently towards him in the dark.
It would be as easy as anything to see him hauled away. Asia assumes John will report it. And yet, days go by. She asks John about it. “I don’t know,” he says, as if he’s as surprised as she by his own lack of action. “I seem to have forgiven him.”
How is a person able to do this, erase an injury from the heart as if it never made a mark? Asia can’t fathom it. John, so determined, so single-minded about some things, is oddly mercurial about others.
His restraint appears to unsettle Hooper. Henceforth, Asia says, he treats them with a smiling hatred. A year later when some of Hooper’s sons are hired to work on the farm, Asia objects. “Remember Halloween,” she says.
John puts a hand on her arm. “That was a long time ago.”
No, she thinks. One may smile and smile and be a villain.
* * *
—
This is the last time Asia will see Pinkney Hall on the farm. A few days later he and his sister Mary Ellen run. Aunty Rogers takes this as a personal insult, a suggestion that they don’t take care of their slaves, that their slaves are not, in fact, practically family. If anything, Elijah has been too indulgent. Hasn’t he let Pink see his parents more often than a slave could hope? Hasn’t he always behaved with tolerance and generosity when another owner might have noticed laziness and insolence?
She turns a suspicious eye on Ann and Joe. Someone gave Pinkney and Mary Ellen the money to escape—they could never have managed without money.
Ann listens soberly to Aunty Rogers’ grievances. She says that this comes as a big surprise to her as well; she had no idea. She says that she can’t imagine what insanity came over her children. She agrees that they had no cause, assures Aunty Rogers of her own fundamental goodness. She admits to nothing. The Booths could take acting lessons from her (and probably any other slave in the South as well).
Asia would have been entirely convinced had she not, just a week or so prior, happened on Ann and Rosalie whispering together in conspiratorial fashion, a conversation that stopped immediately when Asia walked in.
Aunty Rogers remains insulted. She comes less often to visit the Booths, where she is so likely to run into Ann. Asia doesn’t want to choose between these two women—she loves them both. She feels there must be blame on both sides. Aunty Rogers should have forced her husband to emancipate Ann’s children. But Ann shouldn’t have participated, if she participated, in this illegal flight.
John says very little about it, noting only that the Booths depended on Pink to care for their horses and what are they to do now? It’s an inconvenience rather than an outrage. He grants the Hall family an exemption from his usual politics.
So two more of Ann and Joe’s children are free. But they won’t see their mother again until the end of the Civil War. And they have looked on their father for the very last time.
xii
For most of Asia’s life so far, the large world of not-Booths has occupied very little of her thinking. Living among slaves, intertwined as they are with the Hall family, she seems strangely oblivious to the great issue of the nation. What does it have to do with her and her brothers? Plus Father always said that actors can’t afford to be political. When he wrote his death threat to Jackson, that was a personal, not a political, matter.
This changes.
National politics grow increasingly violent while politics in Baltimore take their own volatile turn. The issue of the moment here is not slavery, but immigration.
John tries to goad Asia, and sometimes Rosalie, into argument. He has a didactic, badgering style and insists on continuing long past the point at which he’s either convinced or exhausted his opponent, as he will not quit without winning. Asia begins these arguments full of spirit and ends them drained of all conviction. His beliefs are so much more deeply held than hers.
He’s joined the Know-Nothing Party and, finding the opposition at home too tame, begins to frequent the Bel Air saloon in pursuit of livelier game. He’s passionate about the anti-immigration sentiments and there are other things that also appeal to his sixteen-year-old heart. The Know-Nothings are a party of clandestine meetings, secret oaths and handshakes. They think and move like spies.
In November, he’s chosen as a delegate from Bel Air to a great mass meeting in support of the Know-Nothing candidate for Congress, Henry Winter Davis. The day starts dry, but follows a night of rain that left the roads in great puddles of mud. Asia decides to ride Fanny rather than taking the cariole and so she dresses that morning in her riding habit, short jacket, overskirt. She meets John downstairs and he’s wearing a coat Asia has never seen before, red with velvet lapels, over a light vest, and with pale gray trousers strapped under his boots. He’s begun to grow a mustache, as yet a faint shadow on his upper lip. He looks magnificent. Rosalie and Mother come into the parlor to exclaim over him.
“Come with us,” Asia says to Rosalie, knowing that she won’t. She says that crowds give her a headache.