Soon Be Free
CONTENTS
Epigraph
What Happened and When
1 Firebird House
2 A Leg to Stand On
3 Skeleton Key
4 Will in the Shadows
5 Walking on Egg Yolks
6 No More Talk of a Dead Body
7 Too Much History
8 Cockleburs
9 Caught!
10 Miz Lizbet’s Legacy
11 Trap
12 Dred Scott
13 Hound Dog PJ’s
14 A Surprise Passenger
15 Samuel Straightfeather
16 Delaware Woman
17 No Hula Hoops
18 The Cutest Thang!
19 Ronald McDonald Curls
20 The Father of Waters
21 Silent Scream
22 Not Everybody Gets Free
23 Air!
24 Promised Land
25 The Fire-Eater
26 One Goes, We All Go
27 Ernie’s Bait Shop
28 Wicked Wicker
29 Tonganoxie
30 The Crunch of Footsteps
31 Flat as a Cockroach
32 The Old Man Is A-Waiting
33 Floating Feather
34 An Old Goofer
35 Gift of Feathers
36 The Devils in the Cave
37 A Politically Correct Indian
38 Rats and Ambrosia
39 Bo Prairie Fire
40 Shprintze’s Calico
41 Lulu
42 Dawgs
43 Elder Brother Won’t Come
44 A Pair of Conjurers
45 Hollywood Extravaganza
46 A Dang Good Forgery
47 The Delaware Project
48 A Moral Dilemma
49 Whereas and Heretofore
50 Lane’s Chimneys
51 The Missing Treaty
52 Stung by the Love Bug
53 Time and Mother Earth
54 Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing
55 New Time, Old Time
56 Kansas Territory
57 Home at Last
58 State of Kansas
59 Who Knows?
For Jocelyn Charlotte Ruby, my window to the future
WE’LL SOON BE FREE
We’ll soon be free,
We’ll soon be free,
We’ll soon be free,
When de Lord will call us home.
My brudder, how long,
My brudder, how long,
My brudder, how long,
’Fore we done sufferin’ here?
It won’t be long,
It won’t be long,
It won’t be long,
’Fore de Lord will call us home.
—from an old Negro spiritual
WHAT HAPPENED AND WHEN
There are dozens of names and dates in this story, which takes place both in 1857 and today. Time jumps in the blink of an eye. Maybe this will help.
* means an actual historical date; all others are fictional.
1809 Samuel Straightfeather is born.
* 1818–1829 By treaty, Delaware Indians are forced out of their homeland in the Delaware Valley ever westward, until they’re resettled in Kansas Territory on a reservation of 2 million acres.
* 1820 Missouri Compromise allows for Missouri to be admitted to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. Slavery is prohibited from the Louisiana Purchase at the line of 36°30’ north latitude, except in the state of Missouri. Thus, slavery is illegal in Kansas Territory.
1822 Jedediah Morrison is born (Bo Prairie Fire’s great-great-grandfather).
1844 James Baylor Weaver is born in Boston.
1847 Callie Biggers is born in Kentucky.
* 1850 (Second) Fugitive Slave Law is enacted, declaring that runaway slaves must be recaptured and returned to their masters. The new law affirms the principle of once a slave, always a slave, reaching back many generations.
* 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act establishes two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and repeals the Missouri Compromise. Under the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the question of free state or slave state status is left to voters in those states. This act upholds the principle of once free, always free.
* 1854 Lawrence is founded in Kansas Territory, as is Leavenworth.
* 1854 United States treaty with the Delaware Indians reduces the two-million-acre reservation to 275,000 acres, comprising a strip on the north bank of the Kansas River ten miles wide and extending forty miles to the west. This treaty and its repercussions are still being disputed today.
* 1856 James Buchanan is elected the fifteenth president of the United States.
1856 Miz Lizbet Charles dies in Lawrence, Kansas Territory.
* 1857 After an eleven-year court battle, the Dred Scott decision of the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirms once a slave, always a slave and declares that no slave or descendant of a slave can be a U.S. citizen.
1857 Fictional treaty between U.S. and Delaware Indians is signed and lost.
* 1858 Gold rush begins in western Kansas Territory, now called Colorado.
1859 Homer Biggers celebrates his fortieth birthday.
* 1861 (January 29) Kansas Territory becomes the State of Kansas.
* 1861 (April 12) U.S. Civil War / The War Between the States begins.
* 1865 (April) Civil War ends when General Lee surrenders.
* 1866 Delaware Indians are forced out of Kansas and resettled in Indian Territory (now called Oklahoma), among the Cherokee Nation.
1896 Samuel Straightfeather dies.
1920 Bo Prairie Fire is born.
Chapter One
FIREBIRD HOUSE
I ask you, why do weird things always happen to me? Mike says it’s because blazing redheads are an anomaly of nature, so we’re natural magnets for weirdness. He’s got a point. Like, not long ago, when we were renovating Firebird House into a bed-and-breakfast, I found a skeleton hidden in a little room upstairs. I followed those bones back into the past and found out that this drafty, creaky old house was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Not only that, but a runaway slave, Miz Lizbet Charles, had died more than 140 years ago, right here, probably right where I’m sitting this minute.
Mystery solved, right? Hah! Next thing I knew, on a night when there was barely a laser beam of moonlight, a man was snooping around with a flashlight and a shovel in my backyard. It had rained a lot, the yard was a swamp, and the man’s boots were ankle-deep in loamy mud.
Now, a normal person would have run for help, but not a blazing redhead. Besides, mud was squishing over my sneakers, so I couldn’t have run very fast, anyway. I slogged up behind the man and yelled, “My father’s a police captain, you know.” Actually, he’s a history professor, but this fact wouldn’t impress a serious intruder with a shovel and knee-high mud boots.
The man tumbled forward at the sound of my bellow, and the flashlight flew out of his hand and sank into the bog.
He scrambled to regain his balance. His shoulders were no broader than my friend Jeep’s, and he had a sort of caved-in look to him, as if he’d had some terrible disease as a child. “I lost my keys,” he said, scraping mud off his shirt and pants. They were the high-waisted, plaid kind of pants my uncle Tom used to wear, according to the faded Vietnam era photos from the seventies.
This man’s clown pants were held up with suspenders as wide as chalkboard erasers. Tucked into them was a red flannel shirt buttoned to his chin. You’d think he was ambling in from hoeing the south forty.
“I’m supposed to believe you lost your keys in my yard?”
“Dog ran off with them in his mouth. It’s not your business, girl.”
“Yes it is, it’s my house.”
“Wasn’t always,” h
e muttered.
“Oh, this is about Miz Lizbet, isn’t it?” There’d been lots of publicity since I’d found that skeleton upstairs. All of Lawrence—probably all of Kansas—knew how the famous architect James Baylor Weaver had lived in this house when he was a boy, and how his family had harbored runaway slaves until Miz Lizbet died here. “You’re looking for something that belonged to her, like you’re from a museum or something?”
He took off his glasses and blew on them, polishing them on his shirt. “Now, why would I want some hairpin or button from an old slave, answer me that?”
“Lots of people do, people who are interested in the Underground Railroad.”
“I’m not interested.”
“Well, then, it’s got to be about James Baylor Weaver.”
“Never heard of him.”
Something in his tone made my blood pump faster, and without his granny glasses, his eyes were hard as bullets. “What are you looking for, mister?”
Instead of answering, he sloshed past me and started toward a black Ford parked in front of the house. At first he’d just seemed comical sinking in mud in that weird getup. But then he patted his pockets, and a chill rippled over me when I heard the jingle that told me he hadn’t been looking for his keys after all. What did he want in my yard? And had he found what he was looking for?
The old Ford sputtered and cranked, giving me plenty of time to memorize the Kansas license plate before the man sped away.
Spring rains in Kansas can be fierce. They send earthworms leaping to their death over the side of a culvert. So when I say puddles and mud, you get the picture. Diamonds of light filtered through a lattice wall around the back porch, showing me the man’s flashlight beached in the mud with its nose sticking out as if it were gasping for breath. I pulled at it against the resistance of the sludge and swiped the slimy flashlight down my flank. This tells you what an elegant wench I am. Wench. Mike’s word.
Polished up, the flashlight revealed a plastic stick-on label hanging by a glob of glue:
ERNIE’S BAIT SHOP
Beneath it was an address in Kansas City, Kansas, about forty miles away. Looked like I’d have to figure out a way to drag Mike to Kansas City. Who’s this Mike I’m always talking about? Well, he isn’t exactly my boyfriend, since he’s a full three months younger than I am, and besides, my parents would break out in festering, oozing hives if they thought I had a boyfriend at the tender age of thirteen. Mike’s an experiment in progress, still rough like a lump of coal that might just polish up into the Hope Diamond. I’m checking him out carefully as a potential love object when I get to be a freshman, but at this point I can tell you he’s no James Baylor Weaver. Sally and Ahn and I, we are all sort of in love with James-at-twelve, even though we know that he grew up and died eighty years before we were even born.
Come to think of it, Mike does have one distinct advantage over James: Mike’s still breathing.
Chapter Two
March 1857
A LEG TO STAND ON
Two days before James’s thirteenth birthday, the snow finally let up, and he opened the door to a boy with one leg and a crutch that dug inches into the snow because he leaned his weight that way.
“Will Bowers, mercy, what’s happened to thee?”
“It’s plain cold out here, James Weaver.” Will’s voice cracked with weariness.
A wave of stinging air sucked James’s breath away. “Well, here, let me take thy kit bag.”
Will hoisted his weight onto that flimsy crutch and swung himself into the house. James couldn’t take his eyes off the leg that wasn’t there.
“Got shot,” Will said, lowering himself onto the bench at the kitchen table. A pinned-up trouser leg hung like a sack below the bench. Dried blood had turned it the color of an ax left to rust in the rain. Will eyed a plate covered with one of Ma’s embroidered flour-sack tea towels.
James offered him a biscuit that was no better than hardtack, but Will swallowed it in two bites without even a smear of butter or apple jelly. He ate right through the rest of the biscuits like he hadn’t had supper, or dinner before that.
“Surgeon sawed it off.”
James’s stomach lurched. He kept hearing Grandpa Baylor’s voice: “I tell you, boy, a man doesn’t have a leg to stand on unless he’s honest to the bone,” and now Grandpa Baylor was gone and Ma was on her way back from burying him in Boston, and here Will Bowers hadn’t but one leg to stand on.
“It was the Border Ruffians did it.” Will dabbed at every crumb on the table until he had a good supply to suck off his finger.
“At least thee’s alive,” James said, although he wondered if he’d want to be alive with only one leg. What did it look like inside that sack? Was it as raw as fresh meat, or had it healed over into ropy scars?
“Funny thing is, I still feel it.”
“Feel what, Will?”
“A whole leg. There’s a blister on my heel from a wet boot. Itches on the bottom of my foot, too.”
It was too gruesome to think about, so James said, “Ma’s been gone to Boston to bury my grandfather. She and my sister have been gone three months. Pa and I thought they’d be back by Christmas, but here it is the first of March. Until the last day or two, the snow’s been too deep for travel cross-country. Doesn’t stop my pa, though. He’s over in Topeka on Kansas Territory business.”
“Some things never change.”
“Oh, Will, I’m mighty sorry about thy leg.”
Will petted the stump as if it were a dog nipping at him under the table. “Guess I’m lucky. Didn’t I stand right there at your door last September and say I might come back in a box?”
“Thee did. Thee caused quite a stir in my house.” James chuckled. “I’d have gone with thee, but it’s not the Quaker way. My ma and pa would have had fits.”
Will filled his palm with salt from the little salt-cellar and licked his hand clean.
“Thee’s starving.” James jumped up and brought Will back some jerky and a cup of cold tea.
“What would you have done over there at Pottawatomie with John Brown’s posse, James?” Will chewed away on that dried meat strip. “Talked to them pretty with all your thees and thous? That would have turned two or three dozen proslavers back and made them kneel and say their prayers right out loud.”
James felt his scalp prickle, coward that he was. Here they were, living right on the edge of Kansas Territory, which was free, and Missouri, which was a slave state. Border skirmishes were raging all around them. Every Lawrence man had taken up arms, except Dr. Olney and Pa and half a dozen other men in town who were Quakers. Mercy, even one of the Quakers was keeping a rifle clean and greased, just in case.
Flaring with anger—or was it shamed—James asked, “Why’s thee here instead of at thy own place?”
“It’s four more blocks. Try walking halfway across Kansas on a crutch.”
“There’s another reason.”
“Which is?”
“Only thee knows. But I suspect it has something to do with being afraid to go home.”
“I’m not afraid of anything. I’ve followed John Brown into a raid on a camp of Border Ruffians. Sliced one up myself. I watched that doctor take off my leg with just a shot of whiskey to dull the ache.”
James shuddered. “There’s a draft in here.”
“Heck, I’m not afraid of anything,” Will said again. “Except my ma. She’ll fall over dead when she sees me like this. Reckon I can stay here tonight? I can face Ma better when the sun’s just coming up.”
James glanced at the spot in front of the fire where the cat, Trembles, raced her motor. Weeks ago Solomon, who was a free Negro, had lain on a pallet by that fire, sweating through his typhoid fever while Miz Lizbet had nursed him back to health.
Miz Lizbet. What a vexing woman she was, but how James missed her! Six weeks had passed since she’d died in this house.
Then Will startled him with a question: “Still harboring runaway slaves?”
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“Thee knew?”
“Everybody in town knew, except your pa.”
“Naw, not anymore, we’re not.”
“So, you letting me stay here tonight like those runaways did? Least I’m not against any law.”
“We could make thee up a pallet on the floor by the fire. Thee wouldn’t have to manage stairs.”
Will nodded. “I swear, I could sleep a week.”
And he nearly did. He slept around the clock until Ma and Rebecca came back after being gone to Boston for three long months and found a one-legged boy asleep in the parlor.
Chapter Three
SKELETON KEY
I told the kids in the lunchroom on Monday, “There was this really weird guy hanging around in my yard last night with a shovel and a flashlight.”
“What did he want?” Mike tilted his head back, and a sheet of straight black hair hung over his collar as he let a canned peach slice slither down his throat like a raw oyster. He has some amusing mannerisms, if you’re into zoological feeding customs.
“That is so revolting.” Sally wrinkled her freckled nose. “What was the guy, a gas-meter reader?”
Jeep popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth, and his words came out peanut-butter garbled. “On a Sunday night? With a shovel and a flashlight?”
“He said he was looking for his car keys.”
“Oh, yeah, I’d buy that,” Jeep said.
I held a spoonful of Swiss Miss tapioca in front of my lips. I know Mike hates tapioca because it reminds him of why he goes to the dermatologist.
“How can you eat stuff that looks like zits?” he asked.
“Like this.” I slid the spoon into my mouth and slurgged the pudding off. “Delicious.” The Cafeteria Werewolf came by and snapped up two of those vomit-colored trays. I smiled at her, which always makes the fur stand up on her arms. I said, “Whatever the guy was looking for out there, I’m sure it had to do with James.”
“We gotta bring him into the picture again?” Mike protested. “The guy’s been dead since before man started walking upright, and you women talk about him like he’s a box office sensation.” He flicked his tongue over his braces. There didn’t seem to be enough room in his mouth for both his tongue and all that hardware. I know, I’m making him sound grotesque. He’s actually kind of cute with those dimples that drill his cheeks when he laughs. And he laughs a lot.