Free Canaan's Tongue by John Wray

R——. The tiff upstairs looked to have been forgotten. Here and there, at tables or along the bar, I made out the others—; all were making a great show of being unacquainted. Virgil hadn’t followed me downstairs.
    I came and sat down between them, pretty as you please. My anger made me bold. Neither looked at me. Beauregard was trying to get something out of the R——.
    “Don’t condescend to me, M——,” he said.
    “I’d not dream of it, Lieutenant. Drink your sherry.”
    Beauregard scratched at the corner of his mouth. “You’ll have to kill those niggers,” he said. “That much is sure. They’d bear witness against you.”
    “As I understand it, the bounty on escapees applies whether alive or dead,” the R—— said in a comfortable way.
    A silence fell. I looked from one of them to the other. My mouth was dry as parchment.
    “Good God, sir,” said Beauregard.
    The R—— did not blink. His mouth was straight and solemn but it was not impossible to imagine it in a grin.
    “You mean to carry this through, I see,” Beauregard said at last. “I appreciate that now.”
    “You’ve never doubted my resolve in the past.” The R—— sipped at a glass of rye. “Or my discretion.”
    “No,” said Beauregard, the dash gone from his face.
    “I have your support, then?” the R—— said, letting his eyes drift idly across the room. They found Kennedy, hunched over at the bar, and settled.
    “You have it,” said Beauregard. He looked weak and disbelieving, but there was something else in his look besides—: a flicker of excitement. “You have it, M——! You have it. Let your Irishman drink his porter.”

A Baptism.
    THE HOW OF IT WAS SIMPLE, Delamare says.
    I came in on a packing-boat, by foot if the place was set back from the river, found myself a room or a corner someplace in the nigger-town, and stayed there. I might stay for a day, I might stay for a week. Sometimes one afternoon was enough to see I wasn’t welcome. But if the mood was right, if there was the slow, suspicious eagerness in their eyes and in the way they talked, if they stopped to say good-night as they came in from the fields, not looking me in the face but only at my clothes, my hair, my skin, I’d know the lay of the land was fine, and I’d stay on.
    First I’d lay my clothes out on the cot, or on the pallet, if that was all I had—: jacket at the top, pressed shirts underneath, linens at the bottom. My second pair of boots I’d set at the open window, as if I hardly cared whether somebody ran off with them in the night. I’d sit on the stoop (if there was such a thing) and black them in the early evening, when it was still light. When they asked me about the boots and the rest, about the sweet blonde tobacco that I smoked, about the tonic for my hair, I’d say I’d got it up in Louisville, or Baltimore, or Cincinnati. No more than that. But that was all it took.
    I looked about as much like them as a sherry-glass looks like a plate of beans, but anyone could see that I had nigger in me. That and the clothes, and the way I carried on, light-hearted and conceited, was enough to put the thought into their heads. I did no
selling
of it—: no prompting, no whispering, no missionary work. I let the idea do my whispering for me.
    They came when it got toward dark, full and ready to receive. One or two might want to hear details of life in Boston, or Sandusky, or Ottawa, if only to hear those names spoken aloud. But by the time they asked they were as good as struck already. A white man, however nimble, would have held no sway for them—; but I was living, preening proof of freedom’s alchemy. The South they knew could never have engendered me.
    Finding shelter was the hardest part of it, and that was no great work. I arrived in the early forenoon, when the men and a good deal of the women were in the fields, and looked for a cabin apart from the rest, neatly kept, with a woman inside it. Whether she was fat or