Olivia paused to watch two majestic bay horses in their roped off stalls,
wishing she had an apple in her pocket. They were beautiful animals, but jittery.
Neither of them seemed to have their sea legs. She stroked both of their necks and then, feeling hungry, wandered back to where Mourning was waiting. He
had already laid out another grand meal. She went to buy a second cup of coffee
for each of them, sat down, and put her face up to the early morning sun, content.
She had expected to come off this boat with exciting tales for her grandchildren – storms, broken-down engines, exploding boilers, fires, or at least
a threatening sandbar. But so far it seemed that their trip would be relentlessly uneventful. Later that afternoon the boat docked in Cleveland. They had only an
hour to go ashore and buy more food.
Mourning became friendly with the other colored passengers and spent most
of the trip exchanging information with them. Though some intended to continue
farther west, most were headed for small towns in Michigan. Olivia heard
someone mention a nice black community in Backwoods and nodded to
Mourning as if to say, “Didn’t I tell you so?”
She avoided engaging the white passengers in conversation. Mostly she sat on
Mourning’s tool case, with a volume of Elizabeth Barrett Browning for
company. While they were sharing their evening meal, she once again tried to get Mourning to tell her what he knew about her mother, but he looked so
uncomfortable that she let it go.
Once we’re settled I’ll just have to find a bee tree, she thought. Make a bigbatch of Mammo Killion’s honey wine. That stuff gets anyone talking.
On the third morning the passengers began stirring before dawn. Olivia heard
someone say they’d be reaching the mouth of the Detroit River in a few hours.
By the time Olivia and Mourning had stretched their aching limbs and finished
their breakfast, the lake ahead of them had begun to narrow and passengers
crowded the rails. Olivia and Mourning managed to squeeze among them – on
what she by now knew to call the port side of the boat – and marvel at the shoreline. It was dense with orange and red flowered shrubs of a kind Olivia had
never seen.
“That be Canada over to starboard,” the colored man standing next to them
said.
Olivia stood on her tiptoes and looked behind her, saying, “A whole foreign
country, right there! You could throw a stone at it.”
“I hear in Detroit they got a ferry, take you over to Windsor,” the colored man
said. Then he laced his fingers together over the small mound of his belly, looking pleased with himself. “Now let me aks you folks a question. About
geogurphy. If a person be going straight south from Detroit, what be the first foreign country he gonna run into?”
“Mexico?” Olivia ventured.
“Nope,” said the man. “You wanna guess?” He turned to Mourning.
“Argentina? Ain’t that a country down there?”
“Indeed, but that ain’t the one he gonna come to. No sir. You go south from
Detroit, first foreign country you gonna run into is Canada. Fella showed me on
a map.” He slapped Mourning on the back and moved away to ask another passenger the same question.
Olivia turned back to the rail and nudged Mourning, saying, “Just look at
that,” as she nodded at the cluster of islands ahead. “I can’t believe how pretty it
