Olivia smiled. “So I guess you’re going to feel comfortable here.”
“That ain’t all. They got a colored doctor what treats white people and a
colored man what bought hisself a steamship. Hadda hire hisself a white captain,
cause they don’t wanna give him a license, but it still be his boat.”
Olivia kept a smile on her face, though she knew there were plenty of white
people in Detroit – even abolitionists – who didn’t like having Negroes around.
While waiting for Mourning to come out of one of the stores, she had picked up
someone’s discarded newspaper. An article on the front page called free colored
people the “unwanted debris of an unfortunate and undesirable institution.” It said even Thomas Jefferson had advocated shipping all the coloreds away, to
Haiti or Liberia. Jefferson had suggested that the American government sell the
land that had been taken from the Indians to pay for transporting “the whole annual issue” of black children to some far off place. The “old stock” should be
allowed to die off in the ordinary course of nature. But at least, if Mourning’s impressions were correct, white people in Detroit were not inclined to harm
coloreds.
Ahead of them Olivia could see where the buildings ended and the woods
began and suddenly felt reluctant to leave the city limits. “Maybe we should go
back to one of those hotels and wait until morning to start out,” she said. “It’ll be
dark soon.”
“Best to travel at night,” Mourning said. “Cooler it be, better it be for the oxen.”
“Well, let’s stay anyway,” she said. “How much can hotel rooms cost?
Tomorrow morning we could even take one of those ferries over to Windsor, see
what Canada’s like.”
“Nah. We best be gettin’ where we goin’. We don’t wanna leave this load in
the wagon more than we gotta. We be comin’ back to Detroit soon enough. Once
we settled in, know how we gonna keep ourselves alive, we can go spend a day
over in Canada. Go down south to Canada.” He smiled.
“All right.” She looked away from him. “I don’t know why I’m being such a
big baby. Scared of getting lost in the dark.”
“Good to be scared,” he said. “Make you careful. But we got lanterns and we
got oil and we got guns and a wild lady here what knows how to shoot ’em.
Remember the question you been aksing me all the time – What’s the worst that
can happen? Worst that can happen, we drive around in circles for a few days.”
“When are you going to teach me to drive?”
“Not today. Gotta teach myself first. Empty wagon be hard enough. Heavy
load like this, when we gotta go down hills, them brakes – even with the skids on
– ain’t nothing against all that weight pushin’ on ’em.”
“Oh.” She turned to look at the load in the back, imagining them going down
a steep hill and the wagon crashing over poor Dixby and Dougan, flattening
them into orange and black smudges on the trail. “I thought it was only hard going up hills,” she said. “I never thought about going down them.”
“Stop worrying.” He looked over at Olivia. “Thanks to you bein’ such a
spoiled little girl, we got better beds right here with us than what they gonna give
