In the Upper Country: A Novel

by Kai Thomas

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Freedom, you can't get and bury, and keep it and keep it so it won't ever go away.

No, child.

You got to swing your freedom like a club.

In 1859, in a small town jail, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she's in jail for killing him.

Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to tell the woman's version of events, hoping that it will lead to her acquittal, but the woman will only tell her story on one condition: she gets one from Lensinda in return.

As the women swap stories - of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds - it becomes apparent that their histories are interconnected, and a hidden bond between the two women is revealed which will change Lensinda's life forever.

Traveling along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Michigan, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country is an unforgettable debut about the interwoven history of peoples in North America, slavery and resistance, and two women reckoning with the stories they've been given, and the ones they want to tell.

(P) 2023 Penguin Audio

Release date: January 10, 2023

Publisher: Viking

Print pages: 345

Sample

Chapter I

Dunmore, July 1859

It was dusk, and I muttered curses to myself as I made my way down the muddy green lane. Just minutes earlier, it seemed, I’d been tired and keen to finish my day with some stew and warm bread; some idle chitchat in the rocking chair, perhaps. Yet instead there I was, trodding like a fool through the mire and the quickening dark.

Mine was an unusual profession for a young woman. In Spancel Narrows, where I was born, there was a kind old bachelor named Samuel Frost, who loved hosting his coloured neighbours; many a night we brought our suppers down to his estate, dined at his great table, and then sat at the hearth listening to the old-timers. And for years, three mornings every week, my mother would hurry me along through the woods, and I would join Frost in his study while she cooked and cleaned. There, I left behind the paltry education of the crowded schoolhouse, and under his careful tutelage I learned properly to read, write, and tally accounts. I didn’t realize until many years later—until I got to Dunmore, in fact—what a gift he and my mother had given me.

His teaching gave me sovereignty in my work. My employer, Arabella, would be off for days to her meetings and speaking engagements with the True Bands and the congregations as far off as Toronto; as far off as New York even. After a while it was decided I would stay at the house. There were five others there when Arabella was gone. Her brother worked days in the swamp, and he had three young children to whom he had the will, if not the time, to attend. The children’s mother had not survived their escape. Their grandmother Velora used to look after the young ones, but she had begun to lose her hold on memory. She took to hiding food in corners and under loose floorboards, and dinner wouldn’t be made when the brother came home from the swamp and the children from school. They would smell the food days later when it began to rot, and the children would hold their noses at one another and titter about “Granny’s stinkers.” Arabella would quell any such teasing if she heard it. She understood that Velora’s forgotten caches were the resurfacing of an old practice: as a young slave woman she’d made a habit of secreting away meat and provisions for her family in the field.

As Arabella will often remind me, she considered me sent from above—even though my arrival in Dunmore was thought to be strange (for I came from the north when all others came southerly). Stranger still that I could read and write better than most men, coloured or white.

“I asked the Lord for a man and he gave me a hand,” she would say, and wink.

So it was that I came to tend the Brimmer household. And when Arabella returned from sojourning, her shoulders struggling to remain upright, we would spend hours by the fire, talking low beneath the snores of the household and the meandering footsteps of Velora. We’d crush mint in jars of tavern moonshine and Arabella would recline on her chair and rub the heels of her hands into her temples and burrow her fingers into her hair. She would speak quietly; hushed musings interrupted by her chuckles and sighs. I would listen. I considered these soft ramblings the addenda to her notes detailing the struggles of fugitives, the battles of abolitionists, and the news from lands near and far.

And after a while, invariably, she would give me a look—half grimace, half weary smile. “It’s no easy task,” she would say. “No easy task to show the world our worth.”

I listened and I wrote. The next day I would look to my scribbles and I would write again. When I was done I would send my parcel to the editor in Windsor to be compiled with the articles from other contributors, and the following week we would see the newspaper in the store, or better, clutched in the hands of men and women squinting beneath caps and brightly hued head wraps, spelling out words as they learned to be free men.

By Arabella’s account, sales for The Coloured Canadianbegan as a pittance; like most small newspapers, it seemed unlikely that the endeavour would survive. But by the time I arrived in Dunmore, the paper was becoming increasingly profitable. Whether this was due to donations from wealthy abolitionists or to the swelling ranks of fugitives eager to read, I did not inquire, nor did I care. She had enough to pay me well; enough too to give generously to the True Band of the church, which served as Dunmore’s hub for the Underground Railroad. She never flaunted this generosity, but it was known, and she was adored for it. At True Band events, new and old arrivals to Dunmore were reminded of that special miracle whereby a slave with nothing in the world could become a man with a house, food for the winter, and work; there was always work hewing and digging in the swamp, and as a government contract this earned a man more money in a month than he had seen in his life and for labour that wasn’t half as grueling as what he was used to. What a feeling, to work in free country; to move to the harmonizing rumble and trill of voices, and to see faces unified in the sweat and toil, not of terror, but of purpose.

So it was my lot as Arabella’s hand that we came to need each other. She laboured tediously over writing. She worried too much about how her words would sound once read aloud, and whether people would think what she meant for them to think. I, on the other hand, did not have the virtue to care what people thought, nor the will to ask. That was Arabella’s gift. She had the touch. The softening of the brow that said: I know what you have lived, and your words are sacred to me. Her high African cheekbones reminded folk of every slave woman who had ever inspired a dream of dignity in them. I, on the other hand, with my applewood skin, saucy tongue, and warring glares, tended to inspire at best a vengeful desire, and at worst, fragile condescension. All this was fine by me. I didn’t think much of zeal, for I had never seen it last. I was content to be the unchurched high yellow girl who tends the Brimmer house, and no one quite knows where she comes from (though all know what is implied in that lack of knowledge), but she is there, and Arabella is probably looking out for the poor, bush-wild thing. And so I minded my household tasks. I would cook and clean until I could not put off the writing any longer, and then I would take up my station in the study.

Additionally, not as a general practice but as peculiar occasion would have it, I would be called upon to heal. Mostly this meant preparing poke salad for a child in need of deworming, or a brew of scouring rush for old folk who complained of weak bones. There were several women and men in Dunmore who were root doctors with knowledge of potions as well as poisons, so I was not overly unique. But few solicited me openly, for although Dunmore was known as the witch town, it tried awfully hard not to be. Here and there I tended more serious wounds: I had once reset and splinted the broken leg of a child who suffered a kick from a mule; twice I had stitched the cut wounds of drunken men who had brawled outside the tavern; and another time I had used pipe smoke of mullein and hops to calm a young woman who had been found screaming like a banshee in the swamp.

And so I was known, which brings me back to the business that had me scrambling down the wretched green lane. It was dusk, as I said. And I had been sent for. Young Jim burst into the house after supper, as I was reading over Arabella’s latest batch of notes.

“Lensinda!” said Jim as he rushed into the study, not even bothering to remove his shoes or properly close the front door, and the mosquitoes were always thick and fierce as the sun went down. I glared at him for that, and saw him wither, grasping nervously at his long chest. He was not yet a man, and I was normally quite fond of him, as most were; he was uncommonly bright and sober for his age, albeit a bit daft to household decency.

“There’s a man,” he blurted. “There’s a man shot in the green lane.”

I raised my eyebrows. We had heard two shots, about half an hour past. Unusual to hear gunfire so close, but not exceedingly unusual, as there were always people hungry for wildfowl. I capped my ink and rose to gather my things.

“Shut the door, Jim,” I said to him.

“Simeon says to come, and quick.” He spoke with hushed urgency as he fumbled at the threshold of the study. Fanny, the youngest Brimmer child, had come from the living room to stand and look into the study, cocking her head to one side.

“The front door, Jim,” I said curtly, and he jumped and scurried past Fanny to the swinging front door and closed it, keeping his hand on it.

“I’m coming,” I reassured him, “but no need to let the gallinippers eat the house alive.”

I grabbed my pouch and went to the door, patting the silent Fanny on the shoulder as I passed her. I reached for my cloak. It was July, and the cloak would be hot despite the setting of the sun, but still a worthwhile protection from the bugs.

Jim waited with one hand on the doorknob, skittish, not meeting my eyes. I moved quickly but methodically, stooping to tie my boots tight.

I felt Jim’s urgency, but I had questions that I could not put off, even as we made our way briskly out of the house and into the sounds of the evening on the village lane: the crickets, the clatter of dishes in washbasins, and music (someone was plucking up a banjo and moaning in harmony, a woman’s voice trilling along and then laughing).

“Who is this man, Jim?” I asked, trotting to keep up with his long stride.

“I don’t know,” he said, and he pulled at his collar and glanced at the houses on either side of the lane.

“A man,” he said quietly. “A white man who rode in with an Indian.”

It took a moment for this to sink in before I stopped straight in my path. Jim was too preoccupied to notice, and for a moment I watched his back as my mind lurched over this strange piece of news.

“Boy!” I said, and Jim turned around, his face contorted.

“Don’t yell so loud; Simeon says—”

I planted my feet in the soft ground. “Jim, I will raise all hell right here in front of your mama house if you don’t tell me what you fetching me for.”

“Sinda, I got to go, Simeon—”

He cut himself short when he caught my glare.

“Please,” he said, softly now, his eyes darting around the lane again. The twang of the banjo kept on, and more sounds of supper joined in: chatter, water being drawn from a barrel, and in the slight distance, the bark and howl of the dogs. Near us, an old woman sat on a front porch, her face wreathed in smoke from a long pipe. It was loud enough, but the lanes of Dunmore were always watching, always listening. Jim had been directed to be discreet, and if he had cause for discretion, then this was indeed the worst place to talk.

“Please,” he said again, with a pained expression. “In the livery,” he whispered. And he tilted his head in the direction of the stable, beside the tavern on the main road.

I squinted a warning look at him and saw him flinch. He had been warned of me. Good, I thought. And I commenced to walk briskly to the stable. Jim breathed a sigh of relief and hurried alongside me.

Simeon was perhaps the only man for whom I would have come when called, especially under such dubious circumstances. And what could be more suspect? Granted, it was not uncommon for either whites or Indians to come through Dunmore. Indian men traded game meats, basketry, and leather goods for tools at the forge or drink from the tavern. A woman had once made an appearance to search out and shame the Negro father of her children in front of the man’s wife and family—at congregation, no less, much to the everlasting horror and titillation of the churchgoing folk. But none of this spoke to the possibility of a white man and an Indian together; I could not find the logic of it. Perhaps the white man was a missionary on his way to the nearest Indian village. And the Indian himself—a protégé? But who in all hell would shoot a missionary? And what a bloody mess the whole town would be in if that were the case. I quickened my step.

The tavern was a two-story frame building clad in grey cedar that glowed with light from the ground level and hummed with some chatter. Swamp crew workers without wives dined here. Jim and I skirted the tavern and went into the stable. The stable boy was nowhere in sight; the rascal had probably run off to see his sweetheart in the woods, or to get a hot supper from his mother down the lane. We entered and went to Simeon’s quarter horse. She was a big blue-roan whose haunch shivered as we neared. She looked at me with a large, warm eye, and I put my hand out to meet her muzzle.

“Tell me what you know,” I said to Jim as he set about saddling the horse.

Jim was deft and quick in his movements as he fastened the girth. Still, I could hear the nervous quaver in his voice.

“Round end of day,” he began in a near breathless whisper, “this white man and Indian ride right up to the farm.”

“Did anyone else see them?” I asked.

“Probably,” said Jim, “but if they did they maybe figured they was just passing through town.”

He glanced at me warily, and I encouraged him with a nod. He went on:

“Me and the lads were out in the field digging drainage pipe, when the two of them ride up to the house. We seen they seen us. Didn’t think much of it—figured they were old friends of Simeon. However, soon after, we start to get the feeling—well, Weems start to get the feeling that something ain’t right. Can’t quite say what it is, though he never can put words to it, but he almost always is right. Kept looking over his shoulder at the house until Humphrey and me start to feel the hair rise on our necks too. It was too quiet. But none of us rightly knew how to act, except to keep working till sundown, as we usually do. And so we did. And just as we was heading back to wash up, we notice a commotion by the front porch. Someone was running into the corn, and we start to hurrying across the field to see what was the matter. And then bam! One shot go off, and we stop and crouch. But we see Cassi run into the house and come out holding that rifle and we decide we got to at least run to her. Sure enough, bam! Another shot, from the corn. And we reach the porch and Cassi tell us we must go find Simeon, she afraid he might get shot. And we start to hollerin’ for Sim, and rushing into the corn to find him. Finally we see some movement in the stalks and come upon him and he standing there and at his feet the white man just tumbling about on the ground in his own blood.”

By this time Jim had saddled the horse, and he began to lead her out of the stable. I followed, frustrated; the story made less and less sense the more he got to telling it. Did Simeon shoot a man? Surely not—I couldn’t imagine it.

“And well?” I said, hurrying behind Jim, my hand at the horse’s flank. “You ain’t told me nothing; what happened?”

“I don’t know, Sinda!” he said roughly, raising his voice for the first time. He turned to me and I saw the twitching torment in his brow. Of course; he was afraid. I softened my look, feeling a twinge of motherliness toward him. He was just a boy, after all, despite his long limbs. And he had just been reminded how easily the blood coursing through those limbs could be spilled.

“I’m to make haste to Chatham to fetch a constable,” said Jim. “I can drop you at the entrance of the green lane, but I gotta go from there.”

“What happened to the Indian?” I asked him.

“He gone, into the bush.”

It was a strange tale indeed.

Jim mounted the roan, extended his hand, and freed the stirrup for me to step in and pull myself up behind him. He took off and we rode east down the main road, into the darkening dusk. The dogs yipped at us as we passed the kennel. We heard the bellow of a man to silence them. The village fell behind us and was replaced by the rushing field of cattails on one side and the behemoth oaks on the other.

Jim rode well; he was a rangy, strong boy with grace and purpose in his movements. I smelled sweat from the still-damp shirt on his back, and the cedar pomade his mother had made popular among many of the young men, still alive and wafting from the curls at the back of his neck.

He slowed where the main road cracked open to the green lane; discernible because this was where the marshes thinned and Simeon’s fields began. Jim leaned his head back and gave a loud whoop—a call, I guessed, to Simeon, wherever he was across the fields. Jim hopped off and ran a pace, like a crane landing from flight. He offered his hand to help me dismount, and for the first time that evening, I felt afraid. Walking down this path in the quickening dark, someone shot down ahead of me; who knew what villain was still on the prowl?

“Am I in danger, Jim?” I asked.

He looked at me with warmth in his eyes. “No, Simeon says there ain’t no more danger, and he will meet you along the lane. But I can stay with you if you like.”

“That’s all right,” I said, and patted his bony shoulder. “You’d best go on about your task.”

Simeon was one of the few men I trusted. He was sober and sound, and his word was enough.

Jim nodded and swung his long body up and onto the quarter horse and cantered away. The sound of hooves yielded quickly to the vast rustling of the wind in the foliage, and to the clamour of frogs.

I set myself to the green lane. It was said that in ancient times this trail was the extension of the main road. The main road, now a wide trackway of compacted dirt, wood, and stones, was an old portage route, trod for centuries by the moccasins of Indians as they stepped heavy with the weight of their loaded vessels. And as I walked along the green lane and glanced back at the last of the setting sun winking through the trunks of white cedar, I could see it clearly. The green lane girdled the swamp, and as cumbersome as it was to walk through its mud and mosquitoes, it wended the most direct passage around the far deeper trouble of the wetlands.

Simeon was the only one to farm more than a small patch of garden in Dunmore. His ground was black and rich and far too wet for most to manage. Before the contract for the swamp clearing came in, most in Dunmore had subsisted on hunting, labouring on the great western railroad or on farms, in buildings, or in kitchens in other towns, and eventually through their own enterprise, as with the tavern, the forge, and the brickworks. Folk knew how to dig a rock drain—else there wouldn’t be any houses at all. But to dig a ditch around one’s abode is one thing; to drain whole fields properly is another thing entirely. Simeon had done so through careful planning, contracting the men at the brickworks to make him a great quantity of pipe and tile. He studied the land well and dug for drain tile so that his fields were just wet enough to keep the farm lush with Indian corn, rye, peas, greens, and potatoes. His hogs rooted through a large swath of the swamp that he had fenced for them, and they were fat and vigourous.

Simeon had arrived alone when Dunmore itself was in its early days, and he worked tirelessly for his hogs: fencing, gathering slop, building the smokehouse. Folk were happy to buy from him, and he never stopped studying that land. As soon as he raised his barn he hosted the corn-shucking bee that had become one of the most anticipated events of autumn. Each year the place was full of chatter, laughter, music, and a mountain of corn that youngsters would climb despite scoldings from their mothers. Outside, folk would lounge by the pit roast of several hogs dripping grease into the embers, and a massive cauldron of corn soup. The shucking would go from dusk to sunup the following day.

All that to say, by the time I arrived in Dunmore, Simeon was a cherished denizen of town, and supplied a good many of the village and indeed the surrounding counties with the provisions that folk did not manage to grow for themselves. Cassi arrived more recently, and was shunned by the single women of Dunmore for her marriage to Sim. As Velora will attest, there were women laying hexes on Cassi left and right. There was even one who tried to nudge her as she jumped the broom in an attempt to have her garment touch the ground and damn her marriage to misfortune. But Cassi wasn’t no fool, and she and Sim did well by each other. Though they were too old to have children, they were rightly parents to many sons through the work they gave to generations of Dunmore boys such as Jim, whose own father had drunk himself to death. Yes, Simeon was a self-made man, and in my view, one of the few who did not suffer from having something to prove.

I was not walking long on the lane before he found me. He held a lantern that I smelled before I saw it. The aroma of geranium washed over me like a memory. Then the light, yellow as teeth, came in slivers out of the corn, and I saw Simeon’s cloaked figure step lightly through the squash patch until he reached the fence and lifted a beam out of place to beckon me through.

He looked solemn, especially under his dark hood, and the worn creases of his face were taut with concern.

“Thanks for coming, Lensinda,” he said as I ducked under the fence beam, my gaze to the ground to avoid stepping on the gourds at my feet, already grown as big as skulls.

I nodded and patted Simeon on the arm.

“Show me to him,” I said plainly, and Simeon turned and walked. I followed his cloak into the corn.

The white man was slumped on his side, curled up like a child asleep. The corn stalks around him had been broken low. Some were strewn fully on the ground, and others leaned above him like the ruins of an old shelter. The other two farmhands, Weems and Humphrey, were there, still in their sun hats. One stood as tall and lanky as Jim; the other crouched squat. ...