The Slave Dancer Page 13

  It did not take long, to my surprise, for me to slip back into my life as though I’d never left it. There were signs—brooding looks from my mother, Betty’s way of speaking softly to me as though I was an invalid, and, most startling, the change in Aunt Agatha who treated me now with affection and never called me a bayou lout. My mother guessed that the shock of my disappearance had changed her into what she had once been, a slightly soured but not bad-hearted woman. I was back in my life, but I was not the same. When I passed a black man, I often turned to look at him, trying to see in his walk the man he had once been before he’d been driven through the dangerous heaving surf to a long boat, toppled into it, chained, brought to a waiting ship all narrowed and stripped for speed, carried through storms, and the bitter brightness of sun-filled days to a place, where if he had survived, he would be sold like cloth.

  I found work on the Orleans Bank Canal which was to eventually connect New Orleans to Lake Pontchartrain. That might have kept me occupied and earning my keep for some time, but I grew restless and began to think about what profession would suit me, and what would be available to one who could not afford much schooling.

  At first, I made a promise to myself: I would do nothing that was connected ever so faintly with the importing and sale and use of slaves. But I soon discovered that everything I considered bore, somewhere along the way, the imprint of black hands.

  With the help of an acquaintance of Aunt Agatha’s, I was finally apprenticed to an apothecary. It would be a different future from the one I had once envisaged when I had wanted to become a rich chandler.

  When my apprenticeship was finished, I went north and settled in a small town in the state of Rhode Island. Eventually, I sent for Betty and my mother. We were out of the south, but it was not out of me. I missed the sharp sweet smell of fruit lying in the sun in the stalls of the great market, and I dreamed of the long muddy Mississippi and languorous green twilights and the old amber and apricot colored walls of the houses of the rich in the Vieux Carré. I knew that some part of my memory was always looking for Ras. Once, in Boston, I thought I really saw him, and I ran after a tall slender young black man walking along in front of me. But it was not he.

  In the war between the states, I fought on the Union side and a year after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1864, I spent three months in Andersonville, surviving its horrors, I often thought, because I’d been prepared for them on The Moonlight.

  After the war, my life went on much like my neighbors’ lives. I no longer spoke of my journey on a slave ship back in 1840. I did not often think of it myself. Time softened my memory as though it was kneading wax. But there was one thing that did not yield to time.

  I was unable to listen to music. I could not bear to hear a woman sing, and at the sound of any instrument, a fiddle, a flute, a drum, a comb with paper wrapped around it played by my own child, I would leave instantly and shut myself away. For at the first note of a tune or of a song, I would see once again as though they’d never ceased their dancing in my mind, black men and women and children lifting their tormented limbs in time to a reedy martial air, the dust rising from their joyless thumping, the sound of the fife finally drowned beneath the clanging of their chains.

  About the Author

  Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children’s books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.

  In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer (1974), a National Book Award for A Place Apart (1983), and a Newbery Honor for One-Eyed Cat (1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox’s contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

  Fox’s novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir, Borrowed Finery, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the Paris Review presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

  Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1973 by Paula Fox

  Copyright renewed © 2001 by Paula Fox

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Christopher Paul Curtis

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3740-2

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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