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Down the River

Roger McKnight

     “We’re still slaves, folks. The owners just took the chains off our legs and wrapped them around our minds,” Anselmo Washington said, careful to temper his tone. A black Mississippian born and bred to the plantation, as he described himself, Anselmo stood on his three-story mansion’s steamy front porch, hat in hand, and spoke to the white folks before him. He told them how he came to Illinois and eventually bought this grand old slave house on the north bank of the Ohio River to give tours and show Midwesterners their true history. “You never know your future till you understand your past,” he liked to explain. But today only six paying visitors had shown up, and he needed seven to break even. Anselmo wondered if he and these six had anything in common besides the maddening horseflies buzzing around them. He swiped at the pests with his hat and led the visitors into the former slave master’s quarters.
     “Five greenbacks, admission,” Anselmo announced. Sometimes he considered charging more, but his aim was to tell things like they were, and he feared raising the price would turn folks off.
    “I’m Ruth from Rockford,” a blonde, middle-aged woman said, as she paid him. “Interior decorator. Wasn’t this a free state before the Civil War?”
     “Yes,” Anselmo answered. “But a slave owner came here in 1834 and built this lovely mansion, Greek Revival style. It was one of the most notorious slave houses in the U. S. A story of misery and the vile ways slaves were treated by the most violent slave driver in American history. John Crenshaw.”
     “Crane-shaw?”
     “No, ma’am, Crenshaw, John H. See the gorgeous view he had?” Anselmo motioned to a steep verdant hill leading up from the River.
     “Magnificent,” Ruth agreed. “But I’m here to see the inside furnishings.”
    “That’s the hill niggers like me climbed everyday, all the way to the mines. Note the pole with ball and chain attached.”
    Ruth looked up in surprise when Anselmo used the n-word. Without speaking, she turned to the master bedroom featuring flowery wallpaper and sturdy oaken ceiling beams. She studied several cabinets with vintage toiletries and bed linen neatly placed on the shelves. Beside the cabinets stood a glass case displaying shackles, pockmarked hand weapons, and a sawed-off shotgun.
     “Crenshaw became the wealthiest man in the state,” Anselmo said to the other visitors. “So he put up this dwelling. Built by intelligent black men. They scoured the South for the best slave craftsmen. Those colored masons anchored this house in eight foot of solid bedrock.”
    “Amazing construction work, but this Crenshaw guy, he got away with that? Practicing slavery, in the North?” asked a tall, serious-looking senior, who introduced himself as George Johnson, a retired building contractor from Indiana. He addressed Anselmo earnestly while his wife, who walked with a cane, went from room to room. “I’ve heard tell of this place, but never knew what to believe about it.”
     “Crenshaw made his fortune on the salt mines here. The work was too hard for white men. So Crenshaw smuggled slaves from Kentucky. He kidnapped Northern blacks and forced them into the mines. We still got an old salt kiln outside,” Anselmo said pointing to the backyard. He, George, and two others, a couple in their twenties, gazed out at the kiln. “This mansion made 250 thou a year from sales of salt, and paid half the taxes of the State in 1842. Crenshaw was so rich he bribed senators for the use of slaves.”
     After Ruth and George’s wife returned to the fine room, Anselmo went on talking while leading his group up some more stairs. As he spoke, the sixth visitor, a slender Latina with a baby cradled in a sling over her shoulder, appeared from the restroom below. “I’m Carmen. And this is my daughter, Maria. Sorry to lag behind, we’re from Chicago, just wanted to see how other ethnics lived,” she said while pressing a bill in Anselmo’s hand. “Ten, for me and Maria.” Anselmo was happy for Carmen’s extra cash but felt embarrassed accepting money for the child.
    “Crenshaw ferried Kentucky slaves across the Ohio to work here,” he continued. “In bad weather he kept them overnight in a slave hut. Or on the third floor, up above.”
    “Even farther up?” George’s wife asked and pointed at the stairway with her cane.
    Anselmo nodded. “Steep, all right.”
    “Never you mind, we’ll manage,” the woman assured him. “Just you wait and see!”
    “John Crenshaw treated blacks like animals,” Anselmo replied with a contempt for the slave owner that overrode his smile.
    At the top of the second flight, Anselmo paused for the Johnsons to catch up. He ran his hand over a shiny mahogany post. “Know what this is?” he asked. He reckoned no one would answer, but Carmen raised her hand like an eager school kid.
    “A whipping post,” she said.
    “Sure, like at the Cook County Jail, huh?” Anselmo said, as if he spoke from experience.
    “Hey, my man Eduardo did a stint there,” Carmen explained. “He’s from below the border, you know.”
    “No Latinos here, but lots of black men’s blood ran down this post. The whites taught us backwards, in their language, forced us to learn their ways. Out on the slope horses drew black men apart, limb from limb. Ex-slaves early in the twentieth century still remembered their screams. What’s the difference, folks, between killing us on the spot and making us follow their white ways?”
    While Anselmo waited for a reply, Ruth gave him a friendly smile. George shook his head. “Beats me,” he mumbled. The young couple looked at each other until the woman answered, “Up north in Minnesota, we got nothing remotely like this. We’re married students, traveling through. Just tell us.”
    “Killing is instantaneous,” Anselmo explained.
    When no one commented further, he led them into the second-floor rooms. “Is this more like it?” he asked and showed them Crenshaw’s sumptuous banquet hall. The dining table ran the length of the room, with chandeliers jangling above. The group ran their hands along the shiny tabletop talking among themselves, while Anselmo chatted away about the value of the household goods. When they re-gathered, he produced a pre-War bill of sale from the mansion’s files. It listed two mirrors for $1.50 each, a shotgun worth $5.00, a chair for $8.00, a slave woman priced at $500, and her daughter for $100.
    Meanwhile Ruth and the Minnesota couple inspected a mixture of items arrayed along the wall, including canning jars and a cream separator. Ruth pointed at a gaggle of bones hanging from a rod in the otherwise empty cloak room.
    “A dead skeleton,” George’s wife said blankly.
    “A man’s,” Carmen added. “I can tell. Like Dia de los muertos.”
    “Yes,” Anselmo agreed. “A dead slave somebody found in a salt pit. Crenshaw left him there. Never bothered to dig a grave. Later somebody hung him up for tourists.”
    George’s wife put her cane down and leaned against the banquet table. Anselmo pulled out a chair for her. She gazed at the spectacle. “Lord, so hideous.”
    “Folks say that’s Lincoln’s seat Mrs. Johnson’s using,” Anselmo told the others. He made a point of telling every visiting group about that chair, and had grown used to the blank stares his comment often left on visitors’ faces, but Ruth, Carmen, George, and the young couple stood firm and stared at him intently.
    “Abe Lincoln, the liberator?” Carmen asked.
    “He ventured this far south, imagine,” the Minnesota woman said to her guy. “Just like us, honey.”
    “Not what we learned in school about Lincoln,” Carmen added.
    “Oh, yes, in 1840 Honest Abe passed here, running for state office. John Crenshaw hosted him, at this very table, even threw a fancy ball, with white men’s quarters below and slave rooms above.”
    The Minnesotans gazed up as if they imagined rebellious feet stomping on the ceiling. “Hard to believe,” the man said.
    “Cars with twenty different license plates been here to see,” Anselmo agreed. “I’ve had people try sleeping in the slave’s attic. White folk don’t last a night.”
    “Because they realize what their ancestors did?” Carmen guessed.
    “Their conscience can’t bear it,” George deduced.
    “We’re all brainwashed to the max, black and white alike,” Anselmo explained kindly, sensing how this group caught his drift intuitively.
    “Nowadays us slaves believe we are free,” George mused.
    “Here we are a hundred and sixty years later,” Ruth said with a sigh. “If we really were free, we wouldn’t be here now, would we?”
    “Free?” Anselmo asked. “Free puts you on tricky ground. You never know. Crenshaw captured freed blacks and sold them back into slavery. He tricked them into boat rides on the Ohio and dumped them on the other side in chains. Underground railroad in reverse, you know.”
    “Thus the expression sold down the river,” Ruth surmised.
    Anselmo smiled at the group’s attentive feedback.
    “But we can change that,” Carmen said as though reading his mind. “Can’t we?”
    Anselmo turned and led the way up a staircase to the third floor. He showed them a line of windowless rooms.
    “Like for Mexican farmhands,” Carmen commented.
    “Notice, some rooms don’t have bars,” Anselmo explained. “Only women and children were locked up. Sixty to a hundred slaves, eight to ten people per room, in this heat and humidity, no bathroom, no water.”
    “Hideous,” George’s wife repeated. She and George had managed the steps well. So now they stood resolutely together in the narrow hallway. Anselmo noticed how they cringed slightly as though the third floor still smelled of past years’ sweat, urine, and tears.
    “Tiny wood bunks, no ventilation or daylight, in 100-degree heat,” Ruth lamented.
    George wiped perspiration from his brow.
    “What about the men?” Carmen asked. “Why no bars?”
    “Didn’t need them,” Anselmo replied. “If they ran off, Crenshaw shackled them to that pole outside, as an example, but he had to be careful. If he beat them bad, the scars would remain and the slaves’ value sank. The worst offenders went to the whipping post.”
    “Their value sank on the free market,” George commented ironically.
    “Supply and demand,” Anselmo agreed. “See this last room? That’s Uncle Bob’s. Crenshaw kept him locked in there as a stud for twenty years. Like a stallion. Fathered 300 slave children.”
    “And Abe Lincoln knew this?” Ruth asked incredulously. “He was here. Saw it? Heard it?”
    “Your guess’s as good as mine. Stories, you know,” Anselmo answered. “This place operated till the 1860s. Crenshaw outlived the War. The property remained in private hands, for its salt, later for tourists. I owned it a while, till the State paid me for it. Now they let me run it. I get the cash.”
    “You believe that? About Uncle Bob?” George’s wife asked.
    “He lived to be a hundred. Ended up going to a senior residence. The story was, he thought they were moving him to a new stud farm, at age 85.”
    “Spooky,” the Minnesota woman said.
     Maybe so, Anselmo thought.
    The tour over, he showed the way down the stairs till he stood before them again, hat in hand, on the front veranda, in the same summer heat.
    “Interesting, folks?” he asked.
    “Yes, very much so,” Ruth answered. “More ways than one.”
    The others nodded yes, but said nothing. They were sympathetic souls, Anselmo knew, who had not set out that day to spend their cash for so much bitter knowledge. Now here they were struggling with the full import of what they had seen and heard, as though something atavistic and horrific was crawling in their bones. Their looks begged for a magical word to exorcise the nagging unrest or make human cruelty fathomable to them, but Anselmo turned as voiceless as they. Seven times five, he thought, that’s what my day’s work amounted to. Yet he also realized, as never before, that he could do more than break even by speaking the truth, if the time was right and the people, too.
    And so Anselmo stood, together with the six adults and a sleeping baby, as they batted in quiet consternation but perfect unison at the dive-bombing horseflies. They were free to go, but everyone stayed.

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