It started like the chain-up but the difference was the power of the chain. One by one, from Hi Manback on down the line, they dove. Down through the mud under the bars, blind, groping. Some hadsense enough to wrap their heads in their shirts, cover their faces with rags, put on their shoes.
Others just plunged, simply ducked down and pushed out, fighting up, reaching for air. Some lostdirection and their neighbors, feeling the confused pull of the chain, snatched them around. Forone lost, all lost. The chain that held them would save all or none, and Hi Man was the Delivery.
They talked through that chain like Sam Morse and, Great God, they all came up. Like theunshriven dead, zombies on the loose, holding the chains in their hands, they trusted the rain andthe dark, yes, but mostly Hi Man and each other.
Past the sheds where the dogs lay in deep depression; past the two guard shacks, past the stable ofsleeping horses, past the hens whose bills were bolted into their feathers, they waded. The moondid not help because it wasn't there. The field was a marsh, the track a trough. All Georgia seemedto be sliding, melting away. Moss wiped their faces as they fought the live-oak branches thatblocked their way. Georgia took up all of Alabama and Mississippi then, so there was no state lineto cross and it wouldn't have mattered anyway. If they had known about it, they would haveavoided not only Alfred and the beautiful feldspar, but Savannah too and headed for the SeaIslands on the river that slid down from the Blue Ridge Mountains. But they didn't know.
Daylight came and they huddled in a copse of redbud trees. Night came and they scrambled up tohigher ground, praying the rain would go on shielding them and keeping folks at home. They werehoping for a shack, solitary, some distance from its big house, where a slave might be making ropeor heating potatoes at the grate. What they found was a camp of sick Cherokee for whom a rosewas named. Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather thanOklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half theirnumber two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped AndrewJackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, beenexperimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shotbear and translated scripture. All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas River, insisted uponby the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their alreadyshattered number.