The Moving Experience

Gold speckles lined the blue carpet. The house in Wilmington, Delaware showed a bed, a basin, and a chair and desk set with a place for a candle in the room. The bed featured a wooden frame and a single mattress with colorful blankets of blue and gold draped on it; the basin had a crack in the outer rim but looked like ivory; the desk showed scratches and lines that covered its surface. A single flame burned and cast a glow over the whole place. In over a hundred and sixty years, the room had not been touched. The door creaked. The musty smell of old paper struck at the nose of Taylor David. He wore jeans and a uniform that spelled out his reason for being there. “We Move Rooms” emblazoned on his gray shirt in crimson. That remained his task. He received a paycheck to collect the items of rooms and relocate them to storage facilities, homes, and incinerators. Now, he ensured the items wound up in a museum.

He looked down at the table. Its smooth edges laden with dust led him to write his name with his finger.

“Hey, Carter!” He called but he got no response. He left the room and didn’t find his partner. An eyebrow raised and he returned to the room.

“Okay….”

The candle continued to flicker off the walls. Night had fallen when the sun had just shone down on the worker. A young man about his age of nineteen sat at the desk, writing. His skin looked like a seal just like David’s. His attire looked smart and right out of a history book. A starch white dress shirt and brown and gray vest and pants complimented his black shoes. He didn’t even look up at the mover, making money for college shifting furniture and knickknacks.

The young man stood up and found his coat and began to go out of the door. He bumped into David without uttering a word.

“Hey, man! How’d you––”

David looked down at the paper. He saw a string of coded messages that looked like music notes. As an engineering student, he could make out some of the symbols that had been scrawled on the paper. David received a phone call.

“Babe, you’re not going to believe this. I’m in a time capsule. A relic of the past brought to life.”

His girlfriend Nalesha questioned, “When will you be home? You came home late last night.” She blew off his description of weird goings on absolutely.

“I have to call you back.” He canceled the call and heard footsteps. This time a white man brusquely passed by him. The man wore a black jacket and trousers. A starch white shirt also adorned a man who looked to be in his mid-sixties. He stopped at the desk. By reading the letter slowly and with intent, he figured out the code, took the papers under his arm, and rushed out of the room, bumping into David again.

“Alright, nobody’s going to knock into me again, I don’t care what century you’re representing,” David called to no one. When he inched closer to the desk once more, he noted the white man had left a single piece of paper. On it read instructions for the lookout to surface on the Underground Railroad.

David inhaled sharply. “Damn,” he uttered slowly to himself. This is legitimate, he thought.

The light from the candle made the gold in the carpet glisten even more. He maneuvered around the place and noticed that the room had been transformed from a mere bedroom into a place where station agents had found conductors on the route guiding hundreds of former slaves to freedom. David looked at his smartwatch. It neared dinnertime. The moving truck had vanished and he had been transported back to what looked like 1864. Except, he could sense people but they didn’t sense him. They went about their business. The Wilmington streets lined with gas lamps and horse drawn carriages. On returning to the room, he noticed a woman washing her face in the basin. Light flickered off her maple brown skin. She wore a full dark blue dress.

He backed away to give her privacy. She closed the door shut right in front of his face.

“That’s all I was trying to do,” he said aloud. Then, the door burst open and she picked up her dress and hurried downstairs. Like a light, percussive symphony, her dainty footsteps registered with him. They sounded like those of an athlete, a ballerina, or a warrior. For some reason, he didn’t seem too bewildered. David had learned about the routes and how Delaware had been a border state during slavery. Never did he hesitate to seek out where he could go in the room because he knew the history.

A wave of nausea overtook him as he looked down at the street and caught a whiff of what a horse eliminated on the street. He closed the window. To him, the room seemed smaller. Yet at the same time, it deepened in his mind. The simple room had been occupied by so many people longing for liberty. Whether for their own, or for someone else. In his moments of yearning for this little episode to end, he found himself immersed in the make up of the simple space. The walls now seemed cleaner and more presentable. Pillows to the bed seemed fluffier. Sheets and blankets appeared to be even neater.

David scratched his head. He knew he had to walk out of this moment in time and return to what made sense to him. Something moved in his bones. The time shift to the nineteenth century, although a bit jarring, actually presented a way for him to discover the reality of the past. By being launched into this time period, he had the opportunity to actually feel history. The young black man, the white man, the black woman, all commingled in his brain. Amongst all of the times he had passed by this particular house, he’d never known that it had been a look out spot for the secret train system for souls. Despite his schooling, he had never known that this room had been used by so many people, coming and going all in the name of breaking the chains of oppression and servitude.

He sat on the bed and watched the young man return. Scrolls of paper tumbled out onto the desk and he dabbed a quill into an inkwell. Furiously, he wrote on the paper and then stopped. The young man looked up at the ceiling. Next, he looked back down at the paper and spoke aloud as he jotted. “I don’t believe in You, and now is not the time to start. I will say I am going to meet with people who do believe in You. If they find comfort in Your word, that’s their business. I’m just a lowly look out,” he mentioned. With a signature and seal, he collected the papers and rushed out of the area.

Fascinated, David looked at the time fly before him, waiting for him to return back to modern times. A white woman then burst through the door as David stood in the corner, totally mesmerized. She giggled as the young man brought her to the bed. David inched towards the door and allowed them some privacy.

After moments of silent intimacy, David opened the door and both of them had vanished. He peered out the window. “I hope they didn’t break anything falling out the window.” Then he remembered they had shot through the door, distorting his memory of events. The room’s temperature had dropped. The coldness of the surroundings chilled him. Only the flickering candle provided a modicum of warmth. David slid towards the bed with its many blankets and wrapped himself up in the thing like a bear guarding her cub in her fur.

He didn’t drift off to sleep. Too much action arose from this room which had not been touched for decades. David realized his time remained fraught with a queasiness not brought on by what the horses had left. No, this remained an uneasy feeling of the weight of this entire situation. To wonder whether his own ancestors had come up from the South burrowed through his consciousness. No professor had prepared him for this lesson that took place right before him. Sleep finally found him.

Awoken in the morning light by soft voices and scents, he looked at the black young man and white woman, the white older man, and the black woman. They had their arms folded. Smells of soaps and herbs entered David’s nostrils. He could pick up on lavender, sage and rosemary.

“What should we do with him?” The young man asked.

The older white man showed a slight grin. The white woman and the black woman smiled as well, respectively.

“I’ve got no qualms with any of you. I’m just trying to get back to my time.”

“This is a learning moment….” the white man replied.

“Yes, we must figure out what to do with you before you meddle with our look out room,” The black woman announced. Tess walked around to the bed and sat. David slowly moved away from her and rose to his feet, throwing the blanket on the bed in the process.

“Again, I’m just taking in the history and the mystery behind one of the stops on the virtual train ride to the promised land.”

“We get that,” Tess noted. “We’re just trying to figure out when your moving partner is going to return….”

“My moving partner….”

David looked outside of the window. He saw the street had been cleared of the gas lamps and the cars all looked up-to-date. No horses or carriages remained in sight. Up-to-date models from his time occupied spaces. He looked at the men and women standing before him.

“Was this a dream?” David asked, a hint of innocence colored his words.

“I’m Bathsheba Best.” The black woman stated this with pride. She went down the row. “That’s Corgan Biller,” she pointed to the older white man. He bowed. “This is Scottie Hopsin.” The young black man followed suit. “And this is Tess Quick.” She curtsied. “We’re actors at the Delaware Performance Academy. Your friend paid us to mess with your head a little bit.”

Stunned and intrigued all at the same time, David took the time to realize what he just witnessed.

“And don’t worry the intimacy scene was completely acted out as you would see in any play or movie,” Tess reassured. David chuckled.

“I was aware of the look out room, but didn’t know it held such quiet grandeur. In as many years as it had not been touched, I felt compelled to better understand the ways of the Railroad. Especially in Delaware.”

“Yes, well we certainly appreciate you for being our sole audience member throughout this process,” Scottie reminded.

Footsteps on the stairs stirred them all slightly. David’s moving buddy, Carter Vander stepped into the room. A broad grin stretched across his face. He dapped his friend.

“So I have you to ask for payments for the harrowing experience I just encountered….”

“That was nothing. I’m glad we didn’t have to move anything from down South. Those tales are much more horrific than the ones up here.”

“What’d you pay these people to do this?”

“C’mon, man, it’s impolite to divulge such details.”

“He gave us five hundred dollars each,” Batsheba blurted out, finally.

“Wow, you said it, I didn’t,” Vander threw his hands up.

“I thought you were saving that money for spring break….” David wondered.

“This was much bigger. We can make bank just by taking all of this stuff out of here and putting it in the exhibit.” The four actors grumbled.

“No,” Hopsin asserted. “The deal was to shock your friend here with wisdom and poetry of a time gone by and to leave the room intact.”

“We’ve got separate orders and you’ve all received your digital deposits,” Vander replied.

“No, let them keep it like it is.” David piped up. “This is how history in America must be viewed, clear-eyed, sober, and with sincerity. We’ll just tell Horn that we encountered a troupe that really lit up the place.” With that being said, Bathsheba blew out the candle and let the smoke trail as they all exited the room.