Freeman, page 22
Then a boy’s voice says, “You best stop right there, or I’ll shoot.”
He surprises them. He is standing in the gnarled, moss-covered limbs of an old live oak that bends toward the ground like an old woman stooped by time. He has a rifle trained on them.
Marse Jim is unimpressed. “Is that a fact?” he says.
“That is, indeed, sir.” He is probably not yet 18, has something that aspires to be a moustache overtop a few chin hairs sprouting from skin as virginal and white as fresh fallen snow. He watches them from beneath a rebel’s kepi.
“And just who is it that’s givin’ these orders?” Marse Jim asks.
The boy’s voice is thin and reedy, but his response is crisp. “Private Virgil Goodman, sir, Monticello Artillery, Howell’s Battery.” She has the impression that a salute would ordinarily follow this.
Marse Jim grins, amused by the boy. “Well, Private,” he says, “I am Captain James McFarland, Company H, Second Mississippi Infantry Regiment, and you ain’t got no need for that Spencer you got trained on us. We’re on the same side. I seen the elephant too, same as you.”
It is the boy’s turn to be unimpressed. He hops down from the low branch, his eyes never leaving them, motions with the barrel of the rifle. “I expect that’ll be up to Colonel Moody to judge. Y’all want to walk straight through there. But first, I’ll be needing your firearms, sir.”
Marse Jim complies, handing over his rifle and the pistol in his belt, then lifts his hands and shakes his head, still amused, and walks where the boy has pointed. She follows him, the boy follows her. Occasionally, he pokes her in the back with the rifle to make her walk faster.
There is no hint of a trail here. They make their way through an old forest, detouring around trees and climbing over roots half as tall as a man. The ground is spongy with generations of dead leaves. The air is clammy and close. The sun does not penetrate.
Marse Jim says, “You’ve got a company of men back there, I expect?”
The boy says, “You’ll see soon enough.”
Marse Jim says, “Swear, you’re the most close-mouthed pup I ever did see.”
The boy doesn’t respond.
She hears a dog barking a few moments before they emerge into a clearing. In the middle sits a large, rudely constructed cabin, ringed about by the stumps of trees. About 15 men are there. Some are sitting beneath trees, cleaning their weapons. One is perched on a railing on the porch, reading a letter. A few are chatting quietly together. They all seem older than the boy, most of them tall and rangy with heavy beards and a leanness in the eyes that suggests a long time between meals. Those lean eyes come up and all conversation stills as Goodman’s captives precede him into the clearing.
“What you got there, Virgil?” asks a man with a yodel in his voice. He hooks a pair of spectacles over his ears and adjusts them so he can see better.
“Found these two skulking around over by Pike’s Farm,” yells Virgil.
The man laughs. “They hardly look like Yankee spies, Virge.”
“Boy always was a caution,” says another man, coming up behind.
Marse Jim chuckles indulgently, lowers his hands without being told to. “Ah, leave the boy alone,” he says. “Better he be too careful than not careful enough.”
“My sentiments exactly.” The man who has come out on the porch has a mop of yellow hair, as thick and lustrous as any woman’s. His uniform is crisp as a morning in fall, with the exception of a neatly sewn patch on one knee. His belt buckle is a gleaming oval of brass with the inscription CSA. He holds himself as erect as if he were marching at the head of a grand parade, not standing on a porch among a ragtag group of men, half of them in their undershirts.
He extends a hand to Marse Jim. “I am Colonel Jackson Moody, sir, at your service. And you are?”
Instead of accepting the handshake, Marse Jim salutes. This seems to amuse some of the men, who grin and poke one another. But if Marse Jim notices or cares, Tilda cannot see it. His eyes are moist and earnest. “Captain James McFarland, sir, late of the Mississippi Infantry Regiment.” And only now does he pump Moody’s hand.
“Captain, what brings you into these woods?”
Marse Jim swallows. “Man come by my place, told me the war was over. I could barely believe it. He said we’s been whupped by the Yankees and need to accept that. Sir, I told him I can’t accept that. So we been walkin’ ever since, me and her.” A nod toward Tilda. “She’s my last slave. Only nigger ain’t run off from me. She asked me just the other day”—and here, he hunches his shoulders and makes his voice slow, his words mushy and indistinct and Tilda realizes with a shock that this is his imitation of her—“‘Marse, where us goin’? Where you got us walkin’ to?’”
The men around them laugh in appreciation of the mimicry. All at once, Marse Jim yanks himself out of his slouch, makes his posture as vertical as a pole. He is not her anymore, cringing and quivering slave woman, but himself, noble and courageous white man. “I told her I refuse to live under Yankee domination,” he says and here, he lifts his chin in defiance. “I told her, by God, we will walk and keep walking til we find someplace where white men are still willing to fight back against tyranny.”
He stares. Moody stares. The men all stare. And Tilda realizes that something has happened here, something she doesn’t understand and cannot name. But she knows with a deep and sudden foreboding that it is powerful to them, that it puts a glitter in their eyes and sets their Adam’s apples to bobbing.
After a moment, Moody puts a hand on Marse Jim’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Captain. You’ve found that place.”
Marse Jim nods. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“Why don’t you join me? I was just sitting down to a meal. Virgil, you come, too, since you’re the one who found the captain. Judkins will take your place on watch.” He leads them inside.
She doesn’t know what she is supposed to do, so she follows them up to the porch and into the big cabin. Inside is one vast room. Bedrolls line the walls and there is a long, roughly constructed table at one end with benches on either side. Moody motions and all three men sit down. Tilda stands behind Marse Jim.
This annoys him. “Don’t just hover there like a moth!” he snarls, flicking at her as though she were, indeed, a flying pest. “Get away! Go sit yourself down somewhere!” As she moves away to the other side of the room, she hears him say, “Damn niggers. Stupid as the day is long.” There is laughter and general assent. She sits on the floor, far away enough to be unobtrusive, close enough to hear every word.
Moody says, “So, you walked here from Mississippi, Captain? That’s impressive. ’Course, you’re not the only one. Most of these boys have been with me through the whole war, but we’ve got a few that just sort of wandered in, like. Grissom out there is from Texas. Delacroix came up from Louisiana. But they’re all like you—all refuse to live their lives under Yankee domination.”
“So what do you propose to do about it?” asks Marse Jim.
Moody gives him a level look. “We propose to fight, of course.”
Marse Jim’s eyes look as if someone has lit a lantern inside his skull. He is giddy as a boy. “Colonel, that’s all I’ve wanted to hear, that there are still white men in this country who refuse to knuckle under.”
“Well, sir, you have found them. Moody’s Raiders—the men chose the name, not I. We’ve already been fighting, in fact, and we have managed to bloody the Yanks’ noses a few times. You ever hear the term, ‘guerrilla warfare?’ It means sabotage, hit and run strikes and the like. We don’t have the manpower for a frontal assault, yet.”
The boy chimes in eagerly. “We blowed up a bridge at Beaver Creek. Caused the Yanks no end of consternation. And we raided their armory. Got a whole passel of weapons and ammunition. Going to shoot them down with their own guns next time.”
One of the men walks in balancing three bowls of some dark stew. The smell of it makes Tilda’s stomach clench like a fist inside her as he sets one each before Moody, Virgil and Marse Jim, who seems not to notice. “Colonel, I’d be honored if you’d let me join you.” His voice is grave and low.
Moody smiles at Marse Jim’s earnestness. “We’re glad to have you,” he says, clapping Marse Jim on the shoulder. “Welcome.”
Marse Jim looks as if he might cry. The boy speaks around a mouthful of stew. “What about her?” he asks. He is nodding toward Tilda. She snatches her eyes away as if they had touched something hot.
“What about her?” she hears Marse Jim ask.
“You trust her?”
Marse Jim chuckles. “Don’t trust a one of ’em,” he says. “But she won’t do nothin’. I was laid up ten days, flat on my back in some little town east of here. She could have run off any time, but she didn’t.”
“She’s loyal, then,” says the colonel.
She stares at the floor. She can feel their eyes appraising her, feel it as surely as a touch grazing her skin. Marse Jim says, “Yes, I suppose.”
“Good,” says the colonel. “We’ve got a nigger woman who does the cooking and sewing and like that. This one can help. She any good at that sort of thing?”
“Mostly she been a field nigger,” says Marse Jim, “but she’ll learn.”
Hearing her labor promised, hearing her loyalty vouched, she feels a hatred for her very self spreading like warm poison from the center of her body. Why didn’t she leave? Why couldn’t she make her foot cross that threshold? But she knows the answer. She is not the woman she used to be before Marse Jim, before the war. That woman was brave. She was sassy sometimes and impertinent with a mistress who found those traits amusing. Then she was sold. And this man began to hit her. And he knocked the sass and impertinence right out of her, made her this shameful thing she has become.
The boy is watching her closely. “She ain’t half bad-looking,” he says.
Marse Jim glances over without much interest. “I suppose she ain’t,” he says. “I guess I stopped noticing things like that so much after my wife died.”
“Never had a wife,” says the boy. “Don’t get to see too many women, living as we do. You wouldn’t mind if me, maybe some of the boys, gave her a tumble every now and again, would you?”
He is giving her an easy smile as he speaks. She swears she can feel her heart grind to a stop, her blood stand still as midnight in her veins.
Oh, please.
Oh please, God, no.
I have been through so much already.
Marse Jim’s head comes around and he looks at her with more interest this time, stares at her for one heartbeat, then two. She can hear him, lying in the gathering darkness of a farmer’s loft, asking if she is tired. She can remember herself thinking, you don’t ask a chair if it is tired. She moves her head from side to side, a small motion and she does it just once, hoping he will see, hoping he will have mercy and spare her. She has been loyal. He said so himself. Doesn’t that count for something?
Marse Jim grins, but his eyes are dead like fish. “Sure,” he says, “you want to give her a ride sometime, you go right ahead.”
So now her labor has been promised and her body has, too. And she curses the sliver of hope she allowed to bloom in her that night in the loft. Because she knows now, knows with a crushing certainty, that it was but the cruelest of lies.
She is not a person, only a thing.
She will never be anything more.
Jesse Washington stood at the side door, bidding good night to the evening class as another long day at the Cafferty School for Freedmen drew to a close.
He was a behemoth, well over six feet, with hands so large that Bonnie, watching from the stairwell just inside the door, thought he could probably pick up a watermelon in each. But the softness of his smile and the bashfulness of his demeanor belied his fearsome size. When the old women kissed his cheek or the men shook his hand on the way out the door, he touched them in response—a pat on the back, a hand on a shoulder—with porcelain caution, as if afraid they might break if he were not careful. Jesse was, she thought, a giant who had spent his life learning to tiptoe in a Lilliputian world.
Most of those who had volunteered to guard the school against vandals were old men with gray beards and baggy skin. This was to be expected, she supposed; younger men would need to work to support their families and would not have the time. But Jesse was the exception. He was the youngest of seven brothers, each as large as he was if not larger, and his family, hoeing cotton on a plantation north of town, had decided it could spare him a few nights a week to help protect the school.
He stood now, towering over the evening class adults, some of them hunched and toothless, who filed past him after another two hours bent low over books of reading and mathematics. Bonnie always found it a poignant sight, these elders struggling so mightily to learn enough that they might read a favored passage of the Bible for themselves, or simply sign their own names, and finally seize for themselves some fleeting scraps of human dignity from lives that had offered them so little.
Miss Ginny was the last to leave. Bonnie watched as she squeezed Prudence’s arm affectionately. “You comin’, sweetie?” she asked.
Sweetie. The old woman was fond of both of them, Bonnie knew, but for some reason, she had a particular attachment to Prudence.
“I will be along momentarily,” Prudence said.
“Don’t be too long now,” said Miss Ginny. “And if it be dark when you leave, you get Jesse there to walk you.”
“I shall be fine,” Prudence assured. “He should walk you, if anybody.”
Miss Ginny made a show of rolling her eyes and pursing her lips and they all laughed. As the door closed behind her, Jesse gave Prudence one of those humble smiles and aimed his eyes not quite at her. “Be happy to walk you if you want me to, ma’am.”
“Now Jesse,” said Prudence, “you know I hardly require protection from the ruffians of this town. Of course, if you should feel the need to protect them from me…”
She allowed the thought to dangle there playfully. Prudence loved to tease the big, soft-spoken man and sure enough, he ducked his head and began to stammer.
“Oh, no, ma’am, I… I don’t…”
They laughed at his discomfort, but Bonnie could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that they were enjoying themselves at his expense. She was about to apologize, about to tell Prudence to leave the young man alone, when he stiffened all at once, his head coming up sharply like a hound that has caught a scent.
“I heard something,” he said.
“What did you hear?” Prudence was still laughing.
But he did not answer. Instead, Jesse disappeared from the doorway. Bonnie looked at Prudence, saw her own confusion reflected in her friend’s face. Together, they followed Jesse out the side door.
Bonnie recognized the four white boys at once. They were the same ones who had blocked the sidewalk the day she, Prudence, and Paul walked to the other end of Main Street to buy rice. Now they stood confronting Jesse in the alley behind the building. The one with the dirty blonde hair was holding himself conspicuously erect, trying to make himself taller than he was. Still, his chin came up only to Jesse’s chest.
“I ain’t scared of you, nigger,” he declared. His voice, splintering like rotted wood, suggested otherwise.
There was nothing bashful in Jesse’s eyes now. They were narrowed and hard, watching out of the fortress his face had become as he loomed over the boys like a mountain. “Done asked you,” he said, in a stiff tone that somehow managed to offer both respect and threat, “what y’all doin’ ’round back here?”
“Ain’t got to explain nothin’ to you, nigger!” cried the boy in that same cracked voice. “It’s still a free country, ain’t it? Yankees ain’t took that from us, did they?” He looked around at his companions for support. “We can still walk where we want to walk, can’t we?”
Jesse nodded his head toward the boy’s right hand and Bonnie realized for the first time that he was carrying a pail. “Y’all always go walkin’ around with a bucket of whitewash?” he asked.
“Told you I ain’t got to answer no questions from you, boy,” snapped the boy.
“Come on, George. Let’s get out of here.” One of the other boys had a hand on his friend’s upper arm. His eyes were sizing up the situation and not liking what he saw.
“We got a right to walk where we want to!” insisted George, his voice careening toward falsetto.
A third boy said, “Fine. I’m going to walk somewhere else. You do what you want.” He was looking up at Jesse as he spoke.
“Are you all cowards?” demanded the boy named George.
But two of them were already gone. He stared at the fourth boy, who took Jesse in with one round-eyed stare, then shrugged at his friend and trotted to catch up with the other two.
Alone now, George stared up at Jesse. People had come into the alley, drawn by the noise of the confrontation. The woman who lived in the house on the other side of the alley stood in her yard next to a chicken coop, drying her hands on a towel. George gulped. He drew himself up. “Fine then,” he announced in a voice much too loud. “You want us to go? We’ll go. But this ain’t over, not by a long shot. You mark my words.”
He had been backing away. “Mister George?” Jesse spoke in a cool voice and the boy stopped with almost comical obedience.
“What?”
“Why don’t you leave the pail here?”
It sounded like a request, but it wasn’t, Bonnie knew. The boy did, too. He let the bucket down carefully, his humiliation complete. He gave Jesse Washington one more long look. Then he wheeled and ran to catch up with his friends.
