Freeman, page 35
“Splendid,” said Wheaton. “That is most welcome news.”
“I wish I could be as pleased as you,” she said.
“I understand that you cannot,” he told her. “But I am confident you will eventually see this as the best possible outcome. We are of different stock, you Yankees and we Southerners. You do not understand us and we surely do not understand you.”
A pause. Wheaton’s expression closed, his face turning reflective, and for a moment, Sam thought he might have more to say. But Wheaton only touched his hat again, wheeled the horse around without another word, and headed back at a trot in the direction of the river.
“Devil take him, especially!” hissed Prudence, and the fury in her eyes was awful to behold.
Sam regarded her for a moment. Then he said, “I have lost much to men like that over the years. White men like that.”
Prudence met his gaze with eyes he could not read. “Yes,” she said, “I feel the same. I, too, have lost much to white men like that.”
He had a moment to wonder again if she was mocking him. A moment to decide that she was not. He allowed a silence to intervene, as he pondered what he was about to tell her—and why. He could find no reason to do so. Still, he said, “You asked a moment ago if I had seen a ghost. I suppose I had, after a fashion. When I first saw him, that boy in there reminded me of my son.”
Now she looked at him. “You have a son?”
Sam swallowed. “I had a son,” he said.
“He died?”
“Yes, he died, though I suppose it is more accurate to say he was killed—shot. He was about the age of that boy in there when it happened.”
“Oh, Sam, I am so sorry.” Her hand went to her mouth. “How awful. How long ago was this?”
“Fifteen years ago,” he said, and paused. She waited, looking up at him. He looked away.
“It was my fault,” he continued.
“How was it your fault?”
“I insisted on running away to freedom. He wanted to go with me and I allowed it, even over his mother’s protests. You see, we did not have to run. As mistresses go, Louisa Prentiss was far better than most. She did not allow her people to be beaten, she did not work them inhumanely, she did not break up families. She even allowed us to read. But for some reason, my soul still rebelled against the idea that I was owned by this other person, that I was required to accept the notion heaven had placed her in a station superior to my own. So I took my son and ran. The slave catchers caught us and he was killed.”
Sam paused a moment, reminded himself to breathe. “I should never have done it,” he said when he could speak again. “It was not so bad there. I should have been content and told him to be content as a slave.”
Her next words shocked him. “How dare you,” she said. “How dare you say a thing like that? Look again at that child,” she demanded, wheeling to point into the warehouse where the boy, oblivious, had begun mucking out the makeshift stall. “You saw those marks on his back as well as I did. But to be a slave does not simply leave marks on the skin. It leaves a mark here,” she said, tapping her chest. “I should think I, a white woman, would not have to explain that to you. I should think you would know it better than I.”
He stared down into her angry eyes. He felt his shoulders drop. He breathed. “You are right, of course. It is just as you say, and I should not need you to remind me of it. I don’t really. It is just…”
He stopped. He breathed again. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse, grainy like unsanded wood. “I am empty. Do you understand that? Do you know how that feels? I am tired and I am empty.”
Sam swallowed hard. He looked up into a sky he saw only dimly, through the blur of tears. “You made a great fuss over the fact that I was a man who would walk a thousand miles to find his woman. But what I never told you, Prudence, is that that man is gone. He is a stranger to me now. He is something I vaguely remember, but can no longer understand. I told you I was not going to continue my quest because I believe it is hopeless and physically, I am unable. But that is only part of the reason. The rest of it, which I have hesitated to admit, even to myself, is that I have nothing left inside me, no dream of finding her, no hope for any sort of future. It is as if my soul has been hollowed out. Can you understand how that feels?”
He fell silent all at once, brought his eyes down to hers. They regarded one another for a moment. When she spoke, it was in a rasping whisper he barely heard. “More than you know,” she said.
“What do you…?”
But she wasn’t listening anymore.
“Calvin,” she called out to the boy, “I shall be at Miss Ginny’s house. Come get me when you are finished and I shall inspect your work.” She walked away without waiting for an answer. Her steps were lively.
Sam had just managed, clumsily, to get the saddle up on the horse’s back when there came a knocking at the side door. He opened it and Prudence was there.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” he told her.
“May I come in?”
In reply, he stepped aside. She entered, her right hand nervously rubbing her left upper arm. “I wanted to apologize,” she blurted, turning immediately to face him.
“There is no need,” he told her.
“Yes, there is,” she insisted. “I had no right to speak to you as I did yesterday, to lecture you that way. I do not know what had gotten into me.”
“If anyone should apologize, it is I,” he said. “I acted as if I were the only one who understood loss. That was foolish of me. You have lost your entire school.”
She gave him an odd look at that. He went back over to Bucephalus to confront the challenge of cinching a saddle with one hand. The cot stood in the center of the warehouse. He had stripped the bedding and left it folded neatly on the edge of the old desk.
“You are leaving us today?” said Prudence.
“I would have come to say farewell,” he said, fumbling at the straps.
“Do you think you are equal to hard travel again?”
“My knee tires easily, my foot still aches some, but yes, I am up to it”—a pause—“thanks to you.”
“At least you will not have to walk,” she said, watching dubiously as he stood there, trying to decide how to cinch the saddle. “Come,” she finally said, crossing toward him, “let me help you with that.”
“No,” said Sam. He spoke more curtly than he’d intended and she pulled up short. He sighed. “No, thank you,” he amended. “It’s not that I do not appreciate the offer of help. It is just that I won’t have any help getting to Philadelphia. I shall need to be able to do this myself.”
She nodded. “You are right, of course.”
She came and stood above him as he bent down, trying to manage the two straps with one hand. Knowing she was there somehow made the fumbling worse. He pulled uselessly on the strap in his hand, then gave up with a sigh. “Keep trying, Sam. You will find a way.”
He looked up at her. “I have been a fool,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I thought of it after we spoke yesterday. This quest has always been useless, and it is not just because I do not know where Tilda is and do not know if she still lives and do not know if she still wants me. Even if I knew she was alive and I knew precisely where she was, it still would not matter. Even if she still wanted me, that, too, would not matter.”
Her brow furrowed. “I do not understand.”
“It is simple, really. I have come to realize it was not just her I was trying to get back. No, I was trying to get back what was. I was trying to get back the life we once had. But time does not work that way.” He sighed. “In Virginia,” he said, “I saw an old colored woman. She was looking for a baby that was taken from her 20 years ago. She asked everyone if they had seen her daughter. The poor wretch could not bring herself to understand that the baby was no longer a baby, that if she yet lived, she was a grown woman by now, likely with children of her own. You cannot go back to what was.”
Prudence smiled her sorrow. “But perhaps you will find something new.”
“You don’t know,” he said. He turned from her, not wanting to see the pity in her eyes.
“I do,” she said. “Finding something new is the best hope you have. It is the best hope either of us has.”
His eyes came back around. “What do you mean?”
“Leave the horse a moment,” she said. “Come with me. There is something I want you to see.”
And so it was, moments later, he found himself walking down a ruined street on the far eastern end of the town. She walked several paces ahead, her back arched, her shoulders square as a box. He limped behind, leaning on a walking stick like a man 30 years older.
Every house on the block was a blackened cavern gutted by fire, the yards strewn with the burned remains of family life—pots and pictures and shoes and lamps. The stuff of people’s daily existence, gone over now to debris, to pieces and relics owned only by the sun and the breeze.
Prudence stopped. She spoke to him without turning around. “I had many students who lived on this block,” she said. “Of course, the rioters said they only sought to disarm the Negro militia they thought I had armed with rifles.”
“Nigger army,” he corrected. “That’s what they called it.”
She turned. Her face held a sad, beautiful dignity. “Yes,” she said, “that is what they called it, but I wish you would not use that word.”
It made him feel small in his bitterness. “I suppose you are right,” he said.
She turned again without a word and again he stared at her arched back and squared shoulders. They walked for a moment, then Prudence stopped. “This is the tree,” she said, standing before a twisted old oak guarding the end of the block. Sam went to her, stood a few feet behind.
“They hanged twelve people in this tree,” she said, her back still to him, her arms folded tight. “They did terrible things to them, things I cannot speak of, but I still see them in my mind whenever I close my eyes. They hanged Rufus, who was one of the men helping us guard the school. They hanged Bug—that’s what everyone called him, a little boy, so eager to learn, as they all were. They hanged Jesse, who worked for us at the school. And they hanged Bonnie.”
All at once she gasped, then lowered her head, and he knew she was weeping. Her body shook with the force of it.
“Who was Bonnie?” he asked softly.
It took a moment. “Bonnie was…a colored woman. As I told you, my father became an abolitionist. But he did not just demand that the slaves be set free. He would actually buy slaves and set them free on his own. He bought Bonnie when she was but a little girl and brought her to Boston. We were raised together, she and I. She was my very best friend. She was my sister, in all but actual fact.”
A sigh. “You asked yesterday if I knew how it felt to be empty, to have your very soul hollowed out.”
“‘More than you know.’ That’s what you said.”
She nodded. “More than you know,” she said. She started to weep again.
Sam’s hand went to her shoulder. He didn’t tell it to, it just went. He was acutely conscious of the wrongness of what his hand had done, but he couldn’t pull it back. “I am sorry,” he said. “For you, for me, for all of us.”
After a moment, she looked at him. “We should go,” she said.
He nodded. He let her get a few steps ahead, then fell in behind her.
She said, “I was not taught to think that way, you know.”
“What way?”
“Just now, when I was in distress and you put your hand on my shoulder, just to comfort me as anyone would do. I could tell it made you anxious, your terrible brown hand touching my precious white skin. It was the same the first day I helped you walk.” Her laughter was bitter as smoke. “That is not how my father taught us, and sometimes I forget the rest of the world sees things quite differently.”
“Especially here,” said Sam.
“Especially here,” she agreed. “Here, it is as if the war never ended. Yes, the fighting stopped, but only because it had to. But nothing was settled. That is the thing I have found most astonishing in my sojourn here. These people are so haughty and prideful one gets confused sometimes about who actually surrendered to whom. I simply do not understand them.”
“And you are white,” said Sam.
There was a pause. “And I am white,” she finally agreed. Another silence.
“Yes, you are,” said Sam, “but you are not like these people.”
“Perhaps I am,” she said. “Perhaps they are what I would be had I been raised in a place where I was taught to view my skin as proof that I was a higher order of human being. Oh, do not mistake my meaning; there are some in Boston who do feel that way. There are many, I suppose. But there were also those like my father, who came to believe that such beliefs were ignorant and low, and would not tolerate them in his presence.”
“Your father sounds like an exceptional man,” said Sam.
“He was an imperfect man,” she said. “I told you what he once was. But yes, once he understood the error of his ways, he embraced equality with a fierceness. And on that point he was absolutely unbending.”
“It must have made for a difficult childhood.”
The question seemed to surprise her. She stopped and turned, a tiny vertical consternation line creasing her brow. “What do you mean?”
He paused in his hobbling gait. “All the other children,” he said. “They must have thought you some kind of oddity.”
She turned back, walking again. “My father taught us to endure.”
Sam didn’t move. “Is that what you are doing here in Buford? Enduring?”
She stopped again, turned again. “I suppose you could say that. Why?”
“It seems a lonely existence,” he said, “just enduring. You have no business among these white people. You are not like them. I am glad you accepted that man’s offer, though I know it was difficult for you. But I would hate to think of you staying here among them.”
“Do you hate white people, Sam? It is perfectly all right to say so if you do. Sometimes, I hate them myself.”
Sam came forward, his bad leg scraping awkwardly on the baked dirt. “I do sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes, I hate them with a passion. Then I meet someone like you, who has treated me so kindly, or I remember Mary Cuthbert who nursed me to health in Philadelphia when I became ill in camp and the Army sent me there to die, and I am reminded all over again how foolish that is. It is simply that I get…frustrated. I once believed that if I learned to speak as well as they do, better than they do, if I carried myself with scrupulous dignity, they would see the folly of looking at my skin and presuming from that to treat me like dirt. I have since come to understand how naïve I was. But I am naïve no longer. They have beaten and shot and stabbed all the naïveté out of me.”
Prudence nodded, slowly. “I understand,” she said. “Look around you. I thought that with my family’s fortune, and my own stubbornness, my absolute refusal to give in to them, I could change things for the Negroes, at least in this tiny corner of Dixie. What you see before you is the only change I managed to make.”
A mangy orange dog loped out of the front door of a burned-out house. It stopped in the middle of the mud street and watched them for a moment. Then it put its head down and went on its way.
“So I feel much as you feel, Sam,” she said. “I, too, have had much taken from me. They took my illusions. They took my sister. And what is worse, I have no one to blame but myself.”
It was a moment before Sam spoke. “So,” he finally said, “we are passengers in the same boat. What can we do now? Where do we go from here?”
Something helpless stole into her eyes just then, something vulnerable and small. “Well,” she said, “that is the heart of the matter, is it not? I have been asking myself that same question for a month and I still have no idea.”
She looked at him with her defenseless eyes. It was a sight too painful for seeing. He found something over her shoulder to stare at instead. After a beat, she said, too brightly, “Come on, then, let us get you off your feet. You can rest for a while and then return to saddling your horse.” She moved to the right side of him and reached for his arm, draping it across her shoulder. He knew she was waiting for him to flinch. He did not. So she braced him as they made their way slowly down the dirt street, as the blackened houses and the gnarled oak slipped further behind.
He knew someone might see this, might see them walking together this way, might think them a couple instead of a crippled Negro man being helped by a thoughtful white woman. Someone might take offense. Someone might raise the alarm.
He tried to care. But something had gone out of him. Whatever it was that allowed him to worry and fear, whatever it was that allowed him to give a damn, had seeped out of him like sweat, leaving him listless and hollow.
He was empty.
So, although he tried to care, he could not. What could they say to him that they hadn’t said? What could they do that they hadn’t done? What could they take that was not already gone?
With his arm draped across her shoulder, her arm looped around his waist, they walked at his slow and painful pace down the street. At the far end of the block, Main Street crossed like the top bar of a T. On the opposite side of Main stood a cotton field, flowering white. Soon, crews of Negroes would stoop and bend there, twisting the fiber out of the hard bolls under the late-summer sun.
They turned at the corner. The warehouse was down on the left. From behind them, a wagon pulled by two rangy mules slowly overtook them. The driver was a dark-skinned colored man with a heavy beard. He looked at them from under the brim of his hat, nodded with a face that gave away nothing. The wagon clattered off into the distance.
“So now we are discovered,” said Prudence. “A white woman helping a crippled colored man. Oh, the horror.”
