Freeman, page 5
He falls silent abruptly. It is as if the uncharacteristic speech has tired him out.
A sadness steals across Chambers’s face. “I am not here to take you back to the army,” he says. “There is no army to take you back to.”
Now Marse Jim takes a step forward as if into a fight. “What? What in hell’s name do you mean?”
“I mean that the war is over, sir. General Lee has surrendered.”
“No.” Disbelief escapes him in a hoarse gasp. “When did this happen? How?”
The captain dismounts. “I will tell you,” he says, “but perhaps you will first be kind enough to allow a thirsty traveler some water?”
“Well’s on the other side of the house,” says Marse Jim, pointing. “I’ll walk with you.” He seems to remember them all at once. “You niggers get to work,” he snarls.
“Nick, you help them,” says the cavalryman.
Without a word, the Negro climbs down. He is very tall—well over six feet—and very lean. He walks with a limp. As the two white men disappear around the side of the house, the three Negroes wrap their hands in rags kept inside an upturned pail for just that purpose and begin pulling charred timbers from the wreckage.
“What happened to you?” Wilson asks.
“Took a ball in the heel,” he says. His voice is deeper than any man’s the woman has ever heard.
“You were fighting?”
An emphatic shake of the head. “He was fightin’. He took me along, said I’se gon’ be his body servant to check his wardrobe, fetch his meals and like that.”
Wilson laughs. “That’s white folks for you,” he says. “Even need servants when they go to war. I done heard everything.”
The woman is impatient. “Is it true about the war?”
“Near as I can tell, it is. Telegram come in Sunday. Say Marse Bobby Lee give out in some place called Appomattox.”
“So it’s over?”
“’Pears ’bout. My marse been gloomy for five days, ever since he seen that telegram. I can’t hardly read, so I don’t know what it say, but I can tell by how he act. And he act like somebody died. They all do. Been on the road with him for three days and they all leavin’ they camps and goin’ home. Got they heads down, tails between they legs like whipped dogs.”
“So what gon’ happen to us?” asks Lucretia.
“Us?” says Nick. A shrug. “I guess we’s free.”
The woman has her shoulder beneath a timber and is grunting to lift it as he says this. Her gaze comes around to him because for some reason, it strikes her as the most absurd thing she has ever heard. She is surprised—no, horrified—to hear herself laughing. It starts small, but it grows like fire. She tries to control it, but that only makes it worse. It is hard to breathe. Her knees buckle and she feels the timber slide off her. It falls with a clatter.
Lucretia is appalled. “You better stop that laughing ’fore they hear you.”
But now Wilson is infected with it and he is chuckling, too. “Hold on there, Lucretia. You can’t tell no free nigger what to do.”
At that, the laughter explodes out of her like water through a broken dam and she can’t even try to hold it back. She collapses onto a pile of timber because isn’t that just the funniest thing in the world, the idea that she, frightened and tired and bent beneath the weight of burnt wood, is free? Soon they are all helpless. Lucretia is the last to go. She keeps trying to protest, but giggles keep breaking through and at the end, she is not resisting anymore, just slapping her knees and leaning on Wilson, who staggers against her in turn.
The woman keeps waiting for it to pass. It feels so good to laugh, but she is distantly aware that laughter is dangerous, that if Marse Jim comes around that corner and finds them like this, there will be hell to pay. But the spell does not pass. She gasps for breath and it strikes her that laughter is a kind of madness.
“I’ve got to get away from y’all,” she says, panting, “before we all get in trouble.”
She rises on unsteady legs and walks toward the barn where the mule is tethered. Behind her, she hears them sniffling, struggling to master their laughter. They know the same thing she does: that if Marse Jim comes back and sees this, there’s no telling what he might do.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you laugh.”
She is surprised to find Nick at her elbow, following her to the barn. “It just struck me funny is all,” she says.
“I suppose it is in a way,” he replies. “But in another way, ain’t funny at all, is it?”
It takes her a moment to respond. “No,” she says, “I guess not.”
“What you gon’ do, now you’s free?”
She doesn’t know how to answer the question, so she deflects it. “What you gon’ do?”
He scratches his chin. “Don’t rightly know,” he admits. “Marse been talkin’ to me ’bout that very thing, but I can’t make up my mind. Going home with him now, because that’s where my children is. Got a boy and a girl. Their mama dead, ain’t nobody but us and I promised when I left I’d be back for ’em. But after I get ’em, don’t rightly know what I’m gon’ do then. Marse Gus done asked me to stay on, say I can work like I always done and he’ll pay me wages. Sound good but I keep thinkin’, if I just stay where I always been, how I’m gon’ know I’m free?”
They pause before the broken barn wall. “Don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “Never had such a problem.”
“Well, you got it now, don’t you? Same as me.”
The woman thinks about this a moment. “No,” she says, “not the same as you.” She tries to imagine just walking away from Marse Jim, declaring herself free and demanding to be paid for her work. “Marse Jim would kill me dead if he thought I was even thinking about freedom.”
“He can’t do that.”
A bitter chuckle. “You don’t know Marse Jim.”
“But all you got to do is get to the federals. They’ll protect you.”
“That’s easy to say. We’re way back here in the trees, a long way from any federals. We wouldn’t even have known we are supposed to be free if you hadn’t come along.”
“But you can’t just stay here and keep slavin’. Slave times is over.”
“For some,” she says. She steps through the broken wall.
Something is wrong. The woman knows it the moment she enters the cool darkness. It is a moment before she picks it up: the foul smell, the angry buzzing of the flies. When she gets to its stall, she is not surprised to find the mule lying dead, swollen tongue poking out of its mouth.
No more plowing for old mule. Worked to death. Starved to death. She hears Nick coming up behind her. “The mule’s free anyhow,” she says.
“That’s a purely contrary way of looking at it,” he says.
“It’s the truth,” she replies.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
The question gives her pause. She hasn’t had much use for a name in the four years since she was brought here by a mistress desperate to sell before everything she had was lost. Before that, well, she had a few names. She thinks about it, then gives him the one she liked the best, the one she used for a few years when she was, if not happy, at least at peace with her lot in life. It was such a long time ago.
“Tilda,” she says. “My name is Tilda.”
Tilda was coming in from the fields, pulling the burlap sack heavy with cotton. Her hair was gathered under a rag wrapped around her brow, her dress was stained and her expression bore no joy, no love, no hatred, no thing beyond numbness, a fatigue that settled in the cast of her mouth and sucked the very light from her eyes like marrow from the bone.
In this, she was no different from the rest of them, a mirror image of the 12 others who staggered in with her, released at last after 15 hours spent bent over beneath the indifferent sun, extracting cotton fiber from the boll, the hard brown shell of the plant which, if you are not careful—and even if you are—will cut your fingers so bad and so much you can’t feel cuts any more.
From can’t-see-in-the-morning til can’t-see-at-night, this was how they worked. And they might as well be mirror images of one another because what was the difference between them? A name? After a time, you came to know that a name was but a fiction, a thing white folks gave you for their convenience, so they could call the one and not, by mistake, get the other. It allowed the pretense that you were an individual. But they were not individuals. You could see that in the sameness of them now, trudging in from the fields. They were all just pieces of the same evil machine. Just slave niggers.
And yet, if that was so, why did he wait there for her at the edge of the field? Why did his heart hammer and his breath come shallow when he saw her—her and not any of the others who looked just like her? Why did he rehearse his words while he waited for her to see him? And why did it all go away when she did see him, when she looked up from her own tired shoes and saw a man standing there, then realized who that man was? Why did he feel his past, his now, his every hope of the future riding on how she would respond? Her mouth opened and he caught his breath and held it tight as he waited to hear what she would say.
And she screamed.
No, not her. She was gone and he was…where was he?
It took a moment. He was not with her. He had not found her. Instead, he was lying in a field in the darkness of night. He had been walking for most of four days, had crossed meadows in the shadow of mountains, ferried across rivers, taken a ride with a friendly Negro farmer in exchange for helping unload his wagon. And it had brought him here to this field in the center of the capital city, this field where cattle slept, pigs rooted about for food, and a fetid and sluggish creek wandered past, emptying into a river. Sam had fallen asleep—how long ago?—lying on a slope in the shadow of a stubby marble structure someone had told him was an unfinished monument to General Washington.
Now the scream came again and he was surprised to realize it had not been part of his dream. And the cry resolved itself into a single word.
“Lincoln!” she cried. “Lincoln!” she moaned. “Oh, Lord, not Lincoln!”
His eyes found her standing in the flickering light of a street lamp. She was old, with skin the color of mahogany, her gray hair bunched beneath a dirty yellow scarf. Her face was awash with tears and she sagged as if her knees would no longer hold.
“They done shot my president!” she cried. “Lincoln dead!”
Sam rose. He trembled with a cold no breeze had imparted. An agonized groan rose from everywhere at once. Someone yelled, “No!”
“What do you mean?” some white man demanded with a white man’s impatience. “How do you know this? Goddamn you, speak!”
“I heard it just now from a soldier,” she cried. “They done shot the president. They done shot my president!”
“Who did it?” The same white man, his voice a bark of command.
“They say it was an actor. Booth.”
“Edwin Booth has shot the president?” A laugh that tried to disbelieve.
“No, that weren’t the name.” The old woman closed her eyes, searching the darkness there for the name of the assassin.
The white man said, “You mean his brother, then? John Wilkes?”
She opened her eyes. “That’s the one. Shot the president at the theater. At Ford’s.”
The white man turned from her without another word, his lips working furiously, no sound issuing forth. Another white man standing next to Sam spat, “That reb son of a bitch. Need to hang every last one of ’em, by God.”
When Sam looked toward him, he snarled, “What the hell are you looking at, nigger?”
Sam glanced away.
He did not know what to do with himself, but he knew he could not simply stand there, still, as if nothing had happened. It seemed important to walk. Many in the crowd had already begun to move. Sam joined them. They walked as if drawn by something nameless and inexorable, something that required them to stand in the awful presence of the awful thing, for themselves. Something that required them to bear witness.
All about him, candles were being lit, lamps were being lit, stricken faces were appearing from the darkness of an evening in spring turned suddenly grim as a morning in winter, to ask, “Is it true? Did it happen?” People nodded or said yes. The crowd swelled.
“You a soldier?”
It took Sam a moment to hear the question, a moment more to understand it was meant for him. He turned and found himself walking beside a dark-skinned Negro, maybe a few years older than himself. Sam stood six feet; the other man was a few inches shorter. His face was carved deep with lines, and his scalp was smooth, a landscape unbroken by so much as a single hair.
“I said, you a soldier?”
“Yes,” said Sam. “At least, I was.”
The man nodded toward the faded Union Army jacket Sam wore. “I thought so,” he said. “And you got that soldier’s walk,” he added. “Straight up, chest out. Need to watch that. That walk get you killed, you ain’t careful.”
At Sam’s questioning look, he gave a tight smile. “I served, too,” he said. “Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry. We defended this here city.” The tight smile became a grimace, as if he were sucking on something profoundly distasteful, and he added, “Leastways, I thought we did. If what they sayin’ about the president is true…” He allowed the thought to evaporate. After a few moments they turned onto Tenth Street. And the tiny hope Sam had allowed to live inside him died, gasping.
The street was madness. By the light of a gas lamp in front of the theater he saw hundreds of people standing about, choking the muddy, rutted road. Their faces were uniformly stunned. When they moved, they seemed to stagger, as if walking was somehow new to them. But they did not move much, other than to clear a path when some soldier or official came barreling through, crying “Give way! Give way!” Otherwise, they stood, their attention fixed on a narrow house across from the theater.
A Negro woman waited in back of the crowd, her hands pinned beneath her arms, tears gleaming on her cheeks. Because he did not know what else to do, Sam approached her. She did not seem to notice, but when he drew close enough, she spoke without turning. “I seen him,” she said. “He look more dead than alive. They carried him right out the theater.” She pointed. “Right up into that there house.”
“It’s true, then?”
The question came from the Negro soldier who had walked alongside him. Sam was surprised the man was still at his elbow. And what a foolish question. But then, he thought, the man probably just needed to say it out loud, for himself if for no one else. Saying it helped to make it real. The woman nodded.
“Is there any hope?” asked Sam.
Now she turned toward him for the very first time. She was young and she was pretty in a heartbreaking way, her eyes round, and red from crying. “I seen ’em stop twice,” she answered, and her voice was loose and fluttery, “there and there.” She pointed toward the middle of the street. “They reached into his brain and they pulled out the clots of blood.”
Sam swallowed.
The other man said, “I need a drink.”
A smirk from the woman. “They done closed all the taverns by order of the government.”
“Good thing I carry my own,” said the man. A flask was in his hand. He unscrewed it and took a long pull, then extended it to Sam. Sam hesitated only a second—he was a man for whom exhibiting correct behavior was very important, especially in public. And drinking from a stranger’s flask in the middle of a muddy street, well, it was hard to think of any behavior that was less correct, less reflective of the sort of man Sam considered himself to be, wanted others to see in him.
But the president…
He accepted the flask and threw back a healthy swig. He felt it burn a path to his stomach, where it glowed like embers.
Now he hesitated again, unsure what the etiquette was, whether it was proper to pass the flask on to a lady. She solved his dilemma for him, reaching boldly to take the flask and tip it. She passed it back to him, he passed it back to the other man.
They waited.
Sam had not liked Abraham Lincoln much at first. Lincoln had always struck him as a coarse Westerner, too timid and accommodating on the evil subject of slavery. His famous Emancipation Proclamation had only infuriated Sam. After all, Lincoln had ordered the slaves freed in Southern lands where he had no jurisdiction, but left them untouched in lands where his word was still law. But though he had not liked the president, Sam had come to respect him if only because in the end, he had allowed Sam—and thousands of other former slaves—to go fight for their freedom.
Had someone asked how he felt about the president even a few hours ago, that’s all Sam would have said, that he respected the man. But standing here in the muddy ruts of Tenth Street, watching a nondescript brick house, waiting for what, he did not know, was more than respect. The thought that Abraham Lincoln might be dying, might already be dead, made something flap loose in the very bottom of his stomach. It had never occurred to him that you could shoot a president like you could any other man. But apparently, you could. Black was white and up was down and right was left and the president of the United States lay in a nondescript house on a nondescript street, dying of a gunshot wound to his brain. Sam felt again what he had felt standing on the library steps: as if his very life, the whole country’s life, had become confetti, floating down, and all he could do was wait to see where it would land, what the new order of things would be. Or if, indeed, there would ever be order again.
He waited.
It seemed to him incomprehensible that he had walked and ridden so far, crossed rivers and meadows and woods, only to reach this city on this awful night.
He waited.
“My name is Lucy,” said the woman at some point.
“Sam.”
“Ben.”
She ignored Ben. “You from around here, Sam?”
He shook his head. “I am from Philadelphia.”
