Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  Wasn’t none of us sure how the children gonna go into they adulthood after what they seen in 1873. They was still taking shape, and truth tell, us older folks was busy our own selves struggling with how we was gonna do in the new way of living. Fear is a cruel master, but hope die a hard death. Don’t think we just lay down. Six year after the massacre, two hundred colored men from these parts go to the polls and vote. My Sam march shoulder to shoulder with the others through the crowd of white to shore up the Republicans. Israel Smith already buried by then, but I like to think he’d a gone with them too. Didn’t make no difference in the end. By then Republican politicians was on the downslide. Couldn’t nothing blow enough life into the party in the South, too many scared. We don’t keep back easy, but 1879 the last time any of our men was allowed to set foot in the polls. Sam always say us colored get the vote back someday, that his sons gonna get the chance to vote like he done, but that was fifty year ago and I ain’t seen it yet. We running outa time for that. Maybe his grandsons get the opening. Maybe his great-grandsons.

  Most people accept the hand they dealed, dig deep in theyself and carry on, and that’s what we done. One thing always sure. Life go on with you or without you, no matter how much you seen. Was a master just as evil as the devil back in Alabama put a heavy choke chain ’round his dog’s neck and used to jerk on it hard night or day for no particular reason. Just to watch the poor beast suffer, I think. Meanness. That old dog got to the point he just lay down whenever that man around, like all the fight left him, head hung down and shaking. One day they find his master with his throat tore out and the dog gone. Wait long enough and you reap what you sow. That hold for men. That hold for towns. That hold for a whole country, I suspect.

  The same affection Sam and Israel grow when Reconstruction in its last days carry over between the next crop of Tademys and Smiths. ’Course I seed Green and Jackson every day, cook they meals and wash they clothes till they old enough to move out our house and under they own roof and start they own families. Those two brothers never growed out they closeness to each other. I seed young Noby regular too, a tight friend to the Tademy boys. Seed how they all growed up to be fine, God-fearing young men, but wasn’t nothing much more for them in Colfax than we had. Colored didn’t have too much room to press forward. Was a comfort, though, to see how them three boys lean on one another and come at life the stronger for it.

  I think Noby Smith look to Green and Jackson so because of trouble in his own growing-up house. They was poison between Noby and his brother David, carry forward past they youth when they shoulda knowed better and put that bad feeling behind them. Someone on the outside looking in never know the full story, but I think they was rivals for they daddy’s attention, and Noby come out the clear favorite. Even after Israel gone, they still can’t let the bad blood go. Israel never saw beyond David’s pale eyes and fair skin he know didn’t come from him. I say you love family no matter where they come from. It ain’t right to speak against the dead, but I got to fault Israel Smith for letting that brother-hate breed, or at least for not trying to set them straight before it was too late. Wasn’t nothing but his own grievance shining back at him through his sons. But that the way it be, one generation to the next. Like a spinning wheel, go ’round and ’round repeating the same old things.

  Figure 13. Colfax courthouse marker, still outside rebuilt courthouse (Northwestern State University of Louisiana, Watson Memorial Library, Cammie G. Henry Research Center)

  Chapter

  21

  1882

  S weat inches down the pecan-colored farmer’s face, starting at the top of his scalp, under his hat, and makes its way like a troop of stubborn soldiers in a forced march. Rivulets break rank at the stubble of his chin, collecting at the jawline before dropping to the ground or pooling at the collar, fanning out to become dark, salt-ringed stains left behind on the cottonade material of his coarse shirt. Noby Smith is accustomed to the punishment meted out during August Louisiana days in the open field, days that deliver too much sun, never enough shade, and so much water hanging in the air, it may as well be raining. He hasn’t broken pace for over two hours; he’s adept at tilting his head back or to the side to keep the stinging perspiration from his eyes. Before prodding the mule forward once more across the unyielding soil, he takes off his sopping shirt and ties it around his waist, more a nervous gesture than a sensible one. The leather straps chafe against his bare skin and leave a raised red swipe across his upper body as friction, skin, and perspiration conspire. The metal blade of the plow jerks and successfully pierces the dense crusted ground, but clayish dirt and rocks the size of cantaloupes fight Noby at each furrow.

  Two years of drought followed by another year of flood have turned the areas surrounding Colfax an ugly, drab brown, as if temperate sun and moderate rainfall refuse to honor such a place. Three years in a row, cursed, when everyone struggles. Noby picked this long-neglected, miserable patch to work today, as if doing penance under the crush of the midday sun. He is almost far enough away to be out of earshot of the cabin, but close enough for someone to come quickly to fetch him when the time is at hand.

  Earlier this morning, anxious, he hovered too close to the small shack he shares with his wife, trying to occupy himself in planting four new rows of sugar peas in the side vegetable garden. After the first few screams, he hitched up the mule and moved farther afield to escape the terrifying sounds, off to the desolate plot he’s trying to cultivate now. This scrap of land is little more than hard-packed soil peppered through with rocks, and it lays fallow for a reason, unlikely to ever yield a decent crop. Nonetheless, Noby turns the resistant soil, clearing weeds but not seeding. He can’t force himself to budge from his vantage point, this tactical position, mindlessly committing himself to a parallel task as grueling as the one his wife faces inside the darkness of the cabin, but he’s unwilling to endure close up the abandon of her pain screams. Emma is tough and stoic. He has never heard her surrender to suffering as she does now, has been doing for hours. His mother gave birth to nine children, four of them younger than Noby, and he can’t remember this much upheaval associated with the process. Childbirth is new to his Emma, and he can only hope that his mother’s midwifing skills will guide the familiar Emma back to him, that his wife will return to him calm and healthy, she and the new baby.

  Sometime soon, within the tight confines of their cabin, Emma will bring new life to this world, a life that promises not only an extension of himself but also of his own father. The birth of his baby turns Noby’s thoughts to Israel Smith, and as usual, a flood of images from those last three years of his father’s life overshadow the man Noby knew as a boy. He pictures his father sitting up in bed, mute, in the darkened front room of their sharecropper’s cabin, or on his better days, in the rocking chair on the front porch, with a grimy black patch covering his right eye. Sometimes Israel refused to wear the patch, his right eye gummed almost shut and terrifying in its hollowness. On those occasions when he walked, Israel leaned heavily on the twisted oak branch he carried at his side. He was able to be on his feet at most only a few hours each day.

  For those last three years, Noby’s mother, Lucy, took on primary responsibility for Israel, tending him as if he were her tenth child, vulnerable and dependent, cooking down food until it was soft enough for him to eat, changing him, helping him with the chamber pot, taking in washing and fancy ironing by the piece when she could get the work. She didn’t complain, she just moved into the breadwinning role.

  “Nine mouths to feed day coming in and day going out,” she would say. “These children’s bellies still get empty no matter what happen in the past.”

  Noby and David assumed as much of the farmwork and, later, the fieldwork as their size and age allowed. Their father resided in the house with them, all of them, wife and children, but mostly he was not really there. When Noby returned to the cabin in the evening, he undertook his other responsibility, reading to his father, either by the light
from the fireplace or occasionally by the light of a precious bit of oil. Noby was clever at scrounging, bringing back scraps of paper with writing on them—old receipts, discarded newspapers, a page from a catalog, a borrowed schoolbook from a neighbor willing to share the prized volume for a few hours. It was only when Noby read aloud that Israel seemed calm and not quite so distant, his mind willing to take a stake in the current world, as if he had stumbled onto a pathway back to the flow of life.

  Once, and it had happened only once, not long after everyone wandered off to bed and Noby prepared to do the same, dead on his feet after a long day, Israel called him closer, his leathery hand shaking. The front room was deep in the shadow of evening, with only the light from the moon entering through the single front window and a faint glow from the last embers in the fireplace.

  “That day was rigged,” Israel said to Noby. His father’s voice, barely louder than a whisper, carried a chronic coarseness, but now he dropped the volume even further. “I was wrong, son. Don’t never let them put their hands on you.”

  Noby waited for something more, but his father closed his remaining eye and turned away.

  Few of the surviving colored Colfax courthouse men want to share their stories, and the ones who do are immediately shushed by those more cautious. There is a child within earshot, or too much work to do, or a careful life to live. The fear is palpable that somehow the words might carry to the whites, remind them how dangerous these men once were. But it isn’t necessary to relive the events, to name the names. Nine years later, retribution still looms large. In the colored community, any public references to April 13, 1873, however veiled, quickly turn dead and silent on the tongue.

  Noby’s father lived long enough, if you could call it living, to see the end of Reconstruction in Grant Parish, the definitive clanging shut like a heavy iron door, locking out the dreams of the colored courthouse men. Reconstruction passed from potential to unyielding history, a reminiscence, and life in Louisiana returned to its former rigid exclusions. Once open rebellion ended and order was restored, the community slowly shook off the horror. Schools reopened, only for whites, state and parish taxes were collected again, and the police jury, virtually powerless since the fighting, began to exert its authority to undertake the building of a new courthouse to replace the one destroyed during the Easter Sunday battle. By then Israel Smith no longer followed with any interest the goings-on of Colfax, Louisiana, no longer actively participated in the obstinate determination of other families piecing their futures back together in The Bottom.

  Noby remembers those days in early spring before Easter and the terror of hiding in the woods, the smallest of details distinct and unshakable, but the whole scorched through in places by the bruising light of time’s passage. The intensity of those weeks in 1873 is especially potent in Noby’s dreams, enough to bring him fully awake in the middle of the night two or three times a week, unwilling to lie back down for fear of the revisiting. They never leave him completely, the memories. He has trained himself to do without too much sleep.

  Today he starts his own legacy. Hansom if it is a boy, and Lenora if a girl. Hansom or Lenora Smith. He badly wants a boy. For six years after his father died, Noby burned with the need to name his first son after Israel. In a moment of brotherly confidence, in an effort to bridge the wide gulf between them, he told David his plan at their father’s funeral, sharing with his older brother his desire to honor Israel’s memory. David listened, sympathetic, looked him in the face with those cool gray eyes and nodded in support, but when David’s own son was born three years ago, his brother named him Israel, as if he had never heard Noby’s intent. Now Noby will be forced to settle for a different name.

  Hansom is certainly an honorable choice, if it can’t be Israel. Hansom Brisco not only saved Noby’s life when he was a baby, he is one of the most successful colored men around Colfax, and a worthy namesake. Hansom Brisco owns more land in The Bottom than Sam and Green Tademy combined, an admirable feat.

  Another strangled scream from the direction of the house finds its way to Noby, even this far removed in the field. Noby pulls his straw hat down farther, over his ears. He lowers his head, clucks for the mule, and slowly guides the plow forward. There is nothing to do but wait.

  “You got a boy,” his mother tells him when she comes for him in the field. Lucy Smith’s hair is totally white, sweated through, and plastered close to her head. Her loose housedress has a noticeable dark bloodstain at the hem. When she sees Noby staring at the spot and the alarm on his face, she laughs. “Your son doing fine,” she says. “Took his time coming, but now he’s here, he not timid.”

  “Emma, how be Emma?” Noby asks, as his worry shifts to his new wife. Emma is eighteen, same as Noby, a big-boned woman with a burnt-custard tinge to her skin, sturdy but gawky, as if her body is slightly more than she can manage. The real drama of her face is the striking slope of her narrow-slitted, almond-shaped eyes. Her father, China Man Thornton, is the only Chinese man Noby has ever seen, although he disappeared from town shortly after the massacre. When the time came, Noby nervously asked Emma’s mother for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Her mother said yes, and Emma left them in the front room to dash out to the side yard. With a single-handed twirl, she wrung the neck of a chicken to fry up for their celebration supper. The deal was set.

  “She strong, that girl, made for babies, that a fact, but what she need now is rest. Don’t worry, I be looking after your wife till her mother come to spell me. Got to get back to my own after that.”

  By the time Emma’s mother, Louisa, arrives two days later, the household is humming with female energy, but little of the bustle is directed toward Noby and his needs. All the commotion mystifies him. There was always a new baby in the house when he was young, spitting up and crying, sleeping and voiding, gurgling and cooing, creating a ruckus, but he is amazed at how much time and attention has to be directed toward this one tiny creature, his son. The baby boy has a thick head of curly black hair and a powerful set of lungs that he uses often, day and night, but to Noby he seems more fragile than he remembers any of his brothers or sisters being at that age. Emma tells him that is only because he just now pays attention.

  Hansom Brisco rides out to the farm a week after the baby comes. Although well into middle age, Hansom is still a powerful-looking man, walnut brown and brawny, with rippling, muscular arms that give confidence he can either guide a plow or deliver a calf.

  Noby greets his old friend at the front door with a slap on the back. “You got to be Big Hansom now,” Noby says, grinning. “How we tell you and L’il Hansom apart otherwise?”

  Hansom looks pleased. “Let me get a look at my godson, see if he look any better than his daddy at that age,” he says.

  Emma rocks the baby in the front room. She smiles broadly at Hansom and holds up his namesake bundle for him to see.

  “You do me honor,” Hansom says. “Fine-looking boy. Healthy. Got Emma’s eyes too. Thank goodness he take after the mama, not the daddy.”

  “Difference is, this boy gonna always have enough to eat,” says Noby.

  Hansom stays as long as etiquette demands, chats with Emma, inquires after her health, holds the baby boy for a few minutes before giving him back to his mother. “Next time I bring the missus and stay longer,” he says to Emma. He catches Noby’s eye. “Walk me out?” Hansom asks.

  Noby clasps the older man around the shoulder and walks beside him to the mare grazing in the front yard.

  “David come to me last week asking terms on a piece of my land. Say the two of you considering going in together.”

  Noby tries not to look surprised. “Me and my brother always talking land. Nothing more important for a colored man than land.”

  “My hand is out when you ready to get started. Especially now. You know that,” Hansom says. “Since the day you wrap your fist around my finger, you been like the son I never had.”

  “What you done for me and my family already be
yond paying back,” Noby says. “Emma and me working hard to square the money part of those debts first before adding on.”

  After the birth, Emma has a little trouble getting around, nothing serious but enough to keep her closer to home than she would like, and almost three weeks pass before Noby, Emma, and the baby escape the farm for their first real family outing. Jackson Tademy has finally set the wedding day to marry Amy McCullen, and Noby will stand up for his good friend as witness. The ceremony is just immediate family and the closest of friends. Between getting in the crop and the new baby in the house, Noby hasn’t seen Jackson in two weeks. Emma bundles the baby, and they make the short wagon ride to Sam Tademy’s farm in The Bottom, arriving early, before the minister. It is the first time many of the guests, mostly Tademys, have seen L’il Hansom, and the women ooh and aah over both Emma and the baby.

  The heat beats down on the tin roof, turns the farmhouse into a furnace. Within minutes, Emma and L’il Hansom are swept up in preparations inside the house, and Noby drifts outside, where he finds Jackson alone on the back porch.

  “Nervous?” Noby asks.

  Jackson is slight of stature but athletic, his forehead high, a slight downward hook to the nose, full lips, kinky hair kept close-cropped to his head. The Indian-brown undertone to his skin has turned a bronzy-red from the sun, and he looks especially handsome today. Like his brother Green, Jackson has a distinctive appearance, not just in physical features but in a shared sense of certainty and calm. Except for Green’s two-inch advantage in height, they look almost like twins. In fact, they favor each other more as they get older, although they are three years apart. The sharp, chiseled features of Jackson’s face are composed, his pants pressed to shininess, and a crisp white handkerchief peeking from his jacket pocket defies the sticky humidity.