“I never heard anythin’ good about Master Alexander. Nary one good thing.”
“Sallie, she saw somethin’ in that boy nobody else can see. Might be if their baby was born, it would have been different. Some men like havin’ somethin’ more helpless than theirself to care for. Baby’ll take some men that way.”
“And some men run from ’em.” Rufus had his arm around Franky’s waist and was whispering in her ear. Franky had carried two babies to term but neither had lived. It was supposed that Rufus had been the father, but popular opinion credited Rufus with many infants he did not deserve.
Brow furrowed, Aunt Opal considered Master Alexander. “I had a buck sheep once, called him Henry. Handsome, high-headed sheep. Oh, he was skittery—hated to be touched, and when the other sheep came to the grain he’d hide on the fringe of the woods and wouldn’t come out so long as I was near. September—was a full-moon night—and them no-count Stuart boys came down the bottoms coon hunting and their dogs got in the sheep. Next morning there’s three sheep tore to pieces and Henry, soon as he sees me he runs down into the corner and tries to bust through the fence. That fence is new chestnut rails six high and when he runs at ’em, he gets knocked back onto his haunches. Makes an awful sound. I can see him thinkin’, ‘Should I try that again?’ And ’deed he does. Oh, he must have run at that fence eight or ten times tryin’ to get away from what wasn’t chasin’ him before he broke his neck. Oh, he was a good-lookin’ buck. High-headed.”
The Gatewood buggy drove away. Pompey, the driver, did not deign to notice lesser mortals.
“Scared out of his wits,” Jack the Driver opined.
“I don’t know he was scared. I think something was wrong in his mind. I swear I could see that sheep take thought, makin’ up his mind each time to try one more time what hadn’t ever worked before and didn’t make no sense anyway.”
AT NIGHT THE COFFLE RESTS
BLACKS FORD, TENNESSEE
APRIL 8, 1861
THEY WERE THREE days east of Memphis on the Big Sandy River. Ellam wanted to see Memphis. He’d heard things about Memphis. Wasn’t anything you couldn’t find in Memphis. Ellam smacked a mosquito on his cheek. You’d think bugs’d learn that it didn’t pay to fool with Ellam Omohundru.
The light was yellow over the Big Sandy and the sky was big, and Ellam wondered why it was so big here and not so big back in Virginia. Already, the slave jail was lost in shadows.
Uncle Silas wanted to get to Vicksburg before the cotton planting. Prices were lower in the winter, when you had to feed a slave and you couldn’t get much work out of him, and they’d drop later in the summer, after the Delta planters had all the hands they needed. Ellam belched. Brown beans and cornbread. Wasn’t much better than what the niggers ate, except niggers didn’t get no ham and they sure as hell didn’t get no brandy. Ellam scratched a lucifer across the doorpost and waited until the sulfur stink burned itself out before he lit his cigar. He put a thick boot on the bench set outside the inn for travelers to wait for the ferry or simply admire the sweep of the river, whence the bugs were coming. Cigar smoke helped some.
Ellam Omohundru was a young man with an untested conviction that men of quality would rise naturally in society and that he was among their number. He identified his wishes with needs and needs with rights. Let that goddamned Lincoln try to relieve Sumter. Boys like Ellam Omohundru would give him what for!
Uncle Silas and the others were still inside, digesting politics with their dinner. When you did something—like those South Carolina boys were doing—you pulled all the politics along behind you. Politics was what filled the time between doing something.
Ellam was twenty-two. He wanted to see Memphis. He’d wanted to see Richmond too, but Uncle Silas said they’d get a better price in Tennessee. Uncle had spent the winter putting this coffle together, fifteen prime hands, not one of them over thirty. No lungers, no runaways, no whip scars. Only three missing fingers and one missing eye among them. Uncle Silas walked them across Tennessee like they were on a Sunday picnic: twenty miles a day, meals morning and evening, and under roof any night it threatened rain. It wasn’t going to rain tonight, Ellam could tell that, but there they were in the slave jail, which had been a horse barn from the stagecoach days. Now the railroad was putting paid to that line of work. One day they’d have slave jail cars on the railroad and the coffles’d be a thing of the past too.
For two weeks, Ellam had been eyeballing that high yellow girl with the baby. Watched the way she moved, how she held her head so high. Saw her breasts when she gave her baby suck. He liked it and didn’t like it: liked the breasts, didn’t like the way they were being used, no different from a milk cow’s udder. Today, she caught him spying on her, and when the baby was done, she took forever to cover herself. Maggie was her name. Colored girls started younger than white girls did, on account of being more primitive, with stronger animal natures.
The jailer had carefully combed gray hair, a neatly patched vest, and braces embroidered with yellow and black squares.
“They ain’t doin’ nothin’,” he said, gesturing to the judas hole in the door. “One of ’em’s prayin’, but most the rest are just lyin’ in the straw. Last week I watched a pair of them doin’ it in there. They was just walkin’ from Clarksville to Memphis, so they had plenty of strength. Didn’t take long, no longer than a stallion on a mare, just five minutes or so, and I couldn’t see much on account of the lantern light don’t hardly reach, but I could tell they was doin’ it. People on all sides of them, but they didn’t care. They was married and goin’ to different masters, maybe that’s why they didn’t care. I’m Oliver. Mighty pleased to meet you.” The gray-haired simpleton stuck out his hand.
Ellam kept his hand in his pocket.
“Less’n I let you, you can’t watch ’em,” Oliver said. “They might be your niggers, but this is my brother’s jail.”
“I’m Ellam,” Ellam said, looking down to the river, where clouds of bats were sweeping the water. “This is my Uncle Silas’s coffle. He brings a big coffle every spring. ‘Buy in the fall and winter, sell in the spring,’ that’s what my uncle believes. This is my first trip. I was hoping we’d sell ’em in Memphis. Forrest and McMillan has the biggest slave and horse auctions in the west, and I’d surely admire to see ’em. But Uncle Silas says no, we’ll get a better price in Vicksburg. I got to inspect them every night. It’s my job.” He laughed. “I tuck them in just like they was babies.”
Oliver lit a lantern, and the two went inside. The jail was squat and sprawling. The square openings cut in the stone to pass air and light to horses were barred with iron rods.
Ellam wrinkled his nose. “God,” he said. “God damn.”
“They get new straw in here once a week, and there’s a thunder jug every three rings.”
“It’s them,” Ellam said. “It’s just them.”
Oliver giggled.
One side of the jail was a forty-foot pen bedded with straw. At intervals, rings in the stone wall anchored the blacks’ chains. The other side was horse stalls, piled high with broken hubs and axles. A lantern hung from a low beam.
“We didn’t want too many lanterns for fear of fire,” Oliver whispered.
A young black was kneeling, facing the stone wall, praying. Every evening, indoors or out, after supper, before he slept, he got on his knees for praying. Never gave any trouble, never talked back, never bucked or tangled his chains. He’d come from Fluvanna County.
Those that weren’t asleep eyed the two white men. None of them said a word, but their eyes followed every move. A woman was squatting on a chamber pot. When she finished, she shoved a handful of straw underneath her skirt to wipe herself. She replaced the chamber pot against the wall and lay down on her side.
The high yellow sat back to the wall, baby swaddled in her lap, legs stuck out in the straw. Ellam wondered why she had such skinny legs. “What’s this?”
Oliver swung a door open. “Was a tack room. Now we ju
st use it case one of ’em’s sick so the others don’t catch it. Sometimes when we got a runaway we keeps ’im in here.” The room had a high barred window, and a straw pallet on the stone floor.
Ellam took the lantern from Oliver’s hands. “That’s all I’ll be needin’ you for.”
“You intendin’ to stay in here? With them?”
“For a little while.”
The young-old man’s pale eyes wandered the shadowy room. “You’re gonna do it? Which one you gonna do it to?”
“Go on, now. You can see your way to the door. Plenty of light.”
“I’m supposed to stay right here. Particular if anybody’s with ’em. We had one to run away once and it was a good thing the patrollers caught him or brother would have had to pay for him.”
Ellam turned his back before rummaging in his pocketbook for a dime. “Here. I won’t be but half an hour.”
Solemnly Oliver turned the dime in the lamplight. “Some fellows can do it two or three times.”
“Go on. Get out of here. Close the door behind you.”
No sooner was the door pulled shut than the judas hole opened and darkened as Oliver pressed his face against it.
Quietly, Ellam detached the high yellow’s chain. The woman looked at him.
“You’ll want somebody to care for the baby,” Ellam said.
Her eyes were big, and in the lantern light, black as well holes.
Wordlessly, a woman held out her arms, and Ellam passed the baby to her, careful not to step on anyone’s legs. He could have sworn the baby was awake, but it didn’t cry. It smelled cleaner than he expected. The woman cradled the baby in her arms and crooned as Ellam tugged on the high yellow’s chain and she came to her feet, all in one motion. He held the door of the tack room open, and when he closed it behind them, he set the lantern on a high shelf and wrapped his end of the chain around his wrist.
“I’m Ellam,” he said.
“Yes, Master.”
“And you’re Maggie.”
She had her fingers laced in front of her. Long, delicate fingers.
“Why you lookin’ at me like that.” She looked down at her feet. Her feet were pretty good-sized and flat.
“How old are you?”
“I was born the year before the railroad came to Millboro.”
“Where the hell’s Millboro? I never been to Millboro.”
“Millboro, that be where they ship our flour, and we saw up a mess of sleepers for them too. Stratford Plantation, that’s my home.” A tear started down her cheek, and she sniffled.
“Stop that. You’re goin’ to have a new home now. You and your baby.”
“They gonna sell us together, Master? I’d be ever so grateful was you to sell us together. I’d fetch a better price too, on account of everybody know I’m a breeder.”
Ellam smiled a tight smile. “Woman for one price, infant for another. Might fetch more that way.”
“Master, that’d be hard! Little Jacob here is all I got to remember his father by!”
Ellam held his key ring to the light to select the key that released her chain. There was a scurrying outside the barred window, like a possum scratching around.
“I might ask Uncle Silas to sell you together,” Ellam said. His throat was curiously tight, and he swallowed. “Uncle Silas, he ain’t so wellborn as me, ’n’ he’d do most anything to please me. He’s teachin’ me the business now, but one day I’m gonna run it by myself. Buyin’, sellin’, travelin’ everywhere I want. Hell, maybe I’ll get up to Millboro.”
“Stratford’s only a half day farther. First there’s Warwick Plantation and then Dinwiddie’s and then Stratford. After Stratford there’s nothing but Snowy Mountain. Stratford last and the best. Oh, you’d want to stay at Stratford Plantation once you got there, Master.”
“Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t,” Ellam said. “I don’t suppose you been to Charlottesville.”
She shook her head.
“Bridgewater? New Market?”
She hadn’t.
“Well, there’s plenty of towns and plenty of goings-on. Two days hence we’ll be passing near Memphis. I might just tell Silas to walk the coffle by himself while I go in for a time. I just might do that.”
“What’s gonna happen to us, Master?”
Ellam shrugged. “Most will sell as field hands. Some of those Mississippi plantations got two hundred servants planting and hoeing and picking cotton. Cotton’s the South’s biggest crop!”
“I’m a house nigger,” she said brightly. “Ever since I was a pickaninny, I served Mistress Abigail Gatewood. I can wash and iron, I can brush a lady’s hair, a hundred strokes. I can help her to dress, and while she’s out I can clean her boudoir so it looks like nobody’s ever laid down in it. I know which are First Families of Virginia and which ain’t. I can sew and do fancy work.”
“Can you cook?”
“No, Master,” imploringly, “but I can learn. Miss Abigail many time say she never knew no gal to learn so quick as me.”
“You’re pretty.”
Another thud outside the window. Awful big for a possum.
She stared at her feet. She scuffled her feet. She fixed her eyes to his. “That may be so, Master, but it’s never been anything but sorrow to me. Many a time I wished I was born with a cast in my eye or a twitch in my shoulder or a foolish look.” And as she described these maladies, she acted them out, casting a bad eye, twitching at will, grimacing like a fool.
Her mimickry of a demented woman was so accurate Ellam found himself grinning. He hadn’t come to laugh. “Oh, you’re right pretty all right. Light as you are, you’re prettier than many a white girl.” His ears tingled. He licked his lips. “You want two bits?”
She looked around the walls of the room as though the walls had messages. Her eyes roamed from the ceiling beams to the straw-strewn dirt floor, never once looked at the pallet on the floor. “I brush Miss Abigail’s hair a hundred strokes every morning. Miss Abigail say she never had anybody like me. One night, after a ball, two years ago, she come upstairs and I help her into her sleeping things and Miss Abigail said she cared for me same as a daughter. ’Course the gentlemen always drink a little at a ball, and I expect ladies do too.”
“You ain’t her daughter.”
“No, Master. But Auntie Opal says I’m the daughter of Reverend Mitchell, who was drowned when he ordered his buggy drove into the Jackson River when it was in flood.”
“You got a preacher for a pa?”
“I’m not sayin’ he was, and I’m not sayin’ he wasn’t. It’s what’s been told to me.”
“Preacher lyin’ down with a nigger slut. Think of that.”
She was examining her hands, as though surprised at her pale translucent skin. “Master, I don’t need a quarter dollar. I got nothin’ to spend it on.”
“Two bits is the highest I’ll go. I don’t got to give you nothin’.”
She was looking at her feet again. “Master,” she said softly, “I got me a husband.”
“You jumped the broomstick with some buck. That don’t make him your rightful husband.”
“It wasn’t him I was thinking of. Please, Master.”
“You mean you got two sweethearts? Well then, Missy, you’re about to get you a third one. And this one might do you some good. Might be I could tell Uncle Silas to sell you as a house servant. Might be you could keep your baby.”
A clattering sound outside, a scrape against the windowsill.
“Well then,” he said, taking a step to her. “Well then.”
Out of her clothes she was pretty enough, but she didn’t hold herself like she was pretty and didn’t lie like she was pretty either. She was dry, and she kept her eyes closed until Ellam told her to open them and then she fixed them somewhere overhead. When he was done, still kneeling between her legs, he had an uneasy feeling, and goddamned if that fool wasn’t peering at him through the window, where he’d piled boxes on top of an old whiskey barrel so he cou
ld see everything. The fool was grinning to bust.
Next morning Ellam woke with a powerful erection and it seemed his member was longer than it had been before. Maybe doing it stretched your member. He hadn’t heard about that, not even from the Summerfield boys, who had girls in the Quarters and used to describe everything they did and how it was when they did it. Uncle Silas was already up. The sun poured through the windows and scrubbed the room. Ellam yawned enormously. The sun said it was half past six. Uncle Silas would be out feeding the niggers. He always fed the niggers before he ate himself. When Ellam sat up he could smell her on him, kind of a fishy smell. He wondered how long that’d last.
He clumped down the narrow stairs into the ordinary, where a long table was set with tin plates and coffee mugs. Platters—already considerably picked at—held ham and bacon. Another platter had a half-eaten chicken. Cornbread still in the pan, jugs of water and coffee. Most of the plates were dirty. Drovers were always in a hurry to get on the road.
He’d loaded his platter before his Uncle Silas came in, so skinny that from a distance you’d swear he was just a boy. His hair was combed straight back off his head and fastened behind in an old-fashioned queue. The spectacles he’d taken to wearing jutted out of his vest pocket.
Ellam was lifting a forkful of ham to his mouth when Uncle Silas smiled at him, laid his hand on the back of Ellam’s chair, and upended it. One second Ellam was at table, next second he was flat on his back with an aching head where he’d knocked it against the wall and Uncle Silas had dumped his plate on him, ham, cornbread, and all.
Ellam was so confused, he thought, “I can’t eat that now.”
Deliberately Uncle Silas lifted up the pitcher of coffee, dunked his finger in it, testing for heat, and finding it tepid enough for his purposes, poured it over his nephew’s head.
“What the hell, what the hell!” Ellam sputtered.
Uncle Silas’s smile returned. Things had been pleasanter without it. “You look like a fool, boy. Hell, you are a fool. Have more breakfast.” He dumped the cornbread on his nephew.
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