A Light to My Path

by Lynn Austin

  Amos gave him an odd look. “I guess you ain’t following the news. There’s a war going on right now.”

  Grady gestured impatiently. “I know that.”

  “Well, passenger ships can’t be sailing into Confederate ports any time they feel like it. They can only go to cities like Beaufort that the Yankees already took. Them Rebels have forts and armed batteries guarding all their rivers and ports. And Union warships are patrolling up and down the coast, stopping ships.”

  Amos reached the head of the line and paused to fill his tin mess plate, then he led Grady to a makeshift bench outside his tent. “Want some food?” he asked.

  Grady shook his head. “How can I get to Richmond, Amos?”

  “You can’t, boy. The Rebels made Richmond their capitol, like Washington City. The Yankees been trying all last spring and summer to get in there. Didn’t you hear about that?”

  “I thought the white folks was making it all up, about keeping the Yankees out. It was hard to find out exactly what’s been going on in the war, since they had me working as a field hand.”

  Amos grunted in sympathy. “Yeah, well, them Rebels have Richmond all closed up behind earthworks and such. Even General McClellan and thousands of Yankee soldiers weren’t able to get in there last summer. Word is that a new general is gonna try again soon, and that they’re marching down that way right now. But if you’re thinking of going after your family, it ain’t gonna work. They’s still slaves. If you go anywhere near Richmond, them white folks gonna catch you and make you their slave again, too.”

  Grady stood and paced a few steps, his fists clenched in frustration. “How can I help my family get free, Amos?”

  He chewed his food, thinking. “Only way I know is to march into Richmond with the Yankees. That’s why I put on this uniform. When we finish drilling and learning how to fight, I’m hoping to get up there myself and save my own family. And you can bet I’ll be killing every last Rebel I find along the way.”

  This discouraging news wasn’t what Grady had wanted to hear. “Thanks anyway,” he mumbled. He said good-bye to Amos and set off across the camp toward the road, hoping that another plan would come to mind on the long walk back to town. He was crossing the parade grounds when one of the white officers intercepted him.

  “Hello there,” the man said with a friendly smile. “Are you interested in joining the First South Carolina Volunteers?” It astounded Grady to be addressed as an equal by a white man—even more so when Grady recognized him as the officer who had shouted all the orders to Amos and the others as they’d drilled. Grady hesitated for a long moment, his lifetime habits of submission and fear still deeply ingrained. Then he summoned the courage to answer as a free man—an equal.

  “No, thanks. I ain’t taking no more orders from any white men.”

  The soldier looked surprised but not angry. “You misunderstand. The men don’t obey us because we’re white but because we’re officers. We have black officers, too.”

  “You mean Negroes like me giving the orders?”

  “That’s right. Colonel Higginson is in charge of this regiment and he’s white, but he’s been fighting all his life for equality and freedom for the slaves. He even went out to Kansas during the troubles a few years back and fought like a wildcat to keep it from becoming a slave state. He gave money to support John Brown and the slave rebellion at Harper’s Ferry, too.”

  Grady nodded as if he understood, but he had no idea what the man was talking about.

  “Colonel Higginson agreed to lead this regiment as a kind of experiment,” the white man continued. “If we can succeed—and we’re certain that we can—we’ll show the nation that there’s no difference at all between our two races. We believe that you Negroes will fight just as good or even better than whites do because you’re fighting for your freedom. Everyone up north is watching, you know. This is your chance to prove that your race is just as good as ours. Besides,” he added with a grin, “you’ll get paid every month and get plenty to eat. And Colonel Higginson plans to start school lessons in the evenings to teach everyone how to read and write. Think about it.”

  It sounded much too good to be true to Grady. He wondered if it was a trick to get all the Negroes to enlist so that the whites could enslave them again. “No thanks,” he mumbled and began the long walk back to Beaufort.

  Later, as he passed the harbor where Jim worked, Grady saw his fellow Negroes laboring with their backs bent, their faces downcast—still wearing rags and working for meager pay. Watching them, it seemed to Grady that freedom had never come. He couldn’t help comparing them with the Negro soldiers he’d seen that morning, carrying themselves and their weapons with pride.

  Back at Massa’s town house, smoke curled from the chimney of the washhouse. Grady peeked inside to see Minnie scrubbing the white men’s laundry, and it made him angry. He didn’t want to labor on one of the plantations or do menial work like Jim and Minnie. Grady wanted to walk into Richmond as a free Negro. He wanted Massa Fletcher to meet the son he’d sold—a free man now, carrying a gun. It was what the white folks had long feared—Negroes with guns, coming back to get even, searching for the justice they’d long been denied. Grady wanted to aim a gun at Massa Fletcher’s head and make him cry and beg the way Grady and his mama had begged on that last day. After he’d seen his white father’s fear and listened to his pleas for mercy, Grady would pull the trigger and blow his brains out.

  But in the meantime, how would he get there?

  Three days later Grady had made up his mind. He walked back to the army camp and found the white officer he’d spoken to.

  “I’ve decided to join your Negro regiment,” he said.

  “That’s great. I’m Captain Metcalf. What’s your name?”

  Grady didn’t hesitate. He knew exactly who he was. “My name’s Grady,” he said. “Grady Fletcher.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Beaufort, South Carolina

  November 1862—January 1863

  It didn’t take Grady long to adjust to the routine of army life with the First South Carolina Volunteers. After a lifetime of slavery, it felt natural to him to sleep on the ground, rise early every morning, and eat simple army rations from a tin plate—more natural than sleeping in a feather bed and dining at Massa’s polished table had. And he certainly felt more comfortable in his new woolen uniform than in Massa Fuller’s Sunday clothes.

  Grady had spent hours watching the white troops drill on the Point last year, and he already knew many of the commands and maneuvers. But the happiest moment came when the ordnance department issued him a new Springfield rifle. Holding a weapon in his hands, responding to the command “Battalion! Shoulder arms!” gave him a feeling of power and control that he’d never known before. He honed his marksmanship skills as diligently and lovingly as he’d once practiced the violin. And every time he aimed at a target, every face he imagined on it was white.

  More than eight hundred other Negroes had enlisted in Grady’s regiment, undergoing the transformation with him from degraded slaves to proud soldiers. Some days he felt like an item for sale in one of Beaufort’s storefront windows as he drilled, his every movement watched by military experts and newspaper reporters and countless visitors from the North, all curious to see a battalion that was made up entirely of black soldiers.

  “It won’t always be easy to live under such scrutiny,” Colonel Higginson had warned the men in one of his speeches. “Your successes will be reported and applauded, of course. But if even one of you makes a mistake, it will reflect badly on the entire regiment. And a disaster like Bull Run … well, our little experiment with colored troops would quickly come to an end in that event.”

  “What happened at Bull Run?” Grady asked Captain Metcalf later that day.

  “Our soldiers turned tail and ran when the Rebels attacked them,” he said, wincing.

  “White soldiers?” Grady asked.

  The captain nodded. “For many of those men, it was their
first time in battle. That’s why the colonel is afraid for all of you. None of you has seen combat before.”

  “We won’t run,” Grady said. “We faced a death sentence every day of our lives when we was slaves, while you white folks was scared of getting your feet wet. Just give us a chance to fight. You’ll see.”

  Grady lived and worked with his fellow Negroes day and night, just as he had when he’d been a slave. But because of the freedom each man felt and cherished, the atmosphere in camp was vastly different from what it had been on Slave Row. In the daytime the camp rang with the sound of drums and drill commands and laughter. At night the men gathered around their campfires until taps was played, telling stories and roasting peanuts and sweet potatoes as the moon shone through the silvery moss above their heads.

  Grady’s only disappointment was that all of the ranks in Amos’ company had been filled, and he wasn’t able to join his friend. Instead, the army assigned him to a new company under Captain Metcalf. Grady shared a tent with a former slave named Joseph Whitney, the man who had let him drink from his canteen the day the Union soldiers had found him. He was about the same age and height as Grady, but so thin and angular that he might have been made from matchsticks. His coal-black skin was every bit as dark as Grady’s was light. Everything about Joseph irritated Grady, including his name, which was a painful reminder of his years with Massa Coop. But most grating of all was Joseph’s religious fervor. He’d even earned the nickname “Preacher” from the other men because of it.

  “Do you know the Lord Jesus?” Joseph had asked Grady on their first day together as tentmates. Grady had mumbled a reply and tried to ignore him, but by evening he had already heard enough preaching.

  “Listen, Joe,” he said. “No offense, but I don’t want to hear all your God-talk. I’ve had that stuff shoved at me all my life, and never once has God done me any favors.”

  “He sent His Son to die for you—” “Enough!” Grady said, holding up his hands. “That’s exactly the kind of talk I mean. I don’t want to hear it. There’s plenty of other fellas around here who’re happy to listen to your preaching, but not me. Understand?”

  “I’ll be praying that you—”

  “No!” he said, interrupting. “I don’t want you praying for me, either. Just leave me alone, okay? If you can’t talk to me about regular things, then don’t be talking to me at all.”

  Joseph wore the hurt expression of a long-suffering saint. It made Grady angrier still. But when Joe invited a friend with a fiddle over to their campfire that night, and they sat around singing and playing hymns, it was the last straw. Grady went up to the plantation house to see Captain Metcalf first thing the next morning.

  The five-minute walk from the campground to the warravaged house was a picturesque one, passing down the long avenue beneath moss-draped oaks. But even the pleasant, mistshrouded scenery couldn’t soften Grady’s resolve. “You belong to God,” Delia had once told him. “And He’s gonna chase you down and hound your steps until He gets you back.” Well, if God was planning to use Joseph to torment him, then Grady intended to halt those plans right now.

  “I want a different tentmate,” he told the surprised captain. “I can’t be having him preach at me all day and fiddling hymns at me all night.”

  “I’m sorry,” Metcalf said, frowning. “But an army camp isn’t a hotel room that you can check in and out of every time you’re inconvenienced. We can’t have men changing tents every day or two.”

  “Talk to him, then. Tell him to shut up about God.”

  The captain looked taken aback by Grady’s irreverence. It was a moment before he replied. “You’ll have to work out a compromise between the two of you,” he said slowly. “Joseph has a right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”

  Grady returned to camp determined to avoid Joseph as much as possible. It wasn’t hard to do. The men spent all day drilling and learning maneuvers, but during their free time every evening, they naturally gravitated to whichever activities interested them. Joe went to prayer meetings or sang hymns with some of the others. Grady often went to hear a Negro woman from up north teach the alphabet and read lessons from a schoolbook.

  But every now and then, nearly all of the men would spontaneously gather together to hold a “shout,” sitting around a campfire singing chorus after chorus of the old slave songs they’d once sung on the plantation, accompanied by an assortment of instruments. The men would clap and dance and drum their feet in rhythm as they celebrated their newfound freedom. The songs both drew Grady and repulsed him because of the memories they stirred. He remained on the sidelines at those events, feeling the music deep in his soul, but unwilling to join his gangly tentmate and the others as they sang about the Lord Jesus and going to the Promised Land.

  December brought wind and rain and swarms of sand flies. It also brought the disappointing news that General Burnside and the Union army had suffered a defeat up in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Captain Metcalf and the other officers seemed depressed by the news, and they shook their heads as they talked about the 12,600 Union casualties. But those numbers meant nothing to Grady, who had never learned to count that high. To him, the defeat meant that Richmond remained in Rebel hands, and that his 287 mother and the others were still slaves.

  He hoped that he would finally get a chance to fight in the new year. He was ready. But the fact that his regiment was working hard to build a permanent camp here worried him. The tents all had wooden floors now, and each company had its own wooden cookhouse. The men had pitched in to dig a well and build a fireplace in the guardhouse to warm the soldiers on duty. An outbuilding that had once housed a cotton gin now housed a hospital. And nightly school lessons with teachers from up north would soon be offered in a big circular tent made from discarded canvas. The camp had become quite comfortable—and much too permanent for Grady’s liking. He wanted to march north and fight.

  Two months after Grady enlisted, Colonel Higginson announced plans for a New Year’s celebration. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect, officially setting all of the slaves in the Confederate states free. Grady had looked forward to the day ever since he heard the news. Maybe now he could stop looking over his shoulder, worrying that his freedom would come to an end, expecting at any moment to be chained and beaten and returned to slavery.

  He volunteered to help dig pits in the sandy soil and cut down trees for spits to cook the oxen for the feast. The smell of roasting meat filled the camp that night as Grady and the other men took turns rotating the spits by hand and tending the smoldering fires while the meat cooked for the celebration.

  “Looks like there’s gonna be plenty of meat tomorrow,” Joseph said as he sat alongside Grady near one of the pits. “Ten oxen! I ain’t ever seen that much beef before, have you?”

  “No,” Grady replied. He grudgingly recalled being well fed by Massa Coop, but even Coop hadn’t offered him roast beef.

  “Did your massa let his slaves have parties and such?” Joseph asked.

  The slave gathering in Charleston came to Grady’s mind, celebrating Massa Fuller’s marriage. But then the more painful memory of the celebration that had followed his own wedding left him unable to reply.

  “My massa always treated us on Christmas Day,” Joseph said, breaking the strained silence. “But it wasn’t nothing like this. The cook told me they was fixing a real fancy concoction for us to drink tomorrow, made with molasses and ginger and cider. Should be a real fine celebration, don’t you think?”

  Grady raked the coals with a stick to stir the embers. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Real fine.” He wondered why he still felt bitter about anything the white folks gave him, even a celebration.

  “Do you recollect where you was this time last year?” Joseph asked. “What you was doing?”

  “I could’ve been free this time last year,” Grady said. “We had to leave Beaufort earlier that fall, and I could’ve run off then and been free.
Instead, I was fool enough to stay and drive Massa’s wife to the plantation.”

  “She must have been grateful to you, though, for helping her.”

  Grady looked up from the coals to glare at Joseph. “Not her. She rewarded me by sending me down to Slave Row.”

  “That’s where I was a year ago, too,” Joseph said. “Me and my sisters and brothers all living in a cabin with our folks. Sure is hard to believe we’re all free now, ain’t it? When we get married and have children, they’ll all be born free. Never have to know what slavery’s all about. You got a wife or a girlfriend, Grady?”

  He slowly rose to his feet, weary of this painful conversation, depressed by Joseph’s unending cheerfulness. “No,” he lied. “No, I ain’t never been married.”

  * * *

  Guests began arriving about ten o’clock the next day for the celebration, most coming by land, some on steamers sent by General Saxton. Hundreds of women came, the wives and mothers of the other Negro soldiers, including Joseph’s mother and sisters. Grady thought of Anna and Delia, of how proud they would be to see him marching in his new uniform—then he quickly pushed them from his mind.

  There were older men in the gathering, as well, former slaves who were too old for military duty, dressed in their Sunday best. One of them reminded him of Eli, renewing Grady’s resolve to fight for his family’s freedom. Many white visitors had come, too, the wives and families of the white officers, as well as white schoolteachers and missionaries who had come down from the North to teach the freed Sea Island slaves to read and write.

  Grady and the other soldiers assembled by companies in their camps, then marched across the plantation grounds to the grove of live oaks near the river where a platform had been built for the dignitaries. White soldiers from the Eighth Maine Regimental Band played such a stirring march for them that Grady felt as if he could lick an entire regiment of Rebels all by himself.