All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  Noah stood up and glanced around. Then he lifted his chin and gestured with it. “Yonder he is.”

  I looked and saw Sam walking back down by the river, picking nuts from the ground and stowing them in his possibles bag. He didn’t look like a man who’d just led an army to victory. He seemed unbothered by the trial, neither jovial nor gloomy.

  Noah and I walked down to join him and we took our dinner in the shade of those pecan trees that had screened us from Mexican fire. Sam’s actions had raised him considerably in Noah’s eyes; he sat studying this brave warrior with a much different attitude than what he’d had the day before.

  “Where’d you learn to fight like that?” he asked.

  Sam slurped at the coffee we’d made him.

  “Fight like what?” he said.

  “Clearly, you’ve seen a good deal of battle,” said Noah.

  Sam took off his pantherskin hat and set it there on the ground beside him. His hair gleamed like spun gold.

  “I never said nothing bout battles,” he said.

  “How many fights have you been in?” Noah asked.

  “Fights or battles?”

  “Battles then,” said Noah.

  “That was my first,” Sam said.

  CECELIA

  —VIRGINIA, MISSISSIPPI, LOUISIANA, 1829–1837—

  There were no more poems; there was no more singing. Haverford said he would take her to market the first chance he got.

  Mistress Anne was inconsolable. She wept for the better part of a week, begged her husband to show mercy, but Haverford said he was fresh out. Cecelia watched them fuss and argue, watched her mistress slump from room to room; you’d have thought she was the one getting sold.

  The stupidity, Cecelia thought. She felt that she should be owning them.

  In years to come, she’d think of this as a time of falling. She was falling from the tobacco soil of Virginia to the cotton lands of the south. In the slave port of Wheeling, Haverford sold her to a planter named Greer. Cecelia spent the next three weeks on a steamboat, drifting down the rivers to Mississippi.

  She was sold once more in Natchez and confined to a house along the river: six years in a house where everything smelled of mold. From the window, she’d watch field hands pass, knowing they’d have traded places with her in an instant. But Cecelia had stepped foot onto free soil in Pennsylvania and now she was a runner. Now it was in her blood. She slipped out of the house one night and was stopped at the river.

  That was the end of her house days, they said. She’d spend the rest of her life in the fields.

  She was carted to a plantation in the back of a wagon: a new plantation, not far from the one she’d just escaped. She saw the big house and the bare, flat fields, and the buyer drove her down a narrow dirt lane. They pulled up alongside a row of warped pinewood huts, each identical to the other: pitched roofs and windowless walls. Black folks sat on the sloping porches or stood in the doorways staring out, the men in long, threadbare shirts, no trousers or shoes, their naked legs just bones with a loose covering of brown, sagging skin. The women were skeletal, and many of them walked about bare-breasted, nothing but filthy skirts to hide their nethers. Cecelia felt ashamed for them, and then she was worried about her own calico dress: how long would it last? How long before it frayed and fell away?

  The white man stopped the wagon and ordered her down. She had no sooner stepped to the ground than the buyer popped the reins and was moving again, rolling down the lane until he passed into a grove of cedar.

  Cecelia stood there. The slaves studied her, motionless, mute. Their skin had a strange red tint; their hair had grown out and faded in the sun. A bird called. From somewhere, an infant screamed.

  Then the men and women were off the porches, out of the huts, swarming Cecelia, surrounding her. Voices spoke in all accents, from all sides:

  “Have you seen my Johnny, about thirteen year: he stands yay high?”

  “My husband—name of Walter Johnson: he from Alabama. Got a birthmark on his cheek looks just like the moon.”

  “You seen Sissy? Sweet little Sissy? She’s skinny as a bean pole. She’s missing this tooth.”

  Cecelia shook her head. She hadn’t seen Sissy; she hadn’t seen Walter or John.

  She hadn’t seen Thomas, Toby, or Rachel.

  Hadn’t seen Hyppolite or Harriett.

  Never heard of Big Tim from Hawk’s Nest.

  She hadn’t seen her own kin since she was a child. What made them think she’d seen theirs?

  * * *

  It rained. The weeks passed in a gray downpour. The rain fell straight down, descending in sheets, screening off the world, closing them into their cramped cabins. Cecelia was only waiting for an opportunity.

  She looked out one day and saw there was fur on the branches. The next, bugs hovered and crawled. After a shower, the ground would steam, mist rising from the earth as if it were about to burst into flame. She fell asleep on the thin pallet she’d been given, smelling springtime in the air.

  And woke to the noise of a horn blaring, lying in the dark with her skin prickling from the sound. Bodies moved in the hut, though she couldn’t quite make them out. The brass squawk of the horn died away, and she lay there listening to the hum inside her head. She’d been dreaming of something pleasant, but the horn had blasted it from her brain, and she tried to think what it was, caught an image of a green sward sloping up, but the horn sounded again, a single raw note rising. The hairs stood on her arms. She rolled off the pallet and got to her feet.

  She filed outside and stood on the bare dirt with the others assembling around her in the predawn light, watching the overseer approach on his swaybacked mare. They called him Mister Timothy, a large white man who kept his hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He wore a pistol on his right hip, and tucked in his belt on the other side was a rawhide whip with a handle made of wood.

  The sky in the east was a band of red running flat across the horizon. The overseer began calling the names of those who would serve as captains, nine names, ten. These men stepped forward. Then Mister Timothy was reading names from a tablet he held, assigning each to a captain. Cecelia heard her name, and she walked over to stand beside Okah, a tall slave with Delaware in his blood: calm-faced and kind.

  Okah’s crew assembled around him, and then they followed him over to a shed where he began to distribute hoes. He had a dozen charges this morning: man, woman, and child.

  They’d spend the next several weeks planting. She thought she’d get the chance to slip off into the trees, but the overseer watched them all day long. In the meantime, she worked and waited.

  Okah would hold a bag of cotton seed, and women filed past, filling their apron-pockets. They’d line up at the end of a row, some with hoes, some with seed. One would pull the blade across the earth and another would follow, bending to settle each seed in the trench the hoe made, then covering it with soil, stepping on it gently with the ball of a bare foot—day after day until the planting was done, and there was nothing but to wait until the seeds became green shoots; the shoots, stems. Then those stems grew tiny leaves, small as the ears of squirrels.

  The rains continued and there was still no opportunity to run.

  It was April.

  It was May.

  June came, and they were back in the dark in front of the cabins, watching the overseer ride up on his mare. She followed Okah over to the shed and was given a hoe. The crew shouldered their tools like rifles, and went trekking toward the darkened fields.

  There was the slightest breeze, spiced with cedar, though Cecelia hadn’t seen any cedar these months: just oaks and acres of cotton. The plants looked black now in the half-light. The crew walked out along an earthen dike, passed an enormous live oak bearded with moss. She studied every leaf and blade of grass, memorizing everything she could.

  Then they were i
n the field among the cotton. The plants came just to her waist. They were following a row east, marching single-file, when the sun breached the horizon, and they went squinting along in the shine of it, wading in that sea of green leaves, the white flowers turning red in the glare.

  At the far end of the field, they staggered out in a line, each of them taking a row, the boy and girl in their crew working one together. Cecelia had the calluses for it now, but the first week had been blisters and bleeding palms.

  Okah turned his head to either side, and gave each of them a look.

  “Yes,” he said. “Stay with me. Let’s not give Marse Timothy cause.”

  All bent and began hoeing, chopping the weeds between the plants, cutting them up, turning the black earth.

  The captain set the pace, and Okah was an excellent captain: he didn’t set a pace no one could keep up with, but he didn’t set one slow enough to get the overseer’s attention. She glanced up and saw Mister Timothy walking his mare across the dike, hat pulled low. You felt his eyes on you like the sun.

  After an hour, they stopped to receive a breakfast of cornbread, a cold lump of it about the size of your fist. Then it was back to the hoe, chopping earth, a dead sound that shushed to you, the squad of them working in tandem, an occasional clink of steel when someone struck a rock. Once every hour, you were allowed to walk over to the wagon, stretching your muscles as you went—it was the bending that got you, the bending and being bent—and the child in the wagon bed would hand you a ladle-full of water. Cecelia thought she’d never tasted anything like it: sweet and flavored with oak.

  And then the hoe was back in your hands, but your hands were numb. You wouldn’t feel them until later, after a supper of the same cornbread you’d eaten for breakfast and lunch—a little salt pork, two radishes apiece—lying there on the corn shuck mattress, and finally your hands could feel again, and what they felt was the hoe: there was no hoe now, but that’s what you felt. Everything had tightened inside, but somehow you were loose. She would lie there and after a while there was that floating sensation they called sleep, and you might see their faces in dreams—Jubal, Alice, your mother—and when the pleasure of it started to come and they were about to speak, it wasn’t the sound of their voice you heard, but the corkscrewing blare of the horn.

  * * *

  She was good with the hoe. It was punishing labor, but her hands understood it, her arms knew the motions. She never lagged behind the captain; she was quicker than most of the men, coming down the row, chopping weeds, careful of the cotton: she never so much as nicked a plant. You progressed by inches, turning the earth, light to dark, brown to black. There sat the overseer up on his horse, watching, but you might take a second, a brief moment, to turn and examine your work: the line of tilled dirt stretching back down the row. You made one thing into another, weeds into perfectly turned soil, baking in the sun.

  But by day’s end, headed toward the cabins with the hoe on her shoulder, she’d glance back to see row after row of cultivated earth, and couldn’t tell which were hers, which were Okah’s or Margaret’s or Isaiah’s, walking along with a sting in her breast, needing to know which rows she’d done and which she hadn’t, what belonged to her and what didn’t, and then she couldn’t think of it anymore, could only think about that handful of cold cornbread, her stomach straining for it, and the sting in her breast was a mosquito on her sternum, sucking out a meal of its own.

  A small skeletal girl trailed behind her. Her name was Ruby. She shared a hut with Cecelia and she had a baby she carried in a burlap sling. Ruby hoed the fields with that baby; Cecelia didn’t see how. The infant slept, or cried, or stared out at the passing plants. Sometimes Ruby worked with Cecelia’s crew, sometimes she didn’t. Often, she lagged behind her captain.

  The overseer didn’t seem to care about the baby; it was the lagging he wouldn’t have: you kept pace with your captain, infant or no.

  Cecelia thought she might offer to carry the child herself. Mister Timothy was watching Ruby closer and closer.

  And there was something else, something less generous. The baby seemed to call to her, begging to be held. She thought if she could just nuzzle it, that might give her strength. Maybe she’d take the child with her when she ran.

  She rose from the pallet one night, stole across the room to where Ruby lay with her child. Ruby would coo and speak to the baby boy, but Cecelia had never heard her say his name, as though the name was some secret between them.

  Cecelia knelt there and touched Ruby’s shoulder—hard and sharp, no muscle or flesh to it, just bone.

  “Miss Ruby,” she whispered.

  Ruby looked up at Cecelia out of her hollowed eyes.

  “That man is watching you,” Cecelia said. “Timothy.”

  “Yessum,” said Ruby.

  “It worries me. It worries me for you and your babe.”

  “Yessum,” Ruby said.

  Cecelia watched her a moment, watched the infant dozing beside her. She thought about the absolute blessing of this child, the company he provided, even if he couldn’t yet speak a word. The touch of someone who needed you, who gave off love like a stove did heat.

  She said, “I could carry him some of the time. Out in the field. I could carry him for you, now and then.”

  Ruby stared at Cecelia. Her lips did nothing. Her eyes did nothing. But somehow, her face began to close. She cupped her baby with one hand and pulled him close against her, and Cecelia knew this girl was in trouble.

  She patted Ruby’s hard shoulder and started to rise.

  “Cotton coming,” Ruby said.

  Cecelia looked at her. “How’s that?”

  “Cotton coming,” said Ruby. “Be different when we pick.”

  Cecelia knelt there. She didn’t see how picking cotton would improve Ruby’s situation, how the girl would be better off when she had both a baby and a cotton sack weighing her down.

  “Yes,” Cecelia said, trying to think of something to comfort the girl, something to reassure her, but nothing came to mind.

  Then a strange thought passed through her head. There’d been a note in Ruby’s voice, almost as if Ruby wasn’t asking for reassurance, but was trying to warn her of something, and Cecelia rose and returned to her pallet.

  I’ll get away from them, she thought. Nothing frightened her so much as weakness.

  Come the next day, Ruby lagged behind, and all day long, the overseer watched. It was July now, and heat came pressing down from the sky, the blue like a great blanket to smother them. Mister Timothy had begun to carry an umbrella, shading himself, his face impassive. Cecelia saw Ruby in the field, hoeing down the row all by herself, and then Cecelia saw the overseer studying Ruby. He won’t have it, she thought. There was something in the man’s posture. He never said a word, but Cecelia could tell by the way he sat his horse what was coming.

  At sunset, up by the cabins, the overseer called roll, eyes glancing up from his tablet to the answering faces. It wasn’t until he called Ruby’s name that Cecelia realized the girl was absent.

  Crickets chirped from the bushes. Folks stared at the ground. Then the crickets died away and it was very quiet. Cecelia could hear her heart beat in her ears.

  Then she heard a shuffling sound, and here came Ruby, hoe on her shoulder, baby on her back in its burlap sling. The girl walked up and joined the crowd there in front of the cabins.

  It was twilight under the oak trees, in the shadows of the pineboard huts. Everything was in suspension. Then the crickets started pulsing back up, screeching and scraping out a song.

  The overseer examined Ruby several seconds, and then he climbed down from his horse. Cecelia watched him make his way through the crowd of black bodies, men and women parting as he came. Then he stood there in front of Ruby. The girl said nothing, looked at nothing. Her chest rose and fell. What was she, thought Cecelia: fourteen? Fifteen? />
  You were fifteen the first time you ran.

  “On your belly,” Timothy said.

  Ruby blinked a few times. She tugged the sling around so that her child was against her chest, then, cradling the infant, removed the sling: carefully, soundlessly, didn’t want to wake the babe. She handed him over to a woman whose name Cecelia didn’t know, went down on her hands and knees, and then proned out as the overseer had commanded her.

  Timothy bent and set his tablet in the dirt with the same care Ruby used passing her child to the woman, then reached and took the hem of Ruby’s skirt, flipping the garment up to reveal her thighs, her buttocks, her back. There was a latticework of scars, black and blue and purple, and Cecelia turned away.

  You must look, she told herself, though she didn’t want to. She felt it was important to see what happened. Not looking would be a cruelty to the girl; it broke faith with Ruby, betrayed her. So Cecelia made herself turn back and watch, but it was a different kind of watching. It was the kind of watching you did in dreams: you weren’t fully inside yourself; you weren’t fully behind your eyes.

  The overseer was straight again. He’d pulled that whip from his belt, long as a king snake. There was nothing at all in his face: no anger, or arrogance, or irritation, and Cecelia knew he’d done this thousands of times, he had no more hatred for Ruby than the carpenter had for the head of a nail as he brought down the hammer.

  And Cecelia thought that this was worse, watching it all from that strange place where she’d gone. It would have been better if he’d hated the girl he was about to savage; it would even have been better if he’d enjoyed it. But Timothy was only working; it was only what he did. He’d done it a thousand times; he’d do it a thousand more. He wasted no energy, no emotion. He pulled back his arm, and the whip hissed through the dirt, and Cecelia could see that he controlled every inch of that plaited rawhide lash. It came slicing through the air, but Cecelia had turned again and shut her eyes. She heard the loud crack and the scream that followed like an echo, then a second crack and scream, and she thought, though God had made men and women, He’d not made them very well. There’d been two cracks, two screams, and now there was the sound of the girl vomiting, and God, thought Cecelia, had gotten it wrong. Your eyes closed at such moments, but there was no closing up your ears—there were no lids to them—and there were no lids at all to your thoughts. You couldn’t turn away from them, could never turn away, and Cecelia was quite sure of it, God had gotten them completely wrong.