by Aaron Gwyn
This was a painful desire. White men were the murderous beings, not her. She was better than them. She’d always thought so.
Maybe there’s a murderer in me too. I will have to chase it out. In order to be better than them again. In order to hate them as I should.
She’d learned several things as well, things she wished she didn’t know. She had never dreamed that her body could fail her, that she could become estranged from her own mind. She understood why these poor people didn’t run, why they could not. The labor carved you into pieces. It whittled you down to nothing and then became your life.
One harvest had taught her all this. What would several harvests do? Years and years of them?
And now that she could think again, she realized something else: there were no elderly hands on this plantation, no old men or women. Far as she could tell, no one over the age of forty.
She lay on her pallet, considering that. So strange it had never occurred to her, and the next thought was where did they go?
The answer came like a slap: she knew exactly where they went. She sat with it for a day, and then she took it to Okah.
The man was quartered in the cabin next to hers. Cecelia found him sitting at the rear of the little hut, his long legs spread out, something on the dirt between his knees.
She walked up and squatted beside him, placing a hand on his shoulder to announce herself.
Okah glanced over at her, then looked back at the ground. There on the dirt were rows of little stones, all shapes, all sizes, dark stones and light.
“What is it?” she asked.
Okah reached down and took a clear white stone and placed it beside several dark ones.
“Is it a game?” she asked.
“Just my rocks,” Okah said.
“What are they for?”
“I like them,” he said.
Cecelia had never given much attention to rocks. She’d studied trees and flowers all her life, but never stones.
“Is it something special about them?”
“No,” said Okah. “They’re mine, is all.”
This scared her. Why did it scare her so?
She said, “This place is going to kill me, isn’t it?”
Okah didn’t look at her.
“It’ll kill all of us,” he said.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“I’m twenty-eight in February.”
She nodded. “I was seventeen when they sent me down from Wheeling. I’ll be twenty-four this fall. I thought I’d live to have babies, but that’s just something I told myself. I won’t ever have a family. Not if I stay.”
Now Okah looked at her.
“You want to be real careful,” he said, “about the way you talk. It’s some in these cabins would sell you for a loaf of bread.”
“I’ve been careful,” she told him. “If I keep being careful, I’ll end up in a grave.”
Okah looked at his rocks.
She said, “I used to think I could do it by myself. That I didn’t need anybody at all. I thought I’d find the perfect moment, but there isn’t such a moment, and I need all the help I can get.”
Evening was coming on. It was dusk beneath the naked branches.
“I enjoy you, Miss Suss. I’d hate to see something bad happen.”
“You’re seeing it,” she said.
“There’s things,” said Okah, “a heap worse than dying.”
“Yes,” she told him, “isn’t it so?”
* * *
She left that night. She took the food that Okah gave her, rolled it in a picksack, and snuck into the trees.
She found that getting away wasn’t the problem. Furtiveness was in her bones.
It wasn’t until she was several miles from the plantation that she understood the real obstacle she faced: she was alone in an unfamiliar land of cypress swamps and every trail led her to a marsh.
Within a week, she’d taken sick from drinking bog-water and the hounds sniffed her out. The slave-catchers must have thought she would die; they were surprisingly gentle. They carried her to Natchez and locked her in a room.
She lay on a cot with a raging fever. She was so thirsty. She couldn’t stop shivering.
A doctor named Cartwright came to tend her. He was a bald, portly man with red sideburns, and she knew he was only healing her so she could be sent to market.
“What is wrong with me?” she asked.
“You are a drapetomaniac,” he said.
“I’m what?”
“It means your owner has been indulgent. It means you like to run. Your womb is narrow and you will never carry a child to term.” He put a cup to her lips and told her to drink.
She thought she would pass away and see her mother, but it was only the fever that passed. She was able to eat again, sleep again. They fed her very well and in several weeks she could stand.
As soon as she was walking, they escorted her to an intersection called Forks of the Road.
Here she was purchased by a grocer from Natchitoches and taken to Louisiana. Falling. Always falling. And at her new owner’s home she didn’t make it through the night. She waited until dark and walked out the front door.
That was a mistake. She knew it the moment her feet touched the grass, but she hadn’t recovered from her time in Mississippi; she wasn’t thinking clear.
Two slave-hunters caught her on the bayou. These men were as rough as the others were tender. They bound her wrists, snugged a rope around her neck, and dragged her into Natchitoches.
It was bright noon, a cloudless spring day. Seemed everyone in town had turned out just to see her leashed up like a dog. Couples walked the streets; buggies went clacking past. No one would look directly at her; they all turned their heads.
She decided to stare at every single person she passed. She wouldn’t let them ignore her. She’d force them all to see.
Look at me, she thought, but the man she was eyeing didn’t dare.
“Look at me,” she whispered, and two white women began to examine something in a store window.
She stared down drovers, and clerks, and a boy selling newspapers from a booth on the corner: the year was 1837. She stared down men with canes, men with mules, men with aprons and spectacles on their faces. The slave catchers tugged her down the thoroughfare, and a man rode past on a big bay horse, and she glanced up to stare at him too.
But as soon as she did, the man drew his reins, stopped in the street and looked right down at her.
He was a young man, blond and bearded, shining blue eyes and buckskin clothes, a pistol and a knife in his belt. Her captors jerked her forward, and she glared up at the rider, daring him to look away.
He wouldn’t look away, just sat there watching, and suddenly, she felt ashamed. She didn’t want him seeing her after all. The men led her up onto a pineboard walkway and through the open door of a building.
Here, they stripped her naked, wetted her down with lukewarm water from wooden pails, and lathered her up with soap. It was the first time she’d washed in close to a week, and she watched the water trickle down her legs, black as ink. After she’d rinsed and dried herself, the men gave her a clean calico dress and a head scarf with a floral print—the fabric rough as gravel.
When the three of them came back out onto the street, the blond man was sitting in front of the building, as if waiting just for her. The slave catchers led her down the boardwalk and into the city’s jail, the blond man following the whole way.
They kept her in a cell awaiting auction. The constable was a fat man with a lisp. He said she was in for it. She’d be bound for cane country, sure enough. Her beauty couldn’t keep her from it.
“You know what they do to cane niggers?” he asked.
“I bet you’re going to tell me,” she said.
“Don’t take a tongue,” said the constable, and his face had gone bright red.
He studied her several moments.
“Crazy, ain’t you?”
“No,” she said.
“Yes, you are. I’m about half-crazy for talking to you.”
“Then don’t,” she told him.
She saw it in his eyes, weighing up the cost of doing her violence. This man had power, but he didn’t own her body. Anything he did to her he did to the pockets of men who paid his salary.
“Let’s see how smart you are tomorrow,” he said. “Let’s see how your tongue works then.”
She leaned against the brick wall of the cell. She was afraid. This fat constable was right. She could not drift any lower than Louisiana. They would hack at her body like they’d hacked off Jubal’s ears. They’d cut her and cut her until she had nothing left.
DUNCAN LAMMONS
—TEXAS, 1835–1836—
With our victory over the Mexicans at Concepcion, we were on the high ropes: every man was for marching on Bexar the next day. Or every man but Colonel Bowie who thought we needed cannon for a serious siege. Austin disagreed. As did Ben Smith. An argument ensued, and once officers begin to speechify, their soldiers lose all interest in fighting.
Without battle to occupy us, we took up the bottle. Coming from temperance folk, I’d received no education in spirituous liquors. But the rowdy boys of camp said they would be my Princeton and Harvard. Day after day, as our commanders held their councils of war, the rest of us drank till we were shot in the neck. Soon, we’d forgotten all about our Revolution. Even the trouncing of the Mexicans seemed a distant memory. Fights broke out. Men challenged each other to duels. One cold November night, having tied on the bear, I decided it might be a good idea to go for a swim in the river. Had Noah not come to my rescue, I’d have surely drowned.
I recovered from the incident with nothing more than a powerful headache, but Noah took sick with a fever. He got so bad off, he put in for a furlough and headed out for Bastrop.
Sam was now my chief companion. But wild as he looked in his panther cap and wamus, he wouldn’t drink a drop of fool’s water and had no desire to learn.
“Did you not ever try it?” I asked him.
“I tried it,” he said. “It gave me a rash.”
“You got a rash from whiskey?”
“Yessir,” he said. “Made me break out in leg irons.”
To busy himself while the troops carried on their celebrations, he began to go out looking for game. Worried that hanging around with the revelers might lead to another midnight dip in the San Antonio—and without Noah to fetch me out—I sobered myself up and accompanied Sam on his hunts.
Taken all round, he was a study. It was not just that he had courage: he was more wild than brave, ignorant of fear and courage both, like a perfect beast.
But he was a beast with history, though it came out of him in the oddest ways.
One morning, we were stalking a drove of turkey, trying to catch them in the open, when all at once he plopped down in the grass like a flustered boy and propped his rifle across his knees.
“It’s no use doing this on foot,” he said.
I didn’t know what he meant. I stood staring down at him.
“We ought to be on horses,” he explained.
“You can’t hunt turkey from horseback.”
“You surely can,” he said. “You can lasso them from the saddle.”
“Lasso?” I said, and he went on to tell me how he and his pap would ride after a flock of turkey, keeping them on the wing and away from timber until the birds tired out and dropped to the ground. Then they just rode up and roped them.
“Where was this,” I asked, “that you were lassoing turkeys?”
“Arkansas,” he said. “Just south of the little rock.”
“That’s how they catch birds in Arkansas Territory?”
“It’s how Pa did it,” he said.
I thought there’d be more to the tale, but for the moment, that was it.
Then, a few nights later, we were sitting around the fire, listening to the boys belt out their songs when Sam turned to me and said, “What do you have against Arkansas?”
I sat there trying to figure out what he meant, then recalled our conversation from the morning before.
“Don’t have nothing against it,” I said.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Kentucky,” I told him. “Butler County.”
He stared into the fire, mulling this for a bit. I thought he was about to inquire what had brought me so far from home and that I’d be forced to fabricate a story.
Instead he said, “Where’s that?”
Thinking he meant Butler County, I set about trying to situate it in relation to other parts of the state, but he interrupted me.
“No,” he said: “Kentucky.”
Well, that took me aback. A few of the boys around us left off singing and started to listen in.
Not wanting to embarrass him, I dropped my voice to a whisper: “You’ve never heard of Kentucky?”
“I heard of it. Where’s it at?”
“It’s on top of Tennessee.”
I watched that information sink in. Or fail to sink.
“You don’t know where that is either,” I said.
“No,” he said.
“Have you seen a map?”
“I don’t know,” he told me.
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, just stared at him until he said, “I can’t read.”
“Well,” I told him, “that’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not,” he said, shrugging.
And it was no lie: he wasn’t. He didn’t even know that there were men who’d be embarrassed to admit their ignorance of the written word, and suddenly, I felt very protective of him—a strange sensation given it was he who’d strengthened my resolve when the bullets were flying and that Mexican cannon was blazing away.
Later that night, I lay there with the men dozing all round. My heart was going very fast and my brain would not be quiet. I began to think about Dan Yarbrough all those years ago, about the time we’d spent on our hunt. My skin began to hum, and I sat up and looked over at Sam sleeping just a few feet away, watching his chest swell and collapse.
I lay back down, shut my eyes up tight, and began to give myself a talking to.
All that is behind you, I thought. Do not tarnish yourself like you did back home.
I wanted my past to be wiped clean from the slate of memory. Or like Sam’s understanding of geography, hazy and blank.
Or even better, to never have existed at all.
* * *
Toward the middle of November, our army was reinforced by a pack of men calling themselves the New Orleans Greys, and we commenced our siege of San Antonio de Bexar, moving up on the garrison and fighting our way forward, house by house.
But when the new year rolled round, the character of our campaign changed rather drastically. Noah rejoined our ranks, having recovered from the fever that afflicted him, and as the three of us were experienced riders, we were mustered into a ranging company under the command of Captain Tumlinson. Sixty horsemen assembled at Reuben Hornsby’s station there on the Colorado. Our mission was to protect colonists from the depredations of Indians, who, finding themselves ignored for several months while we carried our fight to the Mexicans, began to court our attention, confiscating Texian livestock and anything else they happened across.
I’ve heard it said that old Stephen Austin had called for mounted companies of rangers during the early days of his colony, but Tumlinson’s was the first I ever saw, and I was proud to count myself a member. Some of the captain’s men were salty and others rather green. A boy of barely seventeen years joined our ranks—Levi English, a skinny la
d with a long angular face. Like Sam, he was from Arkansas Territory, and like Sam he was on the prod, enjoying a fight the way most folks enjoy dinner.
We busied ourselves building a headquarters up on Brushy Creek, but we’d no sooner completed our blockhouse than Santa Anna crossed the Rio, making a fast march for Bexar and the famed Alamo garrison. Tumlinson’s company was called east to Bastrop to cover the evacuation of Texian families fleeing the tyrant.
It was early March and the trees were leafing out. We’d started one morning with the intention of guarding the old San Antonio road, when a courier named John Lunsford came loping up and caught us. There was hardly a drop of blood in the man’s face. He sat his horse and stared at his hands.
“What is it?” Noah asked.
Lunsford cleared his throat. He mumbled something.
“Speak up,” said Noah.
“They’re dead,” Lunsford said.
“Who?” Noah asked.
“All of them,” said Lunsford, and I thought he might air his paunch.
But he steadied himself and informed us of the Alamo’s fall, of the deaths of Colonel Bowie and Travis. Of the execution of David Crockett. He said General Houston’s army was now retreating east.
“East to where?” I asked, but Lunsford didn’t know.
We went quiet all round. I thought if the hard hand of war could take great luminaries like Bowie and Crockett, what chance did a no-account like Duncan Lammons have? I glanced over at Noah who, during his absence from Texas, had lived for a time with Bowie and his brother on their claim in Louisiana. His eyes were wet. I looked back at Lunsford.
“What’s Houston expect us to do?”
“The General needs ever man he can get,” he told me. “It’s all hands and the cook.”
“He’s going to want scouts on this road,” I said. “Unless he means for Santa Anna to steal a march on him.”
“Well,” he told me, “I’ll not volunteer you for the duty, but if you want it, pick you one of these men and get to scouting.”
“One?” said Noah, startled out of his grief. “Gad, John: why not just shoot him yourself? There’s an army of Mexicans marching on us and you want to send a single man?”