All God's Children

by Aaron Gwyn

  She covered her mess like a cat and then stood there several moments, thinking. She felt she might be able to do it now and she stole out of the woods, crossed the field and approached the pinewood shanties situated beside a muddy wagon trail.

  Folks were gathered under the loblollies, eating and swapping stories, the men in rough pantaloons and the women in their threadbare calico.

  She saw the problem right off—her gingham dress didn’t look like slave-cloth at all; didn’t matter how frayed and filthy it was. She might have fled back into the woods if the eyes of these people weren’t already on her.

  Every one of them went quiet.

  Fool! she thought. Now you are in for it.

  She felt shame scald her cheeks and she lifted a hand to shield herself. She didn’t want these folks looking at her; it had never occurred to her how out of practice you could get.

  How long had it been since anyone had set eyes on her at all?

  Davy was the last one, watching you as he passed.

  She heard a high-pitched squeal and then two boys sprinted up from behind her. They were chasing a laughing girl of maybe six or seven, all three of them sleek as deer.

  For a brief moment, they startled her out of her embarrassment.

  My, but they are beautiful! Little angels running the earth!

  But when the children turned to look at her, she had to cover her face.

  Don’t stare at me, she thought, hands over her eyes. Please do not stare.

  She’d begun to tremble when she felt someone touch her arm. She spread her fingers and peeked out between them.

  It was the little girl.

  “Did you come to visit me?” she said.

  Cecelia stood there, shaking. For weeks now, she’d planned out everything, how she’d sneak onto these plantations and seek sanctuary among the slaves. But this child had never occurred to her, this tiny hand on her arm, sixty pairs of watching eyes.

  The girl stood on tiptoe; she reached and took Cecelia’s hand.

  “My name is Lily,” she said.

  Cecelia tried to swallow, but her throat caught. Lily’s palm in hers was soft and warm.

  Then the girl was leading her toward the people watching from under the pine trees. Several began to whisper, and then others were whispering, a rustling sound like wind in the leaves.

  She felt eyes begin to fall away from her as the voices swelled and folks’ attention turned back to their evening conversations. A pair of women came walking up to either side of her. She gripped tight to Lily’s hand.

  Don’t leave me, she thought.

  The taller of the two women had a face like an apple and just as round.

  “Chile,” she asked Cecelia, “where you run off from now?”

  * * *

  They didn’t have much food to spare—a cold corn dodger and some chicken fixings—but they shared what they could and gave her a space to sleep.

  She was up again before first light, moving westward through the pines, walking until evening found her in some wilderness or until she happened onto a plantation. Weeks of walking, one day mixing with another, one moon with another. Even the faces mixing, her own face mixed among them.

  Their eyes seemed to say, You belong to us. Your face is one of ours.

  One late spring night she made her way onto a plantation, but couldn’t seem to find the slave quarters. Finally, she located a barn and crept inside it, crossing its bay in the dark, then climbing a ladder and bedding down in the loft.

  She woke to a clacking sound and the low mumbling of voices. There were orange seams of sunlight coming through the planks, a scent of weathered pine. She’d meant to wake and be on her way before dawn, but her body had betrayed her. Weak ole body. I’d rather be a stone. She lay there very still, feeling the boards against her shoulder-blades.

  I’m all edges, she thought. Hardly any flesh to me at all.

  If they find you up here, you won’t even be that.

  She rolled over on her side; the boards creaked beneath her. The clacking noise was steady: clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. The men’s voices were steady. She got onto her hands and knees and crawled to the end of the loft and looked down into the bay of the barn.

  The big doors were open to the morning, golden sunlight slanting in. Black men bustled about below her; three of them stood at three low tables, turning the hand-cranks attached to three wooden boxes while others fed cotton into the hoppers and collected clean lint from the flues. She thought they were called flues. She realized she knew the names of the parts even though she’d never gone inside the cleaning house. She’d never actually seen a gin; it had been too dark when she’d crept inside the barn last night to see much of anything. The men at the cranks turned the rollers and the pale seeds dropped down into a pile. The engines went: clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.

  She thought, It’s springtime. Why are they cleaning cotton now?

  On the plantation in Mississippi, they cleaned cotton right after picking. Or had she just assumed so?

  She watched the men turn the cranks. Something about it frightened and fascinated her, like when Sam had first handed her the pistol in the woods outside of Natchitoches. The thrill of the little machine. The terror in it.

  Her grandmammy had told her about that time before the cotton gin when you had to pick the seeds out by hand. It took hours just to clean a basket’s worth, so the masters put you to work planting corn and tobacco and contented themselves with wearing wool.

  But tobacco was hard on soil and folks said the soil was dying.

  “And we thought that was very well,” her grandmammy said, “for if the dirt took sick, what need would there be for slaves to work it? What need would there be for slaves at all?”

  Then a man came along and built a cotton engine and what used to take hours and hours took several short minutes.

  “The world sped along like a carriage on its wheels,” said her grandmammy, “where before it was only walking.” Now they could clean as much cotton as you could plant. Folks were like a mad dog in a meat house, starved for every scrap. Big factories sprang up in the North, hungry for Southern cotton.

  “And weren’t the Cotton Kings glad to feed them?” her grandmammy said. White folks no longer dressed in wool. They wanted cotton shirts, cotton britches. The planters stopped putting tobacco seeds in the ground; they had their slaves clear fields all the way to the Mississippi.

  Because a man made a box to swipe the seeds from cotton quick as you could turn the crank.

  She lay there, watching one of the men doing it, a big man with skin the color of clay. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and he’d sweated the crown completely through. He turned the hand-crank round and round, round and round, his expression blank as the sky, the emotion burned out of his face, his eyes looking at nothing. The machine had turned him into nothing. How long had he turned that handle? She wondered if he could even remember. And so, where did the machine stop and the man begin? Which was the engine and which the man who ran it?

  She was still thinking about this the next morning when she climbed down the ladder, stole past the silent gins and out into the darkness. She was still thinking about it several days later, shaded up in a stand of pine trees, trying to find her way into sleep.

  She thought, On that plantation I became an engine myself, a machine of blood and bone.

  She sat up in the leaves. The cicadas stopped buzzing. She thought that before there were steamboats or the engines that made them run, before there were engines of any kind at all, there were people who stooped and picked and carried for those who would not stoop at all. These were the first machines.

  Then came the man with a machine that needed more slaves to tend it, a machine to make machines of men.

  It should have stood in for us, she thought. The slaves
that picked the seeds from the cotton ought to have gone away, ought to have been freed by the new engine, but the engine only made more of us. There was a time before and a time after, before the engine and after. Her grandmammy spoke well of that before-time and ill of the after-time. She said, “The coming of a gin was a great evil.”

  But now Cecelia realized the truth of it. Men who made machines would make more machines; more and more men would become machines themselves. Even the masters.

  And one day machines would become the masters. It wouldn’t be cotton poured in the hopper, but men.

  And where will be the hand to turn the crank?

  There won’t be a hand, she thought. The machine will turn itself, round and round and round, men spun up inside the rollers, our seeds swiped out. We’ll come out the other side, just the lint of us, flat and clean and ready for the factory.

  * * *

  When she reached the outskirts of Bastrop, she stopped and stood there, swaying on her feet. She couldn’t believe she’d come so far: it seemed that she’d passed an entire lifetime in the wilderness. And yet, just months before, she’d been living peacefully with Robert and Sam.

  She spent the entire day finding a route that would take her around the town and then two more finding Sam’s headrights. It did not seem possible she would discover their little cabin just as she left it, but she came up through the trees one evening and there it sat: smoke rising from chimney, the window glowing with golden light.

  She watched for the better part of the night, peeping out from her nest among the cedars, making forays to the creek, making water farther back in the woods lest her scent carry on the breeze. She fell into a dreamless sleep for several hours, then woke and raised her head.

  It was still night. The window had darkened.

  She thought, You have to come out at some point, Mister Lammons. You can’t hide away forever.

  At dawn, she was sitting under the branches cleaning mud from underneath her toenails with a twig when the cabin door opened and a man stepped out into the morning sun, shirtless, barefoot, a length of rope over one shoulder—not Lammons as she’d expected, but the Spaniard who’d ridden out to visit them last spring with McClusky, the Spaniard who’d put a rifle ball in Sam. He was tall and thin, his hair completely white, his long beard the color of ash. He let the rope fall to the ground. She couldn’t recall his name. A low animal groan escaped her lips and she clapped both hands over her mouth. Her chest went hot. Very slowly, she lowered herself to the forest floor, the leaves pricking her belly through her threadbare dress.

  The man stood staring at the eastern sky, the pink skyline, the bright orange globe cresting the horizon. Or perhaps, none of these. Perhaps his eyes were closed and he just wanted to feel light on his face. What had the Poet called it? Rosy-fingered dawn. Like the sun could touch you with its hands.

  His name reached out and swatted her—Juan, his name is Juan—and at that very moment he said something very loud, though not to her. It was like a song, but none she’d ever heard. He was singing to the sun. He lifted his hands as if he’d cup his ears, then bent and placed his palms on his thighs, singing.

  Then standing up straight again. Then going down on his knees and touching his forehead to the earth. The sun cast his humped shadow across the ground and in its golden light she saw a latticework of thick scars covering his back from his shoulders to the base of his spine—old white scars and newer pink scars and red lash marks that looked quite fresh.

  They are bad if I can see them from here, she thought. Like snakes have tunneled under his skin. She lifted her head to try and see better, but then he raised back up to sit on his heels and was just a dark shape against the sun, the silhouette of a kneeling man, edged in light.

  He pressed his brow to the dirt again and then he stood. He raised his palms to the sky. He bowed to the sun, straightened up, bowed again, then went back down on his knees and rested his forehead on the ground. Still singing in his strange tongue.

  When he sat up, he stayed like that for some time. His song broke off and he went very quiet. The crickets began to chirp. The sun rose higher. There was a scent of peace on the breeze. Then the man took the rope from over his shoulder and began to run it between his hands, almost like he’d measure it, limbering the rope which she saw was very stiff.

  Once he’d done this, he gripped the rope at one end, coiling it twice around his hand, coiling it a third time.

  Then he swung the rope over his right shoulder and lashed himself on the back.

  The sound of fiber on flesh cracked through the clearing, an echo chasing it. The crickets went silent. He slung the rope over his left shoulder and struck himself on that side too.

  She tried to swallow. She realized she was holding her breath. The Spaniard lashed his right side again, right and then left, right and left. It was a cool morning, but he’d broken out in a sweat, and the eighth or ninth time he struck himself, blood misted up in the sunlight.

  He went on for some time, whipping himself till his back was good and bloody, opening new cuts as well as old, and when he’d suited himself, he stood up once more and ran the rope between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, squeezing the blood from it the way you’d wring water from a rag. Then he turned and went back inside the cabin.

  When he reappeared he had a bucket in hand—the same bucket she’d used to gather water every morning for years. He went down the footpath toward the stable Sam had built.

  She sat up. Her dress was sticking to her and she realized she was sweating. Her hands shook.

  If Robert is in there, she thought, but she severed the line of that before her brain could string it any farther.

  She sat there for a while keeping her mind shut up. Birds called to each other. Her blood made its rounds.

  After a while, she got to her feet and stepped to the edge of the woods. She wondered when the Spaniard would come back. She needed to search the cabin, but if Juan came back and saw her, she’d be no help to Robert at all.

  And then there the Spaniard was, coming up the trail with her bucket. He rounded the corner of the cabin, went inside and shut the door behind him.

  She waited until the sun was down that evening and darkness fell like a shroud. The stars were bright and the moon at three-quarters, more light than she’d have liked, but what choice was there? She crept out of the cedars and stood for a while at the top of the hill. She began whispering to herself without really thinking what she said and it was a prayer she whispered: “Let him be untouched; let him be untouched; let him be untouched.” She’d never been more frightened in all her life, picking her way down the hill, smelling chimney smoke on the breeze. The crickets would go quiet and she’d stop and stand there until they started back up.

  Let him be untouched. No lash to his skin. Not a mark upon it.

  Then she was standing in front of the cabin. She waited until the crickets began chirping, then stepped to the window.

  The fireplace lit the room, but she barely recognized it. The shelves were gone; her cookware was gone. The table she and Sam had built was nowhere to be seen. The room was empty except for the Spaniard who lay facedown on the cedarwood floor, head pillowed on his crossed arms, firelight flickering over his bare back. He had managed to smear a salve over the lash marks. His skin glistened.

  A rifle stood in one corner. A bundle of clothes beside it. The Spaniard’s saddle. His pistol. A knife in its scabbard.

  And no sign of Robert. She would have to make this man tell her where he was.

  When she stepped away from the window, her body felt like it was floating. She went floating back up the hill, thinking of nothing, hearing nothing but her heart inside her ears, a river of blood pumping. She crouched in her nest with the knife in her hands, then sat cross-legged with her skirt stretched between her knees, the fabric catching the shavings of a branch she’d hacked off a ced
ar sapling. Her head felt as if it was rising toward the sky, getting higher and hotter as it went.

  She was grateful for the moonlight now; she could see well enough to work. In an hour she’d carved two wedges from the cedar branch. She sat there staring at them, wondering if two would be enough. What if they were the wrong size? Or if only one of them was right? She began carving others, each different from the last.

  Her lap was full of shavings. She took handfuls of these and made a pile beside her, tested the moisture of the ground with a palm, then sliced away a square of fabric from the hem of her dress, placed the cedar shavings atop it, then tied the corners to make a neat bundle. She sat there trying to remember everything Sam had shown her. Was it a softwood spindle on a hardwood board or the other way around?

  She decided on a piece of dead pine for her fireboard and then began hunting around for a tree from which to make her spindle. The grove was mostly cedar and she wasn’t certain that would work. Finally, she settled for a sapling with several straight branches about as big around as her forefinger. She stood on her tiptoes and cut the limb away from the sapling’s trunk, then went back and sat in her nest, stripping away the bark with her knife. The wood underneath was damp. The branch was about two feet long and straight as a string, but she didn’t like the moisture one bit.

  To take her mind off it, she started to prepare her fireboard. Sam had said a lot depended on your fireboard. She gouged a shallow circle in it with her knife, then cut the notch like he’d shown her; she remembered his instructions about keeping it off the ground. She looked out into the dark, down the hill toward the cabin and then, spreading a pallet of leaves to work on, she positioned the fireboard between her knees, the heel of her left foot on its corner, pinning it down. She fit the tip of her spindle into the little bowl she’d carved, took the spindle between her palms and began to rub it back and forth, moving her hands down the branch as she worked, the wood sticky between her fingers. She went at it until her arms started to cramp, her forehead dripping sweat. When she lifted the spindle and felt the tip, it was warm, but that was about all.