A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “He may be white, but not like you. These are their rules.”

  “Whose?”

  She leaned away from me against a tall locust and folded her arms.

  “All of them.” She flung her hands out wide. “Don’t you see them all?”

  By now Sebastien had succeeded in removing the man’s jacket. The other men had utterly surrendered to his command. Even the angry brother, Edgar, so violent and hot minutes before, had sheathed his weapon and stood by obediently. If any of them still possessed the fire and piss that had drawn them outside to confront the negro, they had all handed it over to the little man. They stood now in silent ratification of whatever Sebastien chose to do. They had given him the authority to act and to think for them, and I could see in Sebastien’s face that he was glad of their surrender, and that he despised them for it. Sebastien, Sebastien. Oh God. The negro, though, had earned his respect, even if he was also the object of his torment. The negro talked back and did not show his fear. Sebastien was perversely deferential to him.

  “Roll your sleeves up, please.”

  “This is becoming boring, Sebastien. What are we about here?”

  “How else can we counter the slander heaped on you if we can’t examine your skin? In fact, take your shirt off entirely. I am protecting your interests here, friend.”

  “It’s cold, Sebastien.”

  “Fine. You are a black-hearted field nigger who dances with white women.”

  “That is not true.”

  The little man finally let his temper boil up.

  “Then show us your white skin, or I will burn those clothes off you.”

  I knew the voice. I held on to Anna Marie all the harder and shrank farther into the shadows.

  The shirt dropped quickly to the ground and the tall man stood meekly before the other men, as if he had suddenly realized his predicament and knew what would happen now. His chest and back glowed in the waning starlight. Freckles scattered in dense clusters across his shoulders like the shadows of those stars.

  “Are you a negro?” the blackbird asked.

  The tall man straightened up again. He had courage.

  “I am whiter than you.”

  I hadn’t seen the poker on the ground behind Sebastien. He raised it into the air, heavy black iron. He was very fast, inhumanly fast. The poker crashed into the tall man’s bad knee, caving it in and snapping it. I had seen men with such injuries, and I thought, He’ll need a wood leg too.

  “Stop it!” Anna Marie screeched in my ear.

  That man, their friend, screamed until his lungs emptied. He breathed and screamed again. The women hurried off with their hands on their ears. The other men looked grim. The game had ended, something else had begun.

  “Stop him.” She said it again.

  In the interest of perfect honesty I must record the reasons I stayed under cover in the trees, holding my hand over Anna Marie’s mouth. She bit me hard, she kicked. I must state the reasons I prayed that General John Bell Hood would not be found at what had obviously become a lynching: I was confused and unsettled by the sight of a white man stripped to the waist and barefoot, abused as a negro; I felt the ache of my leg on its wooden buttress and was unsure that I was still one who could make others obey; I did not know what any of them, even the victim, had done and I understood nothing about them; I had my own problems and it would have been foolish to compound them; I had not intended to witness this, it had been an accident; it was not my business and a prudent man always kept prudence in mind. This, I think, is nearly a full accounting of my cowardice.

  I should also say that I was afraid of Sebastien. I had my reasons. I knew him and, yes, I feared him.

  Prudent. Oh yes, I was prudent. I was prudent while they bound the prisoner and gagged him with his own stockings. I was prudent when I could see that the little mob hesitated, that none of the young men had either the stomach to kill the man nor the strength to resist Sebastien alone, and that they could have been swayed from violence had someone, anyone, acted for them and relieved them of their burden. I was prudent when they carried the man toward my little patch of woods where I shrank back into the deepest dark. I was prudent and scared. Scared, scared, scared.

  Bald fear coursed through me, and I felt ashamed and alive. When had I last been afraid? It was the moment before the Comanche’s arrow pierced my hand, when I was young and still jealous of life. There had been medicine on that arrow, perhaps. It robbed me of fear, which is a kind of love. A love for breath. I live, others die. I had not been courageous in battle, I was not gallant. I had been inhuman, despicable, brutal in my insensate way. But now I felt fear, and it was both humiliating and stirring. I did not intervene for the drunk white negro because I preferred the novelty of cowering. My heart thumped and my face flushed hot. Of all the confessions I need to make, this is the one that shames me the most.

  As the men approached, I could hear them rasping out questions to the blackbird. Where are we taking him? What are we doing?

  “Why did you undress him?” whispered Edgar. I wondered if he even remembered that it had been his drunken outrage over the honor of his sister that had set a man on his way to death. With every step he looked more the boy.

  “Are you embarrassed by his flesh?” Sebastien asked. “Do you long to touch it?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t ask questions. I made him to look like a nigger so that he would be recognized as a nigger when they find him. There should be no confusion. In fact…” He stopped the procession on the other side of the two oaks that shaded me and Anna Marie. She bit at the hand that muted her.

  “Put him down and roll him in the dirt,” Sebastien said. “Yes, like that. Now step on his hands. Step on them! Grind them into the dirt, break off those nails. We cannot have him looking like a man who belongs in our drawing rooms, can we?”

  One of the men quietly vomited at the base of one of the trees, not five feet from my boot. Anna Marie reached out to touch him, to help him, but I held her back. She bit the flesh of my thumb and I swallowed a shout.

  “Don’t get your nastiness on the General. Or his wife. How do you do, Mrs. Hood?”

  Sebastien looked straight at us and I released Anna Marie. She glared but said nothing.

  “You’ve been watching for quite a while, General. We are not trained soldiers, but we do the best we can. I would have thought you’d help, but I suppose you had something more interesting on your hands there.” He winked.

  “Let him go.” I surprised myself, but only for a moment.

  “Oh, General, you can do better than that. I know you don’t mean what you say, or you would have come out of the trees.”

  He kicked his prisoner hard between the legs.

  “But really, wouldn’t you like a lick? These niggers hate you, you know. You, General Hood. They always did.”

  I said nothing.

  “No?” Sebastien smiled. “Next time, then. We’re off to see this one on his way.”

  When they had gone, I escorted Anna Marie down the winding, crunching path, back through our wonder garden, past the statue of St. Joseph with his pleading hands, and on to the foyer door. Before she stepped through, Anna Marie stopped. I couldn’t read her face.

  “You will not silence me again.”

  Then she disappeared into the warm light and across the soft carpets. I didn’t follow her, I assumed she wanted to go home without me. I was once more the cripple and erstwhile general of the late Confederate Army, alone. My head pounded, my good leg felt weak.

  I sat in the garden long after the last light, whispering awkward prayers to the stony-faced Joseph.

  CHAPTER 9

  Anna Marie Hood

  I am walking about the house now, the fever has receded, and yet I feel every bit a hundred years old. My marriage is a thousand years old. I struggle to remember the clothes I wore before meeting the General, the books I read, the things I ate, the people I knew. I carry a rag with me at all times now when on
ce I might have carried a fan painted with pelicans. Noses must be wiped, blood stanched from scrapes, milk sopped from the floor, urine mopped off trembling legs. The midwife laughs at me. She is still here, her name is Hammoloketh, or Ham. Hammie. She follows me from room to room, sighing and sputtering as if I’m pulling her by a harness. She doesn’t leave though I’ve told her she should. I want her to leave, but she says she is well paid by Rintrah only while she is here, and that my little criminal friend has made it perfectly clear she is to stay, so unless I can muster the strength to toss her out, here she stays. John doesn’t notice her, never speaks to her. I talk to myself and pick at the holes in the settee where John has forgotten his cigars. I talk to my dead mother, I tell her she should have told me what this would be like, the casting forth of children, the creation of our own army of grabbers and wailers. I would do it again, of course, but I would have liked to have known. I might have learned to stay out of John’s bed, at least a little more often. I would have been prepared for the isolation, the monasticism of motherhood, and not been forced to learn about it while listening to the screams and fending off the tugging hands. I say this to my dead mother, though I know I am actually saying it to Ham, who smiles and chuckles and waves her rosary at me as if fending me off. I do not know if she has children and I have not asked.

  She is my company now, my visitor, my guest. I still leave the card dish on the table in the foyer, and sometimes I polish it. I have nearly rubbed away the date of our marriage engraved in the center beneath our initials. It was a wedding gift, of course, and once it was always filled on Thursdays, my receiving days. Now I only receive Ham, and she has no cards. But once the multitudes came with their cards, my mother’s friends, their daughters, and the wives of the men who curried the favor of my famous husband. How grand, that horrible mob of gossips and critics and spies, my visitors, my people! I don’t miss them, though I do miss the sound of their voices and the way their crowd of bodies dampened the echoes in the house. Now it is just Ham in the corner, clicking her beads and listening for the crashes and indignant weeping of the children upstairs and in the yard. Someday she will say something, I am sure of it.

  Where did my visitors go? The city has grown around our Third Street house, every year become denser and newer. We had been country people ten years ago. The Mussons moved in across the street five years ago, and then our block became crowded and fashionable. You know the Mussons of course. Do you remember when their cousin, the painter Degas, came to the house to paint Mathilde? You were only just walking, of course you don’t remember. He sketched you stumbling down the streets just out of my grasp. I have this sketch somewhere, he was very kind to give it to me. I will make sure to find it. Mrs. Mathilde Musson Bell and I traded calls for years. Her husband, the American William Bell, paid visits to your father. He cultivated your father, fawned over him. He pleaded with the General to declare himself against the abomination of negro rule, which was surely coming. The White League, of which Mr. Bell was a prominent member, needed men such as Hood and other heroes of the Confederacy to stand up again and fight. This is what the man who sat out the war told your father, who left half his body on the fields of fighting. Your father turned him down flat, though I know he enjoyed the flattery if not the flatterer. I believe you misuse the word hero, William. I have rarely been called by that word, and less so every year.

  Monsieur Degas also spied John struggling to get up in our trap one day during his long visit, and he strolled over to ask your father if he might paint him without his leg attached, and your father refused him also, but only because, as he explained, he had already been painted by his wife and that one portrait of a gargoyle was more than enough for one proper house. I cringe now to think that he turned away little Edgar for fear of offending me.

  William Bell became angry when he heard of this latest rejection, which he added to John’s rejection of the White League, as if the two were one and the same and directed at him personally. He never thought much of Edgar Degas. Oh William, he who walked down the center of banquettes as if he himself had built them and damn the other traffic, he who combed his beard to a greased point at the center of his chin, he was not used to rejection and pointedly refused contact with us ever afterward. This was the beginning of our long social decline, which William took pleasure in instigating, I do believe.

  But the painter, the little man Degas, simply shrugged his shoulders at his rejection, and wished the General well. I heard it sitting in our library, where I was listening through the open window. I do not encounter many men who do not want their portrait made, it is maybe, yes it is, it is admirable. I do not know how to say it. It is bon. I could make a very good painting, but there would be no love in it, no no, not like that of your lover. Ah, your wife? You are lucky, and not so vain, so américain. He gave John a hearty shake and whistled back to the Mussons. I wish William had heard this.

  Now where are my visitors? They’ve spread out, they’ve found new things to do. They watch the Opera, they plot the overthrow of governments. To their left and to their right as they look out from their carriages, behold the men maddened by war, mere animals now, shambling along. The old warriors flinch at the sound of the horses, rend their garments, soil themselves. In the market, which has spread up and down the river, widows and their children sit quietly in doorways clutching the last portraits of their men. These men wear woolens and campaign hats and their eyes look utterly white. The pistols they carry, or the bugles or the battle flags, it all looks much to bulk for them.

  The américains thump and dig their way through the city. They do not call on me either. They spend their days raising buildings and cutting roads, perfuming their bosoms, shooting pistols in the sky. Their houses have sharp corners and picture windows so that anyone might see them eating, arguing, sleeping, making money, bathing in coin.

  Had it only been a matter of money, I would still have visitors. The ladies would have brought us things, they would have taken pity on us. We would have been poor, embarrassed, but not alone. John’s failures in cotton factoring were not so unusual. Among Creoles, a head unsuited for business was, in some circles, a matter of pride. In the Creole world, there were other things to preoccupy a fine and subtle mind, things that were born and died in a brief season like flowers, love, the taste of a good liquor, the Christ of Lent.

  But such things did not occupy the mind of your father. The General wanted only to plead his case before the court of the Confederate mind, to convince those who cared that he had not been incompetent, that he had not sacrificed thousands on the field of Franklin for naught. He muttered about it in his sleep, and he throttled the sheets as if they were the throats of his critics. His businesses failed, whatever he says, because he didn’t care as much about them as he did the opinions of men in distant cities, most of whom (I imagine) gave him no thought at all. John thought he was constantly recognized on the street. If we rode through town in our open trap, he would pull his hat down tight and tuck that beard into his shirt. He’d ask me if I’d seen that man staring, the one with the ruined and burnt face, and I’d say no, he hadn’t been staring because his eyes were dead. We must find a closed cab, he’d say, ignoring me. I do not like being gawked at.

  Your father hid. He hid in his office, grousing about money, scratching at his war memoir. He hid out in the ice factory down on the wharf. He haunted dark men’s clubs, and the corners of hotel lobbies beneath dimmed lamps. He hid in his room, asleep beneath the woolen sheets or pacing—step, click, step, click—long into the night rehearsing for debates he would never engage. Our flank WAS guarded at Spring Hill! That was HUMAN error…. He came to me always deep in the night. The wraiths subsided only then, and he could concentrate on me and on him, on our bodies, on our sharp angles and sweet tingling, on the warm and furious thing of us! If your father had been home more, if he had not secreted himself away until the middle of the night, I might have had fewer of you children. But those were the moments allotted to me, a
nd I craved them whatever pain and exhaustion they might bring later.

  Now we are alone together nearly every moment, except when one of you children crashes into the room chasing a wayward grasshopper, or when we all walk along the levee and spot the lights of the riverboats twinkling away up the river toward cities I’ve never seen. It’s an awfully unsettling idea: that there are people who will live and die without ever being aware of you. John would have said this was his greatest wish, but in fact it was quite the opposite. He had known fame and he had known infamy, and he had lost the power to reject either, especially for perfect anonymity

  I, however, have become glad of anonymity, if only because it protects me from the chaos, silliness, and violence of my city. Even my old friends talk of nothing but whiteness, of the indignity of deferring to Yankee governors and the humiliation of our men. Our white men. We have governments and shadow governments now, each claiming sovereignty and willing to enforce it by club and pistol. They brawl on Canal Street, gouging eyes, burning posters, and overturning horse carts for barricades. The gens de couleur, the octoroons and quadroons, always the picture of mystery, elegance, and desire, are now merely nigger mammies. All negroes are now possessed of pop eyes, swollen lips, and bent spines, if the newspapers and their artists are to be believed. Occasionally they must be purged, the negroes, and so they are rousted, trussed up, beaten, toyed with, burnt, or worse. And afterward, when the muttering hobos are picking over the remains of the negro cottages and plucking out pairs of pants, some bright cuff links, a ladle—my people scurry back to their parlors and recite the litany of purity, of whiteness: Father and Grandfather and Great-grandfather never dallied with the coloreds, Mother is pedigreed back to Charles Martel himself, and we have maintained this purity at great sacrifice for the good of our race, we have no coloreds in the henhouse, Amen. I say bah. I know no such purity. I see the negro in every face, every big dark eye and thick black head of hair, and in every long and graceful hand picking out études on the piano.