Savannah, or a Gift for Mr. Lincoln

by John Jakes

  “Say, you can believe I didn’t,” he exclaimed with surprising vehemence. “Neither did any of my men while I had charge of ’em. I wouldn’t allow it.”

  “We heard stories about the licentious behavior of Yankees.”

  “I don’t doubt Jef Davis would like you Southrons to believe everything you hear, and maybe some of ours acted that way, but none that rode with me. They was just greedy stinking thieves. You’ve had experience with those.” He yawned.

  Vee tiptoed out, vaguely let down, yet excited by pleasing new thoughts. He liked her; she was sure of it. And he wasn’t a monster.

  Possibilities for the future were all at once boundless.

  At half past four, a United States commissary wagon rolled up to the cottage. A portly German chef and two colored stewards carried in food hampers. The stewards began setting the table with Vee’s china and silver. The chef fed kindling into the stove—he brought his own supply—and informed the ladies that the twenty-pound turkey had been roasting throughout the afternoon; now it must be finished. Adam stepped in to assist the stewards without being asked.

  The house filled with delicious aromas, so pervasive and mouthwatering, Hattie grew dizzy with anticipation. She tried to find the treachery in all this Sherman generosity and couldn’t.

  At half past five, the chef said dinner would be served in an hour. With darkness lowering and the rain in abeyance again, Hattie decided Amelia needed a walk. Sara asked Zip to go along and look after her. Hattie didn’t object; she’d taken a liking to the runaway.

  Strolling north on Bull Street, Zip began to utter a series of strange wheeps and whistles. Amelia shied and grunted at the end of her tether. Hattie said, “What on earth’s that?” Zip explained his fondness for imitating local bird life.

  “Is it hard?”

  “Not so hard long’s you practice.”

  “Could I learn?”

  “Some of the calls is pretty tricky, but there are one or two that’s easier. Salt crow’s easy, but it grates on the ear. Here’s one I like.” Despite his puffy lip, he delivered a whistle that slid upward cleanly on the scale. This he repeated, following it with a series of staccato whistles on a single note. “Can you get your tongue around that?”

  “What is it?”

  “Red cardinal.”

  Hattie whistled. Zip grimaced and offered corrections. Hattie tried again. Zip granted that it was better. Hattie practiced the cardinal call all the way back to York Street, delighted by her newfound skill.

  The two returned to Vee’s in the dark, another rain shower imminent. Over by the military camp in the square, Hattie saw a man she’d noticed before, loitering near the double stairway leading up to the doors of Christ Church. She hadn’t seen him following them and perhaps he wasn’t, but things about him made her uneasy: his ugly face, his purplish nose, his gaudy checked overcoat with fur collar and cuffs. The man picked his teeth with a silver pick and stared. Hattie gave him a glare as they hurried on.

  Inside again, comforted by the lamps and candles and Miss Vee at the Chickering playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Hattie forgot the stranger.

  At twenty past six, Sara drew Vee aside with a proposal. They discussed the idea and agreed on a course of action. They repaired to the steamy kitchen, where the colored stewards were busily filling bowls with fried oysters, sugared yams, butter beans, mashed cranberries, and hot corn bread. The golden bird sat in its roasting pan on top of the stove, exuding aromas of oysters and sage.

  The chef bowed. “Ja, madam, what may I do for you?”

  Sara screwed up her courage and began. “We’re ever so grateful for all these fine dishes—”

  “Ja, you will enjoy, I am sure.”

  “But there are so many starving people in town—refugees camping in abandoned buildings, feed lots, boxcars at the rail yards—surely they’d welcome a hot meal. Would you think terribly of us if we asked you and your men to pack everything into your wagon and find people more in need than we are?”

  The chef considered. “To remove all this—deliver it elsewhere—that is not so hard. What is hard is understanding your request.”

  “Christmas,” Vee said. “It’s the time to remember the poor and needy. Have you read Mr. Dickens’s tale of Ebenezer Scrooge?”

  “I don’t read no Englischer books.” The chef’s severe expression melted into a smile. “But you are good ladies. We pack up and find the hungry ones.”

  “And don’t tell General Sherman,” Sara said.

  Thus Sara, Hattie, Vee, Zip, and Adam dined on plates of soggy rice and cups of imitation tea. Vee then suggested more carols. They repaired to the parlor, where Vee launched into one of Hattie’s favorites, “Jingle Bells.” Sara heard a faint call from the bedroom and hurried to respond.

  Awake in the dark, Alpheus Winks said, “I’d be grateful if you left the door open so I could listen.”

  “Happily, Sergeant. In a little while I plan to read the Christmas story from my Bible.”

  “Haven’t heard that since I left Putnam County,” he said with a drowsy smile. “This is a mighty good evening.”

  In a cramped but satisfactorily cheap room in the garret of the Pavilion Hotel, the same sentiment occurred to Isaiah Fleeg, though not for the same reason. Out trolling the local population between rainstorms, he’d spied a handsome buck perfect for his collection.

  Military and commercial activity that stopped for the Sunday observance of Christmas accelerated as the new week began. Sherman issued a special order to make sure the local population was treated with “civility.” A second order allowed disaffected residents to travel under a flag of truce to Charleston or rebel-occupied Augusta; a third granted his regiments permission to add Savannah to the list of battles sewn on their colors. Captain Poe, in charge of the Union engineer corps, sent crews to survey Hardee’s defenses and rebuild them where necessary. A steamer docked and offloaded crates bearing an unexpected legend.

  FROM THE CITY OF NEW YORK

  —TO—

  THE CITY OF SAVANNAH

  RELIEF SUPPLIES (FOODSTUFFS)

  A mate on the steamer said a similar relief ship was loading in Boston despite opposition from Secretary of War Stanton.

  Incoming papers described President Lincoln’s delight at receiving Sherman’s telegraph message in the White House on Christmas Eve. The text had flashed across the North. In a New York Eye column, Stephen read that the moderate stance of municipal officials and the behavior of Savannah’s war-weary citizens combined to give the city a more favored status than that of despised Charleston. The charity of Northerners was not so difficult to understand.

  Even so, Sara and Vee saw evidence of misery. Homes both modest and elegant showed ugly signs of vandalism: fences ripped out, siding torn off for firewood. Dead horses lay in the streets. Vee pointed out a former Latin teacher hawking corn dodgers amid the huts in Wright Square. No doubt the teacher’s wife had baked the little cakes, and she and her husband had gone hungry to supply the ingredients.

  A canvasser knocked at the door Tuesday afternoon. Hattie answered. The man handed her a long foolscap sheet.

  “Military food mart opens tomorrow. All are welcome, regardless of income. Have the lady of the house write down her needs—flour, beans, bacon, pork, sugar, molasses, coffee—then present the ticket for admittance.” He tipped his palm leaf hat and bustled on.

  Zip and Adam spelled each other standing guard outside the house. Zip wore an old coat sweater that had belonged to Dr. Rohrschamp; heavy as it was, it didn’t filter out the afternoon chill. Late in the day, Zip visited the necessary. As he reached for the door latch, a white man jumped from the bushes at the back of the lot.

  “Good afternoon, boy. I’m detaining you. Come along without a struggle, and you won’t be harmed.”

  Zip scowled. “I seen you before.”

  “But you haven’t seen this, have you?” From the pocket of his green overcoat, Isaiah Fleeg drew his Colt hideout pistol
with his yellow-gloved hand.

  “Step around behind the privy. My assistants are waiting with transportation.”

  Tempted to run, or at least yell, Zip’s intentions were balked by the intimidating weapon. “I don’ know what this is about.”

  “All will be explained, and to your advantage, I guarantee. I don’t want to lose my temper with you, boy, so humor me. Get moving.”

  Zip spied a tall Negro with amber skin lurking among low palmettos bordering the alley. Surely these bad men had mistaken him for someone else; he’d convince them of it when the leader was less impatient. On that thin justification he stepped into the shrubbery, where the amber man seized his arm and shoved a rag into his mouth.

  A third man, white, with a gold earring and a livid facial scar, forced Zip into an old one-horse rockaway with its black side curtains rolled down. The white man fastened Zip’s wrists behind his back with baling wire. The two henchmen took the high front seat; the scarred man picked up the reins.

  Zip’s chief abductor climbed in. “Lie on the floor.”

  Zip obeyed. Isaiah pressed the sole of a black ankle boot on Zip’s neck. Get these devils to admit a mistake? Zip suddenly doubted it. The carriage rattled off while he contemplated the enormity of his misjudgment.

  East of the City Exchange, Bay Street petered into an unlovely neighborhood of failed and empty shops and, down the slope, beside the river, abandoned storehouses with grime-streaked windows. Here there were no streetlamps, and few respectable people. The address was the same for all the riverside properties—“Under the Bluff.”

  In a nameless ballast-stone building full of dust and wispy cotton linters, lively spiders and lethargic brown skinks, Zip met two other prisoners of his race. Both were in their early twenties. The stouter of the two, introduced as Nehemiah, bore bruises and abrasions that showed his resistance to captivity. His wrists were manacled around a wooden pillar supporting a rickety stair; above, a loft door opened on a path leading to the top of the bluff. Isaiah used this obscure exit to slip in and out unseen by loiterers along the river.

  His other prisoner, Ralf, wore leg irons. He sat on a pallet of ticking, head between his knees. He barely glanced at the new arrivals.

  “Put the leg irons on this one, boys,” Isaiah instructed his men. When Zip was secured, Isaiah squatted by him, though not so close that he could be seized. “Your name, boy.”

  “Zip.”

  “Zip what?”

  “Zip—uh—Zip Winks.”

  Isaiah made a sucking sound between his teeth. He walked into the vast darkness—the storehouse was lit by a single hanging lantern—and returned with paper and pencil. “Make your mark on this, please.”

  Zip’s eyes gleamed with defiance. “Can’t read that.”

  Isaiah sighed. “Are all you niggers ignorant? What it says is very simple. You willingly consign yourself to me in return for free transportation to a northern city. There you will be given a monthly salary, food, clothes, and a prideful place in the United States Colored Troops.”

  “Slow down. You telling me I be a sojer?”

  “I am.”

  “Sojer with a gun?”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “Gen’l Sherman don’t want coloreds for sojers.”

  “Uncle Billy may be the hero of the hour, but on the issue of arming the Negro, he’s one hundred eighty degrees away from General Grant and Mr. Stanton, the secretary of war. They welcome coloreds into the ranks of fighting men. Sherman will come to grief if he bucks them.”

  He leaned forward to whisper, “Sherman’s a bigot, in case you didn’t know.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Up north you will be a draft substitute for some white gentleman who doesn’t care to risk himself in combat. You will bring dignity and honor to your race.” And to Isaiah, a three-hundred-dollar substitute’s fee, unmentioned. Of course he had expenses—the two street ruffians he’d hired, the rented rockaway steerage fare on a coastal steamer—but if he collected just five Negroes, he’d clear a thousand to twelve hundred dollars.

  “Doesn’t that sound fine, boy?”

  “I wanted to be a sojer a long time,” Zip admitted. “But this is fishy. If I bring dignity an’ honor to my race, how come I got to be chained up?”

  “For your own safety. Savannah’s full of Johnny Reb hotheads eager to hang any nigger willing to bear arms against white men. The whole town fears occupation by colored troops after Sherman leaves. Better you stay out of sight until we can ship you and your friends to New York. One of my men will be back with a bucket for your personal needs. Breakfast arrives bright and early.”

  Nehemiah gnashed his teeth. “Biscuits hard as rocks. Weevily too.”

  Ralf sobbed.

  The tall amber man gratuitously kicked Zip’s ribs and walked away laughing.

  After the disappearance, Adam circulated through the downtown, then Forsyth Park. On neither expedition did he sight Zip or any clue to his whereabouts. He reported his bad news when he returned to York Street.

  Hattie slept poorly. Half-human creatures with fiery eyes chased her through nightmares. Vee and Sara sat in the parlor, fretting. When the clock rang midnight, Sara excused herself. Vee remained and nodded off in her chair. She slept so soundly the next hour, she failed to hear the bells and horns signaling a sizable fire to the west. Ultimately two hundred houses burned, and tons of gunpowder nearly exploded in an arsenal. This they learned from neighbors next morning.

  Winks woke at 3 a.m. complaining of pain. Sleepy-eyed, Sara rushed to his bedside with a lamp. She changed his dressing while Vee spooned medicine into him in such an agitated way that he choked. Vee soothed him by patting and stroking his hair until she realized what she was doing.

  The regimental surgeon called at nine o’clock. He rigged a sling for Winks’s arm, advised that the sergeant was recuperating without difficulty, and complimented the ladies on their care. He left asking himself why they were so dour and drawn, as though their minds were elsewhere.

  Adam visited the newly opened military food store. With a basket on his arm, he joined an amazing assortment of men and women, old and young, queued up outside the hall. Some wore silks, some linsey-woolsey, some garments sewn from cornmeal bags. Adam saw a one-legged grandfather in army butternut, and a lad in a coatee cut from flowered drapery material. He saw grand dames in feathered hats and careworn women in country bonnets. Blacks stood next to whites without comment or complaint from either.

  He waited two and a half hours to have his ticket examined by a guard who then admitted him to the hall. Along crowded aisles he collected rations of rice and black-eyed peas, salt pork, coffee, and a small packet of sugar. Back at York Street, he described the leveling power of hunger that he’d witnessed.

  The next afternoon, Thursday, the mood in the household sank further. Sara expressed it: “I fear he isn’t coming back.”

  “The colored people are in a state of agitation,” Vee said. “He’s run off.”

  “Doubt that, ma’am,” Adam said. “He told me he liked it here.” Hattie added her voice to his; she’d heard the same sentiment.

  “Then something nasty’s happened to him,” Winks said during an impromptu bedside conference. “By thunder, I wish I could crawl out of here. I’d find him.”

  Vee and Sara debated the wisdom of attending a public meeting called for half past four at Masonic Hall. “What’s that about?” Winks wanted to know.

  Vee explained. “Fifty or sixty local folk petitioned Mayor Arnold, requesting a meeting with the city fathers. Apparently there’s broad support for some sort of declaration of loyalty to the Union and Constitution. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to attend. Stay or go, it won’t return that poor boy any sooner.”

  Sara agreed, and Hattie too, although Hattie felt the situation called for something more positive than inaction.

  Legrand dropped in to visit just as Sara and Vee left for the Masonic Hall. Legrand paid his respects to S
ergeant Winks in the bedroom, albeit cautiously. Then he and Hattie sat in the kitchen sharing a stone jar of root beer he’d brought. “Sparks concocted it. Not half bad.”

  Hattie replied with a listless nod. The gloom of the winter afternoon oppressed her. She cudgeled her brains about Zip, whom Legrand suspected of disappearing over the horizon for good.

  A memory clicked in place. “Legrand, I don’t think so. I suspicion he was kidnapped, and I’ll bet I know who took him.”

  “Who?”

  “A strange man who watched Zip and me when we walked Amelia on Christmas afternoon. I saw him twice, once in Johnson Square, then again just down the street.”

  “He followed you?”

  “I presume so.”

  “Was he a local gentleman?”

  “More likely a Yankee. He had a purple nose, like a cabbage, and was dressed up like a circus clown, in a green overcoat with black checks big as windowpanes.” Hattie licked the rim of her empty glass and savored the last sweetness. “I can’t understand why he’d carry off a poor darky like Zip.”

  “Zip’s young, isn’t he?”

  “Not even twenty.”

  “Pa said that up north, they’re selling colored boys for the army—substitutes for men who are drafted and don’t want to serve. Pa read about it in an old Washington paper yesterday. Men calling themselves recruiting agents headed for Savannah when the city surrendered.”

  “My heavens.” Hattie hopped off her stool. “We must find him.”

  “How? He could be locked up out of sight. Wouldn’t you stand a better chance of finding the man who followed you?”

  “Well, that’s true, but if we can’t find him, I know a way to signal to Zip.”

  “You do?”

  In reply, Hattie whistled.

  Hattie donned her bonnet, shawl, and mittens. She and Legrand left the house without informing Adam or Winks. In Wright Square, soldiers were stoking a bonfire and singing “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”