Then he stood back and looked at my front, and his eyes paused a few seconds at my breasts, which were starting to bulge out a bit under my dirty apron. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his two sons wink at each other, and I didn’t much like the way they were looking at me. Then the master nodded to himself and turned back to my grandfather.
‘‘A mite scrawny,’’ he said, ‘‘and not much of a looker. Still, she might fetch seventy-five dollars. You got any of your young bucks in mind to bed her down?
Otherwise I’ll get what I can for her.’’
I didn’t hear what my grandfather said.
It didn’t matter. I didn’t get bedded by any of the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old slave boys, or sold either.
Because two weeks later is when the renegade soldiers came.
MASSACRE
12
IDIDN’T KNOW AT THE TIME WHO THE SOLdiers were.
I didn’t know that the war was all but over, or that the South was breaking up and in chaos, or that deserters or marauders were roaming everywhere. All I knew was that a war had been going on between North and South, that the two sides wore blue and gray, and that somehow we slaves were in the middle of it. Sometimes we’d see soldiers riding by, and once or twice you could hear cannon fire way off in the distance. But mostly we went about our work.
Some said the soldiers from the North, Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers, were trying to set us free. But it was hard to think of any white man—even if they wore blue and talked funny—as friends to colored folks.
I was down at the creek fetching water when I heard horses galloping toward the shacks and barns of our colored town—which now I reckon folks would call a collection of hovels—where we slaves lived. Our men were mostly in the fields, so no one could have put up much of a fight. It was all over too quick for that.
A thunder of riders was coming so fast I could feel the ground shaking under me. With the shouts and horses and the dust and dirt flying, it looked to my eyes like a hundred men bearing straight for the houses, yelling and shooting. I heard screams from Mama and the rest of the women. Then gunfire and more shouts. Terrible sounds filled the air all around me. Horrible screams and loud explosions from the guns all mingled together in an uproar that was deafening.
I dropped my water bucket and ran toward the quarter. But about halfway back I stopped and hid behind a tree. Whatever was going on, it was clear it wouldn’t do a girl like me a bit of good to run out into the middle of it.
What I saw from behind the tree filled me with more terror than I’d ever felt before or since. If I hadn’t been wide awake, and known I was awake, I’d have figured it for a nightmare. It was as grisly as the worst nightmare you could imagine.
The riders were shooting and trampling everybody and knocking everything over and riding around recklessly with their horses kicking and rearing all over the place. They were shouting out horrible curses, and when I think back on it now, I figure they were taking out their anger toward the North and Mr. Lincoln on this little group of slaves, like we were the ones who had caused it all. The horsemen—and I later found out there were fourteen of them—were laughing and cussing like they were enjoying it.
What kind of men would do that? I’ve been asking myself that all my life. What kind of people actually enjoy hurting others? I can’t think of anything to call them but savage as a meat ax, just plumb evil. If ever there’s a day of reckoning when all the things everybody’s done gets put right by God, then bad men like that will surely face some horrible punishment for such awful deeds. Seeing what I saw that day sure made me a believer in hell, because no hell could be too bad for men who could do what they did.
At the time I was too stunned by what I was seeing to hate. But hatred would rise up in my heart soon enough. And it was a hatred I didn’t feel guilty for either. They were the kind of men who did evil that oughta be hated.
They wore shabby, dirty gray uniforms and looked scraggly and mean. Children were screaming and running every which way, and chickens and pigs in their pens were cackling and squawking. Dust was flying about, and I reckon blood was already mixed with it all over the ground. But from where I was, I couldn’t see that yet.
Then my grandpapa came running out of the house with the master’s shotgun that was kept there in case of trouble. I saw the fire explode out of the end of the barrel, and the sound ricocheted through all the commotion. One of the riders tumbled off his horse with the side of his face blown off. The next instant a dozen shots followed, and my poor grandpapa was jerked to the side with the bullets and then fell with half a dozen of them through his heart and head. I was terrified and I could not have moved if my life depended on it.
One of the riders spun his horse around, waving his pistol in the air, trampling over Grandpapa’s body with the horse’s hooves, then turned and shot the body two or three more times where it lay. It seemed to incite the rest of them all the more. They went wild with rage. The man waving the pistol let out a great laugh, then tore off in a huge circle around the place, shooting in a frenzy.
Then I realized he was riding straight toward me!
I was paralyzed. I couldn’t even breathe.
It was just an instant, but as he came riding in my direction, yelling wildly and with that evil fire in his eye, I looked into that face and knew I’d never forget it as long as I lived.
He hadn’t shaved in a while. His whiskers were kind of reddish, though a dirty gray army hat covered up the hair on his head. He had a thick moustache, though not the kind that spin out into a point like some white men’s. But the eyes are what I remember most. I wasn’t close enough to see what color they were. But they were wide, so that the white went all around the inside part, and seemed to be flashing with fire itself. The only way I know to describe them is to say they were wicked eyes.
The next moment my wits came back to me. What was I doing staring at him! Did I want him to shoot me in the head too!
Fearing I was about to be a goner, I shrunk behind the tree trunk, sucking in my tummy as skinny as I could make it, terrified he was going to see me. I heard a few more gunshots. One of them hit my tree, and a piece of bark splintered off and flew back past my ear.
I figured he’d seen me and that I would be dead in less than a minute. I don’t mind admitting that I was shaking from head to foot and clinging to the back side of that tree with my eyes squeezed shut like I was a baby at her mama’s breast.
But then he spun his horse around and went galloping back toward the others, still shooting wildly and yelling like he was corned with a brick in his hat or was crazy. Maybe both.
Then all of a sudden as quickly as it had begun, they rode off, dust flying up behind them, their yelling voices receding in the distance.
And maybe half a minute later came the quiet. The worst quiet I’d ever heard in my life.
Just like I’ll never forget that man’s face, I’ll never forget that silence after they rode off. I reckon somewhere in the back of my head I must have still heard them for a spell longer, because they had ridden out toward the fields where the men had been working. There was more gunfire in the distance when they reached our men. But that was over in another minute or two.
Then came an even deeper stillness than before.
The chickens were still squawking, and now and then I heard the grunt of a pig.
But there were no people sounds. No mother crying. No baby whimpering. Nothing.
It was a deathly, eerie, terrible quiet.
For a long time I just kept standing there, trembling behind the tree. I knew the riders were gone. But I was afraid to come out. I was afraid to look. I don’t know how long I stood there. When I finally came out, there were no sounds anywhere—not even off in the distance . . . not from the fields . . . not from the plantation . . . not anywhere.
And I knew why.
AWAY
13
BY THE TIME I CREPT OUT FROM BEHIND THE tree, afternoon was already getting on. Somehow I s
uppose I knew the riders wouldn’t be back. Why would they come back? There wasn’t anything else they could possibly do.
Who can describe what a person feels at a dreadful time like that? I can’t say I was afraid. I was stunned, horrified at what I saw around me. I figured our own men must be dead too since none of them came back and I heard nothing from the direction of the fields. But I didn’t know for sure. And whether Josepha and the other house slaves were still alive and the master and his family, I didn’t even think about at first. Mostly I just knew I had to pull foot in a hurry and skedaddle out of there.
Of course now the history books call these few days the massacre of Shenandoah County, and everybody knows about the gang of outlaw Confederate deserters called Bilsby’s Marauders. But from where I stood behind that tree, and where I stood after I stumbled up toward what had been my home, all I knew was that I had just heard and seen my mama and my brothers and sisters and my grandfather murdered with my own ears and eyes, and that this place would never be my home again.
I buried them all—Mama and Grandpapa and Samuel and the three younger ones. They were the only family I had, and it was the last thing I could do for them. I couldn’t take the time, and I didn’t have the heart or strength for it either, to try to bury the other women and children. I just couldn’t. There were too many. I did my best to avoid the body of the soldier Grandpapa’d shot. Blood was all over him, and I didn’t want to look at what was left of his face.
I didn’t worry about getting them too deep in the ground, just enough to feel that I’d done what was right and to keep the flies and birds away. Even before I was done, I’d made up my mind I had to leave. I didn’t know where I’d go, but I couldn’t stay there.
People always ask me if I cried, or if I was afraid. People are so curious to know what I felt.
No, I didn’t cry. Not yet at least. I was too numb. I don’t know what I felt inside. Like I said, I was too shocked to feel something I can describe in words. I found the shovel and dug the holes and pushed what was left of my family into them . . . I reckon I did it by instinct. I didn’t think about it. I just found myself with the shovel in my hand starting to whack at the ground. I’d seen enough black folks buried that it was just something I knew you were supposed to do. It took me the rest of the day and into the evening.
But by and by I began to realize what kind of serious trouble I likely was in. I knew enough about the war and the state of slaves in the South to realize that a fifteen-year-old black girl, alone, was going to be in a considerable fix if she ran into someone who maybe wasn’t too inclined to be friendly toward her. Worse— if she ran into the kind of men who had just murdered her family. I probably should have gone up to the big house to see if Josepha and the master’s family were alive. But I wasn’t thinking none too clearly.
If your skin happened to be black in those days, by the time you were old enough to know your own name, you knew that the other kind of people in the world, people with white skin, didn’t think much of folks with curly black hair and colored skin—whether it was brown like mine or tan or dark black, it didn’t make a spit of difference. And they didn’t usually go out of their way to be nice to them unless you had a real good master. I had heard about slaves who had nice masters. And even if I did happen to run into Yankees from the North, though I’d never actually seen one of them Jonathans, as we Southerners called them, in my life, I didn’t figure it’d make much difference. North or South, white folks didn’t like colored folks much. That’s just the way it was.
So I knew I’d be in a heap of trouble if I was found by any white man. I didn’t know what might have happened at the plantation house, but I didn’t like the idea of being found by the master either. He’d be needing more darkies to keep things going. He’d probably want to bed me down with somebody first chance he got— maybe one of his own sons, or even the master himself, since all our men were gone. And I didn’t like the thought of that one bit.
So as soon as I was done with the burying, and said the Lord’s Prayer, then I set off walking across the fields away from the plantation house.
I did one other thing before I left. I went over to the chicken pen and opened the gate, and the same with the pigs. I didn’t know if black people would ever be free. But it seemed to me that those animals weren’t going to be much good to anybody now, especially if they didn’t get fed, so they at least might as well be free to find their own way.
Then I left.
Already dusk was closing in. I didn’t know which direction I was going. I had nothing in mind except just to walk and stay out of sight. I don’t figure anybody who’d been through what I had thinks about eating, and I didn’t. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. My stomach was in such knots it couldn’t have kept food in it anyway. I drank from a few creeks as I went.
After a while it got real dark. I’d probably walked a long way because I was feeling mighty tired. It’s a good thing too. The weariness eventually helped me sleep. I kept walking as the moon came up, and I kept walking and walking, probably for half the night. Then I came to a sheltered little wood that I liked the looks of. It wasn’t too cold that night, so I just lay down in the middle of some bushes and went to sleep.
I woke up sometime after dawn. I could tell the sun hadn’t been up too long. I was chilly and a little damp.
The first thing that came into my head was what a horrifying nightmare I’d had.
I stretched a bit, waking up enough to start wondering where I was.
Then the nightmare that wasn’t a nightmare came crashing back into my soul with the reality that makes memories so different from dreams. Images of dead bodies suddenly filled my head. My stomach gagged and I was sick for several seconds. I wished I could have just kept sleeping forever, and never have woken up. It was the worst waking up I ever had in my born days.
But the only way to cope with the awful pain of the memory was to move. I couldn’t think. It was too dreadful to think. I had to do something. So I got up and started walking again, still without an idea where I was going.
How long I walked, I don’t know. I think I took another drink someplace, but I lost track of events and direction as well as time. I likely wandered around in circles some.
All of a sudden I realized I’d stumbled straight into the yard of a great big plantation house. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going, and there weren’t any sounds coming from anywhere. I just looked up and there the house was in front of me. It was a big, fancy two-story house, all white, with columns all the way around it and several big oaks growing in the front.
I stopped in my tracks. It wasn’t my master’s plantation, that much I knew. It was a lot bigger, and I didn’t recognize anything.
I stood for a minute or two listening, wondering why it was so quiet. I started walking slowly toward the house, a tad scared, but starting to feel hungry enough that I wanted to find something to eat. I wandered around toward the back, where there were a few more buildings. As I got closer I began to realize that things didn’t look right. A buggy was overturned, some of the fence was broken. And as I looked up at the house I saw some windows broken.
All of a sudden I almost stumbled over someone lying on the ground in front of me. I looked down at the body of a young white man who looked to be about twenty. One look at his face and I knew that he was cold as a wagon tire.
I don’t know why I didn’t turn around and take off running right then. But after what I’d seen yesterday, I just stepped over him and continued on. A few yards farther I saw a black woman who’d been shot too and a black man nearby.
I walked toward the house.
It was way too quiet. From off somewhere around the other side, I heard two or three dogs barking. I don’t know where they’d been, but now they were coming back, and I didn’t feel like trying to explain myself to them.
The back door of the house was ajar. I gave it a little shove and it swung open.
I wasn’t really getting
my mind around things too good yet. Maybe I figured if everyone had been killed here too, that at least maybe there’d be something around I could eat. Why I had been leery of being found by my own master but was just going ahead and barging into some other white man’s house, I don’t know. Doesn’t make much sense as I look back on it. But the place seemed so deserted, I probably figured nobody was around but dead folks, like the man in the yard. It seemed like the same evil men must have been here too and killed everyone. And I sure did need food before I keeled over.
The minute I stepped inside I saw that the whole place had been pillaged, just like what had happened where I lived. There was stuff broken all over the floor.
Slowly I walked into what I took to be the kitchen. I saw another body on the floor, this time a white woman, older than the young fellow outside, maybe forty or forty-five.
I had been looking down, but as I now turned toward the center of the house, suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks.
In the middle of a doorway stood a white girl, probably a year or so younger than me. She was staring straight at me through big eyes that looked even more afraid than I felt.
The girl wore a long nightgown and some slippers that had bloodstains on them. Her straight blond hair was probably pretty if it was fixed, but now it was all scruffy and matted together. Even from this distance I could tell her eyes were blue. They were so wide they almost looked like they’d been painted on. Her face was whiter than was natural even for a white person. I almost figured her for dead at first, just a dead white girl standing in the middle of the floor like a statue. Her face was just like a ghost. I mean, I’d never seen a ghost, but if I had, I reckon that’s what it would look like. She might have been a pretty enough girl in her own way, a little more meat on her than me, but not fat, and three or four inches shorter. Like I said, I was a mite tall and scrawny.
I was still too numb to be surprised. I just looked at her, and she stared back at me. It seemed that everybody else in the whole world was dead. And I figured she’d probably topple over onto the floor any minute with all the rest of the dead people.
Angels Watching Over Me (Shenandoah Sisters Book #1) Page 7