The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson

by Nancy Peacock

  I told my fingers to open this paper and see what was there, but I could not get them to obey the command. And so I merely held it. I could not imagine what message it could possibly contain, as Chloe could not write, and I did not know of anyone in the big house who would write a note for her. Finally, as the light was fading, I again sent the mental commands to my body. I forced myself to roll to my side. I forced my fingers to unfold the piece of paper. I forced my eyes to focus in the dimming light and read what was there, but there was nothing there in the form of words. Only the embossed initials of Master Wilson at the top of the page, and then marks of ink, slanting to one side and broken up by spaces, as if in imitation of writing, one final mark at the end, as if a signature. Judging from this last, Chloe imagined her name to be long and florid, and this made me smile.

  I turned the “note” over and over in my hands. I reached with one finger to feel the indentations on the page where Chloe bore down with a pen. I did not need to be either literate or illiterate to know what was written there. It was a note of love, a note of sorrow, a note of passion, and it meant more to me than any words I have ever read.

  Before Sup and Henry returned from the fields I hid the folded paper, sliding it into the seam at the head of my bed, where wall met floor. There I could reach for it while still lying on my pallet. And I did just that on Monday morning, alone in the cabin once more while the others worked. I touched those “words” again and again.

  Four days after my whipping Master Wilson paid me a visit. It was in the middle of the day, the cabin quiet and empty, while off in the distance the rhythmic thuds of the slaves’ hoes hit against the earth. I was lying on my pallet, still on my stomach, touching the words on Chloe’s note, when I heard his footsteps on the stoop followed by the scrape of the door against the floor. Quickly I slid the note beneath my body.

  “Persy,” I heard him say.

  “Yes, Massuh.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Right po’ly, suh.”

  I heard the squeak of leather as he crossed the floor. I could see the tops of his boots as he stood beside me. They looked to be new, shiny with brass buckles, not the boots that had kicked me.

  “Well, yes, I’m sorry to hear that,” Wilson said. “But I suppose you’ve learned your lesson.”

  “Yassuh.”

  “You’ll not be stealing any food from my larder again.”

  “Nawsuh.”

  “Very good, then.” There was a long pause. “Harriet and Sylvie have been taking care of you?”

  “Yassuh. Every night.”

  “Using the brine I sent along, I hope.”

  “Yassuh. I’s grateful fo’ that, suh.”

  “Well, let’s have a look.”

  Master Wilson probed his pudgy fingers into my back, kneading at my wounds. He asked me to move my head this way and that, and he picked up my arms and moved them back and forth. He held my hands and manipulated my fingers. I prayed that he would not ask me to roll over, or get up, that he would not see Chloe’s note which I felt pressing against my chest, causing a small patch of skin there to sweat.

  “Well, I don’t see any real harm done,” he finally said. “This is scabbing up quite nicely. You’ll be back to work next week.” He stood up straight again so that I again saw the tops of his boots.

  “Yassuh,” I said to his knees.

  “It’s a hard way to get a week off, Persy.”

  “Yassuh. Sho is.”

  “I’ll have Katy send some extra rations to your cabin. Biscuits? Do you care for biscuits?”

  “Yassuh. Thank you, suh.”

  “Pies and cakes? Do you care for pies and cakes?” I was silent. He knelt down beside me so that now we looked each other eye-to-eye, man-to-man, except that he was master and I was slave and I knew to look down, away from him, and this I did. “Blueberry?” he taunted. “Apple? Fig?” Again I did not answer, for there was no good way to reply. “I expect you back to work on Monday,” Wilson said. “Full days.”

  “Yassuh.”

  “You’re not getting off of this plantation, Persimmon Wilson. Ever. You’ll die here. I’ll make sure of it. Do you hear?”

  I did not answer.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  I did as I was told. I had never looked so closely into Master Wilson’s face, or any white man’s for that matter. His eyes were black as coal. His nose mapped with broken veins. There was a large mole at the base of his jacket collar that I had never noticed before. I held the bile down in my throat as thoughts of Chloe surfaced, Chloe having to be as close to him as I was now. Closer. Him inside her.

  “Do you hear?” Master Wilson repeated.

  “Yassuh,” I answered.

  “I’ll send Peach with those biscuits.”

  “Much obliged, suh.”

  He rose and looked about the cabin.

  “You boys keep a neat place.”

  “Yassuh,” I said.

  “That’s good. I like that.” I heard him dip the cloth into the bucket of brine and wring it out. He laid it across my back. “Don’t forget what I told you. I’ll kill you myself.” He crossed the floor and opened the door.

  By Monday the lacerations from my whipping had formed scabs that felt tight across my back and itched as I worked. My shirt scraped across them during the first part of the day, but by the afternoon my wounds split open, and by the end of the day the flies that tortured me while I worked had become so drunk with my blood that they fell off me onto the ground.

  I washed my shirt every night, and then tossed the bucket of blood-tinged water out the door. Every morning I put my still-damp shirt back on to repeat the process. As the weeks went by, under Harriet’s care with the brine-soaked cloth, the lacerations on my back changed slowly, first from a solid crust of joined scabs, then to rivers of finger-width scabs, then to trickles of thin incrustations, until finally, by the end of August, my wounds had healed into a landscape of soft ridges, and I still had not seen Chloe.

  The cane plants were ten feet high now and grinding season was upon us. I began to turn my attention to serious thoughts of escape. I began to wonder if now was the time, just before Master Wilson became entrenched in the busy work of making sugar. It is ironic, after all my promises to Chloe of creating a perfect plan, that I had no plan. A plan almost seemed farcical to me now, a thing that could only go wrong, that could trip us up, like the hem of a long ridiculous coat.

  I had devised no way yet of getting a message to Chloe, but all the same, just before sugar making was to start, I paid a visit to Sweetmore’s commissary with the intention of purchasing a few things with the credit I had accumulated by cutting wood in the swamps. Holmes stood behind the rough wooden counter when I entered. I asked him, addressing him in the usual way, “Suh, has I got enough to get two blankets and a fry pan?”

  “You going somewhere, Persy?” Holmes asked.

  I laughed and grinned. “Nawsuh. I’s jest gettin’ some blankets fo’ the winter, and a fry pan fo’ the fish I gonna catch come holiday after grindin’ season done ended. I bring you some them fish, if you like.” It galled me to talk like this.

  Holmes reached beneath the counter and pulled out a large ledger, making a show of slapping this book onto the counter and sighing heavily as he opened it to look up my name. He flipped the pages, one after another. I saw my name go by. Then he started at the beginning again, this time running his fingers down the list of names and marks on each page before turning to the next one. I saw my name again as Holmes’s finger slid over it, written in Master Wilson’s florid script. I saw the marks next to it, each one representing a cord of wood, which I had delivered, cut and stacked, to the sugarhouse yard. “You’re not listed, Persy,” Holmes said.

  IN OCTOBER Jeff, the fiddler, received his last pass of the season to visit his wife Sally and spend a weekend with her at Sweetmore. He had taken a shine to Henry, Sup, and me, and during these weekends, he spent at least a few hours sitting aro
und our fire, smoking his pipe, and delivering whatever news he had garnered during his trips as a fiddler up and down the river. Jeff prided himself on gathering up white folks’ news and spreading it among the coast’s slaves, and well he should have been proud. His was a service we needed, especially on Sweetmore, where the chances of overhearing an informative conversation were next to none.

  “Rations goin’ short this grindin’ season,” Jeff told us during this last visit.

  “Why that?” Henry asked.

  “Blockade,” Jeff said, nodding to himself.

  “Blockade?” Sup said. “What the hell a blockade?”

  “A mess of Yankee ships, what I can tell,” Jeff answered, “blockin’ them Rebel ships from gettin’ to New Orleans, and blockin’ everybody else from gettin’ out. That blockade makin’ the white folk run low on everythin’.”

  “Everythin’ ’cept meanness,” Henry said.

  “They low on food, we lower on food,” Sup observed.

  “They might run low on somthin’ else,” Jeff said. “Three families ’long the river done lost they boys. Niggers comin’ home without they massuhs, if they comin’ home at all. One nigger up on Lastola Place got hisself a whippin’ fo’ not bringin’ his massuh’s body home. He told me warn’t nothin’ left to bring home. Some battle up Virginia. Rebels sayin’ they won that one. Nigger say he couldn’t get outta that place fast enough. Pieces of people flyin’ everywhere. Wudda had to scoop up some mud and guts and call it the right mess of bones to make hisself a massuh.” Jeff shook his head, leaned down to the fireplace, and lifted a burning stick to the bowl of his pipe. He puffed on it till the smoke was going strong, then he dropped the stick back into the fire and shook his head again. “White people killin’ white people like heaven to me.”

  “Why that nigger come home at all?” Henry asked.

  “Wife and younguns. He figure he be gettin’ a beatin’ when he get back.”

  “They can’t ship out the sugar?” I asked.

  Jeff shrugged. “Don’t look like it.”

  “What we growin’ it fo’,” Henry asked, “they cain’t sell it?”

  Jeff shrugged again. “Don’t know. But this as pretty a crop as I ever seen. I reckon they gonna cut it and grind it like always, figure somethin’ to do with it later. Cain’t have no sugar dyin’ in the field. Cain’t have no bunch of niggers doin’ nothin’. Naw siree, cain’t have that.”

  “Them Yankees gonna come upriver and set us free?” Sup asked.

  “White folk say it ain’t never gonna happen. Cain’t nobody get upriver fo’ them forts I told you ’bout. White folk say we safe.”

  “Who they talkin’ ’bout bein’ safe?” Henry said. “They talkin’ ’bout theyselves bein’ safe. Ain’t no nigger safe.”

  “I jest sayin’ what the white folk say. They ain’t always right. I know somethin’ else though, ’bout that fancy in yo’ massuh’s house.”

  I looked up to find him regarding me. “What about her?” I asked.

  “ ’Bout a month ago, she start askin’ ’bout cotton root bark.”

  “Cotton root bark,” I repeated.

  “You know what it fo’?” Jeff asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “She’s pregnant.”

  “Not no mo’ she ain’t,” Jeff said. “I get the cotton root bark to Sally, Sally get it to Peach, and Peach get it to Chloe. She ain’t pregnant no mo’.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She sick awhile,” Jeff said. “We don’t tell you till now. She all right now.” He stood up from the stump he was sitting on and stretched, his fingers easily touching the ceiling of our cabin. “I reckon I better go see that gal of mine. But you watch. Rations this grindin’ season ain’t gonna be like last.”

  “You gotta leave that filly be,” Henry said after Jeff left. “What you reckon would’ve happened if she’d birthed yo’ child?”

  “He’d have killed me,” I said.

  “Damn right, he’d kill you. You gotta leave that gal alone.”

  But I had no intention of that if I could help it. All I could think of as I tried to sleep that night was Chloe being sick, aborting a baby. Even though it was dangerous to do so, she was wise to rid herself of it. I wished I could see her. I wished I could hold her hand. I wished I could comfort her. I wished I knew that the baby was Wilson’s child and not mine.

  Our decrease in rations was noticeable on the first day of cutting cane. Our breakfast was cush-cush, our dinner had no meat in it, and the slabs of pork that were cut for our supper were grainier than they had been the year before. Each day out in the fields we ate our portions of food and hungered for more. I was accustomed to being hungry. We all were. But this was different. This was harder. In the months before grinding season we worked ten- and twelve-hour days, sometimes only eight, and we had Sundays off. Now we worked eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Our stomachs grumbled and complained. Three people collapsed during the first week, two during the second week, and five during the third, but in each instance they were returned to the fields before the end of the day, and soon enough we adapted. We found our rhythm. Four whacks to the cane plant and move on. Swaths of cut cane lay behind me in the path I forged.

  I could not help but wonder, as I worked, if those Yankee ships anchored downriver might mean Chloe’s and my eventual freedom. There was talk of this in the quarters of course, when there was talk at all during grinding season, which was only early in the morning after our shifts or if it rained too hard for us to work the field. Even on rainy days, surprise days off, we were too tired for deep discussions, and so our mentioning of Yankees was reduced to occasional mutterings.

  “I wish they come on, if they comin’,” Harriet said.

  “Damn Yanks,” Henry said. “Ought to come durin’ grindin’ season, at least. Even if they lose the damn war, might get a extra hour off one day.”

  All my days, rainy or not, were spent missing Chloe. I had not known, until her company was taken away from me, how much I had come to depend on our visits to lift my spirits and make me feel like a man. And now there was this news of the cotton root bark. I had noticed of late that Peach would no longer meet my eye when she served me my food out in the field, and this concerned me. I had not seen Chloe for four months now, and with Peach looking away from me every time I stepped up to her food cart, I became obsessed with the notion that Chloe no longer cared for me. Or, and this I found much worse to contemplate, that Chloe thought I no longer cared for her.

  November. December. We worked through Christmas day, just as we had done the previous year.

  The bell rang nine times each day to clock our lives. Once in the morning to get us to rise, a second time to tell us to line up for work, once each for our meal breaks, and again to tell us that this respite was ended, and finally at midnight to tell us to return to our cabins and sleep. The next day would bring it all again. It was no different from the previous year, except in two things. Our rations were cut, as you know, and this grinding season lasted much longer.

  January came, and the year turned to 1862. It was warm that winter in Louisiana. No frost as of yet, and the cane fields remained lush and green. By mid-January we were three-quarters through with the cutting, and still the weather stayed unseasonably warm. We worked all through January and into half of February until finally we’d cut all the cane plants, save one, the one that Master Wilson decorated with ribbons, and that Sally cut down, the one we cheered for as it was handed over to the sugarhouse workers and put into the grinder.

  My second grinding season had come to an end, and I swore to myself, as I stood there cheering with all the rest, that there would not be a third. I swore to myself that if Chloe were still willing to place her trust in me, I would get us free of this place. I would do this if I died trying, and if Chloe died trying, well then, at least she would not die on Sweetmore with Master Wilson’s fingers on her body.

  In spite of the food shortage, we were still given ou
r sugarhouse party. The philosophy of the white folks seemed to be that they should keep appearances as normal as possible in order to avoid alarming us, or leading us to believe in any way that the blockade cutting off their supplies was a concern to them. They went so far as to act as though we had no knowledge of it at all. I do not know if they themselves actually believed this or if it was only for show, but had they stopped to consider it, they would have realized that we knew something was amiss. After all, a slave notices a shortage of food before anyone else.

  The table in the sugarhouse was spread with the same patched red cloth as last year, but with fewer dishes. An attempt had been made to disguise this fact by decorating it with a centerpiece made up of cane leaves and moss.

  “Cain’t eat no cane leaves. Cain’t eat no damn moss,” Harriet muttered as she stood next to me and forked a thin slice of pork onto her plate.

  The year before there had been food left over, enough for Henry and me to pocket a few potatoes, but this year after we had filled our plates there was nothing left but empty platters and bowls, some of them swabbed clean with pieces of bread and fingers.

  Jeff stepped up onto the ledge in front of the kettles and tucked his fiddle under his chin. I danced with the girls. I swung them around, smiled and laughed, but they did not interest me. All I could think of was Chloe, and the message she had sent to me through Peach at the last sugarhouse party, and that night in my cabin with Chloe lying on my pallet, her skin in the flickering firelight. I ached to see her again, to hold her, to tell her of my renewed dedication to escaping this life.

  Master Wilson and Missus Lila came to watch our dancing, but they stayed hardly any time at all before he took her arm and led her outside, her balance and breath so rickety now that twice she had to stop to rest before reaching the waiting buggy. And this was another difference between last year and this. Last year Master Wilson and his wife had walked from the big house to the sugarhouse.