I made sure that Wilson saw me dancing with the girls. This and the food had been my sole interest in the sugarhouse party of 1862, and after Wilson and Old Miss left I, too, left, stopping to swig at a jug going around by a fire, but still firmly making my way to my cabin.
Even though I’d told myself repeatedly, as I made my way down the lane, that Chloe would not be there, I felt my disappointment as a palpable thing when I swung the cabin door open and found it empty. I built a fire and then slipped Chloe’s note from its hiding place. I sat on my pallet and ran my fingers across the marks, feeling each one, and grazing the longest across the last, Chloe’s “signature.” I will teach her to read and write, I thought. I will not let those hands always be plunged into biscuit dough.
During our week off I fished with Sup and Henry, but I was poor company, quiet and sullen. Continually they asked what was bothering me, but I had no answer for them, and eventually they ceased asking and merely let me be. The task I most wanted to do during my holiday was split wood, and I spent a great deal of time at it. The strength it took to wallop a log into several pieces was solace to me. No one spoke with me as I bent to this task, and therefore I was left alone to stew and to brood, and yes, to plan. If only I could somehow think of a way to reach Chloe and speak with her again.
We began planting cane immediately after our week off. We did not spend any days rolling barrels of sugar or molasses down to the quay. We did not load them onto a waiting steamboat. There was no waiting steamboat. There was no exchange of money through white hands. The barrels of sugar and molasses that we had worked so hard to make were stored in a barn. Seven hundred and sixty hogsheads of sugar, two hundred and fifty barrels of molasses, and a grinding season that had lasted four months instead of three. A barn full of sugar, yet still we planted.
The weather was cold now. The ground wet and freezing against my fingers. As I walked back to my cabin with the others at the end of the day I glanced at the big house. It seemed more closed off to me than ever before, its shutters drawn tight. Inside somewhere was Chloe. I wondered if she could see me, if she could pick me out in this surge of slaves as we filed in from the fields. I wondered if she even looked.
Another month passed. I planted the cane. I helped repair the levee. I leveled and filled the wagon ruts in the roads. I tended the stock and planted sweet potato slips. I did everything but enter the swamps and cut wood again.
Toward the first of April the weather warmed and the rains began, and on the other side of the levee I could hear the roar of the river. Out in the fields the mud sucked at our feet with each step, as though the earth wished to haul us down into hell itself, not knowing we were already there. My shoes became wrapped in mud, until my feet felt like clubs on which I must somehow stay balanced and walk. Each night, I sat outside on the stoop of our cabin, shoulder to shoulder with Henry and Sup, each of us with a stick in our hands scraping the caked mud away.
The cane plants did not seem to mind the rain. The fields were designed so that any excess water was channeled off to drain into the swamps, but the swamps were now creeping higher and higher. So much so that one day, I was put on a gang to raise the smaller levee that bordered them. Another day I was ordered to walk that levee and check for cracks, and as I did so I looked fearfully into the dark waters, remembering the summer I had cut wood and the snakes that swam with their bodies riding high. Chloe and I would have to enter those swamps in order to get away, and I wondered if the spits of land it was rumored runaway slaves lived on were still dry.
I reported to Holmes that I had found nothing along the swamp levee to cause concern, and he sent me back into the field to plant more cane. At midmorning I noticed as I worked, a large flock of vultures flying along the road that ran through the swamps behind Sweetmore. There were fifteen, maybe twenty, and they took turns dropping down from time to time and then suddenly flapping back up. I was not the only one who noticed this. In fact it was such an odd sight that we all stopped to look; we could not help it, Holmes and the driver included. “What the hell that?” Sup asked.
Soon we saw a colored man wearing clothes so torn and ragged that they waved in the breeze like banners billowing behind him. He pulled a narrow cart, struggling to haul it along the muddy road, and at the same time fighting the buzzards away by swinging a stick. The man turned up the lane into Sweetmore, and as he did so I caught the scent of rotted flesh in the air.
“This don’t look good,” Holmes said.
“Don’t smell good neither,” someone said.
“Y’all get back to work,” Holmes ordered, but we didn’t. Not one of us moved. We stood in the mud and watched as Holmes rode out to meet the man, who had stopped his cart beneath a live oak tree, the buzzards settling into the branches with the heavy beating of their black wings. I could now see a pair of puffy, black feet sticking out the back of the cart. A buzzard dared to drop on one and the man swatted at it with his stick and the bird flew into the tree and preened its wings.
“That Peter,” Sup said. “Massuh Gerald’s nigger he took to war.”
“Then I reckon that be Massuh Gerald in the cart,” someone said.
“That a nigger in the cart,” another person argued.
“That Massuh Gerald,” Harriet answered. “He dead. He been dead so long his skin done turned black.” I looked over to see Harriet nodding to herself.
Holmes held a handkerchief to his nose as he spoke to Peter, then he wheeled his horse around and rode off in the direction of the big house, leaving Peter to beat away the buzzards as they took turns landing on the body in the cart.
“This gonna be the thing kill Ol’ Miss,” Harriet said.
“Sho is,” someone else agreed. “She love that boy mo’ than she love life itself.”
Chloe’s voice suddenly came to me.
He tell me she gonna die soon, and we be alone together all the time. Like what we doin’ somethin’ we both want. He say after she dead, I sleep in her bed. He come visit me there. No one need to know.
“Can’t be him,” I said quickly. “Must be some other nigger. Some other corpse.”
I felt Sup looking at me. “What some nigger gonna bring his dead massuh here fo’ it ain’t Wilson?”
I shrugged.
“Besides, what it matter to you who it is? You ain’t never even met Young Massuh.” I shrugged again, but I could feel Sup’s eyes boring into me.
All this conversation caused the driver to come out of his stupor and tell us to get back to work, but his words had no bite in them, and we still stood there watching as Master Wilson came running from the big house to meet Peter and his cart. Wilson fell onto the grass at Peter’s feet and began sobbing and then vomited. I watched his back arch as he retched again and again, his hands pressed into the wet earth, mud getting on the knees of his britches, Peter standing above him swinging his stick at every buzzard that dared to drop onto his master’s body.
Holmes came riding back to the field. One man in our crew was told to stop work and go build a casket. “Measure him first,” Holmes said ominously. “Don’t get one out of the barn. You, go dig a grave,” Holmes said to another man, “and you.” He pointed to someone else. “Ride down to Ashleaf and find an overseer. Tell him Mrs. Wilson’s a widow now.” He reached into his pocket for a scrap of paper, scribbled a pass and handed it to the man. “All the rest of you, get back to work.”
And so we began to work again, digging furrows and dropping the cane sticks into the ground, scraping the dirt over them, planting Master Wilson’s fortune to the background of his sobs and retching.
Gerald Wilson’s body was too far decayed for anything but immediate burial. My heart soared at the thought, for even though I worried that the death of Gerald Wilson might have an adverse effect on the health of Missus Lila, I was certain that I would finally see Chloe, for surely she would be required to attend the funeral. It had been eight months since I had last seen her, eight months since our tryst in the barn that had earn
ed me my whipping, but today a grave was being dug, a casket built, a widow told that she was a widow, and a sort of giddiness overtook my mood as I planted cane and waited for the bell to ring that would signal us to stop work and pay our respects to the deceased.
Gerald Wilson was buried after our dinner break in the Wilson family cemetery, a small plot of land surrounded by a wrought iron fence, with a live oak tree spreading its moss-draped branches for shade.
The field hands gathered in a loose semicircle, outside the fence, our feet still clubbed with mud, while the house slaves and the family and Peter, still in his ragged clothes, stood inside the fence. Even the buzzards came to say their goodbyes, hulking in the branches of the oak tree, disbelieving, I thought, that such a fine meal was taken away from them.
Chloe was there, as I had hoped she would be. She stood on one side of Missus Lila, holding her teetering charge by the elbow, while Master Wilson stood on the other, no longer crying, but grave faced and red eyed. Missus Lila was, of course, sobbing, as was her daughter-in-law. The stench of rotted flesh seeped from the casket and the preacher delivered the ceremony holding, at times, a handkerchief to his face. He said a few words and read a passage from the Bible. “Let us pray,” the preacher said, and everyone lowered their heads and closed their eyes.
Everyone except Chloe and me. We stood looking at each other over the bowed heads of our fellow slaves. I wanted to go to her, to take her hand, to hold her. I wanted to stroke the strands of hair from her face, to touch her cheeks and kiss her eyes.
Chloe smiled at me, but the smile itself was no smile at all, so wrought with sadness it was, so filled, I thought, with resignation that I could barely bring my own lips up into an answering smile. In delivering his prayer the preacher held the handkerchief to his nose and rushed his muffled words, but Master Wilson was so entangled in his own grief and shock that, for once, he paid no attention to Chloe or me. We stared over the heads of everyone, into each other’s eyes. We knew we had little time before the prayer ended, and we each tried to glean what we could from the other’s face.
And then one of the vultures swept down off its perch and landed on the casket and began strutting back and forth and pecking at the wood. Chloe raised her one free hand up to her mouth and I could see the laughter in her eyes. I smiled at her now, our separation having been narrowed by the sharing of this sight of the vulture strutting along Gerald Wilson’s casket. I even dared to mimic the bird, cocking my neck out and pretending to peck, but by the time the preacher was closing his prayer, our heads were bowed with all the rest, our smiles erased once more into the unreadable faces of slaves.
TWO DAYS after Gerald Wilson’s funeral I hobbled my mud-caked feet in line toward Peach’s cart. As she dished my food onto my plate, she raised her solemn face and stared directly into my eyes, as she had not done for months. Peach then lifted her spoon and gave it a few swats in the air, indicating that I should move on and let the next man up for his grub. As I ate I watched her closely. She did her work as usual. Serving, clearing, taking the tin plates from those who had finished eating and giving those plates a quick slosh in the pail of water that sat at the rear of the cart. I felt sure that Peach had a message for me from Chloe, and I made certain to linger over my food that I might be the last to return my plate to her.
Peach turned to the side as I approached, keeping her face away from Holmes while busying herself with running the spoon along the inside of the kettle. “Sugarhouse, Sunday mornin’,” she whispered, and then my plate was in her hands and plunged into the pail of water, and I was hurrying along to pick up my bag of cane sticks.
All the rest of that day I had to concentrate at keeping a smile from forming on my face, at hiding any hints of joy from Holmes, and even from my fellow slaves, for I did not wish that anyone would notice a difference in my demeanor. Yet I wonder now how they could have not noticed, for I was so feverish at the thought of seeing Chloe again that I fairly planted up a storm that day. First up one row and then down another, I barely felt the cane sticks in my hand, I barely felt the sun on the back of my neck, I barely felt the mosquitoes, freshly emerged in the warm weather, biting at my bare skin. It was Wednesday when I received this message through Peach. I had three days to wait, but those three days felt like an eternity.
I counted them as they went by. I had never before welcomed the sound of the bell that woke us up in the mornings, but now I did. One more day begun, and then gone by, before I could see Chloe again.
At last it was Sunday and the day woke up cloudy, the sun barely reaching the earth to warm it, and certainly not reaching through the walls of the sugarhouse. About the time that Master Wilson and Missus Lila would be going to church, I eased the door open and stepped inside to the cool dank air. I searched the darkness looking for her shape, the light color of her dress against the gloom, but she was not there yet.
I sat on the brick ledge and waited. It was some time before I heard the door creak open and saw a little light let in, briefly framing Chloe’s silhouette before the door closed behind her. I stood up from my perch. “I’m here,” I said, and then she was in my arms, her skin against my skin, my face nuzzled into her neck, our lips meeting at last. Tears stung at the rims of my eyes, and then, no longer able to contain them, they spilled down my cheeks and wetted the collar of her dress. Chloe pulled back from me and tenderly wiped them away with her sleeve. “Oh, Persy. I so sorry what they done to you.”
I could not think what she was talking about. The most that I had suffered had been her absence, but then I remembered the whipping and Master Wilson’s beating the last time we had met. I shook my head. “That’s over,” I said.
“I heard it,” she said. “I heard it from his room.”
She did not need to say more. Those words, that phrase, “from his room,” told me how Master Wilson had spent his time while the whip whistled through the air and landed on my back. Chloe had lay beneath him while he grunted and fucked and she listened to the moans of the slaves as they witnessed my punishment, to every smack of the whip as it landed on my skin, to my own cries for mercy. I shook the image away.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “The cotton root bark, I heard about that.”
She lowered her eyes. “I all right,” she said. And then she raised her eyes and looked into mine.
“Will you still leave with me?” I asked.
“I still wants to go. We gots to go quick. Ol’ Miss not even goin’ to church today. She gettin’ worse, Persy. Peach watchin’ her now.”
“When can you get away?”
“Next Sat’day night. Katy say Massuh goin’ out that night. Playin’ poker at Lidgewood. Take his mind off Massuh Gerald dyin’, Katy say.”
“Meet me here. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Chloe slyly looked at me. “You got a plan now, Persy?” she asked.
“I plan to take care of you,” I answered. “I plan to never let anything bad happen to you again. That’s the only plan I’ve got.”
“That be good enough fo’ me.” Chloe lifted her sleeve and dried my face once more. “I sorry it been so long. I ain’t able to get away from him after we get caught. He watchin’ me night and day. It only since Massuh Gerald die he let up some.”
“I missed you,” I said. “I was afraid . . . I was afraid you didn’t love me anymore.”
“Naw, Persy. I love you.”
Chloe took me by the arm and led me to a darkened corner behind one of the kettles and there she placed my hands on the bodice of her dress and closed my fingers upon the top button. I undid that button. And I undid the next and the next, taking my time, letting her dress fall open slowly. And when I was done I held my hands against her breasts and kissed her there, but she pushed my head away, and reached for my shirt. She unhitched each of its buttons, letting the cool air fall across my skin as slowly as I had let it fall across hers. The shirt at last fell fully open and Chloe put her hands on my chest and then moved them gently to my back.
I felt her fingers softly tracking the scars that had been left by the lash, and then she slipped my shirt off and turned me around and traced each path of that awful violation with the tip of her tongue.
We parted with vows to meet the next Saturday in the sugarhouse. “Tie your clothes into a bundle to carry with you,” I said. “Steal some food if you can. Don’t bring anything extra, nothing that will weigh us down.”
“I ain’t own nothin’ to weigh us down, Persy. Jest myself.” Then she laughed. “Don’t even own myself, I reckon.”
“You will,” I told her. “I promise that you will.”
I kissed her again and nuzzled my face into her neck once more before letting her slip out the door and into that cloudy Sabbath day.
On Monday I was put with the hoe gang out in the sweet potato field. On Tuesday I was in the cane fields again. On Wednesday I began to worry about the high water in the swamps. I could not swim, nor did I think that Chloe could swim, but I pushed this thought down into the fathoms of my mind. I told myself that I would not worry. I told myself that I would not be stopped by unpredictable concerns. I would not feel this paralyzing fear any longer. We must escape and we must do it Saturday night while Master Wilson played poker at Lidgewood. Thursday I was put on a gang to repair the levee. The river had not risen as the swamps had, but even so I stood on the levee’s crest and gazed at that rush of brown water. A whole tree floated slowly by, and then a dead cow, its feet stuck straight up in the air.
“Spread out in twos,” our driver said, and the slaves made themselves into pairs and skittered down the levee toward the river, each pair moving upstream or downstream searching for crevasses.
I paired with Henry, and soon enough we found what we were looking for. We began digging our shovels into the ground and moving the dirt into the cracked levee, tamping it down with our feet to seal it up.
“What’s on the other side?” I asked Henry as we worked.
“Other side of the river? Mo’ of the same. White folk, planters, cane, cotton. Nothin’ good on either side of this damn river, and nothin’ in between but water.”
The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 9