by John Jakes
“Not by choice, by God. I don’t want them, General Sherman doesn’t want them—they impede our progress and interrupt important work with their incessant pleading for food and shelter.” Stephen wrote rapidly. The comments wouldn’t be well received at the editorial desk of the New York Eye.
Davis thumped the field desk. “I didn’t come down here to free slaves. I didn’t come down here to be Moses. I came down here to help Bill Sherman whip Georgia to its knees.”
Stephen countered with a provocative question politely stated: “Involving able-bodied colored men in that cause isn’t acceptable?”
“It may be acceptable to that four-eyed little frog Stanton, but not here. The general considers nigras useful only as teamsters and pioneers”—Stephen had seen pioneer companies felling trees and corduroying roads in fair and foul weather—“I concur.”
“What about the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, may I ask? They performed gallantly at the siege of Battery Wagner outside Charleston.”
“A fluke.” Davis closed the subject with a dismissive wave.
Antagonized, Stephen was snappish: “Perhaps I should just confirm that the commanding general agrees with you.”
Davis regarded him with cold eyes. “Why, do that if it pleasures you, Captain. Bill Sherman doesn’t think niggers are any more fit to be front-line troops than I do. But ask him. Just don’t stand too close when you do—he’s likely to knock your head off. He tolerates you scribblers only because Washington insists. You and your crowd almost cost him his career.”
Stephen jumped up. “Sir, I didn’t have anything to do with those stories about the general’s mental state.”
Davis matched Stephen by standing behind the desk, knuckles white on a battle map. “This interview is over. Don’t bother sending me a copy of whatever you write—we don’t use paper at the sinks.”
Before Stephen could retort, the aide burst in. “General, sir—the guard caught three bucks trying to steal a horse.”
“At midnight? What the devil for?”
“One of them says there’s an old grandpa who can’t walk another mile tomorrow.”
“Then invite grandpa to sit by the side of the road and rot. We didn’t ask these people to tag after us.” Davis gave Stephen a look. “You see?”
“General, I would certainly like to talk with that Negro.”
“Permission denied. Hand me my saber.”
The aide jumped to fetch it from the general’s camp bed. Davis did up his four-button fatigue coat, cinched his sword belt, and hooked the scabbard over it. He marched out of the tent.
Stephen put his notepad in his pocket and left too. Subalterns peeked from their tents as the general strode by, cursing at peak volume. Stephen craved something to soothe his temper—a cigar, a drink. The latter was illegal—sutlers who sold whiskey lost their licenses—but it was not unheard of.
No sutler was awake to sell him anything, so he rolled up in his rubber blanket underneath a regimental wagon. Far off, contentious voices were raised. Someone yelped, fiercely hurt. Stephen reflected that colored people who thought Sherman’s army brought the jubilee were seriously mistaken. The darkies wanted to show their devotion to their liberators, but men like Davis gave them the back of the hand.
Stephen softly hummed “Beautiful Dreamer” to calm down. With his right hand he played chords on his leg and thus, after a while, lulled himself to sleep.
From the north came winter rains and bitter temperatures. From the Grove River road, during a lull between downpours, came two strange figures that alarmed Sara and Hattie until they turned into Legrand Parmenter and a much older companion, a neighborhood carpenter named Grandpa Stubbs.
Grandpa Stubbs’s white beard reached halfway to his waist. He protected himself with an old parasol more suited to sunny days. Sara had long ago assured Hattie that the gentleman, no more than forty, was indeed a grandfather because of an unwholesome tendency of certain county residents to marry too young.
“Look at Legrand.” Hattie wanted to giggle. “Did you ever see anything so silly?”
“I wouldn’t mock him. I expect I know why he’s dressed that way.”
Hattie realized it then too, and felt ashamed of her witless reaction. She pressed tight to her mother’s side as they stood in the open door, watching the two visitors trudge up the muddy track.
Legrand Parmenter was indeed a sight. His basic garment was a clawhammer coat the color of weathered copper, probably a hand-me-down from his older brother Sparks, who’d been born with a clubfoot. Over this, for warmth, he wore a faded blue wool dressing gown, cut in the double-breasted mode and minus all but one button. A ragman’s sale item, Hattie suspected.
Somewhere Legrand had acquired a soldier’s gray kepi, which he wore at a jaunty angle. Nothing else about him was jaunty. His nose dripped. His knuckles were several shades bluer than his outer coat. He carried a knapsack fashioned from a flour bag. Grandpa Stubbs was all in patched blacks and browns.
“Legrand, Grandpa,” Sara greeted them while shivering in the northern blast. Low clouds of dark gray sped across the pearl sky. “This is awful weather for a stroll.” As their soaked and muddied trousers testified.
“We’re militia,” Grandpa said in a belligerent way. “We’re bound for the front, yonder.” He waved at the west.
“The sector of General Ambrose Wright, on the left wing,” Legrand said. “General Hardee’s thrown a defense line from the Savannah to the Little Ogeechee, thirteen miles. They’ve recruited clerks and wounded war veterans—they’ve even got some Dutchmen who were captured and jailed in town.”
Grandpa Stubbs expressed his disdain by blowing his nose in a red bandanna. “Can’t speak a word of English, them boys.”
Sara stepped back. “Won’t you come in, warm yourselves?”
Legrand shook his head. “No, ma’am, haven’t time. Just came to pay our respects and say you’d better leave—Beauregard’s down from Charleston again, and the word is, no relief column’s coming. What we have is all we’ve got.”
“How close is that old Sherman?” Hattie asked Legrand.
“Nobody knows for certain. My family has rooms in the Pulaski House starting tomorrow. I wouldn’t stay out here alone, if you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Lester.”
“I don’t, Legrand, and I very much appreciate the thought.”
“All right, then.” Legrand scuffed a cracked boot. “You be well, Mrs. Lester. You too, Hattie. How’s Amelia?”
“Cranky as all get-out. There isn’t much to feed her except what’s left of the rice crop.”
“Rice for breakfast, rice for lunch, rice for supper—that’ll be our menu pretty soon,” Grandpa Stubbs predicted with grisly glee. “Ain’t no food nor nothing else getting through to Savannah. No Santy Claus this year.”
Hattie was bursting with a strange, unexpected loyalty to Legrand, admiration she couldn’t express for fear of blubbering. He allowed himself a soulful look at her; the intensity of it jolted Hattie. He tipped his kepi and said, “We’ll be off, Grandpa.”
“’Bout time. More blasted rain coming.”
And indeed, it began to pour before the two were halfway to the slave cabins and the Grove River road. Hattie wanted to run after Legrand, apologize for all the times she’d teased and scorned him as a mere boy. He was brave. He was a soldier.
She might never see him again.
The rain fell harder, almost hiding the rice barn.
Hattie heard Amelia snorting uncomfortably under the old canvas she had rigged to protect her pet. She and Sara retreated into the house; Sara closed the door, enfolding them in shadows. Hattie wondered, as she never had until this moment, about the worthiness of a war that stole away her best friend.
“Perhaps it’s time for us to accept Vee’s offer of shelter,” Sara said.
Zip shivered in the December dark. His teeth clicked. He lay curled on his side with no blanket, praying to last out the night.
No chan
ce of sleeping, the army was still passing by: hoofs banging and wheels creaking on the pontoon bridge, soldiers yelling to other soldiers—they had strange, hard accents, these sunburnt white men from the West. Torches and lanterns lit the trees and swamps on either side of the narrow road.
Closer, amid the human dross camped beside the road and ordered to stay out of the way of the ten-mile-long column and the foul-mouthed general who led it, there was other noise: snatches of hymns, sudden cries of “Amen” or “Save us, Jesus.” Zip’s companion, an old woman named Evangeline, muttered to herself. “Crossing tomorrow. Army be crossed—then I go over an’ find my freedom.”
As if it were some kind of trinket in a box, Zip thought sadly. A lot of the black people tagging after the army wanted to find their newly won freedom, but like Evangeline, they were unsure about its exact nature or whereabouts. Zip believed he was already free. His former owner, Mr. Cato Tightly of the Augusta Gin Company, a natural-born coward in Zip’s opinion, had packed up and boated away on the Augusta Canal, bound for sanctuary with relatives in Hardeeville, South Carolina. This allowed his slaves to run off and look out for themselves.
Zip was eighteen, dark brown, short—handsome in a dignified way. He had no other name so far as he knew; his parents had been sold off to a Texas cotton baron when he was six.
Zip was illiterate, but that didn’t greatly influence his ambition. He wanted to be an army pioneer, had wanted that ever since he ran away and found the great blue-clad army, five or six hundred of his own people wandering in its train. The foul-mouthed general permitted younger colored men to become wagon drivers, cooks, pioneers. Zip had watched pioneers clearing trees and corduroying roads so the great blue army snake could slither forward to gobble Savannah. Not only did the pioneers do important work, but if he was one of them, he’d also be among the first to see the ocean, whose immensity he could hardly imagine.
“Wheeler, Wheeler!” The cry went up from behind them, followed by shots.
Zip crouched with his arm around the old lady: “We be all right, keep our heads low. Those reb boys can’t do nothing but pick off a few.”
As if on cue, a shot hurled a burly teamster from a passing wagon. A young soldier climbed up to control the mules while a second one fired his shoulder weapon into the dark. Evangeline moaned. Similar expressions of terror rippled through the great mass of Negroes on the soggy slope beside the road.
“Drive ’em off, boys—they’s only five or six,” a soldier cried. Galloping horses retreated. Evangeline covered her face with gnarled hands.
She was the reason Zip wasn’t a pioneer yet. He’d accidentally fallen in with her when he came upon the aggregation of ragged Negroes following the army. On his first evening among them, he accepted some corn gruel from Evangeline, who took pity on him. Like Zip, she was alone; a childless widow, sixty if she was a day. Others told Zip that Evangeline was the kind of Negro the cursing general didn’t want following the army: He didn’t want women, children, old men. Didn’t want to feed them or even tolerate them. One colored boy had tried to steal a horse so an elderly man could ride. The general punished the boy personally one midnight, whipping his bare bottom with the flat of his saber until blood ran. Zip heard that the big general who commanded both wings of the army, familiarly called Uncle Billy, felt the same way, though perhaps he stopped short of cruelty.
The morning after Zip arrived, the march resumed and he discovered Evangeline’s true condition: feeble, thin as a stick. She walked with a hand-carved cane, and fell often. Zip helped her to walk, several hours that day, and every day thereafter, letting her lean on him while they pursued the column that advanced ten, twelve, sometimes fifteen miles before making camp, putting up tents, posting pickets, lighting cook fires. At night Zip wanted to entertain Evangeline with his mimicry, but she settled into exhausted sleep almost the minute they stopped. He soon realized he couldn’t be a pioneer while caring for the old woman, yet he couldn’t leave her. He was temporarily stuck.
Lanterns carried by medical corpsmen threw crazy tilting shadows over the road. The fallen teamster was hauled away to an ambulance. The night grew colder; more shots rang out distantly. The reb harriers on the flanks, Joe Wheeler’s cavalry, wouldn’t let the ten-mile army alone.
Zip passed the rest of the night in a frigid doze. In the morning he saw Ebenezer Creek, fast-flowing and dark. A railed pontoon bridge had been flung across it two days ago by the Union engineers, soldiers wearing fancy gold badges decorated with oars, an anchor, and a castle.
The army continued to pass over the creek as it had all night: infantry, wagons, cattle. Among the Negroes there was growing excitement. They would soon cross the pontoon bridge too, moving nearer to the ocean where Linkum’s ships waited for Savannah to fall.
A large family, a woman and five children, climbed up among the cattle lowing and butting each other on the bridge. A mounted officer caught them. “Fall back, fall back with the rest.” They did.
“Won’t be too long now,” Zip said to Evangeline. “’Bout the last of ’em comin’ up the road, looks like.” Ebenezer Creek unsettled him, though; it was wide, flowed fast, swollen by recent rains. Zip didn’t know how to swim. Mr. Cato Tightly had never provided instruction in anything except running the gin machinery, and when Zip ventured into the water on his own once, in the reeds along the canal, he immediately sank. He was strong, but he was clumsy in the water, not a natural swimmer.
Hundreds of Negroes lined the creek bank as the last of the rear guard marched over the bridge. Then a horrid thing happened. Engineers started pulling up the nearest railings and planks, then their supports, cross-pieces resting on one of many canvas boats. They ran the wooden sections forward to wagons on the far shore while other engineers jumped in the first pontoon boat, freed the anchor, and cast off. Someone cried, “We needs to cross over.”
“No, you can’t,” shouted an officer supervising the dismantling. “Orders of General Davis. Wheeler’s horsemen are behind us. We need the bridge later.”
Evangeline lunged away from Zip. “They ain’t going to let us go over.”
“Come back here,” Zip yelled, rather uselessly. Evangeline threw herself in the water and tried to fight the current by flailing about with her stick.
Zip’s large brown eyes brimmed with fright, but he didn’t hesitate. He jumped into Ebenezer Creek as others were doing. Screaming oaths or pleas, young and old leaped in the water, which was bitingly cold. Zip paddled as he’d seen dogs do, but his heavy factory-made shoes, left and right exactly the same, bought by Mr. Cato Tightly by the gross, slowed him down. He was nearly wild with fear, but he didn’t let that stop him.
Evangeline was three or four yards downstream, lashing and kicking like a mad cat but no match for the rushing creek. Zip sank, swallowed water, fought for the surface, spat out the water. He couldn’t see Evangeline. Dozens of black people kept jumping in Ebenezer Creek, only to sink and cry for help. A few of the Union engineers angrily pulled some of the blacks into their canvas boats, but the dismantling of the bridge never stopped.
Zip felt the tug and push of the swift current. An old man cursed him and kicked him hard underwater, then swam around him, able to handle the current despite his age. Zip spied Evangeline ten yards downstream, amid a half dozen children who swam like little fish while she continued to flail and gasp. Then she sank.
“Evangeline, I’m comin’,” he cried, but in truth he wasn’t making any progress, windmilling around in the water, sure that he was just a few breaths away from drowning. Evangeline’s bony brown hand was the last part of her visible above the surface. It released the hand-carved cane that sailed downstream like a fast boat; then she was altogether gone.
“Grab on here, nigger,” a rough voice said. Zip dashed water from his eyes, saw a young engineer in a canvas pontoon boat. He grasped the wood-reinforced gunwale and hung there, saved until the young engineer’s superior, older and wearing yellow chevrons, slammed his paddle on Zip
’s knuckles.
“Let him go—it’s just one more Gol-danged mouth to fill.” The noncom beat Zip’s hands with the paddle until Zip let go and sank. The canvas boat pulled away. In the breaking gray daylight, the whole creek was a scene of similar struggle and failure.
Zip surfaced, kicked, but he was heavy as stone. The current bore him toward the far bank, where a few of the stronger Negroes lay panting and retching. He sailed into a thicket of low-hanging branches. Wild hope surged; he grabbed branches with both hands. The branches broke.
He clawed the bank, fruitlessly digging mud that fell into the creek. He heard snorting horses, quarrelsome voices:
“You see what he is? He’s a coon.”
“Shut your clapper, Professor. I wasn’t brought up to let a man drown.”
The Yankee leaned down, extended his left arm. “Hey you, boy. Hold on here.”
Zip rolled his eyes and gargled incoherently.
“I said grab hold.”
The mounted man seized Zip’s wrist and almost yanked his arm off. Zip’s head lolled back and he glimpsed his benefactor: yellow hair hanging over his ears, a tall black hat decorated with purple and yellow posies.
Zip gradually rose from the water, his benefactor grunting, the horse pawing mud and whinnying. The stranger cursed. “I’m tryin’ to save your black hide, least you can do is help. Do you think I want to do this?”
The pale daylight faded, and Zip faded with it, clinging to the wet arm of the angry Samaritan.
The soldiers came early Saturday morning, ten of them, mostly youngsters. Only three wore uniforms, holes in the elbows, buttons missing. Sara and Hattie watched tensely as the corporal in charge sent the others to the dikes by twos and threes. They attacked the earthen berms with shovels, digging through to let the water pour in. Sara ran to the corporal.
“Stop. You’re destroying private property.”
The corporal, eighteen if that, snapped back at her. “Ma’am, we’re following General Hardee’s orders. Flood all the rice plantations so the only routes into town are the railroad causeways. Less to defend.”