In a Sweet Magnolia Time

by Wintner, Robert;

  The soldiers recalled the fried mullet, shrimp and grits, cornbread and molasses of the last plantation up the coast, but Auntie Riah was gone. So Julya brewed more tea and told a sergeant that if a pig was caught, she’d cook it. The Yanks were city boys or dumb, chasing the pigs till all parties grunted, and the pigs scattered in the copse. Near dusk she remembered the old boar behind the curing shed. He’d do; the tumor on his neck could be cut out easy enough, and though bad legs had left him lying in the wallow wet or dry for a year or two, he’d hardly need to stand up over the coals. Fatback was a fondling who loved melon rinds and fish heads and grunted for a scratch or some greens. But time had come; her mentors must be fed.

  Pleasantly facilitated by Isaac Mikell’s brandy, the federals slit and hung the venerable swine by the hind feet. A few black children came out laughing at the city boys with bayonets, ignorant of dressing a pig. The federals decapitated Fatback and hacked away till Julya stopped the carnage. Scolding and snatching a bayonet, she removed the nuts and returned the blade with the pork balls dangling. She knew what bohog trim could do for a man’s spirit, but alas, the soldiers laughed. So she cursed the fools for opening Fatback before dipping and scraping. Once dipped in the boiling cauldron, Fatback hung again. Julya scraped bristles and asked who else needed a shave. The Yankees laughed again, and so she glowed. Gutted and trimmed, the old boar got staked over the embers, and evening settled with soldiers by the fire watching. Julya tended the coals. At sunrise she poked the crust. The soldiers and freedmen who’d finished Isaac Mikell’s brandy stirred and rose to the scent of seared hide. By noon Fatback’s revenge was secure, his sinewy flesh tough and sour as shoe leather. So the federals left Edisto to the pace of yesterday. Amazed and landed, the new gentry moved to the big house to begin life in earnest. The French collection was adorned, but the dresses constrained and affected the normal stroll to the creek, where the former slaves sat on the bank as paler ladies did that very moment by the Seine, albeit with less mud.

  Daily life became a mission of gathering food and, with winter, staying warm. Mahogany and rosewood burned well through December. Hand hewn and hand crushed, it blazed, celebrating the liberation. That old furniture was too bulky anyway with so many folks residing in the big house, and it burned like a gift from the forbears. By January, unfurnished, the new residents had to haul dead wood in from the yard and chop it. Still, bitter cold seeped through nooks and broken windows that were covered with journals that had warned the master on the hazards of seminal pressure; tawny hands now tacked those pages over drafty openings till the house matched its tenants, who moved through the dark like shades, though this afterlife was hungry and needful as that of the former flesh.

  Net weaving remained with admirable skill in some. Gleaned cotton got spun, and lead weights were forged from pewter mugs. Some weights showed a sword hilt or a horse’s head or a man’s nose or a ship’s bow, now ready to sail gracefully again, this time to settle in the mud around a few shrimp or mullet or crab. When the shrimp ran, a man could net a hundred pounds in an afternoon. Then all gathered at the cauldron.

  When the planting families came home to Edisto in ’65, squalor was in the air. The kitchen was closed as a cesspit is closed once full. The new gentry hadn’t needed a kitchen anyway; cooking was such a fuss, and anyone could do without. So don’t complain of the stench since it was the formers who accounted for slavery in the first place. The new gentry solved hunger more efficiently, eating at the point of acquisition, felling palmetto trees for the bittersweet cabbage at the top. Downed trees lay strewn across the greensward thick as dead soldiers. Palmetto cabbage staved starvation till the tide ebbed for a shuck in the mud. The cloakroom was next closed, then the upstairs.

  The worst of the filth showed up as smallpox on all who had stayed, so all were banished on the day the Mikells returned; banished from Point St. Pierre and Edisto Island, forbidden ever to return on pain of death. The Mikells sat among their mildewed columns and debris on the chipped steps. The women cried; if good help were hard to find before the Great Pandemonium, it’d be impossible after. The men spoke on the portico of the diligence required for restoration and drank nothing.

  The banished Negroes shuffled aimlessly till Isaac Mikell’s son, the unblemished, half-brother, cousin, uncle to the poxed minions of presumptive Mikells, called them down to the crib by the creek. Townsend Mikell told them to leave Edisto as they’d come, not as Mikells. Most Negroes who left with the family in ’61 and returned to the old order in ’65 would be allowed the name Mikell and a wage, factoring expenses of course, because no man nor woman gets free room and board no more no how. Stipends would be minimal, but times were tough.

  But with the tawdry yellows of Point St. Pierre, it simply could not be. Defeat was one thing, but releasing such a sordid tide upon humanity as Mikells would be worse. Yes, they would need a name and could call themselves Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln or Green. But they pressed Townsend to grant a name, to make it official, since Townsend after all was white.

  Townsend Mikell said, “Cohen.”

  “Who?”

  Townsend said it was all fixed with the man in Charleston, and he wrote it on paper: C-o-h-e-n. The Cohens were cousins from Beaufort, or close as cousins anyway, who’d moved inland after the Great Misfortune. Townsend asked for objections and a few new Cohens glanced about to see if dem jections was a good thing or a bad thing. Townsend laughed; assuring their fortune was changing for the better. The Beaufort Cohens had allowed their own slaves the family name, so what harm? An infected band of Negroes set loose with Mikell on their lips could not be endured. Cohen, on the other hand, seemed convenient, acceptable and apropos. So Townsend Mikell walked over the bluff and back to the old home. The Cohens also turned from the creek and headed north, mumbling uncertainty or crying or simply falling into rhythm.

  Walking to Babylon, they stepped free of bondage and this place that was, as far as they could see, used up. Northward seemed the right direction. A few died soon. Some quickly culled themselves from the mortally infected and moved apart. Some spoke of Johns Island, two islands up the barrier chain. A factional group veered off for Yonges Island to the northwest. Those remaining went for Wadmalaw to the north, since convenience and hospitality still seemed joined at the hip. And it would be easy, hardly a week’s walk, if you don’t count the river.

  Two days tramped sadness and confusion into dust. Julya Cohen, née Mikell, had no doubt and felt the peace of movement. Too many dead babies proved the damnation of Point St. Pierre. At the south bank of the Edisto River, only the pox remained in dark splotches. Festering up and down her arms and across her chest, it eased out, leaving scars and change. She stared across the water without pride or hope. Time had come and gone with nothing for it but the river, the river, the river yet to cross.

  Strewn along the south bank, the refugees scanned. A current closely watched moved more swiftly than the distant surface had seemed. The tide was high, so they waited for ebb. But ebb revealed a hundred yards of mud between the migrants and the water. It oozed knee deep and deeper. They forged west, up to a narrow bend and rounded that to thicket. They forged back to wait for the flood. Little waves lapped beyond the mud over an oyster bar and gained momentum to high water. Holding hands, they stepped into the flood, the mud and current. A voice rose, Walk me wid dem Jedus, you gawt a walk me … Some sank in the mud. Some plucked free by buoyancy. Some moved through the water more readily than others. The voice failed when the soloist sank, pulling two more links of the chain down with him. Grasps tightened to the end of the line, and the soloist emerged as another voice rose, Yeah walk me … but the chorus couldn’t follow, because no seas cleaved for these wandering Cohens. It swallowed. Breaking up as the mud thinned below, the chain drifted apart. Some links disappeared, hands and feet flailing on the bully tide.

  Julya sank but then crawled in the direction she hoped was up. At the surface with a gasp, she saw near the middle that the river was a li
fetime wider than it seemed from the south bank. Choking and gasping all around her calmed as she alone pulled for the far shore, bobbing seaward till the water broke beside her with a great, toothy smile, a porpoise, not a shark, so not to worry, except for choking and sinking.

  Fifty years later an old woman would dream of crawling from the river on hands and knees. Up the north bank, cut and bleeding but still breathing, up to the scatter of half-drowned Cohens. A few more arrived within the hour thoroughly drowned. The rest were not seen again. A man staggered east. The rest followed, this time sinking only ankle deep, as if the promise was holding with sawgrass. So they slogged east as oysters hailed their passage, popping, squirting hallelujah!

  At Ledinwah Creek they sank again knee deep but pulled through and across, up and into the trees where night fell and they slept, up from the mud, too weary for weeping.

  IX

  Luzon

  Mud sucks feet like sugar tits with a squish and a gurgle. Jim Cohen trudged down the bank and dug a dozen clams to dice and cook in milk, pepper, butter and French’s Mustard and call it clam chowder for dinner. That left supper unaccounted, so we lifted his bateau by the sides and slid it in then climbed in. I sat between the oars till he ordered me forward; the bow seat was too small for him and would have nosed under anyway, and no waterman wants to sit in the wet, because it’ll raise boils on his ass. So I sat there.

  Never mind; I asked if the judge knew a mullet steak from a surf trout, the small dogfish shark abundant in the tidal creeks, also known as niggerfish along with toadfish, catfish and stingray, because white people don’t eat them. Did the judge know scallop from stingaree? Did Jim? He laughed, umphing us back till we floated. I suggested we try for spottail bass under the old creek house dock, but he spun us the other way and kept us shallow, out of the current. Upstream a ways we crossed. Then we drifted as he rigged a fresh shrimp on a hand line and jigged off the bottom. He gave me the line and steered us over some eddies where a fish took and tugged till my fingers stung then came up like a dead weight—juvenile hammerhead, two feet. She rolled over and cut the line with a grin. “Yeah,” Jim said, handing another hook as shells clawed our bottom.

  He pulled seaward near slack ebb out to where the Edisto joins the Ledinwah. Near the bank in slow water he reached back for a rag so I could wrap my hand in the wet, smelly thing before dropping the new bait over. In a hundred more yards we snagged the bottom but kept moving till I yelled for a knife, and the fish broke dove and hung tight. So we sat. Jim worked the oars easy, explaining, “Dem drum.”

  The fish towed us a stretch till I wrestled it in. Jim estimated forty pounds and chopped the tail off to show the squigglies in the meat, worms or veins. He didn’t give a shit; that fish was six bags of groceries, or eight. We drifted home while the black drum died, silver and black stripes all going gray. It was a day like the old man described, fishing in shallow water when a snake dropped from a bough overhead between himself and a young Jim Cohen at the oars. Jim grabbed the shotgun the judge carried fishing for sharks too big to manage and fired both barrels from the hip, shooting the snake in two and sinking the bateau. I asked how the judge took the sinking and nearly losing his nuts, and if a black man’s nuts turn to jelly at the sight of a snake, because he thinks every snake is a rattler.

  Jim Cohen went screw-faced as the old man, focusing on so far back. “Dey I be. Dat rattuh snek wid dem cawton in e mouf …” And so on, the thrashing fear of the snake’s head, fangs bared, till it drifted out and sank, tide turning, moon rising, and through it all Jim keeping the shotgun dry. I couldn’t call him a lying sonofabitch in his own boat, so I didn’t point out that a man treading water couldn’t keep a shotgun dry. He said, “Shi,…” and spat overboard. He said any man who thinks a snake isn’t a rattler is a fool or white one and waddled up the bank with the clams, the little waves washing his tracks away behind him. On firmer footing, he stopped to watch my struggle with a forty-pound fish and nothing for it but a bear hug in my last clean shirt. He pointed yonder and said: There. There the first Cohens crossed Ledinwah Creek; up under the trees is where they slept and right where the shells barely show over the first of the flood is where they went back to the river at dawn to eat.

  Back up at the house he quartered the clams and a few spuds and onions into a pot of milk with a stick of butter and peppered the mix like pepper was a vitamin supplement, recalling that one man forged the river with a hatchet in his belt, which he then used to knock the sharp edges off the oysters in the shallows so the others could pick, pry and eat, a tedious task but better than none. Reasonable people don’t eat summer oysters. So Jim walked to the door to spit past the front stoop for the foul taste endured. He asked, “Y’eat dem summa awshtuh?” I assured him I did not. He pressed on: You ever wonder what you might eat? He poured more milk and two cups of French’s Mustard. Then for the occasion laid on some fatback. Then he scaled the last six inches of that forty-pound fish, cut it off, filleted it from the backbone, cut it to one-inch cubes and tossed them in the pot. We simmered with another taste of sweet wine.

  Bellies full, they lay in the shade digesting hardship and miles till dusk cut the heat. The hatchet man climbed a palmetto, hacked out the cabbage inside, and dropped it to waiting hands, but it was eaten before he climbed down. So he climbed another and hacked and ate it in the tree, calling down to the others below, Eat dem awshtuh. So they did.

  Dawn cut the mosquitoes. Some shuffled down for oysters. Some ambled into the forest in a refugee tide that scattered along the north bank of the Edisto on the south side of Wadmalaw, then elbowed sideways like crabs claiming bottom. Their clearings sprouted lean-to shacks that would grow into four-wall shacks with roofs and sometimes floors. But time moved slow. Julya stayed with Nat the hatchet and his woman Bet, the last three of the original band to remain by the creek. Eating summer oysters and palmetto cabbage morning and evening, they agreed to set out again tomorrow to meet their fate. So again they slept under till a squall woke Julya. She huddled into a live oak crook till morning, hoping Mist Cotton Mouf won’ be feelin’ honry in dem rain. She couldn’t sleep but woke at first light, wet and alone. So she sat and waited, waking the fifth morning unmoved. Hunger drew her in the sixth day, not knowing what to eat, heading north, or east before turning back south, her path springing up behind her.

  Tired and bruised, she lay down at dusk, hungry and forlorn but soon sleeping deep. She woke in pitch dark, the forest slinking and buzzing till dawn, when the morning birds called the all clear. In the shallow mist she wondered how far to oysters and which way. Then she walked southeast. A yearling pine in her path, dead and brittle could easily be stepped on, but she stopped on a whimper, wide-eyed at the creature moving toward her. Big and fearless it grumbled, “Hareehaa!”

  She jumped back, and the creature spoke, Wha fo you tek dem yiddah tree’n stompum down? Dis heah blong Luzon! Who you be? Thick as an oak but smooth as a snake with muscles like a panther, it shook its head, raised a fist and claimed dominion over the weaker forms. She turned away but a black hand turned her back as a calmer voice grumbled, Wha fo you mek fuh leave? It jumped around her. Wha fo you go? Whea be’s fuh you? Wha you gwine eat? Wha fo you go?

  Julya peered into the thicket. He laughed, Ha! He curled an arm around her shoulder, squeezed too hard and asked again, Wha fo you go? Squeezing again, he led her to a clearing with a shelter in the center and in. Two rudimentary walls of palmetto fronds bound with vines to a live oak were roofed with fronds too. Over a mound of dead coals sat a black skillet and beside that were a dozen tins with no labels and many spices spilled from their linen to mix in the bottom of the box. She stooped in and looked out. Two walls and a roof and a man with a knife now stabbing a tin—beans—made sense, even if he wasn’t light skinned. He laughed, adding beans to the pot licker. She lifted the spice box and smelled gentler time, well fed and happy in the big house kitchen. She sniffed, nearly tearful. Luzon saw joyful acceptance and pounced again, this ti
me with a silk pouch of life everlasting. Mud crumbled as if by exhortation for the next forty years. In exchange for a home, she gave Luzon a name. He neither wanted nor needed one, especially not the Allston one, but after saying Cohen aloud for a week, he would not leave the shelter without it.

  Luzon Cohen was blue black, and so was able to leave the Allston’s home at Rockville, the summer village on Bohicket Creek. Known there as the most shiftless nigger a family could ever buy into, he could bare his teeth to prove undiluted lineage from Africa, the only source of blue gum Negroes. On a few nights between the wane and the wax he joined the darkness and became free. Near the end of The Great Calamity, the Allstons stopped using the Rockville house as they had before the war. Leisure time was less available in a great, civil conflagration with decent help so hard to find. Luzon couldn’t see much point in staying, when he could starve to death well enough on his own. So he crawled under the portico one day with his box of tins and spices and waited for dark. The creek flowed green to silver. The sun dipped in, sizzled pink and set. The flow went silver to gray and then black and so did the night. Sitting cross-legged, naked, palms down, mouth shut with the box sat behind him, sheltered from stray light, nothing remained but his eyes, which he closed. He’d not hoed nor repaired the rotten risers on the back porch nor gathered no vegetables nor chopped wood. The porches remained unswept and the yard cluttered with windfall.