by Sarah Bird
“Solomon needs a helper?”
“Yessir. Cook’s helper, General. For the officers’ mess, sir.”
“What happened to…? You know.” The General circled his hand in the air, urging the name to come forth. “Fat wench. Front teeth knocked out. You know.”
“Betsy?” the colonel supplied. “Betsy died of the bloody flux.”
The General shook his head and sighed with annoyed regret. “It’s what I have always maintained, the Almighty did not fashion woman for the life of a warrior. All right, Terrill, requisition a cook’s helper. But I will have no more ______ females serving my staff, do you hear me?”
“Yessir, sir, General, sir. Couldn’t agree more, sir. No females, sir.”
“Don’t want to ______ see them. Won’t ______ have them dying around me. The rigors of battle require a man’s strong constitution. What is needed is a darkie buck. Stout, husky one with the constitution of a ______ mule.”
From atop his fine steed, Sheridan appraised us, his finger twitching back and forth as he passed over first one slumped specimen quivering before him then the next: Auntie Cherry, who was too blind and crippled up to do anything except stick a finger in a baby’s mouth when she cried from hunger. Hettie, who, though still strong and able, was eliminated since she was not only female, but also convinced that she was still back in Georgie eating crowder peas, the result of Old Mister laying into her with a singletree yoke several years back. Old Amos, though technically a man, still didn’t make the cut as his fingers were knotted up like a corkscrew willow to where he couldn’t hold a chopping knife right. Even Maynard, a near-grown man-boy, who believed he should have been made overseer instead of Mama, did not capture the General’s fancy.
Then Sheridan’s eye fastened on me for, as had become our habit since Old Mister’s blood went bad from the spider bite and Mama was made overseer, I was wearing britches and in no wise gave off the look of a female. I felt Mama stiffen at seeing me being included in all this mule talk and her fury jumped into me like a spark off a fuse.
Being treated like beasts at auction didn’t bother the rest of them. They were all slouched over and beat-down-looking, trying not to attract attention. They didn’t know whether these white Yankee men wanted to free us so they could roast us on spits like the preacher and our masters told us they planned on doing, or if liberation really was at hand. It hardly mattered, though, for we all knew that, one way or the other, long as whites were running the show, it’d be bad for us. So I couldn’t fault them for keeping their heads down and waiting for this latest misfortune to blow over.
But in the months Mama had been running the show, me and her had lost the habit of being sized up like broodmares and we both bristled. Iyaiya had drilled it into Mama never to show weakness before your enemy and Mama had passed that rule on to me. Since any and every white man, no matter what color uniform he wore, was Mama’s enemy, she drew herself up tall and proud and locked eyes with this general.
In the gaze that passed between them it was clear that Sheridan saw who was before him because puzzlement clouded his expression as two things he had never put together before collided in his head: warrior and woman. He shook his head and moved on to the last candidate, me.
“That one!” He pointed at me. “The tall one there! Splendid specimen.”
I brightened. It was hard to hate someone who called you “splendid.”
“He’ll do,” he pronounced. Then General Philip Sheridan spoke directly to me for the first time. “You there,” he said. “You won’t die on me, will you, boy?”
Whether I was about to be liberated or roasted up, I was hard set on the one thing I’d always cared most about: making Mama proud of me. As I gathered myself up, I thought about Daddy telling me how he’d made his way amongst a certain sort of white gentleman who enjoyed a bit of sass. I judged the General to be of that sort and shot back, “No, sir, I be singing at your funeral, sir. You can count on that.”
Everyone except my mother sucked in his breath and stepped away from me. Even Clemmie put some air between us. Sheridan’s dark eyes ceased reflecting the least little bit of light and narrowed down to draw a bead on me. If he could of shot bullets from those black eyes, I’d of come down in a pile right then and there. Yankee or Rebel, a white man was a white man, and I had taken a fatal step over the line. Slaves were lashed to death for imagined slights. Who knew what my bald-face sass would get me?
Old Miss’s face pruned up with the fear that the Yanks would take out my impudence on her and she went to babbling and wagging her finger at me. “That one. That one is incorrigible. Ever since the bucks were taken and her mother was made overseer after Mr. Johnson fell ill, she has run wild. Lord knows we tried to beat the devil out of her, but he would not come.”
“The devil, you say,” Sheridan repeated and I knew I was done for. With strong hands to do the job, Old Miss could now order the hide to be whipped off me.
Instead, Sheridan just studied me as he scrunched his face around so that the tips of his black mustache twitched to one side of his mouth then the other. At last, he let out a bark of a laugh and told the colonel beside him, “They told me at West Point that I had the devil in me, didn’t they, Terrill?”
Terrill mumbled some mealy-mouthed answer I couldn’t hear, but the way Sheridan’s question had caused the prissy colonel to tighten his lips told me that the West Point comment had been a pointed jab.
“Devil’s just another name for spirit. Lad’s got ______ spirit!” Then Sheridan mused, “His is a comical race of japes and buffoonery. Wouldn’t hurt to season Solomon with a wee bit of levity, now would it, Terrill?”
“Indeed not, sir!” the colonel agreed before the question was all the way out of Sheridan’s mouth. “Although, if I might add, sir. Your head cook did specifically request, if not a female, at least a house servant who knows a bit about cooking.”
Well, that was it for me. Any skink slithering past knew more about cooking than me. But instead of asking what I knew, the General bellowed, “This is the United States Army, Colonel Terrill! Not ______ Delmonico’s! Solomon will get the best of a bad ______ lot and make ______ do as we all make ______ do.” He wiggled around in the saddle, settling his rump in good and solid, as if the colonel’s comment had unseated him. Then he proclaimed my destiny. “It is decided then. You”—he pointed at me—“shall come with us and be my cook’s helper.”
Mama wailed, “No, massuh, please, not my child! My child is my heart, massuh. I gon die without my heart.”
I had not heard the word “massuh” slip from between my mother’s prideful lips since all the men had been carried off and Old Mister had made her overseer. She’d say “sir” and “mister,” “ma’am” and “miss,” but never “massuh” and would of switched me if I had ever uttered it. And she never spoke in such a pitiful, mush-mouthed way.
Her begging, though, had no effect on Sheridan who answered, “Then send him with your blessings, Mammy. Your blessings and prayers to our Lord Jesus and his Holy Mother that the Union Army shall smite the Rebels and you shall be the last mother whose son is ever taken from her.”
Mama’s protests that I wasn’t no mother’s son were lost in Sheridan booming out the order, “Colonel! Liberate the boy! He is now, officially, Union contraband!”
Terrill leaped forward, grabbed me roughly, and promised, “I shall personally ensure that he is delivered to headquarters, sir.” Then he shoved me in the direction of a bunch of soldiers, yet still I would not turn loose of Mama.
I was immediately swallowed up by a sea of blue coats. Hands popped out every sleeve and they all took to shoving me along, every soldier jockeying to see who could show off how tough he was by pushing me the hardest. They tried to yank me out of Mama’s arms, but she clung so tight my bones popped. And I was clinging right back for though it was my dream to answer the call of my blood and be a warrior as Iyaiya had been, I never figured Mama and Clemmie wouldn’t be fighting alongside me.
The white soldier boys hoisted me up into the air. The instant they ripped Mama’s hands from mine, my mother shed the first tears I had ever seen fall from her eyes. Seeing that Mama loved me in the regular, American way made love gush so hot and hard through me that I, too, might of cried had I not been within the General’s sight.
I reached out for Mama, but the soldiers pulled us apart and floated me over to Old Mister’s buckboard. The wagon bed was crammed full with three miserable baskets of sweet potatoes, a couple of hogsheads of parched corn, our last scrawny pullet, and a few other sundry items left after three years of foragers stripping us like a plague of locusts from Revelations.
When they let down the back gate, a bushel of sweet corn tumped over, and the ears went rolling everywhere. The soldiers mashed me in next to a hogshead of cured tobacco held back from last year for Old Miss’s personal use, and tried to slam the gate closed, but it banged hard against my knees. I had to tuck my long legs up until I was squatting like a bullfrog, knees beside my ears, before they could get the gate latched. Soldiers gathered up the runaway corn, threw it in, and seemed to be aiming specifically for me, since every ear knocked me in the head.
The buckboard bounced around when the driver, a tall white soldier with shoulders hunched up like a vulture, climbed onto the foretop and took the reins. He went to harring up the mules and the wagon creaked and started rolling away down the trail. As I was parted from them, Mama and Clemmie broke away from the soldiers. They had about reached me when a big iron X dropped down and stopped them in their tracks. Two soldiers marching behind the wagon had crossed the bayonets on their rifles and wouldn’t allow my sister and my mother to come any closer.
Mama yelled to me in Fon, a language that she had never before spoken when whites were around as she would have been flogged for doing so. “Remember who you are,” she said. “You are N’Nonmiton. You are the daughter of a daughter of a queen who was one of the six thousand virgin warrior-wives of King Ghezo, the greatest of the twelve kings of Dahomey!” The words rang with the strange music of the tongue we shared.
The sweat that glazed Mama’s dark skin shone in the firelight. She tugged down the neck of her bodice to expose the five neat rows of scars that glistened there like black pearls between her collarbone and her heart. Holding my gaze, she touched the scar beads.
In answer, I touched my own set of identical scars and cried out to her in the language of my cradle, “Ma’ami! Ma’ami!”
Clemmie bleated out my name, “Cathy! Cathy! Cathy!”
As they fell farther and farther behind, Mama reached her arms out to me. I tried to yank mine loose, but they were mashed in tight next to my knees. All I could set free was my voice, and I yelled, “I’ll come back, Ma’ami, I promise! I’ll come back for you and Clemmie!”
I finally managed to work my arms loose and hold them out, leaning so far over the gate that I touched the bayonets. When I hit iron, the soldier turned his weapon and poked at me like he was transporting a bear. He kept on poking until I squatted back down.
We rolled on and the dark night closed in around the wagon. I stared so hard that my eyeballs ached trying to hang on to the sight of my mother. But Mama shrunk away until the rock that had always anchored my world was whittled down to a frail silhouette swaying in front of the flames.
And Clemmie? I couldn’t see Clemmie anywhere. My sweet, sad little sister had vanished altogether.
Chapter 2
Though that buckboard wobbled and those iron wheels hit every rock and gulley along the trail, I hauled myself up and stood so I could watch until the fire wasn’t but a lonely ember far off in the dark. When even that was swallowed up by the night, the strength left my legs. I sunk back down onto the hard boards of the wagon, not caring that I was wedged in tight as a bullet in a chamber.
Much as it hurt to leave Mama, it was the pain of knowing I had abandoned Clemmie that stabbed the dagger in my heart. Though I had killed Old Mister, still worse might await her if Old Miss put her on the auction block. The most dangerous thing one of our girls could be was pale and pretty, and Clemmie, who favored our handsome daddy, where I took after our strapping mama, was both. Anger heated my tears as I thought about a hand touching her. One that I could not set a brown recluse spider upon.
With no one to hear me except a single lonely chicken, and the creaking of the wagon covering any sound I made, I carried on snorting out big, wet sobs that didn’t stop until I noticed flickers of torchlight off in the woods. The flickers traveled alongside us. Someone was out there in the woods tracking us. Tracking me.
Rebels had only two ways for any slave they caught with Yanks to go: back into slavery or up a tree at the end of a rope. Or worse if they had the time. Burning alive and skinning were two favored pastimes. In the whole, long war, Seceshes never took one black prisoner of war. It was slavery or death if they caught you.
The ones tracking me now, though, had to be pattyrollers. Bad as regular Rebs and bushwackers were, pattyrollers were the ticks on their bellies, for those night-riding fiends believed Jesus had appointed them personally to torture and terrify all blacks and to pay special attention to contrabands. Pattyrollers wouldn’t take the Yanks on straight. Didn’t dare fire on anyone with a gun who could fire back. Instead they’d creep around in the dark like they were doing now and shoot all the freed slaves they could pick off. Then disappear back into the shadows before the Yanks could come after them.
I felt them now. Out there. Watching. Waiting to get a clear shot as soon as the moonlight hit me right. Next, I heard them making the gargly sorts of moans night riders made to terrify us into a case of the screaming fantods. I ducked down far as I could, but the moans approached even closer. They had a horrible rusty sound to them like they were coming either from a man in a grave or a man meant to put me in one.
I was about to meet my maker, sent by an enemy I couldn’t see. My heart thumped hard on that fearful prospect and I prayed that Mama and Iyaiya were right and that Jesus had got it wrong. That it was okay for a captive, a warrior, to kill her enemies the way I had laid Old Mister out. My preference would be to hunt elephants with Iyaiya for all eternity rather than sizzle in the everlasting fires of the white preacher’s hell. Finally, I realized that the moans were coming from close by. Very close. In fact, they were coming from inside the wagon itself.
“Who’s there?” I felt around for a weapon. My fingers closed around the handle of one of the curved knives we used to chop tobacco, the ones that had left my hands filigreed with white scars. I held my breath, but the only sound was the creaking of the wagon and the clatter of the stolen freight, until from practically right beside me came a low groan, “Waaa-tuh.”
In the deep shadows cast by the woods we were driving through, I could barely make out what I realized with a start was the form of a man laying atop some sacks of grain not an arm’s length from me. His head lay toward the gate and a white bandage covered his eyes and a good part of his high forehead. The rest of him was lost in darkness.
He cried out for water again. Weaker this time. I could barely hear him as his calls were quickly lost in the rattle and jouncing of the wagon. I felt around. My hand fell on the round lumps of sweet taters in a tow sack. The pullet in a cage squawked when I felt of her. I pricked my finger on the tip of a tobacco knife. But I found no water.
The man stopped groaning, but his labored breath went on, itself a cry for help. I scrambled closer, feeling as I went. Finally my hand fell on the cool, moist curves of a keg. I unstoppered and smelled of it. Cider. I dipped the long tail of my shirt into the keg until the cloth was sopping. Then, more by feel than sight in the darkness, I found the man’s mouth and squeezed the cider in. He gulped it down. Though it gave me the creeping fantods to touch a white man, I wet and squeezed the shirttail a dozen more times before he heaved a great sigh of relief and whispered something I couldn’t make out.
I was close enough that the hard metal smell of blood along with sw
eat and gunpowder filled my nostrils. When the wagon pulled out from under the black shadows cast by the trees canopying the road, silver light fell on the man and I could make out his uniform. Union blue. At least he was a Yankee. There’d of been no more cider for a Reb.
The dim light of a clouded moon caught on the brass buttons running down the front of the soldier’s jacket. They shone with the care that the soldier had lavished on polishing them. On each button was a fierce eagle, a shield over its breast. In one claw the eagle gripped an olive branch. In the other he held a bundle of arrows. Those buttons, gleaming in the moonlight, were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
The soldier croaked out something I couldn’t hear and I leaned in closer. He whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”
Two Yankees in one day, two white men, one a general, now this regular soldier, had spoken to me.
I lifted my head to answer him at the same moment that the moon sailed out from beneath the clouds and shone down bright, revealing a sight that caused me to wonder if I had taken leave of my senses. For there, beneath the white of the bandage, I saw that the Yank’s face was near as dark as my own. I could not conjure how these two colors, the blue of his suit and the black of his face, could possibly go together.
“Are you still there?” The soldier’s whisper was hoarse and dry as sand. I watched his fine full lips form the question, the moon silver-plating the tip of his tongue when it peeped out on the word “there.” I had never stared hard at a man’s face before. Never had the least desire to do so. What I could see of this face, though, stopped me dead and left no choice but to study it. I tried to answer and was surprised to find that my own words had dried up in my throat.
“Hello?” His voice was husky, scratched raw by thirst and battle and pain.
“I’m here,” I whispered, barely recognizing my own voice for it had gone soft and gentle.