by Sarah Bird
I saw I had to come up with another story to occupy his mind and was grasping for one good enough when he asked, “Your parents? How did they raise you so strong?”
Chapter 4
Oh, he loosed the floodgates on that one. I blew straight past shy as I pondered on how best to tell the wonderful tale of my daddy and my mama. Though my mother was a monstrous large woman, even taller than me and brick-built from the ground up, I didn’t want to reveal the manliness that we shared. Instead, I started off, “If you were American, you’d say my grandmother raised Mama hard and that Mama raised me hard. But that was the Africa way and I was Mama’s Africa child.”
The soldier sighed with satisfaction, signifying that that was the answer he wanted to hear. The one that fit with all the other answers he had stored up in his busy brain. After gathering up his strength, the soldier said something that had the shiver of prophecy about it. “That Africa raising will save you. It will make you strong enough for freedom. While others, the weak, will fall by the wayside.”
“Well,” I whispered. “I don’t know about all that.”
I was putting on, answering his truth with a lie, for he was right. Mama raised me knowing God-sure that we were better than the others. So I went on and admitted as much, saying, “Knowing we weren’t slaves, that we were better than the tore-down souls around us, did not make us popular, but Mama never gave a shovelful of fleas about being liked.”
He snorted the hint of a laugh then sucked in a quick breath that signified pain had stabbed him, and I rushed to chase that hurt away by telling him of the great pride of my life: my daddy.
“Now Daddy,” I said. “Daddy was the opposite of Mama in every way you can conjure up. He was a free man born in the free state of Ohio and educated at the Society of Free People of Colour for Promoting the Instruction and School Education of Children of African Descent. There he learned to read and write, speak like a city preacher, and earn his keep as a tailor of fine gentlemen’s clothing.”
I continued. Daddy was my brag story and it bubbled up out of me like a spring. As I knew it would, that earned the happy murmurs and the soldier’s breathing settled back down.
“Daddy made his living traveling about. He hired out to gentlemen wanted quality. Wanted a fine collar lined with horsehair canvas and lapels done with hand pad stitches so they’d lay down smooth. These were all things that Mr. Chastain Pennebaker over to Glen Eden plantation, a two-hundred-slave for-real plantation, craved. Mr. Pennebaker was a vain man always looking for ways to show he was a real planter and not just some no-ham-and-all-hominy, dog-dirt-poor dozen-slave farmer like Old Mister who never had any more idea how to turn black muscle and brown dirt into a decent tobacco crop than a kitten’d know how to gin a bale of cotton. And that’s why Mr. Pennebaker sent all the way up to Ohio for Daddy.”
The soldier gave a contented nod.
I went on, holding out the shiniest parts of me to him, those being the parts about Daddy. “Daddy could not only tailor to Mr. Pennebaker’s finicky standards, but he spoke American better than anyone else, black or white, in the tricounty area. Mr. Pennebaker liked his work so much, he issued him a pass to come and go as he pleased.”
I didn’t bother adding that Daddy crowed about how he was as slithery good as the serpent in the Garden of Eden at flattering white people and that he had buttered up vain Mr. Pennebaker until the planter took him on as a pet. Not only did Daddy get that pass, he also got away with all manner of offenses would of gotten any other black man flogged or lynched. But Mr. Pennebaker wouldn’t stand for any rough handling of his “little monkey.”
“It was that very pass,” I continued, “that allowed Daddy to attend a sociable over to Chalmers McWattie’s place. And that is where he met Mama. Daddy was the only man ever laid eyes on my mother smart enough to see right off that she was quality, sewed up with stitches so fine and strong they’d never show, never sag, and they’d never, ever give out. Daddy invited her to dance a Walk-Around-Joe with him and that was all it took.”
That appeared to bring a calming picture to the soldier’s mind and the pain stitching what I could see of his face unraveled a bit. So I left a few particulars out. Especially the one that had come to me courtesy of a big old lumbering clay-eater out of Cape Girardeau County, name of Handy. Handy had been at that sociable and ever after liked to do his own little reenactment of Mama and Daddy meeting. Though never in Mama’s presence for Handy used a small, spotted dog to stand in for Daddy. Bending over at the waist and holding the dog by its dainty paws, Handy would play Mama and lead that little dog about on its hind legs.
All this is by way of saying that Daddy was a man as compact as Mama was mountainous. Though Daddy might have been somewhat undersized in the torso and limbs, with stubby fingers on hands that stopped closer to his waist than to his crotch, my father had the head of a lion to accommodate his extra-large brain.
I skipped over the dog-dancing part and moved on to what I figured the soldier would enjoy more. “Like Mama,” I said, “Daddy carried a high opinion of himself and didn’t think it was worth being loved by a woman unless she put equal high stock on her own value. And there weren’t many like that among the other slaves as being someone’s property tends to have a deflating effect on the psyche,” I added, quoting Daddy.
“Amen,” the soldier croaked, too excited to let pain stop his words.
“Yes, Daddy saw right off that Mama was made of oak and iron-bound,” I said, not adding that, though there was close on two foot of difference in height between them, he knew they were made for each other.
Daddy might, indeed, have been a midget as the bullyboys and clabberheads claimed, but to me, he was a giant and, though he would vanish from our lives whenever work or the whites carried him away, he always came back to us.
“Daddy was genius smart,” I stated, seeing no reason to slice that fact any thinner. “He taught me about the Articles of the Constitution. About the eleven planets spinning around the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno. He read and reread to me the copies of The Colored American Deliverer published in New York City that he smuggled with him down South.”
“But you yourself don’t read?” The soldier’s hand went limp in mine. His disappointment surprised me. As if the most dangerous thing next to a gun a slave could be found with wasn’t a book.
He caught himself and said, “No, no, of course not. I just thought…”
What? That I measured up to you?
“Ciphering,” I said quick. “Daddy and I concentrated on ciphering since ten fingers and ten toes were a lot safer to own than books. Instant Daddy learned me my numbers, I could add, do takeaways, times, goes intos, all in my head. Numbers came to me natural as blinking.”
The soldier gave no answer except to make a low, growly sound for he had again, mercifully, taken leave of his senses. With my free hand, I wet a rag, flapped it about in the night breeze to cool it some, and daubed his throat where the blood flowed hottest.
All this talk about Daddy forced the memories I kept buried to rise from their graves and, once again, I was five and it was Christmas. We had our one full day of the year off and were waiting on Daddy to come visit. When he hadn’t shown by the time the sun went down, Mama went crazy for worry that the pattyrollers might of got him. Even before the Rebellion, those calamitous vigilantes were hoodooing around the woods checking passes. If they caught a person of color without one, the acts of wickedness they committed were beyond imagining.
I was ordering my own imagination not to creep one inch further when the soldier’s hand trembled in mine then went cold as death as he struggled to suck in air. A terrible rattle came from the back of his throat that meant the end was coming on fast unless I got him help. The sound unstrung me and my own breath came hard. Panic rising, I searched frantically about the wagon for something, anything, that might save him. I felt like I’d found a gold nugget in a river, but that a swif
t current was snatching it away and sending it, glinting with every hope I’d ever have, tumbling from my grasp.
And then my soldier went silent.
Chapter 5
I raised up to yell for the driver to stop. Before I could open my mouth, though, I saw that we were coming up on an aid station of some sort.
“Hang on,” I begged my soldier, hoping that some part of him could hear. “I can get you help now. You’ll be fine. Just fine.”
There, on the outskirts of camp, was a row of tents large enough to stand up in. Cedar boughs to keep out insects and clean the bad air decorated each one. The flaps in the front and sides were open. Wounded men were laid out on cots with the blanket pulled away from stubs of missing arms and legs that had been stitched up with wide tracks of black catgut like embroidery around a hem.
“Hospital tents,” I told him. “For soldiers. Real soldiers like you. We made it. Driver’s headed there right now. You’ll be resting on a cot before you know it.”
But when we reached the tall hospital tents, instead of stopping, the driver veered away like he hadn’t seen them at all and made for a desolate area back beyond camp. Though it was dangerous to speak out to a white man, I didn’t have a choice. I yelled out, “Sir! ’Scuse me, sir. Sir?”
For the first time, the driver looked over his shoulder at me. Most of his face was covered by an assortment of whiskers—mustaches, sideburns, and whatnot. Out of that foliage peered a pair of hard blue eyes shot with blood by short nights and long days of trail dust.
“Sir,” I said, turning all humble and meek, the way most men of any color preferred to be addressed, “aren’t the hospital tents back yonder?”
The driver curled his lip up to reveal a limited selection of stumpy brown teeth, let fly a thin stream of chaw juice and said, “Not for you Ethiopians they ain’t.” He tipped his head toward my soldier and added, “’Specially not dead ones.”
Without thinking, I scrambled to the foretop, jerked the reins from the driver’s hands, yanked hard to turn the wagon around, and was rewarded with a string of curses regarding my race and a righteous clout in the nose from a fist hardened by years of mule persuasion. Catching me off balance, the blow pitched me back into the bed and I only righted myself when the driver whoaed the mules and we stopped at a desolate place on the far edge of camp. A raggedy pack of contrabands, escaped slaves, and other hard-luck cases sprung forward.
“Got ’nother one for you, boys,” the driver informed the contrabands, cocking his head back toward the soldier. “Haul him to the boneyard. Throw that there other one in with him for all I care. I’da dumped him out myself except Sheridan wants him delivered to headquarters.”
The instant one of the men grabbed hold of my soldier, I screamed, “No!” with all the force of my voice, which was a mighty one when I chose it to be. With no more thought than I’d give to drawing a breath, I threw my body across the soldier and announced, “This man is alive! He needs doctoring! Water! Food! Medicine! He’ll be fine!”
The men cut glances back and forth until a snowy-topped gent with a few scraggly white hairs poking out of his chin like bean sprouts inquired gently, “You touched in the head, son?”
It was then that I saw that my soldier’s struggle for breath had ended. The half of his well-made face not covered by blood-blacked bandages was serene and at peace now that he’d stopped fighting the pain. He had been taken home. I lay across his chest, not letting the men take him, and said Iyaiya’s prayers asking that his ancestors would be waiting for him. I told him I was pleased to have made his acquaintance and then I kissed him good-bye.
That kiss unleashed a torrent of abuse and rough handling from the men, who cursed me as a sodomite as they drug the soldier from his bed of grain sacks. A dark stain of blood marked the spot where his head had been. My soldier hung between the men, limp as a gutted animal. His head, thrown back, neck to the sky, bounced with every step as they made their way to a great pit in the distance. At that pit, men with bandanas over their mouths and noses were shoveling lye powder on those who had already been laid to rest. I turned away, unable to bear any more.
“You got a name for that last one?” a thin private holding a tattered notebook and the stub of a pencil yelled up at the driver.
“Last what?”
“The soldier the graves men just took away?”
“Oh, the nigger,” the driver grunted. “Yeah, they gave me his paper when they loaded him up.” He pulled a document folded in eighths from his pocket and handed it down to the private. The private, a nearsighted boy with narrow shoulders, practically put his nose on the document as he copied my soldier’s name from the limp document to the list he held.
Looking up, he asked, “Where are his personal belongings?”
“Say what?” the driver asked.
“His effects? He was a soldier. I have to collect his personal effects.”
The driver’s face soured.
“What all he had on him,” the graves private explained. “Money. Bible. Penknife. Shaving glass. Last letter home. Such like. It’s regulations. Have to collect them. Store them in this here personal effects box.” The private held up a pretty pine box a bit bigger than a cigar box, and added, “We have to store a soldier’s effects for when his kin comes to claim his personal belongings.”
The driver shooed him away, saying, “You want to go paw through a dead nigger’s pockets, go on ahead,” then went to yelling at the mules, “Back! Back!” to get the wagon turned around.
As the driver backed up the mules, I called out to the private, “Sir! Sir!”
The boy glanced up at me.
“What was his name?” I asked.
The private stuck his nose back down on the list and, as we rolled on into camp, he hollered after us, “Swayne! His name was Private Wager Swayne!”
Chapter 6
A good deal of time passed, though I can’t say how long, for after my soldier died I stopped keeping track not only of time but most other concerns as well. Like living or dying. Losing my soldier made me fear that I would never see Mama or Clemmie again in this life. And, if what Old Miss used to tell me was true—that I was bound to burn forever in the next life for the willful ways she hadn’t been able to beat out of me in this one—I wouldn’t be spending eternity with them, either.
I had just about accepted that I’d end my days thumping about in the back of a wagon when I awoke one morning and saw that we had fetched up in a new world. Just ahead, a vast city of dingy white tents rose from the misty dawn, sagging swaybacked in the scant light.
A bugle was tootling as we approached the edge of all those tents strung along in rows look to have been laid out with a plumb line. White men commenced to spilling from the tents. Stretching, scratching their bellies and posteriors, pulling trousers over their drawers, shouldering on suspenders, hotfooting it to the woods to pee, hawking, spitting, and blowing out their noses on the ground.
It surprised me that Yanks woke up making the same disgusting noises and doing the same disgusting things as every other man I had ever known. Some of them bent over buckets and splashed water on their faces and the backs of their necks. A few waited in line for a turn in front of a shaving glass tacked up on a tree.
Farther on, we passed soldiers already turned out in uniform. Those blue suits must of had extra starch in them from the way the men snapped up tall and straight when they put them on and went to either saluting or being saluted at. Saluting. I liked this handsome way of greeting and showing respect. The sight was a fine one and made me ache for wishing I could of seen the dead soldier standing up straight and proud in his shiny-button uniform.
In the center of camp was a row of tents high enough to stand up in. Outside the middle one, several officers were gathered around a couple of upturned barrels, heads down, studying hard on a map spread out there. The wagon halted. The driver hopped off, marched right up to the cluster of bosses, saluted and announced, “Reporting as ordered, Ge
neral.”
The man in the center lifted his head and, sure enough, there was the General himself, burning hot holes into the driver for interrupting him.
“Sir,” the driver stuttered. “The, uh, contraband you wanted delivered? I got him here.” He shoved his thumb back at me.
Still puzzled and annoyed, Sheridan turned those devil-dark black eyes on me. I drew myself up and, without thinking, my hand snapped to my forehead hard as a cleaver hacking into a hambone, and I saluted the General.
Sheridan’s heavy, black eyebrows jumped like he couldn’t make out the sense of what I was doing. I might of been a dog with my paw tapping my forehead as far as he was concerned. His hard jaw set even harder. It was clear that the General had no more recollection of me than any of the other thousands of threadbare contrabands tramping the countryside.
Sheridan was about to turn his back and condemn me to join the ranks of those lost souls, unrooted from the past and given no future to aim for, when his overseer, Colonel Terrill, stepped forward. “Sir, this is the fine buck you liberated. You wanted him delivered here to serve as your cook’s helper and I took personal responsibility for that charge.”
The General gave Terrill a peeved look that went beyond what any soldier would of gotten for expecting to be thanked for following an order. It seemed that Sheridan genuinely detested Terrill and I wondered again why he kept the man around.
“Then take him to my ______ cook. Jay-sus, Terrill, what would I be wanting with that ______ while we’re discussing strategy?” Though technically fighting to free us, the General had a world of high-caliber insults to hurl upon members of my race.
“Begging your pardon, General, sir,” Terrill stammered. “It’s just that you did make a point of…” The colonel trailed off for his boss was paying him no more mind than a grub worm underfoot and had gone back to poking hard at the map, making swooping gestures with his hand, pointing at one officer then the next, all while questioning the legitimacy of each man’s birth and the virtue of his mother.