by Sarah Bird
He looked back.
“Name’s Cathy, sir. Not ‘contraband.’ Cathy Williams.”
He snorted, shook his head. “Cathy Williams, it’s a damn shame the Creator did not fashion you a man. If I had a hundred men brave as you, we’d have this ______ war won already.”
I wasn’t a man and I sure wasn’t brave, but he was still right.
Chapter 18
“Mopping up” is what they called the minor skirmishes we dealt with over the winter as the starved-out Rebels made their last, futile stands. It was one of the coldest winters in memory, and we stripped timber off every house and barn and chicken coop in five counties to build shacks with wood floors to keep us from freezing. We even put up tall windbreaks for the horses and mules to shelter behind when the wicked winds came screaming down off the Allegheny Mountains.
Near the end of winter, we rolled out again, following Sheridan’s advance deeper and deeper into the burned-out heart of Dixie. By early April, we were headed to a place Solomon said was called Apoplexy. It wasn’t the strangest town name I’d heard by a long shot, but it certainly held its place among the oddest.
The morning when we set out was chilly and damp. Solomon and I had a system where one drove and one slept. It was late in the day when Matildy and me snuggled up amongst the sacks of feed we toted for the mules. I never once rested on those sacks without recalling Wager Swayne laid out the same way. As usual, I dropped off to sleep with every word that had passed between me and my soldier singing in my head, a lullaby to replace Mama’s.
I was dead asleep when the bomb exploded. My eyes flew open and I beheld a night sky bursting with flames. Matildy dug her claws into me tight enough to hang on but not to really hurt. She cuddled up and made her whimpering noise that, over the past seven months, I’d come to know meant she was scared. I stroked her sleek little head and the whimpers turned to a low chittering. All up and down the line horses whinnied, mules brayed, and wagons clattered from being jostled by spooked animals.
“Lord, save us,” I said aloud, terrified of the Rebs’ mighty new weapon.
Solomon cackled and asked, “Don’t tell me you so country you never seen fireworks before?”
For the first time since I’d known him, the face that Solomon tipped up to a sky exploding with colors and light was filled with happiness.
“Somebody celebrating good news,” he announced. “My guess is word come down that ole Bobby E. Lee’s finally gonna roll over and play dead.”
He snapped the reins and we drove on to our destination, which I came to know was called “Appomattox.”
Chapter 19
We set up camp on a rise above the village whose full name was Appomattox Court House on the eighth day of April in 1865. No one slept much that night as the grapevine was singing too loud. By sunrise even the contrabands digging sinks knew that General Grant had decreed that Lee would surrender, not in the courthouse as you might have expected, but in a redbrick farmhouse outside of town. On April 9, around noon, right after Solomon got the new crew of contrabands he had working for him lined out, we skinned out to join those gathering within sight of the farmhouse.
The crowd grew larger as the morning wore on. Though I had long ago accepted in my mind that I would never see Mama or Clemmie again on this earth, my heart would not be convinced, and as I always did, I searched for their faces amidst the strangers gathered on that hillside. My eye went to the female faces. A mother standing next to her man, red headkerchief faded to pink covering her hair, long, dirty apron, bare-butted child on her hip, two others clinging to her rag of a skirt. A flock of hardtack girls squinting into the sun, bodices pulled up proper. A clutch of hard-worn laundresses. Even a few ancient grannies with cob pipes stuck into toothless mouths.
“History gonna be made right down there, baby sister,” Solomon kept announcing, pointing at the two-story, redbrick farmhouse with its wide white porch running the length of the first story and a balcony doing the same on the second. Our soldiers were posted on every step of the broad stairs leading up to the front door. Color guards lined up outside, their regimental banners flapping smartly in the breeze. Grooms stood at rigid attention, holding the reins of the horses belonging to generals who were already inside. Sheridan’s black gelding that he now called Winchester in honor of the horse’s epic ride was easy to pick out for he shone like wet tar in the sun.
Solomon and I exchanged approving nods, proud that our general had the finest mount. “What’s Grant ride?” Solomon asked.
“Chestnut sorrel,” a tall man with a face wide as a shovel said.
“General Grant knows his horseflesh. Cain’t no one say otherwise.”
I wanted to brag on my General’s horse who saved the whole Union Army at Cedar Creek and was such a hero he had already been immortalized in a poem that was famous far and wide. That poem and the heroic ride that inspired it was so popular it had changed folks’ mind up North about how Lincoln was conducting the war. Just as I was about to pipe up and tell how my General and his horse had gotten Mr. Lincoln reelected, a man near old as Methuselah ordered us to hush and added in a deep, rolling voice, “He’s here.”
We all fell silent then. We didn’t need to see Robert E. Lee in his spotless dress uniform, golden sash dancing at his waist, black boots freshly polished, prancing up on an iron-gray horse with a long black mane and tail to know who we had before us.
The ex-slaves next to me shuffled around, their gazes bending down to find their feet. And, even though I was high up on that hill, standing above the commander of all the ones who had fought and died for the privilege of owning me and my people, and I was free now as the birds flying over our heads, my stomach pitched. It was all I could do not to cast my eyes down as well. That’s how strong the feeling was that a master, any master, the master, had ridden in amongst us. For us Lee was every dashing Southern gentleman riding proud and tall on account of him believing he was a knight in shining armor in spite of the fact that he held a whip ready to lash anyone bold or foolish enough not to bow their head when he passed.
None of us exhaled until he dismounted, climbed the front stairs, and disappeared into the house. I imagined Robert E. Lee walking into the room where my General sat waiting. I imagined Sheridan letting his fearsome black-eyed gaze show Lee the terrible death that waited for him.
“You see Lee’s knees shakin’?” the shovel-headed fellow asked. “That man scared.”
“Should be,” Solomon said. “He know what they do with rebels.”
“Hang ’em,” several men chimed in.
“Ones who lose,” agreed Solomon. “Gonna do him like Washington did Benedict Arnold for he’s ten times the traitor Arnold ever was.”
Glee rose in me at the prospect of seeing the tips of those polished black boots pointing down when the leader of the Secesh Army hung from a tall cottonwood.
Solomon’s motion was seconded. “Traitor tried to break up the Union and he will swing for it. Him and all the leaders of the Rebellion.”
“Man’s gon come down them steps in chains,” came one prediction.
Chains. We all liked that idea.
“Might not come down at all,” someone else suggested. “Might burn the traitor down on the spot.”
“Shootin’s too good for him,” a man in a slouch hat disagreed. “Lynch him!”
“Like the Bible says,” the old man intoned, “‘Lord God of Hosts, do not show mercy to any wicked traitors.’”
“And Robert E. Lee is one wicked traitor,” Slouch Hat concluded. “He gon hang. All them gon hang.”
“Hang traitors and shoot deserters,” said a man with a battered campaign hat squashed down on his bushy head of hair. He wore a sack coat that bore dark rectangles on the shoulders where a captain’s straps had once been sewn. The insignia might have been gone, but this fellow still wore that rank in his words as he told us how it was gonna be.
“They’ll hang all the leaders of the rebellion who fought to destroy th
e United States of America, right down to the majors. Won’t be a telegram pole or sturdy oak won’t have a hung Reb dangling from it. And them flags they rallied behind? The Stars and Bars? Grant’ll make the biggest bonfire you ever seen out of them.” He nodded his head with such certainty, we all nodded along with him as he muttered, “Treason, uh-huh, no worse crime. Wouldn’t be surprised if, after they burn all the flags, and hang all the leaders, they make it a crime to even say the word ‘Confederacy.’”
We all amened that.
Half an hour later, a Union soldier with a wild, untended beard that had a stogie jammed into the middle of its whiskery mess, rode up at a full gallop on a chestnut sorrel.
“Unconditional Surrender Grant.” The old man pronounced Grant’s nickname like he was saying “Holy Lord Jesus Christ.”
If General Grant, savior of the Union, hadn’t had those three stars shining on the shoulders of the rumpled private’s blouse he wore, you’d of thought the man incapable of commanding his way out of a privy. Next to the pristine Lee, Grant in his borrowed, mud-splattered uniform looked like a mule skinner at the end of a five-day spree.
But when U. S. Grant dismounted and charged forward, his wide, flat-brimmed hat leading like he intended to knock the redbrick farmhouse down with his head, and then clomped up the stairs loud enough that even us way up on the rise could hear, it was clear as day that this soldier didn’t need a pressed uniform to command. He and Sheridan had a lot in common in that respect. Bulldogs, both of them.
As the hours passed the predictions about Lee’s death, and all the rest of his top men from Jubal Early to Braxton Bragg, turned so gruesome that, in the end, we had half the Rebel army greased up with pig lard and locked in a bear cage.
Given how greedy we were for the sight of the Confederacy shamed and brought low, it was a sore disappointment when, early in the afternoon, Lee strutted out every bit as dapper as when he’d pranced in. An orderly buckled his horse’s throatlatch and Lee reached up and drew the forelock out from under the brow band, then gently patted the gray’s forehead before mounting up.
To our utter stupefaction, when the leader of our enemies, the man most responsible for upward of half a million souls being ripped from this earth, rode away, General Grant saluted him. Our jaws unlatched and we gaped, listening in disappointed astonishment to the peaceable clop of hooves as Robert E. Lee was borne away, whole and unharmed.
I thought of Iyaiya’s stories. How, if a warrior got beat, she had to expect to be put in chains or have her head decorating the top of a gate. I was feeling cheated of the blood vengeance we’d fought for when Bible man boomed out, “‘He hath showed what is good. Showed y’all what the Lord require of thee. Got to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’ Mercy, y’all,” he repeated in case we’d missed his point. “Our General’s doing what Lord Jesus want him to.”
There were a few “amens,” which didn’t mean that if Lee hadn’t been chunked down to us from the top of a tower, most of us wouldn’t of taken a sharpened stick to that fine Southern gentleman.
Into the quiet moment of disappointment that followed someone whispered, “War’s over.” A few seconds later, volleys of celebration shots rang out until it sounded like a full-fledged assault was in progress. Instant the shooting started, though, Grant clomped down the stairs and marched into the sunny yard, head out, ready to butt through whatever brick wall he encountered.
Ulysses S. Grant held up his hand and the firing stopped. He unclamped his thin lips from the stogie he had wedged there and thundered in a voice harshened from a lot more than cigar smoke, “The war is over! The Rebels are our countrymen again, and the best sign of rejoicing after the victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field.”
For a long moment, the only sounds we heard after that was the nicker of the Union generals’ mounts, the clanking of bridles as they slung their heads about, and wind rummaging through the high boughs.
Finally, the Bible man asked, “Any y’all recollect that today is Palm Sunday?”
Chapter 20
After that, chain of command broke down fast among everyone except the army regulars, who were few and far between as most of the soldiers were civilians, farmers and shopkeepers, who couldn’t wait to leave. First to vamoose were the homesick boy drummers and buglers. Without them to sound out orders, the army’s clock was broken and all us as had been slaves made the acquaintance of a powerful force we had never known before: free time, our own to do with as we chose.
For the next couple of days, we scratched about like hens for any scrap of information that might come our way concerning the surrender agreement. In specific, what it said about us.
“Way I heard it,” a fellow with a pair of bushy muttonchops winging out either side of his head declared, “we all’s to be divvied up. Straight down the middle. Half go North to freedom. Half go South back to bondage.”
“You’s all kinda liar,” another disagreed. “Ain’t gonna be like that at all. They’s already built the boats gone carry us back to Africa.”
That caused a mighty stir with all gathered putting in their opinions on life in Africa as if we were standing on the dock at that moment. While we were arguing about whether we’d be greeted as long-lost relatives or chunked in a big pot and boiled for dinner, a piercing voice cut into our chin wag and demanded, “Would any of you care to know what the document in question actually says?”
Though the question wasn’t stated in a loud voice, the tone of it cut so clean through the hubbub that every single one of us fell so dead silent that I expected to turn and see a white man.
But the man, compact built and fine dressed, was as dark as me. He wore a mustache with waxed tips pointing directly east and west and a small afterthought of a beard on the chin. He had a kingly bearing about him that made you wonder, “Who is this fellow?”
A gold watch chain looped from one pocket of his waistcoat. From the other he plucked a pair of spectacles and, with more hemming and hawing than seemed entirely necessary, he curled the wire arms around his smallish ears. Next he produced a newspaper clipping that was limp as a rag from much handling. The crowd fell silent for many among us had never before seen a person of color who could read.
Mr. Spectacles waited until even the wind had stopped soughing in the high branches before he held the wilted article up with an outstretched arm and spoke in a piercing voice that drilled straight into your brain and etched the words directly there, “You have before you today a transcript of the Articles of Agreement Relating to the Surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia.”
Someone chimed in with a chorus of “uh-huhs,” “amens,” and “thas rights.” That someone might have been me for I was distracted by wondering if this small fellow, along with being able to read, might not also possess Daddy’s ability to discern a woman of quality. For though he couldn’t of held a candle to my soldier, and caused none of the firefly flutters he had, it was clear that, like myself, this fellow was a bend or two above the ordinary run.
The small ovals of glass in front of his eyes turned to silver as they caught the afternoon light while he read. Though he quickly lost most of us in a thicket of brigades, detachments, divisions, and corps, we listened as though hearing the word of God. He finished, dipped his head, peered over his glasses, saw our stupefied confusion, and summed it all up this way. “With God as their witness, those damn Rebs agree to lay down their weapons and never again take them up against the government of the United States.”
Oh, that brought on a hallelujah chorus to beat all.
He continued, “Grant’s going to give all the Johnny Rebs parole and let them return home. He won’t send a one of them to prison.”
Though we had seen it all our lives, we were still stunned by this fresh evidence of the murders, treason, and other unspeakable devilry a white man could get away with. No chorus filled the silence this time. There would be no justice. I knew that what Grant and Lincoln
and who all else had drawn those terms up might of thought to be mercy was a calamitious mistake. Though beaten and burned out and laid low, the Confederacy was still a snake with poison enough to kill off half a country.
I told Solomon, “Sheridan would of sent them all to hell.” Everyone within hearing distance told me to tell it. Tell the truth.
When our cries for revenge rose up, Bible man shouted us down, saying, “We ain’t what we want to be. And we ain’t what we gon be. But we surely ain’t what we was.”
A moment passed before someone called out the question that was at the top of all our minds. “What’s it say about us?”
Mr. Spectacles answered in that voice made to carry to the top of the mountain we all wanted to climb. “The Rebels cannot claim you for you all are free men. Lincoln already emancipated you two years ago. He just had to whip the Rebs to make it stick.”
We exploded with joy, cheering the well-dressed stranger as if he were the one who’d personally unshackled our bonds. When he was finished, the crowd bunched up like an adoring congregation, paying their respects to the preacher. Several even asked to touch the scrap of newspaper he held as though it was the very document that had ended their days of bondage.
That night, we all went to sleep praying for daylight, for the final surrender would take place the next day.
And I was there for every minute of it, hypnotized by seeing nearly thirty thousand Rebels lay down their colors and their arms. I grinned for twelve hours straight knowing how aggravating it was for the poor Southern boys who’d never had anything in life except being better than girls and coloreds to see me up there lording it over them at the moment they had to holler uncle. I hurt from wishing so hard that Clemmie and Mama were standing beside me.
When the last Johnny Reb shuffled off, most of the contrabands, finally convinced they were really free, drifted away. Some headed back to where they’d run off from or been plucked from to see who was still alive back home. Some cleared off in any direction but south. But a few stayed tight on the spectacled stranger for he had offered to help us with reading documents and making our way through the scary new world we’d been turned loose in.