Sister Carolina leapt to her feet—or rather what constituted a leap for her, more of a hop, actually—and charged back toward the nuns’ quarters.
“What are you doing?”
“Packing!” she spit over her shoulder. “I’m going to Atlanta to make sure justice is done. I’m going to see that black-hearted murderer hang.”
Thus did Sister Carolina love her brother as herself, and I was left alone with Harris.
So I decided to take Harris into my confidence. What else could I do? The poor former slave was about to be tried—or worse—for a crime which to my nearly certain knowledge he did not commit, and he would be getting no help from Sister. It was likely that the only person standing between this unfortunate man and a rope was myself.
Back in my room, Harris stared in amazement at the now creased and greasy pyramidal “sonnet” I had received so many weeks before and gaped at the story I told him. Now quite calm, he let out a torrent of questions at me, which I answered as best I could. Although outwardly the most faint-hearted of men, Harris showed me a glimpse of a truly ardent intellect—he saw the whole picture in no time at all.
“You must tell this story to them in Atlanta. It may be …” There was a catch in his voice, this time not attributable to his stammer … “It may be you are the only hope James has left.”
ATLANTA
Chapter 17
I secured permission from my superiors to accompany Sister Carolina, and Mr. Harris traveled back with us on the railroad that meandered through Augusta and Macon to Atlanta. We sat in our compartment in stiff silence, reading newspapers and watching Sister impaling the tough, dried berries she used to make rosaries and then stringing them together. At length I motioned to Harris to join me for a drink in the corridor.
“She’s furious,” I said, understating things considerably.
“Wha … what is she doing with those beads?”
“She makes rosaries—they’re bracelets or necklaces used for prayer. The beads help keep count so one can meditate on the mysteries of the faith more easily. There are fifteen mysteries of the rosary, and each bead represents a mystery.”
“Oh, I see. I remember now.”
“Are you a Catholic, Mr. Harris?”
“N-no. I mean, yes… . I mean, I’d like to be. I think I am. Red hair, you see… . Irish.”
“Yes,” I smiled. I offered him a swallow from my small flask and we opened the corridor window to watch the cold, winter-lit forest flash by.
“It isn’t a popular religion in the South. Catholicism,” I reflected. “The Klan used to breathe out threatenings and slaughter against Catholics, didn’t they? Before my time?”
“Catholics, Jews—mostly blacks. Anyone … anyone they didn’t like.”
“What can you tell me about the Klan, Mr. Harris? Folks round here don’t like to speak of it.”
Harris was quiet for a moment, working up the energy to speak. Another long draught from my flask relaxed him. “It is important to … to know … that the war has never really ended. Not here. Deep down, every Southerner imagines that it is forever afternoon on a day in July 1863 at a place called Gett … Gettysburg. The whole world stopped there. Now the Klansmen put on their ghostly costumes, ghosts still fighting that battle that cannot end without the end of honor, too. They fight on for their meager honor, their dismal honor … with the lash and the torch and the … branding iron. And the r … rope.”
“Have you ever seen them?”
“Not for a long time. When Grant became president, he sent the Yankees to chase them off into the woods, but … but they’re still here.” He gestured toward the dimming forest where only the outermost trees were visible to us as we chugged past. “And now the Yankees are gone. What did Shake—Shakespeare say about the woods moving?”
I smiled at the allusion. “Macbeth. He was doomed by an army bearing tree branches as they descended on his castle.”
“Right. The Klan is coming. They used to dress up to hide their faces and scare the colored folks. Some of them … pretend to be ghosts and they surround a sharecropper’s cabin in the night and take themselves apart. They sits on their horses and make like they can cut off their own heads and put ‘em back … back on, or fling off a hand holding a torch. You sees that once and you gits out of there and you don’t come back.”
Harris had slipped into some kind of backwoods banter that flowed with strange fluency.
“You have seen the Klan at work,” I said.
“I have,” he nodded, staring out the window into the approaching night. “You understand, I had nothing—nothing. I was less than a slave on the plantation, and I lived out there … in the … in the slave quarters with them. I had a mother who taught me how to read, but she couldn’t keep me … so I went to work.
“The slaves … they were good to me. We worked hard and at night the fires were done up and they told st … stories, about the little wars amongst the animals in the woods, and they’d sing their hopeless songs.
“Then Sherman came. All was confusion and distress. They sent me off with the horses and mules … I hid out in the swamp, but the Yankees … I could hear ‘em treading through the mud. They took the stock and I beat it back to the plantation, but it was all quiet, everything stripped. Even the slaves were gone … following Sherman like he was the M-Messiah himself.
“After the war I got work in a print … a printing shop, but I still liked to pass the time down in the quarters. The slaves weren’t slaves anymore. Some had their own land, they were sending the little ones to Yankee schools, and they were so proud being free, and their songs and their stories were mostly hopeful.
“Until one night r … riders came. They came right up to our fire and kicked it apart. And one big rider took hold of the peak of his hood and pulled it up and I could swear he had no head!
“That was the end of everything, just everything for my friends… they took their young ones out of the white schools and they disappeared and some were found hanging in the trees like moldy fruit … and certain parties took back their land claims, saying they were abandoned.”
I had to take another drink myself. Night had come, and we could see sparks from the engine and the occasional flicker of fire deep in the woods that surrounded us.
“I understand now why you’re anxious about this situation with the Tarletons’ servant,” I said. “It must feel like demons closing in.”
Harris nodded. “The war goes on, Father. Gettysburg … it’s not over. I don’t know if it will ever end … but there’s mowing to be done.”
“Mowing?”
“On the plantation, we mowed down the weeds or they’d take over, and when they dried just a spark could burn us out. It’s … it’s a war you don’t stop fighting … fighting the weeds of prejudice, Father.”
“’Cursed is the earth,’” I replied. “’Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.’”
“Genesis?”
I laid my hand on Harris’s shoulder.
When we arrived in Atlanta, we separated—Harris to his home, Sister to her family’s imposing gray-stone mansion, and myself to the rectory near the new Church of the Immaculate Conception. I had wired to the curates, and they put me up nicely.
Morning came slowly to Atlanta, but once awake it was noisy. Sister’s wagon called for me and we dodged through the streets of a city that was springing anew from the charred earth of the war. The “heart of Atlanta,” once incinerated by the Union army, sprouted dozens of new buildings, among them the newspaper office where we stopped to collect Joe Harris.
Our plan was to travel to the Tarleton plantation where James was hiding and “bring him to justice.” We had learned that the boss there was a formidable person who wouldn’t give him up, but that any day a mob was liable to storm the place. Sister felt that she had enough influence to extract James from the p
lantation.
Our wagon was under the command of a lean little sprite of fourteen, perhaps sixteen, named Marta, the daughter of one of Sister’s “house workers.” Despite her size, everything about her looked strong—arms, hands, face, even the stiff hair that popped out of her head like fistfuls of straw.
Marta chattered without ceasing, her birdsong of a voice twittering incomprehensibly above the wind and noise of the street, mostly about “the folks,” I gathered. As a lover of gossip, I tried hard to make out what she was saying and did pick up a few words, but her back-country dialect defeated me. Occasionally, Sister Carolina would bark at her to be quiet—to no avail. Marta kept singing through her soliloquy as effortlessly as she steered the big bay horse through the labyrinth of the city.
Soon we were in the countryside, headed south into red hills undulating like the waves on the sea. The day was fine, cold and bright, the trees had discarded their leaves, and I would have enjoyed the ride except for two things: the very real possibility of a calamity ahead and the unnerving feeling that someone was watching us.
It was not a distinct impression, but it grew stronger as we passed patches of woods between empty cotton fields. I fancied there were shadows moving with us within the thickets, and while nothing solid emerged, I found myself trembling and not just from the cold.
At length we dropped into a hollow where a small stream splayed through the forest and turned the road into a blood-colored mire.
“That little r-river’s right … right out of Exodus,” Harris said, and it was just a moment before I realized he had made a joke. The man continually surprised me.
Sister Carolina commanded Marta to stop. The horse needed a drink, and Sister had caught sight of what looked like berries hanging from the pine trees. Marta collected a prickly ball of wood studded with the red-and-black beans that Sister used for making rosaries.
“Don’t touch them,” Sister said as she reached out for the ball.
I asked her what they were called.
“They’s jequirity beans,” Marta crowed. “They grows all over creation, chokin’ the trees, and they’ll kill a cow that eats ‘em.”
Ignoring Marta, Sister explained, “They’re called rosary peas. They harden and hold a lovely gloss, just right for a rosary.”
“They are pretty things,” I said, picking one out of its pod. “Symmetrical, red as a cherry with a tiny black spot on the base of each one. Not edible, I suppose.”
“No,” Sister retorted, rather curtly I thought, and seized the bean from my hand.
Harris murmured, “They’re something of a … a scourge to the planters roundabout. The runners spread deep under the g-ground and come up everywhere, taking over the cotton fields. They poison the stock, too.”
I then realized that the rosary peavines webbed the trees all round us, the beans protruding like little red eyes from their spindly pods.
“Marta, go get me some more of those pods—and don’t touch the beans!”
Marta shrank back. “I ain’t no field hand,” she protested. “I a wagon driver!”
But the little wagon driver relented under threats rather uncharacteristic of a religious woman, and harvested all she could reach for Sister to pack into her ever-present rosary case. Sister examined each pod carefully. “You’ve handled some of these beans!”
“I sorry, I try not.”
Marta climbed back up to the spring seat and we were ready to push on when I thought I heard the crackle of a broken stick in the woods.
“What was that noise?” I said, a little more loudly than I intended. Everyone fell quiet, including Marta. We listened for a moment, hearing no sound but the wind in the tall pitch pines, so Marta urged the horse across the bloody Nile and up the hill toward our destination.
Chapter 18
Before the war the Tarleton place had been a great plantation, but the house now looked like a vast shack roosting precariously on its hill just waiting for the wind to carry it off for good. When we approached, black workers blocked our way with shovels and pitchforks—one carrying a rifle almost as a big as a cannon—until Sister Carolina identified herself and the guards fell back to let us pass. Stretching away from the house was the largest paddock I had ever seen, and a dozen or so lovely young horses romping round in it.
A skeletal lady in riding clothes sat on a rail intently observing the horses, while two stable men at her side observed our approach just as intently.
“Miz Bea!” Sister called, and the skeleton noticed us for the first time. She leapt from the railing.
“Careen! It’s absolutely not you!” This inconceivably thin lady could actually walk, and quite energetically too. Tottering toward us, she had a face as white as a dry bone and hair red like the clay beneath our feet. She greeted Sister with kisses and Joe Harris, whom she had already met, with a curt but respectful bow.
“Miz Bea” was the mother of the late Tarleton brothers. Despite her thinness, she was an abundant soul and invited us all for the midday meal—cornbread and pork belly served from a pot of steaming greens by a frail cook named Tildy. The dining room was returning to nature. Moss grew from the moldings and vines curled round the chandeliers, taking root in the sooty dust of the ceiling.
The lady would hear nothing of our business until we had eaten, and then having laden the hearth with fresh pine, she motioned us into a circle round the fire.
“So your plan is to take James with you to Fulton County and let the sheriff look after him. Mr. Harris, I know you have his interests at heart, but to trust him to the sheriff like that …”
“He … he would be safe there, I be-believe,” Harris stammered quietly, “M-Ma’am. Up in Atlanta they have a r-r-rock-walled jail to hold him until the t … trial.”
“So you think there’d be a trial, do you?” Miz Bea snorted.
“The Constitution would s-see to it.”
“Your newspaper is mighty influential, but I don’t know if your printer’s ink is a strong enough potion to repel the Klan, even from behind rock walls.”
“Begging your p-pardon, Ma’am, but newsprint is … often stronger th-than rock walls.”
“Eloquently put, young man.” She was clearly delighted with him. “I suppose I ought to trust a man with red hair like yours,” she chuckled, tossing her own bloodshot tresses. “Well, Careen, what do you think?”
“Justice must be done, and done proper.” Sister’s white chin shivered. “That’s all I have to say.”
The old lady contemplated this. “Sending James cross country in bold daylight with a nun, a priest, and a shy little scribbler. I suppose it might work. It’s not what they would expect, them roarers and redshirts just looking to get drunk and hang a darky.
“And you started all this,” she turned her shrewd eye on me. “All due to your notice in the Constitution. You know, Father, they came up here last Tuesday week with their torches and their foolishness wearing flour sacks over their heads. They said they would hang James up with the rotten apples, and shouldn’t I be glad my sons are getting their due requital at last.
“I held up my big old Enfield musket and told ‘em my sons were illiterate louts who misspent their lives chasing women and shooting at dogs and Yankees, and they were just fine where they were—six feet under—and they didn’t need no requiting.
“And furthermore, my foreman James never hurt those boys even though they mistreated him every day of his life. And now he’s got a wife and children and nobody’s goin’ to mistreat him again. So you all can turn ‘round and get off my land. And they did.”
I couldn’t help but stare at her in admiration, although I quickly apologized. “I’m sorry to have caused you this trouble.”
“Why did you go about stirrin’ up this pot in the first place?” she asked.
I didn’t think it was right to cast blame on Sister, so I didn’t know how to
answer.
“Not your fault, I know.” She turned to Sister. “Careen, you couldn’t leave it. You couldn’t just let it go, could you? My boys died in a battle more’n fifteen years now—there’s nothing more to say or do about it. It’s done.”
This awkward exchange was interrupted by the arrival of two strangers. “Misters Beaufort, ma’am,” Tildy announced, and our hostess arose to make introductions.
“This is General Abraham Beaufort and his brother, Colonel Tom.”
Apparently they were expected. Both men were square and solid, both smoking identical cigars, the only difference between them the cut of their beards. In addition to his aggressive mustache, the general’s beard circled his face like a hairy halo, while Tom appeared about to be consumed by his. Only two eyes and a blistered nose stood out from the tangle.
“General Beaufort owns the largest horse farm in Kentucky, but he likes to come south in the winter to buy and sell,” our hostess explained. Now I understood the clank and rattle of their elaborate spurs. “I owe him a great deal, as he helped me replenish my stock after the Yankees took all of my horses.”
“You owe me nothin’, Miz Bea,” said the general, his voice amiable but viscous with the chimney residue of thousands of cigars. “And it appears you have greatly improved your stock since the last time we met.”
As soon as he spoke, I had the impression that I had met the general before, but could not isolate him in my memory.
Chairs were brought and she motioned the new arrivals into our circle. “I’m so sorry, we just took our noses out of the manger, but you are welcome to what’s left of dinner.”
While he ate, the general and our hostess bantered a bit on the subject of horses. Brother Tom sat erect eating quietly and politely, and I thought there must be some culture in him despite his haggard, beaten look. At length, Tildy brought us coffee (which made me grimace) and a dessert she called “Republican pudding,” just a dish of sweet rice custard.
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