by Lois Leveen
Nine-Fingered Nate, that’s what Lilly and Daisy and I set ourselves to calling him, as we shrieked out stories of where his tiny pinky lay, severed and wriggling and bringing a haint’s worth of harm on whatever creature it could. We’d screw our voices into kitten yowls and puppy yelps and the cries of helpless children, tormented as we imagined them to be by the diabolical wayward digit. Mama caught us at it once, and when she asked what all the fuss was, Daisy told her it was Nine-Fingered Nate’s missing tenth. Mama didn’t know what or who she meant at first, till I put in something about the fisher’s stall. When Mama realized what we were saying, she got sore as she’d ever been at any of us.
“That man is some mother’s son,” Mama lectured me. “When she brought him into this world, he had ten fingers and ten toes, and a name she gave him. Not a person on this earth ought to take any of that from him. Just because some slaveowner did, doesn’t mean any child of mine better try the same.” She made me promise I’d never so much as utter the moniker Nine-Fingered Nate again, nor abide anyone else doing it either. “His name is Shiloh,” she said. “And I expect you’ll not forget it.”
Shiloh was a name no one could forget these days, as stories seeped back from that battle-stead of how high the piles rose of legs and arms hacked off by military surgeons. Pit after pit dug to bury nameless pieces of what had once been whole men, every one of them some mother’s son. Each wasted limb lost over the claimed right to cut off another man’s pinky, the right to call that other man property. No childhood imaginings could have suffered one negro’s pinky to be worth that multitude of pale arms and legs, all that bloody loss.
No one could say what more bloody loss might come if the war continued. Or what might come to negroes especially, if it didn’t.
If McClellan learned what I knew of Bobby Lee’s ruse, he would surely attack as Aunt Piss feared, capturing Richmond and toppling the Confederate government—returning things to how they were before the war, just as Bet predicted. If the Confederacy fell now, slavery would still stand. But if McClellan, lacking this intelligence, fell for the ruse and retreated, Lee might well seize the great and final triumph that Davis’s advisers believed was within his grasp, bringing the war to an altogether different end.
My breath came shallow, as I felt the awful alternatives squeezing in. But still I sensed something deep and near-resolute within me. Some quaverous inkling of another possibility, if I could only determine how it might come to be.
If we want to win the bigger prize, we need be making a gamble or two along the way. McNiven had uttered the words with confidence, justifying all he did to deceive the Confederates and urging me to do the same. Was I ready to take such a gamble now? Could I trust myself with such a choice, keeping my latest intelligence from the Federals to prevent a decisive, ultimate Union victory, knowing I was risking a decisive, ultimate Confederate victory instead?
If the war came to a close now, there would be no emancipation, no matter which side won. But if the war stretched on—what if I lost my espial wager, as Webster lost his?
“You haven’t heard a word of what I’m saying, have you?” Wilson’s question poked right through my contemplation as he crossed to where I stood by our parlor window.
I gestured toward the panes, pretending it was the latest wagonload of casualties lumbering up Broad Street that had me distracted. “So much suffering and death.”
Wilson and I watched a weeping white woman step forward to embrace a ragged, uniform-clad amputee. “That’s all the violence of slavery, visited right back on them,” he said. “The way you tell it, what gunfire we hear is the very angels singing of liberation.”
“But what if the war ends before Lincoln frees the slaves?”
“I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you entertain the possibility you might have been wrong about anything.” He rapped on the window frame to mark the rarity of the occasion. “You know I’m still not sure secession can do the slaves much good. But if this war is meant to bring emancipation, I suppose it’s bound to last until it does.”
The war might indeed last, if I let it. And so I pressed my lips tight and held his words dear for the next quarter hour as I picked over what trifles I might put into the evening’s cipher, resolved not to give any of Lee’s plan away.
The Confederate ploy succeeded, and in the weeks that followed, the sounds of battle drew farther and farther off, until by summer’s end Richmond heard them only in her dreams. The Federals retreated from Drewry’s Bluff. The tocsin bells no longer tolled. Queen Varina and her children returned to the Gray House. Union prisoners swelled the population of the city between flag-of-truce exchanges, Bet tending them as best a woman playing at dementia might. And I kept my role in what I’d wrought secret, even from my husband.
On the thirtieth August, McNiven brought me a tattered clipping from the New York Tribune, already a week old and obtained the devil only knows how. He was sitting with Wilson in our parlor when I came home from the Gray House, and he pulled the slip of news-sheet from his pocket before saying so much as good evening to me.
It was a letter Lincoln had written to Horace Greeley, the editor of the Tribune, who published it for all the world to see.
My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
As I read aloud, Wilson sank deeper into his chair. “We best accept what this means.”
“It means we have to make certain the Union cannot be saved unless the slaves are freed.” I made my voice as sure as I could.
“Ay, we maun, and I do believe the lass has awready been seeing to that.”
I searched McNiven’s face to see what hint he might have that I’d withheld what I knew of General Lee’s plan. But his pasty features revealed nothing.
“Plenty of hubbub in the Gray House today,” I said, to distract him and Wilson both. “The Confederates have beaten the Federals at Manassas, same as they did last summer. This time, Lee will ride the army into Maryland. He means to invade the Union.”
McNiven weighed the threat. “ ’Tis a ragged force Lee leads, after all this summer’s fighting.”
I nodded. “Half of Lee’s motivation to invade is to raid the farms and shops of Frederick County, to feed and clothe his troops.”
“And the other half?” McNiven asked.
“According to Aunt Piss, the Confederate victories of late have impressed Great Britain. He has persuaded Jeff Davis that taking the offensive may yet convince Queen Victoria to recognize the Confederacy as a sovereign nation.”
McNiven swatted at the idea like it was a gnat aflight in the late summer evening. “England canna support a war to preserve slavery.”
Wilson pointed at the Tribune clipping. “Lincoln says the war is for the Union, not for slavery.”
“Lincoln will make it a war to end slavery, to keep England from aiding the destruction o’ the Union.”
I hummed out my hope that McNiven was right, as I set the latest message between the Confederates and Queen Victoria’s envoy down in Bet’s cipher. I chose each word with especial care, meaning to show Lincoln just what he need do to save his precious Union.
When next I saw McNiven, only ten days later, what he had to tell me wasn’t in any newspaper. It was something Lincoln hadn’t yet made public knowledge. Even McNiven seemed anxious to hold it secret, intercepting me on my way to the Gray House early one morning.
“He has it writ awready, and gotten his cabinet to agree. A proclamation emancipating all the slaves in the territories in rebellion.”
“When?” My heart quickened so, I
barely heard my own words over it. “When will they be free?”
“It becomes law the first o’ the new year. But Lincoln means to be announcing his plan far sooner than that, for all the world and Queen Victoria especially to hear. All he is awaiting is a Union battle victory, so it seems a move o’ strength and not a desperation.”
With emancipation at last hanging in the balance, such a victory was just what I would give him.
I was laying the supper table when the telegram arrived at the Gray House on the afternoon of the eighteenth September. Just after the messenger’s heavy boots thudded up the curving stairs, Burton Harrison, Davis’s secretary, called down for whiskey.
I’d served plenty of liquor at the Davises’ dinners and receptions, and during Queen Varina’s near daily tête-à-têtes with Aunt Piss. But I’d never known Jeff Davis to take a mid-day tipple. I rushed to fetch the crystal decanter, then hurried up the servants’ stairs, anxious to learn whether he wanted the drink to mourn or to celebrate.
When I entered the office, Davis sat ramrod straight, tall even in his desk chair. His bad eye was filmed over, and the steely gray good one stared into space. His face had gone so pale, his high cheekbones might have been chiseled from white marble. I poured out a measure of whiskey, and he drank it in one swallow.
“Read it again,” he ordered.
I refilled Davis’s glass as the messenger shifted under the weight of his butternut uniform. “Sharpsburg, Maryland. Mr. President. I have lost well over ten thousand men, dead, wounded, or captured in yesterday’s fighting above Antietam Creek. We retreat tonight under cover of dark. General Lee.”
“Ten thousand men,” Davis repeated, once he swallowed the second glass of whiskey. “One quarter of Lee’s entire army. McClellan couldn’t have done much more damage if he’d authored Lee’s attack himself.”
McClellan may not have written the plan of attack, but I’d ensured he’d read it. I stepped forward to fill Davis’s glass a third time, but he waved me away.
“Shall I send a note to the hospitals, to expect the wounded?” Burton Harrison asked.
“And to Hollywood Cemetery, that they will need more gravediggers,” I heard Davis answer as I made my own retreat to the servants’ stair.
“Mary El look like the cat what got the canary,” Papa observed as he and Wilson dangled their fishing lines into Shockoe Creek the last Sunday of September.
“Your daughter doesn’t care about getting some old canary,” my husband said, “so much as she likes getting her way.”
Papa gave a harrumph of agreement. “What you let her get her way over this time?”
“Wasn’t me, Lewis. It was President Lincoln. And doesn’t she look glad about it.”
I grinned over at them from where I sat, mending Papa’s workshirt. I took frugal care with the thread, which had grown wildly expensive because of the blockade. But I wasn’t so parsimonious with my joy, which I was eager to share. “Wilson’s just sore that I’ve been right all along, and now everyone knows it.”
“Right about what?” Papa asked. “You two might stop talkin’ nonsense long enough for a person to make out what you got to say.”
“I’ve been telling Wilson that President Lincoln meant to free the slaves. And now Mr. Lincoln has finally announced it himself. A proclamation of emancipation, is what it’s called.”
Papa looked at us as though this were proof we were both mutton-headed. “What it matter what Lincoln is proclamating over to Washington, when I got to do Mahon’s bidding here in Richmond?”
“I know it doesn’t change anything right away, Papa. But it puts slaves in a new legal standing. As of the first January, all the slaves in the Confederacy will be considered free. Once the war is over—”
“As of the first January?” Papa cut in. “Once the war is over? Mary El, I see you mighty impressed with that Mr. Lincoln fellow for all this proclamating. But maybe somebody should tell him it don’t do much good to take out the bit if you leave on the bridle.”
“I don’t suppose it does.” Wilson spoke softly, worried Papa’s sharp words had hurt me. But they hadn’t. They just strengthened my resolve to shake the bridle off.
I knew full well the many ways that being free, or slave, meant more than just a word written out here or there on legal parchment in someone else’s hand. All those years apart from Mama and Papa in Philadelphia, I’d never felt my freedom quite the way I did these days in Richmond, play-acting at slavery as I worked to make Lincoln’s proclamation become true liberation for my papa.
Nineteen
There I was, a grown woman of twenty-three, looking forward to Christmas with the same delicious anticipation I had as a child. In my girlhood, Richmond always slowed its pace the final week of the year, hired-out slaves gone home to the plantations, whites and free blacks alike keeping to their families. Not so in 1862. The city’s population was swollen to three times what it was before the war, and you didn’t have to be a census taker to note the difference. White and colored, everyone was crowded in. The noise and press of the place wasn’t about to let up, no matter what the calendar said. But Papa would have the whole week off, same as always. And posing as a hired slave, so would I.
Spending Christmas week with Papa promised to be sweeter than all the molasses seized in the Federal blockade. I beamed as the days of December fell shorter and shorter still, knowing that as Papa’s holiday with us neared, so did the day Abraham Lincoln would proclaim him legally free.
I wasn’t credulous enough to believe the Emancipation Proclamation would change much of anything for Papa, so I took it upon myself to do for him what Mr. Lincoln couldn’t. The Monday between Christmas and New Year’s, I left him with Wilson, crossed Shockoe Creek, and turned south toward the Bottom, passing factories all along Franklin Street and Main Street that had been turned into hospitals. Blocks once fragrant with tobacco now wreaked of wasting flesh, the slaves and free blacks who manned the tobacco presses before the war these days tending wounded Confederates. Richmond newspapers made much ado over the white ladies who visited the hospitals, never mentioning that the nastiest work there was left to negroes.
Where the factories gave way to residences, I searched out Mahon’s house. Two stories topped by a half attic, the brick building was just wide enough to show that its owner had a successful business, yet plain enough to suggest he still worked with his hands. Only two steps separated the front entrance from Franklin Street, and when I mounted them and rapped the brass knocker, Mahon swung the door open himself. His face lengthened in surprise at finding a colored woman on his stoop.
“Marse Mahon, I’m Mary Bowser, Lewis’s daughter. If you can give me a moment, sir, I’d like to discuss some business with you.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the doorjamb. I’d have to say my piece right in the street, if I wanted to be heard at all.
“My papa is too infirm now to be much good at the forge. My husband and I would like to buy his time from you, sir. We can pay in advance for the year, no guarantee of refund required from you in the case of—”
“Can’t be done,” Mahon interrupted.
I’d known he might well refuse, had schemed and planned about what I’d say if he did. But Mahon didn’t give me a chance to utter any of the persuasives I’d prepared.
“They’ve conscripted him, along with the rest of my slaves, to work for the defense of the city. He’s theirs as of next week.”
I could make no sense of what he was saying. “What use could Papa be to the government? He can barely cross a room, how is he supposed to—”
“No one asked your opinion of it. No one even asked mine.” His voice rang with the angry rhythm of anvil blows. “Man can’t make a living without trained laborers to work his smithy. But President Davis and Governor Letcher don’t give a good goddamn about an honest man’s ability to provide for his family.”
I bit my lip, thinking of all the years Papa had provided for Mahon’s family rather than
for me and Mama. Thinking, too, that there’d be no appeal, no bargaining over the conscription. Wilson and I might have had every dollar in the Confederate Treasury, and still we couldn’t have bought Papa’s time. I pulled my shawl tight and turned to go.
“Lewis don’t know yet,” Mahon called after me. “You might as well tell him yourself.”
One more chore a negro can do for you, I thought as I headed back to Broad Street.
I hadn’t told Papa I was going to speak to Mahon. Wilson and I agreed to hold it for a surprise, neither of us saying what we both feared—best not to raise his hopes in case Mahon refused. Now the news I bore was worse than a refusal. Mahon had reason enough to look after his slaves, property as they were to him. But what did the city of Richmond or the Confederate military care for the well-being of an aging bondsman, when with an order of conscription they could call up a dozen more to replace him?
Wilson saw with a single glance that I hadn’t succeeded with Mahon. Prevaricating came so easy to me by then, I didn’t even have to think before the words came out. “I got all the way to the market, only to realize I’d forgotten my purse. Would you go back to get the things we need for dinner while I warm up before the fire?”
He nodded at my falsehood, understanding that I wanted to be alone with Papa.
Once Wilson left, I pulled two chairs up before the hearth. Sitting beside Papa, every ounce of joy I felt over the Emancipation Proclamation seeped away. Conscription laid bare the one truth I wasn’t able to make untrue. So long as we lived under the Confederacy, my own flesh and blood remained a belonging to change hands among white men, same as a mule or a hog.
I held my gaze on the fire, unable to meet those eyes that were so like mine. “What was it like for Mama, knowing she had her freedom but had to act like she didn’t?”
“Minerva always was one to follow her own mind, slave or no,” Papa reminded me. “She figured out long before then how to be one thing in her heart, though she was something else in the eyes of them Van Lews.”