Strong hands, as black as his own, seized Enoch then, took hold of him from all sides, dragged him off the other man, though it took some powerful doing, it surely did. He’d struggled in their grasp, because even though Wilcox was lying on the ground, Enoch wasn’t through with him. No, sir, not by a far sight.
Even years later, Enoch didn’t recall much about the following hours, for it took that red storm inside him a while to burn off. Next thing he knew, he was locked up in a shack out by the slave quarters, ostensibly for his own good, and Cyprian Wilcox’s father was there, looming over him.
Enoch lay on the shed’s dirt floor at the master’s feet.
“You’ll look at me when I speak to you,” the old man had said. The shed’s door crashed shut behind him.
“Get up,” Wilcox had spit out, his voice dangerously quiet.
Enoch had stood towering over the master. Saying nothing.
“You very nearly killed my son,” Wilcox had reminded him, pacing in that way rich men did, with their hands together behind their back. “Do you realize that?”
Enoch hadn’t answered, figuring nothing he said would matter anyhow. Maybe just get him into deeper trouble, if that was possible.
“You are fortunate,” Wilcox went on, still seething, still unnaturally calm, “that I am so fond of your mother.”
Enoch fought down a fresh surge of anger. He didn’t acknowledge the remark, but he didn’t look away from Wilcox’s long, narrow face, either.
The planter’s discourse continued. “If not for Sophie’s pleas on your behalf, I would have you not just whipped, but flayed to bloody ribbons.” He’d paused then, sucked in a breath, blown it out, as if resigning himself to an injustice that must be tolerated. “Alas, I owe Sophie a debt, and I will honor it by granting her this one favor. You are to be taken to town the day after tomorrow, and there you will be sold. Until then, you are confined to this shed.”
By Enoch’s reckoning, Wilcox owed his mama a lot more than a favor, but there was a limit to his foolishness, and talking back to a man who could do so much harm to his mother and to Tillie Mae was a risk he couldn’t take.
“Have you nothing to say?” Wilcox had demanded, as his exasperation finally got the better of his good breeding.
At last, Enoch had spoken. “I’d rather take a whippin’, any kind of whippin’, than get myself sold away from the only folks that matter to me.”
“Perhaps,” Wilcox had said, with a vicious mildness, “you should have considered that before you turned on young Cyprian and tried to strangle the life out of him. My son, and the heir to all my holdings. Do you realize that you nearly crushed his windpipe? The doctor informs us that he will survive, but he may never recover completely.”
Enoch hadn’t replied, hadn’t dared to tell the truth—that he wasn’t sorry for what he’d done. Wished, in fact, that he’d killed Cyprian Wilcox outright.
The master had heaved another great, long-suffering sigh and made his way to the door. “I realize, of course,” he’d said in parting, “that you could tear down the walls of this shack and attempt an escape. I assure you, solemnly, that if you do that, you will be caught. Then Tillie Mae will get the whipping you so well deserve, and you will witness the punishment. Do you understand, Enoch?”
“Yes,” Enoch had responded, beaten down. Holding back the “Massuh” that normally followed was the only act of defiance he could afford.
Two days later, forbidden to see Tillie Mae or his mama to say goodbye, Enoch had been bound again and hauled away like freight.
He’d had plenty of time to think along the way.
Tillie Mae was lost to him forever and, worse, with Enoch gone, she was at Cyprian Wilcox’s mercy once he recovered. He reckoned she’d be turned over to the master’s son, like a plaything presented to an ailing child in an effort to speed his recovery. Cyprian would be sure to exact revenge soon as he was able.
As for Mama, well, she was still a fine-looking woman, straight-backed and proud as she dared to be, but she’d be eaten alive from the inside, broken by the loss of her only child.
By the time he’d reached that platform, with its splintered planks puncturing his bare feet, even through many layers of callouses, Enoch had given up all hope. He’d made up his mind that he would simply endure, keep his mouth shut and his eyes down. He was determined to survive.
And yet for all his imaginings back then, Enoch had never once considered that his life could be better than it had been, instead of worse.
That day, however, he’d learned otherwise.
The man who bought him turned out to be a Pennsylvania farmer passing through Charleston on the way home from a visit to a friend. Elliott Hammond had merely stopped when he saw a slave auction about to begin. When the first man went up on the block, Mr. Hammond had found himself compelled to bid.
Elliott Hammond paid the price with money he’d earmarked for other things. After that, he and Enoch had made the long journey back to his small farm outside a town called Gettysburg, where, Mr. Hammond told him, he could work off the price of his purchase, milking cows and tilling fields and with the help of Hammond’s Missus, could learn to read and write. Soon as he could sign his name to the proper documents, the farmer said, he would truly be a free man.
At that point, he could stay or go. His choice.
Enoch had been puzzled, not to mention suspicious, but when they finally reached their destination, after many days of difficult travel, Mr. Hammond in a passenger car and Enoch riding with the train’s baggage, he’d been struck to the heart by the green rolling hills of Pennsylvania, the sturdy stone farmhouse, the bountiful food, the quiet kindness of the Hammonds and their one son, Jacob, only ten years old at the time.
Enoch had worked hard, been flummoxed when he was given a room off the parlor for sleeping in, instead of a corner of the barn. The Missus had made him up two sets of new clothes, and he could have all the eggs and milk and meat he wanted. She’d taught him to read and write and figure out sums, too, over the course of many months.
Then one day, Mr. Hammond had told him his debt was paid in full, and he’d be receiving wages from now on. Wages. Money of his own, to spend or save as he saw fit. Enoch had hardly been able to credit such a thing.
When he could sign a fine signature—the Missus wouldn’t settle for an X—Enoch was truly free. He could leave if he wanted, but he didn’t.
With the Hammonds, he had every material thing a man could reasonably ask for. People who treated him fairly and who, in fact, treated him like family. And he had books to read, coins in his pocket, plenty to eat. He’d put by most of the money he earned. His plan was to buy Mama’s freedom, and Tillie Mae’s, too.
Then a runaway slave showed up one dark night, to be hidden in the narrow room beneath the parlor floorboards until it was safe to move on. Enoch had of course heard about the Underground Railroad, but learned from the Hammonds how there were many “stations” in and around Gettysburg, in houses and other buildings in which local families hid runaways. The Hammonds’ house was one such station. Local abolitionists worked together to help escaped slaves reach freedom in the North and in Canada.
Enoch had been startled when he recognized the man the next day. His name was Jonas, and he’d grown up on a neighboring plantation, just a few miles from the Wilcox place.
He’d been half-starved and grateful for the breakfast Enoch brought him, all but shoveling the food into his mouth. Enoch had crouched there in the secret room, facing the man, full of questions.
Jonas told Enoch that Sophie, his mama, was dead a full year by then, that she’d taken a fever and slipped away a few days later. Enoch had no blood kin at all now—his father had been a slave on another plantation, a man who’d apparently disappeared soon after Enoch’s birth. And Sophie had never been able to have another baby. But at least, Enoch had often thought, she’d never
had a child fathered by the master.
Jonas then reported that Tillie Mae had been sold after the young master tired of her. Nobody knew for sure where she’d wound up, but rumors were that she’d taken the pneumonia and never recovered.
Enoch had listened, stone-faced, and done his mourning in private. But he’d gone right on saving his money as a hedge against an uncertain future. He spent little, buying penny sweets or a book once in a while, but mostly he kept the silver dollars Mr. Hammond gave him when wages were due, hiding them away in old fruit jars he kept in the cellar of the kitchen house. He seldom thought about it.
* * *
Now, these fourteen years later, he remained on the Hammond farm, a hired man, there of his own free will. The Hammonds eventually gave him a cabin to live in, which had been the original homestead. Mr. Hammond and his Missus were now dead, six years or more, having died of a fever, but the place was still home. But Mr. Jacob called him a friend and treated him like a brother and Caroline, his Missus, treated him like family. She served him his meals at the table in the kitchen house, right along with her husband and their young daughter Rachel.
Looking back over the long and difficult road that had brought him here, Enoch knew he would miss Jacob sorely. As he held his fishing pole steady, waiting for a bite, he hoped Missus Hammond would be strong enough to bear the burdens of a young widowed mother. He also hoped that her grandmother, daughter and friends—among them the women living on nearby farms and other members of the town’s Ladies’ Aid Society—would bring her some consolation.
Enoch had been against Caroline going off to Washington City, all on her own, after they discovered Jacob’s fate, but he’d understood her single-minded determination, too. When she wouldn’t be dissuaded, Enoch had brought her twenty silver dollars, wrapped in an old handkerchief with the corners tied tight.
At first, she’d said she couldn’t take the money.
Enoch had told her how much he cared for Jacob, how good the Hammond family had been to him, treating him almost as kin, and how he had to do whatever he could to help get that dear man back home, where he belonged. Where he could be looked after properly.
She’d given in, finally, and accepted his offer with thanks.
She’d sat herself down and stitched those shining dollars into the hem of her travel cloak, and he knew she was bent on bringing them back and returning them to him.
Come dawn the next morning, Enoch had driven her to town in the wagon, then waited while Caroline carried the child, Rachel, to the front door of Geneva Prescott’s house.
Rachel had made a little fuss, wanting to go along with her mother, to help find her papa. The Missus had refused these entreaties firmly but gently, and left the child in the care of her great-grandmother.
After that, Enoch had driven the Missus to the train station, carried her one small bag to the platform, waited while she purchased her ticket. She’d been so brave, standing there in her best clothes.
There’d been more than enough work to keep Enoch occupied once he returned to the farm, his heart heavy, his mind troubled. The place was mighty lonely with just him there, but the cows had to be milked and fed, along with the other livestock, and there were fruit trees to prune, fields to tend, a vegetable garden to water and weed.
He’d missed the dim glow of Missus Hammond’s lantern at night, missed the child, too. Most of all, though, he’d missed Jacob, his true friend. As the war continued to rage, he wondered what future sacrifices it might demand of them all.
All these things and more ran through Enoch’s stressed mind that summer afternoon, as he stood on the bank of the creek, pole in hand, hook baited, fishing for an early supper.
Jacob was dead, and that was that. He would grieve as long and as hard as he needed to, but he knew tragedy was the beginning of sorrow, not the end. There was more, much more, to fear.
For one thing, the war, a distant threat before—a thing he and the Missus read about in the newspapers and heard about from Jacob as well as Caroline’s friends and neighboring farm families—was closing in on them, drawing nearer to this peaceful farm country with every passing day.
It kept Enoch awake nights, that knowledge. He was strong, there was no doubting that, but how was he, one man, going to keep the Missus and that little girl safe, as he’d promised Mr. Jacob he would? Two great armies were on the march, and when they collided, as they frequently and inevitably did, the destruction would be beyond reckoning.
Enoch knew about various battles. The Battle of Antietam, with its massive losses, had occurred less than a year before, the previous September. And the Battle of Chancellorsville, in which Jacob had fallen, had cost a similarly overwhelming number of lives. Antietam had been a Union victory, Chancellorsville a Confederate one. And yet, with so many dead on both sides, “victory” somehow seemed a misguided word.
Something else was coming, and soon. He could feel it, lurking nearby, fixing to strike, like a snake coiled in the woodpile.
But this particular threat, whatever it might be, was immediate. Enoch’s sense of its approach was an urgency that temporarily displaced even Jacob’s passing, even the fear of battles to come.
He rubbed the back of his neck, where the small hairs bristled, scanned the countryside. A shiver slid down his spine, and his stomach lining burned around the meal he’d taken at midday.
Then, from the other side of a copse of leafy trees, oak and ash and walnut, came the piercing trill of a woman’s scream. A sudden splashing followed, too loud to be caused by anything but a sizable horse or a mule, made worse by a burst of male laughter.
Enoch threw down his fishing pole and ran toward the ruckus, his heart pounding hard in his throat, his mind full of old and terrible memories that shoved all present worries aside.
Enoch burst out of the trees, saw a young black woman scrambling down the middle of the creek, stumbling, weighted down by her sodden skirts and the bulge of her pregnant belly. Behind her, on horseback, a man gave chase, whooping with delight at her desperate and obviously hopeless efforts to get away. He was white, this man, but in that moment, Enoch didn’t think about the color of his skin.
He thought about evil. About injustice.
Suddenly, Enoch was back on that Georgia plantation, behind the springhouse, watching Cyprian Wilcox trying to force himself on Tillie Mae. With no more caution than he’d shown on that long-ago day, Enoch descended the creek bank, waded into the fast-moving water and stopped the rider by grasping his horse’s bridle in one hand.
The girl, sobbing, out of her mind with terror, had reached the creek bank.
The man on the horse looked down at Jacob and laughed.
“You best go on about your own business,” he said, blithely adjusting his dirty top hat, a stubby thing with a feather tucked into the band. “And let me tend to mine. This here’s between me and her and the fine lady who sent me to fetch her.”
The chase and attempt to run the girl down destroyed the last shreds of Enoch’s restraint.
Enoch didn’t think.
He took hold of the rider’s ragged clothes, jerked him down off the horse, then shifted his grip to the lapels of his thin coat. The stranger went under the swift-moving water, came up sputtering, grabbing for his hat as it floated out of reach.
“Release me right now,” the man bit out, his greasy hair in dripping tendrils. “That girl is a runaway, and there’s a bounty on her head, a good one. She gets away because of you, well, you might find yourself on the block.”
The threat wasn’t an idle one; Enoch knew that. Even in the North, free blacks were snatched from their homes and farms, from the streets of cities and towns, often brutalized in the process and ultimately sold into slavery. If they lived long enough...
Enoch held on to the man’s lapels and glared into his face. “I reckon this is one bounty you ain’t gonna collect, friend,” he
said.
Water rushed by them, icy cold and thigh-deep. From the corner of his eye, Enoch saw the horse struggle to shore and up the low slope, where it snorted and blew and shook itself off the way a wet hound would after retrieving a hunter’s duck. He couldn’t see the girl, or hear her, and had no idea if she’d fared as well as the horse, or collapsed from exhaustion or even slipped back down the grassy bank and drowned.
“You think you’re white once you get this far North,” the man spat, his skin crimson beneath a scruffy beard and weeks of accumulated dirt. “Think you can do as you please!”
“I could drown you right here and now,” Enoch said, through his teeth. “And that would please me plenty.” He gave the man a hard shake, to make his point. “You get on your horse and ride out of here and our business is done, yours and mine. You come after her again, and I swear by every angel in heaven and every demon in hell, I will kill you.”
The slave catcher spat, but he didn’t say anything right away. Maybe he’d finally come to the realization that Enoch was twice his size.
Enoch turned, planning to leave him there, then saw the young woman crouched on the bank, shuddering violently, her clothes clinging to her skinny body and the roundness of her belly.
Her brown eyes were enormous in her thin face as she watched Enoch wading toward her. Then her glance shifted slightly, and she screamed, “Look out behind you! He’s got a knife!”
Enoch spun around, saw the blade arching toward him, barely deflected it by manacling the other man’s wrist in one hand, forcing him to let it drop.
The slave catcher fought hard and was stronger than he looked. The two men struggled, both going under, coming up again, their faces drenched with creek water and an ancient hatred.
Time blurred in Enoch’s mind, no longer a sequence of hours and days, weeks and months and years, but a single, eternal moment. There was no past, no future, but only the present—only now.
The Yankee Widow Page 6