Good Time Coming

by C. S. Harris

  The Reverend Lewis often struggled to project his thin, nasal voice to the back of our church. Not Garette Hale.

  ‘The Lord is in his lofty temple,’ declared the Reverend Hale, his deep baritone booming out like a clarion call from heaven itself. ‘Let all the earth keep silent before him.’ He spread his hands wide, his smile one of beatific forbearance. ‘Enter not into judgment with thy servants, O Lord; for in thy sight shall no man living be justified.’

  I found myself focused for some reason on his big, puffy fingers, which were white and soft, with bejeweled rings that sparkled with fire in the light streaming in through the high arched windows of the nave as he brought his hands together again and bowed his head. ‘Let us pray.’

  We all bowed our heads except for one small child who whined, ‘I’m thirsty!’ before being quickly hushed.

  ‘Lord God, author of peace and lover of concord, to know you is eternal life and to serve you is perfect freedom. Defend us, your humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies, that we, surely trusting in your defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries, through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.’

  A heartfelt ‘Amen’ echoed around the church.

  I’d obediently bowed my head along with everyone else. But I’d long ago discovered that by tilting it slightly, I could present a semblance of devotion while still looking around a bit. If my Grandmother Adelaide had been there, she’d have thumped me, and glared me into a stricter posture of attention. But she wasn’t there, and if my mother noticed my wandering focus, she didn’t let on.

  I let my gaze rove over the pews full of women of all ages, shapes, and sizes; planters’ wives and daughters mingled with the wives, daughters, and mothers of shopkeepers, tradesmen, and laborers. We were a church full of women and children, left alone while our men went off to war. And not for the first time I found myself wondering if one of the women in church with us that day was the intended recipient of that letter carried by the dead Federal down on Thompson’s Creek.

  As I pondered these thoughts, the Reverend Garette Hale’s voice rolled on through the confession and the anthem, the congregation standing and kneeling when appropriate, the old folks’ knees popping and creaking as they labored to comply, the air in the church getting hotter and smellier with a mingling of sweat and onion breath and the occasional squirt of chewing tobacco spit discretely into a half-hidden can. Then, at last, came the moment for which all were waiting: Mr Garette Hale stepped up to the pulpit, and we settled thankfully onto our pews to listen to the famous man’s sermon.

  Our Reverend Lewis always delivered his sermons from a sheaf of notes he prepared every week, sometimes laboring over their composition by candlelight late into the night. But Mr Hale took the pulpit with only a worn black Bible in his hands, which he laid unopened before him as he said loudly and clearly, ‘“The statutes of the Lord are right.”’

  He paused theatrically, his gaze traveling over the congregation as he waited for his words to sink in. ‘This is what God tells us in Psalm 19:8. It is an instruction we do well always to remember, and never more so than at this grievous hour. At this hour, when our benighted brethren to the north have unleashed the hellhounds of war upon us and seek to steal from us the sweet blessings of liberty granted to us not merely by that Constitution writ nearly four score years ago by our forefathers, but –’ he paused to lift one pointed finger – ‘by God himself, as our birthright.’

  I cast a quick sideways glance at my mother. She was beating her pretty little painted wood and silk fan kinda fast, but other than that, she appeared calm, her gaze intently focused on the man at the pulpit.

  ‘“The statutes of the Lord are right”,’ he said again. ‘We obey the Lord’s statutes every day. We honor our fathers and mothers. We resist the urge to covet our neighbor’s donkey or bash him over the head to steal his pretty new pocket watch.’

  A faint titter of amusement rippled through the pews.

  ‘We know all that. But what does God say about slavery?’

  All traces of laughter disappeared as a new seriousness gripped the congregation. One or two glances were thrown our way, and I wanted to sink down behind the back of the pew before me.

  ‘It’s a timely topic, isn’t it?’ asked Mr Garette Hale in a mastery of understatement. ‘So what does the Bible say about slavery? Actually, it tells us a lot. It tells us in the Book of Genesis that when Ham transgressed the rules of God, his father, Noah, cursed his descendants for all time, darkening their skin and saying, “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. Forever.”’

  I shifted my gaze from the man at the pulpit to our own Reverend Lewis. He was sitting with his gaze downcast, a faint flush on his cheeks, and I thought I understood now the source of his earlier discomfort. Reverend Lewis might hail originally from New York, but he was a fervent Southern patriot. Every Sunday, he called for prayers for the Confederacy and Jefferson Davis and all our boys in gray, and vehemently condemned the wickedness of Abraham Lincoln for ordering his armies to burn our farms and kill our cows. Yet I’d never heard him try to use the Bible to justify slavery – not once. I wondered if he’d known Garette Hale’s chosen topic for the day, or only suspected it.

  Hale’s plumy Oxford vowels continued to boom out over the small Louisiana church. ‘Now, some people say, “Oh, that’s the Old Testament” – as if we can parse the Lord’s word, believing some parts and ignoring others as the fancy takes us. But let’s play their game, shall we? Let’s look at the New Testament. Did Jesus condemn slavery? No, he did not. Just pause for a moment and think about what that means. Jesus lived in a world in which slavery was a common institution; he was literally surrounded by slaves. Don’t you think that if he considered slavery an evil, he would have condemned it? Of course he would have! He chased the moneylenders from the temple, didn’t he? But where’s the parable about Jesus freeing the slaves? It must be here somewhere …’

  The preacher made a show of thumbing through his Bible as if hopefully searching for such a passage. Another titter spread through the flock, and he looked up with a smile. ‘You know why I can’t find it? Because it doesn’t exist! Jesus never said a word in condemnation of slavery. But the Apostles talked about slaves. And what did they say? Well, in the First Epistle of Peter, slaves are clearly instructed to obey their masters – “as to the Lord”! Slaves are ordered to submit to their masters just as wives are ordered to submit to their husbands: “as to the Lord”.’

  I didn’t dare look at my mother. I knew that part of the Bible always riled her.

  Hale’s voice rolled on. ‘In The Epistle to Philemon, St Paul tells us how he returned a slave named Onesimus to his master. That’s right; St Paul returned a slave to his master! Now, it’s true; Paul does entreat Philemon to treat Onesimus with the kindness to be expected of a good Christian. But does he tell Philemon to free Onesimus? No! Does he tell Philemon that he must free all the other slaves he owns? No! In fact, in the Epistles of Paul to Titus, Paul actually tells slaves they must obey not only those masters who are good and kind, but even those who are severe and unjust!

  ‘So, ask yourself for a moment: why did Paul say these things? Because Paul knew – as Jesus knew – that in this imperfect world bequeathed to us by Original Sin, slavery is not only appropriate, but necessary for the preservation of the natural order. Slavery was established by the decree of the Almighty God himself. That’s why you find it reinforced everywhere in the Bible – ’ he brought his fist down on the book with a mighty thump that made some folks jump, and woke up Miss Delia, who’d been gently snoring at the end of the pew – ‘from Genesis to Revelation. The stability of church and state, the very survival of civilization itself, rests upon our defeat of the pernicious, misguided doctrine of abolitionism.

  ‘Now, I know that some folks are as kind-hearted as they are wrong-headed.’ He gave a tight, sad little smile and shook his head at the folly of such ignorance. ‘They want to believe that slavery
is wrong, that it goes against God’s teachings. But this is a dangerous, misguided error. Yes, the Negro has a soul – don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise! But just because he has a spiritual soul does not mean that he is in any sense the intellectual, moral, or civil equal of the white man. The truth is, anyone who would try to free the Negro from slavery does not have his best interests at heart. Slavery is the African’s natural condition, the God-mandated institution by which the superior white race, in their benevolence and generosity, has turned the ignorant, heathen savages of Africa into civilized Christian laborers, guiding them and protecting them from the consequences of their own sloth and folly. The Negro is so intellectually and morally deficient that he is simply fundamentally incapable of surviving on his own.’

  My face grew hot, and I shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden pew. I felt as if I were somehow besmirched, just by sitting there and listening to this kind of talk. I could not begin to imagine what all the free people of color and the slaves in the gallery must be thinking, listening to this. I thought about all the gens de couleur libres I knew, like Castile and his son, Leo; they were surviving just fine with their livery stable. And what about Rose Lacroix, with her vast plantation to the north of Bayou Sara? There were something like a quarter of a million free people of color scattered across the South, and a few hundred thousand more up North; how did this preacher think they managed not only to survive, but often prosper?

  I glanced around me. But if these thoughts were occurring to any of my fellow parishioners, it didn’t show on their faces. They stared up at the Reverend Hale in rapt attention.

  ‘The Negro,’ said the preacher with a sad smile, ‘is like the Irishman—’

  I heard Margaret O’Sullivan, a plasterer’s wife from Ulster who sat beside me, draw in a quick, indignant breath.

  ‘He’s like the Irishman, and like our own dearly loved and cherished women and children: of inferior mental faculties, foolish and overly emotional, and in constant need of guidance and control by his betters. And just as we protect, guide, and chastise our women and children when necessary, we take loving care of the black members of our families, too. Anyone committed to the abolition of slavery is in effect advocating the destruction of our families. That’s right; abolitionism is one of the seeds of socialism and communism. Make no mistake; this is what we’re really fighting here. We’re talking about the radical doctrines of Smith and Andrews. And if these dangerous thinkers are allowed to have their way, where will it end? Soon, they’ll be advocating for the abolition of private property! The abolition of religion! Free lands, free love, and free women!’

  He was thundering now, eyes bulging, his entire body shaking with the vehemence of his rhetoric. I was staring at him so intently that my mother had to nudge me twice to get my attention.

  I looked over at her, and her gaze locked with mine. Her color was high, her lips pressed into a tight, straight line, her lower jaw shoved forward in that way she had. Her breath came so hard and fast her chest was jerking.

  I understood, now, why my mother so often chose to sit at the back of the church. She gave me a barely perceptible nod, and we arose quietly to slip out the door into the hot, July sunshine.

  She charged down the pathway to the street with such swift, long strides that I wondered if she feared being contaminated by the poisonous concepts spewing out of the church behind us. I had to run to catch up to her, grabbing her arm so that she swung around to face me.

  ‘Is it true, what he’s saying?’ I demanded. ‘That the Bible—’

  ‘Amrie! No! That man is a pompous, self-righteous idiot. If you want to start reading it that way, the Bible also condones child sacrifice, the brutal extermination of entire societies, rape, and polygamy! What’s next? Shall every man be permitted a dozen wives, simply because it was the custom of some primitive society that ceased to exist thousands of years ago? Good God!’ She clenched her fists, and we heard a loud crack as the guardsticks of her fan snapped.

  She opened her hand and stared down at the broken fan that lay across her palm. Then she startled me by going off into a loud peal of laughter.

  I stared at her, puzzled and a bit frightened. In truth, a broken fan was nothing to laugh about. What might once have been a matter of no importance was now a real aggravation, for the worst of the summer heat was barreling down on us, and there would be no way to buy a new fan until the war ended and the blockade was lifted.

  Her laughter died abruptly. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she said. ‘I should have realized he’d just make me angry if he decided to go off on this.’

  ‘So why did we come?’

  ‘“Know thine enemy”, I suppose.’

  I looked at her, at the familiar, determined tilt of her chin, the angry fire that lingered in her eyes. The golden morning sun poured down around us, the air already hot and humid with a breeze that blew a fine dust out of the road to powder the tombs around us. Yet in spite of the heat, I felt a sudden chill dance down my spine.

  Perhaps the suspicion had been there before, unacknowledged. But it was only in that moment, as we stood beneath the spreading oaks of the quiet churchyard that held the graves of my brother Simon and another brother who had died just hours after his birth, that I first admitted to myself the truth: Hiram Tucker was not the only one who suspected that my mother was the intended recipient of the secret message that began, ‘Dear Madam …’

  Seventeen

  What kind of unnatural child suspects her own mother of betraying her family, friends, and neighbors?

  This was the question that now haunted my long days and sleepless nights. I told myself all sorts of reassuring lies, but I didn’t really believe any of them. And then I started worrying; if even I could suspect my mother, was there any doubt of what would happen if the discovery of the drowned Federal and his undelivered message ever became known around town?

  Yet it wasn’t long before I had a new, more immediate concern. With the vast Union army now entrenched at Baton Rouge, we began seeing what they called foraging parties: troops of men who would descend on isolated farms to seize corn and hay, cattle and chickens, wagons and mules. But often, that wasn’t all they’d take. It soon became obvious that as far as the invaders were concerned, everything we owned was theirs for the taking: gold and jewelry, silver and keepsakes, even silk dresses and children’s toys.

  We’d heard the same stories coming out of Tennessee and Virginia. At first, more cautious folks told themselves these must be isolated incidents, that American soldiers wouldn’t ravage the homes of their own brethren, and American officers would never allow such behavior. But after the second house in our area was plundered, Mama and I hauled some empty barrels and oil cloth into the dining room, and spent one evening packing up our silver teapot and candlesticks, silverware and serving dishes. We sewed our jewelry into flannel pouches and stuck those in there, too, although we kept out a few pieces, because we’d heard that when raiding parties couldn’t find any valuables to steal, they’d string up a woman by her thumbs and stick her with bayonets until she confessed to where she’d hidden her possessions.

  We worked in a silence filled only with the rustle of the paper and old rags we used as wrappings. Finally, I said, ‘Where we gonna bury this stuff?’ The Federals were reputed to have an uncanny ability to know where to look – crawling under houses and kitchens, even digging under beehives.

  She tucked a silver soup ladle down the side of the barrel. ‘Priebus is going to dig a new privy over by the woodhouse.’

  I stared at her. ‘You’re gonna put this stuff down the privy?’

  ‘Not down the privy hole, no. He’s going to bury it beneath the floor.’

  I wasn’t convinced that was going to work. I mean, if the Yankees were willing to crawl under porches and mess with bees, why not privies? But I couldn’t come up with a better idea, so I kept still.

  I settled back against the doorjamb, my hands resting slack as I let my gaze drift a
round the room. I looked at the gilt-framed oil portraits of my Grandfather Dunbar and my brother Simon; at the crystal glasses on the sideboard that had once belonged to Papa’s grand-mère; at the delicately inlaid rosewood stand that Adelaide Dunbar’s mother had brought with her from Boston and that had been in her family since before the Revolution. We couldn’t bury everything. We could only hide the things that were most valuable and therefore most at risk, or that would at least fit in the barrels.

  The Reverend Lewis was always talking about the vanity of material possessions. But I figured my attachment to the old ormolu clock on the mantel – or Grand-mère’s delicate celery pitcher – had nothing to do with how much these things were worth. Their value to me was something intangible, something inside me, something that had to do with the bittersweet ache I felt when I chanced to look at Simon’s portrait and the warm glow of belonging I got when I held my great-grandfather’s worn letter opener in my hands. It was as if all these things both helped to define me and somehow extended me – into the past, where I could connect with forebears I’d never known, and into the future, to the grandchildren I’d always assumed would someday inherit these things from me.

  The idea that someone could take all this from me – my sense of identity, my connection to ancestors I’d never known, the image of my dead brother – made me feel anxious and vulnerable in a way I’d never before realized I was. It also made me quietly, powerfully, and enduringly furious.

  I said, ‘I wish we could somehow hide it all – cast an enchantment on the whole house that would keep everything safe from any Yankees marching up the road.’

  But such wishings came from the imagination of a child, and my childhood was rapidly slipping away from me.

  August came, and with it rumors of vast troop movements. People said that the Confederate General John C. Breckenridge – once vice president of the United States – had come down from Mississippi with nearly four thousand men and was at Camp Moore, preparing to march against Baton Rouge. They said that the Arkansas, the mighty iron ram that had scattered the Federal fleet at Vicksburg, was on its way down the river, too. But I couldn’t help thinking that if even I knew the Confederate plans, then surely the Federals at Baton Rouge must know about them, too?