by Joyce Hansen
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Joyce Hansen
To Dr. Harriet Pitts—a dedicated teacher—
a faithful friend
Prologue
June 1866
Obi immediately recognized the dirt road leading to the Jennings farm.
“Driver,” he shouted over the rattling horse and buggy, “let me off here.” He practically jumped out of the carriage before the coachman halted the horses. He handed the driver two dollars and a generous fifty-cent tip for the ride from Charleston.
“Thank you, sir.” The man tipped his hat, revealing a full head of thick gray hair. “This be your final stop, or do you want me to come back for you?”
“I’m returning to Charleston, but I don’t know how long I’ll be here. You best not bother about coming back. I’ll hail a carriage along the road or walk.”
The coachman stared admiringly at Obi, who wore his blue army uniform with his soft forage cap turned very slightly to the side. With his high cheekbones, deep-set dark eyes, and a surprising smile showing perfect white teeth, Obi cut a handsome figure. “You might have to walk back then,” the man said, “’less a black driver come by. White drivers won’t pick up colored, especially soldiers. I know you a military man and all, but it dangerous walking these roads alone at night.”
Obi shaded his eyes from the bright morning sun and gazed at the beginning of the pine forest in the distance and the nearby oak grove. Slowly the scene sharpened in his mind and became familiar to him once again. He reached in his pocket and handed the man another dollar. “Wait for me here,” he said. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. I’ll be right here.”
Obi tried to remain calm as he strolled slowly down the path he’d often walked as a barefoot boy and a barefoot young man—the slave of John Jennings. Though he was wearing sturdy boots, he imagined that he could still feel the sandy soil between his toes. Now he was a free man, an army man, Corporal Obidiah Booker of the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry, assigned to the Freedmen’s Bureau in Beaufort.
This was his second two-day pass since returning home to South Carolina from Tennessee in March, and once again he was using his free time to search for Easter and Jason, who had been slaves with him on the Jennings farm. Though they were not related by blood, they were the only family Obi had. And blood could not have made the need to find them any stronger.
Five years ago, leaving Jason behind, Obi and Easter had escaped from the Jennings farm near Charleston, South Carolina, and headed for the Union-controlled Sea Islands. On the way they were captured by Confederate soldiers and forced to work in a Confederate army camp. When Obi eventually escaped to join the Union Army, he left alone. Easter, determined to go back to the farm and get Jason, had refused to leave with him.
Although the war kept them apart, Easter lived in the center of his thoughts. He could not forget how she had felt in his arms when he kissed her good-bye before leaving the camp. Now they could become a real family. They were free to marry, if she would be his wife, and Jason could live with them as their son. Someday, perhaps, he and Easter would have children of their own.
When they parted, he’d promised to return for her, and she’d promised to wait for him. He’d kept that promise last month, when he visited the old Confederate camp, which became a freedmen’s settlement after the war. But she wasn’t there. No one in the settlement knew her. The old slave couple, Mariah and Gabriel, who’d helped him and Easter while they were in the camp, had both died. Since Easter wasn’t there, he guessed she’d returned to the Jennings farm.
As he continued down the familiar path and saw in the distance the rough split-rail fence that marked off the beginning of the Jennings’s tobacco fields and the little log cabin where his old friend Buka had lived, Obi’s heart raced in spite of himself. He couldn’t control the rush of excitement that filled every pore when he thought about her.
How did she look now? Did she still have the same small, brown, heart-shaped face and lively eyes that closed and seemed to curl at the corners when she laughed? He guessed she’d be about eighteen or nineteen years old, since he was twenty-one or twenty-two. Neither one of them knew their exact age, because they’d both been sold to John and Martha Jennings as children. Jason, however, was now twelve years old. He’d been born on the farm, and his birthdate had been noted and remembered.
Obi picked up his pace when he reached the tobacco fields and saw in the distance the frame house and the nearby barn where he used to sleep. The fields were choked with weeds, and as he drew nearer to the Jennings’s home, he saw that the roof of the once neat frame house sagged in the middle, and the weather-beaten shutters barely hung on their hinges. He saw neither hound, cow, mule, nor horse. Even before he knocked, he knew that no one would answer.
He tried the door, but it was locked. He then ran to the back of the house and banged on that door, knowing how senseless this was. He looked up at the broken bedroom window. “Easter! Jason!” he yelled and banged on the door. The only response was the sudden flutter of several small brown birds.
Obi couldn’t bear to look around him. Too many memories—Easter calling him to dinner, Jason running and singing. He rushed away from the house, and Corporal Obidiah Booker was almost forgotten. He was Obi again, racing through the Jennings’s empty fields, heading deeper into his slave past. He ran toward the Phillips plantation. Perhaps Easter and Jason were working there. Maybe the Jennings family had moved west, as they’d said they would.
As he passed the creek that separated the Jenningses’ small tobacco farm from the much larger Phillips plantation, he tried not to give in to the despair he’d felt when he didn’t find Easter waiting for him at the camp. Where else would Easter and Jason be? Where else could they go? he wondered as he picked his way through the overgrown brush.
War had not touched the still-gleaming white columns of the Big House, and the cotton fields were still dotted with laborers, just as he remembered. He tried to return to the present, straightened his back, and started to march smartly up to the front door. Obi couldn’t scale, however, the invisible wall of times past. Instead, he walked around to the back of the house as he’d always done when he and Easter were hired out by John Jennings to work at the plantation, or when he went there to deliver the tobacco that Jennings sold to Mr. Phillips. He walked toward the kitchen, separate from the rest of the house. He was hopeful that the cook, or her helper, Rose, was there.
Nothing else had seemed to change. Elderly women sat in front of cabins, watching young children. He was disappointed, though, when he looked into the kitchen shed and saw neither the cook nor Rose.
“Morning, ladies. Excuse me.”
The younger woman was sweeping, and the other one kneading dough. They both stopped what they were doing. The young one curtsied. “Oh, a soldier man. How do, sir?”
The older woman nodded. “Can we help you?”
“I looking for a girl name Easter.”
“
We don’t know anyone use to be here,” the woman said. “Me and my daughter work for the Phillips family since last year.”
“She didn’t live here. She live over yonder on the Jennings place.”
“No one live there.”
“You never hear tell of a girl name Easter or a skinny little boy name Jason?”
“Can’t say that we do. We only hear from one of the old women who still live here after freedom, that all of the people who used to be here run away.”
“Who is this woman?”
“Would you like some clabber?” the younger woman asked, batting her eyes in Obi’s direction.
“No, miss.” He turned to the woman. “Do you know where I can find this old woman?”
“She dead,” the woman answered.
“Are any of the other people who always live here still around?”
“No, sir, they all die out. Like I say, the people who use to live here left. The old man, Mr. Phillips, he dead too.”
He tried to control the throbbing in his head. “What about his wife?”
“She here. Maybe she know about them people you looking for.”
Obi thanked them.
“You live around here?” the younger one asked.
“Gal, you too forward,” Obi heard the older woman say as he dashed out of the kitchen.
He rushed to the front of the house and ran up the steps two at a time, forgetting his shyness about knocking at the front door. He knocked several times before a very young girl, no more than ten, answered, wearing a plain homespun dress and a little white apron. He almost said, is your mistress home? He caught himself, asking, “Is Mrs. Phillips home?”
“Yes. Is you a soldier? A Yankee?”
“Just tell her Obi would like to speak with her. She knows who I am. I’ll wait right here.”
The girl slammed the door, and he heard her screeching, “Anobi is here to see you, Missy. Anobi is here. He a soldier.”
A few moments later, Mrs. Phillips came to the door. Her smile turned to a frown when she saw who “Anobi” really was. She seemed thinner and shorter than he remembered her. She squinted at him.
“What do you want here?” she shouted. “Your master and mistress were good to you. That poor Martha grieved herself to an early grave over you and that little wench you run away with.”
The heat rose from Obi’s feet to his head. “Miss, I just want to—”
“Look at you, a Yankee nigger soldier, come back to make trouble.” Her white wispy hair fluttered around her head. She turned to the girl. “You run right now to Master George and tell him to come here with his shotgun. Tell him a Yankee soldier is here trying to kill your mistress.” The girl hesitated. “Git, before I take a whip to you.”
Before Obi could grab the girl, she’d already flown down the stairs.
“I just want to know where Easter is!” Obi shouted back at Mrs. Phillips.
“I don’t know!” she screamed at him. “They didn’t tell me where they were going when they ran away. If Easter shows back up here, she’ll be arrested for kidnapping, because I know Jason would not have gone if it wasn’t for her.” The built-up anger and rage over her lost human property became so great, she began to tremble. “And as for Rayford and Rose and the rest of them who left us after we took such good care of them,” she continued, “I’m having them arrested too. It killed my poor husband when they left us like that. Just killed him.”
Obi’s head throbbed. He backed away from her, overwhelmed by the urge to wring her little shriveled neck. He ran down the steps quickly before he lost his temper, and before the girl returned with a mob of vigilantes. Mrs. Phillips’s shrill voice followed him. “You’ll be swinging off a tree soon.”
Obi did not take her threat lightly. Instead of walking along the open road that led to the path where the driver waited, he headed for the woods. As he began to pick his way through the brush, he heard a slight rustling near him and felt for his pistol. Suddenly, the same girl appeared from behind a honeysuckle bush. She looked frightened and was crying. “Mister soldier, I didn’t tell them mens on you. I didn’t see you trying to kill her. But she whip me if she find out I didn’t go.”
He relaxed. This girl wasn’t so silly after all. “Don’t cry. You walk real slow and you give Miss Phillips’s message to this Mr. George. Tell him you saw me going that way.” He pointed in the direction of the thick pine forest.
She quickly recovered. “Yes, mister soldier. You won’t tell Missy?”
He shook his head. “You walk real slow.”
He moved, as fast as he could, out of the tangle of branches and vines and brush as he made his way back to the road. Every nerve and muscle in his body was taut. His head was pounding, his mouth dry, and his whole being consumed by anger and disappointment. To his relief, the coachman had waited.
“Hello, sir,” the driver said. “That wasn’t long at all.”
Obi nodded and quickly stepped into the carriage. The man could tell that he was disturbed. Another one of them cases. Kin and love ones missing. Feel sorry for the young man. But that’s the way things be now. Black people seeking each other all over the place. He lashed the horses and the carriage rattled down the road.
Obi looked back at the path and the pines and oak grove beyond, and if he’d had a cannon, he told himself, he would have fired on the farm and the plantation and the entire surrounding area. Leveled it to the ground. Made it disappear from memory. Nothing had changed there, except that the people he knew and loved were gone.
He looked away, wanting to take his tortured head and bang it on the ground. He wanted to wail and scream the way a child would—but he was not a child, he was a man. So he held his aching head and tried to be manly, but he became a boy once more that day, consumed by the memory of his mother. She screamed, and he sobbed in the corner of a small ship that carried him from one of the Sea Islands to the South Carolina mainland—carried him away from her forever.
He sat in the corner of the carriage, grit his teeth, and swallowed his disappointment, anger, and bitterness. He was like a piece of stone all the way back to Charleston.
The coachman could feel Obi’s sad and silent presence inside the carriage. He prayed for Obi. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know him.
Eventually Obi’s headache subsided, replaced by a gnawing emptiness in his heart. That evening when he boarded the ferry that would take him back to his post in Beaufort, he vowed to find them no matter how many years it took.
Easter had returned for Jason. Perhaps they’d left with Rose and Rayford and the rest of the people from the plantation. She and Rose were close. Maybe they were among the thousands of freed people who were still flocking to the Sea Islands.
At least he knew that they were together. Easter would take good care of Jason. He’d find them; otherwise, he’d be locked forever in his slave past.
Chapter 1
Besides soldiers the streets are full of the oddest...
children—dirty and ragged.
—LETTERS AND DIARY OF LAURA M. TOWNE
April 1868
Obi gazed at the long line of black men with a sprinkling of whites and could not shake the odd feeling that something special was going to happen that day. As usual, whenever Obi was in a new place, he searched for a familiar face—anyone who might give him information about Easter and Jason, or the people who had left the Phillips plantation. Fighting his shyness and distrust of people he didn’t know, he even struck up conversations with strangers at times. These often ended up telling Obi their own stories of searching for a sister or brother, a mother or father, a lover, a friend.
In the two years since he’d visited the Jennings farm he had found out nothing. He’d gone back to the farm and the neighborhood surrounding the plantation. He’d also traveled to a few of the coastal islands—Parris, Port Royal, Ladies, Hilton Head—but there were many more that he had yet to step foot on. He promised to visit every one of them. Freed people were still pouring
onto the islands, fleeing the beatings and lynchings and the hatred against them that was beginning to spread like a plague.
He carefully studied the faces of the men who were lining up at the courthouse so that they could vote. Perhaps this was his lucky day, and he’d find the one person who could lead him to Easter and Jason.
“We are witnessing history.” Thomas startled Obi. “Black men have been given the right to vote,” he added.
“Y’all be witnessing buckshots in your hindparts if you don’t pay attention to these woods behind us,” Peter said, his eyes roaming the slight rise of hills covered with pine and oak trees.
“Okay, Peter.” Obi turned to several other men who were also from the 104th U.S. Colored Infantry, part of a small company of soldiers sent from Beaufort to guard the men voting for a new state constitution.
“Time for another round of patrols, men,” Obi said. “Two of y’all go check that thicket. It don’t look natural to me.” Then he turned to Thomas and Peter. “Let’s see what’s over on the other side of the hill.”
“Good spot for a sniper,” Thomas muttered in his clipped northern accent as he rushed ahead of Obi and Peter.
Peter, large and husky, frowned at Obi. “Soon as I muster out of this army, I’m leaving the South. You still ain’t free if you can’t go and vote without soldiers guarding you. Let me tell you, the only reason the freed people ain’t all been killed dead is ’cause the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau still here. When they go—” He ran his index finger across his throat. “Death to all blacks and all Republicans—white ones too.”
“Hush, Peter,” Obi said. “Concentrate on what we doing here.”
Obi watched the back of Thomas’s large head bobbing up and down, and his nervous quick movements as he stomped through the brush, loudly crunching dried leaves and twigs. That city boy still scared of the woods, he mused. “Peter, make Thomas slow down. He sound like a herd of buffalo, someone hear him coming a mile away.”
Suddenly, one of the soldiers who’d walked toward the thicket on the other side of the hill called out, “Corporal Booker. Over here.”