Now Sherman’s men took anything they considered valuable from the house—big, thick rugs; paintings; even stacks of china dishes—and then they set fire to the house, the barns, the stables, the fields, and every tree they could torch, even the peach trees. The slaves were especially surprised by that part.
In the middle of the screaming and yelling, the Yankee general himself shouted the announcement that the slaves were free. “Every bit as free as I am,” he emphasized. Then the troops moved east through the pungent black smoke, singing as they marched. They had not touched the slave quarters.
A few pigs and chickens wandered back during the next week or so. Some hams and cheeses had escaped detection, and potatoes buried in the burned fields tasted nicely roasted when they were dug up. The Yankees had avoided the plantation’s beehives, so there was honey.
Soon enough, however, they ate all the hidden food that was easy to find. Except for a few chickens, the remaining livestock had to be killed for meat. The plantation’s inhabitants lived off whatever forest edibles they could find and whatever fish and game they could rustle up, vegetables they could grow, eggs from the laying hens, and any food the children found from their many hiding places. It was plenty of work just keeping everyone fed.
Today, Janie thought she remembered where she had buried a jar of preserves, and she set out with a large spoon for digging. After digging in an area around a patch of rhubarb gone to seed, she did indeed find a glass jar of peach preserves. She cleaned it off with her apron then carefully cradled it to take back to Aunty Mil, eager to give her something sweet and soft.
On the way, she saw several of the former slaves gathered around the pump. Janie spied Aleta and headed for her side. Seventeen-year-old Blue, a well-liked young man, was saying to the others, “I believe it’s time to go in the Big House and see if there’s somethin’ we can use.”
An elder shook his head. “Miz Laura may think nobody comin’ back here, but sooner or later, somebody be back to claim this land, burned or not.”
After a long pause, Aleta spoke up. “Well, for now, I think Blue’s right. We ought to find what we can use around here. Miz Laura said we could—we all heard her. I say let’s go to the Big House.”
The Big House cook shook her head. “I want nothin’ to do with going in there. That house is haunted.”
Blue looked at her and laughed. “You been goin’ in there for years. Why you say it’s haunted now?”
“Miz Laura was there then. It don’t feel right going in there now. Too much misery.”
“Come on, Cookie,” said Aleta. “Miz Laura gave us her blessing. You heard her. Let’s you and me go in there together and see what we find. No need to fear an empty house. It’s just empty.” Aleta linked arms with the heavyset cook and pulled her along to the back door of the house. “Let’s go find us something good, Cookie.”
Janie hurried back to her cabin with the preserves and woke up Aunty Mil. “I found something soft for you, Aunty,” she said as she pried open the jar.
The old woman dipped a finger in and tasted the peachy sweetness. “Ooh, child, you done it now,” she cackled. “Tastes that good.”
“I’ll be right back, Aunty,” said Janie. “People going in the Big House like Miz Laura said we could. I’ll see if I can find something else for you to eat.” She handed a spoon to Aunty Mil.
“I thank you, Janie-bird.” Aunty Mil stopped dipping her finger into the preserves and began spooning little bites, savoring the syrupy fruit. “I thank you for many things, baby girl.”
Janie laughed and trotted through the quarters again. A slight girl but with strong legs and arms, Janie was always running or dancing about, and she was known as a good worker. She remembered a time when they weren’t always trying to find food, but it seemed like that’s all they did now. And Janie was always hungry.
Maybe there would be some surprises in the Big House. Maybe there was even food still hidden somewhere in there.
Janie hurried up to the Big House.
CHAPTER 2
Inside the Big House
Janie, Aleta, and Blue stood inside what was left of the main entrance hall of Rubyhill’s Big House and looked up the charred spiral staircase to the hole in the roof. They had entered with the cook through the side door, and now the three young people stood in this front hallway. Miz Laura had called it the foyer.
It felt strange to Janie to be inside the Big House. In the past two years, Miz Laura had not moved much of anything since the day the Yankees destroyed so much of it. She’d ordered the others to leave things as they were for some unexplained reason. It was a mess.
“Dunno how that woman stayed in her right mind living like this,” muttered Aleta.
“Seems she lost her right mind,” offered Blue. Aleta shrugged. “Sounded right in her mind to me when she left. Sounded sad is all.”
Janie gazed around the foyer, which was a big room in itself. She vividly remembered the parties here before the war and how she’d peek in from the dining room. It was something to see, all those ladies in their great big hoopskirts, milling about, holding on to the arms of tall, well-dressed gentlemen. They had all fit in here just fine with plenty of room to spare.
Now this once grand entrance area was dark and dingy. The door to the front veranda was tied shut with baling twine. Scattered around the room were broken urns and glass from window panes and once-beloved possessions, sagging drapes, slashed paintings of previous Rubyhill inhabitants, and general filth. It plainly showed the two years of neglect that had followed the fire.
“Maybe we can use them drapes,” Aleta remarked. She was a good seamstress. “I could make blankets out of ‘em.”
Janie hesitantly slid open the pocket doors to the parlor. Since the upstairs fire, this was where Miz Laura had been living, and she hadn’t left the room much at all. One of the former slaves had continued to help her, cooking and doing her laundry. This was done for her strictly out of kindness, since slavery was over.
At any rate, it appeared that Miz Laura had been sleeping in this room on a once-fine couch, its velvet ripped open by a Yankee’s sword. She’d left her blankets and bedclothes strewn around. Janie tiptoed over to them. She shook them out and set them aside to be used by the community of former slaves.
“I’m going upstairs,” she heard Blue announce from the foyer.
“You crazy?” Aleta fussed. “Half the stairs is burned out.”
Blue laughed. Janie hurried to the hallway and watched as he headed up to the charred area. Always nimble on his feet, Blue climbed and pulled himself from solid point to solid point and got to the upstairs balcony. Janie thought he looked like a cat climbing a tree.
Blue disappeared into the first bedroom. “Soldiers took this room apart, that’s for sure!” he yelled from inside.
“Hey, Blue!” Aleta called up. “See if they went into the middle rooms where the clothes were! No windows on those, so it’s gonna be dark in there!”
After a few moments, Blue showed up at the banister. “Nobody touched those rooms, Aleta. Must’a been too busy ripping apart everything else, but those rooms—the doors ain’t even open. Most of the rooms burned through the roof, though.”
“I want to go up there,” said Janie.
“No, little sis,” said Aleta. “Too dangerous.”
Blue laughed. “For her? She’s surefooted as a goat, and she don’t weigh enough to make anything collapse. Come on up, girl. Follow what I tell you.”
Janie listened to Blue and took every step and handhold he instructed her to take until she had made her way up to the second floor. “Wanna come up?” she called down to Aleta.
The older girl shook her head. “I’ll go through what’s down here. Let me know what you find.”
Janie had never been upstairs in all her time at Rubyhill. She’d never climbed the circular staircase when it was intact. The kitchen was detached from the house, as were most plantation kitchens, partly because of the intense southern
heat and partly as a safety precaution in case a cooking fire surged out of control. Because Janie was a kitchen worker, the only indoor rooms she’d been in were the pantry and the dining room.
The five upstairs bedrooms had doors off a U-shaped balcony that looked over the foyer downstairs. All the bedrooms had extensive damage from smashing, slashing, and fire, as well as from rain, since most of the roof had burned out.
Just as Aleta said, some of the bedrooms were connected by dressing rooms that ran between them. The soldiers had entered bedrooms by way of the hallway doors and, in their haste, hadn’t disturbed the dressing rooms.
Blue and Janie discovered that the dressing room in what had been Miz Laura’s bedroom was untouched by the fire. There was a smoky smell, but flames had not reached that small part of the roof. It was dark in there, but even in the dim light, they could see some clothes and wardrobe drawers.
Blue left Janie in Miz Laura’s bedroom and ran to find candles. Janie sank down on her haunches and looked around, then up at the gaping hole in the roof. She could see straight up at the sky through the burned-out part. So blue, and not a cloud in it. Hard to believe anything bad happened here when you look up high, she thought. A family of goldfinches had built nests in the charred boards, and the birds were noisy and upset over Janie’s intrusion. She spoke gently to the largest bird. “Don’t worry, little momma, we won’t be here long.”
Momma. Janie had a quick vision of her mother back at Shannon Oaks, smiling at her in the rosy light of the cabin fire. She had strong memories of Momma stroking her head and singing songs about Jesus to her. Before Poppa was taken away on the chain gang, Momma used to laugh a lot. But nobody knew where Poppa had been taken. There wasn’t much laughter after that day.
Janie’d last seen Momma at Shannon Oaks Plantation, the very place where Janie had been born on Christmas Day eleven years ago. Few slaves knew their birthdays. But since Christmas Day was the one day every year slaves did not have to work, it was easy to remember that day was Janie’s birthday.
She sometimes wondered about going to find Momma, but Janie had never been away from Rubyhill since the day she was brought here six years ago as a small child. She had no idea how to get to Shannon Oaks. She wasn’t even sure how far away it was.
Of course, Janie knew north from south and east from west like every other country child. But she really didn’t have a clear idea as to where she lived in relation to the rest of the world. Rubyhill itself was her world.
The most disturbing thing, though, was that there was no telling where Momma might be now. Poppa was sold south the year before little Janie was sold to Rubyhill, and since then, Momma could have been sold, too. Besides, if Momma were still around, wouldn’t she come find Janie?
This was the question that often nudged its way into Janie’s young heart. It was a question that had left her hopeful after the soldiers told them they were free. But as time went on, she found that question made her heart ache. She didn’t think she could go searching for Momma, but she sure wished Momma would search for her. If she could.
Blue crashed his way back into the room, holding a big torch and a couple of squat candles.
“How you get up them stairs with that fire?” Janie asked.
“Wasn’t easy, girl, but here I am.” He squatted down and handed Janie the candles. After lighting both candles, he walked to a smashed-out window and called down to the yard. “Ready, Nathan, Lucy?” Ten-year-old Nathan and his twin sister, Lucy, were good friends of Janie. They stood below the window, a waterlogged blanket stretched between them. Blue tossed the lighted torch out the window, watched as Nathan and Lucy caught and doused the torch with the blanket, and then turned back to Janie.
Blue took one lighted candle from her and approached the dressing room. “Come on, girl. Let’s see what we got in here.”
Shannon Oaks Plantation, Georgia
Forty miles away at Shannon Oaks Plantation, a former slave named Anna picked her final ear of corn for the day. She and the others dumped each of their heavy canvas bags full of corn into piles at the end of each row. There would be plenty to eat for a while.
The former slaves of Shannon Oaks were undoubtedly eating better than many other Georgians. Food wasn’t necessarily plentiful, but at least Shannon Oaks had not been in the direct path of Sherman and his men. Not all had been lost that day in Georgia.
And Anna had seen plenty of loss over the past few years. Her young husband had been chained up and taken from her before the war. One year later, her brown-eyed little girl was sold and taken away. Anna had been beside herself with grief.
But she held on. Every day Anna hoped and prayed the three of them would be together again. She didn’t know where they were. George could be anywhere south of Shannon Oaks. Maybe Mississippi, she’d heard. And little Janie—really named Georgeanna after both her parents—was last known to be at a plantation called Rubyhill.
Anna sometimes thought about striking out for that place called Rubyhill. Only one thing held her back.
The day George was chained onto the chain gang and led down the long drive at Shannon Oaks, Anna had run alongside him, frantic. It was horrible to see her strong, handsome husband in chains. Anna had wept openly.
“Don’t you cry, woman!” George called to her. His eyes flashed in a mix of anger, fear, and love. “You stay strong. You stay strong for Janie.” He had held Anna’s gaze with his own as he was pulled away, then said the words she would not forget: “I’ll come back and get you. I’ll come back.”
Anna was holding him to it. The war had been over for almost two years now. When would George come back? And when could they go find their little girl?
Anna slipped two ears of corn into her apron pocket to roast later on. She kept her strength up by eating even when she’d rather do anything but eat. Because no matter where George had ended up, if he said he was coming back, he’d be back.
If he was still alive, that is.
CHAPTER 3
The Leather Box
In spite of the general smokiness, a sweet waft of cedar met Janie when she and Blue opened the wardrobe doors. They both worked quickly by candlelight, pulling out all the clothing they could find, first in one room and then in all the upstairs dressing rooms.
There were shirts and pants, dresses, skirts, blouses, nightgowns, robes, warm coats, lightweight jackets, and the real prize: shoes and boots. Them Yankees were in some hurry to miss all this, Janie thought. A few woolen items had started to get moth-eaten, but the cedar walls had protected most of them.
Piece by piece, Janie and Blue pulled clothing out of the wardrobes and hauled everything to an open window. There they dropped the items into the eager hands of former slaves who had gathered below.
On plantations, the only clothes slaves had were the ones on their backs, and technically they didn’t even own those. Every year each person was issued one outfit of clothing and one blanket. Shoes were scarce even in better times, and it was not unusual to go barefoot all year long.
Since midway through the war, however, no clothing or blankets had been issued at Rubyhill. Everyone’s clothing was looking threadbare. There hadn’t been enough wool for winter for a couple of years, and even in Georgia, winters could be chilly. Janie recalled waking up to a dusting of snow on the ground once in a while.
At least now, she knew Rubyhill’s ex-slaves would manage to stay dressed and warm for a long time with all these fine garments.
Eventually, Janie and Blue carefully made their way back down the burned staircase. The sun was lowering, and it was starting to give everything indoors an eerie shadow. Janie was eager to get out of this dark house and into the fresh air. She was also eager to join the other members of the community in sorting through the huge piles of clothes now at their disposal.
“Be sure Janie gets something nice,” Janie heard Aleta reminding them. “She worked hard hunting and hauling for y’all.”
Janie appreciated Aleta’s big-sister wa
ys. She was a little bossy, but nobody minded, simply because Aleta had the interests of them all at heart. She was wise beyond her seventeen years, and everyone saw it.
“Come over here, Janie,” Aleta said.
Janie hurried to where Aleta rummaged through the huge piles of clothing. She pulled out a lovely calico-print dress and held it lengthwise in front of Janie. Aleta’s experienced eye took in all of Janie’s slender body. “Miz Laura’s bigger than you, but not so much. I can cut this down some.”
Aleta looked back at the pile. “Master and his son sure had a lot of clothes for menfolk. Most everybody should be able to find a coat here.”
Janie began rummaging. She found a pair of warm slippers that would fit Aunty Mil. Then she pulled out a thick jacket that had belonged to the master’s son, but on Janie it was a full-length coat. She rolled the sleeves up, over and over. Aleta looked over at her and laughed. “I’ll trim that down, too, but you don’t need that right away. We got a little time before cold sets in.”
Janie rummaged until she found a pair of thick socks that would help Aunty’s cold feet. Then she found some shoes that she could wear herself and a jacket that would fit Aunty Mil.
Janie straightened up and looked around. The rose trellises lay in pieces in bunches of weeds, never having been cleaned up. The many roses and other flowering bushes were long gone.
Only now did Janie notice a few of the other former slaves pulling at the weeds and digging with big spoons in and around the old flowerbeds. Both Nathan and Lucy sat cross-legged, digging at the ground in front of them with cooking spoons.
Valuables had been buried very well in the gardens, and plants were put in the ground right over them. The Yankees hadn’t found a thing there, not that they didn’t try. But back when Miz Laura was still giving orders, she had said to leave that sort of thing buried because there might be stray thieves roaming the countryside. So today was the first digging anyone had done in the gardens.
American Rebirth Page 13