by Tom Blair
So it was ruled by the Captain, Mister Akins and his trunk could ride on our wagon if another family would agree to haul Mother’s hope chest. A ruling of no rationale. A ruling easy to implement once Father recovered the farm money hidden in the bottom of Mother’s hope chest a lifetime ago.
When we cut and chopped our way through the stand of trees days before, there was a toll. A toll collected late. As with many of the men, Mister Johnson was attacking trees with a well-sharpened ax. It was late in the afternoon, perhaps he was tired, but for whatever reason one swing of his ax glanced off his target and cut through boot, skin and bone; lost most of three toes and a bucket of blood before the bleeding was dammed. Mister Ebbs made him a boot special for his short foot and in a brief few days he was walking, walking with a limp and a grimace, but walking. Then he wasn’t. For several days we didn’t see him. Before supper, after the train halted for the day, Mister Akins visited Mister Johnson in the back of his wagon. Mister Akins then back to our wagon to retrieve a book I had not seen before, The Modern Practice of Physic. Sitting under a birch tree he seemed intent on only one or two pages, he wasn’t turning page after page as he did when digesting one of his many other books. Later that evening Mister Akins joined by the Captain and together off to Mister Hanson’s wagon, then to Mister Johnson’s wagon. The next morning Mister Akins returned his book to his library.
Within a few days Mister Johnson was buried near a clump of pine. It wasn’t until later that I considered that we buried him near those that slayed him. There being no planks of wood to construct a box, his body was covered with a piece of stained and torn canvas before the shovels did their work.
It was the evening of the burial, while we were seated around the cooking fire eating beans sprinkled with brown sugar that Mister Akins claimed that Mister Johnson didn’t need to have died. He said that if his leg had been removed it was likely that he would have lived a full life. No one spoke, no need to halt the shoveling of beans between plate and mouth. Then Mister Akins, as if speaking to himself, said that Mister Johnson’s decision made no sense. When told that if he failed to have the infected leg removed he would likely die, he claimed that he would rather be dead than alive with only one leg. Why, I asked, did his choice make no sense? Mister Akins said that Mister Johnson didn’t have any experience to support his conclusion, he had neither been dead nor had he been alive with only one leg; hence, it made no sense for him to say which was better. Father looked up from his plate of beans and mumbled that none of us would be heading to California if we had any sense, so we shouldn’t be saying anything poorly about Mister Johnson.
The day before we joined the Truckee River we paused at the noon break and made camp, the Captain wanted to rest the oxen a half-day before a steady climb along the rise to the summit. For our supper Mister Visnic returned with an elk and a story of water steaming out of the earth like a teakettle. Off Arch and I ran off to explore. The smell made discovery easy. Hot pools of water, spurts of water every few minutes. We tasted the earth’s tea, thought of the Salt Desert. That evening at the dinner fire Mary moved away from me, complaining I smelled like rotting eggs.
More than a week following the Truckee to the crest of the Sierras. Only perhaps twenty miles, but miles of constant fording, moving from one side of the river to another, crossing to the bank that was passable. Halfway up we lost a whole day, a rock slide covered the only route along the river. A full day of straining ropes, straining oxen, and straining men. But the Lord gave us a magnificent gift for our labors, abundant cold, clean water for a drink; melted water from ice and snow above. And while not spoken, we all understood that once over the Sierras, only God could keep us from California.
After Truckee it was three easy days down to Emigrant Gap. Then a day for grazing and resting. I even saw the Captain sitting, leaning against a tree, staring intently at nothing. That night the men had their two full cups of whiskey, smiling faces everywhere. The Captain joined us, said only two more weeks. Easy weeks. Claimed we could skip and sing our way to the Pacific.
At first nothing that unusual, nothing to raise concern as the train rolled toward Sutter’s Fort. Mister Akins was not to supper meals. Perhaps a cup of water and the white of a biscuit. In the morning only half a cup of coffee. Then he sat hunched over one evening, not joining when camp was set. The following morning he did not take his place next to Mother on the wagon seat, remaining in the back of the wagon. In time the ailment made itself felt. Only later would it make itself known. At first only a tenderness of the abdomen; the right side just below the belt line. Mister Akins assured Mother this malady had visited him before and, as all good guests, departed in time. But it did not depart; it lingered and grew in hostility. It was after the night that we heard Mister Akins’s moans that he spoke to me. On his bedding lay a book seen before, The Modern Practice of Physic. Laying next to him several letters; two were handed to me. He asked that when I reached California one be posted, by whatever means assured, to his brother at the College of Edinburgh in Scotland. The second letter he directed me to forward to a Mister John Nobili at Santa Clara College.
Other letters by his side bound together with a piece of twine. These he kept. As daylight was overlaid by the lamp’s yellow glow, we spoke of nothing of consequence, mostly recountings of our journey together. Then Mother came into the darkly lit wagon with a moistened cloth for Mister Akins’s forehead, and soft works for his soul. I sat for a few moments, then I knew they should be alone. As I turned to leave, Mister Akins called my name, “Master Luke,” I turned to see him smiling faintly. In his always soft words he advised me to be alert for Indians speaking Latin. With eyes swelling I climbed slowly down from our classroom. For me that day was no less a descent than when five decades later I walked down the remnants of the marble steps leading from the Parthenon.
My mentor was buried near an oak tree. An oak tree near a stream. A stream that joined the Sacramento River. A river that flowed through California and into the Pacific.
Father and Mister Graham constructed a coffin with unusual care. The last few boards of the second floor of our wagon were pried loose, measured, sawed, and nailed. Five men and a boy lowered Mister Akins into the ground. Five men shoveled dirt onto the coffin while a boy cried. “Nearer My God to Thee” was sung and then, as it always did, the train rolled on.
The night of burial the Captain visited our wagon to deliver three letters Mister Akins had written in his final days. One each for Father, Mother, and me. That evening, while seated on Mister Akins’s trunk, in the glow of our oil lamp, I read my letter. Before opening it I knew. The size and shape were familiar, so many hours I held it tight. A John Jacob Parker fountain pen was his gift to me. But another gift, a gift more lasting. Mister Akins wrote that in his correspondence to Mister John Nobili he was conveying to the college his collection of great books. In consideration he asked that they accept “his able and worthy student.” For several sentences he implored me to attend college; he told me that I had an inquisitive mind and natural inclination toward logic and clear thought; and that I should, by whatever profession chosen, weary my mind and not my back. As a postscript to his letter, Mister Akins asked that I select a book from his library to keep as a reminder of our journey of discovery, discovery of new lands and knowledge.
Father’s letter included kind words and the remaining twenty-five dollar fare. An additional ten dollars was tendered to Father. For this sum Mister Akins asked that he deliver, at a time convenient, the well-traveled trunk of books to Santa Clara College. This Father did.
Mother never shared the thoughts laid upon her letter from Mister Akins.
From the time of Mister Akins’s death until reaching the Pacific no one in our train died. No more sickness, accidents, or misfortune befell us. Mister Akins was the final toll levied for our trespass on America’s wilderness. Or, perhaps better stated, the last cost of admission to our new land of opportunity.
Father bought over three hundred a
cres in a wide fertile valley south of San Francisco. For years he struggled, then he prospered; with every dollar of profit he bought more land. Mother passed a few years after reaching California. But not before she had a vegetable garden more expansive than the one so carefully tended in Iowa so many years before. In Mother’s hope chest Mary found Mister Akins’s letter. As did Mother, she never disclosed the contents. Mary married Levi, the boy she was sparking with at Devil’s Gate. When Father passed they carried on, nurturing and expanding the farm of Father’s dreams, as did their children and grandchildren. Father slept well in his coffin knowing that his grandchildren claimed stake to one of the largest farms in California. No less well did Mister Akins sleep. Hesitantly, and fearful, I enrolled in Santa Clara College. I stayed forty years. First as a student, then as a professor. A professor of physical sciences … “Class, before we begin the structured curriculum, a hypothetical question if I may. A person floating in a rowboat with a score of sledgehammers …”
As one by one the many years layered over me, the focus of my mind’s vision slowly drifted from the future to the past. Of my memories only one held the sting of emotions scraped raw so many years before; that journey on a wagon train rolling on wheels of fear, courage, heartbreak, and triumph. How to sum up this epic time for my children’s children? The answer was found in a novel sent to me by my oldest son, Timothy. As my other children, Timothy was raised in a home where one book was held in a reverence higher than even the Bible, that book which I selected from Mister Akins’s estate. A book desecrated by me as Father’s wagon bumped toward our great hope. My children knew the story of Mister Timothy Akins. They knew the story of Dickens’s Oliver Twist and the Parker Pen. It was with this understanding that my Timothy sent me A Tale of Two Cities, written by Dickens long after our arrival in California. I opened it to the first pages almost expecting to see words clumsily underlined in ink. What I did see was perfection; twelve common words, words that individually held neither weight nor stature, but together shaped perfectly the profile of our long-ago journey.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Luke
Junie
The early American Colonies required an army of laborers to clear and till the virgin lands. To fill this need European bond servants paid for their passage across the Atlantic and served as indentured labor. But as the Colonies pushed out their boundaries, more laborers were needed. Then in the dark holds of a Dutch sailing ship the beginning of a solution to the labor shortage … African slaves.
By the end of the American Revolution slavery had proven unprofitable in the North, and even in the South slavery was becoming less useful to farmers as the prices paid for their most valuable crop, tobacco, dropped to record lows. Then a seismic shift in the South’s economy: in 1793 Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, making it possible for textile mills to use a species of cotton easily grown in the South.
Cotton replaced tobacco as the South’s main cash commodity and this new crop quickly became gloriously profitable. Although most Southerners owned no slaves, by the early 1800s slaves comprised over 30 percent of the population of many Southern States. These slaves were clustered around plantations owned by the “Master.” A Master who saw his plantation as a business; hence the absolute need for his slaves to marry and bear children … future field laborers for the Master. The treatment of slaves ranged from mild and paternalistic to the most cruel and sadistic. Husbands, wives, and children were frequently sold away from one another and punishment by whipping was not considered extreme.
This was Junie’s world, a world where she was one of over two and a half million slaves in the United States.
NO ONE IN MY FAMILY HAD EVER BEEN SOLD. ’COURSE, THAT’S not right. If you were black and bent over from pulling cotton or washing clothes, some poor soul in your family had got sold after being beaten and starved on a slave ship coming from Africa. A ship jammed tight, as tight as kernels on the cob, with two-legged animals for sale to plantation owners with their polished boots and ironed jackets. But I couldn’t, I didn’t, hold no meanness toward Marse Edward for something his granddaddy did a bunch of years before I was born.
For me it was my mama’s mama who was bound over from Africa. Till I had my grief she never spoke of Africa. Never answered no questions about Africa. Always just looked away. All I knew about slaves being sold was what I heard from the field hands and then what I saw one day when I was walking down a street in Natchez with Miss Pauline. That’s when we happened by the big flat rock. A shiny black girl no older than me was standing with hardly any clothes. She was hunched over in shame. Men looking, poking, and shouting out prices and insults. One turned and walked away, complaining that her hips weren’t good for breeding. Miss Pauline, bless her soul, tried to be nice. She was sorry I had to see that, she said. But I remember I was actually glad, glad to my soul that it would never happen to me or my family. Or that’s what I believed until my grief time. The time I learned about Binta.
I was born on Belle Normandie, half a day’s walk above Natchez. Born into the same plantation as my mama before me, except that she was born when Marse Edward’s father had the plantation. Marse Edward’s father was old Marse Jack. Everybody said he was the most kindly cotton grower in Mississippi. Never beat his slaves for no good purpose. Never sold his slaves, never tore the families apart, never pulled crying children from their mothers or sold the men away from their women.
Marse Edward was his father’s pinecone. Not once did I hear him yell an upset yell. Did hear him shout out happy yells when the jugs and harvesting were both through. Guess I should tell you their yes sir and no sir name. It was Claiborne. To their face they were yes sir or no sir Marse Claiborne. When we was in the smokehouse or somewhere they couldn’t hear, they was Marse Jack and Marse Edward. Same with Belle Normandie, when it was just us slaves talking it was the Big House.
I was born at Belle Normandie in 1814, near the end of June, so mama named me June. But most everyone called me Junie. For my husband Sunshine I was June Bug. ’Course that was when we was alone. I’ll tell you more about Sunshine in a bit.
Belle Normandie was the most beautiful house a person could imagine. Like a big white square wedding cake with verandas all the way around both floors. The first floor had six wood columns gleaming from corner to corner. I used to count them as a young ’un, running quickly lest anyone would notice me. On the veranda around the second floor, set back like a cake’s top layer, were four of those same columns from one corner to the next. Glossy black shutters along every window. Black till Marse Edward married Miss Pauline. She said blue was a happy color, so’s they got painted a sky blue. Two tall chimneys jutted high out of the roof like they were trying to grab a cloud. The whole of the house, except the windows, doors, and Miss Pauline’s shutters, was brick painted white. Painted every year so it was whiter than Marse Edward’s Sunday shirts. All around the lawns were the big trees—sycamore, tulip, holly, and the giant sweetgum out in back. Altogether a green tablecloth that the wedding cake sat on.
Born into that place, I became a house slave. ’Course that’s not what the Claibornes called us. They said we were house servants, not house slaves. I think it made them feel better when they told us to empty out their chamber pots.
And let me tell you right away that being a house servant, no matter what dirty work you did, was Gabriel’s heaven for any field slave. With gnarled hands and dead-man stares, field slaves quickly folded over from a life of pulling, digging, hauling, and working harder days than any mule. And the Mississippi sun baked their heads till even the strongest fainted dead away. No cool drink brought them back. A cursing overseer with a frayed baton and mean temper—mean ’cause he was a white man sweating in a field of ignorant blacks—brought the lazy, foaming-at-the-mouth slave back from his sleep to do the Marse’s work. But no more talk about that.
Miss Louisa was the sugar in Marse Edward’s tea. She was why I became a house servant.
Well, it was actually her learning and my learning that got me inside work. She was the only child born to Marse Edward and Miss Belle, born the same year as me. There being no other children, I was her playmate. When she and I got to be five or six she started carrying her little reading books she got from Miss Belle. My favorite was the brown one with drawings. In a while I learned its name, The New England Primer.
I couldn’t keep my eyes away from Miss Louisa’s books. When she was napping, or maybe having her midday meal with Miss Belle, I’d look at her books and turn the pages ever so carefully. Pretty soon I could put the words to the pictures. Still remember them, pictures of cats, dogs, eagles, lions, moons, something for every letter. Pretty soon the words to sentences. Miss Belle would help little Louisa with reading, and I listened like I wasn’t listening. Sometimes Miss Louisa wouldn’t know a word. I’d want to speak up, but I didn’t.
You all can judge this to have been a foolish thing, but sometimes at night I would dream that Miss Louisa and I were sisters. The dream seemed so natural. More than a few times I used lye soap and bristle brush to scrub the back of my hands. I know this is silliness, but I thought somehow the blackness might scrub off. I knew inside I was the same as Miss Louisa. I just wanted to see if I could be just like her. Another reason for me wanting to be her was Miss Belle and Marse Edward. Miss Louisa had parents, I didn’t.
What I’m going to tell you sounds real sad. But it wasn’t sad. Well, it was sad, but not to me, ’cause I never knew them. My mother and father both died when I was too little to remember. Father, Big Bo they told me he was called, was a field slave. After one fall harvest the field slaves spent the winter clearing the woods down by Branson’s Creek, ’cause cotton was starting to be real important. Nobody knew quite how, but one of the chains on a wagon hauling logs to the mill snapped. Big Bo and another slave got pushed dead flat into the Mississippi red clay. Two days later my mama gave birth to my sister. But it wasn’t her time to be born. She was born ’cause of the grief that squeezed my mama. They both went to be with Big Bo in heaven. So that’s why I was raised by my mama’s mama. But you see, I really didn’t grieve for anybody I didn’t know. But for certain I thought about them. I always thought about them on my birthday. Truth be, I didn’t think much. Thought more about whether maybe Miss Louisa would have a tea party for me on my birthday.