Redwood and Wildfire

by Andrea Hairston

  Milton made it through that first awful night thanks to her medicine. He woke up glad to be alive, but too sick from battling poison venom to do much more than eat and fall back asleep. Eddie didn’t waste a minute feeling good that the boneyard baron hadn’t claimed his friend. Folks had paid them in goods and services the last few weeks, and they were low on cash money. Eddie wondered right off where their next dollar would come from if Milton was out of commission and eating like a hog. Redwood couldn’t fault Eddie for worrying, even though it made her mad.

  At dawn, Redwood helped Eddie get Milton onto his chestnut gelding. Eddie mounted the frisky white mare. Redwood climbed onto the pack mule between costumes, props, and instruments. Burning welts on her thighs protested. Milton almost fell out his saddle with the horse standing still, so Eddie set a slow pace.

  It was easy going in pleasant country. Redwood filled her mind with waving grass, whippoorwill calls, and bay branches dancing against blue sky — ’til they come up on a chain gang. Dark figures limped through uneven furrows, getting in the crop and clearing a new field. Redwood spied several dull-eyed boys, hardly more than fifteen, scurrying ’round in rags with rusty shackles clanging on raw ankles. White men sitting shotgun watched her, Milton, and Eddie, like cougars tracking deer. Milton sat up out of his stupor then.

  “Blue Freeman!” He pointed and gasped. “A guitarman we played with, right?”

  “No.” Eddie smacked his hand down. “I never know anybody on a chain gang.”

  Milton shook his head as Eddie hurried them on.

  Redwood shuddered at so many battered men and women, lives lost to sweat and stone. She counted mostly colored and a few dirty-faced whites. “Looked like decent folk,” she said when they were out of sight. “What you think they did?”

  “Being colored and poor is crime enough,” Milton muttered.

  Eddie snorted. “Didn’t your mama teach you nothing, gal?”

  She didn’t say Mama’s gone to Glory, ’cause that was no excuse for talking stupid.

  “Chain gang messed up my ankle. Ruined me.” Milton was shaking. “I’d rather die than have to do that again.” He fell off his horse to the dirt and howled.

  Redwood jumped down and patted Milton’s back. “I know how they get a chain gang. I just wonder who these folks are.” She turned to Eddie. “Ain’t you goin’ help me here?” Eddie stared at the horizon. His mare pranced a few steps down the road. “I can’t lift him back on the horse by myself,” she said, before Eddie could run off.

  “You don’t have to yell,” Eddie shouted.

  After they tied Milton in the saddle, Eddie complained all morning and afternoon. Redwood didn’t mind his tale of woe. Listening to him, she didn’t have to think on her bruised tongue or the wound between her legs or the screams thundering in her head.

  “Entertainers have a hard row to hoe,” he said. “Where’s the crowd you had singing and dancing ’til dawn when you need help? Where are the folks who looked ready to die and you got ’em laughing so hard they forgot every sad, brutal thing in their lives? Where are they when you hit hard times? When a snake bite your dancing foot? Ain’t you the one put ’em in a mood for sweet loving when they thought they’d done lost that feeling for always? Don’t nobody want to see a performer if he ain’t happy or funny no more, if his voice is broke or his knee is busted. The crowd turn away quicker than…” He looked to the horizon again. “I can’t think of nothing fast enough. A colored performer got that and Jim Crow too.” He sighed. “I’m no flashy guitarman like Milton, and ain’t no piano where we going. Might as well shoot me right now.”

  Redwood suspected Eddie was tempted to run out on Milton again, but maybe she was just seeing evil everywhere and maligning Eddie’s good character. She’d never thought of performers having hard times. “I’ll sing with you if you want,” she said.

  He perked up and then tried to hide it. “Well, we’ll see ’bout that.”

  In a no-name colored town, with a general store that at night was a speakeasy, she used Iona’s silver dollar and some of Aidan’s money to buy food, supplies, and a ready-made skirt and dress. Eddie told the owner he’d rescued a poor gal after her entertainer ma and pa had died from an honorable but deadly disease. Redwood looked sad enough to fit the part, and the good natured owner let her take Milton’s place that very night. He offered to rent her a back room, if she had a mind for other business.

  “No sir,” she said. “I’m an entertainer, just singing for my supper.”

  She learned the music on the spot. Eddie was relieved she sang better than average. The eager crowd didn’t notice wrong notes or wayward lyrics. They were as happy as Redwood to forget everything and get carried off in the music. Her wounded tongue bled on the last few songs. She swallowed salty blood and bowed to gleaming faces.

  Milton tried to stand up the second day, but fell down in pain. Redwood pulled what hurting she could from him and sang in his place again.

  “On stage, I go by Sequoia,” she told everyone when they were done applauding. “Remember me for the next time.”

  This was how they traveled north. The days were a murky stew of horse sweat, dusty roads, and funky crowds. Redwood was numb and dull ’cept on stage. She couldn’t exactly remember what happened, where they’d been, who she was sometimes. Forgetting was comfort for all her hurting and wounds. So she didn’t know when or even who decided she was traveling north with Milton and Eddie as part of The Act. Forgetting was a blessing. God had mercy on her. God might even forgive her too, ’cause once she was beloved by the spirit in everything. Still, torment came with this mercy. Thrills of terror ambushed her ’til she didn’t have an hour of peace. Any moment, a posse might ride out the ashes of her old life and drag her away. Jerome’s ghost-soft hands pawed her skin as blood gurgled in his cracked neck and wind whistled through dead lips. If it hadn’t been for healing and singing, she would’ve lost her mind for sure. Helping somebody get right, losing herself in good music, she could forget almost everything else, for a while anyway.

  Milton took his own sweet time healing. Spider got him in his bad ankle. “My Achilles ankle,” he said on a stormy afternoon and laughed. Redwood nodded.

  Eddie shrugged rain off his back. “You know what that Achilles is?”

  “A famous Greek fellow, who got dipped in the river of the dead, ’cept for his heel.” Redwood said. “That’s where death come after and get him.”

  Eddie curled his lip. “I’m in fast company. You know famous Chinamen too?”

  “It’s mythology,” she said. “My aunt give me a book.”

  Milton grinned at her. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to for once.”

  After this, in the daytime, Milton took pains to teach Redwood not just words and a melody, but how to give each song a character of its own, how to play the spirit of the audience. He made her read music off the page and sing foreign songs. Redwood was a demon student, pestering him to share all his theatre magic, but he didn’t have much stamina. At night when she and Eddie put on a show, for food or money, she practiced what she’d learned, supposedly just ’til Milton got back on his feet.

  Weeks slipped by. Redwood read the newspaper whenever she could get her hands on one and listened carefully to folks sharing tales from all over, but in almost a month she never heard mention of Jerome Williams murdered in his peach orchard or Aidan Cooper being hauled off to jail and strung up for snapping a rich man’s neck. In Atlanta, a new train station opened, and a lawyer born in Peach Grove lost control of his automobile, crashed into a horse and buggy, and died. That’s what they called big news. The Williams clan owned half a county. Whatever happened to one of them would have been even bigger news. Redwood let herself hope that Aidan didn’t get caught in her mess, that she didn’t have his suffering on her ledger too. It made her smile to think he’d conjured his way out of court and jail or worse.

  The local gossip from colored folk everywhere was mostly husbands cheating on their wives,
even a few wives running round on their men, and too many tales of how white folk were getting meaner than sin. Redwood had never paid much attention to this before, not like George, who’d been complaining since she was little, that even the Supreme Court is against us now. White politicians had been steady passing laws to keep colored from living where they pleased or working near white folk, or even strolling in the park. Free colored entertainers, traveling ’round, making their lives up as they went, could be classified as unemployed vagrants and end up on the chain gang, men or women — like the guitarman they’d seen that first day. Worse was the gruesome stories of colored folk lynched every week in one town or another. Course, reports of barbarous white folk wrecking havoc never made it into the newspapers.

  Redwood tried not to think on her mama, on upstanding Peach Grove men hanging her from a tree, but terror touched her like never before. She clutched Aidan’s pistol. Was there any place to be a woman? Thinking on Baby Sister, her eyes crinkled with tears. Iris was hard-headed and wild, like Redwood. Who’d protect her?

  Milton steered them clear of the deadliest towns. He knew good spots for colored performers all over Georgia. Folks were always glad to hire him and his Act. At each show, Eddie repeated his rescue yarn, elaborating on the details so he was more of a hero every time, and Redwood was a respectable gal who deserved much pity and a decent chance to earn a way home to her grand-kin up in South Carolina. Eddie could act anything and make a body believe. He never asked Redwood how she come stumbling into their camp that night or why she was always looking over her shoulder. Milton neither. Eddie didn’t care what she was running from or why she cried through the night sometime. Milton was too sick and too gentlemanly to pry.

  One chilly Friday night, feelings ambushed Redwood up on stage, and she sang real Blues for a raucous crowd that stomped and hooted for her harsh, wailing notes. Eddie leered at her tiddies and behind just a moment. Any longer, she’d have pulled Aidan’s pistol on him, and he knew it. “See. When you ain’t pouting, folk like looking at you and listening to you too. Ain’t so many gals traveling ’round, singing the Blues.” He sniggered. “A crowd come for just that.”

  Redwood stopped the next song to pull pain from a loud gal groaning with toothache. This got big applause. The next night she took a jinx off a man crossed by a jealous lover and fighting Eddie over a gal he was talking up. Man felt so good, he gave Redwood two bits. Soon she was earning extra coins at every show. She didn’t dare do anything wild, but when they had a break in music-making to get thirsty dancers to buy drink and food, she’d do sleight of hand magic — snatch a feather from nowhere, make words on a page disappear, or write a card that read one way to a fellow and a different way to his gal. The audience tipped her nicely. She saved up to buy a horse, but shared the rest with The Act. Eddie was too busy gambling away what they got to notice her generosity. He believed she was giving him his due for all the times he saved her.

  Milton was grateful for every coin she offered, for every new song she memorized. “You got an open spirit and an interested heart,” he said.

  Studying Eddie’s antics, she could do any character they threw at her. Milton also taught her entrances and exits, bows and curtseys, how to put on make-up and look like anybody, where the good spots to stand on stage were, how to throw her talking voice ’round, loud as solo singing. He had her quoting Shakespeare, old minstrel stump speeches, and doing fancy dance steps ’til she was sweating and aching but twisting like she had no bones.

  “You’re my best pupil. You can do anything and then some,” Milton said.

  “It was my dream, since I was little…” She trailed off.

  “Milton showed me all that too, when I was green,” Eddie said. “Man think you got to practice all the time. Maybe you, maybe him, but not me. I’m good by nature.”

  “Yeah, you’re a natural born clown.” Milton laughed.

  When Redwood wasn’t on stage or rehearsing, she felt heartsick for Elisa, Ladd, Miz Subie, knucklehead George, the cousins, Iris, and Aidan more than anybody, even if she was mad at him. He should’ve come with her. Sometimes she couldn’t stand her own skin and rubbed it raw with a stiff brush and harsh soap. Still it itched, like from bugs feasting. Keep-away spells didn’t work, ’cause it wasn’t no-see’ems chawing her. She longed to run far, far away, but she didn’t dare do anything wild, like conjure herself somewhere or somewhen else. What if she fell down in a stupor without Miz Subie’s cure? What if she got mad enough to break somebody’s neck? Looking into people’s hearts terrified her too. She kept clear of strong emotions, even her own.

  Frost cut into the late harvest and brought folk low. A tent of angry sharecroppers booed Milton’s quiet new tune, ’til Redwood got storm mad and sang thunder in their faces. Why weren’t they mad at the rich folk stealing their labor and sweat? Why’d they come pick on entertainers passing through? She expected the crowd to cuss and spit at her, but sullen farmers jumped up on tired feet and danced ’til the sun was a promise on the horizon. They left two bushels of fruit and vegetables. Redwood almost cried. Eddie wanted cash money. Milton made them give one bushel back, for good will.

  “You could be a sensation,” Milton said, biting into an apple. “A headliner.”

  “You just saying that,” Redwood said. When she stepped out to sing, audiences didn’t always warm to her right off, but after a song or two, they were more than happy to dance or drink to her music.

  “The only thing holding you back is yourself.”

  “What you know?” Redwood challenged Milton’s twinkling showman eyes, but he didn’t say anything more.

  If some enterprising fellow tried to cheat them or pay less than what Milton and Eddie usually got, she threatened the evil eye or foot-track magic that would cross the no-good, thieving fool and jinx him and his family with ten years bad luck. While she was cussing somebody out for cheating, the wind picked up, smashing loose branches here and there. Clouds swirled in too, and when she was really mad, thunder rolled. If the cheating fool hadn’t been sure before, he could tell then she was a powerful conjure woman not to be trifled with. These fancy parlor tricks kept people honest.

  Even so, on a cold winter day, The Act got run out of town by good Christians who didn’t want no truck with the devil or his Blues music. These stalwart African Methodists reminded Redwood of Reverend Washington. Brandishing shovels and shotguns, they protected their young people from sin, from loose, ungodly women like Redwood, and from no-’count, lazy Bluesmen like Milton and Eddie. A storm wind was nothing to these true believers. They had the force of the Lord Jesus at their back. These good Christians had nothing to fear from Redwood though. She was through with really powerful conjuring — done killed a man doing that.

  “Don’t play that hoodoo trickery on no white folk,” Eddie warned, “They won’t just shoo you away. I don’t want to be lynched or die on the chain gang.”

  When Milton finally hobbled on stage again, he added his guitar licks and sang harmony. Dancing was out of the question, and he didn’t solo sing much. Still, Redwood and Eddie sounded better than ever with him at their side. Milton played any music that come to his mind, and Redwood had to sing like never before.

  Sitting ’round the fire on a cold morning, Milton counted their stash and grinned. They were earning good money. Eddie stared off into the distance. He was no good on his own, and he knew it. Milton did the finances, wrote and arranged the music, knew the good spots to play. Eddie couldn’t run out on that, even if he was a restless soul.

  “We ought to do longer skits, material to feature our new assets,” Milton said.

  Eddie grumbled, but didn’t deny the stage magic they made together.

  “We could get good enough to tour ourselves out of Georgia,” Milton said.

  “Is that a fact?” Redwood was still eager to put miles between her and Peach Grove.

  “He has illusions of grandeur,” Eddie said.

  “Delusions of grandeur, Eddie. Folie
de grandeur,” Milton said.

  “I’d like to go to Chicago myself,” Redwood said before Eddie started cussing Milton out. Why did Milton always make him feel bad for what he didn’t know?

  “Chicago is a city of dreams,” Milton said.

  “Chicago got plenty hard luck performers, why they need us?” Eddie spit at the fire.

  “I remember you talking ’bout how nobody could touch you on the piano. So fast couldn’t nobody even see you,” Redwood said. “They got that in Chicago?”

  “Well,” Eddie mumbled. “I don’t know ’bout that.”

  Milton hooted at him ’til he choked.

  “I ain’t been near a piano for a long while.” Eddie stared at his hands.

  “I’m back on my feet now,” Milton said. “We’ll see about Chicago. We’ll see about a piano and a real nice dress for Miz Redwood.”

  They skirted Atlanta and crossed the Chattahoochee River.

  “Atlanta’s a simmering pot.” Milton grimaced. “Too much anger brewing, and it’s the colored man who will suffer.”

  “Colored woman too,” Redwood said.

  “She’s right there,” Eddie said to Milton’s irritable grunt.

  They watched water drop nearly eight hundred feet at Amicalola Falls. Redwood didn’t mind missing the big city, but she pestered Milton ’til he took her up into Blue Ridge Mountain land. It was a cold, hard ride past logging camps — acres of trees knocked over and dying, whole forests slaughtered, but when they finally stood at the foot of Enotah, a bald mountain and the highest peak in Georgia, she laughed and danced like a young gal. Snow was falling, quiet and fluffy as goose down. It melted on her outstretched tongue and hot cheeks and rolled down her face like tears.

  “I never seen a mountain in winter make a body so happy,” Milton said.