“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Be not afraid,” he said, “for I bring you glad tidings of great joy.” I marveled that he knew the words of the evangelist, for this was the man who would not go hear my father’s preaching.
He nibbled at the charred meat. For a moment I entertained the suspicion that it were human flesh. But it smelled good. I ate my fill and drank from the bloody stream and fell asleep beside the fire to the lilt of the old man’s lullaby.
I had not told old Joseph all the truth. It warn’t only the need to run that forced me from my father’s house. Pa was a hard man and a drinking man and a man which had visions, and in those visions he saw other worlds. He was unmerciful to me, and oftentimes he would set to whipping the demons out of me, but everything he did to me was in keeping with holy scripture, which tells a father that love ain’t always a sweet thing but can also come with bitterness and blows.
I had visions too, but they warn’t heavenly the way his was. I would not wear my shoes. I played with the nigger children of the town, shaming him. I ran wild and I never went to no school. But I could read some, for that my pa set me to studying the scriptures whenever he could tie me down.
This is how I come to join the regiment:
We was living in a shack in back of the Jackson place, right next to the nigger burial plot. Young Master Jackson had all his darkies assembled in the graveyard to hear a special sermon from my pa, because the rumors of the ’mancipation proclamation was rife amongst the slaves. There was maybe thirty or forty of them, and a scattering of pickaninnies underfoot, sitting on the grass, leaning against the wooden markers.
I was sitting in the shack, minding a kettle of stew. Through the open window I could hear my pa preaching. “Now don’t you darkies pay this emancipation proclamation no mind,” came his voice, ringing and resonant. “It is an evil trickery. They are trying to fool you innocent souls into running away and joining up with those butchers who come down to rape and pillage our land, and they hold out freedom as a reward for treachery. But the true reward is death, for if a nigger is captured in the uniform of a Yankee it has been decreed by our government that he shall be shot without trial. No, this is no road to freedom! There is only one way there for those born into bondage, and that is through the blood of our savior Jesus Christ, and your freedom is not for this world, but for the next, for is it not written, ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions’? There is a mansion for you, and you, and you, and you, iffen you will obey your master in this life and accept the yoke of lowliness and the lash of repentance; for is it not written, ‘By his stripes we are healed’ and ‘Blessed are the meek’? It’s not for the colored people, freedom in this world. But the wicked, compassionless Yankees would prey on your simplicity. They would let you mistake the kingdom of heaven for a rebellious kingdom on earth. ‘To everything there is a season.’ Yes, there will be mansions for you all. Mansions with white stone columns and porticoes sheltered from the sun. The place of healing is beyond the valley of the shadow of death. . . .”
My pa could talk mighty proper when he had a mind to, and he had a chapter and verse for everything. I didn’t pay no heed to his words, though, because there is different chapters and verses for niggers, and when they are quoted for white folks they do not always mean the same thing. No, I was busy stirring the stew and hiding the whisky, for Pa had always had a powerful thirst after he was done preaching, and with the quenching of thirst came violence.
After the preaching, the darkies all starts singing with a passion. They done sung “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Pa didn’t stay for the singing but come into the shack calling for his food. It warn’t ready, so he throwed a few pots and pans around, with me scurrying out of the way to avoid being knocked about, and then he finally found where I had hidden the bottle and he lumbered into the inner room to drink.
Presently the stew bubbled up, and I ladled out some in a tin cup and took it to the room. This was the room me and him slept in, on a straw pallet on the floor; a bare room with nothing but a chest of drawers, a chair with one leg missing, and a hunting rifle. He kept his hickories there too, for to chastise me with.
I should have knocked, because Pa warn’t expecting me.
He was sitting in the chair with his britches about his ankles. He didn’t see me. In one hand, he was holding a locket which had a picture of Momma. In the other hand, he was holding his bony cocker, and he was strenuously indulging in the vice of Onan.
I was right horrified when I saw this. I was full of shame to see my father unclothed, for was that not the shame of the sons of Noah? And I was angered, because in my mind’s eye I seen my momma go down on that bridge, fold up and topple over, something I hadn’t thought on for nigh on ten years. I stood there blushing scarlet and full of fury and grieving for my dead mother, and then I heard him a-murmuring, “Oh, sweet Jehovah, Oh, sweet Lord, I see you, I see the company of the heavenly host, I see you, my sweet Mary, standing on a cloud with your arms stretched out to me, naked as Eve in the Garden of Eden. Oh, oh, oh, I’m a-looking on the face of the Almighty and a-listening to the song of the angels.”
Something broke inside me all at once when I heard him talk that way about Momma. Warn’t it enough that she was dead withouten him blasphemously lusting after her departed soul? I dropped the tin of stew, and he saw me and I could see the rage burning in his eyes, and I tried to force myself to obey the fifth commandment, but words just came pouring out of me. “Shame on you, Pa, pounding your cocker for a woman you done gunned down in cold blood. Don’t you think I don’t remember the way you kilt her, shot her in the back whilst she were crossing that bridge, and the Choctaw watching on t’other side in his top hat and morning dress, with his four slaves behind him, waiting to take her home?”
My pa was silent for a few moments, and the room was filled with the caterwauling of the niggers from the graveyard. We stood there staring each other down. Then he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and dragged me over to the chair, lurching and stumbling because he hadn’t even bothered to pull his britches back up, and I could smell the liquor on him; and he murmured, “You are right, I have sinned; I have sinned, but it is for the son to take on the sins of the world; the paschal lamb; you, Jimmy Lee; oh, God, but you do resemble her, you do remind me of her; oh, it is a heavy burden for you, my son, to take on the sins of the world, but I know that you do it for love,” and suchlike, and he reached for the hickory and stripped the shirt off of my back and began to lay to with a will, all the while crying out, “Oh, Mary, oh, my Mary, I am so sorry that you left me . . . oh, my son, you shall bear thirty-nine stripes on your back in memory of our savior . . . oh, you shall redeem me . . .” And the hickory sang and I cried out, not so much from the pain, for that my back was become like leather from long abuse and warn’t much feeling left in it. I gritted my teeth and try to bear it like I borne it so many times before, but this time it was not to be borne, and when the thirty-ninth stripe was inflicted, I tore myself loose from the chair and I screamed, “You ain’t hurting me no more, because I ain’t no paschal lamb and your sins is your sins, not mine,” and I pushed him aside with all my strength.
“God, God,” he says in a whisper, “I see God.” And he rolls his eyes heavenward, excepting that heaven were a leaky roof made from a few planks leftover from the slaves’ quarters.
Then I took the rifle from the wall and pounded him in the head with the stock, three, four, five, six times until he done slumped onto the straw.
Oh, I was raging and afeared, and I run away right then and there, without even making sure iffen he was kilt or not. I run right through them darkies, who was a-singing and a-carrying on to wake the very dead; they did not see a scrawny boy, small for his age, slip through them and out toward the woods.
I run and run with three dimes in my pocket and a sheaf of shinplasters that I stole from the chest of drawers; I run and I don’t even recollect iffen I
put out the fire on the stove.
And that was how I come to be with the regiment, tramping through blood and mud and shitting my bowels away with the flux each day; and that was how I come to be sleeping next to old Joseph, the hoodoo doctor, who become another father to me.
I did not confess to old Joseph or even to myself that I had done my father in. Mayhap he was still alive. I tried not to think on him. My old life was dead. Surely I could not go back to the Jackson place, nor the army, nor any other place from which I run. There was just me and the old nigger now, scavengers, carrion birds, eaters of the dead.
Yes, and sure it was human flesh old Joseph fed me that night, and again that morning. He showed me the manner of taking it, for there was certain corpses that cried out to be let be, whilst others craved to be consumed. We followed the army a safe distance, and when they moved on we took possession of the slain. He could always sniff out where a battle was going to be. He never carried nothing with him excepting a human skull, painted black, that was full of herbs – the same herbs that he always smelled of.
Oh, it was God’s country we done passed through – hills, forests, meadows, creeks – and all this beauty marred by the handiwork of men. Old Joseph showed me not to drink from the bloodied streams but to lick the dew from flower petals and cupped leaves of a morning. As his trust of me grew, he became more bold. We went into encampments and sat amongst the soldiers, and they never seen us, not once.
“We is invisible,” old Joseph told me.
And then it struck me, for we stood in broad daylight beside a willow tree, and on the other side of the brook was mayhap fifty tents and behind them a dense wood. The air was moist and thick. I could see members of my old company, with their skull faces too small for their gray coats, barely able to lift their bayonets off the ground, and they was sitting there huddled together waiting for gruel, but there I was, nourished by the dead, my flesh starting to fill out and the redness back in my cheek. It struck me that they couldn’t see me even though I was a-jumping up and down on the other side of the stream, and I said to old Joseph, “I don’t think we are invisible. I think . . . oh, old Joseph, I think we have been dead ever since the day we met.”
Old Joseph laughed – it were a dry laugh, like the wind stirring the leaves in autumn – and he said, “You ain’t dead yet, honey; feel the flesh on them bones. No, your beau-père he nurturing you back to life.”
“Then why don’t they see us? Even when we walk amongst them?”
“Because I has cast a cloak of darkness about us. We be wearing the face of a dark god over our own.”
“I don’t trust God. Whenever my pa seen God, he hurt me.”
Smiling, he said, “You daddy warn’t a true preacher, honey; he just a boungan macoute, a man which use the name of God to adorn hisself.”
And taking my hand, he led me across that branch and we was right amongst the soldiers, and still they did not see me. We helped ourselves to hardtack and coffee right out of the kettle. In the distance I heard the screams of a man whose leg they was fixing to hack off. Around us men lay moaning. There is a sick-sweet body smell that starving men give off when they are burning up their last shreds of flesh to fuel their final days. That’s how I knew they was near death. They was shivering with cold, even though it were broad daylight. Lord, many of them was just children, and some still younger than myself. I knew that the war was lost, or soon would be. I had no country, and no father save for a darkie witch doctor from Haiti.
There come a bugle call and a few men looked up, though most of them just goes on laying in their misery. Old Joseph and I saw soldiers come into the camp. They had a passel of niggers with them, niggers in blue uniforms, all chained up in a long row behind a wagon that was piled high with confiscated arms. They was as starved and miserable as our own men. They stared ahead as they trudged out of the wood and into the clearing. There was one or two white men with them two: officers, I reckoned.
A pause, and the bugle sounded again. Then a captain come out of a tent and addressed the captives. He said in a lugubrious voice, as though he were weary of making this announcement: “According to the orders given me by the congress of the Confederate States of America, all Negroes apprehended while in the uniform of the North are not to be considered prisoners of war, but shall be returned instantly to a condition of slavery or shot. Any white officer arrested while in command of such Negroes shall be considered to be inciting rebellion and also shot.” He turned and went back into his tent, and the convoy moved onward, past the camp, upstream, toward another part of the woods.
“Oba kosó!” the old man whispered. “They gone kill them.”
“Let’s go away,” I said.
“No,” said old Joseph, “I feels the wind of the gods blowing down upon me. I feels the breath of the loa. I is standing on the coils of Koulèv, the earth-serpent. Oh, no, Marse Jimmy Lee. I don’t be going nowhere, but you free to come and go as you pleases of course, being white.”
“You know that ain’t so,” I said. “I’m less free than you. And I know if I leave you I will leave the shelter of your invisibility spell.” I gazed right into the eyes of the prisoners, and tasted their rancid breath, and smelled the pus of their wounds, and seen no sign of recognition. There was something to his magic, though I was sure it come of the dark places, and not of God.
So I followed him alongside the creek as the captives were led into the wood, followed them uphill aways until we reached the edge of a shallow gully, and there was already niggers there digging to make it deeper, and I seen what was going to happen and I didn’t want to look, because this warn’t a battle, this were butchery pure and simple.
Our soldiers didn’t mock the prisoners and didn’t call them no names. They were too tired and too hungry. The blacks and the whites, they didn’t show no passion in their faces. They just wanted it to end. Our men done lined the niggers and then officers up all along the edge of the ditch and searched through their pockets for any coins or crumbs, and they turned them so they faced the gully and they done shot them in the back, one by one, until the pit was filled. Then the Southerners turned and filed back to the camp. Oh, God! As the first shots rung out, it put me in mind of my mother Mary, halfway across the bridge, with her old life behind her and her new life ahead of her, dead on her face, and the bloodstain spreading from her back onto the lace and calico.
And old Joseph said, “Honey, I seen what I must do. And it a dark journey that I must take, and maybe you don’t be strong enough to come with me. But I hates to journey alone. Old Joseph afraid too, betimes, spite of his ’leventy-leven years upon this earth. I calls the powers to witness, ni ayé àti ni òrun.”
“What does that mean, old Joseph?”
“In heaven as it is in earth.”
I saw the way his eye glowed and I was powerful afraid. He had become more than a shrunken old man. Seemed like he drew the sun’s light into his face and shone brighter than the summer sky. He set his cauldron-skull down on the ground and said, again and again, “Koulèv, Koulèv-O! Damballah Wedo, Papa! Koulèv, Koulèv-O! Damballah Wedo, Papa!”
And then he says, in a raspy voice, “Watch out, Marse Jimmy Lee, the god gone come down and mount my body now . . . stand clear less you wants to be swept away by the breath of the serpent!” And he mutters to hisself, “Oh, dieux puissants, why you axing me to make biggest magic, me a old magician without no poudre and no herbs? Oh, take this cup from me, take, take this bitter poison from he lips, for old Joseph he don’t study life and death no more.”
And his old body started to shake, and he ripped off his patch and threw it onto the mud, and I looked into the empty eye socket and saw an inner eye, blood-red and shiny as a ruby. And he sank down on his knees in front of the pit of dead men and he went on a-mumbling and a-rocking, back and forth, back and forth, and seemed like he was a-speaking in tongues. And his good eye rolled right up into its socket.
“Why, old Joseph,” I says to him, “what are you
fixing to do?”
But he paid me no mind. He just went on a-shimmying and a-shaking, and presently he rose up from where he was and started to dance a curious hopping sort of dance, and with every hop he cried, “Shangó! Shangó!” in a voice that was steadily losing its human qualities. And soon his voice was rolling like thunder, and presently it was the thunder, for the sky was lowering and lightning was lancing the cloud peaks.
Oh, the sky became dark. The cauldron seethed and glowed, though he hadn’t even touched it. I knew he were sure possessed. The dark angels he done told me of, they was speaking to him out of the mouth of hell.
I reckoned I was not long for this world, for the old man was a-hollering at the top of his lungs and we warn’t far from the encampment, but no one came looking for us. Mayhap they was huddled in their tents hiding from the thunder. Presently it began to rain; it pelted us and soaked us, that rain. It were a hot rain, scalding to my skin. And when the lightning flashed, I looked into the pit and I thought I saw something moving. Mayhap it were just the rushing waters, throwing the corpses one against t’other. I crept closer to the edge of the gully. I didn’t heed old Joseph’s warning. I peered over the edge, and in the next flash of lightning I saw them a-writhing and a-shaking their arms and legs, and their necks a-craning this way and that, and I thought to myself, old Joseph he is raising the dead.
Old Joseph just went on screaming out those African words and leaping up and waving his arms. The rain battered my body and I was near fainting from it, for the water flooded my nostrils and drenched my lungs, and when I gasped for air I swallowed more and more water. I don’t know how the old man kept on dancing; in the lightning flashes I saw him, dark and lithe, and the sluicing rain made him glisten and made his chest and arms to look like the scales of a great black serpent. I looked on him and breathed in the burning water, and the pit of dead niggers quooked as iffen the very earth were opening up, and there come a blue light from the mass grave, so blinding that I could see no more; and so, at last, I passed out from the terror of it.
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