Crow

by Barbara Wright

  The slaves climbed into the barn loft. Hungry, scared, and wet, they spent the night huddled together watching the rising water, a foul-smelling soup filled with dark bobbing objects—a dead chicken, an empty barrel, driftwood. They were kept awake by the whinnying of the horses and the lowing of frightened cows, all sloshing about in water up to their necks. One of the log rafts broke loose and crashed into the side of the barn, creating a big gash. Through the opening, Boo Nanny could see a single kerosene light on the second floor of the Big House, and she felt comforted knowing that her baby was safe in the only dry spot on the plantation.

  It was morning before the water level went down enough that Boo Nanny could wade to the Big House. A large log from the raft blocked the back entrance, so she entered by the front door for the first time in her life. The hallway was filled with yapping and barking as Colonel Allman came down the stairs with his prize hunting dogs, which he had herded to the second floor for safety during the flood. He did not seem to mind that she came in the front door—the storm had upended all rules of behavior.

  In the dining room, overturned chairs and broken china were scattered about. A fish flapped on the soaked Oriental carpet. A silver tea set and candelabras had been tossed about in the water and landed in odd places. An ugly brown line on the wallpaper indicated that the water had risen waist-high. Mistress stood over the open drawer of the highboy.

  “My linens. My beautiful linens!” she wept.

  When she saw Boo Nanny, she said, “Where have you been? We have work to do.”

  “Where’s Henry?” Boo Nanny asked.

  A look of wildness flashed in Mistress’s eyes. Her mouth opened into a large O of horror.

  “Where’s my baby boy?” Boo Nanny repeated.

  Mistress started babbling. “It was madness. Everything happened at once. The wind against the windows. Rain beating down. The water gushed in. Oh, it was terrible. Pure chaos. We ran upstairs.”

  Boo Nanny didn’t wait for her to finish. She broke out running from the house, splashing barefoot through the ankle-deep water.

  Evidence of the flood was everywhere. Broken limbs blocked the path. Wind and water had tumbled everything together and rearranged it. A silver tray, tarnished dark purple and copper, had lodged itself in a stand of crape myrtle. The herb garden was a mat of vegetation killed by the salt water. Seaweed, sea oats, straw, and shells were scattered about.

  A tree had toppled over and lay on its side, the root-ball above the water. Mats of sea oats had collected against the dam formed by broken branches, overturned trees, driftwood, and stray barrel staves.

  Boo Nanny forged forward, the salt water stinging the cuts in her feet from the sandspurs, razor grass, random debris. She climbed over a log and thrashed through the forest, her long skirt torn, the sleeve of her blouse ripped. Swatting at the mosquitoes, clawing at the itching bites on her arms, she swept clear the vines that hung down in her path. She had to find her baby.

  She stopped only long enough to smear mud on her bare arms and face to keep away the mosquitoes. She was single-minded. She kept going, a mother’s instinct pointing her in the right direction.

  Water was everywhere, and even the high ground looked like a swamp. When she reached the bald cypress and tupelo gums, she knew she had entered the true swamp. The wind had stripped the water oaks of much of the gray hanging moss and scattered it about in drifts, like giant rats’ nests.

  She was deathly afraid of water moccasins and alligators, but this did not stop her. She splashed forward.

  Up ahead, she saw the sweetgrass basket, surrounded by reeds and angled against the root-ball of an overturned tree. Her first thought was of Moses in the bulrushes.

  “Henry,” she cried. “Henreeeeeee!”

  With her last bit of energy she broke into a run, splashing, not bothering to find high, dry ground. She tripped on an underwater root, fell, and took in a mouthful of water. She spit it out, coughed, scrambled up, and kept going. She reached the basket, chest heaving. Henry lay there peacefully, his fist curled up against his cheek like a new fern. She chucked him gently under the chin, and his head fell over to the side, limp.

  She took the baby out of the basket and clutched him to her chest. He could no longer be scared. He was beyond that. She could scream, wail, and cry to the heavens, to anyone who would listen, and still he would not be scared.

  She cradled the limp body in her arms and howled at the sun, which beat so clear and bright on the wet world left behind by the flood. The baby was still gooey, and the mud on his skin mixed with hers.

  After she had spent her rage, but before grief set in, she clutched the child to her breast, returned to the Big House, and marched straight up the main staircase—the second time in her life she had entered by the front door. Dripping mud, she went directly to Mistress’s room.

  Mistress had taken to her bed with a case of nerves. Boo Nanny didn’t say a word, but set Henry on the white lace coverlet. The baby’s limbs flopped out, like those of a rag doll. Mud seeped through the lace. Mistress screamed. Colonel Allman came running, along with one of the house servants, who fainted at the sight.

  “Get them out of here. My nerves. I can’t take it!” Mistress said.

  Colonel Allman turned to Boo Nanny and said, “Josephine, please. She didn’t mean any harm. You must believe that. I’ll pay for the funeral.” He covered the baby with lace. “You can take this coverlet. It’s a family heirloom.”

  Boo Nanny took Henry but left the coverlet, knowing in her heart that she would rather bury her child in a clean, threadbare rag of her own.

  When the ground dried out, she buried her baby in the slave graveyard. Mistress banned her from the house, and she was confined to the kitchen.

  After Mama finished telling me the story, we sat quietly without speaking. In the other room, I could hear Daddy rustling his paper.

  “Was that the old white lady we saw downtown yesterday?” I asked, breaking the silence.

  She nodded.

  “Now I understand why she couldn’t wait to leave.”

  “That be one reason.”

  “What’s the other?”

  “You too young to understand.”

  Sometimes I wanted to be a man, but that night, I wanted to be a boy, so I didn’t ask any more questions.

  “When you was born,” Mama said, “I had a mind to call you Henry, but Boo Nanny said no, you be Moses—a leader. Someone who lives to tell the tale.”

  EIGHT

  The Saturday of my birthday finally arrived, and I awoke to a clear October day, when the trees hadn’t even thought about changing and the weather was so hot that you’d never have known it was fall. This was the day I was going to ride the train for the first time. For my birthday, Grandpa Tip had purchased me and Daddy discount tickets to Fayetteville, about seventy-five miles away.

  I shined my shoes and took a bath, even though I had taken one two days before. Boo Nanny ironed my Sunday suit, and I was ready to go long before Daddy.

  We walked to the station, and the train was waiting on the tracks. “You go on and board. I’m going to check and see if Grandpa is working on this train,” he said. “Just start walking toward the back and I’ll catch up with you.”

  The first car was crowded, so I walked to the next one and took an aisle seat toward the middle of the car so Daddy could easily find me. Several businessmen looked up from their newspapers. An older gentleman sat in front of me with his hat in his lap. A couple of Negroes hoisted luggage onto the shiny racks above the seats. Soon nearly every seat was taken. There was a buzz and bustle in the car, and I had the feeling people were looking at me.

  Two rows up, a mother sat with her young daughter, who wore a crisp pinafore and high-top shoes that didn’t reach the floor. The mother called the conductor over and whispered something in his ear. Afterward, the conductor approached me.

  “You’ll have to move on, boy,” he said.

  “My father will be here any minu
te. He has the tickets,” I said, knowing full well I could not sit here without a ticket.

  “Very good, but this car is reserved. The colored car is further back. Move along, now.”

  Heat spread to my ears and I felt searing shame, as if I were being made to stand in the corner with a dunce cap for something I didn’t do.

  Lewis hadn’t told me about this. Daddy and Grandpa hadn’t mentioned it, either. I felt betrayed.

  At that moment, Daddy came up.

  “Come along, Moses. It’s not as crowded in back,” he said.

  We walked until we reached a run-down car that hadn’t been swept in quite some time. The windows were so cloudy I couldn’t see out. The seats were starting to shed their stuffing, and the water cooler had gnats floating on the surface. Mama would have had a fit if she’d seen this filthy car.

  “Why do we have to sit here?” I said.

  “It’s better. Not as crowded,” Daddy said without emotion.

  My stomach felt queasy—the car smelled almost as bad as the underground tunnels—and I tried to open a window to get some air, but the latch was stuck. After trying several windows, I found one that worked (it was clearer, too), and we moved to that row. Grandpa Tip was not working on this train. If he were, he would never allow this car to be in such a state.

  This was not at all what I had imagined when I dreamed of train travel. But I didn’t want to hurt Daddy’s feelings, so I tried to hide my disappointment.

  Daddy was quiet. After a while, he said, “Come on, give me a smile. When we get moving, it’s going to be fun.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  When the train chugged out of the station, Daddy took out his gold watch and flipped open the lid. “Ten-oh-five. Right on time,” he said, trying to recapture the excitement.

  He gave me the watch to hold. The lid was engraved with the letters H and J intertwined with a large T in the middle, for Herbert Jackson Thomas.

  “This is Grandpa Tip’s watch. It keeps railroad time, down to the second. It was the most precious object he owned, and he gave it to me when I graduated from Howard University. He didn’t want to wait till he met the eleven fifty-nine for me to have the watch.”

  “The eleven fifty-nine?”

  “That’s what railroad employees say when someone dies. ‘There’s no way to escape a ride on the eleven fifty-nine,’ Grandpa Tip used to say when I was a boy.”

  I asked about the tiny dents in the lid. Daddy explained, “When your grandpa bought the watch, he was afraid of getting cheated, so he bit into it to see if it was real gold. The deal was, if the watch turned out to be gold, it was his, teeth marks and all. It was gold, and he kept his end of the bargain.”

  The train picked up speed as we left the city, and I looked out the window. The tides covered the marsh grass so only the tips showed. “When you graduate from college, the watch will be yours,” Daddy said.

  “Really?” I felt my heart catch. I held the prized object in the palm of my hand. The ticker throbbed like the heartbeat of a small bird.

  The train passed over a high, narrow bridge that crossed the Cape Fear. Below, all I could see was blue streaming beneath me, and I felt the giddy sensation of flying.

  When the train arrived in Fayetteville, we were the only ones from our car to get off, but hordes from the other cars streamed off until the station swelled with people shoulder to shoulder, surging toward the exit.

  Outside, Daddy said, “Stay close to me. Don’t get separated.” I was too old to hold his hand and I didn’t want to embarrass myself by holding on to the sleeve of his jacket, but I kept close.

  In front of the Hotel Lafayette, a parade was forming. Along the length of Main Street, people hung from second-floor windows or lined the parade route. Some had climbed lampposts. They cheered, shouted, and waved handkerchiefs and hats as the brass band set off, followed by a string of carriages. Confederate flags flapped red against the blue sky.

  Two uniformed men in blue coats with brass buttons and red trim held up a banner that said DEMOCRATIC PARTY.

  “I see now why there were discount tickets,” Daddy said. “This was a mistake.”

  “No, it’s great,” I said, regaining the enthusiasm I had lost in the train. I loved the color and noise of a parade. It made the day special.

  “We need to catch the next train back,” Daddy said.

  “But it’s my birthday,” I said.

  He hesitated, then said, “Well, it’s a pity to pay all that money just to turn around and go back. We’ll stay for a while, I guess. But stay close.”

  We took a parallel street to avoid the crowd.

  “What are people celebrating?” I asked.

  “It’s a Democratic rally. I’ll explain later. Don’t call attention to yourself. This is not a welcoming group.”

  Several blocks up, we emerged, and the crowds had thinned out. We stayed back and watched from around the corner as four white horses pulled a fancy float with dozens of young girls in long white dresses waving to the crowd. The banner above them read: WHITE SUPREMACY—PROTECT US.

  “Ignorance is an ugly thing to watch in action,” Daddy muttered.

  A group of Rough Riders fresh from the Spanish-American War marched by. I recognized them because a black infantryman, One-Armed Pete, wandered around our neighborhood in uniform, chattering to himself, as if it were his head and not his arm that he left behind on San Juan Hill.

  Next came more carriages carrying Democratic dignitaries from surrounding cities and counties.

  “Well, if it isn’t old Waddell,” Daddy said as a carriage passed by, surrounded by a walking group from the White Government Union.

  “You know him?”

  “He’s my nemesis. Politically speaking.”

  Challenge word. I cocked my head, and Daddy explained, “A rival.”

  I did what I always did with a new word—worked it around in my head so it would stick. I ticked off the people I could count as a nemesis. Johnny, the spoiled rich boy who was now Lewis’s best friend, was a nemesis. Tommy used to be my nemesis, when he and his pals controlled one side of the railroad tracks. But once I got to know him, he became my friend. A nemesis could be converted to a friend if you knew enough about him.

  There was a lag in the parade and I thought the festivities were over, but the spectators stayed in place. Then, in a cloud of dust, hundreds of men thundered by on horseback giving rebel yells. They all wore red shirts and carried Winchesters, shotguns, and pistols. A few shot into the air. It was a scary sight. The crowd cheered as the men galloped to the fairground.

  “Who are they?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Ruffians of some sort.” Daddy scowled and bit his lower lip. “I want to find out more.”

  Daddy held on to my arm, and we fell in behind the horde of people following the parade route.

  At the fairground, people streamed in from all directions in buggies and wagons, on foot and on bicycles. The air was thick with the smell of smoke from the pits, where several pigs, strung up by their feet, were being smoked.

  Everyone was in a holiday spirit, like our Memorial Day celebration, but I didn’t share the mood. Much as Daddy spoke highly of white people, I knew that most people here wouldn’t care one bit if our entire race caught the 11:59. When I turned around to ask Daddy if we could leave, he was gone. He had been right behind me seconds before. He shouldn’t be hard to find. His was the only other dark face in the crowd. I looked in every direction. People swirled around me, heading for the free food.

  “What are you doing?” said a woman holding an unopened parasol.

  “Looking for my daddy,” I said.

  “I’m sure he’s not at this gathering. Move along, now. This is no place for you,” she said, and tapped me on the back of my legs with the parasol.

  I wandered around the crowd with a growing sense of unease. The sun beat down. People ate and drank and mingled. I couldn’t find Daddy anywhere.

  After an hour or
so, my feet hurt and I was hungry. I stopped by a long plank table beneath a banner that said FREE BARBEQUE. ALL WELCOME.

  By this time, hundreds had gotten there before me, and the table was covered with shredded cabbage and pools of vinegar from the spilled slaw.

  An assembly line of women in sleeveless aprons that buttoned down the back produced mountains of barbeque sandwiches. Some women dropped balls of cornmeal into a huge vat of spitting oil. My mouth watered. I grabbed a sandwich and some fried cornmeal and was starting to leave when I heard one of the matrons shout, “Thief! Stop him!”

  I looked around to see who the culprit was. When someone cried “There he is!” I realized that they were talking about me, and I darted through the crowd.

  When I got to a group of men in red shirts, I crouched down as if hiding in the marsh grass. My heart beat faster as I saw several men making their way through the crowd after me.

  I waddled like a duck to a tree that spread its branches over a table with a barrel on top. The horseback brigade crowded around. They wore all manner of different shirts—silk, cotton, broadcloth. The only thing the shirts had in common was the color red.

  I dropped my sandwich, then tried to climb the tree but my shoes slipped on the trunk, so I took them off, along with my socks and Sunday jacket, and scooted up the tree barefoot. I had a great view of the crowd, but I didn’t see Daddy anywhere.

  The men beneath the tree laughed and joked loudly; a few men broke into song. At the table, one man pushed another aside so he could fill his glass from the barrel, and a scuffle broke out. I was careful not to make any noise in the tree. I didn’t want anyone to know I was there.

  From my perch I could see the men in suits standing on a stage wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting. They all carried pitchforks. The main speaker was introduced: Pitchfork Ben Tillman, from South Carolina. He wore a patch over his eye, like a pirate. This caught my interest. Maybe he was swashbuckling and courageous like my favorite pirate, Blackbeard, though pitchforks were not commonly associated with pirates.