Nothing—not even poor dead Josephine, with her promises of sensual delights—could have been better calculated to tempt Caudell than someone standing in front of him and begging to be taught. That Israel was black worried him less than it would have before the war. For one thing, Israel was free; for another, he was already literate and had not gotten into any trouble on account of it.
That did not mean Caudell had no qualms. “If I do agree to teach you, Israel, when will you be able to come into town? Will Henry let you take time off from your work?”
Sadly, Israel shook his head. “No, suh, he sho’ won’t. I gots to work fo’ my keep. I finish all my cho’s early today so as I can get here an’ ask you. But if you wants to help me learn, I come in soon as I’m done, an’ walk back in the dark. That don’t matter none to me.”
“How many days a week would you want to do that?” Caudell asked.
“Many as you want,” Israel answered at once.
Caudell studied him. If he meant what he said, he had more hunger for knowledge than any of the regular students in the school. A full day’s work, five miles on foot into Nashville, a lesson, another five miles back to the farm, with one of those hikes, at least, and maybe both, made in the night and cutting into his sleep…
“If you really want to try, I guess we could manage three evenings a week and see how that goes,” Caudell said. His own curiosity was piqued. He wondered just how much the Negro could do.
“Thank you, suh, thank you!” Israel’s big happy grin seemed almost to split his face in two. Then he sobered. “How much you want me to pay you?”
Could he have afforded to, Caudell would have done it for nothing. He could not afford to, and he knew it, especially with the lean months of summer staring him in the face. “How does five dollars every other week sound?”
“Like a lot o’ money,” Israel said mournfully. “Reckon I gots to pay, though, if I wants to learn.”
“How much would that work out to per week?” Caudell asked, wanting to see what his new pupil already knew.
“‘Two dollars an’ fifty cents,” Israel answered without hesitation. “You ask me about cash money. I can cipher just fine. But when it’s two an’ a half barrels o’ this an’ three an’ a quarter pounds o’ that, I goes all to pieces.”
“It won’t be so bad.” Caudell did his best to sound reassuring. “Come on back to the widow Bissett’s with me. As long as you’re here, you might as well start your lessons—soonest begun, soonest done.” And, the resolutely practical part of him added, the sooner I start getting paid.
He did not take Israel up to his room. They worked on the front porch till it got too dark to see, and then for a while after that by candlelight, their heads close together. But the candles also lured bugs, until they were doing more slapping than studying. Finally Israel got up. “I better get on back, ‘fore I’s eaten up altogether.”
“All right, Israel. I’ll see you Wednesday, then. You’ve made a fair start, I think.” Actually, Caudell was more than a little impressed. By his own account, Israel had had no schooling at all until he ran off to Federally held territory during the war. But he learned readily enough, and his mere presence here was proof of his willingness—even his eagerness—to work.
Caudell blew out the candles. Night closed down on the porch, hot and close and sticky and completely dark except for the faint glow of a single lamp in the parlor inside. Israel stumbled going down the stairs, and again on the short path that led out to Joyner Street. “See you Wednesday, suh,” he called. Then, but for the sound of his footsteps, he might have vanished from the face of the earth.
Barbara Bissett sat waiting for Caudell to come in, her plump face set in disapproving lines. Without preamble, she snapped, “I don’t want that nigger coming round here again, do you understand me?”
“What? Why not?” Caudell said, taken by surprise.
“On account of he’s a nigger, of course.” His landlady sounded surprised, too, but for a different reason. “What will the neighbors say if they see a nigger coming round my house all the time? I ain’t white trash that’s sunk so low as to have to make friends with slaves.”
“He’s free,” Caudell said. That had no effect on the widow Bissett; she took one of the deep breaths she used to inflate before she went on her crying jags. Anxious to head that off, Caudell added, “He’s just studying arithmetic with me.”
“I don’t care what he’s doing, do you hear me?” Barbara Bissett could write her own name, read a little, and handle money. Past that, her knowledge stopped, nor had she ever shown any inclination to learn more. But she held the whip hand now: “He comes round here again, Mr. Nate Caudell, you can just go and find yourself another place to live, do you understand me? You better understand me.”
“I understand you,” Caudell said resignedly. Though he did not own much in the way of worldly goods, he had had to pack up everything and move out on a moment’s notice so often during his time in the army that he’d developed a permanent aversion to the very idea. “We’ll find somewhere else.”
Wednesday, he met Israel well away from the widow Bissett’s house, took him back to the school, and drilled him there. That was where the lessons continued. Adding and subtracting fractions went well enough, so long as they had the same denominator. But when he showed Israel that a half times a half was a quarter, the Negro shook his head in bewilderment. “It was always a two under the line befo’. How come it be a fo’ now?”
“Because you multiplied it,” Caudell said patiently. “How much is two times two if they’re not under the line?”
“Fo’,” Israel admitted. But no light went on in his eyes; he couldn’t make the stretch from whole numbers to those peculiar-looking entities called fractions.
“Let’s try it another way,” Caudell said. “You know money. Suppose you have fifty cents. What’s another name for that?”
“Half a dollar,” Israel said.
“All right, what’s half of half a dollar?”
“A quarter.” Israel did know money. Suddenly, he stared at the slate where Caudell had chalked the problem. “Half times a half is—a quarter,” he said slowly. Now his face lit up; though he was about fifteen years older than Caudell, he looked like a little boy discovering that, if you put the sounds c and a and t together, they turned into a word. “Halftimes a half is a quarter, an’ it don’ matter whether it’s money or not.”
“That’s right,” Caudell said, grinning his own grin: moments like these were what made his low salary worthwhile. “So what would half times a quarter be?” He tensed as he waited for the black man’s reply. Did Israel truly grasp the principle, or had he just figured out one special case?
Israel frowned in fierce concentration, but not for long. “Half times a quarter—that’d be an eighth, wouldn’t it, Marse Nate?”
“Yup!” Caudell all but shouted it. Now both men grinned, the one in relief, the other in excitement. “You have it, Israel.”
“I got it,” Israel said. “I sho ‘nough do, an’ ain’t nobody can take it away from me, neither. What else you goin’ to learn me ‘bout this multiplyin’ fractions?”
He raced through the rest of that topic, doing his drills as fast as Caudell could give them to him. But he ran headlong into another wall when, a couple of days later, the time came for him to divide fractions instead of multiplying them. Caudell taught him the same technique he used with his regular students: invert the divisor and then multiply.
“We already done multiplyin’,” Israel protested. “This here’s supposed to be dividin’.”
“It is,” Caudell said. “Dividing and multiplying are the inverse—the opposite—of each other, the same way adding and subtracting are. Dividing by a fraction, or by any number, is the same as multiplying by its inverse. They’re just separate parts of the whole thing that makes up arithmetic, you know.”
To his amazement, he found that Israel knew no such thing. He’d learned the rules for eac
h operation without thinking about whether it was related to any other. His jaw fell and his eyes went wide as he took in the concept and made it part of himself. “Ain’t that somethin’ grand?” he said at last. “Five times two is ten, so of course ten divided by five is two. It ain’t no accident. It all fits together.”
“Yup, it sure does,” Caudell said.
“You say ‘sho’,’ Marse Nate, but you the first person ever show that to me. Nobody else ever bother showin’ me it fit together. It’s like a puzzle, ain’t it, where all the pieces go just so an’ make up a whole big picture you couldn’t never guess from lookin’ at ‘em apart. I had the pieces, but I never seen the whole picture till now. Show me this trick o’ yours again, will you? I bet I understands it this time aroun’.”
He did, too. At the next session, Caudell showed him how to find common denominators for fractions. He was slow to see the point of that until Caudell said, “It’s what you do when you get twenty-five and a half bushels of corn from this field and thirty-seven and a third from that one and you need to know how much you have in all.”
Israel’s face took on the intent look with which Caudell had become familiar.” I got you, suh.” He proved himself right in short order. As he started back toward Henry Pleasants’s farm, he asked, “What’s the next lesson?”
Caudell spread his hands. “There is no next lesson, Israel. Far as I can see, you’ve learned everything you need—you should do fine from here on out.” And, as far as he could see, Israel had learned as well and as fast as a pretty bright white man. He was less surprised at that than he thought he ought to be, and a lot less surprised than he would have been before the war.
“Thank you, suh. Thank you from the bottom of this heart o’ mine.” Israel knew better than to shake hands uninvited with a white. He dipped his head and headed north toward the farm.
“It was my pleasure,” Caudell called after him.
Israel didn’t answer. Caudell started back to the widow Bissett’s house. He knew she couldn’t have done as well as the black man had, not if her life depended on it. But she would not have Israel in her house. Before he got free, she could have bought him, assuming she scraped up the money—an unlikely assumption. Caudell tugged on his beard, then kicked at a rock. “If there’s any justice in that, damned if I can see it,” he said out loud. Nashville was already sleeping. No one heard him.
The buggy clattered down the road. Raeford Liles spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into the dust. Then he scowled at his horse’s hindquarters. “Git up,” he snapped, flicking the reins. The horse twitched one ear. Other than that, it ignored him.
Nate Caudell laughed. “Just another old soldier.”
“Miserable, lazy, good-for-nothing creature.” Liles flicked the reins again, harder this time. Maybe the horse moved a little faster, but Caudell wouldn’t have bet more than a dime on it.
He said, “Thanks for giving me the ride into Rocky Mount.”
“That’s all right, Nate. I was going to hear Bedford Forrest give his speech come hell or high water. Since you wanted to listen to him, too, I’m pleased to bring you along.”
“He’s giving a lot of speeches, isn’t he?” Caudell said.
“Goin’ all round the country. If your precious Mr. Robert E. Lee wants to sit up in Virginia and let his people do his work for him, he’s liable to lose this here election.” As if to emphasize his words, the storekeeper spat again, then wiped his chin with his sleeve.
“I don’t know,” Caudell said, frowning. “It doesn’t seem dignified, somehow, for a man to do his own campaigning for President. Only one I can remember, back in the U.S. days, was Douglas in 1860, and look what it got him.”
“Douglas!” Liles spat again, to show what he thought of Stephen A. Douglas. “All he was good for was split tin’ his party. But Forrest now, Forrest is different. He don’t say ‘Go on up there’—he says ‘Follow me.’ If something needs doin’, he does it his own self.”
Caudell didn’t feel like yet another argument with Liles, so he let the conversation lag. Fields and forests flowed slowly past. He’d come up this road three years before, after seeing the wonders of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington City. Since then, he hadn’t been as far from Nashville as Rocky Mount. Away from the railroads, travel stayed as slow as it had always been. Listening to a speech a dozen miles distant meant a whole day away.
Rocky Mount had spread itself to welcome the Presidential candidate. Confederate flags flew everywhere; bunting decorated the buildings in the center of town—most of them new since the war. A platoon of Forrest’s Trees in their Confederate-gray capes ushered spectators toward the platform from which their man would speak. Beside the platform, a band thumped away on the “Bedford Forrest Quickstep,” over and over and over again. In front stood a platform loaded with food and drink. “Y’all help yourselves,” a Tree said expansively.
As Liles poured himself a drink of whiskey, he said, “All this must cost a pretty penny, if Forrest does it every stop he makes.”
“Look around,” Caudell suggested.
Liles did. The whiskey glass stopped halfway to his lips. “Rivington men,” he said in disgust.
Several of them, wearing their usual muddy green, prowled the edges of the Rocky Mount town square, AK-47s in their hands and serious expressions on their faces. Caudell couldn’t figure out what they were up to until he remembered the Federal sentries at the White House after the rebel army broke into Washington. Bodyguards, that’s what they are, he thought.
“If they’re for Forrest, that’s the best reason I can think of to vote for Lee,” Liles said.
“They are.” Caudell pointed to the flagpoles that sprouted from the comers of the platform. “Look, those are their flags flying under the Stainless Banner.” He’d seen the AWB’s three-spiked insignia on Benny Lang’s jacket and again in Richmond across from Mechanic’s Hall.
“They got their own flag? What the hell business they got, havin’ their own flag?” Liles demanded, “They ain’t a country, nor a state neither. I just figured them things was there for. decoration.” And indeed, the red and white banners with their black central emblems fit in well enough in the sea of red, white, and blue that had washed over Rocky Mount.
“No,” Caudell said. The storekeeper answered him, but he didn’t hear what Liles said. He’d just recognized one of the Rivington men—Piet Hardie. He wanted to go up to him, grab him by the front of the shirt, and snarl, What did you do to the mulatto wench that made her hang herself? What did you do to frighten Mollie Bean, who wasn’t frightened at Gettysburg ? That seemed unwise; not only was Hardie half again his size, he was also carrying a repeater. But if Piet Hardie backed Nathan Bedford Forrest, it was, as Liles had said, another reason to favor Robert E. Lee.
The town square filled rapidly. Most of the people there took no special notice of the Rivington men; some, mostly men of an age to be veterans, came up and talked with them in a friendly way about the AK-47s. Caudell knew the South might have lost the war without them. He couldn’t make himself like the Rivington men even so.
To the bang of a drum, the Trees called out, “Hit ‘em again! Hit’ em again! Forrest! Forrest!” A couple of men went up to the platform and sat down on the front edge, rifles across their knees. A plump man whose name had escaped Caudell went up there too, and launched into a speech of his own. Finally one of the Rivington men turned around and glared at him. After a few seconds, the glare got through. The plump man said,” And now, my friends, without further ado, the man you’ve been waiting for”—”And waiting for,” Liles put in sourly—”the next President of the Confederate States of America, Nathan Bedford Forrest!”
The Trees redoubled their chant, but the shouts of the crowd all but drowned them out. Forrest bounded up onto the platform. He stood there for a moment, letting the cheers wash over him. He was a bigger man than Caudell had expected, and had more presence. Like Lee, he was impossible to ignore, or to take l
ightly.
He raised both hands, lowered them again. The noise in the square went down with them. Into the quiet he had caused, Forrest said, “Thank you all, for coming here to listen to me today.” His accent was unpolished, but his voice was smoother than Caudell would have guessed. Smooth or not, though, it carried.
He went on: “In Richmond, they think they can pass on the Presidency like it was a farm going from father to son. In Richmond, they think it’s a matter betwixt gentlemen.” He loaded the word with scorn. “Are they right, the gentlemen up in Richmond?”
“No!” people shouted back. Caudell kept silent. So did Raeford Liles, but they were in the minority.
Forrest stalked back and forth across the platform. He was by no means a classic speaker, but he was effective all the same. The farther into his speech he went, the louder and more booming his voice became. Soon it was easy to imagine him roaring out orders through the din of battle, and easy to imagine men jumping to obey.
“Up in Richmond,” Forrest cried, “Mr. Robert E. Lee says he knows better’n you what to do with your property. Hear me now, people, it’s not for me to say freein’ slaves is always a bad thing. I freed plenty o’ my own, and they went through the war with me as my teamsters.”
His bodyguards from Rivington did not care to hear that. Rivington men, Caudell knew, generally didn’t care to hear anything about easing restrictions on blacks. The one who had glared down the plump functionary turned his stare on Forrest. But the former cavalry general was made of sterner stuff and ignored that warning gaze.
In any case, he did not keep the Rivington men worrying long: “If you want to free your niggers, that your business. But if the government goes an’ tells you you’ve got to free your niggers—hell’s bells, gentlemen, am I right or am I wrong, but didn’t we fight a war with a government that wanted to tell us that?”
This time, the roar from the crowd was “Yes!” and this time, Raeford Liles roared along with the rest. Caudell did not roar “Yes!” He was not inclined to heckle, though, either, as he’d heckled Isaac Cockrell. That had nothing to do with the men with rifles who sat on the platform; the thought that rifles might be turned on a heckler simply never entered his mind. But Forrest, unlike Cockrell, had to be taken seriously.
The Guns of the South Page 50