April 1865
Dearest Will,
The Confederacy is broken. Peace will come now, though at far too great a price. Why could the war not have ended before the battle that took you away?
Three of your men remain here. With them, I can speak of you and remember. Their bodies will never be whole again, but they talk of going home soon. I confess I will miss their company. They do not seem elated by the Confederate surrender. They are, I think, too much victims of this war, to feel like conquerors.
Ragged, skeleton men, once proudly marching Confederates, stop at Peach Orchard to rest as they straggle home to Honey Ridge and beyond. They are a sad and desolate lot, defeated both in fact and in spirit. I feed them and feel sorry for them, though I am not sorry the war is ending. Indeed, had the fighting ended sooner, you would still be in this world, breathing the air that I breathe. Is it foolish of me to think such things? That somehow I might take a draught of the air that once graced your lungs? I like to think of it, and now that spring has returned to Honey Ridge and the peach blossoms perfume the air, I breathe deep and remember you.
We took the carriage into Honey Ridge for church. One of the women, Rosie Satterfield, sniffed loudly and flounced away when I approached her, but Mrs. Jacobs and her daughter, Jenny, invited me, Josie and Patience to a ladies meeting to rally around the widows. I shall attend and do my part to bring comfort where I can. For isn’t that why the Creator put us here? To ease the way for others?
The Negroes are slowly leaving us. Since Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation they are no longer slaves and no longer required by law to remain. Edgar had counted on loyalty, but if I were a slave, would I be loyal to those who had kept me in bondage? One by one, they disappear so that we are left to shoulder more and more of the farmwork.
Spring is here, the time to plant and plow, so all of us pitch in to do the work once done by slaves. It is hard, exhausting labor from dawn to dark. Four of our servants remain, besides Lizzy. I wonder when they, too, will disappear over the horizon.
An interesting thing occurred. A freed slave I did not know appeared at the back door and nervously asked for help. His wife lay near childbirth in the peach orchard. The memory of my own dead babies threatened to paralyze me with fear, but I took Lizzy and went to her. She was very young but stalwart, and late in the afternoon we delivered her of a fine baby girl. The mother named her Peachy because of the blossoms that fell around her as she labored. I wonder what will become of Peachy, this child born into freedom with nowhere to go?
We bedded the new family down in the barn for the night. Edgar would not allow them in the house or the cabins, though two stand empty now. I thought he might offer them shelter and work, but he did not.
Later, Lizzy asked, “Where they gonna go? Where any of us going to go now?”
“I don’t know.” Truly, I do not.
“I’m free now,” Lizzy fretted in her wise manner. “Free to leave. Free to stay. But freedom don’t feel the way I expected.”
I knew then that liberty requires more than an official proclamation to take root in the soul of man. Freedom, it appears, is as much a condition of the mind as of the body.