Well, heck, maybe it didn’t matter if I did get sold! Didn’t no one seem to care whether I was here or not. The day after Cookie and Amos jumped the broom I was banging and clanging pots around in the cook-house, banging and clanging them so loud it sounded like Jonas Beecher had set me another trap. I stormed across the yard to feed the peelings to the hogs, yelling their names, thumping the pail into the trough. Miss Louellen was sick in bed and I was singing my head off when I come back, singing my lungs out. But the master didn’t tell me to git. Mammy didn’t come scooting down to whup me. Cookie didn’t tell me to hush my mouth. No one even noticed. I was so wrapped up in myself it never occurred to me to wonder why. It’s dark by the time I find out.
We all in the attic but ain’t no one settling down to sleep. Amos is whispering about how the South don’t want to be part of the Union no more; they want to be a country all by themselves – only the North don’t want to let them go. Some gentlemen someplace had taken to shooting at each other. I didn’t hardly listen to him. I didn’t give no thought to what it meant. It was just white folks, a long way away, doing who-cares-what to each other. When Cookie clasp him by the hand and murmur it’s the beginning of a war, that don’t mean nothing to me neither. I ain’t got the faintest notion of what a “war” might be. It didn’t make no difference to nothing, as far as I could see.
But I was wrong. Because the first thing that happened was that Mr Beecher packed up and left.
Next day, I’m drawing water when I see a cart piled high up outside the overseer’s house.
“Hey, Ham! What’s going on?”
The master’s valet come over and explain it to me.
Up until now I thought white folks was the same all over. But it seemed there was two kinds: Yankees and Confederates. Mr Beecher was a Yankee. He been born in New York, or Washington or someplace way up north. Mr Delaney was a Confederate. Now the Confederates was rebelling against the Yankees and they’d all started fighting each other, Mr Beecher figured he’d better take himself back home, sign up for the right army.
I didn’t understand more than half of what Ham told me. But one thing sure grabbed my attention. “So, they going? Leaving? All three of them?”
“Yep. Every single one.”
I been miserable as sin just a moment before. But now my heart’s pounding and a wave of joy come crashing over me. They going! Leaving! All three of them! My heart’s singing it over and over.
I’m standing there with my mouth wide open watching while Mr Beecher check them trunks is roped down good. When he’s done, he climb up on the box and call to his wife to come join him.
She all scrunched up, like a dishcloth that been washed out one time too many and never smoothed flat to dry. But when Mr Beecher flick the reins and the horse move on away her shoulders drop and she sits up taller, holds her head higher. She don’t look back, not once. As they go down the drive it’s like seeing a weight being lifted off her. I know precisely how she’s feeling because I’m feeling the same.
Jonas is sitting at the back, legs dangling down. He’s maybe fifteen years old but he’s crying. Snuffling and crying like a baby. And he’s looking my way.
I’m thinking, I won. I beat you. You didn’t get me. You’re leaving and I’m still here. I feel like dancing. I can’t help myself. I mouth the words at him, “Got ya!”
They nearing the bend in the drive. The last thing I see Jonas do is point at me with one hand. He put the other to the side of his neck and clench it into a fist. Then he jerks it up sudden, cocks his head to the side, lets his tongue loll out like he been hanged. It send a shiver right through me. Just like that, my happy mood is gone.
But can’t nothing change the fact that Jonas has left. My heart is pounding it out, over and over.
That same night there was a whole heap more whispering in the attic and this time I paid attention. According to Amos, who heard it from Josiah, who heard it from Ham, who heard it from the Rideaus’ Walter outside the post office in town when he been sent to collect the mail, the president of the United States of America – Abraham Lincoln himself – had his heart set against slavery. And most all them fine gentlemen in Washington agreed with him. The whisper was that if the Yankees won the war, we might get ourselves freed.
Well, that confused the hell out of me right off. Mr Beecher was a Yankee. The notion of him heading north to join an army that might free the folks he been whipping the hides off all these years didn’t make no sense. The notion Jonas might do the same was even crazier! I figured Amos must have heard things wrong.
But there was this thing: freedom. I didn’t know what it meant. Couldn’t imagine it. But that word tasted sweet as molasses on my tongue. I rolled it around my mouth, pushed it up against my teeth, stowed it away in my cheek like a wad of tobacco. My lips formed the shape and I breathed it out on the warm night air. Freedom. There was something powerful good in the sound of it.
I made my own picture of what it would be like. Took the notion from the stories Cookie had told me nights before Amos come along, and from the words of songs I’d heard drifting in from the fields on the wind. I figured Freedom was out there, just waiting over the horizon for the right time to show its face. And one day it would arrive in a blaze of dazzling light, trailing clouds of glory and there would be a whole host of angels singing sweet alleluias carrying jugs of lemonade and plates of gingerbread and one of them angels – the one with biggest wings and the brightest halo – would give me a spoon and a whole tin of molasses all to myself. Me and Cookie, we’d sit easy in chairs on the big house porch, rocking slow and steady, watching the sun go down just like the master and Miss Louellen.
To begin with, the fighting was all happening a long way off. News was spread from mouth to mouth in whispers. There was battles and there was Confederate victories and Yankee defeats. Then there was Yankee victories and Confederate defeats but we all remained the property of Mr Delaney. A whole year went by. Then two. Three. Mr Delaney’s neighbours was losing sons. Brothers. Husbands. Old Grandma Rideau lost every single man – they all got themselves killed, one after the other. But the only thing that changed on the Delaney place was that the cotton harvests got stacked in the barn instead of being took off to be sold. Seemed them Yankees was stopping everything from coming in or going out of the county. Miss Louellen’s dresses was getting faded and worn and fine cloth to make new ones just couldn’t be had. She minded about that more than anything. As for the master, he couldn’t get no Irish liquor. He took to sending Ham off into the woods to buy corn whisky from the white-trash family lived there. The other thing they had to whistle for was coffee. And ginger. Molasses. Cookie and me couldn’t bake no gingerbread no more. The Delaneys had to eat what come off the plantation, same as us. But they didn’t have no one measuring out rations of cornmeal for them. So they ate plenty and we ate less than ever. They was doing fine on it. But we was all getting one heck of a lot thinner.
Then, about three and a half years after it started, the war come riding right on into the neighbourhood. The second that happen, Miss Louellen go riding right on out. When word come that General William Tecumseh Sherman is marching the Yankee army through the mountains and heading right on down towards us, she takes her children, along with Mammy and most all the house slaves, and runs off to refugee someplace with her cousins. I was almost as glad to see the back of her as I had been to see the back of Jonas. Suddenly there was no one watching me. No one trying to trip me up, catch me out. So long as I kept out of the master’s way when he was having one of his drinking times there was no one even trying to hit me.
I figured General Sherman must be Moses, Jesus and Joseph all rolled into one. He was gonna lead us to the Promised Land. I was expecting them Yankees to bring us a slice of heaven.
But what they bring is more like hell on earth.