TWO DAYS after Gerald Wilson’s funeral I hobbled my mud-caked feet in line toward Peach’s cart. As she dished my food onto my plate, she raised her solemn face and stared directly into my eyes, as she had not done for months. Peach then lifted her spoon and gave it a few swats in the air, indicating that I should move on and let the next man up for his grub. As I ate I watched her closely. She did her work as usual. Serving, clearing, taking the tin plates from those who had finished eating and giving those plates a quick slosh in the pail of water that sat at the rear of the cart. I felt sure that Peach had a message for me from Chloe, and I made certain to linger over my food that I might be the last to return my plate to her.
Peach turned to the side as I approached, keeping her face away from Holmes while busying herself with running the spoon along the inside of the kettle. “Sugarhouse, Sunday mornin’,” she whispered, and then my plate was in her hands and plunged into the pail of water, and I was hurrying along to pick up my bag of cane sticks.
All the rest of that day I had to concentrate at keeping a smile from forming on my face, at hiding any hints of joy from Holmes, and even from my fellow slaves, for I did not wish that anyone would notice a difference in my demeanor. Yet I wonder now how they could have not noticed, for I was so feverish at the thought of seeing Chloe again that I fairly planted up a storm that day. First up one row and then down another, I barely felt the cane sticks in my hand, I barely felt the sun on the back of my neck, I barely felt the mosquitoes, freshly emerged in the warm weather, biting at my bare skin. It was Wednesday when I received this message through Peach. I had three days to wait, but those three days felt like an eternity.
I counted them as they went by. I had never before welcomed the sound of the bell that woke us up in the mornings, but now I did. One more day begun, and then gone by, before I could see Chloe again.
At last it was Sunday and the day woke up cloudy, the sun barely reaching the earth to warm it, and certainly not reaching through the walls of the sugarhouse. About the time that Master Wilson and Missus Lila would be going to church, I eased the door open and stepped inside to the cool dank air. I searched the darkness looking for her shape, the light color of her dress against the gloom, but she was not there yet.
I sat on the brick ledge and waited. It was some time before I heard the door creak open and saw a little light let in, briefly framing Chloe’s silhouette before the door closed behind her. I stood up from my perch. “I’m here,” I said, and then she was in my arms, her skin against my skin, my face nuzzled into her neck, our lips meeting at last. Tears stung at the rims of my eyes, and then, no longer able to contain them, they spilled down my cheeks and wetted the collar of her dress. Chloe pulled back from me and tenderly wiped them away with her sleeve. “Oh, Persy. I so sorry what they done to you.”
I could not think what she was talking about. The most that I had suffered had been her absence, but then I remembered the whipping and Master Wilson’s beating the last time we had met. I shook my head. “That’s over,” I said.
“I heard it,” she said. “I heard it from his room.”
She did not need to say more. Those words, that phrase, “from his room,” told me how Master Wilson had spent his time while the whip whistled through the air and landed on my back. Chloe had lay beneath him while he grunted and fucked and she listened to the moans of the slaves as they witnessed my punishment, to every smack of the whip as it landed on my skin, to my own cries for mercy. I shook the image away.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “The cotton root bark, I heard about that.”
She lowered her eyes. “I all right,” she said. And then she raised her eyes and looked into mine.
“Will you still leave with me?” I asked.
“I still wants to go. We gots to go quick. Ol’ Miss not even goin’ to church today. She gettin’ worse, Persy. Peach watchin’ her now.”
“When can you get away?”
“Next Sat’day night. Katy say Massuh goin’ out that night. Playin’ poker at Lidgewood. Take his mind off Massuh Gerald dyin’, Katy say.”
“Meet me here. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Chloe slyly looked at me. “You got a plan now, Persy?” she asked.
“I plan to take care of you,” I answered. “I plan to never let anything bad happen to you again. That’s the only plan I’ve got.”
“That be good enough fo’ me.” Chloe lifted her sleeve and dried my face once more. “I sorry it been so long. I ain’t able to get away from him after we get caught. He watchin’ me night and day. It only since Massuh Gerald die he let up some.”
“I missed you,” I said. “I was afraid . . . I was afraid you didn’t love me anymore.”
“Naw, Persy. I love you.”
Chloe took me by the arm and led me to a darkened corner behind one of the kettles and there she placed my hands on the bodice of her dress and closed my fingers upon the top button. I undid that button. And I undid the next and the next, taking my time, letting her dress fall open slowly. And when I was done I held my hands against her breasts and kissed her there, but she pushed my head away, and reached for my shirt. She unhitched each of its buttons, letting the cool air fall across my skin as slowly as I had let it fall across hers. The shirt at last fell fully open and Chloe put her hands on my chest and then moved them gently to my back. I felt her fingers softly tracking the scars that had been left by the lash, and then she slipped my shirt off and turned me around and traced each path of that awful violation with the tip of her tongue.
We parted with vows to meet the next Saturday in the sugarhouse. “Tie your clothes into a bundle to carry with you,” I said. “Steal some food if you can. Don’t bring anything extra, nothing that will weigh us down.”
“I ain’t own nothin’ to weigh us down, Persy. Jest myself.” Then she laughed. “Don’t even own myself, I reckon.”
“You will,” I told her. “I promise that you will.”
I kissed her again and nuzzled my face into her neck once more before letting her slip out the door and into that cloudy Sabbath day.
On Monday I was put with the hoe gang out in the sweet potato field. On Tuesday I was in the cane fields again. On Wednesday I began to worry about the high water in the swamps. I could not swim, nor did I think that Chloe could swim, but I pushed this thought down into the fathoms of my mind. I told myself that I would not worry. I told myself that I would not be stopped by unpredictable concerns. I would not feel this paralyzing fear any longer. We must escape and we must do it Saturday night while Master Wilson played poker at Lidgewood. Thursday I was put on a gang to repair the levee. The river had not risen as the swamps had, but even so I stood on the levee’s crest and gazed at that rush of brown water. A whole tree floated slowly by, and then a dead cow, its feet stuck straight up in the air.
“Spread out in twos,” our driver said, and the slaves made themselves into pairs and skittered down the levee toward the river, each pair moving upstream or downstream searching for crevasses.
I paired with Henry, and soon enough we found what we were looking for. We began digging our shovels into the ground and moving the dirt into the cracked levee, tamping it down with our feet to seal it up.
“What’s on the other side?” I asked Henry as we worked.
“Other side of the river? Mo’ of the same. White folk, planters, cane, cotton. Nothin’ good on either side of this damn river, and nothin’ in between but water.”
“Naw.” Then he stopped working and lifted his head. “That the bell?”
I ceased shoveling and stopped to listen. The river lapped at the shore, and for a while this was all that I could hear. I strained my ears, blocking out all sound and then, just barely, I heard it. The bell clanging back and forth, calling the slaves in from their work, for what reason, I did not know.
“Back to quarters,” the driver yelled down to us.
We climbed to the crest, making sure not to drag our shovels or shove them into the dirt for leverage, lest we be accused of causing further damage. Then we scaled down the other side of the levee and began the trudge back to quarters, merging with other gangs leaving their own work and moving in the same direction.
“Ol’ Miss,” I heard someone say.
“She dead I bet,” another said.
“She been ’bout half-dead all her damn life, what I hear,” Henry said, but no one dared to laugh. The death of one’s white person was rarely a good thing. We could so easily be sold, or inherited, moved like furniture into another room. “Too soon fo’ her to be dyin’,” Henry added.
“Massuh Gerald ain’t been in the ground that long,” another said.
“Too soon,” Henry said again.
I barely felt my feet meeting the ground with each step, barely felt the shovel I held in my hand or noticed the other slaves drifting along with me toward the sound of the bell. Wilson stood on the stoop of one of the cabins, as he always did when he had an announcement for us. We gathered around as we were meant to, crowding around him like cows waiting to be milked. Some of us pasted on our anxious, concerned masks. Others looked as impassive as always. I stood at the back of the crowd, not wishing to be in Wilson’s sight if this announcement was what I feared.
Master Wilson raised his hands. “I have some very sad news,” he said. “Your kind and gentle mistress has passed away. I know that you all share in the sorrow I feel.”
A proper murmur ran through the group of slaves. I tell you, we were such good performers. A few cries of “Oh no” and “Lord have mercy” rose from the crowd. A few sobs were heard and a few heads were lowered into the skirts of their owners, the grief, it would seem, too much to bear. Perhaps some of it was real. I cannot say for sure.
Harriet said, “I knew her when she come here a young bride, Massuh.”
“She a kind and gentle mistress,” someone else said, echoing Wilson’s own words. “Sho was.”
“Her sufferin’ over now, Massuh,” another person intoned.
Without discussion or plan, we formed a line, and one by one, we shuffled by Master Wilson and hung our heads and gave him our condolences.
“I sorry fo’ yo’ loss, Massuh,” I said.
“Thank you, Persy.” And as had happened before when in Master Wilson’s presence, I felt that cold spirit there between us, touching my chest with its bony fingers and extending the same, I suspect, to Wilson, who reached out and gripped my shoulder. “I know you will miss her,” he said pointedly.
After we had filed by and given him our shows of sympathy, Wilson held his hands up again to silence us that he might say more. “This is hard news for you to receive in the middle of a workday,” he said. “I know that it pains every one of you to think of your mistress passed away, and of the loss to me of my companion in this life. I know that your grief is excruciating, as is mine, but the best thing for you in this time of loss, the best thing to help us heal our wounds, is to just do our work. This is what God wants of you, that you just do your work.”
There was a response of, “Yassuh. Yassuh. Yassuh.” Those who were crying, or pretending to, wiped their eyes. We drifted away from the yard like a flock of moths.
All the next day a throng of white people came and went from the big house, buggies pulling up, colored coachmen standing by, waiting for their masters and mistresses as they paid their respects to Missus Lila and gave their condolences to Master Wilson. Sylvie was pulled from the fields and given a clean dress and told to help serve the guests and clean up after they had left.
“Missus Lila,” Sylvie told us that night as we gathered in her cabin, “layin’ out in the parlor, wearin’ a blue satin dress. She look good.”
“Better than when she alive?” Henry asked.
Sylvie giggled and the others laughed. I sat with my head bowed, unable to think of anything but Chloe and our plans of escape the following night.
“Chloe grievin’ hard,” Sylvie said.
I looked up, and found that she was staring at me.
“She grievin’ hard. Stayin’ up all night with Missus Lila. She’d of stayed with her all day, too, ’cept all the white folk.”
“They buryin’ her tomorrow,” Harriet said. “Chloe’s grievin’ come to an end after that.”
“Uh-huh,” Sylvie answered, still staring at me.
“Grievin’ come to an end,” Harriet repeated, shaking her head.
I had so utterly failed Chloe. I had so utterly let her down. I had lied to her, I had deceived her, I had delayed all chances of taking her hand and flying over the cane fields to freedom, and now I doubted that Master Wilson would be going to a poker game the next night. I doubted that Chloe would be able to meet me in the sugarhouse. I doubted that we might ever get as clear a chance for escape again, for as soon as Missus Lila was buried, Chloe would lose the only protection she ever had from Master Wilson’s lasciviousness. She would belong to him more than she had ever belonged to him before.
I plan to take care of you.
I plan to never let anything bad happen to you again.
“They somethin’ goin’ on with the white folk,” I heard Sylvie say. “They all agitated. They come to pay they ’spects to Missus Lila but they standin’ round talkin’ ’bout somethin’ called a ’bardment. Yankees done barded they way up the river what I hears. I tellin’ y’all, they’s mighty antsy over that ’bardment. Doin’ some mighty large frettin’ seem like to me. Massuh too.”
I lifted my head to hear more.
“What gonna happen them Yanks get through?” Sup asked.
“Gonna be free,” Harriet said. “Yankees gonna set us free.”
“Sound like they done got through,” Sylvie said. “Broke through somethin’ called a boom.”
“What did you say?” I asked.
They looked at me blankly.
“Sylvie, what did you say about Yankee ships on the river?”
“They down below New Orleans, white folk say. Broke through a boom, they sayin’. Got past two ’federate forts. White folk right jumpy ’bout it.”
“Wilson too?”
“He jumpy fo’ sho. He pacin’ in front of Missus Lila casket all day long. It a sight to see. Her layin’ out, him and all the other white folk standin’ round talkin’ ’bout ’bardments and booms like she ain’t even there.”
“What you think it mean, Shoot?” Henry asked.
I shook my head. “I do not know.”
The following day Holmes was free with his whip. It snapped beside us if it was deemed we were not planting fast enough. It slashed across our backs if we stopped to wipe the sweat from our brows. It popped left and right as Holmes rode through the fields on his horse. “You goddamn niggers,” he said more than once. “You think you gonna be free. I’ll show you free at the end of a rope.”
The whip landed that day twice across my own back.
“You fucking niggers,” Holmes kept saying, as if the war, as if the ships Sylvie reported on the night before, as if every perceived injustice done to white people was the fault of the enslaved.
Late afternoon a wagon rolled into the lane and rambled up to the cemetery, where it stopped. The driver was a colored man, and he jumped down and began to wrestle with dragging something off the wagon bed.
“Persy,” Holmes said. “You go over there and help that boy, and be quick about it.”
“Yassuh.” I pulled the cane bag off my shoulder and trotted across the grass. The item the man was struggling with was the tombstone for Gerald Wilson’s grave, lying, I saw, in the wagon bed in front of two others.
“Reckon we’ll be needing another one ourselves,” I told him as we slid the slab of stone off the back of the wagon. “Our mistress died this week.”
“Might not get it,” the man said quickly. “Yankees at New Orleans now. Name’s Joe,” he added.
In the short amount of time it took us to move the tombstone off the wagon and lean it inside the wrought iron fence, I learned that Joe belonged to a man whose home lay between Sweetmore and New Orleans. He was being sent upriver to deliver and collect on three tombstone orders, after which he was to return to his master as fast he could with the money. “Massuh say we gonna refugee,” Joe said. “Him, me, all the slaves ’cept the oldest and the youngest goin’ to Texas.”
“What about his wife?” I asked.
“He say she be all right stayin’ on. He say he got to ’tect his property, and she stay here, make sho the house don’t get burnt down.”
Just then the lash whistled through the air beside my ear and landed next to me, spitting up a clump of grass at my feet. “You taking too long, Persy,” Holmes said. “You, nigger,” he said to Joe, “you done your work. Now get on out of here before I whip you myself.”
“Yassuh,” Joe said, “but I supposed to collect on this from Massuh Wilson.”
“Get on up to the big house, then, but stop your jabbering here.”
“Yassuh.” Joe climbed into the wagon seat and chucked the mule into moving.
I returned to the fields and whispered the news to Henry as we knelt down to plant. “Yankees at New Orleans now,” and then Henry whispered it to Sup, and Sup to Sally, and Sally to her neighboring planter until it had spread across the fields like water. Holmes continued to lash with his whip like a madman, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. He could not stop this whispered knowledge from spreading among us like gospel. By the time Missus Lila was buried that evening the slaves fairly vibrated with what we were not supposed to know.
Perhaps, I thought, it was the perfect night after all, for Chloe and me to escape. Perhaps Master Wilson would be so distracted by this new development that Chloe would be able to sneak away. Perhaps we could avoid the swamps altogether, and make it downriver to the Union lines.
We gathered graveside just as we had for Gerald Wilson, many of the hands this time showing stripes of blood through the backs of their shirts, but still our elation could not be contained. We stood in our mud-caked shoes and our bloodstained shirts at the grave of our former mistress, and I swear that we could barely keep from rolling onto our toes and dancing a little jig. We twitched, we scuffled, we jittered, and whenever a white person looked our way we quickly stilled ourselves and hung our heads and showed the proper sadness at the passing of our “dear and kind” mistress.
Chloe stood with the small group of house slaves behind Wilson and his daughter-in-law. Chloe’s head was bowed and her hands clasped in front of her, and this time she did not look up. None of the house slaves looked up. They stood still and solemn and I wondered if they knew as much as we did, and then I wondered if they perhaps knew more. I stared at Chloe as much as I dared. I tried to will her with my eyes and my heart to look at me, to give me a smile, to assure me in some way that we would be meeting in the sugarhouse that night. But she and the other house slaves kept their heads down, although I saw that Wilson looked up plenty. He and all the white people, including the preacher, kept glancing nervously toward the river, and then the road, as if Yankees might invade at any minute.
The same preacher who had presided over the service for Gerald Wilson delivered words for Missus Lila, and he was even quicker in his delivery than before. A short reading from the Bible, a scant few words on the goodness of the dearly departed’s character, a hasty prayer for her soul, and then four slaves grabbed the ropes that were snaked under the casket, lowered Missus Lila into the ground, and began shoveling the dirt back into the grave.
“Get to your cabins,” Wilson said to the rest of us. “If any of you are outside tonight we’ll shoot you down dead.”
As I turned to walk away I caught Chloe’s eye at last. I gave her a smile and a barely perceptible nod toward the sugarhouse. She returned my gesture with one slight shake of her head and then looked down again. We walked in opposite directions, away from each other, always away from each other it seemed. Holmes came riding up beside me. “Get going,” he said, and he lashed the whip into the mud, spattering it against my legs. “Get to your cabin and stay there. All you niggers,” he hollered as he spun his horse around. “Get to your cabins and stay there.”