AFTERWORD: CHRISTMAS 1899

Christmas’s Eve, actually. A Sunday. And it is today that the memories have come roaring back, memories of our march through the night to attain Freedom after a three-week sortie granting it. Through the Great Dismal we’d trooped, down to Old Elizabeth, on to the church at Shiloh, then to the hanging tree outside Indiantown, over to Knotts Island, and up to Pungo Point in the company of Miss Nancy White. Hail the African Brigade!

Those were times of overmuch feeling. And the day’s earlier encounter with Patrick was the what-for that had rousened them to life anew within me.

Being a holiday today, and as the weather and condition of the surf permit it, I have given my U.S. Life-Saving Service crew leave to sail to their homes on Roanoke, to be with their families. Me, I would keep things operative out here, at our station at Pea Island, tending to the watch. Passing shipping does not drop anchor for reasons of sentiment, neither Godly nor National, and so a watch is required, to ensure that all is well. Fanny never expects less of me. My children have come to understand it. Such is the stuff of good leading.

Should some ship meet with trouble, either out on the Atlantic or on the Pamlico Sound behind, our modernistic telephone would connect me to the neighboring stations at Chicamacomico or at Oregon Inlet in the time it would take to turn the hand-crank. The next century, nigh upon us, and all is so new.

And not so much new, too. These telephones, for instance. The Island’s Board of Commissioners contracted business outfits from across the Sound to survey all of Roanoke and build lines so that the house of every single Sand Banker might have one. Yet Fanny remarked that she had yet to see a single contractor on the north end, where most colored live. No lines and no telephones for our quarter, apparently, nor notice of the discrepancy.

New and not so new. Such is the way of things.

I have been helming this crew some twenty-odd years, and I’d be lying if I did not admit that a day on my own is rather welcomed. During the bright and prosperous years of the seventies, when the federal government built these houses along the Nation’s many beaches to safeguard our coasts, Fields and I sought in it. A number of colored veterans did. Many a Sand Banker resented those few of us hired, though, and before long, the Northern pols tired of attempting to Reconstruct long-held views and decided to organize the scattered lot of us into one single crew. No colored would have gotten to stay on in the Service otherwise. They placed me at its head, and its captain I remain.

While watching out to sea from the observation deck atop the station house on this Christmas’s Eve, I heard called, “Halloo!” and recognized the voice before seeing its source: Patrick. He was descending the dune behind my station, in a blue USLSS long coat overtop his uniform, captain’s insignia prominent on the sleeve. He’d taken to sporting a dangling scruff of beard that made him look not so much of age as just increasingly unshaven.

“Hello, yourself,” I called back, rushing over the widow’s walk, down the ladder, then the stairs, and out to meet him.

My brusque arrival onto the porch blunted his approach to within a few feet of my station’s front steps, and this was as I wished it. He stood below me, gazing up—and smiling all the same.

“I saw your skiff hitched on the Sound as I was boating by,” he said. “How is it you come to be out here when a Holy Day would give us leave to go home? Me, I’ve got Judson Demps overseeing my station till tomorrow evening, when the others will return. Demps owes me.”

“We guard the coast,” I told him, “we save lives. This is our duty.”

He guffawed. “Like I don’t know it!”

Patrick has been in the Service nigh on as long as I have and is considered a hero, not just along the Banks but throughout the Nation. Newspapers and magazines from Raleigh to Washington, D.C., have written on his famous exploits the day in 1884 when the barkentine Ephraim William ran aground atop a shoal five miles off our coast. The nearby station crew thought the rough conditions made succor impossible, but Patrick rallied the crowd of standers-by who had gathered on the beach and, in a six-oared longboat, guided a group of them out through the breakers and abreast of the ship. All nine souls aboard were saved. It earned Patrick a Gold Life-Saving Medal, and he rightly deserved it.

Still, he remains forever the Patrick of our youth. “Annie expects me home for the holidays, and I always abide by the missus’s wishes,” said he. “But ain’t it just like you, Dick? Over-exacting of yourself and over-indulgent of your crew.”

He’d meant this for jestful, but I took it otherwise, as a reflection on our lives and the choices we had made, some for better, others for worse.

He approached closer, placing a foot upon the bottom step, breaching the threshold of my porch. He leaned over a bent knee, and I supposed the gesture to foretell something serious. But as always it was just more patter from him, jocular gossip about the nearby Chicamacomico crew, conveyed as though he and I were yet friends.

I tuned him out two sentences along, keeping him going with a well-placed nod or a mutter meant to signify interest, knowing that soon he would stop and continue on his way. A studied peace better served me than outright disdain, as we were fellow station keepers and thus peers, and sometimes had to band our crews in order to effect rescues.

This studied peace—I had learned its usefulness early on. When newly returned from the Army—years before, in 1867—while I was still sleeping at my ma’am’s cabin in the Freedman’s Colony, Patrick came by one morning and hailed me outside. Though surprised and none too pleased, I ignored Ma’am’s enjoinful glare and went and faced him.

It was the first I’d seen him since our encounter in the pocosin.

“Heard tell you was back,” said he, and I offered, “Indeed I am.”

“You look well,” he said, and I, “It is a comfort to no longer have to cross Rebel fire.”

I hadn’t invited this reunion and felt no need to allay any awkwardness.

“I’ve been thinking, Dick. There’s money to be made, fishing and ferrying and suchlike. The time is favorable. I figured you and me might have at it.”

It sounded more a direction than a request, and I wasn’t much patient of being ordered, by officers let alone by erstwhile masters. So I stood there, silent.

“I’m saying we should start up an enterprise together,” he continued, adding, “You and me,” as though this hadn’t been clear.

He said, “Between your connections among yours and mine with mine, we could do well.”

When I no more reacted to this than I had to the previous, he said, “Maybe, if you want to?” inflecting the last, an attempt to transform it into a query.

Finally.

“Maybe,” said I, and I turned and went back indoors.

Right then was an ideal time for rupture, from the Etheridge House altogether and not only just from Patrick. But I thought on it long, and conferred with Fanny, and even with my ma’am, though I could aforehand divine her opinion on the matter. In the end, I agreed.

Patrick covered my portion of the investment at cost, and we bought the Margery & Sarah from John B. at below market price. We piloted the inlets and ferried folks to and from Elizabeth City. In the first years—before our venture got going good and Fanny and I could marry—John B. let us refit one of the slave cabins behind the Etheridge House, and Patrick and I moved into it together for lodgings.

Do not fret, the irony wasn’t lost on me, not back then any more than now. For how do you forget the grievances that should not, by any right, ever be forgot?

You don’t. But with time, you make do. In the Sand Banks, blood is blood, even if it is never fully family, and so you come, day in and day out, to cease to remember your justified resentments. By and by, they find their way into dark places you rarely allow yourself to visit.

It’s true: I never did know for certain what had happened between Fanny and Patrick, if anything at all. She was ever Fanny, always, the manifest echo of my ma’am. If she did not need to relive it, whatever it might have been—and she never did—then neither did I.

And so why shouldn’t I have availed myself of the chance to prosper by a fruitful enterprise? It was an opportunity that presented itself and that I capitalized on. I made money, good money, and I gained standing in the Banks. I was an American, by God—all of us former Colored Troops were. Our exploits during the war had been written on far and wide, and had earned us the right to make whatever we might of this freedom. Why should I not have taken the utmost advantage?

After our return to Fortress Freedom, the newspaperman Tewksbury published in the New York Times his account of the raid, and though the man’s presence had tried my last patience, I still to this day find his words stirring to read. He lauded us as “sable braves” and detailed our every accomplishment. “An army of 50,000 blacks could march from one end of Rebeldom to the other almost without opposition,” Tewksbury concluded, “the terror they would inspire making them invincible.” I return to the yellowed newsprint often, so much so that this last bit is committed to memory, word for word.

Southern newspapers reported our foray otherwise, as was to be expected, harping on the “defenseless women and children” into whose houses we forced entry and on the depredations committed therein. I have kept this old newsprint, too. If what Tewksbury described does not in every regard square with my own recall of events, his gushing account cast a cleansing light upon the lies of the Southern reports, for theirs were lies to the core.

On New Year’s Day, 1864, a week after my battalion’s night march from Pungo Point, the African Brigade marched down the main street of Fortress Freedom in full-dress military parade, wearing white gloves and with fixed bayonets. The Colored Ladies’ Association of Norfolk had made for us a regimental flag, with CORPS D’AFRIQUE stitched across it, and our new guidon whipped about for all to see. All of Negro Portsmouth and Chesapeake and Norfolk turned out to celebrate our victorious return, as did sizable segments of the garrison entire—even many of the white soldiers who, before then, had always jeered us. Benjamin Butler, the commander of the Department of Virginia, watched from atop a raised dais, saluting our passage. He held an especially long salute to Colonel Draper as he passed by, atop his mount.

We were brave soldiers and, around Fortress Freedom, heroes all. Yet this did not in every regard serve us. To the Union brass, our December raid merely proved that General Wild would not be bent to its will, even less after the accolades. Before the end of the winter, he was removed from command.

In truth, I missed Wild’s dash but never his derring-do. No, in the fighting we later undertook, under Draper—three forays along the Rappahannock, defending the canal at Dutch Gap, and charging the Confederate artillery at New Market Heights during the siege of Richmond—we benefited from Draper’s steady, predictable direction and authority. I served in his staff through his rise to general, as his regimental commissary sergeant, the second-ranking non-comm after Henry Adkins, who was regimental sergeant major.

Wild’s boldness and brash had marked us, all the same. When news arrived that Bobby Lee’s army was pulling back from Richmond, the African Brigade raced up Old Osborne Turnpike and were the first troops to enter the Rebel capital—this, even though Draper had been commanded to give up the road to the white Twenty-Fourth Corps, to allow them to arrive first. Such a gesture was pure Wild, even as Draper had executed it.

After Dixie fell, the brass wanted all colored troops out of there quicker than quick. General Draper led the African Brigade to the southmost lick of Texas, to Brazos Santiago, nigh on in Mexico. It was a mean, dry land, piercingly bright and cut of gulches they called arroyos but that served as flues for the stinging, hot winds. On a leisurely ride from camp one day—just the general and me, and Simon Gaylord, who’d become a corporal and served as his orderly—Draper dropped from the saddle and just lay there on the ground. Gaylord and I scrambled to his side. Neither of us had heard a shot discharged nor seen a muzzle flash, nothing. Yet a ball had entered below his collarbone and blown a hole the size of a fist out his lower back.

I told him, “You’re okay, Allie, you will be all right,” though I knew this was not so.

He knew as much himself. Still, he managed a smile. “The irony of it! Now, after all the fighting is done. Isn’t that how a literary man would put it?”

It was the last he said.

I’ve read that the Comanche tribe of Indians attacked in this way, stealthy-like, unseen and from afar. Perhaps them, or maybe some Rebby-boy with a sharp-eyed aim, of which there were still plenty about. All I knew was that I’d lost a friend true.

Patrick’s is the Janus face of Alonzo Draper’s, his uninvited appearance prompting nostalgia about the proving ground of my past. What I know of leading I owe to Alonzo Draper. His example lives on in my own captaincy at Pea Island, I make sure of it, and my life-saving service crew has earned a strong reputation along the coast. A few seasons ago, we rescued the ten mariners aboard the foundered three-master E. S. Newman during a hurricane so severe that other crews had sought shelter inland from the storm. It was noteworthy, all as much as Patrick’s exploits in relief of the bark Ephraim William, and when now I sail to headquarters at Elizabeth City, for supplies or other matters, I’m always heartily greeted as a result. Even by the likes of R. B. Creecy!

The “Our Colored People” column of Creecy’s newspaper, the Economist, just last week proclaimed:

The worthy Keeper of Pea Island Life-Saving Station, Captain Dick Etheridge (colored), our old friend, was in town on business today. He is a representative of the old-time colored man—polite, respectful, considerate and self-respecting.

Always I wonder, does he remember me from those three decades ago and our late-night walk through the occupied city, when he promised to see me dead?

The Economist is an important organ of the statewide Democratic Party, advancing the plank of White Supremacy, and Creecy was a key player in riling up the mob that rioted last year, down to Wilmington, and overthrew the duly elected government, killing numberless colored in the process. So maybe this is just what freedom looks like: colored with colored and white with white, and a courteous nod allowed to us ones who do not threaten to upset the new order of things—which, as I have aforehand said, is not so new and, for colored, not much orderly.

New and not so new, much my interrelation with Patrick—our studied peace. The doggedness of his silent gaze, as we stood together a-front of my station house, brought me back from my musings. He was leaning forward, not a step farther up onto my porch, but about as close to my face as he could be, given the distance.

Having succeeded at staring me out of my reverie, he started up again. “Sometimes I’d just as soon give it all up and return to my youth. Things seemed easier. A man could be a man, have an enthusiasm and pursue it. What seemed right was clear back then.”

He stared, insistent, seeming to press for a response. I watched from above without offering one. His last comment did not warrant it.

It never surprised, a white man’s capacity for convenient blindness.

“I got a boy,” he said, abruptly, “a baby, not six months old. Did you know that, Dick?”

Neither did this surprise, for I already knew it.

“My boy, he’s black like you.”

By Catherine Pruden—one of the orphan slave children who had turned up at the Freedman’s Colony during the war and stayed on after. Her husband, Micah, was lost off Hatteras in the 1896 storm season, and since, Patrick has been known to spend time at her house of an evening. Known among us, anyway, in the colored quarter. She named the baby George Edward.

John B. had died nigh on a score years before, and things had ended up much as he had wished. Patrick had become him, a grandee by Sand Banks standards. And now this, too.

With age, John B. had taken to asking after my ma’am’s well-being, though she felt no improved warmth of feeling toward him and never reciprocated. She had likewise aged visibly, but not so much as to limit her. She lived in a cabin off the rear of Fanny’s and my house, and her nearby presence was generally a blessing, and sometimes not. And when she passed also, it was so sudden and unexpected that it took me going on a year to daily remember that I need not go out back and look in on her. This was four years ago.

I stared down at Patrick, John B. anew. His face was unsettled, his eyes fixed upon me but seeming to seek a faraway horizon beyond, one he did not know how to attain. He looked incapable of even beginning to understand how to.

Me, I could have explained his disquiet to him, if he’d truly wanted the knowledge. For Patrick, a world where a nigger was a man—even this nigger—could only mean that being a man meant less. Now the nigger would be of his own loins, a darker hue of him. This realization had surely been the spur that pricked his need to seek me out today and take an accounting of things.

But had he actually desired to know, I also would have told him that time would temper his feelings of confusion and dread, that it would whittle down his foreboding sense of responsibility to a stub of indifference. John B. had taught me this.

Patrick righted himself, flattening the front of his coat with the palms of his hands, and he smiled true. “My boy,” he said, “when he grows up, I’d be proud to see him at your station, in your crew. That’s all. I wanted to say this because I thought you should know it.”

And this last piece did surprise. Surprised me entirely.

He turned and tossed up a hand. “Okay, Dick. So long.”

I watched him walk up the dune’s face, then over, myself feeling suddenly bewildered.

I’m an old man now, I am grown old—fifty-nine years on the sixteenth day of the new century. And it is with the utmost shame that I admit this: the memories unloosed by Patrick’s visit—of who I was back then, and who I thought I have become since—have rousened a sentiment that I thought lost in me when it came to Etheridges, one I was sure that I had willed gone. The sentiment feels like heartache, a contemptible longing for something that never truly was.

And it is this feeling of shame that leads me to the last bit, to the story of how it ended with Revere. For it could not just end thusly with Revere, with him popping off shots and me more and more looking over my shoulder. No, our dispute had required conclusion.

On the evening after the New Year’s Day parade at Fortress Freedom, in 1864, the African Brigade held a frolic on the regimental grounds with lively music and hearty dancing, a shindig to fête our having been commended. Many of the officers attended, including for a time Generals Wild and Butler. The officers stayed largely to the side, now and again clapping along to the beat. All but Allie Draper! He took several turns, even once with my Fanny.

Me, I remained vigilant, a-seat on a bench with my back to a wall, as I knew Revere to be about. I carried Private Lindsey Babley’s pepper-box pistol in my pocket, borrowed earlier in the day. I did not offer a reason for requesting it; Babley did not inquire after my motives.

Along past midnight, I finally saw Revere, lurking on the edge of the onlookers opposite me, alone, without any of the swamp men. I supposed them to have returned to the Great Dismal, as our mission was done and their temporary enlistments correspondingly. I invented a pretext for our leave-taking—a sour stomach or some such thing—then accompanied Fanny back to the barracks for lady contrabands. I professed to be on my way to turn in, too.

I had told a similar lie to Fields before quitting the frolic with Fanny. He would have insisted on seconding me had he known my intentions, and I refused to put him in danger. No, it would be just me and Revere.

After leaving Fanny, I doubled back, aiming to settle it once and for all. The festivities had died down considerable by this time. The surrounding campfires, unattended, had faded to embers, and the lantern light was spare. Two musician boys still played fiddle, and a few troopers danced with women who yet lingered. Paps Prentiss threw bones for stakes against three others at a long table, a crowd amassed around, sometimes mocking, sometimes cheering.

It was then that I spotted him anew. Revere walked toward the sinks, at the far end of the ground. It didn’t seem that he had seen me, so I followed, several paces to his rear. The surroundings grew darker as the frolic became more distant. This suited my purpose should I need to justify or defend my actions.

Separate lines had formed for the sinks—and long ones, even at that hour. I did not see Revere in nan one of them. I didn’t know how I could have lost him.

It occurred to me that he had maybe opted for the trees, just beyond, to avoid the wait. It’s what I would have done. I circled wide around the queues, keeping to the shadows. It was even darker out there at the camp’s edge, and the brush and fallen leaves crackled under my slow steps.

I felt a strong arm, restraining me from behind, and the urgent line of a blade nicking longwise at my neck.

“Where you off to, Etheridge? Where is it you think you are going?”

It was him.

I saw the rest of them then, shadows separating from the shadowy trees, their feet shuffling over the dead foliage, loud as cicadas, and how had I not heard or noted their movements before this?

I was entirely surrounded. They were twenty or more, pushing in on me. I thought I perceived Golar, the silhouette of his wild head. If it wasn’t to be by Revere’s knife, there would still be no exit for me from there.

Revere had kept his free hand atop the pistol in my pocket but did not disarm me of it when he backed away.

“You think me a bogeyman, just like the whitey do.”

I heard him more than I could see him, his shadow shifting toward the dark mass of the swamp men, who had stopped at a short distance of me.

“I’m but a man, yet a better one than you.” I thought myself to see his smile, though the pitch of night was deep. “I better you, Etheridge. Had I wanted you dead, you would be. And you! You have a pistol and will not use it.”

And he was right. I could not bring myself to loose the pepper-box and shoot him, though it was workable presently and this had been my aim. I had stood with a gun leveled on him once before, out there in the pocosin, and why had I not shot then either?

If conviction is the measure of the man, I was indeed lesser.

I heard his laugh, inmost and broad. Saw his shadow turn and move away, toward the woods into which the swamp men were likewise disappearing. There was a rustling over dry leaves, and before long, not even this.

Then was his voice: “You do not see, Etheridge, just like whitey does not see—that which is right and real, direct in front of your eyes. That we the labor and we the music, our women rear their children and birth their sons. Niggers are everything, Etheridge. Not what they think they see, but us in fact!”

The man spoke truly, the lesson my ma’am had tried to teach me from the start. Ma’am and Fanny, Fields and the rest—none had ever doubted this truth, not once. It inhered in the marrow of their bones. Me, I seemed capable only of seeking truth elsewhere.

Top to bottom, that nigger proved out right again.