CHAPTER 25
“You forgive me that I can’t come with you?” Samson asked, handing her traveling bag to Tom, who loaded it along with his own onto the steamboat. “I’ll send my regrets to Mr. Chauvet this very minute and jump on the boat with you.”
Effie shook her head, uncertain she could keep the disappointment from her voice were she to speak. The trip to St. James Parish had been his idea, after all. But Samson was right not to come. It would be bad form not to accept the invitation to Mr. Chauvet’s party after he’d sponsored Samson’s membership in the Louisiana Progressive Club. With the club’s backing, Samson’s bid for state Senate was as sure as April rain.
“You look after her,” he said to Tom, then pulled Effie close and kissed her. She felt both thrilled and a touch embarrassed at such a public display, especially in front of Tom, who frowned toward the river.
“Good luck up there,” Samson said. He’d released her lips, but kept a snug hold about her waist. “And don’t let any of those swampers charm your heart away, you hear?”
Effie managed a laugh, her first in weeks it seemed, ever since Mr. Whitmark and the morgue. Her diaphragm was stiff with the effort. “I won’t.”
“And you’ll think on my proposal?”
“I will.”
Samson waved to her from the dock as the boat pulled away, then disappeared into the blur of the crowd. Despite the warm day, Effie reached about her shoulders, only to remember she’d packed away her shawl.
She and Tom sat portside near the stern wheel amid the seed bags, farming tools, and barrels of rum going upriver. Tom knew one of the roustabouts who’d taken them aboard without fee, provided they keep to the lower decks. Effie unwrapped a bundle of cornbread Mrs. Neale had sent, and Tom opened a can of pickled herrings. They shared the luncheon treats between them and stared out at the silty water rippling in the boat’s wake.
“Heard you got in a spot of trouble with your boss after the funeral,” Tom said, spitting out a bone and tossing it in the river.
Spot of trouble. An ill-fitting description, but she had no desire to correct him and relive the events at the morgue in the telling. “He’s trying to distance himself from his position during the War.”
“Outrun his reputation as a scalawag, you mean?”
“Yes, so he’s . . . wary of political matters.”
Tom stopped eating and turned to her. “Effie, why you defending him? Way I heard it, he slammed you into a wall and threatened to cut off your fingers if you done such nonsense again.”
“He . . . I . . . We’re all just trying to get by.”
“We’s free now, Effie. Don’t need to take that from no one no more.”
“Embalming is all I’m good at.”
“That ain’t true. You the smartest gal I know. You could be a nurse, a teacher, even start up your own undertakin’ business.”
“Tom, you’re plumb crazy if you think that would ever work. Not even up North would they take to that.”
“So you just work for the coloreds.”
“Plenty of them would still object on account of my sex.”
“Something else, then.”
She’d never considered work beyond the dead. The idea tarried in her brain, an unexpected but not altogether unwelcome stranger.
Tom drew her attention back with a gentle nudge and handed her the last herring. “How’d you manage these four days away without getting your boss’s dander up, then?”
“He’s at the lake this week, fixing up his mother’s summer house.” She didn’t tell him of all the chores he’d left for her at the shop, how she’d been up past midnight the last two nights sweeping and scrubbing.
“Must be nice, taking the summer by the lake.” He leaned back against a stack of seed sacks, resting his head on his interlaced hands. “You ain’t been here for a summer spell yet, have you? Some treat you’re in for.”
“I lived through the Indiana winters. I’m sure I can endure the New Orleans summers.”
Tom laughed. “Don’t know about that.”
His laughter drifted into silence and they sat quietly for several minutes. The sway of the boat and warm, river-scented air soothed her nerves. She tucked her legs beneath her and rested her head atop a small wooden keg. She let go of the foreboding that had followed her from the docks and tried not to think about what lay ahead. A heron called from the shore. Dragonflies hummed overhead, their spindly bodies iridescent in the sunlight.
“You remember the first time it really hit you that you weren’t a slave no more?” Tom asked.
Effie raised her head but didn’t answer.
“Me, was a few years on in the War. The company chaplain been teaching us to read and write. When there weren’t no trenches to be dug or lumber to be cut. I was mustered in for pay and instead of signing an X, I spelled out my full name, Thomas Button.”
“You didn’t feel it when you first enlisted?”
“Nah. Your rifle, see, they can take from you. Hell, if you was captured and not killed they could send you right back to the cotton fields. Even a leg they can take from you. But this”—he tapped his temple—“ain’t no taking away what’s in here.”
Effie considered his reply. She too had learned to read during the War, but didn’t remember feeling materially different at any one point during the process.
Then it struck her. There had been a moment. A line, a fracture, that proverbial point of no return she’d traversed by no one’s hand but her own.
She told him about the Kinyons and the daughter they’d had before the War. “I never flattered myself that they held for me the same affection. But I did replace her, in some measured way. Slept in her bed, played with her dolls, wore out her dresses.”
Mrs. Kinyon had never thought of Effie as a daughter. But Mr. Kinyon had. Or so she’d thought. And though she’d never called him papa, he’d been idol, savior, and father to her all in one. How eager she’d been to impress and please him, to prove herself worthy of any affection he might spare. She kept her distance, studied tirelessly, endured the cold nose and slobbery tongue of his mangy dog Otis.
Again Effie groped about her shoulders for her shawl, ruing the decision to pack it away. “I hadn’t a family back here. None that I knew of, none I remembered. Peculiar as our situation was—the captain and missus and I—I suppose I thought . . .” Effie stopped, surprised how her throat constricted around the words.
“Thought you’d found a new family,” Tom finished for her.
Effie nodded. But fascination, not paternal affection, motivated the captain. Effie realized that now. Realized how he too saw her as an oddity, a museum curiosity more than a girl. Astounding intellect! Unmatched skill! Impervious to the labile emotions and fragile sensitivities so common to her sex.
“One evening a man came to dinner, a well-known naturalist from Philadelphia. I didn’t know his niche of study, but hoped we might talk of botany or ornithology. I’d recently read Mr. Audubon’s Birds of America and hoped—” Effie stopped again. She was shirking the subject and would soon bore Tom dead.
She turned and faced him. “Are you acquainted with the field of craniometry?”
He shook his head.
“It’s the examination of the skull and facial features, measurements of the cranial circumference, facial height, nasal breadth, and the like. Scientists use it to explore variation within and betwixt species.”
“You mean, like animals?”
“People too. It’s used to buttress claims of Negro inferiority, hayseed theories that the races developed from different origins instead of a single ancestral species. Polygenism, they call it.”
Tom’s expression darkened, his eyebrows bunching and his full lips cinching together.
“Neither the captain nor I favored that theory. But this naturalist from Philadelphia did. He was one of the foremost proponents of such . . . rubbish.” Effie stared beyond the river at the foliage-entangled shore. Cyprus trees and ferns and marsh grass. Creeping vines and drooping moss. She drew her knees up to her chest, wishing as she had then to disappear like vapor into air. “Captain Kinyon brought this man to our—his home, that he might measure and examine me.”
At the time, Effie hadn’t been able to explain her dread, didn’t remember her days in the slave pen, the daily indignity of being poked and prodded. She declined the examination, but Captain Kinyon pressed her. Think what a contribution she’d be making to science. It wouldn’t hurt a bit. The man had come hundreds of miles for this, after all.
A father would have noticed her fear—the frantic push and pull of her breath, the sweat aglint on her forehead—but Captain Kinyon had not.
“I thought you said the captain didn’t believe in this polygenism,” Tom said.
“He didn’t. He thought I was the perfect specimen to disprove the theory.”
“Specimen?”
Effie kept her gaze trained on the river’s shoreline. Not even Samson or Adeline knew of this sliver of her life. After all, if Captain Kinyon, the man who’d saved her from the War and raised her up since she was small, saw her in that light, a mere specimen to be studied, surely others would too.
“I did as he bid and let that man . . . measure me.” She took a deep breath to fill the sudden stab of emptiness. “Eleven years—since the first day in camp—I’d done as the captain bid, thinking . . . thinking that’s what love looked like. But that night, as that vile scientist tinkered about with his tools, that was the moment. I sat there and I knew. I’d never do as Captain Kinyon bid me again.”
After the examination, she’d lain awake, recalling the cold pinch of the man’s caliper against her skull, the flutter of his measuring tape, the pads of his probing fingers across her cheekbones, down her spine, and other places of no relation to craniometry at all. She’d disgorged her dinner into the chamber pot many times over and couldn’t bring her quaking limbs to heel. Before dawn, she’d packed her trunk, her traveling bag, her embalming cabinet, and was gone.
Tom touched her hand. She peeked at him without turning her head. “You must think me foolish for leaving after so trivial an offense.”
Neither his hand nor his gaze retreated. “It ain’t trivial, Effie. Not at all. You’re a woman, not some specimen.”
The emptiness inside her lessened. She turned to him and did her best to smile. “Thank you.”
Tom returned her wan smile. He picked up the empty herring tin, tossed it up and down in his palm a few times, then chucked it into the water. It floated a moment atop the waves, then sank below the surface. “We’re going to be all right, living through what we’ve done. You’ll see.”
Effie longed to believe him.
* * *
Several hours into the afternoon, the boat stopped at a small dock affronting a wide swath of sugarcane fields to unload cargo. Effie and Tom disembarked and headed down a narrow dirt road paralleling the river. The sugarcane stalks reached thigh height, the neat rows in which they were planted blurring to a sea of green as they stretched to the distant tree line. Between the far trees, Effie could just make out the shingled roof and dormer windows of a monstrous plantation house.
“Is that—”
“No, the Saulnier place is the next tract upriver. But likely some of the old field hands sharecrop these parts too. We’ll find a place we can bed down for the night and see what folks can tell us.”
Inland from the river, beyond the rows of sugarcane lay a spattering of clapboard shanties raised on pillars a few feet above the muddy ground. Rust streaked the tin roofs a bloody red. A spattering of children played with sticks and rag dolls in the shanties’ lengthening shadows, but anyone big enough to hold a pail or hoe bustled about fetching water or tending the gardens.
Tom introduced himself to an old woman hanging out the day’s wash. Her filmy eyes narrowed slightly when he mentioned he was from the Republican Office. Not here to stir up any trouble, he assured her, only to see how things were faring in these parts and if the Party might be able to help.
Effie had worried without Samson they’d struggle to make headway with these people. He was the great speechifier, after all. And with that smile, he hardly needed words. It struck her now, however, how well-suited Tom was for this work. He’d removed his faded slouch hat before addressing the woman, exposing his shaggy hair. Samson’s hair, trimmed short and slicked to the side with oil—à la mode in the city—would seem ostentatious here. Tom had brought his wood-whittled crutch instead of his brass-tipped cane to better navigate the uneven terrain and this too seemed fitting. The woman eyed his cotton suit—tidy and well-tailored, but not at all foppish—his stump leg and travel-worn boot. He too had a handsome smile, Effie realized, broad and earnest.
The woman nodded, then looked at Effie. “This your wife?”
“No, ma’am.” Tom looked down, the dark coloring of his cheeks deepening. “This is Effie. She was sold to Mr. Saulnier during the War. Worked his land a spell before escaping. We were hoping someone about these parts might remember her and them other slaves brought up from the city with her.”
Effie extended her hand. The old woman grasped it with surprising strength and pulled her close. Her free hand patted the planes of Effie’s face, the dip and swell of her cheekbones, the rise of her nose and the slope of her jaw. “You couldn’t have been but a babe then.”
“Seven, according to the bill of sale.”
“Weren’t supposed to sell ones that young. Not that it ever stopped ’em.” The woman sighed. “Effie. We got several here about this bayou who done slaved for Mr. Saulnier. Several more a little farther on who still work that land. I’ll see who I can rustle up.”
Effie helped her hang the last of the washing while Tom passed out candied pecans to an ever-swelling crowd of children. By suppertime they had a bowl of rice and crawfish in their hands, and a worn couch and a bedroll in the front room of the woman’s home on which to sleep. Word had spread of their arrival and people gathered around, dust-covered and sweaty from the day’s labors.
Effie sat on the woman’s front porch, her bustle tucked beneath her, legs dangling over the side. The moss-speckled wood creaked beneath her weight. Tom stood beside her, shaking hands and repeating his introduction. Then he listened. Those in the crowd were tentative at first, crossing their arms and glancing over their shoulders. But once the first spoke, others quickly chimed in.
The men talked of heavy debts and diminishing wages. They wanted their own land, but rarely had a dollar to squirrel away. They wanted their wives out of the fields. A colored school for their children.
“There isn’t a school here?” Effie asked.
“Nearest school’s twenty miles yonder in Thibodaux,” one of the men said.
“Don’t take no colored children anyhow,” said another.
Tom flashed a wistful smile. “New Orleans is likely the only place in the whole South with integrated schools, and the White League’s made such a hullabaloo about it, I doubt they’ll last long.”
Mention of the White League brought forth a slew of new complaints. Armed Regulators roaming about with lynching rope conspicuously hitched to their saddles. Crops plundered. Threats of whippings, beatings, and worse against anyone who voted the Republican ticket in the coming election.
“My boss wants me to sign some Loyalty Certificate, saying I promise to vote Democratic,” one among the crowd said. “Scared if I don’t, he’ll fire me. Or worse.”
“A colored man from Lafourche Crossing was kilt just last month.”
“The Smiths down by Chevreuil Bayou was run off their farm.”
Anger wrestled with the fear in their voices. Mr. Guillot’s body, stiff and swollen, bullied into her mind. The vagabond from the morgue.
She stood and walked away from the crowd. The last rivulets of sunset pooled at the far horizon. Frogs croaked from the nearby waterways. Emotion bloated inside her, pressing at the underside of her skin. Would that she had her trocar and could drive it into her gut to relieve this pressure.
The old woman—Maddie was her name—came up and handed her a burning cattail. “Keeps the skeeters away.”
The smell was familiar to Effie, not only the woody fragrance of the smoke but the earthy scent around her. The moss-draped oaks, the still water of the nearby swamp, the blooming spider lilies. The reminiscence hit her not as it had at the slave pen, sharp and sudden, but with the almost sleepy awareness of one coming to from a dream. She breathed in deep and let the scent fill her lungs, hoping to fill the familiar surroundings with concrete memories. Nothing.
A fleck of hot ash flitted onto her hand, burning her skin. She snuffed out the cattail and retreated to bed.
* * *
In the morning, Tom borrowed a bony old mare—the only horse anyone in town owned—and traveled to meet with men from the neighboring communities. Several people remarked how well he road despite his missing leg. Effie had grown so used to his smooth gait and nonchalant demeanor she’d all but forgotten the injury.
She was glad not to be going with him. Last night’s disquiet had only just begun to deflate, and any more talk of politics might start it building again. Besides, she had her own affairs to attend. No sooner had she and Maddie finished scrubbing the breakfast pans than an old man arrived in a dilapidated box cart.
“This here’s Joe Watkins,” Maddie said. “He born at the Saulnier place and worked there till Emancipation. He’ll take you around, see if anyone who came up with you still here.”
Effie shook his hand and clambered into the cart beside him. The wheels squeaked with each rotation and the loose-fitting side boards rumbled, but they managed a conversation over the din. He asked many of the same questions Maddie had yesterday—when Effie had come to the Saulnier place, how old she’d been, how many slaves had been in the coffle with her up from New Orleans—then sat quietly a moment with her answers.
“Don’t reckon I remember ya, but them War years were funny about the plantation.”
She stared out at the threads of mist still tangled about the underbrush and tried to swallow her disappointment. “I came up with a man. Jonesy he was called. Young, early twenties maybe.”
“Jonesy . . . big feller, right?”
Effie nodded with such vigor her bonnet slipped down over her eyes.
“Yeah, I ’member him, I think.”
“Is he still here?”
“Hmmm . . . Jonesy.” He took a swill from the water jug beside him and smacked his lips several times. “Nah, don’t think so. But we ask Lula. She ought be about today.”
“What about Mr. Saulnier? Would he remember?”
“He done passed a few years back. Lost both his boys in the War. Just him and the missus till he died. She done sold what she could and moved back to be closer to her kinfolk. Charleston, I think.”
Another disappointment. She tried not to let it rattle her, made a point of keeping her shoulders from slumping and forced a smile when Mr. Watkins looked over.
They passed over a narrow bridge as creaky and weather-bleached as the wagon, then through a patchwork of forest and fallow fields. She wiped the stickiness from her brow and tried to conjure specific memories to hang upon the familiar landscape. Soon they were back in the company of rows of sugarcane. Dark figures dotted the fields, backs bent over the green leaves, clothes wet through with perspiration.
“Not much different than before the War. Plantin’, growin’, cuttin’, millin’—we’s busy all year round,” Mr. Watkins said. “Mean work it is. When they’s ready for harvest, them canes be taller than your head.”
He asked for the second time how old she’d been when Massa Saulnier bought her. Seven, she yelled over the wagon’s rattle.
“You seem like a strong girl. Bet you was out in the field with the rest of us.”
Like the forests and smell the night before, his description of work in the cane fields stirred nothing more than a vague recollection. Her past was all around her, yet still beyond her reach.
Effie jumped from the wagon without bothering to ask Mr. Watkins to slow the mule. Soft red dirt cushioned her landing. She walked into the field, letting her hand trail over the thin ribbed leaves that drooped from the canes. The lower leaves, just starting to brown, rasped against her skirt. She closed her eyes and let the sun’s warmth sink into her skin. The air hung still, trapping the dampness and buzz of insects like a sleeve around her.
Yes, she’d been here, at work in the fields. She remembered the way the leaves’ pointy tips had pricked her bare forearms. She remembered the rustling sound that heralded those rare but heavenly breezes. Snatches of those days bombarded her then: flicking away the dried mud from her skin after hours of weeding, waddling along the rows with a heavy water bucket and ladle, lumbering toward the wagon with an armload of newly cut canes.
But something wasn’t right. She ungartered her stockings and flung them off along with her boots. The soil was cool and silky beneath her soles. It swallowed her feet when she stepped and squished between her toes. Phantom sounds rose around her—voices lifted in song, knives hacking against cane, a whip cracking somewhere in the distance.
Despite the sun’s heat, Effie shivered. She listened, straining to hear that rumbling baritone above the others. Yes, there it was. Jonesy.
When she climbed back into the box cart, Mr. Watkins asked no questions, but urged the mule onward. They reached the heart of the plantation and he pointed out the brick sugar works building and several rows of weather-rotted slave cabins. Effie tried to dredge from these a more continuous stream of memory, but again only flashes came, nothing that linked to her life before the slave pen. Her mind, it seemed, had born the ravages of time no better than these untended cabins, worm-eaten and rusted. Foolish to have thought she could raise intact something so long interred.
The vast plantation house had fared little better than the cabins. Faded white paint peeled from the grand colonnades. Vines swallowed half the facade.
“Some feller in St. Louis owns it now,” Mr. Watkins said. “This and about near all the land. Sho did shine back in the day.”
He seemed almost wistful, and strangely the neglect and decay roused a similar pang in Effie. Not for her former master, nor the sons who’d died in the War. Not for the house or the cabins or the crumbling sugar works. But for the connections forged and broken here, now weathered to dust. At least some testament to it should remain. Even the chains and shackles would someday rust and crumble. Then who could say it happened at all?
“What about this Miss Lula?” she asked, fearing Mr. Watkins too had lost himself in the past. “Might we still talk to her?”
They found Miss Lula with her lunch pail sitting with a group of other field workers in the shade of an oak tree. They all knew Mr. Watkins and greeted him warmly, dragging over a stump for him to sit on and pushing chunks of cornbread and cold chicken into his hands. They offered food to Effie too, but she declined. Her stomach hadn’t stilled since leaving New Orleans.
“You ’member a young buck that come in the War years, name a Johnny?” Mr. Watkins asked Lula.
“Jonesy,” Effie said.
Lula bit off a hunk of biscuit and chewed for some time. “Yeah, I remember him.” She turned to Effie. “You some kin of his?”
“No, a . . . friend. We came up in the same coffle from New Orleans.”
Lula cocked her head and stared. “I’ll be! Little Effie. You sho did grow up big and fancy. What you doin’ back?”
“I’m trying to piece together my life before the War. Jonesy and I were together in New Orleans before Mr. Saulnier bought us. I’m hoping he might know something.”
“Why you talk all funny like?” one of the other laborers asked.
She spun the shortest explanation she could, eager to return to the topic of Jonesy and wary of spawning more questions, leaving out all mention of what Adeline termed her unfortunate occupation.
“But about Jonesy,” she said when they were satisfied. “Does he yet live in these parts? I’d so like to see him again.”
Lula flashed a curious expression, then shook her head slowly. “No one seen him since you’s all run off. We thought since neither of you was brought back by them patrollers that you made it to safety together.”
Effie tried to wind back from her recollection of hiding in the grass at the edge of the Union camp to when she’d been with Jonesy in the swamp. He’d carried her as they fled, his arms tight around her, his heart thumping steadily in her ear, and then . . . nothing. She squeezed her eyes closed and tried to envision it. Only muted daylight shone behind her lids.
“Real shame about all that,” Lula said. “Some of them other boys weren’t so lucky.”
“What do you mean?”
“Massa had them two who the patrollers brought back covered in hot tar and nailed to the fence. Kept ’em there even after they was dead so no one else would think of runnin’ off to join the Yanks.”
Effie was grateful she hadn’t eaten. Bile burned in her throat and rose the longer she listened. Had she slowed them down after all? Had they been right to want to leave her behind? She looked at the ground between her feet. A fat millipede scampered between the tufts of grass and burrowed into the red soil. “When I followed them into the swamps that night . . .” Her voice caught. “I didn’t know they were running away.”
Lula shook the biscuit crumbs from her skirt. “You always was on Jonesy like a wart on a frog. At his heels every morning on the way out to the field, beside him every night by the fire, gobblin’ up everything he don’t eat, though your cabin be clear across the yard.”
“You talk like I was a stray.”
“You was!” She balled up her lunch cloth and tossed it into her pail. “Queer little thing, as I remember.”
Effie stood. She wished she were back on the boat bound for New Orleans. A mosquito landed on the back of her neck. She slapped it dead and wiped the smear of blood off on her skirt. “That’s all you know?”
“Don’t take no offense. All orphans is strays. And Jonesy didn’t seem to mind much . . . ’cept . . .”
“Except what?”
“Well, only one of you’s here.”