The Home Guard’s presence was finally signaled the next day, our sixth one out, when we arrived at River Bridge, on the outskirts of Elizabeth City. The bushwhackers had got at it. All that was left was the charred tops of the pilings.
Paps Prentiss brought forward a recently freed contraband. “Mass,” he said to Lieutenant Backuss. “This servant has got information on who torched the crossing.”
Some of the men, old-timers especially, talked like this, calling our officers “master.” (And Prentiss was as old as they came, fifty-one that fall, as likely as not the grandpappy of the Brigade.) It was a mode of address that we non-comms tried to get them shed of—and one that risked from the younger troopers mockery at best, and sometimes more. For those like Paps, the lesson did not take. He likewise carried the regrettable habit of being forever from ear to ear a-grin. Just then, he even removed his forage cap from his head, which Backuss appeared to welcome.
I hailed Fields forward, to accompany the contraband in.
Backuss waved him off. “No, Etheridge. You.”
He turned and regained the top of our formation with nary another word.
I certainly did not mind the errand. Far from it. This offered me the too rare occasion of associating with the general directly. If greatness was communicable by proximity, I welcomed the opportunity to get close enough to share in some of his.
The contraband’s name was Malachi, and I double-timed him forward as best I could. He moved gamely but gimping on unshod feet that, upon a closer look, were missing toes: the great toe and the minor on one, and the great toe on the other. The man was dour of disposition—on account of those feet and whatever dread history had prompted their misuse, I imagined. We arrived at the head of the column, and I presented him to the general.
Wild asked, “You have information, sir?”
Malachi was clearly unaccustomed to being formally addressed. He stared up at the general a long moment, not seeming to mind the courtesy, but not full-on trusting it either. Then he finger-pointed a nearby house.
“That there the domicile of Billy Drinkwater. Him one of Elliott’s boys. They is the ones that shot Black Sanders.”
“Black Sanders?” said Wild. This pricked his ear.
“The captain of them Buffaloes,” Malachi explained, but this didn’t appear to provide greater illumination.
I was surprised that Wild did not know of it—a Union officer shot down in the streets of Elizabeth City. The man’s assassination had caused a stir throughout these parts. From what was told, Black Sanders had been to a frolic at the home of local colored, in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. A gang of masked men fired a volley as he was returning to his quarters later in the night, and Black Sanders dropped dead.
I stepped in. “Buffaloes, sir. That is what the Union Army volunteer company that was raised out here last year is called by folks hereabouts.”
The name was not intended to convey fondness of feeling. Before relocating to Elizabeth City, the Buffaloes had been based on Roanoke and had recruited the Island. Captain Sanders had visited the Etheridge House to seek John B.’s assistance in the endeavor. John B. politely agreed, though I’d actually seen him do very little. Only a few Sand Bankers enlisted, and the Buffaloes moved on.
“White men then, these Buffaloes?” asked the general, bemused or amused, I wasn’t sure which.
“Yes, sir,” said I. “Organized by two brothers from up north, from President Lincoln’s home state, I believe.” I knew, in fact, but did not want to come off as too showy. “A Enos and a Nathan, one of flaxen hair, the other dark.”
“Hence Black Sanders?” He smiled. “And the brother, White Sanders, I suppose?”
“Yes, sir,” said I. “One a captain, the other his lieutenant.”
The general’s shifting facets showed his mind to finally recall the event. “Yes, yes, I remember the dispatch announcing the murder. The land pirates got at two others in the neighborhood, too, a Captain Newby and another named Dowdy.”
Bone Dowdy, I expected, from over by Shiloh. Before the war, he did business in naval stores, and John B. often availed himself of the man’s pine pitch for repairs on his boats or of his shake shingles after gales had blown through. A genial man. I did not know him killed and wondered if John B. did.
The contraband Malachi said, “If trouble been got up to around here, Billy Drinkwater either in on it or knows of it.”
This seemed to rousen the general. “Well, then,” said he, waving for his brother, his mount shuffling about beneath him. “Let us restore the bridge, then.”
The general looked over at me. “Good work, Sergeant . . . ?”
“Etheridge, sir.”
“Good work, Etheridge,” said he.
A back-clap and well-done that I was gratified to receive.
The general turned to Captain Wild, speaking too low for me to hear. I said to Malachi, “You’ve done us a great service.”
“It was my girl, Betsy, made me do it, elseways I would not have.” He stared dead-faced at me. “I hope it not to cost us when you Union boys move on and we have to return home to here.”
I fought my strong impulse to reply sharply. Instead, I attempted to alter his dim view of us. “How is it you ain’t got shoes?” said I.
“Mass took ’em all up when word come of youall’s approach.”
“Let’s rustle you up some new ones, then, Malachi.”
It would take a special broad pair, I reckoned, on account of the bloated cast of his spoiled feet.
“That’s Malachi, sir,” he corrected me, and he smiled. “Due regard from white mens and new gunboats, to boot? A body could get used to such treatment.”
A recruit in the making, thought I. “You know, you ought to consider signing up for service. Soldiering proper might not be possible.” I glanced toward his feet. “But there is all sort of supporting work, cooking and suchlike. It’d provide a proper wage to buy all the gear you like or need, and you’d be pitching in your two bits to help emancipate others, such as we are doing.”
His smile dropped. “I think not. I have plenty paid my fair share for the freedom of me and mine, working wageless for Mass Jepson on his crops and critters and what-all else he bid me to work these past twenty-nine years.” He threw me again that dead stare. “Naw, I think I will leave broad-field emancipating and other such high-flown ambitions to youall.”
He made a valid argument that I would not dispute. I took him for his shoes.
The quartermaster sergeant, Bill Berry, looked down from his perch at the rear of the supply wagon toward the spectacle of Malachi’s feet. “You thought ten too many?”
Everybody was a jokesmith.
Malachi did not take it poorly. “I always thought myself deserving of a more distinctive look than the common lot. Mass Jepson decided to oblige me.”
He claimed three pair of brogans, one for himself, another for “his girl”—either a wife or a daughter, I did not know—and the last for some other. Neither Berry nor I objected to the surplus. Afterward, I rejoined F.
Captain Wild conveyed orders down the line that all sorties were to cease and companies were to visit that man Drinkwater’s home and secure whatever our engineers might need to rebuild the bridge. A thousand men swarmed the property, streaming in and out like ants on a hill. Some had at the dwelling house, others at the barn and outbuildings, selecting the best timber at first, but soon, whatever timber was left. It was all razed to nothing in less than an hour, with Drinkwater onlooking, in shackles for his bushwhacker pursuits, his wife and four children whimpering nearby. Hammers hammering, the back-and-forth whizzing of handsaws. The bridge went back up in less than six hours.
F was left out of the fun. We watched from the woods, as we’d been ordered to flanker duty again.
The column reached Elizabeth City just before nightfall and what we found left us-all mute. Desolation, the streets unpeopled and still. Windows shuttered or outright boarded with no sign of light or life beyond. The double-doors of the bank, broad open, one banging back and forth with each burst of wind, open then shut, open then shut, until the latch finally caught.
I’d sailed here more than once, accompanying John B. on some errand or trade, and old Elizabeth had been my London or Paris. I could not imagine more bustle and life than what my Sand Banker eyes had beheld of this city. Manufactories all about, and public houses for sharing chitchat and raising toasts, and ladies’ garments stores and haberdasheries for men, and greengrocers with many-varied vegetables and fruit of lovely odor, staged in pyramids atop long tables. After the salt fat pork and hard biscuits that were our daily ration, I will confess to having joyously anticipated the prospect of foraging for provisions here. That hope now seemed dashed.
No sooner had we arrived in the central district, though, which had seemed completely abandoned, than there appeared colored of all ages and sizes, in every mode of outfit, streaming from those shops and other buildings. The brooding silence of the streets burst into jubilation and uproarious frolic as we were overrun, folks extending hands in greeting, others clapping us on the back, all waving hats and kerchiefs.
“We come in from over by Winfall, could not get here quick enough,” an old uncle told me, his mouth more dark space than teeth, stretched broad in a grin. “Me and my old woman, and our grandchildren, too.”
There she stood, wrapped in shawls against the cold and holding a tiny baby in her arms, two tykes clutching tightly at the skirt of her dress. All three little ones bawled, upset by the commotion.
“And likewise you?” I asked a girl in a red headscarf, clinging to their party. “You from Winfall, too?”
“No, sir,” said she, taking up the smaller of the two bawling tykes, cooing the boy quiet. “Me be up in my Missie’s cellar on Water Street, hiding there so as she could not find me, until they had finally left.”
Such was the case all about. Some were local. More still had come in from the surrounding country. All had made their way here with freedom in mind, and they entwined with troopers, one soon indistinguishable from the other in the great throng of us. Over there I saw Simon Gaylord, smiling while attempting to retrieve his forage cap from the lively woman who had donned it atop her own gleesome head. And there, Valentine Dozier and Zach Gregory and Paps Prentiss in a ring dance with a party of bondmen. And there, Fields, a-smile and back-clapping, also caught up in it.
If the Brigade’s presence had made of Ferrebee’s farm an impromptu Negro outpost, then Old Elizabeth, the crown jewel of all northeast North Carolina, was now become a Coloredopolis! Emancipation City!
The mass of freedmen engulfed the general. Wild waved his stump over his head to the rhythm of their waving, waved and waved, his mount disquieted but unable to move in the crush of men and women and children closing in around them. The horse reared up, turned nervously to the left and to the right. But Wild—he didn’t appear to mind one whit, keeping a-saddle as best he could, smiling full, and waving and waving his stump.