Where Wild was, well, . . . wild, and predictably so, Colonel Draper was harder to figure. We all regarded the general as one of us. With the colonel, it wasn’t always clear that he saw us truly. The very next morning, I arrived from my quarters in the Pool carriage house to find the colonel explaining to Tewksbury the method of effective leadership of colored troops. “The only course,” he was saying, “is a kind yet steady and firm hand. You see, the Negroes are more ambitious of approbation than fearful of punishment.”
He might have been describing a scent hound he was training to hunt. And just as though he was talking in front of a dog, Draper seemed to consider it no more likely that I would savvy his explanation than would the beast. He just went on about his point, even after noting my presence, the newspaperman enthusiastically scribbling the words onto a notepad.
It was clear he was different from Lieutenant Longley and his Sergeant Sambo camp dog routine. Yet and still, Draper maybe did not for real see us colored, all the same.
Though Wild forbade application of the lash in the African Brigade, regardless the offense, for respect of what we had known in bondage, Draper found ways to break even the most headstrong that would not or could not abide by his “steady and firm” regimen. The bark of the stump that served as a barber stool back at Fortress Freedom was worn smooth by the many men charged with hoisting it as they marched the yard for poorly cleaned equipment or malingering or dereliction of duty (charges which I learned were of easily variable interpretation). And we all watched as Leon Bember spent an entire October afternoon bucked and gagged atop a scaffold in the middle of the parade ground for smart-talking Robinson Tynes, when Tynes was yet a corporal. It wasn’t a flogging, but it wasn’t far off.
It is unsettling to know that a man who is rooting for you to overcome doesn’t full-on recognize you as capable of rising to a station akin to his own.
Once the colonel had finished his discourse with Tewksbury, he greeted me with a military salute, accompanied of a warm smile—oddly eager, even if stiffly formal. He then set me upon a series of chores that heralded the routine and monotony that would characterize my subsequent days. The work of adjutanting a colonel was largely administerial, I quickly came to learn. Wild and Draper amassed abundant but sundry intelligence from the many freedmen who came into headquarters to offer it up. Once verified by information otherly garnered—typically, from Pool or one of his loyal acquaintances willing to speak with Wild and Draper, however guardedly—detachments would be sent to the four corners of northeast North Carolina, units large and small, on canvassing missions and for recruitment, to follow up on leads about the land pirates or to forage for supplies. Me, I ran the orders that directed these actions about the city.
Lieutenant Colonel Holman set out with a sizable battalion, some four hundred men, to the west of our position, where there was reportedly a large camp of irregulars commanded by John Elliott, the bushwhacker who most vexed the general. Elliott’s band was the one that Malachi told us had shot down Black Sanders. The steamer Frazier hauled Major Wright, leading two hundred, to the mouth of the Pasquotank River to scour the peninsula between Wade’s Point and our base, where other guerrilla movements were said to be occurring. Each detachment was expected to return complemented of that neighborhood’s slaves.
Beyond the contrabands carrying information, our headquarters was overrun from first sun till dark with complaints from local citizens. We heard claims of horses misappropriated by freedmen and of feed silos unjustly ransacked by troopers; we received white Elizabethans desiring to take the oath of allegiance or others requesting passes to quit the region entirely. This was all overseen by Colonel Draper. He dictated the unclassified directives to me. “Good practice for your literacy, Etheridge,” he would say, as though my literacy needed practicing.
General Wild brooked no such assistance. He sat at a long mahogany desk in the middle of the room and worked at penning every dispatch himself. Having but one arm, and that one half lame, it was striking—honorable, even—but wholly inefficient. The New York newspaperman, who seemed always underfoot, was impressed just the same, which was maybe Wild’s intended purpose.
“The General imposes very little office work on the members of his staff, doing nearly all himself,” Tewksbury read aloud from his notepad one night beside the fireplace in the parlor, for the benefit of any who would listen. “This is especially laborious, but it is his way. Nothing, however trivial, escapes his notice, and he personally superintends everything.”
Delivery of a satchel of correspondence for transport over to Roanoke took me to the docks that Tuesday afternoon, our fourth in the city. The weather had blustered since our arrival, making the Pasquotank choppy. But General Wild insisted on maintaining a steady communication and transfer of supplies between our position and the military camp back on the Island, whatever the conditions and despite the threat of ambush from the Rebels’ so-called Mosquito Fleet. It was to the benefit of those of us from there. By this method, we could keep apprised of news from home—though none of it, so far as I could tell, was the information sought by Fields.
Before seeking out the steamer captain who would convey the current satchel, I gave myself leave to compose the overdue letter for Sarah so that I might entrust it along with the official correspondence before another day had passed with it yet unwritten. Duties called me elsewhere in the city, so I had to be brief. I took a seat on a piling to scribble hasty words, off a ways from the bustle of loading and offloading boats. It was hardly the “flourishes of plume” that Sarah had come to expect, just business: Did she have knowledge of Llewelyn Midgett and what had become of his slaves?
I heard myself hallooed and turned to find approaching me Joseph Etheridge, a cousin to John B., wearing Union blue and Navy insignia. He strode over and offered his hand to shake.
Such a strange gesture from a man before whom I’d always had to drop my eyes.
“How good to see you, Dick! And what a surprise.”
“And likewise you,” said I, forcing my mind to think only “Joseph Etheridge,” lest lifelong habit, and thereby also my tongue, slip back to erstwhile titles: Master; “Mass Joe.”
“So, you’re part of this mission General Wild has struck up in these parts?” he said.
“Yes, sir” would have been the appropriate response, given his captain’s patch and the scrambled eggs that embroidered his bell crown cap. But this too much recalled my previous condition, and I stood there mute.
He took my hesitant silence as a response in itself and continued: “It is a difficult but noble mission. Times are changing. We cannot live in yesteryear.”
I supposed he was talking about our aims of Emancipation, but who knew? He was a slave owner himself. Maybe it was our operation against the bushwhackers to which he referred.
He pointed over his shoulder, toward the wharf. Disembarking from a steamer there was a procession of Zouave soldiers, bearded and mustachioed and sporting their Harlequin attire. “Me, I am piloting that paddle-wheel. It’s my contribution to peace and union.”
I found myself even more distracted by the Zouaves than by a blue-uniformed Etheridge, and not on account of their garishness. I didn’t relish seeing those boorish white men arriving in the city. Were they just transiting through, or were they there in support of the Brigade? I very much hoped the former.
I hadn’t asked about home, but Joseph Etheridge offered news. “All is well enough out on Roanoke. Cousin John is doing a healthy business with the government, supplying foodstuffs at just less than market price. Given the number of Yanks, he is cutting a tidy profit all the same.”
And that was all—nothing about my ma’am or about the colored with whom I was kin or was known to be friends. The only bit proffered was of the singular part with which he was capable of associating me: my former master.
He smiled broad. “Your position in the army will be a great asset to Cousin John.” He pointed at my stripes. “When you return home, your status will help to boost the family’s business dealings with the runaways at the Freedman’s Colony. They are more than you would believe or could fathom.
“And this would serve you as well, of course,” he added as an afterthought.
His words rankled not inconsiderably, given his apparent assumption about where my loyalties lay. He struck me as being as much for “peace and union” as was John B.—which was to say, not much. The Etheridges were for their own stake, for siding with those who could aid in the advancement of family ventures and enterprises.
I said, “Thank you, Captain Etheridge. I’ll remember that when I have done with fighting for freedom, should I decide to return to the Island.”
He did not take it as I had intended or did not hear me, for he continued with his unspooling ideas on profiteering. “Yes, yes, your hand could be good in it. The Freedman’s Colony counts nigh on two thousand darkies now.” He beamed. “Hell, before the hostilities, the whole blamed Island didn’t have but maybe six hundred people all told, nigger and white!”
He promptly blanched. “Forgive me, Dick. Habits of speech are not easily quit.”
I did not concede that I would forgive it, but forbearance was somewhat inborn in me and I imagined that my face revealed this.
His humbling of himself seemed an opening for me to inquire after Fields’s brothers. “Tell me, do you have news of the Midgetts? Of Llewelyn, in particular?”
Joseph Etheridge’s face soured.
“Do you know what has come of him and his?” said I.
“The Island split much more than not toward Union, but a few have cast their lot the other way. Llewelyn figures among those.”
I already knew this. I asked the more pressing question. “In our sorties into the neighborhoods hereabouts, we hear tell of folks taking their property and lighting out for Texas and suchlike, to keep as far away of our armies as possible. Might this be the case with Llewelyn Midgett?”
In pondering this as long as he did, Joseph Etheridge did not offer the quick dismissal of the proposition that I’d hoped for.
“The schooner Erasmus and the Midgett sloops are nowhere to be seen in Shallowbag Bay these days,” he said, working out his thoughts. “I’d supposed this to mean that they’d loaded up what property they didn’t want to lose to military seizure and transferred it down to Wilmington. But down there, seizure by the Confederate military is just as likely, and I suppose it ain’t but a slight push past Wilmington on to Texas, when in exile already.”
He paused again.
“It is possible, yes,” said he. “I have not heard this specifically with regard to Llewelyn, but Midgetts have left in bevies. It sure enough is possible.”
This was bad news. I didn’t know what I would tell Fields.
“Llewelyn and his lot,” said Joseph Etheridge, “they’re not alone in slipping off in the night. Others have, too—nearer to home.”
I didn’t reply, as I was not following his intimation.
“Patrick,” he said, and his face darkened further. “Patrick has defied his uncle and joined the Rebels.”
“The North Carolina infantry? Patrick?”
“The irregulars,” said Joseph Etheridge, glumly. “Jack Elliott’s band, out here in Pasquotank.”
“Paddy? A bushwhacker?”
“That is how I hear it.”
And partnering with the worst of them, to boot. I asked, “From whom this information?” I needed to be certain.
“Bo Evans. He said Patrick come to his window one night and tried to get him to join along.”
Evans was a boyhood friend of Patrick’s, his closest one aside from me. He would not invent such a thing.
“Much ago?” said I. “When did he run off?”
“Two weeks. Maybe three.”
Hence Patrick’s picture postcard.
Oh, Patrick, thought I. Paddy . . . Was this yet one more attempt to rival me, only this time inspired of spite? Or was he acting on the cussed promise to ornament the gum tree on the square?
I turned my face so as not to give away what I was feeling. In that direction, I saw disembarking from Joseph Etheridge’s paddle-wheel, after the last of the Zouaves, a huddle of colored faces I knew from home—six or seven, mostly men, mostly aged—and right there among them was Fanny Aydlett. My Fanny!
I ran toward her without offering Joseph Etheridge even a farewell, and she saw me then, too, and she ran to meet me. We were in front of colored soldiers and Zouaves and everybody there on the wharf, and she jumped right into my arms like it wasn’t but us two in all the world.
“Oh, Fanny,” said I, “what are you doing here?”
“Why, following you, Richard.” She smiled broad.
“But here? How did you know I would be here?”
“I didn’t.” She let herself slip from my embrace and stepped back a pace. Pulling up her bonnet, half fallen from her head, and straightening her lambswool sweater, which had become disheveled in our entwining, she explained: “Pompeii injured his leg, helping construct the sawmill up at the Freedman’s Colony.”
Sure enough, there he was, off over her shoulder, leaning heavily on a crutch and on old Ebo Joe Meekins, who was helping him to stand.
“A kindly preacher from the missionary society said it could be saved with proper doctoring,” Fanny went on. “He got Pompeii a dispensation to travel on to Norfolk. I secured passage as his attendant.”
And then anew, her smile: the smile I so loved, beaming pride at her industry and ingeniousness.
Yet as happy as I was to see her, I wasn’t at all glad that it was here, smack in the middle of our campaign in Confederate territory—a territory that was throughout troubled with murdering bushwhackers, at that!
“This ain’t Norfolk, Fanny. How are youall to get up to Fortress Freedom from here?”
“They just put us on the boat. They told us the Union command would secure our passage on up.”
This revelation set my stomach to churning. It would be Wild’s and Draper’s charge, another among so many, to get them safely there, and to keep them safe until it was accomplished. I tried not to let my worry show.
“Oh my, Fanny. I didn’t have any expectation of seeing you for some time. Maybe not even evermore.”
She grabbed me up into her embrace again. “I know it, Richard. This is why I was set on finding my way to you, wherever you was.”
It was a tender moment, and I felt no compunction or embarrassment at tearing up right there in the street, my girl, Fanny, wrapped in my arms.