The next morning, with the column formed up and marching on, the Great Dismal itself proved to be a more immediate foe than whatever bushwhackers might be about. The swamp was as inhospitable a patch as I had known. The road that ran adjacent to the canal—a towpath, really—was in disrepair, more packed dirt than graded stone, and was bordered on both sides by dikes fouled with black water. December spared us the raids of mosquitoes, but yellowjacks seemed untroubled by the winter chill. We swatted and marched, swatted and marched, it became a rhythm. Below the canopy of cypress and gum trees, full-on day could, of a sudden, with a passing cloud, become inky night, and we were often walled in by briar and head-high thorned bushes filled of frogs and insects so bold they did not let up their spectral calling even as marching soldiers stomped past. Moccasins and swimming rattlersnakes infested the area. More than one trooper was heard to call out for some other to mind his step, and Private Robert Hunter got bit just above his left brogan.
We made eighteen miles, just clear of the swamp, much to my great relief, as the idea of camping therein wasn’t a welcome one. The column stopped at the trading station at Ferrebee’s farm well past dusk.
Even at that late hour, the place was a-bustle with activity, including an unsavory lot idling about the porch. I organized my men on a corner of open field far enough from the store to disinvite temptation, on the off chance that an eighteen-mile slog through mire had not sufficiently done it. I likewise ordered Fields and my other corporals to be extra vigilant through the night, just in case.
Lieutenant Backuss, who, in the absence of an actual captain, captained us in Company F, joined the rest of the officer corps congregating around the general and the farm’s owner beneath a kerosene lamp hanging from the eaves near the entrance to the store. Wild was coordinating with the old man about the expected arrival of two canal steamers sent down from Fortress Freedom, carrying rations to re-provision the Brigade. Ferrebee wore a straw hat and overalls over a white cotton shirt, and had a smile that too readily signaled consent and did not match up with his eyes.
As I watched, leaning against a falling-down stone wall, there sauntered over a youthful variant of Ferrebee—what I took to be a son, as he was similarly narrow of shoulder and false of smile. He was eleven, maybe twelve.
“Them there is Scratch Hall folk,” the boy explained, pointing at the laze-abouts on the porch, lounging opposite where Wild and old man Ferrebee spoke, though I had not inquired after them.
They were a peculiar lot, yet and still. Each appeared a curious mix of poor white and colored, and nan one of them looked of the sort to inhabit any place meriting designation as a “Hall.” They stared at the general and our officers, suspicious more than interested.
“How come is they so named?” said Fields, of a sudden standing aside us.
“Why, after their cousin Old Scratch, of course!” said the boy, bursting up with laughter, but mocking, not mirthful. “Swamp people,” he explained. “They live in the pocosin and stay mostly to themselves, but come by the store for whatever they cannot make or catch on their own. Inbred mixbloods—Occaneechi, what’s left of ’em, and Meherrin and run-off colored, to boot.” He spat into the dirt. “Goddamn mongrels.”
I turned from the porch toward this coarse and overly familiar boy then back, thinking: As though this ain’t true of all, white and black, Indian and otherwise! It appeared to be so of the boy, in fact, whose tawny tinting looked to result from more than merely exposure to the sun. It was for certain so back home.
There weren’t plantations out on the Sand Banks. There wasn’t sufficient farmland for it, only small plots here and about on the scant arable bits, mostly on Roanoke. Fishing and oystering, lightering cargo and piloting the inlets were the primary means of money-making, and most Bankers did not make or have much. Few could afford slaves, and those few rarely kept more than one or maybe two. John B., who was a grandee by Banker standards, didn’t own but nine of us. This, I learned at Fortress Freedom, was a paltry score for a Southern man of means.
Among an isolated people, increasing your slave stock was as difficult as finding new blood for brides. Mulattoes were the result, open secrets. I stood as a model illustration, a “scion” of the Etheridge House and broadly known as such, though a branch inscribed with my name would nowhere be found on the family tree.
Some Sand Bankers—though few—were not so guarded about publicly acknowledging the kinships. Millie Evans (white) and Abiah Owens (colored), out at Tommy’s Hummock, and Vicy Bowser (colored) and Ben Dough (white), down to Kinnakeet, were openly coupled, with children and all, though in neither case were they legally married, as the laws of the state disallowed it. I would see Ben Dough on Roanoke with his tawny sons, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, regular if not often; he and John B. would barter fresh catch for whatever naval stores Dough might need from John B.’s supplies. White Bankers made no more fuss of the Doughs’ presence than they might of wild Corolla ponies found pasturing in their yard of a morning.
Likewise for colored Bankers. We knew what we knew and so, among us, mixed blood was drylongso, just ordinary. Not for my ma’am, though. She’d been born a Dough slave, was bought in her teen years from Ben’s brother Warren, and there was no love lost for anybody of that family, any more than there was for the Etheridges. She forbade me to interact with Matthew, Mark, and Luke. One time, I asked why.
“Vicy think having some tiny-small say in things with Ben be worth the price it cost to get it,” she replied.
Ma’am was a lean woman, angled and taut. She could spark tinder with a shuddersome look and wasn’t one to explain herself. But given that she’d started in, I asked more—the thing a mixblood slave boy knows yet still doubts the full truth of.
“With John B., was the price he offered too high?”
“Offered!” was all she said.
Her silences spoke louder than her words, and the one that followed merely reprised what I already knew without providing any connecting bits to help me make a song of the scattered verses. The worst of what I knew could wake me from sleep and seemed like an accusation against me, of what a man should do or had not done.
I quit the Ferrebee boy before he could recommence his gibbering. Fields followed. “Whatever that child says, he says with relish and might not nary a bit of it be true.”
“Much like the father,” said I.
I glanced back over at the older version, up on the porch, smiling oily at General Wild. A Southern man who had a broad patch of land, a store and goods for sale, and a barn and barn fowl and several beefs, yet not one slave? If the bushwhackers did not already have intelligence as to the Brigade’s composition and hardware, they would once we’d decamped from this location—that was certain—either by Ferrebee or by the Scratch Hall folk.
Walking back toward F’s place on the grounds, Fields announced, “George Bowser is in camp.”
“Bill Charles’s brother?”
“He was paddle-wheeled in among the recruits that arrived around the time we was out at Clapson’s. They put him in Company H.” We stopped briefly to warm our hands over a campfire. “It’s said he’s been looking for us.”
This was gladsome news. Though three or four years younger, he’d been part of our pack coming up. “Well, let’s go find him, then.”
H had pitched camp on the pasture abutting the west-facing woods. Bowser’s pup was easy enough to locate, after only a few queries. When he saw us, he ran up all a-smile.
“Fields, Richard! I am pleased to see you!”
“It’s Sergeant and Corporal, Private!” said I, sharp but not too much so, so as he would recognize it for playful. “I’m likewise pleased to see you, George, and glad you decided to sign up. Could you not convince Bill Charles to do the same?”
“You know he ain’t much for joining. He slipped off one night and holes up down to Pea Island, with our people out there.”
Fields asked, “And the rest of it—how are things back on Roanoke? Much as to be expected?”
Bowser moseyed toward the nearest campfire, us following along. He said, “It is why I asked after you, once I’d arrived to Fortress Freedom.”
His tone was foreboding. He full-on faced Fields.
“Don’t tell me the Zouaves have changed their minds?” Fields joshed, looking to lighten the sudden turn. “Do they not enforce President Lincoln’s call for deliverance? Are Roanoke colored no longer free?”
Though said jokefully, such a thing was possible. Where numberless folk held the Northern Zouave regiments in high esteem for their flashy attire and sense of dash, not so back home. They’d played a live role in the battle for the Island but were a frightful occupier afterward. Loud and braggadocious in their puffed-up pantaloons and blood-red sashes and fezzes, disrespecting property and people, and not caring one damn about colored. They treated us worse than our owners had, calling us out as poltroonish buffoons, too stupid to effect our own emancipation—this, even as streams of us were coursing toward recruiting officers and enlistment.
“Well, more or less,” answered Bowser, sheepish yet. “Refugees keep flooding in, and the Union Army puts them to work in return for offers of school learning and suchlike. But for us homegrown Banker colored, if our Mass and Mistuss have pledged loyal, it is not so clear.”
Bowser stared at Fields, as though the implication of his words was so obvious that he didn’t need to say it aloud.
“Go on with it, man,” said Fields. “Speak your piece!”
“Llewelyn Midgett”—Fields’s former owner—“took his remaining colored and sailed off from Shallowbag Bay, among them, Riley and Lawrence.”
These were Fields’s brothers. “Naw, no way. They was to follow me as soon as possible, to join me at Freedom.”
Me, I could imagine it, though. The Midgetts were a rowdy lot. Even after Roanoke fell and siding with the Union seemed inevitable, many of them slipped off in a skiff or a lighter or whatever craft remained after Zouave seizures, in order to resist it. Llewelyn, being a Midgett and feeling bullied, might do just about anything.
And as though my thinking on it had made manifest the worst thing possible, Bowser added: “Before shoving off, Midgett had Riley flogged right there at Shallowbag Bay, for sassing.”
“Sassing?” Fields protested, in vain, as Bowser was but the messenger. “That boy ain’t sassed in his life. He hardly even speaks!”
It was an extreme of punishment, regardless the offense. Lashings were rare in the Sand Banks, and I’d never seen colored equipped of bits like horses nor the other manner of discipline that soldiers of the Brigade described as common fare where they’d come from. Yet Riley had been flogged, and out on the public square, to boot.
“That cannot be!” Fields’s face was a churn of anger and confusion and pain. “It just cannot be.”
Bowser dropped his eyes, which was all the corroboration that was needed.
“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you,” he said finally. “But I wanted you should know.”
I needed news of Ma’am. I’d left the Island with her emancipated, settled in at the Freedman’s Colony. Now I wondered if this remained so, and under what conditions. I remembered Jenny at Clapson’s farm. My ma’am bore the scars of memory like that old mammy wore the mess of gnarls that defaced her back, and for that reason she rarely held her tongue or masqueraded her true feelings. So long as tasks were done, Sand Bankers accepted it as her nature and let her be. But “sassing” could rightly describe her manner of talk, too.
I figured that if Bowser had something to disclose on it, he would have, but I asked all the same. “And my ma’am, George? Do you have any news?”
“Nothing out of the usual, so far as I know,” said he, his eyes at once apologetic yet endeavoring also to add a dose of reassurance to his indeterminate report.
“And Fanny?” I asked.
My girl. She’d been safe when I quit the Island. I wouldn’t have left otherwise.
But so too had been Riley.
“Fanny Aydlett?” queried Bowser.
“Yes,” said I. “Any news about her?”
“Nothing out of the usual.”
This “news” was hardly news, though much better than what Fields had learned. I reached a hand onto his shoulder, and he and I quit Bowser. We wended our way back to F’s place on the grounds, both of us quiet, which felt appropriate. For what words could lighten a weight such as this one?
Outside his pup tent, Fields plopped onto the ground and sat at the entrance. “Man, we could sail from Roanoke of a morning, hire a hack for the rest of the journey, and reach this place by nightfall, that’s how close it be. And here we is, in a patch of country I ain’t ever even known of before, much less actually seen. So thick of white pine and juniper you wouldn’t believe we was spitting distance to the Banks and the sea.”
I could not follow his train of thought, but I sensed his eyes searching for mine in the dark.
“As a boy, I thought that freedom would be getting to rove about as I saw fit,” he continued, “to decide my own choices.” He faced down into his lap. “God is getting me, Richard, for shameful ignorance and prideful self-regard. It is wet and we are sleeping outdoors and I cannot go and do the things I need to do.”
I wanted Fields heartened. “Come on, now, it’ll be all right. We can . . .”
I could not finish the thought, much less my effort at consoling. If it was Ma’am and not Riley—or if it was Fanny!—I would be suffering it as he was, wrenched by my helplessness to do aught for her and restless for the chance to try something, anything, to make it right.
Troopers moved about around us. It was as though I’d only then noticed.
Fields said, “I run off despite offers of wage work and a share of the yield. Facing further threat of the loss of us, who knows what Mass Llewelyn might do?”
I’d not heard him call his former master “master” since we’d quit the Island.
“Listen,” I said. “Packet boats are regular between Elizabeth City and Roanoke. I’ll send a letter once we get there.”
“Who to? Mass Llewelyn?”
“To the superintendent of the Freedman’s Colony,” said I, “or to the Northern missionary society there, or to both. But we will get the most current information and figure out how to act accordingly.”
He seemed not overmuch convinced, despite the conviction with which I’d made my pronouncement. Nor was I, frankly. Even with news of their whereabouts, what could we do?
Our Old North State homecoming was not bringing the joy that the general’s speech had heralded. Fields and I seemed farther from home and from our kin than had we been fighting over in Italia, like Wild had done. It left you feeling disillusioned, maybe even a little disloyal. After all, whom should we rightly be fighting for if not loved ones and family—for Ma’am, for my girl?