It was a fitful dream that night, in the barracks back at Fortress Freedom—a thrashing between half-woke and full-on asleep. More a memory, really, the aftertaste of sleep that was either dusking or dawning but no longer fully dark. I was myself but back home on Roanoke Island. Walking up the lane that ran alongside Uppowoc Creek, past the barn and the windmill partly obscured by evening fog, toward the Etheridge House. Then standing in the vestibule, grayly lit by lantern light. Then afore the great doors to the dining room.
Had I knocked or just entered?
I watched myself, astraddle the threshold, dinner conversation of a sudden stopped. Mistuss Margery and Missie Sarah. Patrick. Mass John B. The silence of the room.
Ma’am Molly’s Peter, the colored boy who served meals, was still now, too, his head bowed and eyes lowered, a platter outstretched toward Mistuss Margery but not close enough that she might successfully spear a fillet of the grilled bluefish.
“They are recruiting colored for soldiers up to the Contraband Camp,” I heard myself saying, calling it what the Union boys called it and not the “Runaway Colony,” like Sand Bankers derisively did. Nigh on as soon as the Northern Army had captured the Banks, slaves from inland, scores and scores, began to flee over the Croatan Sound to Roanoke, by whatever means—in pilfered canoes, dog-paddling on lengths of timber. The Northerners were collecting them together up by the Isaac Mann house.
“I will go there in the morning and enlist,” I said.
I’d directed it at John B., but Patrick was the one who reacted. His face broke into a familiar, impish smile, as though I were taunting him with prankful play. Then it shifted, from amused to surprised and on to something other—darker—like I’d only on rare occasion seen.
“The hell you will.”
None else moved, not even a flinch. Ma’am Molly’s Peter stood stiff as statuary, the platter outstretched.
“The hell you will!” Patrick repeated, only stronger, as though it was him the master of the house and not John B.
Just then Mistuss Margery speared a fillet of bluefish—a sharp clink! of metal tine on metal platter. She refused to look at me. Ma’am Molly’s Peter slipped out the side door, off to the kitchen, though aught other had been served.
“He can’t do it, can he, Uncle John?”
I hadn’t intended my announcement to waylay Paddy thusly. In fact, I had imagined the opposite. Even in this dream, I expected him to side with me.
John B. said, “The Yankees run the Island now. I suppose you will do as you wish from here on, Dick.”
“Yes, sir,” said I, wondering was the “sir” still mandatory or even appropriate.
I did not drop my eyes, though, as was custom and had always been my habit, and our gazes locked. Was it remorse I saw in his face, or was that merely what I hoped to see? I wished that the truth might expose itself. What did the man behold when he looked upon me? A son claiming his station, with the begrudging pride that this might inspire, or a slave of a sudden become ungovernable?
No such wish granted. Just his expressionless face and the sharp clink of tiny metal—Mistuss Margery hotly poking at pieces of fish, heedless that no one else had been served.
“But Uncle John! He can’t,” cried Patrick, less in protest than as a plea. He turned toward me. “It’s their war, not ours. They will move on and things will . . . And who knows but that you might get . . .”
He seemed not to know at whom to aim his appeal, only that it was falling on deaf ears, as neither his uncle nor I would face him, each of us facing the other.
Then Patrick’s voice changed. I heard something like contempt. “When you are killed and your nigger head is just some ornament hanging from the gum tree aside the square on Shallowbag Bay, we will leave it there for all to see what you have chosen.”
He pushed off fiercely from the table and toward me, his chair toppling backward. Our statures mirrored one another’s, as always, only now I felt taller, as though looking down upon his approaching form. My memory told me that our shoulders collided, perhaps deliberately, as he went past and out the door. But in this imagining of it, he spins back and takes my sleeve. “Dick,” pleading. “Come on now, Dick. No . . .”
Was this truly said, any more than the part about the ornamented gum tree? I couldn’t tell, the dream-memory breaking apart with the rustle of movement all around, with new sounds pulling me up through sleep. The metal-on-metal clinking of military gear, the bursting call of “reveille”—a din of fife and bugle in the distance. I forced open my eyes, saw my corporals moving between the rows of bunks, barking orders. I should have been up, too, rousening the men alongside them.
Instead, I lay there on my hard berth in the dawning November cold, remembering my mother’s words, back at her cabin later the night of my announced leave-taking. “You couldn’t just run off like other colored do?” Ma’am had said, her angled face unsparing. “You needed to beg for his approval?”
“Tell me,” she’d added. “Did you get it?”