Though that buckboard wobbled and those iron wheels hit every rock and gulley along the trail, I hauled myself up and stood so I could watch until the fire wasn’t but a lonely ember far off in the dark. When even that was swallowed up by the night, the strength left my legs. I sunk back down onto the hard boards of the wagon, not caring that I was wedged in tight as a bullet in a chamber.
Much as it hurt to leave Mama, it was the pain of knowing I had abandoned Clemmie that stabbed the dagger in my heart. Though I had killed Old Mister, still worse might await her if Old Miss put her on the auction block. The most dangerous thing one of our girls could be was pale and pretty, and Clemmie, who favored our handsome daddy, where I took after our strapping mama, was both. Anger heated my tears as I thought about a hand touching her. One that I could not set a brown recluse spider upon.
With no one to hear me except a single lonely chicken, and the creaking of the wagon covering any sound I made, I carried on snorting out big, wet sobs that didn’t stop until I noticed flickers of torchlight off in the woods. The flickers traveled alongside us. Someone was out there in the woods tracking us. Tracking me.
Rebels had only two ways for any slave they caught with Yanks to go: back into slavery or up a tree at the end of a rope. Or worse if they had the time. Burning alive and skinning were two favored pastimes. In the whole, long war, Seceshes never took one black prisoner of war. It was slavery or death if they caught you.
The ones tracking me now, though, had to be pattyrollers. Bad as regular Rebs and bushwackers were, pattyrollers were the ticks on their bellies, for those night-riding fiends believed Jesus had appointed them personally to torture and terrify all blacks and to pay special attention to contrabands. Pattyrollers wouldn’t take the Yanks on straight. Didn’t dare fire on anyone with a gun who could fire back. Instead they’d creep around in the dark like they were doing now and shoot all the freed slaves they could pick off. Then disappear back into the shadows before the Yanks could come after them.
I felt them now. Out there. Watching. Waiting to get a clear shot as soon as the moonlight hit me right. Next, I heard them making the gargly sorts of moans night riders made to terrify us into a case of the screaming fantods. I ducked down far as I could, but the moans approached even closer. They had a horrible rusty sound to them like they were coming either from a man in a grave or a man meant to put me in one.
I was about to meet my maker, sent by an enemy I couldn’t see. My heart thumped hard on that fearful prospect and I prayed that Mama and Iyaiya were right and that Jesus had got it wrong. That it was okay for a captive, a warrior, to kill her enemies the way I had laid Old Mister out. My preference would be to hunt elephants with Iyaiya for all eternity rather than sizzle in the everlasting fires of the white preacher’s hell. Finally, I realized that the moans were coming from close by. Very close. In fact, they were coming from inside the wagon itself.
“Who’s there?” I felt around for a weapon. My fingers closed around the handle of one of the curved knives we used to chop tobacco, the ones that had left my hands filigreed with white scars. I held my breath, but the only sound was the creaking of the wagon and the clatter of the stolen freight, until from practically right beside me came a low groan, “Waaa-tuh.”
In the deep shadows cast by the woods we were driving through, I could barely make out what I realized with a start was the form of a man laying atop some sacks of grain not an arm’s length from me. His head lay toward the gate and a white bandage covered his eyes and a good part of his high forehead. The rest of him was lost in darkness.
He cried out for water again. Weaker this time. I could barely hear him as his calls were quickly lost in the rattle and jouncing of the wagon. I felt around. My hand fell on the round lumps of sweet taters in a tow sack. The pullet in a cage squawked when I felt of her. I pricked my finger on the tip of a tobacco knife. But I found no water.
The man stopped groaning, but his labored breath went on, itself a cry for help. I scrambled closer, feeling as I went. Finally my hand fell on the cool, moist curves of a keg. I unstoppered and smelled of it. Cider. I dipped the long tail of my shirt into the keg until the cloth was sopping. Then, more by feel than sight in the darkness, I found the man’s mouth and squeezed the cider in. He gulped it down. Though it gave me the creeping fantods to touch a white man, I wet and squeezed the shirttail a dozen more times before he heaved a great sigh of relief and whispered something I couldn’t make out.
I was close enough that the hard metal smell of blood along with sweat and gunpowder filled my nostrils. When the wagon pulled out from under the black shadows cast by the trees canopying the road, silver light fell on the man and I could make out his uniform. Union blue. At least he was a Yankee. There’d of been no more cider for a Reb.
The dim light of a clouded moon caught on the brass buttons running down the front of the soldier’s jacket. They shone with the care that the soldier had lavished on polishing them. On each button was a fierce eagle, a shield over its breast. In one claw the eagle gripped an olive branch. In the other he held a bundle of arrows. Those buttons, gleaming in the moonlight, were the most beautiful things I had ever seen.
The soldier croaked out something I couldn’t hear and I leaned in closer. He whispered in my ear, “Thank you.”
Two Yankees in one day, two white men, one a general, now this regular soldier, had spoken to me.
I lifted my head to answer him at the same moment that the moon sailed out from beneath the clouds and shone down bright, revealing a sight that caused me to wonder if I had taken leave of my senses. For there, beneath the white of the bandage, I saw that the Yank’s face was near as dark as my own. I could not conjure how these two colors, the blue of his suit and the black of his face, could possibly go together.
“Are you still there?” The soldier’s whisper was hoarse and dry as sand. I watched his fine full lips form the question, the moon silver-plating the tip of his tongue when it peeped out on the word “there.” I had never stared hard at a man’s face before. Never had the least desire to do so. What I could see of this face, though, stopped me dead and left no choice but to study it. I tried to answer and was surprised to find that my own words had dried up in my throat.
“Hello?” His voice was husky, scratched raw by thirst and battle and pain.
“I’m here,” I whispered, barely recognizing my own voice for it had gone soft and gentle.
“You … you’re…” I had to lean so close to his mouth to hear him that his breath warmed my ear when he said, “… a woman.”
“I am.”
“You’re a … a … black woman.” I had never before heard anyone put those two words together the way he did. Like they were poetry. Like they were a prize and he had just won it.
“I am.”
“My prayer has been answered,” he gasped.
The effort caused a horrible rasping and rattling cough to overcome him.
I fetched up several more soppings of cider until he was breathing easy again, then I asked, “What prayer is that?”
“Not to die alone.”
He spoke the way Daddy had. Educated and with none of the slurry drawl that made Southerners sound lazy or slow or both. And not hurried-up and mean the way Yankees talked, either.
“I didn’t dare to ask for a black woman to comfort my last moments on this earth. But the Lord knew what was in my heart and He sent you to me.”
His words and the feel of them forming against my ear caused my belly to quiver and my cheeks to warm like I’d been caught at something shameful. I answered as Daddy would of, clear and powerful and polished, for I needed to sound smart when I told him, “You are not going to die.” It was both an order and what I suddenly wished for with all my heart.
He answered, “Yes I am,” like it was a fact beyond disputing. In little halting bursts, with many stops to rest and allow me to trickle cider into his mouth, the soldier related, “I was near gone already when Sheridan’s scavenging party came upon me. I’d been left for dead after a little skirmish my unit got caught up in just north of here.”
“Your unit? So this blue suit? It’s yours?”
Again, in the halting way of a dying man, he managed to say, “I put the blood in it. Put the sweat in it. Figure that makes it mine as much as enlisting did.”
“You’re a soldier? A signed-up Yankee soldier?”
He told me how there were lots of black soldiers, tens of thousands. All fighting and dying to end slavery. Speaking wore him out, though, and with a long sigh, he slumped even more heavily into the sacks of grain. His head listed to the side as though the spirit had left him.
After several long, motionless minutes, I placed my hand beneath his nose. A long time passed before I felt the warm puff of a weak breath. I started to take my hand away, but the soldier leaned into my palm, and nestled his cheek up against it like a dog wanting to be patted. So I stroked his cheek, and comfort I never knew I had to give flowed out of me. The relief of a human touch allowed him to lower his guard so much that a few whimpers of pain mixed with the fear of the death coming up on him slipped from his lips.
The feel of his cheek skin was finer than when I was allowed into the big house and would run my hand against the silk-smooth wood of the maple banister. Other than Clemmie’s, I had never stroked another person’s cheek. Certainly no boy’s. Mama had warned me from early on that to catch the eye of a boy, black or white, was to make a misery of your life. What befell Clemmie proved her warnings true.
Maybe because my nature had never come, I didn’t have the slightest interest in boys the way most girls did. Far as I was concerned, they were just girls in britches. Though, by and large, a sight stupider, dirtier, meaner, smellier, and a whole lot louder. Now, though, a queer giddiness lit me up like hundreds of fireflies were zipping around inside my belly. For a second, I almost understood how girls went calf-kneed and forgot their raising when they were sweet on a boy.
The soldier slept and I was fixing to pull my hand away, but the instant I did, he groaned deep in his throat. The groan sounded like the noises that came from the other side of the cabin we shared with Maynard and his mama when one of the men visited Maynard’s mother, a woman who was as man-fevered as they came.
The soldier leaned his cheek further into my palm and I left my hand just where it was, nuzzled against his warm skin. He slept and we traveled many a rough mile in this manner, my hand holding off troubled dreams and fears of the grave. I slept then woke without knowing when I’d dozed off and never certain I was truly awake as we rolled through forests shrouded with Spanish moss and swirling with foggy mists.
The days passed. I gnawed on sweet potatoes and fed the pullet parched corn, and other victuals the Yanks had stolen. The wagon only stopped when the driver—who had his rations on the foretop with him and never once looked back or spoke a word to me, and would of been happy if me and the soldier’d both gone cold—had to do his business.
Soon as he set the handbrake, I would jump off, hurry to relieve myself, and gulp down some water before I soaked my shirt, kerchief, and any other bit of rag I could lay my hands on. I’d bring the sopping cloths back and squeeze out a good drink for both the soldier and the pullet in the cage who’d become a friend with her fretful clucking.
It was during one such foray that I listened in on the white soldiers talking soldier talk and got the lay of the land as to where we were headed and why. Our destination was a place called Harper’s Ferry where Sheridan was gathering up the Army of the Shenandoah along with the Sixth Corps of the Army of the Potomac, four infantry and two cavalry divisions. All told the soldiers reckoned he’d have him a force of fifty thousand men. This figure was beyond my power to conjure. They were fixing to have one whale of a showdown with the Rebs, who were massing their own men to the south under a general by the name of Jubal Early.
I couldn’t say how many days passed, other than to note that I had made a considerable dent in the sweet taters, when I started awake from a dead sleep one night with a heavy feeling pressing in on me. Terrified, I checked on the soldier. He was taking his murmurless rest, and though he didn’t wake, he did swallow a mouthful of cider before sagging back into a deep sleep.
The more time that passed with us bundled up so close, the greedier my palm grew. Soon, it took to sliding down to mold around the strong place where his jaw curved. Then to stroking his neck where the blood pulsed and the apple Eve gave Adam that got stuck in all men’s throats ever after rippled when he swallowed. I brushed my fingertips across the wide flare of his nose, the bristly rasp of a mustache, the softness of his full lips.
That last, touching his beautiful lips, caused a spirit to take possession of my soul and that spirit desired the touch of those lips against mine. Though I attempted to rebuke such a willful spirit, a weariness greater than any I’d ever known came stealing over me. It made my head so heavy it drooped on my neck like a giant sunflower, forcing me to lean in closer. Then closer. I inhaled the scent of his skin, his breath. I leaned further.
Just as my lips touched his, the soldier woke. His croak of a voice after such a long silence startled me by asking, “May I…”
I jerked my head away and, from a respectable distance, answered, proper as I could with my heart thumping like a scared rabbit. “Yes? May you what?”
“May I…” His hand, trembling and weak, rose. “May I touch your face?”
I pulled back even further. All the sweet touches and words would stop the instant his fingers found the truth written on my dark face for even a blind man to see: I was a plain girl.
“Well, now,” I stammered. “I don’t know about all that.”
“I am dying,” my soldier stated flatly. “Let the feel of the face of a kind woman accompany me to the grave.”
He reached his hand toward me, palm up, begging. Though I still worried about what he would see with his fingers, I could not deny a dying man his last wish. I guided his hand to my face. The tips of his strong fingers brushed across my cheeks, nose, forehead. They stroked my eyelashes gently, then traced the outlines of my lips. The breath bunched up inside my lungs as he saw me the way Auntie Cherry saw after her eyes went cloudy and gray.
He considered what his fingers felt and said, “You are a handsome woman. Gallant and stouthearted.”
That queer giddiness came over me even stronger then for I felt the soldier had seen me better than anyone outside Mama and Clemmie ever had. Aside from the handsome part, he didn’t just see who I was but who I dreamed about being. It was like when Daddy first laid eyes on Mama and knew right off that she was quality.
He laid the flat of his hand against my neck and then ran his fingers across my collarbone. “What are these?” he asked, his fingertips resting on the top row of scars like a piano player with his hands on the keys. “Who did this to you?” The way he asked, harsh, like he would of taken out after whoever had cut into my flesh, like he would of protected me, made me want to rest my head on his chest and never lift it from that spot again.
“No one put them on me,” I answered, my voice so soft, I had to whisper directly into his ear. “My mama marked me the way her mama marked her. And all the girls were marked when…” I couldn’t say “when their nature came.” Instead, I just mumbled, “When it was time.”
My scars were lies for my nature had never come. When I was seventeen and still had never bled, Mama said it was because I was not a female who would ever be claimed by a man. That I was meant for better than to be a brood sow for some short-weight plowboy. Might have been that or might have been the fact that us field hands had naught but a handful of ground corn and what we could steal and scavenge to eat and because I worked too hard for a womanly nesting to take hold in my nethers.
Clemmie, though, she worked in the house and ate regular and never lifted anything heavier than a feather duster, and her womanhood arrived when she was fourteen. So that’s when Mama decided to mark us both.
I told the soldier how I had kneeled in front of Mama and she used a blackberry thorn to pluck up bits of my young hide, which she then lopped off with a straight-edge razor Clemmie had borrowed from Old Mister for just that purpose. After Mama dotted me thusly thirty times, she rubbed a handful of ashes and some pinches of her snuff into the cuts to stop the bleeding and make the dots puff up pretty.
“Did it hurt?” my soldier asked.
“Getting ashes and snuff rubbed into cuts leaking thirty trails of blood down your chest?” My answer pointed to the foolishness of the question. “But I was Mama’s Africa child and if I ever let the water fall from my eye those tears would of washed away the strength and magic and power Mama had cut into me. Then I’d be like everyone else: a slave not a captive.
“But Clemmie, Lord.” I chuckled at the memory. “Where I’d made myself into a stone on the bottom of a clear river the way Mama had taught me, Clemmie boo-hooed buckets. That’s because she was Mama’s America child and never knew Iyaiya the way I had.”
I wished I knew the American words for the chant Mama repeated through all the cutting, so that I could tell that to my soldier, too. But it only came back to me in Fon: I cut strength into you. I cut belonging into you. Me to you. You to me. We to our people, to our ancestors, and to our children to come. I cut a warning into you that no unwelcome hand shall ever touch you and go unpunished.
That last is why I’d been obliged to kill Old Mister, for he had put his unwelcome hands on my little sister and had to be punished. I didn’t tell that part.
The soldier stroked the tips of his fingers across the beaded rows soft as a bird brushing me with its wing and my breath stopped. “You know who you are,” he whispered, as though that was some kind of miracle. “You haven’t forgotten. They haven’t taken Africa from you. How is that possible?”
“Iyaiya’s stories,” I answered. “She told them to me every night until Old Mister sold her off. Then Mama told them. They were our lullabies. Now I tell them to myself in the moments before sleep catches me.”
“Tell me,” he asked. “Tell me about Africa, about the home I never knew. Tell me your lullabies.”