“Sister, what’s taken you?” Clemmie hissed in my ear.
“Clemmie, I know him. I know that man. And he knows me. He recognizes me.”
Clemmie snorted. “Yeah, that man recognizes you all right. Recognizes you and every other calf-eyed female out here mooning after him.”
Clemmie was right. All the women had been struck dumb by the sight of the soldiers. And deaf, dumb, and blind by the sight of one of our men ahorseback, riding tall and proud commanding them all.
“Put a blue jacket on any old hog,” Clemmie said, “and women lose they minds. Put a gun in his hands, mount him top a prize steed? Lordy God, I mean.”
Still I couldn’t stop staring.
“Girl, quit eye-eating the man,” Clemmie ordered.
But I couldn’t. Those were the lips I had taken my first and only kiss from. I knew they were. I felt it down to the tips of my toes. And, the way he looked at me? In spite of his eyes being bandaged when we met, I was sure as the sun rises in the east that he knew me. That he felt the connection I felt.
Clemmie whispered, “Solomon’s getting jealous.”
“What? Solomon?” I whispered. “Jealous? You mean me and Solomon? Naw, sister, ain’t like that at all. He’s just a friend.”
But Solomon’s arm tightening around my shoulder, pulling me back the tiniest bit away from my soldier, wasn’t a friend’s arm. Clemmie saw that and hissed into my ear, “Might not be like that for you, but I know a jealous man when I see one.”
I cut my eyes as far as I could without turning my head and there it was, clear as day, Solomon glaring up at my soldier, tight-jawed and stiff-necked with jealousy. He snugged me in closer.
“What I tell you?” Clemmie asked in a low voice, proud of all she knew about reading the ways of men.
“But he’s so…” Though the band was ripping through one of Sheridan’s favorite songs, “Nelly Bly,” and Solomon couldn’t have heard me over the banjos plunking along with the horns, I still whispered the last word, “… old.”
Clemmie looked him up and down. “Still got his own teeth. Hair. Maybe he ain’t no hero on a white horse, but I tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That man is the reason you alive.”
“Naw, sister. I’m the reason I’m alive. Me and General Sheridan. Clemmie, you seen it yourself. Sheridan picked me out special that night on the farm. I was the General’s girl. No one dared lay a hand on me.”
“Yeah? Fine, if that makes you happy, then you go on and believe that a white man, a general, was watching out for you. You also go on and believe a hero in a blue jacket’s gon pluck you up, ride away with you on the back of his pure white horse.”
Clemmie wasn’t being ugly when she said that. Just speaking the truth that anyone with two eyes could see. I always regarded myself as a person who faced facts head-on. And the fact here was: girls as plain as me didn’t catch the notice of a man fine as the one who’d dismounted and was now standing at attention with his men. Girls like me counted their blessings if a man as good as Solomon cared to put his arm about her shoulders.
The final, and most important, fact of all was this: no matter how I might dream it was not so, Wager Swayne had died. I had seen him carried away to be buried. Those were the facts and I saw that I better figure out how to accept them, and do it fast, or miss my chance.
With one whip of his baton, the band director snapped the song shut. The musicians left the stage and the sergeant took it. He strode out and studied us until even the slightest whisper and cough had died away into a breathless silence.
I leaned forward, straining to hear every word he spoke, so that I could match them with how my soldier spoke. No matter what sense and the facts told me, no matter that he’d never choose me now, no matter that I’d seen him carried off to the burying pit, I still believed and I still had to know.
He spoke. “The war has been won! We are free!”
For a second the silence held. It was like we had all just heard the news for the first time. Then everyone went to whooping and hollering, happier and lifted higher than we had been even when we saw Robert E. Lee surrender. I couldn’t open my mouth, though. I was lost in comparing my memory of the soldier’s voice with the one I was hearing. They matched. I believed again. That was Wager Swayne.
The crowd quieted down and he started back in. He said, “I am…” Then time stopped while I waited for him to say the name I knew was his: Wager Swayne.
“… First Sergeant Levi Allbright…”
Levi Allbright.
“… of Troop D, Ninth Cavalry, and I come to you tonight with a message.”
As the sergeant spoke, I understood why I had believed that he knew me. He stared at every one of us, man, woman, and child, the way he had at me. Like he knew us. The real us. Not the pitiful bunch we were then. No, Sergeant Allbright saw who freedom would make us into.
“Men of color,” he went on, his voice sounding less and less like my soldier’s with every word. “We must use our freedom well.” This voice now rang out strong and vibrant with life and clear as church bells on Sunday morning. Compared to it, Wager Swayne had sounded like what he was, a dying man. My dreams had gotten the better of me. Made me see, and for a moment hear, what wasn’t there. Much as I wished it, this wasn’t the kind and true man who had touched my face and breathed his last to the sound of my voice. The only place where that sweet soul still lived on was in my dreams and no amount of wishing otherwise would ever change it.
“We must heed the words of Brother Frederick Douglass well,” First Sergeant Levi Allbright proclaimed. “‘Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship!’ My brothers in freedom, let us earn that right!”
Solomon took his arm from my shoulders and the three of us clapped until our palms smarted. Sergeant Allbright couldn’t speak two words without the cheers breaking out again, but he was a commander and knew how to make himself heard. He told us that the army had set up six brand-new colored regiments that’d be sent out west of the Mississippi to fight the heathen savages.
Most important, we’d get paid thirteen dollars a month. After a lifetime of earning naught but parched corn and floggings, that was a sum to make your head spin. Then he added one last particular that made it all seem like he was laying out a path specially for me to follow. “Our commander is to be General Philip Sheridan, whom Lincoln has named Governor of the Fifth Military District.”
I glanced at Solomon. He was nodding, and I reckoned he was as pleased as I was that we had the chance to serve with our old commander again.
“I grew up out West,” Sergeant Allbright continued, “and I know that a new world awaits us there. A world of promise and plenty, where a man can be judged as a man. Uncle Sam stood up and fought a mighty war so we might be free. Now, I say to you all tonight, my brothers in freedom, stand up with your Uncle Sam and help him win the fight to make the West a land of peace and prosperity for all. A land where we can live our lives and raise our children to be free citizens of these United States!”
Oh, we cheered aplenty at that. Brothers and sisters alike.
“A recruitment depot will be established in town tomorrow. Inspections start at dawn. Those qualified will be transported to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis to be trained for service in the United States Army. Who will join me?” he shouted, holding a hand high. All the men shot their hands up. “Who will join your brothers in the Ninth Cavalry?”
The brass band broke into a march that could barely be heard over the crowd roaring like the Gates of Heaven had just been swung open for them as Sergeant Levi Allbright and his men marched offstage. Even Solomon was swept up in the jubilation, waving his hat over his head and shouting hurrahs for the mighty Ninth as the soldiers marched away.
I had to holler in his ear for him to hear me. “You gonna join up?”
“Me? What they want an old man like me for?”
“It’s like you always say,” I reminded him, “you need an old dog for a hard road.”
He tipped a little smile at hearing his own words come back to him and said, “Tell you what, though, I’d sign on as cook if it meant I’d be feeding our … our…” His voice wobbled and he stopped for a few seconds before he could finally finish up. “Our own boys wearing, really wearing, the blue suit.”
There was too much feeling in both of us for talk, so I took his hand and squeezed it. Solomon’s eyes snapped open wide and, after considering for a moment, he squeezed my hand back. An understanding passed between us then that somehow the two of us, maybe even our children if the Lord saw fit, were going to be part of the new world out West where black men wore the blue suit and rode horseback and defended their own.
A fiddle band took the stage and tore into a lively breakdown and clumps of dancing and whooping erupted here and there.
“Cathy,” Clemmie said, her cheeks flaming with excitement. “My unit leaves tomorrow. I’m going with them. Come with me. Both y’all. We can be together again. Things be different for black folk out West.”
“What you say, Queenie?” Solomon asked. “Baby sis is right. They’d hire us no question. You, me, Clemmie, and Matildy out West? Cooking would still be better than a day of picking cotton, right?”
“Go with them to cook?” I asked.
“What else you thinking about?”
“Enlisting, of course. In the cavalry.”
“What?” Solomon said, like he hadn’t heard me right.
Before he could say anything else, I rushed to ask, “Aren’t you about sick of cooking? I know I am. Solomon, listen, you’re not too old to enlist. Wear the blue suit. I could … I could—”
“Uh-uh,” he said, trying to stop what he knew I was about to say.
I said it anyway. “Solomon, I could enlist with you.”
His mouth dropped open, but before he could object, I rushed to remind him, “Lots of girls did it during the war. You know they did.”
Solomon laughed, pretending I was joking, and told Clemmie, “Now I know for sure your sister is crazy as a betsy bug.”
“Crazy?” Clemmie said. “That girl is wild! Wild as an acre of snakes. Always has been. You never seen the like. She be dead now our granma hadn’t thrown a protection spell over her.”
I ignored Clemmie and told Solomon, “Solomon, I’m serious. We go in together like them other couples you say you seen, we can do it. I can do it. Be hard. But we’d have each other’s back. I’d be looking out for you way you’ve always done for me. Where else we gon make thirteen dollar a month? That’s twenty-six between the two of us. We do our hitch, two, three year? We’d have enough saved up to buy us a place. Place out West where we can live the way we want to live. No one ever tell us what to do again.”
Solomon said to Clemmie, “Tell this fool to stop talkin’ like a crazy lady.”
“Why not?” I asked. “They did it. Them other females. Why can’t I?”
“Why not?” Solomon asked. “How about it was wartime for starters. Everyone spread all out in tents. Off by themselves. And those young soldier boys? The drummers? Most of them looked like girls. And since it was wartime, army let anyone in. You had teeth enough to rip open a powder cartridge, you were in. Peacetime be a whole other deal. No Rebels trying to destroy the country, they gone get picky. Have a hard look at what they’re letting in. Top of all that, all them other females were white.”
“What?” I interrupted, tired of his eternal gloominess. “You don’t think I’m good enough to wear the blue suit? My color wrong?”
“Not your color we’re talking about, you know that.”
Solomon drew away. I was left alone and, after all the merriment, lonely. This mournful feeling caused me to see clear what I was doing: throwing away what I had right in front of me to go chase after a dream didn’t even exist just like I’d mooned after a soldier who no longer existed. I needed to be the girl I believed I was. The one who faced facts. Right then and there, I made up my mind.
“Solomon,” I said, “I’d rather die than stay here in the South. I want to go out West, but I can’t do it alone. Wouldn’t be safe on my own. I’d rather join up and serve. But, if I did, without a partner, other soldiers’d kill me or worse if they ever found out. No, can’t risk either one alone. The three of us, though, you, me, Matildy, out West, we stand a chance of making us a decent life. Have some dignity. Some respect. Have…” I paused. “We’d have each other. How’s that sound?”
Clemmie put in, “Sounds like you’re proposing a damned tactical maneuver’s what it sounds like. Solomon, what I think my sister is saying is, I think she’s asking you to marry her.”
Solomon nodded slowly. “That so? Thought she might be.”
“Well?” I said, already getting huffy at him not jumping at my proposal.
“Well,” Solomon started off, then stopped, took my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “I suppose that’d be all right.”
Maybe the words don’t sound romantic writ on the page, but we were pledging our lives to each other and that beat romantic all to smash in my book. Solomon and I would leave the misery of the South and go out West. We stared into each other’s eyes, and nodded: the deal was done.
The fiddle band began sawing out a rousing version of “Leather Britches.” Solomon took his crumpled top hat off, bowed at the waist, and asked if he might have the pleasure. Then he whirled me into his arm and spun me around until the lights and faces all smeared together. My head kept whirling even after Solomon was ripped out of my arms.
I have recounted what happened next a million times in my head and never once found a way to stop it. To make it all come out different. Only in memory can I force those few seconds to pause. I was standing there, wobbling and laughing, for I thought Solomon was having a bit of fun turning me loose after spinning me like a top, when I saw that a white man had grabbed Solomon. It was Dupree.
Quick as a rattler striking, without a word spoken, Dupree stabbed a bowie knife into Solomon’s gut, pulled it down hard with both hands, yanked it out, and disappeared into the crowd.