Dupree’s sodden pants and buckskin shirt hung on me like a sweated-up horse blanket and smelled a hundred times worse. The drop-front britches did contain one welcome surprise, though. In the pocket was a straight-edge razor. The bushwhacker must of stolen it off a Yankee for it had a fine whalebone handle with a four-master sailing boat scrimshawed into it. I opened it, sliced off my braids, and crammed the stinking coonskin hat onto my head. I didn’t know what I looked like. Sure not a woman. Probably something slightly below a man. A muskrat trapper maybe.
Thus disguised, I stood at the edge of the woods and peered out, afraid to take the first step into the new life I had determined would be mine. Though it was barely daylight and there wasn’t another soul on the Richmond–Lynchburg stage road into Appomattox Court House, I felt like the noonday sun and a thousand eyes were waiting to drill into me the instant I revealed myself. Holding my breath the way I used to do back home when I’d jump off Sunset Bluff into the swimming hole, I stepped out of the deep shadows and set to marching back into town.
The road was lined with rail fences that made long, zigzagging curves around land that might have been lush once upon a time before soldiers, blue and gray, had knocked the rails down and trampled the fields into muck. Shivering from the chill and weighted so bad with the heaviness of missing Solomon that I wanted to sit down and never rise again, I put my sorrow away sure as I’d put Old Mister away, whispered, “Hay foot. Straw foot. Hay foot. Straw foot,” and ordered myself forward.
So intent was I on hunching over and shrinking away under Dupree’s coonskin cap that I was considerably spooked when, first one, then another, and another silent group of men, two and three at a time, emerged from the woods, all heading in my direction. And not just any old men. White men. Enemy white men. Glum Rebels who’d been camping rough with the twigs and leaves in their hair and grimy faces and hands to prove it
In spite of looking more creature than human, for the first time in my life, I felt positively womanly. It suddenly seemed like the nubs of my small breasts had grown into massive udders certain to betray me and snatch my dream away. I ducked my head low as a turtle pulling back into her shell, yanked Dupree’s disgusting cap down even further over my eyes, and hunched so far forward that the only thing I could see were my feet.
There wasn’t much more to the village of Appomattox than a tavern, the courthouse it was named for, a general store, a squatty little law office, a few houses, a three-story redbrick jail with so few windows the place made me pity those unlucky enough to know its grim justice. But it was mobbed that day. Rebels. Yanks. Ex-slaves, they were all there.
The ex-Rebs all headed for the Clover Hill Tavern where passes that marked them as paroled prisoners of war were being handed out that would allow them safe passage home. Quick as I could, I skinned off away from the Rebs and sidled up to a cluster of men of color. I had to pass unnoticed until I located the recruitment depot.
Space immediately cleared around me due to the excessive ripeness of Dupree’s raggedy duds, but I could still hear muttering behind me with one asking the other where he thought the recruitment depot the heroic sergeant had referred to the night before might be.
We were milling about like cattle in a pen, shuffling one way, then the other, none brave enough to ask a white stranger for directions when who should strut up but Justice Vikers, the bespectacled fellow with the piercing voice who’d read out the Surrender Agreement. He led a band of followers that had been made brash by the bold words that swirled around Vikers’s head thick as a cloud of gnats.
“What ho?” he called out when he came upon us milling about. “What cause for your delay, good fellows? Have you lost your way in this great metropolis?” I once overheard a bunch of actors putting on a play for the white folk and they had the same high-toned manner of speech as Vikers was putting on.
“Is it the recruitment depot you’re seeking?” he asked, switching the words around so what you’d expect to go first come last and vicey versey. “Why don’t you simply read the notice clearly posted before you?”
And, sure enough, there was a sheet of paper hung from the square head of a nail sticking out the front of one of the Clover Hill Tavern’s porch columns. It was hard to miss for a reading person. For us, however, a piece of paper scribbled up with writing was of as little interest as a gold nugget to a sparrow flying overhead.
Vikers stepped forward, making a show of clearing his throat and cleaning the lenses of his spectacles a time or two before he read the directions written on the paper to himself. Instead of just telling us the way, he led us a couple of miles outside of town, talking the whole way. By the second mile, the peculiar voice and high-toned manner that I had been so taken with when he was reading out the Surrender Agreement was starting to grate. It was plain that, like the actors he reminded me of, Vikers had a need for an audience. The more adoring, the better.
“You were right about that one,” I whispered to Solomon. Imagining his know-it-all chuckle comforted me and I shambled on.
Vikers led us to an abandoned farm a mile or two east of town set upon a charred field that sported nothing but a few scorched stalks of what once might have been a fair corn crop along with a rickety old barn that had somehow survived the Burning. With my destination in plain sight, I moved out ahead of Vikers and his followers.
I searched the crowd both hoping and fearing I’d catch a glimpse of Sergeant Allbright. Though I’d of given considerable to look upon that fine face again, I did not want him to see me in my current degraded condition. But neither he, nor any soldier of color, was to be found among the soldiers manning the depot. White soldiers pushed us into lines with shoves so unnecessarily rough that I feared once again we were to be tricked by the whites who were really running the show. I would have turned and left then and there but for the fact that I had no other place on earth to go.
A row of three tables with white soldiers sitting behind them were lined up outside the barn. A few ex-slaves, twisting hats in their big work-hardened hands, stood in front of each one, answering questions while the soldiers filled in their answers on enlistment forms.
Enlistment.
Suddenly, it felt like I was high up atop that shot tower again or someplace a heap higher than I had ever intended to go. I couldn’t catch my breath for I’d gone to panting too hard and fast to pull in a proper lungful of air. My hands shook until my fingers near rattled. Sweat that had nothing to do with the gathering heat of the day beaded up beneath the coonskin cap and came creeping down until it was dripping off my temples. Since Mama didn’t hold with giving in to emotions, my whole life I’d had to wait for my body to let me know what I was feeling, and at that very moment I came to know that I was terrified.