After the necessary parlay with Vikers, I carried my uniform and the enlistment form he’d “adjusted” to the isolated spot on the river where I’d left my woman clothes and carried them to a secluded water hole.
On the bank, I found a nice mossy spot in a patch of sunshine. I hurled the foul buckskins as far away as possible then carefully placed my recruitment issue and the enlistment form that Vikers had fixed for me atop the mossy cushion. I had to keep the paper safe for Vikers’s work in changing my future had cost me dear. I couldn’t help but admire his precision as he had dabbed what he called his “magic mixture” onto the word “infantry” along with the company I’d been assigned to. I guessed his secret potion to be nothing more than lemon juice and baking soda, but it did the trick, lifting off near all the ink the private had laid down. What specks were left, Vikers picked away at with a pin, his hand steadier and his eye sharper than any I’d seen since watching Daddy do his fine handwork.
When the space was blank, Vikers set the paper to dry, and placed one of his IOUs in front of me. I asked him what the freight was, and he answered, “First three months’ pay and any and all favors and services I may require henceforth.”
The money was bad enough, but I near balked thinking of the yards of shit that conniver would have me eat. The whole deal threw a heavy shadow over my dreams of glory aback a horse. Still, I signed my X on Vikers’s paper, and in place of my infantry assignment, he wrote in “9th Cavalry Regiment (Colored), Troop J.” After I made sure that the swirls matched the ones on his paper exactly, I signed his damn IOU.
It took more than an hour to scrub away every bit of Dupree’s filth and stench, but I stepped from the chilly pond clean and fresh as a new-saved soul. I used Dupree’s stolen straight-edge to slice long, wide strips from my old skirt. When I’d collected enough to do the job, Iyaiya joined me and I kneeled so as to properly receive the strength she’d come to deliver. I traced my fingertips over the rows of dots that marked me as her Africa grandchild and whispered the words Iyaiya had learned Mama:
I cut strength into you. I cut belonging—me to you, you to me, we to the N’Nonmiton—into you. I cut a warning into you that no unwelcome hand shall ever touch you and go unpunished.
I tried to call the dead soldier back, to feel the touch of his fingers on my woman’s body before I hid it away. But he would not come. For a moment, I was sad to know that the bond between us wasn’t strong enough for me to call him back even for a moment. Then, like I always did, I put aside any feeling that made me weak and picked up a strip of the skirt’s fabric. “Negro cloth” it was called for such was the rough weave that my people wore and I now used it to bind my breasts. I wrapped the coarse, scratchy strips tight, pulling hard so as to make what had once been round flat.
The wool flannel army shirt ballooned out around me while the sleeves stopped near half a foot from my wrists, leading me to believe that the shirt’s previous owner must have had the shape of a cannonball. A whiskey barrel would have fit nicely in the sky-blue trousers. The only things keeping them in the vicinity of my body were the canvas suspenders and a belted strap I used to cinch them up until it looked like I was being held captive in a tow sack. The blue sack coat was little better except for this: it had the brass buttons with the eagle clutching his arrows.
I buttoned the jacket and rubbed my palms down the front, pleased that nothing bumped out. I took in a deep breath and was overwhelmed by a feeling I almost couldn’t identify as it came from a long time ago. From when my Iyaiya would hold me and sing her Africa songs. I felt as sleepy now as I had back when I was held in the old lady’s arms. I gathered up some fallen limbs and a few armfuls of tall grass to make myself a little nest, laid down, and sleep overtook me with a suddenness I hadn’t knowed since childhood. Before I blinked out, one word came to me, “Safe.”
That’s what I felt in the blue suit. I felt safe.