I will now tell you why this cozy, damn near luxurious, warm, lighted place was hell: no privacy. I’d never expected the army would put us all inside, but Solomon was right again. There weren’t any tents where I could get off by myself to unwind the infernal binding and catch me a full breath. I wasn’t going to last three years without a full breath.
Worse even than the barracks, though, was when the corporal led us to the colored men’s washroom. A long, galvanized tin trough ran the length of one side. The men stepped right up and, with much jolly splashing, sent their torrents rushing down the thing.
In the hubbub, no one noticed me hanging back, the whites of my eyes turning yellow from having held my water for so long. At least on the train, there’d been a bucket off in a little closet. How was I going to do my business here? I’d pictured woods. Privies off by themselves. Just when I was about to give up and shuck off to pull a plow somewhere, the corporal said, “For those that need them, outhouses are around back.”
I rushed outside and slipped into one of those rickety, stinking chambers, praising the Lord for delivering me. Those disgusting outhouses would be my salvation.
Next stop was the quartermaster’s where we each drew thirteen pounds of hay. Back in the barracks, while we stuffed our mattress ticks with the hay, Corporal Withers informed us that our first duty the next morning would be to report to the bathhouse. “Army requires every man to get him a bath once a week. Keeps the lice down. Some.”
Oh, Queenie. Solomon chuckled. What’d I tell you? You figured you’d be off in your own cozy tent, sneaking on down a lonely creek once a month or so for a wash way soldiers always done, didn’t you? he asked.
That’s exactly what I had been thinking, remembering how the only soldiers I’d ever seen naked in water were the two ladies in Cedar Creek. Most of the men never even peeled off their drawers when they bathed. Just wet down a bit, snuck a hand inside, rubbed here and there, and called it a day.
Withers had even worse news. “When the bugler sounds reveille tomorrow, every single one of you will report to Sergeant Baumgartner at the bathhouse.”
Baumgartner?
The name had a terrifyingly Kraut sound to it. A bath was one thing, but a bath supervised by a Kraut was a whole other can of worms as Krauts were known for their mania for cleaning every nook and cranny. The prospect of having my own personal nooks and crannies cleaned threw me into a state.
I panicked, imagining being stripped naked in front of Vikers and his men. The corporal had his hand on the doorknob about to leave me to my fate, when he tapped a finger to his head to signal he’d just recollected something, turned and said, “You all have to report tomorrow except for one man. I need a volunteer to carry food to the guardhouse.”
Iyaiya had saved me again.
Mine was the only hand that shot up.
Then the corporal added, “Besides the bath, this volunteer will be excused from drill and all duty except…”
Every single man put his hand up.
“… sink duty.”
All the hands dropped and even mine quivered a bit for sinks were latrines and I already knew enough about men and latrines that I was gagging at the thought. Still I kept my hand up. Not another one was raised, and I thought my worries were over. Then I spotted one other volunteer. Tea Cake. The other Georgia boy they called Ivory explained brightly, “Tea Cake cain’t smell. Not a lick. Not since he got too close when Sherman was running the Rebs out of Atlanta and they done set fire to all them railroad cars loaded with ammunition. The boom knocked the smell right out of Tea Cake’s nose.”
Tea Cake grinned proudly as Ivory concluded, “Stick a dead possum under his nose, he’ll eat that booger and lick his chops while he’s doing it.”
Tea Cake lowered his eyes modestly at the extent of his gift. Withers picked him for the guardhouse duty.
As soon as the door closed behind the corporal, Vikers, who’d gathered a whole new congregation about himself, brayed out, “All right, men, everyone claim a spot.” Which we were all going to do anyway, but him saying it first made it like we were following his orders. Me and Lemuel took bunks as far from Vikers as we could get and settled in for the night.
“Bill,” Lem asked. “Ain’t you hot, man?”
I was the only person in that stuffy room who still had a jacket on. Most had wadded up their long blue jackets to use for a pillow. Mine was buttoned all the way up to my chin to hide the apple of Adam that I didn’t have.
“Naw,” I answered. “Catch cold easy. Had a sister carried off by a sniffle.”
“Oh. I am sorry to hear that, Bill. Had me a baby sister fell off the back of Massuh’s wagon. Curled up and turned blue. Peanut I called her for she was just that small.”
“I’m sorry, Lem.”
“I appreciate it, Bill, for I loved that baby girl and miss her still.”
A bugle sounded. I recognized the call and hollered out before Vikers could, “Lights out. One of you want to douse them lanterns?”
The lanterns hanging off chains from the high ceiling were blown out and the big room went dark except for stripes of moonlight coming in the high windows. I hoped the men, exhausted by five days in a metal box, would go directly to sleep for I had an important mission I needed to carry out. However, excited by all the newness, they jabbered away until it occurred to someone to point out, “They ain’t fed us.”
A general chorus of grumbling followed, then those who had rations left over from the trip started sharing out their hardtack. The crunching of tooth busters echoed in the big room and someone said, “Sounds like hail hitting on a tin roof.”
“That’s just your big teef, Cyrus,” another voice shot back.
“Least I got all my grinners, Chester. Your smile like a jack-o’-lantern!”
“What I told you ’bout calling me Chester? Ain’t no damn Chester no more. Name’s Antoine now.”
“You ain’t no aunt of mine. I’ma just call you ‘Big Teef.’”
Next the men debated whether Corporal Withers’s nickname should be Rosy for his cheeks or Catfish for the wispy bits of mustache he had straggling down either side of his mouth.
The joking went on, everyone in such high spirits that a warm spurt of pride shot through me as I thought about how a bunch of white men would of acted if they had been done this way. Put to bed with no supper? There’d of been an armed mutiny. And here my people were laughing and sharing out what they had. This caused a lovely vision to appear to me in which, once I’d gained the trust and admiration of all, I could reveal my true nature and be accepted as one of them. Just another soldier in the ranks fighting for a better life and a bit of dignity.
Gradually, the jabbering fell into introductions of a sort, and from every corner of the big room, names and jobs rang out. Not surprisingly, we had us a mess of farmboys, pickers, balers, choppers, strippers, and field hands, with names like Clem, Clyde, and Claude. We also had a Virgil who’d worked in a cigar factory in Virginia as a roller and a Tom who’d been a mechanic in Ohio and even a Thaddeus, a freedman who’d worked the whaling ships out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had once sailed all the way to Hawaii before coal oil knocked the blocks out from under the whale oil business.
Hearing the freedmen from up North talk about being bartenders, bootblacks, chimney sweeps, even owning laundries where they had a dozen women working for them was like the dream I used to have of discovering that our wood-floored shack had endless rooms I’d never known about and were there waiting for me to wander about in.
Vikers waited until the names and jobs had settled down then announced, “Yes, well, I was the editor in chief of a freedmen’s newspaper published in Baltimore, The Colored American Deliverer.”
Off in my dark corner, I perked up because I was the only one in that vast room who knew that Vikers had just told a whopper. Daddy used to read to me from his beloved Deliverer and had always noted with pride that it was published way up in New York City, New York. Not Baltimore.
“Why’d a newspaper editor go for a soldier?” Lem whispered to me in all innocence, as if there must be some detail he’d overlooked.
“I couldn’t say,” I answered. “But I tell you what, Vikers keeping his eye on me? I got both mine on him.”
“Stanky,” Vikers called down to me. “I hear you and Mule…”
Men that wouldn’t have laughed in our faces felt free to hoot in the dark at the nicknames given us by Vikers.
“I hear you talking way off down there. What’d y’all do back home? Then in the war?”
“Well, Little Man,” I said, for I couldn’t let that “Stanky” nonsense stand, no matter what. “Back home I worked a logging crew.” I made my voice as deep and gravelly as any soaker been marinating his vocal cords in alcohol and tobacco smoke for fifty years. “Then, come the war, I bucked logs to build corduroy roads for General Philip Henry Sheridan.” That sounded a sight more manly than scrubbing pots and cooking ever would.
But men, being what they are, took my log bucking as some kind of manliness challenge that they were then required to beat. They did this the best way they knew how: smutty talk. I thought I already knew how men carried on. But the nastiest comments I’d ever heard before that night in the barracks were Bible stories compared to the tales they fell to telling.
This one bragged about “all the tail” he’d gotten off “this ole gal back home” who was “hotter’n July jam.” Someone else blowed on about a “high yaller gal” who’d beg for it until tears came to her green eyes.
From the way they went on about the women who couldn’t get enough of their willies and the women who had never seen such a much of size as what they were packing, you’d of thought every one of them had a magic wand stuck down their britches. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and not set the fools straight on the true way of it. How women mostly just put up with the willie part as the price of a gentle touch, a kind word, a bit of attention. Maybe a pretty or two. Or even just a plank of hardtack.
I thought about that girl on the barrelhead back at camp, the way she’d let out all them big moans even while her mind was off studying a redheaded flicker hopping up the tulip tree. And how puffed up Solomon had been when he came strutting back. I also recollected the nights back in our cabin when Maynard’s man-fevered mama would have a visitor and how she’d moan like that hardtack girl. Then, after he’d done his business, she’d whimper and beg him to stay, hold her for a bit, whisper more sweet words like before he’d had his way. But her visitors would always ignore her and shuck on out without a glance back, just as convinced as the fools around me that she was as pleased as he was and couldn’t wait for more. That his wand had worked his special man magic again.
I was glad that Mama had set me straight early on about not wasting myself on short-weight plowboys.
“Ain’t right,” Lem muttered. “All this nasty talk. You don’t appear to be enjoying it, either.”
“Can’t say as I do,” I rumbled back.
“Bill,” Lem went on. “We’re different from them others.” In a whisper, he added, “Especially you.”
Different from the others. Lem knew. I’d let him get too close and he had sussed me out.
Unbreathing, I flushed with heat, feeling like Lem was staring through the dark, through my jacket, shirt, and bindings straight at my naked titties. I was already figuring out whether I should offer him money, friendship, or something nasty to keep his mouth shut when he went on, “You’re like me, Bill. You know your Bible. Know that Revelations told us, ‘Blessed is he what stays away, keeping his garments on so as not to go about naked where whosoever gonna see what ain’t meant to be seen.’”
My new friend was churched. I was safe. “That’s it,” I said with relief. “You got my number, Lem. Me and the Scriptures is like this.” I held up two fingers pressed together tight.
“Uh-huh,” Lem murmured. “Thought so. Saw right off that you and me was alike.”
As the smutty talk went on, Lem asked, “Ain’t none of them been saved?” Then he rolled over, putting the shield of his back between himself and all the wickedness of the world and was snoring half a minute later.
I prayed that the men would leave off and go to sleep, so I could do what I had to do to stay safe. But all the fornication talk had turbulated them so that as soon as they shut up, they set to playing with themselves. Which I wouldn’t of given a hill of horse turds about if they’d been quiet. But, Lord, the panting and squeaking and gasping and creaking. I feared they’d pleasure themselves straight into idiocy.
At last, snores replaced the creaking and I slithered off to where Tea Cake slept. I had my hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out, leaned in and whispered, “Tea Cake, you got to give me the guardhouse duty.”
Tea Cake muttered moist syllables against my palm, which I couldn’t make out. I slid my hand into my pocket and took hold of the folding straight-edge razor I always kept there. I was ready to use it to help persuade him when I realized that he was saying, “Only volunteered so’s to get me some extra victuals.”
I let the razor fall back into my pocket and whispered, “You give me the duty, I’ll bring you all the victuals I can steal.”
Our deal was struck. I retreated to my spot, snugged my jacket up even tighter around me, tried to blot out the sound of one last man having a go at himself, and thought what a miserable, ruttish bunch of beasts men were. It would never be safe for them to know I was a woman.
I didn’t sleep one single wink that long, first night in Carlisle Barracks.