The kitchen was a sulfurous place of giant iron vats with mush burbling and heaving in them and fires roaring beneath. Pumps groaned as they forced water up from the river through large pipes. When the iron door of a roaring oven creaked open, tongues of hellfire leaped out. Here and there big lumps of pork sat out on tables. They’d gone greenish in the heat and were buzzing with flies. I wondered what Solomon would of made of this sorry operation and wished hard that he was with me.
“You!” a stout fellow in a long, dirty apron, white cap atop his head, yelled at me. “You the recruit Withers sent?”
“Yessir!” I answered, snapping him off a salute.
As his hands were occupied hefting one of the big vats off the fire, he tipped his chin to a tall wheelbarrow, lowered the vat onto it, and said, “There’s your cart. Get you some that pork.” When I winced, he hurled a colorful variety of race slurs my way. I dropped a slimy chunk onto the cart and set out.
The sun was barely up as I trotted along the big, open parade ground between the two long wings of limestone buildings. A serving girl tossing away a bucket of water out front of one of the officers’ quarters spotted me, tilted her head back so she could gaze up at me from beneath her thick eyelashes, gave a sweet little smile and waved. Why, the hussy was flirting with me! Delighted and relieved that I could fool even another female, I gave her a little salute. She glanced quick up and down the field and, seeing no one about, pulled her bodice down so as to reveal a pair of titties high and tight as two apple halves stuck on her chest. Just another hardtack girl looking for business, she’d have flirted with a badger if she thought the creature had a nickel. I hurried on.
The guardhouse was even more solid than the rest of the post. The cells were limestone boxes with iron bars at the front. Each one had a bed big enough for a man as long as he didn’t intend to ever turn over. A chilly dampness hung over the place. I started off passing out breakfast to the white prisoners first.
Food was an occasion here, and at the sound of the cart’s squeaky wheels, the prisoners jumped up and thrust their mess tins out through the bars and I dolloped a ladle of mush onto every one. They complained because I didn’t bring any molasses and I promised to fetch extra when I returned. Not many took any pork, saying they had to wait until their current case of the drizzly shits cleared up before partaking again.
One prisoner heaped a world of abuse on me for serving up the green pork as though I was the one had left it sitting out. “Least during the war, they boiled our pork, you miserable ______,” he said, somehow connecting my race to the rotten meat. “Flies is still alive on this shit.”
That unloosed a whole hymnbook of laments on the subject of how much better a soldier’s life had been during the war than it was now in peacetime. The stories flew about how easygoing life during the war was, pretty much just a big camping trip between battles. And the town girls! What happened to the patriotic young beauties blowing kisses to the soldiers as they marched through a Union town? Bringing them baskets of apple jelly, ginger cake, and fried ham? Holding ice cream socials for their valiant boys?
“Why, can you credit it?” one outraged fellow demanded. “When I come up with my draft group, dang if we weren’t met at the station by a mob of town folk all hollering at us, ‘Soldier, soldier, will you work?’” He shook his fist and pulled his face into an idiot frown to show how mad and stupid this mob was, then finished up quoting their answer, “No, indeed, I’d rather shirk!”
Best I could recollect, that particular fellow was actually in for shirking. Not that that slowed him or any the rest down from recounting all the instances of ingratitude and outright hostility been showed them by civilians. They gabbled on moaning about “what this country was coming to,” and wondering about what had happened to “respect for the U.S. military” as though they couldn’t puzzle out how one half of the country destroying the other half and leaving hardly a family on either side hadn’t chiseled at least one tombstone might of soured folks a bit on war and those in the business of making it.
There was no such talk among the black prisoners as life had never been a camping trip for a single one of them.
Wheeling my barrow, empty now except for what I’d saved out for Tea Cake, back to the kitchen, I passed the colored men’s washhouse and peeked in. The walls and floor of the long room were covered with white tiles. A row of a dozen galvanized tubs ran down the middle of the room. Each one was occupied by a naked trooper being parboiled and scrubbed on by Baumgartner with a long-handled brush. A line of naked men waited their turn.
“Scrub harder!” Baumgartner yelled. “Das Arschloch und der Hodensack must be clean or there is coming disease!”
Each man received a minute inspection when he stepped from the tub. The particular attention the sergeant paid to the men’s private parts left no doubt as to the meaning of Arschloch and Hodensack or what my fate would have been had I not eluded what Daddy called ablutions.
As I pushed my cart away, I realized that, like all slaves, I already possessed the most useful skill a recruit could have: the ability to look busy. Just wheeling that cart around gave me the appearance of carrying out an assignment. Away from the parade grounds, I found a porch deep and dark enough to hide beneath and I caught up on the sleep I’d missed the night before.
I emerged from my nap hideout in time to return to the kitchen, refill the vat with mush, and serve that, along with generous lashings of molasses, for lunch. Dinner was slumgullion stew, the recipe for which must of read: to too much water and not enough salt, add every victual needs throwing out or feeding to the hogs. Boil until the green on both cabbage and pork is gone. Serve to convicts and soldiers for the hogs won’t touch it.
I finished just in time to join my group at the quartermaster’s, where I was issued a real uniform that came close to being my size, complete with a handsome caped overcoat of sky-blue wool, a sack coat with brand-new, shiny brass eagle buttons, a fine pair of boots, a cavalry cap with the crossed sabers, and a long grooming coat made of white duck. But the best was two sets of drawers and shirts that covered a body from ankle to wrist and was made of a wonderful soft cloth.
In the barracks, all the troopers were either strutting about in regulation U.S. Cavalry uniforms or in some stage of undress, hurrying to do the same.
“Bill,” Lem asked. “Why you ain’t parading that new uniform about?”
“That’s right,” said Vikers, who’d crept up on us in the chaos of men hopping about, pulling on the first pair of boots’d ever touched some of their feet. “Why don’t you go on, strip down, and put on the blue suit?” The man had an unearthly gift for popping up exactly when I most wanted him gone. Also for gathering a crowd with that diamond-cutting voice of his. They were all looking on now, waiting on me to answer back.
“Fixing to wash up first,” I answered. “Get my arselock and hodensack just as clean as Baumgartner got yours with his brush all up in your business.”
“Hoo-WEE! Hoo-WEE!” A few of the men yelped with joy at my little jibe and danced about. This was an Africa thing. A way to show out when you’ve been tickled.
Lem whooped, “Little Man! Little Man, Cathay hit you another straight lick with a crooked stick!”
Vikers’s eyes and smile got tight as a piano wire, and his tone was viperous mean when he came back at me. “Stanky,” he said. “Why are you the only one still wearing those rank recruit clothes? And why was it so important to you to duck out of having a bath that you bribed Tea Cake?”
The whole barracks turned to stare at Tea Cake’s face, greasy from the bowl of slumgullion I’d stolen for him. Wouldn’t have taken a genius to put that together with me pushing the guardhouse barrow.
“Stanky,” he asked. “What else you hiding from us?”
Oh, Vikers had planted an evil seed and I saw it take root on the spot. All the troopers studied me, searching now for what I was hiding.
“Who you think you are, Justice Vikers?” I put some sting on that fake name since we all knew that no master and no mammy had given it to him. “Ordering me around like you’re my massuh. Day Abraham Lincoln signed that paper’s the last day anyone on this earth be my master.” That backed him off enough that I grabbed my new uniform and left.
In the kitchen, quiet now save for the mush and slum making slow, swamp-gas bubbles over low fires, I dippered up a bucket of hot water out of what was left in the vats of water for coffee and retreated to a hidden corner.
I peeled off the bindings flattening my breasts and the skin underneath was so chafed and raw, it came off in flakes big as sycamore leaves. In one raw spot beneath my armpit, new skin was growing right into the scratchy fabric. I had to touch the tips of my fingers to Mama’s pearl scars for the strength not to cry out when I ripped the binding from the scabs.
The woman’s body I was hiding was like an old friend I missed more than I could say. Gently I sudsed all the parts I had to keep hidden and felt a tiny bit less scared and alone. I whispered to my hidden self and told her that she was my twin, my sister, my secret strength, and that I would always protect her and keep her from the men meant to do her harm. As I washed, I cried without making a sound and that was a relief, too.