Oh, he loosed the floodgates on that one. I blew straight past shy as I pondered on how best to tell the wonderful tale of my daddy and my mama. Though my mother was a monstrous large woman, even taller than me and brick-built from the ground up, I didn’t want to reveal the manliness that we shared. Instead, I started off, “If you were American, you’d say my grandmother raised Mama hard and that Mama raised me hard. But that was the Africa way and I was Mama’s Africa child.”
The soldier sighed with satisfaction, signifying that that was the answer he wanted to hear. The one that fit with all the other answers he had stored up in his busy brain. After gathering up his strength, the soldier said something that had the shiver of prophecy about it. “That Africa raising will save you. It will make you strong enough for freedom. While others, the weak, will fall by the wayside.”
“Well,” I whispered. “I don’t know about all that.”
I was putting on, answering his truth with a lie, for he was right. Mama raised me knowing God-sure that we were better than the others. So I went on and admitted as much, saying, “Knowing we weren’t slaves, that we were better than the tore-down souls around us, did not make us popular, but Mama never gave a shovelful of fleas about being liked.”
He snorted the hint of a laugh then sucked in a quick breath that signified pain had stabbed him, and I rushed to chase that hurt away by telling him of the great pride of my life: my daddy.
“Now Daddy,” I said. “Daddy was the opposite of Mama in every way you can conjure up. He was a free man born in the free state of Ohio and educated at the Society of Free People of Colour for Promoting the Instruction and School Education of Children of African Descent. There he learned to read and write, speak like a city preacher, and earn his keep as a tailor of fine gentlemen’s clothing.”
I continued. Daddy was my brag story and it bubbled up out of me like a spring. As I knew it would, that earned the happy murmurs and the soldier’s breathing settled back down.
“Daddy made his living traveling about. He hired out to gentlemen wanted quality. Wanted a fine collar lined with horsehair canvas and lapels done with hand pad stitches so they’d lay down smooth. These were all things that Mr. Chastain Pennebaker over to Glen Eden plantation, a two-hundred-slave for-real plantation, craved. Mr. Pennebaker was a vain man always looking for ways to show he was a real planter and not just some no-ham-and-all-hominy, dog-dirt-poor dozen-slave farmer like Old Mister who never had any more idea how to turn black muscle and brown dirt into a decent tobacco crop than a kitten’d know how to gin a bale of cotton. And that’s why Mr. Pennebaker sent all the way up to Ohio for Daddy.”
The soldier gave a contented nod.
I went on, holding out the shiniest parts of me to him, those being the parts about Daddy. “Daddy could not only tailor to Mr. Pennebaker’s finicky standards, but he spoke American better than anyone else, black or white, in the tricounty area. Mr. Pennebaker liked his work so much, he issued him a pass to come and go as he pleased.”
I didn’t bother adding that Daddy crowed about how he was as slithery good as the serpent in the Garden of Eden at flattering white people and that he had buttered up vain Mr. Pennebaker until the planter took him on as a pet. Not only did Daddy get that pass, he also got away with all manner of offenses would of gotten any other black man flogged or lynched. But Mr. Pennebaker wouldn’t stand for any rough handling of his “little monkey.”
“It was that very pass,” I continued, “that allowed Daddy to attend a sociable over to Chalmers McWattie’s place. And that is where he met Mama. Daddy was the only man ever laid eyes on my mother smart enough to see right off that she was quality, sewed up with stitches so fine and strong they’d never show, never sag, and they’d never, ever give out. Daddy invited her to dance a Walk-Around-Joe with him and that was all it took.”
That appeared to bring a calming picture to the soldier’s mind and the pain stitching what I could see of his face unraveled a bit. So I left a few particulars out. Especially the one that had come to me courtesy of a big old lumbering clay-eater out of Cape Girardeau County, name of Handy. Handy had been at that sociable and ever after liked to do his own little reenactment of Mama and Daddy meeting. Though never in Mama’s presence for Handy used a small, spotted dog to stand in for Daddy. Bending over at the waist and holding the dog by its dainty paws, Handy would play Mama and lead that little dog about on its hind legs.
All this is by way of saying that Daddy was a man as compact as Mama was mountainous. Though Daddy might have been somewhat undersized in the torso and limbs, with stubby fingers on hands that stopped closer to his waist than to his crotch, my father had the head of a lion to accommodate his extra-large brain.
I skipped over the dog-dancing part and moved on to what I figured the soldier would enjoy more. “Like Mama,” I said, “Daddy carried a high opinion of himself and didn’t think it was worth being loved by a woman unless she put equal high stock on her own value. And there weren’t many like that among the other slaves as being someone’s property tends to have a deflating effect on the psyche,” I added, quoting Daddy.
“Amen,” the soldier croaked, too excited to let pain stop his words.
“Yes, Daddy saw right off that Mama was made of oak and iron-bound,” I said, not adding that, though there was close on two foot of difference in height between them, he knew they were made for each other.
Daddy might, indeed, have been a midget as the bullyboys and clabberheads claimed, but to me, he was a giant and, though he would vanish from our lives whenever work or the whites carried him away, he always came back to us.
“Daddy was genius smart,” I stated, seeing no reason to slice that fact any thinner. “He taught me about the Articles of the Constitution. About the eleven planets spinning around the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, and Juno. He read and reread to me the copies of The Colored American Deliverer published in New York City that he smuggled with him down South.”
“But you yourself don’t read?” The soldier’s hand went limp in mine. His disappointment surprised me. As if the most dangerous thing next to a gun a slave could be found with wasn’t a book.
He caught himself and said, “No, no, of course not. I just thought…”
What? That I measured up to you?
“Ciphering,” I said quick. “Daddy and I concentrated on ciphering since ten fingers and ten toes were a lot safer to own than books. Instant Daddy learned me my numbers, I could add, do takeaways, times, goes intos, all in my head. Numbers came to me natural as blinking.”
The soldier gave no answer except to make a low, growly sound for he had again, mercifully, taken leave of his senses. With my free hand, I wet a rag, flapped it about in the night breeze to cool it some, and daubed his throat where the blood flowed hottest.
All this talk about Daddy forced the memories I kept buried to rise from their graves and, once again, I was five and it was Christmas. We had our one full day of the year off and were waiting on Daddy to come visit. When he hadn’t shown by the time the sun went down, Mama went crazy for worry that the pattyrollers might of got him. Even before the Rebellion, those calamitous vigilantes were hoodooing around the woods checking passes. If they caught a person of color without one, the acts of wickedness they committed were beyond imagining.
I was ordering my own imagination not to creep one inch further when the soldier’s hand trembled in mine then went cold as death as he struggled to suck in air. A terrible rattle came from the back of his throat that meant the end was coming on fast unless I got him help. The sound unstrung me and my own breath came hard. Panic rising, I searched frantically about the wagon for something, anything, that might save him. I felt like I’d found a gold nugget in a river, but that a swift current was snatching it away and sending it, glinting with every hope I’d ever have, tumbling from my grasp.
And then my soldier went silent.