Though we were meant to sail on down to Indianola off the coast of Texas, there was a yellow fever epidemic raging from New Orleans on south. Sergeant didn’t want to risk that it had reached Indianola, so we docked north of New Orleans in the town of Vicksburg and unloaded in what remained of the city Grant had bombarded and burned to cinders.
The horses, who’d ridden below in the shade of the upper deck, were led down a wide gangplank. With their hooves clopping big and echoey against that wooden plank, the company gathered its traps and prepared to go ashore. I hauled myself up by clinging to the pilothouse. The instant I put the least bit of weight on my legs, though, I came down in a heap. I wondered what was broken and if I’d be a cripple, seeing double, for the rest of my days.
“Guess I’ll haul you off way I got you on,” Lem said, and made to scoop me up.
“Naw,” I mumbled, for even pushing words out exhausted me. “Got to walk.”
And though I leaned on Lem so heavy he might as well have been carrying me for all the good my legs were, I made it ashore on my own two feet. I don’t intend to moan any further about my miseries and will simply state that mounting up on Bunny and riding out of Vicksburg was a disagreeable business. But, oh, what a comfort it was to be reunited with my floppy-eared friend. She healed a loneliness in me that Lem, for all his goodness, could not touch. For Lem did not know my secret and Bunny did.
After a few days, my vision leveled out. Then, once I got myself splinted and bound up to where I could sit the saddle again and not fall out from the pain, I found myself embarked upon a right pleasant ride. It was as if the war had never ended and I was once again out camping with the General. The joy of being released from the barracks and away from Vikers’s tormenting attention was a first-class tonic. Away in whatever little corner of the forest that Lem and I found to camp in of a night, I was free again. Free to be alone, free to squat and do my business, free to breathe.
We headed south by southwest for over a week through wet grassland and pine forests so thick we rode single file, spread out for miles. In that way, we passed into east Texas where the ringing of axes and the thunder as the giant pines fell told the story that the houses and barns and businesses the war had burned to ash were to be built again. It was odd, though, that the farther west into those piney woods we rode, the heavier grew the spell of the South that fell upon us. Buried within the deep woods, sound and air and even time was stopped so still by those walls of pine trunks that it seemed the war had never been fought. That slavery times not only had never ended in east Texas but would go on for all eternity.
The story passed among us that this state had fought not one, but two wars for the right to own us and build Texas off of free black labor. The first one was against the Mexicans who didn’t allow slavery. Then they fought the United States of America to keep my people in chains. I figured this explained why the state seemed double haunted and double damned.
Whenever we passed a work crew, the hands pulling the long saws and swinging the axes were all black. The ones holding the reins, all white. The axmen blinked a time or two as we rode past like they couldn’t believe they were seeing black men, armed and mounted, wearing the blue suits of the Union Army. The company, which had come off that paddle wheel boat gay and full of song at being real soldiers riding West, fell silent upon seeing these zombie men.
I summoned up the strength to yell out to the frozen black figures watching us pass, “You’re free. Come with us! You’re free! Free!” I repeated, but they acted like they either didn’t know the meaning of the word or didn’t believe it held true in Texas. They were back to their sawing and ax swinging even before we’d finished passing through.
The white masters were another story. Late on a morning, so muggy I feared I might drown from breathing the swampy air, I heard a shot ring out, then a couple dozen terrified troopers came thundering past. One of them was riding double, his passenger clinging to him, eyes wild with fright. A white boss had shot the man’s horse right out from under him and threatened to kill the next black ______ that trespassed on his property.
Later, when I recounted the hardships of my years in the army, the doubters, the ones who called me a liar, would always ask, “If it was as tough and hard as you make out, why didn’t you just leave?”
My answer came from the sorrowful, ghostly creatures who inhabited the piney woods of Texas and from the demons who drove them. Nothing could be worse than that.
Lem and I rode on, silent until he said, “Thought things was gon be different out West.”
“This isn’t the West,” a voice pronounced from behind us. Me and Bunny’d been flopping along in our pitiful way, but the instant I heard that voice, I came up straight as a die and my hand cleavered a salute into my forehead.
“At ease, men,” Allbright said. “No one out here to see us except that mama turkey down there.”
He tipped his head toward a pile of underbrush and it shaped itself into a lanky, lock-kneed gobbler leading a wobbling clutch of six babies through the shadows. I, who thought myself a sharp hunting eye, had not so much as glimpsed that tasty bird and her young. We were alone, we three, for the column, tiptoeing over fallen trees and around marshes, was stretched out far ahead and behind, leaving us with our own space of lonely quiet.
The Sergeant, free from command for a moment, expanded into that open space and said, “No, Powdrell, we’re a long ways from where the West begins. What we’re riding through here is the worst of the South that will never end.”
“Yessir,” I piped up, excited that Sergeant Allbright had spoken my thoughts. “It’s all this Spanish moss. Stuff gives me the all-overs.”
Allbright said, “Like fog and pond scum had a baby.”
I noted that Sergeant Allbright had spoken to me without the disgust that usually pickled his face. I think not dying might have graded me up some in his eyes. When we finally rode into a bit of sunshine and glimpsed a patch of sky and a horizon to go along with it, Allbright said, “Let’s see exactly where we are.”
We dismounted and Allbright dug a beautiful brass instrument he called a sextant from his saddlebag. This he held to his eye and explained as he measured various angles how to pinpoint our precise spot on the face of the earth. Juggling the instrument, he fumbled to write the numbers in his notebook and I offered to do the writing for him.
“You can read?” he asked.
“No, sir, but I can cipher. I do know my numbers. Can write a fair hand when it’s not letters.”
Suspicious, he turned his notebook over to me, and after shaking the rust out of my fingers, I showed him how well Daddy had taught me. We finished and rode on, the Sergeant clearly lost in his thoughts. After a bit, he asked, as though the three of us had all been part of the conversation he was having in his head, “What was it that slavery required to grow and flourish?”
“Wicked white folk,” Lem answered in complete sincerity.
“You can find those anywhere,” the Sergeant said. “No, what slavery required was water. No point in slaves unless you had the water to raise cotton, tobacco, sugar. That’s what saved the West. Not enough water for slavery to make white men rich in that parched terrain. If they’d had the water, they’d have had the slaves. But they didn’t. Which is why true freedom will not begin until we reach the ninety-eighth meridian.”
“Is that right?” Lem said, having no more idea what a “meridian” was than I did—just that it was the spot where freedom would begin.
“The ninety-eighth,” Allbright went on. “That’s where annual rainfall drops off to less than twenty inches a year. That’s where we can breathe free. By my measurements, we crossed the ninety-third a while back.”
“Five more to go,” I said, showing off. I was considerably puffed up to be riding along with Sergeant Allbright, being schooled about meridians and annual rainfall. It was like being back with Solomon. If Solomon had been young and had skin that shone like it had been rubbed with linseed oil and broad shoulders and a lavish plenty of eyelashes that curled up tight as a music box spring and a manner of speaking that was educated but didn’t low-rate everyone else.
And then the Sergeant got going on someone I would come to find out was, essentially, the love of his life: Mr. Frederick Douglass. When he started in quoting his idol, a spirit possessed the Sergeant purer and stronger than any preacher I’d ever heard. And so it was that, with Mr. Douglass’s thoughts on “color-phobia,” which is what that great man called the “disease” of racialism, ringing in my ears, Sergeant Allbright led us like Moses out of that land of bondage and toward the Promised Land of the ninety-eighth meridian.