After the night of the flash flood things changed fast. The Sergeant put Vikers on the Black List to punish him for creating discord in the ranks, and he caught every nasty assignment that came along. Seeing Vikers cleaning out latrines brought him down a peg or two and he lost some of his hold on the men. And, though I was never destined to be a troop favorite, I was generally accepted as one could be counted on to haul his own weight without bellyaching and to stand pat with his friends. But the real change, the only one that mattered, was with the Sergeant. He started treating me like any of the other men. Then better than any of the other men.
First, he made me his puller. I’d be the one walking the tape out that he held so that he could check measurements. Then he handed me his notebook and had me enter the figures. Then he asked me to do a few sums. Then some takeaways.
After a week of double-checking my figures, he pulled me aside and said, “Private, I could use your assistance in keeping the company records. I have too much to do filing all the reports that the army requires. If you could take over the accounts, it would be most helpful. I can offer you a monthly pay raise of fifty cents.”
Though I was doing cartwheels inside and bursting to yodel out with joy, I buried such nancy-boy capers and replied solemnly, “Yessir. That’d be fine, sir.”
“Good. Be at my quarters after retreat.”
That evening, soon as the flag was lowered and the sun had set as the bugler played the last notes of retreat, I knocked softly on the Sergeant’s door.
Instead of hollering for me to come in, he opened the door himself and said, “Private, good, you’re here.” He wore only his muslin shirt. His suspenders dangled loose from the waist of his pants. His jacket hung from a nail.
He closed the door and, though he always kept the curtains open so the whole company could view us, we were alone together in that small room. I knew every inch of his room from the outside, but now standing inside the four walls of chinked cedar posts made it new. A lantern glowed on the table where he worked. The room smelled of cedar and kerosene and pencil shavings and the Sergeant’s scent, which was his own combination of bread baking and sweat and lye soap and clothes dried in the sun. I breathed it in and felt like I’d reached a destination I hadn’t known I was heading for. I was where I was always meant to be.
“You can take the stool,” he said. Waving his hand at a stack of papers, he added, “These are the company accounts from the day we arrived. Up until this point, they’ve been kept by Lieutenant Banfield. I suspect there might be…” He paused before adding dryly, “Errors in the lieutenant’s calculations.”
The pages were filled with lines of numbers so smeared and scrawled my daddy would have been disgusted. Even if I was just forming my numbers with a stick in the dust, ready to be patted away should a white appear, he taught me to respect them. To give the four its tidy little roof and the sixes and nines their pretty, curled tails. His rule was, “If the dullest of dullards cannot immediately say what your figure is, you have failed.” The lieutenant had failed.
The Sergeant continued, “Since the army demands triplicate of every report, supply order, sick call tally, and disciplinary action, I haven’t had time to review these accounts.”
He gave me a tall, narrow book, bound with a green cover. The pages inside were blank. With a trembling hand, I picked up a pencil he’d already knife-sharpened to a fine point, and held it above the bright, clean page.
“Just copy these”—he tapped the crumpled sheets, then the page in front of me—“to this. Tally up each page and move on to the next.”
My first few entries were a sight and I feared the Sergeant would kick me out. But all he said, after glancing over only once, was, “Easy there, Private. Easy. I’ve seen you do better than that.”
My fingers loosened up then and my numbers were as neat and tidy as any Daddy ever showed me.
From that evening on, I spent the days whistling through any chore set before me, counting the minutes until retreat. Then, after everyone else was settled in for the night, I’d go to the Sergeant and we’d work together in a silence broken only when I finished one long column and needed him to enter in the corrections I had found. And corrections there were aplenty.
Pretty quick it came clear that the lieutenant was either pitiful bad at ciphering or he was a crook robbing the company.
“What are you going to do?” I asked the Sergeant. “You can’t charge a white officer.”
He patted my green book and said, “That’s insurance, Private. You’re creating insurance for us. When charges are made, we’ll be protected. We’ll have the truth.”
Him believing the truth would protect a black man was another way he reminded me of Daddy. Much as I knew it wasn’t how the world worked, I admired that belief. Like Daddy, the Sergeant needed a woman strong enough to protect him when he found out that the truth was whatever the white man said it was.
Night after night, I sat beside him as silent and companionable as a cat. Over time, he started talking. I quickly sussed out that the one subject he could not resist was his idol, Frederick Douglass. Like that great man, the Sergeant was dedicated to uplifting our race and he figured he’d start with me. Many an evening passed with our reports and accounts ignored as he schooled me in Douglass’s teachings.
The Sergeant knew nearly every one of Douglass’s speeches by heart and, instead of passing the time talking while we worked, he recited whole chunks of them, a thing he could do without ever slowing down on his reports. The one he favored most, though, came from the same speech he’d quoted us at the recruitment back in Appomattox. He’d stop his work completely and glow like a new-saved sinner when he recited this part.
I know that Congress has been pleased to say in deference to prevailing prejudice that colored men shall not rise higher than company officers. They might as well have passed a law that black men shall not be brave; that they shall not learn to read; that they shall not shoot straight; and that they shall not grow taller than five feet nine inches and a half. The law is even more absurd than mean. Enter the army and deserve promotion, and you will be sure to get it in the end.
“‘Enter the army and deserve promotion,’” he repeated, “‘and you will be sure to get it in the end.’”
He didn’t need to say that part twice for me to understand that it was all ten of his commandments melted down to one word: deserve.