It was high noon when Solomon and his boys returned with a string of jacks all skinned and dressed out. I jumped up off that bench and hurried to meet him.
While Solomon was explaining to his boys how he wanted the jacks chopped and seasoned, I broke in and informed him, “I can pot a mess more varmints than y’all did. And I won’t ruin the meat with gut shots, either,” I added, nodding at one critter been blown into tatters.
“You don’t say,” Jonathan said in a sneery way.
“You don’t believe me, give me that old musket you got, and I’ll show you. I’m a dead shot.”
I made to grab for the gun, but Solomon jerked the long arm away, saying, “Shot dead, more like it. Slave with a gun? Any white ever seen that, you’d of been swinging ’fore nightfall.”
He got that right. Horses and reading and rifles, they were all forbidden. You got caught riding or reading, there’d be a whipping. Maybe worse. But a rifle? Lord. That’d guarantee you a long drop from a short rope.
“Yeah,” Solomon’s boy Eli put in. “How’d a slave ever get a gun?”
“Took it off a dead Rebel,” I answered, and my head filled with the sound of buzzing like a hive been bust open. That was the sound that had led Mama and me to that dead Reb one day when we were out clearing timber for a new field. The bees had turned out to be a cloud of green-eyed flies feasting on the pulpy remains of what we figured to be a Secesh deserter. His right leg was swole up to where it had ripped open the leg of his trousers. “Copperhead,” Mama said, naming the viper that had bit him.
“He had a rifle beside him,” I explained. “A beautiful German yagger.”
I knew the name, for Mr. Pennebaker had one and never tired of gassing on to Old Mister about his fine German yagger rifle with its stock special-made of fine burled wood and a patch box, muzzle, and trigger guard of polished brass.
“And what?” Solomon demanded. “Your sweet old master put up some targets? Took you out and learned you how to shoot?”
“No, my grandma did.”
“Your grannie?” How they hooted at that.
“Well, not her so much as the stories she’d told us about being—”
Solomon cut me off, saying, “Seems you’re mighty good with stories.”
I sulled up then like a possum playing dead at him calling me a liar to my face and didn’t go on to explain that I’d watched Mr. Pennebaker load and shoot his yagger a hundred times. Or that Clemmie stole pinches of black powder and minié balls from Old Mister for loads. Or how, with my strong, steady hands and eagle eyes, I was a natural. How I got to where, using the flip-up rear sight, I could peel a squirrel off a high branch fifty yards away. I wished most fervent that I had my yagger at that very moment, for I would of shut them all up with a few dazzling shots. But my beloved long arm was in the woods back home where I’d hidden it inside a hollow ash tree. Someday, I swore, I would reclaim it.
Without another word, Solomon grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, dragged me back to the bench, saw the mess I’d made of the few taters I’d tried to skin and the big pile I hadn’t touched.
“Get your filthy hands off—” I started, but the poke of the Green River knife digging into my throat shut me up quick. Pausing only to stuff a couple of potatoes into his pockets, Solomon drug me off.
The camp was a town of canvas and mud that went on for miles in all directions. After tromping past endless rows of the regular soldiers’ low tents, we approached an open field. Here new recruits were attempting to march to the beat pounded out on a drum by a redhead boy looked to be all of ten years old. They succeeded only in tangling themselves up like a nest of snakes.
I couldn’t make out the strange army commands the jug-eared drill sergeant was barking out. The aspersions he cast upon them, though, came through loud and clear. He called them hayseeds, Paddies, dagos, Limeys, Krauts, Wops, and greasers. Mostly, though, he shouted out, “Hay foot! Straw foot! Hay foot!” This made no sense until we drew abreast of the marchers and saw that the plowboy soldiers had tied a wisp of straw to their right foot and hay to the left so as to tell one from the other.
Farther on, veteran soldiers who had some polish on them were lined up in three rows. They could of been windup toys the way they all moved together when the man in charge yelled out orders. At the commands “Handle cartridge,” “Tear cartridge,” “Charge cartridge,” the men in the first row pulled out a cartridge, ripped it open with their teeth, and poured the black powder and bullet down the barrel of their upturned musket. I imagined the balls they fired cutting through a line of Rebels and could of watched all day. But Solomon, his face set graveyard grim, dragged me on.
In the middle of camp we came across a fellow, mother naked, stuck in a barrel. His arms poked out the two holes that had been hacked into the sides and his head popped up through another hole at the top. His face was sun-scalded red as a boiled tomato where it wasn’t flaking away entirely. The ground around the bottom of the barrel was wet from him doing his business right there. I reckoned he must of slit someone’s throat in their sleep to rate such a punishment and wished I could read what the sign hanging from a knife stabbed into the barrel said.
“Food thief,” Solomon informed me like he knew my mind. “See now how serious General takes feeding his army?”
Like all of the questions he asked, Solomon didn’t expect an answer to this one and he hauled me away, blowing on about how Sheridan had come up through the Quartermaster Corps. How, like all great generals from Hannibal to Napoleon, he knew that an army marched on its belly. “No food, no fight. Got that, Queenie?” Not being fond of answers, he carried on, words stomping out of him as fast as his feet, telling me how he believed that Sherman, “that’d be General William Tecumseh Sherman,” got the idea of something called “total war” from Sheridan.
“Total war, know what that means?” he asked.
Of course, the man didn’t give a slick shit what I knew and went right on. “Doesn’t mean just fightin’ on the battlefield. Means Sherman is shuttin’ down the Confederate’s pantry. Means cleanin’ out every Rebel farm, plantation, and vegetable patch between here and Atlanta. No food. No fight. It was our General’s idea first, though, and he’s gon win the war with it,” Solomon carried on. “Just as soon as we get this army assembled and start marching down the Shenandoah Valley. Food, baby sister. Food is the key. And you know who holds the keys to that kingdom?” He pointed to himself. A cook, a pot-scrubber, and a stew-stirrer. He believed he was the big dog. Crazy coot.
At the edge of camp, just before the woods started crowding in, the marching and shooting fields stopped. In their place were a couple dozen ramshackle lean-tos and curtains of dirty quilts hung over lines running between trees to make a bit of private space.
Closest to camp, laundresses were hard at work. An acrid stink spewed out from where one woman was dumping a bucket of rancid fat and potash for making soap into her pot. At another cauldron, a bony girl with chicken-wing shoulder blades stirred a black pot of dirty clothes set over a low fire. A couple of her brothers poked bits of kindling into the fire.
The mother of the skinny children, dressed in a long skirt, long apron dotted with scorched spots from where cinders had landed, kerchiefs around her neck and over her hair, put her back into scrubbing some man’s dirty drawers on a washboard set in a galvanized steel tub of gray water. The big sister, tall and gangly, the way I always was, distributed the clothes she wrung out across any shrub or tree branch hanging low enough for her to reach.
A baby sat in the dirt, naked and ignored, nose boogered up, wailing so big drool poured out of his mouth. The whole family watched us pass with eyes hollow and haunted as any slave’s. Maybe more since they didn’t even have the dream that freedom was going to be one tiny bit better than slave time.
After we passed the laundresses, we reached another set of crude shelters where Solomon yanked me to a halt. The tattered tents and lean-tos appeared deserted. Or they did until Solomon called out, “Hello, ladies!”
Then, like gophers popping out of their holes, heads started to poke out from tent flaps and around the edge of blankets hanging off lines. Women, sleepy white women, appeared. They took one look at us and immediately vanished. One gal, however, opened her mouth to reveal an empty hole with but two gray teeth left, and bawled out, “Darkies down the end!”
At the last couple of shelters, five girls with some color to them scampered out. Bedraggled as they were, they’d done what they could to spruce up a mite. A light-skinned girl had rubbed berry juice on her lips and cheeks and tucked a flower behind her ear. They were all tugging on their bodices to show more of what their mamas had given them. They were slinking this way and that with a hand on a hip cocked to the side and big smiles on their faces that never made it to their tired eyes.
“Hey, Solomon, whatchoo brang me?” the light-skinned girl called out.
“Brought you a new recruit,” he answered, yanking me forward. I tried to jerk free, but stopped when the Green River poked at my throat again. “That what you want?” he hissed in my ear, grabbing so tight on my shirt that he cut off my wind and I couldn’t of answered if I’d wanted to.
“You see them?” he asked, like I had any other choice.
I clawed at the collar that was strangling me, but Solomon just choked up on it harder.
“Any man here can have ’em for a piece of hardtack. You don’t have no hardtack, you can have ’em you punch ’em hard enough. You wanna be a hardtack girl? That what you want, Queenie? ’Cause I’d be real happy to make that happen. Pure dee delighted, truth be told.”
I was near passed out when he turned loose of my collar. I gulped in enough air to spit back at him, “I’ll run away.”
“Where you run to?”
“Home.”
“What you eat? They burnt you out.”
“I can hunt. I was the best shot on the place.”
“You can’t hunt no varmints been burnt up. You gon go back, take the food outta your mama’s mouth? Huh? That what you do?”
The mention of Mama snatched my breath away and took the fight out of me worse than the choking had.
“Don’t matter. She’s long gone anyhow. Sheridan already sent out units to gather up every contraband they found and carry them God knows where. Total war. No slaves, no food. No food, no fight. Your mama and everyone you ever knew is gone. You got nowhere and no one to go back to.”
I felt like I’d stepped into a sinkhole. Dropped straight down into a dark place with no bottom, no escape, and no Mama or Clemmie. Though I didn’t let it fall, water stood in my eyes at the thought.
“Dry your tears, Queenie. Only one thing world cares less about than a black man’s tears, that a black woman’s. You be dead soon anyway. You not half as tough as you think you are.”
Solomon plucked a sweet potato out of each pocket and held them up. The whores swarmed over him like he was waving around a Liberty dollar. One big ole heifer pulled Solomon’s head down and mashed his face in her titties. Another with a washboard for a chest, seeing she couldn’t compete in the titty department, backed her bony behind up to Solomon’s crotch and pumped away until his willie poked out and tented up the front of his trousers.
The light-skinned one, though, didn’t need to do anything nasty. She just crooked her finger at Solomon and he followed her to a quilt thrown over a line between two trees. The lack of a real tent didn’t matter. If a girl is pretty enough, nothing mattered, the men will come for you. Come and do what they want. I already knew that.
Not ten seconds later that quilt came alive with the shapes of elbows, hips, and butts bumping it out here and there. A barrel, half the staves pulled out for firewood, stood next to the quilt curtain. The girl’s head appeared and she rested it atop the barrel, her hands folded under her ear. She was naked from the waist up and Solomon had a hand holding on to her shoulder, pulling back while he pumped into her. He scooted her back and forth on the top of that barrel. And though she let loose with a few big moans as if having splinters ground into her chest was a pleasuring experience, her eyes were way off somewhere far and gone. She took a sight more notice of a ladderback flicker pecking its way up the side of a tulip tree than she did of Solomon. Then, like she had just remembered that she had a man’s hambone all up in her, she let out one of her fake good-time groans.
Her gaze fell on me and, still getting rocked back and forth across that barrel, she watched me with no more or less interest than she had paid the flicker. When the shoving stopped, she lay quiet, only reaching back to pull her skirt down before she raised up. Then she just stood there, bodice off, ninnies out for the world to see, flower behind her ear drooping now down her neck, and she stared at me like I was the one had just let herself get plowed way a bull plows a heifer. Then, like she knew me, knew who I was, she winked. At me.
That wink, as though she’d read my future and saw me with my head atop a barrel, gave me a feeling so near to drowning that I couldn’t draw a breath until I ran away from her, away from the hardtack girls, away from the launder women with babies they couldn’t feed blubbering at their feet.
Tough? Solomon didn’t know the first little thing about tough. He didn’t know Africa tough. But I’d show the fool.