For the next few weeks, camp life went on around me like it was happening in a dream. Every time a bugle blew, men would line up in some new spot. They lined up to march. To practice shooting. To hold tin plates out for a ladle of something from a steaming pot. Even lined up for a turn in the privies if they didn’t quick step off to the woods. There was a rhythm to camp life that soothed me. It put me in mind of all the training that Iyaiya had told me she’d done with her sister warriors. How it had had a purpose: to take many and make them into one.
I wished I was marching along smartly in a blue suit and practicing killing Rebs. Doing something important. But day after day, all I did was fetch water, gather firewood, scrub pots, and peel an everlasting pile of taters. And not one bit of it was ever to Solomon’s liking. Man just loved to find some speck I missed cleaning off a dirty pot and yell, “You want them Rebels to win this war?”
Then he’d make out like I’d answered, “Oh, yessir, my dearest dream is to be a slave again and die chopping tobacco for a man who made free with my little sister and sold off my grandmother and one little brother and two other baby sisters.”
Then, like I’d actually said all that, he’d snap back, “Is that why you’re trying to give the General the flux? Get you some wood ash, sand, and scrub this pot out right. Better you wear out your arm scrubbing than the General wear out his bowels purging. And pull a comb through that nappy mess top your head. You are an embarrassment to this unit.”
“Thought I wasn’t supposed to let on I’m female.”
“Not asking you to be female. Figure that’s way above your bend. Just try for human.”
“What? You think you perfect as a painting hanging in the parlor?”
“Always got an answer, don’t you? Even though you don’t even know what the question really is, you always got an answer.”
“Me? You’re the one with all the answers.”
Solomon snorted. “You know what your problem is?”
“Doubt I need to. Pretty sure you’re fixing to tell me.”
“Damn right, I am. Your problem is you’re used to not mattering.”
It wouldn’t of taken a schoolteacher to read the sour look I shot him.
“Oh, I ain’t saying you don’t matter. You matter plenty. To yourself. Not talking about that. I’m talking about mattering to the world. You think you the wrong color to matter. Think you don’t…” He never finished. Just shook his head like I wasn’t worth his time and concluded, “Just think you don’t.”
One morning in early September, Solomon rousted me out before the bugler even got warmed up. He was lit up like a man been hitting the applejack barrel and he had no time for my complaints. “Sherman did it,” he announced, beaming from ear to ear.
“Did what?” I croaked, my mouth moving though my brain was still asleep. A shiver went through me. I rubbed my hands along my upper arms to chase away the chill that had settled in during the night.
“Took Atlanta. General’s gon want to celebrate tonight. I’ma see if the commissary has any them desecrated vegetables. Make up a burgoo for the man invented total war.”
After setting me to husking and hacking kernels off a hundred ear of corn, Solomon left, and I was too busy to worry overmuch about what desecrated vegetables were. Army had its own name for most things. I fetched up buckets of water and set them to boiling in the big cook pot. I skinned, dressed out, and cut up the squirrels Solomon’s boys brought in and tossed them in with the kernels.
Solomon returned with a small sack that contained a rectangular lump size of a brick and about that heavy that looked like a big chunk of sweet feed flecked with green and orange. He pitched the lump into the pot along with heavy dousings from his precious box of spices: salt, pepper—both black and cayenne—curry powder, and fistfuls of the crumbled-up leaves he gathered on his own. He stirred it all with his long-handled ladle, dipped up a bit, tasted, shut one eye, pondered, took another taste, shut the other eye, and announced, “Needs onion.”
“Commissary’s out.”
“Mother Nature’s commissary’s never out.” He held up a tow sack. “Go on, gather me up some wild.”
I jumped to my feet, eager to be set loose, to get out in the woods on my own. Letting Solomon see my shiny excitement was a mistake.
“Second thought,” he said, snatching the sack away. “I’ll go myself. No telling what you’ll bring back. Here, mind the burgoo.” He shoved the ladle into my hand and left.
We’d been getting on tolerably well and it wrathed me up to have Solomon do me that way, holding out a couple hours of freedom then snatching them back. He knew how much I hated being trapped doing woman’s work. He didn’t know that it always made me think about the woman’s work Clemmie was forced to do. By Old Miss during the day. By Old Mister at night.
After an hour of boiling, the green and orange brick loosened up into strips of what might once have been carrots, green beans, parsnips, peas, and celery. I even caught sight of a few shriveled-up purple knots that might once have had a passing acquaintance with beets. The burgoo rolled beneath the ladle as it started boiling. The dried carrots uncurled. Steam rose from the pot. Sweat beaded up and ran down my face. The steady boil turned to furious bubbling and, of a sudden, those desecrated vegetables plumped out and sucked up so much water that the stew started to go dry. Solomon would hide me if I ruined the General’s and his officers’ celebration supper, so I stirred hard to keep the bottom from burning, but that only made it worse. Soon I was scraping at the bottom and every scrape brought up charred flakes of scorched food.
I tried to lift the pot and move it off the flame, but I could barely heft the massive cast-iron thing when it was empty. Full as it was, all I managed to do was burn the bejesus out of my hand. With the scorching smell getting stronger, I had no choice but to dump in another bucket of water to cool it all down. I was stirring the extra water in when Solomon finally returned. He sniffed two times, grabbed the ladle out of my hand, stirred, saw the soupy mess with big, black scorched flakes floating around in it, and proceeded to curse me and my ancestors back to Adam and Eve.
“Damn you, girl! You trying to ruin my food or is it possible a body can cook as bad as you without trying?”
“What the hell’s I supposed to do? It was burning.”
“You blind? You supposed to do like you seen me doing a dozen times a day.” With the toe of his shoe, he pushed a log burning beneath the pot off to the side. “You couldn’t figure to do something that simple? You really that stupid?”
Stupid.
With that one word, quick as cocking the hammer back on a flintlock, my fist was balled up, pulled back, and ready to fly before I got hold of myself, and froze.
“What? You gon chug me one? That it, Queenie? That your plan?”
My arm quivered from the effort of not burying my fist in his face. But that was what he wanted. What he’d been goading me to do since he first laid eyes on me, the helper he didn’t want. The second I touched him, Solomon’d cut me loose. Tell everyone I was female and let them tear me apart like a pack of wolves. I was tough. Too tough to let him bait me that way. Much as it pained me, I lowered my fist.
Instant I did, though, a nasty smile cracked across Solomon’s face. He was gloating. Gloating just the way Old Mister used to gloat. Pleased with himself. Pleased that he always got whatever he wanted. Pleased that he got Clemmie.
I slugged Solomon.