Marse Jim hesitates as he approaches, and the woman knows this is because he deserted from the rebel army last year, when he came home to take care of his boy after his final daughter died. He has lived in fear ever since that they would come and take him back. She imagines he wishes he had not left his rifle and pistols next to his bed.
The cavalry man sweeps his hat from his head. “Morning,” he says. “Captain Augustus Chambers, late of the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry.” He nods toward the Negro. “That’s Nick.”
Marse Jim has stopped well short of them. “What do you want?” he asks.
“We thought this place might be abandoned.”
“Well, it ain’t.”
“So I see. Well, then, might we trouble you for some water?”
“You might as well know: if you’ve come to take me back, I’ll just run off again, first chance I get.”
Chambers is perplexed. “Take you back to what?”
“The army, of course. It wasn’t cowardice caused me to leave, neither. It was my boy. After my daughter died, wasn’t nobody to take care of him. Of course, he’s gone now, I suppose I could go back—love nothing better than to shoot some Yankees for what they done to my place—except there’s nobody to watch my niggers. They’ll run off soon’s I’m gone and I’ll lose the last thing I have of value in the whole world. So you see, that’s why you can’t take me back.”
He falls silent abruptly. It is as if the uncharacteristic speech has tired him out.
A sadness steals across Chambers’s face. “I am not here to take you back to the army,” he says. “There is no army to take you back to.”
Now Marse Jim takes a step forward as if into a fight. “What? What in hell’s name do you mean?”
“I mean that the war is over, sir. General Lee has surrendered.”
“No.” Disbelief escapes him in a hoarse gasp. “When did this happen? How?”
The captain dismounts. “I will tell you,” he says, “but perhaps you will first be kind enough to allow a thirsty traveler some water?”
“Well’s on the other side of the house,” says Marse Jim, pointing. “I’ll walk with you.” He seems to remember them all at once. “You niggers get to work,” he snarls.
“Nick, you help them,” says the cavalryman.
Without a word, the Negro climbs down. He is very tall—well over six feet—and very lean. He walks with a limp. As the two white men disappear around the side of the house, the three Negroes wrap their hands in rags kept inside an upturned pail for just that purpose and begin pulling charred timbers from the wreckage.
“What happened to you?” Wilson asks.
“Took a ball in the heel,” he says. His voice is deeper than any man’s the woman has ever heard.
“You were fighting?”
An emphatic shake of the head. “
He
was fightin’. He took me along, said I’se gon’ be his body servant to check his wardrobe, fetch his meals and like that.”
Wilson laughs. “That’s white folks for you,” he says. “Even need servants when they go to war. I done heard everything.”
The woman is impatient. “Is it true about the war?”
“Near as I can tell, it is. Telegram come in Sunday. Say Marse Bobby Lee give out in some place called Appomattox.”
“So it’s over?”
“’Pears ’bout. My marse been gloomy for five days, ever since he seen that telegram. I can’t hardly read, so I don’t know what it say, but I can tell by how he act. And he act like somebody died. They all do. Been on the road with him for three days and they all leavin’ they camps and goin’ home. Got they heads down, tails between they legs like whipped dogs.”
“So what gon’ happen to us?” asks Lucretia.
“Us?” says Nick. A shrug. “I guess we’s free.”
The woman has her shoulder beneath a timber and is grunting to lift it as he says this. Her gaze comes around to him because for some reason, it strikes her as the most absurd thing she has ever heard. She is surprised—no,
horrified
—to hear herself laughing. It starts small, but it grows like fire. She tries to control it, but that only makes it worse. It is hard to breathe. Her knees buckle and she feels the timber slide off her. It falls with a clatter.
Lucretia is appalled. “You better stop that laughing ’fore they hear you.”
But now Wilson is infected with it and he is chuckling, too. “Hold on there, Lucretia. You can’t tell no free nigger what to do.”
At that, the laughter explodes out of her like water through a broken dam and she can’t even try to hold it back. She collapses onto a pile of timber because isn’t that just the funniest thing in the world, the idea that she, frightened and tired and bent beneath the weight of burnt wood, is free? Soon they are all helpless. Lucretia is the last to go. She keeps trying to protest, but giggles keep breaking through and at the end, she is not resisting anymore, just slapping her knees and leaning on Wilson, who staggers against her in turn.
The woman keeps waiting for it to pass. It feels so good to laugh, but she is distantly aware that laughter is dangerous, that if Marse Jim comes around that corner and finds them like this, there will be hell to pay. But the spell does not pass. She gasps for breath and it strikes her that laughter is a kind of madness.
“I’ve got to get away from y’all,” she says, panting, “before we all get in trouble.”
She rises on unsteady legs and walks toward the barn where the mule is tethered. Behind her, she hears them sniffling, struggling to master their
laughter. They know the same thing she does: that if Marse Jim comes back and sees this, there’s no telling what he might do.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you laugh.”
She is surprised to find Nick at her elbow, following her to the barn. “It just struck me funny is all,” she says.
“I suppose it is in a way,” he replies. “But in another way, ain’t funny at all, is it?”
It takes her a moment to respond. “No,” she says, “I guess not.”
“What you gon’ do, now you’s free?”
She doesn’t know how to answer the question, so she deflects it. “What
you
gon’ do?”
He scratches his chin. “Don’t rightly know,” he admits. “Marse been talkin’ to me ’bout that very thing, but I can’t make up my mind. Going home with him now, because that’s where my children is. Got a boy and a girl. Their mama dead, ain’t nobody but us and I promised when I left I’d be back for ’em. But after I get ’em, don’t rightly know what I’m gon’ do then. Marse Gus done asked me to stay on, say I can work like I always done and he’ll pay me wages. Sound good but I keep thinkin’, if I just stay where I always been, how I’m gon’ know I’m free?”
They pause before the broken barn wall. “Don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “Never had such a problem.”
“Well, you got it now, don’t you? Same as me.”
The woman thinks about this a moment. “No,” she says, “not the same as you.” She tries to imagine just walking away from Marse Jim, declaring herself free and demanding to be paid for her work. “Marse Jim would kill me dead if he thought I was even
thinking
about freedom.”
“He can’t do that.”
A bitter chuckle. “You don’t know Marse Jim.”
“But all you got to do is get to the federals. They’ll protect you.”
“That’s easy to say. We’re way back here in the trees, a long way from any federals. We wouldn’t even have known we are supposed to be free if you hadn’t come along.”
“But you can’t just stay here and keep slavin’. Slave times is over.”
“For some,” she says. She steps through the broken wall.
Something is wrong. The woman knows it the moment she enters the cool darkness. It is a moment before she picks it up: the foul smell, the angry
buzzing of the flies. When she gets to its stall, she is not surprised to find the mule lying dead, swollen tongue poking out of its mouth.
No more plowing for old mule. Worked to death. Starved to death. She hears Nick coming up behind her. “The mule’s free anyhow,” she says.
“That’s a purely contrary way of looking at it,” he says.
“It’s the truth,” she replies.
“What’s your name, anyway?”
The question gives her pause. She hasn’t had much use for a name in the four years since she was brought here by a mistress desperate to sell before everything she had was lost. Before that, well, she had a few names. She thinks about it, then gives him the one she liked the best, the one she used for a few years when she was, if not happy, at least at peace with her lot in life. It was such a long time ago.
“Tilda,” she says. “My name is Tilda.”
Tilda was coming in from the fields, pulling the burlap sack heavy with cotton. Her hair was gathered under a rag wrapped around her brow, her dress was stained and her expression bore no joy, no love, no hatred, no thing beyond numbness, a fatigue that settled in the cast of her mouth and sucked the very light from her eyes like marrow from the bone.
In this, she was no different from the rest of them, a mirror image of the 12 others who staggered in with her, released at last after 15 hours spent bent over beneath the indifferent sun, extracting cotton fiber from the boll, the hard brown shell of the plant which, if you are not careful—and even if you are—will cut your fingers so bad and so much you can’t feel cuts any more.
From can’t-see-in-the-morning til can’t-see-at-night, this was how they worked. And they might as well be mirror images of one another because what was the difference between them? A name? After a time, you came to know that a name was but a fiction, a thing white folks gave you for their convenience, so they could call the one and not, by mistake, get the other. It allowed the pretense that you were an individual. But they were not individuals. You could see that in the sameness of them now, trudging in from the fields. They were all just pieces of the same evil machine. Just slave niggers.
And yet, if that was so, why did he wait there for her at the edge of the field? Why did his heart hammer and his breath come shallow when he saw her—
her
and not any of the others who looked just like her? Why did he rehearse his words while he waited for her to see him? And why did it all go
away when she did see him, when she looked up from her own tired shoes and saw a man standing there, then realized who that man was? Why did he feel his past, his now, his every hope of the future riding on how she would respond? Her mouth opened and he caught his breath and held it tight as he waited to hear what she would say.
And she screamed.
No, not her. She was gone and he was…where was he?
It took a moment. He was not with her. He had not found her. Instead, he was lying in a field in the darkness of night. He had been walking for most of four days, had crossed meadows in the shadow of mountains, ferried across rivers, taken a ride with a friendly Negro farmer in exchange for helping unload his wagon. And it had brought him here to this field in the center of the capital city, this field where cattle slept, pigs rooted about for food, and a fetid and sluggish creek wandered past, emptying into a river. Sam had fallen asleep—how long ago?—lying on a slope in the shadow of a stubby marble structure someone had told him was an unfinished monument to General Washington.
Now the scream came again and he was surprised to realize it had not been part of his dream. And the cry resolved itself into a single word.
“Lincoln!” she cried. “Lincoln!” she moaned. “Oh, Lord, not Lincoln!”
His eyes found her standing in the flickering light of a street lamp. She was old, with skin the color of mahogany, her gray hair bunched beneath a dirty yellow scarf. Her face was awash with tears and she sagged as if her knees would no longer hold.
“They done shot my president!” she cried. “Lincoln dead!”
Sam rose. He trembled with a cold no breeze had imparted. An agonized groan rose from everywhere at once. Someone yelled, “No!”
“What do you mean?” some white man demanded with a white man’s impatience. “How do you know this? Goddamn you, speak!”
“I heard it just now from a soldier,” she cried. “They done shot the president. They done shot
my
president!”
“Who did it?” The same white man, his voice a bark of command.
“They say it was an actor. Booth.”
“Edwin Booth has shot the president?” A laugh that tried to disbelieve.
“No, that weren’t the name.” The old woman closed her eyes, searching the darkness there for the name of the assassin.