"Is that you, Flower?" Abigail
said.
"Sure it is, Miss Abigail. I
ain't gonna let you down, either," Flower said.
"That poor man."
"No, no, do what I tell you
and don't be looking over there," Flower said, touching Abigail's eyes
with her fingers. "You a brave lady. I wish I was as brave as you. One
day everybody gonna know how brave you been, how much you done for us.
I'm gonna see to it."
When they sat down on the
bench together they clenched hands like schoolchildren. The palm and
banana trees along the levee clattered in the wind off the river, and
the deepening color of the sky made her think of the purple cloak Jesus
was supposedly made to wear at his crucifixion. The street was empty
now. The manacled man hung like a long, narrow exclamation mark against
the wall of the Mint.
"My own people did this. Those
who claim to be the voice of justice," Abigail said.
"But we didn't. That's what
counts, Miss Abigail. You and me didn't do it. Sometimes that's about
all the relief the world give you," Mower said.
"It's not enough," Abigail
said.
FLOWER Jamison walked through
Jackson Square, past St. Louis Cathedral, and down cobbled streets
under colonnades and scrolled-iron balconies that dripped with
bougainvillea and passion vine. A man in a constable's uniform was
lighting the gas lamps along the street, and the breeze smelled of
freshly sprinkled flower beds on the opposite side of a gated wall,
spearmint, old brick that was dark with mold, and ponded water in a
courtyard where the etched shadows of palm fronds moved like lace
across a bright window.
The moon rose above the
rooftops and chimneys and cast her shadow in front of her, at first
startling her, then making her laugh.
She walked past the brothels
in Congo Square, two-story wood-frame buildings, their closed shutters
slitted with an oily yellow light from inside. The only customers now
were Yankee soldiers, boys, really, who entered the houses in groups,
never singly, loud, boisterous, probably with little money, she
thought, anxious to hide their fear and innocence and the paucity of
their resources.
She passed a house that
resonated with piano music and offered only mulatto women to its
customers, what were always called
quadroons, no matter what
the racial mix of the woman actually was.
A baby-faced soldier not older
than seventeen sat on the front step, klicking pebbles with his thumb
into the yard, a kepi cocked on his head. He watched her pass and then
for some unaccountable reason tipped his kepi to her.
She nodded at him and smiled.
"Some other fellows went
inside. I was just waiting on them," he said.
The overseer who had brought
her from New Iberia had placed her with a husband and wife who were
free people of color and lived in an elevated cottage overlooking Basin
and the drainage ditch that sawed its way down the middle of the street
to a sinkhole that was gray with insects. She ate supper with the
husband and wife, then waited for the husband to drive her to the
hospital on St. Charles.
He was a light-skinned man who
ran a tannery and looked more Indian than African. He seemed irritable
as he pulled a pair of gloves over his palms, vexed somehow by her
presence or his need to transport her back and forth to her work.
"Is something wrong, suh?" she
asked.
"The overseer tole me
yesterday you're Ira Jamison's daughter," he said.
"He ain't said it to me. No
white person ever has."
"I seen you walking past them
houses down there tonight. Flirting wit' a Yankee soldier on the
porch," he said. He wagged his finger back and forth. "You don't do
that when you stay at my house."
"Colonel Jamison is a prisoner
of war. He cain't hurt you, suh."
"I bought my freedom, girl. I
ain't ever gonna lose it. If you come to New Orleans, scheming to get
free, you better not drag me into it, no," he said, pulling down his
shirt to expose a circular scar that looked like dried plaster, of a
kind left by a branding iron poorly laid on.
FLOWER knew she should have
been depressed by the hostility and fear of her host and the hanging
she had witnessed that evening, but oddly she was not. In fact, since
the day an overseer had arrived in New Iberia from Angola Plantation
and had told her Colonel Jamison was in New Orleans, badly wounded,
asking for her, she could hardly deal with rhe strange and conflicting
emotons that assailed her heart.
She remembered when she had
seen him for the first time as a little girl, dressed in skintight
white
breeches and a blue velvet jacket, his hair flowing behind him as he
galloped his horse across a field of alfalfa and jumped a fence like a
creature with invisible wings. A teenage boy picking cotton in the row
next to hers had said, "He ride that hoss just like he rode yo' mama,
Flower."
The boy's mother had slapped
him on the ear.
Flower did not understand what
the boy had meant or why his mother had been provoked to such a level
of anger, which to Flower, even as a child, was always an indicator of
fear.
She saw Marse Jamison again,
on a Christmas Day, when her grandmother brought her to work with her
in the big house. Flower had peeked out from the kitchen and had seen
him talking with other men by the fireplace, the whiskey in his glass
bright against the flames. When he saw her watching him, he winked and
picked up a piece of hard candy from a crystal plate and gave it to her.
In that moment she believed
she was in the presence of the most important man in the world.
She did not see him again for
fifteen years.
Then, on what might become his
deathbed, he had asked for her. She felt herself forgiving him for sins
that he had neither acknowledged nor had asked forgiveness for, and she
wondered if she were driven less by charity than by weakness and
personal need. But people were what they did, she told herself, not
what they said or didn't say, but what they did. And Colonel Ira
Jamison had sent for his daughter.
Now she enclosed him in
mosquito-netting at night and sponge-bathed him and changed his
bandages and brought his food from the hospital kitchen on a
cloth-covered tray. He was melancholy and remote, but always grateful
for her attentions, and there were moments when his hand lingered on
hers and his eyes seemed to turn inward and view a scene she could
hardly imagine, a field churning with smoke and terrified horses or a
surgeon's tent where human limbs were piled like spoiled pork.
He read until late at night
and slept with the flame turned low in the lamp. On one occasion, when
the oil had burned out, she found him sitting on the side of the bed,
his bare feet in a pool of moonlight, his face disjointed with his own
thoughts.
"The war won't let you sleep,
Colonel Jamison?" she asked him.
"The laudanum makes you have
strange dreams, that's all," he replied.
"It ain't good to take it if
you don't need it no more," she said.
"I suspect your wisdom may be
greater than mine, Flower," he said, and looked at her fondly.
But tonight when she reported
to the hospital he was not reading either the Bible or one of the
several novels he kept on his nightstand. Instead, he sat propped up on
pillows with a big ledger book spread open on his knees. The pages were
lined with the first names of peopleJim, Patsy, Spring, Cleo, Tuff,
Clotile, Jeff, Batistand beside each name was a birthdate.
As he turned the pages and
read the lists of names, which must have numbered almost two hundred,
he moved his lips silently and seemed to count with his fingers. He
extinguished the lamp and went to sleep with the ledger book under his
pillow.
In the morning a new sentry
was on duty at the entrance to the ward. His cheeks were pink, his hair
so blond it was almost white. He straightened as she walked by,
clearing his throat, a hesitant grin at the corner of his mouth.
"'Member me?" he said.
"No," she said.
"Sitting on the porch at that
house on Congo Square? Place I probably didn't have no business?" he
said.
"Oh yes, how do you do?" she
said.
He shifted his hands on his
rifle barrel and looked past her out the window, his eyes full of
light, thinking about his response but finding no words that he felt
would be very interesting to anyone else.
"I'm on our regimental
rounders team. We're gonna play some Vermont boys soon as I get off
duty," he said.
"Rounders?"
"It's a game you play with a
ball and a bat. You run around bases. That's how come it's called
'rounders.'" He grinned at her.
"It's nice seeing you," she
said.
"Ma'am, I didn't go in that
place last night," he said hurriedly, before she could walk away.
"I know you didn't," she said.
He had just called her
"ma'am," something no white person had
ever done. She looked back
over
her shouldee at him. He was twirling
his kepi on the point of
his fixed bayonet, like a child
intrigued with
a
top.
THAT night, when she returned
to the hospital, Ira Jamison was in an ebullient mood, one she did not
understand in a dying man. He had two visitors, men with coarse skin
and uncut hair, with a lascivious look in their eyes and the smell of
horses in their clothes. They pushed the screens around the bed and
lowered their voices, but she heard one man laugh softly and say,
"Ain't no problem, Kunnel. We'll move the whole bunch up into Arkansas,
safe and sound, ready to fetch when the shooting is over."
After they were gone she
brought Ira Jamison hot tea and a piece of toast with jam. The ledger
book with the lists of names was on the nightstand. On top of it was a
page of stationery that Jamison had been writing on. Her eyes slipped
across the salutation and the words in the first paragraph as she
propped up the tray on Jamison's lap.
"Who was them men, Colonel?"
she said.
"Some fellows who do work for
me from time to time."
"They got dirty eyes," she
replied.
He looked at her curiously.
"I could have sworn you were
reading the letter I was writing to a friend," he said.
"How could I do that, suh?"
"I don't know, but you're no
ordinary"
"Ordinary what?"
"No ordinary girl. Neither was
your mother."
"I ain't a girl no more,
Colonel."
She picked up his soiled
bedclothes from the floor and carried them to the laundry.
DURING the night, out in the
foyer where she kept a cot, she overheard a Union physician talking to
one of the nurses.
"You say he's mighty cheerful?
By God, he should be. I thought sure we'd be dropping him into a hole,
but his specimen has been clear two days now. The colonel will probably
be back abusing his darkies
in no time. I guess if I
ever wanted to see a nonsuccess in the treatment
of a patient, my vote would he for
this fellow."
Flower sat up on her cot, her
body still warm from sleep. The ward was dimly lit by oil lamps at each
end, the air heavy with the smell of medicine and bandages and the
sounds of snoring and night dreams. She walked softly between the rows
of beds to the screened enclosure where Jamison slept, unable to think
through the words she had just heard. She stood over his bed and looked
down at the mound of his hip under the sheet and the pale smoothness of
his exposed shoulder.
His face was turned into the
shadows, but even in sleep he was a handsome man, his body firm,
without fat, his skin clear and unwrinkled, his mouth tender, almost
like a girl's.
Had he known his life was out
of danger and not bothered to tell her? Was he that indifferent about
the affections and loyalties of others?
She had other questions, too.
What about the visitors whose clothes smelled of horse sweat and whose
eyes moved up and down her body? Why had the colonel been reading from
a ledger book that contained the names of all his slaves?
He had completed the letter he
had been writing and had stuck it inside the cover of the ledger book
and had slipped the book under his pillow. She eased the sheets of
paper out of the book and unfolded them in the light that was breaking
through the window. Each line of his flowing calligraphy was perfectly
linear, each letter precise, without swirls or any attempt at
grandiosity. She began reading, moving her lips silently, tilting the
page into the grayness of the dawn.
Dear Colonel Forrest,
I have good news from the
Union surgeon and am on my way to a fine recovery. However, I am still
haunted by the destruction of the 18th Louisiana Regiment at Shiloh and
the fact the Orleans Guards, partially under my command, were not there
on their flank when they advanced so bravely into Yankee artillery.