"What happened
out
there?"
she asked.
"We divided our numbers and
tried to fight on both sides of the bayou. They chewed us up. They been
running us for six days."
"Do you know where Willie
Burke is?"
"Lieutenant Burke?"
"Yes."
"Captain Atkins put him on
rear guard."
"You mean now?"
"Yes, ma'am," the soldier said.
"Captain Atkins recently saw
Lieutenant Burke?" she said.
But the soldier's eyes had
lost interest in her questions.
"Fix my arms and my feet," he
said.
"Pardon?"
"You know what I mean. Fix
me," he said.
She started to speak, then
gave up the pretense, the lie, that was in reality an insult to the
dying. She folded his arms across his chest and lifted his good leg and
pressed it close to the other, then tied his ankles with a strip of
rag. His tin identification disk, with a leather thong looped through a
hole at the top, was clenched tightly in his palm.
"Do you want me to write a
letter to someone?" she asked.
"No, no letter," he said. His
eyes filled with a terrible intensity and roved the vaulted ceiling
above him, where a bird was battering itself against the glass windows,
trying to escape into the treetops outside. "I stole money from a poor
man once. I had a wife and wasn't good to her. I did mean things to
others when I was a boy."
"I bet you were forgiven of
your sins a long time ago," she said.
"Lean close," he said.
She bent down over his face,
turning her ear to his mouth. His breath touched her skin like a moist
feather.
"When I'm dead, set my tag so
it's up and down between my teeth and knock my jaws shut," he whispered.
She nodded.
"If you got your tag in your
mouth, they got to put your name on a marker," he said.
"I'll make sure. I promise,"
she said.
"I'm scared, ma'am. Ain't
nobody ever been as scared as I am right now."
She raised her head and gazed
down at him, but whatever conclu
lion he had
reached about the unchartcred course
of his
life or the fear that had beset him in his last moments
had
already drifted out of his face like ash off a dead fire.
The bird he had been watching
dipped under the arch of the front doorway and lifted into the sky, its
wings throbbing.
THE next day Flower Jamison
rose before sunup and lit her wood-stove and fixed coffee that was made
from chicory and ground acorns. Then she lit the lamp on her table and
in the misty coolness between false dawn and the moment when the sun
would break above the horizon she removed from under her bed the box of
books and writing materials given her by both Willie Burke and later by
Abigail Dowling and opened the writing tablet in which she kept her
daily journal.
She no longer hid her books or
her ability to read them from white people. But her fear of her
literacy being discovered did not leave her as a result of any decision
or conscious act of her own. It had simply gone away as she looked
about her and saw both privation and the cost of war on distant
battlefields indelibly mark the faces of those who had always exercised
complete power and control over her life. She could not say that she
felt compassion or pity for them. Instead, she had simply come to
realize that the worst in her life was probably behind her, and
adversity and struggle and powerlessness were about to become the lot
of the plantation owners who had seemed anointed at birth and placed
beyond the reach of the laws of mortality and chance and accident.
At least that is what she
thought.
Outside her window the new
cane was green and wet inside the mist and she could hear it rustling
when the wind blew from the south. She placed her dictionary next to
her writing tablet and began writing, pausing on every fourth or fifth
word to look up a spelling:
Last night there was either
shooting or thunder down the bayou. The dead were took out of the back
of the church and laid on the grass under a oak tree. There were
flashes of light in the sky and a loud explosion in the bayou. A free
man of color say a yankee gunboat was blowed up and fish rained down in
the trees and some hungry people picked them up with their hands for
food to eat.
Miss Abigail ask me why
I come back from New Orleans when I
could stay there and he free. I told her this
is my home and inside myself I'm free wherever I go. I
told her I want to stay and help other slaves escape up the Mississippi
to the north. I have been telling myself this too.
I cannot be sure this is
exactly truthful. This is my thoughts for this morning.
Respectfully, Flower Jamison
She looked back down at her
words in the lamplight, then gazed out the window at the blueness of
the dawn and a calf wandering out of the cane field. The calf caught a
scent on the breeze and ran toward a cow that stood on the lip of the
coulee in a grove of swamp maples.
Flower picked up her pencil
and wrote at the bottom of the folded-back page in her tablet:
Post ScriptI know I should
hate him. But it is not what I feel. Why would a man not love his own
daughter? Or at least look at her the way a father is suppose to look
at his child? All people are the same under their skin. Why is my
father different? Why is he cruel when he does not have to be?
LATE that afternoon Flower
filled the caulked cypress tub behind the slave quarters with water she
drew from the windmill, then bathed and put on a clean dress and began
her pickup route, stopping first at the back door of Carrie LaRose's
brothel.
Carrie LaRose could have been
the twin of her brother, Scavenger Jack. She was beetle-browed,
big-boned, with breasts the size of pumpkins and red-streaked black
hair that grew on her head like snakes. She wore a holy medal and a
gold cross around her neck, a juju bag tied above her knee and paid a
traiteur
to put a gris-gris on her enemies and business rivals. Some said
she had escaped a death sentence in either Paris or the West Indies by
seducing the executioner, who bound and gagged another woman in
Carrie's prison cell and took her to the guillotine in Carrie's stead.
Flower paid little attention
to white people's rumors, but she did know ont thing absolutely about
Carrie La Rose, she either possessed the powers of prophecy
and
knew the future or she was so knowledgeable
about human weakness and
the
perfidious and venal nature of the world that she could predict the
behavior of people in any given situation with unerring precision.
Cotton speculators, arms
dealers, munitions manufacturers, and slave traders came to her
bordello and had their palms read and their lust slaked in her bedrooms
and gladly paid her a commission on their profits.
Early in the war a Shreveport
cotton trader asked her advice about risking his cotton on a blockade
runner.
"How much them British gonna
pay you?" she asked.
"Three times the old price,"
the cotton trader replied.
"What you t'ink them textile
mills in Mass'chusetts gonna pay?" she asked.
"I don't understand. We're not
trading with the North," he said.
"That's what you t'ink. The
cotton don't care where it grow. Them Yankees don't, either. They
rather have it come up to the Mis'sippi than go t'rew the blockade to
the British. The blockade runners gonna bring guns back to the
Confederates."
The cotton traders who
listened to Carrie increased their profits six - and sevenfold.
But those who sought her
advice and the service of her girls and sometimes the opium she bought
from a Chinaman in Galveston little realized she often listened to
their confessions and manifestations of desire and infantile need by
putting her ear to a water glass she pressed against the walls of their
rooms. On Saturday nights her brothel roared with piano music and good
cheer. On Monday mornings a New Orleans export-importer might discover
a profitable business deal had been stolen from under his feet.
Flower stripped the sheets
from the mattresses in the bedrooms and piled them in the hallway.
Outside, the western sky was streaked with gold and purple clouds and
under an oak tree in the dirt yard three paddy rollers were drinking
whiskey at a plank table. The wind puffed the curtains and blew through
the hallway, and Flower could smell watermelons and rain in a distant
field. She thought she was by herself, then she heard a board creak
behind her and turned around
and saw Carrie LaRose
sitting in a chair, just inside the kitchen doo
r,
watching her, a
contemplative expression on her face.
"Why you want to do this shit,
you?" Carrie asked.
"Ma'am?"
"I could set you up in your
own house, make you rich."
Flower wadded up the dirty
linen she had thrown in the hallway and the dresses of Carrie LaRose's
higher-priced girls and tied them inside a sheet.
"Don't know what you mean,
Miss Carrie," she said.
"Don't tell me that, no. In a
week or two this town's gonna be full of Yankees and all you niggers
are gonna be free. A pretty li'l t'ing like you can make a lot of
money. Maybe you t'inking about selling out of your drawers on your
own."
"You don't have the right to
talk to me like that, Miss Carrie."
Carrie LaRose looked at her
nails. She wore a frilled beige dress, her hair piled on top of her
head, a silver comb stuck in back.
"You could have stayed in New
Orleans and been free. But you come back here, to a li'l town on the
bayou, where you're a slave," she said.
"I don't mess in your bidness,
Miss Carrie. Maybe you ought to keep out of mine."
It was silent except for the
muffled conversation of the paddy rollers in the yard and the wind
popping the curtains on the windows. Flower could feel Carrie LaRose's
eyes on her back.
"You come back 'cause of Ira
Jamison. You keep t'inking one day he's gonna come to your li'l house
and tell you he's your daddy and then all that pain he give you for a
lifetime is gonna go away," Carrie LaRose said.
Flower felt the skin draw
tight on her face.
"I'll be getting on my way,"
she said.
"He ain't wort' it, girl.
Learn it now, learn it later. Ain't none of them wort' it. They want
your jellyroll wit' the least amount of trouble possible. The day you
make them pay for it, the day you got their respect."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't play the dumb nigger
wit' me."
"I'm fixing to be free, Miss
Carrie. It doesn't matter what anybody say to me now. I can read and
write. Words I don't know I can look up in my dictionary.
I can
do sums and subtractions. Miss Abigail and M
r.
Willie
Burke say I'm as smart as any
educated person. I'm fixing to be anything I want, go anywhere I want,
do anything I want, and I mean in the whole wide world. How many people
can say that about themselves?"
Carrie LaRose propped her chin
on her fingers and studied Flower's face as though seeing it for the
first time. Then she looked away with an age-old knowledge in her eyes
that made something sink in Flower's chest.
The wind was picking up now as
she loaded her laundry bags into the carriage behind the brothel. The
three paddy rollers were still at the plank table under the oak tree,
their heads bent toward one another in a private joke. After the war
had begun they had postured as soldiers, carrying the mail from the
post office out to Camp Pratt or guarding deserters and drunks, but in
reality everyone knew they were mentally and physically unfit for
service in the regular army. One man was consumptive, another
harelipped, and the third was feebleminded and had worked as a janitor
in the state home for the insane.
Flower was about to climb up
into the carriage when Rufus Atkins rode into the yard and stopped
under the oak tree. He did not acknowledge her or even look in her
direction. The three paddy rollers grinned at him and one of them
lifted their whiskey bottle in invitation. Atkins dismounted and pulled
his shoulder holster and pistol down over his arm and hung them from
the pommel of his saddle. His eyes lit on Flower momentarily, seeming
to consider her or something about her for reasons she didn't
understand. Then the object of his concern, whatever it was, went out
of his face and he took a tin cup from his saddlebags and held it out
for the harelipped man to pour into. But he remained standing while he
drank and did not sit down with the three men at the table.
Flower continued to stare at
him, surprised at her own boldness. He stopped his conversation with
the paddy rollers in mid-sentence and looked back at her, then set his
cup down on the table and walked toward her, the leaves from the oak
tree puffing into the great vault of yellow-purple sky behind him.
He wore boots and tight,
gray cavalry pants with gold stripes down the leg
s, a wash-faded checkered
shirt, and a
slouch hat sweat-stained around the crown. A canvas cartridge belt with
loops designed for the new brass-cased ammunition was buckled at an
angle on his narrow hips.