Willie raised himself in the
saddle and removed his hat. "It's a terrible temptation, May, but I'd
be stricken blind by your
beauty and would never find my home or
dear mother again," he
said.
The girl grinned
broadly and was about to shout back a rejoinder, when she was startled
by a young barefoot man, six and a half feet tall, running hard after
Willie Burke.
The tall youth vaulted onto
the rump of Willie's horse, grabbing Willie around the sides for
purchase while Willie's horse spooked sideways and almost caved with
the additional weight.
Willie could smell an odor
like milk and freshly mowed hay in the tall youth's clothes.
"You pass by without saying
hello to your pal?" the young man said.
"Hello, Jim!"
"Hello there, Willie!"
"You get enough grog in you
last night?" Willie asked.
"Hardly," Jim replied.
"Are you going to see that nigger girl again?"
"It's a possibility. Care to
come along?" Willie said. The young man named Jim had hair the color of
straw and an angular, self-confident face that reflected neither
judgment of himself nor others. He pulled slightly at the book that
protruded from Willie's pocket and flipped his thumb along the edges of
the pages.
"What you're about to do is
against the law, Willie," Jim said.
Willie looked at the dust
blowing out of the new sugarcane, a solitary drop of rain that made a
star in the dust. "Smell the salt? It's a fine day, Jim. I think you
should stay out of saloons for a spell," he said.
"That girl is owned by Ira
Jamison. He's not a man to fool with," Jim said.
"Really, now?"
"Join the Home Guards with me.
You should see the Enfield rifles we uncrated yesterday. The Yankees
come down here, by God we'll lighten their load."
"I'm sure they're properly
frightened at the prospect. You'd better drop off now, Jim. I don't
want to get you in trouble with Marse Jamison," Willie said.
Jim's silence made Willie
truly wish for the first time that day he'd kept his own counsel. He
felt Jim's hands let go of his sides, then heard his weight hit the
dirt road. Willie turned to wave good-bye to his friend, sorry for his
condescending attitude, even sorrier for the fear in his breast that he
could barely conceal. But his friend did not look back.
THE last house on the road was
a ramshackle laundry owned by Ira Jamison, set between two spreading
oaks, behind which Flower sat in an open-air wash shed, scrubbing
stains out of a man's nightshirt, her face beaded with perspiration
from the iron pots steaming around her. Her hair was black and
straight, like an Indian's, her cheekbones pronounced, her skin the
color of coffee with milk poured in it.
She looked at the sun's place
in the sky and set the shirt down in the boiling water again and went
into the cypress cabin where she lived by the coulee and wiped her face
and neck and underarms with a rag she dipped into a cypress bucket.
From under her bed she removed
the lined tablet and dictionary Willie had given her and sat in a chair
by the window and read the lines she had written in the tablet:
The gator down in the coulee
look like dark stone when the sunlite turn red and spill out on the
land.
There is talk of a war. A free
man of color who have a big house on the bayou say for the rest of us
not to listen to no such talk. He own slaves hisself and makes bricks
in a big oven.
I learned to spell 3 new words
this morning. Mr. Willie say not to write down hard words lessen I look
them up first.
A band played on the big lawn
on the bayou yesterday. A man in a silk hat and purple suit tole the
young soldiers they do not haf to worry about the Yankees cause the
Yankees is cowards. The brass horns were gold in the sunshine. So was
the sword the man in the silk hat and purple suit carry on his side.
Mr. Willie say not to say
aint. Not to say he dont or she dont either.
This is all my thoughts for
the day.
Signed, Flower Jamison
She heard Willie's horse in
the yard and glanced around her cabin at the wildflowers she had cut
and placed in a water jar that morning, her clean Sunday dress, which
hung on a wood peg, the bedspread given to her by a white woman on
Main, now tucked around the moss-stuffed mattress pad on her bed. When
she stepped out the door Willie was swinging down from his horse,
slipping a bag of dirty clothes loose from the pommel of his saddle.
He smiled at her, then
squinted up at the sunlight through the trees and glanced back casually
at the house, as though he were simply taking in the morning and his
surroundings with no particular thought in mind.
"You by yourself today?" he
asked.
"Some other girls are ironing
inside the big house. We iron inside so the dust don't get on the
clothes," she said.
"Could you give a fellow a
drink of water?" he said.
"I done made some lemonade,"
she replied, and waited for him to enter the cabin first.
He removed his hat as though
he were entering a white person's home, then sat in the chair at the
table by the window and gazed wistfully out onto the young sugarcane
bending in the breeze off the Gulf. His hair was combed but uncut and
grew in black locks on his neck.
"What did you write for us
today, Flower?" he asked, his gaze still focused outside the cabin.
She handed him her tablet,
then stood motionlessly, her hands behind her.
He put the tablet flat on the
table and read what she had written, his elbows on the table, his
fingers propped on his temples. His cheeks were shaved and pooled with
color that never seemed to change in hue.
"You look at the world only as
a poet can," he said.
He saw her lips say the word
"poet" silently.
"That's a person who sees
radiance when others only see objects. That's you, Flower," he said.
But she disregarded the
compliment and felt the most important line she had written in the
notebook was one he had not understood. In fact, she was not quite sure
what she had meant when she made the entry. But the martial speech of
the man in the silk hat still rang in her ears, and the hard gold light
beating on his sword and the brass instruments of the band hovered
before her eyes like the angry reflection off a heliograph.
"Is there gonna be a war, Mr.
Willie?" she asked.
"Why don't you sit down? I'm
getting a crick in my neck looking up at you," he said. "Look, y'all
are going to be free one day. Peace or war, it's just a matter of time."
"You gonna join the army,
ain't you, suh?"
In spite of his invitation she
had made no movement to sit down at the table with him, which would
have caused her to violate a protocol that was on a level with looking
a white person directly in the face. But after having shown her
obedience to a plantation code that systematically degraded her as well
as others, she realized she was now, of her own volition, invading the
privacy and perhaps exposing the weakness of a man she genuinely
admired and was fond of.
For just a moment she wondered
if it was true, as white people always said, that slaves behaved
morally only when they were afraid.
"I try not to study on it,"
Willie replied. Then, as though to distract himself from his own
thoughts, he told her of his father's participation in the Texas
Revolution, the massacre of prisoners at Goliad, the intercession of a
camp follower who probably saved his father's life.
"A prostitute saved all them
men from being killed?" she said.
"She surely did. No one ever
learned her name or what became of her. The Texans called her the Angel
of Goliad. But think of the difference one poor woman made," he said.
She sat down on her bed, her
knees close together, her hands folded in her lap.
"I ain't meant to be prying or
rude. You're always kind to the niggers, Mr. Willie. You don't belong
with them others," she said.
"Don't call your people
niggers," he said.
"It's the only name we got,"
she said, with a sharpness in her voice that surprised her. "You gonna
let the Yankees kill you so men like Marse Jamison can make more money
off their cotton? You gonna let them do that to you, suh?"
"I think I should go now.
Here, I brought you a book of poems. They're by an English poet named
William Blake." He rose from his chair and offered her the book.
But she wasn't listening now.
Her gaze was fixed outside the door. Through the crisscross of wash
lines and steam drifting off the wash pots scattered throughout the
yard, she saw Rufus Atkins rein his carriage, one with a surrey on top,
and dismount and tether his horse to an iron weight attached to a
leather strap he let slide through his fingers.
"You best go, Mr. Willie," she
said.
"Has Mr. Rufus been bothering
you, Flower?"
"I ain't said that."
"Mr. Rufus is a coward. His
kind always are. If he hurts you, you tell me about it, you hear?"
"What you gonna do, suh? What
you gonna do?" she said.
He started to speak, then
crimped his lips together and was silent.
AFTER he was gone she sat by
herself in the cabin, her heart beating, her breasts rising and falling
in the silence. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Rufus Atkins'
silhouette break across the light.
He stepped inside the cabin,
his wide-brimmed hat on his head, his gaze sweeping over the room, the
taut bedspread on her mattress, the jug of lemonade on her table, the
cut flowers in the water jar.
He removed a twenty-dollar
gold piece from his watch pocket and flipped it in the air with his
thumb, catching it in his palm. He rolled it across the tops of his
knuckles and made it disappear from his hand. Then he reached behind
her ear and held the coin in her face.
"Deception's an art, Flower.
We all practice it. But white people are a whole sight better at it
than y'all are," he said.
When she didn't reply, he
smiled wanly. "Young Willie bring you his wash?" he asked.
"Yes, suh," she replied.
"I hope he wasn't here to get
anything else washed," he said.
She lowered her eyes to the
floor. Atkins sat down at the table and removed his hat and wiped his
face with a handkerchief.
"Flower, you are the
best-looking black woman I've ever seen. Honest to God truth," he said.
He picked up the jug of lemonade and drank out of it.
But when he set the jug down
his gaze lighted on an object that was wedged under her mattress pad.
He rose from the chair and walked to her bed.
"I declare, a dictionary and a
poetry book and what looks like a tablet somebody's been writing in.
Willie Burke give you these?" he said.
"A preacher traveling through.
He ax me to hold them for him," she said.
"That was mighty thoughtful of
you." He folded back a page of her tablet and read from it. "'A cricket
sleeped on the pillow by my head.' This preacher doesn't sound like
he's got good sense. Well, let's just take these troublesome presences
off your hands."
He walked outside and knelt by
a fire burning under a black pot filled with boiling clothes. He began
ripping the pages out of her writing tablet and feeding them
individually into the flames. He rested one haunch on the heel of his
boot and watched each page blacken in the center, then curl around the
edges, his long hair and clipped beard flecked with gray, like pieces
of ash, his skin as dark and grained as scorched brick.
Then he opened the book of
poems and wet an index finger and methodically turned the pages,
puckering his lips as he glanced over each poem, an amused light in his
face.
"Come back inside, Marse
Rufus," she said from the doorway.
"I thought you might say
that," he replied, rising to his feet, his stomach as flat and hard as
a board under his tucked shirt and tightly buttoned pants.
AT four-thirty the next
morning, April 12, 1861, a Confederate general whose hair was brushed
into a greased curlicue on his pate gave the order to a coastal battery
to fire on a fort that was barely visible out in the harbor. The shell
arced across the sky under a blanket of stars, its fuse sparking like a
lighted cigar tossed carelessly into a pile of oily rags.
BY AFTERNOON of the same day
the telegraph had carried the news of the bombardment of Fort Sumter to
New Iberia, and Camp Pratt, out on Spanish Lake, was suddenly filled
with young men who stood in long lines before the enlistment tables,
most of them Acadian boys who spoke no English and had never been
farther from Bayou Teche than the next parish. The sky was blue through
the canopy of oak trees that covered the camp, the lake beaten with
sunlight, the four-o'clocks blooming in the shade, the plank tables in
front of the freshly carpentered barracks groaning with platters of
sausage, roast chickens, boudin, smoked ducks, crab gumbo, dirty rice,
and fruit pies that had been brought in carriages by ladies who lived
in the most elegant plantation homes along the bayou.