She moved into an unpainted
cypress cabin in the trees behind Amilia
Dowling's house and did
housework for wages. For a brief time she sorted mail for a nickel an
hour at the post office, then was let go, with a sincere apology from
the postmaster, Mr. LeBlanc, because he felt obligated to give the work
to a woman whose husband had been killed at Petersburg.
Many of the Confederate
soldiers from New Iberia returned home before the Surrender, either as
paroled prisoners of war with chronic diseases or wounds that would not
allow them to serve as noncombatants. Flower thought she would have
little sympathy for them, regardless of the degree of their suffering.
Why should she? she asked herself. The flag they had fought under
should have been emblazoned with the overseer's lash rather than the
Stars and Bars, she thought. But when she saw them on the street, or
sitting on benches among the oaks in the small park across the bayou,
the injuries done to some of them were so visibly grievous she had to
force herself not to flinch or swallow in their presence and hence add
to the burden they already carried.
Since the rape her anger had
become her means of defense and survival. She fed it daily so that it
lived inside her like a bright, clean flame that she would one day draw
upon, like a blacksmith extracting a white-hot iron from a furnace. It
was her anger and the possibilities of revenge that allowed her to
avoid a life of victimhood. But an incident in the park almost robbed
her of it.
An ex-soldier who had lost his
eyes, his nose, and his chin to an exploding artillery shell was
escorted each evening to the park by a child. A veil of black gauze
hung from his brow, covering his destroyed face, but the wind blew it
aside once and what Flower saw in a period of less than three seconds
made her stomach constrict.
One week later, on a Sunday
afternoon, when the park was almost deserted, the child wandered off.
Rain began to patter on the trees, and the soldier rose to his feet and
tried to tap his way with a cane to the drawbridge. From across the
bayou Flower saw him trip and fall, then gather himself up and walk in
the wrong direction.
She crossed the bridge and
took him by the arm. It felt as light as a stick in her hand.
"I can take you home if you
tell me where you live," she said. "That's very good of you, ma'am. I
stay with my father and mother, just behind St. Peter's," he said.
The two of them walked
the length ot Main Street, then went through a brick alley toward the
Catholic
church
.
"There's a cafe here on the
corner. They have coffee. I'd love to treat you to a cup," the soldier
said.
"I'm colored, suh."
The ex-soldier stopped, the
gauze molded damply against the skeletal outline of his face. He seemed
to be staring into the distance, although Flower knew he had no eyes.
"I see," he said. "Well,
everyone looks the same to me these days, and you seem a very sweet
person to whom I'm greatly indebted. I'm sure my mother has tea on the
stove, if you would join me."
She refused his invitation and
told herself she could not look any longer upon his suffering. But in
the secret chambers of the heart she knew that the pity he inspired in
her was her enemy and the day the clean and comforting flame of her
anger died would be the day that every bruise and probing act of
the hand and tongue and phallus visited upon her by the three rapists
would take on a second life and not only occupy her dreams but come
aborning in her waking day.
She and Abigail had driven out
in the country with the revolver Abigail had bought at the hardware
store. An elderly Frenchman who lived in a houseboat on the bayou and
spoke no English showed them how to remove the cylinder from the frame
and pour powder and drop the conically shaped .36 caliber balls in each
of the chambers and tamp down the wadding on top of the ball with the
mechanical rod inset under the barrel and insert the percussion caps in
the nipples of the chambers. Then he stepped back on the bank as though
he were not sure in which direction they might shoot.
Abigail aimed at a dead
cypress across the bayou and fired. The ball grazed an iron mooring
plate nailed to a nearby oak and whined away in a field. She cocked the
hammer with both thumbs, squinted one eye, and fired a second time. The
ball popped a spout of water out of the middle of the bayou and
clattered into a canebrake.
Abigail blinked her eyes and
lowered the revolver, opening her mouth to clear her ears, then handed
the revolver to Flower. "I think I'd have better luck throwing it at
someone," she said.
Flower extended the revolver
with both hands in front of her. The steel frame and wood grips felt
cool and hard and solid in her palms as she forced back the hammer. But
unlike Abigail, she didn't try to sight down the
barrel at
the cypress; she simply pointed, like a finger of accusation, and
pulled the trigger.
The ball struck dead center.
She fire'd the remaining three
rounds, each time notching wood out of the tree. Her palms stung and
her ears were ringing when she lowered the revolver, but she felt a
sense of power and control that was almost sexual.
"I'd like to keep the gun at
my house, Miss Abby," she said on the way back to town.
"Maybe I should keep it for
both of us," Abby said.
"Hitting a man with a buggy
whip is a long way from being able to kill somebody."
"You're right, it is, and I
think you're too willing to do that, Flower," Abby said. She turned and
looked into Flower's face.
"You worry for my soul?"
Flower asked.
"The commandment is that we
don't kill one another," Abigail said.
"Rufus Atkins and those men
who raped me already tried to take my soul. They wanted to take my
soul, my heart, my self-respect, my mind, my private thoughts,
everything that was me. If they could, they would have pulled off my
skin. Pray to God men like that never get their hands on you, Miss
Abby."
They rode in silence the rest
of the way to the cottage. But that evening Abigail carried the pistol
and the gunpowder, bullets, and caps for it to Flower's cabin.
"I was unctuous at your
expense. There's no worse kind of fool," she said, and handed the gun
and ammunition through the door.
In the evenings and at night
Flower read. She now had sixteen books in what she called her "li'l
library," the books propped up neatly on her writing table between two
bricks she had wrapped and sewn with pieces cut out of a red velvet
curtain a white woman down the street had thrown away. Some of the
books were leather-bound, some had no covers at all; many of the pages
in her dictionary were dog-eared and loose in the binding. Each day in
her journal she recorded the number of pages she had read, the new
words she had learned, and her observations about characters and events
that struck her as singular.
Some of her entries:
"Mr. Melville must have known
his Bible. Ishmael and Hagar were cast out and unwanted and I think
that is why the story of Moby Dick is told by a sailor with the name of
Ishmael. I think Mr. Melville must have been a lonely man."
"I like Mr. Poe. But nobody
can tell a story like Mr. Hawthorne. He tells us about the Puritans but
what he tells us most about is ourself."
"I saw ball lightning in the
swamp last night. It looked like a mess of electric snakes rolling
across the water, bouncing off the trees. I wish I could write about it
in a way other people could see it but I cannot."
For the remainder of the war
she did not see Rufus Atkins or Ira Jamison. As with the mutilated
ex-soldier, she sometimes experienced feelings for Jamison that made
her angry at herself and ashamed of her own capacity for self-delusion.
When she had last seen him, on the lawn at the Shadows, he had walked
her to the street, his hand biting into her arm, and had fastened the
gate behind her, without speaking, as though he were locking an animal
out of the yard. But she found excuses for him. Hadn't she deliberately
embarrassed him in front of his friends, making him somehow the
instrument of the assault on her person rather than his overseer, Rufus
Atkins? In fact, for just a moment, she had enjoyed her role as victim.
For once she had left him speechless and awkward and foolish in front
of others.
But just when she had almost
convinced herself that the problem was perhaps hers, not his, and hence
her attachment to him was not a form of self-abasement, she remembered
the hospital in New Orleans, Jamison's letter to General Forrest
referring to the "unwashed niggers" who tended him, and the murder by
his men of the young Union sentry. Then she burned with shame at her
own vulnerability.
In moments like these she
emptied her mind of thoughts about her father by concentrating her
anger on the men who had raped her. Each day she hoped she would
recognize one of them on the street. It should have been easy. Each was
defective or impaired in some fashion. But the rapists seemed to have
disappeared into the war, into the broad sweep of the countryside and
the detritus of armies whose purposes made less and less sense. The
injury done to her had become just another account among many told by
the victims of Union soldiers, jayhawkers,
Confederate
guerrillas, stray minie balls and artillery
rounds and naval mines, or
wildfires that burned homes and cabins and barns to charcoal.
Most of the Yankee soldiers
had gone somewhere up in the Red River parishes. The windows of their
paddle-wheelers, headed up the Teche with supplies, were darkened at
night because of sniper fire from guerrillas, but otherwise the war had
simply gone away. Flower came to believe wars didn't end. People just
got tired of them and didn't participate in them for a while.
On a Sunday in April 1865 she
was sitting on a bench in the park when she picked up a discarded New
Orleans newspaper and read an article that perhaps told more about the
future of her race than she wanted to know. The article was about Ira
Jamison and described his wounding at Shiloh and how his slaves had
fled their master's protection and goodwill after his fields and
storehouses had been burned by Yankees. But Flower sensed the article
was more a promotion for a new enterprise than a laudatory account
about her father. Ira Jamison was transforming Angola Plantation into a
penal farm and would soon be in the business of leasing convict labor
on a large scale.
The writer of the article said
most of the convicts sentenced to Angola came from the enormous
population of Negro criminals who had been empowered by the Freedmen's
Bureau and turned loose upon the law-abiding whites of Louisiana. The
writer also said the cost of convict labor would be far less than the
cost of maintaining what he termed "servants in the old system."
A shadow fell across the page
she was reading. She turned and looked up at the face of Todd McCain,
the hardware store owner on Main Street. He had just come from church
and was wearing a narrow-cut suit with a vest that made him sweat and a
stiff white shirt with a high collar and one of the new bowler hats.
"I heard you could read," he
said.
She folded the newspaper on
her lap and looked through the oak trees at the sunlight on the bayou.
His loins brushed the top of the backrest on the bench.
"I read that same article this
morning. I don't agree with everything that's in it. But there's a mess
of criminals out there belong on a chain gang, you ask me," he said.
"I d like to read
my
paper, suh," she said.
"I got a lot of colored
customers nowadays. I could
use
a
clerk. I'll pay you fifty
cents a day."
"Please leave me alone."
It was quiet a long time.
"You're an uppity bitch, ain't you?" he said.
"Bother me again and find
out," she replied.
"What did you say?"
She rose from the bench and
walked out of the coolness of the trees into the sunlight, hating
herself for her rashness. When she got to the drawbridge and looked
over her shoulder, Todd McCain was still watching her.
ABIGAIL did not believe in
omens, but sometimes she wondered if human events and the ways of the
season and four-footed animals and winged creatures did not conspire to
weave patterns whose portent for good or evil was undeniable. If God
revealed His will in Scripture, should He be proscribed from revealing
it in His creations?
The azaleas and wisteria were
in bloom, the destroyed countryside greening from the spring rains, and
the telegraphic news bulletins from Virginia all indicated the same
conclusion—that the surrender would come any day and all the soldiers
who had survived the war, including Robert Perry, would soon be on
their way home.
But instead of joy she felt a
sense of quiet trepidation that seemed to have no origin. The night she
heard that General Lee had given it up at Appomattox Courthouse she
dreamed of carrion birds in a sulfurous sky and woke in the darkness,
her heart beating, her ears filled with the sound of throbbing wings.
She went to the window and
realized her dream of birds was not a dream at all. There were hundreds
of them in the trees, cawing, defecating whitely on the ground, their
feathers a purplish-black in the moonlight. They flew blindly about,
without direction, thudding into the sides of her cottage, freckling
the sky and settling into the trees again. One struck the window with
such force she thought the glass would break.