He was a plump, short man, his
eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against
his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a
checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit
tucked in the pocket.
"No one loved God more than
St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great
his suffering, he never listened
to false prophets. When the
Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them ..."
Jubal Labiche fitted on his
spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in
front of him.
" 'Servants, be obedient to
them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and
trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.
The people seated on the plank
benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at
their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn
rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in
the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of
dissent in their eyes.
Flower looked directly into
Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as
though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long
prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in
unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.
After the service Jubal
Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He
stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his
hat, then lowered his hand.
"You seemed to have great
interest in the homily," he said.
"St. Paul wrote down that
slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked.
/
"He's telling us to put our
faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through
those who know more about the world
than
a simple servant such as
myself," he
replied, bowing slightly.
"How come we cain't learn from
the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"
"I guess I'm not really
qualified to talk about that," he said.
"I guess you ain't," she said.
She turned and walked down the
dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair
blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back.
BUT
all the way home
she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the
congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one
another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture
itself a white man's fraud?
She warmed a tin cup of coffee
and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of
fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like
dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness
she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the
cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.
God wanted her to be a slave
and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?
She looked through her front
door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry
for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a
hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.
Flower walked across the
backyard, through the wash pots and clotheslines, and entered the back
door of the laundry. The widow's bedroom door was open, and on the
dresser was a leather-bound edition of the King James Bible.
It took her less than five
minutes to find the lines Jubal Labiche had read aloud from Paul's
letter to the Ephesians. Labiche had carefully avoided reading the
passages that followed his selective excerpt, namely, that Christians
should live and perform "not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as
the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with
goodwill doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."
And a bit farther on: "For we
wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities,
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world,
against spiritual wickedness in high places."
She closed the cover on the
book and went back to her cabin and finished her lunch, a strange sense
of both confidence and tranquility in her heart, which she did not as
yet quite understand.
Before sunset she walked
downtown and bought a peppermint stick from the drugstore for a penny.
She ate it on the bank of the bayou, not far from the boardinghouse
operated by Willie Burke's mother. She watched the dusk gather in the
trees along the bayou and the water darken and the sunfish and gars
rolling in the shallows. The
western sky was red and black now
and she could smell the rain falling on the fields somewhere out on the
rim of the earth.
She stood up from the bank and
brushed off her dress and started to walk back to the quarters behind
the laundry, before the paddy rollers came out on the roads. But now,
for some unexplained reason, the thought of encountering them did not
fill her with apprehension.
Then she realized the origin
of the feelings that had flooded through her after she had gone into
the widow's bedroom and hunted through the New Testament for the
excerpt from St. Paul. She could read. No one could ever take that gift
from her, and no one could hide knowledge or the truth about the world
from her again.
AT sunrise the next morning
she heard Rufus Atkins' horse in the yard, then heard him swing down
from the saddle and approach her door. She was undressed, and she
gathered up her clothes and sat on her bed and held them in her lap and
over her breasts. He stepped inside the door, smelling of tobacco and
cooked bacon, steam rising from his uniform in the morning coolness.
He removed the bent
twenty-dollar gold piece from the watch pocket of his trousers and
began working it over the tops of his knuckles.
"I got to go to bell count,"
she said.
"No, you don't."
"All the niggers got to be
there, suh. The widow don't abide lateness."
"Not you, Flower. You can do
almost any goddamn thing you want. You're a juicy bitch and you know
it."
"Ain't right you talk to me
like that, suh."
"I'm not here for what you
think," he said. He walked to the back window and looked out on the
cane field. The sun had just broken the edge of the horizon, like a
soft red lump of molten metal.
"Marse Jamison is establishing
a slaves council on all his plantations," Atkins said. "That means the
slaves will lay out the punishment for anybody who breaks the rules.
Marse Jamison reserves only the rightto overturn a punishment if he
thinks it's too severe . . . are you listening?"
"I'm not dressed, suh."
Atkins took a deep breath and
went outside the door. She heard him light a cigar and lean against
the
railing on her small gallery.
She put on her work dress and lit the kindling in her stove and washed
her face in the water bucket, then pushed the coffee pot over the
flames that leaked around one of the iron pothole lids.
She
heard Atkins clear his throat and spit and then felt his weight bend
the floorboards in the cabin.
"You're going to be on the slaves council for the laundry and two of
the plantations up the road," he said.
"This don't sound like Marse Jamison," she said.
"What do you care? It gives
you a little power you didn't have before."
"What if I say I don't want
it?"
"I'd say you were a mighty
stupid black girl."
"Tell him the stupid black
girl don't want it."
He removed the cigar from his
mouth and tossed it through the back window.
"You're a handful, Flower. In
lots of ways," he said, biting down on his lip.
"You been in my bed, Marse
Rufus. But it ain't gonna happen again."
"Say that again?"
"You heard me. I ain't afraid
of you no more."
It was silent inside the
cabin. Outside, the wind off the Gulf rustled the cane and flapped the
clothes drying in the yard.
"I wouldn't be talking out of
school, Flower. There are houses in Congo Square for girls who do
that," he said.
"I ain't afraid."
He took a step toward her, his
eyes roving over her face and the tops of her breasts. Her hand touched
the oyster knife she kept on the table next to the stove.
Atkins rubbed his mouth and
laughed.
"Damned if being white makes
any man less of a fool. If I ever get rich I'll buy you and carry you
off on my saddle and keep you as my personal strumpet. You believe
that? It's a fact. Wouldn't lie to you, girl," he said.
His eyes seemed to be laughing
at her now, as though he were reliving each moment he had probed inside
her, put her nipples in his mouth, lifted her up spread-eagled across
his loins. She turned away and picked up the coffeepot and burned her
hand. Behind her, she
heard
him walk out the door, his boots knocking with a hollow sound on
her gallery.
I hope the Yankees kill you,
she said under her breath. But the vehemence in her thoughts brought
her little solace.
WHEN she was a child, Abigail
Dowling's father, who was a physician and a Quaker, taught her that a
lie was an act of theft as well as one of deceit. A lie stole people's
faith in their fellow man, he said, and the loss was often irreparable,
whereas a monetary one was not.
In early August of 1861 the
first casualty lists from Manassas Junction made their way back to New
Iberia. The postmaster sat down behind the counter where he daily
sorted the mail into pigeonholes, an eyeshade fastened on his forehead,
and went down the alphabetized row of names from the 8th Louisiana
Volunteers with his finger. Then he removed his glasses and placed them
on his desk and with some very tiny nails he tacked all the lists to
the post office wall.
He put on his coat and went
out the front door and walked toward the end of Main, where he lived in
a tree-shaded house behind the Episcopalian church. Without apparent
cause he began to sway from side to side, as though he were drunk or
possessed of epilepsy. When he collapsed against a hitching rail, a
black deliveryman picked him up and sat him down in a chair against the
front wall of the grocery. Then two white men took him inside and
peeled off his coat and fanned his face and tried to get him to drink a
glass of water.
Abigail stared through the
grocery window at the scene taking place inside.
"What happened?" she asked the
black man.
"Mr. LeBlanc's son got kilt in
Virginia," the black man said.
"How did he learn?" she asked.
"I reckon it come t'rew the
wire or the mail, Miss Abigail. That po' man."
Abigail hurried inside the
post office. The wind through the open door and windows was lightly
rattling the casualty lists against the wall. Her heart beating, she
read the names of the soldiers under the captions "Wounded" and
"Killed" and saw none there she could put a face with. She let out her
breath and pressed her hand against her heart and then felt shame that
her joy was at the expense of families that would never see
their soldier boys again.
When she turned to leave the
post office she glanced at the floor and saw a sheet of paper the wind
had blown loose from the nails. She picked it up, her hand beginning to
tremble. At the top of the page was the caption "Missing in Action."
The third name in the column was that of Lieutenant Robert S. Perry.
She walked stone-faced down
the street to her house, her ears ringing, unaware of the words spoken
to her by others on the street or the peculiar looks they gave her when
she didn't respond to their greetings.
Later, she did not remember
drawing the curtains inside her house, filling it with summer heat that
was almost unbearable, nor did she remember pacing from one room to the
other, her mind drumming with her father's words about his experience
as a surgeon with Zachary Taylor's troops in Mexico.
"I saw a lad, not more than a
tyke really, struck by an exploding cannonball. It blew him into small
pieces. We buried parts of his fingers and feet. I had to pick them up
with forceps and put them in a sack," her father had said.
Why had she lectured Robert on
slavery, trying to inculcate guilt in him for deeds that were his
family's and not his? Were her piety, the sense of righteousness with
which she bore her cause like a personal flag, even her sexual modesty,
were all these virtues in which she prided herself simply a vanity, a
self-deception that concealed the secret pleasure she took in the
superiority of her education and New England background?
Could she deny she was not
guilty of pride, the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins? Or of
carnal thoughts that took hold of her sleep and caused her to wake hot
and wet in the middle of the night?