Come Juneteenth (2 page)

He was just about to leave for the end of his furlough when he found out. And on the way back to Fort Belknap, he stopped at Aunt Sophie's place to register his complaint.

"You have taken away from her what it took Ma years to build," he told Aunt Sophie.

"Don't you come tramping into my home and telling me what to do, young man," she said. And she gave him what for, as if he were a little boy and not standing in front of her in the uniform of a captain in the Confederacy. "Mind your own business, or I'll be forced into taking her back. Did it ever occur to you that if tragedy struck and we had to sell her, she has no training in household duties at all? And could be put in the fields?"

"She is my business," Gabe told her. But no, it hadn't occurred to him. Or to any of us.

"Just how does she get to be your business?" Aunt Sophie asked. "I hope you're not talking about what I think you're talking about."

Gabe turned on his heel and left for Fort Belknap. The Kickapoo Indians he was up against back there were easier to deal with. Even a fox knows when it is outwitted and will creep back into its lair and lick its wounds and plan for next time.

I
WAS IN
the pumpkin patch, counting the ones that were good enough for Old Pepper Apron, our cook, to make into bread. I recollect that Pa was happy that he'd gotten one or two cents more on the pound from the cotton Granville had shipped out of Bagdad. And that the fields were being sown with winter oats and rye.

I looked up and saw Sis Goose standing by the gate, a frown on her lovely face. It was all like some Dutch still life I was learning about from my tutor. Sis twisted her apron in her hands. She always wore a snow-white apron, like I did, even though we had no real household chores.

"Luli, there's an old negro man in our barn," she said.

For a moment I did not understand. The place was full of negro men: field hands, household help. But the look on her face told me something was amiss.

"Who is he?"

"Says he comes from Virginny. Says..." and her voice broke.

"Says what?"

"Says the negroes are free. That Abraham Lincoln freed them in January of '63."

That rumor again. But with the war there was a different rumor every week. I swallowed. Something on Sis Goose's face bespoke her distress.

"Go and get Gabe," I told her. "He'll know what to do."

Gabe was in the house, helping Mama decide whether the one hundred bushels of corn she wanted to trade for three pounds of sugar was worth it.

I went to the horse barn, but I didn't go in until Gabe and Sis Goose came back.

"Where'd you come from, Uncle?" Gabe asked the man, who looked old enough to be somebody's grandfather.

"Virginny. I comes from Virginny," came the answer. "From Applegate I come. On the advice of Miz Heather."

Applegate was my Virginia grandmother's plantation.

Gabe scowled and ran his hands over the back of the man's mule. It had
USA
branded on its back. "This is a fine-looking animal. Where'd you get it?"

"Miz Heather give it to me. And say to come here. She give me a message for y'all."

"What message?" from Gabe.

"She say that no matter what, I shud tell y'all that Mister Linkum done freed the slaves nigh over a year ago now."

"Did she now?" Gabe's voice was tight, forced in its casualness. "Well, to my knowledge my grandmother never had a mule with
USA
branded on its back. This mule is government property," Gabe told him.

"I came from Virginny," the old man insisted. "Miz Heather, she tell me..."

"Yes, yes, I know, that Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves. I'll tell you what, Uncle—" Then Gabe stopped and looked at us. "Go on into the house," he directed us. "Tell no one about this. I'll handle it."

We obeyed. I said nothing to Sis Goose about it. But she did to me. "Do you think he's right?" she asked.

"I don't know. I mean, we would have heard. If not us, then Gabe or Granville. I'm sure we would have heard."

And so I lied to my best friend, my sister, who trusted me. Because I
had
heard of this before. But both Gabe and Granville had ordered me not to speak of it.

The slaves free!
I could not think on it all at once. It assaulted my spirit. It gave lie to everything I knew in my life.

All Pa's people in the fields could put down their hoes and walk off if they wanted to. We'd never have another corn or cotton crop. The sweet potatoes and white potatoes and vegetables needing dirt banks to keep them safe from the winter would all be ruined. No more corn shuckings with banjo playing and cider. No one to repair the fences, see to the livestock. In the house, no one to
keep Mama's Chippendale furniture free of dust or polish the silver or make the beds. Who would do the laundry?

My mind gave way to hopelessness. And then I remembered what Granville had said the last time a man came to the barn like this. In June of '63, it had been, right before Gettysburg.

"You breathe a word of this and you'll start bloodshed in Texas," he warned me.

Granville liked to make dramatic statements like that.

"I could be free." Sis Goose stopped walking and looked at me. The news had come over her the same way.

"And what would you do?" I asked casually.

She lowered her eyes. Then looked at me almost flirtatiously. "I'd marry Gabe."

No, I couldn't take this, too. I drew in my breath. I'd noticed of late the way he served her at the table before he served himself. How he gave her the best cuts of meat. How he held out her chair. Was he just being a Southern gentleman?

He didn't do all that for me. With me he was brusque, moody. Gentle but sealed off.
Fool,
I told myself.
You should have seen it.

"Has he asked you?" I pushed.

"Yes. But I can't, unless I'm free. I told him yes, at the end of the war. He wants to marry now. Because he says then Aunt Sophie can't sell me. I'd be his wife. But I don't want to be like my mama, the colored wench of a white man."

She spoke fast. And I thought fast. I entered into a covenant with myself then, a promise to lie, even if it killed me. "Well, it's just a rumor. I'm sorry, Sis Goose. My brothers and my pa would know if it were true."

She accepted that. "You'd never lie to me," she said. "Remember, we're sisters."

T
HERE ARE,
as far as I can see, two kinds of lies in this world. There's the kind I tell Mama when she asks if I've been to see the hoodoo woman who lives on our plantation. And I say no. Though I have been. And now, like Sis Goose, I have a red flannel bag of my own that holds small animal bones, powdered snakeskin, horsehair, ashes, dried blood, and dirt from the graveyard. All to protect me from any evil I can imagine. And some that I can't.

Then there's the kind of lie you live when you enter into a devil's agreement with yourself never to disclose a certain fact for fear of the results if you do.

There are planters in our neck of the woods who believe so much in the lie that the slaves are not free that they will shoot or hang anybody who says otherwise. And that's what Gabriel knew would happen to Uncle Charley, the negro in the barn, if he were allowed to roam free telling his story. He'd be hanged or shot on the spot.

So Gabriel supplied him with food and money and clothing and sent him on his way, warning him to get out of Texas.

Some planters, like Isaac Coleman, across the valley, and Uncle Garland, husband to Aunt Sophie, would have called a meeting of all his slaves if someone like Uncle Charley showed up at their plantations. And told them it was an outrageous lie. The slaves were not free.

What did slaves on our plantation and other farms think of it all?

Oh, they knew about the war, all right. They called it "the freedom war." And they talked about it amongst themselves. What they would do if push came to shove and they really were free, nobody knew. Likely nothing. They didn't have the means to do anything. It was just easier to pick up the hoe in the morning and go into the fields. To have Massa dole out the weekly supply of corn-meal and sorghum. To be given your winter clothing and see to it that your cabin was chinked up for the cold weather and settle down to enjoy a supper of possum, cooked just the way you liked it.

True, here and there a slave couldn't wait for this freedom anymore. And it wasn't something they heard about from anybody. It was something that grew inside them, all the while they were hoeing or eating that possum. And they would run off, into the river bottoms or the canebrake or the woods, and somehow make their way across the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they would be free.

So far, none of our people have done that. Maybe because Pa treats them good. Maybe because where we are,
just east of Austin, Texas, it's many days' journey to the Rio Grande.

And not many strangers who could bring the news come here. Our plantation, called Dunwishin', provides us with everything we need, except what we used to import from England, of course. And all that has stopped with the Yankee blockade. Except for certain goods that Granville can smuggle through to us.

As of now, Mama and I and even my hoity-toity sister, Amelia, are back to wearing homespun for our daily tasks, like my grandmother, Pa's mother, wore when she came here. But thanks to Granville, Amelia's wedding dress was going to be silk. What deals he had to make to get that silk nobody has asked him.

So, even though we've been deprived of things like imported fabrics, leather goods for shoes, and coffee, we get along just fine, thank you. Without the outside world coming to our door and telling us that our negroes should be free.

All this in my favor, it still doesn't forgive the lie I had to tell Sis Goose. Because even though my mama still has papers saying Sis Goose is a slave owned by Aunt Sophie, even though her father was white riverboat captain Ashbel Smith and her mother was a black slave, she was raised free. Simply because Pa wanted it that way. And so she could be a sister to me.

The lie I had to tell her haunts me every day. And when she finds out, I don't know what mayhem it will
bring. Maybe she'll never speak to me again. Oh, I'll deserve her wrath, and when it comes I'm half ready for it.

What I find surprising, though, is that, being raised as free, it would bother her so much that the authorities still consider her a slave. I know that in the outside world she could be sold on the block. But this isn't the outside world. This is our home.

Here we can tell as many lies to each other as we need to and still be all right. The thing I don't understand about freedom is ... can they really take it away from you? And if, inside you, where it matters, you think you are free, doesn't that count for something? Does it have to be legislated to be real?

And then there is another question. How does my brother Gabe fit into this problem with Sis Goose? If he loves her, isn't his lie greater than mine?

I don't dare think of these things. They don't add up. I'd rather go into the pumpkin patch and count the pumpkins to be made into bread. They do add up, and you can't dispute the numbers.

M
AYBE IT'S
time now to tell how Sis Goose came to live with us. Maybe that will explain things better than anything.

The year was 1848, and Mama and Pa were living here at Dunwishin' with three children: Granville, who was eleven; Gabriel, ten; and Amelia, just nine. The plantation was thriving. Pa raised a goodly amount of sugarcane back then, but in April a killing frost finished off most of his corn crop. Still, he'd been selling cotton to England steadily, so by the time the war broke out he had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars waiting for him in English banks. Money he couldn't reach during the war. But he still had it.

That year of 1848, Sis Goose was born. But not to Mama.

That was the year Mama's younger sister, Sophie, came to Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico on a steamboat. She was to be married to a wealthy and important man who was the United States minister to England and France. Garland Prescott owned four plantations and four hundred slaves. Mama traveled with her personal girl, Melindy, south to meet Aunt Sophie, who was to stay at our place for two months until the circuit preacher came around to wed them.

Mama, with Melindy, was invited aboard the steamboat
Yellow Stone
for some festivities. On board was a negro woman named Molly, who'd just given birth to a little girl. Aunt Sophie had taken charge of the birth, as she was wont to do. But Molly was dying, and because Aunt Sophie was the only one on board who was really kind to Molly, that negro woman gave the baby to Aunt Sophie before she died.

Molly named her Rose. Her daddy, the captain, was Ashbel Smith, and he promptly signed the baby over to Aunt Sophie.

Her daddy called her Sis Goose.

He knew that by law the baby took her mother's condition of slavery. He knew the oral traditions of the South, too, his mammy having raised him on Brer Rabbit stories.

"As they say in the stories, in the Brer Rabbit tradition," he told Aunt Sophie, "she'll be jus' 'er common goose in de cotehouse when all de rest of de folks is foxes."

So she was called Sis Goose by everyone. And though we weren't all foxes in the courthouse, she was always regarded as a common goose by society.

She was a slave.

Aunt Sophie came to Dunwishin' with her, and Mama took over when Sis Goose cried in the middle of the
night, when she wailed out her miseries and her hunger. Mama appointed her a wet nurse from the quarters, and before long she fit into the scheme of things like a bale of cotton packed for market.

Meanwhile, Aunt Sophie was having dressmakers sew her silk and tulle gowns for when she had an audience with Queen Victoria on her wedding trip. By the time she and Uncle Garland were wed, that baby was Mama's. Sis Goose had eyes for no one else but Mama. She smiled only at Mama. She stopped crying only when Mama held her.

"You keep her, Luanne," Aunt Sophie told her. "When I'm settled, I'll come and fetch her home."