Freeman (15 page)

“But he was gettin’ away.”

“You damned fool! He ain’t had nowhere to go!”

“You know how much you get paid for a dead nigger, Zach? Nothin’, that’s what! Do you know how much money you just cost us?”

As they argued and cursed, the older one, the father, nudged his horse forward. He came up quietly behind Sam. “Time to go, Perseus,” he said.

Sam looked around. The sun was behind the white man on the big horse, casting them both in silhouette. “My son,” said Sam, helplessly. He could say no more.

“I know,” said the man, and his voice was oddly gentle, “but we can’t help that. We got to go.”

“They tied my hands,” Sam told Ben, “and made me walk behind the old man’s horse. They left my son lying right there in the woods. They did not even allow me to give him a burial.”

“That’s the way they do, ain’t it?” said Ben. “Once a nigger dead, he ain’t got no more value to ’em. Might as well leave him to rot in the woods.”

“It took two days to get back. They kept arguing with the one who shot Luke over how much money he had cost them. I remember, we came to this spring and they untied me so I could get a drink. Instead, I made a grab for the old man’s gun. I did not get two steps before one of his boys clubbed me upside the head with a gun butt and I fell into the water. I still have the scar. The boy said, ‘He was trying to kill you, Pa.’ And the old man said, ‘No. He would have used the gun on himself.’ He was right. I have felt that way a little bit ever since, I suppose.”

Ben spoke gently. “Sam, you can’t…”

“I killed my son,” said Sam.

And what could Ben say to that? After a moment, he got up and put more wood on the fire. It crackled and a thin plume of smoke rose. He sat down.

Sam said, “It was middle of the day when we got back to the quarter. The old man—Ames, was his name—went to the house to report to Mistress. The boys tied me straightaway to a tree. There were no whips on the place. Our mistress didn’t believe in whipping slaves. So one of the Ames boys had to go and get a whip off his horse. Couple of the others went and called all the slaves in from the field. After a moment, I heard Tilda crying, ‘Where’s my son? Where’s Luke?’

“She ran up to the tree where I was tied. ‘Where’s Luke?’ she asked me. ‘What happened to Luke?’ Before I could respond, one of the Ames boys snatched her away and threw her down to the ground. And I was glad of it, because it spared me from answering her. How do you tell a woman you have killed her son? How do you say that?”

A single tear overflowed his eye. He swatted at it impatiently.

“I know not how to say that,” he mumbled. “I was glad I did not have
to. Of course, she figured it out on her own when she could not find him. I heard her shrieking and crying behind me. I could not see her, though. I was unable to turn my head, so closely had they pressed me against the trunk of that tree. Then the Ames boys ripped off my shirt and started laying on the licks. And you know, I did not even feel it. I could not even tell you how many times they hit me. I know they hit me; I still bear the scars from that, too. But I had all the pain I could handle, just hearing Tilda cry.”

Another tear. Another impatient swipe.

“When they were done, they threw me in the pest house to heal up. They would not let anyone in there except an old blind woman, Mammy Sue. She tended my cuts as best she could. Once, I asked her how Tilda was doing. ‘Not good,’ she said. I said, ‘Would you tell Tilda something for me? Tell her I’m sorry.’”

Sam’s laugh was bitter as unripe fruit. “Are there any two words in the English language more useless than those?” he asked. “‘Sorrow makes us all children again.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson said that.”

“What
she
say?” asked Ben.

“I asked Mammy Sue the next day when she came in to apply the poultice to my back. She told me Tilda said nothing, not a word. She said it was as if she had spoken to the tree. As I said, the word is useless.”

‘Yeah, but wasn’t too much else you could say,” said Ben.

Sam looked at him. “As soon as I was feeling better, Mistress sold me. One day, she walked into the pest house; it was the first time I had seen her since they brought me back. She faced me with me a sorrowful countenance as if to express to me how profoundly I had disappointed her. She said, ‘Perseus, I never would have thought it of you.’”

“What you say?”

“I said nothing. What am I supposed to say to that? Then this white man entered behind her. He looked me up and down as though appraising a horse. He said to her, ‘Yes, he’ll do just fine.’ That was when I realized I was being sold.

“An hour later, I left there, tied in the back of his wagon. It rolled past the fields where the slaves were working, chopping cotton. Some of them stopped to look as I went by. Tilda never lifted her head, never even looked my way. I wanted to cry out to her, but it would have been useless, and besides, what could I say? I saw them telling her I was leaving, I watched them point toward me. She never stopped what she was doing.”

“Angry,” said Ben.

Sam nodded. “She had a right to be.”

“So why you going back?”

Sam pondered this a moment. Then he said, “I do not rightly know. I suppose I just feel there must be something more I should say, some word I can find that will be more meaningful than
sorry
.”

He pulled out his watch. It was getting late. “I am going to retire for the night,” he said. He found a likely spot and lay down on the thin spring grass, clasping his hands behind his head as a pillow. Ben did the same and after a moment, Sam heard the other man’s breathing grow steady and deep. Only then did he allow himself to weep. The tears fell silently, his body shaking. He covered his mouth with his hand, lest any sound escape.

Regret ate him like cancer. It gnawed at the very gut of him.

His son, his only child, the quick and lively boy who had looked like him and walked like him, even stood like him…and his Tilda, who had adored him and nurtured him, who had given shape and meaning to his days…why hadn’t that been enough? Wasn’t it more than many men had? Wasn’t it more than he even had a right to hope for? Why, then, had he risked it and ruined it? Why did he need all that, and freedom, too?

God, he had loved her.

Not just because she was beautiful, not just because her thighs were round and strong and her hair thick and long. No, he had loved her laughter. He had loved the quiet moment lying together on a mattress of corn shucks after a hard day, not speaking and not needing to. He had loved holding her hand and watching the rain from the front door of their cabin. He had loved watching her nurse their son, watching the boy tug greedily at her nipple while she gazed down on him with all the tenderness in the world. He had loved reading a book and handing it to her saying, “You should read this,” and then talking about it with her afterward. He had loved her.

He still did.

The knowledge of it brought tears rushing in fresh sheets of pain down his cheek. He wept in silence.

And it began to rain.

They left the steamboat at Memphis in the bright heart of the morning. After two days floating quietly down the sleeping river, they were jolted by the cacophony waiting at the end of the landing stage: whistles and curses, the bleat and squeal and mooing of livestock and the song of Negro stevedores, toting cargo onto and off of the ship. Prudence hired two wagons—one for them, one for crates that had been shipped ahead—and they set off traveling south. On the cusp of twilight they arrived in Buford, an ugly little town of mud streets and clapboard dwellings squatting toad-like against the eastern bank of the Mississippi.

This was where Bonnie was born. But Prudence saw no soft gleam of sentiment in her best friend’s eyes as she gazed about. No, Bonnie’s eyes weighed and judged and, finally, disdained. Something about it made Prudence sad. It was, she thought, as if Bonnie had somehow been separated from herself.

Overhead, a hawk circled lazily in search of a late-day meal. In the homely streets below, one barefoot white boy chased another, their steps landing like hammer blows on the wooden planks of the sidewalk. They barely managed to dodge around two pinch-faced white women who never even saw them, who stared up at the passing wagons with eyes demanding answers.

At the very end of town, just before Main Street surrendered itself to cotton fields, the driver brought the lead wagon to a stop. Time, sun, and rain had scraped most of the paint from its weary boards, but the warehouse
was still imposing, lording it over a row of tiny shotgun houses that cowered in its shadow. The warehouse was a remnant of prewar times, when there was commerce here. But commerce had long since died in this part of Buford. Across the street stood what had been a livery. Now boards were nailed across the door and the grass grew tall as a small child around it. Next to that, shadowed and abandoned, stood a stable and harness maker, next to that a cotton broker, next to that a tobacconist, all of them shuttered and abandoned.

Commerce was just a memory. Now this part of town belonged solely to the Negroes who, as if on some silent signal, came to their front doors, gathered in their meager yards, and converged on the two wagons. Curiosity burned in dark faces. No one spoke. Bonnie gazed down at them, eyes still weighing and judging. Prudence did not like that look.

She climbed down from the wagon without waiting for assistance and went to gaze up at the warehouse. It would do, she decided. Not that its fitness had ever really been in question. Her father had chosen it, after all. Still, it was good to see for herself.

Prudence turned, surprised to find the Negroes pressing closer. All she saw of them was eyes, patient, waiting.

She spoke with voice raised, looking from one to another to make sure she encompassed them all. “My name is Mrs. Prudence Cafferty Kent,” she said, “and I am from Boston.”

“Is that in the North?” A little boy gazed up at her from the shelter of his mother’s dress.

Prudence smiled. “Yes,” she said, “Boston is in the North. My father—my late father; he died last year—was a man named John Matthew Cafferty. Some of you may know him, or at least know of him. He owned a plantation south of town where there were no slaves. Before the war, it was his custom to travel down here once a year. He bought slaves, and even took some of them back to Boston, and set them free. That is Bonnie in the wagon,” she said, nodding. “Her mother was the first slave he bought.” They all turned to look. Bonnie’s gaze flickered and became unfocused for a moment. Then she gathered herself and stared resolutely forward.

“On his last trip down here,” Prudence continued, “my father bought this building. He knew the war was coming and he felt certain the North would win. But he was concerned that after the war, when you all were set free, the government would not provide you with opportunities to better
yourselves, to learn. So he intended this building to be a school for you all. As I say, my father did not live to see the end of the war, so we are here to carry on his dream. This will be the Campbell and Cafferty School for Freedmen. Miss Bonnie”—she caught herself, glanced at Bonnie, went on—“and I will be the teachers and it will be open to all who want to come.”

“Why you pappy do this for us? Out the goodness of his heart?” The man’s voice was a singsong of mockery, his chin was lifted, and his eyes were twin coals, smoldering in a deep, dark pit.

Someone else said. “Don’t talk like that ’bout Marse Cafferty. I knowed him. Took my brother with him one year to the North.”

Another voice said, “I knowed him, too. Worked on that place of his for a while, me and a bunch of others. Might’ve made a go of it, ’cept white folks wouldn’t sell us no supplies, nor leave us alone to farm in peace.”

Prudence leveled her gaze. “My father came to this country as a small boy from England. His mother died on the ship and when he disembarked in Boston, he was all alone. He might have died but for a colored man named Cyrus Campbell, who took him in. He was an escaped slave from right here in Buford and he took my father on as an apprentice. He had a business making furniture and years later, he made my father his partner. Father became a wealthy man and he always felt that he owed his life to Mr. Campbell. So when Mr. Campbell died, Father decided he would—”

There were white people in the crowd. It stopped her. She saw them all at once, two white men standing in the back, smirking at her. They were watching and wanted her to know. Prudence swallowed.

“When Mr. Campbell died,” she went on, “Father decided he would free slaves and build a school here in honor of the man who had saved his life.”

The angry man’s mouth twisted, but a general murmur of approval lifted from the crowd. Prudence glanced up at Bonnie, who gave her a nod and a tight smile of encouragement.