Freeman (30 page)

“I did,” she said.

He turned to show her a smirk. “I told him you would,” he said. “I bet Vern half a dollar you would. It’s too bad. Like I told you, you got sand for a Yankee. I can’t say much for your common sense, though.”

“Fortunately, your opinion does not matter to me.” Prudence spoke with an assurance she did not feel.

In silence, they rode back through town, past Miss Ginny’s and the school, out into the country. They passed a cotton field. It occurred to her that Charles Wheaton had been right about one thing, at least. In another few months, the field would be a blaze of white and she would have to close the school down for a few weeks to give the children and adults time to pick the crop.

Finally, Bo brought the wagon to a stop next to a little whitewashed building that sat alone in a clearing. He came around to help her down. “This here is their church,” he said, her hand resting in his. Then a sour smile bowed his lips. “Or I guess I should say it’s you-all’s church,” he corrected. “You’re pretty much a nigger yourself now, ain’t you?”

Prudence pulled her hand from his in disgust. “You are a truly despicable man,” she said.

He just laughed as he climbed back up on the wagon. “We are going to be friends someday, Mrs. Kent,” he told her. “You watch and see.” The wagon turned in a great clatter of wood and bridles and horse’s hooves and he rode off the way he had come.

When she was sure he had gone, Prudence pushed open the door of the church. Heads turned at the intrusion. Murmuring voices fell silent. Eyes studied her. It came upon her all at once, fell down on her from nowhere. Prudence had never felt so white. White with all whiteness’s burden of
privilege, and history of cruelty, showing on her lone face. White with the expectations of others piercing her bosom like arrows. It wasn’t simply that hers was the only white face in the room. That had happened before. She had spoken before abolitionist meetings, after all, and now she taught at a school for colored just a few miles away. But those things, she understood suddenly, had put her at the center of events. On those occasions, colored people came into her places, places she controlled.

This was the first time in her life—the realization came as something of a shock—
the first time in her life
, she had been alone with a mass of colored people in one of
their
places, where she was only a guest and controlled nothing. Prudence looked back into that sea of dark eyes, dark hair, dark skin, and felt heat rising in her cheeks. Though he had spoken crudely, Bo Wheaton had spoken truthfully in a way. She
had
cast her lot with them. And she had not understood until this very moment exactly what that meant.

It meant that she had thrown away prerogatives she had not quite realized she had, prerogatives she had always taken for granted, because they were as much a part of her as the skin on her face. This was what the Wheaton men, each in his own coarse way, had told her. And now, realizing the truth of it all at once, Prudence felt unmoored, felt as if she held herself to the earth only by sheer force of will. She searched the crowd for Miss Ginny and Bonnie, hoping the familiarity of their faces would keep her from floating away. She found them sitting near the front. Miss Ginny was smiling.

Bonnie did not smile. Her eyes were large and tentative, her mouth a grim line in the middle of her face. After a moment, she turned away. She held herself more erect than seemed absolutely necessary, her hands clasped together in her lap as if glued there. Prudence realized with a shock that Bonnie was feeling what she herself was: her own outcast singularity.

Bonnie was a Negro, but she had been raised in a white man’s home in the North. She had never known Southern Negroes, had never been alone with them in their places. In her outlook and her deportment, Bonnie was more like Prudence than them.

For some reason she could not name, Prudence found that vaguely distressing, but she did not have time to wonder about it. From the pulpit, Preacher Lee welcomed her with a smile. “Mrs. Kent, please come on up here,” he said. “We just been talkin’ about you.”

Mildly surprised to find that gravity still held her fast, she did as she was asked. She felt the touch of eyes upon her as she moved through them. Every eye except Bonnie’s. Bonnie stared resolutely ahead.

“We understands Marse Wheaton sent one of them boys to get you,” said Preacher Lee when she was standing next to him. “I expect he asked you to shut down the school you and Miss Bonnie there opened for colored.”

“Yes, he did,” said Prudence.

“And what you tell him?” The smile, broad and expectant.

“I told him no.”

She flinched at the cheer that went up then, sudden, lusty, and full. People slapped one another’s backs, clapped their hands, laughed uproariously. Preacher Lee let the sound wash over her for a full minute. Finally, he raised his hands and appealed for silence. As the last of the laughter was snuffing itself out, he said, “Did y’all hear that? She told him no.”

Amid general murmurs and cries of assent, he turned to her. “We was sayin’ before you arrived how grateful all us is for you and Miss Bonnie to come down here and start this school. Y’all ain’t had to do it. We know that. You could have stayed up there in Boston, comfortable and snug. But y’all come down here to see about us, come down here to
help
us, and we thank you for it. We thank
God
for it.”

There was another uproar. People shouted “Yes! Yes!” Some old woman moaned. It was a mournful, wordless sound. Prudence found Paul Cousins, sitting in the row behind Bonnie and Miss Ginny. His face reminded her of Colindy’s. It bore no expression, gave away no secrets. Prudence wondered idly how colored people could do that so easily, could command their feelings to hide.

After another minute, the preacher raised his hand. “We know them devils already been causin’ trouble for you. And we know the Yankee army refuse to help. I was with you when that happened. So here’s what we proposes to do, Miss Prudence, if you’ll let us.
We
gon’ post a guard at the school to protect it and to protect you and Miss Bonnie. We got it all worked out. We’ll set up shifts so somebody’s always down there, every night, watchin’ out for them rascals. All you got to do is give us the word.”

Instinctively, she looked toward Bonnie. The warning in her best friend’s eyes was clear as water. Don’t do this, the warning said. It might be dangerous.

But Bonnie had not felt that creature’s hand mashing at her breast. She had not gone for help and been turned away with a self-righteous smirk, as if she were the cause of her own troubles. She had not met Colindy or seen the look in her eyes. And she had not sat on that porch overlooking the Mississippi River and heard that bitter old man say that the natural order of things was for him to be on top and to keep his foot on the necks of people like Miss Ginny and Paul and Bonnie herself.

She met Preacher Lee’s eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I consider that a most excellent idea.”

“Surprised you’re still here. I thought you’d have run off like the rest of ’em.” Marse Jim says this as he accepts a bowl of soup from her hand. He is on Mrs. Lindley’s couch. It is the first time in ten days he has been able to sit up under his own power.

She wonders what she is expected to say. “No, Marse,” she tells him. “Ain’t run off.” Confirming the obvious, adding nothing.

He works his tongue around inside his mouth like he’s chasing a piece of gristle, his eyes speculating. “Can see that,” he says. “Just surprised is all. Those others, they’d have been in the wind a long time ago, knowing I was down and can’t do nothin’ about it.”

He eats some more, spooning soup into his mouth quickly, loudly. Flecks of chicken dot the unruly tangle of his beard. She stands there, waiting for him. He finishes quickly, reaches the bowl out. When she tries to take it, he holds it a moment extra, so that for just that second, both their hands are on it. He looks at her. “I guess every nigger ain’t treacherous after all,” he says. And releases the bowl.

It is supposed to be a compliment, she knows. “Yes, Marse,” she says. “I expect not.”

They set out again two mornings later when he judges his strength has fully returned. “Want to thank you for taking care of me,” he tells Agnes Lindley. “Don’t know what would have come of me if you hadn’t been there.” He is soiled and unshaven and Tilda wonders if Mrs. Lindley will ever get the smell of him out of her couch.

But Agnes Lindley gazes upon him as adoringly as a young girl in first love and clasps both his rough hands in her tiny ones. “It was the least I could do,” she says, “for someone who fought for our nation.”

His eyes crinkle. “Yes,” he says in a strange, hoarse voice, “we did have ourselves a nation, didn’t we?”

They stand there a long moment like some grotesque parody of courtship. Then he nods, as if wakening himself from a dream. “Well,” he says, and he pulls his hands back. “Thank you.”

Awkwardly, he doffs the hat she has given him—it belonged to her late husband, she says—and motions toward Tilda. Tilda crosses the threshold behind him—she tries not to remember the humiliation of standing on that spot, unable to do so simple a thing as take a step—and walks down into the day. The air feels like steam and it is not yet eight in the morning.

The sun on their backs, they walk to where the town ends. Then they walk into the fields beyond. An occasional wagon prattles past. Hours go by.

“Yeah, most niggers would have run.” Out of nowhere, Marse Jim picks up a two-day old conversation.

She knows what he wants. He wants the why, the reason. But how can she give him what she doesn’t have?

No, that isn’t true. She does know the reason, but it humiliates her too much for speaking. She has become some weak and beaten-down thing, unable to imagine herself in any other life, unable to imagine herself free. Worse, she has become the hateful thing he always calls her, always calls every colored man or woman. He has beaten
nigger
into her, hammered it deep into the soft tissues of her very soul. And she doesn’t know if she will ever get it out.

All at once, she is aware of him looking back at her, waiting for an answer. “Didn’t want to leave you like that,” she manages.

Scorn edges his voice. “You care about me,” he says.

“You’re my master,” she says.

He appears to consider this for a moment. Then he turns back. “It’s a good thing you didn’t run,” he rumbles. “Good thing for you. ’Cause I’d have found you, two weeks head start or not. I’d have found you and I’d have done to you like I done them other two.” He pauses and when he continues, his voice is smaller, as if he is speaking to himself as much as to her. “Wouldn’t want to do that,” he says. “You deserve better than what they got. You been faithful. More’n you can say for most, white nor black.”

It is, she knows, another intended compliment. She wonders if he knows how much his compliments make her hate herself. But of course, he has no idea. “Yes, Marse,” she says.

He doesn’t speak again. They spend the morning traversing fields of cotton and corn. Shortly after noon they stop in the shade of a tree and he breaks out some of the cold chicken and boiled eggs Mrs. Lindley has packed for them. He passes her the canteen full of water the widow has given them—for some odd reason Tilda has never understood, Marse Jim doesn’t mind drinking after Negroes—but she mishandles it and it falls, spilling water into the dirt. She snatches it up. He glares at her and instinct winces her eyes closed against the coming blow, the only question being whether his hand will be fisted or not.

But he doesn’t strike her. “Don’t be so damn clumsy,” he snarls.

She opens first one eye and then the other. This, she realizes all at once, is her reward for the humiliation of staying with him. To anger him and be cursed for it, but not hit. It is a small gift, but it is a gift nonetheless and she resolves to appreciate it. When life gives you little to be grateful for, you cherish the little.

“Yes, Marse,” she says. He gives her a reproachful look as if reconsidering the mercy. She drinks from the canteen, thankful it gives her something to hide behind. He snatches it from her before she is done.

For the remainder of the day, the space between them is filled with silence. The walk is punishing, the June sun pounding down on them like retribution. Hours later, when their shadows drag long behind them, they are lucky enough to find a farmer who allows them use of the hay loft in his stable. Marse Jim breaks out the last of the chicken and boiled eggs—tomorrow, they will be back to begging and foraging, she supposes—and they have supper in the fading light of another lost day. When she is done eating, she lies back upon the straw, massaging a knot of pain in her right calf. A sigh slips out of her.

“Are you tired?” he asks.

She could not be more surprised if he had sprouted wings and circled the barn. “Yes,” she says.