Freeman (32 page)

One of the men walks in balancing three bowls of some dark stew. The smell of it makes Tilda’s stomach clench like a fist inside her as he sets one each before Moody, Virgil and Marse Jim, who seems not to notice. “Colonel, I’d be honored if you’d let me join you.” His voice is grave and low.

Moody smiles at Marse Jim’s earnestness. “We’re glad to have you,” he says, clapping Marse Jim on the shoulder. “Welcome.”

Marse Jim looks as if he might cry. The boy speaks around a mouthful of stew. “What about her?” he asks. He is nodding toward Tilda. She snatches her eyes away as if they had touched something hot.

“What
about
her?” she hears Marse Jim ask.

“You trust her?”

Marse Jim chuckles. “Don’t trust a one of ’em,” he says. “But she won’t do nothin’. I was laid up ten days, flat on my back in some little town east of here. She could have run off any time, but she didn’t.”

“She’s loyal, then,” says the colonel.

She stares at the floor. She can feel their eyes appraising her, feel it as surely as a touch grazing her skin. Marse Jim says, “Yes, I suppose.”

“Good,” says the colonel. “We’ve got a nigger woman who does the cooking and sewing and like that. This one can help. She any good at that sort of thing?”

“Mostly she been a field nigger,” says Marse Jim, “but she’ll learn.”

Hearing her labor promised, hearing her loyalty vouched, she feels a hatred for her very self spreading like warm poison from the center of her
body. Why didn’t she leave? Why couldn’t she make her foot cross that threshold? But she knows the answer. She is not the woman she used to be before Marse Jim, before the war. That woman was brave. She was sassy sometimes and impertinent with a mistress who found those traits amusing. Then she was sold. And this man began to hit her. And he knocked the sass and impertinence right out of her, made her this shameful thing she has become.

The boy is watching her closely. “She ain’t half bad-looking,” he says.

Marse Jim glances over without much interest. “I suppose she ain’t,” he says. “I guess I stopped noticing things like that so much after my wife died.”

“Never had a wife,” says the boy. “Don’t get to see too many women, living as we do. You wouldn’t mind if me, maybe some of the boys, gave her a tumble every now and again, would you?”

He is giving her an easy smile as he speaks. She swears she can feel her heart grind to a stop, her blood stand still as midnight in her veins.

Oh, please
.

Oh please, God, no
.

I have been through so much already
.

Marse Jim’s head comes around and he looks at her with more interest this time, stares at her for one heartbeat, then two. She can hear him, lying in the gathering darkness of a farmer’s loft, asking if she is tired. She can remember herself thinking, you don’t ask a chair if it is tired. She moves her head from side to side, a small motion and she does it just once, hoping he will see, hoping he will have mercy and spare her. She has been loyal. He said so himself. Doesn’t that count for something?

Marse Jim grins, but his eyes are dead like fish. “Sure,” he says, “you want to give her a ride sometime, you go right ahead.”

So now her labor has been promised and her body has, too. And she curses the sliver of hope she allowed to bloom in her that night in the loft. Because she knows now, knows with a crushing certainty, that it was but the cruelest of lies.

She is not a person, only a thing.

She will never be anything more.

Jesse Washington stood at the side door, bidding good night to the evening class as another long day at the Cafferty School for Freedmen drew to a close.

He was a behemoth, well over six feet, with hands so large that Bonnie, watching from the stairwell just inside the door, thought he could probably pick up a watermelon in each. But the softness of his smile and the bashfulness of his demeanor belied his fearsome size. When the old women kissed his cheek or the men shook his hand on the way out the door, he touched them in response—a pat on the back, a hand on a shoulder—with porcelain caution, as if afraid they might break if he were not careful. Jesse was, she thought, a giant who had spent his life learning to tiptoe in a Lilliputian world.

Most of those who had volunteered to guard the school against vandals were old men with gray beards and baggy skin. This was to be expected, she supposed; younger men would need to work to support their families and would not have the time. But Jesse was the exception. He was the youngest of seven brothers, each as large as he was if not larger, and his family, hoeing cotton on a plantation north of town, had decided it could spare him a few nights a week to help protect the school.

He stood now, towering over the evening class adults, some of them hunched and toothless, who filed past him after another two hours bent low over books of reading and mathematics. Bonnie always found it a poignant sight, these elders struggling so mightily to learn enough that they might
read a favored passage of the Bible for themselves, or simply sign their own names, and finally seize for themselves some fleeting scraps of human dignity from lives that had offered them so little.

Miss Ginny was the last to leave. Bonnie watched as she squeezed Prudence’s arm affectionately. “You comin’, sweetie?” she asked.

Sweetie
. The old woman was fond of both of them, Bonnie knew, but for some reason, she had a particular attachment to Prudence.

“I will be along momentarily,” Prudence said.

“Don’t be too long now,” said Miss Ginny. “And if it be dark when you leave, you get Jesse there to walk you.”

“I shall be fine,” Prudence assured. “He should walk you, if anybody.”

Miss Ginny made a show of rolling her eyes and pursing her lips and they all laughed. As the door closed behind her, Jesse gave Prudence one of those humble smiles and aimed his eyes not quite at her. “Be happy to walk you if you want me to, ma’am.”

“Now Jesse,” said Prudence, “you know I hardly require protection from the ruffians of this town. Of course, if you should feel the need to protect them from me…”

She allowed the thought to dangle there playfully. Prudence loved to tease the big, soft-spoken man and sure enough, he ducked his head and began to stammer.

“Oh, no, ma’am, I… I don’t…”

They laughed at his discomfort, but Bonnie could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that they were enjoying themselves at his expense. She was about to apologize, about to tell Prudence to leave the young man alone, when he stiffened all at once, his head coming up sharply like a hound that has caught a scent.

“I heard something,” he said.

“What did you hear?” Prudence was still laughing.

But he did not answer. Instead, Jesse disappeared from the doorway. Bonnie looked at Prudence, saw her own confusion reflected in her friend’s face. Together, they followed Jesse out the side door.

Bonnie recognized the four white boys at once. They were the same ones who had blocked the sidewalk the day she, Prudence, and Paul walked to the other end of Main Street to buy rice. Now they stood confronting Jesse in the alley behind the building. The one with the dirty blonde hair was
holding himself conspicuously erect, trying to make himself taller than he was. Still, his chin came up only to Jesse’s chest.

“I ain’t scared of you, nigger,” he declared. His voice, splintering like rotted wood, suggested otherwise.

There was nothing bashful in Jesse’s eyes now. They were narrowed and hard, watching out of the fortress his face had become as he loomed over the boys like a mountain. “Done asked you,” he said, in a stiff tone that somehow managed to offer both respect and threat, “what y’all doin’ ’round back here?”

“Ain’t got to explain nothin’ to you, nigger!” cried the boy in that same cracked voice. “It’s still a free country, ain’t it? Yankees ain’t took that from us, did they?” He looked around at his companions for support. “We can still walk where we want to walk, can’t we?”

Jesse nodded his head toward the boy’s right hand and Bonnie realized for the first time that he was carrying a pail. “Y’all always go walkin’ around with a bucket of whitewash?” he asked.

“Told you I ain’t got to answer no questions from you, boy,” snapped the boy.

“Come on, George. Let’s get out of here.” One of the other boys had a hand on his friend’s upper arm. His eyes were sizing up the situation and not liking what he saw.

“We got a right to walk where we want to!” insisted George, his voice careening toward falsetto.

A third boy said, “Fine.
I’m
going to walk somewhere else. You do what you want.” He was looking up at Jesse as he spoke.

“Are you all cowards?” demanded the boy named George.

But two of them were already gone. He stared at the fourth boy, who took Jesse in with one round-eyed stare, then shrugged at his friend and trotted to catch up with the other two.

Alone now, George stared up at Jesse. People had come into the alley, drawn by the noise of the confrontation. The woman who lived in the house on the other side of the alley stood in her yard next to a chicken coop, drying her hands on a towel. George gulped. He drew himself up. “Fine then,” he announced in a voice much too loud. “You want us to go? We’ll go. But this ain’t over, not by a long shot. You mark my words.”

He had been backing away. “Mister George?” Jesse spoke in a cool voice and the boy stopped with almost comical obedience.

“What?”

“Why don’t you leave the pail here?”

It sounded like a request, but it wasn’t, Bonnie knew. The boy did, too. He let the bucket down carefully, his humiliation complete. He gave Jesse Washington one more long look. Then he wheeled and ran to catch up with his friends.

Immediately, the alley was filled with laughter and applause. Men patted Jesse’s broad back.

“Look at that rascal go!” someone said. “He ain’t gon’ stop til he reach the river.”

“Might not stop then,” someone else said, and the laughter renewed itself. “Might not stop til he halfway through Arkansas.”

“Good job, Jesse,” a woman said.

Jesse lowered his eyes, smiling his embarrassment. “Aw, I ain’t done nothin’,” he said. “Weren’t nothin’ but a boy. Scared boy at that.”

“I know his family,” said Paul. He had come up behind Bonnie without her realizing. “They not too bad for white. I talk to his pappy tomorrow if you like.”

Prudence said, “I would like that very much, Paul. Please see to it.” She gave Bonnie a meaningful look. They had quarreled over the wisdom of setting up a guard at the school. Prudence felt vindicated now, Bonnie knew. If Jesse hadn’t been here, there was no telling what mischief the boy would have accomplished.

Bonnie couldn’t deny that. But she still felt a faint unease bubbling up from the very center of her. She could not place it, but she couldn’t deny it, either. Bonnie touched Paul’s arm. “Come,” she said, “let’s go read.” She said this softly, for his ears only; he would not want the crowd in the alley to know she had been teaching him privately for weeks.

Together, they slipped away from the knot of people still laughing and congratulating Jesse Washington. She was aware of Prudence’s eyes upon them, watching them go.

“What’s wrong?” asked Paul, as they climbed the stairs to the loft where Bonnie and Prudence had their office.

“Nothing is wrong,” she told him.

She felt him smile behind her. “Bonnie, you need to tell that lie to someone don’t know you. You might fool them, but you don’t fool me. You still worried ’bout havin’ them guards in here.”

“‘Those’ guards,” said Bonnie. “‘Them’ is incorrect.”

“Don’t change the subject,” he said.

She turned on him. “What do you want me to say? Of course I am worried. But what can I do?” She stood on the landing. He was a step below, looking up at her, his eyes full of sudden gravity.

“You can talk to her,” he said. “Tell her you think puttin’ a guard in here make things worse. It’s like askin’ for trouble.”

“You think I do not know that?” she snapped. But the anger wouldn’t hold. It passed like an April storm. “Oh, Paul, I’m sorry,” she said. “The truth is, I do not even know what I think. Part of me is happy to see us standing up for ourselves. But another part is fearful of where that’s going to lead.”