Freeman (39 page)

The thin Negro stopped well short of her, his hat in his hands, the space between them measuring the width of his deference. Prudence had given up explaining to Southern Negroes that she did not need or desire these tokens of submission with which they came into the presence of whiteness. The habit was too deeply ingrained for them to stop.

“Mornin’, Miss Prudence,” he said, speaking to the tops of his shoes. Then he glanced behind her. “Miss Bonnie not with you this mornin’?”

“She will be along shortly.”

Alex nodded and gave her his report, the gist of which was that the night had passed uneventfully. Then he bade her good day and slipped past her out the door. Prudence lit a lamp. It guided her to her desk at the front of the classroom where she sat down to begin grading papers. Soon enough the students would arrive and the long day would begin.

“Is it true? Did one of your niggers kill Georgie?”

Prudence jumped at the thin, reedy voice from her doorway. She lifted the lamp so she could get a better look. Its light fell upon a white boy with dark, unkempt hair and brown eyes round and suffused with sorrow.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“I asked you if your nigger killed Georgie.”

“Georgie? Who is that?”

“Georgie
Flowers
,” insisted the boy. “He shot big Jesse that day.”

Prudence came to her feet. “That boy is dead?” This brought a nod. “What happened to him?”

“Got beat up real bad,” said the boy. “Way I hear it, your niggers done it.”

“No.” Prudence came around the desk, the lamp held high so the boy could see her face. “
No
,” she repeated. “No one at my school would have done anything like that.”

“That ain’t what I hear,” said the boy. He took a cautious step inside, eyes traveling the walls. “This here is your school?”

“Yes,” Prudence heard herself say. Suddenly, her mind was spinning in a dozen different directions.

“Ain’t never been in no school,” he said.

“You could be in this one if you wished,” said Prudence. “We would be happy to teach you.” She knew her mistake before the echo of her words had faded.

“Me come here?” The boy laughed in scandalized disbelief. “With the
niggers
? No thank you, ma’am.”

“You know, I do not like that word,” said Prudence. The admonition had become a reflex.

The boy’s face was innocent as snow. “What word?”

“That word you use for the Negroes.”

“Niggers?”

“Yes, that one.”

He laughed. “Shucks, ma’am, that’s what everybody calls ’em. That’s what they call themselves.” He gave another cautious glance around the room. The tables and chairs were neatly arranged, the books were stacked just so, a map of the world adorned one wall. “You give ’em a nice school, an’ all, I’ll say that much for you.”

“Thank you,” said Prudence with an automatic politeness that felt ridiculous.

“You know,” said the boy, “Georgie ain’t meant no harm. He was just funnin’, is all. Weren’t no cause to kill him.”

“We
did not
kill him!” Prudence was surprised to hear herself yell.

The boy shrugged. “People say you did.”

“
Who
says?”

He looked at her. “Everybody.”

And a coldness shivered through her. The boy seemed not to notice. He shrugged and said, “Bye, ma’am,” but she was barely aware of his leaving. Prudence made her way back around her desk and fell heavily into her chair, stunned by the implications of that one pregnant word.

Everybody
.

She was still sitting when Bonnie arrived, 15 minutes later. Prudence looked up as her sister entered the room. “We have a problem,” she said.

Bonnie was silent as Prudence recounted the boy’s visit. She was silent for a long moment after. Then she sighed. “Paul said there would be trouble.”

“He did?”

“Yes, last night as he walked me home. He is leaving, you know. He asked me to go away with him. I was going to tell you.”

Prudence’s mouth opened and surprise fell out. After a moment she said, “Gracious. I knew he was smitten with you, but I had no idea. What did he say? What did you tell him?”

“He does not even know where he’s going, but he wants me to accompany him.”

“You told him no,” said Prudence, and it was less a question than a request to confirm what they both already knew.

“Perhaps I should have told him yes,” said Bonnie. “He said these people are scared and they do dreadful things when they are scared.”

“You do not think he exaggerates?” asked Prudence. She was, she knew, grasping for hope.

Bonnie gave her a level look. “Do you?”

There was a silence. Then Prudence asked, “What shall we do?” It struck her that she could not remember asking that question since she had first made plans to come to Buford.

Bonnie thought for a moment. Then she said, “The men. That is the provocation. We must get word to the men that they are to stay away for their own safety.”

“I shall do it,” Prudence said, coming to her feet, happy to have a course of action to follow. Forward. Always, forward.

Bonnie stopped her. “No,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“
I
shall do it,” said Bonnie. “You are something of a provocation yourself, sister. You stay here and watch over the school.”

Prudence wanted to disagree. It offended her to hide away like some dirty secret. But she knew Bonnie’s logic was sound.

“You’re right,” she said at last. “Devil take you, but you’re right. I will stay here. I will keep watch over the children.”

So it was Bonnie who, a minute later, slipped out of the old warehouse by the side door. The street was still quiet, the rising sun cutting long morning
shadows on the ground. She walked east where Main Street gave itself over to cotton fields. White flowers were blooming on the plants, petals fluttering gently, stirred by an early morning breeze. The fields seemed to extend themselves forever.

Bonnie tried not to think. She feared that if she allowed herself to consider their predicament, she would be paralyzed by terror. There was too much to contemplate. The boy, dead. The rumors, apparently flying. The simmering anger of white people who felt themselves willfully insulted, humiliated, robbed of their natural prerogatives. But of all that, nothing struck Bonnie so forcefully as a single, stunning realization:

Prudence was shaken.

She had tried to hide it, but she was. Bonnie had never seen her sister shaken, had never considered her shakable. And if Prudence was shaken, what should she herself feel, who lacked Prudence’s iron will? It was, thought Bonnie, a question best avoided, even in the private chambers of her mind. So she walked east through the cotton fields and, to the best of her ability, thought nothing.

It took her an hour and a half. She found Preacher Lee on his knees in a row of cotton plants, his hoe thrown down beside him as he wrestled weeds out of the soil by hand. She came up behind him and spoke without preamble. “Preacher,” she said, “we must talk.”

He whipped around, startled, shading his eyes. “Miss Bonnie?” he asked, confused.

“A white boy came to the school this morning,” she said. “He told Prudence that another white boy, the one who shot Jesse Washington in the arm, has turned up dead. He said the boy was beaten to death and there is a rumor going around the town that one of our guards did it.”

“What?” asked Preacher Lee, climbing slowly to his feet.

It was as if he couldn’t quite take it in. It made Bonnie impatient, though she knew she had no right to be. “Do you not understand?” she demanded. “There is a rumor in the town that our men killed this boy.”

“They wouldn’t do that.”

“Of course they would not.” Bonnie was finding it difficult not to snap at him.

“But if white folks think they did…” He didn’t finish. Preacher had finally arrived at the crux of the thing. Now he met her gaze, his eyes wide.

“We need to reach the men and tell them to stay away from the school.”

“I can’t leave,” said Preacher. The words seemed to shrink him.

“What do you mean?” demanded Bonnie.

“Marse Joe Hunsacker, he the man I work for. I signed the contract. I can’t just leave. He get the dogs on me. He send the law after me.”

“But the men must be warned!”

“Yes’m, but Marse Joe, he won’t like…”

“He is no longer your master!” Bonnie heard herself yelling, couldn’t make herself stop. “Do you not understand? There are no masters anymore. There are no slaves. You are a free man! You are
all
free men! That is the entire point!”

Preacher absorbed all this without response. His expression, thought Bonnie, was that of a man waiting out a storm. Which, perhaps, he was.

Nor did he bother to answer her tirade. Instead, when she was done, he said simply, “You gon’ have to warn them men yourself. I can tell you how to find them.” Feeling suddenly spent, Bonnie only nodded.

She spent the next four hours tramping through fields of cotton. She found the men on their knees like Preacher, or wielding hoes or sipping water from tin dippers or slopping hogs or mending fences, and it occurred to her how little the landscape of this place had been changed by the supposed new order of things. If you didn’t already know there were no more slaves, you wouldn’t know it by traveling these fields watching black men and women and children toting and hauling, stooping and bowing, and chopping cotton as they had, always.

To a man, the men expressed surprise. To a man, they all said they’d had nothing to do with the death of George Flowers, Jr.

“Why any us want to hurt that fool boy?” Jesse asked in his soft voice as she stood in the shade of him, looking up.

“I know you did not hurt him,” she said.

She begged him, as she begged all of them, to stay out of town, stay out of sight for the next week, at a minimum. To a man, they all asked if she and Prudence would be all right.

“We will be,” she said. “It is you all they want.”

“Did you know I fought for the Union?” Jesse had asked her as she turned to go.

“Beg your pardon?”

“Run away to Union lines when the soldier boys come through here. Ended up walkin’ north to Washington. When I heared they was gon’
raise a colored regiment, I made my mark on the paper and they sent me off to the war. I done my part, Miss Bonnie. But I swear, I thought things be different, after.”

She allowed herself the tiniest of smiles. “I suppose many of us did,” she said.

She turned again to go. “Miss Bonnie?”

Bonnie came back around. His eyes were serious and sober. “Yes?” she said.

“You
sure
you and Mrs. Kent be all right?”

“Yes,” she said with a certainty she did not feel.

It was close to noon when Bonnie came back in sight of the school. She was thirsty and staggering from fatigue, so it was a moment before she noticed the people standing across the street. When she finally registered them, her feet stopped moving and her heart stammered in her chest like an adolescent boy. There were seven of them, white men, standing there across from the big doors, talking together, watching.

All at once, Bonnie was not tired anymore. Exhaustion had been crowded out of her by panic. She gathered herself and walked forward. Their eyes tracked her. She felt the touch of them as surely as she would a hand on her arm. Their conversation reached her in bits and pieces.

“…heard that boy’s head was near tore off his shoulders…”

“…now you see what the Yankees have loosed on us…”

“…there go one of ’em now…”

“…nigger army…”

Bonnie didn’t stop at the school. She continued west down Main Street, still feeling the touch of eyes upon her, people pausing, talking, pointing.

Bo Wheaton was coming out of A.J. Socrates’s store as Bonnie approached it. He did not acknowledge her with so much as a glance. Bonnie found herself grateful to be ignored.