Freeman (59 page)

Bonnie tried to hug her. “Oh, Prudence, thank you. I do not know what would have become of me had you not been there.”

Prudence shoved her off. She raised a stiff index finger to Bonnie’s hurt and disbelieving face. “You must never let them see you cry,” she said. “
Never
let them see you cry.”

And now, here she was, 15 years later, sitting at her sister’s grave, crying. You could never tell where life would deliver you.

Time passed. Finally, when she knew she could avoid it no longer, Prudence rose. It was time to rejoin the day. One last time, her hand tarried on the stone marker beneath which Bonnie lay. Prudence pursed her lips, done crying for now.

“Farewell, sister,” she said. And she walked away.

A stone path took her around the side of the little church to the yard in front where her phaeton was parked. Her driver, a rangy Negro boy of perhaps 17 named Curtis, was chatting with Preacher Lee. They stopped when they heard her coming. Preacher Lee, holding his pipe by the bowl, approached her. His smile was solicitous. “Are you all right, Mrs. Kent?” he asked.

“About as well as can be expected,” she told him.

“I understands that,” he said. “Ain’ never easy, losin’ a loved one.” Pause. Then he said, “You know, I’ve heard some say you feel guilty for all that happened here. The riot and such, I mean. Is that true?”

She looked at him. “I suppose it is,” she said. “Were it not for me, none of it would have happened.”

He shook his balding head. “Uh-uh,” he said. “You can’t feel that way, Mrs. Kent. I can’t let you. After all, weren’t you had the idea of puttin’ them mens in that school. If you remember, it was
me
.”

It had been. Somehow, she had forgotten. “Well, yes,” she began, “but—”

Another emphatic shake of the head. “No ‘buts,’ Miss. It was
my
idea. I’m the one give it to you. If anybody guilty for what happened, I expect
it’s me. And believe me, I done spent a many a night walkin’ the floor and talkin’ to Jesus about that. Expect I still got a few more to go. If it weren’t for me, whole lot of trouble be avoided, whole lot of good people still be alive, startin’ with your friend.”

“You cannot take that all upon yourself,” she said.

There was sad wisdom in his eyes. “Oh, but it be all right for you?” he said.

She didn’t know what to say. She said nothing.

“Here’s what I think,” said Preacher Lee. “Maybe if we got to blame somebody, we ought to blame them what set fire to people’s homes and hanged them in trees. That’s who I think we need to blame, the same ones who even now pressin’ forward to stir up more wickedness.”

“You refer to the new ordinance.”

“Yes, ma’am. They passed it last night, way I hear.”

“It is a ridiculous law,” said Prudence. “The provost will never suffer it to stand.”

Preacher Lee shrugged. “He might. He might not. But here’s the thing, Miss: what it tell you they even pass a law like that?”

“I do not understand,” said Prudence.

“Well,” he said, “think about it. Seem to me if I done been in a war and my side give out, I be bound to do what them who won the war want me to. Can’t have my own way about things, ’cause I’se on the losin’ side. Seem to me that’s the natural way of things. But these rebs…” He shook his head.

“They seem not to realize they are the ones who were defeated, do they?”

“That’s it exactly,” said Preacher Lee. “Way they sees it, they just got beat. Ain’t the same as bein’ defeated.” There was no amusement in his laugh. At length, he put the stem of the pipe in his teeth and gave a meditative pull. The boy, Curtis, watched them in big-eyed silence.

“Well,” said Prudence, “as you know, I do not intend to allow them to get away with it.”

“I knows about your plan,” said Preacher Lee. “But it don’t really change things, do it?”

“What do you mean?”

He allowed a puff of smoke to drift out of his mouth. “If you pull this thing off, it might teach this town a lesson sure ’nough, help the colored here in Buford. But ain’t gon’ do nothin’ for the next town over or the town after that or the town after that.”

Prudence was stung. “I cannot fix all of Dixie, Preacher. I am doing the best I can.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kent,” he said. “Didn’t mean to sound like I was findin’ fault. You doin’ the Lord’s work. All I’m sayin’ is, it gon’ take more than that to cure what ails these rebs. They can’t get it out they minds, can’t get it out they
hearts
, that they’s the ones God put here to rule over his dominion. If the Union Army couldn’t get that out they heads, what you doin’ ain’t gon’ change it.”

“I am under no illusions about that,” said Prudence. “But I am not trying to change them. I’m trying to pay them back.”

“‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ That’s in the book.”

“I know,” said Prudence. “And I know it is unseemly. But if what I am doing inflicts a little discomfort on the lordly white masters of this town, I cannot say that I will lose any sleep over it.”

He gave her a puckish smile. “Can’t say I will neither.” He drew on his pipe and did not speak for a moment, regarding her by the fading light of that mischievous grin. After a moment, the smile had burned itself out and he said, “You got a good heart, Mrs. Kent.”

She felt herself blushing. “I do not know about that,” she said.

“I do,” he assured her.

Prudence was moved. She held out her hand. He grasped it lightly in his own. “You have a pretty good heart yourself, Preacher,” she said.

He braced her as she climbed onto the phaeton. “Goodbye, Mrs. Kent,” he said. “I’ll see you soon.”

She bade him farewell. Curtis turned the wagon back onto the dirt road that fronted the church and headed for Buford. In her mind, Prudence went wearily down a list of things yet to be done, even as her deadline ticked toward zero. She would make it, she promised herself. She had no alternative.

Twisting around in her seat, she watched the tiny church growing smaller, Preacher Lee turning to go back inside. And behind the humble building, the neat row of tombstones, 12 in all, names and dates carved deep to recall this story for generations not yet born.

Farewell, sister
.

She turned in her seat, facing resolutely forward, and did not look back again.

Sam hitched Bucephalus to a railing outside the offices of
The Freedman’s Voice
, which was housed in a little clapboard building where it shared walls with a general store on the one side and a law office on the other. He automatically put a kerchief to his nose; on the next block was a tannery whose stench hung over the entire area like a cloud. Through the paper’s front window, he spied the man he was looking for: A.L. Jones, the publisher, sitting at his desk, poring over copy.

Abraham Lincoln Jones—until Emancipation, he had been just Isiah Jones—was an energetic young colored man with a wide, friendly smile, which he lifted toward the door now, as the tinkling of a bell fixed to the frame alerted him to Sam’s entrance. Sam had come to like Jones in the week of their acquaintance. His naÏve optimism reminded Sam of the man he himself had once been.

“Good morning, Sam,” the younger man said.

“Morning, Abraham,” said Sam. “Is there news?” He knew there wasn’t, even before he asked. He had come here once a day now for seven days straight, ever since he placed the notice in the paper. Abraham knew how much finding Tilda meant to Sam. If there was news, he would have said it before Sam even opened his mouth.

Sure enough, a grimace curdled Abraham’s affable features. “Afraid not,” he said.

Sam nodded, stoic. Then the fatigue overtook him and he sighed. “Is there ever news?” he said.

“I don’t understand.”

“Of all the people who place notices in your paper, are any of them ever successful?”

“Occasionally,” said Abraham, coming out from behind his desk. “Not very often. But what other choice is there? A small chance is better than no chance at all.”

“You’re right, I suppose,” said Sam, feeling older than his very bones, “but I can no longer sit around Little Rock waiting.”

“Where will you go?”

“I am not sure. I suppose I will go West.”

“What should I do if we hear word?”

“I doubt that will happen,” said Sam, “but if you do, I would appreciate it if you would wire a Mary Cuthbert through the Library Company of Philadelphia. I will write her to let her know I have taken the liberty of giving you her name and that I shall be checking in with her every month or so.”

“You won’t give up?” asked Jones, scratching the information down on a pad.

Sam shrugged. “I wish I could.”

Abraham offered his hand. “I wish you good luck, then.”

The handshake was warm. “Thank you,” said Sam. “I wish you the same.”

The bell on the door chimed again as Sam passed back through. Abraham felt a rare stab of melancholy as he watched his new friend lever himself laboriously up into the saddle, lift the special reins, and turn his horse west. He had a great hope for the future, did Abraham Lincoln Jones. It was why, when the Yankees took Little Rock, he used the money he had been saving to buy himself free to start the paper instead. He had an expectation that with shackles struck away, colored men would startle the world, achieve stupendous things, rise to heights scarcely dreamt during the time of bondage. It would happen with stunning speed, he believed, well within his lifetime. And he was determined to be part of it.

But all too often, his dream collided with a reality such as this, a good man wounded deep in his soul, doomed to spend the rest of his life locked into a quest that could not help but end in failure. How, Abraham wondered, could colored men achieve those stupendous things, rise to those heights scarcely dreamt, when slavery had left so many scars upon them?
Sam Freeman was an intelligent man with the potential for greatness. But that potential would never be realized because Sam had only one consuming passion: to get back what he had lost.

Abraham sighed.
Not all chains are visible
, he thought.

He was returning to his desk when the bell over the door chimed again. He looked up, already smiling, and found himself facing a colored woman. She was meanly clothed in a faded old dress. Sweat shone on her brow from some unknown exertion and her eyes were round with some unknown fear. “Can I help you, Miss?” he said.

She didn’t speak. She looked around wildly, sweeping the tiny office with those panicky eyes. He had the impression of an animal in a cage. “Miss…?”

“There was a notice about me in the paper,” she blurted finally.

“A notice?”

“It said Sam was looking for me. My name is Tilda.”

He jerked to his feet like a puppet yanked by its master’s strings. A moment. A moment to disbelieve, a moment to grasp for words, a moment to realize. And then Abraham Lincoln Jones was flying past the startled woman, through the door, racing down the mud-rutted street, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Sam thought he heard his name being yelled. He reined his horse and twisted around. To his surprise, Abraham was running full tilt after him. Sam tried to imagine what could be wrong, what dire thing could have sent the young man hurtling down the street so madly. When his friend reached him, Sam said, “What is it? What is wrong?”

Abraham tried to speak, but his voice came out of him in a gusty, indecipherable wheeze. He doubled over, hands on his knees, mouth hanging open like a fish, spittle dripping off in a long chain.

Alarmed, Sam said, “Abraham, are you all right?”

Still unable to speak, Abraham pointed in reply, his finger stabbing back toward the newspaper office. Mystified, Sam looked. He saw nothing. The tannery men in their rough jeans, going to work. The lawyer, waddling off in search of lunch. A wagon rolling away, muck flying from its wheels. A boy and his father walking together, talking animatedly. A woman standing in front of the newspaper office gazing their way. Nothing.

No, not nothing. A woman.

Sam squinted. He turned the horse.

A woman. Hard to make out at this distance, but she could have been, could almost have been… He urged the horse forward a couple of steps, stopped again.

He had grown so used to thinking of her as something remembered, something dreamt, and hoped, but not something real, something tangible and flesh. So he stared at her with the purposeful scrutiny you give a mirage. But she didn’t waver like a trick of the heat. She was real. And yes, she looked like, she could have been, could almost have been…