Jordan County (31 page)

Then she died too, and the house was razed, the grounds converted into a public park. Two years ago a man came down from Memphis, an art critic, or so he called himself, a columnist from one of the papers; he had heard about the maps. They got them out of the cupola for him and dusted them off, the multi-colored one-to-one-hundred representations of people going about their joys and griefs, seen on the streets of Bristol from above. He called his column “The Last Romantic” and spoke of Hector Sturgis as an undiscovered genius. There was a revival of interest in the maps; they stayed on display in the foyer again for a while. But then it faded, even faster than before, and they were put away. Maybe the man was just wanting to fill a column. Certainly they are romantic in a different way from our current ‘tough-minded’ brand of that endemic sickness. Perhaps when their true time comes, if it does come, they will be brought down to stay.

At any rate, nowadays when people ride past Wingate Park, where children and nursemaids stroll in the dappled shade, the name on the wrought-iron arch means almost nothing to them. They just remember that the park was donated by an old woman who died with no one to leave her money to. From time to time, however, they are reminded who she was by the story in the newspaper, revived by the editor at the request of
the Chamber of Commerce, anxious to show how much the town has grown. The engraving is always there, the old lady in the wheelchair, her eyes like agates set into the sockets of a skull, and the caption always calls her the mother of Bristol.

You ask about that old time. It aint nothing I cant tell you. Kluxers, smut ballots, whipping-bees, all that: I’m in a position to know and I remember, mainly on account of my mamma. That woman loved freedom like nothing ever was. She was the daughter of a free man, a barber, and when she married my daddy it like to killed him — the barber I mean. A barber had a position in those days; the shop was kind of a gathering place where the white men would sit around and talk, so he knew all the business deals and the scandal, who-all was messing with who-all’s wives, and so forth. When he got the news his only child had up and married, he butted his head against the wall, kicked at the baseboard so hard he lamed himself in the foot for a week, and threw two of his best porcelain shaving mugs clean across the shop. My daddy you see was a slave from the beginning, and he had looked a good deal higher for her than that. I’m still talking about the barber, but the fact was I didnt know him. He died of a sudden seizure around the time I was born, five months after the wedding. He just thought she’d been putting on weight, when all the time it was me.

He should have known better how to handle her. Ever since
she was a little girl, if you wanted her to have something, even medicine, no matter how bitter-tasting it might be, all you had to do was act like you were going to keep it from her. I know, for Ive got children of my own, including one marriageable daughter, and I wouldnt cross her for the world. Then, too, he had a lot of blood-pride — claimed we had African chiefs somewhere in the background. But I dont know; I never put much stock in all that talk. You used to hear lots of such claims among the colored. If it wasnt chiefs it was French blood. Maybe we caught it from the white folks. Anyhow, he certainly didnt want the son-in-law he got.

You see, my daddy was a kind of artist, high-strung and determined. He belonged at one time to a rich lady, a widow; she gave him his freedom in her will when she died. Maybe she sort of spoiled him. Anyhow he always wore a black silk tie under a soft collar and kept his hands smooth. He was a photographer, had his tent right down by the levee at the foot of Marshall Avenue, and country people theyd get their picture taken every time they came to town with twenty cents. Whatever else Mamma’s daddy wanted, he certainly didnt want any twenty-cent artist.

But that was what he got, all right, and he butted his head and took it. What else could he do? That was during the war; I was born the day after Vicksburg fell on the Fourth. I dont remember the war, howsomever, though sometimes I think I do. The first I remember, really, was afterwards — what I’m telling now. The surrender was some time back and I was maybe six or seven. My daddy didnt come home one night. Then next morning here he came, with a lump beside one eye. “Where you been?” Mamma asked him, hands on hips, eyes blazing. She was worried and angry too. But he just stood there in the doorway, kind of weavy on his feet. So she got the camphor bottle off the shelf and some cotton and began to swab at the lump. The camphor fumes helped to clear his mind, and while she swabbed he told her.

“I’ll tell you the plain truth, Esmy,” he said. Mamma’s full
name was Esmeralda; Daddy called her Esmy. “I was standing on the corner Third and Bird, minding my business. It wasnt even late. This man comes up, big, so tall, with a derby and a cigar, a mouth full of gold. Say, ‘What you doing, boy?’ I aint no boy. I look back at him, eye to eye. Then I look away, across to where the Pastime Pool Hall was. Say, ‘Answer up!’ — like he had every right. Did I say he was wearing a brass watch chain? Well, he was, and every breath he took it made a little line of fire run across his vest. I said, ‘Whats it to you what I’m doing?’ Thats what I told him. He was already solemn but now he got more-so. He clouded up: say, ‘Dont jaw back at me I ask you something. Come along.’ Then it happen; I see what he was wearing. He let his coat kind of slide ajar and there it was. A badge. I turn to run and Blip! all I saw was stars and colored lights; the Pastime Pool Hall run round in a circle. He done hit me slap up side the head with one of them billy things, birdshot wrapped in leather. Next thing I knew it was the jail and a white man looking at me through the bars. I said, ‘Captain, what was that?’ ‘Was what?’ — the white man talking; he run his hand through the front of his hair where he had his hat tipped back. ‘That man, Captain,’ I ask him, ‘was that a colored
policeman
?’ ”

Mamma went on swabbing at the lump. I was sitting there watching, smelling the camphor. She was so mad her face just swole up with it. I could see what was coming next, and here it came.

“Sue,” she says.

“Sue who?” my daddy says. As if he didnt know, the same as me that was going on seven or eight.

“The town of Bristol,” Mamma says. “The Law. Who else? They cant knock you round for sport and then just turn you loose like nothing happened.”

“Cant?” my daddy says. He sat there for a minute, saying nothing. He was a high-strung man; God knows he was. But not that high-strung. So he told her: “You sue,” he says, “but not in my name. I already got one knot up side my head.”

It was the times; thats what it was — the carpetbaggers coming to town with cotton receipts already signed and the number of bales left blank to be filled in later, the fine-dressed man selling bundles of four painted sticks for you to use to stake off your forty acres come Emancipation Day again, and the night-riders pounding the roads in their bedsheets with the pointy hoods and the hoofs like somebody beating a drum along the turnpike. They burnt crosses every night all round us, and a man who’ll burn what he prays to, he’ll burn anything. It was the times, the whole air swirling full of freedom and danger; it was catching, you see, and Mamma already had it bad in the first place.

What happened next I didnt see, for she didnt take me with her. She left, walked out the door with that swole-up look still bulging her face, and was gone a good long time, till afternoon. Then here she came, back again, looking a good deal worse than Daddy did. He just had him a lump on the head but she had that and more. I broke out crying.

She went there looking for damages: “For what you done to my husband,” she told them, right there in the town jail with the prisoners watching through the bars. At first the constable and this other man thought it was some kind of joke; they couldnt believe it. But then she got angry and started to yell in a loud voice about freedom and justice, right in their faces, and of course they couldnt stand for that, there in their own jail-house with the prisoners looking on. So they hit her, knocked her down. They almost had to, to get her to stop. But she wouldnt. She was still hollering in a high voice about freedom and justice and the vote, lying there on the floor where they had knocked her; she wouldnt quit. And then one of the men did something I cant justify, even considering all the disruption she was making. He kicked her full in the mouth, twice, cut both her lips and knocked several of her teeth right down her throat. That stopped her, for the time being at least, and then he kicked her once more to make certain. They didnt arrest her — which they could
have done. When she came to, she picked herself up, holding her mouth, and came on home. I took one look at her and bust out crying; I was high-strung like my daddy in those days. But she wouldnt tell us anything. She went to bed without even the camphor bottle, and pulled the quilt up over her face and lay there.

Next day she had a nervous diarrhea, passed three of the teeth, and she picked them out of the slopjar, rinsed them off, and put them on the mantel to remember freedom by. That might sound like an ugly thing to you: I can see how it might. But to me it always seemed real fine, since it showed how much her love of freedom meant to her even after all it got her was three hard kicks in the mouth. It was the times, all that new liberty and equality coming so sudden before we had a chance to get used to them. But it worked both ways. You think we didnt laugh at all those white men cutting head-holes in their wives’ best sheets and eye-holes in the pillow cases? We did indeed. It was a two-sided thing.

For a while then — most of her teeth being missing on one side, I mean — she didnt much look like herself. She’d always been such a fine-looking woman; her barber daddy had kept her dressed in style. But we got used to it in time, and Mamma was downright proud. It was like she’d sued and won. She held her head high, showing the missing teeth and the sunk-in cheek. You couldnt down her.

She didnt live long, though. She had some kind of stomach ailment; it went into a tumor and she died. I was nine or ten. The night she died she put her arms around me and her tears fell onto the back of my head. “Youll be free, Emanuel,” she told me, her last words. “Youll have freedom and the vote and youll be free.”

But I dont know. It was true; I got them, but it seems like they dont mean so much as they did back then with the Kluxers riding the roads to take them from you. Thats how it is, even with freedom.

My daddy he outlived her many years. He had two more
wives in fact, including the one that outlived him. I inherited all his clothes — and wore them, too, till I started putting on all this weight. Now all I can wear is these ties, a whole drawerful of silky bow ones. I got the business, too, this tent and all; I’m an artist like my daddy, with a wife and four grown children, one on Beale, one in Detroit, one in New Orleans, and one to help my wife keep house. You want me take your picture?

Ankle deep in the dusty places, the road led twelve miles from the landing, around the head of a horseshoe lake and down its eastern shore where the houses were. We left the gunboat at eight oclock in brilliant sunlight, two mounted officers wearing sabers and sashes and thirty Negro infantrymen in neat blue uniforms; at noon the colonel halted the column before a two-story frame structure with a brick portico and squat, whitewashed pillars. He sat a hammer-headed roan, an early-middle-aged man with a patch across one eye.

“Looks old,” he said, rolling his cigar along his lower lip. He faced front, addressing the house itself. “Ought to burn pretty,” he added after a pause, perhaps to explain why he had not chosen one of the larger ones in both directions. I saw that he was smiling, and that was as usual at such a time, the head lifted to expose the mouth beneath the wide pepper-and-salt mustache. Behind us the troops were quiet: so quiet that when the colonel turned in the saddle, leather squeaked. “Walk up there, Mr Lundy, and give them the news.”

The troops stood at ease in a column of fours, the rifle barrels slanting and glinting. Above their tunics, which were
powdered with dust except where they were splotched a darker blue at backs and armpits from four hours of hard marching, their faces appeared cracked as if by erosion where sweat had run.

“Orderly,” I said. A soldier stepped out of ranks and held the reins near the snaffle while I dismounted on the off side, favoring my stiff right leg. I went up toward the house. When the colonel called after me, something I could not distinguish above the sound of my boots crunching gravel on the driveway, I halted and faced about. “Sir?”

“Tell them twenty minutes!” With one arm he made the sweeping gesture I had come to know so well. “To clear out!” I heard him call.

I went on — this was nothing new; it was always twenty minutes — remembering, as I had done now for the past two years whenever I approached a strange house, that I had lost a friend this way. It was in Virginia, after Second Bull Run, the hot first day of September, ’62. The two of us, separated from our command in the retreat, walked up to a roadside cabin to ask the way, and someone fired at us from behind a shuttered window. I ran out of range before the man (or woman; I never knew) could reload, and by the time I got up courage enough to come back, half an hour later, no one was there except my friend, lying in the yard in his gaudy zouave uniform with his knees drawn up and both hands clapped tight against his belt buckle. He looked pinch-faced and very dead, and it seemed indeed a useless way to die.

That was while I was still just Private Lundy, within a month of the day I enlisted back home in Cashtown; that was my baptism of fire, as they like to call it. After that came Antietam and Fredericksburg, where I won my stripes. The war moved fast in those days, and while I was in Washington recovering from my Chancellorsville wound I received my commission and orders to report directly to the War Department after a twenty-day convalescent leave. I enjoyed the visit home, limping on a cane and having people admire my new shoulder straps and fire-gilt buttons. “Adam, youre
looking fit,” they said, pretending not to notice the ruined knee. ‘Fit’ was their notion of a soldier word, though in fact the only way any soldier ever used it was as the past tense of fight.