“Sam and Doe, those both slave names.” The man whispered, but his voice boomed inside Sam’s head as if he shouted. “Stretch out your hand.”
Sam and Doe were slow to respond, looking over to their mother for a signal of how to act. She nodded, and Sam reached his right hand out for the both of them, feeling vaguely unsafe.
“Spread your fingers apart far as they go,” the man said, his speech thick, in a timbre unfamiliar to Sam. Sam complied. “It’s like your arm the river, and your fingers smaller rivers running to the sea. The big one the river Nile. Bigger than any river you ever see. We come from the part with the little rivers, call the Nile Delta. Alexandria in Egypt, and Egypt in Africa. That where you from. Not this place.
“We got a real name, a family name. My father tell me, and now I tell you. Keep it here.” The man tapped at his head with the broad fingers of his right hand.
Sam’s senses were swimming. He saw the scars, more frightening up close than they had been from across the room. It was as if the man were trying to eat him up, inhale his very essence, pressing his urgency on him. Sam’s skin tingled, but he lost some of his fear. It was as if they were tethered together in the moment, just the two of them, connected for better or worse.
“This all I got to give you,” the man said, “and can’t nobody take it away.” He squeezed Sam’s shoulders so tight they began to ache. “We from far away. We wasn’t brought to this country as no slave. We come free, of our own will. We come from the Nile Delta, and my daddy pay passage by his sweat-work on a ship supposed to take him to a land of opportunity. He work boats on the dock, loading and unloading. He come over on a ship had twelve thousand tons of lumber on it. It was a trade. He work on the ship for one year with no pay to come here. He thinking he come to a better place, and they make him a slave after he get here. He born free. My daddy tell me, and now I tell you.”
Little Sam still held his hand out, fingers splayed, afraid to move. The Nile River? The Nile Delta? Born free?
“Our real name Ta-ta-mee.” The man gently pushed Sam out a little farther away from him, studying his face, but still holding him tightly by both shoulders. “Say it.”
Sam looked at his mother. She was busy cutting off a portion of their weekly ration of bacon and tying it up in a cloth rag. Sam could tell she was listening to each word, but she kept her back to them, maintaining a distance, refusing to get between the man and his two boys. Sam wasn’t going to get any help there. He turned again to the man calling himself his father.
“Ta-ta-mee,” Sam whispered.
“Again,” the man demanded.
“Ta-ta-mee.”
“One more time, like it fit your mouth.”
“Ta-ta-mee.”
“Don’t never let go of it. That your real name,” the man said. “All’s you can do now is whisper, but one day you gonna shout it out so everybody hear, and your children gonna shout it so they remember who they is. Again.”
“Tatamee,” Sam whispered, wondering what would happen if they found his father here in the cabin. Would they beat him, kill him? Would they kill all of them just for listening?
“You a good boy. You got strong, free, fighter’s blood in you. Teach that to your brother, and when you make your own sons, teach them to shout out they name like they know who they is.” The man let go of Sam and stood erect again. “You still a fine-looking woman,” he said to Sam’s mother.
“Good luck,” she said, her face still arguing with itself, hard and soft. She handed him the food wrapped in her head scarf. “I pray you make it out.”
The man accepted the small bundle and stuffed it in the pocket of his ragged, handspun trousers. He peeked warily out the small window. “Don’t forget,” he said to Sam. “What your real name?”
“Ta-ta-mee,” repeated Sam.
“Hold on to it. You a Tatamee.”
As quickly as he had burst into Sam’s life, the man calling himself Sam’s father was out the front door, out into the deepest darkness of the moonless night.
They never knew whether he made it out of Alabama to a free state, or whether he was caught and taken back to his plantation, but Sam always remembered the last words he heard his father speak.
“You a Tatamee.”
By nightfall, most of the colored women and children are already back in their homes. When the steamboat from New Orleans docks later that evening, there are no troops on board, nor is there any word from the governor.
Sam meets McCully bringing the ladder into the courthouse for the evening. The older man looks as tired as Sam feels.
“Long day,” says Sam. “I send Polly and the boys on home.”
“Don’t see nothing from up top but families headed out,” says McCully. “No whites left close in to Colfax.” McCully has found chewing tobacco somewhere and offers a plug to Sam. “Why you won’t be no deputy, Sam?”
“No gain being a deputy. No pay, no extra safety, no longtime work. I’m here just the same.”
“Could be something to tell your grandchildren one day,” says McCully.
“A name on a piece of paper making some of us deputies don’t have nothing to do with nothing,” says Sam.
“I thought you was so proud of that name, Tademy.”
“Only place I need to see ‘Tademy’ is on a deed for a piece of land, or on a schoolhouse.”
“Opening the court made some folks settle down. Most men held, even if families went back.”
“Still don’t smell right to me,” says Sam. “The Federals not coming.”
“That’s not what the politicians say,” says McCully.
“If troops was coming, they’d be here,” says Sam. “Levi say they talking about sending someone down to New Orleans to fetch them up here. That’s three or four days, going, talking, coming back.”
“Unless the Federals already on their way.”
“How long since little Noby Smith heard them men in Summerfield Springs?” Sam asks. “Over a week,” he answers, without waiting for McCully to do the figuring. “Eight days, and each time we go on patrol, we see more white posses, more men we don’t recognize. Sheriff Nash not gonna sit around forever. Citation or no. The notion of troops marching in here the only thing holding him back. May be acting like the courthouse open for business make us feel better, but ain’t gonna stop them.”
“Federals got to come, Sam,” says McCully. There is a stretched-thin shrillness in his tone; he is plainly exhausted by anger and drained by grief. Sam isn’t used to a wheedling McCully, neither confident nor boastful. “They got to come.”
“If the governor of Louisiana on our side, why it taking this long to get troops here? I keep thinking he don’t care if a fight break out in Colfax. What if he want everybody to see how bad it got here between white and colored, between Republican and Democrat? What if he want to stir up the fight, so’s to get more votes next election?”
“You talk nonsense, Sam. Not even a politician got a heart that cold. They Republican, and they owe us.”
Chapter
8
Another endless night, another damp gray morning before the overnight fog burns off, another disorienting wake-up, another day of marching and guns instead of plows and crops. At the afternoon coffee break under the Pecan Tree, Israel unwraps the hard biscuit and bit of smoked bacon that are his meal, eager to share with McCully and Sam what he has just learned on his last patrol.
“They all leaving by this evening,” Israel tells his friends, his mouth full. He is hungry and tired, but at least his feet have toughened from the constant walking patrols. The blisters that plagued him have dried up, no longer painful to the touch. “One of them already gone, snuck down to Boyce, waiting till dark for the boat. We not supposed to know.”
“What you mean, all?” McCully’s deep voice carries in the open air, and Israel and Sam both put their fingers to their lips. “All who?” he asks more quietly.
“Judge Register, the assessor, everybody come up to Colfax
to begin with, except for Sheriff Shaw and Levi. They going for help in New Orleans. The colored boatman gonna ferry them out to catch the steamer.”
“We here protecting them, and suddenly they all leaving?” McCully’s voice rises again. A pinched harshness is etched into his features.
“Guess it turn out harder than they thought,” says Israel.
“Time for us to take charge, anyway,” announces McCully. “Colfax our town.”
Other men milling around don’t even pretend to give them privacy, listening in.
“Why the white man can’t give us our forty acres and a mule?” McCully complains. “No matter how much they hold us back, we still here, we still strong. We better at the land, we better at breeding, we better at making do and getting by. And now we got guns and done throwed down the mask. No more patting us on the head like a pet dog or kicking us in the ribs like a stray. This our town. If we got to kill for them to understand, that the way it got to be.”
“Don’t talk foolish. We don’t stand a chance without those troops,” Sam says. He lowers his voice, tries to return to private conversation. “Levi staying.”
“Levi the one man I’d pick out the lot of them,” says McCully. “Let the politicians go and do what they do best. Talk. We never was in this together noway, Republicans or no. And somebody got to go see what keep the Federals away.”
“It’s a bad sign, all of them leaving at the same time,” says Sam.
“We in it now, Sam. What else you think we can do?” McCully flashes some of his old bluster. He is a powder keg of a man ready to stand pat to the last, regardless of consequences.
Israel stays out of the conversation.
When Israel was eleven, one of his jobs on the plantation in Alabama was to deliver water to the sweating, thirsty men and women in the field, ladling out the liquid with a gourd as he passed between the endless rows of growing cotton. Back then all Israel knew was Low Water, the sprawling plantation with hundreds of slaves where he was born. He called all of the women in the quarter Aunt, and slept in the big cabin with other children who didn’t have an exact mother or family to whom they belonged. Israel belonged to all of them on Low Water, and he belonged to none of them, just one more strong buck in training on his way to slide smoothly into a lifetime in the fields.
The overseer was particular about Israel going to each of the field hands to bring them water, one after the other, so they didn’t break routine. One day in early spring, the overseer rode up on his horse just as Israel’s old wooden bucket gave way from the bottom, the water draining in a quick flush.
“Stupid boy,” the overseer said.
“I didn’t do nothing ’cept use this old rotten bucket, Massa,” Israel protested.
Without warning, Israel felt the sharp sting of the lash cutting into the flesh of his right cheek, and like a door slamming, his right eye closed of its own accord. He forced his eye open again, but his vision was clouded. He felt as if he were trying to focus underwater in a vat of milk. Israel put his hand to his face. The hand he pulled back dripped wet with the dark red of running, pulsing blood.
“You sassing me, boy?” Israel dared not look up, but he knew by the nearness of the voice that the overseer had gotten off his horse. “What my name, darky?”
“Mr. Neely, sir.” When he talked, Israel could feel the blood trickle into the side of his mouth, and a slight breeze let loose a stinging circle around his cheek, as if someone had cut him with a straight razor.
Israel sensed quick movement, and he crouched, head down, between the facing rows of cotton bushes. The approaching strides of the overseer were so careless that the white man brushed off several emerging cotton buds from the bloom-heavy plants. Several of the tight, hard buds dropped to the ground, wasted, useless to the harvest now, an offense that would have provoked a whipping if committed by a slave. The overseer loomed directly over Israel, so close that even with his bad eye, Israel saw the rough, raised grain of the overseer’s heavy boots. Neely kicked Israel in the side, and Israel crumpled, scraping his tender cheek against the caked, lipped-up dirt of the row. The smart thing to do was lie still and wrap his body into a ball to withstand the blows. Even the youngest slave on the plantation knew that, but a red rage washed through Israel. There was the briefest of moments when he might have called his anger to heel, but instead, he gave the beast inside room to blossom and grow stronger. When the familiar flood of red surged in his brain and the acrid tang of metal lodged in his throat, he yielded, released himself to the swelling song, and gave it free rein.
They told him what happened later, those in the field close enough to see. Israel couldn’t remember. How he had blocked Neely’s foot before he landed the next kick, throwing the overseer off balance, how the two of them had scrambled ineffectively on the ground, a lumbering, surprised white man and an agile eleven-year-old colored boy, how Israel had bounced up like a coiled spring and snatched the whip from where it had fallen on the ground, walking away in the direction of the quarter, the prize of the whip still in his hands. Young Israel had touched the overseer, but at least he hadn’t struck him. That was the only thing that saved his life.
Within the hour, they bent Israel over the post in the central yard, and Neely himself delivered twenty lashes to the young boy’s back. The lash gave off a distinctive whistle right before slicing into his flesh. Each blow delivered a bright flash of pain, and the oozing cut under his eye in the shape of a question mark throbbed with its own music, making him dizzy, taking him out of his body. Then they untied his hands and took him back to the quarter, where an old woman salved his seeping wounds. Again Israel’s mind escaped what his body could not, so he didn’t remember much of that part. Afterward, they talked about him and his defiance in the quarter, and the number of blows, and how there were grown men who couldn’t take as many lashes as Israel, just a skinny eleven-year-old boy.
Later, Israel became convinced that Neely hadn’t wanted to kill him. The overseer had stopped after twenty lashes, not only because Israel had future value as a slave, but because he wanted Israel’s punishment to be of a more personally satisfying and longer-lasting nature. From that day forward, he whipped Israel himself whenever he took the notion, or had him whipped at least once a month. Ten lashes even if there had been no offense, and twenty if he could actually attach a shortcoming. To show Israel his place, the overseer of Low Water said.
For a small handful of men, this repeated treatment might have fed obstinate rebelliousness or a determination to run away. In the case of Israel Smith, the constant beatings accomplished exactly what the overseer had intended. They leeched the fight out of him. They caused Israel to defer to white men. They made him always afraid.
At nightfall, Israel is one of six men assigned to the escort party. They manage to get the politicians away to the steamboat without being discovered, and return to the courthouse without incident, but Israel can’t shake a deep sense of defeat. Other men speculate on how long it will take troops to arrive, but Israel wants no part of that. He goes to his sleeping corner in the back room of the courthouse and lies down, pulling his blanket over his head. He thinks about what the men who oppose the new officeholders are capable of. He thinks of the family he wants to protect at any cost. He thinks of Noby, the storehouse of Israel’s greatest hopes for the future, at the dangerous age of nine.
One word ricochets in his brain. Alone. They are alone, the colored men of Colfax. For sixteen days, they have been encouraged to stand up for themselves, and promised the help of the United States government. Despite the obstacles, despite incontrovertible proof of violence surrounding them, against the better judgment of many of the men huddled in their own private reverie on the dirty courtroom floor, they have believed. In pursuit of the blind hope of opportunity, they have taken a great risk.
And now they find themselves, all of them together, more alone than they have ever been.
Chapter
9
S am straighte
ns up to stretch, and immediately, the low, stabbing pain at the base of his spine eases. For every shovel of reddish Louisiana dirt he hollows out and heaps atop the mounting barricades, the resentment building in his chest swells tenfold. The goal is to construct and extend a bulwark three hundred yards in length and four feet high on three sides of the courthouse before nightfall, and Levi put him in charge. The work is slow, and the men who have been assigned are overwhelmed.
It is the Saturday before Easter Sunday, and no one has heard from Cap’n Ward, the assessor, or Judge Register in three days. The last Sam saw was their backs as they fled Colfax, bound for New Orleans. Enough time has elapsed to at least send a message on one of the New Orleans packets that come upriver. Nothing. Three weeks, Sam thinks, three weeks since the carpetbaggers and politicians entered town, asking for the help of the people of Colfax. And now they are gone.
Sam goes back to digging, chopping at the stubborn soil with growing disgust. The courthouse they fight to hang on to is more a symbolic shell than an instrument of the new order. No politicians inside, no elected officials, and no town business being carried out. Even Sheriff Shaw spends more and more time away from the building now that the others have left, staying down at Calhoun’s Sugarhouse. Most times the men don’t know exactly where he is.
A short copper-colored farmer, sweating profusely, breaks the line of men and leans heavily on his shovel, mopping at his forehead with a grimy white handkerchief. He is part of the detail assigned to fill bags with claylike mud from the river and stack them on top of the barricade to add height around the riverbank side of the courthouse. The man stares into space, propped against his shovel. Sam works his own patch of dirt and keeps an eye on him. Finally, the man stuffs his handkerchief back into his trousers pocket. Instead of bending back over his shovel, the man wanders over to the shade of the Pecan Tree and lies down.
Sam drops his own shovel and moves toward the Pecan Tree, first at a walk and then breaking into almost a full run.
Red River Page 10
