At first, Effie couldn’t move, her legs so wobbly she could barely stand. More memories came back to her. Not just snatches but entire days and weeks. As she had before, she reached out and ran her finger along the gully of mortar between the bricks. Hours she’d spent like this, circling the pen, tracing her finger along the wall. Waiting.
She took a deep breath and continued farther into the pen. A trestle table had stood there in the corner, where traders took their dinner while she and the other slaves ate squatting over the hard-packed dirt. Bacon, cornbread slathered in butter and dipped in milk. Eat up, you scrawny pickaninny, they’d told her. And eat she did. Except when one of dem older boys stole her plate behind the trader’s back. Then she went to bed hungry, same as before. Till Jonesy came, leastways, and put a stop to dem boys.
When Effie closed her eyes, she could picture him, slumped against the wall across the yard. Shoulders like an ox. Nose just like one too. The breath in and out of those wide nostrils could be heard clear across the pen. Eyes nearly as black as his skin. Mean nigger eyes, the traders said, and told him to keep ’em turned to the floor when buyers came around. They were scared of him, the traders, though they tried not to show it. Everyone was. Especially Effie, seeing as he was big enough to swallow her whole without bothering to chew, if he’d had a mind to.
Effie picked her way among the pigs toward the back of the pen. To the left was the door to the showroom. Despite standing in the shade with the day’s heat waning, she began to sweat. Not a light dappling of moisture across her upper lip, but full droplets on her brow and temples.
The first day she’d crossed that threshold, the splendor of the room struck her dumb. Papered walls, ornate molding, finished floors so shiny she could see her reflection. Candles hung suspended from the ceiling surrounded by huge raindrops of cut glass. Not many days later, clouds had darkened the sky, and the candles, at last, were lit. But by then Effie no longer noticed the wallpaper or shiny floor or glass raindrops, only the men parading about, asking her questions, and pinching her chest in search of breast buds.
The male slaves were lined up on one side of the room, the girls along the other. They stood tallest to shortest, Jonesy at one end of the room, Effie clear across at the other. She wasn’t supposed to look at him or anyone, except the buyers and traders, and only when they asked her a question. But she did look at Jonesy, whenever she could sneak a stare.
At first, she looked out of sheer awe. Later, to see which buyers took an interest in him that she might try to impress them too. More than once, Jonesy caught her gaping at him. He glared at her at first, the way he glared at everyone. Effie didn’t glare back, nor did she look away. They were wrong, the traders. He didn’t have mean eyes.
She blotted her brow on her sleeve and turned from the door. A short way down stood a rusty steel water basin for the pigs. Back then, the traders had used that ground to set up their screens. Only twice they’d taken her there. She remembered a small tear in one of the linen panels and the shame she felt when, at the buyer’s behest, the trader made her remove her clothes. Could the other slaves, those left milling in the yard because they didn’t suit any of the buyers’ fancy, see her nakedness through the tear?
Effie shivered. Her stomach heaved again. She’d been too young to know why a man might want to see her without her dress, and far too young that any man, save the most deviant, would make such a request. If there were a God, he’d been with her those days, for whatever attributes tickled those men’s perversion, she didn’t possess.
“What the . . . excuse me, miss. You can’t be in here.”
Effie looked over at the sound of the voice. Across the yard, opposite the showroom, rose the outbuildings. A man stood on the second-story gallery, leaning over the balustrade. “Don’t know how you wandered in here, but you best wander your way right back out.”
The rooms behind him used to have bars crisscrossing the windows. They’d slept in there, on the dirty unfinished floor, sometimes ten to a room. Did the doors still lock only from without?
“You deaf? I said get!”
The sharpness of his tone jolted her back to the present. But she wasn’t finished here, wasn’t finished remembering. “I ain’t—am not disturbing anything here, sir.” She looked at the row of rooms beneath him. Kitchen, storage shed, more sleeping quarters. The bars were gone here too. She noticed for the first time the mud and pig shit caked over her boots and hem. The sky above had that final shade of pale blue before bruising over into night.
All the slaves had looked forward to this time of day—buyers gone, dinner cooking, traders preoccupied with their ledgers and logs.
“I don’t care what you’re doing or not doing. If you don’t get, I’ll fetch the police.”
Effie looked up again. She couldn’t think with him talking. Something else lay buried in these walls. Something else she was supposed to remember. Who had brought her here? To whom had she been sold? And what had become of Jonesy?
CHAPTER 19
Her jail cell stank of urine. Cockroaches skittered across the stone floor. The room was too dark for her to see them unless they wandered into the small pool of light that spilled through the barred window of her cell door. Or that was cast by the moonlight through another barred opening high up in the wall. But she could hear them, the cockroaches, a constant patter of frenzied legs and dragging exoskeletons.
She wrapped her arms around herself and wished she’d had the presence of mind to bring a shawl. Then again, she’d not left Mrs. Neale’s—however many hours ago that was—expecting to pass the night in jail.
Perhaps she ought to have listened to the man when he told her to leave the stockyard. She’d believed him when he said he’d fetch the police, but at the time, that hadn’t seemed important. A few more minutes, that’s all she needed to fully remember. A chance to stand in the far corner and see the entire space laid out before her—the door that led to the traders’ office through which she’d first entered the yard after being sold by her master; the wooden cistern tucked around the corner where they drew water to drink and bathe; the outbuilding where they changed each morning from their rags into suits and calico dresses for show, where the traders polished their faces with oil and slicked their hair with tallow, where she first saw the tangle of scars on Jonesy’s back, a briar patch of raised flesh, when he pulled off his shirt to change; the heavy oak door at the back, still rigged with iron locks, leading out to the alley. She’d exited only once through that door, she and Jonesy and four or five others of the season’s dregs, coffled together, bound for whatever new hell awaited them.
Beyond that door, Effie remembered little. A few flashes of sound, of sight, of smell, but nothing concrete. Nothing from which she could glean where they’d gone or the name of their new master. Maybe if the man at the stockyard hadn’t accosted her before getting the police, grabbing her from behind and binding her with rope as if she were some wayward sow, maybe then she would have remembered more. She leaned back against the cold plaster wall of the cell. The crude stool beneath her creaked and wobbled.
No, likely not. She’d remembered all she could from the place. Her life before, her life after had been locked out as surely as she’d been locked in. What, then, did she have to show for the day? Two dollars gone to some Voodoo queen. The memory of this Jonesy—a man not her kin. Charges of vagrancy and trespassing, which might well cost her her livelihood once Mr. Whitmark found out. And a desire to scrub her skin raw. Not from the mud and pig shit clinging to her boots and skirts and stockings, but from those hands. All those men’s hands.
What she wouldn’t give for a bar of soap and pitcher of water! Hot, cold, it didn’t matter. If only she could likewise scrub her mind. She was done with this. Looking for her past. She’d tell Adeline straightaway. No more of these little excursions. Damn her anyway for meddling. Adeline just wanted to assuage her guilt—she who had a mother and a brother and had never been a slave.
Footfalls sou
nded in the hallway. Likely the police had rounded up another ruffian from the streets. A prostitute from down by the levee. A drunk passed out in the rail yard. But as the click-clack grew louder, she realized it came from only a single set of feet. A set of feet that stopped right before her door.
Effie sat forward and straightened. Dawn was hours off yet, the sliver of sky visible through her window lit only by the moon and stars. So whoever it was, they had not come to usher her before a judge for her arraignment, nor to toss another ne’er-do-well into her cell.
She readied her voice to scream. Surely those in the surrounding cells would hear. The other officers in the guardroom. But what could her fellow prisoners do if the man at the door attacked her? And the officers? Likely they’d grown deaf to such screams.
A key rattled in the lock. Strange how this was now familiar—the tiny, foul-smelling room, the barred windows, the click of rusty pins and springs, the foreboding. The door swung outward. The man before her, a tall, square-shouldered mulatto, said nothing but motioned for her to exit. Effie hesitated, but as he stepped back and glanced over his shoulder, his face caught the lamplight. She recognized him not only as the guard who’d taken down her name and led her to her cell earlier that evening, but from somewhere else as well.
He closed the cell door quietly behind her and, after another furtive look toward the guardroom, nodded down the hall in the opposite direction. They passed several cells before the hallway curved into darkness. The man grabbed a lamp off the wall and stepped around her, illuminating another short stretch of hallway, three descending steps, and a heavy wooden door. Effie’s hands went cold. Her feet shuffled her around the bend. She hesitated again at the top of the stairs, but he waved her down, a look of urgency in his eyes, and handed her the oil lamp.
“Hold this,” he whispered, and flipped through several keys bound together on an iron ring. Despite her stranglehold on the handle, the lamp quivered, the yellow flame hissing and sputtering. He looked up from the keys and laid his hand over hers around the handle. “I’m Hiram. I’ve seen you at the club meetings. I’ve called someone to take you home.”
He let go of her hand and returned to sorting through the keys. Effie replayed what he’d said through her mind. Yes, that was where she recognized him from. He sat a few rows from the front. Always made a point of talking to Samson and Tom afterward, and kissing Mrs. Carrière on the cheek before he left.
He fitted the key into the lock. When it wouldn’t turn, he tried another.
“But the charges . . .”
“I didn’t record your name, Miss Jones. You were never here.”
“I broke the law.” The whine of unoiled hinges sounded over her words. If he’d heard what she’d said, he made no show of it. A rush of cool air entered through the open door. Beyond it lay a dark side street, the sound of crickets, the smell of damp stone and day-old vegetable scraps. Freedom. She thought to repeat herself. She had in fact been trespassing, but it seemed a small turn of justice that after so many closed and locked doors, here, at last, was one open.
“Thank you, Mr. . . .”
“Elliott. Hiram Elliott.” He took the lamp from her and smiled.
Footsteps hurried down the street toward them. Effie shrank from the threshold, but Mr. Elliott stepped out unconcerned and greeted the newcomer. “Samson.” The sound of clapping hands. “She’s right here.”
For a moment, returning to her bleak, stinky cell seemed preferable to meeting Samson like this. Filth soddened her dress. Dust had dried with her sweat, making sandpaper of her skin. She hadn’t the energy to laugh, smile, nod, to use any of Adeline’s little tricks. And that woman from the saloon. The remembrance still made her sick.
Effie’s arms fell limp to her sides. Only a perfect fool would think of such things at a time like this. But after all that had happened today—or yesterday—whatever day it was, dabbling in Voodoo gris-gris, breaking into a private yard, inviting arrest, she could hardly claim to be anything but a perfect fool.
Had Samson not taken her elbow and shepherded her into the street, she might have lingered forever there in the doorway. He brushed a strand of hair from her face and held firm to her arm. “Miss Jones, are you all right?”
She managed a nod.
“A bit shaken, I think,” Mr. Elliott said.
Samson thanked him and bid him good night, then hurried her down the street. They didn’t speak until several blocks later when they’d reached the levee. Strange how quiet it was now, how still. A line of steamboats slumbered along the dock. Farther downriver the masts of fishing smacks and schooners bobbed and swayed against the black horizon. Her lungs welcomed the crisp air, expanding fully against her ribs for the first time in hours. It smelled of earth and river weeds here, of the tar-coated canvas draping the sugar barrels stacked about the dock.
The waxing moon hung pregnant above them, its light glinting off the water. Hadn’t it just risen when she clambered into the police cart? “What time is it?”
Samson patted his waistcoat pocket. “I hadn’t the presence of mind to bring my watch. A few hours before dawn, I’d venture.”
She noticed the stubble on his cheeks, the white crust at the corner of his eyes, the mismatch of his coat and trousers. “They woke you, then?”
“I’d only just gone to bed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sleep’s not so important.”
“On the contrary, necropsy done on the brains of mice after extended—” She stopped when she saw his smile. He was joking of course. Hadn’t wanted her to feel bad about the trouble she’d caused tonight. How different he seemed now than he had only a few short nights ago at the saloon. How attentive and caring. Just as he had the afternoon of Mardi Gras, the night of the ward meeting when they were alone in the alley. Her brain, perhaps suffering the same affliction as those mice, struggled to reconcile his behavior. Her heart, however, readily dismissed the contradiction, surrendering to his kindness without struggle at all.
“Miss Jones—”
“Effie.”
“Effie.” He stopped walking and faced her. “Sergeant Elliott’s man said you’d been arrested for trespassing and vagrancy. You needn’t tell me what happened, but is everything all right?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but couldn’t tame her thoughts into words. Her newly unlocked memories remained raw and jumbled. Something else silenced her as well. Not some high-order reasoning, but a base and visceral feeling she couldn’t quite name. Her eyes retreated to the river. The moon’s pale reflection undulated like a ghost upon its surface.
Shame. That was the feeling.
Not because her hair and clothes were a mess. Not because she stank of pig excrement. Not because she’d been arrested and jailed.
She’d been a slave, subject to all its indignities. Her past was no longer an abstraction but a reality she could taste and smell and remember.
Samson coaxed her to walking again. “I was arrested once. No twice, I think. Just after the War. The usual charges. Vagrancy, impudence, swearing. They’d have arrested a black man just for breathin’ if they could in those days.”
Effie knew about the Black Codes, how hard the Southern Democrats had tried to clip the wings of Emancipation. It wasn’t a fair comparison. “I deserved to be arrested. I was trespassing.”
“Whoever you were trespassing on could have just asked you to leave.”
“He did. Several times. I ignored him.”
Samson laughed—a rich sound she drank through her ears like pure honey. “Now see, that don’t surprise me one bit.”
“You were a soldier during the War, weren’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am. Seventy-fifth U.S. Colored Infantry.”
“And before that?” Effie knew the answer. She’d gleaned it from his speeches. From the stories other people told of him. She could hear it in his voice too, those country words and phrases and pronunciations that broke through his polished vernacular when he was particul
arly impassioned. From their first encounter in Tivoli Circle, she’d known it. But she wanted to hear him say it.
He steered her among towering piles of baled cotton awaiting passage on tomorrow’s ships and sat down on one of the shorter stacks. Effie sat beside him, her feet swinging just above the ground.
“I was a slave. A field hand. Up north a ways.” He pulled a wisp of cotton from a tear in the burlap and worked it between his fingers until it became a knotted ball. “I picked more of this shit than God had tears.” He threw the pea-sized ball onto the ground. “Sometimes I think I can still feel the fibers in my nose, my ears, wet and stringy on my tongue like they used to would get during pickin’ time.”
Effie had the urge to reach out and touch him. His forearm, perhaps. His hands, now clasped and lolling between his knees. His rounded shoulders. Not in a romantic way, but as a tether of sorts. An anchor.
A breeze rolled across the river, sending a tremor across the water’s surface and scattering the reflected moonlight. The canvases stretched atop the nearby sugar barrels flapped and rippled.
“The stockyard I was arrested at had been a slave pen.” Her words came without conscious thought to voice them. She glanced askew at Samson. His heavily lashed eyes regarded her intently, his expression one of earnest curiosity. Had she really thought he’d look down on her for a past over which she had no control? For a past they shared? Still, she looked away before continuing. “I didn’t remember until yesterday, but I’d been there as a girl. I mean, I was sold there.”
Another sideways glance. He sat as before, his entire attention upon her, and it was impossible not to give over to it. She told him everything then. A rush of words flying from her mouth like expelled poison. She told him how she’d emerged from the swamps into the Union camp without memory of whence she’d come. She told him of Captain Kinyon and her time in Indiana. She told him of her work as an embalmer and even at this, he didn’t flinch.
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