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Author’s Note
This book is dedicated to the Buffalo Soldiers who inspired it.
“He who fights the battles of America may claim America as his country – and have that claim respected.”
Frederick Douglass
(Former slave, abolitionist, author, orator
and advisor to Abraham Lincoln)
Two covered wagons are heading out into the open, slow and steady, like little ships afloat on the ocean. Axles are greased, wheels barely creaking. The oxen are well groomed, their hides glossy as polished wood. Gaily coloured ribbons are tied to their horns and silver bells hang around their necks.
The faces of the people driving them are freshly washed, their clothes starched and pressed. Crisp linen shirts; pretty flounced dresses. Blue-eyed women with hair of dazzling blonde; square-jawed, clean-shaven men; and the children – rosy-cheeked and plump – are just as cute as they come. Smiling brightly, their hearts are full of courage, their heads full of hope. They’re planning on settling down in the wilderness, carving a homestead out of nothing, making a little piece of heaven right here on earth: it’s their destiny. The Almighty has given them the vast, empty land of America just as surely as he gave Paradise to Adam and Eve.
Only the land isn’t as empty as it seems.
Whooping screams rend the air, chilling the blood and freezing the marrow. War cries.
Indians! Savages!
A dozen painted warriors, naked save for their loincloths, come riding bareback on spotted horses, feathers in their hair, tomahawks in their hands, scalping knives at their waists.
They circle the wagon and the settlers are fighting back but there are too few of them and too many Indians. One of the men takes an arrow in the chest. Falls. His wife runs to him. He dies, his head cradled in her lap.
The savages’ blood is up now. Their yelling gets wilder. Ear-piercing shrieks, going on and on and only stopping when all the men are slaughtered.
And now the Indians are coming for the women. As they leap off their horses, terrified mothers shield their weeping children behind their skirts. They’re all looking at a fate worse than death.
But then a bugle sounds. In the blink of an eye panic shows on the savages’ faces. They try to run. Too late.
The cavalry are riding in on snowy-white chargers, uniforms of deep blue with scarlet neckerchiefs, buttons polished, boots shining, sabres gleaming. Soldiers slash at the Indians until every one of them is lying dead.
The cavalry ride a lap of victory. Once, twice, three times around the wagons while the rescued women and children cheer and jump for joy. Then they’re pulled up onto the horses. Away they all trot, back through the curtained entrance and out into the darkness.
Where a stablehand is waiting in the shadows to lead the horses quietly back to their stalls.
1.
I guess Ma died. Or she was sold. I don’t know which. By the time I got around to wondering there was no one I could ask. All I got from her was a name. Charlotte. Darned fool fancy thing for a slave girl. Didn’t no one never call me that.
If I felt her loss I have no recollection of it. My life began in the cook-house. Seemed I’d just grown there, like a seed from a crack in the floor.
Child’s heart got to attach itself to something. Mine attached itself to Cookie, winding around her like bindweed on a post. So long as she was there I could stand tall. When she was gone I was left sprawling on the ground helpless, twisting and twining every which way, not knowing how I was ever gonna get up on my own two feet.
Me and Cookie was the property of Mr Delaney. His plantation was three miles outside of town, but it could have been three thousand. Until the war come, I never set one foot off the place. My world was the cook-house, the attic above it, the bare earth yard around it, the vegetable garden beyond it: that was all. I never got as far as the fields, even. My only aims in life was pleasing Cookie, not getting noticed by the master and avoiding Jonas Beecher. That boy was three, maybe four years older than me: the overseer’s son, with a streak of mean running through him that was wider than the wide Missouri. Seemed the sole purpose of his life was to make mine a misery. Punchings and kickings was the very least of it.
When I was around about eight years old I got me another aim in life: not offending Miss Louellen.
Master must have been close to forty years old when he got himself a wife. Miss Louellen arrived in a carriage with her mammy, followed by a cart stacked high with trunks all shapes and sizes. She was a dainty slip of a thing: dark-haired, white-skinned, blue-eyed, pretty and delicate as a piece of painted china. The belle of three counties, she was sixteen years old and as empty-headed as they come. Ham told Cookie there wasn’t nothing much running between her ears but notions of balls and parties and where her next dress was coming from.
If Miss Louellen been left alone I don’t suppose me and Cookie would have hardly noticed she was there: it was just another mouth at the big house table was all. But one fine day Mrs Beecher pay her a visit. After that there was all kinds of ideas in Miss Louellen’s head causing us a heap of trouble.
The first we know of it is when Miss Louellen starts yelling for Cookie one morning. She come out of the house all on her own, her big old hooped skirt swishing, sweeping grass and leaves aside as she storm across the yard. She carrying a pen and ink and a pocket book and she come right into the cook-house. Suddenly she got a bee in her bonnet about how every darkie on the plantation was a lazy good-for-nothing who been cheating the master for years.
“I know what’s been going on,” says Miss Louellen. “And you can’t fool me. I’m the mistress here now and things are going to be different. I’m going to be keeping a close eye on you all.”
She give me a real particular look, though I don’t know what for. I surely ain’t done nothing to offend her. Not that there needed to be a reason. Existing was enough.
“Now, I have a fancy for some gingerbread,” she says to Cookie.
“Yes, Miss Louellen,” says Cookie.
We was both expecting her to go back across the yard to the big house and leave us to it, but she don’t. Miss Louellen just stands there. “You better tell me what you need to make it.”
Cookie’s keeping her eyes on the floor. “Well, Miss Louellen,” she says slow, “first I needs some flour.”
“Flour,” says Miss Louellen. “Where’s that?”
“In that jar. Shall I fetch it down?”
“Yes. Put it here. Now, how much do you require?”
“Three cups.”
The mistress takes Cookie’s old tin cup and scoops out the flour. There’s a set of scales in the cook-house, rusting in the corner. Cookie never weighed nothing in her life – all her baking is done by hand and eye and feel. But Miss Louellen weighs the flour, real careful. She does the same with the butter and the sugar and the molasses. She does it to the
eggs and the raisins. She even weighs the buttermilk. She writes down all them numbers in her little pocket book and adds it up. Takes her a while. Her ivory-white forehead goes crinkling into lines with the effort. Finally she says, “I’ll be weighing the gingerbread when it’s baked, you hear me? I’m not having you stealing, no siree. You’re not thieving so much as a raisin from me.”
It was the middle of summer and the cook-house was hotter than hell. Sweat was already making dark circles under the arms of Miss Louellen’s dress. She didn’t stay around to watch us do the baking. Calling for Kissy to bring her some lemonade, she went to sit on the porch.
Cookie starts beating up the butter and the sugar, working real fast to get it creamy-white before it melts, her wood spoon pounding so hard against the sides of the bowl it seemed both would break. She sets me cutting up raisins, taking seeds out, dusting them with flour.
I’m scraping them seeds into a pail for the hogs when a thought hits me hard in the head.
“Should have seeded them before she left. Cookie, they gonna weigh less. She gonna be mad at us.”
Cookie frowns. “You right, child. Better save them. Heap them up there, so she can see we ain’t eaten nothing.”
So I pick them seeds back out of the pail, every last one. When I break the eggs I save them shells too, just in case.
When everything’s together in that bowl Cookie starts up beating again. She whacking that mix around and I’m watching that arm of hers, wondering if mine will ever be as strong. I see the sweat coming up into beads on her brow and the smell of them spices got me drooling like one of the master’s dogs.
When the beating was done Cookie adds in the raisins, then scrapes that bowl out clean. Every last trace of that mix goes right into the tin and that tin goes right into the oven.
But there was just one itty-bitty smear of molasses left on a spoon. Looking over her shoulder to check Miss Louellen wasn’t watching from the yard she give me a wink and, without saying a word, pop it right in my mouth for me to lick clean.
That sweetness is so good it’s making my head spin. I’m thinking I’ve died and fetched up in heaven. Then I hear a whooping and a voice piping up, “Nigger’s licking a spoon. I seen it! I seen it!”
Jonas Beecher been hiding all this time, watching from the branches of the cottonwood tree, waiting, just waiting for me to do something I shouldn’t. I see a flash of his golden curls catching in the sunlight as he shins down and streaks off across the yard, yelling his head off. And then all I see is Miss Louellen. She come in a whirl of skirts, fussing and fuming. She cussing Cookie and slap! slap! slapping! me across the face.
My head was still pounding by the time night come. That dainty slip of a thing had hit me so hard with the back of her hand the rings on her fingers cut into me. My blood gets smeared on that dress of hers. I got me diamond-shaped holes punched into my cheek. And me and Cookie, we got ourselves a whole new heap of rules we had to abide by. Didn’t matter none that the gingerbread come out weighing right. As far as she was concerned neither of us was to be trusted. That suits Jonas fine. I see him standing, leaning against the cottonwood. I hear him laugh: a high-pitched squeal that bring to mind a hog at feeding time. I see him mouthing, “Got ya!”
But Jonas is the least of my problems. Miss Louellen ain’t finished yet. She says, “I want you to whistle.”
“Whistle, Miss Louellen?” Cookie can’t believe her ears.
“That’s what I said. Whistle. I want everything weighed. Everything accounted for. Any time you’re cooking, I want to hear you. If you’re whistling you can’t be eating.” She looks at me. “You too. And every time you’re carrying food across to the dining room, I want to hear you.” She gives me a prod with her little white finger, jabbing it so hard into me she breaks the nail. “I’m watching you. I can have you sold any time I choose. Don’t you forget it.”
The thought of being sold – of being sent off someplace without Cookie – just about makes my knees give up on me. My head is filled with fear. It squeezes out every thought. Every thought but one. Her finger’s bleeding where her nail broke. A streak of her blood is smeared across her dress right next to mine. Ain’t that strange? Can’t tell whose is whose.
2.
Whistling all the time makes your face ache. Whistling all the time makes your throat dry and your lips crack. If you whistling all the time you can’t eat. But you can’t talk neither. Can’t hardly think, even. And it ain’t like all that whistling makes Miss Louellen any happier. If anything, it makes her madder than ever. And it irritates the hell out of the master.
For weeks me and Cookie had them both yelling at us. Her hollering for us to whistle louder, him hollering for us to shut up.
Then come the day that Miss Louellen drop down in the yard and lay there like she dead. Had to be carried back up to her bed by Ham. My, did that cause a stir! There was whispers of typhoid fever and shaking sickness. But there wasn’t nothing too much wrong with her. When the doctor come from town he say she with child, is all. The way she acted you’d of thought it was something shameful. She wouldn’t have no callers after that. Her mammy was the only one allowed into her room. She wouldn’t see another living soul, not even her husband.
“What’s wrong with her?” I ask Cookie. “She sick in the head?”
“No,” says Cookie with a smile. “She a lady.”
According to her, ladies was way too delicate and refined to acknowledge such things as breeding. As far as they was concerned cows didn’t have no calves, horses didn’t have no foals and chickens most definitely didn’t lay no eggs. Ladies didn’t have no babies neither. The way they told it, they found them under rosebushes.
I never heard such nonsense. It made me wonder how the heck she’d ended up getting that baby inside her in the first place but when I asked Cookie that, she burst out laughing and told me to hush my mouth.
The baby growing made Miss Louellen tired and sick. She slept most all the time. She couldn’t hardly keep no food down. Took to her bed and lay there like she was dying.
While Miss Louellen was confined to her room we didn’t need to whistle no more. Her window overlooked the yard. Instead we had to tiptoe around, quiet as mice, try not to disturb her.
Jonas had himself a whole heap of fun with that. I slept in the attic right above the cook-house along with Cookie and a bunch of house slaves. One time he come creeping in the dead of night and pile a stack of pans by the ladder so I kick them when I come down in the morning. Another time he fix a length of twine across the doorway so I go flying with a pail of swill. Each time Miss Louellen sent Mammy down to give “that clumsy nigger” a licking. That woman had hands like frying pans – just as big and twice as hard. My ears was always ringing after she done with me. I figured the only thing keeping me from getting sold was that Miss Louellen was too tired and sick to get around to organizing it.
Cookie kept fixing treats to tempt Miss Louellen’s appetite but didn’t nothing work. Them plates would come back hardly touched. The first time it happened, my eyes was popping and I was drooling like a dog. If Miss Louellen didn’t want it, why, there was plenty of room in my belly. Well, hey, I was happy to give that food a good home! I check the cottonwood tree to see no one’s watching. I’m sitting on the floor, and Cookie’s telling me to tuck right on in. But then I give that plate a closer look. A gob of green spittle is squatting right in the middle, like a toad in a swamp. Hell, it’s so big it’s practically blinking its eyes at me. Miss Louellen didn’t have the strength to eat, but she sure had strength enough to spit. I couldn’t touch none of it. After that, all her leftovers went to the hogs.
When the baby come it darned nearly tore Miss Louellen in half. It was put right out to a wet nurse and she was in bed another two months, recovering. When she finally come out of her room I didn’t hardly know her. That pretty, empty-headed slip of a girl had become a woman but she was like a dried-out rose: withered, faded, fragile, likely to crumble into dust if y
ou breathed too hard on her. She’d kept her thorns though. They was as sharp as ever, and just as like to draw blood.
She was only back on her feet a few weeks before she was with child again. It was strange. Seemed to me she didn’t much like her husband. She didn’t much like her baby neither. Nor the one that come next. Yet she spent her entire time dropping babies, one right after the other. All that breeding was sucking the life right out of her, but I wasn’t complaining. It kept her from landing on me like a duck on a bug every time I put a foot wrong.
3.
Time passed and things went on much the same. I got by. I stayed put. Miss Louellen’s threat was always hanging over my head but I didn’t get sold on.
Ask any slave on the Delaney place when they was born they’d give the same answer: sometime. The day? The month? The year? Didn’t no one know. So I can’t be precisely sure of my age but I figure I was maybe ten, eleven, when the United States of America decided to rip itself to pieces. That small world of mine was about to be blown right apart.
Now there must have been talk about it in the attic night-times. Whisperings about Abraham Lincoln and freedom and when and if and how it might come and what it would be like if it did. But if there was, I didn’t hear them.
Seems to me life is all about big things and little things. Sometimes you standing up so close to a little thing you can’t see nothing beyond. You don’t realize there’s a big thing standing right behind it until it’s too late.
See, I had me a problem. Besides Miss Louellen and Jonas Beecher there was something new to worry about. It was just a little itty-bitty thing, truth be told, but it filled my head so full I couldn’t see nothing else.
A month or two back, Ezekiel, Mr Delaney’s smith, been kicked when he was shoeing the master’s horse. Hoof catch him in the face, cave his nose right into his head. I was sad when I heard, but I hadn’t known Ezekiel so I can’t say I took it personal. He been mortal sick for more than a week before he upped and died but the master hadn’t never sent for no surgeon. Why would he? He was more concerned for his horse. As soon as it was plain where Ezekiel’s soul was heading Mr Delaney took himself off to the auction house in town to buy a new smith. He come back with a man by the name of Amos.
Buffalo Soldier Page 1
