by Lynn Austin
“For now, I’m stationed close by,” she heard Massa Fuller say, “but our lines shift constantly to protect the railroad. We’re more like bush-fighters than regular combatants. Our lookouts watch all of the Union’s movements along the coast, and we’re able to move quickly if an attack on the railroad seems imminent. We know all the inlets and rivers and waterways in this area much better than the Yanks do. So if we spot Union vessels heading up one of them, we know where they’ll end up and we can be ready for them. We’ve placed mines and other obstructions in the main waterways, and we have batteries placed in all the strategic places. So far, we’ve been able to keep the enemy confined to the Sea Islands and off the mainland.”
Later that evening, Kitty walked down to Slave Row for the first time, looking for Grady. She was afraid that he would hear the rumors about slaves not being returned to their owners, and he would try to run away. She needed to warn him that the Confederates had lookouts everywhere and were guarding all the waterways. It would be nearly impossible for him to get off the mainland to safety.
The stench of Slave Row, the atmosphere of squalor and hopelessness, nearly made Kitty turn back. But Grady suddenly stepped out of one of the huts, spotting her before she had a chance to change her mind.
“Anna? What are you doing here?” he asked in surprise.
Kitty wondered if she would have recognized him if he hadn’t spoken first. He looked older and rougher, his wooly hair longer and poorly trimmed. His body was leaner yet more muscular, if that was possible. But the biggest shock was seeing him dressed in rags when he’d always worn his coachman’s livery with such pride.
“Is there someplace we can talk?” she asked. “I can’t be gone from the house too long.” He led her inside the hut he’d just come out of, and she had to battle not to show her shock at how he was forced to live. The room had a fireplace but little else—most of the space on the dirt floor was taken up with rough, narrow wooden beds with cornshuck mattresses. Three other men Grady’s age lay on three of the beds, but Kitty knew which bed was Grady’s even before he gestured to it and invited her to sit. He had decorated the walls above it with her drawings.
Kitty sat down and quickly told him what she had heard that morning. The other three slaves also listened intently. As Kitty expected, Grady reacted to the news with anger. “I ain’t giving up! There has to be a way to get free from here!” he said in a low, harsh voice.
“Grady, listen, I’m going to talk to Massa Fuller about you. Just as soon as I can get him alone, I’ll ask him if you can come home and—”
“No, don’t do that,” he said quickly. “It’ll only make trouble for me. And maybe for you, too. Supposing Missus Fuller finds out I wasn’t whipped?”
Kitty’s eyes filled with tears. “I miss you,” she said softly.
He reached out to stroke her cheek. His hand was rough and callused, his forearm scarred with insect bites. “You drawing any new pictures since I been away?” he asked.
Kitty hesitated. “I can’t … I ran out of paper again.”
“And you won’t ask your missy for more.” He made it a statement, not a question.
“Missy don’t have any paper, either,” she said, shaking her head. “She can hardly get enough to write letters on now that there’s a blockade.”
The anger faded from his eyes. Sorrow took its place. “You better be going,” he said. Kitty knew he was right. If it was painful for her to see him again, how much harder must it be for him to see her, and to be reminded of all that he’d lost? She stood. Grady rose from where he’d been sitting on the bed across from her. Kitty leaned toward him and held him in her arms for a long moment, just to remember what it felt like.
He hugged her in return, but nothing was the way it had been. His embrace was brief and passionless, his homespun shirt rough beneath her cheek. He no longer smelled of soap and leather and horses the way she remembered. She stepped away again.
“Bye,” she whispered.
“Good-bye, Anna.”
Chapter Sixteen
Fuller Plantation, South Carolina
April-November 1862
The horn blew before the roosters crowed or the sun rose, and Grady’s long, exhausting day began. Instead of meals in the kitchen with Delia and Kitty, he had to cook his own rations as best he could and pack his dinner can to carry with him into the field. The foremen doled out rations of smoked pork and cornmeal each week, but it seemed to Grady that he never had enough to eat, that hunger gnawed around the edges of his stomach all the time.
He walked the long road to the fields with the other slaves each day, carrying a hoe or a shovel or tugging one of the mules along by its bridle. He would leave his dinner can at the top of the row, waiting as long as he could before eating it, knowing that it would be after sundown before he ate again. And even then, he would have to cook the food himself.
Each morning he’d be given a task to do, and he’d work until it was complete, sometimes until after dark—every day but Sunday. The work changed with the seasons but the fatigue and monotony were always the same. And it would be this way until the day that he died and they buried him by torchlight after the day’s work was finished.
When winter was nearly over, Mr. Browning assigned Grady to one of the mule-drawn plows and gave him a quarter-acre of ground to till each day, in preparation for planting. They weren’t planting cotton this year, the overseer said, because the harbor in Beaufort was still occupied and there was no way to ship the cotton past the enemy blockade of the coast. Instead, they would plant wheat, rice, and other food crops. The Confederacy always needed food.
As soon as the seeds sprouted, the task of hoeing began, and the fight against weeds continued endlessly through spring and summer. Browning couldn’t be everywhere at once, but he rode up and down the rows on his mule, his lash flying every time he saw a slave chop a plant by mistake or overlook a weed or labor too slowly.
Browning knew about Grady’s experience with horses, and he often made him work with the mules. The animals were strong but proverbially stubborn, and Grady’s horse tricks seldom worked with them. He had to resort to brute force to get them to do what he wanted, and his arms ached at night from wrestling with them. When the spring rains came, the mules’ hooves had to be fitted with wooden boots to keep them from sinking into the mud. Since Grady knew how to shoe a horse, it was his job to help fit these boots into place—and a miserable job it was. Massa’s horses had never kicked him, but he often found himself knocked to the ground by one of the mules. And in Grady’s half-starved condition, the ugly bruises were slow to heal.
When the ground began to dry out, Grady shoveled muck out of the ditches that would be used to flood the rice fields when it was time. They sowed rice twice—in early April and again in June to avoid the migrating birds that swooped down to feast on the newly planted seeds. Grady watched the bobolinks fly overhead, listening to their distinctive call, and he thought of Amos’ words long ago in Richmond. “That’s freedom, boy … flying away anytime you want, going wherever you want—just like that bird… . You gotta plan for it, boy. Know where you gonna go and how you’re getting there. Otherwise they catch you right away and whip you ’til you wish you was dead.” Ever since they’d fled Beaufort and Grady had missed his opportunity to escape as they’d waited for the Port Royal Ferry, freedom was all that he thought about. He would plan for it this time. He would be ready. He would not let another chance pass him by.
In time, Grady learned ways to help take his mind off his aching hunger and boredom. Sometimes as he drove the mule-drawn plow up and down the rows, he imagined that he was driving Massa through the streets of Charleston or Beaufort again, and he would try to recall each building and landmark. Other times he would rehearse the fiddle in his mind while he hoed, dreaming that he was still in New Orleans with Beau, before Massa Coop had forced him to play for the slaves. Grady would concentrate on all the fingerings and how to move the bow, humming the melodies in h
is mind and trying to see how many songs he could still recall after all this time.
But the most painful days were the ones when he couldn’t stop thinking about Anna. He would re-create the details of her face in his mind, or envision her delicate hands as they sketched a tree or a flower. He would remember what it felt like to hold her in his arms, until the pain would overwhelm all his other sorrows—the ache of his muscles, the blistering heat, his never-ending hunger.
The other slaves often sang to help drown their troubles, and when Grady first heard them, it made him angry. They sang as they traveled to the fields, and as they worked throughout the day, and as they journeyed home at night, weary in body and spirit. He wanted to shout for them to stop. Why were they singing? Music was an expression of joy they couldn’t possibly know. The fact that most of the songs had something to do with God added to his bitterness.
But as time passed, Grady gradually began to see that these work songs created a sense of community and shared hardship among his fellow slaves. Like Grady’s own mental exercises, singing helped pass the time, relieved the boredom of their monotonous tasks, and distracted them from their pain. When they had to labor together as a group, the Negro foreman set the pace and rhythm of their work with song. But most of the time the songs sprang spontaneously and unplanned. Someone would sing a line, and the others would quickly join in, echoing the words, adding verses of their own. Some of the tunes were lively, but many were mournful and hauntingly beautiful.
And one day, without making a conscious decision, Grady joined them. The release he felt as he sang along with the other slaves—his brothers and sisters—was even greater than what he’d felt when he’d learned to play the fiddle. This time it was his music, slave music, not a white man’s song. No one compelled him to sing. And he was very surprised to find that the music offered hope for a changed life, a better life:
My army cross over; O, Pharaoh’s army drowned!
My army cross over, we cross the river Jordan… .
Even the songs that talked about Jesus had an undercurrent of rebellion and a yearning for freedom that Grady grew to love:
Ride in, kind Savior! No man can hinder me.
O, Jesus is a mighty man! No man can hinder me… .
He rehearsed his plans to escape as he sang, “Brother, keep your lamp trimming and a-burning … for this world almost done” or “Way down in the valley, who will rise and go with me? We’ll run and never tire, Jesus sets poor sinners free.” They could sing about freedom and the overseer couldn’t stop them as long as freedom from slavery was disguised behind words of dying and going to heaven:
We’ll soon be free, when the Lord will call us home.
My brother, how long before we done suffering here?
We’ll walk the golden streets when Jesus sets me free.
We’ll fight for liberty, when the Lord will call us home.
Grady labored all that long, hot summer beneath a broiling sun, the humid air as thick as wet cotton against his skin. He dreamed of sailing down one of the waterways to freedom as he and the others opened the reservoir gates and watched the water pour through the channels to flood the rice fields. He thought of Anna’s love of color when he saw the rows and rows of ripening rice, the stalks a vivid yellow-green against the muddy water. When the heads of rice began to bend down, he helped drain the water again so the fields would dry before harvest—and he wondered if he would live this way until the day he died.
On a sweltering Sunday in August, Grady’s only day off, he sat outside his hut watching all the other families on Slave Row. He saw children playing, husbands and wives enjoying an hour or two together, and his longing for his own family was so great that he suddenly decided to sneak home and visit Delia and Anna. He knew that he stank of sweat and dirt, so he carefully rinsed out his shirt first, and laid it in the sun to dry while he shaved and washed himself as best he could. But when he arrived at the little cabin he’d once shared with the two women, he found it empty. He stared up at the rear façade of the Big House, bitterly disappointed, and remembered that house slaves didn’t get a day off.
Grady returned to his own hut on Slave Row, his loneliness multiplied. As he sat staring at the dirt, trying to ignore the smells of cooking food and the sounds of activity all around him, he heard a woman’s voice. “Hey, there. You look awful sad sitting all by yourself.”
Grady looked up. One of the young slave women who had worked beside him in the rice fields all week, smiled down at him. She was pretty and shapely but not as lovely as Anna.
“I just been cooking some greens,” she said. “You want to come on down to my place and have some?”
Grady’s stomach rumbled at the thought. Many of the other slaves managed to grow a little extra food in gardens of their own after the workday was finished. This girl was making a huge sacrifice in offering to share what little she had with him. He couldn’t take her food.
“Thanks. But I ain’t hungry,” he lied. He expected her to leave, but she surprised him by sitting down on the step beside him.
“Every time I see you, you’re all alone,” she said. “What I can’t figure out, is why a good-looking fella like you don’t have a dozen gals cooking for him. Don’t you know we all need each other to help make this sorry life of ours a little easier?”
Grady thought of his life with Coop—a lonely existence without companionship. He’d worked with William every day, but the servant had remained cold and distant, as if unwilling to get close to Grady and risk seeing Coop kill him as he’d killed the first “Joe.” Grady’s life with Delia and Anna had been very different. He had still been a slave, but the love they’d shared made it bearable.
“I know. You’re right,” he said. “But I have a wife. I’m already married.”
“You are? Where is she?”
“She works up at the Big House. Lives up there, too.”
“And you don’t ever get to see her?”
He shook his head.
“What’s she like?”
Beautiful, he wanted to say. Trusting and naïve. She noticed colors and saw beauty everywhere, in things he never even noticed. But she had no more self-respect than a dog. “She draws pictures,” he said, instead.
The girl looked at him as if she’d never heard of such a thing. “What do you mean?”
“Come inside, I’ll show you.” He rose to his feet and led her into the deserted shack, pointing proudly to the drawings pinned to the wall over his bed. The girl crawled onto the bed and knelt there, studying them for a long moment, straightening the heatcurled edges with her fingers.
“Mmm. These are really something,” she said. She turned around to face Grady again but remained seated on his bed. “I heard you used to be Massa’s coachman. Why’d he send you down?”
“He didn’t, Missus Fuller did. Besides, Massa ain’t got any more horses for me to take care of. The Confederates came and took them all away for the war.”
She didn’t seem to be listening. Instead, she was looking him over from head to toe and smiling at him in a way that stirred his blood.
“Why don’t you come on over here and sit down?” she asked, patting the mattress beside her. Grady’s heart speeded up. He was so tempted, so lonely. Why not forget his miserable life for a little while, and take whatever love was being offered to him? Why not close the cabin door and take this girl in his arms and drown out his pain any way he could?
But Grady knew from experience that loving someone only led to more sorrow, in the end. He and this girl might grow to like each other—and then they might be separated in the blink of an eye, the same way he and Anna had been. He remembered how Anna had sat in the same place this girl was sitting. How she had stood to say good-bye and held him in her arms before she left.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. “But I … I love Anna. My wife.” Grady was astonished to discover that it was true. And that he was unwilling to risk loving one more person in this life—and losing them.
“Oh.” The girl looked disappointed and a little angry. She slowly climbed off the bed and stood close to Grady, resting her hands on his chest, looking up into his eyes. “Well, if you ever change your mind, let me know.”
Grady’s longing was almost more than he could bear. He gently lifted the girl’s hands from his chest and ducked out of the shack before he changed his mind.
* * *
Once a week Mr. Browning drove into town to pick up supplies and the mail, and he often took Grady along to wrangle the mules and help load the wagon. It was the only chance that Grady and the other slaves had to hear the latest news about the war and all the battles that were being fought. There might not have been many trade goods to buy in the general store these days, but the white men who gathered there loved to talk about the War for Southern Independence.
Grady quietly rejoiced when he learned that the city of New Orleans had fallen into Yankee hands. He imagined Massa Coop’s capture and arrest and pictured the slave trader rotting in a filthy jail cell like the ones where Grady and Coop’s other slaves had lived. Grady paid especially close attention when he heard that several battles were being waged near his old home in Richmond, Virginia. His hopes for freedom for his mama and Eli soared as a huge Yankee army marched all the way up the Virginia Peninsula that spring and summer, determined to conquer the city. But as the summer months passed and the last Yankee soldier was chased back to Washington City in defeat, Grady’s hopes were crushed. In August, the entire town celebrated the second Rebel victory at a place called Manassas. And September brought news that the Rebels were on the move, marching into Yankee-held territory in Maryland. While the plantation owners rejoiced at these victories, Grady despaired.
By the time the long days of harvesting and threshing began, Grady had become a trusted member of the slave community. Each time he made a trip to town and back, the men would gather in his hut at night to make whispered plans for escaping.
