When a bullet took the Commander in the chest, he sat down. Disbelieving, he touched the wound. His unlined face contorted into a baffled, protesting moan.
This was where Top had been running to. All those other places had been waypoints to here. No more running. He felt sorry for the Commander, whose face betrayed no understanding that this place, this dust, these screaming hurt horses, those shrill whistles were where he’d always been bound. The Commander had thought he was meant to come to some other place, to be general of the army, perhaps, or perhaps he’d live in the White House. He’d thought he’d always be loved. Sergeant Major Edward Ratcliff felt a twinge of sympathy for the Boy General who’d go to hell not knowing how he got there.
Sergeant Major Ratcliff put a bullet into a warrior who leaped over Vic. The man—a Cheyenne, by his paint—collapsed on the carcass. Soldiers raised their hands in surrender to indians who killed them anyway. Rain in the Face cut Tom Custer’s throat and as the captain backpedaled clutching the gash, Rain in the Face gutted him from belly to sternum, reached in, and dragged the man’s pulsing heart into the light. Gleefully, he held the thing before the dying captain’s eyes. As Tom Custer slumped to his knees, the indian bit into the gory meat and spat into the dirt.
Sergeant Major Edward Ratcliff, United States Colored Troops, free as he’d ever be, charged three thousand warriors, swinging his rifle over his head like a war club, yelling his kill song, “Hincty Nigger! Hincty Nigger! Hincty Nigger!” into their whistles and cries.
What a Santee Plenty Cuts would have made!
It was soon over. Afterward the Washitu said Yellow Hair and his Seizers had fought to the end, but most did not fight at all. The warriors killed them like sheep. There was no honor in it. One Seizer walked through the fighting as if charmed until a Cheyenne brained him. Others ran down the narrow coulee to escape, but it was a death trap lined with warriors on the rim firing down at them.
At the end my husband was a true warrior. I was proud of him.
I tried to catch Plenty Cuts’s eye, just once, to summon him to my heart one last time before his soul departed for the Shadowland, but it was not to be.
CHAPTER 60
AMERICA’S TEMPERANCE DRINK
Add the contents of one package of Mr. Charles Hires’s medicinal extract to each gallon of water and boil twenty minutes. When still warm, add 3 tbsp. yeast and 1/2 pound white sugar. Cover your container with a cloth and let stand for two hours before bottling.
THE LITTLE GIRL DROPPED HER MOTHER’S HAND AND SLIPPED forward to touch the statue’s cold bronze toe.
A broken manacle dangled from the slave’s left wrist. In his right hand he brandished the Emancipation Proclamation. Naked save for a rumpled sarong, he strode into the future, powerful and exultant.
The child’s father’s dark suit was more respectable than new. He put on spectacles to read the statue’s name aloud: “The Abolition of Slavery in the United States.”
The mother said, “He ’most naked, Jesse. In Richmond that boy be locked up.”
“It’s an allegory, Sudie,” Jesse Burns said.
“What’s a ‘leg-ory’?” his daughter asked.
Sudie snorted. “That leg-ory best put his pants on.”
The child lifted her eyes. “Mama, I want some soda water. I’m right thirsty.”
“You’re very thirsty, Soj,” her father corrected.
“Well, I is!” Sojourner Burns took refuge with her mother.
Hands clasped behind him, Jesse Burns leaned closer to examine the statue. “Reminds me of a boy I used to know.” He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Rufus meant to become a farrier. Rufus’s hands . . . shaking his hand was like grasping a boot sole.” Jesse cased his spectacles. “Haven’t thought ’bout Rufus in years. He was shot dead not long after Lincoln signed that.” He nodded at the bronze proclamation. “I buried Rufus.” Softly, he added, “Buried Rufus’s ambitions with him.”
“Like Jimson,” Sudie said.
“Yes.” Jesse didn’t know what to say about Jimson so he rarely spoke about him. Jimson’s mother mentioned him often.
The family withdrew when two young white men approached. In striped blazers and straw hats, they might have been college boys. The pair eyed the statue solemnly until one opined gravely, “If this ’un’s freed, I say, stuff him back into slavery.”
His friend snorted. The speaker tipped his hat to Sudie. “Hot, ain’t it?” he observed.
Sudie hid behind her fluttering fan.
The Memorial Hall at the Centennial Exposition was America’s first art museum, and visitors touched anything they felt like touching and were more curious than awed.
That July third, 1876, the summer’s long heat wave had shrunk the exposition crowd to thirty thousand. Here and there in the manicured park grounds, a footsore visitor could find shade.
As Mr. and Mrs. Burns proceeded down the crowded aisles, eight-year-old Sojourner darted into the next gallery, popped back out, and recaptured her mother’s hand. “Soda water, Mama?”
“Soon, honey. I thirsty too.”
They’d arrived in Philadelphia yesterday and taken a room at the United States Hotel, built specially for the exposition. Jesse had made their reservation on Virginia Assembly stationery. The desk clerk had welcomed him and called him “Mr. Burns” as if Jesse were white.
The hotel overlooked the exposition’s main entrance, but their small room overlooked railroad tracks in back. They’d supped in the hotel that evening and after Sojourner was asleep in a cot beside their bed, Sudie had loved Jesse with an eagerness that surprised him.
The next morning, they’d toured Machinery Hall, where Sojourner asked the man adjusting “The Telephonic Instrument,” “What that do?”
The man looked up and smiled. “It’s supposed to talk.”
Hands on hips. “How it gonna do that?”
“Well, you see,” its inventor explained, “it’s supposed to change sound into electrical impulses and re-create them over there.” He pointed across the hall where an assistant knelt with his ear pressed to a similar instrument.
“That man can hear what you saying?” Sojourner didn’t believe it. “Way ’cross the room?”
“That’s the idea.” The man bent to what looked like a black megaphone stopped with a brass layer cake. He waved his hand and enunciated, “To be or not to be.”
When his assistant stood and shrugged elaborately, Sudie said, “I guess it ain’t to be.”
Jesse was fascinated by the Corliss, the two-thousand-horsepower steam engine whose hissing overhead belts, clattering pulleys, whirring gears and shafts powered the hall’s exhibits. Sojourner clamped her hands over her ears.
They took an early supper at the Scandinavian Pavilion, where a smiling blond waitress fetched tinned herring on thick dark bread and mugs of effervescent golden beer.
Sudie said they should go back to their room so Sojourner could nap. Her daughter protested, “Mama, I’m not little anymore.”
Jesse said, “Dear, she’ll remember this day the rest of her life.”
“Why this day, Jesse? How you know what day Soj gon’ ’member? Other day I ask my child ’bout her brother and only thing Soj remembered was how Jimson lift her up and spin her until she sick. Didn’t ’member what he look like nor anything he said; just that spinnin’ foolishness.”
“If Jimson had seen this, he might have understood . . .”
“Understood what, Jesse: that white men know how to make things work? Jimson knowed that. Everybody knows that. Was white men made the boats brung us to ’Merica wasn’t it?” She discarded the strong-flavored bread and got up. “Come along, Soj. Your daddy wants to see more white men’s marvels.”
“Don’t you see, Sudie? They’re our marvels too.”
“Don’t you get pouty with me, Mr. Assemblyman Burns. You got no call get pouty!”
Jesse grinned despite himself.
In Memorial Hall they went dire
ctly to The Abolition of Slavery in the United States, the single Centennial artwork every negro in Jesse’s ward had heard about. The only other works which interested Jesse’s constituents—particularly Jesse’s Baptist constituents—were in the French exhibit. That outpost of Gomorrah was wall to wall with intensely curious (apparently blasé) adult Americans whose small sons furtively caressed the nude sculptures’ cold marble breasts.
Sudie hissed, “This ain’t decent, Jesse.”
He leaned to her ear. “They aren’t near as good-lookin’ as you, Sudie.”
She smacked his hand.
The Burns family escaped into the American galleries, where too many paintings crowded the walls of too-small rooms.
Jesse paused at the moody sunset, darkening clouds, and frightening sheer cliffs of Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley.
Sudie pinched her husband. “Don’t you get to dreamin’, Jesse. It’s just a picture. Painter man paints whatever comes to mind. Yose-mite might be no pretty place. Might be a desert or a darn mud hole or filled with savage indians.”
“I wonder how Duncan and Sallie are faring,” Jesse mused. “Edward Ratcliff is in the West too. I had the strangest dream the other night. We were both back in uniform. It wasn’t a parade ground or a battle—nothing like that. With hundreds of other soldiers, Edward and I were falling through the air.”
“Why you thinkin’ ’bout that man, Jesse? You ain’t thinkin’ ’bout uprootin’ and draggin’ us out West?”
He kissed her forehead. “For better or worse, dear, our future’s in Virginia. Sojourner’s too.”
“Mama, I’m wearied of pictures ’n’ statues. I’m thirsty!”
Outside Memorial Hall heat struck them like a blow. The huge winged stone horses looming over Republic Avenue were so white they hurt the eyes. Sudie’s fan fluttered like a panting butterfly.
“I came to this city for the Republican convention after the war. I met Thaddeus Stevens and your husband shook Frederick Douglass’s hand.”
“So you told me ’bout a thousand times.”
Sojourner cried, “Mama, Mama! Look over there, Mama!”
Sojourner found her soda water at a vaguely moorish kiosk whose minarets flags advertised: “The Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World!!” and “Hires Root Beer Stands for Health, Temperance, and Home!”
Six soda jerks were busy serving the crowd. Jessie laid down his nickels on the zinc counter and iced glasses were produced.
Sudie dipped her tongue into the foam. “Jesse, this is sassafras tea!”
The chief soda jerk materialized before heresy could spread. “No, madam, it is not sassafras. Mr. Hires is a licensed pharmacist. Mr. Hires used his vast understanding of medicinal herbs to select the rare, costly ingredients in Hires Root Beer. I assure you”—he said with a condescending chuckle—“There is more—far more—to Hires Root Beer than sassafras.”
Jesse called a truce. “It deserves a great future.”
But when Sojourner’s empty glass clattered on the counter, the little girl announced, “Tastes like sassafras to me.”
Jesse had marked his Centennial catalog with the exhibits and pavilions he particularly wanted to see. Froebel’s kindergarten was a one-story wood schoolhouse with a red tile roof.
The model schoolhouse had a spectator’s gallery facing the schoolroom. The Burnses took seats near the front.
“Why, they ain’t nothin’ but babies,” Sudie said wonderingly.
The children, age three to five years, were orphans from the Home for Friendless Children. Seated before their workbench, these industrious waifs assembled wooden blocks: squares, triangles, and circles. A teacher tutored a small dark-haired girl. “Elaine,” she asked, “what does this remind you of?”
“It’s my house,” the child named the block construction.
“This one?” The teacher turned a rectangle on its side
“I don’t know.”
“Imagine, child. Imagine.”
The child knocked it over. “That’s the wall ’round the home,” she added happily. “All fall down!”
“What they doing, Mama?” Sojourner spoke through her yawn. Lacking a response, she slumped against her mother and closed her eyes.
The attentive children, the click of their blocks, the whisper of brightly colored paper shapes becoming lions and tigers and steamships, the mild tones of the yankee teachers’ voices: all this unlocked Jesse’s memory. When not much older than these children, he’d been Uther Botkin’s slave: cleaning the milk cow’s stall, feeding the hogs, splitting and carrying the old schoolteacher’s firewood. Jesse made excuses to be near the porch where the old schoolmaster instructed the Gatewood children and his beloved daughter Sallie in the mysteries of reading, spelling, and arithmetic. One morning, the schoolmaster caught Jesse puzzling over Sallie’s McGuffy’s Reader.
It was illegal to teach slaves to read. The notorious Nat Turner had been literate and his slave rebellion had slaughtered a hundred innocent whites.
When Jesse dropped the reader, it landed on its open pages. He remembered as if yesterday how frightened he’d been.
But gentle Uther Botkin picked it up and said, “I guess I’ll have to get you a book of your own.”
A book of his own!
The hushed schoolroom was stuffy. Jesse heard a tiny snore. Eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, Sudie leaned into him.
“Education is the negro’s best hope!” Jesse’d argued in the assembly, where negroes mostly agreed with him and white assemblymen were reluctant to pay for white public schools, much less the separate black schools Virginia’s constitution required.
Most of Jesse’s constituents couldn’t read, and since the Freed-men’s Bureau schools had closed, many would never learn to read. Watching Sudie work so hard to extract meaning from an ordinary newspaper was painful to him. Eight-year-old Sojourner read better than her mother.
Once, in an ill humor, Sudie had snapped, “You only married me to uplift me, Mr. Assemblyman Burns.”
Nothing she’d ever said in anger hurt him worse, because there was a kernel of truth in her accusation. Jesse almost snapped back, “There aren’t many literate negro women to pick among,” but he was wise enough, that once, to embrace his angry wife and whisper, “I married you because I never saw a finer, prettier woman. First time I saw you at the First Baptist social, you were pouring iced tea and I thought to myself, That girl bound to melt every piece of ice she touches . . .”
She wept then, bitterly, and said, “Jesse, I know I disappoint you. I try not to. You should be married to some high-toned gal, not no ignorant pickaninny like me.”
A child scholar laughed, and a teacher shushed the child. Some spectators got up and left. Sudie’s head was heavy on Jesse’s shoulder.
Jesse’d seen Samuel Gatewood in Richmond outside the Gatewoods’ rooming house. The planter who’d once held absolute power over his life hadn’t recognized Jesse, and Jesse hadn’t introduced himself. To the old man, Jesse was just another black face in a city of black faces.
When Jesse heard Stratford had been sold, he didn’t care. Unlike Uther Botkin’s schoolroom porch, Stratford held no memories the former slave wished to revisit.
Sudie woke and took Jesse’s handerchief from his pocket to blow her nose. A child was noisily clattering blocks together. Sudie said, “At that girl’s age, I was brushing Mistress’s hair, two hundred strokes morning and night.”
“Things are different now. Our Sojourner will attend Hampton Institute one day.”
Sudie’s eyes pleaded. “Jesse, if Soj go—she be ashamed of her old ma. She get ‘elevated’ and she never come home no more.”
Jesse took a moment to think. “Wouldn’t you want her, dear Sudie, to have a better life than you’ve had?”
“Oh, Jesse—mostly I do. But sometimes I don’t want my little child to get above her rearin’.”
“Mama?” Their daughter rubbed her eyes. “What you sayin’ ’bout me?”
“We sayin’, honey, that you’re gonna be grown up one day.”
“I always love you, Mama. You know I will!”
Just inside the cavernous iron-and-glass Machinery Hall, three enormous Krupp cannons loomed over the aisle.
“What they for?” Sojourner stared at the huge guns.
“They our marvels too, Jesse?” Sudie whispered.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “I’m afraid they are.”
THE CATARACT—an exhibit of industrial pumps—was at the far end of Machinery Hall. Water cannons shot silver arcs from all sides of a hundred-yard pool, whose centerpiece was a four-sided waterfall without a river.
Jesse led his wife and child to the rail, where cool mist drifted over them.
“This my kind of marvel,” Sudie said.
A red-faced white man was running through the crowd. He was waving his arms and yelling something. His words were nearly lost in the cataract’s rumble. They heard “Little Bighorn.” They heard “Every last man.” They heard “General Custer.”
“Papa,” Sojourner Burns asked her father, “what’s a ‘massa cure’?”
EPILOGUE
In the Moon of the Falling Leaves in the year when Plenty Cuts was killed, Tazoo and I and several hundred others followed Sitting Bull across the Medicine Line into the Grandmother’s land. Fearing the Seizers’ revenge, most Lakota surrendered their guns and went to the agencies. The Seizers killed everyone who didn’t come in or run.
I rode a mule I found on the Greasy Grass. I found papers in its saddlebags: words about the Seizers and Yellow Hair. I knew more about them than I wanted to know and threw the papers into the fire.
My Tazoo was not as dark as Plenty Cuts and she had no scars across her back. I never told my husband I was afraid of his scars. Sometimes when he was asleep the thick ridges in his flesh seemed like snakes writhing their way into his heart. In the end, Plenty Cuts became his scars.
The country on both sides of the Medicine Line was flat and windy, bordered in the far distance by the mountains the Blackfeet call the Backbone of the World.
Canaan Page 38
