The Soldier's Lady

by Michael Phillips

  The Soldier’s Lady

  Copyright © 2006 by Michael R. Phillips

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-1136-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Cover design by John Hamilton Design

  Cover photograph by Steve Gardner, PixelWorks Studio

  To our friends from many years ago of Campus Christian Fellowship (CCF) and InterVarsity at Humboldt State University. With you we learned, we studied, we questioned, we laughed, we struggled, we prayed . . . and we grew into faith. What can be a more powerful foundation for lasting affection than that! Judy and I still look back at those days and those friendships as among the richest in our lives, for which we are eternally grateful. We think of you often and miss you. The hearts of all those who were part of those special bonds will forever be united with us by ties of love. How dear you are in our memory!

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. River of Baptism, River of Death

  2. Buffalo Soldier

  3. Stranger at Rosewood

  4. Reunion

  5. New Friends

  6. Ambitions

  7. A Mighty Fine-Looking Man

  8. Reading, Writing, and Ranching

  9. Cows and Confusion

  10. A Trip

  11. Complications in Charlotte and Elsewhere

  12. Master and Mistress

  13. Sometimes It Hurts to Be Black

  14. Storm and Stories, Laughter and Tears

  15. Boy in Chicago

  16. Streets for a Home

  17. Mentor

  18. Reflections

  19. Confusing Thoughts

  20. Stories, Dances, and Memories

  21. Baptism

  22. A Conversation to Remember

  23. Learning to Read

  24. Altercation

  25. Weed Jenkins

  26. Emma Hears a Voice

  27. Another Baptism

  28. Shakedown

  29. Unexpected Feelings

  30. Give Me Jesus

  31. The River’s Claim

  32. Confrontation

  33. Grief, Healing, and More Tragedy

  34. Another Conversation at the River

  35. Plans

  36. Happy Day

  37. Farewell

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books by Author

  PROLOGUE

  As those of you who know something about me already know, I like to tell stories. When I was young, I used to make up stories to tell my little brother. We were slaves and life was hard, and stories helped the time pass easier.

  As I got older, I realized that the best kind of stories weren’t made-up “stories” at all. They were true stories. They were just what happened.

  So that’s how I first started telling about my life during and after the war, and about the people I grew to love through those times—Katie and her uncles, and Emma and Josepha, and Henry and Jeremiah. And I came to see that everybody’s life is a story worth telling, because everybody’s life is a “true story” just like Katie’s and mine.

  But it’s sometimes hard to tell someone else’s story. You have to try to think like they would think, and feel the kinds of things they feel. To tell someone else’s story you have to “get inside” them, and that’s a mighty hard thing to do. But then that’s what makes another person’s life worth telling—that inside part of them that’s the real person God made.

  If there’d never been a war and if slavery hadn’t ended, maybe I’d have grown up to be one of those old white-haired slave women rocking in a chair with little black children all around, telling them all the old slave stories and singing them the old colored spirituals.

  But the war did come, and slavery did end. I used to be a slave, then I was a free black girl. Change came to blacks like me all over the South. Change came to whites too. It was a time when this country was turned upside down in the way folks thought about the color of people’s skin. So the stories I’m telling are the stories of black folks learning to be free and about white folks learning to live with free black folks, and about those times after the war when it was dangerous to be black, but also exciting. It was a time when things were changing so fast you could hardly keep up with them, in good ways and bad ways both.

  I reckon I say that because there were good people and bad people, of both colors of skin. And some of the stories I have to tell are about both kinds of people.

  What happened in those days involved danger and heartbreak because, though there are lots of happy memories, they were frightening times. But those of us who lived through them discovered how deep love can be. Because when it weathers change and danger, love comes through stronger than ever.

  So I reckon you’d say those times taught us to endure heartache, but mostly they taught us to love.

  RIVER OF BAPTISM, RIVER OF DEATH

  1

  AS THE SUN SLOWLY CREPT ABOVE THE HAZY HORIZON and then inched its way into the sky, it was clear enough to anybody who’d spent much time in North Carolina that this would be a hot and muggy day.

  By ten in the morning it was ninety degrees. At noon it was over a hundred. Not a breath of wind came from anywhere. What work there was to be done around the plantation called Rosewood was finished by lunchtime, and no one felt inclined to go out in the hot sun after that if they didn’t have to. The cotton and other crops would continue growing. The weeds in the vegetable garden would keep for another day. The animals would take care of themselves without any help until milking time came for the cows late in the afternoon. It was the kind of day that made the dogs too tired to do anything but lay sprawled out on the ground with their tongues hanging out. The chickens were too listless to make much racket. Only the cattle in the fields didn’t seem to notice the heat. They just kept munching away.

  “You want ter go dab dose feet er yers in da ribber, William?” said twenty-one-year-old Emma Tolan to her four-year-old son.

  “Dat I do, Mama!” replied the boy eagerly. “Kin we go now?”

  “We’ll go right after lunch,” answered Emma.

  Forty minutes later, the tall slender black girl and chubby little boy of tan complexion walked away from the house hand in hand. They crossed two fields of green ripening stalks whose cotton the young mother would help pick later in the summer as she had for the past four years since coming to this place. Back then she had been a scatterbrained former slave with a half-white newborn son to take care of, fathered by her former master. She hadn’t been much use to anyone all her life up until that moment, and she knew it. If ever anyone felt worthless as a person, it was she. Though she had been the oldest of the three girls thrown together by the war and left to figure out a way to survive alone, she had needed more taking care of than both the others combined.

 
On the memorable day when the white girl discovered Emma hiding in the Rosewood barn, she was babbling incoherently and frightened out of her wits, and her labor with little William’s birth had already begun. But she had grown and changed in the four years since that day she had found her way here. The roots of that change had matured slowly and invisibly under the influence of her two friends and saviors, white Kathleen Clairborne, whose plantation it was, and black Mary Ann Daniels, whose home it became.

  And new and even more far-reaching kinds of changes had begun to stir in Emma’s heart a month or two ago, in the spring of 1869. These changes had been obvious to everyone at Rosewood—and what a strange assortment of people it was! Emma’s countenance grew quieter. A look of peace and dawning self-assurance gradually came over her face. More often these days, rather than the most talkative, she was the quietest member of the Rosewood family around the kitchen table, sitting content to listen, watch, and observe.

  Emma’s soul had begun to come awake.

  And that is about the best thing that can ever happen to anyone.

  So as she and William made their way to the river on this hot June day, Emma was not thinking of swimming or playing in the water with her son to cool off from the heat. She was going to the river to remember.

  She had been doing this so often these last several weeks, since that day she would never forget. Usually she came alone—to pray or sing quietly and let her heart absorb the memory of what she had felt as she had come up out of the water, face and hair dripping, face aglow with new life.

  Praise Jesus! were her only words. She had not shouted them as in a camp meeting revival. Rising out of the river’s waters, she had uttered them quietly, reverently, scarcely above a whisper. For the first time in the depths of her being she knew what those two eternal words meant. And her smiling heart had been quietly repeating them over and over since then . . . Praise Jesus . . . Praise Jesus.

  Emma Tolan had begun to change before that day. But her baptism sent that change so deep into her heart that she was still trying to grasp it. So she came here every few days—to sit as the river flowed slowly past her, to ponder what God had meant when He made her, and to reflect on what He might want to make of her now that she knew how much He loved her.

  She could not know—how could she have known?—that she was being watched.

  In this season of peace and happiness in her life, Emma was not thinking of the past, nor of the secrets she possessed, whose danger even she herself did not fully recognize. She was thinking of the wonderful now and the bright future.

  But there was someone who was thinking of a dark past—of a time in her life she had finally almost forgotten. He had not forgotten. He had sent the watchers to watch, and to await an opportunity to bury the memory of that past forever, not in the triumphant waters of baptism, but in the dark waters of death.

  Emma sat down at the river’s edge and eased her bare brown feet into the shallow water as William ran straight into it.

  “You be careful, William!” she said. “You stay near me, you hear. I don’t want ter be havin’ ter haul you outta dat water yonder cuz I can’t swim so good.”

  Whether William was listening was doubtful. But he was in no danger yet, for the site where Emma had been baptized was far on the opposite bank, and the sandy bottom sloped away toward it gradually. He ran and splashed within four feet of the shore, to no more depth than halfway up his fat little calves, laughing and shrieking happily without a care in the world, until he was wet from head to foot. Emma watched with a smile on her face. It wasn’t easy to pray with a rambunctious youngster making such a racket. But she was content to be there.

  She had just begun to get sleepy under the blazing sun and had lain down on her back, when sudden footsteps sounded behind her from some unknown hiding place in the brush bordering the river. Startled but suspecting nothing amiss, Emma sat up and turned toward the sound. Three white men were running toward her, two bearing big brown burlap bags.

  Before she could cry out, they were upon her. One of the men seized her and yanked her to her feet. It didn’t take long for her to find her voice. She cried out in pain as the second man pulled her arms behind her. The third had kept going straight for William, threw the open end of one sack over his head, and scooped the boy out of the shallow water and off his feet.

  “Mama!” William howled in fright. But the next instant he was bundled up so tightly and thrown over the man’s shoulder that all he could make were muffled noises of terror.

  Emma’s pre-baptismal voice could now be heard a half-mile away, if not more. She screamed at the top of her lungs, struggling and kicking frantically to keep the second bag off her own head.

  “You let him go . . . William . . . git yo han’s off me . . . help—somebody . . . Miz Katie, help! Mayme!”

  “Shut up, you fool!” yelled one of the men, trying desperately to calm her down. But even two of them were hardly a match for an enraged, frightened human mother-bear. She writhed and struggled and kicked with every ounce of survival instinct she possessed. As one tried to take hold of her shoulders and force her to be still, Emma’s teeth clamped down onto his wrist like the vise of a steel trap.

  He cried out in pain, swearing violently, glanced down to see blood flowing from his arm, then whacked Emma across the side of the head with the back of his hand. But it only made her scream the louder.

  “Help!” she shrieked in a mad frenzy. “Git away from me . . . William, Mama’s here . . . help! Miz Katie . . . dey’s got William. Help!”

  Two hands took hold of her head from behind, and the next instant Emma’s voice was silenced by a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. She felt herself lifted off the ground, kicking and wildly swinging her arms about and writhing to free herself. The three men now made clumsily for their waiting horses and then struggled to mount with their unwieldy human cargo.

  The river was not so far from the house that Emma’s screams were not plainly heard. The frantic cries quickly brought everyone running from several directions at once.

  “Is that Emma?” called Katie in alarm, hurrying out onto the porch and glancing all about to see what was going on.

  “She went to the river,” said Mayme, running around from the side of the house.

  “Where’s Emma and William?” yelled Templeton Daniels, Katie’s uncle and Mayme’s father, as he ran toward them from the barn where he’d gone to prepare for milking.

  “At the river,” Mayme answered.

  “William must have fallen in,” he said. “Let’s go!”

  They all sprinted away from the house in the direction of the river.

  Someone else had also heard Emma’s cries for help. He had come to Rosewood as a stranger a few months earlier. At Emma’s first scream he had burst out of the cabin where he had been bunking, a cabin that had been part of Rosewood’s slave village before the war. He was now flying across the ground in the direction of the sounds.

  He reached the river twenty or thirty seconds ahead of the others. He was just in time to see three horses disappearing around a bend of the river, two lumpy burlap bags slung over two of their saddles. A hasty look around what he knew to be Emma’s favorite spot showed signs of a scuffle. Seconds later he was sprinting back for the house. He intercepted the others about a third of the way but did not slow.

  “Somebody’s taken Emma and William!” he yelled as he ran by. “They’re on horseback!”

  He reached the barn just as Templeton’s brother, Ward, was returning from town. Though his horse was hot and tired, it was already saddled, and every second might be the difference between life and death. Ward Daniels’ feet had no more hit the ground than he saw the figure dashing toward him, felt the reins grabbed from his hands, and in less than five seconds watched his horse disappearing at full gallop toward the river. He stared after it in bewilderment until his brother and two nieces ran back into the yard a minute later and explained what was happening.

  The rider lash
ed and kicked at his mount, making an angle he hoped would intercept the three horses he had seen earlier. He had no idea where they were going, unless it was toward Greens Ford, a narrow section of river which, in summer, was shallow enough to cross easily and cut a mile off the distance to town by avoiding the bridge downstream.

  He reached Greens Ford and slowed. There was no sign of them.

  Frantically he tried to still Ward’s jittery horse enough to listen. A hint of dust still swirled in the air where the ground had been stirred up beyond the ford but on the same side of the river. He kicked the horse’s sides and bolted toward it. If they had not crossed the ford, where were they going? Why were they following the river?

  Suddenly a chill seized him as the image of the burlap sacks filled his mind. The rapids . . . and the treacherously deep pool bordered by a cliff on one side and high boulders on the other!

  He lashed the horse to yet greater speed, then swung up the bank hoping to cut across another wide bend of the river toward the spot.

  Three minutes later he dismounted and ran down a steep rocky slope so fast he barely managed to keep his feet beneath him.

  He heard them now. They were at the place he feared!

  He slowed enough to keep from sending the stones underfoot tumbling down the slope ahead of him, thinking desperately. What could he hope to do against three white men, probably with guns!

  He began to slow and crept closer.

  Suddenly a scream sounded.

  “William . . . somebody help us!” shrieked a girl’s voice.

  He knew that voice! Whatever was to become of him, nothing would stop him now! He sprinted toward the sound.

  “Dey’s got William . . . help!” came another terrified scream.

  “What the—” a man exclaimed. “How did she get that thing loose?”

  “Just shut her up!” shouted another.

  “It doesn’t matter now. Let’s do what we came to do!”

  One more wild scream pierced the air, then a great splash. It was followed by another.

  “That ought to take care of them . . . let’s get out of here!”