Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  Ezekiel slit the small envelope, scented and sealed with candlewax, with his thumbnail, filled his mouth with whiskey, which he sloshed around until it became warm, and, after wiping off Moses’ thumbprints, read:

  Mr. Sykes,

  You must forgive me for not writing sooner. I owe you letters and letters. I can never repay you for what you have done. I should like to meet you more than anything in this world, but I am afraid you would find me poor company. You are in my prayers. Do believe me when I say that I love you, shall always love you, that you have been like a father to me, and that without your aid I should be lost; I remain, Honored Sir,

  Your Servant,

  Althea

  Now, I must call your attention to Eastern texts that Ezekiel himself made me read, works that said Samsara (the world of appearance) was Nirvana (the world to be attained), which implied, outrageously, that man’s highest achievements were won in the realm of Matter. The girl’s letter, though brief, made Ezekiel’s brow go blank. Was he not obliged to give in greater measure? Was he not, after all, incomplete in his efforts to serve? Men saddled with obligations, like Moses—like Master Polkinghorne—would scoff at this, no doubt, seeing how they’d blundered into duty—the quiet, dull triumph of devoting themselves to everyday things, placing children and wife, colleagues and acquaintances in a widening circle that soon enveloped the entire community, before all else. But it kept them honest. It brought out, begrudgingly, the best qualities in the bulk of humanity, whether humanity appreciated it or not.

  Ezekiel stuffed the girl’s letter in his coat. “What is your proposal?”

  “You’ve read Althea’s letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “That part where she says you been like a father?” Moses paused with his glass midway between his mouth and the table. He put one finger in his ear and jiggled it. “You read that?”

  “Yes.”

  The hired man took a deep breath.

  “She’s for sale. You kin have her. Now, put down that bottle!” His voice jumped. “It’s plain I can’t do for her like you kin, poor as I am. Without a wife. Mr. Sykes, you lifted the bottle again….” Moses waited as Ezekiel put the flask down. “You might’s well do for her directly. Without me in the way.” Quickly, taking another drink, Moses kept his eyes on Ezekiel’s hands. “Does four hundred dollars sound fair?”

  Ezekiel looked at him in astonishment; he filled his cheeks, then his chest, with air, but held himself still; if he moved he would hang for second-degree murder.

  “Four hundred,” said Moses, “and you’ll never see me again.”

  “If I do, you’re a dead man.”

  Moses laughed.

  “The girl….” He cleared his throat. “When do I see her?”

  “After I see the money.”

  Never in his life had he hated anyone as deeply as Shem Moses. “Next Wednesday week—is that soon enough?”

  “I kin wait.”

  Now began a terrible period in Ezekiel’s life. The payment was difficult to come by. What credit he had at Cripplegate was exhausted; he was forced to wire friends in Missouri for the money, explaining that he was engaged, soon to be married. This Ezekiel came to believe. There rose in him, starting at about the fifth button on his vest, a vague feeling of purpose. And order. For the first time in years he had the courage to make plans and prelive the future. A month passed. Two months before the money arrived. While he waited, Ezekiel notified Jonathan of his resignation—he would find other work, work with his hands, perhaps even build his own house outside Hodges—you could do that, couldn’t you? Find a center? And ever he fixed his mind on the girl, who was the radix for this revolution in his life, ever his hatred for the hired man increased. By this time, it should be mentioned, my tutor lived only for the promise of this new life. He thought he would be transformed by taking her from Moses; he would enter, he believed, into a life of clarity and law. From his cabin, where crates of books waited for moving, there drifted from the quarters to the Big House the sobbing and broken song of a lonely man desperately in love. This luminary, the object of his new hope—Althea—seemed all the more beautiful for her bondage to Shem Moses, a creature so ashamed of the transaction he failed to show on the day Ezekiel, dressed to the nines, delivered the money to the dance-hall. He sent a slave, a messenger boy named Jeff Peters, who trousered the money for Moses, and gave Ezekiel a map to the Greenwood Farm.

  This is what happened now:

  He hitched wagons to Greenwood, bought a bouquet of flowers, then hiked six miles to the farm, and this wearied him, for the wind was strong and stirred (red) dust, the path was uneven, the footing poor, with night coming on, and he, painted and powdered as he was, wearing his highhat, his tight, square-toed shoes, and carrying a walking stick, was not dressed for hiking. First he saw a porch sharking onto the yard. A wild pig scrambled down the steps, cutting dirt across the fields. Something clicked in his throat. His stomach turned. He took off his hat and stepped inside to the shock of rooms emptying into rooms. Each step on the old floor was like the crack of a coffin shrinking. The farmhouse had not been inhabited for years. Ezekiel looked in the kitchen, the study, the sitting room; no Althea. Only this toadstool smell floating over black-dark furniture. Broken lanterns. Roots bursting through the floor. Birds nesting on the chimneypiece. Curtains moved behind him and he turned around. Rats. He sobbed—his first sound—dropped the flowers, then his cane, and crumpled at the room’s center, his back against a barrel, the shadowy house quiet now, a bony ruin where the only movement was blood pounding in his temples, his heart overheating—searing pain in his chest, and then even the work of this bloody, tired motor went whispering to rest, his spirit changed houses, and he dropped into the solitary darkness like stone.

  You will object, and rightly, that I cannot know what Ezekiel Sykes-Withers felt when he died, for this work is first-person, the most limited form. But even this philosophical problem of viewpoint—the autobiographical I—will be answered, I assure you, and I confess, for now, that this account is a tale woven partly from fact, partly from fancy.

  I will confess even more:

  A quarter mile from the Yellowdog Mine I still had no plan for escape, only a feeling that, if given a moment out of Plunkett’s sight, I could wing a way to liberation. The Lord, as my stepmother would say, provided the moment when we cleared the last hill and Captain Walter’s shed came into view. “We can walk from here,” I told Plunkett.

  His head went back. “You can what?”

  “You can leave us here,” I said. “It’s a long ride back.” The coachman bit and moistened his lips. “You’re up to something, ain’t you?”

  “No.”

  “If you are,” he screwed up his eyebrows, “it won’t work. There’s nothing around here but woods.” He stopped the horses and, when we’d piled out, said, “They know you’re coming.”

  I assured Plunkett that we would report to Captain Walters—I gave him my word, but the coachman waited as we walked, both relieved to be free of us and suspicious. Reb and I pushed a few paces ahead of the others as Plunkett watched from the wagon. When we reached the shed, the others were several rods behind us. Reb pulled at my arm. I pushed him ahead—timing was important—then, praying he was inside, knocked on the Chief Engineer’s door. My knees gave a little; I had gone a day without chandoo. My chest felt like a furnace; my teeth ached. Dragging for air, I pushed his door, which opened onto an unvarnished desk littered with surveying maps, a bevy of mining equipment, bottles containing coal and sand samples, and, behind it, the Chief Engineer. Walters lifted his head—he’d been sleeping—and came to his feet: “Yes?” He smoothed down his shirt. “Can I do something for you?”

  Stepping back, I let Walters fill the doorway, and said, “I’ve brought these men from Abbeville.”

  Looking south, we saw Sam Plunkett wave, then turn round his wagon. Walters threw up his hand.

  “You work for Flo Hatfield?”

  “The sa
me.”

  He returned to his desk, sweating, nodding at no one in particular at first, then at me to pull a calf-bottom chair closer to his desk. Reb stood close by me, silent as a wall. Now it took all my effort not to moan; the pain moved, experimentally, in my legs—a light green pain speckled with particles of blue. From his drawer Walters removed a bottle of peach-colored whiskey, which he offered me. It eased the ache of withdrawal by a little.

  “It’d be a blessing for a man to break his neck in times like these.” Walters laughed, all gloom. “You and your man there must be tired. We’ll fix a place for you tonight—”

  “We be leaving now,” I said. “Mrs. Hatfield expects us back by morning.”

  Noah Walters nodded.

  “You say hello to Flo for me.” He reached into his pocket, dragging keys, dust-sprinkled coins, then a gold watch, which played nicely when he opened it, onto his desk. “She always liked this. You give it to her for me, Mister…you musta told me your name, but I forget. My memory,” he touched his left temple, “ain’t what it used to be.”

  “It’s Harris,”

  Reb exhaled and rubbed his face.

  “He has bronchial trouble,” I told Walters. “The dust up here….”

  The Chief Engineer gave a headshake.

  “She’s a fine woman, you know that. I never met nobody quite like her. It ain’t every woman can keep a farm going like Flo Hatfield. She used to tell me….” He cracked the knuckles on his right hand slowly. His left. His sad, watery eyes skimmed over me. He said, to draw me out, “She’s good in bed, too.”

  “I know.”

  His mouth fell open. “You do?”

  As it often happens in the world, especially the tiny southern communities of South Carolina, Noah Walters and I had a third person in common: His fifteen year marriage ended, six years before, in Flo Hatfield’s bedsheets. He was not free of her yet. Would, I realized as he pumped me for the kind of information only shared by men who have slept in the same places, never be free of her. Did Flo still eat candy for breakfast? Dress her lovers like gigolos?—he still had a suit she’d given him. Did she still blather on and on about her Continental education? The Chief Engineer relaxed and let his hair down and looked at me with the preposterous, intimate, slightly embarrassed love of men who have survived—are trying to survive—the same war. It goes without saying that I had found in Noah Walters a friend; it was almost (I thought, stunned) as if I’d slept with him by proxy.

  At dusk, Reb said, “Sar, we got to go.”

  “I know, I know how she is,” said Walters. “I was late once and….” He laughed and put his arm round me as I looked, weakly, to the door. “Can I get you a pair of horses for the ride back? You can bring’em back when you come through again.”

  “That,” I said, “would be fine.”

  “And provisions?” Outside, Walters grabbed my shoulders, held me at arm’s length, and, like a great, wise uncle, said, “Bill, you be careful now. If you get in trouble, come down here. You can stay overnight. We’ll talk about it.” His hug lifted me a foot off the ground. “It wasn’t until now that I talked about this to anybody. Maybe,” he said, turning back to his shed, “I can get on with my life now….”

  The coffinmaker and I got on, thanks to Noah Walters, with our lives—about forty miles’ worth, which was the distance we put between ourselves and the Yellowdog Mine; we rode northeast, skirting Anderson, then stopped to rest the horses. You must remember that I rode sick, with quicksilver down my spine, bowels burning, fastened sometimes to my saddle because, every few miles, I fell off. Reb tethered my wrists to the pommel, pulled my horse at times by its reins through heavily wooded country near Greenville.

  “He can’t die now.” He was talking toward Heaven by the time we stopped by a dry riverbed for the night. “You listen to me….” Reb built a fire behind a rock, stretched me out on a blanket, and prayed, “Lord, you brought us out of Abbeville, so You better not quit on us now.”

  “I got us out,” I said. “It was me—”

  “You, You!” howled Reb. He hated personal pronouns; the Allmuseri had no words for I, you, mine, yours. They had, consequently, no experience of these things, either, only proper names that were variations on the Absolute. You might say, in Allmuseri, all is A. One person was A1, the next A2. (These are Western analogues. Don’t make too much of them.) “You ain’t strong enough to even ride, Freshmeat!”

  It was so. I was reeling, vomiting and voiding waste, by midnight. His voice and lips were out of sync. Words hung in the air seconds after he spoke. Between the thought Move your arms and my body there was no connection, an abyss between will and word, and I sank: the last thing I remember of the Black World was Reb tending the fire, twirling a sliver of kindling; sank: a circle of flame; sank: a brilliant firewheel of inexpressible beauty.

  PART TWO

  The White World

  VII

  MIDDLE PASSAGE:

  THE ROAD TO SPARTANBURG

  It is impossible for me to recollect all that took place our first night, for I was from that point on the poorest of traveling companions; I was unable to ride for long, or too fast, fell dizzily from my horse when we resumed flight, and lost all sense of distance and direction. But worse than all this, I had lost Minty. When I tell you that my urgency for freedom came from my desire to see Minty free, that my well-being depended largely upon hers, you will not believe me. You are going to say that at twenty Andrew Hawkins was infatuated or, like most men, in love with the idea of love, or perhaps propelled by romance. None of that would be true. The view from the quarters changes the character of everything, even love—especially love—and in ways not commonly admitted. This was true of my feelings about Minty, and no less true of the tie between her mother, Addie, and father, Nate, whom my stepmother had reason to call the Toadstool, though for a time he was my father’s only friend after the Fall.

  My father was not well received when he came back from the Big House. Not at first. As might be expected, his head was lowered a little after the incident with Anna Polkinghorne, his voice was lower, too, softer, more unsure, and for two or three months he stayed clear of scrub balls, church services, and the drunken communion of bondsmen behind the still. He was not unsocial. Then, more than ever, he needed the company of other slaves, but what kept him away, behind the rag curtains over the kitchen window, was the feeling that in one evening he’d lost a lifetime of building a good name for himself, winning his master’s confidence, and disproving the grim Negro wisdom that no effort served to alter history and nature. He’d thought himself the exception—thought there could be exceptions, other models, if a man just did what he was told. Hadn’t he lived closer to Jonathan Polkinghorne than the others? Didn’t those years of service count for something? In all this, George decided, he’d been duped. Old women in my mother’s Prayer Circle, wearing bonnets of braided horsehair, inclined their gray heads together when my father walked by, as if to say, “Now, there goes a fool,” which, I needn’t tell you, slowed George’s step a little. He’d straighten his back, start to speak, then bite down on his lip and pass on silently into a life that could only be called conditional (if that is the right word). He lay down to sleep, but always conditionally, as if to say, “This is no longer the right or real thing,” ate, dressed himself, and did a day’s work oxherding, but without once coming out of himself toward Mattie or, after Anna delivered her issue to the quarters like a bad tooth, toward me. One deed, it seemed, could be a destiny. For all but my stepmother, George had done only this one thing—made a total ass of himself, and whenever he appeared outside his cabin the other bondsmen saw, or he thought they saw, not a man who had fallen by virtue of his own free will back among them, but instead living proof of the futility of black pride.

  Only Nate McKay, a blacksmith, troubled to visit my father: a friendship of lepers, Mattie called it. George was slow in responding, suspicious of the blacksmith’s evening visits, because what was he after? To be near a
man shattered by circumstance? Was he the kind of man who drew satisfaction from the suffering of others? There were such men, George knew. They stopped him on the road, making small talk at first, then after a silence they’d ask, “You patch things up with the Polkinghornes yet?” He would lie, of course, say, “We ain’t fell out for good.” But they needed something else, a different story, a confession that would confirm through his life that all Negroes at Cripplegate, high and low, in the Big House and fields, were united by the deadly upas of color. In the silence that followed their questions he felt water building at the back of his eyes, a catch creeping into his voice, and he would have cried, but that was unmanly. So he lied again: “I’ll be back in the House soon,” and he stayed clear of festivities in the quarters. In time, my stepmother forgave him; she came to see his confusion that night, but George avoided even her. He had no friends. No one to speak to. Friends could hurt you, as Jonathan had. But Nate McKay wore down George’s resistance and won his trust. Some soil is low in lime, high in acid, my stepmother told me. It produces poisonous yet strangely beautiful, brown toadstools and, in the days before Surrender, men like Minty’s father.

  He was, by any standard, handsome. A long-stalked, high-yellow Negro with “good hair,” as bondsmen called it, and a trickle of Cheyenne blood that sharpened his cheeks and gave a feminine lilt to the corners of his eyes: a “pretty man” who, since the day he realized his image was pleasing to others, traded on this, and even my stepmother’s eyes twinkled when he came round. He could read. He was proud of his African (Kru) and Indian blood. Children loved to touch his hair, which Nate McKay washed often, twisting it back into a waist-long braid when he worked, which wasn’t too often. He was, after all, too blessed to squander himself in hard work or, for that matter, in limiting himself to a single black woman. Although he could have his pick of any woman in Cripplegate’s quarters, he belonged—so he told George—in the company of ladies a little more polished, a saying that made George laugh because he wasn’t sure whether Nate was serious or mocking him. He never said outright that black women were beneath him, but he hinted that by selecting one—or several—for his attention he was performing an act of extraordinary sacrifice. He had, some said, twenty-five children sprinkled on farms throughout South Carolina, but this was rumor and my parents only knew that when Addie, his Cripplegate wife, was pregnant or had the Curse, Nate unbraided his hair and brushed it for hours, then slipped away for several days.