Oxherding Tale

by Charles Johnson

  There were days in November (always November), just at winter’s damp hem, with the whole school year leveled toward me like the business end of a shotgun barrel, when teaching was worse than fieldwork. The classroom was a pit. My students, all frightened, had lockjaw. And if they did speak, it was to challenge me, corner me, force me to quote from mysterious texts (the ones I deliberately didn’t assign for class) to prove my right to be at the front of the room. A monstrous way to pay off my mortgage, it seemed to me, a minor torture from the workshop of the man who invented the Iron Maiden. After one such class I hied home to Fruity badly in need of a hot toddy and a hug.

  Usually, Wife was good on hugs. That evening, however, she was not herself. Her head turned when I held her, she let her arms fall at her sides. She had been crying, I could tell: her nose swelled when she wept; it looked rather like a radish, a snowman’s proboscis shoved under her bifocals. “What is it?”

  She walked, intense and quiet, into the kitchen, and sat, her face vacant, before a small package that rested amiddlemost the table like a bomb. “William, that awful man was here!” No bigger than the box cufflinks are sold in, it was torturously knotted with bootlaces. “He said it was a wedding present.”

  Taking a step back from the table, I felt, ever so slightly, the stone foundations of the cabin sink deeper into the soil, through leaf mold through rock to the blind, white tendrils that suck at bier and bone.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Peggy pushed it toward me. “After you do, there’s something I want to tell you, so sit down.”

  Wife waited for me to pick it up, shake it, to say something Voltarian to dispel her disgust. I could not. The package would put me, I knew, in a different, new, and diseased relationship with everything I held dear. At the table, facing it sideways, I extended my hand. The box was moist, soaked perhaps by rain pounding Bannon’s saddlebag as he pursued…. “William!” Peggy grabbed a knife, “If you won’t open it, I will!” She sawed at the string. Upended the box. Shook it. Onto the table clattered a dull ring (orichalc) that twirled on its side, then clinked against the candlestand. A trinket that from time out of mind was the ornament of the Allmuseri osuo. Metal worked painfully, like scarification, into the skin during infancy and, like skin, was impleached until cartilage and metal melted back into a common field.

  Wife picked up the ring.

  “Why did he give you this?” She snapped her fingers under my nose. “Hello? You can return to your seat, thank you, now if I could have another volunteer….”

  I grabbed her wrist. “Stop playing!”

  Peggy rubbed her forearm, a little afraid of me now. “There’s something else….”

  “What else?”

  “Never mind!” She tore off her glasses. “You’re so mean! How can I tell you anything when you look like you just swallowed a bone?”

  Without replying—what could I say?—I took Reb’s ring, then rode a (now) very tired horse back to town, feeling not so much fear as a throb in my chest, a strange hurting, what I can only call the concrescence of past deeds pushing in upon me: a cathedral ceiling collapsing. Reb had not reached Chicago. His capture was beyond question. How else could Bannon have come by this ring? A terrible thought (I am known for these fits of terrible thought) came to me: The Soulcatcher would have duplicated the Coffin-maker’s spirit, reproduced—as his method demanded—the idiosyncrasies of his victim, which meant he would, in a way, be Reb. Was that it then? Why Bannon decided this moment propitious to begin the painstakingly slow manhunt with me? But he had called despair the precondition for the death wishes he delivered, and I felt, with Peggy, in my profession, here among friends, anything but despair. No. I had but to face him to call his bluff; but to call his bluff for him to leave us in peace.

  At dusk, Spartanburg was deserted. Main Street emptied, as if an epidemic had erased all movement, except for fine red dust forever filtering through the air. The taverns were shut up tight. The evening sun, low in the sky, was cold, casting more light than heat, the shadows gathered thickly on the ground. From where I dismounted, hitching my horse to a rail outside the Motley Cow (closed), I could glance up and down Main Street at the gray, wind-battered buildings, yet what I felt most powerfully was the silence. Except for the panting of my horse, it was quiet enough to hear a cricket clear its throat. Did everyone in town know something I did not? Carriages were abandoned, a mule-drawn wain in front of the General Store had been left unattended.

  Yet and still, there was no sound—not the lowing of cattle, nor the brattle of dogs, no dusty pigeons in the court house windows.

  Silence.

  I climbed the steps to the brothel, knocked softly, sensing some pestilence had swept the town clean. Mamie parted the curtain to the front window. I had come to ask her about Bannon; I asked instead if the town had been evacuated. She kept the door half-closed. I could not see her face. “Don’t you know what happens tonight?” Behind her the rooms were dark, no candles lit. “There’s a sale at Sullivan’s bar.”

  Not because I wanted to did I walk to the auction, but because I hoped Bannon had brought Reb there. Trading slaves in 1860, shipping Africans, was illegal, but the practice continued in backrooms poorly lighted to conceal the physical deformities, the damages to blackmarket goods, each slave lifted onto a high table, a makeshift Block, with someone (a boy usually) standing watch for the sheriff at the door. But could this happen here? With neighbors and students I trusted completely? It was as if the people I knew, and worked beside by day, underwent a Walpurgis Night transformation at dusk. In Sullivan’s tavern stools were stacked on his tables. I stepped around to the rear, the night blacker now than a funeral of bondsmen in a thunderstorm. The storeroom door was open, the interior packed with people from all strata of Spartanburg—the officials, the thieves, the merchants and streetfolk. Gilbert Finney, wearing two top hats, jangled a bell outside, shouted, “Oh yea! Oh yea! Walk right in, gennulmum, for the rarest business opperchunity of a lifetime!” Music drifted from inside. An organ. A Confederate flag flapped above the door. Will Smythe, entering, saw me, and blenched like a man caught outside a burlesque hall, then moved toward a dim spot of light at the end of the huge storeroom; I followed him into a crowd of fifty liquescent shapes milling around a small platform, a hastily constructed bar—and then! I saw the organ used a month before at my wedding! But now it was playing an anapestic rhythm (short, short, long, pause) that was exactly opposite the rhythm of the heart, made it slam violently, skip beats, and left me reeling. It was late; I’d missed the introductions made by the lawyers, the creditors, and the distributors. Cigar smoke thick enough to lean on hung from the ceiling, floating between a hundred brightly colored balloons. The room had the gamy smell of tainted meat, like a flesh market. Which it was. A second boy, an usher in a livery uniform and chimney-pot hat, seated patrons. There was Wendell Blake. Here another of my students. And here Gene Sullivan. Nowhere did I see Reb. And then the room was quiet.

  It became quiet and two slaves walked into the soft kerosene lamplight. Twice the auctioneer, a fat man dressed like a circus ringmaster, tapped his gavel. His voice rang out, “Don’t shove! Don’t shove!” I shrank back, certain my shock would give me away, that the crowd would know me for the fraud I was: a counterfeit white man. A spy in the Big House. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to open this evening’s bidding with some of the best merchandise to be found in South Carolina.” In rapid, camera-shutter succession, a woman my stepmother’s age was sent through her paces, made to lift her dress and trot around the room after a tossed stick to demonstrate the strength of her legs. Her husband came next. The crowd asked him, “What can you do?” “Can you plow?” “Have you ever cared for livestock?” His face glistened with sweat: “Whatever you want!” One hand muffled a cough that favored the overture to a funeral. “You gonna take me and my wife together, ain’t ya? That’s all I’m askin’ fo’. We been tergether fo’ thirty years….”

  “Forty-eight dollars,”
said someone up front, “for the man.”

  How much worse this was than being on the Block! I was, having passed, a witness. The vilest of turncoats to my father’s values. To see persecution to others and to be powerless to end it—to be by accident above it—was, I saw, the same as consent. My vision slipped. My temples throbbed. All reformed opium eaters feared this sudden vertigo, set off by a sound. A certain song. By the pitch of the auctioneer’s voice as he said, “May it please you, ladies and gentlemen, we have one last item on tonight’s agenda,” and, before he finished, there stepped, slowly, through a stale pall of azure smoke—did I dream—a girl of two and twenty from the adjacent room, a distant Call I could not but answer, the final knot of the heart that is broken—as Bannon said—from inside, bringing difficulties thick and threefold, delivering destiny as your deepest wish.

  “This one’s Christian name,” said the auctioneer, looking down, locating my gaze, locking into it in a crowd of fifty, “is Minty.”

  XI

  THE MANUMISSION OF FIRST-PERSON VIEWPOINT

  In this second (unfortunate) intermission there is yet another convention of the Slave Narrative to consider, possibly its only invariant feature: first-person viewpoint. By definition, the Slave Narrative requires a first-person report on the Peculiar Institution from one of its victims, and what we value most highly in this viewpoint are precisely the limitations imposed upon the narrator-perceiver, who cannot, for example, know what transpires in another mind, like that of Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, or in a scene that excludes him; what we lack in authority, we gain in immediacy: a premise (or prejudice) of Positivist science. But the Age of Reason overlaps the age of slavery, and it is not, therefore, unseemly to wonder, despite Dr. Marx’s dislike of metaphysics, about the transcendental nature of the narrator.

  He is, in fact, nobody; is anonymous, as Hume points out in his Treatise. Actually, he cannot be said to be nothing, for as all Kantians claim, the I—whatever we call the Self—is a product of experience and cannot precede it. The implications are worth noting. The Self, this perceiving Subject who puffs on and on, is, for all purposes, a palimpsest, interwoven with everything—literally everything—that can be thought or felt. We can go further: The Subject of the Slave Narrative, like all Subjects, is forever outside itself in others, objects; he is parasitic, if you like, drawing his life from everything he is not, and at precisely the instant he makes possible their appearance. This proposition will doubtlessly infuriate our Positivist friends, who will think it scandalous, but the “Kantian compromise,” as it is traditionally called, suggests that to think the Slave Narrative properly is to see nowhere a narrator who falteringly interprets the world, but a narrator who is that world: who is less a reporter than an opening through which the world is delivered: first-person (if you wish) universal.

  All this the author(s) of the Uphanishads and Bhagavad Gita probably knew, in their preanalytic fashion—knew, by instinct, that what we loosely call thought, or consciousness, or Mind is, far from being a “blockhouse,” instead a restlessness that, refusing to be contained, contains everything.

  Having liberated first-person, it is now only fitting that in the following chapters we do as much for Andrew Hawkins.

  XII

  IN THE SERVICE OF THE SERVANT

  No one wanted the girl.

  After her introduction a few people drifted toward the door, then others followed, lured by Sullivan’s offer to open his best keg of beer. The girl, grotesquely outfitted in an antique ball dress (perse), with an accent of velvet flowers at the décolletage, her hair parted down the middle, watched them leave with the resignation, the fatalism of a woman rejected more than once on the road, who expected it, and lowered her cheap parasol—they’d dressed her to favor a girl at the fair—stepping down unsteadily from the table: the token black girl at the beauty contest, forever told, “Maybe next year.” Except for a few children, and those signing papers for the earlier purchase, the storeroom cleared, leaving the floor littered as if a trashbin had been upturned, and the auctioneer in the worst of moods, tearing his leaflets from the wall, pulling down balloons, barking at the girl: P. T. Barnum on a slow day, giving the Crocodile Woman her severance pay.

  What I could not tell was whether this was indeed Cripplegate’s Minty hanging back in the shadows, flinching as the auctioneer shouted, watching him—not unlike a theatrical agent—turn his other talent over to their new owners. And soon even these left, and I stood trying to recognize something of the girl at Cripplegate, in whom the world once chose to concretize its possibilities in the casement of her skin—limiting itself that something beautiful might be—in this badly used woman by the table. If you looked, without sentiment, you could see that her dress was too small and crawled up when she moved, flashing work-scorched stretches of skin and a latticework of whipmarks. Her belly pushed forward. From the cholesterol-high, nutritionless diet of the quarters, or a child, I could not tell. She was unlovely, drudgelike, sexless, the farm tool squeezed, with no thought of preservation in the seigneurial South, for every ounce of surplus value, then put on sale for whatever price she could bring. She was, like my stepmother, perhaps doubly denied—in both caste and gender—and driven to Christ (she wore a cross) as the only decent man who would have her.

  And, dear God, she was Minty. I did not have a hold on my feelings. They slipped from remembered desire, the glandular hungers I’d once felt for her, to a biblical grief (Pauline) for both her damaged beauty and, within me, the inevitable exchange of passion for compassion.

  “You want something?” asked the auctioneer, dragging his equipment past me. “The sale’s over, son.”

  “You have not sold that girl,” I said.

  “Her?” He laughed. “And I probably won’t.” He snapped his head, and she obediently came closer, curtsied clumsily, falling left, then turned around for me to examine her. Someone had, I noticed, buttered over a gunpowder burn on her back. Scar tissue like a bacon-grease mark. Her eyes were too deep, the sockets in a cowskull. My distress was not lost on the auctioneer.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “She’s sick.”

  The girl finally spoke: “I can work! I can!”

  “If you believe that,” said the auctioneer, “there’s forty acres of good bottomland in Anderson I’d like to talk with you about.” Now he looked tired. “You can turn it off, sweetheart. Tomorrow you go back to Colonel Woofter, and if he still don’t want you, then it’s too bad, because,” he slid his eyes at me, “I been in every village between here and Ware Shoals with her, and you know what, son? No takers.” He laughed again, at himself, I thought. “She’s bad for business, you know what I mean? You gets a reputation for putting poor stock on the market and….” His shoulders bunched. He walked outside to his wagon, the back of which was loaded with chains—like a pile of coiled snakes copulating—and the girl, for whom every step seemed excruciating, began to cry. In less time than it takes to tell, I was at the wagon, pulling out my purse.

  “What will you take for her?”

  The auctioneer smiled, then suppressed it, a poker player’s slip. “Make me an offer.”

  “I only have a few dollars, twenty….”

  “You need ten times that.”

  “Two hundred?” My heart swung into my ribs. “You said yourself—not a minute ago!—that no one would have her! Is she so valuable now?”

  “My instructions,” he said, “are to sell this girl for no less than two hundred dollars. That’s what Colonel Woofter paid for her—I ain’t saying there ain’t been a whole lot of depreciation, but I’ll tell you what….” He reached into his coat for a deed of sale. “You teach over at the schoolhouse yonder, don’t you?” When I nodded, he said, “So you’re good for the money. You kin raise it in a month, can’t you?”

  He took my name, and took my twenty dollars as “earnest money,” then snapped his head again at the girl. “Go on, darlin’. This gentleman just saved you from the auction circuit. No more pancake
and greasepaint.”