The Past Is Never

by Tiffany Quay Tyson

  “Stand fast therefore in the liberty,” he said, in a deep voice his own mother barely recognized. “Wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled with the yoke of bondage.”

  It was Paul speaking to the Galatians, but those who heard Moses read that night swore Christ himself had descended from heaven to deliver a message to them all.

  “Stand fast in the liberty,” Moses said. “Stand fast.”

  By the time Moses turned fifteen, he was preaching regular sermons to the slaves. His master encouraged it.

  “I keep my slaves happy,” the old man said. “They’d rather be here with me than out in the wide world on their own.”

  The old man walked with a severe limp and used a cane to steady himself. Despite the slow gait, he walked his land daily. He liked to keep an eye on things and make his slaves aware of his presence. He spoke with them and not only to give them orders.

  “Ain’t you happy here, Moses,” he called out one afternoon. “Ain’t it a beautiful day?”

  “Oh, yessir.”

  “Ain’t you content with your place in the world?”

  “I want nothing but what I’ve got.”

  “Ain’t you glad you don’t got to scrape and claw to find food or a place to sleep at night?”

  “You give me all that and more.”

  “And I ask again, Moses, ain’t you happy?”

  “Happy as Adam before the apple.”

  The men mining quarry stone worked through the Sunday morning hours set aside for worship and family, so Moses was allowed to preach to them as they worked. The master thought it would inspire the men to work harder, and he was proud of his generosity. He bragged about it to owners of nearby plantations and they asked if Moses would come preach to their slaves. It could only be a good thing to bring the word of God to the godless, they said.

  Moses preached to the men from Jeremiah. “Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbor’s service without wages, and giveth him not for his work.” And he preached from Proverbs: “Righteousness exalteth a nation!”

  The master often stopped by to listen to the sermons. He was impressed by the strong, singsong quality of Moses’s preaching. “I don’t know where the boy learnt it,” he told his wife. “But he speaks better than most white men.”

  His wife warned him not to encourage so much speaking and thinking among the slaves. “You don’t want them getting ideas,” she said.

  He waved her off. “They love me,” he told her. “They wouldn’t leave me if Jesus himself descended to offer them freedom. Where would they go? What would they do without me?”

  Moses dropped news into his quarry sermons. Always aware the master might be nearby, he chose his words carefully. He tucked the news between Bible verses and kept his intonation steady. The timbre of his voice lulled the careless, but anyone who knew how to listen would hear plenty. This was how they learned about the free blacks living in Virginia. This was how they first heard of the town sixty miles northwest, where the brother of the Confederate president provided slaves with dental care and education, where black men worked as merchants earning a wage. The world changed around them, but their days remained the same. They dug and hauled stone and pumped away the spring water bubbling up from the ground of the quarry. Or they picked three hundred pounds of cotton each day and submitted to the whip when they failed to meet the quota. They’d worked this way forever. It kept them exhausted and dulled their minds, but something awoke in them when Moses spoke. Rebellion blossomed.

  Fall came and went and with it the cotton harvest. The men picked and baled until their hands bled. The women joined them in the fields when the harvest became too much. That year the younger children of the slaves, the ones who were too little to work the fields, tended a garden near the slave quarters. They planted seeds and cuttings pilfered from the woods near the quarry. Moses led the project, telling the parents and the slave owners it was good for children to be busy.

  “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” he said.

  The children watered the garden with spring runoff from the quarry. Foxglove, lily of the valley, and water hemlock grew and flowered. Moses praised the children for their work. He called them his sharp arrows, a reference to the book of Psalms.

  “As arrows are in the hands of a mighty man, so are children of the youth.”

  White men, young and old, joined the army. Even the men who were once deemed too old or frail to serve marched off to lend their hands to the efforts. Soon, there were hardly any white men left. The plantation owner with the limp remained. A few of the oldest landowners remained, but their sons and grandsons marched off to join the war.

  In spring of 1863, General Grant ordered his troops across the Tallahatchie River on the way to Vicksburg. Confederate soldiers marched in to defend the area, mostly quiet through the fighting until that point. They enlisted the strongest slaves to build a fort. They lugged the cotton bales they’d put away in the fall to the spot where the Tallahatchie meets the Yazoo. People think cotton is a soft substance, wispy and insubstantial, but pack it tight and it’s stronger than wood or steel. They covered the bales with dirt and stood ready.

  Union soldiers surged into the river, but the Confederates held them back with Colt revolvers and light Congreve rockets. The Confederate soldiers were outnumbered, but the advancing troops were exposed and vulnerable. The Union soldiers retreated. They would go on to take Vicksburg, but White Forest would be spared.

  After the battle, some of the Confederate soldiers requested a meal and a bed in nearby homes. The old plantation owner with the limp was happy to oblige. His wife instructed the slaves to cook a feast for the soldiers. Neighbors gathered and brought supplies. Moses told the children to harvest the plants. “This is what we’ve been working for,” he told them. “Let them eat from the labor of your hands.” The children delivered baskets of freshly dug plants to their mothers and aunts working in the kitchen. The women chopped and stirred and baked for the jubilant, but tired, soldiers. They stirred hemlock into the vegetable stew and sweetened the tea with foxglove. They ground stalks from the lily of the valley into the cornmeal from which they baked bread. They served it up to the soldiers and the old men and the women and the children. It was an evening of celebration. Someone pulled a bottle of bourbon from a cellar. The men shared pipe tobacco.

  By morning, illness swept through the plantation. Everyone who’d gathered for the feast was suffering or dead. Soldiers vomited and lost control of their bowels. The stench was terrible. Feverish and panicked, the women went to check on their children. The littlest ones were already dead. The older ones were close. Over the next two days, forty-eight people died from the poisoned supper.

  One of the few survivors was the old plantation owner with the limp. His wife had succumbed to the poison in the final wave of the illness and he thought he would surely die alongside her. He spent a week in bed, drenched in sweat and plagued by hallucinations, but he kept his grip on life. When he gained the strength to walk again, he made his way across the fields to the slave quarters. He found them empty. He would later learn most of his men had joined the Union army. The women and children had traveled north in search of free communities. No one could say for sure what happened to Moses, but rumors came from Georgia and Alabama and Florida about a fiery preacher making the rounds at black churches.

  The old plantation owner was angry about the revolt, of course. Hadn’t Moses said he was as happy as Adam before the apple? What more could any man want? The answer was scrawled on a wooden cross planted in the children’s poison garden. In bold letters scratched deep with a knife blade, it read: THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE.

  A mound of quarry stones anchored the cross. The old plantation owner ran his hands over the letters. They meant nothing to him. He could sign his name to purchase land or buy slaves, but he’d never learned to read. It was one of his only regrets. His wife used to read to him in th
e evenings. She read Bible stories and passages from the few books they owned. She read him the day’s news if he traveled to get a newspaper. But his wife was gone now and his sons were off fighting losing battles. All the evenings of his life stretched out before him, long and lonely. He unearthed the cross and carried it back to his home, where he planted it at the head of his wife’s grave.

  THREE

  THE DAYS FOLLOWING PANSY’S disappearance run together in my mind. Was it Sunday when everyone lined up to search the woods? I think so. I believe the local churches let out early and encouraged the members of their congregations to join in the search for Pansy. I believe the women went home and changed from skirts and dresses into blue jeans and T-shirts. I believe the men set aside their ties and starched shirts and made uncomfortable jokes about the blessings of a short sermon, no matter the reason. When things go wrong, people want to feel useful. And they are curious. Everyone is so curious about a tragedy. No one wants to miss out on the morbid discovery. If, years later, someone brings up the time that girl went missing, people want to say: I was there. I was there when they found her. I was there when they found her body. You can’t imagine what it was like. Let me tell you.

  A hundred people, maybe more, lined up at arm’s length and walked for miles. Willet wanted to go, but the police said no. They didn’t want him stumbling upon our sister’s corpse. Or they thought he knew something and might compromise the search. I don’t know. No one told us anything. We didn’t line up and march through the woods with our gaze to the ground, searching for any bit of evidence that might lead us to Pansy. We didn’t find the blue hair ribbon or the plush alligator or the soggy book of nursery rhymes, all of which were retrieved and bagged and handed over to police officers with careful solemnity.

  We were there when the police brought the items to our mother, held them out with a reverence reserved for sacred objects. Mama shook her head, pursed her lips. “No,” she said. She turned away, as if the sight of some other child’s lost items were an affront. Nothing they uncovered belonged to Pansy. Nothing brought them closer to finding our sister.

  “She ain’t out there,” Willet said to me.

  “But where is she?”

  “Somewhere else.”

  Willet had an old motorbike he’d restored from junkyard parts. It was unregistered and illegal, and Mama hated it. She was convinced he would kill himself on it someday. I was forbidden to ride on it, but sometimes, if I begged, Willet took me out for a spin. On that day we weren’t riding for fun; Willet had a clear destination in mind. I loved sitting behind him, my arms twined around his torso, my face pressed into his back. The wind pushed against us, and it was like flying. With everything going wrong at home, it seemed shameful to take pleasure in anything. I tucked my face against Willet’s shoulder and closed my eyes against incidental joy.

  I believe it was Monday, a busy day when people would be at work in offices or on construction sites. A peroxide-blonde reporter from the local news asked Mama to pull together some recent photos of Pansy. The pictures Mama pulled were posed and careful. They were taken at holidays when Pansy wore a starched dress and an impatient smile. They looked nothing like Pansy, if you asked me. Pansy in real life had a headful of untamable curls. She didn’t smile often, but when she did it was with a wild grin. She never smiled the way she did in those pictures, with her mouth barely stretched over her tiny teeth. Well, nobody asked me.

  Willet and I were in the way. You might think Mama wouldn’t want us out of her sight, what with one child gone missing. You might imagine she’d pull us close and pour her energies into protecting the children who were still at home, but you’d be wrong. She was annoyed with us, angry with us for our role in losing Pansy. That morning, as Willet made a second pot of coffee and I straightened up the living room for the reporter with the video camera, Mama swatted at us.

  “Are you trying to kill me?” she asked when she tripped over the vacuum cleaner cord.

  “But, Mama …” There was no use saying I was trying to help. I knew she’d hate it if the television reporter showed us living in the midst of dirt and clutter.

  “Put that thing away and get scarce. I don’t want you lurking around here today.”

  When Willet grabbed my arm and pulled me out the back door an hour later, I didn’t ask where we were headed. Any place, I figured, would be better than home.

  When we pulled up to Uncle Chester’s trailer, I reconsidered. Daddy’s brother was a hard man. He lived out in the country in a doublewide trailer a few yards from the perfectly good brick house where his mother lived. I don’t know if Granny Clem kicked him out or if he preferred to live alone. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to see him, but if anyone knew how to find our father, it would be Chester. I wasn’t sure if he even knew about Pansy’s disappearance. I’d overheard Mama talking with Granny Clem on the phone, but we hadn’t heard a thing from Chester.

  Willet was convinced Daddy and Uncle Chester’s shady business deals were connected to Pansy’s disappearance. If Daddy didn’t take Pansy, Willet reasoned, someone connected to Daddy must have snatched her.

  “All those men showing up to buy bills? They’re desperate, Bert. They don’t have a thing to lose.”

  I wasn’t convinced. If someone took Pansy for a ransom, even a counterfeit ransom, wouldn’t we have heard from them by now?

  Granny Clem was outside when we pulled up. She shaded her eyes against the morning sun and the dust from the motorbike. Willet set the kickstand. He seemed to be taking a long time and I couldn’t figure why he was stalling. Now I think he was nervous. It was brazen of us to come out uninvited.

  “Does your mother know you’re here?” Granny Clem stood on her front porch, hands on hips, sun in her face. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or curious.

  “No, ma’am,” Willet answered. He was polite when it suited him. “We’re looking for Uncle Chester. Is he around?”

  “I don’t rightly know,” she said. “You’ll have to knock on his trailer. I don’t keep track of his goings.”

  Willet nodded.

  “When you’re done,” Granny Clem called, “you two come in here and see me. I’ve got pound cake.”

  Granny Clem was famous for two things: dealing with pregnant women and babies, and her lemon pound cake. A slice of that cake was often the first thing a woman tasted after giving birth and some women swore their children carried the scent of lemon and butter in the folds of their skin throughout adolescence. Later, when I worked for Granny Clem, women would sometimes stop by with children they’d birthed or adopted from her and would encourage me to sniff their toddlers for the lingering lemon odor.

  Granny Clem disappeared inside her house. Willet gave me a look. “You ready?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Me neither.”

  Even so, he walked toward Uncle Chester’s trailer. He took long strides and puffed out his chest. He looked like a grown man. He looked like Daddy. There wasn’t room on the trailer steps for both of us, so I waited at the bottom while Willet knocked on the door. It was a pretty high-end trailer, but the whole thing seemed to bend a little under Willet’s fist. Right away, we heard movement from inside. Chester peeked out from behind a curtain on the far end. I lifted a hand and tried to smile. We heard him rambling around. The sun baked the back of my neck. A crow let out a menacing caw. The sharp scent of fertilizer filled my nose, though I couldn’t see anything growing nearby. It seemed Uncle Chester would leave us standing there for hours, but finally the aluminum door creaked open and he stepped back to let us in. As I eased across the threshold, a skinny white cat darted past me.

  Dust motes floated thick in the dim interior. Chester lit a cigarette and sat at a small dining table. He used an old beer can for an ashtray. The trailer smelled like it hadn’t been aired out in years. Stale smoke, greasy cooking odors, and the raw scent of Chester himself mingled together in a terrible stench. The salty chemical fumes from the ink he and Daddy used to print
bills hovered beneath the bad smells, and I realized Uncle Chester was only living in this tiny section of the trailer. The back half was blocked off for the business.

  I gagged, and Willet reached back to smack me. He was right, of course; we couldn’t afford to be rude.

  Chester didn’t seem to notice the smell or my reaction. He wore a stained T-shirt rotted through where he’d splashed it with bleach. His hair was gray and coarse. The sight of him, hunched and filthy, terrified me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen him. He never came to holiday gatherings or family dinners. Whatever he and Daddy did together, they did it away from our family. Daddy was careful that way. He didn’t hide his business from us, but he didn’t let it infiltrate our lives on a daily basis. Daddy didn’t look like a criminal. Uncle Chester looked like nothing else.

  Willet and I remained standing. We had no choice. The furniture in the trailer was buried underneath a layer of junk: old newspapers, crushed aluminum cans, half-empty bags of dry cat food, cracked melamine plates with crusty bits of old beans or canned stew.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “We’re looking for our father,” Willet said. “We thought you might have an idea where we could find him.”

  Chester laughed and the laugh dissolved into a prolonged hacking cough. It sounded as if his lungs were working their way out through his throat. He wiped his mouth with the tail of his T-shirt, leaving a smear of yellow phlegm across the cotton fabric. He grinned. His teeth were a disturbing shade of brown. He took a drag off his cigarette and dropped the butt into the old beer can, where it smoldered.