The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  “Like I’m a child.”

  “No,” Carrie hissed, and then calmed. “No. Not like a child. Like a woman who knows how to outwit those who would hold her back.”

  “And what will they say about you, Miss Carrie?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “They say, ‘She not right in the head. She a nigger lover.’ And the white ladies say, ‘She ain’t getting invited to no teas no more.’”

  “And I’ll say, ‘Oh, thank God.’”

  An impasse had arisen, a decision had to be made. Did she want to testify, or did she merely want to be seen trying?

  Mariah climbed up into the trap.

  Carrie drove her into town like she was the servant and Mariah the mistress.

  They didn’t speak.

  At the railroad track they continued down Lewisburg Pike past the boys’ institute to Main Street. People watched the trap go by. Mariah wondered if they knew what she was going to do.

  At Main Street they turned right. There was the Billard Saloon, and the men standing around in front. The men stepped back from the edge of the sidewalk when the trap came abreast, but they didn’t acknowledge what they saw. Not even a tipped hat. Across the street Mariah saw Mr. Smithson the newspaperman standing by. He seemed smaller than she remembered. He watched them the whole way past. Down ahead Mariah began to hear voices, real voices, murmurings and singing.

  Now Mariah could see the courthouse and the front door through which she would enter. From her vantage, across the square she could see several things at once. Off to her left, down the straight road from Nashville, she saw white men on horses trotting closer. On her right, up from the Bucket, she saw fifty or so men and women—black men and black women—approaching on foot from a few blocks away. Carrie urged the horse on, but the crowds met at the courthouse before they could get there. Black men and women surrounded the courthouse, facing out, daring anyone to try to interfere with the proceedings. They parted and Carrie drove forward. She parked the cart at the foot of the courthouse steps. They hadn’t rehearsed this, but somehow Mariah knew to wait in the cart for Carrie to descend and come around.

  Carrie helped her down, Mariah’s naked palm covering Carrie’s gloved hand.

  Together the women marched up the courthouse steps, eyes on the courthouse doors, the crowd quiet. Soon they were through the doors and into the dim and looming vestibule. To the right was the main courtroom, where the tribunal was already in progress.

  Carrie walked Mariah to a seat in the courtroom. “This is as far as I can go with you,” she said. “You don’t need me anymore.”

  The time has come, Mariah thought. Going to be heard, so I hope I got something to say.

  Chapter 37

  Tole

  August 6, 1867

  The entire town would be preoccupied most of the day, Tole knew. The U.S. Army had shown up yesterday, soldiers bivouacking in tents out by the Nashville Road, and a few of the higher-ups bunking in the Parrish Hotel. Tole made it a point to know where they were staying, and to know the schedule of the tribunal, which would formally begin at ten o’clock sharp at the courthouse—presided over by the city magistrate, Elijah Dixon, as well as a lieutenant and lieutenant colonel of the U.S. Army, and two others.

  At seven o’clock that morning, Tole was on the roof of the opera house across the street from Elijah Dixon’s office, with a clear view of the front door and the side streets on either side of the building. He could also see down the block a hundred feet in each direction. Conceivably someone could creep through the back alleys, enter a back door, and take the rear stairs to reach Dixon’s office, but would anyone go to such trouble, especially on today, of all days? Tole doubted it.

  The next few hours passed slowly, but Tole was in a mental state that he recognized and welcomed: the moment when he dwindled to something less than “I,” when he was part of the brick parapet in front of him and the gritty graveled roof beneath him, as if each pebble recognized him and cried out to him and embraced him, so he became part of them. He knew neither boredom nor anxiety—he just waited.

  All of Franklin flowed in one direction: toward the courthouse. Groups of freedmen and bands of white men poured past, some with signs and horses, some on foot, laughing and chatting as if they were going to the Williamson County Fair. A girl in a yellow dress tied with a green sash adjusted her hat brim and Tole thought for an instant that she’d seen him, hiding here, but she turned and smiled up at her companion and the moment passed.

  At 10:05, Tole descended the opera house stairs and out into the street, meeting no one. Most shops were closed. He crossed the street as if crossing a river, wading against a tide that threatened to bear him off downstream, fought his way across, put one hand on the front door, and pulled it open.

  Upstairs, the doors to Dixon’s office were locked, but the locks were simple and basic, he’d brought a screwdriver and Bowie knife. It took almost nothing for him to open one.

  Once inside, he rifled through drawers—dozens of them. All he found in the promising drawers—those that were locked, in the desk—was liquor, Hooper’s better stuff. Two of the eight file cabinets in one of the antechambers, however, surrendered gold, quite literally: the big wooden four-door cabinet (locked, until it met Tole’s screwdriver) on the far right side yielded the real estate transactions, hundreds of them, thousands of acres, it seemed to Tole. Too many files to carry, so he searched through the documents and pulled out those that reflected the largest transactions.

  Combing the four drawers in the right-hand file cabinet took him the better part of an hour. He had a stack of documents about eighteen inches thick, and wished he’d brought a sack to carry them in.

  He waded into the other cabinets. More documents—much of them from the city of Franklin. As magistrate, Tole knew, Dixon was a sort of judge who could hear certain matters, review arrests. Tole also knew that Dixon had much to do with the financial rebuilding of Franklin after the war. He didn’t know the details, but had heard that Dixon was instrumental in obtaining loans from the U.S. government, and otherwise facilitating the rebirth of a town decimated during the war. Now he found details, far more than he wanted—lists of contractors and supplies, correspondence with government officials both in Nashville and in Washington, D.C., orders for building and orders for rebuilding—the files seemed endless. But nothing struck him as odd or problematic. He remembered Bliss’s suggestion to look for ledger books, and he found them lined neatly on a shelf near one of the cabinets—long lists of entries and figures that he didn’t quite understand.

  Was this everything? It was probably enough. All those real estate transactions would be of interest to someone, surely.

  Just to be on the safe side he pulled the rugs away and walked the room board by board, listening. The board he was looking for wouldn’t sound hollow, he thought, just different. The sound of his foot would have an odd timbre; it would ring out different from the other boards. He methodically walked the boards lengthwise, heel first, striking each in the exact same way until, finally, the sound he heard was slightly muffled. He checked to make sure there weren’t extra nails. He bent over and took note of the lack of dust in the joints. With one of Dixon’s letter openers, he pried the board up and found, hard up against the joist, a metal box about the size of a very thick book.

  Before he opened the box, the lock easily broken, he replaced everything just as it had been—rugs, drawers, pictures. The whole operation had taken him another half hour.

  When everything was settled again, he opened one of Dixon’s drawers, pulled out a bottle, and poured a few fingers of whiskey into a tin cup. He settled himself into the soft, high-backed chair near the fireplace, rested the cup on the mantel, and pulled the papers out of the box.

  Stock certificates in the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company, on fancy paper: olive-green border, black lettering, an engraving of men in a switchyard, trains flying past trailing steam. Tole found a whole pile of these, and gave u
p trying to calculate the value. This was worth more money than he had ever thought a man might hold in one hand. He guessed this was most of what Dixon owned, and it made him laugh. Just paper, but so much trouble!

  He put the papers back in the box, shut the lid, placed the box on the rug in front of him, stared at it and the sheaf of real estate documents. This was exactly what Bliss was talking about. He’d done well. It was time to get over to the tribunal before Mariah’s testimony.

  Bliss had asked him about where Dixon’s money came from, and Tole realized nothing he’d found had the answer. All that stock and land would have required a vast sum. The Dixon family did not live in an extraordinary mansion, and he wasn’t known to have inherited extraordinary wealth.

  Again he returned to the file cabinets, flipped quickly through each drawer, looking for something, anything, that seemed wrong, strange. Nothing. Then he reached up.

  A three-inch space lay between the top of the upper file drawer and the cabinet top. Tole’s fingertips grazed leather binding. A book had been slotted into the space. It took him a few moments to figure out how to extricate it, but he found some straps and a tie. The book tumbled into his hands.

  Another ledger book.

  Each of the eight file cabinets held another ledger. Each ledger was neatly organized—more rows of names and figures. Each of the ledgers was labeled: City Tax Revenue. Building Reparations. Water & Sewer. Quickly he found the ledgers out in the main office—dozens of them, but a few labeled similarly. He compared them, side by side. They did not match.

  Tole wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but he could guess. Mr. Dixon, magistrate of Franklin, had his hand in the till. The magistrate of Franklin was pilfering funds of Franklin, and funds meant for Franklin. This was where all the extra money was coming from.

  He allowed himself a breath of exultation. They wanted proof? He’d gotten the proof.

  In fifteen minutes he’d left Dixon’s office, hidden the documents in Theopolis’s old house, and headed to the courthouse. If he were lucky, he’d hear Mariah speak. That would be a perfect day.

  Chapter 38

  Mariah

  August 6, 1867

  Mariah emerged from out of the darkness at the back of the courtroom and could feel the sun through the high windows. She had not been called by the men at the bench far ahead of her, and she nearly turned back, but then she thought she might have been called by powers greater than those of mortal man, and who knows the mind of such forces? They create worlds unimaginable, even worlds in which a woman such as she walks down the aisle of a white man’s tribunal and takes her place in it. Such is the mind of God. The minds of men twist and knot around the impossible task of understanding.

  A thousand faces, it seemed, watched her way. Probably a hundred, but it felt like more. The faces she passed flickered from dark to light, in the shadows that passed over the windows, shadows of men on horses and other men and women. The courthouse was a ship at sea, buffeted by agitated and irreconcilable waves.

  Ahead of her rose five chairs on the dais, older men looking down at the room in judgment upon a town that had murdered two of its own, a white and a black. On the left sat Elijah Dixon, magistrate. Mariah did not recognize the other four, but noted that the bald one in the middle was clean-shaven, with a high-bridged nose and delicate glasses perched on the end of it; the one between the man with glasses and Elijah Dixon seemed gruffer, with thickset arms that bulged with muscle beneath the blue U.S. Army uniform.

  Dixon met Mariah’s gaze as she stepped forward. “Who is this?” he said. He knew full well who stood before the tribunal.

  The room turned as one, to follow his gaze and look upon her, dressed in a linsey-woolsey dress, as if she’d just then walked right off the plantation, out of the past. She wore the boots of a man, but polished mirror black. All the room looked at her, and knew her. She was every Negress they had ever seen, and none of them.

  Silence. Two spots of color flushed red as rose on Dixon’s face. He craned his head around to watch Mariah.

  Mariah Reddick stood with her spine straight, hair like hard silk pulled back from her face. Her mouth was set in a straight line, but even so she could feel the anger in her own eyes and she tried to squint it away. She held her hands before her, then at her sides. She stood in the aisle at the back of the room, and those in the audience who had been wandering about took their seats but quick.

  “You are?” the bald man asked her, speaking for the tribunal.

  She walked slowly up the aisle, enunciating every word as if wanting to be heard clear to heaven. She spoke to the bald man as if born to it, as if there were never any question that a Negress could stand before a tribunal of white men on her own authority. The audience murmured.

  She began with a booming “I.” The sound of it, like the note of a choir, echoed into the rafters, as if causing little birds there to twitter and leap and seek shelter. “I—” she said again, and paused. “I am the mother of the dead man. Mother of Theopolis Reddick. I am Mariah Reddick.”

  The bald man called her forward, but she only stood there looking at him. She cocked her head, inspecting him, her eyes took his entire measure. The bald man—all of the tribunal, in actual fact—had seemed bored and hard before, barking out instructions, taking pleasure in their power. But now the lines of the man’s face softened, as if chastened. He slackened, he leaned back against his chair. He never quit watching her, nor did she quit watching him.

  Then he asked her if she would please come forward and take her place in the witness’s chair. The audience tittered and whispered. He afraid of this Negress. Mariah knew it wasn’t fear. But what did he see in her? Did he see the future, and was that something to fear? There was no time to think about it.

  She walked forward.

  Six windows stood on either side of the courthouse. A row of high windows stretched far above the judge’s bench where the five sat. Off to the right of the bench a chair had been placed. Mariah took the chair and turned it to face the audience directly, instead of the men on their bench above her. The windows glowed. She was silent. Shouts came from beyond the walls. From the back of the room came a hiss and a curse. Several people giggled. But Mariah stared down the culprit until he ceased, until it became apparent that there would be no one, that day, who would lay a hand on her. She was shocked, though she didn’t show it. It wasn’t just the fact that no one would lay a hand on her, but that it soon became apparent, the longer she sat there, that no one dared.

  On that day and in that moment, the world ended as she had known it, and who could know the future? The firelight in the windows flashed and doused, chaotic and uncertain. There was a fearful tremolo in the sound of the shouting outside the courthouse. The future was as unknowable as God himself.

  Before she spoke she removed the scarf from around her neck and tied it up over her hair as if she were going to work. When she was done arranging herself, she was every Negress who had ever stooped over the long, lonely field rows, or nursed the lady’s child, or cooked the master his food. She wore it as a costume, as if playacting. Mariah meant it as a revelation and a scandal, the gesture of a prophetess.

  She had imagined that the only thing in her mind would be a rebuke and a great reordering of time, history, and that town. The colors of justice would flow from her mouth to dazzle the gathered. The audience would be captured and made to see the world differently. Theopolis would become a hero and then a martyr. There would be great wailing for the injustice done. Her words would be inscribed in marble.

  But this was not what was in her mind at the moment she took her place, and these were not the words that came out of her mouth.

  “Mariah Reddick? That is your name?” The bald man spoke as if from the bottom of a well. She heard the words but paid them no attention. She looked into the audience. How long had they all been sitting there? Eons. They faded, darkened. The faces lost focus, became shapes and then only brushes of color.

&n
bsp; “Do you have something to say, Mrs. Reddick?” She heard the impatience in the man’s voice, but she couldn’t begin yet. She had to see.

  “Well, she can’t just sit there.” Dixon dragged himself to his feet, but she held up her hand and watched him freeze. He looked up at the bench and sat down slowly.

  This was a real place. There was a seat here, in the middle of a courtroom, and she sat in it as a witness. She, a Negro, sat in the middle of the courtroom. She had the right to sit there. She had words, whatever words, which would be taken down in the record like any other man’s or woman’s.

  “Yes,” she said, finally. “I have something to say.” She looked up at the bald man, who smiled in relief, pointed his finger at her, and sat back in his chair. He listened for her words, but she had already said them. She had already spoken: she had taken her seat. Anything else she had to say wasn’t all that important.

  There were consequences of freedom; the world had not been miraculously transformed by paper declarations of independence. Nevertheless, she was not afraid. Others would have to carry it forward from there. Things would get worse before they got better, she thought. As they always do.

  But if she had not taken her seat, the seat would have disappeared.

  “Please begin your testimony.”

  “My name is Mariah Reddick. My son was Theopolis Reddick. My boy was killed by men who ain’t had the courage to hear him speak. He were no murderer. He was a free man.”

  Only then did she realize how long she had sat there with her eyes closed. When she opened them the light flooded in, all was foggy. The faces in the audience came into focus slowly. She saw eyes first, then faces.

  “Did you see who killed your son?”