by Sarah Bird
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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Dedicated to those who seize what an unjust world refuses to give
Acknowledgments
The list of those I have to thank is long and starts with the remarkable Juneteenth cowboys and cowgirls who first introduced me to the tale of Private Cathy Williams in the late seventies.
I am forever indebted to Pam Black for lighting the fire with her words, “My students need books about heroes who look like them,” and to Emily Haas for fanning it.
I must acknowledge Mary Williams, Fort Davis NHS, as an early advocate and protector of Private Williams’s legacy.
I would like to especially draw attention to the work of Barbara Richardson, who in her books, Black Directory of New Mexico and Noteworthy Black Women of New Mexico, as well as in her conversations with Pam Black presented an illuminating portrait of Private Williams found nowhere else.
I also offer heartfelt thanks to the men and women of the Buffalo Soldiers Heritage and Outreach Program; the Buffalo Soldier Society of New Mexico; and to Paul Matthews, founder of the Buffalo Soldier Museum of New Mexico for their vivid reenactments and help with the details of army life and dress. The Fort Davis National Historic Site and the Fort Clark Springs Museum were also both invaluable resources that allowed me to imagine myself into Cathy Williams’s world.
I give thanks to the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship at the University of Texas for a wild and open space where Williams could come to life.
I am grateful to the Meryl Streep Screenwriters Lab for its support and to the dear and wise friends I made there: Lyralen Kaye, Kim Turner, Vanessa Carmichael, Billie Mason, Janet Stilson, Tracy Charlton, Jan Kimbrough, Anna Hozian, Kellen Hertz, Gretchen Somerfeld, and Peres Owino who provided an invaluable African perspective.
I offer appreciation to all who guided me along this path by reading early drafts, providing critical insights, offering counsel, and sharing bottles of wine and cups of tea: John Pipkin, Carol Dawson, Anne Rodgers, Kelly Harrell, Tiffany Yates Martin, Clare Moore and Sarah Phelps, Satori Shakoor, John Jones, S. C. Gwynne, Ben and Sharie Fountain, Steven Harrigan, Elizabeth Crook, James Magnuson, Brenda Bell, Saundra Kirk and all the Chickas of Victoria Cottage, Christine Swanson, Scottie Gissell, Chris Tomlinson, and Michael Hurd.
Special thanks are due to Ann Weisgarber for telling me how the novel begins.
Among all my readers and advisors the most important are my sisters, Martha and Kay Bird. I won the Sister Lottery with two darlings who will not only read endless drafts but constantly lift me out of the pit of despair with encouragement, enthusiasm, and cheese.
For more unearned generosity and kindness than I deserve or could ever repay, I thank the luminous Kristin Hannah and Christina Baker Kline.
I am profoundly grateful for the extraordinarily happy new home I have found at St. Martin’s. I have been bowled over by the enthusiasm and expertise of everyone there from visionary publisher Jennifer Enderlin, to Lesley Worrell, the creator of the perfect cover, to my boundlessly energetic friend, former aerobics instructor, and now marketing guru, Gillian Redfearn. I am thrilled to be working with so many gifted and passionate bookpeople, Brant Janeway, Erica Martirano, Jordan Hanley, Dori Weintraub, Sally Richardson, and George Witte.
Finally, most crucially, I give thanks for a woman whom I feel Cathy Williams guided me to, the sublime Monique Patterson, editorial director extraordinaire, and her rock-star colleagues, Alexander Sehulster and Mara Delgado-Sanchez.
Needless to say, none of this would have happened without the empress of agents, my brat sister, Kristine Dahl.
And, of course and always, my essentials remain George, Gabriel, True, and the inspiration of Lt. Colista McCabe Bird, R.N.
A tribute in fiction inspired by the singular decision made by Cathy/Cathay Williams, the first woman to enlist in the peacetime U.S. Army, and the only to ever serve (1866–1868) with the fabled Buffalo Soldiers.
Girls want marvelous adventures just as much as boys do.
—L. FRANK BAUM, AUTHOR OF THE WIZARD OF OZ
“I reckon that I is a hundred and three or a hundred and four years old. I was a woman grown at the end of the war.
“I ain’t had no daddy ’cause queens don’t marry, and my mammy, Junny, was a queen in Africa. They kidnaps her and steals her away from her throne and fetches her here to Wake County in slTribuavery.”
—ANN PARKER, AGE 103 (?) WHEN INTERVIEWED IN THE WAKE COUNTY HOME, RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA, BY MARY A. HICKS
The option of a white man’s republic ended at Appomattox.
—DANIEL FRIED, AMERICA’S MOST SENIOR DIPLOMAT, RETIREMENT SPEECH, 2017
BOOK ONE
Back South
Chapter 1
Here’s the first thing you need to know about Miss Cathy Williams: I am the daughter of a daughter of a queen and my mama never let me forget it. That’s right. Royal blood runs purple through my veins. And I am talking real Africa blood. Not that tea-water queens over in England have to make do with. My royal blood comes from my grandmother, my Iyaiya, as we called her in Fon, our secret Africa language. And don’t go picturing one of them sweet old grannies like you got nowadays with linty lemon drops tucked into her apron pocket for the grandkids. No, she had possum teeth, filed to points so, if need be, she could rip an enemy’s throat out, for my grandmother was one of the Leopard King’s six thousand warrior-wives, what the French called les Amazones.
The second thing you better get straight about Miss Cathy Williams is that, even though I had the misfortune to be born in Missouri nearly fifty years ago, somewhere in the vicinity of 1840 to 1844, depending on how Old Miss told the tale that day, I am not a Southerner. Only two things in this world the South is good for. Hookworm and misery. I’ve lived here in Trinidad, Colorado, for over twenty years and it’d take chloroform and a gun to ever get me back to the South. What I’m trying to say is I am a Western woman and that is what that dandified reporter from the St. Louis Daily Times never understood about me. Just because I was from the South, that pinch-nosed weasel expected me to be a grinning old auntie, calling him “suh,” shuffling her feet, and talking about dem ole days back home. When I didn’t turn out to be some green country gal fresh off the plantation never knew the touch of shoe leather and was, instead, a person who could talk just as proper as him when she was of a mind to, here’s what that skunk dump wrote in the January 2, 1876, edition of the St. Louis Daily Times. He wrote that I received him “with an assumed formality that had a touch of the ridiculous.”
“Assumed”? Because I knew when to say “ain’t” and when not to?
How do you answer back to a newspaper? With just a few words, that bowler-hatted jasper made me out to be a fraud and every word out of my mouth a lie. No wonder folks don’t believe me when I tell them I was a Buffalo Soldier. Having both my feet amputated last year has not strengthened my case either. The way I’m bein
g whittled down, I reckon I might have another year, two at the most, to set the record straight before they fit me out for a pine box. So, with Miss Olivia Hathcock, teacher at the Trinidad, Colorado, Free School for the Children of Colored Miners, taking down my words that is what I intend to do.
No point in starting off with whatever date Old Miss wrote in her book to record the births of the slaves born onto their miserable tobacco farm off on the far west side of Missouri in a region so Confederate it was called Little Dixie. No, my real life, the one I was meant to have, did not start until an August night in 1864, three years into the war, when I watched the only world I’d ever known burn to the ground and met the man who was to be my deliverance and my damnation, the Yankee general Philip Henry Sheridan.
The first time I laid eyes on Philip Sheridan, the man might of been Satan himself. He was mounted up high on a black horse must of been sixteen hands tall set smack in the middle of fires roaring so loud that Sheridan had to yell orders down to his blue-jacketed demons in a voice that thundered like Judgment Day. The Yank soldiers swarmed through the farm, torches held aloft, kerchiefs tied over their noses against the smoke. Tears washed white streaks down their soot-blackened faces. They were burning Old Mister’s tobacco crop and the smell, like ten thousand men smoking stogies, could of harelipped a bull ox.
My little sister Clemmie, a wisp of a girl subject to many a nervous complaint, trembled in terror against me, for the white preacher had warned us that Yankees were minions of Lucifer. “They’ll slice you open,” he promised whenever the occasion had presented itself. And many times when it had not. “And let their dogs drag your guts out so you can die watching your entrails being devoured.”
Sheridan might of been Satan himself, still I could not take my eyes off of the man. When I separated him from his mount, though, I found I was looking at a squatty little fellow with black hair so short it looked painted on, a long body, strong, broad chest, short legs, not enough neck to hang him with, and arms so long that if his ankles itched he could scratch them without stooping. He had a head like a bulldog, big and round, with a hard set to the jaws that signaled once he sunk his teeth into a thing, either him or that thing’d be dead before he turned it loose. It was a head molded by the Creator to do one thing on this earth. And that one thing was fight.
There wasn’t but one Yankee fit such a description, the dreaded General Philip “Little Phil” Henry Sheridan. Even the Feds called him “Smash ’em Up” as that’s what the young general was given to yelling as he rode, laughing and cursing up a blue streak, into battle.
Old Mister and his Secesh friends despised all Yankees, but they hated Sheridan worse than any other Federal. They called Sheridan’s habit of burning everything in his path “despicable and unspeakable savagery and against every rule of civilized behavior.” Unlike, say, shackling up humans and working, flogging, or starving them to death. All in all, I was inclined to like the man.
“Burn it all, lads!” Sheridan bellowed over the sound of the flames crackling and roaring. “Burn the Rebels’ food and burn what they’d sell to buy food! Burn every grain of Rebel wheat and every kernel of Rebel corn! Burn it to the ground! I want the crows flying overhead to have to carry their own rations!”
Before that moment, I had never heard this exact brand of Yankee being spoke, and though it hit my ear like a handful of pebbles hurled against a window, I had to admit that the General, as I came to think of him then and forever after, could preach him some damnation.
Out beyond the dirt yard where the soldiers had gathered us up at bayonet point, flames flowed over the fields like a river of blazing orange spreading into an everlasting lake of fire. It roared so loud it took me a minute to make out the caterwauling of Old Miss.
“You are the devil, Phil Sheridan!” Old Miss wailed, gathering her three wormy offspring to her side. “The very devil himself, for only a demon of the lowest order would burn out a poor woman with a husband lying fresh dead in her parlor and leave her and these poor innocent children with nothing to eat!”
“Don’t be calling me a devil, woman,” Sheridan said, his queer accent turning “devil” into “divvel.”
“The Union Army has burned your crops, madam, we have not slaughtered your sons. And we shall not be laying a hand upon your daughter.”
He pointed a righteous finger toward the pasty-faced Little Miss, trembling in her pinafore worn now to a gray rag beside the two Young Sirs, both bowlegged with rickets.
“You traitorous Secessionists brought this miserable war on yourselves. Insisted upon it. Sought to sunder our country in two with it. War is brutal, my good woman. I do not make it any more so than I must.”
The three gray curls that hung down either side of Old Miss’s long face hopped around like fleas as she’d had no tonic to calm her nerves for the three long years the Rebellion had been grinding on. “We’ll starve!” Old Miss cried, so pitiful you’d of never guessed at the blackness of her heart.
Never of imagined her looking bored and peevish when my grandmother, my Iyaiya, was led away, naked but for a rag twixt her legs, in a coffle of other wore-out slaves, all chained together like fish on a trotline. Old Mister had sold her for ten dollars to a turpentine camp down in Alabama, where they’d squeeze the last bit of work and life out of the captured queen in a dank pine forest. Bored and peevish was also how Old Miss had looked when my mama’s other babies were sold away from her. It was how she looked when Old Mister took my beautiful baby sister, Clemmie, up to the house to use like a man uses a wife.
“You have left us nothing,” Old Miss shrieked. “Nothing!”
Looking at Old Miss then, with all three of her children alive and clinging to her, their fine house standing proud, I thought, Nothing? Why, that stupid woman hasn’t touched even the least little hem of “nothing.” But she was starting to, and for that I was glad.
“How will we feed ourselves?” Old Miss whined.
Sheridan roared down at her, “Rebel, don’t be adding lying to the crime of high treason against the United States of America. Feed yourselves with the silver you’ve buried.”
That shut her up right quick. We all knew that Old Miss had buried her precious silver even before the war started.
“Or would you prefer that I hogtie your youngest son?” Sheridan asked. “And hold him over a fire until the fat and the truth is rendered out of him?”
We had all heard about how bushwhackers had done just that over to Glen Eden plantation where they had strung Mister Pennebaker up over a low fire until they cooked the truth out of him, and he directed them to the fork above Perkins Creek where he’d buried his valuables in a barrel.
“Might that not encourage you to reveal where you’ve hidden the spoils which, by all rights, belong now to the Union Army?” Sheridan prodded.
Old Miss’s jaw worked as she bit at the inside of her mouth. Her eyes twitched about in the rabbity way she had, but she didn’t answer.
“Speak no more of the hardships you’ve endured,” Sheridan said. “Not with more than half a million souls, yours and ours, lying in their graves because, for the most selfish of reasons, you willful, prideful, ignorant, arrogant, traitorous Rebels would destroy the finest country our Almighty Lord ever set upon His benighted earth.”
I could see from the start that Phil Sheridan was a serious man.
With Old Miss shut up good and proper then, Sheridan demanded of one of his officers, “Have all the contrabands been accounted for?”
For the first time, the soldiers shone the torchlight upon our faces.
Mama, who was standing to my right, and Clemmie, to my left, huddled up closer against me. Fear was making my sweet little sister vibrate like a hive humming with bees. Old Mister’s nasty doings had taken all the starch out of her. And that is why I had been forced to slip a brown recluse spider into his pocket to bite the hand that had interfered with my baby sister. His blood had gone bad and, with all the fit men carried off and no one else left
to run the place, he’d had to make Mama overseer. After the bitten hand turned black, Old Miss took her nasty husband into town to have it cut off. But he died anyway. I thought that was the happiest day of my life. This one, however, was showing fair to beat it out.
I wanted to tell Clemmie not to be afraid. That no one’s guts’d be getting dragged out by dogs. My little sister had never been able to fully understand that white folks generally preferred the more economically satisfactory practice of working us to death over outright killing.
Me? I was more excited than scared for, no matter how bad the Federals were, I saw no way they could be worse than what we had here.
“Madam,” Sheridan boomed down at Old Miss, “are these all your Negroes?”
“All that your cowardly marauders and scavengers have left us,” Old Miss sniffed, as though it wasn’t the Rebs and general riffraff bushwhackers who’d carried off, first the strong men, then the weak, and, finally, the boys.
A Yankee with silver oak leaves on his shoulder straps stepped up and asked, “Sir, should I confiscate the contrabands?” The officer had the toadying manner of the worst kind of overseer sucking up to the master. I figured him to be either the General’s overseer or he was angling for the job.
The General had what you might call a salty vocabulary and he roared, “Colonel Terrill, need I remind you that we are on a ______ foraging mission? And it’s been a damn ______ miserable one so far? We’ve barely liberated provisions enough to keep our own ______ bellies full and you’re proposing we add a pack of ______ Negroes to the quartermaster’s load? No, Colonel, I’ll send a detachment later to take them to a freedman’s camp. I’ve no intention of feeding every ______ pickaninny between here and Washington, D.C.”
“Begging the general’s pardon, sir,” the colonel went on. “I hate to mention it, sir, but your staff’s head cook did requisition a helper, sir.”
