by Sarah Bird
Seeing the odds tilted heavy against us, I was about to show him the yagger when Solomon said, “Remove your hand from the lady.”
Dupree swiveled his dim, bleary-eyed gaze to Solomon and asked, “Whud you say? Boy?”
“I said,” Solomon repeated, “take your grimy paw off the lady.” This time, he accompanied the order with action and jerked Dupree’s hand off me. The instant Solomon’s black hand touched Dupree’s white one the air became charged the way it does before a thunderstorm.
Almost more amazed than outraged, Dupree stated, “Boy, you done put your hand on me.”
Once the crime was named, his gang fell on us and we were locked in strangleholds and neck locks. And, though we hollered and struggled for help, none of our own people came to our aid. They just looked on and let that pack of hyenas drag us back into the woods where, I expected, they’d finish us off in ways too awful to name.
When they got us back to their campfire, I wriggled free and kicked a couple of them where it hurts a man most. Then I chugged Dupree a stout one in the mouth and the few teeth he had left in his head gave way and came gushing out in a spray of what looked like kernels of corn mixed with blood and slobber. Solomon proved himself to be all wool and no shoddy in the fighting department as well. He had a reach you wouldn’t of expected on a man of his height and a solid upper cut that came all the way up from Alabama to flatten a couple of them egg-suckers.
Then Solomon and me backed toward each other so that we put a solid V of fists between ourselves and the trashy skunks. We were holding our own and edging back away to safety when one of the polecats slipped around behind and coldcocked me with what felt like a round jack sap to the back of the head, and I went down heavy as a dead beef.
When I came to, I was on the ground staring up at a rockslide of fists raining down upon me. Those crackers were refighting the Rebellion and there wouldn’t be any surrender this time. I prepared myself to meet Iyaiya, Mama, and Clemmie. Then, just as the fellow with the bassoon butt was fixing to plant his boot in my face, a shot was fired and he dropped down dead on top of me. Another shot was fired, this one more of a boom than the first, which had had a crack to it, and it blew another fellow out of his clothes. I squirmed out from beneath the dead man in time to hear another shot fired and to see the skunk punching Solomon come down in a pile.
I figured a band of Yankee snipers had finally come to our aid and were hiding out in the woods picking Dupree’s gang off one by one. The gang arrived at the same conclusion, for they left off murdering us and, not knowing where the snipers were, they all clumped together, whirling from side to side and darting glances about, looking for the attackers they reckoned had them surrounded.
Dupree, drooling red slobber, had lost, along with the majority of his teeth, every bit of his bullyboy spunk. The next shot fetched off his cap, revealing that the only hide he had atop his newborn-bald head had been coonskin. Whimpering like a wormy pup, he crouched down, held his hands out in the direction the shots were coming from, and pleaded, “Let us go! We didn’t intend no harm! Please, Grant told y’all to leave us be. It’s peace now. Y’all can’t just shoot at us like—”
Of a sudden Dupree, having seen something emerging from the woods, stopped wheedling, and sounding like he was about to perish from the dry wilts, whispered, “Oh, Lord God Amighty,” and fell silent.
For out of the shadows stepped all the freedmen and women I thought had abandoned us to our fate. Leading them was none other than Gator Mouth. Not a one of them spoke, nor did they need to. With three of Dupree’s ranks dead and the rest near to it from fright, the mangy pack did not require any persuading to clear off. They backed away, bit by bit at first then in a wild, galloping stampede, tearing over one another in their hurry to escape.
“You see them crackers turn tail and run?” Gator Mouth asked again and again, each time to greater and greater amusement as our rescuers were doubled over laughing until they came close to airing their paunches from sheer gut-cramping mirth. Once I collected myself, though, I realized that not one of those folks had any iron on him.
“Who did the shooting?” I asked.
Before anyone could answer, the distant notes of the band whipping into a schottische, a lively Kraut tune that made for good dancing, caught their attention and the freedmen and women rushed off to join in.
When they’d left, I called out for our rescuers to make themselves known so we might thank and reward them for they had surely saved our lives. Expecting a couple of burly pistoleros to appear, I was taken aback when a plump girl bearing my yagger stepped into the firelight. No doubt her accomplices were remaining out of sight to cover her.
The girl wore sparkly earbobs of the sort no laundress or cook could earn in three lifetimes of boiling clothes or victuals. Her face, a delicious color this side of caramel, was rouged up and powdered as befits a fallen Daughter of Eve. She was a comely young woman with glossy hair that hung in springy curls and a figure, though gone to fat at a young age, was still fetching enough that it was easy to see how she could command a pair of sparkly earbobs.
“I am mighty obliged to you,” I started off, not knowing how to go about the business of thanking this stranger and her partners in hiding for saving me and Solomon.
Solomon went to put his hand into his vest pocket, but the girl whipped a derringer from the well-padded holster of her cleavage, cocked it, and ordered in the growly voice of a gin-soaked bawd, “Hold it right there, Top Hat!”
“I ain’t armed,” Solomon protested. “I got money and figured on giving you and your buddies, wherever they’re hid, a reward.”
“You saved our lives,” I said. “Tell us your name.”
The hussy made no answer, for my question had caused her to start bawling like a baby. In that instant, the hands of time turned back and I didn’t need her to cry out in our Africa language, “Am I that fat and ugly that you don’t even recognize me?” to know that I was being held at gunpoint by my baby sister.
Chapter 24
And then my head took over and told me it couldn’t be. “No,” I said, backing away from this pretender. “My sister is dead. Talked to the man who buried her.”
The girl stepped closer, took my hand, and stuck it down her bodice until I felt five rows of puffed-up scars, round as pearls. She put her hand on my scars and the presence of Mama and Iyaiya came on so strong I could smell the licorice root they both were given to chewing. There was no denying it: the bawd was my sister Clemmie. Once the truth of it came clear, I saw that the only thing truly different about her was that the woebegone look that had fallen upon Clemmie after Old Mister began having his way with her had vanished. Though gone to fat and to the bad, little sister had been returned to me as bright and shiny as she had ever been. I fell into Clemmie’s arms.
I can’t say how long we’d been clinging to each other and sobbing before Solomon said, “This must be the famous baby sister Clemmie.” He said it like she was his family, too, put his arm around both of us and added, “We heard you was dead.”
Clemmie and I wiped away tears and snot and she answered, “No, I’m alive.”
“She never stopped looking for you,” Solomon went on. “There wasn’t a black face we come across, she didn’t search it. About wore the neck of her dress out, tugging it down, showing those Africa scars, asking if anybody’d seen the like.”
I never suspected that Solomon had ever much noticed what I did unless it was not chopping or cleaning or serving to his liking. But he had. He’d been paying attention the whole time.
“No,” Solomon went on, “she never stopped looking. Not for you, nor…” He glanced my way and added, “Nor your mama.”
The way Clemmie froze, only her eyes darting to find mine, I knew for the first time that Mama was gone and a crumbling that started in my knees overtook me, for until that moment, I had not truly believed that Mama was truly gone.
I wobbled and Clemmie stepped forward to grab me. “Could you g
ive my sister and me a moment?” she asked Solomon.
I collapsed, sobbing, into Clemmie’s arms; she welcomed me with a kick in the shins from her boot so hard that the pain snapped the tears right off my cheeks. Before I could hit back, she grabbed me by my shoulders and ordered, “Get a hold yourself, right now this instant.”
“But Mama,” I whimpered.
“No!” she shouted sharp and hard, way you would a dog messed on the carpet. “No! Ain’t having that. Not one bit of it. You listen to me. Mama went North, you hear? Went North to be with our daddy—”
“But they said Daddy was—”
“Shut your mouth. Shut it. Don’t let that word come out of your mouth or enter into your mind. Mama and Daddy are up there in Illinois now eating biscuits and honey. He’s doing his tailoring and she’s taking care of him. They have them a sweet little house with hollyhocks in the garden.”
I was seeing my sister for the first time. Who she really was. She was ten times tougher than I would ever be and had seen grief I could not imagine. She was tough enough to decide she wouldn’t allow the cruelties of a wicked world to break her down or destroy her memories.
“Now that is the picture of Mama and Daddy I want and I will not let you or anyone else take it from me.”
I nodded, swallowing back my grief. So, though my little sister did hold me and let my tears run down her neck, we spoke no more of Mama. I told her my tears were for joy at finding her again and, by the time the crowd surged in around us, pushing and jostling toward something behind us, tears of joy were what they had become.
Suddenly, a marching chant rang out from the distance.
Say that in the Army, chicken’s might fine
One jumped off the table, started marking time
Say that in the Army, coffee’s mighty fine
Looks like muddy water, tastes like turpentine
Say that in the Army, biscuits mighty fine
One rolled up off the table, kilt a friend of mine
Sound off!
One! Two!
Sound off!
THREE! FOUR!
I glanced up and found that, for some reason, whoever was counting cadence was causing everyone to stare off with looks on their faces like Jesus was behind me raising Lazarus from the grave. When I finally threw enough elbow to twist around and get a look, what I saw was more miraculous than a dead man rising.
The crowd parted and a detachment of black soldiers—real soldiers, not the scruffy work gangs of contrabands I’d seen in their cast-off jackets and seat-blown trousers digging graves and chopping kindling—came marching up. And here’s the miraculous part: these troopers were carrying rifles and they were wearing the blue suit. Crisp new uniforms, not ones ventilated with bullet holes and bayonet stabs. These soldiers had their shoulders pinned back, spines straight as fence posts, heads held high. They were ready to look anyone, black or white, straight in the eye with no fake smiles or shift-down glances. These were real, full men. Real, full human beings.
A brass band struck up the “Battle Cry of Freedom” and, with the stern profiles of our men marching past—Spencer carbines resting on the left shoulder, stiff right arms ticktocking back and forth with each step, keeping time—we sang along with the chorus.
The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
Down with the traitor, up with the star;
While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,
Shouting the battle cry of freedom!
Hurrah, boys, hurrah!
It was the first time the song had ever been about our boys and we couldn’t shout that battle cry of freedom loud enough.
Even the band, playing atop a low stage, was made up of a dozen of our boys. Soldiers holding torches took places around the platform and the light gleamed up onto the brass curlicues of the horns the musicians held to their mouths. Their forage caps were on straight, not hanging off to one side or the other trying to look jaunty the way the contraband soldiers wore them. No, these caps sat right so that the golden horns embroidered on the round tops all faced us and we knew that they were in the United States Infantry. They were bona fide marching soldiers.
Another unit of soldiers paraded in and lined up, four abreast on either side, in front of the stage. This group wore caps that I knew for a calcified fact no other black men had ever worn atop their heads. They weren’t infantry. These caps were embroidered in gold with the crossed swords that meant they were better. They were the best. Like Sheridan, they were cavalry. They were riding soldiers.
“Company halt! Parade rest!” their top sergeant called out. The ground beneath us thundered as all the men stomped a foot down and set their rifle butts down next to the toes of their boots.
“To the right!” the sergeant bellowed. Every soldier jerked his head toward his right shoulder and stared hard into the shadows where the jingle of a bridle and some loud snorts told us a man ahorseback waited.
“Salute!” Their hands snapped up so hard and so fast that I was sure some prissed-up white commander was waiting out there to make his big entrance. Maybe it was even that show-off Boy General Custer with his greased-up yellow ringlets. I heaved a sigh of disgust and bid farewell to the little fairy tale I’d just been telling myself where my people were the equal of whites, running the show, being saluted. That happy vision crumpled: the white boss was coming.
The ones up near the front of the crowd saw him first. It made me sick the way the men pawed the hats from their heads, children pointed, and women put a hand to their mouths or sent fingers fluttering at their necks.
If I hadn’t been boxed in so tight I’d of left then and there. The last thing I ever intended on doing again in my life was stare up at some white man lording it over me atop a horse. With Solomon’s arm still cocooning my shoulders and Clemmie snugged up next to me, though, I reckoned I could stomach the sight of this showboating jackass making his grand entrance.
But the commander who rode up to the edge of the stage wasn’t white. In fact, he had skin near as dark as my own, fine full lips, a strong, wide nose, and a high, noble forehead. He dismounted, stepped onto the stage and gazed out at us. Though the soldier had never seen me before, he immediately picked me out of the crowd and stared right into my eyes.
I didn’t know how it was possible, but he knew me. I was for God sure of it because, for the second time that night, a ghost had appeared. Like Clemmie, Wager Swayne had come back to me.
Chapter 25
“Sister, what’s taken you?” Clemmie hissed in my ear.
“Clemmie, I know him. I know that man. And he knows me. He recognizes me.”
Clemmie snorted. “Yeah, that man recognizes you all right. Recognizes you and every other calf-eyed female out here mooning after him.”
Clemmie was right. All the women had been struck dumb by the sight of the soldiers. And deaf, dumb, and blind by the sight of one of our men ahorseback, riding tall and proud commanding them all.
“Put a blue jacket on any old hog,” Clemmie said, “and women lose they minds. Put a gun in his hands, mount him top a prize steed? Lordy God, I mean.”
Still I couldn’t stop staring.
“Girl, quit eye-eating the man,” Clemmie ordered.
But I couldn’t. Those were the lips I had taken my first and only kiss from. I knew they were. I felt it down to the tips of my toes. And, the way he looked at me? In spite of his eyes being bandaged when we met, I was sure as the sun rises in the east that he knew me. That he felt the connection I felt.
Clemmie whispered, “Solomon’s getting jealous.”
“What? Solomon?” I whispered. “Jealous? You mean me and Solomon? Naw, sister, ain’t like that at all. He’s just a friend.”
But Solomon’s arm tightening around my shoulder, pulling me back the tiniest bit away from my soldier, wasn’t a friend’s arm. Clemmie saw that and hissed into my ear, “Might not be like that for you, but I know a jealous man when I see one.”
I cut my eyes a
s far as I could without turning my head and there it was, clear as day, Solomon glaring up at my soldier, tight-jawed and stiff-necked with jealousy. He snugged me in closer.
“What I tell you?” Clemmie asked in a low voice, proud of all she knew about reading the ways of men.
“But he’s so…” Though the band was ripping through one of Sheridan’s favorite songs, “Nelly Bly,” and Solomon couldn’t have heard me over the banjos plunking along with the horns, I still whispered the last word, “… old.”
Clemmie looked him up and down. “Still got his own teeth. Hair. Maybe he ain’t no hero on a white horse, but I tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That man is the reason you alive.”
“Naw, sister. I’m the reason I’m alive. Me and General Sheridan. Clemmie, you seen it yourself. Sheridan picked me out special that night on the farm. I was the General’s girl. No one dared lay a hand on me.”
“Yeah? Fine, if that makes you happy, then you go on and believe that a white man, a general, was watching out for you. You also go on and believe a hero in a blue jacket’s gon pluck you up, ride away with you on the back of his pure white horse.”
Clemmie wasn’t being ugly when she said that. Just speaking the truth that anyone with two eyes could see. I always regarded myself as a person who faced facts head-on. And the fact here was: girls as plain as me didn’t catch the notice of a man fine as the one who’d dismounted and was now standing at attention with his men. Girls like me counted their blessings if a man as good as Solomon cared to put his arm about her shoulders.
The final, and most important, fact of all was this: no matter how I might dream it was not so, Wager Swayne had died. I had seen him carried away to be buried. Those were the facts and I saw that I better figure out how to accept them, and do it fast, or miss my chance.
With one whip of his baton, the band director snapped the song shut. The musicians left the stage and the sergeant took it. He strode out and studied us until even the slightest whisper and cough had died away into a breathless silence.
