by Sarah Bird
“Bill,” Lem asked. “Ain’t you hot, man?”
I was the only person in that stuffy room who still had a jacket on. Most had wadded up their long blue jackets to use for a pillow. Mine was buttoned all the way up to my chin to hide the apple of Adam that I didn’t have.
“Naw,” I answered. “Catch cold easy. Had a sister carried off by a sniffle.”
“Oh. I am sorry to hear that, Bill. Had me a baby sister fell off the back of Massuh’s wagon. Curled up and turned blue. Peanut I called her for she was just that small.”
“I’m sorry, Lem.”
“I appreciate it, Bill, for I loved that baby girl and miss her still.”
A bugle sounded. I recognized the call and hollered out before Vikers could, “Lights out. One of you want to douse them lanterns?”
The lanterns hanging off chains from the high ceiling were blown out and the big room went dark except for stripes of moonlight coming in the high windows. I hoped the men, exhausted by five days in a metal box, would go directly to sleep for I had an important mission I needed to carry out. However, excited by all the newness, they jabbered away until it occurred to someone to point out, “They ain’t fed us.”
A general chorus of grumbling followed, then those who had rations left over from the trip started sharing out their hardtack. The crunching of tooth busters echoed in the big room and someone said, “Sounds like hail hitting on a tin roof.”
“That’s just your big teef, Cyrus,” another voice shot back.
“Least I got all my grinners, Chester. Your smile like a jack-o’-lantern!”
“What I told you ’bout calling me Chester? Ain’t no damn Chester no more. Name’s Antoine now.”
“You ain’t no aunt of mine. I’ma just call you ‘Big Teef.’”
Next the men debated whether Corporal Withers’s nickname should be Rosy for his cheeks or Catfish for the wispy bits of mustache he had straggling down either side of his mouth.
The joking went on, everyone in such high spirits that a warm spurt of pride shot through me as I thought about how a bunch of white men would of acted if they had been done this way. Put to bed with no supper? There’d of been an armed mutiny. And here my people were laughing and sharing out what they had. This caused a lovely vision to appear to me in which, once I’d gained the trust and admiration of all, I could reveal my true nature and be accepted as one of them. Just another soldier in the ranks fighting for a better life and a bit of dignity.
Gradually, the jabbering fell into introductions of a sort, and from every corner of the big room, names and jobs rang out. Not surprisingly, we had us a mess of farmboys, pickers, balers, choppers, strippers, and field hands, with names like Clem, Clyde, and Claude. We also had a Virgil who’d worked in a cigar factory in Virginia as a roller and a Tom who’d been a mechanic in Ohio and even a Thaddeus, a freedman who’d worked the whaling ships out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had once sailed all the way to Hawaii before coal oil knocked the blocks out from under the whale oil business.
Hearing the freedmen from up North talk about being bartenders, bootblacks, chimney sweeps, even owning laundries where they had a dozen women working for them was like the dream I used to have of discovering that our wood-floored shack had endless rooms I’d never known about and were there waiting for me to wander about in.
Vikers waited until the names and jobs had settled down then announced, “Yes, well, I was the editor in chief of a freedmen’s newspaper published in Baltimore, The Colored American Deliverer.”
Off in my dark corner, I perked up because I was the only one in that vast room who knew that Vikers had just told a whopper. Daddy used to read to me from his beloved Deliverer and had always noted with pride that it was published way up in New York City, New York. Not Baltimore.
“Why’d a newspaper editor go for a soldier?” Lem whispered to me in all innocence, as if there must be some detail he’d overlooked.
“I couldn’t say,” I answered. “But I tell you what, Vikers keeping his eye on me? I got both mine on him.”
“Stanky,” Vikers called down to me. “I hear you and Mule…”
Men that wouldn’t have laughed in our faces felt free to hoot in the dark at the nicknames given us by Vikers.
“I hear you talking way off down there. What’d y’all do back home? Then in the war?”
“Well, Little Man,” I said, for I couldn’t let that “Stanky” nonsense stand, no matter what. “Back home I worked a logging crew.” I made my voice as deep and gravelly as any soaker been marinating his vocal cords in alcohol and tobacco smoke for fifty years. “Then, come the war, I bucked logs to build corduroy roads for General Philip Henry Sheridan.” That sounded a sight more manly than scrubbing pots and cooking ever would.
But men, being what they are, took my log bucking as some kind of manliness challenge that they were then required to beat. They did this the best way they knew how: smutty talk. I thought I already knew how men carried on. But the nastiest comments I’d ever heard before that night in the barracks were Bible stories compared to the tales they fell to telling.
This one bragged about “all the tail” he’d gotten off “this ole gal back home” who was “hotter’n July jam.” Someone else blowed on about a “high yaller gal” who’d beg for it until tears came to her green eyes.
From the way they went on about the women who couldn’t get enough of their willies and the women who had never seen such a much of size as what they were packing, you’d of thought every one of them had a magic wand stuck down their britches. It was all I could do to keep my mouth shut and not set the fools straight on the true way of it. How women mostly just put up with the willie part as the price of a gentle touch, a kind word, a bit of attention. Maybe a pretty or two. Or even just a plank of hardtack.
I thought about that girl on the barrelhead back at camp, the way she’d let out all them big moans even while her mind was off studying a redheaded flicker hopping up the tulip tree. And how puffed up Solomon had been when he came strutting back. I also recollected the nights back in our cabin when Maynard’s man-fevered mama would have a visitor and how she’d moan like that hardtack girl. Then, after he’d done his business, she’d whimper and beg him to stay, hold her for a bit, whisper more sweet words like before he’d had his way. But her visitors would always ignore her and shuck on out without a glance back, just as convinced as the fools around me that she was as pleased as he was and couldn’t wait for more. That his wand had worked his special man magic again.
I was glad that Mama had set me straight early on about not wasting myself on short-weight plowboys.
“Ain’t right,” Lem muttered. “All this nasty talk. You don’t appear to be enjoying it, either.”
“Can’t say as I do,” I rumbled back.
“Bill,” Lem went on. “We’re different from them others.” In a whisper, he added, “Especially you.”
Different from the others. Lem knew. I’d let him get too close and he had sussed me out.
Unbreathing, I flushed with heat, feeling like Lem was staring through the dark, through my jacket, shirt, and bindings straight at my naked titties. I was already figuring out whether I should offer him money, friendship, or something nasty to keep his mouth shut when he went on, “You’re like me, Bill. You know your Bible. Know that Revelations told us, ‘Blessed is he what stays away, keeping his garments on so as not to go about naked where whosoever gonna see what ain’t meant to be seen.’”
My new friend was churched. I was safe. “That’s it,” I said with relief. “You got my number, Lem. Me and the Scriptures is like this.” I held up two fingers pressed together tight.
“Uh-huh,” Lem murmured. “Thought so. Saw right off that you and me was alike.”
As the smutty talk went on, Lem asked, “Ain’t none of them been saved?” Then he rolled over, putting the shield of his back between himself and all the wickedness of the world and was snoring half a minute later.
&nb
sp; I prayed that the men would leave off and go to sleep, so I could do what I had to do to stay safe. But all the fornication talk had turbulated them so that as soon as they shut up, they set to playing with themselves. Which I wouldn’t of given a hill of horse turds about if they’d been quiet. But, Lord, the panting and squeaking and gasping and creaking. I feared they’d pleasure themselves straight into idiocy.
At last, snores replaced the creaking and I slithered off to where Tea Cake slept. I had my hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out, leaned in and whispered, “Tea Cake, you got to give me the guardhouse duty.”
Tea Cake muttered moist syllables against my palm, which I couldn’t make out. I slid my hand into my pocket and took hold of the folding straight-edge razor I always kept there. I was ready to use it to help persuade him when I realized that he was saying, “Only volunteered so’s to get me some extra victuals.”
I let the razor fall back into my pocket and whispered, “You give me the duty, I’ll bring you all the victuals I can steal.”
Our deal was struck. I retreated to my spot, snugged my jacket up even tighter around me, tried to blot out the sound of one last man having a go at himself, and thought what a miserable, ruttish bunch of beasts men were. It would never be safe for them to know I was a woman.
I didn’t sleep one single wink that long, first night in Carlisle Barracks.
Chapter 36
The kitchen was a sulfurous place of giant iron vats with mush burbling and heaving in them and fires roaring beneath. Pumps groaned as they forced water up from the river through large pipes. When the iron door of a roaring oven creaked open, tongues of hellfire leaped out. Here and there big lumps of pork sat out on tables. They’d gone greenish in the heat and were buzzing with flies. I wondered what Solomon would of made of this sorry operation and wished hard that he was with me.
“You!” a stout fellow in a long, dirty apron, white cap atop his head, yelled at me. “You the recruit Withers sent?”
“Yessir!” I answered, snapping him off a salute.
As his hands were occupied hefting one of the big vats off the fire, he tipped his chin to a tall wheelbarrow, lowered the vat onto it, and said, “There’s your cart. Get you some that pork.” When I winced, he hurled a colorful variety of race slurs my way. I dropped a slimy chunk onto the cart and set out.
The sun was barely up as I trotted along the big, open parade ground between the two long wings of limestone buildings. A serving girl tossing away a bucket of water out front of one of the officers’ quarters spotted me, tilted her head back so she could gaze up at me from beneath her thick eyelashes, gave a sweet little smile and waved. Why, the hussy was flirting with me! Delighted and relieved that I could fool even another female, I gave her a little salute. She glanced quick up and down the field and, seeing no one about, pulled her bodice down so as to reveal a pair of titties high and tight as two apple halves stuck on her chest. Just another hardtack girl looking for business, she’d have flirted with a badger if she thought the creature had a nickel. I hurried on.
The guardhouse was even more solid than the rest of the post. The cells were limestone boxes with iron bars at the front. Each one had a bed big enough for a man as long as he didn’t intend to ever turn over. A chilly dampness hung over the place. I started off passing out breakfast to the white prisoners first.
Food was an occasion here, and at the sound of the cart’s squeaky wheels, the prisoners jumped up and thrust their mess tins out through the bars and I dolloped a ladle of mush onto every one. They complained because I didn’t bring any molasses and I promised to fetch extra when I returned. Not many took any pork, saying they had to wait until their current case of the drizzly shits cleared up before partaking again.
One prisoner heaped a world of abuse on me for serving up the green pork as though I was the one had left it sitting out. “Least during the war, they boiled our pork, you miserable ______,” he said, somehow connecting my race to the rotten meat. “Flies is still alive on this shit.”
That unloosed a whole hymnbook of laments on the subject of how much better a soldier’s life had been during the war than it was now in peacetime. The stories flew about how easygoing life during the war was, pretty much just a big camping trip between battles. And the town girls! What happened to the patriotic young beauties blowing kisses to the soldiers as they marched through a Union town? Bringing them baskets of apple jelly, ginger cake, and fried ham? Holding ice cream socials for their valiant boys?
“Why, can you credit it?” one outraged fellow demanded. “When I come up with my draft group, dang if we weren’t met at the station by a mob of town folk all hollering at us, ‘Soldier, soldier, will you work?’” He shook his fist and pulled his face into an idiot frown to show how mad and stupid this mob was, then finished up quoting their answer, “No, indeed, I’d rather shirk!”
Best I could recollect, that particular fellow was actually in for shirking. Not that that slowed him or any the rest down from recounting all the instances of ingratitude and outright hostility been showed them by civilians. They gabbled on moaning about “what this country was coming to,” and wondering about what had happened to “respect for the U.S. military” as though they couldn’t puzzle out how one half of the country destroying the other half and leaving hardly a family on either side hadn’t chiseled at least one tombstone might of soured folks a bit on war and those in the business of making it.
There was no such talk among the black prisoners as life had never been a camping trip for a single one of them.
Wheeling my barrow, empty now except for what I’d saved out for Tea Cake, back to the kitchen, I passed the colored men’s washhouse and peeked in. The walls and floor of the long room were covered with white tiles. A row of a dozen galvanized tubs ran down the middle of the room. Each one was occupied by a naked trooper being parboiled and scrubbed on by Baumgartner with a long-handled brush. A line of naked men waited their turn.
“Scrub harder!” Baumgartner yelled. “Das Arschloch und der Hodensack must be clean or there is coming disease!”
Each man received a minute inspection when he stepped from the tub. The particular attention the sergeant paid to the men’s private parts left no doubt as to the meaning of Arschloch and Hodensack or what my fate would have been had I not eluded what Daddy called ablutions.
As I pushed my cart away, I realized that, like all slaves, I already possessed the most useful skill a recruit could have: the ability to look busy. Just wheeling that cart around gave me the appearance of carrying out an assignment. Away from the parade grounds, I found a porch deep and dark enough to hide beneath and I caught up on the sleep I’d missed the night before.
I emerged from my nap hideout in time to return to the kitchen, refill the vat with mush, and serve that, along with generous lashings of molasses, for lunch. Dinner was slumgullion stew, the recipe for which must of read: to too much water and not enough salt, add every victual needs throwing out or feeding to the hogs. Boil until the green on both cabbage and pork is gone. Serve to convicts and soldiers for the hogs won’t touch it.
I finished just in time to join my group at the quartermaster’s, where I was issued a real uniform that came close to being my size, complete with a handsome caped overcoat of sky-blue wool, a sack coat with brand-new, shiny brass eagle buttons, a fine pair of boots, a cavalry cap with the crossed sabers, and a long grooming coat made of white duck. But the best was two sets of drawers and shirts that covered a body from ankle to wrist and was made of a wonderful soft cloth.
In the barracks, all the troopers were either strutting about in regulation U.S. Cavalry uniforms or in some stage of undress, hurrying to do the same.
“Bill,” Lem asked. “Why you ain’t parading that new uniform about?”
“That’s right,” said Vikers, who’d crept up on us in the chaos of men hopping about, pulling on the first pair of boots’d ever touched some of their feet. “Why don’t you go on, strip down, and
put on the blue suit?” The man had an unearthly gift for popping up exactly when I most wanted him gone. Also for gathering a crowd with that diamond-cutting voice of his. They were all looking on now, waiting on me to answer back.
“Fixing to wash up first,” I answered. “Get my arselock and hodensack just as clean as Baumgartner got yours with his brush all up in your business.”
“Hoo-WEE! Hoo-WEE!” A few of the men yelped with joy at my little jibe and danced about. This was an Africa thing. A way to show out when you’ve been tickled.
Lem whooped, “Little Man! Little Man, Cathay hit you another straight lick with a crooked stick!”
Vikers’s eyes and smile got tight as a piano wire, and his tone was viperous mean when he came back at me. “Stanky,” he said. “Why are you the only one still wearing those rank recruit clothes? And why was it so important to you to duck out of having a bath that you bribed Tea Cake?”
The whole barracks turned to stare at Tea Cake’s face, greasy from the bowl of slumgullion I’d stolen for him. Wouldn’t have taken a genius to put that together with me pushing the guardhouse barrow.
“Stanky,” he asked. “What else you hiding from us?”
Oh, Vikers had planted an evil seed and I saw it take root on the spot. All the troopers studied me, searching now for what I was hiding.
“Who you think you are, Justice Vikers?” I put some sting on that fake name since we all knew that no master and no mammy had given it to him. “Ordering me around like you’re my massuh. Day Abraham Lincoln signed that paper’s the last day anyone on this earth be my master.” That backed him off enough that I grabbed my new uniform and left.
In the kitchen, quiet now save for the mush and slum making slow, swamp-gas bubbles over low fires, I dippered up a bucket of hot water out of what was left in the vats of water for coffee and retreated to a hidden corner.
I peeled off the bindings flattening my breasts and the skin underneath was so chafed and raw, it came off in flakes big as sycamore leaves. In one raw spot beneath my armpit, new skin was growing right into the scratchy fabric. I had to touch the tips of my fingers to Mama’s pearl scars for the strength not to cry out when I ripped the binding from the scabs.
