Gloryland

by Shelton Johnson

  And if that rich man had looked like he was about to bust before, now he was truly giving way in his shoulders and at his neck, yes indeed, he was about to blow. Then Bingham stopped laughing and said softly, “Sir, the sergeant here was just tryin to say hello, but you just actin like he’s been pissin on you the whole time, so it seems to me you the one who’s behavin poorly.”

  He said it calm as calm could be, like he always said that sort of thing to white people.

  Now the white man did explode.

  “What is your name, boy? How . . . how dare you speak to me with such a tone!” His voice was like a loud growl, but it held too much contempt for the truthful sound an animal makes. The mix of hate and fear in his voice I’d heard all my life, as a child in Spartanburg and in the army too, but it sounded funny here under the great trees, like it was lost.

  I turned around and said, “Bingham,” quiet enough that the gentleman couldn’t hear but my corporal could. Could hear in my voice that he was on the edge, that we were all on the edge, and considering that none of us could fly, I didn’t appreciate him pushing us over on account of this fool here.

  Bingham looked at me, and I could tell he was considering his choices, which were few, and then he looked up to the sky as if God had something to say, which he probably did. It’s always easier to hear God when you’re about to die. I don’t know if God spoke to Bingham, but the man came to some kind of decision.

  “Sir,” Bingham said to the visitor, saying it slow. Even slower, he took out his Colt with his right hand, casually resting his forearm on the pommel of his saddle with the revolver visible, but pointing down. “You don’t have a right to call me nigger.”

  It had been quiet since the white man’s outburst, but now I could hear the horses breathing and the red firs around us creaking, and I could see that man seeing us for the first time with the blue hardness he used for eyes, how they looked at Bingham’s revolver without focusing on it.

  “Soldier,” he said carefully, “I didn’t call you any such thing. Don’t be putting words in my mouth!”

  “No sir,” Bingham corrected him, still speaking soft and slow. “You called me a nigger, you called us all niggers, and maybe you didn’t use that word, but those words you did use, well, they added up to nigger. I may not be an educated man, and I know there’s much in this world I’ll never understand, but one thing I know is when I been called a nigger—”

  I broke in. “Excuse me, mister, what is your name, sir?” While Bingham spoke, the man had been looking round at all of us with those cold eyes, but as he turned toward me, he seemed to be considering something he hadn’t thought of before. Maybe he was thinking how we were all alone out here in the middle of nowhere.

  “My name is unimportant,” he answered sourly.

  “All right, Mr. Unimportant,” I began, “it appears you’ve mistaken Corporal Bingham and the rest of us for niggers, and to be honest, I can understand how that happened. I mean, the sun is bright and hot, but here we are in the shade of these beautiful trees—you know they’re red fir? Well, I guess you just couldn’t make out our uniforms with all the glare and shadows, isn’t that right? I mean, you couldn’t tell we were soldiers, and that we’re armed and all, and you probably didn’t know that we have the authority to stop anyone at any time for any reason. You couldn’t see all that cause of the sun and shade, so you just thought we were men who had no business stoppin such an important man as yourself.

  “But now, sir, I think you clearly see your mistake, just as clearly as you see the corporal’s desire to use that revolver. And I hope you can discern—now, ain’t that a fine word? The chaplain taught me all about discern—so I’m hopin you can discern how eagerly the corporal’s waitin for me to give the order. Cause that’s how the army is, you can’t just do somethin without orders.

  “So, Mr. Unimportant,” I finished up, “I haven’t quite decided what order to give the corporal here. Do you have any suggestions?”

  Mr. Unimportant fidgeted a bit in his saddle, looked up at the sun as if for advice, then pulled out a red silk handkerchief from the waist pocket of the vest he wore under his coat. Holding it to his face, he cleared his throat before speaking, cleared it of all the words he wanted to say but couldn’t get up the nerve to say.

  “Sergeant,” he said in a low voice, like he was talking to a dog that he suddenly realized had teeth and wasn’t friendly, “I think you should ask your corporal to put his gun away because I meant no harm, and I really must be going.” And then he added quickly, “With your permission, of course.”

  I waited a minute, holding his eyes.

  “Well, now, Mr. Unimportant,” I said, “how can I refuse such courtesy? You may proceed on your way, sir, but remember that Yosemite is under the protection of the Ninth Cavalry. That means colored soldiers, and we have a job, no, a duty that we do our best to fulfill. And that means makin certain everyone understands that huntin’s not allowed, and grazin livestock up here’s not allowed, and leavin your campfire for the rain and snow to put out is not allowed.

  “As a matter of fact, there’s a lot of things not allowed, and one of them is somethin you just did, but you admitted your mistake, and I’m happy bout that cause we avoided havin to ride through some rough country. You understand what I’m sayin, sir?”

  “I believe I do, Sergeant,” was all the man said. Then he put his spurs to his horse, and he was down the trail.

  I turned to Bingham, who was still holding his Colt.

  “Corporal,” I said, “you plannin on puttin that revolver away any time soon?”

  Private McAllister laughed, but you could tell he didn’t think it was funny. I kept staring at Bingham, who seemed to realize for the first time that he’d drawn his pistol.

  “Yes sir!” said Bingham. “I always follow orders, sir. You know that.” He smiled a bit as he holstered his weapon, but seemed a little disappointed. I think deep down he’d wanted me to give the order to aim and fire, but just because you feel like killing somebody don’t mean you got a right to.

  When I was a boy, Grandma Sara told me how she killed the whole U.S. Army, but only in her heart. She never aimed a rifle or pulled a trigger or went to jail, but inside her soul there was a massacre, and not one soldier got out alive.

  Maybe killing someone in your heart ain’t illegal cause you can’t see the damage, but that don’t mean it can’t be felt, don’t mean that someone or something didn’t die. My daddy nearly died on the street outside the courthouse in Spartanburg. There were no wounds on him, no blood, but he almost died. I figure most people know someone who’s dead or had something killed in them. And no one ever went to jail for it.

  We rode on through sunlight and shade.

  After that patrol, when I was writing in the ledger beside the lamp on the table in the post, all I ended up putting down was this: “Encountered gentleman from San Francisco, explained park rules and regulations.”

  So much of what happens never gets written down, but still you can’t forget it. There’s a lot between the lines of a ledger, a lot of talking that never got heard, a lot of feeling that never got across. I always wished there was someplace I could put all of that day and all the other days on patrol, someplace that could take it all in.

  I particularly wished I could put down what happened to Bingham that day, cause I thought about it a lot afterward. Bingham didn’t drink unless he needed to, and he’d never acted crazy before, but he’d been up in these mountains for months, and mountains are like whiskey. A little bit every day can open you up in ways that are hard to imagine, but a lot every day goes down deep and does things to a man. I never realized how deep it had gone down into Bingham.

  Patrol report on Yosemite Park stationery, under “Remarks,” Wawona, Cal., August 13, 1903

  At the Tuolumne Meadows Station I found Corporal Holmes and two Privates Troop K, 9th Cavalry in Camp and one Private on patrol up Alkali Creek. This detachment has a good camp which, except for the f
act that no latrine had been constructed, was in good condition. The grass near this station was excellent and the horses were in good condition. From Corporal Holmes’ retained memoranda of scouts, this detachment seems to have properly patrolled its section of the Park.

  Very Respectfully,

  J. T. Nance,

  Capt., 9 Cavy,

  Commanding Detachment

  blood memory

  Some things you remember. Some things you can’t forget. Remembering the heat of the sun ain’t a dream, but what about the dreams of fire I dreamed in Yosemite?

  Something bout the place seeps into you like the cold of a creek or the sun’s heat soaking into granite. It gets to you and into you. It was different from South Carolina. I was born into Spartanburg, but I woke up in Yosemite. Some places you can live your life and not pay much attention to what’s around you, but those mountains held my eyes and my mind like nothing else I’ve seen. It didn’t happen all at once, it kind of grew in me, this feeling I still have even after those times have gone cold as an evening fire round sunrise.

  So many days in the saddle. So many nights looking up at stars or clouds or the moon trying to free herself from weather she couldn’t even feel. The light that almost got through was often prettier than what did. The animals moving round the camp that you heard but didn’t see. Yellow eyes burning in blackness, little fires drifting over the ground or creeping up close to the campfires.

  All of what was around me got into my lungs when I breathed, into my head when I looked, into my heart when I heard, into my bones when I touched, and it stayed there like a stack of wood piled up deep in the dark of me. And there was a spark and it all began to smoke, light started coming out of a place inside me where light had never been, and I started dreaming the same dream over and over.

  In the dream I’d wake up and be standing beside Bingham and McAllister, and the fire would be low, smoldering into coals like little orange flowers blooming without a day. The night was round me, the red firs leaning in as if a wind was at their backs, and stars peering over the shoulders of trees, white eyes staring down as if my waking up was somehow indecent.

  I would walk off a ways from the fire and begin to undress. It was cold, but the fire in me made up for it, so I didn’t need clothes. I was naked like the day I was born, but as a man, not a baby. I could move, and I did.

  It always happened the same. I would begin to move, walking or running out from the fire, right out from the safety and the comfort of that fire, out into darkness, into something I should’ve been avoiding. But I felt different about the night and darkness when I was in this dream.

  I was running along a trail, the same trail we’d been following just a few hours earlier, but now I was naked and alone, running on darkness, breathing it in deep like I was stoking a fire, as if the darkness was wood and I was a furnace looking to turn something to ash. I was hungry but I didn’t know what food was. I was thirsty but didn’t know what there was to drink. There was only the cold mountain air, so I drank that as I ran and ran and ran, and the night didn’t care that I was naked. I wasn’t cold even though I ran barefoot through drifts of snow, my feet didn’t sting at the touch of it, and I wasn’t afraid of the darkness. I wasn’t afraid of anything.

  And there was something else, something I had never felt before. I was free. I could run in any direction, and it was all right cause no one was chasing me. I could run north and that was fine. I could run south and that was all right too. I could run east or west, run in circles round some nameless meadow covered with the night frost, and it didn’t matter, it was all right to be running, to be free.

  A colored man running in the wild and no one chasing him. Just running for the joy of running and breathing and seeing and hearing and feeling, one foot after the other, right, left, and right again, beating down like rain beats down, in a rhythm that sounded in my heart. And the blood in me was the same blood running through everything round me, and the stillness I ran through was me running through myself, finally unafraid.

  Is that what freedom is? To run and yet be still? To sleep and yet be awake? I asked myself those questions in the dream, then ran away from the words in my own head, and it wasn’t deceitful or dishonest, it’s just that when you’re an animal you can’t waste your life thinking bout your life. You got to run cause that’s what bodies are for, to be used and used up entirely, like how a creek uses up a lake or trees use up the sun or a man and a woman use each other up, but nothing ever gets empty, everything is always full, like this night I’m taking in and letting out, yes, this is what I’m supposed to do.

  You can’t find answers sitting still. You can only find God if you’re running. Only if you’re moving can you be moved, and God only talks to those who can be moved by what he’s saying, she’s saying. And in the dream pretty soon my daddy’s running beside me and my mama too, and they’re both naked, and I look back and see Grandma Sara running, and a man beside her who must be my grandfather, and someone behind him, someone I should know, whose name I should have bright in me like a fire. And behind my family is more of my family, and behind them more again, great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers and -grandfathers, all of them running with me in a night that has no sunset and no sunrise but only a dark sky full of stars.

  Thousands and thousands of black people and red people, the color of night, the color of fire, my people, running behind me, making no sound but their breathing like a mighty wind, so when I thought I was running alone in the world, I was wrong, cause everyone that made me was right behind me, and every step I took in the world was leading them on into the moment before waking from whatever sleep this was, if it was sleep and the other waking.

  It started to rain as we ran, and the rain was all the tears of my family and my ancestors, and it was sweet on the tongue and the body, the coolness of that rain comforting and soothing to all the miles of hurt my people had run.

  I saw that we were running in great winding circles that moved like a wind blowing back on itself, and I was lifted up in that wind, looking back down on my people. I saw the path they were following on the black earth, a path that turned back on itself, going nowhere and everywhere, a path like the whirlpools at the tips of fingers, but whose fingerprint? What hand held us, and what was this path that held no fear or pain?

  The same dream, night after night, and I would wake up sweaty and tired, my legs and feet aching, and round me Yosemite, listening, knowing something about me that I didn’t know. It knew the feel of my naked feet, though I’d slept hard on the cold ground with my shoes on. It knew the part of me that was never still. It was moving like I was moving when both of us looked like we were sleeping.

  Waking up, I saw my own hands and fingers in front of my eyes, as if I’d held them pressed together all night praying, and now they were unfolding like a flower opening to the sun. There in the tips of my fingers, I could see the same curving paths I followed in the dream, like the contours of the land I’d run through, and I knew my people were in there, all my relations running round through my fingers, and one day if I ever had a child, I’d be in there too, running in the fingertips of someone who ain’t even born yet.

  I’m already there, part of a hand that can hold a father and a son and a daughter and everyone that’s my blood who’s ever been and ever will be, and that was the dream, and it runs like water underground through everything I’m saying. And what’s green and rooted in it knows it’s there, and can’t live without it.

  To Accustom Horses to Military Noises and Firing

  Especial care should be taken not to alter the feel of the horse’s

  mouth when firing, or suddenly to close the legs; the rider being

  cool and quiet, his horse will soon follow the example.

  from Cavalry Tactics

  cocked pistol

  Something was eating away at Private First Class Bledsoe, something you couldn’t see, but it got so’s you could feel a bite in the air whenever he
was around.

  All of us got darkness, holes inside where you don’t want light to go, but Bledsoe’s was beginning to show on the outside. It was in his attitude, in his voice, the way he moved, how he answered when you called his name, and it was beginning to interfere with his soldiering. It got harder and harder for him to give an order and take one. I guess he’d been taking so much all his life, he just got full up. How much can you take before you start falling apart inside like a house with wood rot or termites, the damage invisible until it all crashes down?

  I was taught that pain makes calluses, rough leathery skin spreading over what’s tender, but sometimes even that skin can split open and bleed. I still don’t really understand what happened to Bledsoe. All I know is that one moment four of us, myself, Bledsoe, McAllister, and Bingham, were standing on the edge of a meadow swatting at mosquitoes in the country north of the Tuolumne River, a place where there were more rocks than trees, with a mild breeze blowing past. And while I was thinking what a beautiful day it was, I was also thinking about how to pull Bledsoe out of the hole he’d put himself into and where he lay silent and raw.

  All I’d asked him to do was help dig a latrine for our camp that night, cause we didn’t have enough time to make it to the post, and it was a reasonable thing to ask a private to do, should’ve been expected after all his years in the army. It was just an order like a thousand others I’d given, and even McAllister thought it was wrong for Bledsoe to argue about doing his job, but the whole time he was swelling up to bust, and we couldn’t see it cause we were so caught up in being annoyed at him.

  One minute I was staring up at the sky, hoping for a little rain to cool me off, pushing the conversation to one side of my head the way you sweep a floor clean. The next minute an arm was round my neck, and I felt something hard and cold pressed against my right temple.