A Fool's Errand & Bricks without Straw

by Albion Winegar Tourgée

  Respectfully, P. DESMIT.

  In accordance with this order Nimbus was sent on to have another interview with his master. The latter's wishes were explained, and he was asked if he could fulfil them. "Dunno," he answered stolidly.

  "Are you willing to try?"

  "S'pect I hev ter, ennyhow, ef yer say so."

  "Now, Nimbus, haven't I always been a good master to you?" reproachfully.

  No answer.

  "Haven't I been kind to you always?"

  "Yer made Marse War' gib me twenty licks once."

  "Well, weren't you saucy, Nimbus? Wouldn't you have done that to a nigger that called you a 'grand rascal' to your face?"

  "S'pecs I would, Mahs'r."

  "Of course you would. You know that very well. You've too much sense to remember that against me now. Besides, if you are not willing to do this I shall have to sell you South to keep you out of the hands of the Yanks."

  Mr, Desmit knew how to manage "niggers," and full well understood the terrors of being "sold South." He saw his advantage in the flush of apprehension which, before he had ceased speaking, made the jetty face before him absolutely ashen with terror.

  "Don't do dat, Marse Desmit, ef you please! Don't do dat er wid Nimbus! Mind now, Mahs'r, I'se got a wife an' babies."

  "So you have, and I know you don't want to leave them."

  "No more I don't, Mahs'r," earnestly.

  "And you need not if you'll do as I want you to. See here, Nimbus, if you'll do this I will promise that you and your family never shall be separated, and I'll give you fifty dollars now and a hundred dollars when you come back, if you'll just keep those other fool-niggers from trying — mind' I say trying — to run away and so getting shot. There's no such thing as getting to the Yankees, and it would be a heap worse for them if they did, but you know they are such fools they might try it and get killed — which would serve them right, only I should have to bear the loss."

  "All right, Mahs'r, I do the best I can," said Nimbus.

  "That's right," said the master.

  "Here are fifty dollars," and he handed him a Confederate bill of that denomination (gold value at that time, $3.21).

  Mr. Desmit did not feel entirely satisfied when Nimbus and his twenty fellow-servants went off upon the train to work for the Confederacy. However, he had done all he could except to warn the guards to be very careful, which he did not neglect to do.

  Just forty days afterward a ragged, splashed and torn young ebony Samson lifted the flap of a Federal officer's tent upon one of the coast islands, stole silently in, and when he saw the officer's eyes fixed upon him. asked,

  "Want ary boy, Mahs'r?"

  The tone, as well as the form of speech, showed a new-comer. The officer knew that none of the colored men who had been upon the island any length of time would have ventured into his presence unannounced, or have made such an inquiry.

  "Where did you come from?" he asked.

  "Ober to der mainlan'," was the composed answer.

  "How did you get here?"

  "Come in a boat."

  "Run away?"

  "S'pose so."

  "Where did you live?"

  "Up de kentry — Horsford County."

  "How did you come down here?" "Ben wukkin' on de bres'wuks."

  "The dickens you have!"

  "Yes, sah."

  "How did you get a boat, then?"

  "Jes' tuk it — dry so."

  "Anybody with you?"

  "No, Mahs'r."

  "And you came across the Sound alone in an open boat?"

  "Yes, Mahs'r; an' fru' de swamp widout any boat."

  "I should say so," laughed the officer, glancing at his clothes.

  "What did you come here for?"

  "Jes' — kase."

  "Didn't they tell you you'd be worse off with the Yankees than you were with them?"

  "Yes, sah."

  "Didn't you believe them?"

  "Dunno, sah."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Anything."

  "Fight the rebs?"

  "Wal, I kin du it."

  "What's your name?"

  "Nimbus."

  "Nimbus? Good name — ha! ha: what else?"

  "Nuffin' else."

  "Nothing else? What was your old master's name?"

  "Desmit — Potem Desmit."

  "Well, then, that's yours, ain't it — your surname — Nimbus Desmit?"

  "Reckon not, Mahs'r."

  "No? Why not?"

  "Same reason his name ain't Nimbus, I s'pose."

  "Well," said the officer, laughing, "there may be something in that; but a soldier must have two names. Suppose I call you George Nimbus?"

  "Yer kin call me jes' what yer choose, sah; but my name's Nimbus all the same. No Gawge Nimbus, nor ennything Nimbus, nor Nimbus ennything — jes' Nimbus; so. Nigger got no use fer two names, nohow."

  The officer, perceiving that it was useless to argue the matter further, added his name to the muster-roll of a regiment, and he was duly sworn into the service of the United States as George Nimbus, of Company C, of the — -Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and was counted one of the quota which the town of Great Barringham, in the valley of the Housatuck, was required to furnish to complete the pending call for troops to put down rebellion. By virtue of this fact, the said George Nimbus became entitled to the sum of four hundred dollars bounty money offered by said town to such as should give themselves to complete its quota of "the boys in blue," in addition to his pay and bounty from the Government. So, if it forced on him a new name, the service of freedom was not altogether without compensatory advantages.

  Thus the slave Nimbus was transformed into the "contraband" George Nimbus, and became not only a soldier of fortune, but also the representative of a patriotic citizen of Great Barringham, who served his country by proxy, in the person of said contraband, faithfully and well until the end of the war, when the South fell — stricken at last most fatally by the dark hands which she had manacled, and overcome by their aid whose manhood she had refused to acknowledge.

  CHAPTER V

  NUNC PRO TUNC

  Table of Contents

  The first step in the progress from the prison-house of bondage to the citadel of liberty was a strange one. The war was over. The struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part of the South, was ended, and fate had decided against them. With this arbitrament of war fell also the institution which had been its cause. Slavery was abolished — by proclamation, by national enactment, by constitutional amendment — ay, by the sterner logic which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man could claim his service or restrain his volition. He might go or come, work or play, so far as his late master was concerned.

  But that was all. He could not contract, testify, marry or give in marriage. He had neither property, knowledge, right, or power. The whole four millions did not possess that number of dollars or of dollars' worth. Whatever they had acquired in slavery was the master's, unless he had expressly made himself a trustee for their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed, a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded, penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless, nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions. Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family — none of these words had any place in the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still color-blinded by the past.

  The fruit of slavery — its first ripe harvest, gathered with swords and bloody bayonets, was before the nation which looked ignorantly on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not comprehend its work; the South could not comprehend its fate. The unbound sl
ave looked to the future in dull, wondering hope.

  The first step in advance was taken neither by the nation nor by the freedmen. It was prompted by the voice of conscience, long hushed and hidden in the master's breast. It was the protest of Christianity and morality against that which it had witnessed with complacency for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie. While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bought and sold had hidden this evil from the eye of morality, which had looked unabashed upon the unlicensed freedom of the quarters and the enormities of the barracoon. Now all at once it was shocked beyond expression at the domestic relations of the freedmen.

  So they made haste in the first legislative assemblies that met in the various States, after the turmoil of war had ceased, to provide and enact:

  I. That all those who had sustained to each other the relation of husband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application to an officer named in each county, be registered as such husband and wife.

  2. That all who did not so register within a certain time should be liable to indictment, if the relation continued thereafter.

  3. That the effect of such registration should be to constitute such parties husband and wife, as of the date of their first assumption of marital relations.

  4. That for every such couple registered the officer should be entitled to receive the sum of one half-dollar from the parties registered.

  There was a grim humor about this marriage of a race by wholesale, millions at a time, and nunc pro tunc; but especially quaint was the idea of requiring each freed-man, who had just been torn, as it were naked, from the master's arms, to pay a snug fee for the simple privilege of entering upon that relation which the law had rigorously withheld from him until that moment. It was a strange remedy for a long-hidden and stubbornly denied disease, and many strange scenes were enacted in accordance with the provisions of this statute. Many an aged couple, whose children had been lost in the obscure abysses of slavery, or had gone before them into the spirit land, old and feeble and gray-haired, wrought with patience day after day to earn at once their living and the money for this fee, and when they had procured it walked a score of miles in order that they might be "registered," and, for the brief period that remained to them of life, know that the law had sanctioned the relation which years of love and suffering had sanctified. It was the first act of freedom, the first step of legal recognition or manly responsibility! It was a proud hour and a proud fact for the race which had so long been bowed in thralldom and forbidden even the most common though the holiest of God's ordinances. What the law had taken little by little, as the science of Christian slavery grew up under the brutality of our legal progress, the law returned in bulk. It was the first seal which was put on the slave's manhood — the first step upward from the brutishness of another's possession to the glory of independence. The race felt its importance as did no one else at that time. By hundreds and thousands they crowded the places appointed, to accept the honor offered to their posterity, and thereby unwittingly conferred undying honor upon themselves. Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless. The distance from zero to unity is always infinity.

  The county clerk in and for the county of Horsford sat behind the low wooden railing which he had been compelled to put across his office to protect him from the too near approach of those who crowded to this fountain of rehabilitating honor that had recently been opened therein. Unused to anything beyond the plantation on which they had been reared, the temple of justice was as strange to their feet, and the ways and forms of ordinary business as marvelous to their minds as the etiquette of the king's palace to a peasant who has only looked from afar upon its pinnacled roof. The recent statute had imposed upon the clerk a labor of no little difficulty because of this very ignorance on the part of those whom he was required to serve; but he was well rewarded. The clerk was a man of portly presence, given to his ease, who smoked a long-stemmed pipe as he sat beside a table which, in addition to his papers and writing materials, held a bucket of water on which floated a clean gourd, in easy reach of his hand.

  "Be you the clerk, sail?" said a straight young colored man, whose clothing had a hint of the soldier in it, as well as his respectful but unusually collected bearing.

  "Yes," said the clerk, just glancing up, but not intermitting his work; "what do you want?"

  "If you please, sah, we wants to be married, Lugena and me."

  "Registered, you mean, I suppose?"

  "No, we don't, sah; we means married."

  "I can't marry you. You'll have to get a license and be married by a magistrate or a minister."

  "But I heard der was a law — -"

  "Have you been living together as man and wife?"

  "Oh, yes, sah; dat we hab, dis smart while."

  "Then you want to be registered. This is the place. Got a half-dollar?"

  "Yes, sah?"

  "Let's have it."

  The colored man took out some bills, and with much difficulty endeavored to make a selection; finally, handing one doubtfully toward the clerk, he asked,

  "Is dat a one-dollah, sah?"

  "No, that is a five, but I can change it."

  "No, I'se got it h'yer," said the other hastily, as he dove again into his pockets, brought out some pieces of fractional currency and handed them one by one to the officer until he said he had enough.

  "Well," said the clerk as he took up his pen and prepared to fill out the blank, "what is your name?"

  "My name's Nimbus, sah."

  "Nimbus what?"

  "Nimbus nuffin', sah; jes' Nimbus." "But you must have another name?"

  "No I hain't. Jes' wore dat fer twenty-odd years, an' nebber hed no udder."

  "Who do you work for?"

  "Wuk for myself, sah."

  "Well, on whose land do you work?"

  "Wuks on my own, sah. Oh, I libs at home an' boa'ds at de same place, I does. An' my name's Nimbus, jes' straight along, widout any tail ner handle."

  "What was your old master's name?"

  "Desmit — Colonel Potem Desmit."

  "I might have known that," said the clerk laughingly, "from the durned outlandish name. Well, Desmit is your surname, then, ain't it?"

  "No'taint, Mister. What right I got ter his name? He nebber gib it ter me no more'n he did ter you er Lugena h'yer."

  "Pshaw, I can't stop to argue with you. Here's your certificate."

  "Will you please read it, sah? I hain't got no larnin'. Ef you please, sah."

  The clerk, knowing it to be the quickest way to get rid of them, read rapidly over the certificate that Nimbus and Lugena Desmit had been duly registered as husband and wife, under the provisions of an ordinance of the Convention ratified on the — -day of — -, 1865.

  "So you's done put in dat name — Desmit?"

  "Oh, I just had to, Nimbus. The fact is, a man can't be married according to law without two names."

  "So hit appears; but ain't it quare dat I should hev ole Mahs'r's name widout his gibbin' it ter me, ner my axin' fer it, Mister?"

  "It may be, but that's the way, you see."

  "So hit seems. 'Pears like I'm boun' ter hev mo' names 'n I knows what ter do wid, jes' kase I's free. But de chillen — yer hain't sed nary word about dem, Mister."

  "Oh, I've nothing to do with them."

  "But, see h'yer, Mister, ain't de law a doin dis ter make dem lawful chillen?"

  "Certainly."

  "An' how's de law ter know which is de lawful chillen ef hit ain't on dat ar paper?"

  "Sure enough," said the clerk, with amusement. "That would have been a good idea, but, you see, Nimbu
s, the law didn't go that far."

  "Wal, hit ought ter hev gone dat fur. Now, Mister Clerk, couldn't you jes' put dat on dis yer paper, jes' ter "commodate me, yer know."

  "Perhaps so," good-naturedly, taking back the certificate; "what do you want me to write?"

  "Wal, yer see, dese yer is our chillen. Dis yer boy Lone — Axylone, Marse Desmit called him, but we calls him Lone for short — he's gwine on fo'; dis yer gal Wicey, she's two past; and dis little brack cuss Lugena's a-holdin' on, we call Cap'n, kase he bosses all on us — he's nigh 'bout a year; an' dat's all."

  The clerk entered the names and ages of the children on the back of the paper, with a short certificate that they were present, and were acknowledged as the children, and the only ones, of the parties named in the instrument.

  And so the slave Nimbus was transformed, first into the "contraband" and mercenary soldier George Nimbus, and then by marriage into Nimbus Desmit.

  CHAPTER VI

  THE TOGA VIRILIS

  Table of Contents

  But the transformations of the slave were not yet ended. The time came when he was permitted to become a citizen. For two years he had led an inchoate, nondescript sort of existence: free without power or right; neither slave nor freeman; neither property nor citizen. He had been, meanwhile, a bone of contention between the Provisional Governments of the States and the military power which controlled them. The so-called State Governments dragged him toward the whipping-post and the Black Codes and serfdom. They denied him his oath, fastened him to the land, compelled him to hire by the year, required the respectfulness of the old slave "Mahs'r" and "Missus," made his employer liable for his taxes, and allowed recoupment therefor; limited his avocations and restricted his opportunities. These would substitute serfdom for chattelism.