The Shiloh Series: Books 1-3

by Phillip Bryant

  Getting up out of the water and stepping onto the shoreline, he made up his mind he would say that she had gone out away from the shallows and was caught in a current, and he couldn’t get to her in time.

  It was Abby’’s fault, she went out too far, she wouldn’’t listen to me, she got caught in the current. She would take the blame for his carelessness and save his hide. One last time.

  Taking a few steps to get his bearings, Will recognized whose land he’d just lit upon. He was standing in the rear of Baxter’s farm as it fronted the riverside. An idea began to form, an ugly one. Will ran, leaving behind the lifeless body of Abigail. Baxter was weeding his cotton field and didn’t notice Will sneaking across his property to the road. They had drifted downstream, aided by the current, a good thirty minutes of leisurely walking.

  Hurrying to where he and Abby had left their shoes and clothes, Will donned his own and left Abby’s where they lay. Will ran hard for home. He and Abby were to have been home an hour ago to prepare supper for their father. He would already be home and waiting.

  Bursting into his house, he blurted, “Abby’s missing!”

  “Whut? Whut you say, boy?”

  “Abby, I can’t … I can’t find her!”

  “Where’s Abby?” Thomas asked.

  “She was going to go fer a swim in the Duck; I tole her not to go alone, but I ain’t seen her all day.” Will cried. The tears were real.

  Soon the neighboring farms and homesteads were abuzz with activity and the riverfront combed. Will made a show of looking around the Baxter home but wasn’t going to be the one to find the body. Even Baxter was out and looking, something that filled Will’s gut with a pang of remorse.

  The day drew on, but no one had ventured behind Baxter’s farm to the river. Baxter himself spied Will loitering along the roadside.

  “I’s sorry ‘bout yo’ little sister, Massah Will. I don’t holds no hard feelin’ about ma fence; hope Massah Will don’t hold none toward ole Baxter. We find li’l massah’s kin all right, we find her.”

  Will nodded in agreement, unable to look the man in the eye.

  Several other blacks from neighboring plantations were busy trolling the shallows along the river way or combing the woods along the shore. By the end of the day there were hundreds out looking. Will could not leave the vicinity of Baxter’s farm, hoping that someone soon would discover the body so he could finish his story.

  Near dark, Baxter came running from behind his house. “Li’l massah, Massah Will, Massah Will; come quick, lil’ massah! Missus Abby, I find li’l Missus Abby! I’s sorry, Massah Will, I’s real sorry. Come quick!”

  Will was the closest, but others hearing the call also came running. Still, it was he and Baxter who made it to the spot first. There she was, just as Will had left her—lying on her back and clothed only in her nightshirt and knickers.

  “I’s sorry, li’l Massah Will; I fink she dead; I fink she drown,” Baxter said, looking down on the little girl with a sad, forlorn expression upon his brow.

  Will raced to the body. She was cold and clammy, and his skin crawled as he made a show of cradling the corpse. Baxter stood off a ways, thumbing his hat round and round in his hands. It was time to finish the lie, Will thought. Looking at the sad man, Baxter’s eyes deferring to his own, treating him better than he deserved, Will’s resolve melted.

  But it was too late.

  “What’d you do, you nigger bastard!” shouted Cephas Hunter as he came to an abrupt stop. Will jumped at the sound and flinched, letting Abby’s head plop sickeningly in the soft sand of the shore.

  “Me?” Baxter cried, panic in his voice.

  “Paw, it looks like … “

  “This nigger kilt my little Abby! What you do to her, you filthy nigger!” his father shouted and lunged at Baxter.

  “No, Paw; Baxter found her!” Will shouted.

  Will’s father grabbed Baxter and flung him to the ground but was too drunk to land anything like a punch. Others who’d come up at the same time didn’t wait for explanations, but surrounded Baxter immediately and did the dirty work for him.

  Will watched in dismay.

  Staggering forward, his father collapsed to his knees next to the body, a sincere look of dejection and sorrow marring his otherwise cold countenance. Will had never seen this in his father before. He imagined it might not have been since his mother died that he’d had that look. “My Abby, my sweet little Abby; that bastard! Oh, my Abby, my sweet, sweet Abby!” he wailed.

  Will was stuck. He had his out now—but being back with the body, his emotions, real ones, came out in more tears. It was probably the only time he’d ever seen his father cry or show anything but contempt and drunken bitterness.

  “Abby drowned,” Will said. “It looks like Abby drowned.”

  “It was that nigger, Baxter! He molested and killed your girl, Mr. Hunter,” a young man by the name of Jackson Kearns said. “That’s why her body’s on Baxter’s property. You can count on it, Mr. Hunter.”

  Will stayed his tongue. Despite anything he’d try to say, the result was going to be the same. Baxter had done something horrible to Abby. They all knew it now.

  “Paw, I don’t think Baxter … “

  “Shut up, boy! Help me get her up and take her home. I’ve got some business to take care of.” Will’s father stood. His usual mean expression had returned, and Will obeyed.

  By the time Will and several others had carried Abby home in a hand-pulled dogcart, his father and others had arrived on horseback, looking haggard and mute. Will knew the look—he had seen it once or twice before, after someone had done something he shouldn’t and had paid for it at the end of a rope. Each man took a turn in paying respects to Abby’s body as it lay in the cart and patting Will on the head, giving his father a tap on the shoulder or a hug. The community had come together to find a body and right a wrong.

  Will only nodded and stared at the ground. What was done was done.

  Chapter 1

  Covington, Kentucky, August 15, 1861

  Twenty-five-year-old William Hunter rode easily. The gentle canter and clopping of his horse in the soft dust of the farm track was soothing to one used to saddle time. A glimmer of life was returning to the countryside as spring warmth and rains brought the planting season with its color and field work. The green never left northern Alabama, not even in the wintertime. It was the fields that showed the seasons the most. Barren and dead for the winter and early spring. The slaves were fat and lazy, just as the plows and shears were underutilized and wanting of attention.

  It always happened in the late spring. Some part of that society of tools, human tools, a slave, would decide he’d had enough. Seeing yet another season of toil on the horizon, he would dare to deprive his owner of his duly paid-for services. The clothes on his back and the food in his belly were insufficiently accounted for in the bid for something denied: freedom. What was the loss of freedom but an exchange for other services and care? The stupid, vacant eyes and annoying deference, mandated by virtue of skin and intellect, were no less reason for the lash.

  The days were nicely warm by this time of year, though the evenings and early mornings were still chilled. Will Hunter beheld the pleasing sight of the fields come alive once more with work, sable bodies bending their backs in God-ordained toil. Fires burned as last season’s dead plant matter was piled high by little Negro boys and set alight by Negro men. Negro women cleared away the dead plants, and men readied the ground for tilling. Every field was practically the same: Negro labor under the watchful eye of a white overseer or Negro labor marshal. It was the natural order of things, and Will liked it this way; they in the fields and he riding a horse on another hunt for a runaway.

  Hunting runaways was business, his own position on the status of the Negro having softened somewhat from his youth and what he’d done to Baxter. Will hated the quintessential slave owner if for no other reason than that they were no more deserving of the Negro labor than the Neg
ro himself was deserving of freedom. If given a choice, it would be a hard reckoning to come up with whom he’d rather dispense with. At least the slave had usefulness in labor; the fat and rich land holder, with hundreds and even thousands of slaves, could be done without. Send them all back to Africa.

  This latest foray into the backcountry plantations and farms was to track a particularly difficult quarry. It was the coldness of the scent, he told himself. The slave did not possess any special talent but for escaping work, and Will had seen that plenty, for any man had the special skill to shirk. Will’s own father was especially gifted at it. Why work or even try to sell a trade when someone can go to the nearest plantation and hire out a nigger for a quarter of the price, his pappy would whine, promising to go out and look for a horse who needed shod on the morrow. It was the same for all the poor whites, the white trash of the backwater Alabaman south. As long as the poor white knew he was at least one to two steps above the black, there was at least someone whom he could blame his troubles on.

  Will’s father had been right, though. When it came to shoeing a horse, no one cared if it were done by a black hand or a white; if he didn’t have to pay three bits, why pay some poor white blacksmith? Why pay any poor white craftsman anything?

  There was only one way to earn a living as a poor white: within the slave system as an overseer, a craftsman, as someone supporting the slavers and those who bought the slaves. Otherwise one lived below the value of a slave, which no self-respecting white man would do even if it meant propping up those they hated just a little less than the blacks themselves. But pride in one’s freedom did not fill the belly. William had found early on that unless he broke from his father, he too would become just another poor white-trash blacksmith, making his living training other slaves to do his own job for cheaper.

  So Will’s conscience did not trouble him over hunting down runaways. Freedom was no boon to blacks anyway. It was better that the free blacks were being restricted, and it would be better still if they were relieved of their freedoms. They were better off under control as property than free and subject to the will of the mob. What had happened to Baxter was an evil. Anyone would think twice about hanging another man’s slave. No one had thought twice about hanging Baxter.

  ****

  Will walked his horse to the edge of the sloping banks of the Ohio River and espied the familiar city of Cincinnati from the Kentucky side. Its dirt and mud streets and busy docks teemed with workmen. No trace was to be had of his quarry on the friendly side of the river, Kentucky. Across the river, as if by agreement, there would be frowns and scowls, obstinacy and distrust. He would find no aid there, but his sense of duty would not allow him to give up just yet. The slave would be found amidst the coloreds living along the shoreline in the shantytowns and working among the warehouses and docks.

  The city stood along the mighty river and sprawled up to and over a ring of hills that rimmed the shoreline. Rude buildings formed streets leading right down to the riverbank.

  Leaving his horse on the Kentucky side, Will stepped off the riverboat and onto hostile soil. He felt it. Though other Southerners could be seen mixing it up along the shore and up into the business area, he felt especially the target of derision from those who fancied themselves so much superior to him. Even the rude river workmen seemed to display a contempt for his presence. He imagined he looked worse for wear after many days of travel and exposure to the elements. Blank stares and few nods greeted him as he walked up the steep embankment leading from the river, following a trail of many footfalls up to the smooth dirt streets that began the great city’s commercial district. The odor of fish and water permeated the buildings. A fine layer of coal dust was present everywhere, and it coated even the tongue.

  His thoughts drifted back. It was something to be damned, the whole slave system. But it was built on what Will knew was a truth: the white man was better, had to be better, than the black, or the whole social order would collapse. As long as each knew his place, all was right with the world. Yet, he too had to swallow his own standing, his own place in the world that had him, by virtue of skin, one step above the black man—but only one. There were lofty and well-trimmed lawns and handsome galas for the new aristocracy, and there were bordellos and bars for his own ilk; freedom was the only dividing line between the slave blacksmith and the likes of Will’s father. All else remained the same. They were both subject to the system.

  Will looked warily about, seeing many a black face among the workmen. These people would be useless to examine or question; all would play dumb though few showed any signs of fear. He did not wear his vocation on his person in any visible way, but Southern posse or lawmen were almost a staple on these shores, like the coal dust.

  It was better to catch runaways before they made it into Ohio, though there was enough anti-Southern sentiment that local law enforcement in the pro-Union states was often unwilling to lend a hand. They had to be caught before they crossed the Ohio River. Missouri was better—no runaway could travel by day upon its roads without being accosted and stopped, and the river routes were well traveled. Runaways knew they would find little in the way of help, but it was always into Kentucky and then into Ohio that most found their way. This used to be easier, Will reflected.

  It was almost cliche for the Kentucky slave to find his way into this river city. Will would start with the shipping warehouses and inquire about any recent dockhands, then go to the coal houses and look for any new bargemen, and finally, failing that, to the local constabulary—though in a city this size, that would prove of little avail. The poor whites were sometimes more help, having little love for the runaways who competed for the same jobs and little pay.

  Will grimaced at the thought. Already this trip had cost him a bundle of coin, and the poor whites always needed their memories jogged by the jingle of silver.

  Three dollars and half of his day later, the tips had led nowhere. Scowling and ready to brawl, Will stepped out of the office of the last of the dock warehouses empty-handed. Anybody who crossed the Ohio River landed on this dirt—but he had come too late. He had to admit it, the trail was long cold and had been since Kentucky.

  A gang of blacks, dirty from loading coal all day long upon the barges that plied the river, were lounging in front of a shoreline warehouse. They regarded him coldly as he approached. Will had a swagger that he could not suppress, something he’d learned to execute to make himself feel important. The white foreman was inside the large building teeming with burlap sacks of coffee, cotton sacks of sugar and flour, barrels of salted beef, and crates of machinery.

  “You had any new niggers ask for work, last couple of days?”

  “Who you?” the man asked with an impertinent air.

  “Looking for a runaway; woulda come from Kentucky side an’ lighted here.”

  “Any one o’ them prolly a runaway. No one last couple o’ days, but if they was, why would I tell you?”

  “Because it’s the law.” Will tried to be diplomatic. “More to the point, it would be worth your while—the owner pay you for the information.”

  “That so? I point out one o’ them niggers, an’ you cost me a day’s labor—’less you plannin’ on replacin’ ‘im. None o’ them come last couple o’ days.”

  “Pardon yer time.” Will turned on his heel and moved past the resting gang of laborers. Instead of deference, he got scowls and stoney glares from the group. There was no need to ask them; they could have all shown up today, but they would swear to the last man they were born free in Ohio. There were dozens of warehouses and dry-goods shippers all along the riverfront. Any of them could be sheltering his runaway. Only it had to be his runaway—not just any runaway would do. If he couldn’t locate the man, Will would go home empty-handed.

  There were plenty of docks and plenty of gangs to scrutinize, and Will had a general description of the man he was hunting, but he’d never seen him before, and Kearns had never thought to invest in an image of one of his slaves
. Plenty of blacks could have been Seth, but none matched the description.

  It was nearing the end of daylight, and Will was about spent from talking and walking. No newcomers were pointed out. Not even the poor whites who could be found among the dock gangs were of any help—one man put on such truck about Southern vileness and evil, heartless slavers that Will dragged him away and boxed his ears. Being spat on by some drunken, white-trash laborer was one thing Will was not going to let slide. None of the blacks who watched did anything to interfere, and though the foreman was down one useful hand, he himself only nodded and let Will pass. There was little use in pressing the foreman; he would have said anything just to get rid of Will.

  In an ill temper, Will made his way up a hill lined with hotels and bordellos and entered the Black Hand, where he’d often stopped to get a drink and relax after a long trip. He’d been to Cincinnati twice before on similar errands—when, he might add, he had always found his man. The bar was filled with dirty white dockhands and a few respectable-looking travelers. The tables were littered with working men enjoying a respite from home and an ounce of whiskey to wash down the coal dust.

  “Find yer nigger?” a man called out.

  Will turned a fierce glare at the foreman he’d talked with that day, a small man whose disdain for Will had been evident when he heard the first words from his Alabaman mouth.

  The foreman looked away with evident contempt. “This piece of shit slaver is looking for some runaway,” he said to some of the men around him.

  Will ignored him and ordered a refill. He had to decide to stay and travel further inland or just cut his losses and leave by the next transport back to the Kentucky side.

  “How ‘bout you paint yerself minstrel black an’ turn yerself in instead?” the man crowed with a toothy grin, egged on by the laughter of a few men around him.