Come Juneteenth

by Ann Rinaldi

  "I came from Virginny," the old man insisted. "Miz Heather, she tell me..."

  "Yes, yes, I know, that Mr. Lincoln freed the slaves. I'll tell you what, Uncle—" Then Gabe stopped and looked at us. "Go on into the house," he directed us. "Tell no one about this. I'll handle it."

  We obeyed. I said nothing to Sis Goose about it. But she did to me. "Do you think he's right?" she asked.

  "I don't know. I mean, we would have heard. If not us, then Gabe or Granville. I'm sure we would have heard."

  And so I lied to my best friend, my sister, who trusted me. Because I had heard of this before. But both Gabe and Granville had ordered me not to speak of it.

  The slaves free! I could not think on it all at once. It assaulted my spirit. It gave lie to everything I knew in my life.

  All Pa's people in the fields could put down their hoes and walk off if they wanted to. We'd never have another corn or cotton crop. The sweet potatoes and white potatoes and vegetables needing dirt banks to keep them safe from the winter would all be ruined. No more corn shuckings with banjo playing and cider. No one to repair the fences, see to the livestock. In the house, no one to keep Mama's Chippendale furniture free of dust or polish the silver or make the beds. Who would do the laundry?

  My mind gave way to hopelessness. And then I remembered what Granville had said the last time a man came to the barn like this. In June of '63, it had been, right before Gettysburg.

  "You breathe a word of this and you'll start bloodshed in Texas," he warned me.

  Granville liked to make dramatic statements like that.

  "I could be free." Sis Goose stopped walking and looked at me. The news had come over her the same way.

  "And what would you do?" I asked casually.

  She lowered her eyes. Then looked at me almost flirtatiously. "I'd marry Gabe."

  No, I couldn't take this, too. I drew in my breath. I'd noticed of late the way he served her at the table before he served himself. How he gave her the best cuts of meat. How he held out her chair. Was he just being a Southern gentleman?

  He didn't do all that for me. With me he was brusque, moody. Gentle but sealed off. Fool, I told myself. You should have seen it.

  "Has he asked you?" I pushed.

  "Yes. But I can't, unless I'm free. I told him yes, at the end of the war. He wants to marry now. Because he says then Aunt Sophie can't sell me. I'd be his wife. But I don't want to be like my mama, the colored wench of a white man."

  She spoke fast. And I thought fast. I entered into a covenant with myself then, a promise to lie, even if it killed me. "Well, it's just a rumor. I'm sorry, Sis Goose. My brothers and my pa would know if it were true."

  She accepted that. "You'd never lie to me," she said. "Remember, we're sisters."

  CHAPTER TWO

  THERE ARE, as far as I can see, two kinds of lies in this world. There's the kind I tell Mama when she asks if I've been to see the hoodoo woman who lives on our plantation. And I say no. Though I have been. And now, like Sis Goose, I have a red flannel bag of my own that holds small animal bones, powdered snakeskin, horsehair, ashes, dried blood, and dirt from the graveyard. All to protect me from any evil I can imagine. And some that I can't.

  Then there's the kind of lie you live when you enter into a devil's agreement with yourself never to disclose a certain fact for fear of the results if you do.

  There are planters in our neck of the woods who believe so much in the lie that the slaves are not free that they will shoot or hang anybody who says otherwise. And that's what Gabriel knew would happen to Uncle Charley, the negro in the barn, if he were allowed to roam free telling his story. He'd be hanged or shot on the spot.

  So Gabriel supplied him with food and money and clothing and sent him on his way, warning him to get out of Texas.

  Some planters, like Isaac Coleman, across the valley, and Uncle Garland, husband to Aunt Sophie, would have called a meeting of all his slaves if someone like Uncle Charley showed up at their plantations. And told them it was an outrageous lie. The slaves were not free.

  What did slaves on our plantation and other farms think of it all?

  Oh, they knew about the war, all right. They called it "the freedom war." And they talked about it amongst themselves. What they would do if push came to shove and they really were free, nobody knew. Likely nothing. They didn't have the means to do anything. It was just easier to pick up the hoe in the morning and go into the fields. To have Massa dole out the weekly supply of corn-meal and sorghum. To be given your winter clothing and see to it that your cabin was chinked up for the cold weather and settle down to enjoy a supper of possum, cooked just the way you liked it.

  True, here and there a slave couldn't wait for this freedom anymore. And it wasn't something they heard about from anybody. It was something that grew inside them, all the while they were hoeing or eating that possum. And they would run off, into the river bottoms or the canebrake or the woods, and somehow make their way across the Rio Grande into Mexico, where they would be free.

  So far, none of our people have done that. Maybe because Pa treats them good. Maybe because where we are, just east of Austin, Texas, it's many days' journey to the Rio Grande.

  And not many strangers who could bring the news come here. Our plantation, called Dunwishin', provides us with everything we need, except what we used to import from England, of course. And all that has stopped with the Yankee blockade. Except for certain goods that Granville can smuggle through to us.

  As of now, Mama and I and even my hoity-toity sister, Amelia, are back to wearing homespun for our daily tasks, like my grandmother, Pa's mother, wore when she came here. But thanks to Granville, Amelia's wedding dress was going to be silk. What deals he had to make to get that silk nobody has asked him.

  So, even though we've been deprived of things like imported fabrics, leather goods for shoes, and coffee, we get along just fine, thank you. Without the outside world coming to our door and telling us that our negroes should be free.

  All this in my favor, it still doesn't forgive the lie I had to tell Sis Goose. Because even though my mama still has papers saying Sis Goose is a slave owned by Aunt Sophie, even though her father was white riverboat captain Ashbel Smith and her mother was a black slave, she was raised free. Simply because Pa wanted it that way. And so she could be a sister to me.

  The lie I had to tell her haunts me every day. And when she finds out, I don't know what mayhem it will bring. Maybe she'll never speak to me again. Oh, I'll deserve her wrath, and when it comes I'm half ready for it.

  What I find surprising, though, is that, being raised as free, it would bother her so much that the authorities still consider her a slave. I know that in the outside world she could be sold on the block. But this isn't the outside world. This is our home.

  Here we can tell as many lies to each other as we need to and still be all right. The thing I don't understand about freedom is ... can they really take it away from you? And if, inside you, where it matters, you think you are free, doesn't that count for something? Does it have to be legislated to be real?

  And then there is another question. How does my brother Gabe fit into this problem with Sis Goose? If he loves her, isn't his lie greater than mine?

  I don't dare think of these things. They don't add up. I'd rather go into the pumpkin patch and count the pumpkins to be made into bread. They do add up, and you can't dispute the numbers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MAYBE IT'S time now to tell how Sis Goose came to live with us. Maybe that will explain things better than anything.

  The year was 1848, and Mama and Pa were living here at Dunwishin' with three children: Granville, who was eleven; Gabriel, ten; and Amelia, just nine. The plantation was thriving. Pa raised a goodly amount of sugarcane back then, but in April a killing frost finished off most of his corn crop. Still, he'd been selling cotton to England steadily, so by the time the war broke out he had two hundred and fifty thousand dollars waiting for him in English
banks. Money he couldn't reach during the war. But he still had it.

  That year of 1848, Sis Goose was born. But not to Mama.

  That was the year Mama's younger sister, Sophie, came to Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico on a steamboat. She was to be married to a wealthy and important man who was the United States minister to England and France. Garland Prescott owned four plantations and four hundred slaves. Mama traveled with her personal girl, Melindy, south to meet Aunt Sophie, who was to stay at our place for two months until the circuit preacher came around to wed them.

  Mama, with Melindy, was invited aboard the steamboat Yellow Stone for some festivities. On board was a negro woman named Molly, who'd just given birth to a little girl. Aunt Sophie had taken charge of the birth, as she was wont to do. But Molly was dying, and because Aunt Sophie was the only one on board who was really kind to Molly, that negro woman gave the baby to Aunt Sophie before she died.

  Molly named her Rose. Her daddy, the captain, was Ashbel Smith, and he promptly signed the baby over to Aunt Sophie.

  Her daddy called her Sis Goose.

  He knew that by law the baby took her mother's condition of slavery. He knew the oral traditions of the South, too, his mammy having raised him on Brer Rabbit stories.

  "As they say in the stories, in the Brer Rabbit tradition," he told Aunt Sophie, "she'll be jus' 'er common goose in de cotehouse when all de rest of de folks is foxes."

  So she was called Sis Goose by everyone. And though we weren't all foxes in the courthouse, she was always regarded as a common goose by society.

  She was a slave.

  Aunt Sophie came to Dunwishin' with her, and Mama took over when Sis Goose cried in the middle of the night, when she wailed out her miseries and her hunger. Mama appointed her a wet nurse from the quarters, and before long she fit into the scheme of things like a bale of cotton packed for market.

  Meanwhile, Aunt Sophie was having dressmakers sew her silk and tulle gowns for when she had an audience with Queen Victoria on her wedding trip. By the time she and Uncle Garland were wed, that baby was Mama's. Sis Goose had eyes for no one else but Mama. She smiled only at Mama. She stopped crying only when Mama held her.

  "You keep her, Luanne," Aunt Sophie told her. "When I'm settled, I'll come and fetch her home."

  But Aunt Sophie never did settle down. If it wasn't a trip to England, it was a trip to Russia where she met the czar and czarina. Or the south of France in the middle of the winter. Or she was entertaining lavishly at their main plantation, Glen Eden. And her stuffed shirt of a husband didn't want Sis Goose. Or if he did, it would be only to have her raised as a household servant.

  Mama said she'd run back to Virginia with Sis Goose first. The baby was that adorable with her beautiful smile that made her eyes light up, her pert nose, and golden skin. Everyone knew back then that she was going to be a beauty.

  Three years after Sis Goose was born Mama had me. Aunt Sophie and Uncle Garland never did have children. But the year I was born, Pa came down with cholera, and has been in a weakened state since. Mama had to take over running the place with the help of Sam, the negro foreman. The years went on, Granville and Gabe went east to the states, as we call them, to college, and soon enough came the war.

  All Aunt Sophie ever demanded was that Sis Goose and I spend two weeks a year at her place. And always there was the implication that she might claim her. Take her away from us. We lived with that fear, especially Mama.

  I thought it cruel of Aunt Sophie to do so. And I know by now that if she ever exercised her legal rights and took her, Sis Goose would run away.

  "And then what?" I asked Gabriel one day.

  "Be caught and sold as a slave by some conniving, stealing man," he said.

  Oh, my head spins, thinking on it. And I prefer, on most days, not to think of it at all.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I SHOULD TELL some good things before I go on. I mean about our family and how we came to live here. And how my grandfather had to shriek and throw things in the air and yell out to the world that this land was his in order to claim it.

  We're not yeomen farmers, with fewer than ten slaves. Neither are we small planters with ten to fifty slaves. Before the Yankees came, Pa had over seventy negroes working the fields and the gardens and tending the sheep, the horses, the cows, and the house. Pa was someone to be reckoned with, not just an ailing old man.

  He was already in college in the states when his father, Grandpa Holcomb, came from Virginia as part of that group of Stephen Austin's original "old three hundred" families in that first community of settlers that came to East Texas in 1821.

  Edom told me and Sis Goose all this. Edom is close to ninety by now and lives in the log house that is the first one Grandpa built before he built the big one. The same log house all of us live in now that the Yankees came this past June of '65 and put us out of the plantation house.

  Edom was in his early forties then, and was Grandpa's body servant. He told us how Grandpa claimed his land. To me, it's so romantic that I never tire hearing tell of it.

  In order to take possession of the land, Edom says, Grandpa had to have three witnesses and a surveyor. Stephen Austin was there, too.

  The surveyor walked the landmarks with Grandpa, from a red oak tree two feet in diameter, to a pecan tree, to an ash tree, and finally an orange tree. The surveyor dutifully marked it all down.

  Then, in order to take possession, Grandpa had to cry out, pull up weeds, throw stones, drive in stakes, and perform other necessary solemn acts to show the land was his.

  Exactly the kind of thing I want to do when I'm out riding and I see the endless land and sky. I feel like crying out and pulling up weeds and throwing stones, too. My spirit quickens and I know how Grandpa felt.

  Grandmother was with Grandpa when all this happened, of course, on her tall gray horse, Smokey. She'd ridden that horse clear across the country, using a sidesaddle Grandpa had given her. She wasn't afraid of anything. Not Indians or wolves or outriders. And she could shoot a coin off the top of an apple without disturbing its skin. Gabe says I take after her with my shooting and my spirit.

  Pa was there, too, when Grandpa claimed the land. It was just before they sent him back to college in Virginia. Grandpa chose a high bluff to build the plantation house on, but first he had to build the log cabin. He built it with logs right off the property. There is a huge fireplace inside. The door shutter is made out of thick slabs split right off the thick pieces of lumber. And the door was locked at night with a large peg that could not be broken through. This was in case of a raid by Indians.

  The Indians did come, of course. After all, this was their land. Kickapoos, like the ones who plague our frontier, the ones who wounded Gabriel, would come and walk around the log cabin at night, hoping to scare the wits out of Grandmother. But all she did in reply was take out her spinning wheel and keep it whistling all night so they would be sure to hear it.

  Edom told us that before their final leave-taking, they built a fire on the lawn, right where Ma's orchard is now, and danced around it in honor of Grandmother and her courage.

  That sure made me proud. And whenever Gabe scolded me, he always put in how nobody would ever build a fire for me in honor of my courage, just to make me feel bad.

  Anyway, after the Indians left Grandmother and Grandpa, the buffalo came. A whole drove of them passing through the river about a mile above our house. Grandmother figured there must have been close to a hundred of them, and they never stopped. They went over the land like a flood, and they went southward, Grandmother said.

  Those first years were a trial for Grandmother and Grandpa. They had about eighteen head of cattle, a small herd. They'd started out with more, but on the trip west the cattle got sick and some died. They had only six horses left. And they set about the task of surviving.

  When the buffalo and Indians weren't plaguing them, the flies and mosquitoes were. Then one year Grandpa's corn crop failed. The next year there was a drought. The
year the corn crop failed they had no bread, not until Grandpa raised a good corn crop.

  They had no salt at all. But the cotton crop gave a good yield. The only problem was getting it to its destination.

  The first few years, before he built his own landing on the river, Grandpa took the cotton to Mexico on pack mules.

  Edom told us of this, too: "One slave could manage ten or twelve pack mules. The cotton bales weighed seventy-five or eighty pounds each. The only roads were Indian trails. But we managed eighteen or twenty miles a day."

  He told us how the men were heavily armed. And how they hoped the Indians were too afraid of the colored slaves to attack. How, in Mexico, Grandpa exchanged his cotton for coffee, tea, clothing, and Mexican silver dollars.

  Pa still has a cache of those silver dollars. I have three. I know my brothers and Amelia have their share, too.

  I think about all this because I know how difficult it was for Grandpa and Grandmother to build up this plantation. And because now the Yankees have it. They just took it. And I dream of the day we can get it all back.

  "What will it take?" I've asked Gabe.

  "Words," he'd said. "Isn't that what it always takes?" And somehow I felt he wasn't just talking about the plantation, and I was treading on dangerous ground, so I shut my mouth right up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THERE ARE more good things I should tell, and I keep them packed away in my memory in a box with a big red bow on top.

  I suppose, over the years, I have always been considered as "belonging" to Gabe by the family. And this was long before Pa got so sick he took to his bed and Ma took over the running of the ranch.