“No, Master Ramses, please, I didn’t do no malingering. My ankle—”
“Damn it, gyp, show your back to the lash or you’ll show it your face!”
The woman began to sob and lowered her blouse to her waist. He skin was smooth as melted chocolate. She closed her eyes and mouthed a prayer.
Ramses’s whip was a true instrument of terror, tipped at the end with metal sharp as a knife. He let the lash slip from his hand one coil at a time until the tip lay upon the ground. He reared back and cast the whip in the woman’s direction. The tip sang as it sailed through the air. With a precision only years of practice could deliver, it tore across the poor woman’s shoulder like a butcher’s blade and left a trail of blood and open flesh.
The woman bit her lip and fought back a scream.
“Malingering’s an expensive hobby,” Ramses said. His eyes danced up and down the fresh blood upon her back. “Damn high priced.”
With what seemed like little more than a flick and twist of the wrist, he propelled the whip around for another pass. This time it struck the woman’s other shoulder and left a perfect X of running blood and ravaged flesh across her spine.
The second blow was too much for her to bear in silence. The woman shrieked in pain. The smile faded from Ramses’s face, replaced with bright red, unmitigated rage.
“You dare cry out? You gonna complain ’bout this just reward for your laziness? Ungrateful damn bitch! I’ll learn you to show silent appreciation.”
With that he surrendered all attempts at finesse. He lit into her with the whip hard and fast. Over and over, the tip met its mark with every volley. With each strike, the woman cried out again, and with each cry the fury in Ramses’s eyes burned brighter. The whip churned the woman’s once supple back into a hash of red and brown. Unsatisfied with lashing her at a distance, and livid at her refusal to cease her screams, Ramses leaped from his horse with a profusion of profanity. He folded his whip in thirds and, dragging his crippled leg beside him, closed to a foot from the suffering woman. Then he continued to beat her with the whip’s looped ends until she finally dropped to the ground, face-first, unconscious.
Ramses towered over her, panting and sweating from the force of his fury and exertion. “See! You can be quiet if’n you just try. Goddamn bitch.”
He tipped back his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve, though the splattered blood on his pants did not seem to bother him. He returned the blood-soaked whip to the saddle and swung himself back up on Victor’s saddle. The steed whinnied and flicked his head in what looked like approval. The horse trotted in my direction.
Ramses did not look shocked that I was there. My observation of his assault on the poor slave was of no more consequence to him than if he’d been seen by a rabbit or mouse. He might have known I was there all along, and indeed, standing next to two large mules, I would have been quite hard to miss. He stopped right beside me and stared down across his silvery nose. Blood speckled the right side. Anger filled his eyes, though only a fraction of what he’d shown the slave woman. Still more than enough to terrify me, having seen his capability for cruelty.
“Boy, what time I tell you to have those mules out here harnessed?”
“A-after dinner, sir.”
“Well, , damn it does this seem like after dinner? Does your stomach feel full?”
I dared not attempt an answer.
“So look what you’ve done,” he continued. “Them mules’ll be out here two extra hours in the sun afore they start pulling that plow. What good’s that going to do the mule? You’re just baking them in this heat.”
“I-I’m sorry,” I offered.
“Next time you don’t do as I say, there will be consequences. And nothin’ untoward better happen to those mules.”
He rode away to the main house and a dinner of his own. He’d nearly beaten a woman to death for nothing, but he was concerned that the mules needed to be kept out of the sun.
I looked over at the wounded woman, facedown in the dirt, glistening blood across her back like a wet, red vest. My first instinct was to rush to her side, to somehow get her to help. But the possible repercussions popped up like weeds, especially those that might come from the tip of Ramses’s whip.
I was about to assist her, when three young male slaves came tearing across the cotton fields. One of them shouted and sobbed that he was coming to help her. A husband perhaps.
Now, from the moment I saw the three come running, I told myself that only their arrival kept me from rushing to the beaten slave’s aid. But the lie rang hollow. Deep down, I knew the truth: that I was about to head in the opposite direction and protect myself rather than risk anything to save her.
To acknowledge yourself a coward at the age of fourteen fosters a self-loathing I hope none others ever have to experience. Before the week was out, I would pay the penance this sin demanded. And more.
Chapter Eight
That afternoon, I’d filled a wheelbarrow with the detritus from the horse stalls. The garden was the natural place to dump this fertilizer. But the gardens abutted the cookhouse, and dumping a load of manure there would bring the cooks out upon me as sure as kicking a hornets’ nest earned sharp stings, and the cooks would have the hornets’ ill temper to boot. I lifted the handles of my wheelbarrow and headed for the garden’s farther edge, where I was certain to spy a proper location for my delivery.
Being midsummer, the garden held a bountiful yield, with all manner of greens, swaying stalks of corn and ripe tomatoes desperate for plucking. Knowing the allure of such a cornucopia to the starving slaves, the Powells built a great fence to separate these fruits of the earth from those who trod the cotton fields. I followed the fence’s perimeter.
At the far edge, a gate in the fence stood open; the lock and chain hung on the fence post. Surely it would be refastened by nightfall, but for now it was my opportunity. I trundled my load through the gate and up a narrow pea gravel path between crop rows. I passed through stalks of corn that towered over my head, laden with deep green ears crowned with golden tassels. I exited the edge of the cornfield and came upon a wondrous sight.
A second trail of pea gravel cut across my path. On the far side were beds of roses, each a rectangle about eight feet by three, each a solid carpet of rich, blooming red. The bushes closest to me were about waist high, and the beds’ heights diminished as newer-looking plantings sprouted farther from the path. The roses’ sweet aroma tried to subdue the stink of my wheelbarrow’s load.
Several beds away, there lay a fresh-turned patch of earth, brown and rich, a perfect rectangle, ready to host a new planting of roses. If ever a place begged for a delivery of manure, this was it. The broken soil saved half the effort of turning the manure under.
I made my way between the rose beds and heaved my load upon the bare earth. I turned to work it in with my shovel and stopped short at the unexpected sight of a woman.
She stood shrouded in the clothes of high mourning. Black lace and dusky crinoline left nothing of her exposed to the sunlight. Despite the heat, velvet gloves covered her hands.
“That can’t be so,” she said, though she had no companion for her conversation. “No; the ball will go on this year. It wouldn’t do to cancel it.”
This had to be Master Powell’s wife, whom Washington had mentioned. Only in the aftermath would I learn her name was Beulah.
There was no lack of women in mourning throughout the state. Grim weekly losses were posted on the steps of every courthouse, not just the one in De Kalb. But Miss Beulah’s son Junius had died over a year ago. Her proper period of high mourning had long ago passed. The combination of her dark mode of dress and her conversation with herself gave me pause.
“Well, the war is the war,” she said. “But it’s far from here, and our generals will never let it get this far south. We must uphold our traditions. It’s what you’re fighting for, isn’t it?”
I wondered how she could not know that the war was abou
t to come to her front doorstep, at least according to the aged Confederate captain. Surely she would at least know Vicksburg fell.
At this point, she noticed me standing on the other side of the planting. She looked at me through the lace veil across her face. She betrayed no shame or embarrassment at being overhead speaking to herself. Even through the lacework cover, her eyes looked tired.
“There, boy, who are you?”
“Jebediah, ma’am. I work the stables.” I felt great discomfort in her presence: not the fear for my safety that I felt with Ramses, just an unease around someone unbalanced.
“Stables? Why, where is Marcus?”
“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.” I wondered how many years gone this Marcus was.
“Where’s your family?” she said.
“I’m orphaned.” I was shocked at my acknowledgement. It was the first time I’d recognized my new status. “My father died at Gettysburg.”
A strange look that combined sympathy and elation crossed her face. She rounded the bushes and grasped my hands in her soft, velvet gloves.
“Then you understand! My Junius made his ultimate sacrifice saving Richmond in the Seven Days’ Battle. We both share the sweet agony of loss.”
I restrained myself from contradicting her. There was nothing sweet about my loss, the cursed circumstance that led me to her stable and a life one step away from involuntary servitude.
She looked past me to the tilled patch of ground. “Master Powell has had them start another bed. Junius will be so happy.”
“He liked roses, ma’am?”
“He is the roses, dear child. Can’t you feel him here with us?”
Again, I kept my answer to myself, but she continued on without it.
“The mortal coil he shed lies here beneath us, buried amidst the roses. The more roses we plant, the stronger his presence here.”
Concern flashed across her face. She looked to the side at nothing.
“Now, Junius, he’ll understand. His papa was lost in the war. I can tell him about you.” She looked back at me. “You understand how it works, don’t you?”
I dared not dash the sense of happy anticipation she exuded. Though she made no sense at all, I nodded.
“It was the spell on the roses that did it. Well, Master Powell calls it a spell; I call it a blessing. Old Eleeza cast it so that the life within the roses could give Junius life in the beyond.”
Grief had surely taken this woman’s mind. I backed away a few inches. Her grip on my fingers tightened.
“Why, with enough roses,” she said, “he shall live forever.”
She dropped my hands and looked off at her empty side again. “Yes, yes, I know.”
Then, as if I didn’t exist, she shuffled off into the garden of roses, enmeshed in a deep one-way conversation with the humid air.
I turned back to my task and worked the manure into the fresh-turned earth. At my fledgling age, understanding much of what transpired between adults eluded me, but I understood her madness, perhaps because I understood her feeling of loss. Her firstborn son, the heir to the plantation, had been killed in combat. Only a fellow sufferer knew how unreal the loss felt, for at first it was just a name on a page on the courthouse lawn, a name that could as easily be wrong as right, with all the confusion in war. There was no evidence to back up the preposterous claim that her son or my father, who had been so full of life, so much more real than reality, could actually cease to exist.
But while my loss was still in limbo, unconfirmed by physical proof, hers was not. Her son’s corpse did come home. No doubt a horrid, damaged, putrefying, unrecognizable lump of cold flesh by the time it made the long trip south from Richmond, perhaps missing limbs where flying lead had found its mark. How could a mother reconcile what lay before her in a rude pine box with the strapping son she had sent off to fight a glorious war?
So she retreated into the comfort of superstition and spirits. And now she walked the roses, dressed in eternal mourning, and conversed with the dead son of her imagination. And so she held on to the edge of reality instead of falling fully into insanity’s abyss.
I turned more earth with my dull spade and remembered the vision of my father the last night at my uncle’s farm. I shuddered and sent up a prayer to the Lord, a prayer that Beulah Powell wasn’t a portrait of my future.
Chapter Nine
My situation at Beechwood was tantamount to invisibility. Unless addressed by someone else, my presence passed unheeded. The stables were between the plantation house and the slave quarters, and it appeared the inhabitants of each area treated it as the domain of the other, a place to avoid, like the stretch of battlefield between Yankee and Southern lines. Even when I left the stable area, there was no acknowledgment of my existence unless my crossing interrupted someone’s work. So the list of people who ignored me, which had started with my mother, grew much longer at Beechwood.
That afternoon, I discovered a bright side to this social shunning. At the edge of a patch of trees south of the stables, I loaded up a pull cart with hay for the horses. In the shade of the oaks, two teenage male slaves rested low to the ground. A few extra tools lay between them. They had apparently been sent on an errand to fetch them, and decided to extend the time allotted. My presence did not interrupt their conversation one syllable.
“He ain’t coming back. Percy’s just gone.”
“Maybe he run off.”
“I know Percy. Ain’t got nothin’ to run off with. Besides, why the Massuh didn’t send the dogs out to find him if he run off? Because he ain’t run off.”
“They sent the dogs out after Old Eleeza when she run off, and they come back with nothin’. Maybe the dogs ain’t no good no more.”
“The dogs is good. He got Percy and took him off. I’m telling you, I saw it myself. Old Ramses came up in the night and ordered him to the big house. Then he gone.”
“Who you tell?”
“I ain’t tellin’ no one but you. I don’t want to be next.”
“What’d he do to cross Ramses?”
“That’s it—ain’t done nothin’. Like Joshua done nothin’. Like Terrence done nothin’. Every disappeared one done nothin’ but come of age.”
I lay this conversation side by side with the snippet I’d overheard through the cookhouse window. Slaves were disappearing from the plantation. After witnessing the innocent woman’s horrific beating, I knew Ramses certainly was capable of such a crime. From my experience, even his horse seemed capable of such a crime. A man who’d had his nose bitten off by a slave would certainly have a debt to settle there, a debt he might extend past the individual and on to the whole race.
As I walked the cart of hay back, I mulled whether Ramses satiated his bloodlust with the Powell family’s consent. I perceived not. Mr. and Mrs. Powell didn’t seem aware of what transpired around them. Ramses could do as he pleased, and they would never know. From the look of things in the fields, the real power in the plantation rested in his hands.
When Ramses returned Victor to the stable that night, thoughts such as these were still foremost in my mind. I shuddered as his dark figure approached from the shadows of the spreading oaks, imagining how Percy and his other victims had seen this same scene during their last hour on Earth. The closer he came, the more frightened I grew. As he entered the stable, I was near frozen in place with sweat dripping from my temples.
He brought Victor up just short of me. I raised my eyes to the overseer and had to bite my lower lip to keep from screaming. Ramses cast a steely gaze down upon me. From my vantage, I could just make out the jagged stump of a nose under the silver tent on his face. His black eyes smoldered with contempt.
“What the hell is wrong with you, boy?”
“N-nothing.”
“Then take the damn horse!”
I shook myself from my paralysis and grabbed Victor’s reins. Ramses dismounted. Victor threatened me with a rumbled chuff.
“A day in the fields with the goddamn gyp
s, and then I have to trust Victor to an imbecile. You treat this horse like he was your mama, or you’ll see the tail of my whip, you hear?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Wait, you ain’t got no mama, right? Nor papa?”
“No, sir.”
Ramses broke into a smile that made my skin crawl. “Ain’t no one ’round to miss you at all.”
From another, such a comment would have been mere insult. But as he sauntered out of the stable, I was left quivering in my shoes, knowing that he’d just realized I could join his list of victims. Even the slaves wouldn’t ask what happened to me if I vanished.
Victor brought me back to the world with a vicious strike of his enormous head. I dropped the reins and he strode into his stall, no doubt knowing how much more difficult removing his saddle would be in those confines. And indeed I struggled with the task amidst a series of violent kicks and surprise nips. I realized that Victor behaved so well in the morning, not out of any respect for me, but out of fear of Ramses’s wrath if he wasn’t ready on time.
It took quite a while for sleep to overcome me that night. I stared for hours at the stable’s closed door, certain it would creak open and that Ramses would return. Bloody whip in hand, he’d drag me from my perch and take me to the dark place where he’d dispatched the other innocent boys. Had I any sense that I could survive outside the Beechwood gates, without food or money and trapped between the clashing armies, I might have run off just then.
In the wee hours, exhaustion finally won out over fear, but my sleep would not last long.
Chapter Ten
I awoke in a cold sweat in the stable loft. Despite the thick, warm night air, I trembled with a chill. I sensed a presence in the stable and thought that an intruder had entered and made some noise to awaken me. Ramses had come after all.
I realized Ramses would have no need to employ stealth. It had to be a thief. The only thing of value to steal was Victor or perhaps Ramses’s saddle. Neither was a loss I wanted to answer for.
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