by Joyce Hansen
Chapter 3
“Every mother’s son among them seemed to be in search
of his mother; every mother in search of her children.
—FREEDMEN’S BUREAU AGENT FROM
BEEN IN THE STORM SO LONG
May 1868
The driving rain was like a wall, and Obi couldn’t see much beyond the dock at Bay Street as the ferry pulled away. He found shelter under a tarpaulin and managed to keep dry. He was glad to be alone, with time to think. His days had been full and busy, and the children he’d helped were still at the bureau. Miss Jeffries had told him she expected to have a placement for them soon. Major Delany had found out that Grace’s story was true. A freedmen’s settlement had been burned to the ground in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, six months ago, and twenty-four men, women, and children were hanged from the trees surrounding their burned cabins.
Obi hated to think about it. Each time he saw Grace, however, her faraway gaze, her unsmiling face, and her grim silence reminded him of the horror she’d witnessed and of his own loss and longing.
By the time the ferry reached Santa Elena, the rain had stopped, but the sun was hidden behind a thick blanket of clouds. As soon as he stepped off the boat, he was greeted with smiles from the fishermen, stevedores, and others working on the dock.
“Happy to see you, soldier,” an old man with a toothless grin greeted him.
“Hello, Father,” Obi said respectfully. “Can you tell me where is New Canaan on this island?”
“Yes, mister soldier. That’s the colored village where the people own their land.”
“Is it far from here?”
“No, not so far. Just yonder,” he said, pointing to the largest oak tree Obi had ever seen.
As Obi walked past the massive oak, its spreading branches reminded him of open, welcoming arms. He followed the shelled road into the freedmen’s village and felt something different about the place. Maybe it was the way the tops of the trees met, forming a natural canopy over the winding path. Or perhaps it was the oak trees, thick gray moss dripping from their branches, standing near a cluster of cabins with their doors and shutters painted blue to keep away the haints and bad spirits.
When the shelled road turned into a dirt path, he saw a small frame building and guessed that it was a praise house, where the islanders held their weekly shout. Beyond the homes he saw cotton and corn fields dotted with men and women. Cabins stood at the edge of the fields.
Obi walked a few more feet and was relieved to see a store; adjacent to the store, a church was nestled in a grove of oak trees. Several cabins stood behind the church. An old woman sat on the porch of the store. Her bent fingers moved nimbly as she made a basket out of sweet grass.
“How do,” the woman greeted him. “Who you seeking?”
“Is this New Canaan, Mother?”
“Yes. This be the place.”
Obi nodded and smiled pleasantly at the woman. “I’m looking for a girl and a boy, Easter and Jason. Maybe people call her Esther Jenkins.” Then he gave his usual speech, describing them and giving her their approximate ages.
“Nobody here go by those names, but you know people been changing their names. Everybody had to find a last name when we was freed. My husband and I use our old master last name. Just in case some of our kin be looking for us. Wayne, my name is Mary Wayne, but everybody call me Miss Mary.”
Suddenly Obi realized that Easter might have been looking for him, thinking he took the name Jennings.
“I don’t know for sure who these people are you seeking, because my husband use to run the store and I took over when he die two month ago. But Brother Paul might know. He the preacher and know all the new people moving here. A passel of them come just a few month ago.”
“Where this preacher?”
“In he field.”
“Do you recall any people by the last name Phillips?”
“I think some of them first people who come here in the time of the Yankee man and the war go by that name.”
“You know a woman name Rose?”
“Yes. Rose Sabay. She have a son. Her husband was kilt.”
Was it the same Rose? Maybe she’d gotten married and had children. Obi’s heart began to beat faster, but he didn’t want to get his hopes soaring, only to come crashing down. There was more than one Phillips family who’d owned slaves.
“Where can I find these first people?”
“They all about, son. Most of them be working in their field. You just have to go one by one and ask.”
And so he did. He walked under the burning sun from field to field. As the day wore on, his legs cramped and he tried hard not to limp. He repeated the same speech until it became almost a litany. By the time he had covered the ten square miles that made up New Canaan, he was exhausted, the heat sapping all of his strength. Everyone he’d met knew of the people from the Phillips plantation—the people from the time of the Yankee and the war, they called them. Some of them were sharecropping elsewhere, even though they owned land in New Canaan. Others worked at the mine near Charleston. No one had heard of Easter or Jason, or Esther Jenkins. Many said they were new to the island.
He followed a narrow footpath and saw a small marsh where a man was growing rice. Beyond the rice marsh, Obi noticed a cabin. It caught his eye because the door and shutters were not painted blue like so many of the other cabins.
“Good day,” the man said. And Obi immediately began his recitation. Suddenly the man interrupted him with a great bear hug. “It’s you! Obi from the Jennings farm.”
Obi looked confused.
“You don’t remember me? Samuel. From the Phillips plantation.”
The man’s broad smiling face was vaguely familiar to Obi. “Yes. I remember. You was one of the hands.” A great burst of joy filled his heart, his spirit. At last he’d found someone from the old place.
“That’s right. You a soldier?”
“Yes. With the 104th Regiment. Samuel, is Rose here with Easter and Jason?”
Before Samuel could answer, a spindly-legged boy chasing a toddler darted from behind a clump of bushes. The young child ran toward a woman.
“Look who’s here,” Samuel shouted to her. “Another one of us been found.”
Obi could not take his eyes off her. He knew her. He knew those large dark eyes. She walked as erectly as a soldier, while balancing a basket on her head and carrying a three-legged pot for cooking rice when working in the fields.
She stared at Obi too—as though she were trying to remember. Then suddenly she put her basket on the ground, spread her arms, and shouted, “My Lord, Obi. It really you?”
His name coming out of her mouth jogged his memory. It was Rose. She gathered him up in her soft, comfortable embrace.
She held him at arm’s length, then hugged him close to her again. The toddler grabbed her skirt, while the older boy tried to pull him away. “Leave your mama be,” the boy said.
Rose held his face in both of her hands. “Obi, I can’t believe it’s you. You a soldier?”
He nodded. His joy subsided somewhat, and his heart was fearful as he asked the question. “Rose, where Easter? She here with you?” He saw the answer in her great dark eyes before she spoke.
“She not here, Obi.”
Chapter 4
O still green water in a stagnant pool!
Love abandoned you and me alike.
—ARNA BONTEMPS
“You know where she is? She marry? Is she dead?” His voice cracked.
“No, bless God, she fine, and I don’t suppose she’d marry no one but you. Easter in a school in Philadelphia.”
Obi relaxed, though his heart raced and his temples pulsated.
“And Jason?”
“He with a traveling medicine show.”
“Easter promise to wait for me at the place where I leave her. Now she even let Jason go?” His deep-set eyes looked pained. “I think of nothing nor no one but her and Jason all these years.”
“S
he want to stay here, but Easter’s a smart girl. She learn to read and write in our little school. The missionaries send her to a school up in the north. She try her best to find you, Obi, even went to the Freedmen’s Bureau and register herself there.”
“I find the notice by accident. Wasn’t even sure it was her. If she waited like she promise, we would’ve been together from two years ago.” He felt himself growing angry, and his head was beginning to pain him.
“Wasn’t no accident. You wasn’t meant to find her till now. She coming back, Obi. Come, I tell you everything.” She picked up her basket, placing it on her head, and walked toward the cabin he’d seen in the distance.
“Miss Rose, I going back in the field.”
“Yes, Simon. I’ll be there directly.” She turned to Obi. “That boy a good help to me. No mother, no father, so I take him in.”
The child held onto his mother’s skirt as they walked along. They entered a neat two-room cottage, the same home Obi had seen near the marsh. Rose motioned for him to sit at the pine table as she took a pitcher and a tin cup off the mantel and poured him a drink of water. The baby scrambled into Rose’s lap when she sat down in front of Obi. She seemed thinner than he remembered her, not as round and plump. “Why you in the field, Rose? You can’t find work as a cook?”
“These are my fields, Obi. I working for myself.” She told him her story.
“Easter escape from the Confederate camp and come back to the Phillips plantation. She arrive just in time, for the next day we all escape the plantation. Rayford had it plan for a long time.”
“Who leave?”
“A passel of us. Samuel, Melissa, Sarah, Elias, Isabel and Paul, Virginia and George and their sons, Nathan, David and Isaiah, James, Julius, me and Rayford. Julius been a soldier too. He a hardworking man and manage to buy up a good amount of land. He know all them Republicans in Beaufort. And spend a lot of time getting people to vote with the Republicans.”
She continued her story. “We get here to this island and grow cotton for the Yankees on this same plantation land. They promise we can get the land to keep when the war over. Me and Rayford marry. A real wedding too. This here is our baby, little Rayford. The Yankees don’t keep their promise, and they give the land back to the family who abandoned it when the war start. But here on this plantation, we say we not giving back this land that we work on.”
Her eyes watered as she rocked Little Ray, who was falling asleep.
“Rayford was shot and killed when the Yankee soldiers come to take the land and Rayford, Julius, and all the men refuse to leave.”
He was shocked. “You sure it was Yankee soldiers?”
“Yes. They was Yankee for sure. Said that the land had to go back to the Williams family. The president and the government was giving the land back to the rebels.”
“I know most of the white Yankee soldiers didn’t like us, but I didn’t think they shoot civilians.”
“We get some of the land in the end. The Williams family sold it to us. My Ray had to die, though.”
“Rose, I sorry.”
“It God’s will.” Her large, sorrowful eyes slowly brightened. “Obi, you is like a godsend. We need men like you in New Canaan. You home now.”
“And Jason. Where is he?”
“He with Dr. Taylor’s medicine show. They travel all about. He write Easter and say he’s coming to visit us.”
Obi sighed and rubbed his forehead as he stared at the spotless table. “I wish she stayed and waited for me. Why she let Jason run off with a medicine show?”
“Jason was bound and determined to go. Easter couldn’t stop him.” She gazed at him for a moment. “Obi, why you looking so sad? Easter will return in September. You as good as find her now. And you find your home too,” she insisted. “You know you always been one of us, even though you and Easter live on the Jennings farm.”
She leaned across the table, her eyes large and hopeful. “Listen, Obi, we find out that the Williams family still owe so much money for tax they might have to sell the rest of their land. We want to buy this whole plantation. Then we really have our own village. A lot of the people here be renting land or sharecropping for the Williams family.” She threw her head back proudly and hugged Little Ray. “But twenty-five of us own our land. I has twenty acres and plant cotton and corn. The government promised that people who been working these lands will get first chance to buy, before anyone else.”
He poured himself another drink of water. “You believe that? The government ain’t giving away land.”
“I know. I ain’t like some of these people still talking about the government giving them forty acres and a mule. Things different now. Julius and the other men in New Canaan have a Republican club, and they watching them buckra in Beaufort. Know just what them whites be doing.”
“Them men from the north grabbing up land so fast, make your head spin,” Obi said.
“I know it. Nothing left for people like us unless we stick together,” Rose said. “Stay here with us when you’re done with the army and build a future for you and Easter in New Canaan. I give Easter two acres of land when she leave. Build a house on it for you and her. And when the rest of this land for sale, you buy more. Grow your own cotton, instead of growing it for someone else.”
“Rose, I just find you all. I’m happy to know that Easter and Jason is alive. I can’t think on all these things you telling me now. Suppose Easter don’t want to marry, or to marry me?”
“Obi, I ain’t no mind reader, but I know Easter don’t want no one but you, and I don’t think she want to be a unmarried schoolmarm all of her life.”
“You know Easter’s address?” he snapped, beginning to grow weary of all of the talk.
“Yes.” She stood up, holding Little Ray, who had fallen asleep, and placed him on Simon’s pallet. “I didn’t mean to tell you what to do. Guess I forget that you and Easter is grown-up people. I just don’t want you to take Easter away. We been like sisters.”
“I didn’t say I was taking her away, Rose.”
She took a box off the mantel and removed a letter. “When Easter write a letter, Miss Fortune, the teacher, read it to me.” She looked embarrassed. “Rayford started teaching me, but then he die. Now I have no time. Can you read?”
“Yes. I learn in the army.”
“You can write to her then. You remember this box?”
Obi nodded. He remembered it well. It was Rayford’s box where he’d hidden a pen, ink, and paper so that he could write passes; Rayford had written Obi a pass the night he and Easter ran away, using paper from that same box. Obi copied Easter’s address, and then he and Rose were able to talk to each other. With the bright sun shining through the open shutters and door, and the sweet scent of the azalea bushes, they spoke of their old life—the people they knew, the times they’d lived through.
When Obi got up to leave, Rose said, “Obi, think about what I tell you. Easter be back here in a few months. You could start putting up your home and be living here when the land available for sale.”
He wouldn’t get angry with her again. She was determined to have her say. “I muster out of the army in July. I’ll write you and let you know whether I go to Philadelphia, or wait here for Easter.”
“I wish I could see the joy on Easter’s face when she get your letter. Now, you write to me at the general store,” she instructed. “Miss Mary will give me the letter, and the teacher will read it to me.”
Obi had time on the trip back to Beaufort to organize the events of the day—to make them clear and orderly in his own mind. He still couldn’t quite believe that he’d finally found out where Easter was. But he wouldn’t be able to celebrate until she and Jason were at his side.
It seemed to Obi, however, that when the ship docked in Beaufort that evening the stars shone brighter than usual and the full moon cast a soft light on the harbor. As he walked along the dock and headed toward Bay Street, the air felt warm and soft like velvet.
When he reached headquarters, instead of going to the room he shared with the other men, he went to the office where the records were kept. He lit the lamp and found a pen, paper, and ink. Even though he had thought about all of the things he would say to Easter as he rode on the ferry, there were no words for the feelings so deep and strong in his heart. But he did the best he could.
May 20, 1868
Dear Easter,
At long last I find you. So many things happen since we part. I will tell you all when I see you. I’m in the Army, but will be out in July. Rose give me your address. I find her today. I been seeking you and Jason for these many years. Easter, I never ask you before, because you was just a girl when we parted. But the whole time we was separated I think of no one but you, and I begin to dream of a time when you and me become husband and wife. Easter, will you marry me? Do you want me to come and get you when I muster out of the Army in July? Or, do you like the life in the north? Easter please tell me what you want to do. I wait anxiously to hear your answer.
Also, other news to tell you. I been to the old confederate camp looking for you and find out Mariah and Gabriel both die back in 1866. Martha Jennings die too, or so Miss Phillips tell me when I went there looking for you, also in 1866. I go by the last name Booker. Please write me back soon to this address.
Corporal Obidiah Booker
104th United States Colored Troops
Headquarters Bureau Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
Beaufort, S.C.
Love, your Obi
He folded the letter and put it away in his haversack. Tomorrow he’d send it out by post, and wait impatiently for her reply.
Chapter 5
Yours is the face that I long to have near,
Yours is the face, my dear.
—ANGELINA A. GRIMKE
Obi could not get annoyed with Thomas and Peter the next morning when they nagged him about missing another meeting of the Beaufort Republican Club. Every time he thought of Easter reading his letter, he’d burst into a big smile. Not his usual way.
