by Jon Walter
‘Doesn’t everybody?’
Connie shakes his head. ‘Do you know who it is you’re praying to? Are you sure it’s your God, Friday?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘What I mean is this – is your God a black man? Or is He white?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think you do.’
And Connie’s right. I do know.
I want to tell him that when God speaks to me, He speaks the same way I do, that He has the same voice as me – a black voice. But I remember the picture in Father Mosely’s office and I remember the face on the wooden crucifix in the chapel, those bright blue eyes staring down at me since I been seven years old.
I know the answer to Connie’s question. I’ve always known it and I tell him so. ‘He’s white, Connie. The good Lord’s a white man, sure as eggs is eggs.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ He runs a hand across his tired face. His teeth are clenched hard, but I don’t know why he looks so angry. It’s just the way it is. It’s the way it’s always been.
‘Go on now,’ he tells me. ‘Time to get some sleep.’
He stands and prods at the fire one last time, making a flame leap up around the last remaining log as I leave him. But at the door I stop and look back, intending to say goodnight one last time. Connie is already pulling his shirt up over his head and his back is a mess of scars, all standing out in the firelight like the furrows of a freshly ploughed field.
‘Holy Moses! Connie? What happened to your back?’
That man turns on me like a dog. ‘I thought I told you to leave! Why can’t you leave me alone in peace, huh? Go on and get out!’
He grabs at a grease lamp, maybe meaning to throw it at me, but I’m gone before he gets the chance and I resolve not to speak of God to him again. Not unless I got good reason.
Chapter 9
Hallelujah for small mercies.
My heart skips a beat when Sicely announces she’s moving back to live in the house. She gives us the news one evening, when we’re sat at the table about to eat corn pancakes.
‘Mrs Allen has said it makes more sense if I go back to live with her.’
‘That’s fine,’ says Lizzie.
‘Mrs Allen needs my help if she’s gonna get those uniforms finished. She’s taken on more than she can chew if you ask me.’
‘You should do as you see fit,’ Lizzie tells her.
Sicely casts a glance my way. ‘Do you think you can manage here without me?’
‘Yes, thank you, Sicely. I can manage just fine.’ I offer to look after Gil. ‘I’ll make sure he’s keeping out of trouble.’
Lizzie don’t thank me for that. ‘Gil’s a good boy,’ she tells me curtly. ‘He don’t need no looking after.’
And so we finished our meal with little else said. That was typical of how things were between us. Lizzie didn’t make things difficult for me, but she didn’t go out of her way to make ’em easy either. I was a cuckoo in their nest and I knew it.
Sicely leaves us that very night and the next day is a Sunday, our day of rest, just as the good Lord intended it to be. I have learned to count the weeks in Sundays, looking forward to ’em like they’re Christmas Day. The only thing missing from ’em is a good church service, since Chepstow only preaches to us once a month and his meetings don’t exactly bring us together in worship.
Mrs Allen has begun to give us religious instruction in the evenings, but it ain’t the same thing. She gathers us around the fire pit at the end of each day. Sometimes she gives a reading from the Bible or recites a prayer to us, but I can find no religious fervour in any of the other slaves, and when we pray the loudest ‘Amen’ always comes from me or Mrs Allen herself.
That’s why I’m surprised when I wake on Sunday to the sound of Lizzie’s voice coming from outside the cabin. She’s singing songs about Jesus, the same that I learned at the orphanage, and I lie on my mattress wondering where she might have learned ’em and what it means for her to be singing ’em out loud the way she is.
Cracks of light come past the rags that are stuffed in the holes of the wall and Gil is beside me on the floor, his breath all heavy as he sleeps. He won’t wake up for a while yet. If he could stay in bed all day, that boy surely would.
I fetch a cup of water from the bucket before I go outside. Lizzie’s digging her garden at the back of our cabin and I watch her while she sings her songs. Soon to glory we will go, down by the riverside. I know that tune and I start to sing it too – not loud or anything – but joining in so she knows I’m here. Lizzie stops singing and looks up at me. ‘Where d’you learn that song? They let you to go to church back in Tennessee?’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘Guess I’ve always known it. Where’d you learn it?’
Lizzie straightens up and puts her hands on her hips, smiling as she remembers. ‘A few summers ago, we went to the Baptist camp. Me and the kids. Mr Allen took all of us who wanted to hear the words of the Lord spoken by a proper preacher, on account of there being no chapel within easy reach of here.’
‘Didn’t Mr Chepstow have a chapel then?’
‘Chepstow? Sure he did. But it’s too far to walk there and back on a day pass.’ She comes closer, treading carefully along the single line of carrot tops till she’s only a few feet away from the little wooden fence that divides us. ‘Henry went there once,’ she confides in me. ‘He’s always had a hunger for the Lord, has Henry, but he got caught on his way back by a patrol, led by the very same preacher who’d blessed him in church only an hour before. That preacher stood by and saw Henry whipped to the bone, even though he knew where he’d been and what he’d been doing.’
‘You mean Chepstow did that?’
Lizzie raises her eyebrows nearly halfway up her head and I know that’s who she means without her having to say, and it makes my mind up once and for all about that priest. ‘Does Henry still believe in Jesus?’
Lizzie looks at me like I’m stupid. ‘Sure he does. He just don’t go to Chepstow’s church. But he came to the Baptist camp with Nancy and the kids. Yes, he did. Got ’em all baptized so they know the ways of the Lord in case anything were to happen to ’em. Harriet and Levi were there too, though it was before they jumped the broomstick. Before they’d had baby Richard too.’ Lizzie looks at me square on, like she’s had an idea. ‘So you like to sing to the Lord too? Hmm … Well, I never.’ She sees a weed near her feet, bends down, and pulls it up. Then she changes the subject. ‘You want to fetch me some eggs?’
Now, I know that her asking me to fetch eggs is a mark of trust, cos Lizzie owns all the chickens that scurry out the back of the cabins. She bought ’em with her own money and no one else goes near ’em without her say-so. Everyone knows that. She takes their eggs in on market day and sells ’em to the man from the store, along with the vegetables that she grows.
So anyway, she hands me a basket and tells me to look over in the bushes on the far side, but I do better than that, I do a real good job for her, looking under the floors of the huts and in around the trees where those chooks like to scratch about in the evenings, and I don’t mind doing it, even though I could still be in bed.
The chickens sure make me laugh when they come clucking and clicking around my feet, and I remember how Joshua loved ’em to bits when we were back at the orphanage. He’d play with ’em all the time. He thought they were the funniest things, the way they couldn’t keep their feet or their heads still. He used to act like ’em – he could do the walk and everything – used to stick his arms out like they were little chicken wings and he did that thing with his chin, pointing it in and out while he strutted about. Sometimes he would catch one and we’d see that little chicken’s eyes get bigger an’ bigger, all puzzled and nervous, with its little chicken brain wondering why its feet weren’t taking it nowhere. It used to make us laugh, though I’d always tell him to let it go if he held it for too long. They don’t like it, see. It ain’t in their nature to be standing still li
ke that.
Anyway, I don’t try to catch Lizzie’s chickens; all I do is collect the eggs, and once I’ve got six of ’em I take the basket back to her. She’s still in her garden, bending down and digging at the earth, but she straightens up and takes the basket. ‘You did well, Friday. Thank you.’
‘You saving ’em up?’ I ask her.
‘Sure. I always got something to save for.’
‘Are you hoping to buy back Sicely?’
I said that without thinking, and for a moment my heart is in my mouth, cos she’s in swinging distance if she wanted to slap me. She don’t though. She just looks thoughtful.
‘I doubt I can afford Sicely.’ She puts her hands on her hips and sucks at her teeth. ‘Sure, she ain’t pretty like Milly, but even so, it would take more eggs than I could sell and more time than I got to stitch.’ She thinks about it some more. ‘Sicely can look after herself. She’s independent-minded.’
I can’t argue with her there. Sicely’s just about the most independent-minded girl I’ve ever met.
‘Maybe I could afford Gil though,’ she continues. ‘I got a bit more time on my side for him, and he may not cost so much while he’s still young.’
I feel uneasy ’bout listening to her weigh up the odds of buying her own kids with eggs and needlework. ‘Connie told me the Yankees gonna set us free. He said they’re sailing up the Mississippi as we speak and they’ll be here soon.’
‘Is that what he says?’
‘Yes, it is, and I believe him too.’ I feel bold enough to pull her leg a little. ‘So maybe you don’t need to sell your eggs after all. Maybe we could have ’em for lunch.’ I lick my lips and make her smile. ‘Well, we could, couldn’t we? Maybe fry ’em up with a little milk?’
‘You keep your ideas about my eggs to yourself, young man.’ She makes as though to hit me, but she’s only kidding. ‘And I wouldn’t pay no heed to Connie neither. I heard them Yankees don’t like to sit down with a Negro any more than they do down South.’
‘Yeah, but Lizzie, people are saying Lincoln’s already set us free.’
She dismissed the idea with a quick shake of her head. ‘The only way we’re gonna get set free is by doing it ourselves. Just like Moses. You ever hear ’bout Moses?’
‘Sure I heard about Moses.’
Her face softens and her eyebrows lift themselves a little higher up her brow. She comes out of her garden and walks back around the cabin, putting the basket of eggs down by the door. ‘There ain’t no white man gonna free us, Friday. We need God to give us a Moses, a big black ol’ Moses who’ll lead us to the promised land. That’s the only way it’s ever gonna happen.’
Those are Lizzie’s last words on the matter. She sends me up to the big house for rations and I bring back cornmeal, molasses and bacon in a sack. But she’s waiting for me when I get back and she strides out to meet me as I bring the sack back down the path. She takes hold of my arm and puts her head close to mine. She’s so serious I wonder if I got the wrong food. ‘I’m gonna tell you something, Friday, but you need to know it’s a secret. You got to keep it to yourself. Do you hear me? You let on about this and you’ll answer to God himself.’
I say I heard her and I cross myself before the Lord so she can see I mean it.
And then she tells me.
*
They take me to the river in the dead of night – these night-owl Baptists – they take me down into the woods.
There’s ten of us when we go, following one after another in the dark, a pine torch held in front of us to light the way, and no one makes a sound – not a whisper or a word – until we know we can’t be heard.
It don’t take long before we stop in an open space, a circle of grass on the river bank, where the trees don’t reach the edge and the mud slopes gently to the water. On sunny days it’s just the kind of place that’d invite you in for a swim, but tonight it looks haunted, with moonlight shining on the surface and the trees seeming to move when you don’t keep your eye on ’em.
Henry takes charge. He tells us to gather ourselves together and I’m expecting us to sit in rows, crouched down upon the grass with our hands clasped together in our laps. That’s the way we did it at the orphanage, cos Father Mosely always taught us it weren’t no good to stand before the Lord. No. You were better off on your knees. But these here Baptists show no sign of sitting down.
They start to shuffle on their feet and I get taken by the arm and we start moving in a wide circle, like a lazy old current in a slow stream, with Nancy humming a tune, not singing any words that I can tell, but moaning away from deep inside herself until we all humming along, like some great old religious swarm of bees, all of us content to work our way to God.
An owl hoots from a tree across the river. I close my eyes and we’re moving and moaning. We’re whispering, ‘Take me, Jesus! Take me to your loving heart!’ And it feels good to be praising Him again, so good I even forget I’m in a wood at midnight and the air becomes a little warmer. Everything’s gentle. Everything’s so gentle it seems we’re in a bright bed of summer flowers, all full of reds and yellows, with the suckle smelling sweet.
I ain’t much of a mover, but I shuffle about a bit, and I’m warming up to it cos it’s easier letting go when you’ve got your eyes closed. One moment I think I’m next to Lizzie and then maybe I’m with Mary – I feel her thighs brush up against me. Then Levi shouts out, ‘Save me, sweet Jesus, save me,’ and the others tell him, ‘Shushhhh!’ and he puts his hand upon my head and I feel the power of the Lord, right here in this wood like I used to at the orphanage, and I know He’s here for me, I know He’s here for all of us, like He never went away. And I’m crying for the love of God, crying like I ain’t cried for a long, long time, letting it all out, all the hurting and the worry and all the woes of the world, they all lift from my shoulders. ‘Save me, Jesus,’ I pray to the Lord. ‘Save me.’
Henry drags a cross out from under a bush and hammers it into the ground so it stands upright, about three feet high in the middle of our circle, and the sight of it shining in the moonlight gives us a whole new energy. We start clapping our hands softly and we whisper louder than ever. ‘Oh Jesus!’ We got our fingers in the air. ‘Oh Jesus!’ We’re pointing the way up to heaven and the moonlight don’t seem creepy any more, but it seems like it’s the light of God shining down upon us and I know the only spirit in these woods is the Holy Spirit and His hand protects us from the wolves as though we were a flock of sheep and He were our shepherd, though of course we left little Gil and Benjamin to keep a watch out – but even so, that’s how it feels.
Henry places his hand upon the top of the cross. ‘Jesus, hear my prayer,’ he calls out boldly, and the circle answers him, ‘Oh sweet Jesus, hear our prayers.’
‘I got to thinking the other day about them Israelites and how they had to wait so long till Moses delivered ’em from slavery.’
‘Tell us about Moses, Henry, tell us about that blessed journey.’
‘Well, those Israelites were the slaves to the Egyptians and they had suffered for so long, they couldn’t remember what it was like not to suffer. But when the time was right, God gave ’em Moses and he rose up among ’em and he led ’em through the wilderness …’
Lizzie takes hold of my hand. ‘Hallelujah!’ she shouts out, not caring whether it’s too loud, and we all shout out together, saying things like, ‘Take us through the wilderness! Take us to freedom, heavenly Lord Jesus! Take us to the promised land!’
Lizzie steps up into the circle and she calms us down to keep us quiet. ‘Show us the Good Book, Henry. Show us where Moses led his people ’cross the great sea, where the waves parted some to the left and the rest to the right.’
And Henry picks up his bag from the ground and he reaches inside and brings out a book, a great thick Bible with a cover of tanned leather, which he holds in the air. ‘I have marked the place where it is.’ He crouches beside the cross, rests the book on his knee and opens it up at a page whe
re the corner is as floppy as a rabbit’s ear and almost as soft.
Nancy holds the flickering pine torch as everyone gathers around to listen. I’m at the back, but I don’t mind, I don’t need to see the Bible, and I wait to hear the words of Exodus which I know so well, how Moses lifted his arm across the sea and brought the waters crashing down upon the Pharaoh and how the Israelites were delivered safely to the further shore.
No one says a word.
I move closer, thinking Henry must be speaking quietly, and I lean across the backs of Lizzie and Harriet, hoping to hear. But then I realize Henry ain’t reading to ’em at all. No. He’s pointing at a picture.
Lizzie sees me looking and she shifts, letting me in closer, and Henry lifts the book from his knees and puts a finger to the page of the illustrated family Bible. ‘Here you go, Friday. Look. That’s Moses right there, I’m sure it is. See how he holds that staff up to keep the sea from closing in? I’m sure that’s him.’
And I know it then for the first time, though I should have guessed before. There ain’t a man or a woman here who can read. Not one of ’em.
I reach for the book and Henry lets me take it. ‘You can touch the Good Book, Friday. Sure you can. You can put your finger on the face of ol’ Moses.’
But I begin to read out loud, using the light of the moon to guide my eyes. ‘When Pharaoh let the people go, God did not lead ’em by way of the land of the Philistines …’ I read it clearly, loud enough that everyone can hear me, and at first those slaves aren’t sure how I’m doing it. Maybe they think I’m good at remembering or that I’m telling ’em a story. But they see my eyes move along the written lines, sometimes squinting to make ’em out, and soon they realize I must be reading, though it’s little Gil who says what they’re thinking out loud. ‘Mama,’ he asks Lizzie, ‘is Friday reading?’
‘I doubt it, Gil.’ Lizzie looks at me with fear and respect when she answers him. ‘We ain’t allowed to read. You got to remember that.’
