“I know where your carriage is. But, sir, I won’t put down this rifle. I don’t think that would be wise. You can help him yourself.”
I went to where Percy sat and began to lift him up. Percy startled me by saying, “No, Tom, I don’t want to go to the carriage.”
“What do you mean?” the assailant asked, before I could pose the same question.
“Do you have a name?” Percy asked him.
“Ephraim,” the man said, reluctantly.
“Ephraim, my name is Percy Camber. What did you mean when you said your son was inside this barracks?”
“I don’t like to tell you that,” Ephraim said, shifting his gaze between Percy and me.
“Percy,” I said, “you need a doctor. We’re wasting time.”
He looked at me sharply. “I’ll live a while longer. Let me talk to Ephraim, please, Tom.”
“Stand off there where I can see you, sir,” Ephraim directed. “I know this man needs a doctor. I’m not stupid. This won’t take long.”
I concluded from all this that the family of wild Negroes the landlady had warned me about was real and that they were living in the sealed barn.
Why they should want to inhabit such a place I could not say.
I stood apart while Percy, wounded as he was, held a hushed conversation with Ephraim, who had shot him.
I understood that they could talk more freely without me as an auditor. I was a white man. It was true that I worked for Percy, but that fact would not have been obvious to Ephraim any more than it had been obvious to the dozens of hotelkeepers who had assumed without asking that I was the master, and Percy was the servant. My closeness to Percy was unique and all but invisible.
After a while Ephraim allowed me to gather up my photographic gear, which had been scattered in the crisis.
I had been fascinated by photography even as a child. It had seemed like such patent magic! The magic of stopped time, places and persons rescued from their ephemeral natures. My parents had given me books containing photographs of Indian elephants, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the natural wonders of Florida.
I put my gear together and waited for Percy to finish his talk with the armed lunatic who had shot him.
The high cloud that had polluted the sky all morning had dissipated during the afternoon. The air was still scaldingly hot, but it was a touch less humid. A certain brittle clarity had set in. The light was hard, crystalline. A fine light for photography, though it was beginning to grow long.
“Percy,” I called out.
“What is it, Tom?”
“We have to leave now, before the sun gets any lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passed through that town. Some rural bonesetter, probably, a doughty relic of the mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.
Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was, “We’re not finished here yet.”
“What do you mean, not finished?”
“We’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see Ephraim’s son.”
Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.
I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices? (Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?
“What is his name?” I asked. “This son of yours.”
“Jordan,” he said.
I had married Maggie not long after I got back from Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put into my business. But there was a vogue among young women of the better type for manly veterans. I was manly enough, I suppose, or at least presentable, and I was authentically a veteran. I met Maggie when she came to my shop to sit for a portrait. I escorted her to dinner. Maggie was fond of me; and I was fond of Maggie, in part because she had no political convictions or fierce unorthodox ideals. She took the world as she found it.
Elsebeth came along a year or so after the wedding. It was a difficult birth. I remember the sound of Maggie’s screams. I remember Elsebeth as a newborn, bloody in a towel, handed to me by the doctor. I wiped the remnant blood and fluid from her tiny body. She had been unspeakably beautiful.
Ephraim wore the key to the barn on a string around his neck. He applied it to the massive lock, still giving me suspicious glances. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm as he did this. He slid the huge door open. Inside, the barn was dark. The air that wafted out was a degree or two cooler than outside, and it carried a sour tang, as of long-rotten hay or clover.
Ephraim did not call out to his son, and there was no sound inside the abandoned barracks.
Had Ephraim once held his newborn son in his arms, as I had held Elsebeth?
The last of the Liberty Lodges were closed down in 1888. Scandal had swirled around them for years, but no sweeping legal action had been taken. In part this was because the Lodges were not a monolithic enterprise; a hundred independent companies held title to them. In part it was because various state legislatures were afraid of disclosing their own involvement. The Lodges had not proved as profitable as their founders expected; the plans had not anticipated, for instance, all the ancillary costs of keeping human beings confined in what amounted to a jail (guards, walls, fences, discipline, etc.) for life. But the utility of the Lodges was undisputed, and several states had quietly subsidized them. A “full accounting,” as Percy called it, would have tainted every government south of the Mason Dixon Line and not a few above it. Old wounds might have been reopened.
The Ritter Inquiry was called by Congress when the abuses inherent in the Lodge system began to come to light, inch by inch. By that time, though, there had been many other scandals, many other inquests, and the public had grown weary of all such issues. Newspapers, apart from papers like the Tocsin, hardly touched the story. The Inquiry sealed its own evidence, the surviving Lodges were hastily dismantled, and the general population (apart from a handful of aged reformers) paid no significant attention.
“Why dredge up all that ugliness?” Maggie had asked me.
Nobody wants to see those pictures, Elsebeth whispered.
Nobody but a few old scolds.
It was too dark in the immense barracks to be certain, but it seemed to me there was nobody inside but the three of us.
“I came here with Jordan in ’78,” Ephraim said. “Jordan was twelve years old at the time. I don’t know what happened to his mama. We got separated at the Federal camp on the Kansas border. Jordan and I were housed in different buildings.”
He looked around, his eyes abstracted, and seemed to see more than an old and ruined barracks. Perhaps he could see in the dark—it was dark in here, the only light coming through the fractionally open door. All I could see was a board floor, immaculately swept, picked out in that wedge of sun. All else was shadow.
He found an old crate for Percy to sit on. The crate was the only thing like furniture I could see. There was nothing to suggest a family resided here apart from the neatness, the sealed entrances and windows, the absence of bird dung. I began to feel impatient.
“You said your son was here,” I prompted him.
“Oh, yes, sir. Jordan’s here.”
“Where? I don’t see him.”
Percy shot me an angry look.
“He’s everywhere in here,” the madman said.
Oh, I thought, it’s not Jordan, then, it’s the spirit of Jordan, or some conceit like that. This barn is a shrine the man has been keeping. I had the unpleasant idea that Jordan’s body might be tucked away in one of its shadowed corners, dry and lifeless as an old Egyptian king.
“Or at least,” Ephraim said, “from about eight foot down.”
He found and lit a lantern.
One evening in the midst of our journey through the South I had got drunk and shared with Percy, too ebulliently, my idea that we were really very much alike.
This was in Atlanta, in one of the hotels that provides separate quarters for colored servants traveling with their employers. That was good because it meant Percy could sleep in relative comfort. I had snuck down to his room, which was little more than a cubicle, and I had brought a bottle with me, although Percy refused to share it. He was an abstinent man.
I talked freely about my mother’s fervent abolitionism and how it had hovered over my childhood like a storm cloud stitched with lightning. I told Percy how we were both the children of idealists, and so forth.
He listened patiently, but at the end, when I had finally run down, or my jaw was too weary to continue, he rummaged through the papers he carried with him and drew out a letter that had been written to him by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Mrs. Stowe is best remembered for her work on behalf of the China Inland Mission, but she came from an abolitionist family. Her father was the first president of the famous Lane Theological Seminary. At one point in her life she had attempted a novel meant to expose the evils of slavery, but she could not find a publisher.
Percy handed me the woman’s letter.
I have received your book “Every Measure Short of War,” the letter began, and it brings back terrible memories and forebodings. I remember all too distinctly what it meant to love my country in those troubled years and to tremble at the coming day of wrath.
“You want me to read this?” I asked drunkenly.
“Just that next part,” Percy said.
Perhaps because of your book, Mr. Camber, Mrs. Stowe wrote, or because of the memories it aroused, I suffered an unbearable dream last night. It was about that war. I mean the war that was so much discussed but that never took place, the war from which both North and South stepped back as from the brink of a terrible abyss.
In my dream that precipice loomed again, and this time there was no Stephen Douglas to call us away with concessions and compromises and his disgusting deference to the Slave Aristocracy. In my dream, the war took place. And it was an awful war, Mr. Camber. It seemed to flow before my eyes in a series of bloody tableaux. A half a million dead. Battlefields too awful to contemplate, North and South. Industries crippled, both the print and the cotton presses silenced, thriving cities reduced to smoldering ruins—all this I saw, or knew, as one sees or knows in dreams.
But that was not the unbearable part of it.
Let me say that I have known death altogether too intimately. I have suffered the loss of children. I love peace just as fervently as I despise injustice. I would not wish grief or heartbreak on any mother of any section of this country, or any other country. And yet—!
And yet, in light of what I have inferred from recent numbers of your newspaper, and from the letters you have written me, and from what old friends and acquaintances have said or written about the camps, the deportations, the Lodges, etc.,—because of all that, a part of me wishes that that war had indeed been fought if only because it might have ended slavery. Ended it cleanly, I mean, with a sane and straightforward liberation, or even a liberation partial and incomplete—a declaration, at least, of the immorality and unacceptability of human bondage—anything but this sickening decline by extinction, this surreptitious (as you so bitterly describe it) “cleansing.”
I suppose this makes me sound like a monster, a sort of female John Brown, confusing righteousness with violence and murder with redemption.
I am not such a monster. I confess a certain admiration for those who, like President Douglas, worked so very hard to prevent the apocalypse of which I dreamed last night, even if I distrust their motives and condemn their means. The instinct for peace is the most honorable of all Christian impulses. My conscience rebels at a single death, much less one million.
But if a War could have ended Slavery…would I have wished it? Welcomed it?
What is unbearable, Mr. Camber, is that I don’t know that I can answer my own horrifying question either honestly or decently. And so I have to ask: Can you?
I puzzled it out. Then I gave Percy a blank stare. “Why are you showing me this?”
“We’re alike in many ways, as you say, Tom. But not all ways. Not all ways. Mrs. Stowe asks an interesting question. Answering it isn’t easy. I don’t know your mind, but fundamentally, Tom, despite all the sympathies between us, the fact is, I suspect that in the end you might give the wrong answer to that question—and I expect you think the same of me.”
There was another difference, which I did not mention to Percy, and that was that every time I remarked on our similarities, I could hear my wife’s scornful voice saying (as she had said when I first shared the idea of this project with her), “Oh, Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’re nothing like that Percy Camber. That’s your mother talking—all that abolitionist guilt she burdened you with. As if you need to prove you haven’t betrayed the cause, whatever the cause is, exactly.”
Maggie failed to change my mind, though what she said was true.
“From about eight feet down,” Ephraim said cryptically, lifting the lantern.
Eight feet is as high an average man can reach without standing on something. Between eight feet and the floor is the span of a man’s reach.
“You see, sir,” Ephraim said, “my son and I were held in separate barracks. The idea behind that was that a man might be less eager to escape if it meant leaving behind a son or father or uncle. The overseers said, if you run, your people will suffer for it. But when my chance come I took it. I don’t know if that’s a sin. I think about it often.” He walked toward the nearest wall, the lantern breaking up the darkness as it swayed in his grip. “This barracks here was my son’s barracks.”
“Were there many escapes?” Percy asked.
I began to see that something might have been written on the wall, though at first it looked more like an idea of writing: a text as crabbed and indecipherable as the scratchings of the Persians or the Medes.
“Yes, many,” Ephraim said, “though not many successful. At first there was fewer guards on the gates. They built the walls up, too, over time. Problem is, you get away, where is there to go? Even if you get past these sandy hills, the country’s not welcoming. And the guards had rifles, sir, the guards had dogs.”
“But you got away, Ephraim.”
“Not far away. When I escaped it was very near the last days of Pilgassi Acres.” (He pronounced it Pigassi, with a reflexive curl of contempt on his lips.) “Company men coming in from Richmond to the overseer’s house, you could hear the shouting some nights. Rations went from meat twice a week to a handful of cornmeal a day and green bacon on Sundays. They fired the little Dutch doctor who used to tend to us. Sickness come to us. They let the old ones die in place, took the bodies away to bury or burn. Pretty soon we knew what was meant to happen next. They could not keep us, sir, nor could they set us free.”
“That was when you escaped?”
“Very near the end, sir, yes, that’s when. I did not want to go without Jordan. But if I waited, I knew I’d be too weak to run. I told myself I could live in the woods and get stronger, that I would come back for Jordan when I was more myself.”
He held the lantern close to the board wall of this abandoned barracks.
Percy was suffering more from his wound now than he had seemed to when he received it, and he grimaced as I helped him follow Ephraim. We stood close to the wild man and his circle of light, though not too close—I was still conscious of his rifle and of his willingness to use it, even if he was not in a killing mood right now.
The writing on the wall consisted of names. Hundreds of names. They chased each other around the whole of the barn in tight horizontal bands.
“I expect the overseers would have let us starv
e if they had the time. But they were afraid federal men would come digging around. There ought to be nothing of us left to find, I think was the reasoning. By that time the cholera had taken many of us anyhow, weak and hungry as we were, and the rest…well, death is a house, Mr. Camber, with many doorways. This is my son’s name right here.”
Jordan Nash was picked out by the yellow lantern light.
“Dear God,” said Percy Camber, softly.
“I don’t think God come into it, sir.”
“Did he write his own name?”
“Oh, yes, sir. A northern lady taught us both to read, back in the Missouri camp. I had a Bible and a copybook from her. I still read that Bible to this day. Jordan was proud of his letters.” Ephraim turned to me as if I, not Percy, had asked the question: “Most of these men couldn’t write nor read. Jordan didn’t just write his own name. He wrote all these names. Each and every one. A new man came in, he would ask the name and put it down as best he could. The list grew as we came and went. Many years’ worth, sir. All the prisoners talked about it, how he did that. He had no pencil or chalk, you know. He made a kind of pen or brush by chewing down sapling twigs to soften their ends. Ink he made all kind of ways. He was very clever about that. Riverbottom clay, soot, blood even. In the autumns the work crews drawing water from the river might find mushrooms which turn black when you picked them, and they brought them back to Jordan—those made fine ink, he said.”
The pride in Ephraim’s voice was unmistakable. He marched along the wall with his lantern held high so we could see his son’s work in all its complexity. All those names, written in the space between a man’s reach and the floor. The letters were meticulously formed, the lines as level as the sea. Some of the names were whole names, some were single names, some were the kind of whimsical names given to house servants. They all ran together, to conserve space, so that in places you had to guess whether the names represented one person or two.
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