When I done opened my eyes, the rain was just a memory: the sun was rising; the forest was silent and shrouded in mist. And I thought to myself, I have been dreaming, and I am still beside the creek where the dead bodies lay, and I never did see no old Joseph out of my past; but then I saw him frying up a bit of salt pork he done salvaged from the camp. Warn’t no morning bugle calls, and I reckon the company done up and gone in the middle of the night, soon as the storm subsided.
Old Joseph, the patch over his eye again, was singing to hisself, that song I heard as a child. And when he saw me stir, he said, “Marse Jimmy Lee, you awake now.”
“What is that song?” I asked him.
“It called ‘Au Claire de la Lune,’ honey: ‘by the light of the moon.’ ”
I sat up. “Joseph?”
“What, Marse Jimmy Lee?”
“Last night I had the strangest dream . . . more like a vision. I dreamed you were possessed, and you pranced about and waved your arms and sang songs in a African language, and you raised up nigger soldiers from the grave.”
“Life is a dream, honey,” he says, “we calls them les zombis. It from a Kikongo word, ‘nzambi,’ that mean a dead man that walk the earth.”
The fog began to clear a little and I saw their feet. Black feet, still shackled, still covered with chafing sores. We was surrounded by them. And as the sunlight began to dissipate the mist. I could see their faces; it was them which had been kilt and buried in the pit – I knew some of their faces. For though they stirred, they moved, they looked about them, there were no fire in their eyes, and didn’t have no breath in their nostrils. Mayhap they wasn’t dead, but they wasn’t alive, neither.
They stood there, looming over us. Each one with a wound clean through him. Each one smelling of old Joseph’s herbs.
“The magic still in me,” old Joseph said, “even without the coup poudre.”
I reckon I have never been more scared than I was then. My skin was crawling and my blood was racing.
“I never thought that old magic still in me,” said Joseph again. There was wonderment in his voice. No fear. The dead men surrounded us, waiting; seemed like they had no mind of their own.
“Oh, Joseph, what are we going to do?”
“Don’t know, white child. I’s still in the dark. The vision don’t come as clear to me no more; old Joseph he old, he old.”
He fed me and gave me genuine coffee to drink, for the slain Yankees had carried some with them. I rose and went over to the pit, and it were sure enough empty save for the two white officers. “Why didn’t you raise them too?” I said.
“Warn’t no sense in it, Marse Jimmy Lee. For white folks there is a heaven and a hell; there ain’t no middle ground. Best to forget them.”
So we threw dirt over them and we marched on, and the column of undead darkies followed us. I could not name the places that we passed, but old Joseph knew where he was going. It was toward the rising sun, so I guessed it was southeast.
At nightfall we rested. We found a farmhouse. There warn’t no people and the animals was all took away, but I found a ham a-hanging in the larder, and I feasted. In the night I slept in a real bed. Old Joseph sat out on the porch. The zombis did not sleep. They stood in a ring outside the house and swayed softly to the sound of Joseph’s singing. As I looked out of the smashed window I could see them in the moonlight; there was still no fire in their eyes, and I recollected that they hadn’t partaken of no victuals. What was it like to be a zombi? Iffen that the eyes are the windows of the soul, then surely there warn’t no souls inside those fleshy shells.
We found plenty of gold in the abandoned house; they done hid it in a well, which was surrounded by dead Yankees. I reckon they done poisoned it so that the Northerners wouldn’t be able to drink their water. But poison means naught to the dead.
And we walked on, and the passel of walking dead became a company, for wherever we went we found niggers that had been kilt, not just the ones in Yankee uniform but sometimes a woman lying dead in a ditch, or a young buck chained to a tree that was just abandoned and let starve to death when his masters fled from the enemy, and one time we found seven high-yaller children dead in a cage, with gunshot wounds to their heads; for they was frenzied times, and men were driven to acts not thought upon in times of peace. It was amongst the dead children that I found another cornstalk poupée like the one old Joseph gave me ten years before, a-sitting in a vial in the clenched fist of a dead little girl. After we done wakened them, she held it out to me, and I thought there were a glimmer in her eye, but mayhap it were only my imagination.
“Get up and walk,” old Joseph said. And they walked.
And I said over and over to him, “Old Joseph, where are we going?”
And he said, “Towards freedom.”
“But freedom is in the north, ain’t it?”
“Freedom in the heart, honey.”
We marched. For many days we didn’t see no white folks at all. We saw burned hulks of farms and stray dogs hunting in packs. We passed other great battlefields, and them that was worth reviving, that still had enough flesh on them to be able to march, old Joseph raised up. He was growing in power. It got so he would just wave his hands and say one or two words, and the dead man would climb right out of the ground. And I took to repeating the words to myself, soundlessly at first, just moving my lips; then softly, then – for when he were a-concentrating on his magic, he couldn’t see nothing of the world – I would shout out those words along with him, I would wrap my tongue around them twisted and barbarian sounds, and I would tell myself, ’twas I which raised them, I which reached into the abyss and drawed them out.
Still we encountered no sign of human life. The summer sun streamed down on us by day, and seemed like I sweat blood. It warn’t at all certain to me that we was still alive and on this earth, for the land was a wasteland, spite of the verdant meadows and the mountains blanketed with purple flowers, spite of the rich-smelling earth and the warm rain. Sometimes I think that the country we was wandering in was an illusion, a false Eden. Or that we was somehow half-in, half-out of the world.
Though I didn’t know where the road was leading, yet I was happy. I trusted old Joseph, and I didn’t have no one else left in the world. The only times I become sad was thinking on my pa and momma’s death, and wondering iffen my pa was with God now, for he said he done seen the face of God before I smashed his head. Sometimes I dreamed about coming home to see him well again. But they was only dreams. I knew that I had kilt him.
On the seventh day, we come onc’t more into the sight of living men.
The road become wider and we was coming into the vicinity of a town. I knew this was a port, maybe Charleston. There warn’t no signs to tell us, but Pa and I had been booted out of Charleston once; I remembered the way the wind smelt, wet and tangy. A few miles outside town, our road joined up with a wider road that come in a straight line from due north. On the other road, straggling down to meet us, we saw a company of graycoats.
Not many of them, maybe three dozen. They warn’t exactly marching. Some was leaning on each other, some hobbling, and one, a slip of a boy, tapped on the side of a skinless drum. Their clothes was in tatters and most of them didn’t have no rifles. They was just old men and boys, for the able-bodied had long since fallen.
They seen us, and one of them cried out, “Nigger soldiers!” They fell into a pathetic semblance of a formation, and them which had rifles aimed them, and them which had crutches brandished them at us.
I shouted out, “Let us pass . . . we don’t have no quarrel with you.” For they were wretched creatures, these remnants of the Southern army, and I was sure that the war was already lost and they was coming back to what was left of their homes.
But one boy, mayhap their leader, screamed at me, “Nigger lover! Traitor!” I looked in his eyes and saw we were just alike, poor trash fighting a rich man’s war, him and me; and I pitied the deluded soul. Because I knew now that there warn’t no
justice in this war, and that neither side had foughten for God, but only for hisself.
“It’s no use!” I shouted at the boy who was so like myself. “These darkies ain’t even alive; they’re shadows marching to the sea; they ain’t got souls to kill.”
And old Joseph said, “March on, my children.”
They commenced to fire on us.
This was the terriblest thing which I did witness on that journey. For the nigger soldiers marched and marched, and not a bullet could stop them. The miniés flew and the white boys shrieked out a ghostly echo of a rebel yell, and les zombis kept right on coming and coming, and me and old Joseph with them, untouched by the bullets, for his magic still shielded our mortal flesh. The niggers marched. Their faces was ripped asunder and still they marched. Their brains came oozing from their skulls, their guts came writhing from their bellies, and still they marched. They marched until they were too close for bullets. Then the white boys flung themselves at us, and they was ripped to pieces. They was tore limb from limb by dead men which stared with glazed and vacant eyes. It took but a few minutes, this final skirmish of the war. Their yells died in their throats. The zombis broke their necks and flung them to the ground. Their strength warn’t a human kind of strength. They’d shove their hands into an old man’s belly and snap his spine and pull out the intestines like a coil of rope. They’d take a rifle and break the barrel in two.
There was no anger in what the zombis done. And they didn’t make no noise whilst they was killing. They done it the way you might darn a sock or feed the chickens; it were just something which had to be done.
And we marched onward, leaving the bodies to rot; it was getting on toward sunset now.
Oh, I was angry. The boys we kilt warn’t no strangers from the North; they could have been my brothers. Oh, I screamed in rage at old Joseph. I didn’t trust him no more; the happiness had left me.
“Did you hear what he called me?” I shouted. “A traitor to my people. A nigger lover. And it’s God’s plain truth. If you wanted freedom, why didn’t you go north into the arms of the Yankees? You spoke to me of a big magic, and of the coils of the serpent Koulèv, and the wind of the gods, and the voices of darker angels . . . to what end? It were Satan’s magic, magic to give the dead an illusion of life, so you could kill more of my people!”
“Be still,” he said to me, as the church spires of the port town rose up in the distance. “Your war don’t be my war. You think the Yankees got theyselfs kilt to set old Joseph free? You think the ’mancipation proclamation was wrote to give the nigger back he soul? I say to you, white child, that a piece of paper don’t make men free. The black man in this land he ain’t gone be free tomorrow nor in a hundred years nor in a thousand. I didn’t bring men back from the outer darkness so they could shine you shoes and wipe you butts. The army I lead, he kingdom don’t be of this earth.”
“You are mad, old Joseph,” I said, and I wept, for he was no longer a father to me.
We marched into the town. Children peered from behind empty beer kegs with solemn eyes. Horses reared up and whinnied. Women stared sullenly at us. The Yankees had already took the town; half the houses was smoldering, and we didn’t see no grown men. The stars and stripes flew over the ruint courthouse. I reckon folks thought we was just another company of the conquering army.
We reached the harbor. There was one or two sailing ships docked there: rickety ships with tattered sails. The army of dead men stood at attention and old Joseph said to me: “Now I understands why you come with me so far. There a higher purpose to everything, ni ayé àti ni òrun.”
I didn’t want to stay with him anymore. When I seen the way les zombis plowed down my countrymen, I had been moved to a powerful rage, and the rage would not die away. “What higher purpose?” I said. And the salt wind chafed my lips.
“You think,” said old Joseph, “that old Joseph done tricked you, he done magicked you with mirrors and smoke; but I never told you we was fighting on the same side. But we come far together, and I wants you to do me one last favor afore we parts for all eternity.”
“And what sort of favor would that be, old sorcerer? I thought you could do anything.”
“Anything. But not this thing. You see, old Joseph a nigger. Nigger he can’t go into no portside bar to offer gold for to buy him a ship.”
“You want a ship now? Where are you fixing to go? Back to Haiti, where the white man rules no more?”
Old Joseph said, “Mayhap it a kind of Haiti where we go.” He laughed. “Haiti, yes, Haiti! And I gone see my dear mamman, though she be cold in her grave sixty year past. Or mayhap it mother Africa herself we go to. Oba kosó!”
And I remembered that he had told me: My kingdom is not of this earth. He had used the words of our savior and our Lord. Oh, the ocean wind were warm, and it howled, and the torn sails clattered against the masts. The air fair dripped with moisture. And the niggers stood like statues, all-unseeing.
“I’ll do as you ask,” I said, and I took the sack of gold we had gathered from the poisoned well, and I walked along the harbor until I found a bar and ship’s captain for hire, which was not hard, for the embargo had starved their business. And presently I come back and told old Joseph everything was ready. And the niggers lined up, ready to embark. Night was falling.
But as they prepared themselves to board that ship, I could hold my tongue no more. “Old Joseph,” I said, “your kingdom is founded on a lie. You have waked these bodies from the earth, but where are their souls? You may dream of leading these creatures to a mystic land acrosst the sea, and you may dream of freeing them forever from the bonds of servitude, but how can you free what can’t be freed? How can you free a rock, a tree, a piece of earth? Dust they were and dust they ever shall be, world without end.”
And the zombi warriors stood, unmoving and unblinking, and not a breath passed their lips, though that the wind was rising and whipping at our faces.
And old Joseph looked at me long and hard, and I knew that I had said the thing that must be said. He whispered, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, O Lord.” He fell down on his knees before me and said, “And all this time I thought that I the wise one and you the student! Oh, Marse Jimmy Lee, you done spoke right. There be no life in les zombis because I daresn’t pay the final price. But now I’s gone make that sacrifice. Onc’t I done gave my eye in exchange for knowledge. But there be two trees in Eden, Marse Jimmy Lee; there be the tree of knowledge, and there be the tree of life.”
So saying he covered his face with his hands. He plunged his thumb into the socket of his good eye and he plucked it out, screaming to almighty God with the pain of it. His agony was real. His shrieking curdled my blood. It brought back my pa’s chastisements and my momma’s dying and the tramping of my bare feet on sharp stones and the sight of all my comrades, pierced through by bayonets, cloven by cannon, their limbs ripped off, their bellies torn asunder, their lives gushing hot and young and crimson into the stream. Oh, but II craved to carry his pain, but he were the one that were chosen to bear it, and I was the one which brung him to the understanding of it.
And now his eye were in his hand, a round, white, glistening pearl, and he cries out in a thunderous voice, “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out!” and he takes blind aim and hurls the eye with all his might into the mighty sea.
I clenched the poupée in my hand.
Then came lightning, for old Joseph had summoned the power of the serpent Koulèv, whose coils were entwined about the earth. Then did he unleash the rain. Then did he turn to me, with the gore gushing from the yawning socket, and cry to me, a good-for-nothing white trash boy which kilt his own father and stole from the dead, “Thou hast redeemed me.”
Then, and only then, did I see the zombis smile. Then, as the rain softened, as the sky did glow with a cold blue light that didn’t come from no sun nor moon, then did I hear the laughter of the dead, and the fire of life begin to flicker in their eyes. B
ut they was already trooping up the gangplank, and presently there was only the old man, purblind now and like to die. I thought.
“Farewell,” he says to me.
And I said, “No, old Joseph. You are blind now. You need a boy to hold your hand and guide you, to be your eyes against the wild blue sea.”
“Not blind,” he said. “I chooses not to see. I gone evermore be looking inward, at the glory and the majesty of eternal light.”
“But what have I? Where can I go, excepting that I go with you?”
“Honey, you has lived but fourteen of your threescore and ten. It don’t be written that you’s to follow a old man acrosst the sea to a land that maybe don’t even be a land save in that old man’s dream. Go now. But first you gone kiss your beau-père goodbye, for I loves you.”
My tears were brine and his were blood. As I kissed his cheek, the salt did run together with the crimson. I saw him no more; I did not see the ship sail from the port, for my eyes was blinded with weeping.
So I walked and walked until I come back to the Jackson place. The mansion were a cinder, and even the fields was all burnt up, and the animals was dead. The place was looted good and thorough; warn’t one thing of value in the vicinity, not a gold piece nor a silver spoon nor even the rugs that the Jacksons done bought from a French merchant.
I walked up the low knoll to where the nigger graveyard was and where our shack onc’t stood. The wooden markers was all charred, and here and there was a shred of homespun clinging to them. I thought to myself, mayhap the Yankees come down to the Jackson place not an hour after I done run away, whilst the slaves was still a-singing their spirituals. That cloth was surely torn off some of the slave women, for the Yankees loved to have their way with darkies. And I thought, mayhap my pa is still laying inside that shack, in the inner room, beside the locket with Mamma’s picture, with his hickory in his fist, with his britches down about his ankles.
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