The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He'd been hungry and frightened, all those nights and weeks up from Halifax County. But he was hungry here and—though he didn't like to admit it to himself—frightened too, in a different fashion that he couldn't describe. In the woods at least there was peace.

  He was concentrating so hard on remembering all the turns and streets he'd taken that he didn't even notice the little group of young white men until they crossed the street to surround him.

  They were dressed roughly, wool trousers and coarse calico shirts powdered all over with dust. They wore thick boots and slouch hats and two of them carried whips, the long blacksnake kind that teamsters used. When two of them pointed at him he hastily sprang off the footpath into the ditch—they were in a street of rough little houses not too far from the camps on the edge of town, small unpaved streets darting with half-naked white children who screamed in a language John had never heard.

  But the stockiest of the young men moved to block his way: “What you doin' hereabouts, then, boy-o?” He shoved John hard on the shoulder, so that he staggered and almost fell.

  “I'm lookin' for work, sir.” John lowered his eyes, his heart pounding. He'd had to do with few enough white men in his short life and they always scared him, for they had power and a cruel need to prove their power to anyone around them.

  “You a runaway, then, boy-o?” The white youth wasn't much older than John, nor were any of his friends, but he was squat and stocky, with hair the color of a fox and tawny eyes that seemed yellow against the mask of dust. His body stank of sweat and his breath of liquor.

  “No, sir. My ol' Miss, she died, an'—”

  Without change of expression the young man slashed him across the face with the rolled-up whip. “Don't you be lyin' to me, boy.”

  John staggered back, and one of the others must have come around behind him and tripped him. His memories weren't clear after that. A boot cracked into his ribs and another into the soft meat below them, and he curled himself together, clenched his thighs to protect his balls and wrapped his arms around his head. He heard someone shout something about going back to where he came from. Weeks later he remembered seeing a Union soldier stroll over across the street to them with his rifle, but he never did remember the actual blow that knocked him cold.

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, YOUNG MAN?” A SMALL, GENTLE HAND BRUSHED his forehead. A white lady's voice, with the honeyed inflection of the South.

  Even before he opened his eyes the midday light went through his skull like an ax.

  He mumbled, “I'm fine, ma'am,” out of the sheer habit of never admitting to a white that there was a problem—you never knew what they'd choose to do about it. But when he opened his eyes the pain in his skull cleft him down to his belly, and he rolled over fast, feeling bile flood up his throat, drowning him.

  He tried to roll away; the movement only made it worse. Vomit exploded from his lips like the seeds from a squished tomato. The woman was sitting on the ground beside him with her black skirts spread around her and she got a lapful—How the hell can I throw up so much when I ain't eaten anything?

  Then he was heaving helplessly, conscious of nothing except those small hands holding him steady, agony in his ribs with every spasm, and the smell of vomit that seemed to fill the world.

  He sank back to the rough blanket spread on the ground, whispering frantically, “I'm sorry, ma'am, I'm so sorry—I didn't mean it....” Mr. Henry at Blue Hill had beaten a servant for passing wind while waiting at table. John knew perfectly well that white ladies—particularly Southern ladies—did not appreciate niggers vomiting on their skirts.

  “Good heavens, don't be silly,” she said briskly. Beneath the overwhelming halitus of the vomit he smelled the musk-rose sachet in her clothing as she leaned around him with a wet kerchief, and wiped his mouth and chin.

  He opened his eyes, and met her worried gaze, the most beautiful shade of green-touched blue he'd ever seen, like the heart of a flower.

  And genuinely concerned that he was all right.

  He looked away at once—Mr. Henry would box a pickaninny's ears for being “uppity,” i.e., looking a white in the face—but this woman only went on briskly, “If anyone owes me an apology it's the louts who did this to you. Lizabet...thank you.”

  She held out a tin cup of water to him and in taking it he immediately upset it all over her tightly corseted bosom. She rocked back but caught the cup deftly—“Oh, dear, you did take a bad hit, didn't you?”—and put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Do you want to lie down again?”

  “No, ma'am. Thank you, ma'am.” He glanced shyly up again at her face, her tone of matter-of-fact friendliness sponging away his fear and his shame. He saw a square, motherly face with a short nose and a determined chin, older than her girlish voice would lead you to think—his mother's age at least and probably more. The flesh around those beautiful eyes was discolored with sleeplessness, netted with fine lines of grief and pain, and he saw she wore the black of deepest mourning.

  “I'm all right now, ma'am.”

  A woman leaned down behind her with another cup of water.

  “Thank you, Lizabet. Shall we try this again?” And she gave John an encouraging smile as he took the second cup.

  They were under the shelter of an Army marquee. John could see the sloped weedy wall of the fort nearby, yellowing in the autumn heat. It was nearly midday. It had been growing dark when he had been jumped. Lizabet, who had handed down the second cup, was a tall creamy-dark mulatto woman. In Virginia, John would have guessed her to be a housekeeper or uppermost lady's maid, but she was too elegantly dressed in clothes that obviously weren't her dumpling-shaped friend's cast-offs. In a lovely low alto Lizabet said, “He was brought in last night, beaten up by some Irish teamsters, and at least one soldier.” She handed her white friend a damp towel to wipe her skirts.

  John didn't remember the soldier, but he touched gingerly the pounding nexus of pain on the left side of his forehead and felt a bandage there. His face felt puffy as a blown-up bladder; his ribs and belly ached from blows.

  “Even before the fighting brought refugees into town, the Irish seemed to think every black man a personal threat to their livelihood,” Lizabet added in a voice like cold bitter coffee.

  The white woman turned back to John, shocked. “Is what Mrs. Keckley says true?”

  “Yes, ma'am,” said John, sitting up—cautiously—and sipping the water. “But I wasn't askin' for a job drivin' no team, I swear. Just cuttin' wood or somethin' so's I could get a little food.” His hands shook so badly he spilled the water he held, and his left eye was swollen almost shut. His clothes stank of the ditch where he'd been knocked down. “I didn't start nuthin'.”

  The marquee around them seemed to be jammed with people, with more pressing in around its open sides. Three or four women at the other end of the big shelter dipped flour and cornmeal and cups of beans from sacks on a rough table before them. They, like the elegant Lizabet Keckley, were people of color, mostly lighter-skinned than the runaways—the contrabands, the soldiers had called them—who shoved each other to get near them, holding out dishes and gourds and empty sacks to receive the food.

  “Well, I should hope not,” said the white lady briskly. “If you had started something with a gang of Irish teamsters and an armed soldier I should be obliged to question your sanity. It's a complete disgrace, Lizabet. Something must be done about it! I'm sure this boy...What's your name, son?”

  “John,” he said. “John Wilamet.”

  “And I am Mrs. Lincoln,” she told him, holding out a small gloved hand to shake. “I'm sure John here could do as good a job driving horses as any of those Irish louts.” She scrubbed at her fouled skirt with the matter-of-fact touch that made John guess that she'd nursed the sick before—and in spite of the stylish cut of her mourning dress, that she'd washed clothes, too. “Do you have family here, John?”

  “Yes, ma'am—Mrs. Lincoln.” At least the name was easy to remember, for it was the same on
e as the Union President whose election Mr. Henry had gotten so worked up about last year. John wondered if she was any relation, though he couldn't imagine how she could be. She was very much a Southern lady. She would have been much more at home among the friends of Mr. Henry's wife Miss Daphne, he thought, than in this Northern place looking after him. “My mama, and the girls an' Isaac. They'll be worried about me. I left 'em yesterday afternoon, under a tree out by the sheep-pens....”

  “You rest for a few minutes more, then, dear, and let me know when you're feeling well enough to get up. I'll see you back there. I'm sure your dear mother—oh!” Her head snapped sharply around at the sound of rising voices from the food-tables.

  A man—a contraband—was thrusting his gourd back at one of the serving women, shaking it about angrily, demanding more. At the sight of this, Mrs. Lincoln's eyes flared with abrupt fury. “Oh, this is ridiculous! I've told them about keeping order here!”

  She got to her feet with surprising speed for a lady of her girth and swept in the direction of the tables, hoops and drapes and ribbons all flouncing like a peony in a tempest. “I told that Mrs. Durham that it was no good handing things out piecemeal like this, not that anyone ever listens to me....”

  John sat up, watching in a kind of horrified fascination, as his stout little friend thrust her way into the middle of the altercation between contraband and server. The nearly instantaneous change in her, from worried kindliness to hot rage, was so total as to be shocking.

  Another woman of color, neatly clothed in blue-and-white calico, had already come over to speak to the angry contraband, but Mrs. Lincoln pushed between them. “Stop that at once! You should be grateful you're getting anything at all, rather than demanding more!” When the woman in blue—presumably Mrs. Durham—spoke quietly to her, Mrs. Lincoln whirled upon her.

  “Let you handle it? I've let you handle the whole of this distribution, and to what end? Nothing organized properly, people shoving in any old how...” She positively spit the words, her small black-gloved hands balled into fists. “If you'd done as I suggested and worked through the Army, I daresay in time I could have gotten men in my husband's Cabinet to improve the allotment. I know men in Congress, and I daresay I'm not without some influence, in spite of what people like you seem to think. But instead we have only this piddling tent, and people thrusting in as if they owned the whole concern....”

  “The only one who's acting as if she owned the whole concern,” retorted Mrs. Durham, her voice arctic, “is you, Mrs. Lincoln.”

  “How dare you!” Mrs. Lincoln's face went from blotchy red to a furious pallor. “Mrs. Durham—if that is your name, and I daresay I've often wondered why there isn't a Mr. Durham anywhere in sight...”

  By this time John was on his feet and almost to her side, heedless of the pain jabbing his ribs. He acted without thinking, recognizing with deadly accuracy in her voice, in her stance, in the narrow blazing focus of her eyes, the echo of his own mother's flash-fire rages. Mrs. Keckley was right beside him, reaching out to touch Mrs. Lincoln's swagged black sleeve before the outraged Mrs. Durham could collect her breath to respond.

  “Mrs. Lincoln,” Lizabet said, and John put in,

  “Mrs. Lincoln, 'scuse me, ma'am, but I feel well enough if you'd take me on back to my family now.”

  Her blind momentum broken, Mrs. Lincoln stopped, gasping, seemingly dazed by the onslaught of her own emotions. Mrs. Keckley flashed John a grateful look and put in gently, “Come, Mrs. Lincoln, we must help this young man.”

  For a moment it was touch and go whether she'd respond—whether she'd even heard them—for she was trembling with anger. But she blinked, and looked again at John's ashy face, and the hot wrath in her eyes changed to concern.

  “Of course,” she said, her voice uncertain. “Of course, poor boy...”

  As if it were the most natural thing in the world—as if she were one of his own aunties back at Blue Hill instead of a white lady in an expensive dress—she took his arm and put it around her shoulder to take some of his weight. Exhausted, discouraged, and hungry—and sick with the sense of having once more failed to meet his mother's expectations—John could have wept at her kindness.

  As they made their way through the crowded tents and makeshift shelters of the contraband camp, Mrs. Lincoln alternated between watchful concern for John and leftover fulminations concerning Mrs. Durham: “The impudence of the woman! Who does she think she is?”

  Lizabet nodded and made gentle noises that neither agreed nor disagreed, from which John deduced that Mrs. Keckley was also used to this abrupt transformation from lady to Gorgon and back. And whatever the right and the wrong of the matter was, Mrs. Keckley clearly valued her volatile friend too much to sever the relationship.

  “Obviously she regards herself as cleverer than a mere smatterer like myself, who has only been around men organizing major military and political campaigns. I—” Mrs. Lincoln broke off, pressed her hand to the bridge of her nose. When she took it away her eyes had lost their glitter, and seemed to see him again. “Are you quite sure you can walk, John? You look dreadful.”

  John felt dreadful, struggling to stay on his feet. But what he felt mostly was deep gratitude for her care and friendship at what was probably the nadir of his short life, coupled with awed fascination. Later, looking back on the incident, he was never sure what shook him up more: that this snub-nosed, haunted-eyed Southern belle, who could show such kindness one moment and such termagant fury the next, was in fact the wife of the notorious President Lincoln—

  —or that she was quite clearly as crazy as his mother.

  JOHN SAW MRS. LINCOLN MANY TIMES DURING THAT BITTER COLD winter of 1862.

  She often came to the contraband camp with Elizabeth Keckley—who, Cassy told him a few days after their first encounter, was her dressmaker and one of the most prominent free colored residents of Washington City. Mrs. Keckley had helped found the Freedmen's Relief Association, and had enlisted her friend and employer to help her distribute food and blankets, to find homes for the runaways who continued to flood into Washington City, and jobs they could work at to earn their keep.

  John quickly became a sort of page for Mrs. Lincoln when she came. He ran her errands, or helped her unload the bundles of blankets and clothing that she would collect from the wives of Senators, Cabinet members, and officers. Long experience in dealing with his own mother had given John the knack of letting her quick, spit-cat angers slide off his back; had taught him how to talk her out of her rages when it seemed that she did not know or care what words came out of her mouth.

  “I really don't know what gets into me,” she said, upon one occasion when she returned to the camp a few days after an outburst directed at the commander of Fort Barker that had finished with her departing in tears. “I hear myself saying these terrible things, see myself...it's almost like watching someone else.” She made a quick gesture as if pushing the memory away. “So mortifying...”

  Mrs. Keckley put a hand on her shoulder as if to say that she understood. But in fact John guessed that the quiet-voiced, supremely reasonable seamstress didn't understand, any more than he understood why his mother would rant and shriek at total strangers—or, worse, at people who could do her harm if annoyed. They were standing beside Mrs. Lincoln's carriage, a handsome open barouche, in which Mrs. Lincoln had brought clothing collected for the camp children: John guessed that without the necessity of delivering these, she wouldn't have come at all.

  “But the Commander really was at fault,” Mrs. Lincoln declared, rallying. “He had no call to speak to me as he did and certainly no call to question my judgment about shelter for the contrabands. He just wants to save himself trouble. If he could find a way not to provide shelter for his own soldiers here he'd prefer that, too. Or food...‘Surely the men could just go into town for their suppers.'” She aped the Commander's pinched Maine accent with such devastating accuracy that both John and Mrs. Keckley dissolved into laughter.

&n
bsp; Later in the winter, when John's little brother, Isaac, fell ill with fever, Mrs. Lincoln helped care for him in the rude shack on M Street that the family occupied. She brought him meat and milk unobtainable in the camp, and when Isaac died, she wept so bitterly that Cassy had to lead her outside, for her stricken wailings only fanned their mother's howling grief.

  Later, Lizabet Keckley told John this was because Mrs. Lincoln had only recently lost her own son—and indeed, John noticed, when he next saw Mrs. Lincoln at a troop review with the tall, gawky President, that her husband, too, wore the black of deepest grief.

  In the spring the armies began to move. Mrs. Lincoln found John a job with an Army surgeon in General Ord's corps. By that time his family was living with a free colored family named Gordon, in a tiny cottage not far from the unfinished Capitol Building: the Gordons had taken in five other contrabands already and the house was bursting at the seams.

  At sixteen, John was small and wiry, but working for Dr. Brainert was less physically taxing than picking tobacco leaves for seventeen hours a day. He and the sturdy, red-faced surgeon got along well.

  John still had blinding headaches, especially in cold weather, and the cut he'd taken from the rifle-butt had healed to a curved scar that pulled one eyebrow to a peak and turned his thin, clerkish face oddly ferocious.

  He was in Richmond two years later, when President Lincoln came by steamboat to view the captured Southern capital.

  Never, in after years, did John forget the host of men, women, children, former slaves—wearing the ragged garments that were all their masters could afford to give them in these days of privation and defeat—pressing up around the President's horse as he rode with his Generals through the rubble of bricks, the soot-black broken walls. Women held up their babies for Lincoln to touch, as if he were a god in one of the books John had begun so voraciously to read. Men struggled through the crush to grasp his boots in the stirrups.

  Everything seemed vividly clear to John that day, for he'd recently gotten his first pair of spectacles from the Army, and was still dazzled at being able to distinguish leaves on trees, the letters in his books, the faces of people at a distance with such magical, crystalline brightness. He had glimpsed Mr. Lincoln often at Headquarters—a gangly, almost comical figure, cracking his knuckles as he slouched in a camp-chair with his feet on the table, telling funny stories in that high husky scratchy voice. But today that tall man looked grave and a little shaken, as if shocked by light streaming in from the opened doors of the future, light that only he could see. He had made all these people free, John thought, watching the tall black figure over the heads of the crowd. Had given them not only the rights, but the terrible burdens of the free. That responsibility would rest on his bony shoulders forever.