Silent Thunder

by Andrea Pinkney

  I could hear the disgust in Parnell’s voice. He went on in a flurry. “It’s bad enough that Confederate forces are letting slaves get into the thick of the fighting, but the thought of coloreds using bullets and cannonballs on behalf of the Union makes me queasy. It’s a wonder I can sleep at night knowing the Yanks are fortifying their efforts with black hands.”

  That’s when I heard Master Gideon clear his throat. It was as if he were about to make some big announcement. But when he spoke again, he spoke real low, real soft, not like he was hiding his words, but like he was ashamed of what he was about to say. “But I’ll say this—and I’ll only say this to you, Horace, seeing as we’ve known each other since the cradle—even if them nigra soldiers are falling all over themselves, at least they’re in the war, and that’s more than I can say for my own flesh and blood. Imagine it, coloreds to arms!”

  I could hear Doc Bates closing up his medicine bag. “Don’t put yourself into a dander about it, Gideon. Worrying doesn’t solve anything.”

  Doc Bates and Master Gideon passed Dash’s stall, where I was making like my hay-pitching was serious business. The two men didn’t so much as glance in my direction. Doc Bates had a hand on Parnell’s hefty shoulder. “Marlon will be just fine so long as you keep him active. If the colic persists, feed him a little mineral oil.”

  I peered through the barn slats, watching the doctor and Master Gideon make their way back toward the entrance road to Parnell’s place. “I wish you had a potion in that bag that could cure my boy,” Master Gideon said.

  “A healthy dose of kindness can work wonders for a sickly child. Talk to your boy, Gideon. It sure can’t hurt him.”

  Parnell shrugged. Doc Bates mounted his horse. Master Gideon gave the horse a gentle hind-slap, and watched the doctor ride away.

  All’s I could think on then was what I’d seen in Harper’s Weekly, about black men being allowed to enlist in the Union army, and gaining their freedom once they did. Even though Gideon had gone on and on about Southern black troops who were not free, the master’s protest was the promise of possibilities.

  “Imagine it, coloreds to arms!”

  5

  Summer

  September 10, 1862

  ROSCO AND I FINALLY GOT to starting on our lessons. We met behind the quarters, right before dusk, near the cypress tree. I slid my book from the croaker sack where I’d been keeping it hid. “This here’s the best present ever, Rosco,” I said. “You know what the master told me ’bout books when I went to see him on my birthday?”

  I was all ready to tell Rosco everything about this year’s visit with the master, when he held out a hand to shush me.

  “We ain’t here to talk about that,” he said. Rosco lifted the book from my hands. He pushed it back down in its sack. “Put this away,” he said. “We need to start with explaining, before we get to full-out book learning.”

  “But, Ros—” A swell of disappointment started to rise in my belly. I’d been touching on my book’s pages—and feeling the hardness of its cover under my head at night—long enough!

  “Hold your horses, Summer.” Rosco put a little squeeze on my arm. “Like Mama’s always tellin’ us, we got to take first things first.” Then Rosco said, “Show me your leg, high up.”

  “Ros!” I was gettin’ all up-jumpy. “You playing a trick on me? ’Cause if you are, it ain’t no bit funny!”

  Rosco’s face was serious. “This is no silly foolin’, Summer. It’s our first lesson in letters. Now, slide your skirt up so’s I can see where your leg meets your hipbone.”

  I knew Rosco would never wrong me. He was as honest as the sun (well, he was mostly honest, ’cept for when it came to swiping books and tablet paper). And sometimes he had a strange way of explaining things. “All right, Ros.” I agreed. “I’ll lift my skirt, but I’m stopping soon as I get to my unders,” I said firmly, sliding my skirt.

  “Okay, that’s good.” Rosco held up his palms. “Now, what you see there?”

  I was truly confused. “All’s I see is my leg, sitting out like a prime target for a hungry mosquito looking for some flesh to chew on,” I huffed. “This is a silly way to learn to read, Ros!”

  “Keep looking,” was all Rosco said.

  I stared down at my knee and started to fidget. Then Rosco pointed to the old scar up near my hip. He said, “Learning to read starts with letters. You got your own letter right on you. It’s the sixteenth letter of twenty-six. The letter P.”

  I touched the spot on my thigh where the skin was puckered and raised and dark. “I been having that old scar on me since forever, Ros. That don’t look a thing like what I seen on young Master Lowell’s learning book. Why are you bluffing me so, Ros?” I clicked my tongue.

  “You got that scar from the master himself. I got me one, too.” Rosco yanked down the top of his britches to show me a hip scar that looked just like mine: P.

  Then he yanked up his drawers and folded his arms tight in front of him. “P is the first letter of the master’s family name— Parnell. It’s a brand that tells people Parnell owns us. I’ve had my brand forever, too, Summer. We both got ours when we was babies, too little to remember the sore.”

  My skirt was still up to my hip. I studied the scar— the brand, the P—on my leg. “Sore?” I asked.

  “The burn sore,” Rosco said. “White people take a red-hot iron and burn the brands right into us, like we’s their animals.”

  “Mama got a brand—a P—too?” I asked.

  Rosco nodded. “Every slave on this place got a P— Mama, Clem, Thea.”

  My mind was back to racing with all those pretty letters from Lowell’s lesson book. I wanted to be looking at them, not at some old natty scar on my leg. Even if the scar—the brand— was a letter, I sure didn’t see the same beauty in it as I saw when I looked at them curlies in my book. I slid my skirt down over my leg, back to where it belonged. Rosco must have sensed my jumpiness. He took up my book from where it had been resting in the dirt and opened it to the front. I could feel my impatience start to ease. As soon as Rosco turned open my book, I let my eyes dance along the curves of them fancy letters on the book’s inside cover, the ones made with quill ink. “Beautiful,” I whispered. “What’s it say, Ros?”

  “Says Lowell Farnsworth Parnell. That’s young Master Lowell’s full name.”

  “All them swirls for Lowell?”

  “Somebody—maybe Lowell himself—wrote it all out in the finest ink,” Rosco explained.

  “It swirls like the pattern on Missy Claire’s china.” I was staring hard at Lowell’s name, taking it in. “Young master sure is lucky to have his name lookin’ so fine,” I said softly.

  Rosco turned to my book’s first page. There stood that pretty row of letters, staring back at us.

  “You see this?” Rosco ran his finger along the bottom of the row.

  “It looks like a parade. A happy parade, all lined up for a march,” I said.

  “This here’s the alphabet. It’s all the letters that make words.”

  Now I was touching the book, but not with just my finger. I was rubbing on it with the whole palm of my hand. “What does all this parade of letters say?”

  “The alphabet’s not a word, Summer. But you can take it apart—take two or three or four or ten letters from the alphabet, put ’em together in all kinds of different ways, and make a whole mess of words.”

  I turned through the pages of my lesson book, showing Rosco how the letters, and words, and alphabet danced when I fanned the pages real fast. “Let’s put some letters together—now, Ros.” A bunch of lesson time had gone by already, and I still didn’t know one iota ’bout how to read!

  Rosco said, “Words’ll come, Summer.” Then he turned back to the place in my book that held the parade of letters, the alphabet. “You see anything here that looks like your brand scar?” he asked.

  I studied the letters from front to back, and back again. Some letters were tall and lean, others round and fat.
One was sharp and pointed, like the tip of the paring knife Mama used to peel apples for a pie. I didn’t see nothing that looked like my leg scar—like mine and Rosco’s scar.

  “It ain’t here,” I said.

  “Keep looking,” Rosco encouraged. “If you ever gonna learn to read, you first got to learn to stick with it when it starts gettin’ hard.”

  I nodded. “All right, Ros, but I just don’t see nothin’ that looks anything like—” and before my impatience got the best of me, I saw the letter—the P—standing right up in the middle of the alphabet parade. “There it is, Ros!”

  “What I tell you?” Rosco said.

  That P was just as proud. It was nestled between two circles; one of the circles had a line poking out from it. “That’s how my leg must’ve looked sticking out to the right, from my dress, ready for a mosquito to bite it,” I said, pointing to that round, one-legged letter.

  “That’s Q comes after P, in the alphabet,” Rosco explained.

  “Q” I repeated, tracing the letter with my finger.

  “What words can you make with a Q and a P?” I wanted to know.

  “Ain’t no words you can make with just a P and just a Q. You need other letters woven between the two of them before they can be turned into a word.”

  Fireflies had begun to spark the darkness. “We best get back to the quarters, Summer. Thea’s gonna be starting evening prayers soon.”

  “But I don’t know nothin’ ’bout reading yet, Ros,” I protested, turning through the pages of my book a second time. “All’s I know is what a P and a Q look like, and them two letters together don’t even make no words.”

  Rosco clapped his hand onto my shoulder, same way I seen him do to Dash when Dash gets riled up. “Girl, you jumpin’ past the gate too fast,” Rosco said. “Remember, it took me a long time of studying that book before I could even know a few little bitty words.”

  “But—” I began.

  “But nothin’,” Rosco interrupted. “Tonight at prayers you need to ask whoever it is Thea prays to to put some kind of patience in you.” Rosco stood and held out a hand to help me up off the grass. “And pray to calm that flutter-bug that’s batting at you.” Rosco started to walk toward the quarters. I followed after him quickly.

  “There ain’t no flutter-bug batting at me, either! I got me plenty of patience,” I snapped.

  As we made our way back to the quarters, Rosco promised me that we’d stick with our lessons, that we’d meet under the cypress tree every time we could both steal away without anybody knowing we were gone. I could see the glow of Mama’s prayer candle coming through the burlap that hung at the door of our cabin. The burlap was there to let in any little bit of night breeze that might float by, and to keep the bugs outside, away from where we slept. Mama’s candle grew brighter as we walked.

  Rosco and I each drifted into our own private thoughts. I was still itching to know more letters, but the two that I had just learned were enough to ring inside me like a happy little play-song: P~Q~P . . . Q~P~Q . . . P~Q~P . . .

  6

  Rosco

  September 11, 1862

  IT WAS GONNA TAKE A MIRACLE to teach Summer to read. She was so eager to get letters and words in her head all at once that she wasn’t paying full attention, and she wasn’t learning nothin’. If she wasn’t my sister, I’d have told her that I didn’t have no time to waste trying to teach an addle-head.

  And Summer talked way too much. After our lesson, soon as we got back to the quarters, she was all set to start bragging to Mama about her Q’s and P’s. She was ready to announce to every slave on Parnell’s place that I was giving her book lessons. But I shushed her with a single cut of my eyes, and she swallowed back her excitement. It was a good thing I had taken her book from her. She’d have been waving it right up under Master Gideon’s nose if I’d let her keep it. My backbone went cold just to think about the trouble Summer could have brought with her restlessness.

  This morning I was at the blacksmith shack with Clem, helping him keep the irons’ fire alive. “You know anything ’bout coloreds fighting in the war?” I asked cautiously.

  Clem looked at me sideways. “Maybe so, maybe not,” was all he said. Clem was good at not letting on that he had know-how about certain things. When he didn’t want to let go of what he knew, he said stuff like, “Could be.” Or, “It’s possible.” Or, “That’s a question for the heavens.” Sometimes, Clem didn’t answer at all; he just shrugged. That’s when I knew to back away from badgering him.

  But when Clem answered me with a “Could be,” or an “It’s possible,” it was because he wanted to see how much I knew before he committed himself to sharing any information he had tucked in his back pocket.

  Clem hadn’t always been as short on words as he was now. Just last summer he was serious in love with Marietta, a girl who lived nearby on the Johnston plantation. I never saw a man more giddy than Clem when Marietta came to Parnell’s with her mistress to visit Missy Claire. Clem even got dreamy-eyed when he talked ’bout Marietta (and he talked ’bout her— ’bout her pretty honey-colored skin and her true understanding of how to grow flowers and harvest berries—all the time). Talked about Marietta like she was some kind of queen. He even used to call her Queen Etta, a nickname he let roll off his lips every chance he got. Heck, whenever I was fetching water from Parnell’s well, I secretly wished that when I got to be Clem’s age—he was sixteen, three years more than me—I’d be lucky enough to find me a Marietta of my own.

  It didn’t take long for Marietta and Clem to decide they were truly matched in the eyes of God. But they wanted to make their match official, so Clem went to Master Gideon and asked to get hitched. He asked if Parnell would purchase Marietta, so’s the two of them could live together as husband and wife.

  I wasn’t there when Clem asked to marry, of course, but I hear tell that Parnell didn’t even consider it. He said no almost before Clem got the words out.

  Gideon is said to have told Clem, “I got enough womenfolk among my slaves.”

  Clem said the master told him to “tie the knot with one of the fine women right here on this plantation. I’ll bless any marriage that’s between two of my own slaves.”

  But Clem didn’t want one of Parnell’s slaves. He wanted Marietta. Back then, Clem was strong-willed, and when something didn’t sit right with him, he spoke his mind about it. But rather than go at the master in his haughty way, people say he got real humble, and he begged the master to buy Marietta so’s they could marry. He told Parnell about all the things Marietta could bring to his plantation—how she would make Missy Claire’s flower beds the envy of everybody in Hobbs Hollow. And how she could harvest some of the healthiest vegetables anywhere.

  Clem’s persistence didn’t pay off. The master said no, and he meant it.

  That same night, Clem and Marietta ran off. It was the second full moon in August, to be exact. I remember, ’cause Thea still spoke on it long after it happened, said all kinds of hexes happened under a full moon, that a second full moon in the same month made any hexes double, and that Clem and Marietta should have waited till the moon was new before they fled.

  I sure wish Clem had told me he was plannin’ to run. I could have slowed up Marlon, the master’s horse, by overfeeding him. And I could have mixed some bad meat into the food barrel of Parnell’s search dogs, so’s they’d be too sick to hunt.

  Master Gideon didn’t waste no time calling on the bounty-fetchers to find Clem, ’cause Clem was valuable to him. He was the slave who knew how to best tend horses, pigs, and dogs.

  Marietta and Clem were caught just beyond the back woods of Parnell’s property, at Holly Glen, not too far north of Hobbs Hollow. Master Gideon’s dogs sniffed them out in no time.

  Marietta, she was sold off to cotton country, to the deep south of Mississippi, where the slave masters were meaner than the devil himself. Clem, he was brought back here and whipped somethin’ awful. But it wasn’t Master Gideon who whipped him
. I never saw that man lift a whip. He never carried out whippings. He couldn’t. Whipping wasn’t in him.

  Even though Parnell said he believed runnin’ off was grounds for a whippin’, I didn’t think he fully believed it. Seems he wanted to show his town council buddies that he was up to punishing nigras. So whenever the situation called for it, Gideon made Rance, his overseer, do the dirty work. “Carry it out,” was what he said when they brought Clem back. And after he gave the order, he disappeared—never stood by to watch his slaves get beat.

  I seen a few real bad whippings, but I will never forget the day Rance Smalley put the whip to my friend Clem. Thea says it was hell come to earth.

  Sometimes when I closed my eyes at night, I could still see that whippin’, like it happened yesterday. Remembering it was as bad as ten demon dreams rolled into one. (And it often led to a night of haints stealing my sleep.)

  Even when I thought on that whippin’ when I was wide awake, I saw it clear as day. Clem bleeding, all ’cross his shoulders and down his back. Rance’s bull-whip hurling forward, snapping in the air, like a wild, dancing snake, then landing on Clem’s flesh with a loud, stinging slap.

  I remembered the grimace on Clem’s face, too. His teeth gritted, his jaw tight. But more than anything, I remember that when Ranee was flinging his whip, Clem was stone-silent. He didn’t holler, or cry out, or nothin’. And after the whippin’ was done—after Ranee had gone and left Clem hanging, and Thea and Mama had untied Clem’s wrists from the branches of Parnell’s old hickory tree—Clem still didn’t utter a single sound. Not a cry, or a whimper even.

  Weeks later, when Clem had healed some (it took days and nights of Thea and Mama dressing Clem’s wounds with root salves), Clem was different. Strange-different. It was like he’d lost the will to speak. He’d gone silent, with just a little bit of talking here and there.

  Still, since Clem and me were friends, I could get him to speaking more than other folks could. He talked to me more than he talked to anybody. We were still at the blacksmith shack when I floated my question past him again, hoping maybe he’d give me more of an answer this time. “You know anything ’bout coloreds fighting in the war?”