The March

by E. L. Doctorow

  But she sat down in the water cross-legged, like a child, and splashed water on her face and sank down to the shoulders to soak herself and sat up again with a bar of brown soap, which she ran around her neck and over her breasts, looking up at him with such pleasure in her eyes that he felt vile for the feelings going through him. Yet he could tell Pearl knew the effect she was having.

  You c’n do my back, please, she said.

  He pulled up a stool and sat behind her and ran the soap along her shoulders and down her back, attending glumly to each vertebra.

  Now, Stephen Walsh, she said, I know what all mens have in dere minds. Don’t I know? How old are you?

  Nineteen.

  Well, I don’t know how old I am. I think thirteen—I know not much more than fourteen. I know, ’cause my stepma’m’s sons, brudder one and two, they was there since I can remember and brudder two he had a birfday of fifteen this las summer. And dey both taller? So I knows that way.

  You don’t have to worry.

  Oh I . . . I know that. I wouldn’t be sittin here in the altogether if I didn’t know that.

  Then he nearly dropped the soap, because she said, An when the time comes when I feel it upon me, I s’pose who it is will be you, Stephen Walsh.

  HE FOUND SOME towels and wrapped one around her as she stood up from the tub. She was still as he rubbed her shoulders and back and buttocks and thighs through the towel.

  Wif all the soldiers writin letters for the mail boat, Pearl said, did you?

  No. No one I care to write to.

  No fambly?

  They wouldn’t read it if I did.

  She turned and faced him, holding the towel around her at the throat. Sad, she said. Sad sad sad. An you from the New York City where the perfec Union is. I’m goin there, you know that?

  No. Since when?

  Yes, when the war is done. That poor Lieutenant Clarke’s letter, ’member I tole you?

  Yes?

  Why give it for the mail boat if I can read the envelope now with the ad-dress? I will take that letter to his mama and papa in the New York City, so as I may tell them.

  Tell them what?

  How he took care of Pearl and hid her and made her a drummer boy to keep her safe. Dey will need comfort.

  What is the address?

  The Number 12 Washing-ton Square, as I have read it.

  Sure, and that’s a neighborhood for the rich folks.

  Well, some rich folks is good I ’spect, if their son joined up to free black folks.

  She was smiling, with her face still dewy and her hazel eyes wide and the ribbon having fallen from her hair. There rose in Stephen Walsh’s breast a feeling so painfully glorious that it was all he could do to keep from pressing her to him.

  Number 12? he said, clearing his throat.

  Uh-huh, and Washing-ton Square.

  I know where it is, he said. I can take you there.

  PEARL WAS AWAKENED by the moonlight coming through the small attic window. The moon had arisen to shine in her eyes. She found herself with her back snuggled against Stephen. His arm lay over her shoulder. They were lying on a horsehair mattress they had pulled off the little attic bed and put on the floor. Though they were fully dressed it was a thin blanket over them, too thin for the chill of this silvery night. She lay there quite still. She was suddenly irritated by that arm around her. It was heavy, and she leaned away until it slipped to the space between them.

  She closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep. Earlier that evening their wagon had ridden past the fields where the black folk were camped. The picture of that was in her mind now. All of them sitting around their fires, and the children running here and there, and the smell of cooking, and the little tents for their sleep, and the carts for their things. And the singing, the sad hymn singing—it was like a soft murmur of the wind, it was like sound coming up from the earth. It was the sound she had been born to, the prayerful sadness of their lot on earth. And they were singing of it now, all those people like her, except she wasn’t there with them, she was riding by in the army wagon with army clothes on her back and good army food in her stomach and this white boy beside her, attached to her like by a chain. But these folks had heard they were going somewhere else than on the march with General Sherman, and they didn’t know where that was or what they would find or if it was possible to be free men and women without the army to protect them.

  She could not get back to sleep. Why had she lied to Stephen Walsh? She knew exactly how old she was, she was fifteen, her mama had told her, and that she was born on the tenth day of June, when the air was like something sweet to drink and the leaves on the trees were still young and soft, like you could feel the sun in them. But she had told him a story so well, and with such detail, about the Jameson brothers one and two that she almost believed it herself. Why? She was attracted to Stephen, she was impressed with him and secretly flattered that he had taken to her, this grown man, to be smitten as he so clearly was by her. It made her feel good and different, so that she was encouraged to be bolder than she had ever before been in the social ways of the world. Because if he was taken with her she would see to it that he was justified.

  So why did she lie? It had just come out of her mouth before she knew what she was saying. What was her purpose, because she did have feelings for him. She liked his voice and his manner, the way what he said was always a clear thought. He did not chatter about nothing. He had a silence in him that made you understand he was no fool but a deep-minded person who knew more than he spoke aloud. And that he was angry about something from his life, just as she was—he was a white man with his own troubles—that interested her, and that he didn’t make himself smaller by easily talking about it. From the moment she had held his burned hands, she had felt herself different. And she loved his mouth—it was all she could do sometimes not to lean up and kiss it.

  But now the thought came to her that made her sit up and nearly cry out. What had she done since leaving the plantation but attach herself to white men? From the day she was lifted up to the saddle behind Lieutenant Clarke, and then even staying with that Gen’ral Sherman hisself, who had taken to her thinking she was a drummer boy, and then even through Miz Thompson getting to nurse for the Colonel-doctor, and now Stephen, she had acted as white, and lived with the whites with a white stepma’m and dressed her blackness in a uniform given to a white Union army. Oh Lord, such a deep shame now came over her, it made her ill. Was not Jake Early a prophet when he and Jubal Samuels came by to fetch her and he called her a Jez’bel? But you got to be a whore lady to be a Jez’bel, and I ain’t a whore lady. No no, dear God, but I am worse, coddling up to be like one of them, making them like me like slaves do to proteck theirselves, bowin and scrapin to the white folks and smilin like some fool, and even servin Miz Jameson an watchin out for her an takin care of her. Didn’t I know she wanted my pap to sell me away when I was a little chile? Look at me—didn’t nobody sell me off in the auction, I done sold myself, and what does that make me but a slave, a slave like my mama Nancy Wilkins.

  This thought had brought Pearl to her feet: I am owned.

  She looked down at Stephen Walsh, his face so washed in moonlight as to be spectral. Who was this white man who had felt privileged to put his arm around her? Who was she as a Negro girl that she was allowing it and pushing her body up against his for the warmth? Her mama had lain with Pap Jameson as she had this night next to Stephen Walsh and, surely that arm of Pap’s was as heavy around my mama as Stephen’s around me. So how is I free? Never as a black girl, and not now as a white.

  MOMENTS LATER SHE was flying down the stairs in her bare feet. She let herself out the front door and headed across the road and into the pasture, where, in the distance, the blacks were camped. She could see everything clear in the moonlight, the rises and dips in the earth, the paled leaves of grass, the lean-tos and wagons up ahead, and the embers of the cook fires glowing like stars in the fields. Ten minutes later she was walking
in the paths of this improvised settlement, and many people were awake, huddled in their blankets around their fires, or rocking infants in their arms, or simply standing by their rigs and wagons and staring at her as she passed by. In their eyes she was a white woman, an army woman, and if they were curious as to what she was doing among them they did not demean themselves to inquire. They were being sent off to walk by themselves in the direction prescribed for them by their hero and savior, General Sherman. All they had wanted to do was praise him, revere him, and now he was turning them away, sending them off on their own, and what their destination was or what would happen to them when they got there nobody knew. For these people staring her down, she was the General’s stand-in, as if she was responsible for their wretched disillusionment solely by virtue of her color and her uniform. Pearl kept shaking her head as if in discussion with them, though they said nothing, because she knew what they were thinking. And what was she doing here, anyway? She didn’t know. She was looking for someone who knew her. Maybe looking for Jake Early and one-eyed Jubal Samuels, though they would long since have fallen by the wayside. Or Roscoe, from back at the plantation—a good, simple, kind man like no other, who had dropped the two gold eagles wrapped in his kerchief at her feet. She felt now in her pocket to make sure she still had them, something she did at least ten times a day. And for an instant as she passed a man, a skinny bald man with huge dark eyes who smiled a sweet, gap-toothed smile at her, she almost called out, Roscoe! thinking that it was him.

  And now, seeing the enormous encampment this was, with no end to it in the fields, for across the road it went on, and up to the edge of a forest, Pearl felt as helpless as she had ever felt on the plantation, and all the comforts and satisfactions of her working life in the Union army seemed now a terrible scandal, a way of looking out for herself and no one else that was no better than her selfish slave-owning pap. So that what she took from his color as a white girl was the worst of him, and all these wretched people around her were the people she had ignored and left to themselves just as they said General Sherman had left them after setting them free to go on by themselves in a land that still was not theirs. And what had it got her except some shelter from the storm, like she was some house slave looking out from the window at the field niggers and forgetting she, too, was owned.

  EARLIER THAT NIGHT Hugh Pryce had told the boy David that he would find him a place with his own people, and the minute he said that, David, not satisfied to hold his hand, had clung to his leg, so that the Englishman limped around the black encampment as if a ball and chain were attached to him. How awkward, how embarrassing.

  Pryce had got them to Fayetteville on the little mule and found himself severely tried with a child to look after. David was underdressed for the weather, and Pryce took off his pullover and belted the sweater with rope to make a coat for him. The child was constantly hungry. Pryce, with his casual British bonhomie, was usually able to cadge rations. But with a Negro boy in tow it was as if he had lost his gift—the bummers exacted money for everything.

  He was by now more annoyed with himself than moved by the child’s dash to freedom. It was not his responsibility to free the slaves—was it?—yet he had lifted the boy to the saddle. A rash act, in violation of the imperative to be a strictly neutral observer. Somehow, without thinking too clearly, he had assumed he would be relieved of the burden—that the authorities in Fayetteville would take David off his hands. But what authorities? The city was in chaos. The army was everywhere, and life had become unnatural for the inhabitants. No one seemed to know anything. In London there were established asylums for orphans, a fact of which the lower classes took advantage by happily depositing their newborns on the doorstep for society to raise. Of course, these were white foundlings, but how, war or no war, was it wrong to assume that every civilized society would have homes for its unwanted children even if they were black?

  Worst of all, it was impossible to be taken seriously as a professional journalist with this appendage hanging on to him. He was losing out on the stories. He had heard a rumor that the secessionists were finally gathering an army the equal of Sherman’s. Where it was and how big and where it would make a stand were important questions. He had gone to Sherman’s busy headquarters, and one imperious frown from Sherman’s wing commander, General Howard—a sweeping glance from man to boy—was enough for an adjutant to come forward and tell Pryce he had no business being there. Yet milling about were his competition—men from the Herald Tribune, the London Telegraph, the Baltimore Sun. Here was the biggest story of the campaign in the making and Hugh Pryce felt it getting away from him.

  But there were stories no one could deny him. This afternoon he had hurried David up the hill to the site of the Fayetteville Arsenal, where the soldiers were demolishing buildings and setting them on fire. It was weirdly festive, squads of men running battering rams into brick walls, twelve and fourteen horse and mule teams pulling away foundations. Crowds had gathered to watch, and now and then had to back away from the flames and the chunks of fire flying everywhere. David yanked Pryce’s sleeve. Don’t like it, he kept saying, don’t like it. And then one of the buildings was detonated with a monstrous roar, collapsing in an inferno of fire and smoke, and perhaps fusing their relationship forever in the mind of this child, for from that moment David, who had been a stouthearted little fellow, became tearful and querulous and clinging. Nor was he any better in his mind this night, as Pryce brought him to the encampment of the freed slaves and told him it was time for him to find a place with his own people.

  CERTAINLY THERE WERE enough of them, and a poorer, more bedraggled mass of humanity Pryce had never looked upon. A majority were women, more old than young, and there were numerous old men, but only here and there a man in his prime. Pryce, used to the outdoors himself, saw no pathos in this encampment where the sky was the only roof and the only home was the space around the fire. People had lived this way from time immemorial. But the state of these beings, so many crippled and bent, withered and worn, all of them with a history of having been kept, as horses or mules were kept, sent a fine moment’s rage into his breast. Yet he needed one of them now for the service she could supply—he needed a woman with strong maternal instincts, someone still with the strength to take on a child, or another child, without thinking twice about it. He needed someone healthy, with an apron and a kerchief around her head and good, strong arms. Pryce smiled. I need a mammy.

  Just hold Hugh’s hand, David, he said. Don’t worry, he won’t let you go.

  This was still fairly early in the evening, and it was difficult for him to understand the nature of the gatherings—whether people were camped according to the plantations they had come from or had simply plunked themselves down hither and yon, like bathers on a beach. He found himself at the edge of a large group listening to an elderly man who stood on a box. The man had a scraggly white beard, very biblical he looked, a distinguished ancient, though he was dressed in rags and leaned on a stick. We are the sable brethren, he said in a soft deep voice, and finer in our natures and nobler in our forbearance than these European Americans who have chained us and whipped us and sent us into the fields. For we know our God, who has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. And if we are freed by this General, still, is he not one of them? The worship of this Sherman is blasphemy, for he is not your God. This Sherman has his own purposes, his own reasons. The Hebrews setting forth on their exodus did not ask an Egyptian general to lead them. Those Hebrews, they followed their own, as we must do now, for we are an army in ourselves. We have no weapons—no cannon and no muskets—but are an army of the free and righteous who make their own path, and find their own way by the grace of God.

  A woman called out, And who be you, old man—is you Moses? There was laughter, but the man said, No, sister. I am a poor old field slave free now to die like a man. But the Lord our God knows I speak the truth. If you long for the General to protect you, you are still un
free. Freedom should fill your heart and lift your spirit. Let you not look to white mortals for your food and shelter and salvation. Look to your own and God will provide, and God will show us the way. We have been in the wilderness far more than forty years. It is the promised land now. Be fruitful and multiply and make it your own.

  Amen, came the cry from several, and some hoots of disparagement from others. Hugh Pryce foresaw himself cabling a story describing seditious sentiments among the Negroes. But first he had to deal with his problem. Wandering on, he could see no one he could reasonably approach. With David, whom he had regularly to pry from his leg, he went among the blacks until he finally saw a possibility for him—a woman and two children eating their supper by a fire. The woman had fried some cornmeal cakes, and she looked at David and then at Pryce and then at David.

  You lost, son? she said.

  No’m, David said, his eyes on the fritters in the frying pan.

  What’s your name?

  This is David, Pryce said. He’s an orphan. He needs someone to take him in.

  Is that right? If you ain’t lost, who this? the woman said to David. This your daddy talkin?

  Yes’m, David said.

  I am not the child’s father. My name is Hugh Pryce. I’m with the London Times.

  Not the father?

  No. Surely that should be obvious.

  The woman laughed. Not to me, she said. No tellin by now what color a chile will come with.

  My good woman—

  Vengeance is mine—ain’t that what the Lord said? And she laughed again.

  Do you actually think—

  She appraised Pryce. Favors you. Got his mama’s skin but his daddy’s eyes. And lookit his hands and feet. Gonna be a tall man, like you.