Freeman (6 page)

The woman waits—why, she doesn’t know—but the sound doesn’t come again. She moves on. In a pit in the yard, she builds a fire, heats a tin of water, and uses it to press together four patties of cornmeal. They are almost out of cornmeal. She wonders if there is any corn left to grind. The woman puts the patties on a shovel blade and places it across the fire so the cornmeal can brown. This is what they have to eat now. Corncakes and dandelion greens.

While she waits on breakfast to cook, she makes a morning visit to the privy. She returns to find Wilson and Lucretia squatting at the fire, eating their corncakes. They nod acknowledgment. It is too early for speaking. Breakfast passes in silence.

The stars disappear, the sun staggers above the horizon. Its light is meager and it falls on ruin. The kitchen is little more than black sticks, tumbling in on one another. The house itself is only a pile of blackened lumber. The barn is missing part of a wall and most of its roof. The blacksmith shop and the stable are ruined spots on the earth. The fields are leveled. Only the two slave cabins still stand mostly intact.

And Marse Jim thinks he can raise this place back to what it was with just the three slaves he has left, and two of those, women. As she does every morning, the woman gazes upon a landscape of shambles and wonders if the white man has lost his mind. Driven by a hellish, not quite sane determination to put things back as they were, he has them working sixteen-hour days clearing debris, plowing weed-choked fields, and hammering together the frame for a new house. Not undertaking one job, finishing it, and moving methodically on to the next but, rather, spending an hour clearing a field and then being ordered to pick up debris from the yard, to spend half an hour there and then being ordered at gunpoint to go up on the ladder and work at patching the roof of the barn.

It’s as if his mind tumbles ahead of him, unable to settle, unable to focus. So much to do, so much to do. He runs along, trying to do it all, trying to catch up with his own thoughts and forcing them to do the same. The woman doesn’t know how much longer she can keep up.

She was born a slave. She has been one all her life. It has never been easy. But it has never been as hard as this.

The woman hears stirring in the cabin Marse Jim has taken. He appears a moment later, a balding, burly man with red eyes and a ragged black fringe of beard. Wilson comes to his feet straightaway. “Marse Jim,” he says in that voice of false cheer that white people somehow never see through. “Got breakfast for you, sir.”

Marse Jim, pulling suspenders over a filthy undershirt that barely contains a prodigious gut, grunts his lack of interest, then staggers off in the direction of the privy. A moment later, there comes a long, guttural sound,
hrrrrrrk
. It repeats itself twice. Wilson, Lucretia, and the woman look at one another. No one speaks, though Wilson allows amusement to flicker briefly in his eyes.

By the time Marse Jim returns, they are working. Wilson is pulling charred timbers from the wreckage of the kitchen, his hands wrapped in rags to protect them. The woman and Lucretia are harnessing the plow to a cantankerous mule, made more stubborn—listless, really—by lack of feed. Its skin falls in sallow ridges against prominent bones.

“Not yet,” says Marse Jim.

Wilson straightens. “Marse?”

His eyes are downcast, like a shy schoolboy, his lips moist and flecked with pieces of vomit. “I said, not yet,” he says. And now he looks up. “It’s been a month. One month today. Want you people to go up to the grave with me, pay respects to Little Jim. You should want to go. He was your young master, after all.” He says this last through an accusatory scowl, as if they have already turned him down.

But for the woman, the calculation is a simple one. A morning spent at the dead boy’s grave, versus one spent lifting lumber and walking behind a recalcitrant mule. There is no contest.

Wilson says, “Marse, we’d be honored to.” He says this with false gravity and for a moment, Marse Jim regards him so intently that the woman wonders if he has finally seen through.

But Marse just says, “Well, all right, then. That’s better. And maybe you could sing one of those darky songs.”

Wilson says, “Darky songs, Marse?”

Impatience clouds the white man’s red face. “Yes, darky songs! You know what I mean. All them moanin’ songs you niggers sing down to the clearin’ Sunday mornin’s when you think nobody can hear you.”

Lucretia shoots the woman a look. Wilson says with perfect earnestness, “Oh, yes, them songs. Yes, Marse. We be pleased to sing for you and young marse.”

“Well, that’s more like it, then,” he says. “We’ll go in a minute.”

He lumbers back to the cabin and goes inside. Wilson waits until he knows the white man cannot hear him, then turns and says with the same perfect gravity, “Oh, yes, Marse, we be happy to go up top of the hill and sing darky songs for your dead boy. Why Marse, you ain’t even need to ask. Nothin’ give us more pleasure.”

Lucretia risks a pretty laugh. “Shush, fool. Anything get us out a morning work, I’m happy to do.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” says Wilson. “We sings them darky songs all day for you, Marse, you want us to. Sing ’em so pretty, make the angels weep in heaven.” Lucretia laughs again.

“Both of you just hush up,” hisses the woman. “It’s nothing to fun about, losing a child. Even a child of his.”

Wilson’s smile is thin and cutting as a knife’s blade. “We just have to disagree on that,” he says.

The woman leads the mule back into its stall. When she returns, Marse Jim is there. He is wearing a rumpled shirt now and a slouch hat sits atop what remains of his coarse, black hair. His eyes glitter. The woman thinks he may be the most pitiful thing she has ever seen.

“Let’s go,” he says.

It isn’t far. Thirty minutes, though all uphill, to the slope where the family graveyard sits, overlooking what once were fields of Jim McFarland’s land, blooming white in spring. Fields black now and scoured of all life.

They walk single file behind Marse Jim. No one speaks. The woman brings up the rear. The sun feels good on her back.

She remembers Wilson’s smile, that tight, secretive pressing together of his lips, so different from the open, show-all-the-teeth grin that white people never see through. It scares her some.

She is not sentimental about Little Jim McFarland. He was a devilish child who delighted in making life difficult for the slaves—he sneaked into his father’s room and broke his father’s things and blamed it on little black boys knowing they would be whipped for it, he lay under the house and chunked rocks at slaves returning from the fields, he thought it funny to hide in a tree and pee down on some poor colored man having his lunch
below. She has no doubt that, had he lived, he would have grown up to be just like his father, if not worse. He was not a good boy and she does not miss him.

But that doesn’t mean he deserved to get shot by some hot-tempered Yankee boy not too many years older just because he bloodied the Yankee’s head with a rock. That doesn’t mean his father’s pain is not worthy of respect.

They reach the top of the hill. The little cemetery is overgrown with weeds. The older tombstones stick up from the soil at crooked angles, some of them cracked and broken. One of the Yankee boys did it, seemed to take pleasure trying to kick the grave markers to pieces before his commander stopped him. Just meanness, thinks the woman. Meanness, plain and simple.

If Marse Jim notices the condition of the graveyard, he gives no sign. He leads them past the broken and defiled markers for his father, his mother, his brothers, his daughters, his wife. Leads them to the far edge where there is a small wooden marker that was not disturbed by the marauders because it was not erected until after they moved on. It is lettered with charcoal, crudely drawn and unlikely to survive the next rain.

Marse Jim removes his hat, glares down at the marker. His thoughts are unknowable.

The woman turns from him, preferring to study the broken tombstones and burned fields. Sad sights, but preferable to seeing that narrow junction of dates on the boy’s grave marker. Twelve years old when he died. Her own son was fourteen.

He loved mornings, did her son. Would get up at dawn just to see the stars disappear, the horizon turn from black to blue to pink to gold. He was smart as a whip, her son. He could read just as well as white boys, if not better. And he could cipher, too. Blue was his favorite color. And when Mistress—her old mistress, not Marse Jim’s peevish wife—gave them a pig to roast for Christmas, he was always first to finish his plate. She misses him terribly.

She has at least that much in common with Marse Jim, understands at least that much about him. The woman wishes there was a way to say that to him. Maybe it would make it easier for him. Maybe it would make it easier for them all. But of course, there is no way.

“You all can sing now,” rumbles Marse Jim.

Wilson, Lucretia, and the woman look at each other. And then, as if they shared one mind, they sing a song they have sung many times when moaning seemed the only sensible response to the meanness of life.

She closes her eyes, lets the words take her. How many times have they sung this song? Sung it through fire and flood, sung it through beatings and stillbirth, sung it to shore each other up, urge each other on. The song groans beneath the weight of their voices. They pull at the words, stretching them out til one syllable becomes two or three, becomes a perfect dirge bearing all their suffering and sorrows as a river barge bears its cargo toward the sea.

It is an awful sound. A sad, awful sound. That is the entire point.

Lucretia and Wilson, she knows, are singing by rote, pretending feelings they don’t feel. You can hear it if you listen closely enough, see it if you only look: Lucretia’s face a mask, a dead space untrammeled by emotion, Wilson’s mischievous eyes rolling back in a perfect imitation of piety and pain. But Marse Jim will not notice this. Like most white people, he never truly looks at them, never really listens.

Three times they sing the verse, moaning more extravagantly each time. After the third, again as if they shared a single mind, they stop. There is a large quiet. Marse Jim touches two fingers to the crude marker. “I’m sorry, boy,” he says. “I should’ve done better.” His eyes are dry. His soft voice trembles just the least bit.

After another moment, he turns on his heel. They allow him to pass, then fall in line for the walk back down the hill. The woman is directly behind Marse Jim. His head is held so low it is barely visible beneath the rounded slope of his shoulders. It is a terrible thing to lose a child. Doesn’t matter if you are slave or master. A terrible thing. They walk for a few minutes. Then she hears herself say, “I had a boy, too.”

Where it came from, she has no idea. She only knows she is immediately sorry she said it. Sorrier still when he whirls on her like something dangerous coming up behind. “What did you say?”

She tries to swallow, but she can’t. Her throat seems coated with dust. “I said, I had a boy, too,” she says. “My boy died, too.”

For a moment, he looks perplexed, looks as if she is trying to cheat him and he cannot figure out how. She braces herself for his fist because when he is confused, he hits. But in the end, he doesn’t hit her. Instead, he snorts a kind of half laugh, as if in disbelieving contempt for all the damnable, eternal presumption of fool niggers. He turns without a word and continues down the hill at a faster pace.

She stands there. Lucretia and Wilson pass her. They shoot her looks that question and condemn. She cannot meet their eyes and finds herself staring instead up the path they have just walked, back up to the little cemetery at the top of the hill where a wooden marker sits atop a 12-year-old’s grave.

“My boy died, too,” she says, when they are gone. She says it in a voice both soft and defiant, to no one in particular and to everyone she has ever known. Then she follows Wilson and Lucretia down the hill.

When they get back to the house, they are surprised to find two men waiting for them. One is a Negro in tattered clothes driving a buckboard. The other is a white man sitting astride a magnificent bay horse. He is dressed in the uniform of a Confederate cavalry officer.