Freeman (65 page)

Later that day, Tilda inspected the wound again. This time, Prudence was with her. “You are right,” said Prudence as Tilda drew the dressing away. She wrinkled her nose. There was an awful smell.

They sent Ginny for the doctor. He inspected the wound and confirmed their fears. There was an infection. He cleaned the site as best he could, then prescribed bed rest.

“What are we going to do?” asked Tilda, once the doctor was gone.

“We have only two more days,” said Prudence.

“You will have to postpone it.”

“She cannot postpone it,” said Sam, still sitting up in the bed. “There are too many moving parts to the plan. It could never be done in time.”

“Well, perhaps Sam and I can stay here in town until he is better,” said Tilda.

Prudence shook her head. “The ordinance goes into effect three days from now. No colored allowed within the city limits.”

“Surely, they will make an exception,” said Tilda.

Prudence shook her head. “These people will not make an exception, I promise you.”

“But they
might
,” insisted Tilda.

“I do not
want
an exception!” Sam yelled it. Tilda looked at him. He seemed as surprised as she did. He repeated himself, softly. “I do not want an exception. I want to leave. I hate this place,” he breathed. “I do not want to be here a second longer than necessary.”

“I hate it, too,” said Prudence.

They turned to her, waiting. “Very well, Sam,” Tilda said. “No exception.”

It made him smile. She smiled in return, but it felt like a forgery, like a crude imitation of a smile. Tilda turned away so Sam couldn’t see what a fraud she really was.

In doing so, she found herself facing Prudence, who did not bother to fake a smile. Her eyes searched the other woman’s face and Tilda knew they shared a single thought, a single fear.

It angered her. She had shared too much with this woman already.

On that Monday morning when all things changed, A.J. Socrates arrived at his general store on Main Street and was perplexed to find it still locked up tight at eight o’clock in the morning. Ordinarily, his colored man, Horace, got there an hour before he did, swept the floor, stocked the shelves, and made coffee. Socrates rattled the front door in frustration, then went fishing in his pocket for his seldom-needed keys as he wondered what could have happened to Horace.

Then his gaze strayed across the note tacked to the wall. He snapped it down and read it quickly. When he was done, he read again, more slowly. Then his head came up. His eyes were dark dots surrounded by white and his cheeks were scarlet.

That same morning, Mrs. Millie Baker awoke with a start. She checked the clock by the side of the bed and saw to her consternation that she had overslept by almost an hour. But that was impossible. She had a very dependable colored girl named Sue who woke her faithfully on time every morning and brought her breakfast. Mystified, Millie threw on a housecoat and padded downstairs. She found the house dark and silent.

Then she saw the note on the table in the front parlor. Mystified, she picked it up and began to read. As she did, her mouth fell open—and stayed that way.

That same fateful morning, Joe Hunsacker and his oldest son, Joe, Jr., took a table, two chairs, and a stack of contracts and set them up on a patch of dirt in front of the cabins where his Negroes lived. They sat there and
they waited. And they waited. Joe had reminded his people as recently as the previous Friday that he would be here this morning with papers for them to make their marks obliging them to pick his cotton crop for him.

After 15 minutes, Joe sent his son to bang on cabin doors and bring the Negroes out. Instead, Joe, Jr. brought him a note he’d found. Joe Hunsacker read it, then looked up at his son and saw his own confusion reflected back at him.

As all this was unfolding, Charles Wheaton sat in his wheelchair at a table in his study waiting for tea. This was the way his day always began, with a cup of tea and a biscuit brought to him by Sassafras. That routine disrupted, he felt oddly unmoored. He had things to do today, had to meet with his foreman, then with his attorney, then prepare for a trip to Memphis to inspect a rail car he might buy. But how could he do any of that, until he first had his tea?

After waiting fifteen minutes, Wheaton called his son Bo and sent him to Sass’s room to make sure she was all right. It annoyed him that Sass was moving tomorrow to a house of her own outside the city limits. He would miss the convenience of having her in his house, answerable to his needs, 24 hours a day. But it couldn’t be helped. The trouble that woman—he never called Prudence by name, even in the sanctuary of his own thoughts—had brought down on Buford simply could not be allowed to repeat itself. And clearing the town of niggers was the best way to ensure that. No exceptions.

Bo returned moments later. He didn’t have Sass, but he did have some sort of folded paper in hand. Wheaton had just taken it from him when there came a sharp rapping at the door. Father and son stared at each other. Vern came into the room then, scratching his armpits and yawning. “What happened to Sass?” he demanded. “She usually wakes me up way before this.”

Wheaton didn’t reply. He was waiting to hear Louis, the houseman, open the door. Instead, he heard another rapping, louder and more insistent this time. “Wheel me to the door,” he said.

Vern looked at Bo as if their father had spoken to them in Greek. Wheaton slapped at the wheels of his chair. “Now!” he demanded.

And Vern took hold of the chair and pushed it. Bo went ahead of them and opened the door. The man who stepped inside without waiting for an invitation was known to them all. Silas Alexander, a man of grand gray whiskers and prosperous girth, was the longtime mayor of Buford, known
since the war for never being seen around town unless wearing the dress uniform of his former rank in the Confederate cavalry. But there were no shiny brass buttons or crisp gray serge about Silas today. Today he wore jeans and a frayed old shirt, as if he had been in such a hurry he hadn’t had time to dress properly.

When Wheaton rolled up, the mayor grabbed his chair by the arms, stopping it short, and began babbling, the words pouring out of him like water. “Oh, Charles, it is a disaster. What will become of us! What can we do? The bitch has ruined us!”

“Stop jabbering, man!” scolded Wheaton. “What are you talking about?”

Alexander drew himself up, pointing. “I see you have one those damnable notes,” he said. “Read it for yourself.”

Mystified, Charles Wheaton unfolded the paper in his lap. It was a form letter, professionally printed, except for his name in the salutation and the signature at the bottom, both of them printed in emphatic block letters. It said:

Below this signature was printed a message in Colindy’s hand:

Wheaton looked up into the mayor’s sweaty eyes. He felt as if he was going to be sick. “These notes are…?”

Silas Alexander answered the question before it was asked. “All over town,” he said. “Every planter, every shopkeeper, every wife who employs a nigger for cleaning house or cooking, has gotten one of these damn notes.”

“That Yankee bitch. This is her doing.”

Alexander glared scorn at him. “Well, of course it is,” he said. “What I want to know is: what are we going to do about it?”

Wheaton swallowed hard, fearing the answer even before he asked the question, but needing to ask it anyway. “How many of the niggers are leaving?”

Alexander looked at him. “As near as I can tell? All of them.”

Prudence stepped out of the front door of Miss Ginny’s house and surveyed her handiwork with a smile.

The street was filled with colored people and mule-drawn wagons, 57 of them in all, plain wooden contraptions with benches and a driver’s perch. The line of them began behind her phaeton and stretched east down Main Street past the warehouse to where the cotton fields began. All of them were Union Army surplus and had been purchased at favorable prices, the military happy to be rid of them now that the fighting was over. Right on schedule, they had begun rolling in the previous night under cover of darkness.

The resulting scene was all cacophony and bedlam, mules grunting, babies squalling, children laughing, women crying, men shouting, families flocking back and forth loading bundles of clothing, cookware, and personal belongings. Through an agent, the Cafferty family had purchased four parcels of land totaling 1,700 acres in the central part of Ohio. Because much of it had not been cleared, they got it for the bargain price of $25 an acre. It was to this land that the Negroes of Buford were now embarking.

The coming fall and winter, she had told them, would be difficult. There would be time before the hard weather came to build only a few rough structures, and these would be used as dormitories to shelter the elderly and the infirm. The rest of the former slaves would live in surplus Army tents on provisions to be provided by a charitable foundation hastily set up by the Caffertys and several of their wealthy abolitionist friends. Each of
the 47 colored families in and around Buford had been advanced a mule team and a wagon provisioned with food and farming implements. In the spring, they would begin to clear the land, break their new soil, and plant their crops, and when harvest time came, they would take those crops to market. A year later, when there was a second harvest, the Caffertys would receive 10 percent of any profit. They would continue this arrangement for 10 years or until the original purchase price of the land had been reimbursed, whichever came first. After that, each family would own its own plot of land, roughly 36 acres each.

Buford and the area around it were home to 1,398 souls, 412 of whom were colored. And all 412 stood gathered in the street this morning, packing their wagons. The town would get its wish. No more Negroes would live here. Buford would be—what was the phrase Bo Wheaton had used?—“exclusively white.”

Prudence had not slept in two days. Yet she had never felt more alive. Satisfaction filled her chest the way air swells a balloon.

Standing next to her, Colindy said, “This a mess.”

Prudence looked down at the plump little woman, who stood watching with arms akimbo, lips pursed, head moving slowly, pityingly, from side to side. “Are you sorry you changed your mind?” Prudence asked.

For the first time since Prudence had known her, Colindy smiled. “No,” she said. “Most fun I ever had in my life was signing that note to Charles Wheaton. I be happy to go anywhere, long as it’s away from him.” Prudence laughed, and felt a ghost of guilt for doing so. After all, this was still the place where Bonnie had died. But she couldn’t help laughing. It felt good.

Behind her, the front door opened and Willie Washington, one of Jesse’s equally massive brothers, stepped out of Miss Ginny’s house, cradling Sam in his arms. Tilda followed. Prudence and Colindy moved aside to give them room. Sam was unconscious, unaware of his very presence in the world. He had only gotten worse these last couple of days. A stubborn fever had claimed him, turning his shirt gray with sweat. Last night, he had returned to the war, awakening from a fitful sleep to order some unseen soldier to duck if he didn’t want to lose his head. You could hear his cries all through the house. In the bed she now shared with Miss Ginny, Prudence had wept.