Nightjohn (6 page)

But she didn’t answer, just looked past me, past Lucy at where a building used to be and there wasn’t anything but burned boards and smoke. “We had a store there. We had a store right there. See? Right there where—”

“I had two children, miss,” I said. “They came here on a wagon. They must have come here. They were this high, to my waist and a bit more. A girl and a boy. Did you see them?”

Didn’t say anything for the longest time. Just kept picking at her dress where there was a hole as big as her hand burned through. I started to turn.

“I had a boy,” she said. “I had a son and he went to Antietam and is buried there. I had a son and a store and a husband who ran off and now they’re all gone.”

“I’m sorry but—”

“I never had slaves. I didn’t like slavery. Why did they burn my store?”

“I don’t know.”

She picked some more, tears cutting the soot on her face, making white streams. “The man you want is Greerson. He owns—I guess owned would be the right way to say it now. He owned the slave yards at the south end of town.”

“Thin man, face sharp like an ax, slick hair?”

She nodded. “Yes. He might know what happened to your children. Just go to the south end of town and look for the yards. If you see my husband would you send him home?”

But we were already gone, headed through the broken town, me with my small sack and Lucy with her two hams, looking for the slave yards.

We found the yards and almost got to Greerson in time. Yards were pens with slat-board roofs on them, rings in the wooden walls for chains, chutes that came out to a central open area like there was on the plantation for working with the pigs and cattle.

Same as that. There was some smoke where somebody had tried to fire the pens but the wood wasn’t close enough to burn and it went out. The place was empty.

Or almost.

Out front of a small shack was the wagon with the chain rings in it, the wagon that took my children, and I felt the pull of it, felt that it had been close to little Delie and Tyler and thought maybe they were inside the shack but no, nothing there but papers thrown all over, boxes of papers.

“Oh Lord,” I said. “They’re not here.”

There was a sound from the back then. Sound like a hammer hitting meat to soften it
and I ran out around the shack into the main yard opening and there was Greerson.

Not alone though. There was a black man there, big man, hands like my Martin had, shoulders like a door, and he was holding Greerson up against the side fence with one hand and beating him with the other.

Didn’t look even mad, the black man. Just as cool were he at a job of work. Hold him with one hand, bring the other back like a club, like a hammer, like a cleaver.

Chunk!

In the forehead, in the face, slow hits that seemed to float, but each time Greerson’s head snapped back like a mule had kicked him and I forgot for a moment why I was there. Just watched. Then I thought, no, not yet, I need this man.

“Hold!” I said. “Wait. This man took my children and I need him to tell me where they are.”

The black man turned and looked at me. “He laid a whip on me. Laid a whip on all of us, but he laid it on me hard. I’m just taking it back. But I can finish later.”

He stood to the side but kept holding Greerson up against the fence by the neck. Greerson he just hung there and when I came close I could see that he wasn’t going to be doing any talking. His face looked like a
wagon had run over it and both his eyes had rolled back to just show white and what breath there was came in little jerks.

“Greerson—can you hear me? You remember coming for my children? Out to the Waller place? You remember that?” But he didn’t hear me, didn’t hear anything. “You hit him too hard. He ain’t there anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” the black man said, and he looked sorry too. “I didn’t know you were coming or I would have held back a tad.”

It was Lucy that saved me. I turned away and the black man went back to hitting Greerson and I moved out of the yard and was near crying, thinking of little Delie and Tyler. The wind blew four ways and they could have gone any of them. No way to know.

“In the shack,” Lucy said. “There might be something in all those papers about little Delie and Tyler …”

And I would have walked away hadn’t she said it, would have walked away and never thought of it, never known.

We went inside and started to work. I didn’t know what to look for, didn’t know where to begin, but Lucy just picked up a piece of paper and went to reading.

“Male, teeth show age not over eighteen, answers to name of Herman, no whip scars, to be at auction. Nope.” She threw it aside and
picked up another. “Female, teeth show age between twenty-five and thirty, answers to name of Betty, no whip scars, trained for house duties, to be at auction. Nope.”

That’s what all the papers were. Bills of sale, hundreds and hundreds of them, all records that Greerson kept for all the time he sold slaves.

It was soon dark, too dark to read, but Lucy she found an oil lamp with an unbroken chimney and some matches and soon we had light. Still hard to read but by holding the paper close to the lamp we could make out the letters.

Must have read fifty or a hundred of them when I looked up and Lucy she was sitting there crying, holding the paper.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just come across old Willy. You remember him?”

For certain I remembered him. Delie she said that she and old Willy once had eyes for one another. Soft old man used to carve willow whistles for the children in the quarters. Called them whoop-te-do whistles. Gray hair, gray beard, soft voice, soft smile.

“They sold him for fifty dollars,” Lucy said. “That was all. Fifty dollars …”

And it caught me then, what we were looking
at. I had been too much on little Delie and Tyler, couldn’t see past my darlings.

Lives. These were lives. All the people we knew and didn’t know and Greerson, Waller, all the small evil men had been selling lives. Whole lives. My mammy, pappy, Delie, Billy—didn’t matter. All bought and sold, people bought and sold for money, for work, to work to death. Heard once that when they worked the men down in the cane fields south, far south, they figured on the men being dead by twenty and seven. It was the way they worked it out. After they were twenty and seven they started to break and it was easier to just let them die and get newer ones, younger ones.

People. People bought and sold and each of them on these little pieces of paper, each of their lives down to a slip of auction paper. “Answers to name of …”

Swore then, swore in my mind so I suppose it’s the same as swearing in the open and I hope God he don’t get to keeping too close a track on those things. Swore at all the evil that men could do and I cried some with Lucy, cried for the people on the small papers we read in the yellow light from the lamp.

We stopped for a bit and sat, getting sad, but then I shook my head. Crying wouldn’t
help. “We have to eat something now. So we can keep going.”

She took out one of the hams. We didn’t have a knife but there was broken glass from the windows and I found a piece and sliced two chunks, thick with fat and smelling of hickory smoke. The smell must have been more than I thought because twice men came to the door while we were eating. One white and the other the same black man who had been beating Greerson. The white man he just looked in and moved on, scared looking, a white face flashing in the lamplight and gone. The black man he came in and we gave him some ham and he chewed it quiet, sitting in the corner, didn’t talk to us, never a word and then he left, nodding his thanks for the ham while we went back to the papers.

More lives. We looked all night, paper on paper, and I stacked the ones we read in a neat pile. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away meaning what they meant and just at first gray dawn, sun just starting to help the lamp, Lucy she found it.

“Two children, one boy answers to name of Tyler, girl answers to name of Delie, to be auctioned together or separately—”

I snatched the paper away from her and read but it didn’t say more. Just that, to be
auctioned. My babies, to be sold. Together or separately? Not that, not apart, not all of us apart. Where were they, when were they sold, who bought them, who bought my babies, my life?

Nothing more on the paper. I turned it over and over but it didn’t give nothing. Couldn’t think, couldn’t do, couldn’t make my brain get working again.

“We have to keep looking,” Lucy said. “There might be more paper on them.” And she picked up another piece, then another, and I nodded and we kept going, kept looking and finally, eyes burning from smoke and no sleep and reading in the dim light all night Lucy she found it again.

“Two young Negro children, answer to Delie and Tyler, sold to William Chivington of New Orleans without auction for three hundred dollars.”

I took the paper, hands shaking. Only thing else was the date. One day after they were taken from me. There was no auction. Greerson he must have been worried about what was coming. Wanted to get his money and run, only he didn’t run far. Just to his yards. Low man, low as a snake’s belly, he laid dead now in the yard where he caused so much misery.

But we had something now. We had a name, the name of the man who bought my children. We had a name and we had a place.

“Where,” Lucy asked, “is New Orleans?”

“It’s where we’re going.” Had hope now, had a name, a place. Had hope. Had
something
. “It’s where we’re going.”