The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Page 10

  “Can you swim?” I asked.

  “Naw.” Then he stopped working and lifted his head. “That the bell?”

  I ceased shoveling and stopped to listen. The river lapped at the shore, and for a while this was all that I could hear. I strained my ears, blocking out all sound and then, just barely, I heard it. The bell clanging back and forth, calling the slaves in from their work, for what reason, I did not know.

  “Back to quarters,” the driver yelled down to us.

  We climbed to the crest, making sure not to drag our shovels or shove them into the dirt for leverage, lest we be accused of causing further damage. Then we scaled down the other side of the levee and began the trudge back to quarters, merging with other gangs leaving their own work and moving in the same direction.

  “Ol’ Miss,” I heard someone say.

  “She dead I bet,” another said.

  “She been ’bout half-dead all her damn life, what I hear,” Henry said, but no one dared to laugh. The death of one’s white person was rarely a good thing. We could so easily be sold, or inherited, moved like furniture into another room. “Too soon fo’ her to be dyin’,” Henry added.

  “Massuh Gerald ain’t been in the ground that long,” another said.

  “Too soon,” Henry said again.

  I barely felt my feet meeting the ground with each step, barely felt the shovel I held in my hand or noticed the other slaves drifting along with me toward the sound of the bell. Wilson stood on the stoop of one of the cabins, as he always did when he had an announcement for us. We gathered around as we were meant to, crowding around him like cows waiting to be milked. Some of us pasted on our anxious, concerned masks. Others looked as impassive as always. I stood at the back of the crowd, not wishing to be in Wilson’s sight if this announcement was what I feared.

  Master Wilson raised his hands. “I have some very sad news,” he said. “Your kind and gentle mistress has passed away. I know that you all share in the sorrow I feel.”

  A proper murmur ran through the group of slaves. I tell you, we were such good performers. A few cries of “Oh no” and “Lord have mercy” rose from the crowd. A few sobs were heard and a few heads were lowered into the skirts of their owners, the grief, it would seem, too much to bear. Perhaps some of it was real. I cannot say for sure.

  Harriet said, “I knew her when she come here a young bride, Massuh.”

  “She a kind and gentle mistress,” someone else said, echoing Wilson’s own words. “Sho was.”

  “Her sufferin’ over now, Massuh,” another person intoned.

  Without discussion or plan, we formed a line, and one by one, we shuffled by Master Wilson and hung our heads and gave him our condolences.

  “I sorry fo’ yo’ loss, Massuh,” I said.

  “Thank you, Persy.” And as had happened before when in Master Wilson’s presence, I felt that cold spirit there between us, touching my chest with its bony fingers and extending the same, I suspect, to Wilson, who reached out and gripped my shoulder. “I know you will miss her,” he said pointedly.

  After we had filed by and given him our shows of sympathy, Wilson held his hands up again to silence us that he might say more. “This is hard news for you to receive in the middle of a workday,” he said. “I know that it pains every one of you to think of your mistress passed away, and of the loss to me of my companion in this life. I know that your grief is excruciating, as is mine, but the best thing for you in this time of loss, the best thing to help us heal our wounds, is to just do our work. This is what God wants of you, that you just do your work.”

  There was a response of, “Yassuh. Yassuh. Yassuh.” Those who were crying, or pretending to, wiped their eyes. We drifted away from the yard like a flock of moths.

  All the next day a throng of white people came and went from the big house, buggies pulling up, colored coachmen standing by, waiting for their masters and mistresses as they paid their respects to Missus Lila and gave their condolences to Master Wilson. Sylvie was pulled from the fields and given a clean dress and told to help serve the guests and clean up after they had left.

  “Missus Lila,” Sylvie told us that night as we gathered in her cabin, “layin’ out in the parlor, wearin’ a blue satin dress. She look good.”

  “Better than when she alive?” Henry asked.

  Sylvie giggled and the others laughed. I sat with my head bowed, unable to think of anything but Chloe and our plans of escape the following night.

  “Chloe grievin’ hard,” Sylvie said.

  I looked up, and found that she was staring at me.

  “She grievin’ hard. Stayin’ up all night with Missus Lila. She’d of stayed with her all day, too, ’cept all the white folk.”

  “They buryin’ her tomorrow,” Harriet said. “Chloe’s grievin’ come to an end after that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Sylvie answered, still staring at me.

  “Grievin’ come to an end,” Harriet repeated, shaking her head.

  I had so utterly failed Chloe. I had so utterly let her down. I had lied to her, I had deceived her, I had delayed all chances of taking her hand and flying over the cane fields to freedom, and now I doubted that Master Wilson would be going to a poker game the next night. I doubted that Chloe would be able to meet me in the sugarhouse. I doubted that we might ever get as clear a chance for escape again, for as soon as Missus Lila was buried, Chloe would lose the only protection she ever had from Master Wilson’s lasciviousness. She would belong to him more than she had ever belonged to him before.

  I plan to take care of you.

  My words echoed back to me.

  I plan to never let anything bad happen to you again.

  “They somethin’ goin’ on with the white folk,” I heard Sylvie say. “They all agitated. They come to pay they ’spects to Missus Lila but they standin’ round talkin’ ’bout somethin’ called a ’bardment. Yankees done barded they way up the river what I hears. I tellin’ y’all, they’s mighty antsy over that ’bardment. Doin’ some mighty large frettin’ seem like to me. Massuh too.”

  I lifted my head to hear more.

  “What gonna happen them Yanks get through?” Sup asked.

  “Gonna be free,” Harriet said. “Yankees gonna set us free.”

  “Sound like they done got through,” Sylvie said. “Broke through somethin’ called a boom.”

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  They looked at me blankly.

  “Sylvie, what did you say about Yankee ships on the river?”

  “They down below New Orleans, white folk say. Broke through a boom, they sayin’. Got past two ’federate forts. White folk right jumpy ’bout it.”

  “Wilson too?”

  “He jumpy fo’ sho. He pacin’ in front of Missus Lila casket all day long. It a sight to see. Her layin’ out, him and all the other white folk standin’ round talkin’ ’bout ’bardments and booms like she ain’t even there.”

  “What you think it mean, Shoot?” Henry asked.

  I shook my head. “I do not know.”

  The following day Holmes was free with his whip. It snapped beside us if it was deemed we were not planting fast enough. It slashed across our backs if we stopped to wipe the sweat from our brows. It popped left and right as Holmes rode through the fields on his horse. “You goddamn niggers,” he said more than once. “You think you gonna be free. I’ll show you free at the end of a rope.”

  The whip landed that day twice across my own back.

  “You fucking niggers,” Holmes kept saying, as if the war, as if the ships Sylvie reported on the night before, as if every perceived injustice done to white people was the fault of the enslaved.

  Late afternoon a wagon rolled into the lane and rambled up to the cemetery, where it stopped. The driver was a colored man, and he jumped down and began to wrestle with dragging something off the wagon bed.

  “Persy,” Holmes said. “You go over there and help that boy, and be quick about it.”

  “
Yassuh.” I pulled the cane bag off my shoulder and trotted across the grass. The item the man was struggling with was the tombstone for Gerald Wilson’s grave, lying, I saw, in the wagon bed in front of two others.

  “Reckon we’ll be needing another one ourselves,” I told him as we slid the slab of stone off the back of the wagon. “Our mistress died this week.”

  “Might not get it,” the man said quickly. “Yankees at New Orleans now. Name’s Joe,” he added.

  In the short amount of time it took us to move the tombstone off the wagon and lean it inside the wrought iron fence, I learned that Joe belonged to a man whose home lay between Sweetmore and New Orleans. He was being sent upriver to deliver and collect on three tombstone orders, after which he was to return to his master as fast he could with the money. “Massuh say we gonna refugee,” Joe said. “Him, me, all the slaves ’cept the oldest and the youngest goin’ to Texas.”

  “What about his wife?” I asked.

  “He say she be all right stayin’ on. He say he got to ’tect his property, and she stay here, make sho the house don’t get burnt down.”

  Just then the lash whistled through the air beside my ear and landed next to me, spitting up a clump of grass at my feet. “You taking too long, Persy,” Holmes said. “You, nigger,” he said to Joe, “you done your work. Now get on out of here before I whip you myself.”

  “Yassuh,” Joe said, “but I supposed to collect on this from Massuh Wilson.”

  “Get on up to the big house, then, but stop your jabbering here.”

  “Yassuh.” Joe climbed into the wagon seat and chucked the mule into moving.

  I returned to the fields and whispered the news to Henry as we knelt down to plant. “Yankees at New Orleans now,” and then Henry whispered it to Sup, and Sup to Sally, and Sally to her neighboring planter until it had spread across the fields like water. Holmes continued to lash with his whip like a madman, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. He could not stop this whispered knowledge from spreading among us like gospel. By the time Missus Lila was buried that evening the slaves fairly vibrated with what we were not supposed to know.

  Perhaps, I thought, it was the perfect night after all, for Chloe and me to escape. Perhaps Master Wilson would be so distracted by this new development that Chloe would be able to sneak away. Perhaps we could avoid the swamps altogether, and make it downriver to the Union lines.

  We gathered graveside just as we had for Gerald Wilson, many of the hands this time showing stripes of blood through the backs of their shirts, but still our elation could not be contained. We stood in our mud-caked shoes and our bloodstained shirts at the grave of our former mistress, and I swear that we could barely keep from rolling onto our toes and dancing a little jig. We twitched, we scuffled, we jittered, and whenever a white person looked our way we quickly stilled ourselves and hung our heads and showed the proper sadness at the passing of our “dear and kind” mistress.

  Chloe stood with the small group of house slaves behind Wilson and his daughter-in-law. Chloe’s head was bowed and her hands clasped in front of her, and this time she did not look up. None of the house slaves looked up. They stood still and solemn and I wondered if they knew as much as we did, and then I wondered if they perhaps knew more. I stared at Chloe as much as I dared. I tried to will her with my eyes and my heart to look at me, to give me a smile, to assure me in some way that we would be meeting in the sugarhouse that night. But she and the other house slaves kept their heads down, although I saw that Wilson looked up plenty. He and all the white people, including the preacher, kept glancing nervously toward the river, and then the road, as if Yankees might invade at any minute.

  The same preacher who had presided over the service for Gerald Wilson delivered words for Missus Lila, and he was even quicker in his delivery than before. A short reading from the Bible, a scant few words on the goodness of the dearly departed’s character, a hasty prayer for her soul, and then four slaves grabbed the ropes that were snaked under the casket, lowered Missus Lila into the ground, and began shoveling the dirt back into the grave.

  “Get to your cabins,” Wilson said to the rest of us. “If any of you are outside tonight we’ll shoot you down dead.”

  As I turned to walk away I caught Chloe’s eye at last. I gave her a smile and a barely perceptible nod toward the sugarhouse. She returned my gesture with one slight shake of her head and then looked down again. We walked in opposite directions, away from each other, always away from each other it seemed. Holmes came riding up beside me. “Get going,” he said, and he lashed the whip into the mud, spattering it against my legs. “Get to your cabin and stay there. All you niggers,” he hollered as he spun his horse around. “Get to your cabins and stay there.”

  HENRY BUILT the fire up and as he laid sticks on the crackling flame he asked, “What you think it all mean, Shoot?”

  “They’re nervous.”

  “Jittery as hell look like to me,” Sup said.

  “Ought to be jittery.” Henry again. “Judgment day comin’.” He paced across the floor. “Ought to be layin’ down on the ground beggin’ fo’ mercy, you ask me.”

  Sup mixed up a batter and cooked the hoecakes for our dinner. We sat on the edges of our pallets eating. There was nothing more to say, although Henry occasionally shook his head and muttered under his breath, “Judgment day comin’, Massuh,” while Sup added a chorus of, “Yankees comin’, Massuh.”

  I could barely contain my glee at the thought of leaving Sweetmore with Chloe that night. Her shake of the head, her looking down, the house slaves’ somber demeanor, were all signs I refused to read. She would be there. We would leave. We would go to the Yankees. Somehow we would find our way to them, to freedom, and to a little house of our own with Chloe baking in the kitchen and children crawling across the floor.

  Sup stood and put another log on the fire. We lay down for the night, but I kept myself awake, waiting to hear the slowed breath of my cabinmates that I might at last slip out the door and sneak away to the sugarhouse to meet Chloe and disappear into the night. I was tense with excitement. My skin felt as though it would crawl away without me if I did not leave soon.

  Outside an owl hooted, and I heard the rustling of some creature along the exterior wall behind my head. The insects started up their din of song. Then the pounding of someone riding a horse through the quarters. Holmes most likely, patrolling, I thought.

  The fire sputtered and gave away in the grate, yet Henry’s and Sup’s breathing did not deepen and I knew that they, too, lay awake listening to the horse pounding past our cabin. How could any of us sleep, I thought; how could we not lay awake and wonder what this increased surveillance meant to our lives. To their lives, for it would mean nothing to me. I would be leaving with Chloe. Even if Henry and Sup never fell asleep, I would fly this coop. When I heard the horse ride through again, I began to silently sing to myself the verses of my mama’s favorite song, thinking to use each chorus to mark the amount of time between one ride-through and the next.

  Children go where I send thee.

  And how shall I send thee?

  I’m going to send thee one by one,

  One for the little bitty baby

  Born, born, born in Bethlehem.

  Now children go where I send thee.

  And how shall I send thee?

  I’m going to send thee two by two,

  Two for Paul and Silas,

  One for the little bitty baby,

  Born, born, born in Bethlehem.

  It was a good song to gauge time by, building on itself the way that it did, plus it was a strengthening song, for tonight, the night of my escape with Chloe, I almost believed in God again. By the time I reached “five by five,” five for the gospel preacher, four for the four that stood at the door, three for the Hebrew children, two for Paul and Silas, one for the little bitty baby, Holmes rode through once more. I judged it was just enough time between his rounds to make my way to cover, if not all the way to the s
ugarhouse.

  I reached behind me and tugged Chloe’s note from its hiding place and in the dark I ran my fingers across the indentations of its marks, lingering as always on her “signature.” I determined that I would take the note with me, that it would be something I would show our children when I told them about slavery times, about what it had been like to belong to another man, about loving their mother, and how much this note had meant to me as I lay on my pallet with my back raw-open from a whipping.

  I would tell our children everything. Chloe’s and my children would not grow up lacking for knowledge. I would hold nothing back. I wanted them to know what a brave, kind mother they had. I wanted them to know how much I loved her, and how we had risked our lives to leave a place called Sweetmore. I pictured them asking, “Where is it?”

  “Gone,” I would answer, “it’s gone. Once the slaves were no longer there to work the cane and repair the levee, the river rose and broke through and swept it out to sea.”

  I practiced the words in my mind. Gone. Swept away. Out to sea. I pictured the levee breaking and the water pouring over the land, covering the cane fields, lapping at the wheels of carts and wagons, seeping beneath the doors of the sugarhouse, rising to the lips of the kettles, flowing up the steps, one by one, of the big house.

  I folded Chloe’s note and slid it into my pocket and as I did so I felt the little noose from One-Eyed Jim’s hanging. I still carried it every day, although I had not fingered it in a long time. My mind of late had stayed so thoroughly saturated with thoughts of Chloe and escape that I had simply forgotten it. It had become something that I owned, something that was always in my pocket, but not something that I ever thought of, and I wondered at that. How could I, a slave who owned so little, not give thought to what little I owned, while the white folks, it seemed to me, owned a great deal, and thought about it with debilitating constancy?

  I lay on my back and held the little noose, rubbing it as I had once done for comfort. I inserted my finger into its loop, and pulled on the rope, causing it to tighten. Then I loosened it and ran my fingers once again along its knot.