The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Read online

  You call her now “the most tragic figure of the frontier,” a “white” woman degraded not just by an Indian, but also by a nigger. You say that Chloe was my slave, and I write this to disavow you of that thought.

  There is so much more truth to tell, and so little time left in which to tell it. And so I ask your forgiveness for the literary pace with which I write this section, this narrative that bridges my life as a field slave on a cane plantation along the Mississippi River to my life as Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo, the man you are about to hang.

  I have many years to cover and a short time in which to do it, and I am in this moment still a man with a body that protests for food and rest, a body that cares not that tomorrow it will be dangling and jerking from the end of a rope. My body wants only for its immediate needs. It screams at me to stop this foolishness, this ridiculous writing. It screams at me to eat, to sleep, to massage my hand and forearm until my muscles relax again. As a Comanche I learned to set aside the needs of the body. Today my heart burns only with the wish to complete this narrative and to still be able to stand up straight enough to die.

  I joined the army after I left Sou Sou. I had heard from passersby that a regiment of Negro soldiers was being formed, and I walked downriver to Camp Parapet and presented myself to the first white soldier I saw. He took me to his captain and I was signed up. I was told that yes, I would be sent across the river to Texas to fight. It was not true. I was not sent to Texas, and my plan to desert my post once there and begin my search for Chloe was thwarted.

  I spent the remainder of the war serving the Union, serving the country that had brought my ancestors here as slaves, and had then regretted that decision enough to now allow black men to fight and get shot at. It was as safe a place to be as any for the next three years. At least I had a gun and was surrounded by other men with guns. At least I was on the side of the white people who would not re-enslave me once the war was over.

  I will tell you only two stories from this time.

  While still in Louisiana along the German Coast above New Orleans, I made a survey with my captain upriver. He was fond of me, as I was literate and, he said, intelligent. He was a kind man, far kinder than the white soldiers who taunted and swore that “Niggers won’t fight.” I had lied to him, telling him that I knew the land, therefore he chose me often to go with him on these little excursions into the country. On this particular exploration we rode our horses a long ways up the levee road. We passed many plantations with the cane gone long in the fields, the weeds lapping at walkways and steps leading to high and once mighty verandas, the morning shadows falling across busted windows and doors left ajar. Not all the plantations were abandoned by their owners, but the vast work-packs of Negroes were missing, and the fields left unattended. As we traveled upriver, a white man or woman would often step out onto the gallery of a big house and glare at us.

  In the afternoon the levee road became familiar to me. I recognized the bend in the river where Henry and I had worked to repair the levee the day Old Miss died. A little later I saw the quay where I had once rolled barrels of sugar and molasses, and where I had waited on the deck of the steamer for Master Wilson to bring Chloe and the other house slaves to board. In the other direction I could see all of Sweetmore, the quarters, and the fields, and beyond the fields, the sugarhouse, and beyond that, the big house with its four cold chimneys. Beside the lane leading to Sweetmore was a grave marked with a wooden cross, rocks mounded like a tumor on the land. We reined in our horses and sat in the saddles looking down at the tilted cross. An animal had pawed at the earth, and a hole was partially dug along one side of this last resting place.

  “Sir,” I said. No sentence shaped itself. I swallowed a great lump that had formed in my throat. “Sir,” I said again.

  My captain looked at me. His name was Captain Wiel. “Is this your old place, Persy?” he asked.

  “Yes sir.”

  “I’ll hold your horse,” he said, and he reached out to take the reins.

  I dismounted and clambered down the bank of the levee. There was no name on the cross, but this would be where Katy, Wilson’s cook, fell when he shot her five months earlier. I wondered who had buried her, Henry and Sup perhaps, or one of the others who had run off into the swamps. I pushed my boot against a rock that had been pawed away from the grave. I straightened the cross and wedged another stone against its base to hold it upright. Behind me the fields of cane, their plants taller than me now, waved and undulated in the breeze.

  When I looked up I saw that Captain Wiel was making his way down the side of the levee, leading my horse as he sat astride his. He stopped before me. “I could use a little break,” he said, dismounting. “I’ll just sit in the shade here.” He led the horses to a live oak tree and tied the reins to a low-hanging branch. “Take a look around if you want to.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I turned downstream a ways and followed a footpath into the quarters and pushed open the door of my old cabin. The smell of damp disuse rose to meet my nostrils. There were four pallets lined against two walls. Ashes filled the hearth. I shoved the toe of my boot against a partially burnt log and wondered if it was from the same fire I had stoked the morning of our departure, the morning I woke up to find Henry and Sup gone. I touched the peg where Henry had always hung his hat. I walked to the pallet in the far corner of the front wall and lay facedown on it. I ran my fingers along the crack where the floor met the wall, as if Chloe’s note would materialize at their touch. I rolled over and looked at the ceiling, my movement stirring the scent of mold.

  I stepped back outside and headed up the lane, past the bell that had called me to work, tilting now on its post, past the stoop where Master Wilson had stood to make his little announcements, past the wagon I had hidden behind while making my way to the sugarhouse, past my hopes of ever escaping with Chloe.

  I pushed the door to the sugarhouse open. The ghosts of grinding season were thick here, the boiling kettles, the rollers crushing the cane, the feet scuffing paths from task to task until the dirt floor was ridged like a washboard. And then the ghosts of our sugarhouse party made their way onto the floor, the table covered with the patched red cloth and laden with food, the couples swinging and dancing to Jeff’s fiddle. The door behind me heaved and creaked. I turned, but nothing was there. Nothing but ghosts. They owned this place now.

  They jingled tack as I passed the stable where the horses had been kept. They bleated as I passed the milking barn. They moaned as I approached the whipping place, the three stakes in the ground where I had been tied. I kicked at one of the stakes. It did not move. It would not move. I turned to face the big house, and it loomed as ominously as it ever had, towering in the landscape, towering over the cane plants, towering over me. I walked toward it.

  Parts of the picket fence that surrounded the big house had been kicked over, large sections of it lying on the ground with tangles of thick weeds punching their way through the slats. The gate still stood and I pushed at it, but it hung by only one hinge and I had to lift it in order to scrape it across the ground.

  I had never before approached the front door of Master Wilson’s house. With each step closer the house grew larger and larger, its windows like accusing eyes staring at me, as though the house itself would punish me for daring to verge on such directness. I stood now at the foot of the steps, looking up at the veranda, at the chairs and couches pulled into a circle as if they expected a slave to step forward with tumblers of bourbon, a box of cigars. My eyes wandered to the front door, left slightly ajar, creating one slant of darkness that revealed nothing of the interior.

  I placed one foot on the first step and stood, not moving, until finally I placed my other foot on the next step, and so I climbed to the gallery, slowly, and then stood on the gray-painted floor facing the dark green–painted front door. I had always thought it black from a distance.

  I told myself that there was no reason to feel such trepidation at entering the big house o
f Sweetmore. I reminded myself that I had entered and plundered the big house of Sou Sou plenty of times. I had dragged out furniture, rifled through books and papers, stolen dishes and clothes, the very boots on my feet, the piece of map I still kept folded in my pocket. Yet this felt more dangerous, and I swear that as I set my hand on the latch of the front door, I felt once again the chilled fingers of that spirit raking across my skin, always, it seemed, connecting me to Master Wilson. I pushed the door open and stepped inside, finding myself in a wide front hall, doorways to rooms in every direction except directly in front of me. There, a curved staircase rose as if to some clouded, exalted place in the sky.

  I smelt him here; his stinking breath, his flatulence, his sweat, his semen. I suddenly felt ill and leaned over and vomited in one corner of the hall. I straightened and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “You bastard,” I said out loud, my voice echoing against the cold white walls.

  I walked through the lower rooms first, my boots thumping hollowly across the floor, leaving prints in the dust that coated everything. In the dining room nothing had been touched, not the large table with the twelve chairs pulled up close to it, not the china soup tureen with a ladle jutting out from under its lid, not the thick spiderweb that filmed from the ladle to the windowsill.

  In the parlor were two chairs with curved backs. One was pulled up against the wall as if waiting for a firing squad; the other lay on its side in the hearth, partially burned. There were three upholstered settees, a knife slash running through each, horsehair spilling to the floor. Tables, once polished, were now sheeted with dust, and a lamp sat on one, its globe clouded with soot. In another room books were spilled onto the floor, and some piled in the fireplace, but in the study it looked as if nothing had been touched. An inkwell, a pen, and stationery were arranged on the desk in an obsessively meticulous line.

  I ran my fingers across one sheet of the stationery, over Master Wilson’s embossed initials, the same stationery on which Chloe had written her note to me. I opened a drawer. There was nothing in it. I rifled through the rest of the drawers in the desk, searching for anything that might tell me where he had gone in Texas. There was nothing. A receipt for Gerald Wilson’s headstone. A wax seal. A strip of ribbon curled into one corner, gritty with dust.

  I climbed the curving staircase to the upstairs rooms. There were five in all, and I went first to one and then to the next, peering into the doorway of each, not sure what it was that I sought, then realizing that the room I most wanted to visit would be Missus Lila’s room, where Chloe had spent most of her time. But which one was it?

  I thought about the placement of the windows that I had studied so much from down below, and the balcony I had stared up at so often. I walked to the western side of the house and entered the last bedroom. I opened the doors to the gallery and stepped outside, looking out over the yard, and beyond it the fields, the sugarhouse, the levee, and the river. I saw Captain Wiel sitting beneath his tree, his hat pulled down over his eyes. I returned my gaze to the yard and recognized the tree I had stood beside with Sup while witnessing the newly formed Confederate troops march and drill. I turned back to the room, knowing that this was indeed Missus Lila’s quarters. A four-poster bed, thick with lace and ruffles and comforters. Rugs. Dressers and armoires. Tables. Two chairs were pulled up to either side of the bed, and at its foot, a pad made of an old quilt. This, I was certain, was where Chloe had slept, but it told me nothing of where she had gone.

  I went to the next room. Another four-poster bed. Less lace, fewer ruffles. I opened the armoire. It was filled with men’s clothes, a pair of boots. This was his bedroom, his bed, where he had patted his plump hands as Chloe stood in the doorway. This was the place where Master Wilson had repeatedly raped my woman. My rage released itself like a bear finally let off its chain.

  I picked up a chair and threw it into a mirror, glass splintering across the floor. I rocked the armoire back and forth until it crashed down with a loud crack, a cloud of dust rising from the floor and then settling. I pulled my pistol and fired three times into the mattress, and feathers puffed out into the air. They drifted onto my uniform, onto my hat, onto my boots. I leaned down to brush one away, and there on the floor I saw a small shadow in the low-slung afternoon light that cast itself where the armoire had stood.

  You will perhaps think I have gone mad if I tell you that the world became quieter then, not just because I had ceased my rage, but because the birds and the insects, so incessant in Louisiana, stopped singing. The air grew still, as though every spirit who had ever crossed the cane fields of Sweetmore was now behind me, pushing me, guiding my hands toward this small object with the long shadow. I knelt down and touched it. I picked it up. A button, plain and unadorned. I held it in the palm of my hand, and remembered, as we sat together on the deck of the steamer, Chloe’s fingers wandering at the rent of fabric on her dress.

  How many times had she let me unhitch this button from its fastening? How many times had I spread the fabric of her dress apart? How many times had I slurped at her love like a hungry calf, and what had she received from me but semen, and empty promises? I closed my fingers around the button and I swore that, somehow, I would find her. As I did so I heard Captain Wiel’s boot steps on the stairs. “Persy,” he called. “Persy, are you injured?”

  “No sir,” I said.

  He stepped into the room and saw me kneeling there amid the feathers, the overturned armoire, and the splinters of mirror glinting across the floor. “Perhaps it’s time to leave,” Captain said.

  “Yes sir.” I slipped the button into my pocket.

  It was September 1862. I had not yet seen battle, but that would soon change. As my regiment advanced on Port Hudson in the spring of 1863, a shell hit a man in the head and his brains splattered across my uniform. He was the color sergeant, and his name was Anselmas Planciancois. When he was hit two corporals to either side of him seized the flag to prevent it from touching the ground.

  That night I served as assistant to a surgeon, who was not really a surgeon but was merely a hospital steward. All the white doctors had refused to attend to the colored troops, but this man could saw through bone as well as any, and that seemed to be all that was required.

  We worked in a small shack on a spit of land inside a swamp. The floor around us was slick with blood, the air slick with screams and moans, pleading and suffering. Our patients were laid out on an old pine table, and the steward’s apron was covered in blood, as was my own. We administered chloroform, and when the chloroform ran out we administered muscle, holding the men down on the table as they writhed and screamed, and as the surgeon plied his grisly trade. With each limb he sawed off I took hold of it and tossed it out the back door like a stick of firewood.

  When we had finished our horrible task I wandered out into the night. There was a small campfire close by and I went to it and sat on a log, listening to the snores of the sleeping men all around me, and picking pieces of Sergeant Planciancois’s skull from my uniform. I felt in my pocket for Chloe’s button, and was relieved to find it still there, nestled against the little noose.

  I did not want to risk losing it and so I wandered back to the makeshift hospital, and I found a man who had died in the night. I loosened the buckle of his belt and slid the belt from his pants. I then took the belt outside and held it against a stump as I cut from it a thin strip of leather. On this I strung Chloe’s button and tied it around my neck.

  IF I WERE a gentler person, a man of sentiment and poetry, then I would tell you that it was only my love for Chloe that kept me alive during the war. I have read enough books to know that it would make a good story. But truthfully, it was also my hatred of Master Wilson. I nursed that hatred, and it became the strength with which I dug the trenches for latrines, the ferocity with which I built breastworks and went into battle, and the desperation with which I survived.

  At the end of the war the entire nation was desperate—some folks for food, others for she
lter, almost all to be with loved ones again, if the loved ones were still alive. I was no different. I was desperate to find Chloe. It pained me to think that she might remember me as yet another man, no different from the rest, who had used her for his pleasure. I was as desperate to prove to myself that this was not true as I was to prove it to her.

  It had been three years since I’d last seen Chloe. That she might not remember me at all, that she might not love me any longer, that she might have married another man, that I would not even be able to find her; these were thoughts I would not allow myself as I caught a steamer across the Mississippi River and began walking. It was October of 1865. I slept in burned-out houses and abandoned barns and along spits of land inside the swamps. I looked out for snakes and battled swarms of mosquitoes and ducked under my worn wool coat during thunderstorms, and shaded my face from the sun with an old hat I’d found along the road. I ate what I could find. When game was scarce I ate bugs and for nourishment, drank a tea brewed from lichen or pine needles. I foraged for persimmons and wild grapes. I caught crayfish and snapping turtles. These last I threw directly into the fire, and when they tried to crawl out, I poked them back in with a stick, later scooping the cooked meat out of the shells with my fingers.

  I was given, on occasion, a ride in the back of a wagon, or passage across a bayou on a flat boat. I was given, on occasion, a meal sneaked to me out the back door of an old plantation by an ex-slave who had stayed on with a former master or mistress. I saw that the loss of the war, the loss of crops and prestige, the loss of slaves and property had stricken some white people with what is politely called “a case of the nerves.” Those who were stricken as such became harder than they had ever been before. I wondered at times if Master Wilson had succumbed to such a disorder, or if he had somehow righted himself, as a cat that tumbles will always land on its feet.