The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Read online

  I asked about him wherever I went, as I inquired also about Chloe. A light-skinned colored woman I said. Last seen traveling with her master in 1862, on their way to Texas. He was short, and round. A large mole right here. I pointed to my neck, just below Chloe’s button.

  Last I saw her, my wife, I added, she had long wavy brown hair. She usually wore it in a braid. Slight of build, I said. Strong arms. Her name is Chloe. My wife, I said again. I am searching for my wife.

  I was met with women like Lizbeth who told me I was on a fool’s errand, and that I would never be able to find her. Texas, I was told, again and again, is a big place. “Better get yo’sef a new wife. That one done gone.”

  But I was also met with sympathy, a shake of the head, a pitying look, and a hand reaching out to take the empty plate from my lap. “They been several mo’ like you come through here lookin’ fo’ wives, or chirrens, or mamas or papas. Somebody always lookin’ fo’ somebody. Now you best get on fo’ my mistress see you. Somethin’ fo’ yo’ travels.” And this kind woman would hand me bit of bread, and bacon perhaps, wrapped in an oil-stained cloth. “Get on now, fo’ we both in trouble.” And on I went, to the next barn to sleep in, the next back door to inquire at, the next begged meal, if I could find one.

  I had traveled two weeks, maybe three, when I met a black man along a lane, walking in the opposite direction. We nodded to each other, and stopped for conversation. “Name’s Zek,” the man said.

  “Persy,” I told him.

  “Where you headin’?”

  “Texas.”

  “You almost there. Not too late to change yo’ mind.”

  “Why would I change my mind?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “White folk in Texas ain’t givin’ up so easy. ’Mancipation come late fo’ ’em. They still some slavin’ over there, and some may as well be slavin’ fo’ all the diff’ence they is. They still whippin’ in Texas,” Zek added.

  “That can’t be legal,” I said. “We’re free now.”

  Zek laughed. “You sho talk purty, but legal and free two diff’ent things.” He shrugged and pointed down the road. “Don’t matter to me. Sabine River ’bout three miles off. You almost there. Don’t ask to cross at the ferry. They’d soon drown you. Travel downriver a ways, find a colored man named Lester. He take you ’cross if you hell-bent on it.”

  “I am,” I said. “My wife—”

  He cut me off. “I got me a wife. I got three, all diff’ent places fo’ I get sold on to the next place. Even if I thought I could find one, I wouldn’t know which to look fo’. They was all fine women,” he added.

  “I’ve just got one.”

  “You talk educated,” Zek observed.

  “I can read and write.”

  “I wouldn’t let on ’bout that if I was you.” He nodded. Lifted his hat. “Good luck to you, then. Lester’ll take care of you.”

  It was late afternoon when I found the man Lester along the eastern bank of the muddy and flat Sabine River. He rowed me across for the last bit of money I had in my pocket. “You change yo’mind now, I row you back,” he said. “Ain’t no extra charge fo’ changin’ yo’ mind. Ain’t no shame in it neither.”

  “No, thank you,” I said.

  He pulled the skiff ashore and I climbed out. “Now listen here,” Lester said. “You in Sabine County. You follow that path.” He pointed to a footpath cutting through the bottomland and into woods. “Where it fork, you go left. Not right. You got that?”

  I nodded.

  “Left, not right,” he said again. “Right lead you to the big house of a place called Shambleville.”

  “A town?” I asked.

  “Ain’t no town. It jest a cotton farm belongin’ to Massuh Shamble. You don’t wanna mess with him. He mean as hell befo’ his slaves run off. Now he meaner.”

  “They’re free,” I insisted. “A free man can’t run off.”

  He gave a little huff at that. “Tell it to Massuh Shamble if you want to. I jest tryin’ to help you keep a rope off yo’ neck.” I looked at him. He nodded gravely. “I ain’t lyin’ to you,” he said. “They hangin’ niggers fo’ lookin’ at white people wrong. Massuh Shamble’s niggers done left befo’ he could get up a gang to quit ’em from it. He fired up ’bout that. Got cotton in the field need harvestin’ and no niggers to work it.

  “I take you back,” Lester offered again. “No extra charge. I goin’ back anyway.”

  I shook my head.

  “You one determined nigger,” he said, and then reminded me about the footpath. “Go left at that fork. You still be on Shambleville land. Quarters that way. If you don’t light a fire or lamp, I reckon you could stay in one of them cabins fo’ a night. They a woman named Hannah still there. She ’bout to pop a baby. Husband done left her. You find her, she help you know where to go next.”

  He nodded and shoved off, and I turned away from him, gazing at the bottomlands and the path leading through the woods and listening to his oars dipping into the water behind me, growing farther and farther away.

  I took the path as instructed, turned left instead of right, and arrived at nightfall along the edge of a cotton field, and beyond the cotton, the rows of cabins. I crossed the field, the plants scraping against my shirt and trousers, and as they did so I remembered one of the men I had served with at Port Hudson. He’d told me that as New Orleans fell, his master had also fled, taking his slaves to his second plantation, a cotton farm in Texas. I had not heard of Master Wilson owning any other plantation, but perhaps he did. Perhaps he had come here. I entered one of the cabins and there I spent my first night in Texas, falling asleep on a pallet similar to mine at Sweetmore.

  I found Hannah the next morning standing with her hand on her back, watching the sunrise. She did not seem surprised when I called out to her. “I reckon Lester send you,” she said. “I reckon you lookin’ fo’ somebody.” I nodded, and introduced myself, and gave my descriptions of Chloe and Master Wilson, and asked if she knew of a farm belonging to a man by that name.

  She shook her head and said, “Nobody by Wilson round here.”

  “Did you see someone fitting his description?” I asked.

  Hannah sighed. “It been a long time since them folk started comin’ from Lou’siana. I seen a bunch of ’em, lines of slaves walkin’ behind a wagon or two, but I cain’t rightly ’member any ’ticulars.” She moved her hand from her back to the mound of her stomach. “Massuh Shambles be hirin’ out Massuh Wilder’s niggers startin’ tomorrow mornin’. I gotta cook fo’ ’em. They be a mess of ’em stayin’ in the quarters.” She sighed heavily again. “Overseers too. You cain’t stay here.”

  “I didn’t intend to, but who’s going to help you,” I asked, eyeing her belly, “after the baby comes?”

  She gave a sad little laugh. “Nobody. Nobody gonna help me befo’ or after.”

  “What will you do?”

  She turned and looked at me. “I do what I have to do. Whatever that be. Don’t worry ’bout Hannah. You got yo’ own woman to worry ’bout.” She ran her hands across her stomach. “It kickin’,” she said. “You wanna feel?” She reached out for my hand and took it and laid it on her belly, and beneath my palm I felt the rumblings of her child. Hannah smiled and moved my hand away.

  “Do you think I’m a fool,” I asked, “to look for her?”

  Hannah reached over to me again, and this time laid her hand on my arm. “I think you a good man fo’ lookin’.” She squeezed her fingers into my skin and repeated, “You a good man.” And then she let go and the warmth of her hand was replaced by the cool, indifferent Texas air.

  “It ain’t gonna be easy to find yo’ Chloe,” she said. “But here what you gotta do. You gotta stay away from white folk if you can. Unless you know fo’sho they kind. You talk to black folk, what you do. You find the next colored person and ask where you go, who you go see, who you ask ’bout yo’ Chloe, which white man give you work and be fair.”

  “But where do I go now?” I
asked.

  “You go six mile west. Stick to the woods. You find another quarters. Look fo’ Levi. He help you out.”

  I hesitated. It seemed as though she would give birth that very day. She read me. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do fo’ me,” she said. “Jest get on. It make me happy to know they a man out there lookin’ fo’ his woman.”

  “I imagine there are a lot now that the war’s ended,” I said.

  “Some givin’ up. It too hard. White people too crazy ’bout losin’ the war. They takin’ it out on everyone but theyselves. Go find Levi. Stick to the woods. Don’t take the road if you can help it. You see white men, get out of they way. Don’t let ’em see you. You ain’t supposed to be travelin’ without no pass.”

  “A pass? I’m a freedman.”

  “Depends on what you call free,” Hannah said. “I told my man to leave me here. Jake’s his name. I told him to get out and take our other chirren. Two boys.” Her voice cracked. “Joey and Billy. Save the chirren, I tell Jake. Save yo’self. I don’t reckon I ever see ’em again. Now go.” She pushed against my chest. “Go. Get out of here.”

  I left her there crying at the edge of that yet to be harvested cotton field. I found the man named Levi, and from there a man named Cor, and from there a woman named Hester, and on I went, from Negro to Negro, seeking now not just information about Chloe, but also information about how to stay safe.

  By the end of November, by carefully staying off heavily traveled roads and away from towns, by following the network of former slaves, one to the next, I had made my way safely to what is known as Hill Country. All along the way I asked about Chloe to no avail.

  Winter came, and I found work, herding sheep. I slept in one corner of the farmer’s barn, bedded down in hay with an old worn quilt donated by his wife. The wind blasted through the slats of the barn. Come spring I moved on, traveling to the next settlement I’d been told about, working once cleaning a saloon in the mornings before the drinking began, another time as a grave digger in a town hit by cholera, once more herding sheep, another time teaching school, but the school was burned down.

  Occasionally I met a freedman who had a copy of the Colored Tennessean newspaper. Whenever it was available I read the advertisements placed there by a man or a woman searching for their loved ones. Sometimes I read them to myself, and sometimes out loud to a family I was staying with.

  “Information wanted of the children of Janie Smith, sold to John Webb when they were nine, six, and three. Names Noah, George, and Mary.”

  “Information wanted of my sister, Martha Ginger, mother’s name Collie Jones.”

  “Information wanted of my mother, Libby Monroe, last belonging to Henry Wallace.”

  “Information wanted by Kansas Barks on the whereabouts of her children, Eliza, Jimmy, Lina, Sarah, and Adam, sold in auction in South Carolina. Ministers, please read the above to your congregation.”

  My heart jumped one night when I read the name Chloe by the light of a fire in a slave cabin. “Information wanted about the mother and father of Chloe Simmons.”

  Simmons. The name did not fit, but names among the enslaved were fluid things. I read the details. I tried to remember the names of her mother and the man she’d called father. Anna? Jason? None of the names in the ad fit. The white men who’d once owned this Chloe did not fit. I read the rest of the ads in the paper and found nothing. The next day I headed on.

  Months passed. Seasons passed. Seasons added into years and they too passed. There was no method to my wandering, no logical approach to finding Chloe. There was no way to have a logical approach, or a plan. I knew in my mind, even in my heart and my soul, that I should end this search. Texas was too large. I would never find her. I knew this as well as I knew anything, yet I could not stop.

  Time and again I took the piece of map I’d stolen from Sou Sou out of my pocket and unfolded it. It was now thin and creased from carrying it so long, and I trawled my finger over its soft, frayed paper, as if it could somehow give up the secret of where she might be. I trawled my finger even across that empty swath of land labeled Comanches.

  As I traveled I heard stories of the Indians. It seemed unbelievable to me that outside of Saline 2,100 cattle were taken during a daytime raid, along with fifty-four horses. A few months later a man and his son were killed, the man found with twelve arrows bristling in his back, the boy with his throat cut, both scalped. Two children were captured near Comfort. A woman was raped and scalped, her son taken—Saline again. A man and his sister were killed in Gillespie County, the man’s wife and five children captured. Another man in Mason heard sounds outside, and upon investigating, he shot the figure he saw creeping around his barn, his own son it turned out, mistaken for an Indian.

  Somewhere outside of San Antonio, in June of 1867, as the land gave way again to hills of grass, I heard a wagon rattling up behind me. “Name’s Mo Tilly,” a man hollered out. “You wantin’ a ride?”

  I looked up into the face of a white man whose skin had been sunned the color of caramel, and whose cheeks looked withered as a dried leaf. He grinned at me with gummy, stained-black teeth, and then turned his head and spat tobacco juice off into the weeds.

  “Yes sir,” I said. “Thank you, sir.” And then I froze, for without thinking, I had spoken normally to this man.

  “Well, what you waitin’ fo’?” he said.

  I went to the back of the wagon, but the man stopped me.

  “Set up here by me,” he said. “I could use the comp’ny. Besides, you set back there you liable to get hit when I spit my tombaccer juice.” He let another stream fly, and then wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “Where you headin’?”

  “Texas,” I answered.

  “Ha. You in Texas.” He gave the reins a light slap and the mules plodded forward, twitching their ears against the flies.

  “Yes sir. I’m looking for my wife.”

  “Ah. Got split apart, did you?”

  “Yes sir, during the war.”

  “What yo’ name?”

  “Persy.”

  “Well, what her name? Who she belong to? I might know somethin’.”

  I told him.

  He shook his head. “Naw. Don’t know no one by name of Wilson, but Texas a big place. You plan on coverin’ every damn inch of it?”

  “It feels like I already have.”

  “How long it been since you seed her?”

  “Five years.” I began rolling the button between my fingers, and then, I cannot explain it, I told this man, this white man, Mo Tilly, whom I had just met, everything. The story poured out of me unbidden, and Mo Tilly sat there listening, slapping the reins against the mules’ backs every now and then, swatting at the flies, spitting, and occasionally interjecting commentary, kindly, so as to ease the parts that were clearly painful for me.

  “Listen here,” he said when I’d finished. “You ain’t no crim’nal or murderer, are ye? We get along jest fine, providin’ you ain’t no crim’nal or murderer. You ain’t, are ye?”

  “No sir.”

  “All right, then. You a liar though. This gal Chloe, she ain’t really yo’ wife.”

  “No sir.” I shook my head and wiped my sleeve across my face. “I’d like her to be.”

  “Five year a long time,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I hates to say it, but she might not even be alive no mo’. That damn war . . . I reckon you noticed a whole messa folk got theyselves kilt.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “If she alive, she might not want you no mo’.” He spat and wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

  “I know.”

  “Gal as good-lookin’ as all you say bound to ’tract some ’tention.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Might be married to someone else.”

  “I hope to someone good,” I said.

  “Or she might be lookin’ fo’ you while you lookin’ fo’ her, and you be goin’ ’long in Texas and she be travelin’ back to Lou�
�siana, and y’all pass each other a hunderd miles apart.”

  I nodded.

  “Lot to think ’bout.”

  “Yes.”

  “All them pos’bilities. It enough to make a man profundy tired. Why don’t you get on back in the wagon and lay down. They some blankets and such. Make yo’sef comfortable. I try not to spit on you.”

  I was tired. I felt ashamed that I had exposed myself to Mo Tilly, that I had not been more careful in dealing with a white man. As I crawled into the back of the wagon and rolled myself into a cocoon of blankets, I thought of Henry and Sup. I missed them. I missed the camaraderie we had shared. I covered my head with the blanket, only wanting to escape into sleep. Above me Mo Tilly chucked at the mules and talked to them—Gee—Haw—Come on now, Jenny, gitty up—and I fell asleep, the wagon creaking and rocking me farther along, to where, I did not know.

  When I woke it was dusk and the wagon had come to a squealing halt. I sat up to see Mo Tilly jump down off the seat and stretch his back. Sitting as he had been, I had not noticed his stature, but now I saw that he was chunky and short, about as tall, it almost seemed, as a pair of men’s knee-high boots. “Come on now, Persy,” he said. “We got to make camp.”

  A creek bubbled nearby and we drank deeply before pulling weeds away from the ground to make a fire pit, and gathering wood, then setting a blaze going, which I tended while Mo Tilly hunted. Before long he had shot a rabbit, skinned it, and had it cooking on a greenwood spit. He pulled out a jug and took a swig, then offered it to me. I took a swig and passed it back. I had never shared a jug with a white man before, or since, but it was comfortable sitting around the fire with this man, listening to the rabbit drip grease onto the sizzling coals.

  Mo Tilly told me he was heading off to foreman a ranch for a Yankee man who’d purchased it sight unseen. His first task was to winter over on the ranch, repairing what needed it, and building new where that was required. “Them plains is full of longhorns jest free fo’ the takin’,” he said. “Now listen here, Persy. I been thinkin’ ’bout yo’ sitchiation. You cain’t jest be wanderin’ Texas lookin’ fo’ this gal. You been doin’ it, what? Almost two years now? And you ain’t found her yet, and it a wonder you ain’t been kilt. It don’t make no damn sense the way you goin’ ’bout it. You got to have you a base of op’rations.”