The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Read online

  I would not feel we’d made any progress at all except for our midnight walks back to the quarters, where I would finally see in the moonlight—if there was any, and in torchlight if not—fields of cane already cut, the stubble poking above the ground like hard little sticks. The next day, before dawn, we were marched out to the fields again, and there was more cane ready to be cut, its leaves rustling in the breeze as if to taunt us.

  In my first few months at Sweetmore, I learned a few of the names of my fellow slaves, but certainly not all. There was a fellow named Sup, whom Henry, Bessle, and I bunked with in a cabin at the back of the quarters, and a woman named Sally, who cut cane faster than anyone else, and a solemn little girl named Peach, who served us our three meals a day out in the fields. But in the sugarhouse and on the boiler gang there were faces with names I would not learn until the end of grinding season.

  In the few early-morning hours between the end of work and the beginning of work, a blaze guttering in the fireplace of our cabin if it was cold enough, I learned about my new white people from Sup. He told us that Master Wilson’s wife, Missus Lila, was a thin, sickly woman, not suited to the climate of Louisiana, not suited to much of anything according to Sup. The couple had one son, whose name was Gerald. He lived with his young bride at a plantation called Ashleaf, farther up the river.

  “It when young Massuh Gerald get married, Missus Lila get sick,” Sup told us, continuing the story from one morning to the next. “She couldn’t stand to lose him. Cried and wailed when he married Miss Emma. Wailed on like he dead, fo’ god’s sake.” Sup shook his head and poked at the fire before tossing on another log. “She never did get seasoned into this place. Lost her some babies when she first come here down from Maryland. Lost three.” He stood and walked to his pallet, lay down and crossed his arms behind his head. “Make her kind of tetchy, if you ask me.”

  While cutting cane I had looked up as often as I dared toward the big house, hoping to catch a glimpse of Chloe stepping out the back door, or carrying dishes of food from the kitchen house to the big house. But the distance was too great. Now I reached into my pocket, for I slept in my clothes, as we all did during grinding season, and fingered the little noose from One-Eyed Jim’s hanging. When I looked up, Sup was staring at me, leaning on his elbow, the thin gray blanket falling from his chest. “What you know?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Somethin’ troublin’ you?”

  I took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling, at a hole where the moonlight shone through. At the foot of my pallet Bessle shifted on his moss-stuffed mattress. “There’s a girl named Chloe,” I said. “Came in the same day as us.”

  From his pallet across from Bessle’s I heard Henry groan. “Fo’get ’bout her, Shoot.”

  “What ’bout her?” Sup asked.

  “Master Wilson,” I began. And then I fell quiet.

  “Take a likin’ to her, did he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you too?”

  “Yeah, he did,” Henry said. “Now y’all go to sleep. Long day tomorrow. Long day fo’ever. Damn shit.”

  “Not the way he did,” I answered Sup.

  “Naw, I reckon not.” Sup lay back down and crossed his arms behind his head again. “I heard of her. A fancy is what I heard.”

  “Do you know what Chloe’s doing?” I asked.

  “Workin’ as a nursemaid to the missus. ’Spect come grindin’ season over, she be seein’ a lot mo’ of him.”

  I knew from my shifts driving the wagon, hauling cane to the sugarhouse, that Wilson was there most of the time during grinding season. I’d seen him talking to his overseers and drivers. I’d seen him leaning over the steaming kettles of cane juice, gauging the efficiency of the slaves working that station. I’d seen him pacing up and down with his thumbs tucked into his suspenders.

  Christmas came. Wilson did not shut down the sugarhouse as I heard some did. On Sweetmore we worked as if there had never been a savior born, as if there was nothing to celebrate, and no god to pray to.

  It was not long after Christmas that a man named Breech got his hand caught in the rollers at the mill, mangling it so badly, Henry told me, that it looked like bagasse.

  “What is bagasse?” Bessle asked.

  “Pulp,” Henry said. “Pulp left over after the cane get smashed.”

  “Breech a dead man now,” Sup said. “Been here fo’ever and ’bout wore-out anyway. They ain’t gonna do nothin’ fo’ him.”

  Two weeks later Breech died from the infection that set in after the hand went untreated. We were called away from our work to see him buried in the slaves’ cemetery along the edge of the swamp: overseers, drivers, house slaves, and field slaves, all but those working in the sugarhouse where the grinding and the boiling of syrup must go on. By the time my gang arrived a grave had been dug, and Breech lay on the ground beside his pine casket, his right hand wrapped in a blood-slick feed sack.

  It was plain to see that Breech wasn’t going to fit in that casket. His feet lay on the ground a good two hands’ length beyond its end. I’d heard from Sup that Master Wilson kept a stockpile of coffins for the slaves stored in a barn. A man named Jonas built them off-season. I would see them later on. Coffins for children of all sizes, infant on up, and coffins for adults, but no coffin that would fit Breech, and apparently no time during grinding season to build one. Behind me I heard the stifled weeping of Breech’s widow, Harriet, and his child, a girl sixteen or seventeen years old named Sylvie.

  Wilson was not there yet, and I took the opportunity of his absence to search for Chloe in the group of house slaves opposite us. I found her, clothed now as the other female house servants were, in a plain dress with a full apron, her hair swept up and pinned beneath a little frilly cap, holding on to one elbow of Master Wilson’s wife. It was my first look at the missus, and she was a sickly looking thing, skinny and pale, with a face that seemed as though it might draw up and cave in on itself with the next disappointment. Her lungs were good though. She leaned against Chloe for support, and dug her clawlike fingers into the sleeves of Chloe’s dress, and fairly shouted, “Chloe, why did you bring me here?”

  “A man die, Mizz Lila. We here to see him buried.”

  “Who?” Missus Lila said. “Who died? Someone I know?”

  “Yesem. A man named Breech, what I hear. Worked in the sugarhouse.”

  “Pshaw. I don’t know any of those niggers.”

  “Yesem,” Chloe said, but she made no effort to leave. Instead she looked up and scanned the group of slaves across the yard from her, and when her eyes landed on me, they rested there.

  Master Wilson showed up, anxious to get the ceremony under way so we could get back to making his sugar. He strode between the two groups of slaves, not noticing why Breech was lying on the ground instead of in his casket. “This nigger Breech,” Wilson said, pacing back and forth, “was a good worker. A hard worker. God rest his soul in heaven. Amen. Now someone put him in, we got work to do.”

  “Amen,” we muttered, standing there staring at Breech’s body and the casket.

  “Someone put him in and let’s get this over with,” Wilson said.

  An overseer stepped up. “He ain’t gonna fit, sir.”

  “What?”

  Chloe looked up at me, Missus Lila still clawing at her sleeve. “Why don’t someone put him in?” Missus Lila yelled.

  “He ain’t gonna fit, sir,” the overseer repeated.

  “Chloe, I’m cold. I don’t need to see this nigger buried, I need to go back to bed.” Missus Lila again.

  “Yesem,” Chloe answered, but again she made no move to leave. She shook her head slightly at me, and smiled a little, as if to say, “These damn fools.”

  I smiled back. It was the wrong thing to do, for Wilson looked up and caught the moment between us. He turned to me and said, “Persy, stomp his neck.”

  “Suh?”

  “You heard me, boy. Get over here and stomp his neck.
Break it.”

  “Suh,” I said again.

  “You disobeying me? You want a whipping? Now get over here and stomp this nigger’s neck. Any fool can see he won’t fit otherwise.”

  Harriet gave out a low moan. “Naw,” I heard her say. “Naw.”

  I handed my cane knife to Sup.

  In my mind it is better to bury a man with no casket at all than to break his neck to make him fit. But Master Wilson prided himself on being a Christian, and whatever else that meant to him, his dead slaves got caskets.

  “Persy, stomp his neck,” Wilson said again.

  “Oh, naw. Naw, naw, naw,” Harriet moaned.

  “Mama,” Sylvie said. “Don’t look, Mama.”

  I walked over to where Breech was lying. I lifted my foot. Breech’s eyes were open. Harriet and Sylvie had been working in the fields when he died in their cabin. No one had been there to close his eyes, and now those eyes stared at me in frozen disbelief. I brought my foot down hard on his neck. I heard the crack of bone, and the wail of Harriet, and I felt Breech’s neck shift beneath my boot. His head lolled to one side. As I walked back to my place in line, I saw that Harriet had slumped to the ground and was crying in her daughter’s arms. All the other slaves gathered on my side of the grave had their heads lowered and were looking intently at the ground. I dared not look up to see the house servants’ side of the grave, for fear of looking into Chloe’s eyes.

  “Persy, you about the stupidest nigger I ever saw,” Wilson said. “You think he gonna jump in that casket all by himself.” He laughed. “Come over here and load him in. Henry, you take his feet.”

  Henry and I did as we were told. We lifted Breech. His head hung off his broken neck and swung heavy, like a ball off a chain. We laid him in the casket, and when Breech’s head caught on the edge of the wood, I folded it down to his shoulder to make him fit. We set the casket’s lid in place and nailed it on. Using ropes, Henry, Sup, Jonas, and I lowered Breech into the ground.

  “Get back to work,” Wilson said. “That mill ain’t running itself. Peach, you take Harriet back to her cabin. Harriet, you take a few hours off. Sylvie, I’m sorry about this. Best thing for it will be a little work. Persy, you fill in this hole after your shifts.”

  It was a thin waxing moon that night. I was given a lantern to work by, and I stood in its meager light scraping my shovel into the pile of dirt beside Breech’s grave, tossing it onto his casket. The Comanche speak of tears as belonging to women, but they are warriors. The Comanche’s solution to grief and sadness is warfare. I cannot see that white men are any different. But working beside Breech’s grave that night, I was not yet Comanche, and I would never be white, and I am not ashamed to tell you that I cried. When I was finally done filling in the grave, when I had finally tamped it down and pounded in the nameless wooden cross so thoughtfully provided by the Christian Wilson, I sat down in the dirt and sobbed. I rolled onto Breech’s grave and begged his forgiveness. I begged Harriet’s forgiveness. And as I lay on my back beneath the cross and fingered the little noose in my pocket and watched the sliver of moon march across the sky, I thought of Chloe, and I prayed to my remnant of a god that she had not watched me break a dead man’s neck. And still I cried, on into the dawn when the bell rang and the work began again.

  I address you now, you who are the first to read this after I am dead, you, white man. Perhaps you are my jailer. Perhaps the preacher who sometimes visits in the hope of saving my soul. Perhaps the newspaperman who drops by my cell, wanting an interview that I will never give. Whoever you are, laugh once at this passage, and I promise I will haunt you. I will haunt you until the day you die. I will never let you sleep without some visitation from me. I will form myself into a body like Breech’s, with a head that lolls to one side. Do not tempt me. I have no shame for crying that night. And in this narrative I am to cry many more times, yet I tell you this about me, Persimmon Wilson, Twist Rope, Kweepoonaduh Tuhmoo: in two days I am to hang and I am not crying now.

  GRINDING SEASON ended in mid-January. I remember cutting my last plant that afternoon, then standing in the field hunched and ready with my knife in my hand, looking for the next one. But there were none. None in my field anyway. As my gang slowly realized this, we straightened and looked at each other questioningly. “Last plant,” the driver called out. “We done. Sup, you go get Massuh. The rest, follow me.” We trudged behind him in a row.

  My whole body was tense, each muscle coiled, wanting it to be over, yet not believing that it was. The cane knife felt heavier in my hand than it had on that first day. Where were we heading? To another field? We must not be done. I could feel my muscles spasm with disappointment.

  As it turned out, three fields over, there was one cane plant left. The largest cane plant of the harvest held out from all the rest stood lonely in a field of stubble. “Hold off fo’ Massuh,” the driver said, and we stood around this plant, staring at it. The other gangs drifted in, joining us, until all the field workers were there, staring at the cane plant. Finally I heard the sound of a horse at a gallop and Master Wilson came riding up to us, dismounting in a great hurry. In his hand he carried a streamer of blue ribbons, which he tied onto the lone cane plant, the hardest work I’d seen him do yet. Then he stepped back and said, “Sally?”

  Sally, the fastest cutter at Sweetmore, was given the “honor” of cutting down the now-decorated last cane stalk of the season. Whack, whack. The leaves. Whack. It fell to the ground. Whack. The top came off.

  A great cheer erupted from all the field hands gathered round. Master Wilson mounted his horse again, and Sally carried the cane plant to him, still tied with the stubs of ribbon that had now been severed by her knife. I leaned down and picked up a strand of ribbon that was left on the ground and slid it into my pocket without notice.

  We followed Wilson to the sugarhouse, where, again, a great cheer went up among the workers when they saw that final plant. Grinding season was over, but the next day, the bell rang again before dawn. This time Master Wilson had us all standing in the quarters, while he stood on the stoop in front of one of the cabins. The weather was cold now and we stamped our feet for warmth, an unhappy clump of slaves: the sugarhouse workers, the boiler gang, the field hands, the wagon drivers. Our dissatisfied breath puffed into the air in front of us. Master Wilson held his hands up and said, “Go back to bed. Rest up. Y’all got a party tomorrow night.”

  I am sure that Wilson did not feel the beat of annoyance in his slaves before him. In his feeble mind he was playing a good-natured joke on us. How clever to make us believe that we would be working that day, when in fact he was sending us back to bed and telling us that we were to be rewarded with a party. We played our roles, every one of us. We set up another loud cheer and tossed our hats, those of us who had them, into the air. But Master Wilson hadn’t gotten us out of bed to tell us anything we didn’t already know. There had been talk among the slaves about sweeping and scrubbing the sugarhouse clean, and who would be preparing the food for the party, and what most likely would be served. A slave from another plantation, Sally’s husband, had been hired to play the fiddle for us. We knew all this, but we went along. We cheered and hoorayed, and Wilson raised his hands again, and patted the air with his stubby, sausage-like fingers, indicating that there was more he wanted to say.

  “Every one of you worked hard,” he said. “We had a good season. We made five hundred forty hogsheads of sugar and one hundred eighty barrels of molasses, and every one of you deserves a week off after the party.”

  Another cheer. More hat tossing. The week off, like the party, was presented as a reward for all our hard work, all our “loyalty,” but we would not be spending it in rest. We would tend our winter gardens, fish and hunt for extra meat, gather moss with which to re-stuff our mattresses, split wood for our fires. Now that grinding season was over our rations would be cut by a third. We all knew this. Even Bessle and I knew it, for Sup had told us. Still, we played our roles. We made Master Wilson feel l
ike a hero as he stepped down off the cabin stoop.

  “Thank you, suh,” we said.

  “Much obliged, Massuh.”

  “Bless you, Massuh. Bless you.”

  He held up his hands again, as if to ward off our phony gratitude, and made his way, chuckling, to his own house, to his breakfast cooked and served by slaves, to Chloe if he wanted her.

  I looked for Harriet. Even though she and Sylvie lived in the cabin next to ours, I had not talked to her since Breech’s death. There hadn’t been the time, and I hadn’t had the nerve, but the event weighed on me and I needed to say something, no matter how inadequate I knew it would be. I caught sight of her hurrying away with Sylvie, and I worked up my courage to call out to her.

  They stopped and turned, and waited for me until I reached them. But once there, once facing the wife and daughter of the man whose neck I had broken, I could not speak. I just stood there and shook my head. I stammered, “Breech. His neck.”

  Harriet placed her hand on my arm. “Warn’t yo’ doin’. Don’t think no mo’ ’bout it.” She turned and left me standing there, Sylvie following along behind her. At their cabin door Harriet stepped inside, but Sylvie stood on the stoop and stared my way before slipping inside herself.

  My fellow slaves poured along beside me, heading to their cabins, wanting to get some sleep before the sugarhouse party.

  Henry came along behind me. “What she say, Shoot?”

  “She said don’t think about it anymore.”

  “Then that best be what you do. What Sylvie say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on. Let’s snore.”

  Henry, Sup, Bessle, and I slept, as I believe every sugar worker on Sweetmore did, all that day, on into the night, and all the next day, waking up at last to the ringing of the bell announcing the party.

  It was not the first time I had seen the inside of the sugarhouse. On occasion, while hauling cane to the mill, I had stepped inside to help with one task or another. I already knew the cast-iron kettles lined along a brick wall with a ledge in front that could be stepped up on, and I knew the dirt floor so busy with people that their shoes had raised dust and dug furrows. But now the floor was even and tamped and swept, the marks of a stiff broom crisscrossing it. Along the walls, pine-knot torches gave light, while also giving a dark, pitchy smoke that rose to the ceiling and hung there like a thundercloud. A long table was spread with a patched red cloth and covered with platters of food, food like I had never seen offered to slaves before. The abundance alone was startling. There were hams and chickens and sausages, plates of greens and potatoes, and bowls of stewed apples. There were pies and cakes, and jugs of cider.