The Life and Times of Persimmon Wilson Read online

  Among the slaves there was a slight, almost imperceptible stir. We were usually so skilled at keeping our feelings and thoughts to ourselves, but this news that we could be whipped by anyone caused a small fissure in our composure. I glanced over at Henry, barely turning my head as I did so. His face was sculpted again into his mask for white folk, but his fists clenched by his side.

  “Husbands,” Wilson continued, “from another plantation can see their wives but twice a month, no more.” Sally straightened her spine and narrowed her eyes.

  “Marriages will no longer be approved between plantations.” I watched Lucy, whose beau lived on another sugar farm several miles downriver, blink twice at this news and heave her chest up once, her mouth tightening into a stick-straight line.

  “Furthermore, any white man can inspect any Negro’s cabin at any time. Now I don’t expect any of this will make much difference to you, as long as you do your work and behave.”

  This is what white people always told us. Work and behave and nothing bad would befall us, as though being a slave was not evidence of something bad having already befallen us.

  I saw the patrollers more often now as I worked in the fields, groups of white men on horseback, riding back and forth along the levee road, looking down on us as we worked. I could see the whips coiled and at the ready, snugged into the hand of one, or against the leg of another. Sometimes Master Wilson was among them.

  Several times a day these patrollers passed by now, and at night I occasionally woke to the thunder of horses’ hooves as they rode unrestricted through the quarters.

  While we were repairing the levee one day, a group of white men stopped and spoke to us, telling us that we had best behave ourselves, that word again, telling us that we had best obey our master who feeds us and clothes us, telling us not to be getting any crazed ideas about freedom in our woolly little heads. “Ain’t no Yankee soldiers gonna come down here and save your sorry asses,” one of them said.

  “Yassuh. Yassuh,” we replied.

  They rode on, and we kept on packing dirt into the levee crack, saving their sorry asses from the river, should it decide to rise anytime soon.

  More bothersome to me than the increased patrols was the decrease in rations. My stomach growled as I worked, and it growled as I watched the big house for signs of Chloe, and it growled as Master Wilson rode here and there, stopping in the road to talk to patrollers or a neighbor, or riding along the lanes that ran beside the fields, watching his slaves stoop and dig his crop in.

  On Sundays Wilson gathered his sickly wife up like a heap of silk and lace, put her in the buggy, and drove to church. When it wasn’t Sunday Missus Lila most likely languished in her bed, and Chloe most likely carried her food in and her slop out, wiped her brow, made her comfortable, waited by her side, and held her papery hand.

  It was March before I saw Chloe again, and again it was Peach who brought me the message. “Chloe say meet her in the sugarhouse, Sunday mornin’, after Massuh and Missus leave fo’ church.”

  On the appointed day, I watched for his carriage pulled up to the house, for the careful way he led Missus Lila down the steep front steps, for the way he helped her into the buggy and took the reins from the waiting slave and chucked the horses into moving.

  The sugarhouse was a long ways off from the big house, with nothing but a yard and the Wilson family cemetery and cane fields between the two, the cane plants a mere blush of green across the brown landscape now. I worried that it was too far for Chloe to make it safely during the day. Our master might be gone, and patrollers might not be in sight, but there were others who would betray us. Overseers, drivers, slaves as common as me who might tell Wilson of our tryst in the hopes of some scrap of a favor from him. But if she was clever, and if she stayed low, and if she skirted the edges of the fields, alongside the swamp, there was a chance, I thought, that she could make it. I, too, looked around, and made sure I wasn’t being watched as I scurried up the lane toward the sugarhouse.

  Chloe was there when I arrived, sitting on the ledge in front of one of the kettles. She came to me, and I went to her, and we met in each other’s arms in the middle of the floor. I kissed her lips and then she pulled back, still holding on to my waist, and looked at me. “Lets us go to New Orleans,” she said quickly. “They’s plenty free niggers there. We pretend we free, get us a little house, start us a bakery. I good in the kitchen. You make us up a pass, Persy, you know how to write, make us up some of them papers say we free. That all you got to do, ’sides go with me.”

  “Chloe.” I shook my head.

  “I steal us some food,” she kept on. “Massuh give me all the food I want. I pocket some away. You need food?” she asked. “You hungry?”

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  Chloe ripped out of my arms and began walking back and forth in front of the kettles. “You don’t know what it like,” she said. “You don’t know. I trade places if I could. I plant cane. I work the field. Those long days.” She beat one palm against her chest. “Ain’t nothin’ longer than my day. Since grindin’ season over, he pawin’ on me all the time. He want . . .” Her voice cracked. “He say, ‘Come here,’ and I got to go there.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “I standin’ in his doorway pretendin’ what ’bout to happen ain’t gonna happen. I say, ‘Massuh, you want I should stoke the fire? You want I should bring you a brandy or some tea?’ He laugh and say, ‘Chloe, you coy thing.’ ”

  “Stop,” I said again.

  “He pat the bed fo’ me to come over there. His wife, next room over, dyin’. He don’t care. He pat the bed like I a little dog.” Her voice grew louder as she talked. “He tell me she gonna die soon, and we be alone together all the time. Like what we doin’ somethin’ we both want.”

  I covered my ears. “Stop,” I said. “I can’t hear anymore. Please.”

  “He say after she dead, I sleep in her bed. He come visit me there. No one need to know. Like all those other house niggers don’t already know what goin’ on. Like they ain’t lookin’ at me now like he favorin’ me somethin’ good. Like he tellin’ me, ‘Chloe, close the do’,’ somethin’ fun goin’ on. Like I want it.”

  “Chloe, stop,” I yelled. “Stop. Please. I can’t hear anymore.” I put my face into my hands. “I can’t hear anymore,” I repeated.

  When I looked up she was staring at the floor. “You all I got, Persy,” she whispered.

  “That’s a shame,” I answered, “because I am nothing but a field nigger.”

  “That right,” she said. “I ain’t got nothin’.”

  “You got food,” I snapped. “Be grateful for that.”

  “And you ain’t got Wilson humpin’ on you all day, all night,” she snapped back.

  I took a deep breath. I did not want to think about that.

  “He on me all the time,” she whispered. She stopped her pacing and sat on the ledge in front of the kettles. I could see her shoulders tremble as she stifled tears. Finally she wiped the hem of her apron across her face, and looked up. “I don’t reckon it matter.”

  “It matters.”

  She steadied a gaze at me, and said nothing. If I had thought what she told me with her voice was bad, what she told me with her eyes was even worse. Prove it, they said. Prove to me that I matter.

  I took a deep breath and said nothing. Chloe continued to stare at me for what seemed like an eternity. I withered under her gaze, and then, when she looked down, away from my eyes, I withered even more, for I could not bear the pain of disappointing her. I could not bear Sweetmore without the promise of her affection, and I found myself saying what I did not know I was going to say. “If we run away, we’ve got to have a plan. We can’t just take off without thinking it through. You’ve got to go back to the big house.” My own voice cracked at the thought of it. “You’ve got to go back to the big house,” I continued. “You’ve got to . . .” I broke off my sentence, unable to say what it was she had to do.

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p; “I know,” Chloe said. “I gotta go back and make him think everythin’ the way it always been. I do that, Persy. I strong. I been pretendin’ all my life. But jest give me some hope. Jest a little hope to live on.”

  In that moment, when Chloe mentioned hope, I told myself that this was perhaps all she needed of me, to tell her a story, to comfort her with a lie.

  “All right,” I said. “Don’t talk about this to anyone.”

  “Naw,” she said. “I ain’t no fool.”

  “I’ll think of something,” I told her. “I’ll send word through Peach,” I added to make it sound believable.

  She stood up and came over to me, and placed her hands on either side of my face. “I be a good woman to you, Persy.”

  I took her. I roughly shoved her clothes aside. I hurriedly unfastened the buttons on my britches. I took her and she gave herself to me on the sugarhouse floor, and for all his property rights Master Wilson could not buy what I had that Sunday, and yet I had bought it. I had bought it with lies.

  It is not that I wanted to stay on Sweetmore. It is not that I didn’t want to take Chloe away from that place, away from Wilson and his endless pawing at her. It is not that I didn’t desire to take care of her, just as every man desires to take care of his woman. It is just that I was a slave, and I knew that New Orleans was not far enough away for safety, yet it seemed as unreachable as Africa.

  In spite of the patrollers, and the danger, Chloe took the chance of meeting me three more times before the cane had grown above my head. Our passion fulfilled itself once again on the sugarhouse floor, once screened from view by the smaller levee that bordered the swamp, and once in the loft of one of the barns, above the stash of coffins Jonas had made.

  Each time we were together I lied to her. I told her I was forming a plan for our escape. I told her I was working on forged papers. I told her that it took time to make them realistic. I told her I thought we could make it to New Orleans and pass as free coloreds, find a little house the way she wanted, sell her baked goods on the streets and earn a fine living. I told Chloe whatever I thought she wanted to hear, and in the brief time we had together, she told me her own stories, stories that I didn’t want to hear, stories that made me even more ashamed of what I was doing, and what I was not doing.

  She was born on a plantation in Georgia called Collinswood, to a woman named Anna, and the man she called Papa was named Jason. “But I think Massuh Collins be my daddy,” Chloe said. “I think Ol’ Miss don’t want me round no mo’ ’cause I ’mind her of her husband.” I stroked the skin on her arm and wondered at the generations of masters breeding with their slaves that had resulted in its color.

  “I ’bout seven when I taken to Alabama, and I miss Mama and Papa, but things be all right ’cause I with my sister again, and she have a baby, and I in the kitchen now with Dicey May and she teachin’ me to bake. She teach me everythin’ ’bout bakin’. I good at bakin’. Then I gets a little bigger and Massuh Dan start with me. I ain’t but eleven or twelve.”

  I pushed a curl of hair from her face.

  “It go on fo’ years, Persy.” Her voice cracked. “I jest little when it start up, and I jest take it, then I gets bigger, and then one day I gets sold ’cause I . . .” She paused and looked up at me.

  “What?”

  “I crack a broom ’cross Massuh Dan’s head. He fall on the flo’. I think I done kilt him. I run down the road and into the woods and it get to be dark. I hear the dog man comin’ and I gets caught, but no one whip me. ’Stead I get brought down here to where . . .” She paused again, touching my face with her fingers. “Where I meet you,” she whispered.

  It was a whisper that made me ashamed, holding as it did all her hopes and dreams, as though meeting me could end this string of events in her life, as though I could somehow turn us both into free and respected colored folk, as though that little house she wanted was just waiting on us.

  All this time the work of Sweetmore went on. There were, of course, the cane plants to tend to, and the repairs to the levee, but this was not the sum of it. I planted corn and sweet potatoes. I fed and watered the stock. I worked on a gang that graded and repaired the roads left rutted and worn from their use during grinding season, and turned to ribbons of mud during the previous rains. And always there was wood to be cut and hauled from the swamps to feed the boiler of the sugarhouse mill for the next grinding season.

  For this work of standing in swamp water, felling cypress trees, we were paid in credit, fifty cents per cord. It was the first time I had ever been paid for work in my life. This overwork, as it was called, came at night, after our day in the fields, and we volunteered for it. We piled into flatboats and pushed out into the swamps, one lantern held high for every six men, the light reflecting eerily in the dark rippling water as we moved along, the whole scene ghostly and surreal as we stepped into the water to cut the trees. Oftentimes a snake would come swimming along, carrying its body high, and we would clamber and splash away from it, fighting each other to climb up on a cypress knee. The snake would pass and we would slip back into the swamp and swing our axes against the very tree that had just protected us.

  I do not think the mosquitoes in Louisiana ever truly went away. In the swamp the air was alive with them. We slapped at our bare arms and faces, and cursed the damn devils, and kept on with our axes and our muscles and our sheer determination that we might use our credit at Sweetmore’s commissary to buy gaily colored swatches of cloth for our women, or a drinking gourd if ours had cracked, or a spoon with which to eat our cush-cush if ours had been lost.

  Once a month I visited the store, and stared at the things I would like to buy for Chloe. A bolt of calico. A bonnet. Another ribbon for her hair, prettier than the one I had burned. I bought nothing. Now I do not even know why I went into the swamp so willingly, except that not doing so would have brought attention to me, as every able-bodied young man ached for the chance to earn something for his labors, and to buy something to call his own.

  My credit at the commissary built, and built some more with each cord of wood I delivered. I could have bought a fry pan, a blanket, leather with which to repair shoes worn-out with the running from baying hounds. Instead I let my credit grow, and continued to assure Chloe that I was working on a plan for our escape, a plan so clever and perfect, I told her, that it would seem to Master Wilson we had merely floated away over the cane, its green leaves waving goodbye to us as we glided right into the heart of safety and freedom.

  Chloe always looked at me when I said this, her eyes gone soft with love, and awe, and wonder. It was a look that I craved.

  In May or June, I do not recall with certainty which, a local militia was formed to fight for the Confederacy, and Master Wilson’s son, Gerald, signed up, as well as three of Sweetmore’s four overseers. I had not seen Gerald Wilson the entire time I had been at Sweetmore, but Chloe told me he and his wife had come to Sunday dinner several times. Missus Lila, Chloe said, rallied to the table on the days that Master Gerald visited, dusting herself with powder for color and having Chloe dress her in her finest attire. Then she made her way down the staircase with the help of the banister at one side and Chloe at the other. At the bottom of the staircase her son was always waiting.

  The newly formed Confederate militia made a grand tour of each plantation along the coast, marching in line and performing drills in their unsullied gray uniforms. It was, I suppose, for the glory of the cause and the entertainment of the ladies. These ladies, the young unmarried ones, followed the men from big house to big house, each buggy driven by a slave wearing a top hat and white gloves and holding the reins in stern profile. Sitting behind him, the ladies waved their handkerchiefs in the air, their pastel gowns spilling over the sides of the buggy like icing on a cake. Occasionally they broke into some rousing song about their sweet homeland, and Jefferson Davis, and hanging Abraham Lincoln from a sour apple tree.

  At Sweetmore our work was stopped briefly and we, too, were rallied toge
ther on the lawn of the big house to watch these new, some of them barely whiskered, soldiers perform their marches and drills. We gave our own performance of mute subservience, our hoes and shovels and axes still in our hands or resting against our hips.

  It is hard to say what I felt in that moment. It was, I think now, a mixture of things. These men were showing off their might and their power, as white men have always done, yet this grand display only told me that my enslavement was not such a certainty any longer. I could not, of course, articulate this in that very moment.

  I thumped Sup on the hand. “Which one is Master Gerald?” I asked.

  Sup scanned the soldiers. “All look the same to me,” he said. He looked harder. “He that one, behind the one carryin’ that flag.”

  I looked closer. Gerald, for I will not call him master here, was tall and thick boned. He looked in the face like neither his father nor his mother, but he marched perfectly, rested his rifle on his shoulder perfectly, held his head up in perfect Confederate pride, never once glancing toward the porch of Sweetmore, where his father stood with a few house slaves gathered behind him, or to the balcony where Chloe stood, holding a weeping Missus Lila in her arms.

  I could see Chloe talking to Missus Lila. Perhaps offering gentling and unfelt condolences of comfort as Missus Lila’s only son marched off to war. Whatever Chloe said, it did not please Old Miss, for she abruptly gathered her body up straight, and her arm rose up, and her hand slapped Chloe across the face. I felt Sup grab my wrist and in that instance Chloe bowed her head, and I could see her lips moving in apology.

  The soldiers finished their display. Master Wilson and the pastel ladies clapped their hands and Chloe led Missus Lila back into the house. Chloe turned once, as she was about to push the curtains aside, and scanned the slaves gathered on the lawn, but she could not immediately pick me out of the crowd of faces, and our eyes did not meet. The curtains closed behind her, and moved ever so slightly as they settled into place.