Buffalo Soldier Read online

  They know precisely what they’re doing. They was like the locust plague of Egypt, come to strip the whole place bare. Couldn’t have been faster or more efficient. Looting don’t take them no time at all. They come back out, pockets stuffed with trinkets. One got Miss Louellen’s ear-bobs; another, the master’s gold watch. When they done with the thieving they start on the burning.

  The barn goes up first. Three years of cotton harvests is stacked high in there: them bales catch real good. Don’t seem a moment before that fire is raging, the heat enough to singe our hair even from where we standing. Then they smashing the windows of the big house, throwing in blazing torches. The curtains catch, flames running up from floor to ceiling, spreading from the dining room to Miss Louellen’s bedroom above. Ain’t long before that fire is poking its fingers between the tiles on the roof. Then it take them rafters in its mighty fist and pull the whole house down.

  And them Yankees ain’t finished yet. Heck, they only just getting started. Overseer’s place, stables, stores, cabins, smithy, cook-house – they all go up in flames, along with the master.

  The air’s thick with smoke, the sound of roaring and crackling. They kill the hogs. The chickens. The cows. Feathers flying. Shit spilling. And animals squawking, squealing and screaming, screaming, screaming. They’re butchered where they fall. Loaded up onto a cart. Rivers of red blood on the red dirt. Red flames. The whole damned world turned red. Scarlet.

  Next them soldiers come right into the garden. We’re all pinned up against the fence while they’re riding their horses back and forward, back and forward, them hooves mashing up the earth until all the vegetables in the garden are trampled down into it. Ain’t a mouthful left can be eaten.

  By the time they’re done, Ham is on his knees, arms wrapped around himself, rocking, wailing, “Master’s dead! What do I do? Oh Lord, Lord, what do I do?”

  In reply, them Yankees tell him he can stay or he can leave. All of us got a choice. Seems we can do whatever we please now. President Abraham Lincoln himself has proclaimed we’re free.

  I stood in that stinking mess of ruination, too deep-down shocked to feel a thing, thinking, Free to do what? Free to freeze to death? Free to starve?

  They ready to go riding on out, leaving us there, when Kissy starts sobbing. And it’s Kissy’s sobbing that changes everything.

  She’s a fine-looking woman. Soon as she starts up one of them Yankees takes pity on her.

  “You a field hand?”

  “No, sir. I’s a maid.”

  “You can wash clothes, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He points to Cookie. “You?”

  “I’s the cook.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “She a cook too.”

  He nods, thoughtful. Points at Amos. “You? What can you do?”

  When that man finds out Amos is a smith, his eyes light up like a swamp crocodile’s. Suddenly he’s weighing us up like we’re all on the auction stand.

  And then – for the first time in my life – I find I’m walking off the Delaney place. For the first time in my life I see what lies around the bend in the driveway.

  Because suddenly it’s turned out we ain’t quite so free after all. We’re being taken right along with the Yankee army. We ain’t slaves no more. We’re confiscated enemy property. We’re officially classed as “contraband”.

  Don’t know how we’re supposed to tell the difference.

  6.

  The Yankees ain’t told Ham to come but they ain’t told him to stay neither and we can’t go leaving him standing there all alone. Me and Cookie take a hand each and bring him with us. The army march and we follow, trudging along at its rear end.

  To begin with don’t none of us say nothing. Ham was crying, gulping sobs that come up from someplace deep inside of him. But as the hours wore on and we walked further and further away from the plantation he fell silent. His palm was cold as ice in mine. I kept glancing at him sideways. He looked the same on the outside but there was an emptiness within: like a fly once a spider done feeding off it. I couldn’t understand. Wasn’t like he’d loved the master. Hadn’t liked him even. I lost count of the times I heard him cussing the day that Mr Delaney been born. But now he was gone there just didn’t seem to be anything left of Ham. I was afraid for him. See, me and Cookie, we was useful. So was Amos. Officer’s horse tread on a stone, mule go lame, wheel come off a cart, he was running every which way fixing things up. But Ham was a gentleman’s valet: he didn’t know nothing else. What in the heck was he gonna do in the middle of an army, in the middle of a war?

  After a while Cookie starts sucking her teeth and grumbling about Kissy and Rose and, What in the Lord’s name had those two girls been thinking of? Kissy had rode off the Delaney place on a Yankee’s horse, perched sideways in front of him, his arm tight around her waist. He’d give her Miss Louellen’s thieved ear-bobs and they been dangling from her lobes. What she was gonna give him in return didn’t take much imagining. Rose been pulled up onto the back of another horse. Cookie was saying over and over that no good would come of it but my head was too full of other things to care. Besides, it wasn’t like either of them had any choice.

  The master was dead. It banged around in my head with each step I took. The Delaney place was burned and the master was dead.

  Something been torn in two. Was like them Yankees had picked up one of them big heavy ledgers Mr Beecher used to write in and split it down the spine. The past been thrown to the wind, the pages blown away. Them old rules was gone. What was left was blank sheets ready to be writ on fresh. There was a whole new world beginning. But I didn’t much like the way it was starting out. Someone was writing it all wrong.

  I kept thinking, who was gonna tell Miss Louellen? How was she gonna know her husband was dead? How was them children gonna know their pa was gone?

  That question snagged in my head and I couldn’t shake it. Someone should have wrote her a letter. Sent a telegram. Ridden off with a message. I don’t know why I had me such a thing about it. Wasn’t like I was especially concerned for her feelings. But there been right ways of doing things. There been order. Now there was none and it wasn’t glorious, like I’d imagined. It scared me half to death.

  As we walked on I was hoping things would get better. That things would take shape. Come together. Make sense. But they didn’t. The further we went, the worse it got.

  War is supposed to be armies fighting each other, ain’t it? Soldiers against soldiers. Men against men.

  But these Yankees wasn’t fighting Confederate soldiers. They was doing what they done to the Delaney place over and over again: burning women out of their homes. Old folks. Children. Babies. We kept passing big houses that been razed to the ground, just the chimney stacks left, standing to attention like soldiers on guard duty. And a heap of white folks in carts heading off to Lord-alone-knows-where. Guess they had cousins someplace safe, like Miss Louellen. Families that would take them in.

  But their slaves? Heck! Where was we supposed to go? Where was we all meant to live? What was we gonna eat?

  We was trailing along a path of destruction. Looked like Judgement Day. Now, I ain’t never seen a railroad so I ain’t exactly sure what they supposed to look like. But I’m sure as sure them rails ain’t meant to be wrapped around trees like neckties. Sure telegraph wires ain’t supposed to run along the ground neither.

  “Why the Yankees doing this? Why they smashing everything up?”

  Ham don’t answer. Neither does Cookie for a long while. It’s only when Amos come back from fixing something and start walking by her side that she turn to face me.

  “They’re ripping their enemies’ hearts out, child.” There’s something in her eyes I ain’t seen before. She look about a million years old. “If you take away what somebody cares for most … well, then, they don’t have no fight left in them. Ain’t no reason to go on struggling.”

  Amos puts his arm about her and she rests her head on his shoulder. I feel that
knife twisting in my gut. She talking about them Confederates? Or she talking about herself? She had something took away? What? When? I don’t know what she talking about. How come Amos does?

  “But it don’t make sense!” I says. “It don’t make sense!”

  Don’t neither of them try explaining.

  It don’t make sense. It don’t make sense.

  Them words keep pounding between my ears. By the time we stop walking my head’s almost splitting. My feet is all wore-out – they ain’t used to this. But I can’t go sitting down and resting. One of them Yankees is yelling for Amos. Another is yelling for Cookie. Me and her, we spend most all that night boiling up the master’s hogs for them troopers. Then we got to stand there, bellies grumbling, watching white folks eat. Some things don’t never change.

  By the time they had their fill there’s barely a mouthful for me and Cookie. Ain’t none at all for Ham.

  We was smarter after that. Next time them Yankees gone thieving meat and hand it over to me and Cookie to prepare we hide some. I stuffed the wing of the chicken I been plucking inside my shirt. I keep the neck too. And the heart and the liver. Cookie tuck one foot of the hog we about to start boiling right down her bosom. We waited until all them soldiers had done eating. By then it was dark and they had other things on their minds. We poked what we got into the dying embers of the fire. Wasn’t much, but it kept us alive. I figured so long as we was careful, the three of us could eat.

  We didn’t need to worry about feeding no one else. Kissy and Rose was being taken care of by their gentlemen friends. And Ham was gone. Don’t know what happened to him. When we lay down to sleep he been there. Come the morning he wasn’t. Must have wandered off. We tried calling him. Yelled ourselves hoarse. Seemed he’d just melted away like butter into a yam. We couldn’t go looking for him. As soon as the sun was up, we was on the move again.

  It went on and on, one day much the same as the next. Days become weeks. Nights, we slept on the ground in the open, no roof to keep the rain off, not even a blanket between us. Daytimes we walked and we walked and we walked and the number of folks walking along behind the Yankee army gets bigger and bigger. Some been told to come. Some just followed because they didn’t know what in the heck else to do with themselves. Seemed to me the men was all right but the women didn’t have it so easy. By night most of them was given over to entertaining soldiers. Some was willing. Some wasn’t. Their willingness or otherwise didn’t seem to concern the soldiers none. If they couldn’t persuade or pay a woman to lie down with them they’d carry on regardless. Them soldiers’ appetites was nigh unquenchable. Sometimes you couldn’t sleep for all the grunting and squealing going on under cover of darkness. Sounded like hogs in a swamp.

  Well, whatever Amos had heard from Josiah, and whatever he’d heard from Ham, and whatever he’d heard from the Rideaus’ Walter outside the post office in town, I figured they all been hearing plain wrong when it come to the Yankees.

  “You sure they want us freed?”

  “I’m sure,” says Amos.

  “Only they don’t act no different to the master and Miss Louellen.”

  “They civil enough to me,” says Amos. But he’s lying. I hear the way they talk to him: Boy, do this. Boy, do that. Shift your lazy nigger ass. Get your worthless black hide over here.

  Cookie knows it as well as I do. But he’s her husband. She weave her fingers through his and give me a real hard look that tell me to hush my mouth even if she ain’t saying the words out loud. “This here’s a war,” she says. “Guess folks is all kinda crazy right now. They be different when peace come.”

  “You right,” says Amos. “Things be better then. You’ll see.”

  I wanted to believe him. It give me something to hope for. Meantime, we had to pass through a place where there been fighting. There was bodies smashed up, left out in the open so the flies and the rats had got to them. Made me heave my guts up, so I stopped thinking. Stopped trying to make any sense of it. Concentrated hard on getting by. Walking, head down, eyes on the dirt. Seemed we’d wandered right on into hell. Didn’t know how it had happened – we must have took a wrong turn someplace. Any day now the Devil was gonna appear and shake us by the hand.

  I knew that day had come when we reached the end of the world.

  We stopped walking. And, when I lifted up my head and looked around me to find out why, I could see we’d stopped walking because there wasn’t no more land to walk on. In the distance there was just water, as far as the eye could see. And a smell. A fresh smell. Kinda pleasing. A tang of salt in the wind.

  “Well, look at that!” Cookie put an arm around my waist. She’s gotten smaller. Or maybe I got taller. All of a sudden I can rest my chin on the top of her head. “Hey, girl! We walked all the way to the ocean.”

  Seemed we’d reached the eastern shore of America. Amos got called away to fix something or other, but he listened good while the officers was talking. When he find us later that night he says there a town along the way and the Yankees are hell-bent on taking it. There gonna be a battle some day soon. But right now we’re staying put in this big old foul-smelling army camp with a bunch of loose-living Yankees and some truly worn-out women.

  But I guess Cookie was right: the heart been ripped out of them Confederates. Don’t seem to take more than a few days before the folks in that town give themselves up. They roll over like puppy dogs, show their soft bellies to the Yankees, wag their tails and beg to be treated nice. I’m expecting them soldiers to go storming on through there. To hear more screaming, see more smoke. But they don’t.

  The army rubs its hands together, tips its hat and says, “Thankee kindly for surrendering so nice. We gonna leave your buildings standing as a reward.” Then it sit down on its pimpled white ass and has itself a nice long rest before it march north to start thieving and burning and killing all over again.

  But this time we don’t follow.

  This time, when the army start marching Cookie, Amos and me get up like we been told. But we ain’t gone far when Cookie turn her ankle in a rabbit hole or some such thing. She fall down. Her foot start to swell so Amos tear a strip off her skirt, wet it in a stream and start to strap her foot up. By the time he finish the army is along off up the road. They two hundred yards away already. And hadn’t no one come back yelling at us to get our butts moving, or to shift our lazy hides.

  Cookie look at Amos, Amos look at Cookie, they both look at me. Don’t none of us say nothing. But we stay put. Sit tight. And when the army is out of sight, we turn our heads in the other direction and we start walking, fast as Cookie’s ankle will allow.

  We didn’t know where we was going. Away was all. That first day we just headed blind. Hunkered down that night in the burned-out shell of some big house. Hadn’t had a bite to eat.

  Come the morning Amos went raking through the ashes of the slave quarters. Found the head of a shovel in amongst them. Handle been burned clean away but he had his whittling knife – Amos was never without that. He cut a branch off a tree, fashioned it into a good-enough handle to make that thing just about useable.

  It was that shovel saved us from starving. The Yankees had trampled down all that been growing in every garden we come across, but there was some things buried too deep for them horses’ hooves to smash entirely. We lived on potatoes. Yams. Raw, because we didn’t have no means to light a fire. Not until a few weeks later when we was wandering through a clump of woods and we come across the body of a dead Yankee lying curled between the roots of a tree.

  Well, we seen enough by then to know his pockets and his pack would have been rifled through long ago but we looked just the same. And it was good we did. That man can’t have been killed in no battle. He must have gone off alone. Deserted, I guess. Or got left behind. Because no one had thieved his belongings. There was strips of jerked beef in there and some hard-tack crackers. And – praise the Lord! – a box of matches.

  For a long time we was well and truly lost. Wanderin
g, just wandering. Keeping moving in the hopes of finding someplace better tomorrow than the one we was in today. We avoided people, black and white. We’d take a wide detour around where there was big groups of freed slaves camping out, looking dazed and hungry. There was always a real bad stench hanging over them places. You could tell just by breathing it in that Sickness was standing in the shadows: that it would probably be carrying off them folks long before Hunger did.

  Them days was dark and they was desperate. But then come a morning when I woke and the air seemed to smell different. The wind had changed direction. There was something familiar in it. Something that was calling to me.

  Amos and Cookie was for going east, but I grab Cookie’s hand and start dragging her behind me. “This way. We got to go this way.”

  I had this feeling, deep down inside, that now I wasn’t going away from something, I was going towards it. The closer I got the stronger that feeling become. We walked all that day. By the time the sun was ready to go down, the earth seemed to be humming beneath my feet. I was footsore, half starved, bonetired, but when we come over that last rise, when I look across the fields below me and see that curving river, that hump of hill, that clump of woods, I start running.

  We’d come right back to where we started: the Delaney plantation.

  The place was deserted, it was bleak, and it was godforsaken. But to see that land: oh my sweet Lord, it was like being small, snuggling under Cookie’s arm. I lay down flat, took me handfuls of that red earth and squeezed it through my fingers. I was rolling in it every which way like a hog in muck. Heck, I even hugged the cottonwood! I pressed my face against that bark, smelled that old familiar smell and felt that I’d come home.

  There was just one cabin that wasn’t entirely burned to the ground. It was the one furthest from where the big house been. Its walls was scorched and its roof was caved in on one corner but it was just about standing. That feeling of being back home was powerful good. When we hunkered down our first night I wrapped myself up in it like it was a blanket.