Crossing Ebenezer Creek Read online

  “This is beyond gladhappy, Jonah,” Mariah said. “Bein’ here right now, breathin’ in freedom … Gladhappy don’t strike me as a big enough word.” Then she rose.

  “Turnin’ in?”

  Mariah shook her head, tightened her cloak around her.

  “Well, where you off to?” Jonah rose too.

  “To myself.” Mariah smiled, patting Jonah’s arm. “Don’t worry. Not far.”

  By the scattering of campfires Mariah stepped gingerly to a clear stretch of ground. Stars, numberless, were beginning to shine.

  Gazing up, Mariah whispered, “Thank you, Lord.”

  For Jonah—always a help. Skinning rabbits and possums she trapped. In the winter daubing chinks in the cabins along with collecting cow chips and kindling overmuch so all in the quarter could keep warm.

  She thanked the Almighty for Mordecai too. So wise. He’d picked up where her ma and pa had left off on how to read people and such. And so kind. Warning her when Miss Callie was in a tempest. Sparing her from having to carry things up to Master Roberts’s room when the miscreant was in it. “I’ll take it up,” he’d say if Miss Callie wasn’t about.

  As for the Doubles—like mothers to me. When Chloe was called to the sick room on the Chaney place, she could make a sweat seem a fever, a sprain a break, so a body got more time off work. Some Sundays Zoe came with a basket of ginger cakes or other treats. Hidden under the treats, now and then, was an item a member of the Melrose family had tossed aside. Blue-back speller. A reader. Half-used copy book. Cracked slate. Lump of chalk. That print of the African Free-School No. 2 in New York.

  Mariah eased down onto the ground, pulled her knees up, and draped her arms around her legs. She rubbed a hand over the top of her boots.

  And Caleb. She added him to her list of blessings.

  Mariah went misty-eyed thinking about her brother. Zeke’s simple cheer had been her only real joy these last few years. Then she saw herself over the years, praying as she polished the parlor floor, lit fires, made beds, cleaned grates, washed chamber pots, milked cows, churned butter. Saw herself praying as she stood, paced, knelt, rocked before her hearth. All those days, weeks, months, years of pleading. For a weakening of the Chaney wrath. All those days, weeks, months, years of pleading. For strength of body. For her mind not to go loose.

  Not now. On this night so divine, Mariah did no pleading. The only thing on her heart was gratitude.

  But she did have one request.

  She wanted to stay awake, wanted to see what freedom looked like, felt like at midnight, then at the cusp of dawn.

  CAMPED AT DAVISBORO

  “Sun., Nov. 27th, 1864,” Caleb wrote in the upper right-hand corner of the page. He chided himself for failing to write for the last few days, wanted to play catch-up.

  “Milledgeville is behind us. It is a bit simple for a capital. The governor and other high-ups were gone by the time Yankees marched in.” Caleb wrote of the burning of the depot, the hotel. The looting of stores. “Even ransacked the library, tossed a passel of documents & books out into the muddy street.” And there was the white lady who chased two soldiers from her establishment with a shotgun. “You dirty thieves!” she screamed. “You dirty thieves!”

  More Yankees were running amok. It worried Caleb. He understood that Sherman planned for his men to live off the land. He understood wrecking railroads and whatever else could be used against Union troops. He understood that along the way Yankees had need of fresh horses and mules. But the senseless destruction, the heedless, needless stealing—with some even robbing colored folks of their few possessions. Caleb feared that some Yankees would get more reckless with his people. General Reb wasn’t the only one who grumbled about the thousands of coloreds on the march.

  The thought of General Reb called up Caleb’s rage. Beyond dangerous, the man was evil. How many minds had he poisoned with his “useless negro” decree? A lot of hogwash that was. Soldiers had more food than they could eat. Private Sykes had told Caleb that meals on the march were better than what could be made of regular army rations. And what harm did it do to let folks ride in a wagon or on a mule?

  Night and day, from the way Captain Galloway saw things. “They have more than paid for any clothing, food, and whatnot that comes their way.” That was his position when Caleb collected things his people needed.

  Back to his diary.

  “Capt. G. spoke with Col. L. about the rampages. Was told to think of it as letting off steam. The most Capt. G. can do is ride with foragers & set an example for the likes of Pvts. S. and D.”

  Caleb put his pencil down. His zeal to make a record of the march had suddenly petered out. But not his thoughts about Mariah.

  “Met a young woman today. She came away with us down below Sandersville. Her name is Mariah. She is—”

  The march was no place for feelings. Too much danger. Better he put down the diary and pick up the Bible, read from Lamentations or another book with a lot of destruction, affliction, plagues, and the like. The book of Job with that poor man’s boils head to toe and ten lifetimes of sorrows—that story would definitely take Caleb’s mind off Mariah.

  Before Caleb closed his diary, he ended the entry as he always did. With location.

  “Camped at Davisboro.”

  SPILLING MEMORIES

  Many roads were sandy, hard on the feet.

  They slogged through swampland with towering cypress trees veiled in ghostly Spanish moss. Mariah almost lost her footing when she saw a silver-gray crane staring at her as if privy to some great mystery.

  Now and then they heard rifles firing or cannon booming in the distance. Just as unnerving were the pillars of smoke. And there’d been that long halt yesterday after a handful of miles thanks to Rebel devilment—bridge at Black Rock Creek burned. Nearly nightfall by the time the laying down of a pontoon bridge was complete and they finally marched on into Louisville. And it already in flames.

  But none of it dampened Mariah’s spirits. Struggle in freedom was nothing like struggle in slavery. Before she struggled to stay alive and in her right mind. Now the struggles of the march were hitched to striving for a new life.

  And last night had a sweet ending. When Caleb came to their campsite with socks, waistcoats, shirts, bandanas, clothespins, tin canteens, bacon, and other random things—and a small wagon—he came early enough to sup with them. Then this morning he came with good news.

  “Division won’t march today,” Caleb told them before he headed out with a forage squad.

  “Why?” Mariah had asked. “Some trouble?”

  Caleb shook his head. “Soldiers deserve a rest is what I heard.”

  As the day wore on Mariah saw soldiers do more of what they usually did during a long halt. Fill canteens. Nap. Get up games of chuck-a-luck or whiskey poker. She also saw her people chopping wood for Yankees, currying their horses, blacking their boots.

  “Useless negroes.” Nobody wanted to be seen as that.

  Mariah made herself useful for a while in a mess tent with Zoe, chopping, dicing, slicing for a big batch of Hunger Stew. Mariah also took charge of the coffee, lard, and salt soldiers chipped in as thanks, along with the bucket of liver, chitlins, kidneys, shanks, and bones the regimental butcher let them have.

  Later Mariah worked alongside Chloe. She turned bedsheets into bandages, prepared a poultice, and boiled cow feet for a compress. She and Chloe got sugar, a penny or two, sometimes a dime, depending on a soldier’s rank, for treating snakebites, sores, or sprains, and for balms to treat blistered feet.

  “Ointment and aid!” Chloe called out as she walked among the soldiers during long halts and on this stay-put day. Mariah walked behind her. Over one shoulder was a beat-up saddlebag with scissors, needles, lance, boiled rags, and gauze. Over the other a sack with bundles of herbs and blended teas, like red oak for stomach miseries and boneset for fevers and other things. As she looked out over the sea of soldiers, Mariah knew that after dark some young women would make thems
elves useful to Yankees in other ways.

  “It ain’t so bad,” said a slender, doe-eyed girl Mariah figured to be her age.

  It was going on dusk. Mariah was riverside, wringing out a pair of socks.

  Hagar and a couple of other women had sucked their teeth, snatched up their clothes, and huffed off up the bank when the girl came near.

  “You not gonna flounce off like them witches?” asked the girl.

  Mariah glanced up. The girl had her mouth poked out, her hands on her hips. “Beg pardon?” Mariah dropped the socks into her basket.

  “Ain’t you gon’ flee too?”

  She looked now, not at the girl but at the dirty petticoat over her shoulder. “I got no cause to flee,” Mariah said drily. She lifted a pair of britches from the water, reached for a stone slightly larger than her hand.

  “Not ashamed to be seen with a fancy girl?”

  Mariah commenced scrubbing Zeke’s britches. “Happy girl, sad girl, fancy girl,” she said without looking up. “It’s nothin’ to me what kind of girl you are.” She rinsed the britches, started wringing them out.

  The girl stepped closer to the water’s edge, dunked her petticoat. “Name’s Praline.”

  “Mariah.”

  She got an earful about Praline’s life back in Louisville. Like Mariah, mostly Big House labor. Only Praline’s whitefolks had five young children. “Little hellions. Their mama an idiot. And Master, he—”

  One of the huffed-off women cried out. Mariah looked up the bank and saw her sloshing into the river with a long stick to recover a piece of her washing the current sent adrift.

  “Anyhow,” Praline continued, “when Master John used to hand me around to his men friends, I didn’t get nothin’ but sore.”

  By now Mariah was washing a head wrap.

  “But these Yanks,” Praline continued, “one give me a tent all to myself. Nother a little bottle of scent. It ain’t so bad.”

  With washing done, supper done, Praline, thank goodness, nowhere in sight, and Zeke and Dulcina tucked in, Mariah again found a clear patch not far from the others, again went to herself. Third night of freedom. Third night and still in the dark about the somewhere place. And sad that Caleb hadn’t supped with them. Hadn’t come after supper either. Mariah tried not to worry.

  By now she knew not all foragers came back whistling happy tunes and with plenty of plunder. Hagar had heard of one getting a back full of buckshot and of another found in a ditch, throat cut ear to ear. If Rebels did that to Sherman’s soldiers, Mariah knew they’d do worse to a colored man.

  “Mind some company?”

  Mariah almost jumped out of her skin. So lost in thought, she hadn’t heard his footsteps. “Not at all.”

  What a relief. Caleb had gotten back in one piece.

  Mariah fumbled for something else to say as he joined her on the ground. “You took supper with Captain Galloway?”

  “Ate on the run. Was helping out at the forge. Shoeing horses, repairing some limber chests.”

  Mariah couldn’t think of anything else to say. Or ask.

  Caleb got a small fire going.

  As the minutes went by Mariah still couldn’t think of anything to say, kept hoping Caleb would come up with conversation. When he didn’t she wondered why he came to be with her if he didn’t—

  Caleb gently tapped the burn scar on her neck.

  She flinched.

  “What happened here?”

  There was a breeze, bearing the scent of pine.

  Mariah pursed her lips, looked up at the sky. “Miss Callie and the tip of a hot poker … candle wax on the parlor carpet. I was nearest to blame.”

  Next, Caleb’s finger swept gently across the tiny gash above her left eyebrow.

  “Judge Chaney backhanded me. Wore a locket ring on the hand he used.”

  Another question, then another—before Mariah knew it, she was spilling a host of pent-up memories. The slaps, the kicks, the pinpricks. Then she told him about her pa.

  She never knew what her pa did to get the dungeon: a hole in the ground big enough for a body to fit sitting up but too small for a body to move. A piece of board weighed down by a stone covered the pit. A few crude holes allowed just enough air to live.

  The man was stuck in the dungeon for one day, two days. At eventide on day three, the dungeon cover, stone and all, blew off in a hurricane rain.

  Mariah saw her ma, Patience, fly to the Big House. “Master Chaney, he’ll drown!” she screamed. “Master Chaney, please, have mercy!”

  Little Mariah grabbed a kettle from their hearth, raced to the dungeon, bailed out water as fast as she could, soon sopping wet herself as she tried to save her pa—and he tried to be heard above the storm’s roar.

  “No, daughter, git inside ’fore you catch sick. Daughter, git inside.”

  She kept on with the kettle despite the pain in her thin arms, despite the hard, heavy rain beating her down.

  “Love you, daughter,” her pa panted, the water at his chin.

  Behind a blind of tears, Mariah bailed and bailed and bailed—until Nero descended upon her, snatched the kettle from her hands, dragged her away.

  “No!” she screamed, trying in vain to kick and bite free of the hazel-eyed beast. “No!”

  Years later Mariah overheard Mordecai tell Esther about that night. “For all of Patience’s pleading, Judge Chaney just grunted, ‘He be all right,’ then knocked back another whiskey.”

  When done telling Caleb about her pa, it dawned on Mariah that this was the first time she’d ever told anybody about it, the first time she recalled it out loud. Never had a need to. Everybody on the Chaney place knew. The Doubles knew. Others miles around knew. There had never been anybody new to tell. And hardly anybody went in for recollecting nightmares out loud. Or asking. Comfort mostly came in code. A basket of ginger cakes, the soft-singing of “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” or whispering “God’s watchin’.”

  For the first time in her life Mariah knew the benefit, the balm of not keeping blistering memories padlocked in her mind.

  She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, took a deep breath, managed a half smile.

  Caleb handed her a handkerchief. “Didn’t mean to cause distress. I don’t know what came over me. I just—”

  “You caused no distress. Did me a favor. Been a long time since I had a good cry.”

  “Would you rather be left alone now?”

  “No, no.” She looked into his eyes. “Stay.”

  Caleb reached into his coat pocket, brought out a paper packet, and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “Rock candy.”

  Mariah undid the packet, popped a few blue crystals into her mouth. “From Captain Galloway?”

  Caleb nodded. “I’ve never known a grown man with such a love for candy.”

  They burst out laughing. When they settled down into another silence, Mariah longed to tell Caleb more, longed for more relief. She told him about her ma.

  About a month after her pa died in the dungeon, Judge Chaney gave up the ghost. Cause of death was a mystery. Miss Callie, bedeviled by the notion that Patience had put a hex on him, ordered Nero to give her fifty lashes.

  “Please, Miss Callie, please have mercy!” Mariah threw herself at the woman’s feet. They were behind the Big House. Callie Chaney, head to toe in black, beginning with a veil.

  “Please, Miss Callie, please don’t whip my mama!”

  Mariah watched in horror as Nero stripped her mother naked to just below her big belly, tied her up to a rough red oak.

  “She ain’t put no hex on him!” Mariah clamped her hands over her ears, muffling her mother’s screams after Nero laid on the first lash.

  “Please! Please!” Mariah sobbed. “I beg you, Miss Callie!”

  Nero, in a sweat and grunting, cracked that bullwhip again, again, again.

  “My mama believe in Jesus, only in Jesus! She ain’t no conjure woman! Please, Miss Callie!”

  T
he whipping continued as did a woman’s screams, a little girl’s pleas.

  At lash thirty-three, Mariah saw Callie Chaney raise a hand, signaling Nero to stop. Mariah, a trembling mass of snot and tears, kissed the woman’s feet. “Thank you, ma’am,” she whispered.

  Miss Callie looked down on her. Voice candy-coated, she said, “She’ll get fifty on top of fifty if you don’t hush up that hollerin’.”

  Mariah clamped her hands over her mouth.

  Callie Chaney lowered her hand.

  Nero resumed his bullwhipping work.

  In spilling that memory Mariah also told Caleb about her ma’s piercing cries when, after the scourging, Nero doused her back with brine, about how with Josie’s help she got her ma to their cabin. But Mariah couldn’t bring herself to tell Caleb how she covered her mother’s nakedness with her apron, how her stomach churned, how she gagged at the sight of the bloody, shredded back. But she did tell him how Josie ran to Miss Callie, begged her to let Jonah go get Miss Chloe because the baby was coming.

  How it seemed a lifetime before Miss Chloe came.

  “Then came my mama’s last breath, glassy eyes. All I felt was … hollow. Too hollow to shed another tear. Life seemed a sorrow without end. I think that day was the last time I cried. Five years ago.”

  Caleb rubbed her shoulder.

  Mariah tensed up, then quickly relaxed. Caleb’s hand felt good. “When I finally looked around me, that’s when I first laid eyes on the baby boy Miss Chloe was swaddlin’.” Mariah took a deep breath. “She said it was for me to name him, so I did. Ezekiel, after our pa.”

  Mariah heard twigs snap, footsteps.

  Jonah. “Everything okay?”

  Mariah looked up, saw Jonah standing a few feet away. The fire flickered, flared up, casting long shadows on the pine trees towering above their heads.

  SECESH

  “Tues., Nov. 29th, 1864.”

  Caleb paused, stuck on Mariah’s story. Such cruelty, brutality was hardly news to him, hardly shocking, but it ate at him in a way that no other story had. Hatred was trying to claim him again.

  Best not to dwell on it. Best to focus on the fact that she came through it all sound, didn’t wind up like Dulcina. For his own soul’s sake, Caleb needed to change the subject.