Andersonville (119 page)

Again: the distressing implacable stubbornness of the inanimate which remained after the animate were gone away.

Oats, flour, rice, meal—something had been kept in that wooden pail in its original time and place. Perhaps Vermont maple sugar, perhaps sugar of the South? Certainly. Flinty cany bits had been weighted up to the brim, and the wooden lid had molded the mound flat when it was pressed on, and a woman or a slave (ha, slaves were become women now; it must not be forgotten) had reached in with smooth wooden scoop or teacup or gourd dipper to lift the sugar out, to bake it in a cake, to stir it in a pudding. Sunlight had come kindly through a window and had found the bucket on a shelf in its accustomed situation, and sunlight had warmed through wood and had made the sugar richer, or so you could imagine; and a little boy had come tiptoeing to steal the sugar . . . the bucket waited in docility upon that shelf when Bet whispered outside the pantry door and told her mother bashfully that she was going to have a baby next April; it stood there in February when the baby came too soon, when the baby was born dead, when Bet died, when the preacher stood in the front room and quoted sepulchrally,
I am the Resurrection and the Life.
It stood there.

Hate the inanimate, expunge it.

Let there be but Resurrection and Life.

Whence, and by what power?

Was God strong enough?

What of the Nation? The Nation was mutilated and crippled, crippled worse than Coral Tebbs, crippled worse than Badger Claffey might have been had he dragged himself homeward instead of contributing to cold loam in fabled mountains.

(Perhaps— No loam in the Chickamauga region? Naught but rocks and the gravelly soil of hills, and clay, and clay again, and bones and skin and young men’s lungs and tongues turned into fresher clay?)

Shebangs broken, many others unbroken and brooding in emptiness, yawning pits drilled deep—one must be careful not to fall into them— Crushed metal cups, the sole of a boot, the fold of paper with its more exposed portions flaking, and there were marks of penciling upon soggy inner portions, and it had been a letter written from one human being to another, and for some great purpose, but now it could not be read: it was a letter no longer; its legibility had strayed off into the elements as its original purpose had strayed into space with the boy who’d treasured it—

Trudging solitary through this wasteland, Ira Claffey felt the indefinable disease of old age upon him. He feared that it would not let him move his limbs and respire and keep his blood in motion long enough for him to keep his body in motion, and so walk at last through that open gate yonder, and escape the balefulness which clung to every rotting rag and scrap of charcoal.

Nineteen months ago, he mourned, partridges were here. Nineteen months ago the open pine forest was compassionate. What rare concentrated tragedies will have occurred within another nineteen months—not here, for this place has bred a tragedy greater than any recorded in the Nation’s past—but elsewhere, all over the South, through back roads and on wharves and in legislative rooms, in foundries which rust because the fires have gone out?

He prayed wordlessly, felt no answer, heard none. Gone far into his fifty-second year he felt that in fact he was a generation older than that, two generations older. He was ninety, he was a hundred and more. If grief made age then his hair was hoary and his flesh pendulous, his tendons frailer than thread, his eyes sightless.

But finally the sun came out, burned weak clouds apart, the sun said that the half-a-button lying here was a jewel, the piece of buckle over there was another jewel, and dank hovels between were nothing but manure needed by soil to fetch a future growth.

Let my age and my weakness fall away; and in some inverse fashion weakness must decline within the Nation’s body as its age increases. . . .

Here was a truth to offer strength and—perhaps, later—courage. This truth: any creed for which men are willing to die achieves an historic dignity, and cannot be shamed, no matter how one hated it. I hated the North, said Ira. Hated the National Government. My sons warred against the Nationals, my sons were killed by the Nationals. Yet the youths who suffered within these walls have given the National Government a greatness it did not possess before; and in time that Government may be embraced, welcomed, respected, worshipped by those who once were unwilling to love it without stint.

A slender stiff stick was trodden up by the weight of one boot and passed between his feet as if to trip him. Ira stepped back and nudged the thing aside, then bent to pick it up. He held a tooled length of hardwood, worn smooth by the dirt and touch of many hands. A branded
C
was visible still, no matter how many centuries of soakings and tribulations the broken fragment had endured since Ira handed out implements to his black people in the home dooryard.

...All of you watch these axes and shovels, to make certain they’re not stolen. Hear me?

...Yes, Mastah, we watch.

...May be some dishonest folk among the other laborers. And such implements are valuable. Watch as I bid you.

...Yassah.

...I wish to pick up my shovels, sir. My hands did not fetch them home last night.

...Don’t know anything about your God damn shovels! I can’t go around guarding every bastard’s shovels in the land.

Fist swinging and smashing. He could recollect still his boyish primitive satisfaction in that.

Who had used the broken handle as a crutch, who’d used it as a tent pole, had it been a weapon, was a spongy corpse pried with it?

To what use might it be put at last? Might Coral employ it as a bean pole? Ira moved on toward the gate, his knee suffered because of the uneven terrain; now he had a cane. But first and foremost the shovel-handle suggested agriculture, and agriculture had been a prime necessity of men all the way back to those desert tombs where peas of the past were found drying. Ira felt that his own gardening must proceed indefinitely, though it was assuming a new form.

But if he put mind and heart into the soil where his sons had gone, and where the human wastage of Andersonville had gone, and where that enormous blood-curdling fraction of America’s young males had gone, North and South— Eventually the stalks might rise, toughen; beards would dry out, husks turn to parchment; and those hands who’d made his crop might reach in memory to carry him in salute to the crop, the fields, the earth itself.

...You had to pretend to be surprised, you did not know that a toting was due. Secretly you arranged for Naomi and the wenches to provide meats, cakes, sweets; these were hid and locked away, and so was the cask of wine; you grew both religious and Masonic in your thought and discussed with yourself the virtues of salt, wine, oil, and corn. You sat with your own white flock upon the evening gallery while a chanting came from cabins spread along their private avenue beyond the outbuildings. Your white children giggled and whispered as black children must be giggling and whispering. You sat aloof, you fanned yourself idly with a newspaper, you pretended not to heed.

Oh, that old moon, way up there.

Ooohhhh. . . .

Where he gone, gone, that old moon?

He gone in corn, that where he gone.

Ooohhhh. . . .

Where he gone, gone, that old moon?

The moon was behind a cloud for a while, but then the cloud shifted with its gilt and blue and suggestion of other rainbow colors, the low moon burned white again, and seemed to blister long sacred fields with its oil and its salt and—God knew—also wine in the moonlight? For the intensity of hardening corn was in the air, it made you think of coons and possums and the yammer of dogs, and pine knots flaring scarlet as Negroes whooped.

They approached slowly, trailing banners of flame, the clattering voices muted as the long troop of them passed under the driveway’s magnolias . . . men coming on ahead, the women next with torches enchanting their plain garments, children gyrating as if they danced to drums, twisting and turning and holding little arms aloft for sheer love of the twist and turn.

He gone in corn, he gone in corn.

Ooohhhh. . . .

No, sir, old coon, no sir, old coon. . . .

You never get the Mastah’s corn!

We pick that corn, own selves, we pick that corn.

Oooohhhh. . . .

They issued from Nile and Congo and Niger, they had come a long way to grow Ira’s corn for him and now to carry him in triumph amid it. They jigged in orange and black and shadows, with eyes agleam, they came pirouetting, the fierce barbaric rank of strong men in the lead.

Now was the time for the planter to arise and step to the front of the gallery (as a general might have stood, as a Highland chief might have stood when pipes came screaming in the March Past). Silence chopping suddenly, the silence a pain from the second the master arose; and his woman and his children and his visiting aunt and cousin grouped behind, years of error stretching off behind them, years of other error staggering ahead with neither servants nor master able to evaluate them.

Mastah! That was before Leander was bent to helplessness, it was when his voice held the bronze timbre of a plantation bell.

Yes, Leander.

Evening, Mastah.

Good evening to you all.

Mastah, time right! Night all right, moon all right, corn all dry, ready now we pick it—

That is so. Some of you shall start the picking tomorrow. I’ll be up early to tell you off.

No, sir, please, Mastah. Not up early. Up late! For tonight—

Why, what about tonight?

This was the ritual. It varied from year to year, yet in truth it never varied until a war loomed to dismember the plantation, dismember the Union, eventually dismember the new Confederacy itself.

Tonight—we wants—to
tote
you!

Yah, yah, yah, and suddenly he was festooned amid their babble, their rich smell came up around him, he loved it as he loved the odor of cows and horses which also were his property and paid the same domestic dividends. His haunch was on Jonas’s shoulder, his other buttock sustained by Japeth’s big hands, Nestor clutched Ira’s ankle, Ira was riding high. Dudley had a cowbell, Putty a tin washbasin, Putty was thrumming the thing with his knuckles as his grandfather might have stroked a jungle drum.

Toting time, toting time. . . .

Oh, woh, woh, woh, woh!

Tote our Mastah to the corn. . . .

Why we tote him? Corn all ripe!

Ah, wah, wah, wah, wah!

Younger women lifted their skirts as they skipped behind, children scuttled and scooted, and soon were chased out of the first cornfield. This was a rule enforced by Leander: he would not permit women and children to venture past the gate, they did too much damage in dry crowded fields, they tore down stalks and made it difficult to find the ears, they made more work for the menfolks and for themselves. A coon whickered over toward the McWhorter place (in pine woods become extended Hades, pools stirred by evil pitchforks; why, it might have been at this very spot that the coon called) and all the pickaninnies yipped to hear it; the bigger more ornery ones said that it was a Woogum. There was thought of autumn coming on, colder weather, potatoes roasting in ashes; birds whirring up as if they were cranked to the whirring; smell of burnt powder, the smoke blowing free, the setter racing, the setter bringing a bird in his mouth. Thought of cool mornings after cooler whiter nights, and Naomi fetched the biscuits wrapped in a red-checked cloth, and pine flames seethed on many a hearth. It was good to be alive and crush a biscuit and smell a fire. And always there was the thought of corn, and how men and beasts would feed on it, and they would profit from the grain because it was a good thing, made good by the earth and the labor of many hands.

Oh, that old moon stay so high. . . .

Why we tote our Mastah dear?

Corn all ripe. Pick, pick, pick! Corn all ripe.

Oohhhhh. . . .

(Here corn bread had rotted, but most of it was rotted away . . . most of the last prisoners had lain within the hospital enclosure, while the stockade itself took on an air of wide desertion. Ah, here indeed was a scrap of corn bread surviving as a paste! A bug was feeding on it, several bugs. Ira turned from the sight and walked on.)

His black people’s song cried from the past, but Ira told himself that also he must listen to their lamentation. He thought that he had not caused them to lament, but others had done so. America owned its own Wilberforces, and
Laus Deo
said the poet whose poem had filtered down from the North. No blacks would ever tote Ira again in a triumphal circuit of the cornfields, no other man would ride on slaves’ shoulders, because now there were no slaves (and little corn to triumph about). He must tell himself that the institution of slavery was evil because it had perished. He must persuade himself that a greater good was achieved when a thing vanished. For his own part he saw little difference between a legal slavery and an economic one, and he thought that his own people were better off than sickly whites he’d seen trooping through mill gates at the North. But perhaps the Claffey place was not the Confederacy, and God knew there must be happier children at the North than bobbin boys.

Here was the hillside, here the spring. Often he’d stood upon that sentry platform yonder and watched the prisoners filing for their drinks, with police of their number standing, clubs at the ready, to keep them in line, to discourage speculators, to give fair opportunities for drink to everyone. Police, he thought, may I have my turn? On an impulse he knelt and scooped up water; he closed his eyes and listened to Lucy talking about a fairy she’d seen among mossy places now not mossy but only littered and tattered. Ira Claffey got up blindly and went down the slope, crossed the narrow rotten cat-walk over the marsh (with its smell lessening but still a smell) and went up toward the South Gate past the place where gallows had stood.

Thought of the gallows brought memory of those specific dead—the giants slaughtered to bring them to time!—and also the recognition of the nigh-onto-fourteen thousand who lay past pines northwest of the stockade. How many other Yankees had gone to their sleep in cars bound for Savannah or Charleston, how many had jittered and then silenced themselves in pens at Millen and Florence because they held the evil of Andersonville in their bodies when they staggered through that gate ahead? Say another thousand, or two, or thousands more? What of the relics who were carried to their homes at last? Would they grow keen and sprightly, unblemished except in spirit?—or would they languish and continue the putrefaction which had begun within these acres? Had Americans ever brought so many Americans to death in such limited acreage before? Ira thought, No great battle was ever waged within the confines of a twenty-eight-acre patch. It was said that seven thousand were shot dead at Gettysburg; there they fought over twenty miles of hills and orchards. . . .