Freeman (47 page)

A pause. Her eyes lost focus. “Lizzie died,” she said. “Weren’t even a year after she lost that baby. I think it were heartbreak that done it. Just plain as that.”

“I do not believe you,” said Prudence.

“Yes, you do,” said Miss Ginny. “That’s why it hurt so bad and I’m sorry for that, Prudence. I truly am. But I couldn’t stand to look at you no more, grieving and tearing yourself to pieces and not knowing the truth. You had this picture of your daddy, like you had this picture of Cyrus, doing the right thing for the right reasons and here I come and throw dirt on the picture. I knows how you must feel. But see, I think all us deserve to know where we come from, if we can. I think that’s important.”

“My father was a good man! He hated slavery. That is why he came down here once a year and set a slave free.”

“Yes, he done that. That started about two, three years after Lizzie died. He come down here to check his property and found out she were dead. And I told him what I told you: him takin’ her baby away is what killed her. That really seem to hurt him, and I ain’t minded at all. See, I wanted to hurt him. Far as I was concerned, he were the reason my only child was gone. That’s when he swore off slavery. That’s when he freed ever’ slave he owned. Some of us went away, some of us stayed and tried to work that land. But white folks here about, I expect I ain’t need to tell you how they is. We soon come to see, weren’t no use, they weren’t never gon’ let us farm in peace. Land been just sittin’ there ever since. Good land, too.

“But your daddy, he ain’t seem to care. And ever’ year after that, he come down here and set somebody else free, took them up to the North if they wanted to go. He started with Bonnie and her mother. They was the first. He tried to take me, but I wouldn’t go. I ain’t wanted to be in the same town with him. So instead, he give me that little house I got. Must have sat empty for six months ’fore I finally decided to move in to it. I hated him that much.”

“I never knew these things,” said Prudence, helplessly.

“I know,” she said. “Must be 30 people runnin’ ’round up North owe they freedom to your daddy—and his guilt. And you know the day he come down ever’ year?”

Prudence nodded. “He left every year on June 21.” Then she started. “Today,” she said.

“Lizzie’s birthday,” said Miss Ginny. Her eyes shone with tears waiting to be cried. “Oh, my God,” said Prudence. She did not trust herself to say more. For a shadow of time, she hated this little woman sitting next to her, this woman who, from the moment they first laid eyes upon one another, had shaken and undermined Prudence’s understanding of her very self. It was bad enough she had told Prudence that Cyrus Campbell was a monster who hated and tormented his own. Infinitely worse, she had told Prudence that the father she loved and adored and wanted more than anything in life to make proud had been a slave owner, had fornicated with some poor slave woman, just like all those dealers in human chattel he had taught her to loathe.

None of what the old woman told her contradicted the fundamental truths Prudence had been taught to believe: her father had been saved by a colored freeman who took him in and treated him like a son. Her father had gone South every year to buy the freedom of some poor man, woman or family held in slavery, and he had loathed slavery. All of it was true and yet, all of it was now a lie.

And the biggest lie, she realized, might be herself. She herself might be colored, and this wizened little woman with chestnut skin might be her grandmother.

“Who knows about this?” she asked.

“Some of the old folks,” said Miss Ginny. “Not so many of the young ones. Some of the older ones, they wanted to tell you, but I ain’t let ’em. Had to think on it, first. Ain’t everyday you tell someone she might be colored. Or part colored, which is the same thing.”

The sound of her own voice surprised her. “But I am white,” whispered Prudence. “For goodness sake, Ginny, look at me and you will see not a trace of African blood. I am white as paper. I have red hair. There is no chance my mother could have been colored.”

Miss Ginny shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I suppose that’s what make this such a pickle, child. We’ll never know for sure.”

The awful truth of that settled over Prudence like a shroud. Miss Ginny saw. “Do it bother you,” she said, eyeing Prudence closely, “knowing you might be part colored?”

“Of course it does,” said Prudence. “It is a lot to consider.”

Miss Ginny reflected on that for a moment, then nodded to herself and stood. “Then I leave you to it,” she said. Pause. “Are you sorry I told you?”

She wanted reassurance, Prudence knew. And that was surely odd, because Prudence did, too. “I do not know,” said Prudence, and there was a new helplessness in her voice. She was grateful when the little woman didn’t speak again, just hobbled back down the street, empty lemonade glass in her hand.

Prudence felt Bonnie’s absence with a knife blade’s keenness. If only her sister were there, she would know what to say, would know how to push and cajole and even vex Prudence in a way that helped her to understand the mysteries of her own heart.

“Honey,” the old woman had said, “they
all
that sort of man.”

But not John Matthew Cafferty, she had wanted to insist, wanted to cry. Not her father. Not the man whose teachings had been the very
cornerstone
of her. Not him, too.

They all that sort of man
.

But maybe she was right. Maybe they were.

Look at him: He had not acted from lofty principle. He had not acted from noble ideals. No, he had only acted from the guilty conscience of a small man whose misbehavior led to a tragic thing. And for all those years, he had allowed her to believe otherwise, had accepted accolades from the abolitionist societies, preached with fire for the cause of freedom, beamed in the adoration of his friends, his daughters, her.

So long had he lived this lie, she thought, that he probably forgot it was not true. No, he had passed the lie down to his daughters like some loathsome family trait and they, unknowing, had lived it as well. Her confidence, her sense of self and of place, seemed relics from another life. She knew nothing. She was no one.

Prudence had no idea how long she sat there. But when next she became aware of herself and her surroundings, the long shadows were melting together. In a few minutes, the light would be gone. Mechanically, she took the chair and the empty glass inside and lit a lamp.

Pushing absently at the tears that trailed down her cheek, Prudence went to check on the half dead man. She would make sure he was still breathing before she went upstairs to her makeshift bed in the loft and tried to read herself to sleep.

The circle of light fell on him. She leaned over to take a look and her heart kicked painfully. His eyes were open.

Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh my Lord,” she said. “You are awake.”

He answered her in a rasping whisper. “Who are you?” he asked.

And Prudence could only laugh.

“My name is Mrs. Prudence Cafferty Kent,” the white woman said.

“Where…?” His voice had become a mere rumor of itself. He was so weak. And Lord, the pain. His every joint and limb and square inch of skin pulsed with echoes of the same angry throb. Yet apparently, he was alive. The idea rather surprised him.

“Do not try to speak,” the woman said.

He had a sense of having lived this episode before. It took him a moment to place it. Then he remembered the day he had awakened in the hospital in Philadelphia to find another white woman, Mary Cuthbert, leaning over him. He had always marked that moment as his restoration to life. Apparently, life still was not finished with him. Sam swallowed dust. “Where am I?” he asked.

“You are in Buford,” said the woman. “We found you outside. You were beaten badly. We did as much for you as we could.”

“‘We?’”

“Ginny. A freedwoman. She is a friend.”

“You saved my life,” he said.

“We did what anyone would have done.”

He doubted this, but did not say. “May I have water?” he rasped.

“Yes, of course,” she said.

She disappeared from his sight for a moment and returned with a glass of water. She lifted his head—God, how it hurt—and brought the glass to his lips. The water was warm, but he drank it greedily, then automatically
brought his left hand up to wipe his wet cheeks. Instead, the stub of his ruined arm came into view and he remembered. He sank into the cot with a grunt that had nothing to do with physical pain.

“Are you all right, Mr….?”

“Freeman,” he said. And saying it, he could not help reflecting how haughtily he had once pronounced that name. How proud it had made him then. Now it was only a name. “Sam Freeman,” he said. It was only then that he caught it. She had called him “mister.” No white person had ever called him “mister.” Not even Mary Cuthbert had ever called him “mister.”

He looked at her with new interest. “You are not from here,” he said.

“I am from Boston,” she said softly. “I came two months ago when the war ended to start a school for the freedmen.”

“That was a noble gesture.”

“The school is closed now,” she said.

“Closed? Why?”

She straightened. “We will talk about that another time,” she said. “For now you must rest. I will go and tell Ginny you have awakened. She will be pleased to hear.”

The white woman stepped away from him, closing the door on further questions. Sam had the impression she was in a hurry to get away. He lay there in the stifling heat, every movement a torture, questions with no outlet circling in his mind. What day was it? How long had he been here? How badly was he hurt? Who was this woman and why had she seemed in such a hurry to get away? What was this place?

He turned his head—about the only movement that did not cost him pain—and allowed his eyes to rove the vast room by the light from the lamp Mrs. Kent had left behind. In the corner, in some kind of makeshift stall, Bucephalus dozed. The big doors looming above were pocked with holes. They could almost have been bullet holes. The vast room was filled with broken and overturned desks. The floor was a carpet of papers covered with childish scrawls.

And he realized with a start that this was it. This was the school she had spoken of.

My God, what happened here?

He resolved to ask her when she returned. But he was so weak, so tired. After a moment, he dozed.

Sam’s screams rang through the old warehouse, wordless shrieks of mingled rage and fear that jolted Prudence out of a light sleep and sent her trotting down the stairs from the loft. She found him, the shadow of him, just visible in the thin white light of the moon, sitting upright on the cot, his breath pushing in and out of him in great, fast gusts, his entire body trembling as if wracked by some arctic chill. She paused a few feet short of him.

“Mr. Freeman?”

He did not look her way, did not answer, seemed to have concentrated his whole will simply on the act of being.

“Mr. Freeman?”

“I apologize for having wakened you,” he said finally, still not looking at her. “I did not know you were up there. I had a bad dream.”

“You had a nightmare,” she said. She sat on the cot next to him.

He nodded. “I had them often when first I left the Army. I have not had one for a very long time.”

“What did you dream?”

He looked at her. “I dreamt of the men who attacked me.”

“You were attacked? Well, I feared as much from your injuries. What happened to you?”

He didn’t speak. She waited. It took a long moment. She waited. “I went back to the place where I was…owned,” he said. He paused before the last word as before a hostile door.

“Why would you do that?” she asked.

“I went looking for my wife,” he told her. “I have not seen her since I left that place 15 years ago. I was hoping she might be there still.”

“But you did not find her?”

“No. I found only my old mistress and a gang of white men who set out to stomp me to death because they thought I was part of some Negro militia.”

At those words, Prudence felt some unspeakable cold shiver her blood. “Is that what they called it, Mr. Freeman? A Negro militia? Were those the exact words they used?”

He glanced at her with sudden interest. “Well, no,” he said. “They called it a…”