Chapter Sixteen

FLOWER had to wait outside almost five minutes before Abigail Dowling finally came to the door. Then she saw Willie Burke step out of the bedroom into the glow of the living room lamp and her face tightened with embarrassment.

"I'm sorry. I reckon I caught y'all at supper," she said.

"Come in, Flower," Abigail said, holding back the door.

"How you do, Mr. Willie?" Flower said.

"Hello, Flower. It's good to see you again. Miss Abby says you've been doing splendidly with your lessons." His voice was thick, his cheeks pooled with color, as though he had a fever. His eyes did not quite meet hers.

"Thank you, suh," she said.

"What was that about the laundry?" Abigail asked.

"Some Yankees came across the fields and started pushing people out of the cabins. They drug a corn-shuck mattress behind the laundry and chased down some girls and drug them back there, too. When they were finished they lit a cannonball and threw it through the kitchen".

"Where'd they go?" Willie asked.

"To the saloon. They were carrying all the rum out the door."

"Did you see other troops? Soldiers in large numbers?" Willie asked.

"No," she said.

"You stay here tonight," Abigail said. "I'm going to take Mr. Willie to his mother's."

"Mr. Willie, you suppose to be in reg'lar clothes like that?" Flower said.

"Not exactly," he replied.

"Suh, there's bad things going on. Don't let them hurt you," she said.

"They're not interested in people like me," he said.

"I hid in the coulee, but I could hear what they were doing on the other side of the laundry. You don't want them to catch you, suh."

"You be good, Flower. The next time I see you, I'm going to have a new book for you," he said.

Please don't talk down to me, she thought. "Yes, suh. Thank you," she said.

Abigail and Willie walked out into the yard. Flower followed them as far as the gallery.

"Mr. Willie, put your uniform on," she said.

He grinned at her, then climbed into the buggy beside Abigail. Flower stood on the gallery and watched them ride away toward the center of town.

Miss Abby, aren't you a surprise? she thought.

The sky was red in the south, and pieces of burnt cane, like black thread, drifted into the yard. A riderless white horse cinched with a military saddle wandered in the street, its hooves stepping on the reins. The shutters and doors of every house on the street were latched shut.

By habit she did not sit down in a white person's home until she was in the kitchen. She wished she had taken her books and writing tablets from her cabin, and she wondered if the soldiers who had attacked the girls had found the box she kept under her bed and thrown its contents into the flames that had climbed out of the laundry's windows.

The fact that their uniforms were blue didn't matter, she thought.

Their kind hated books, just as the paddy rollers did and Clay Hatcher and Rufus Atkins did and all those who feared knowledge because of what it could reveal to others about themselves.

The cannon fire had stopped and there was no sound of either horses or wagons in the streets, but she believed the quietness outside and the easy sweep of wind in the trees were like the deceptions that had always characterized the world she had grown up in. Nothing was ever as it seemed. A child was born in a cabin to a mother and a father and believed it belonged to a family not totally unlike the one that lived in the columned house up on the hill. Then one day the mother or the father or perhaps the child was sold or traded, either for money or land or livestock, and no was supposed to take particular notice of the fact that the space occupied by a human being, made of flesh and blood, a member of a family, had been emptied in the time it took to sign a bill of sale.

But Flower had come to believe that moral insanity was not confined to people who lived in columned houses.

That day Yankee soldiers had come hot and dirty across a burned field, and while a Union flag flapped from a staff above their wagon, they had lined up to rape two fifteen-year-old girls whose mother was beaten back from the scene with a barrel slat.

Abigail Dowling loved human beings and nursed the dying and risked her life for the living and was detested as a traitor.

Willie Burke taught her to read and write. Then served in an army that had no higher purpose than to keep African people in bondage to ignorance and the overseer's lash.

She thought she had freed herself of her anger by helping other slaves escape up the Mississippi to Ohio. But an English poet in one of her books had used a term she couldn't forget. The term was "mind-forged manacles." They didn't get left on the banks of the Ohio River, she thought. They were the kind people carried to the grave.

What if she set about teaching others to read and write, just as Mr. Willie Burke had taught her, she thought. Each person she taught would in turn teach another, and that person another. If the Yankee soldier who stood guard in the hospital in New Orleans had not been murdered by Ira Jamison's men, she would have been able to give him what Mr. Willie had given her. But now she could create an even larger goal for herself. She could do something that was truly grand, influential in ways she had never imagined. By teaching one person at a time, she had the potential to empower large numbers of people to forever change their lives.

The thought made the blood rush to her head and she wondered if she was not indeed vainglorious and self-deluded. She heard the wind chimes tinkling on the gazebo and through the back window saw the moonlight inside the oak branches and shadows moving on the grass when the wind blew through the limbs overhead. Then a darkened steamboat passed on the bayou, its stacks blowing sparks on a roof, its wake slapping hard against the cypress trunks.

For just a moment she thought she saw the silhouette of a man on the bank, a stick figure backlit briefly by the red glow off the steamboat's stacks. She got up from the kitchen table and walked out into the yard. But the boat was gone and the bayou was dark again, and all she could see along the bank were the heart-shaped tops of flooded elephant ears beaded with drops of water as fat as marbles.

She went back inside the kitchen and sat down at the table and put her head down on her arms. She wondered where Ira Jamison was. She wondered what he would do when Yankee soldiers swept across his lands and drove off or killed his livestock and fired his barns and cotton fields and freed his slaves and gutted the inside of his house and perhaps stacked his furniture in the front yard for burning. She wondered what he would have to say when he was powerless, sick, and alone.

Then she wondered why she even cared.

When would she ever free herself of the father who not only refused to recognize her but who in a letter to Nathan Forrest said he was "quite sick of being tended by unwashed niggers"?

Maybe one day some of them would tend him in hell, she thought.

But the clear, bright edges of her anger would not hold, and again she fell back into the self-hating thoughts that invaded her soul whenever she meditated long upon the name of Ira Jamison.

An image flicked past a side window, like a shard of light out of dream. She raised her head off her arms and stared out in the darkness, wondering if she had fallen asleep. The air smelled like leaves burning on a fall day. A twig snapped in the yard and she heard feet moving fast across the ground, then a shadow went across the kitchen window.

She locked down the boll on the back door and walked to the Iront of the cottage and stepped out on the gallery. She looked up and down the street, but no one was there and the only lamp burning on the block was in the house of a mad woman. Then the riderless white horse thundered across the lawn and crashed through banana trees into the street, its eyes bulging in a ripple of heat lightning across the sky.