'We instruct them in the things that matter,' Jackson said. 'Why, I myself began and taught a Sunday school for the Negroes in and around Lexington, Virginia, before the War of Secession. They are, in my view, perhaps not the Regulars of the church, but they assuredly make up the militia.'
Douglass started to say something, then stopped. He resumed after an evident pause for thought: 'I have come to see, over the years, that few men are entirely of a piece. I did not know you had done such a thing, General; it shall redound to your credit on the day when our Father judges you. How can you, though, justify the manifold evils of slavery while preaching the Gospel that sets all men free?'
'As you must know, the Good Book sanctions slavery,' Jackson replied. 'If Providence sanctions it, who am I to speak in opposition? I do believe Negro slaves to be children of God no less than myself, and deserving of good treatment.'
'You might be wiser, from a master's point of view, if you did not,' Douglass observed. 'A slave who has a bad master wants a good master. A slave who has a good master wants to be free.'
'Are you not betraying slaves' secrets to tell us this?' Porter Alexander asked.
Douglass shook his leonine head. 'A bad master does not become a good one at the pull of a lever. Nor does a good one easily go bad; that can and does happen, as I know to my pain, but slowly, over years.'
One of the telegraph keys in the tent began to chatter. Everyone whirled to stare at it. When it fell silent, the telegrapher carried the transcription of the wire over to Jackson. Douglass' eyes followed the man's every step. Jackson read the telegram, then smiled a crooked smile. 'Anticlimax, I fear,' he said. 'General Alexander, some of the new shipment of horses that will haul your guns has arrived.'
'I'm relieved to hear it.' The artillery commander glanced over at Frederick Douglass. 'Rather more so than our… guest, I daresay.'
'I am not your guest, unless I misunderstand and am in fact free to come and go as I please,' Douglass snapped. 'I am your prisoner.'
'Yes, you are a prisoner.' Jackson minced few words, and appreciated candor in others. 'Whether you will remain a prisoner, and upon what terms-these matters await President Longstreet's decision.'
Porter Alexander raised an eyebrow. 'I stand corrected. Our distinguished prisoner, I should have said, or perhaps our notorious prisoner. No, distinguished will do, for were you not distinguished, Douglass, were you, say, an ordinary white Yankee, it is moderately unlikely that you should have taken supper with the general-in-chief of the Confederate States.'
A beat slower than he might have, Jackson caught the irony there. It won a smile from Frederick Douglass, too, a sour smile. 'I note, General Alexander, that however distinguished I may be in your eyes and those of General Jackson, I am not distinguished enough for either of you to preface my name with Mister.' Jackson blinked. 'It never occurred to me to do so,' he said. 'To the best of my recollection, I have never called a Negro Mister in my entire life.'
'That in itself speaks unhappy volumes on the history of my race in what are now the Confederate States,' Douglass said bitterly, 'and, I note, in the United States as well.'
Another telegraph apparatus began to click. 'This is the reply from the president, sir,' said the soldier at the chair in front of it. Like every telegrapher, he enjoyed the privilege of learning the content of the message before it reached the man to whom it was addressed.
When the clicking stopped, he brought the wire to Jackson, who donned his reading glasses and skimmed through it. Longstreet made his instructions unmistakably clear. Jackson turned to Douglass. 'By order of the president of the Confederate States, you are to be turned over to U.S. military authorities under flag of truce as soon as that may be arranged. You are to be freely given to those U.S. authorities; no exchange of any Confederate prisoner now in U.S. hands is to be required or requested. Until such time as you are turned over to the U.S. authorities, you are to be treated with every consideration. Is that satisfactory…' He hesitated, but the president had said every consideration, and he was not a man to disobey orders. He began again: 'Is that satisfactory, Mr. Douglass?'
The Negro's eyes widened; he recognized what Jackson had done. Ever so slightly, he inclined his head to the Confederate general-in-chief. 'It is more generous than I had dared hope. As soon as my identity was known to my captors, I thought a rope hoisted over a tree branch my likeliest fate, an apprehension of which they did little to disabuse me. I know your opinion of me here.'
'Not far removed from your opinion of us,' General Alexander remarked.
'Perhaps.' Douglass shoved that aside with one word. His features took on a look of intense concentration. 'President Longstreet is a clever politician. He realizes, where many in his position would not, that harming me would in the end also harm the reputation of your country even more, and refrains from taking the brief pleasure that hanging me would bring.' His shoulders hunched and slumped as he sighed.
'President Longstreet is a clever politician,' Jackson agreed. He eyed Douglass. 'And you, sir'- every consideration — 'unless I find myself badly mistaken, are at the moment somewhat dismayed that you shall not make your cause a martyr after all.'
'I cannot contest the charge,' Douglass said. 'And yet I should also be lying were I to claim that I am not glad to go on living, and, even more so, to be restored to liberty. Having lived without it more than twenty years, I know how dear it is.'
'At dawn tomorrow, 1 shall send an officer under flag of truce to arrange for your return to the United States,' Jackson said. 'I delay only because a flag of truce may not be recognized at night, and 1 would not willingly expose a man to danger thus.'
'I understand.' Douglass turned his dark, clever eyes on Jackson. 'Tell me, General, what would you have done with me absent President Longstreet's instructions?'
'Since I did not know what to do with you, I asked for those instructions,' Jackson answered. It was an evasion, and he knew as much. To his relief, Frederick Douglass did not press him on it.
Cananea baked in the Mexican sun. No sooner had that thought crossed Jeb Stuart's mind than he rejected it. Sonora now being part of the CSA, Cananea baked in the Confederate sun. The Stars and Bars hung limp from a flagpole in the middle of town. The tents of the Confederate army and its Apache allies vastly outnumbered the squalid adobe houses that made up the miserable little place.
Water mirages danced and shimmered on the desert. Stuart knew they weren't real. They were amazingly convincing, though. Someone thirsty who hadn't seen them before would surely have chased them till he perished or realized that, like wills-o'-the-wisp, they endlessly receded before him and were not worth pursuing.
Major Horatio Sellers walked up beside Stuart. 'Good morning, sir.'
'Hmm? Oh, good morning, Major,' Stuart answered, a little sheepishly. 'I'm sorry. I was looking at the mirages and not thinking about very much of anything. If you hadn't come along, the buzzards probably would have picked me up and carried me off in an hour or two.'
'Really, sir?' Sellers looked surprised. 'I would have guessed you were thinking about your son.'
'Captain Stuart, do you mean?' The commander of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi smiled. 'If he's not the youngest captain in the history of the Confederate Army, I'll be everlastingly surprised. What I should be is jealous. I wasn't even at West Point at his age, let alone winning battlefield promotions.'
'War will give a push to things that would have happened more slowly without it,' his aide-de-camp said. Sellers suddenly looked as if he'd bitten down on a lemon. Without seeing any more than that, Stuart understood what it meant.
Sure enough, Geronimo and Chappo silently came up to stand beside the two Confederate soldiers. Their soft moccasins were far better suited to quiet movement than the boots Stuart and Sellers wore. As always, Geronimo greeted Stuart as an equal. That bothered the general less than the impression he got that Geronimo was stretching a point to do so.
Through Chappo, the medicine man said, 'Is it true your son is now a warrior? I have heard this from my men who have some English.'
'It is true,' Stuart agreed gravely. 'Your son, Chappo here, fought well against the Yankees in New Mexico Territory. My son, who is Chappo's age and has the same name I do, fought well against the Yankees in a land called Kentucky, far from here.'
'For boys to become men is good,' Geronimo said. 'Your son, I hear, did something very brave, something very fine. What is it?'
