Love and War

As the mounds of snow in the dooryard grew smaller, the two blacks began to notice bands of horsemen on the road at all hours. At night, the tree line glittered from artillery fire along the river; occasionally the explosions shook the windowpanes so hard the vibration produced an eerie whining sound. Washington and Boz conferred often about the seriousness of the situation and finally decided to approach their mistress.

They argued for an hour about who should do it. The job fell to the younger man. Boz went to the kitchen at suppertime.

'Ain't no way to get around it, Miss Augusta. Gonna be fighting soon. Union Army might roll straight across this farm. Ain't safe to stay here. Washington and me, we'd fight to the end for you. Die for you. But neither of us wants you killed, an' we don't much want to be killed either if we can help it.' He took a deep breath. 'Won't you please go to Richmond City?'

'Boz, I can't.'

'Why not?'

'Because if he came looking for me, he wouldn't know where to find me. I could write him, but the mails are so poor he might never get the letter. I'm sorry, Boz. You and Washington are free to leave whenever you want. I must stay.'

'Stayin's dangerous, Miss Augusta.'

'I know. But it would be worse to go and never see him again.'

When Billy left Lehigh Station at the end of his short furlough, Brett again found herself adrift in gloom. In part, her mood was a direct result of her husband's preoccupation with the army. He said the sagging morale didn't affect him; he was a professional. But she saw the changes in him — the tiredness, the cynicism, the simmering anger.

Just one medicine seemed to relieve her depression: long hours of helping the Czornas and Scipio Brown care for the lost children. She scrubbed floors, cooked meals, read stories to the smallest, and taught letters and numbers to the older ones. Each day, she worked until she was certain of falling asleep moments after she went to bed.

Late in the bitter winter, Brown took two of the youngsters out to Oberlin, Ohio, by train; he had located a black family who wanted to adopt a son and a daughter. He returned through Washington, bringing three new girls, ages seven, eight, and thirteen. On his first day in Lehigh Station, he took each for a horse­back ride. Brown had spent so much time gathering up supplies, some purchased but most donated, and searching the packed refugee camps in Washington and Alexandria that he had found it useful to move faster than he could on foot. He had taught himself to be a competent rider. Horses seemed to sense an innate kindliness in him, as did the children.

That didn't mean he had softened his spine or his militancy. Although Brett had grown to like Brown very much, she felt that he enjoyed provoking arguments with her simply because of who she was and where she came from.

One of these took place on an afternoon in March when she and Brown left the building on the hillside to buy corn meal and some other staples from Pinckney Herbert. Brown drove the buggy, and she sat beside him — something that would have caused no comment around Mont Royal, where it would be presumed that he was a bondsman. In Lehigh Station their appearance together inevitably generated hostile stares and sometimes ugly comments, especially from people like Lute Fessenden and his cousin. Both had thus far evaded military service.

They wouldn't much longer. Lincoln had recently signed an act conscripting able-bodied males twenty to forty-six for three years of duty. A man could hire a substitute or purchase an exemption for three hundred dollars. That escape hatch for the rich had already infuriated the poor of the North — Fessenden and his cousin among them, she suspected. In good weather the two men were almost always on the street, and that was true today. As Brett and the broad-shouldered black started their return trip up the hillside, the red-bearded Fessenden spied them and shouted an insult.

Brown sighed. 'Wonder if this country's ever going to change. I see scum like that, I have my doubts.'

'You've certainly changed since we first met.'

'How's that?'

'For one thing, you hardly mention colonization any more.'

Brown turned to look at her. 'Why should the Negro be packed off on ships now that the President's granted us freedom? Oh, I know — the proclamation's really a war measure. Not meant to apply anywhere except down South. But Mr. Lincoln still calls it freedom, and we'll do more with it than even he can imagine. You wait and see.'

'I don't believe Lincoln has changed his mind about resettlement, Scipio. The Ledger- Union said he has a program to ship a boatload of blacks to a new colony this spring. Nearly five hundred of them. They're going to some tiny island near Haiti.'

'Well, Old Abe won't send me there — nor Dr. Delany, either. I saw him in Washington — did I tell you? No more robes for Martin. He wants a uniform. He's trying for a commission in a black regiment.'

Over the clop of the walking horses, she said, 'Billy told me Negroes aren't being received well in the army. Don't take offense, now — these aren't his words or mine — but most white officers protest that they're being niggered to death.'

'Let them. For the first time I feel I'm close to real freedom. Anyone tries to deny it to me, I'll expend every drop of blood in my body. Mr. Lincoln may not have intended his proclamation to say every black man and woman in the land is free now. But that's how I take it.'

'That's an extreme view of the proclamation, Scipio.'

'You say so because you grew up where it was all right to steal a man's liberty. Own him like you would a side of bacon, a piece of lumber. But it isn't all right. Either the freedom in this country is for every last man or it's a fraud.'

'I still say you're being extreme about —'

'Why are you defensive all the time?' he interrupted. 'Because I jab a pin into your conscience deep enough to hurt?' He reined in at the shoulder. A baker driving his wagon down the hillside gave them a scornful stare. 'Look me straight in the eye, Brett.

Answer one question: Do you think liberty's just for persons of your color?'

'That was the intent of the authors of the Declaration.'

'Not all the authors! Anyway, this is 1863. So you answer. Is freedom for the white people and nobody else?'

'I was taught —'

'I don't want to know what you were taught, I want to know what you believe.'

'Damn you, Scipio, you're so blasted —'

'Uppity?' Thin smile. 'That I am.'

'Southerners aren't the only sinners, you know. The Yankees really don't want black people free. Some abolitionists do, but not the majority.'

'Too late.' He shrugged. 'Mr. Lincoln signed his order. And frankly, I don't care much about what is. I care about what ought to be.'

'Pushing that attitude could set this whole country on fire.'

'It's already on fire — or haven't you read the news lately?'

'Sometimes I absolutely detest you, you're so arrogant.'

'I detest you for the same reason. Sometimes.'

He reached over to pat her hand but held back; he feared she would misconstrue. Calmer, he went on, 'I wouldn't bother with you one single minute if I didn't believe there was a sensible, decent woman inside you someplace, twisting and fighting to get out into the light of day. I think the reason you can't stand me sometimes is that I'm a mirror. I make you look at yourself. What you believe — and what you have to become unless you want to mock all the dead of this war.'

Quietly, with tension: 'You're right. I guess that is why I despise you sometimes. Nobody wants to be shown his errors — be pushed along a path that's hard and dangerous.'

'The only other path leads you down to the dark for sure. That the one you want?'