Grab the pommel as well as yuh kin.” The gaunt man coughed.
“I tell you,” he said, in a disappointed voice,
“If we just strung him up it’d make things a hull lot easier.
He’s a spy for sure, and everyone strings up spies.
We got a long piece to go yet and he’s a nuisance.”
“Aw, shut yore face,” said Jim Breckinridge in a drawl,
“Yuh kin hang any Yanks yuh ketch on a piece uh dishrag,
Yuh ain’t caught no armies yit.” The gaunt man was silent.
Ellyat saw the little tin dish that carried the life
Slowly sink down, to safety, the black dish rise.
“Come on,” said Billy. The horses started to move,
Stirring a dust that rose for a little while
In a faint cloud. But after the horses had gone,
The cloud settled, the road went to sleep again.
Book IV
Strike up, strike up for Wingate’s tune,
Strike up for Sally Dupré!
Strike up, strike up for the April moon,
And the rain on the lilac spray!
For Wingate Hall in its pride once more,
For the branch of myrtle over the door,
Because the men are back from the war;
For the clean bed waiting the dusty rider
And the punchbowl cooling for thirsty throttles,
For the hot cooks boiling the hams in cider
And Cudjo grinning at cobwebbed bottles—
The last of the wine, the last of the wine,
The last of the ’12 and the ’29!
Three times voyaged around the Cape
Till old Judge Brooke, with an oath oracular,
Pronounced it the living soul of the grape,
And the veriest dregs to be supernacular!
Old Judge Brooke with his double-chins
Sighing over his hoarded claret
And sending the last of his cherished bins
To the hospital-doctors with “I can spare it
But if you give it to some damned layman
Who doesn’t know brandy from licorice-water
And sports a white ribbon, by fire and slaughter,
I’ll hang the lot of you higher than Haman!
The Wingate cellars are nearly bare
But Miss Louisa is doing her hair
In the latest style of Napoleon’s court.
(A blockade-runner brought the report,
A blockade-runner carried the silk,
Heavy as bullion and white as milk,
That makes Amanda a gleaming moth.
For the coasts are staked with a Union net
But the dark fish slip through the meshes yet,
Shadows sliding without a light,
Through the dark of the moon, in the dead of night,
Carrying powder, carrying cloth,
Hoops for the belle and guns for the fighter,
Guncotton, opium, bombs and tea.
Fashionplates, quinine and history.
For Charleston’s corked with a Northern fleet
And the Bayou City lies at the feet
Of a damn-the-torpedoes commodore;
The net draws tighter and ever tighter,
But the fish dart past till the end of the war,
From Wilmington to the Rio Grande,
And the sandy Bahamas are Dixie Land
Where the crammed, black shadows start for the trip
That, once clean-run, will pay for the ship.
They are caught, they are sunk with all aboard.
They scrape through safely and praise the Lord,
Ready to start with the next jammed hold
To pull Death’s whiskers out in the cold,
The unrecorded skippers and mates
Whom even their legend expurgates,
The tough daredevils from twenty ports
Who thumbed their noses at floating forts
And gnawed through the bars of a giant’s cage
For a cause or a laugh or a living-wage,
Who five years long on a sea of night,
Pumped new blood to the vein bled white
—And, incidentally, made the money
For the strangely rich of the after years—
For the flies will come to the open honey,
And, should war and hell have the same dimensions,
Both have been paved with the best intentions
And both are as full of profiteers.
The slaves in the quarters are buzzing and talking.
—All though the winter the ha’nts went walking,
Ha’nts the size of a horse or bigger,
Ghost-patrollers, scaring a nigger,
But now the winter’s over and broken,
And the sun shines out like a lovin’ token,
There’s goin’ to be mixin’s and mighty doin’s,
Chicken-fixin’s and barbecuin’s,
Old Marse Billy’s a-comin’ home!
He’s slewn a brigade with a ha’nts’s jaw-bone,
He’s slewn an army with one long sabre,
He’s scared old Linkum ’most to death,
Now he’s comin’ home to rest from he labor,
Play on he fiddle and catch he breath!
The little black children with velvet eyes
Tell each other tremendous lies.
They play at Manassas with guns of peeled
Willow-stalks from the River Field,
Chasing the Yanks into Kingdom Come
While one of them beats on a catskin drum.
They are happy because they don’t know why.
They scare themselves pretending to die,
But all through the scare, and before and after,
Their voices are rich with the ancient laughter,
The negro laughter, the blue-black rose,
The laughter that doesn’t end with the lips
But shakes the belly and curls the toes
And prickles the end of the fingertips.
Up through the garden, in through the door,
That undercurrent of laughter floats,
It mounts like a sea from floor to floor,
A dark sea, covering painted boats,
A warm sea, smelling of earth and grass,
It seeps through the back of the cheval-glass
Where Amanda stares at her stately self
Till her eyes are bright with a different spark,
It sifts like a dye, where Louise’s peering
In a shagreen-case for a garnet ear-ring
Till the little jewels shine in the dark,
It spills like a wave in the crowded kitchen
Where the last good sugar of Wingate Hall
Is frosting a cake like a Polar Highland
And fat Aunt Bess in her ice-wool shawl
Spends the hoarded knowledge her heart is rich in
On oceans of trifle and floating-island.
Fat Aunt Bess is older than Time
But her eyes still shine like a bright, new dime,
Though two generations have gone to rest
On the sleepy mountain of her breast.
Wingate children in Wingate Hall,
From the first weak cry in the bearing-bed
She has petted and punished them, one and all,
She has closed their eyes when they lay dead.
She raised Marse Billy when he was puny,
She cared for the Squire when he got loony,
Fed him and washed him and combed his head,
Nobody else would do instead.
The matriarch of the weak and the young,
The lazy crooning, comforting tongue.
She has had children of her own,
But the white-skinned ones are bone of her bone.
They may not be hers, but she is theirs,
And if the shares were unequal shares,
She does not know it, now she is old.
They will keep her out of the rain and cold.
And some were naughty, and some were good,
But she will be warm
