Interlude: A Southern symphony, 1930
“Air cover says they’ve lost contact, sir.”
Captain Rufus John Longstreet looked around sharply at his executive officer. “Lost
contact? How the hell could they manage that?”
“In the swamp? Easy. Now you see it, now you don’t.”
“Well, one way or another, seems to have happened.” Longstreet slumped his shoulders and sighed. “You come from swampland, don’t you, Billy?”
“No, sir,” said the lieutenant, who also answered to Bilali. “Sapelo Island. The Ogeechee Republic.”
“They still call it that?” Longstreet shook his head, but it was more in amusement than anything else. He’d learned a lot about black Georgians these last few years, and the Gullahs’ independent streak had ceased to surprise him. “It’s marsh country, though. Not all
that different. Where would you go, if you were them?”
“I imagine they’ve got a camp somewhere, and I bet they don’t move it often enough. Tell them to look for smoke, or for garbage. That’ll lead us to them if we find it.”
“Give the order, Billy.” The captain nodded, satisfied. He’d had his doubts about how a black XO would work out – he respected most of the black officers he’d met, but figured that things went smoother if everyone stayed in their own regiments – but Mahomet was a good troop, and the white soldiers followed him. He’d been good at keeping the peace, too, when fights broke out in camp.
A question suddenly came to him, one he’d wanted to ask for a long time. Maybe today was the right day. “Tell me something, Billy,” he said. “I can understand why the hard-core whites might keep fighting, but the ones we’re going after today are your folk. Why would
they keep blowing things up after we came in? Seems like we’re on their side, doesn’t it?”
Lieutenant Mahomet was silent for a long moment, and Longstreet began to wonder if he thought his loyalty was being questioned. It wasn’t – the captain knew Billy was loyal, and he’d been as outraged as anyone else about those holdouts bombing a courthouse when there was supposed to be peace – but the Gullah could be touchy as well as independent. His lips started to form an apology, not that he really needed to be sorry for anything, but keeping the peace was important.
But Mahomet wasn’t insulted; he’d just been thinking. “Seems to me, sir, that they think we came in and stopped them with the job still half-done. We can vote all over Georgia now, not just the Republic, and we can do anything the buck…
whites can do, but there are still neighborhoods we can’t buy a house in and stores where we have to use the colored door.”
“Fair enough,” Longstreet admitted – he couldn’t really do otherwise, after his great-grandfather had spent his later years fighting against that nonsense. “But you could fight that with votes and courts now.”
“I guess some people don’t want to wait.”
“Things like that’ll only make it take longer,” the captain answered, and Mahomet nodded: he didn’t want to wait either, but
his family had learned patience in the days of slavery, and the special arrangement the Geechee counties had had meant that his relationship with whites was less adversarial than most. “Anyway, go give that order…”
Whatever response the lieutenant might have given was cut off by a corporal running into the tent. “Air cover says it found them!”
“Sir,” Mahomet finished, and the corporal repeated the word. He did that more often with the white troops than the black ones, and Longstreet had thought of saying something to him, but he still
had to do it more often with the white troops, and he didn’t have to worry as much that a black soldier’s informality was a mask for disrespect. The captain decided to let it go this time. Black and white would both have to learn to let a lot of things go, if this were going to work.
“Corporal,” he said instead, “get the men together. Billy, time to go to war.”
“C’mon and sit down, Frank,” said Moreland Lewis expansively. “You know Samuel already, and that’s Young on your left, and over there’s our lovely Laurel.”
Frank Field took a seat and a drink, and looked back at the man making the introductions. Lewis was a dandy in a fifty-dollar suit, a size too small for his personality; he clearly thought he was the leader of this round table, and he just as clearly wasn’t. But those were details. Frank had read his books, full of history and dark family secrets and doomed people straining against the bonds the land placed on them, and he knew that this man’s work would mark the South for generations to come. A chance meeting in a New York bar had led to this invitation, and Frank hadn’t wasted a second in accepting it.
“You’re the man from the
Times?” asked Young Daniels. A poet, that one, but he’d tried his hand at novels too: brisk and modern where Lewis’ were florid, and all the more jarring where their themes were rural counties and ancient feuds.
“The very one, Mr. Daniels.” Lewis’ jovial tone belied his formality. “He’s come to drink with the
belles of Southern
lettres, and tell all the New Yorkers that we might blow each other to hell but we at least write good stories about it.”
“He’s in the wrong place, then. The only belle here’s Laurel.”
Field joined the general laughter – a bit more than the joke really warranted, but the number of empty glasses on the table were all the explanation that was necessary – but found his attention turned to the woman of whom Daniels had spoken. She was a poet too, and a playwright; in that she was no different from the others. But it wasn’t long ago that no one would have asked a person of her shade to a gathering like this, and she’d never have been admitted to a Royal Street nightclub even if someone
had asked her.
“I’ll certainly be writing about Miss Wilson too,” Frank said. “I’m planning an overview of what the South is producing…”
“What part of the South, Frank?” asked Samuel Harris, the other one who Field had met that evening at the Park Hotel bar. “Here in Mobile? Tennessee? Florida? Virginia? We aren’t all the same.”
“I think he’s figured that out, with me at the table,” Laurel answered. There was laughter again, but with an edge of nervousness this time. “You’re right, no two places are the same. But there are things that set all of us apart from the rest of the country, and they’ve got into our soul.”
“You think there’s one Southern literature, then? Virginia and Alabama, black and white?”
“No, Mr. Field, I didn’t say that. You’ll notice there are two places Sam didn’t mention. South Carolina. Mississippi. They’ve been telling a different story for a long time – could you imagine Moreland’s books set
there? And black and white, country and city, the mountains and the coast –
they’ve been telling different stories. But now we’ve got a chance to come together again. Give it twenty years, and maybe there
will be one Southern literature.”
“When I write your story, Miss Laurel?” Young said, raising the wine bottle and filling her glass.
“Or when she writes yours,” said Moreland.
“Or that,” said Frank. He said something else too, but it was lost as steel drums and electric guitars announced the evening’s entertainment, and he settled for another drink.
“I think you may want to find yourself another church,” said Pastor Fredericks.
“You saying I’m not welcome here, reverend?”
The pastor thought of ways to temporize, but decided against all of them. “That’s exactly what I’m saying, Johnny. I don’t think you’ll fit in with us, and I
know you don’t agree with us. There are other places you can worship.”
“No Freedom Riders in this church, is that it? We’re children of a different God?”
“We don’t believe in killing here. The kind you did, or the kind the Yellowhammers did to our families to
get even for what you did.”
“I don’t believe in it either, pastor. You know I’ve repented of it.”
“You don’t
do it any more, Johnny, but that’s not the same thing…”
“What the hell do you know, reverend?” Johnny’s voice was suddenly sharp and angry where before it had been resigned. “I repented of it, all right. When we blew up that bank back in ’27, we didn’t know that there’d be a school trip going through it when the bombs went off. I killed kids, reverend. You know what it’s like to have that on your soul? I’ve been living with that every damn day, and you think I didn’t
repent?”
“No, I
don’t know what it’s like to have that on my soul,” Fredericks answered, trying to regroup. “But if you did repent, God knows it. You don’t need this church for that.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, pastor.” The former Freedom Rider was calm again, preternaturally so. “You think I came here just ‘cause I like getting treated like trash? If I just wanted to be seen in church, I could go to the one on Seventh Avenue – plenty of old Riders there, even the reverend. That ain’t the only one around here either.”
“All right, then,” said Fredericks. He’d decided somehow, without conscious thought, that Johnny had at least earned the right to say his piece before leaving. Maybe it was the rawness of his confession, maybe it was something else. “Why
did you come here, then?”
“Because the folks on Seventh Avenue think they won.
You’re still fighting.”
“Yes.” That wasn’t the answer the minister had been looking for, and his voice was altogether more thoughtful. “Yes, we are. Not your kind of fighting, though, Johnny.”
“There’s a time to fight with guns, reverend, like in slavery days, and don’t tell me you have a problem with what
they did.” Fredericks couldn’t have denied that even if he’d wanted, not with a picture of armed Underground Railroad guides just inside the door, and not when the Titusville Baptist Church had itself been a stop on the railroad. “And when the Yellowhammers were killing us, too, though I know you won’t agree with that. But there’s a time to put down the guns and fight them with shame, like they did in Java. You’re fighting the battle we need to fight now. I want to join it.”
“You do? You’ll have to break bread with Sadie Mayes, you know. Cop shot her husband a couple hours after your boys attacked that police station – he never knew anything had happened, but they were jumpy.”
“I can face Miz Mayes. And the others. Can’t face the enemy if you don’t have the guts to face your friends.”
“We’re your friends, then?”
“Why not? You were brave, and you’re fighting a godly fight.” Johnny turned to go, noting the time that services would be held that Sunday. “I hope you realize someday that we were yours, too.”
“Saint Helena Island, comin’ up in a few minutes,” called the conductor from the front of the ferry. “Y’all gettin’ out at St. Helena Island, start gettin’ your things together now.”
Rebecca Felton reached under her seat for her bag, then realized she’d put it on the bench after her neighbors had got off at the Parris Island naval station. The boat was light in the water by now, and it chugged slowly past marshy coastline and rising shorebirds.
The people still in the ferry didn’t seem in much of a hurry either. The inner Sea Islands were close enough to the mainland that a bridge could easily have been built, but the Sea Islanders didn’t want one – they liked living on islands just fine, and they preferred the slower pace of a place slightly removed from the world.
“St. Helena Landing,” the conductor called, and the ferry was indeed pulling up to a dock, set on a point of solid ground that rose out of the salt marsh. The boat pulled in smoothly – the captain was a master at his craft – and Rebecca joined the line of people waiting to debark.
There was a step up to the dock, and it was daunting for someone of her years. Her neighbor must have noticed her hesitation, because he held out a hand and asked, “Help you up, ma’am?” She flinched instinctively from his touch, but then remembered where she was, followed closely by the recollection that she was more than ninety years old.
“Thanks, don’t mind if I do,” she said, and took the offered hand. Her companion saw her safely to the pier, and took his leave with a “good day to you, ma’am.”
You wouldn’t say that if you knew who I was, she thought, but he didn’t know, and why should he? The number of white people who
lived on St. Helena Island could be counted on the fingers of both hands, but everyone had white friends or business associates in Beaufort and Charleston, and to his mind, she was just an old white lady come to visit someone or other. Which, as it happened, she was.
There was a group of stores just past the old sign that said “ST. HELENA ISLAND – SEA ISLAND REPUBLIC,” and they weren’t all Afro-modern like the ones in Beaufort – they were a hundred percent Southern, most of them houses from before the war. She passed the first one, saw tables on the veranda and smelled cooking, and she suddenly realized how famished she was. Famished enough that she didn’t care what color the owner was.
That worthy proved to be a Gullah woman of indeterminate age with the look of a root-doctor about her. “Come on, sit down,” she said, motioning Rebecca to a corner table. She didn’t bother taking any orders, just set down a bowl of shrimp boil, a plate of red rice and hoppin’ john, and a tall cup of lemonade.
Rebecca ate, more bemused than anything, and noticed the stack of newspapers by the front door – five or six of them, including what looked like the Freetown and Monrovia dailies. The tablecloths came from across the ocean too, and the plate was fine copper with the mark of a local mill. They liked things slow here, but they weren’t the childlike villagers Rebecca had once imagined them to be.
No, not in the least.
Her hunger satisfied, she realized that it was noon, and even in May it was already getting hot. She wondered if she could make it where she was going, and when she asked directions of a delivery-man on a motorbike, he evidently wondered the same thing. “You’ll never get there walking, ma’am,” he said, patting the seat. “Hop on, I’ll take you.”
She realized, with a shock that was visceral even after this long, that he was inviting her to sit behind him and hold onto his waist. Even with everything new in the South, and even with her the age she was, such a casual invitation would be beyond a Georgian’s imagining. She almost turned and started walking – but she
wasn’t in Georgia, and when in Geechee country…
She wondered, as the driver kicked off, how it would feel. After a nervous minute, it turned out not to feel like anything at all. What she felt instead was the wind in her face and the exhilaration of speed, and what she saw was the tidy houses and farms and tabby mills.
They looked African – old slave quarters, many of them, built out and improved for the yeomen who’d been living in them these seventy years.
“Looks like pure Africa to you?” the driver said, and she realized she must have spoken out loud. His accent was Krio, not Gullah. “To us, they look like pure Georgia.” Rebecca was about to demur, but then saw the clothes drying on the lines, and the women sipping sweet tea in front of the houses.
This is how we wanted it, didn’t we? Them in their place and we in ours? Can’t get much more their place than this. But in those days we never realized how much of them was in us, and how much of us had got into them.
And with that, she realized that the motorbike had pulled up to their destination.
She dismounted, offered her thanks, and wandered up a well-traveled walk to a house by the sea. There was a single stone in the yard, and someone had put a bench up facing it: evidently she wasn’t the only one to make this journey. “TUBMAN,” it said, “Born Madison, MD, March 10, 1820. Died Columbia, SC, May 14, 1922.”
A laugh welled up from nowhere and came to Rebecca’s lips.
So March 10 will be her birthday forever. She always said she picked it out of a hat – she wasn’t sure what year she was born, let alone the day. Good as any other, I guess.
She breathed in, and exhaled heavily. “Well, Miss Harriet,” she said. “’Bout time I came to see you. Always should see a person at home. Sorry I never dropped by when you were alive – I was scared, I guess, but turns out there was nothing to be scared of. Never too late to learn, I guess.”
She was silent for a while. “Sorry it took me so long to realize, too. I figured out slavery and lynching were wrong, but there was something else behind it all, and I never saw it until the bombing. Did you hear me, when I got up on the floor of Congress and said you’d been right all along? Cost me the election, but I was about ready to give it all up anyway. Time for someone else to make the future, and there’s no future here unless it’s for us both.
“But you know that, don’t you? You’re Southern soil now, of course you know. We’ll all be Southern soil before too long.”
