Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen Page 6

  “Food thief,” Solomon informed me like he knew my mind. “See now how serious General takes feeding his army?”

  Like all of the questions he asked, Solomon didn’t expect an answer to this one and he hauled me away, blowing on about how Sheridan had come up through the Quartermaster Corps. How, like all great generals from Hannibal to Napoleon, he knew that an army marched on its belly. “No food, no fight. Got that, Queenie?” Not being fond of answers, he carried on, words stomping out of him as fast as his feet, telling me how he believed that Sherman, “that’d be General William Tecumseh Sherman,” got the idea of something called “total war” from Sheridan.

  “Total war, know what that means?” he asked.

  Of course, the man didn’t give a slick shit what I knew and went right on. “Doesn’t mean just fightin’ on the battlefield. Means Sherman is shuttin’ down the Confederate’s pantry. Means cleanin’ out every Rebel farm, plantation, and vegetable patch between here and Atlanta. No food. No fight. It was our General’s idea first, though, and he’s gon win the war with it,” Solomon carried on. “Just as soon as we get this army assembled and start marching down the Shenandoah Valley. Food, baby sister. Food is the key. And you know who holds the keys to that kingdom?” He pointed to himself. A cook, a pot-scrubber, and a stew-stirrer. He believed he was the big dog. Crazy coot.

  At the edge of camp, just before the woods started crowding in, the marching and shooting fields stopped. In their place were a couple dozen ramshackle lean-tos and curtains of dirty quilts hung over lines running between trees to make a bit of private space.

  Closest to camp, laundresses were hard at work. An acrid stink spewed out from where one woman was dumping a bucket of rancid fat and potash for making soap into her pot. At another cauldron, a bony girl with chicken-wing shoulder blades stirred a black pot of dirty clothes set over a low fire. A couple of her brothers poked bits of kindling into the fire.

  The mother of the skinny children, dressed in a long skirt, long apron dotted with scorched spots from where cinders had landed, kerchiefs around her neck and over her hair, put her back into scrubbing some man’s dirty drawers on a washboard set in a galvanized steel tub of gray water. The big sister, tall and gangly, the way I always was, distributed the clothes she wrung out across any shrub or tree branch hanging low enough for her to reach.

  A baby sat in the dirt, naked and ignored, nose boogered up, wailing so big drool poured out of his mouth. The whole family watched us pass with eyes hollow and haunted as any slave’s. Maybe more since they didn’t even have the dream that freedom was going to be one tiny bit better than slave time.

  After we passed the laundresses, we reached another set of crude shelters where Solomon yanked me to a halt. The tattered tents and lean-tos appeared deserted. Or they did until Solomon called out, “Hello, ladies!”

  Then, like gophers popping out of their holes, heads started to poke out from tent flaps and around the edge of blankets hanging off lines. Women, sleepy white women, appeared. They took one look at us and immediately vanished. One gal, however, opened her mouth to reveal an empty hole with but two gray teeth left, and bawled out, “Darkies down the end!”

  At the last couple of shelters, five girls with some color to them scampered out. Bedraggled as they were, they’d done what they could to spruce up a mite. A light-skinned girl had rubbed berry juice on her lips and cheeks and tucked a flower behind her ear. They were all tugging on their bodices to show more of what their mamas had given them. They were slinking this way and that with a hand on a hip cocked to the side and big smiles on their faces that never made it to their tired eyes.

  “Hey, Solomon, whatchoo brang me?” the light-skinned girl called out.

  “Brought you a new recruit,” he answered, yanking me forward. I tried to jerk free, but stopped when the Green River poked at my throat again. “That what you want?” he hissed in my ear, grabbing so tight on my shirt that he cut off my wind and I couldn’t of answered if I’d wanted to.

  “You see them?” he asked, like I had any other choice.

  I clawed at the collar that was strangling me, but Solomon just choked up on it harder.

  “Any man here can have ’em for a piece of hardtack. You don’t have no hardtack, you can have ’em you punch ’em hard enough. You wanna be a hardtack girl? That what you want, Queenie? ’Cause I’d be real happy to make that happen. Pure dee delighted, truth be told.”

  I was near passed out when he turned loose of my collar. I gulped in enough air to spit back at him, “I’ll run away.”

  “Where you run to?”

  “Home.”

  “What you eat? They burnt you out.”

  “I can hunt. I was the best shot on the place.”

  “You can’t hunt no varmints been burnt up. You gon go back, take the food outta your mama’s mouth? Huh? That what you do?”

  The mention of Mama snatched my breath away and took the fight out of me worse than the choking had.

  “Don’t matter. She’s long gone anyhow. Sheridan already sent out units to gather up every contraband they found and carry them God knows where. Total war. No slaves, no food. No food, no fight. Your mama and everyone you ever knew is gone. You got nowhere and no one to go back to.”

  I felt like I’d stepped into a sinkhole. Dropped straight down into a dark place with no bottom, no escape, and no Mama or Clemmie. Though I didn’t let it fall, water stood in my eyes at the thought.

  “Dry your tears, Queenie. Only one thing world cares less about than a black man’s tears, that a black woman’s. You be dead soon anyway. You not half as tough as you think you are.”

  Solomon plucked a sweet potato out of each pocket and held them up. The whores swarmed over him like he was waving around a Liberty dollar. One big ole heifer pulled Solomon’s head down and mashed his face in her titties. Another with a washboard for a chest, seeing she couldn’t compete in the titty department, backed her bony behind up to Solomon’s crotch and pumped away until his willie poked out and tented up the front of his trousers.

  The light-skinned one, though, didn’t need to do anything nasty. She just crooked her finger at Solomon and he followed her to a quilt thrown over a line between two trees. The lack of a real tent didn’t matter. If a girl is pretty enough, nothing mattered, the men will come for you. Come and do what they want. I already knew that.

  Not ten seconds later that quilt came alive with the shapes of elbows, hips, and butts bumping it out here and there. A barrel, half the staves pulled out for firewood, stood next to the quilt curtain. The girl’s head appeared and she rested it atop the barrel, her hands folded under her ear. She was naked from the waist up and Solomon had a hand holding on to her shoulder, pulling back while he pumped into her. He scooted her back and forth on the top of that barrel. And though she let loose with a few big moans as if having splinters ground into her chest was a pleasuring experience, her eyes were way off somewhere far and gone. She took a sight more notice of a ladderback flicker pecking its way up the side of a tulip tree than she did of Solomon. Then, like she had just remembered that she had a man’s hambone all up in her, she let out one of her fake good-time groans.

  Her gaze fell on me and, still getting rocked back and forth across that barrel, she watched me with no more or less interest than she had paid the flicker. When the shoving stopped, she lay quiet, only reaching back to pull her skirt down before she raised up. Then she just stood there, bodice off, ninnies out for the world to see, flower behind her ear drooping now down her neck, and she stared at me like I was the one had just let herself get plowed way a bull plows a heifer. Then, like she knew me, knew who I was, she winked. At me.

  That wink, as though she’d read my future and saw me with my head atop a barrel, gave me a feeling so near to drowning that I couldn’t draw a breath until I ran away from her, away from the hardtack girls, away from the launder women with babies they couldn’t feed blubbering at their feet.

  Tough? Solomon did
n’t know the first little thing about tough. He didn’t know Africa tough. But I’d show the fool.

  Chapter 8

  As I had nowhere else to go, I went on back to what passed for Solomon’s kitchen. With the boss gone, Jonathan and Eli and them were cutting up, shoving each other around, showing their big teeth in big laughs, having a high old time. They paid me no more mind than if I’d been a June bug skittering underfoot. They treated me like I was a field hand and they were house servants too high-nosed to even cut a glance my way. Which was fine by me. The less truck I had with them, the better.

  I didn’t want them or any of the other shiftless drifters knowing a thing about me. Least of all that I was a girl. Someone they could take and rake across the top of a barrel. I plopped down on the bench and, cursing under my breath, set to peeling Solomon’s damn potatoes.

  It was past dark by the time Solomon came back from his visit with the whores. I had a pile of skinned taters on the bench next to me and a pair of hands that appeared as if I’d stuck them directly into a thrashing machine. I don’t know how it was that I could gut and skin a deer with a penknife, whittle a cob into a passable pipe, and chop an acre of tobacco without a scratch, but getting the peel off a tater flat bumfuzzled me.

  Solomon stood above me and stared hard at the fat peels piled at my feet. When he shook his head in disgust he fanned the smell of lilac water and fornication my way. “Left more meat on the peel than you took off.” Then he ordered, “Scrape them peels until you got enough for pies.”

  “It’s too dark to see.”

  “There’s your first cooking lesson then: get it done while sun’s up.”

  I scraped by firelight until the embers burned down. Then I scraped by nothing until the moon rose. When I finished, I laid my head down on the bench, my hand under my head, cupping the spot the soldier had stroked. It seemed like less than a minute passed before the infernal bugles were squawking.

  Chapter 9

  For the next few weeks, camp life went on around me like it was happening in a dream. Every time a bugle blew, men would line up in some new spot. They lined up to march. To practice shooting. To hold tin plates out for a ladle of something from a steaming pot. Even lined up for a turn in the privies if they didn’t quick step off to the woods. There was a rhythm to camp life that soothed me. It put me in mind of all the training that Iyaiya had told me she’d done with her sister warriors. How it had had a purpose: to take many and make them into one.

  I wished I was marching along smartly in a blue suit and practicing killing Rebs. Doing something important. But day after day, all I did was fetch water, gather firewood, scrub pots, and peel an everlasting pile of taters. And not one bit of it was ever to Solomon’s liking. Man just loved to find some speck I missed cleaning off a dirty pot and yell, “You want them Rebels to win this war?”

  Then he’d make out like I’d answered, “Oh, yessir, my dearest dream is to be a slave again and die chopping tobacco for a man who made free with my little sister and sold off my grandmother and one little brother and two other baby sisters.”

  Then, like I’d actually said all that, he’d snap back, “Is that why you’re trying to give the General the flux? Get you some wood ash, sand, and scrub this pot out right. Better you wear out your arm scrubbing than the General wear out his bowels purging. And pull a comb through that nappy mess top your head. You are an embarrassment to this unit.”

  “Thought I wasn’t supposed to let on I’m female.”

  “Not asking you to be female. Figure that’s way above your bend. Just try for human.”

  “What? You think you perfect as a painting hanging in the parlor?”

  “Always got an answer, don’t you? Even though you don’t even know what the question really is, you always got an answer.”

  “Me? You’re the one with all the answers.”

  Solomon snorted. “You know what your problem is?”

  “Doubt I need to. Pretty sure you’re fixing to tell me.”

  “Damn right, I am. Your problem is you’re used to not mattering.”

  It wouldn’t of taken a schoolteacher to read the sour look I shot him.

  “Oh, I ain’t saying you don’t matter. You matter plenty. To yourself. Not talking about that. I’m talking about mattering to the world. You think you the wrong color to matter. Think you don’t…” He never finished. Just shook his head like I wasn’t worth his time and concluded, “Just think you don’t.”

  One morning in early September, Solomon rousted me out before the bugler even got warmed up. He was lit up like a man been hitting the applejack barrel and he had no time for my complaints. “Sherman did it,” he announced, beaming from ear to ear.

  “Did what?” I croaked, my mouth moving though my brain was still asleep. A shiver went through me. I rubbed my hands along my upper arms to chase away the chill that had settled in during the night.

  “Took Atlanta. General’s gon want to celebrate tonight. I’ma see if the commissary has any them desecrated vegetables. Make up a burgoo for the man invented total war.”

  After setting me to husking and hacking kernels off a hundred ear of corn, Solomon left, and I was too busy to worry overmuch about what desecrated vegetables were. Army had its own name for most things. I fetched up buckets of water and set them to boiling in the big cook pot. I skinned, dressed out, and cut up the squirrels Solomon’s boys brought in and tossed them in with the kernels.

  Solomon returned with a small sack that contained a rectangular lump size of a brick and about that heavy that looked like a big chunk of sweet feed flecked with green and orange. He pitched the lump into the pot along with heavy dousings from his precious box of spices: salt, pepper—both black and cayenne—curry powder, and fistfuls of the crumbled-up leaves he gathered on his own. He stirred it all with his long-handled ladle, dipped up a bit, tasted, shut one eye, pondered, took another taste, shut the other eye, and announced, “Needs onion.”

  “Commissary’s out.”

  “Mother Nature’s commissary’s never out.” He held up a tow sack. “Go on, gather me up some wild.”

  I jumped to my feet, eager to be set loose, to get out in the woods on my own. Letting Solomon see my shiny excitement was a mistake.

  “Second thought,” he said, snatching the sack away. “I’ll go myself. No telling what you’ll bring back. Here, mind the burgoo.” He shoved the ladle into my hand and left.

  We’d been getting on tolerably well and it wrathed me up to have Solomon do me that way, holding out a couple hours of freedom then snatching them back. He knew how much I hated being trapped doing woman’s work. He didn’t know that it always made me think about the woman’s work Clemmie was forced to do. By Old Miss during the day. By Old Mister at night.

  After an hour of boiling, the green and orange brick loosened up into strips of what might once have been carrots, green beans, parsnips, peas, and celery. I even caught sight of a few shriveled-up purple knots that might once have had a passing acquaintance with beets. The burgoo rolled beneath the ladle as it started boiling. The dried carrots uncurled. Steam rose from the pot. Sweat beaded up and ran down my face. The steady boil turned to furious bubbling and, of a sudden, those desecrated vegetables plumped out and sucked up so much water that the stew started to go dry. Solomon would hide me if I ruined the General’s and his officers’ celebration supper, so I stirred hard to keep the bottom from burning, but that only made it worse. Soon I was scraping at the bottom and every scrape brought up charred flakes of scorched food.

  I tried to lift the pot and move it off the flame, but I could barely heft the massive cast-iron thing when it was empty. Full as it was, all I managed to do was burn the bejesus out of my hand. With the scorching smell getting stronger, I had no choice but to dump in another bucket of water to cool it all down. I was stirring the extra water in when Solomon finally returned. He sniffed two times, grabbed the ladle out of my hand, stirred, saw the soupy mess with big, black scorched flakes
floating around in it, and proceeded to curse me and my ancestors back to Adam and Eve.

  “Damn you, girl! You trying to ruin my food or is it possible a body can cook as bad as you without trying?”

  “What the hell’s I supposed to do? It was burning.”

  “You blind? You supposed to do like you seen me doing a dozen times a day.” With the toe of his shoe, he pushed a log burning beneath the pot off to the side. “You couldn’t figure to do something that simple? You really that stupid?”

  Stupid.

  With that one word, quick as cocking the hammer back on a flintlock, my fist was balled up, pulled back, and ready to fly before I got hold of myself, and froze.

  “What? You gon chug me one? That it, Queenie? That your plan?”

  My arm quivered from the effort of not burying my fist in his face. But that was what he wanted. What he’d been goading me to do since he first laid eyes on me, the helper he didn’t want. The second I touched him, Solomon’d cut me loose. Tell everyone I was female and let them tear me apart like a pack of wolves. I was tough. Too tough to let him bait me that way. Much as it pained me, I lowered my fist.

  Instant I did, though, a nasty smile cracked across Solomon’s face. He was gloating. Gloating just the way Old Mister used to gloat. Pleased with himself. Pleased that he always got whatever he wanted. Pleased that he got Clemmie.

  I slugged Solomon.

  Chapter 10

  My fist had barely finished connecting with Solomon’s jaw before I was packed up inside the barrel FOOD THIEF had recently vacated. The stench that rose from that container was so rank I feared that FOOD THIEF had died and decayed while confined there. The barrel weighed in the neighborhood of fifty pounds. I could stand up, but the barrel dug hard into the tops of my shoulders when I did. The worst pain, though, was the humiliation.