Colleton County, SC
November 1864 to March 1866
Art: Winslow Homer, Dressing for the Carnival
For twenty days, through the death throes of a war, Raymie Johns walked home.
He’d left his blue coat up by Rocky Mount. He reckoned he wouldn’t have any more need of it now that the battles were over, and besides, he was passing through Rebel country and they might not look kindly on it. He had a shirt and trousers he’d taken from an abandoned farm that would do him just as well. He kept his hat, though, and he kept his Springfield; the same people who wouldn’t look kindly on a federal uniform might also look unkindly on him without it.
He had to use the Springfield a couple times. The battles were over, but not all the fighting was; the raids were still happening, the country swarmed with Reb deserters, and the farmers – the ones who the raiders hadn’t burned out – were jumpy. He found a traveling companion part of the way – a sergeant in the Colored Troops who, like him, hadn’t waited to be discharged – but they parted company west of Wilmington, and from there on to the state line, it was moving by night, hiding in the underbrush by day, and hoping to God some stray dog wouldn’t give him up.
He crossed into South Carolina just outside Tabor City. He could walk tall from there and the going got faster, but the scenes that met his eye were as bad or worse. He’d heard stories of the Rising even before he made it to Union lines and put on a uniform and he’d heard more in the army, and they all agreed on one thing: it was damn bad. There weren’t just burned farms in the lowcountry; there were burned fields, and some of them weren’t replanted even now. He walked through gutted towns, slept in barns that still smelled of death, shared the road with women and even children who had hard soldiers’ faces, heard stories of crop raids and bushwhacking from preachers in church and men in patched-up saloons.
But there was a different kind of story when he got to Whitehall.
Over the campfire one night, a buckra sergeant from Maine had told him the story of Ulysses. The part that always got to him was how the dog and the nurse recognized Ulysses even though he’d been gone twenty years – he suspected, though the New England man never told him, that Eurycleia had been a slave, but that scene got to him anyway. And now he was the one who’d been away from home near on twenty years – he’d been sold away when he was eight – but damned if the guard at the gate wasn’t Samuel who’d lived next hut over when they were children, and damned if Sam didn’t drop his gun right there and shout “it’s Raymie back!”
The others at the gatehouse – that was new, as was the earthen rampart that surrounded what had been Whitehall Plantation and was now the Whitehall Circle – knew Raymie too. They were of an age, they’d played and worked together once, and between then and now, they’d all grown up slaves and turned into soldiers. One of them threw his arms around Raymie and all of them slapped him on the back, and more than one said “I’ll be goddamned.” Sam called to one of the boys playing just inside and said, “Go get Mariam – get her fast, it’s a homecoming!”
Mariam. Raymie didn’t recognize that name. But he did recognize the woman who came to the gate a few minutes later, running faster than the child who’d found her could keep up. Raymie had heard other people call her Mary before he got sold off. But he knew her face like she knew his, and the name she was called was the last thing that mattered.
“Mama?” he said, and then there he was, a grown man bawling his eyes out, feeling her arms go around him, feeling every minute of those eighteen missing years, and for that moment, going on to eternity, it was all he’d ever dreamed.
#
He’d had a notion that, since the Rising, everyone lived in the big house. They didn’t. He could see that as soon as he stepped in the gate – as vast as the big house had seemed when he was a child, it didn’t have near enough room for everyone. They called it the people’s house now and had school and church and the Circle’s offices there, but everyone still slept in the quarters and his mother’s hut was the same one it had always been.
He sat up late that night talking with her and his sisters Jasmine and Lily – one of the things he learned was that he had sisters. He slept a troubled sleep on a mat borrowed from one of the neighbors, trying to understand why the place he’d been born didn’t yet feel like home. In the morning when they went out to work, he didn’t follow, and everyone left him alone; he slept again, a bit better this time, and spent the afternoon with his memories until it was time for the homecoming shout.
They’d had shouts in Mississippi too, deep in the woods – the buckra had tried to stop them but never could. This one was the same but different. Everyone was in a circle stomping and clapping their hands and some of the prayers were what he remembered; there were prayers of thanksgiving and reunion everywhere, and he knew some of the praise-songs they sang here as well as those he’d learned down south. But with everyone on the lawn of the big house, he couldn’t help looking around like a hunted animal, and some of the people were praying in a language he didn’t recognize. He’d heard those stories too – that the Gullah people on the islands had a teacher they followed from somewhere called Mali, and that they’d brought those teachings with him during the Rising. It didn’t seem like everyone had listened, but a good quarter of the people had, and from all Raymie could tell, his mother was one of them.
It didn’t feel right, that voice speaking a language he didn’t understand, that body swaying and clapping and praising a different God from the one he’d learned of at her knee. It didn’t feel right when the feast was laid and her smile went away for just a second when he cut a portion of ham. Sam must have noticed, because he took Raymie out to dance with the girls, but the music wasn’t what he’d got used to in Mississippi and hard as he tried, that didn’t feel right either.
The next morning they brought him to the big house to talk about a job. The Circle’s clerks had taken over the master bedroom –
that was right, that was
damn right – and one of them, a young woman in a homemade gray dress, looked up from a ledger book and motioned him to a chair.
“Raymie?” she said. “How do you spell that?”
“Don’t know,” he answered. He’d tried to learn his letters a couple times in the army but it had never taken very well, and he couldn’t remember how they’d spelled his name in the regimental paybook. “Spell it how you want. Raymie Johns.”
The clerk – Sarah, she said – found a blank page in her ledger and wrote it down. She had a fine hand. Raymie had heard that reading and writing came easier to younger people, and Sarah was practically a child; that must be why she could write so well even though she couldn’t have been learning long. She looked up and started to smile, but she must have seen something in his face; she straightened and paused, still friendly but all business.
“What did you do in Mississippi?”
“Worked the fields when I was a child. Then they taught me to cut stone.” He fell silent for a moment, wondering if his time in the army counted as an answer to that question. “I soldiered too,” he said, deciding that it was.
“We all soldier here,” Sarah said – was she including herself in that? Maybe. Young as her face was, there was a veteran’s look in it like Raymie had seen too many times on the road home. “You’ll find
that out tomorrow, I expect. Do you want to cut stone here?”
It was a new thing, someone asking Raymie what he wanted. “It’s what I know how to do. You got something else for me?”
“There’s field work. We all do some of that – I’m in the Wednesday and Saturday crew, and every day at harvest time. You can do it all the time if you want. Or you can prentice if there’s a trade you want to learn and someone to teach you.”
“Reckon I’m too old for that, I think. I’ll stay with the stone if you don’t mind.”
Sarah made an entry in the ledger and underlined it. “I’ll tell Roger – he’s the boss stonemason since we came home from the Rising – and he’ll call on you if he needs you. We’ll have to find a field gang for you till then, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid. I know how to do that too.”
Now she did smile. “Go to the west rice field then and ask for Tammy. She’ll find something for you to do.”
Raymie figured that was an invitation to take his leave, so he did. The west field wasn’t far and it was obvious who the boss lady was. “You’ve grown so since you got sold south,” she said, and then, “I remember your mama cried for days.” Did she think that would be a comfort to him? “Anyway, we’re workin’ this part of the field today – you remember what to do?”
He did and he didn’t. He’d worked this field and the others at Whitehall from three years old to eight, but that was a long time ago, and in Mississippi he’d picked cotton rather than growing rice. He did enough things wrong in the first hour that Tammy set him to weeding like he was a child again; she didn’t say anything and neither did anyone else, but he knew they knew and his eyes burned.
He’d thought that field work might be different as a free man, and it was – they’d enrolled him in the Circle right after the shout and told him he was part owner of Whitehall now, and it did feel different working in a place he owned. And there were no whips, and everyone, man and woman, bantered and spoke their minds freely as they worked. But he was working in a gang with a boss shouting across the field to all and sundry, and somehow, the fact that the boss was Tammy rather than some buckra didn’t make as much difference as it should. He’d had twenty-odd years to get tired of people shouting at him that way.
Supper was at a long table in the courtyard where his hut was, and Sam slapped his back again and said “looks like you’ll have to prentice after all.” The words were kindly meant, but Raymie couldn’t share the laughter, and when his mother laughed too, just for a second, it felt like treason.
Next morning at four, there was another voice shouting his name and the shape of a man in the doorway. “Get on up!” he shouted, not seeming to care if he woke Raymie’s whole family, though by some miracle, none of them did wake. “You got a gun already, so let’s get you a pack and you can come on the patrol.”
Sarah had given warning, but that didn’t make it any better to be rousted out of bed when it was still night and still cold. “You the captain?” Raymie said. “You gonna court-martial me if I don’t get up? Do I call you sir like I called the buckra officers?”
The man – he was at least six foot three, Raymie realized, and looked like he could pull a plow without a horse – put his hands on the door frame and stayed where he was. “Name’s Tom and you can call me what you please,” he said, “but you’re in my patrol and you’re comin’ along.”
A buckra sergeant – the same one who knew about the Odyssey – had told Raymie about the better part of valor. “Just wait a bit,” he said, and he dressed hastily and slung his Springfield over his shoulder.
There were eighteen others waiting outside with Tom with machetes on their belts and a motley array of weapons on their shoulders – a couple others had Springfields, some had Enfields or Mississippi rifles, and a few still had muskets they’d probably taken from the big house or some other plantation gunroom they’d captured in the Rising. They wore armbands instead of uniforms, and one of them had a spare that he handed to Raymie in silence. But it was clear, both at the storeroom where the packs were kept and when they passed the gatehouse on patrol, that they were a platoon and that Tom gave the orders.
“Ammed here, he’s your sergeant,” Tom said, “and Billy’s your corporal. We patrol on Mondays and we drill with the whole Circle four times a month. We were all together in the Rising – this plantation and the four others out that way were a brigade – but you had some hard fighting in Mississippi and Virginia, so you should fit in fine.”
Again he did and again he didn’t. He fell into the rhythm of the march easily; this was something he really did know how to do. When a raider showed up – lone scouts still did sometimes come this far, looking for weak points – he was the first to see, and with a single well-aimed shot, he made sure the Reb’s comrades would never hear his report. After that, the others treated him pretty much as one of themselves, and their praise when the patrol camped at noon was like wine. But when they got to telling stories of the Rising, Raymie realized they were still part of a brotherhood that he was not, and that their war had been a harder one. Even at the worst times, his war had rules; the only rule in theirs was woe to the conquered.
That war had made them into a nation, man, woman and child. He’d been somewhere else when that nation was formed, and he wondered if he could ever become a citizen.
#
“You’ll start liking it after a while,” his mother said. They were sitting outside after sunset; her arm was around his shoulder as it had been every moment that was possible since he got home, and her touch was still the balm it had been that first day. Up to that moment neither of them had said anything; all they’d done for an hour was sit and watch the sky get darker and the stars come out.
“I don’t hate it now, Mama.”
“Come on, Raymie, I ain’t blind. We don’t do things like you do. But we don’t do things like
we used to do either. The war changed us all, and it just took a while to realize this way was for the better.” She took his face in both hands and looked deep into his eyes. “God’s change comes when people change,” she said – he’d been home long enough now to recognize that as a verse from that strange Bible of hers.
“I’ll try, Mama.”
He tried. He did try. Sometimes he even succeeded for a while. He got the hang of rice cultivation again with amazing speed, calling back half-remembered childhood skills until he earned even Tammy’s praise. He went to the shouts and dances, and he started walking out with Sam’s sister Rose. He took his turn leading the drills – as a veteran of the regular army, he had things to teach – and he tried a couple of the evening classes before deciding that they didn’t much interest him.
But it still wasn’t home, and it was still too much like the Mississippi fields and the army all at once, especially since there wasn’t much stonework going these days so he stayed in the rice fields most of the time. There were still too damn many people telling him what to do. And when the whole Circle met to decide who to support for governor and the state legislature, his fascination with the idea that he could vote met up with the realization that once the debate was over, everyone was expected to vote for the winner. Lockstep – that was another word he’d learned from that Maine sergeant, and there was too much of it here.
“Why don’t you talk to some of the other homecomers?” Tom said right after the meeting. “You’re not the only one. Maybe they got some tricks they can show you.” And Raymie did talk to a few – even took a walk to the next Circle over – but they didn’t have any tricks, or at least none that they could put into words. It just got better after a while, that was all, except for the ones who thought it
didn’t get better and were thinking about leaving.
After a few of these conversations, Raymie wondered if time might be the key after all, but not in any way that was helpful. The homecomers who’d got back before him – some of them had found their way to South Carolina during the Rising itself – had come to a society in formation and been part of its forming. He’d come to one with its ways already set.
“Then why don’t you talk to Callie?” Tom said. Callie had been a root-doctor when Raymie was sold south; she was a granny-griot now and everyone listened to her. She wasn’t the oldest woman in the Circle – she was just a bit this side of sixty, or maybe a bit that side – but she was the only one left who’d actually been in Africa at an age where she could remember it, and there were stories about what she’d done in the Rising. She was a conjure woman, some people said; nonsense, said others, but they still spoke of her as if she was.
She lived at the other end of the quarters, and Raymie paid a call on her one evening as she was finishing the day’s basket-weaving. He wasn’t sure what he expected – magic spells, maybe, or mystic incantations – but what he got was a cross-examination that was almost clinical, as if Callie were a lawyer in a Charleston courtroom or a general interrogating a spy.
“You’re afraid we want to make you in our image?” she said. “Then make us in yours.”
“How do I do that?” he asked. “There’s a thousand and more of you, and one of me.” But he was reminded of his own thought of a few days earlier, that it was easier to join a society you had a hand in forming.
“Cut some stone, maybe. You don’t have to wait for the next time Roger calls you. Find a block somewhere. Tell a story for everyone to see.”
Raymie shook his head, but in days to come, he kept thinking about it. In his free moments, he wandered the back end of Whitehall, the part that was too hilly to plant, and seeing if any of the stones there struck him. He talked with his mother and Tom and Rose about what shape he might carve, what story he might tell. A monument to the Rising? A statue of a Union soldier? But the one wasn’t his story and the other wasn’t theirs.
“Just start cutting,” his mother said, and he didn’t have any better ideas. He found a block of veined granite of truly heroic size half-buried in the hillside, and when he wasn’t working, he dug it out some more and started carving the bottom into a plinth. Wasn’t that always how a statue started? Maybe by the time he finished that part, he’d figure out what went on top of it.
Day by day and he still didn’t know, but the work and the drills didn’t bother him quite as much. He wasn’t remaking Whitehall in his image, but maybe it helped just to have something that no one was telling him how to do. When Tom and Sam and Tammy cracked jokes about how the statue of nothing was going, he gave back in kind. His mother didn’t joke, didn’t ask, just said that verse again about God’s change.
He wasn’t sure how long it took – summer at least, maybe the beginnings of fall – before he realized the stone above the plinth was starting to take
her shape. Without quite knowing it, he’d carved the rough outline of a woman’s body on the part of the rock closest to the hill, stooped and careworn, half kneeling and half rising. The body didn’t have a face yet, and he imagined it for a moment as his mother might have looked after he was sold – a face, as Tammy had told him, streaked with days of tears.
But the story hadn’t ended there, had it? It didn’t end with loss; it ended with what had been found. Raymie carved another shape, the upper body of a boy half-buried in the plinth, reaching out his hand so the woman could pull him up. The boy’s other hand reached out to a third form, a young girl; she to a man, and he to the woman. Four shapes making the full circle; a family, each pulling the other out of captivity and despair.
“All of us together,” Rose said, and maybe that’s what it was – the four shapes rising from the plinth were everyone at Whitehall. All of a sudden Raymie realized what story he was telling – it was the one he’d heard at all the shouts and the meetings, from the pastors and imams, from the field-bosses and soldiers, all of how the Rising had been everyone rising together. Maybe he’d been part of that too when he ran to Union lines and put on the blue coat, even though he’d been far away. Maybe he didn’t
have to like everything here, maybe he didn’t have to accept everything for their story to become part of his.
He felt like it all
was becoming his story. Until they took it away.
It happened when the last of the winter of ’65 was going and the spring of ’66 was putting out shoots, when Raymie was about done with the rough work and was ready to start the fine. By that time everyone knew about the Whitehall Family – Raymie hadn’t named it but Callie had, and the name had stuck – and Raymie often had an audience when he went out to work on it. About a dozen were there that day – the field workers had quit for the day an hour before, and supper was still an hour away – when that clerk Sarah came running and told him he was wanted at the big house.
He wondered what on earth they’d want him for; Sarah didn’t know. And his questions weren’t answered when George Sims, who’d become chair of the council after last month’s Circle elections, greeted him at the door and brought him to an upstairs room. The rest of the council was there along with a couple of men who Raymie didn’t recognize. They were wearing suits, those men, and it had been a long time since Raymie had seen someone wearing a suit.
“Sit down, Raymie,” George said, and motioned him to a chair. “Heard about the work you’ve been doing back there, and the new council thinks maybe it’s time we built us a memorial. You’ve made a good start, but we reached out to Charleston and found these two – fine sculptors, been to school for design. They think it could be improved a bit.”
One of the sculptors reached into a satchel and rolled out a sheet of paper. It was big – big enough for Raymie to see the drawing on it from all the way across the table – and it changed Raymie’s design a lot more than a bit. In the drawing, the plinth was cut deep so the Family could stand all the way out of it. They were shown in a more heroic pose than Raymie had carved, with the man armed, and where Raymie had planned to leave the cutting rough, the sculptors’ design was chiseled fine.
“Can you do it that way, Raymie?” George said. “We can make it your full-time job, so you won’t have to work on anything else till it’s done.”
Raymie got up from the chair. He looked down at the drawing again and didn’t say a word. He was suddenly on the edge of tears – he, a grown man, and he fought them hard so he wouldn’t break down right in front of the council.
“That a yes?” George was smiling – he really thought he was doing Raymie a favor, he couldn’t see what was wrong. A couple of the others on the council did see, and it looked like one of them was starting to say something, but the sculptor who’d unrolled the drawing – George
still hadn’t introduced him – spoke first.
“You see, your design’s no good,” he said. “The proportions are wrong, and the poses aren’t correct for any of the schools of statuary…”
“They’re
correct for my school of statuary,” Raymie said, his voice tight and controlled. “I don’t want your job, George. I’ll finish it on my own damn time. And if I see
you touch it” – the sculptor had soft hands, he probably hired stonecutters to do the work he designed, but right then Raymie didn’t care – “I’ll take this chisel and hammer it into your goddamn skull.” He turned to the door, shaking off one council member’s hand on his shoulder as another got between him and the sculptor, and stormed out the door.
He was never quite clear on what happened after that. He remembered going downstairs and out of the house, with Sarah following and swearing that she didn’t know. He remembered George coming down after him, the council and the sculptors in tow; he remembered loud words in front of a gathering crowd; he remembered his mother and Rose and Tammy screaming something although he couldn’t recall what; he remembered the moment when he swung on George and knocked him down. George was no fool and he’d been in the Rising like everyone else, but he wasn’t looking for the punch and he hit the ground heavily.
Everything stopped then, and there was silence until George got up and filled it. “We had about enough of you, I think,” he said. “I’m calling a meeting now and you’re out of here.”
“Go ahead, call your damn meeting.” Raymie knew the rules – George might be boss, but the only way to kick someone out of the Circle was by majority vote. Maybe George was too mad right now to care, but Raymie didn’t think he’d win.
Or maybe it didn’t matter anyway. Maybe Raymie had had enough too. Maybe he’d just tell the meeting to take their Circle and put it where the sun didn’t shine.
“Fine,” George said. “You asked for it. Let’s call the meeting right now…”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind.” It was Callie, coming out of the crowd, standing between Raymie and George. “No meetings – not tonight, not tomorrow. Come on, Raymie, you and me are gonna talk.”
George could still have called the meeting. Those were the rules. But while he’d been brave enough to fight the Rebs and campaign for the council, he wasn’t brave enough to say no to Callie. She took Raymie’s hand and led him away.
“Well, that was a disgrace,” she said when they were back at her place in the quarters. She’d been silent up to then, and Raymie hadn’t said a word either. “Believe me, if I knew George was gonna bring in some high-yellow sculptor who got sent to some art school in Paris, I’d have said something. And I’m saying something now. I like the story you’re telling. Go finish the Family – I promise that anyone else who touches it will do so over my dead body.”
Raymie shook his head. “It’s finished. I reckoned I’d leave it rough anyway. But it ain’t mine anymore.” Now the tears he’d been fighting came. “Nothing here’s mine – George made
that damn clear. Whatever part of me was born here is dead. I’m going.”
Callie, who’d been facing the window, spun back around and took his face in both her hands. The touch was so like his mother’s that he felt as if he’d been struck by lightning.
“There’s part of all of us that’s dead,” she said slowly. “You can’t go through all this” – she took her hands off his face and spread them to include the quarters – “and a war on top of it without dying some. But the part that doesn’t die keeps growing, like a branch on a stump. You can still grow here.”
He shook his head again. “Think I’ll go out west, qualify on some land. Buckra sergeant said the government’s giving it out free, and I figure that’s the only way I can live without everyone else trying to live my life for me.”
“On the plains? You sweet, sweet child. You’ll go broke dryland farming, if you don’t die first. And Rose sure won’t go out there with you – she’s got too much sense, even if you don’t.”
She pointed him to a chair. “Let me tell you what I heard from Columbia the other day. A lot of people are like your mother was – missing family who got sold south, not knowing if they’re alive or dead. The Freedmen’s Bureau says is helping to find them, but it can’t do enough. So Miss Harriet wants to hire some people, go down south, find them where they are, bring them home. No one’ll be lookin’ over your shoulder down there, and you’ll have your mama and me and Rose to come back to. You want it? Miss Harriet won’t say no to me.”
“Bring people home?” Raymie said, and Callie nodded. “Bring people home so they can end up like me?”
“Bring people home so they can have a chance. So their families can have a chance.”
“I’ll think about it. Tell you tomorrow.” But Raymie already knew what he’d say in the morning.
#
Mama and Rose said goodbye to Raymie at the gate. He had his Springfield and his pack, and a new shirt and a new horse. “I’ll be back soon,” he said. “Be home soon.” But they wrapped their arms around him tighter, and for that moment, going on to eternity, it was all he’d ever dreamed.
