The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks
“You hired me to kill a man.”
“The story everyone will believe is that a mean nigger jumped into the crowd and shot a white man dead before getting killed by a mob.”
“The people in that crowd know that ain’t true.”
“Maybe. But what are you going to tell them? I was up in an attic with a rifle pointed at the square because the magistrate of Franklin told me to kill one of them politicians, but I botched the job? And the magistrate will say that he did not tell that nigger, who happens to be crazy and a trained assassin, to kill anyone. And they’ll leave my office and you’ll be dead in five minutes.”
Tole thought that maybe this had been the whole point of the meeting, for Dixon to let him know how little he mattered to anyone, and how much he depended on Dixon’s favor. He mattered so little there, in Franklin, that it wasn’t worth killing him or even roughing him up to keep his silence. He was nothing, hardly a human, with no standing and no thoughts or knowledge.
Tole’s heart beat fast and his face went hot. He realized that he had been expecting to be punished for what he did, or at least to feel some heat. Without that, the guilt he had felt since the day of Theopolis’s death was now compounded by shame. He deserved pain, consequences.
“So,” Dixon continued, “just for convenience’s sake, if they ask you, you were anywhere but up there in that attic, and you don’t know anything about me or the man in the hat or any of it. We’ll just keep this simple and clean.”
“Of course.” Tole’s instinct for survival was an abomination.
He waited expectantly for the threat, and it came in the form of a new proposition: “There’s one more thing, Mr. Tole. I’m going to need you to finish the job I hired you to do.”
“Sir?”
“You’re going to go put a bullet in that man’s head. It’s real simple.”
“Can’t do that.”
“You’re going to.”
Tole was quiet. He thought of his sleepless, dreamless nights, when the drink wasn’t enough to put him down, and he’d lie awake trying to remember all the men he had killed. He was never able to finish the list. He’d count his kills as a means of drifting away. He believed it was two dozen or so, but he could never be sure. He knew it was enough that he never wanted to do it again. Enough, he would tell himself, his voice slurring as he rolled around his small bed, half-conscious. Enough killing. Never again! But killing was like drinking. Every time, he promised himself it was his last. Just this last one and I’ll be finished, he’d say.
Or what? Tole stared out, unblinking, unmoving. What could Dixon, realistically, threaten him with? Death? It had been a long time since the mention of dying had caused his heart to beat any faster. Prison? He wasn’t scared of it. In his mind, he stood and said, Mr. Dixon, you go ahead and kill me if that’s what you want to do. I don’t give a damn.
But there was another truth, too, which Tole had been trying to drink away these last few nights: that he just might have a reason to stay around, living and moving, and this was something he hadn’t had for a long time. He hadn’t been expecting a reason to live. But he couldn’t get the image out of his mind of the gray-eyed midwife holding her dead son in her arms.
Too often Tole acted without thought of the immediate consequences; too often he acted just to act, to move forward in the world, because any action is better than standing still like a dummy, like a brainless scarecrow. He followed his first instinct. For George Tole, at that moment, the future unspooled like a ragged thread, all options equally dark, equally bitter. The right play would be to get the hell out, head west, and not turn back, his instinct said.
Except.
Except, perhaps, if he stayed here in this miserable town with its backbiting neighbors and terrible plots: if he stayed, just for a while longer, perhaps he could make a difference to her.
He nodded. “All right, sir.”
“What do you mean, all right?”
“I’ll do what you asked. I’ll finish the job. Kill your man.”
Dixon seemed satisfied, for the moment. He leaned back in his chair, which creaked. He sipped the bourbon and licked his lips. Never took his eyes off Tole, though. He leaned farther back in the chair, contemplating his guest behind slitted eyes, before bringing the chair crashing forward again and dismissing Tole with a wave of his hand.
Chapter 13
Mariah
July 10, 1867
Mariah told Miss Carrie she would be heading back into Franklin to see about some business. What business? If there’s a baby to be born, the families will come to you. Stay here, where it’s safe, Carrie might have once asked, but now she swallowed her tongue.
Mariah walked into town and through it, taking the side streets around the courthouse square, avoiding the place where the stage, now gone, had stood. She traveled beyond that, into the Blood Bucket, just as she had left it. The neighborhood shifted as she moved east, the world slowly dilapidated around her, from the pristine cherry brick houses to boarded-up shacks that housed two or three black families at a time. She stood on the edge of her old neighborhood, just a few blocks from where Theopolis had lived, and a couple more blocks from her own house, but nothing about it felt like home. Not anymore. From the windows wafted the scents of fatback and ashcakes. They all still ate slave food.
Around her, men and women moved about in anxious groups. She could hear bits of their talk as they went by.
I heard they was coming for Mr. House. Tonight.
They getting their rifles together down at Colby and Vaughan’s stable.
Ben Bostick still hiding, you hear? Won’t even see Doc Cliffe ’bout his head.
They ain’t done with it...They ain’t done with it yet.
Mariah arrived at the Thirsty Bird and found April and May in their cane-back chairs against the wall, whispering to each other. Mariah was sure they were gossiping about the military men’s depositions from the other day.
Now April and May grinned and called out insults to Mariah, which was their greatest expression of affection. May was short, broad-shouldered, and sleepy-eyed, and April was her opposite: long-legged and sloe-eyed. She had a small head, and her hair flowed back into a loose knot. How had her face managed to emerge unblemished, unscarred, from all of their history? None of the rest of them had made it through without marks; even their basic features, eyes and noses and ears, had got twisted up and mashed down by time. But not April’s.
“Guess they don’t got none of Hooper’s cure out there at the big house, Miss Mariah?”
“Better cures than that,” Mariah said. She was happy to see April and sat down close to her on a stool.
May, who hardly talked, brought Mariah a short drink of the thick Hooper liquor. She winked when she did it, and took her seat on the other side of April again.
Mariah took a long sip at the sticky jar. Across the room, at the end of a long table, April and May had set liquor and loaves of bread. This was their idea of a saloon, and why not? Mariah thought. She leaned over and put a little coin in May’s hand. It occurred to her to stand up and announce that, in fact, she had earned this money herself and not taken it from the white lady who was her former owner. She knew no one would care, and so she stayed quiet. There was a lot of shouting, anyway, and she wasn’t sure she’d be heard over the din.
The last couple of days, April told Mariah, their tavern had been half-full with black saloon-goers, riled up about the shootings, talking too loudly, too drunkenly, about Theopolis being shot. Each Negro had their own theory.
But so much of the talk was political: these freedmen could vote. The very idea was enough to get them drunk. Many were vocal about supporting Brownlow. A few of them were Conservatives, and they would try to shout the others down, saying that the Republicans needed to tone down their support for the Reconstruction government so that they could live alongside the whites, and get and keep their jobs working for them.
It was easy for Mariah to ignore such talk—sh
She looked out at the rest in the room: the fiddler was plunking at his fiddle like it was a guitar and mooning at April; a couple danced with one arm around the other and a jar in the other hand; a treecutter and a turpentiner sat on chairs in the corner closest to the window; and a scattering of others, mostly country people she’d seen before but whose names did not immediately penetrate the growing fog of Hooper’s liquor. These men talked to each other animatedly, their hands sweeping through the air with the force of their words. The saloon, usually light with laughter and friendly conversation, felt heavy with their anger and their fear. Brownlow, Mariah heard them say, again and again. Bliss. Dixon. Brownlow. Theopolis. Dixon. Brownlow. Brownlow, Brownlow, Brownlow. She wished they would be quiet.
April put her hand on Mariah’s shoulder. “They gone to come and set a hearing for the killings. Maybe you knew that.”
Mariah leaned forward again. “Who they?”
“Nashville people. They coming soon. August 6. Just a few weeks away now. Freedmen’s office too. And the U.S. Army itself is coming back.”
“The whole Army?”
“Don’t know. Talk is a hundred or so. There to keep the peace for the Nashville folk.”
“White folk from Nashville? I got my fill of them for right now.”
“Well, who you think, Mariah? Who you think they send? Least they send someone.”
“Someone ain’t always better than no one.” Mariah thought for a moment, wrinkled her eyes with her squinting. “What they looking for?”
“Want to know who killed your boy and the grocer, and they wanna talk to all them others who got hurt. They say more’n thirty people got a bullet in ’em that day, black and white folks.”
“They don’t care about none of that.” That day Mariah had lost any faith she might have had in the idea that there was even one person in Nashville who cared how her boy had died, or that he had never owned a pistol in his life, and had very clearly been murdered without a thing to defend himself with except for a speech he had scrawled on some crumpled butcher paper. Not a gun or a knife or a stick or a rock.
Theopolis had stood beside her when they filled in the grave of his father, her one and only husband. He put his little arm around her waist, reaching about halfway. She had tried to leave him behind, but he insisted and set about preparing himself. He washed his face and cleaned his shoes, and when she leaned over him the top of his head smelled like cooking fires and sunlight. They were two alone, the last of their kind, and she had loved him. Right then, she had wanted him beside her at all times, forever, underfoot or no.
Now she was the very last of the Reddicks, their little family. I am the only one left to make things right. I am the last one before we all disappear from the face of the earth.
“Hey April.”
“Yes darling.”
“What do you know about that man, Tole?”
“Not much, though he come in pretty often.”
“You find out anything about him, you be kind and let me know.”
“Mariah Reddick is sweet on a man!” April cackled, the romantic notion getting the best of her.
But when Mariah looked over at May, she was squinting at her in that way that she had, which meant, I know something going on, Sister Mariah, and it gone get you in trouble.
Mariah sat for a time with these people she had known most of her life, letting their warmth and sincerity wash over her and trying to shut out their anger.
“I so sorry ’bout your boy passing. He was real special. Those damned Conservatives gonna pay for what they did to him, you hear?”
“Decent man, your boy was. More decent bones in his body than every one of those white devils put together.”
“Fine cobbler. Nobody made shoes as fine as he did. Even them that got their hands on him, they was wearing his shoes. They knew his was fine.”
They surrounded her, the former property of Frank Colby and Jim Vaughan and Jasper Morton, field hands and grooms and stable boys, laundresses and seamstresses and cooks and ragpickers, and they talked and they laughed and they remembered.
“Special man,” Pleasant repeated. She was the former maid of Logan Neely, who’d owned her mother, and owned her and her brothers, when they were born.
“You younger than he was,” Mariah told her. “What you know about how special he was? You just repeating what the others sayin’.”
“I old enough to know a decent man.”
“I remember the morning you was born. I was the one pulled you outta your mama. You were stubborn as a damn mule...You woulda thought we was pulling you away from Eden, the way you didn’t wanna come out. Musta been something about her belly that made you wanna stay. Maybe it was Eden. And when you came out, you were the fattest baby I ever seen.”
“I wasn’t no fat baby.”
“Oh you was. You was so fat. Meaty legs and full cheeks like corncakes. And a big ol’ belly. And you was precious.”
“All babies precious.”
A round of nods and agreement.
Then Mariah said, “Spent damn near my whole life here. And I reckon I brought most of these folks into this world in some way or another, same way I did you. And now somebody take my own child out the world, and I wonder what I been doing all this time, filling up the world with people.”
Mariah paused, thinking, I made up my own lullabies and I sang ’em in the softest voice I could muster until he’d stop kickin’. And I pushed him out in a tub of blood and bathwater, and he came into this world with a full head of hair, and he looked just like me. I never thought I was much to look at, but damned if he wasn’t the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. And I didn’t feel like no nigger when I held him.
What they took, what they always took from Negroes, was knowledge. They were scared what we would do with it, Mariah thought. And we was too tired and beaten and…hell, we was scared too. Scared to get knowledge, to know why things are as they are. If there was anything that made her feel like a nigger, it was that state of unknowing. It was one of the ways the Negro had been walked upon for so many years. Don’t tell the Negro nothing and after a while the Negro quits expecting there to be explanations: for why they getting lashes, or why they getting sold to Mississippi, or why they got to live here while the white people live there. The Negro had learned to praise Jesus instead. The Negro might even forget to look for someone to explain why her son been killed. No more, Mariah thought. No more, or I might as well put the shackles back on myself.
Mariah turned to April and May. “It just now come to be that I should be here asking for your help, you two and Minnie and Patsy and Maggie and Pleasant and all of ’em. You tell ’em all I came by to see you, and if they hear anything about what happened there in the square, seen anything, heard some white old fool whisperin’ from down the bar. Anything. You tell ’em come find me. You hear? Tell ’em to tell the white folk what they want, but I want to know the truth.”
They heard what she meant, how her words sounded in a world where the fate of a black man was of as much concern to the white man as that of his favorite horse.
This time she would not go forward quietly, Mariah thought. And thus it began: the first conversation, the first stirring. Mariah would fight to know. And with knowing, change the world.
* * *
Over Carnton lay a low, starless sky. The trees were like dark clouds against the sky before they disappeared entirely into the coming night. Mariah’s walk back to Carnton had been quiet.
Now she sat at the window, letting the reflection from the window glass magnify the oil lamp as she hemmed and rehemmed table linens, an unending task within a household that seemed threadbare at every turn. Mending was a break in the list of Carnton’s daily chores. Today had been wash day, which had meant that clothes had been boiled in the old work yard, behind the wing of the house. Washing and ironing were constant, as was setting the menu and overseeing the preparations for supper. She had taken on th
Then again, who else was there? Most of the former slaves had either run off during the Union’s military occupation of Franklin, or had simply walked off since the end of the war. The McGavocks were trying to adjust by hiring freedmen, but most didn’t want to be servants anymore.
But Mariah could take comfort in such tasks: fixing the cracked windowpanes and finding a local man to replace rotting floorboards, cleaning last winter’s leaves from the corners of the stairs, and on and on the list went. She’d even found bats hanging upstairs in the room of one of Carrie’s three dead children. Carrie had not been spared that pain, Mariah grudgingly admitted.
There was still a cook and a staff of two to clean the place, but nothing seemed right. Carrie, focused on the cemetery, cared nothing for the house. Her husband, John, away now in Memphis, was buying fruit trees, thinking that a great orchard would save them. Who’d tend the trees and pick the fruit? Mariah wanted to ask him, but of course this wasn’t her concern, and he wasn’t around to hear her anyway.
Mariah was overwhelmed in disbelief at what she saw when she returned to Carnton. It had felt as if she’d inherited the place years ago, before the war, while Carrie was consumed with grief at the loss of three of her five children. Somehow it had seemed understandable then, but Carrie’s focus and obsession with the soldiers killed on the battlefield—killed on Carnton’s front fields, many of them—now seemed too much to Mariah.
Did Carrie believe that Mariah would return forever and fill the vacuum that Carrie had left while she patrolled the cemetery and her cult of the dead? Mariah felt elated to know the answer to that question—that she was just regrouping, gathering her strength. When she was ready, she would go.