Forty-Two. The Excepted Parishes
Chapter Forty-Two
The Excepted Parishes
The paper came up the bayou on the fourteenth of January in a boat, and it was a fortnight old, and by the time it got into the street somebody had already said the substance of it four different ways.
That it was done. That the President had put out a paper on New Year’s Day and everybody was free.
That everybody was free in some places. That everybody was free except in the places where the army was, which could not be right, because that was backwards and no man would write a thing that was backwards.
They had the paper itself by the middle of the afternoon.
A man off the boat had it and had left it at the store and it came down the street from hand to hand, folded, and it stopped where such things stop, which is nowhere in particular, because there were sixty-one people on that place and not one of them was going to be the one to say out loud that he could not read it.
Nelson stood in that street for about two minutes and then he went and took it.
He had never told anybody on Bergeron’s place that he had letters. Three years and he had not said it once, and he had had good reasons, and every one of them went out of his head between the time somebody said the word paper and the time his hand was on it.
—
He was bad at it.
It had been a dozen years since anybody had sat with him over a page, and what he had had then was one spring and summer in an ordering pit and a spelling book and a boy who was learning it out of a Latin grammar himself.
He knew his letters. He knew perhaps three hundred words on sight and could get at another hundred by sounding them, slowly, out loud, and there were sentences in that column that went past him entirely and that he read the words of without getting the sense.
He read it standing up in the middle of the street with about forty people round him and the light going.
He read it out loud because there was no other way to do it — he had to hear the words to get them — and so the whole of that street heard him fight it.
He got stuck on whereas twice at the start and had to go round it.
He got rebellion on the second try. He said thenceforward three times, in three different shapes, and Félicité said “Go on,” and he went on.
And it was in there. He found the sentence and he got it out entire and it came out clean: that all persons held as slaves within any State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.
Somebody behind him said something and somebody else told them to be quiet.
Then the next part was a list, and a list was the easiest thing on the page for him, because a name is a shape and he had been reading the shapes of names on hogsheads and bills of lading and the sides of boats for three years.
He read it the way it was printed, at the speed a man reads a list.
“...the parishes of Saint Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, Saint John, Saint Charles, Saint James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche —“
His mouth got there before he did.
He stopped.
—
Nobody understood at first, because he had not explained what the list was, because he had not known what the list was until he was inside it.
A man said, “What.”
Nelson went back four lines and read the sentence that came before the list, which was the sentence he had gone past without getting the sense of, and got it this time. That the parts of the country named after it were excepted out. That they were not in it.
And then the end of that sentence, which he read twice, once for himself and once for the street, because it was short and because he wanted to be certain he had it:
“...which excepted parts are, for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.”
There was a silence in that street of about the length of a strike at the batterie.
Then a woman said he had read it wrong.
He said he had not read it wrong.
She said read it again, and he read it again, and a man from the far cabin said read the list again, slower, and he read the list again, slower, and there were thirteen parishes in it, and Lafourche was the tenth.
It was the worst hour he had had on that place, and it happened in the middle of the afternoon in front of everybody, and nobody laid a hand on him.
—
Numa was standing at the back of it with his arms folded and had not said one word.
When it had gone quiet again he said, “Is there something in there about wages.”
Nelson went down the column looking for the shape of it. It took him a while and people waited.
There was. It was near the end, and it was two lines, and he read them out.
That the persons declared to be free were enjoined to abstain from all violence unless in necessary self-defence; and that it was recommended to them that in all cases when allowed they labour faithfully for reasonable wages.
Numa said, “Who’s that to.”
“The ones that’s free,” Nelson said.
Numa unfolded his arms and went up the street to his house, and that was the whole of what Numa said about the Proclamation.
—
The other thing in it was Virginia, and he came to it after, when the street had let out and there were seven or eight of them left and the light was nearly gone and he was going through the column again for himself.
Virginia had a list too.
It had the forty-eight counties they were calling West Virginia, and then it had seven counties named out, and he read them slowly because he did not know most of them: Berkeley. Accomac. Northampton. Elizabeth City. York. Princess Ann. Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth.
Norfolk.
He sat down on the step with the paper in his hands.
He had been in Norfolk. He had been nine days in a yard in Norfolk in December of 1859 waiting on a brig, and it was the last place in Virginia his feet had touched, and it was on the list, and Lafourche Parish was on the list, and everything in between the two of them was free.
—
He worked the rest of it out that night on the floor in the dark and it did not take him long, because it was the only kind of sum he had ever been good at.
Louisa County was not named in that paper.
It was not in the forty-eight, and it was not in the seven.
He had gone to mill and to the Court House and stood about in roads while men said the names of the counties over, all his boyhood, and he knew Louisa was nowhere near Norfolk or the Eastern Shore, and there was no possible way it was in either list.
So Louisa County was in it.
So on the first day of January in the year 1863 his mother had been declared free by the President of the United States, and he had not.
And then the second half of the sum, which took longer.
Nothing whatever would happen to her because of it.
There was not a Federal soldier within eighty miles of Fair Prospect and every white man in that county was in rebellion and would go on being in rebellion, and a paper printed in Washington was not going to walk up the lane and open the loom room door.
And nothing whatever would happen to him either, and the reason nothing would happen to him was that the army was already there.
It was nine miles off. It had been nine miles off since October.
The place was in the United States and the mill was making sugar for the United States market and Bergeron had sworn his oath in Thibodaux, and that was precisely why the paper had been written to go round him.
He got it down to two sentences some time before it got light.
Everything the army had not got to was free.
Everything the army had got to was not.
—
The street argued about it for a fortnight and the argument was better than he expected.
There were men who said it meant nothing at all, and they had the strongest case on the face of it, because the paper said in so many words that Lafourche was to be left precisely as though the paper had not been written.
But Basile — who had walked back from Donaldsonville in November with a bad foot and had the most reason of anybody in that street to say the whole business was worth nothing — Basile said the other thing, and said it more than once.
He said a law that names your parish has got your parish in it.
He said that a year ago no paper out of Washington had said one word about anybody on that bayou, and now there was one that had gone to the trouble of writing Lafourche down in a list so as to leave it out, and that a man who has to be written out of a thing was not left out of it by accident.
And there was the other part, which Nelson had read out that afternoon and which the street took longer to get to: that such persons of suitable condition would be received into the armed service of the United States.
Two men off that place had already gone in the autumn.
Everybody in that street now knew there was a place to go.
Nobody in the street settled it. It went on being argued at fires through Lent.
—
The wages came in February.
It was an order out of New Orleans and it came down through Thibodaux and Bergeron read the parts of it he chose to read out in the yard with the hands standing in front of him.
There was to be no whipping.
There was to be a contract for the year and the people on the place were to work the crop and not leave it, and the ration and the clothing would go on as before, and there was a rate, and the rate for an able man in the first class was three dollars a month.
It was to be paid at the end of the year, out of the crop, less anything owing at the store.
Nelson stood in that yard and did the arithmetic while Bergeron was still talking, and it came out to thirty-six dollars in a year, before the store took its part.
A man in New Orleans had paid fifteen hundred and fifty dollars for him three years before.
Forty-three years.
That was the number, and he had it before Bergeron got to the end of the paper, and he stood in that yard with it and there was nobody in the world he could have said it to who would not already have known it.
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