Fifty-Six. Five Miles
Chapter Fifty-Six
Five Miles
The order came through on the eleventh of December, nine weeks after he put the letter on the desk.
He had been up those stairs four times in nine weeks and had been told twice that it was gone to New Orleans and once that it was gone from New Orleans to Washington and once that these things took time, and then on a Tuesday the clerk called his name off a list before he got to the front of the line and handed him a printed order with his name written into it in ink.
It was transportation on government account for one, from New Orleans to Baltimore by sea, and from Baltimore to Richmond, and it had Reuben, Nelson, freedman, late 70th U.S.C.I. written on it in a hand that was not the clerk’s.
That was the whole of what the United States government did about it and it took nine weeks and it was worth about thirty-five dollars, and Nelson stood on the stairs over that store with it in his hand and did not know what to do with his face.
—
He went down the bayou on the Sunday.
Jonah had ground now. He had taken twelve acres off the back of a place two miles above Bergeron’s on a rent, with a stand of live oaks on the far corner of it and a wet piece behind that was no good for cane and was good for nothing except that moss hangs over standing water and always has.
He walked Nelson over the whole of it, which took an hour, and he explained about the rent and about the two years and about what he meant to put in and where the pit was going, and Nelson listened to the whole of it and asked the questions a man asks.
Then they went back and sat outside and Jonah went into the cabin and came out and put money on the boards between them.
It was forty dollars.
“I got the passage,” Nelson said. “I got a paper for it.”
“You got a paper for the passage,” Jonah said. “You ain’t got a paper for the other end of it.”
Nelson looked at the money and did not put his hand on it.
“That’s your ground.”
“That’s this year’s moss,” Jonah said. “The ground’s paid.”
—
He asked him at the end of the afternoon and he asked him badly, the same as he had asked him about the swamp in 1861 and about the army in 1864, because he had never once in his life got better at that particular thing.
“Come with me.”
Jonah sat there.
“No,” he said.
And then he did a thing he had not done either of the other two times.
He waited a second and said one more sentence, and it was not an argument and it was not an apology and it was not enough, and Nelson understood while it was being said that it was the only part of it Jonah was going to give him.
“I got twelve acres on a rent and two year to run on it.”
“All right,” Nelson said.
Neither of them said anything about how long, or about after, or about whether. Jonah said the water would be down in the wet piece by February and he could get at it then, and Nelson said that was good ground for it, and the light went.
He took the forty dollars because it was forty dollars and because the other end of it was Virginia in January.
—
Jonah came down to New Orleans with him.
He was not asked to. He came down on the boat with him from Thibodaux and got off with him and went up into the city with him, and the two of them spent a day and a half in New Orleans waiting on the sailing, and neither of them said one word in that day and a half about what the day and a half was.
They walked up Chartres to Esplanade because Nelson wanted to and Jonah did not ask why.
The pen was gone. The house with the two doors was a house with two doors and there was a family in it and there were curtains up in the front room, and the wall down the side of the lot was still there and still had the bottle glass along the top of it, and the yard behind it had been broken up into garden ground and a shed and somebody’s fowls.
Nelson stood in that street for a minute or two and looked at the top of that wall.
“Come on,” Jonah said, after a while.
They came on.
—
The vessel went out on the second of January, 1867.
He had a deck ticket on a government order and the deck of a coasting steamer in January is a hard place to be, and he had the New Orleans coat over the army coat and slept sitting up against the deckhouse with his knees drawn.
It was the same water he had come down in 1859.
He went up it in six days with a ticket, and nobody read anything out to him, and nobody counted him, and when he wanted to go forward he went forward.
He did not make anything of it. It was cold and the food was bad and he was sick the first two days like everybody else.
—
Baltimore was a shock and he had not expected to be shocked by anything ever again.
It was the first Northern city he had been in and he was in it three days waiting on the Richmond boat, and what he could not get over was not the size of it and not the cold.
It was that a Black man walked down the middle of a pavement in Baltimore, Maryland, and white people went round him, and nobody stopped and nobody stared, and Nelson caught himself twice stepping off into the gutter out of a habit he had had since he was six years old.
He also stood in a bookseller’s doorway on the second day for a quarter of an hour, until the man inside came and looked at him, and then went on.
—
Virginia began at Richmond and Richmond was the other thing.
He came up the river to it on the twelfth of January and he knew the water and he knew the smell of it before he could see anything, and they put in below the city and he walked up into it, and it was burnt.
The whole of the low ground along Cary and Main was ash and standing walls and lots grown up with weeds under snow, and it had been that way for twenty months, and he went and stood at the corner where Wall Street runs down into the Bottom and worked out where the Davis jail had been.
He was fairly sure. There was a new frame building on the lot with a sign on it about hides.
He did not go and look at the room. There was no room; the whole block of it was gone. He stood on that corner about as long as he had stood in Chartres Street and then he went and found out about the road to Louisa.
—
The trouble came on the second day out of Richmond and it took about ten minutes.
He was walking, because the rail west out of Richmond was running as far as Beaver Dam and no further that week and he had put his money into food and a pair of boots, and he was on the road with the army coat on him, which was the warmest thing he owned and which he had been told twice in Baltimore to think about.
Three men on horses came up behind him at the middle of the morning and got in front of him and stopped.
They wanted to know where he was going and who he belonged to, and one of them used that word and the other two did not correct him.
They wanted to know where he got the coat.
They asked him that twice. One of them rode round behind him while the others talked, which is a thing that is done to a man on a road so that he will know it is being done.
Nelson put his hand inside his shirt and got out the discharge and unfolded it and held it up and did not let go of it.
The one in front took hold of the other end of it and read it, and Nelson kept his fingers on his end the whole time, and there was a moment somewhere in the middle of that where Nelson could not have said which way the whole business was going to go.
Then the man let go of it.
“Go on,” he said, and they went round him and up the road, and one of them said something over his shoulder that Nelson did not catch and did not ask him to repeat.
Nelson folded the paper along the fold and put it back inside his shirt.
Then he stood in the middle of that road for a minute with his heart going, and then he walked on, because standing in it was the worse of the two things available.
—
He came into Louisa Court House on the fourteenth of January at about four in the afternoon.
He knew the buildings. That was the strangest part of the whole journey and he had not been ready for it: he knew the shape of that street, and the tavern, and where the road went out west, and he had been ten years old in it and twelve and fifteen, standing about with a wagon and a load of staves while men talked over his head.
He asked at a store and got told what he already knew, which was that Fair Prospect was five miles out the west road and you turned at the second lane past the branch.
There was an hour and a half of light.
He did not go.
A Black man in a soldier’s coat on a Virginia road after dark in January of 1867 is a man who has walked a thousand miles to be unlucky at the last five, and he had worked that out somewhere between Richmond and Beaver Dam and had already decided it.
So he found a place to stop at the near end of that street, and paid for it, and got a man there to say he would carry him out west in the morning for two bits, and then he went and stood outside in the cold for a while, looking down a road he could not see the end of.
Five miles.
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