Chapter Thirty-Eight
When word of Lee’s surrender reached us, I found Grace in the kitchen building, a rolling pin in her hands, tears streaking
her cheeks.
“Is it true?” she asked.
Grant at Appomattox Courthouse to surrender the Army of Northern Virginia. The war’s end was no longer a question of if, but
when.
In the days that followed, news arrived swiftly. Mobile, Alabama—the last major Confederate port—fell. Then Union troops raised
the Stars and Stripes once more over Fort Sumter, the same flag lowered in defeat four years before. The postmaster’s boy
rode from farm to farm, his horse lathered with sweat, delivering the tidings like a death notice.
That same night, Lincoln was shot in his theater box. I still don’t know what was more shocking—that the president had been
assassinated, or that it happened at the very moment he must have believed the war was behind him.
A few days later, I gave birth to our eleventh and final child.
Eng chose the name: Robert Edward, after the general he’d once called our last great hope.
As he cradled the baby, he spoke of honor and heritage, of what this child would carry forward.
I wasn’t happy about it. Naming a newborn after a defeated general felt like christening him with sorrow—binding him to a lost cause before he’d even taken his first step.
But I tucked the blanket around him and held my tongue.
What was the use? The name was already his.
That same day, though we wouldn’t know it for weeks, Stephen was shot at the Battle of Boykin’s Mill, one of the war’s final
skirmishes. A .44-caliber bullet pierced his shoulder. He kept the flattened slug in a velvet pouch, darkened by his blood.
A souvenir of survival.
By late spring, it was over. Jefferson Davis was captured wearing his wife’s shawl in a failed attempt to flee. Armies folded
their banners. Pardons were issued. North Carolina had sent more men to the Confederacy than any other state—125,000 in all.
A third of them never returned home. In Surry County alone, more than 800 names were inscribed in church ledgers, the pages
soon yellowed by the touch of grieving hands.
That our boys were not among them felt like a mercy.
Everyone around me spoke of the North as if it were a force of unspeakable cruelty, bent on destruction. They cursed Lincoln’s
name and called emancipation a theft of property masquerading as justice. I mourned with them, as I was expected to. I cursed
the war and all it had taken. But I could no longer pretend not to see what was right in front of me. Beneath the ashes, something
was being put right.
A shout rose up: official word of the war’s end had reached our farm.
I stood on the porch with my infant son on my shoulder, watching. In the fields and near the cabins, people who had lived
on this land all their lives cast aside their shovels and hoes and began packing to leave.
I asked Grace to gather everyone at the porch at midday.
I was relieved that Eng and Chang were at Addie’s—I didn’t want to broker any dissent.
I set my children to work assembling parcels of bread and cheese, cured meats and beans.
Startled, perhaps, by the unusual resolve in my voice, they obeyed without complaint.
All morning, we heard whooping from the road. Across the distant ridges and down in the valley, we saw groups of freed people
on the move. By early afternoon, those on our property had taken their bundles and joined them.
As I stood on the porch and watched them go, I felt something I hadn’t expected: relief. I was glad it was over. Glad that
they could see us brought low.
The fact that they didn’t burn our homes and kill us all felt to me like a kind of miracle.
Grace lingered after the others had gone. She stood near the porch steps, her satchel slung across one shoulder, her boys
behind her—Noah, Daniel, and Isaac—carrying rucksacks of their own.
“Where are you headed?” I asked.
“I’m going to look for my mama.”
I nodded, swallowing the lump in my throat. “Good luck, Grace. I will miss you. But I’m glad you’re going.”
“Good luck to you, Miss Sarah,” she said.
I watched her walk down the path, her boys falling in step beside her. I wanted to call out—to thank her, to acknowledge all
the years she had labored in my house. To name the weight of what she had endured under this roof, what we had taken from
her. But words felt paltry. She had seen too much. Survived too much. Any comfort I might try to offer now was too little,
too late.
The newly freed people passed our farm in twos and threes, heading north in search of family long since sold away, toward Freedmen’s Bureau outposts, toward towns where it was said a man could earn a wage without fear of the whip or a lynching.
But the roads were dangerous. Beyond the farm, all was confusion.
Nobody knew what to do. There had been no plan, no contingency for what came next.
One day, men, women, and children were enslaved; the next, they were free to go.
The war had been fought over their bodies, their futures.
But when freedom came, they had nothing to start with—no land, no money, no place to call home.
Most were illiterate, as had been the law. For generations, they had been taught their place: don’t meet a white man’s eyes,
don’t speak out of turn, don’t step beyond the limits imposed on you. Now they had been tipped into a hostile void, surrounded
by men who’d spent four years fighting to keep them in chains.
The Confederacy had fallen, but its anger still burned. In cities throughout the South, Federal troops patrolled the streets,
and the Freedmen’s Bureau was setting up relief efforts—opening schools, offering rations to the starving. But the rural reaches
were lawless. The land held the war like a bruise.
The morning after the exodus, I stood in the kitchen house, staring at the cold cast-iron stove.
Our lives had changed overnight. The cabins were empty, the fields still. No clang of the water pail at the well, no pots
clattering at dawn, no voices drifting across the yard.
Eng and Chang were tending the crops and trying to salvage a planting schedule. The older boys were mending fence rails and
hauling brush. The girls were inside, keeping the little ones occupied. That left me here, facing a stove I hadn’t touched
in years.
I crouched and stuffed it with kindling and logs, trying to recall how Grace used to lay the fire. I’d watched her do it a
hundred times and never fully paid attention. Smoke billowed into the room. When I finally coaxed the flames to catch, I leaned
too close and burned my arm on the rim, forgetting to test the heat with a drop of water, as she always had.
I didn’t know where the cornmeal was kept. I had never scrubbed a floor in this house or scoured a pot. At Joan’s, all those years ago, I’d washed windows, milked goats, swept corners. But it had been just two of us. Here, Grace and the house girls labored for a sprawling family.
The sheer physical work staggered me. Keeping the stove warm for baking meant constant tending—feeding it wood, adjusting
the damper, gauging the heat by instinct. By midday, my arms were streaked with ash and my back ached. I nicked my finger
with a paring knife. The potatoes boiled dry. I scraped charred stew from the bottom of the pot.
I had imagined myself a gardener, but I saw now how much I’d relied on others. I knew the names of plants, the shape of a
seedling’s leaf, but not which beans to sow when, how deep to plant turnips, how to keep ahead of the weeds that choked new
growth.
All my life I had watched women scrub linens on the washboard with sure, practiced hands—rinsing and wringing after breakfast,
hanging them by noon, pressing them by dusk. I’d never considered the weight of wet sheets from half a dozen beds, the sting
of cold water, the burn of lye soap. I took for granted that a mountain of linens would return, clean and folded, to the cupboards
by nightfall.
After burning the stew and boiling the potatoes dry, I tied on an apron, rolled up my sleeves, and dragged the washbasin into
the yard. I scrubbed until my fingers were red and raw and was still only halfway through the pile. By afternoon, my hands
were blistered, my dress damp with sweat, the basin ringed with dirt. I sat on the porch steps watching crows pick through
the turned-up soil in the garden beds. No one was around to chase them off.
A week later, Ned, one of our strongest field hands, came back. He took off his hat as he stepped onto the porch, turning
it in his hands.
“I’m in need of work, Miss Sarah,” he said.
I wasn’t exactly surprised to see him. The roads beyond our farm were treacherous. There were rumors of slave patrols still
riding through the hills and fields, of sheriffs jailing freedmen for “vagrancy”—a charge that required nothing more than
standing still with no white man to vouch for you. For many, freedom meant hunger, uncertainty, and the bitter realization
that liberty, without justice, was little more than a cruel joke.
I told him I would pay him what he asked and would put it in writing.
“I can start tomorrow,” he said. “And I know others would come back too, if the terms are fair.”
That night, Eng and Chang sat at the dining table, the account books open before them. Eng’s hand rested on his forehead.
Chang tapped the ledger, shaking his head.
“We can’t afford to pay for labor,” he said. “We’ll be ruined. You understand that, don’t you?”
Eng didn’t look up. “I understand the numbers. We’ll pay what we can afford. What choice do we have?”
“I’ll tell you what choice we have. We do what the rest of the county is doing,” Chang said. “Offer them a share of the crop,
give them land to work.”
We all knew what this new system, sharecropping, really was. The contracts were so binding, the depts so steep, the terms
so fixed that the workers might as well have been in chains. It was merely the old ways disguised with a new name.
“These men are free now,” I said, keeping my voice even. “You think they’ll sign that?”
“They don’t have a choice. Not if they want to eat.”
I looked to Eng. “The ones coming back—they want to be here. If we pay them decently, we might keep them.”
Eng rubbed his temples. “She’s right. We have to pay a fair wage.”
Chang exhaled loudly. “You’re both fools.” But he didn’t argue further.
Over the next few weeks, more men returned. We hired as many as we could, paid what we could manage. It wasn’t enough, but
it was a start.