“Don’t we all want our children to get a better life? I know what I want for mine. They free, just starting out, but that’s not enough. I want more. I want them not only free but with the chance to do better than me.
“We need more men for our patrols, till the Federals come stand with us. We need more men to step up and make a difference now, when it mean something.
“Jessie just as dead playing the fool to the white man, not asking for nothing. The time for waiting is over. Our time is right now, this very day. We want our turn.”
McCully’s voice cracks at the very end, and he stops talking. There are no more dramatic pauses or impassioned pleas. The big man suddenly looks as confused as a child who has lost sight of his mother.
Israel leaves Lucy’s side and pushes forward to where McCully stands rooted. He takes McCully by the elbow, a light touch, and leads him back to his seat. McCully sits, not once glancing at Israel or any of the others gathered, and sinks his face forward into the arc of his big hands.
Israel stands directly behind McCully as Sam Tademy takes the preacher’s spot, the last to speak.
“We all understand and sympathize with Brother McCully’s grief,” Sam begins. “We all want a better life than the one put on us. The question is how to get that life. Brother McCully think the time for settling scores is now. A eye for a eye. I say we need to take a good look around us. If we say we need more men for this fight, we get twice the local colored men we got now. If Sheriff Nash put out the same call, they get five times more white men, bringing their own guns.
“We farmers, most all of us, better at land than at rifles. I want land and education for my children. My boys gonna read and write. They gonna use both their minds and their backs to get their chance. My oldest son, Green, go away half the year to the colored school in Montgomery.” Sam pauses and nods in the direction of fourteen-year-old Green Tademy standing in the congregation. Next to Green stands his little brother, Jackson.
“Green already know how to read. And one day, Lord willing, we build a colored school right here in Colfax. My other children, and your children too, go to that school one day. We need education, not bullets. That the only way we win. Not all these white men bad. We got to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks. That the only way progress last.”
Amens drift from the congregation. Hands wave slowly in the air.
Preacher Johnson leads them in a final prayer, and the hastily formed choir sings. They have had only the morning to rehearse, but when they lift their voices, the hymn is strong and they are in harmony. Everyone in the congregation is moved, no matter which side of the courthouse question they are on. The women dish up the food, and everyone gets as much to eat as they want. The service is over.
Chapter
7
Monday morning, the courthouse square is congested with men, women, and children camping out. Neither Smithfield Quarter nor the courthouse can contain the latest torrent of people surging into Colfax. Some are old hands, in town since the beginning of the siege two weeks before, but most are newcomers, just arrived in Saturday’s latest big wave.
“Some service yesterday,” Israel says to Sam Tademy over midmorning coffee.
“Polly and the boys look mighty good to my eyes,” says Sam. “Been too long.”
“You got afternoon patrol?”
Sam nods.
“McCully back on the roof?”
“Took first watch this morning.”
“More women in the courthouse today than ever, Lucy and Polly right up front. Can’t seem to help themselves, cleaning up behind us no matter where we is. Lucy want to go back home to The Bottom, say it too crowded at McCully’s. What you telling Polly to do?”
“Stay put till we get a sign. Maybe Federals show up now we in a fresh week. This thing got to have some end in sight, or nobody gonna keep to it much longer.”
They sit in silence for a while.
“You think McCully shoot at a white man from up there?” Israel asks.
“McCully bullheaded, but he not a fool,” Sam says. “Trouble I see is too many guns in too many hands, white and colored.”
“Education, not bullets,” says Israel. “Fine preaching yesterday.”
“Something need saying to cool the sting of McCully’s eye for a eye.”
“My Noby listen close to you yesterday.” Israel stumbles over his words, twirling his cap around in his hands. “Noby study that book you give him all day and night if he could. He want to be like Green, but we can’t send him off to school. He got to help on the farm.”
“Best twenty-five cent we ever spent,” says Sam. Last year Sam pooled cash with two other farmers to buy a secondhand copy of Sheldon’s Primer, dog-eared and worn. The little book makes the rounds in The Bottom, lent and rotated among children learning to read. Green is already beyond the lessons, but Jackson still uses the primer when his turn comes.
“Noby got a temper,” Israel says. “I pray on it. He a good boy, but lose himself sometime. Nothing that boy want more than reading. Might calm him some.” Israel glances at Jackson expectantly.
“What you asking?”
“A place for Noby in your school when the time come.”
“Every child welcome,” says Sam. “But the school ain’t real yet. No telling how long before it start. Not many white want a colored school in Colfax.”
Israel acknowledges with a nod.
Men mill around, waiting for their patrol duty shift. Others seem lost, the routines and discipline of the last weeks disrupted as they are pressed instead into domestic chores in service to the large numbers of families camping outside. Sam spots Levi Allen under the Pecan Tree, slightly apart from the others, smoking the stump of a cigar.
“I’ma talk to Levi,” says Sam, standing. “Coming?”
Israel trails Sam toward the Pecan Tree. The military man seems uncomfortable, surrounded by the unruly throng, but relieved to see Sam and Israel.
“Must be four hundred people here,” Levi says.
“How many guns we got?” Sam asks.
“Maybe eighty.” Levi scans the tumult of the square. There is a sea of makeshift shelters and tents, separate cooking fires, transported pots and dishes, children running in all directions, kindling and firewood stacked in heaps, bags of foodstuffs, dogs rummaging through discarded garbage, hastily dug sewage mounds. “Meeting be over soon, I suppose.”
“When the Federals coming, Levi?” Sam says. “No more dodging.”
Levi seems to debate how to answer, which official party line to give, but then he shrugs. “No way to know, exactly,” he says. “We expected them before now.”
“Our wives inside cleaning for the general meeting, but unless something change in the next hour or two, you gonna have a spotless courthouse and most men taking their families back home.” Sam rests his Enfield rifle against the base of the Pecan Tree. “I’m thinking that way myself,” he says. “What’s today’s meeting about?”
“We gonna open the court and deputize more men. And if the boat from New Orleans don’t bring troops today, we gonna send Cap’n Ward down to talk to the governor in person,” says Levi.
“We got families to worry over, not political careers,” says Sam.
“Why don’t you get sworn in this morning, Sam?” Levi asks. “You too, Israel.”
“Without those troops, don’t matter if you make every colored man in Colfax a deputy,” Sam says. “You got to know that, Levi.”
Levi takes a long draw on the fat stump of his cigar. “Spread the word about new deputies,” he says, but before they have a chance to respond, someone begins ringing an old plantation bell at the front stoop of the courthouse to signal the beginning of the general meeting.
Sam, Israel, and Levi head toward the sound.
Polly and Lucy, already inside the courthouse, have managed to save four seats in the second row of the judge’s meeting room. Sam and Israel push toward the front of the crowd and join their wives.
The few chairs quickly fill, and the rest of the men and women of Colfax and surrounding towns stand anywhere they can in the small room. Hundreds of people cram inside or wait outside.
“Never been in a courtroom with a judge before,” Polly announces to Sam. Her brown eyes shine; she is like a youngster with her first candy treat. Eight years with this woman, and Polly still surprises Sam. The uncompromising fullness of her pouty lips even now has the power to stir him.
“Tangling with the law in a courtroom usually don’t mean nothing good for colored,” Sam corrects. “We got danger here.”
“Times is changing, Mr. Tademy,” retorts Polly.
Judge Register, one of the original three white elected Republicans who arrived in town at the beginning of the siege, beckons Sheriff Shaw and the rest of the politicians to his side and opens the courthouse for official business, the first time since the administration change. With a great show of pomp and dignity, the judge gavels the courtroom to silence. “I call the first session of the only official and recognized court of Grant Parish to order.
“This court and its officers are duly appointed by Governor Warmouth of the great state of Louisiana, and we will not tolerate interference in performing our duties on behalf of the local citizens of Grant Parish.” The judge embodies new-order legitimacy, hope that the escalating patrols of armed men gathering up and down the river and in the woods, black and white, are an oddity that will pass. “We have two orders of business before us this morning.
“First. We issue a citation against Sheriff Christopher Columbus Nash for attempting to violate the civil rights of Sheriff Shaw, the legal officeholder.”
A burly middle-aged colored man, lucky enough to claim one of the few seats in the front row, stands. “You be able to do that?” he asks.
“We are Republicans, the ruling party, recognized by the state,” the judge says. “We hold the court, we hold the law, and we hold tax assessment powers for Grant Parish.”
“What’s a citation?”
Sheriff Shaw, at the judge’s elbow, speaks. “A citation sends a message that we serious. Give us the power to arrest their agitators if we have to, like they trying to arrest some of us. Trust me. A citation is proof for New Orleans that we got trouble, and once they see it, they gonna send armed troops lickety-split. None of these local troublemakers gonna stand up against that. Then we go after the renegades who kill Jessie McCullen, arrest them, and bring them to justice. This citation gonna turn everything around.”
“That sound good to me,” the colored man says, and sits back down.
“Which brings us to the second order of business,” says Judge Register. “To keep the peace, we will accept more deputies. All men prepared to defend the town and our rights who weren’t sworn in before can sign up now with Sheriff Shaw.”
There is an immediate buzz in and around the courthouse room. The standing-room-only crowd parts for four men who come forward, eager to sign. A few more men approach, trying to decide.
Judge Register pounds his gavel a few times for effect. “Court is hereby adjourned,” he says. “Deputies sign up at this table.”
Less than fifteen minutes has passed.
By eleven o’clock, everyone in Smithfield Quarter has heard about the new colored deputies, a few young men barely past their twenty-first birthday, but most in their thirties or forties, drawn by McCully’s appeal at Jessie’s service or the promise of a new day when the weight of the court and the law will work in their favor. Instead of sixteen local colored deputies, now there are thirty-five. There are no other topics of conversation over midday dinners.
In freedom, most agree, every step forward has always been accompanied by a step back. Notwithstanding the memory of Jessie, a tentative confidence settles over the colored men in the courthouse.
Recruitment to the cause is on the upswing. New men join and stay in town even as they send their families back home. The carpetbaggers and politicians have long since run out of guns of any kind to issue, and they encourage the Colfax late-joiners to bring whatever weapons they can get their hands on. They are careful with their patrol assignments, mixing the more experienced in with men newly recruited, the unarmed in with those who have carried weapons for weeks, and young in with old. They are short on rations, still living off yesterday’s feast, but they pool what they have. Women and children promise to forage for supplies to bring back to their men.
There is a great swell of movement out of Colfax. A few days before, white and black families crossed paths, the colored flowing in and the white ebbing out. This time the families on the move are only colored, leaving.
Sam sends Polly back to Smithfield Quarter to pack up and get the boys ready for the ride back to The Bottom. He will take them himself, then circle back into Colfax by evening. No matter what his doubts, Sam isn’t ready to give up on the siege. If there is another way to break the grip of the white terror-mongers in Colfax and make a colored school possible, he hasn’t figured it out in the eight years he has lived in the town.
It doesn’t take Polly long to gather their belongings at McCully’s brother’s house and organize for the family’s trip back home. Green and Jackson help load the wagon, and then they pile in, Sam at the reins.
“Mr. Tademy, we ready to go now,” says Polly. She gives him a smile of encouragement, and Sam clucks the horse forward into the afternoon glare, his Enfield by his side.
Mr. Tademy, Sam thinks.
Polly calls him Mr. Tademy because she knows how much it means to him. It is possible to draw strength from a name. Like the moment eight years ago when he started again new. There had been the long time of sleepwalking as someone else’s property, of hanging back and holding on, being careful to sweep each day’s sameness and indignities out to the margins of himself in a single-minded attempt to protect all that was still free and hopeful at the inner core. Compliant on the outside but waiting for his chance on the inside.
If not for the name, he surely would have broken when he was whipped in the field, or when his first woman was sold away from him and their young sons, but he went inward, dreaming of a different kind of life that bore no resemblance to the one he was forced to live then.
By the time Sam reached the age of twenty, he had become certain of several things. He might be a slave, knee-deep in cotton fields and subject to the desires of master and overseer alike, but he could figure things out in his head that others couldn’t, and he knew that when he talked, other men in the field or in the quarter listened to what he had to say. He had been absolutely certain that one day he would no longer belong to any other man.
Sam had sharp memories of his father, memories kept safely hidden in his secret place. His father was dark and powerful, with deep, pitted scars on his face and arms. He knew the man as his father only because he told Sam so, not because he lived with Sam and his mother and brother in their little cabin. This man had come to them late one night, wild and desperate, when Sam was still so young his main work was to run water to the cotton field and his brother, Doe, didn’t yet have steady chores. The man was a stranger to Sam, but his mother’s eyes had grown wide with some emotion Sam had never seen before, a softness and hardness doing battle on her face at the same time.
“Sam,” his mother said when the man calling himself his father burst into the cabin and shut the door tightly behind him, large, ragged breaths coming from his mouth as if his chest couldn’t hold them. At first Sam thought his mother was talking to him, but her eyes were trained on the stranger. She didn’t move. None of them moved.
“How you get here? They know you gone?” she said.
“I don’t have no time,” the dark man said. “I come about the boys.”
“You running?”
“They selling me tomorrow. I’ma take my chance. You and the boys come with me.”
His mother grabbed Sam and Doe and pulled them close into her skirt, pinning them flat against her, so hard that Sam felt the shaking all the way through to
his bony chest. “You not taking me or my sons nowhere,” she said. “We never make it out.”
“Those boys always gonna be mine, my blood.”
“Nobody say different.”
Sam couldn’t figure out what was happening in the small cabin, this strange man’s entitled attitude toward his mother, and her acceptance of his right to be there.
“Come here, boys,” the man whispered.
Sam looked up at his mother in confusion. He didn’t want to go to the stranger. What was he supposed to do? The man frightened him.
“You not taking them,” she said again, a clampdown in her tone.
The man nodded, just once, full of disappointment but yielding. “Just a few words, and then I got to get gone,” he said.
His mother pushed Sam gently toward the stocky, sweating man by the door, and Doe trailed behind. The man stooped down, eye level with Sam, and took him by both shoulders.
“I’s your daddy,” he said. “Your name Sam, like the name they give me.” The man shook with the power of his message. “And I name you Dara,” the man said to Sam’s little brother.
“They call him Doe now,” Sam’s mother said.