Darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable; Lightness has a call that’s hard to hear.
-Amy Ray, Emily Sailers
In the Dark Corner of South Carolina, men spoke of themselves as God-fearing.
James’s Pop figured he wanted to be a God-loving or people-loving man. He once told James that a man who was doing what God told him to do didn’t need to fear God.
“James,” he’d say. “God has given us this day to give thanks and to do good in. Every day’s good work is different. We don’t know what it is until God shows us.
“When someone asked Jesus what was the most important law, Jesus told him to love God with all your heart and might and to love your neighbor as yourself.”
“That ain’t always easy. Nope. That’s the hardest rule there is. You can fudge on what it means to love God, but loving others like yourself...that’s a tough one.”
None of these conversations took place around church. They were almost always at dusk-dark, and generally as they were washing up after a long day’s work. Evidently, his Pop did his religious thinking while working up a sweat.
James didn’t have enough of those conversations. His Pop was gone before James understood what he said well enough to talk about it.
But there were many days James found those words rolling around in his head, fading in and out at different parts of the day. Wondering what today’s good would be.
James missed his Pop.
*****
Driving Doc into North Carolina to meet up with Orr’s Rifles was not something Pete had wanted to do.
As a slave, that didn’t matter much.
Being a slave of Doc’s was akin to Pete’s life with the McCleod’s and he knew how lucky he was for that. Almost grown, Pete’s body bore not one scar. All the meanness he had ever known in his life had been from those who didn’t own him.
Doc had saved Pete and his mama from unknown horrors, but Pete also knew that nothing was certain for someone who was property. If anything happened to Doc, he could be sold to anybody. Even a slave of a kind master was never safe.
Living with the McCleods had not exposed Pete much to the hatred that accompanied the color of his skin. All their neighbors knew them. They knew that Pete and his mama and the McCleods worked side by side to bring in a crop from the mountain soil. The neighbors knew how the McCleods came to own two slaves in a place where owning one was a rarity. If there was envy, it didn’t blossom into the kind of hate Pete met when he crossed into South Carolina.
Short staple cotton had made some people rich in the upcountry of South Carolina… cotton and slaves. In the hills of North Carolina, there were few towns to entice the wealthy and the differences between farmers there were not so great. Land for growing cotton was scarce. Most people farmed to feed their family.
South Carolina was different. Greenville was a big town. There were many large plantations to the south and east of it. Most of the small farmers lived closer to what was known as the Dark Corner, a hillier place to the northwest where people tended to keep to themselves and were suspicious of anybody who tried to tell them what to do. Most of them thought Greenville had too damn many lawyers and others who thought they were better than everybody else.
Pete saw the sneers poor white farmers sent his way and knew them as replicas of the ones the town people directed toward them. Pete kept his head down and tried to be as invisible as he could, but it was not easy.
A light-complected Negro was not as unusual around Greenville as it was other places, but in the farming areas where Pete took Doc to treat the sick, it was a different story. Most people spent their whole lives outside working in the hot sun, and more than a few had some Cherokee blood in their family. Pete was often mistaken for Doc’s white apprentice which made things even worse. When someone would treat Pete like a white boy and then realize he was a slave, it shamed them.
No good ever came from someone feeling shame.
As Doc’s boy, Pete was safe from any real physical harm, but pushes and shoves and insults were plentiful.
*****
The trip to Kinston was cold. Pete was glad for his coat and the gloves Doc insisted he wear when driving the horses. Protecting a slave’s hands would not even cross the minds of most men in the South. It was another of those queer ways of Doc’s that people blamed on his dead Quaker wife.
Around the Upcountry, Pete drove Doc in the dog cart, but they rode the covered carriage to North Carolina and Doc spent the time inside either sleeping or reading. Doc had made his decision to join the Confederate troops from the Upcountry now stationed in eastern North Carolina, and he aimed to be prepared.
Doc was a unionist and was against the war, but when conscription came and most of the men left to fight, people thought Doc’s services would be better served with the troops. Doc resisted at first. He wanted no part of what he thought was a hot-headed response to Lincoln’s election.
But as more and more of the county’s boys were killed or came home wounded, Doc decided that he must do what he could with the skills he had. Medical journals were his carriage reading material. He had only performed one amputation in his life, and that was one he kept a secret. Doc knew that amputation would be required of him as much as any procedure working with battle-wounded men. He knew from his training in the North how much infection was going to be his enemy. Doc filled the carriage with his own medical and cleaning supplies. He was going to be prepared as he could.
It had taken them over a week to arrive. It was early December and biting cold. Word that the Yankees were moving in from the coast came almost as soon as they arrived. The hospital was set up in the ballroom of a town home and was mostly filled with men sick from dysentery and disease. Doc immediately separated those with infectious disease and insisted on more washing facilities. The nurses complained and often didn’t comply. Doc was the only one there with any formal training.
Doc put Pete to work washing patients, checking his supplies and making sure his instruments were kept clean; but when news of General Foster’s advance came, Pete was sent with every other able bodied man to down trees along the road.
Always a bit on the small side, Pete struggled. His arms were strong from handling the horses but he hadn’t needed to chop wood since his days with the McCleods. For three days, he worked with the others to block the road from the coming Yankee advance, his shoulders screaming in pain, barely able to sleep when night came.
And then, Pete got caught in the battle.
Smoke surrounded Pete and he found himself clinging to a pine tree half a mile from the Neuse River. Pete couldn’t tell which soldiers were shooting his way. The balls whistled in seemingly every direction. His only weapon was the ax he had been using for the last few days and he couldn’t imagine using it on anything but a tree, and it certainly couldn’t keep him from a bullet. How had he come to be lost in this deafening hell?
He couldn’t remember.
He couldn’t think for his fear.
There was nowhere to go, nothing to do but clutch the bottom of this tree and pray that no one would shoot him. Pete’s stomach cramped and his lungs were seared with smoke as he clung to the earth keeping as still as he could.
The cold made that hard. He couldn’t stop his shivering. Pete tried to clamp his teeth down to keep them from chattering so loudly, unreasonably afraid that someone would hear them.
Then came a thundering as if the entire world was exploding. A huge clump of hard red clay hit Pete’s shoulder and knocked him away from the tree. Pete was caught up with the sudden onrush of men, Confederate and Yankee, running for the river.
The smoke worsened the closer they came to the river and Pete saw that the bridge was on fire. Terrified of both the fire and the river, Pete tried to move in another direction. All around him Yankees were forcing Confederate soldiers to drop their rifles as they came to the uncrossable river.
Pete just kept running. The artillery guns pounded the ground in every direction and all he could think was run.
Blood running down his face, Pete had no idea where he was or how he got there. His ankle was on fire and he spit blood into his hands. His foot was caught in thick black mud. Somehow he had outrun the battle and into a swamp. Looking around him to find himself alone, Pete’s vision began to spin, and then he knew nothing.
Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected by it are as outraged as those who are
- Benjamin Franklin
James recognized him immediately. It was Doc’s Negro, the one that was almost white.
James blushed with shame at an old memory.
It was a bright summer day after a week of rain. James and his Pop had gone to Pendleton to trade their goat cheese at the store there. Pop was strapping their mule Henry with the supplies they had traded for while James offered Henry water from a bucket.
The boy was walking down the road with a smile on his face, his mind on something good. He didn’t see the other boys until it was too late. Just as he was passing a particularly muddy patch, the other boys ran over and gave him a huge push.
Doc’s boy had gone face first into the red mud. The other boys laughed and teased him, saying he was looking more like a nigger now.
James laughed, too.
He felt his Pop’s hand hard on his shoulder. “Do you find that funny, son?”
James’s laughter sputtered out. “Yeah, Pop. It did look kinda funny.”
“Do you think that boy on the ground thinks it’s funny?”
“No sir.” James sobered. “I don’t reckon he does.”
“Neither do I. It’s never a good day’s work to laugh at someone else’s misery. And doubly not to be encouraging of a bully.”
“No, sir.” James repentantly agreed, and nothing more was said. His pop finished packing the mule and they headed home.
When they were almost there, his pop put his hand on Jame’s shoulder once again, more gently this time. “Don’t let anyone ever make you believe that boy is any different from you. Folks around here are wrong. He’s the same as you or me. Just like that Samaritan, he’s our neighbor.”
Their paths didn’t normally pass, but James saw Pete twice more. Once when he brought Doc to tend Jame’s pop and once the day of the funeral.
James was sitting on the porch, his heart hurting so bad that he could hardly move. When his brother and sisters had died, he had been so sick himself that he didn’t remember the physical pain of losing someone you loved. The pain in his chest made it hard to breathe. It burned deep down inside. It followed him through every room in the house and every acre of the farm.
The neighbors moved in and out of the house, comforting his Ma, keeping the coffee hot and food on the table. Pete stood at the edge of the chicken house with his hat in his hand. He waited there for permission.
When one of the women noticed him there, she asked James if he wanted her to send Pete away or see what he wanted.
“I’ll do it,” James told her.
He got up slow and walked even slower to where Pete waited.
“I got a pie from my ma,” he said.
“From Doc Hendricks,” he amended.
James took it from him.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
Pete seemed to be struggling with some powerful emotion, a desire to say something more.
“Your daddy was a good man,” Pete whispered, then nodded to James, put his hat back on and walked away. James watched him go.
James wondered then as he wondered now as he gazed down on the crumpled figure
in the mud. “How did he know?”
James had spent the last month trying to keep his promise to Catherine to find her brother Bill. Fool had taken substitute money to join the army for that Mennonite man. Bill was younger than James and had no business in the army. James had sworn to Catherine that he would find him and return with him if he could; but if he couldn’t, at least she would know.
James knew that Bill was here somewhere with Orr’s Rifles and that a battle had just been fought. He could have been wounded or killed in it. James needed to know.
It had taken James most of the month to get here on foot, the thought of Catherine’s tears accompanying him along the way. He worried about leaving his mam, but there was nothing he wouldn’t do for Catherine. He didn’t know but that she would’ve come herself if he hadn’t promised her.
But Doc’s boy would have to be tended to first. He was breathing, not dead. Looked like he might have a broke ankle.
Taking care of Pete was not the good James wanted to do today. Something in him wished he’d never come this way, never seen him. He had come for Bill, not Pete.
But James knew he could not pass Pete by.
James could hear his pop’s voice. “That boy’s same as me and you. That boy’s the same as Bill. This is the good work God has shown you today, son.”
James leaned down and touched a hand only slightly darker than his own.
