The Soldier's Lady (18 page)

“We have to tell her,” said Katie. “Do you mind if I write back and tell her about Mayme? I won't say anything you don't want me to. I could never even think of going to Philadelphia without Mayme.”

“So you think you might go for a visit?”

“I don't know. I'm not interested in finishing school. But she is kin. It seems like, now that I am nearly grown, that maybe I ought to get to know her.”

“Oh-oh!” exclaimed Ward.

“What?”

“Didn't you feel that? I think I felt a drop of rain.”

They glanced up. The storm clouds were blacker than ever and nearly directly overhead.

“We'd better get these horses moving!”

We all became quiet and reflective. Henry's story, I think, reminded us all of our former years as slaves.

“Micah,” said Jeremiah, “when we were together in da army, I recall you tellin' me dat you had a hard life. But you wuzn't no slave, wuz you?”

“No, Jake, I never was.”

“You ever picked cotton, Mister Duff?” asked Emma.

“No, Emma,” smiled Micah. “There's not much cotton in Chicago.”

“Well den, son, you's got somethin' ter look forward to!” chuckled Henry. “You can't be black in da Souf wiffout pickin' cotton. Jes' consider yo'self lucky, son.”

At the words, Micah grew pensive. These people around him had all had a much harder life than he had. Nothing of what he had had to endure compared with how dreadful and demeaning slavery must have been. It was part of the cruel heritage of his race that he had not experienced.

Maybe his life hadn't been so hard after all. Being a Negro in the North was nothing like being a slave in the South.

Jeremiah's voice interrupted Micah's reverie.

“Den what made yers a hard life, Duff?” he asked.

A strange and far-off look came into Micah's eyes. He drew in a deep breath, then sighed with the hint of a smile, though a sad one.

“Do you really want to hear about it?” he asked.

“Oh, yes, Mister Duff—please tell us,” said Emma. “I likes hearin' stories 'bout everybody.”

Micah smiled again.

“All right, then, Emma,” he said. “How can I resist a request like that?”

As Micah began, his voice got quiet. It almost didn't seem like the same voice at all, like it was coming from far away. It almost sounded like he was telling about someone else altogether.

And in a way, I guess he was. The boy he told us about might have once been him . . . but it wasn't him any more.

We all got quiet too as we listened to the boy's story.

B
OY IN
C
HICAGO

15

A
BOY OF ELEVEN DUCKED OUT OF SIGHT IN A DARK
alleyway of Chicago's dreary waterfront district, where respectable people did not venture out at this hour. His skin was as black as the shadows where he hid.

All the local flatfoots knew the youngster, and none would have given him worse than a box on the head or a surly warning or two, even if they had caught him red-handed. That he had to steal a loaf of bread, or a piece of fruit or meat if he was lucky, to keep himself alive was well known to the neighborhood the boy haunted. So was the fact that his mother would probably not be alive without what he shared with her. The meager earnings from her disreputable trade selling her body mostly disappeared down her throat in the form of whiskey, rum, or gin.

By the time her unwanted son was of an age to beg, she sent him out with a forlorn expression and tin cup. By the time he could run fast enough to keep from getting caught by unwary shopkeepers, she taught him to steal. He had been doing both ever since and had grown proficient at
both trades. He begged by day in those sections of the city bordering on respectability. He stole by night wherever food was to be had, and wherever shadows and alleyways offered refuge and escape.

Over the years he had learned every nook and cranny of the bustling metropolis for two miles in every direction from what he called home, though a more disgusting environment could scarcely be imagined for human habitation. Many nights he curled up in his own little corner on a dirty thin pad on the floor, wrapping a single blanket around him, with words and sounds coming from his mother's bed no child should have to hear.

But he was too young to understand, had no idea why sailors of all races, skin colors, and origins came and went every night, and thus was not badly damaged by it. Like most children of adverse circumstance, he possessed a remarkable capacity to adapt and to make the best of the sordid condition fate had thrown at him. He had probably slept cuddled to the warmth of his mother's side—certainly as an infant, surely as a young child, but he did not remember it. No human affection within his memory had touched his cheek, no kiss graced his lips. Out in the city, he saw men and women kissing, he saw parents and children hugging and walking hand in hand, but he did not know what any of it meant.

His life could not in any way be called pleasant. But it was filled with variety and interest, which for a child are as important as food for the mind and heart as is bread for the body. What he lacked in companionship from his mother he made up for in the infinite sights and sounds of the city. From the smile of a stranger, the pat on the back to accompany
a penny tossed in the cup from a passing businessman, from the affection of a hundred dogs of the city who knew him as a roamer like they, the tough words of the beat cops who secretly watched out for him, even from the angry scolding of the shopkeepers and their wives as he passed . . . from all these, life somehow reached out and smiled at him. Even strangers were his friends. The human creature is a social animal and will derive companionship of soul from the unlikeliest sources. It will be fed by even the hint of a smile or twinkle of the eye from a passerby where no more vital companionship-food is to be had.

He turned at the end of an alley into a flight of rickety outside stairs, where he bounded up two at a time in near total blackness. It was after ten o'clock. About halfway up he heard a door close above him. A dark figure loomed on the landing, nearly indistinguishable from the blackness of the sky. Heavy footsteps began tromping down the stairs.

“Get out of the way, kid!” said a deep, surly voice as he stood with his head against the railing to let the man by. As soon as he was gone, the boy raced the rest of the way to the top and inside the filthy hovel lit dimly by a lone candle.

“Hi, Mama,” he said. “I brung you a roll an' a couple er sausages—dey's fresh too, Mama, from jes' dis mornin'. I stold 'em from da man wiff da meat cart fo you, Mama.”

A few mumbled words were all the thanks he received for his evening's labors. He expected nothing more. A few minutes later he was curled up in his corner, silently munching on the day-old crust he had kept for himself. He had pulled his blanket up over his head and was sound asleep twenty minutes later when the door opened again
and the next customer walked in.

Day followed night, night followed day, in the endless succession of moments from which destiny is written and character fashioned.

The boy did not know his life was miserable because he did not consider it miserable. It was simply his life and he lived it . . . and went on. Misery is only misery to those who pity themselves in the midst of it. For those who seek to make the best of it, the same circumstances are pregnant with opportunity waiting to be born.

His mother rarely went out, for the fact was—she was not well. Though they shared the same hovel, in truth he rarely saw her. She still lay snoring and half drunk in her bed when he rose and left each morning to begin his daily round of activities as a street urchin, beggar, and budding thief. He usually returned once or twice a day to leave what few coppers he had inveigled in the streets, and then went out again.

But more and more she was in bed at these times too. The cough, which had been growing ever since the previous winter and now seemed constant, he hardly noticed. He heard such things all day from people in the city and thought nothing of it. He was unaware that it was a deep cough and wracked her lungs with increasing pain. The gradual failing of her liver from years of hard drinking and poor nutrition did nothing to help her condition. Whether it was pneumonia or consumption that eventually killed her was never looked into—she was not the sort whose passing the city mourned. Nor did she have friends who would have known the difference, or even cared. In the end, if
tuberculosis was the cause, her lack of intimacy with him no doubt saved her son's life. For as severe as her cough became during her final weeks, mercifully the infection never reached him.

It was merciful too that he himself did not have to bear the burden of the discovery of the body at such an impressionable age. The landlord arrived early one afternoon to take out his wages for rent in flesh, as was his weekly custom, and found a corpse awaiting him rather than a warm body. The woman whose earthly life left no mark of eternal value on this world as she had passed so fleetingly through it, had now gone to see what the next world could make of her. Behind her she left but a child—the most precious and lasting legacy of humanity. Perhaps he might, in time, if not redeem the squalid existence she had led, at least bring redemption to her memory through his own life.

He arrived late that same afternoon, a few pennies and the huge wealth of a shiny nickel clutched in his excited little palm, to see a policeman standing at the bottom of the stairs talking with the landlord. A premonition swept over him—he had never before seen a white policeman this close to the building he called home.

“Dere he be, Officer,” said the black man, nodding the boy's direction.

Almost the same instant he glanced up at the landing above. Two men were coming out of the topmost door carrying a stretcher with a blanket over it—a blanket bulging with an indistinct but recognizable form beneath it—the shape of a human body. He glanced again at the two men.

“Your mother's dead, boy,” said the policeman.

He might not know human affection, but he knew what
dead
meant. The depths of its mystery did not occur to him at that moment, only the stark fact that his mother's voice had been silenced, that he would never see her again, and that he was now alone in the world.

Only a moment more he stood, unable to comprehend the totality of what this change meant.

The two men continued talking. Only fragments of their conversation reached the ears of his spinning brain.

“. . . have a father?” asked the policeman.

“. . . you kiddin', Officer . . . half da men in Chicago . . .”

Suddenly the boy turned and darted away.

“Hey . . . hey, boy!” called the policeman. “Come back . . . we'll try to—”