Freeman (23 page)

After all, the thinking went, Bonnie was a just a nigger—despicable, yes, but in the final analysis, beneath contempt. Prudence was the white Yankee who had put ideas in her head, who had induced her out of her natural place, who was a traitor to her own race, starting that school at the edge of town and teaching
their
niggers to read and write and calculate and maybe even to believe themselves every bit as good as white men. Worse, Prudence was the one who, when they tried to confront her about it, had responded with impudence.

So it was left to Bonnie to conduct their business, to do their shopping, pick up their mail, send their telegrams. But she knew Prudence, so she knew her sister would not long accept that arrangement. It was not in her nature. And this meant another confrontation was inevitable.

But that, decided Bonnie as Paul Cousins came walking toward her, was a problem for another day. To her surprise, he was wearing new store-bought clothes—a dark serge coat and a matching tie knotted in a neat
bow. Prudence smiled, eyes still dancing. “Are you going to church tonight, Mr. Cousins?”

“No, ma’am,” he said, removing his hat. His voice was as stiff as his posture in the unfamiliar garments and Bonnie found herself hoping Prudence wouldn’t tease him anymore.

She didn’t. Instead, Prudence said, “Well, I will see the both of you when you return.” She gave Bonnie a meaningful look Paul Cousins didn’t see.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said solemnly, replacing the hat.

Bonnie shook her head, smiling despite herself, wondering again how it was she could have been incomplete and never even known.

“How them children comin’ along?” he asked when they were halfway down the block.

“The children are doing quite well,” said Bonnie.

“They seems to enjoy it. They likes you a lot.”

“It is learning they like,” said Bonnie, shielding her eyes from the afternoon sun and waving at a group of her students walking home on the other side of the street. “I am going down to order new benches because we no longer have room for all our students. You know, you are still welcome to join us in the evening class, Mr. Cousins. I could tutor you privately to help you catch up with the lessons you have missed.”

She hoped the lure of spending time alone with her would be enough to make him reconsider his refusal to join the adult classes. The man was too proud for his own good.

For a moment, she thought he would accept her offer. He was certainly tempted. She could see that in his eyes. But then he smiled. “No,” he said, “ain’t no use you tryin’ to teach me nothin’ new. I’m an old dog. And besides,” he added, “ain’t I asked you to stop calling me Mr. Cousins? My name Paul. Gon’ make these white folks think I’se puttin’ on airs, you and Miss Prudence keep up.”

Bonnie smiled right back. “I suppose I am just an old dog, too,” she said.

It took him a moment. He blinked twice. Then the laughter cracked his face and broke out like water from a cistern. “‘Old dog,’” he said. “All right, must’a had that comin’, I expect.”

Bonnie had had a few beaux in Boston, though not many. Eager and ambitious young freemen, smitten and bashful young white men, they had plied her with sweet cakes and sweet talk. But she never had been in love with any of them. That realization usually arrived when she found herself
out for a ride or going to the theater with one of those young men and trying to imagine herself still with him in five years, three years, two years, one. She never could.

At 26, she was, she supposed, of an age where she must begin to contemplate her future seriously or risk dying a spinster. She wondered sometimes if that were not preferable to marrying a man with whom she could envision no tomorrow. She remembered how lost and awash in Jamie Kent Prudence had once been. Bonnie had never felt like that for any man. She did not know if she could.

But there was, she had to admit, something engaging in Paul Cousins. He was not eager or ambitious or especially young, nor even learned. There was, however, an openness to him. He had not an ounce of pretension in him. He was what he was, with neither apology nor regret. Somewhat to her surprise, she liked him. She did not know if her feelings could ever become anything more than that.

It took them 15 minutes to reach A.J. Socrates’s store. A lanky white man with a long beard sat outside, aimlessly whittling a piece of wood into chips. He stopped what he was doing and watched with frank interest as they walked past him into the darkness of the store. Socrates glared at them with his customary hostility. Bonnie had the sense they wronged him simply by existing. “What y’all want?” he demanded.

Paul swept his hat from his head. “Like to send a telegram, Marse.”

Marse
, she thought.

The man’s shirt was soiled and torn at one cuff. His thinning hair was unkempt, and he had yet to shave that day. This miserable wretch had never mastered anyone or anything, himself included. But he was white and they were not and nothing else mattered. He reached out a hand. “Well,” he snapped in a brittle voice, “don’t just stand there like a lump. Give me the message.”

Paul’s hand went inside his coat pocket and fumbled out the paper on which Prudence had written the note to her sister’s husband at Campbell & Cafferty, requesting that he ship more desks and chairs. Socrates snatched the paper away. His eyes widened as he read. Then he looked up, shaking the paper in his fist like a rag doll.

“Do you know what this is?” he demanded. “This is trouble, that’s what. Folks around here been plenty patient with you, boy. You and that Yankee wench. She shouldn’t ought to press her luck.”

Paul turned the hat slowly in his hands. He kept his eyes on the floor. “Yes, Marse,” he said. “I just…that just the message they wants to send, is all.”

The white man’s eyes darted. He regarded Paul, he read the note again, then he fixed a baleful stare on Bonnie. Her eyes brushed his for not even a second before she remembered to glance down. But she could feel the hateful touch of his gaze even so. He said, “More chairs and benches, huh? So I guess you all will have every woolly head in the county crowded into that place now. Well, no skin off my nose.” He placed the paper to the side of the telegraph as he began to key in the message, then added, “But people ain’t going to like it, I can promise you that.”

And how would people ever find out?
Bonnie thought this, but did not say it. It would not be wise and besides, she already knew the answer. This slimy little man with the sinkhole cheeks and yellow eyes, with his ratty shirt and his five strands of hair across the bald expanse of his scalp, would run and tell them as quickly as he could.

Bonnie was seized with a sudden need to be out of there. It was all she could do to hold herself in that spot, the room silent but for the clicking of the telegraph, and not go running back to Memphis as fast as horses could hurtle, grab the first steamboat, and return to Boston where, it was true, white people called you nigger sometimes and acted like their white skin was some benediction bestowed directly from the hand of almighty God himself, but at least the colored person who sought an education was not a threat to the very foundations of the community.

She allowed her glance to graze Paul’s face and was instantly sorry she had. His bottom lip was held fast by his teeth, his jaw was locked like a vault, his downcast eyes were searching some inmost vista and she knew the proud man (
too proud for his own good
) was engaged upon some awesome and awful struggle he would not want her to see. Would be ashamed for her to see.

Bonnie looked at the floor instead.

She looked up when the telegraph stopped clicking. The white man had his hand out. Paul placed three dollar coins in it, then lifted the paper with Prudence’s message on it off the counter. “Let’s go,” he told Bonnie, his voice almost too soft for hearing. She followed him to the door.

The white man’s voice followed them both. “Hope you all know what you doin’,” he said. “Hate to see y’all get y’selves in a bad way.”

His voice followed them out. The man carving wood chips looked up without interest. They walked together. Paul still had his hat in his hand, crushing the brim in his fist. When the white side of town fell behind them, Bonnie breathed for what felt like the first time in an hour.

“Mr. Cousins,” she said, attempting a light tone, “I do not think—”

That was as far as she got. “Done told you before,” he said, in a featureless voice, “ain’t no ‘Mr. Cousins.’ Just Paul, you hear? That’s my name, just Paul. Ain’t no ‘mister’ nothin’. That’s for white mens and I ain’t no white man.”

The resulting silence sat hard between them. It had, she realized, cost him something to hear himself treated—and find himself forced to behave—like a small child in front of her.

In front of her
. Her mind repeated this last part belatedly, a sun dawning slowly. It almost made her smile, but she didn’t. There was nothing here to smile about.

He spoke. She had to incline her head to hear. “I ain’t had no call to snap at you like that,” he said. “I ain’t meant it. It’s just…”

“I know,” she said and touched his hand.

He looked at her. “I just don’t know why white folks got to treat us so mean,” he said.

She swallowed. “Not all of them are that way.”

He studied the wooden planks passing beneath his feet. “Hard to remember that sometime,” he said.

Silence sat between them again, but not so hard now. It was easier to take now.

The warehouse came in sight and Bonnie allowed herself to think ahead to the adult classes she and Prudence would teach tonight, one in the north corner of the warehouse, the other in the south. Miss Ginny would be the first to arrive, sitting proudly on a bench right in front. The adults were as eager to learn as the children, maybe more so, but they were more difficult too, more easily discouraged, more apt to take offense at the barest hint of condescension.

The voice brought her head up sharply. “Come on, honey, why won’t you let
us
enroll in your nigger school?” Oily as axle grease it was, coming from just inside the big warehouse door. She saw her alarm mirrored in Paul’s eyes. Then they were running.

There were two of them, two young white men. They had Prudence
backed against a bench, where she could retreat no further without falling. Her chin was up, her right hand in her pocket, and Bonnie knew that meant she was clutching the derringer. One of the white men glanced around at the sound of running feet. Pale blue eyes in a blandly handsome young face regarded them with scant interest. “Are these two of your niggers, honey? Why don’t you send them away until we’re done?”

“For the last time,” said Prudence, “I am asking you to leave.”

The other man, a shorter, even younger version of the first, cackled at that like a bird on a wire. “Ooh, Bo, she askin’ us to leave. Guess we better leave, huh?”

“I am goin’ nowhere, little brother,” said the older one and he leaned so close he and Prudence were breathing the same air. “Ain’t goin’ nowhere til I get what I come here for.”

“Go on and kiss her,” said the younger one.

“Think I’ll do that,” said the one called Bo. With his left hand, he took her face between his left thumb and forefinger, squeezing until her lips came together in a grotesque parody of a pucker. He planted his right hand on her breast like a plow handle and mashed it hard. “I never kissed a member of the Yankee race before. Like to see what they taste like.”

“Let go of me!” she tried to cry, through her constricted lips. Bonnie saw the hand with the derringer coming up from the folds of Prudence’s dress.

“Marse?” Paul’s voice was fluttery, as if something was rattling loose inside his throat. “Marse Bo, Marse Vernon, what y’all doin’ here?” His mouth was smiling a strange smile his eyes knew nothing about. They were frightened wide.

The older one’s gaze narrowed. “I know you, boy?”

“I knows your pappy,” said Paul in his odd new voice.

The one called Bo snorted. “Everybody knows my pappy. Charles Wheaton owns half the county.”

“Yes, sir, I knows that.” Eyes still wide, mouth still trying to remember what a smile looked like. But he took a step forward anyway. “I knows ever’body know who Marse Charles is. What I means is, I knows
him
. Use to shoe his horses back ’fore the war. He always brung ’em to Marse Dunbar, on account he had no blacksmith on his place. He always right sociable to me. How Miss Annie, by the way? She still fixin’ to marry that Wiley fella?”

Confusion darkened the pale blue eyes. “You know my sister?”

The thing Paul’s mouth was doing that wasn’t quite a smile grew wider.
“Oh, no sir. Only by your pappy talkin’ ’bout her. He proud of her. Proud of all his chil’ren, tell you the truth. He used to say that to me all the time, say, ‘Paul, ain’t nothin’ better in this life than chil’ren who you do you honor.’ That’s exactly what he used to say.”