Freeman (3 page)

“No one can blame you for that,” said Sam.

“Yes, but I allowed that to blind me to what was best for the library. That was unfair to my other employees and to you in particular. I just wanted to let you know that you won’t have to worry about Mr. Horn anymore. He is no longer employed here.”

She picked up a piece of paper from her desk and lifted her reading glasses, which lay on her bosom, suspended from a chain. It was a dismissal. He didn’t move. She looked up at him—a question—and he realized to his surprise that he had just made a decision.

“There is something I need to tell you,” he said.

She frowned. “What is it, Sam?”

He had time to wonder if he was not about to do something he would regret for the rest of his days. Miss Cuthbert spoke again, her voice softer this time. “Sam,” she said, “what is it?”

He gazed up at her. “I realize this is going to seem very sudden, and I apologize to you for that. You have been nothing but fair to me. You have given me every opportunity.”

She leaned back in her chair. “You are leaving,” she said. This wasn’t a question.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Immediately?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“May I know why?”

For some reason, the question caught him off guard. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “there was a…there was this…”

She smiled a thin smile. “There is a woman,” she said.

He nodded gravely. “Yes, ma’am, there is. Or at least, there was. My wife.”

“She was a slave?”

“We were both owned by the same woman, ma’am.”

“Now you are determined to go find her.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

“All the way to Mississippi?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You do realize that’s insane.”

He had been gazing fixedly at her desk. Now he met her eyes. “I do, ma’am. But I still must go.”

“You have not seen her in, what? Ten years?”

“It has been 15 years, ma’am.”

“Fifteen years, then. And you will be travelling into what was, until just yesterday, enemy territory.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Sam, by this time, she may well have married someone else. She may not be in the same place. She might even be—I hate to say this, Sam, but it is the truth—she might even be dead. She may have taken sick or been killed in the war. You have no way of knowing.”

“I realize all of that, ma’am.”

“But that will not dissuade you.”

“No, ma’am.”

“She must be an exceptional woman.”

He was not a man who smiled often, but he did now. “She is, ma’am. She is truly exceptional. Plus, well…I feel as if I owe it to her.”

“Oh? Why do you feel that way?”

Tilda shrieking his name in hatred and fury. Him, chained to a whipping tree, wanting to explain, wanting to apologize. Not having the words, because the words do not exist. Then the whip knifing through the air, cutting his flesh. And her, cursing him
.

“I made a mistake,” said Sam. “I did something I should never have done. I hurt her.”

“I’m sure she’s forgotten all about that by now,” said Miss Cuthbert.

“No, I can assure you she has not,” said Sam.

“I see,” said Miss Cuthbert. She drew a breath. “Well, then, the alternate might be true. She might not wish to see you. You might travel all that way and she might refuse.”

“Yes, that is a possibility,” said Sam.

“But you’re going anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am, I am. But I hate to leave you shorthanded.” He liked Mary Cuthbert. He had met her when she was volunteering as a nurse, tending to the Union wounded at a makeshift hospital. He had not been wounded himself, had been loaded on the train with all his limbs intact, something not many in that ghastly rail car could claim. But he had been sick, suffering from one of the deadly wasting diseases so common in camp. He had fever, headache, delirium, and chills that shivered him so violently his teeth knocked together. He had lost 20 pounds, unable to keep food down.

The doctor had decided that he would die, and he had been left in a sunless corner of the hospital in Philadelphia where he might do so in peace. He didn’t know this at the time. He learned it the day he awoke to find Mary Cuthbert reading to him. She nursed him to health, spooned a watery broth
into his parched lips when he couldn’t keep anything else down, offered to write letters for him (he had no one to write to), exactly as if he were white.

She was delighted to learn that he could read and was even happier to discover they had a love of books in common. She had told him that when he was well enough, he could come work for her at the Library Company of Philadelphia. “Founded by Mr. Benjamin Franklin,” she had added, in a rare show of pridefulness.

Franklin, lips knotted in something that was not quite a smile, watched from a portrait over her desk now as she shook her head. “Do not trouble yourself on my account,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, but you have been more than fair to me, and I feel bad just leaving you this way.”

“Sam, this library survived for many years before you arrived. It will survive without you. Finish out the day. You may draw your pay when you leave.”

She lifted the glasses again. Sam stood to leave. His hand was on the doorknob when she called his name. He turned. She was gazing at him closely.

“Sometimes, you simply must follow your heart,” she said. “No reasonable man can blame you for that.” A smile. “No reasonable woman can, either.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Thank you, ma’am.”

He felt oddly weightless and untethered as he closed the door to her office. It was as if saying it, speaking this sudden, up-from-nowhere compulsion aloud, had made it real when before, it had only been…what? Idle thought? Passing fancy? Well, if it had ever been that, it was no longer. He was actually going to do it, actually going to leave behind comfort and predictability—
home
, meager as it was—to go looking for Tilda. It occurred to him that he might truly be mad. He was surprised to feel himself smiling again.

The day passed in a blur, passed as so many of his days had passed in the months since he came here, in routine worn meaningless and forgettable by repetition. How many books had he shelved? How many floors had he swept? How many windows had he cleaned? It felt like thousands.

But he would miss this place. For a man who loved books, it was as near as earth ever came to heaven. He would miss Homer and Milton,
Aeschylus, and all the other poets and storytellers who had lightened his days while he was here. But he missed Tilda more.

When he was done working, he collected his wages, bid Mary Cuthbert a last farewell, and walked out into a fine, misting rain. For a moment, he simply stood atop the double stairwells that curled in opposite directions down to the street. A tradesman’s wagon clattered by on the rough bricks. A Negro woman pushing a cart sang out, “Pepperpot, right hot! Who will buy some pepperpot?” Two white women walked past her, lost in conversation, not even noticing she was there.

From across the street, he could see through the trees the back of the old Pennsylvania statehouse where the founders had debated their Declaration of Independence and Constitution. He found himself wondering, as he often did when he contemplated this view, how they could have sat there, powdered and bewigged, debating the rights of man, yet never see the hypocrisy and irony of returning home to be tended by slaves. They had even written slavery into the great document for fear of offending delegates from the South. But the reckoning had come and now the country lay in smoldering pieces, and he had no idea if, or how, it could ever knit itself together again.

At that moment, as if Sam’s thoughts had conjured him, Billy Horn stepped out from the trees behind the statehouse and walked toward him. Sam held his ground. His fists came up automatically when Horn was halfway across the street. But the other man tottered as if it required all his concentration just to stay upright, and his eyes were shiny as a new coin. Sam lowered his hands. He did not have to guess where Horn had spent the day.

“What do you want?” asked Sam.

Horn stopped, still a few feet away, and a humorless smile opened like a seam in the heavy beard. “What do I want? What do I want?” He turned the question over as if considering it closely. “I want a thousand Union greenbacks. I want a fetching wench or two to help me spend it.” He barked in a sudden wild guffaw, but tears tumbled from his eyes. “I want the life I used to have,” he added, softly. “I want my good right arm back, goddamn you. I would never have given it in the first place if I had known it was for the likes of you.”

“You are”—the word
inebriated
came to mind, but Sam thought better of it—“drunk. Go home.”

Horn shook his head sorrowfully. “I remember a time, and not so long ago, mind, you would never have dared talk to a white man that way. The world has changed, hasn’t it? Just since surrender. The world has changed.”

His eyes searched Sam’s as if he really needed to hear Sam’s answer. And Sam thought of how, that day, he had punched a white man in the face and renounced a job he loved in order to traipse to Mississippi, searching for a woman he had not seen, or even allowed himself to think of, in many years. “Yes,” he said, with more tenderness than he’d have thought possible. “The world has changed.” His whole life, everything he had ever been, everything he had ever known, thrown in the air like confetti, the pieces drifting down.
Changed
. And no one yet knew exactly what it was changing to. Drunken fool though Horn was, Sam did not blame him for his fear.

Horn nodded. “Well, I liked the world the way it was,” he said, and added after a pause, “though I expect you did not.”

It was, Sam knew, as close as Bill Horn could come to an apology. The white man’s eyes held Sam’s. He pursed his lips as if he were about to speak. Then he simply turned and stumbled off, disappearing into the foot traffic on the street. When he was gone, Sam turned up the collar on his frayed old Union coat and walked home to the boarding house off Lombard.

After dinner, he told Edwina Brewster he would no longer have need of her room. He told her to give away or sell his few meager articles of clothing and books.

Sam had no money. Mary Cuthbert had paid him $1.25 a day to work at the library. Edwina Brewster had charged him $5.00 a week to live in her boarding house. The difference had gone into clothing and books. So when he set out early the next morning, he didn’t walk to the docks and he didn’t walk to the train station. Instead, he walked until he reached the bridge that spanned the Schuylkill River. There, he paused and took in a breath. It smelled of chimney smoke, rotting fish, and the threat of rain. He had nothing in his hands, nothing in his pockets, nothing on his back except a shirt and a Union Army jacket, and he wondered again if he were not about to make the biggest darn fool mistake of his entire darn fool life.

And it occurred to him: yes. Quite possibly, he was.

Still, he shrugged and did the only thing that made sense to him: he started walking. He set off on foot in search of her.

Tilda. His Tilda.

On the Wednesday after the end of the war, Prudence Cafferty Kent surveyed for the final time the bedroom in which she had spent her entire life. It was a spacious, sunny room with a four-post bed, a brick fireplace, two settees, a dresser, a dressing table, a writing desk, and her favorite spot in the house—a bay window overlooking the stately, tree-lined seclusion of Louisburg Square below.

On the floor at the foot of the bed sat a steamer trunk, the lid open, already filled with dresses, bonnets, and shoes; a few treasured books; and some other effects. Only one item remained to be packed before the trunk could be sealed—a polished walnut box she took now from her writing desk as she went to sit on the ledge of the bay window.

She did not open it right away. Instead, she ran a finger along the gleaming surface, knowing this would be difficult and, in some part of her at least, wanting it just the same. A pair of carriages rattled past one another in the street below, the faint clop, clop, clop of horse’s hooves carrying to her ears. Prudence felt a tear slip her eye. She let it fall.

On the night before the battle in which he was killed, Captain James Kent of the 1
^st
Massachusetts Regiment had written a letter to his new wife back home in Boston. Now, two years later, Prudence steeled herself and raised the lid of the box in which all of Jamie’s letters were neatly stacked. She lifted the envelope containing his final letter off the top.