My Name's Not Friday (27 page)

‘Don’t make the boy stand there, Hubbard.’ Celia takes us both by the arm and pushes us gently back to the door. ‘Bring him inside. We got a lot to talk about.’

They sit me down on some stuffed sacks that they got for chairs and I arrange myself with my best face forward as Celia brings us all some sliced apples on a plate with a spoonful of jam. She lights Hubbard’s oil lamp – that very same big oil lamp – and hangs it from a pole so we can see each other clearly.

‘I thought you were dead,’ I tell him again, unable to think of anything else to say.

Hubbard raises an eyebrow. ‘For a week or so I thought so too.’

‘But you know how stubborn he is,’ Celia interrupts. ‘I don’t think he’ll let the Lord take him till he’s good and ready. Anyway, Sicely turned out to be a good nurse and she knew a thing or two about Mrs Allen’s medicine cabinet.’

I can picture Sicely immediately, the same as she was when I’d last seen her, with bottles of ointment and her pockets full of bandages. But I don’t like to dwell on that moment cos Gerald’s there in the same room. I can still see him standing over by the window and I don’t want to think about how he was only moments later, spread out bleeding on the broken glass.

‘What’s happened to Sicely?’

‘She’s safe,’ Hubbard reassures me. ‘Least I think so.
Lizzie wanted to stay on at the cabins. Far as I know, that’s where they’ll be.’

‘She would’ve been waiting for Milly.’

‘That’s right. That’s what she wanted. You know the Allen house burned down? Well, there weren’t much of the plantation worth saving by the time the Yankees left, and Mrs Allen had no interest in it. She returned to live with her family just as soon as we buried Gerald.’

My heart breaks right there as the little piece of hope I had turns cold. I have to swallow hard before I can speak. ‘Did you bury him up at the old elm?’

‘Yes, we did,’ replies Hubbard quietly. ‘It’s where he would have wanted to be set to rest, right next to his daddy.’

I know the truth of that and I nod enthusiastically. ‘He’ll be happiest there.’

We each take a moment for ourselves.

‘Tell us what happened to you,’ says Celia, and she leans across and takes hold of my hand. ‘You look lucky to be alive.’

‘I suppose I am.’ I take a deep breath and begin from the point where I ran from the field. I tell ’em about the river and the embalmer, how I got to be blown up by old Whistling Dick and how the Major saved me. I get a lump in my throat knowing he’s probably still missing. ‘I ain’t as certain about things as I used to be,’ I tell ’em once I’m done. ‘The world’s a lot more complicated than I thought it was. I suppose if I’ve learned anything, it’s that.’

Celia smiles at me and says, ‘You’re still only young.’

Hubbard brings out his pipe from the pocket of his shirt and opens the tin where he keeps his tobacco.

‘So how come you’re here at the camp?’ I ask him. ‘How come you didn’t stay on at the plantation?’

‘We’re on our way to the Sea Islands. They’re off the
coast of Carolina. So we ain’t here for long. Just till we make some cash.’

‘Oh. I see.’ I weren’t prepared for that, but I should’ve been, cos that’s the way it always goes. All the good men always leave.

‘There’s a place called Port Royal,’ Hubbard continues. ‘It fell to the Yankees in the first few months of the war and they’re letting the slaves work it for themselves. I heard they’ll give you forty acres and a mule if you look like you can handle it.’

‘That can’t be true, can it?’

‘I think it is.’ Hubbard sits up straighter on his sack. ‘Lincoln wants to see what happens when us Negroes get our own land. It’s sort of an experiment. To see if we can make it work. People say that when the war’s over they might do the same for all of us.’

‘We want to be a part of that,’ says Celia. ‘We want to show ’em we can survive on our own when we have the opportunity.’

‘Of course,’ I say quietly, thinking how I could never get me and Joshua there, not when it took me such a long time to get us where we are now.

Hubbard has his pipe in his fingers, all ready to be lit, and he leans toward me as he puts a flame to it. ‘Did you ever find out what happened to your brother?’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I found him. He’s out working at the minute, but he’ll be back. Him and me always stick together, for better or for worse.’

‘Good!’ says Celia smiling. ‘Then we won’t have to go and find him before you come along with us.’

Celia’s nice. I don’t think I ever met a woman who’s so full of sweet thoughts as she is.

When I bring Joshua to meet her, he comes ready to impress, tells her he already has a job that pays a dollar a day, with a selection of fresh vegetables to bring home if there’s any left over. She tells him that’ll be ever so helpful.

When Sarah takes Joshua outside to show him the horse, I let Celia know that he ain’t as grown up as he likes to think. ‘He can be naughty too, but you don’t need to worry cos I can keep him in line.’

‘He seemed sweet as pie to me, but that’s good to hear.’

‘I’ve been looking after him since the day he was born, so there’s no way he can pull the wool over my eyes. I’ll be onto him soon as he begins to misbehave.’

‘Thank you, Samuel,’ she says again. ‘I am reassured.’

When Hubbard takes me out to the work line, he stands right next to me. The first officer that comes along wants men to dig trenches, and he passes me over but touches Hubbard’s arm.

‘I ain’t stepping out without my son,’ says Hubbard. ‘The two of us come together as a team.’

The man looks back at me doubtfully. ‘The boy’s too young.’

‘No, he ain’t. He’ll do the work of a fully grown man and I’ll do the work of two. That’s three days work for the price of two. Take it or leave it.’

The officer takes another look at the size of Hubbard, then he touches my arm and we both step out together.

After three weeks of work Celia says we’ve enough put by
to move on, and she reckons, if we’re thrifty, we might make it all the way to Carolina without needing to stop again. Hubbard agrees. ‘We’ll get to the Sea Islands,’ he tells me. ‘It won’t be long now, and if they give us land, we can build a house. There’s a lot you can do with a few acres and a mule.’

I say amen to that.

For my father is a shepherd and he leads me to lie by still waters.

Surely goodness and mercy will follow me always and I shall dwell in his house for ever.

There’s a long way ahead of us and the horse we have is knackered. She was knackered when Mrs Allen owned her and she’s knackered now, so she only takes small steps along the road. I don’t mind. I just hope her big ol’ heart don’t give out along the way.

Above us the sky holds dark clouds and sunshine, the sort of day that can’t decide which way it wants to go. It ain’t raining but it ain’t warm either. A patch of sunlight pools on the distant road and the hill we have to climb. It’d be nice to get there before it’s gone.

In the back of the wagon, Joshua and Sarah are squabbling like little kids. I’m riding up front with Celia and she says to ’em, ‘Why don’t you two jump out and run alongside for a bit? It’ll do you good to stretch your legs.’

‘Don’t want to,’ says Sarah.

‘Me neither,’ says Joshua.

He’s been getting younger by the day, but I reckon that’s a good thing cos it don’t do to grow up too soon, not if you don’t have to. Sarah made him a ring out of braided grass
and he won’t take it off his finger cos he says they’re married now. They might be too, cos the two of ’em ain’t stopped arguing ever since. Those kids always make me laugh.

Hubbard’s walking out in front. He’s leading the old nag so she goes in a straight line. These days his boots have got holes in the toes where they never would before, but he don’t mind – at least I don’t think so.

A broken-down shack comes into view and there’s an old fella standing out the front, hoeing at the dirt as he watches us arrive. Sometimes these poor folk give us trouble when we come their way. They ain’t never had much to call their own and they don’t like to see a family of black folks with a wagon and a horse. Used to be they could at least say they weren’t slaves. Now they can’t even say that. Not this side of the battle lines.

I jump down from the seat and run ahead to be with Hubbard. That way there’ll be two of us if there’s a problem, but it’s OK, the old man don’t hardly give us a second look, just keeps scraping at the earth as we walk on by.

‘You want me to take a turn with the horse?’

‘Sure,’ says Hubbard. ‘Be nice to sit up with Celia for a while.’

I take hold of the bridle and lead us on along the road. It ain’t hard work cos the nag don’t have the strength to pull against me. Our horse sure has got the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen, and she snickers when I rub my hand along the length of her nose. Perhaps she likes being free just the same as we do. ‘When we get there,’ I tell her, ‘we won’t ever make you work again. We’re gonna build you a lovely little shed all of your own and you can stand in it and eat hay all day.’

When we reach a trough that has water, I let her drink till she’s ready to move on. She sure takes a long time, but that
don’t matter. We’re going so slowly, another few minutes at the trough won’t make any difference.

Sometimes I think we’ll never get there, but then I look back the way we’ve come and that shack we passed is nearly out of view, so I guess we’ve travelled further than I thought.

The horse lifts her head from the trough, the water still dribbling from her chin, and she looks at me like she’s the one been waiting. I lead her back out on the road.

Up ahead of us that pool of sunshine is still there on the hillside. I don’t think I ever seen grass look so green as it does up there. And we make our way towards it, putting one foot in front of the other, taking each slow step at a time, knowing one day that we’ll get there.

Some time soon I’ll stand in sunshine.

It’s a common belief that authors have a very clear plan before they sit down to write something. That might be the case for some, but it wasn’t for me – at least not with this book.

This book began as a writing exercise in an Arvon Foundation class – a moment of panic where I had ten minutes to get something down on paper. It had to be a scene that used a sense other than sight, and I wrote about a boy, alone in darkness, thinking he’d been taken by God.

That boy turned out to be Samuel – a child from the American South, who believed completely in a personal, interventionist God. At this point I had no idea where or when he lived and I tried to keep those decisions open as I completed the first scene and then the backstory to it.

So I didn’t set out to write an historical novel. In fact, the idea of writing an historical novel made me wary. It felt like a burden and I think this was because I had an idea that history has an accepted canon of opinion, which you shouldn’t mess with. I didn’t like the constraints that suggested, imagining myself having to chisel away at stone rather than type.

But that’s not how history works. The story of slavery
has changed over time, with each generation of historians interpreting and unearthing source material according to their own values and the politics of the period in which they write. Everyone wants to put their own story into history and I came to realize that the America of the Civil War era held a multiplicity of truths, exactly as we do today.

Far from being a burden on my story, history became its inspiration. It didn’t confine me. It held me. It suggested scenes and plotlines. It mapped out themes that intersected with the unformed ideas already in my head. And my task as a novelist was the same as it would be had I set my story in the present or the future. I had to use detail to portray a narrative that was believable and then make choices about how best to illuminate the truths contained within the story.

One of my first choices concerned the use of accent and dialect and I chose to use only a few words that gave the reader a suggestion of the time and place. I thought to do otherwise would be too intrusive. This decision was particularly acute in the use of the word ‘nigger’, which would have been used more commonly in the period by both black and white, but which I chose to use infrequently and – with a single exception – only from the mouths of whites who were invested in slavery. This seemed to me the right balance – to bear witness to the past and still keep sight of the present.

There are several historical accounts that I have referred to or used within the book, mostly because I couldn’t improve on them. The lame man at auction is taken from a famous eyewitness account of a slave auction published in the
New York Daily Tribune
in 1859.

Reading Harriet Jacob’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl
had a huge influence on my understanding of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. I was particularly moved by her story of a madam who relieved a slave of her life savings to buy a new chandelier, promising to pay the poor woman back when she could. This seemed to me as cruel as any beating and it inspired the scene with Lizzie’s chickens. Her book also gave me the hiding place for Hubbard’s wife and child.

The chapter with the Major contains many references to the works of Walt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. These are fragmented and scattered throughout the text as the Major reads to Samuel while he is semiconscious. The passage from Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
found on p. 303 is pretty much verbatim and I thank him for it. It feels to me like the heart of the story.

Finally, to those who might read the book hoping to plot a precise timeline of the Civil War – you are bound to be frustrated! Some of the place names are invented and the timescale is obscure. Those who know their history might recognize Whistling Dick as a particular gun made famous in the siege of Vicksburg. They will also know that the cotton embargo occurred in the first year of the war. But if they use these as clues to when and where the scenes occurred, they are likely to reveal themselves as red herrings and force the reader to declare that the whole story is impossible and it couldn’t have happened exactly as I said it did because history and geography and all the textbooks in the world tell us otherwise.

But this is fiction, even if it is historical, and the truth is that it didn’t happen at all. At least it might not have done. And probably not exactly as I have described.

I thought it could be helpful to give an indication of the economics involved in buying and owning slaves at the time the book is set.

It became illegal to import slaves into America from 1808 and this produced a steady increase in the value of the slaves that were already owned. Although the average prices at auction rose or fell due to factors, such as the price of cotton, this increase continued right up until the Civil War.

The worth of a slave would vary according to many factors, such as whether they were male or female, young or old. It also varied according to the skills a slave might have, such as carpentry or cookery.

Although it is impossible to reach an exact figure, a single slave would represent an investment of between £20,000 and £60,000 in today’s money.

I use the word investment because that’s exactly how it was seen. A slave owner would calculate the cost of keeping a slave over their lifetime and the likely returns in productivity. Though this would mostly be through cotton profits, there was also a market in hiring out slave labour. The high price that Milly commands at the auction is not only due to her sexual desirability and her experience in 
serving at the house. As a young woman entering childbearing age she would be expected to produce children who would then become the property of her owner, to sell or keep as they wished.

Although most of the slave trade existed to serve the cotton and tobacco industries, it was not uncommon for townsfolk to own slaves as well. About twenty-five per cent of households owned a slave, many of them inherited through wills, and they were regarded as both status symbols and additional sources of income.

Even the outbreak of the war did not immediately undermine the price of slaves, and auctions continued to be held in Confederate states that were not occupied. As the war drew on, the market for slaves did become increasingly haphazard, as this piece from the
New York Times
from 1863 illustrates.