Roots: The Saga of an American Family

  Then a spring 1862 afternoon, when a rider came cantering down the Murray driveway, wearing the Confederate officer’s gray uniform, even from some distance he seemed vaguely familiar to Tom. As the rider drew nearer, with a shock Tom realized that it was the former County Sheriff Cates, the feed-store owner, whose counsel to Massa Murray had forced Chicken George to leave the state. With growing apprehension, Tom saw Cates dismount and disappear within the big house; then before long Matilda came hurrying to the blacksmith shop, her brows furrowed with worry. “Massa want you, Tom. He talkin’ wid dat no-good feed-store Massa Cates. What you reckon dey wants?”

  Tom’s mind had been racing with possibilities, including having heard his customers saying that many planters had taken slaves to battles with them, and others had volunteered the war services of their slaves who knew trades, especially such as carpentry, leather-working, and blacksmithing. But he said as calmly as he could, “Jes’ don’ know, Mammy. I go find out is de bes’ thing, I reckon.” Composing himself, Tom walked heavily toward the big house.

  Massa Murray said, “Tom, you know Major Cates.”

  “Yassuh.” Tom did not look at Cates, whose gaze he could feel upon him.

  “Major Cates tells me he’s commanding a new cavalry unit being trained at Company Shops, and they need you to do their horseshoeing.”

  Tom swallowed. He heard his words come with a hollow sound. “Massa, dat mean I go to de war?”

  It was Cates who scornfully answered. “No niggers will go anywhere I’m fighting, to fly if they as much as hear a bullet! We just need you to shoe horses where we’re training.”

  Tom gulped his relief. “Yassuh.”

  “The major and I have discussed it,” said Massa Murray. “You’ll work a week for his cavalry, then a week here for me, for the duration of the war, which it looks like won’t be long.” Massa Murray looked at Major Cates. “When would you want him to start?”

  “Tomorrow morning, if that’s all right, Mr. Murray.”

  “Why, certainly, it’s our duty for the South!” said Massa Murray briskly, seeming pleased at his chance to help the war effort.

  “I hope the nigger understands his place,” said Cates. “The military is no soft plantation.”

  “Tom knows how to conduct himself, I’m sure.” Massa Murray looked his confidence at Tom. “Tonight I’ll write out a traveling pass and let Tom take one of my mules and report to you tomorrow morning.”

  “That’s fine!” Cates said, then he glanced at Tom. “We’ve got horseshoes, but you bring your tools, and I’ll tell you now we want good, quick work. We’ve got no time to waste!”

  “Yassuh.”

  Carrying a hastily assembled portable horseshoeing kit on the mule’s back, when Tom approached the railroad repair settlement at Company Shops, he saw the previously lightly wooded surrounding acres now dotted with long, orderly rows of small tents. Closer, he heard bugles sounding and the flat cracking of muskets being fired; then he tensed when he saw a mounted guard galloping toward him. “Don’t you see this is the Army, nigger? Where do you think you’re headed?” the soldier demanded.

  “Major Cates done tol’ me come here an’ shoe hosses,” Tom said nervously.

  “Well, the cavalry’s over yonder—” the guard pointed. “Git! Before you git shot!”

  Booting the mule away, Tom soon came over a small rise and saw four lines of horsemen executing maneuvers and formations, and behind the officers who were shouting orders, he distinguished Major Cates wheeling and prancing on his horse. He was aware when the major saw him there on the mule and made a gesture, whereupon another mounted soldier came galloping in his direction. Tom reined up and waited.

  “You the blacksmith nigger?”

  “Yassuh.”

  The guard pointed toward a small cluster of tents. “You’ll stay and work down by those garbage tents. Soon as you get set up, we’ll be sending horses.”

  The horses in dire need of new metal shoes came in an unending procession across Tom’s first week of serving the Confederate cavalry, and from first dawn until darkness fell, he shod them until the underside of hooves seemed to become a blur in his mind. Everything he overheard the young cavalrymen say made it sound even more certain that the Yankees were being routed in every battle, and it was a weary, disconsolate Tom who returned home to spend a week serving the regular customers for Massa Murray.

  He found the women of slave row in a great state of upset. Through the previous full night and morning, Lilly Sue’s sickly son Uriah had been thought lost. Only shortly before Tom’s return Matilda, while sweeping the front porch, had heard strange noises, and investigating she had found the tearful, hungry boy hiding under the big house. “I was jes’ tryin’ to hear what massa an’ missy was sayin’ ’bout freein’ us niggers, but under dere I couldn’t hear nothin’ atall,” Uriah had said, and now both Matilda and Irene were busily trying to comfort the embarrassed and distraught Lilly Sue, whose always strange child had caused such a commotion. Tom helped to calm her, then described to the family his own week’s experience. “Ain’t hardly nothin’ I seed or heared make it look no better,” he concluded. Irene tried a futile effort to make them all feel at least a little better. “Ain’t never been free, so ain’t gwine miss it nohow,” she said. But Matilda said, “Tell y’all de truth, I’se jes’ plain scairt somehow us gwine wind up worse off ’n we was befo’.”

  The same sense of foreboding pervaded Tom as he began his second week of horseshoeing for the Confederate cavalry. During the third night, as he lay awake, thinking, he heard a noise that seemed to be coming from one of the adjoining garbage tents. Nervously Tom groped, and his fingers grasped his blacksmithing hammer. He tipped out into the faint moonlight to investigate. He was about to conclude that he had heard some foraging small animal when he glimpsed the shadowy human figure backing from the garbage tent starting to eat something in his hands. Tipping closer, Tom completely surprised a thin, sallow-faced white youth. In the moonlight for a second, they stared at each other, before the white youth went bolting away. But not ten yards distant, the fleeing figure stumbled over something that made a great clatter as he recovered himself and disappeared into the night. Then armed guards who came rushing with muskets and lanterns saw Tom standing there holding his hammer.

  “What you stealin’, nigger?

  Tom sensed instantly the trouble he was in. To directly deny the accusation would call a white man a liar—even more dangerous than stealing. Tom all but babbled in his urgency of knowing that he had to make them believe him. “Heared sump’n an’ come lookin’ an’ seed a white man in de garbage, Massa, an’ he broke an’ run.”

  Exchanging incredulous expressions, the two guards broke into scornful laughter. “ We look that dumb to you, nigger?” demanded one. “Major Cates said keep special eye on you! You’re going to meet him soon’s he wakes up in the morning, boy!” Keeping their gazes fixed on Tom, the guards held a whispered consultation.

  The second guard said, “Boy, drop that hammer!” Tom’s fist instinctively clenched the hammer’s handle. Advancing a step, the guard leveled his musket at Tom’s belly. “Drop it!”

  Tom’s fingers loosed and he heard the hammer thud against the ground. The guards motioned him to march ahead of them for quite a distance before commanding him to stop in a small clearing before a large tent where another armed guard stood. “We’re on patrol an’ caught this nigger stealin’,” said one of the first two and nodded toward the large tent. “We’d of took care of him, but the major told us to watch him an’ report anything to him personal. We’ll come back time the major gets up.”

  The two guards left Tom being scowled at by the new one, who rasped, “Lay down flat on your back, nigger. If you move you’re dead.” Tom lay down as directed. The ground was cold. He speculated on what might happen, pondered his chances of escape, then the consequences if he did. He watched the dawn come, then the first two guards returned as noises within the tent said that Ma
jor Cates had risen. One of the guards called out, “Permission to see you, Major?”

  “What about?” Tom heard the voice growl from within.

  “Last night caught that blacksmith nigger stealing, sir!”

  There was a pause. “Where is he now?”

  “Prisoner right outside, sir!”

  “Coming right out!”

  After another minute, the tent flap opened and Major Cates stepped outside and stood eyeing Tom as a cat would a bird. “Well, highfalutin’ nigger, tell me you been stealin’! You know how we feel about that in the Army?”

  “Massa—” Passionately Tom told the truth of what had happened, ending, “He was mighty hungry, Massa, rummagin’ in de garbage.”

  “Now you got a white man eating garbage! You forget we’ve met before, plus I know your kind, nigger! Took care of that no-good free nigger pappy of yours, but you slipped loose. Well, this time I got you under the rules of war.”

  With incredulous eyes, Tom saw Cates go striding to snatch a horsewhip hanging from the pommel of his saddle atop a nearby post. Tom’s eyes darted, weighing escape, but all three guards leveled their muskets at him as Cates advanced; his face contorted, raising the braided whip, he brought it down lashing like fire across Tom’s shoulders, again, again . . .

  When Tom went stumbling back in humiliation and fury to where he had been shoeing the horses, uncaring what might happen if he was challenged, he seized his kit of tools, sprang onto his mule, and did not stop until he reached the big house. Massa Murray listened to what had happened, and he was reddened with anger as Tom finished, “Don’t care what, Massa, I ain’t gwine back.”

  “You all right now, Tom?”

  “I ain’t hurt none, ’cept in my mind, if dat’s what you means, suh.”

  “Well, I’m going to give you my word. If the major shows up wanting trouble, I’m prepared to go to his commanding general, if necessary. I’m truly sorry this has happened. Just go back out to the shop and do your work.” Massa Murray hesitated. “Tom, I know you’re not the oldest, but Missis Murray and I regard you as the head of your family. And we want you to tell them that we look forward to us all enjoying the rest of our lives together just as soon as we get these Yankees whipped. They’re nothing but human devils!”

  “Yassuh,” Tom said. He thought that it was impossible for a massa to perceive that being owned by anyone could never be enjoyable. As the weeks advanced into the spring of 1862, Irene again became pregnant, and the news that Tom heard daily from the local white men who were his customers gave him a feeling that Alamance County seemed within the quiet center of a hurricane of war being fought in other places. He heard of a Battle of Shiloh where Yankees and Confederates had killed or injured nearly forty thousand apiece of each other, until survivors had to pick their way among the dead, and so many wounded needed amputations that a huge pile of severed human limbs grew in the yard of the nearest Mississippi hospital. That one sounded like a draw, but there seemed no question that the Yankees were losing most of the major battles. Near the end of August Tom heard jubilant descriptions of how in a second Battle of Bull Run, the Yankees had retreated with two generals among their dead, and thousands of their troops straggling back into Washington, D.C., where civilians were said to be fleeing in panic as clerks barricaded federal buildings, and both the Treasury’s and the banks’ money was being shipped to New York City while a gunboat lay under steam in the Potomac River, ready to evacuate President Lincoln and his staff. Then at Harpers Ferry hardly two weeks later, a Confederate force under General Stonewall Jackson took eleven thousand Yankee prisoners.

  “Tom, I jes’ don’ want to hear no mo’ ’bout dis terrible war,” said Irene one evening in September as they sat staring into their fireplace after he had told her of two three-mile-long rows of Confederate and Yankee soldiers having faced and killed each other at a place called Antietam. “I sets here wid my belly full of our third young’un, an’ it somehow jes’ don’ seem right dat all us ever talks’bout any mo’ is jes’ fightin’ an’ killin’—”

  Simultaneously then they both glanced behind them at the cabin door, having heard a sound so slight that neither of them paid it any further attention. But when the sound came again, now clearly a faint knock, Irene, who sat closer, got up and opened the door, and Tom’s brow raised hearing a white man’s pleading voice. “Begging pardon. You got anything I can eat? I’m hungry.” Turning about, Tom all but fell from his chair, recognizing the face of the white youth he had surprised among the garbage cans at the cavalry post. Quickly controlling himself, suspicious of some trick, Tom sat rigidly, hearing his unsuspecting wife say, “Well, we ain’t got nothin’ but some cold cornbread left from supper.”

  “Sho’ would ’preciate that, I ain’t hardly et in two days.”

  Deciding that it was only bizarre coincidence, Tom now rose from his chair and moved to the door. “Been doin’ a l’il mo’n jes’ beggin’, ain’t you?”

  For half a moment the youth stared quizzically at Tom, then his eyes flew wide; he disappeared so fast that Irene stood astounded—and she was even more so when Tom told her whom she had been about to feed.

  The whole of slave row became aware of the incredible occurrence on the next night when—with both Tom and Irene among the family gathering—Matilda mentioned that just after breakfast, “some scrawny po’ white boy” had suddenly appeared at the kitchen screen door piteously begging for food; she had given him a bowl of leftover cold stew for which he had thanked her profusely before disappearing, then later she had found the cleaned bowl sitting on the kitchen steps. After Tom explained who the youth was, he said, “Since you feedin’ ’im, I ’speck he still hangin’ roun’. Probably jes’ sleepin’ somewhere out in de woods. I don’ trust him nohow; first thing we know, somebody be in trouble.”

  “Ain’t it de truth!” exclaimed Matilda. “Well, I tell you one thing, if he show me his face ag’in, I gwine ax him to wait an’ let’im b’leeve I’se fixin’ ’im sump’n while I goes an’ tells massa.”

  The trap was sprung perfectly when the youth reappeared the following morning. Alerted by Matilda, Massa Murray hurried through the front door and around the side of the house as Matilda hastened back to the kitchen in time to overhear the waiting youth caught by total surprise. “What are you hanging around here for?” demanded Massa Murray. But the youth neither panicked nor even seemed flustered. “Mister, I’m just wore out from travelin’ an’ stayin’ hungry. You can’t hold that ’gainst no man, an’ your niggers been good enough to feed me something.” Massa Murray hesitated, then said, “Well, I can sympathize, but you ought to know how hard the times are now, so we can’t be feeding extra mouths. You just have to move on.” Then Matilda heard the youth’s voice abjectly pleading, “Mister, please let me stay. I ain’t scared of no work. I just don’t want to starve. I’ll do any work you got.”

  Massa Murray said, “There’s nothing for you here to do. My niggers work the fields.”

  “I was born and raised in the fields. I’ll work harder’n your niggers, Mister—to just eat regular,” the youth insisted.

  “What’s your name and where you come here from, boy?”

  “George Johnson. From South Carolina, sir. The war pretty near tore up where I lived. I tried to join up but they said I’m too young. I’m just turned sixteen. War ruint our crops an’ everything so bad, look like even no rabbits left. An’ I left, too, figgered somewhere—anywhere else—had to be better. But seem like the only somebody even give me the time of day been your niggers.”

  Matilda could sense that the youth’s story had moved Massa Murray. Incredulously then she heard, “Would you know anything at all about being an overseer?”

  “Ain’t never tried that.” The George Johnson youth sounded startled. Then he added hesitantly, “But I told you ain’t nothin’ I won’t try.”

  Matilda eased yet closer to the edge of the screen door to hear better in her horror.

  “I’ve always
liked the idea of an overseer, even though my niggers do a good job raising my crops. I’d be willing to try you out for just bed and board to start—to see how it works out.”

  “Mister—sir, what’s your name?”

  “Murray,” the massa said.

  “Well, you got yourself an overseer, Mr. Murray.”

  Matilda heard the massa chuckle. He said, “There’s an empty shed over behind the barn you can move into. Where’s your stuff?”

  “Sir, all the stuff I’ve got, I’ve got on,” said George Johnson.

  The shocking news spread through the family with a thunder-bolt’s force. “Jes’ couldn’t b’leeve what I was hearin’!” exclaimed Matilda, ending her incredible report, and the family’s members fairly exploded. “Massa mus’ be goin’ crazy!” . . . “Ain’t we run his place fine ourselves?” . . . “Jes’ ’cause dey both white, dat’s all!”. . . “’speck he gwine see dat po’ cracker different time we sees to it’nough things go wrong!”