James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

It deadened her. She’d let me into her room to clean and tidy and give her water and empty bedpans and so forth. But soon as I was done, out I went. She wouldn’t say more than a few words to me. Seemed like she was emptied out, like a glass of water poured onto the ground. Her window looked over the slave yard—you could just see the edge of it, and it gradually filled back up—and many an afternoon I’d walk in on her and find her staring down there, cussing. “They ruined everything,” she said. “God-damn niggers.” She complained the hanging throwed her business off, though the lines of customers outside her room was still long. She’d stand at the window, cussing about the whole business, and would throw me out on one pretext or another, leaving me to sleep in the hallway. She kept her door closed always. When I come by offering to teach her letters, she weren’t interested. She simply stayed inside that room and humped them fellers dry, and some of ’em even took to complaining she fell asleep right in the middle of the action, which wouldn’t do.

I was lost. And also—and I ought to say it here—I growed so desperate for her, I gived some thought to stop playing a girl. I didn’t want it no more. Watching Sibonia changed me some. The remembrance of her picking that feller up at the scaffold, saying, “Be a man,” why, that just stuck in my craw. I weren’t sorry she was dead. That’s the life she chose to get rid of, in her own form and fashion. But it come to me that if Sibonia could stand up like a man and take it, even if she was a woman, well, by God, I could stand up like a man, even if I weren’t acting like one, to declare myself for the woman I loved. The whole damn thing was jippity in my head, but there was a practical side, too. Miss Abby had lost four slaves to that hanging—Libby, Sibonia, and two men, fellers named Nate and Jefferson. And while she’d been hinting my time on my back was coming, I figured she could use another man or two to replace them that was hung. I figured I would fit the bill. At age twelve, I weren’t quite a man, and I never was a big man, but I was a man still, and now that she had lost a lot of money, Miss Abby might see things my way and take me as a man, since I was a hard worker no matter how the cut comes or goes. I reckon I decided I didn’t want to play like a girl no more.

This is what happens when a boy becomes a man. You get stupider. I was working against myself. I risked being sold south and losing everything ’cause I wanted to be a man. Not for myself. But for Pie. I loved her. I was hoping she would understand me. Accept me. Accept my courage about throwing off my disguise and being myself. I wanted her to know I weren’t going to play girl no more, and for that reason, I was expecting she’d love me. Even though she weren’t being good to me, she never turned me away outright. She never said, “Don’t come back.” She always let me in her room to clean up and tidy a little bit, and I took that to be encouragement.

I had them thoughts in my head one afternoon and decided I was done with the whole charade. I went up to her room with the words ready in my mouth to say ’em. I opened the door, closed it tight, for I knowed her chair sat behind the dressing partition, which set by the window, so that she could look out, for you could set there and see the slave pen and past the alley outside, and she favored setting in that chair, looking out into the alley.

When I come into the room I couldn’t see her from the door, but I knowed she was there. I couldn’t quite face her, but my mind was set, so I spoke to the partition and declared what was in my heart. “Pie,” I said, “no matter how the cut goes or comes, I’m gonna face it. I’m a man! And I’m gonna tell Miss Abby and everybody else in this tavern who I am. I’ll explain everything to ’em.”

It was quiet. I looked behind the partition. She weren’t there. That was unusual. Pie hardly ever left her room, ’specially since she had that money hidden under her bed.

I checked the closet. The back stairs. Under the bed. She was gone.

I stole around to the kitchen to look for her, but she weren’t there, either. I went to the saloon. The outhouse. Gone. I went back to the slave pen and didn’t find her there, neither. It was empty, for the few slaves that was held out there spent most days loaned out or working elsewhere. I looked up and down the alley by the pen. Not a soul. I turned and was about to head back inside the hotel when I heard a noise from Darg’s hut, on the other side of the alley, directly across from the slave yard. It sounded like struggling and fighting, and I thought I heard Pie squawking in there, in pain. I whipped over there quick.

As I hurried over, I heard Darg cursing and the sound of skin hitting skin, and a yelp. I rushed to the doorway.

It was fastened by a nail from the inside, but you could push it open a crack and peer inside. I peeked in there and seen something I would not soon forget.

From the sliver of lights in the broken shutter I seen my Pie in there on a straw bed on the floor, buck naked, on all fours, and behind her was Darg, holding a little tree switch about six inches long, and he was just doing her something terrible, just having his way with her and striking her with that whip at the same time. Her head was throwed back and she was howling while he rode her and called her a high-yellow whore and turncoat for turning in all them niggers and revealing their plot. He whipped her with that switch and called her every name he could think of. And she was hollering that she was sorry and had to confess it to someone.

I kept a two-shot pepperbox revolver under my dress, fully loaded, and I would’a busted in there and put both loads in his head right then, but for her look of liking the whole business immensely.

Inever said nothing to nobody about what I seen. I done my duties around the Pikesville Hotel like normal. Pie come to me a few days later and said, “Oh, sweetie, I been so terrible to you. Come on back to my room and help me out, for I wants to work on my letters.”

I didn’t have the spirit for it, to be honest, but I tried. She seen I weren’t shining up to her like normal, and got mad and frustrated and throwed me out as usual, and that was the end of it. I was turned out in a way, changing, and for the first time was coming to some opinions of my own about the world. You take a boy and he’s just a boy. And even when you make him up like a girl, he’s still a boy deep down inside. I was a boy, even though I weren’t dressed like one, but I had my heart broke as a man, and ’cause of it, for the first time I had my eye on freedom. It weren’t slavery that made me want to be free. It was my heart.

I took to spilling a little rotgut down my throat in them times. It weren’t hard. I growed up around it, seen my Pa go his way with it, and I went with it. It was easy. The men in the tavern liked me, for I was a good helper. They let me help myself to the suds at the bottom of their mugs and glasses, and when they found out I had a good singing voice, throwed me a glass of rye or three for a song. I sung “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Rebels Ain’t So Hard,” “Mary Lee, I’m Coming Home,” and religious songs I heard my Pa and Old John Brown sing. Your basic rebel was as religious as the next man, and them songs moved ’em to tears every time, which encouraged them to throw more happy water in my direction, which I put to good use, sousing myself.

It weren’t long before I found myself the life of the party, two sheets to the wind, staggering around the saloon, singing each night and tellin’ jokes and making myself handy the way my Pa done. I was a hit. But a girl in them times, colored or white, even a little one, who drinks and carouses with men and acts a fool, is writing an IOU that’s got to be cashed in sooner or later, and them pinches on my duff and old-timers chasing me ’round in circles at closing time was getting hard to take. Luckily, Chase appeared. He’d tried his hand at cattle rustling in Nebraska Territory and got broke at it, and he come back to Pikesville heartsick about Pie as I was. We spent hours setting on the roof of Miss Abby’s, drinking joy juice and pondering the meaning of all things Pie as we stared out over the prairie, for she wouldn’t have squaddly to do with neither of us now. Her room on the Hot Floor was for only those who paid now, no friends, and we two was clean out of chips. Even Chase, feeling low and lonely, tried his hand at getting fresh with me. “Onion, you is like a sister to me,” he said one night, “even more than a sister,” and he groped at me like the rest of them old-timers in the tavern, but I avoided him easily and he fell flat on his face. I forgived him course, and we went on like sister and brother from then on, my kidnapper and me, and spent many a night drunk together, howling at the moon, which I generally enjoyed, for there ain’t nothing better when you sunk to the bottom to have a friend there.