and the stable, I heard their rumors, their boasts, their threats, and even (reading between the lines) their fears. None of these men was eager to go up the mountain after Brown. Not after Iron Bridge. They were all waiting on Holliday, the head of the Virginia militia, to arrive from the Tidewater. The private talk (for a stable and tavern boy heard lots of private talk) of Holliday’s agents, who were already in town arranging provender, was that these over-the-mountain fur-hat hillibillies didn’t really know how to deal with ‘niggers,’ as white folks felt free to call us in those days. The fur-hat hillbillies let them talk. Though the militia, press, government, and army alike, stayed at the Planters or the Potomac, those who weren’t ‘on found’ tended to eat lunch at least at Mama’s. It was cheaper and better. Everyday the big parlor was filled with a wild mix of white men, and the backyard, under the catalpa tree, with colored. Mama gave all the same fare: cornbread and beans, greens and hamhocks too fat for eating (a hamhock in those days, great-grandson, would flavor a week’s beans; they weren’t your skinny wartime hams), chicken, pork, squirrel and dove in season, rabbit and catfish, all the game and fish brought from her extensive network of slave and free black entrepreneurs. Mama had her partialities, though, and she would often give me a plate of pigeon breasts or sweet little squirrel hearts to set down near a certain favorite, always a preacher, and always colored. (We didn’t get white preachers whatsoever; I doubt Mama would consider them real preachers anyhow.) Mama was in her element, serving rough men strong food and making money: for though she was a slave, she managed all of the old German’s money. She liked a crowd as much as Deihl shunned society. Her warmth in this crowd was in contrast to her brooding silence in private. I found her, my own mother, proud, cold, shy, and mysterious; she seemed to come alive around others, but alone she was remote and distant. I regretted being an only child almost as much as I regretted slavery, though I knew the two were linked; Mama had told me that the reason she’d been sold to Deihl was because she could bear no children after me. I think now, looking back, that the lonely life of semi-freedom in town, in a white man’s house, killed something in her by taking her away from her people. But she had wanted it; she managed both our lives and was a slave in name only. Those were strange days, great-grandson. Two countries were fighting a war by night but eating out of the same pot of greens by day. In fact, the whites seemed positively friendly that August, thinking, I’m sure, that the ‘niggers’ who weren’t up the mountain liked both slavery and them. This particular one of their illusions didn’t survive the winter. The black folks, especially those in the town, seemed more mistrustful of one another than of the white folks in those first months of the war. Maybe it was the affair of Granny Lizbeth that did it. All the talk under the catalpa out back was of mules and weather and food, as if there were no such thing as the fire on the mountain, no army of abolitionists burning plantations and setting slaves free. I used to study those dark faces and wonder: did they really believe nothing had changed? Or was it part of the centuries-old mime the African played for the whites and, ultimately, for ourselves as well. We kids were going through our own changes. Since the raid, and especially since the night I lost Sees Her and found the flag (as I think of it), Cricket was more brotherly and less ornery than usual. He didn’t pick on me and boss me around like before. Meanwhile, the few friends I had had among the white kids in town, such as Sean Coyne, were gone. I didn’t see them anymore, not after Iron Bridge, not after the courthouse for sure. And I didn’t miss them either, except for Sean. I later learned he was killed at Roanoke
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