The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (8 page)

After several days of this I reached an especially exciting part of the book, and before I knew it, late afternoon was almost gone and the first evening stars were getting ready to come out. I jumped up and ran for the buckets.

They were full.

From a bush came a voice, slow and soft: "Don't be scared, missy. I noted that you looked to be running out of daylight afore you run out of book, so I thought to lend a hand."

"Thank you," I whispered, and took off for home, buckets bouncing and spilling berries all the way, wondering was it elves or fairies or was God speaking to me from a bush the way He spoke to Moses.

The next day I looked around a little for tiny footprints or signs of burning before I sat down to read.

"Morning, missy," said the voice from the bush. "Looks like we're in the same business, you hunting God's bounty in the bushes and me in the creeks."

The stranger parted the bushes and looked through. He was no elf or fairy. He was a grown man with curly hair and whiskers. And he was brown. Very brown. Not like the sailors from the Sandwich Islands we had seen in San Francisco. Browner. He was not an Indian, for he wore more clothes than the Indians I'd seen around Lucky Diggins. Nor was he from South America like Friday in
Robinson Crusoe,
for his hair was not long and straight like Friday's.

I had never met a brown man before. There were none in our small Massachusetts town. I had heard that the barber in Acorn was the kind of brown man called colored man. Was this a colored man like the barber? My thoughts were so busy I stood stock-still and stared.

The brown man came out from behind the bush, lifted his pan in a salute, and walked down to the creek, where he swished that pan in the muddy ooze all day trying to wash gold from the gravel. I picked some and then ran home to help Mama make soap.

"Mama," I said, carrying out a bucket of meat scraps and bacon grease, "I saw a brown man. A colored man."

Mama looked up from the bubbling tub but said nothing. I could barely see her for the smoke from the fire and the steam rising from the kettle.

"Why are some people brown?" I asked her.

"Some people are brown like some people got red hair. We all belong to God," Mama said, stirring the boiling fat and ashes in the kettle.

"Are colored people same as us?"

"Probably have harder lives but otherwise I reckon so, though not everybody agrees. Some people think what you look like makes you what you are." Mama straightened up and stretched. "Only have to know Jimmy Whiskers to know that ain't so, such a good gentle heart in such an ugly bear of a man."

I saw the brown man every day as I continued picking berries and soon came to trust his soft voice, sad eyes, and kind face behind the scruffy beard. Sometimes he spoke, sometimes not. Sometimes he left me berries or greens, pigweed or miner's lettuce, which I took home for supper.

His name was Joe. He sang while he worked, songs full of sadness and longing.

"What you readin' there, missy?" he asked once.

"A tale of romance and adventure," I said.

Well, nothing would do then but for him to join me. Soon we were both sitting with our feet in the mud of Ranger Creek, swapping stories. He told me of Anansi the Spider, old John and the Devil, and Bruh Rabbit,
who was puny but smart. Then I would read out loud a spell. He greatly admired my reading and asked all the right questions: "Lord, what made him do that?" and "Couldn't she tell what a villain he was?"

Sometimes we shared my noon dinner, but he'd never eat bacon or salt beef. "Give me hog and hominy, and I'll live on hominy," he said. "Pigs is living critters treated like things, the way I was, and I'll not be eatin' 'em."

I finally got up the courage to ask the question Mama had failed to answer satisfactorily. Why are some people brown Joe?"

"Good Lord saw fit, and I figure I don't need a better reason than that."

Seemed like that was all the answer I was going to get. How did you come here? No other people like you around"

Joe wiped the sweat off his face with his sleeve. "I spent all my born days on Mr. Sawyers place in Virginia, jist Sawyer and the missus and me and four other slaves. I never can remember anyone of my own. Mr. Sawyer, he decides that farm ain't enough for him, and he brung us out west. Near the Big Muddy, Mrs. Sawyer says, 'John, I ain't going a step farther and set fire to the wagon." Joe scooped up a mess of muddy water in his pan. "Lord, what a stubborn lady. They hadn't settled the dispute when she up and died of camp fever." He whirled the pan so that the water and lighter particles splashed out. "So Mr. Sawyer bought another wagon and we come to Paddy's Bar, miners like thousands of others. At least we five were. Since Mrs. Sawyer died, Mr. Sawyer took to drink and jist sat and waved his rifle about and beat us if he thought there wasn't enough dust at the end of the day." Joe picked through the muck left at the bottom of the pan, looking for bits of color. Nothing in that pan. He stooped and scooped up another.

"One day a scraggly old fella on a mule says, 'Why do you take it? No slavery in California, you know.' I didn't know if he was right or he was wrong, but I saw this as my chance to take off, saying to Mr. Sawyer, 'You can shoot me, but you can't own me no more.' Mr. Sawyer, he was too dumb and too drunk to know was this true or not, just fell off his horse, so I left. Took nothing but this here pan and a pick and a bedroll; figured he owed me for all my free labor."

Joe stood up straight and stretched, then stooped down to scoop again. "I ain't found much since, just work tired-out claims others have abandoned. But what I find is mine. The belly that gets hungry is mine and the shoulders that ache are mine and the hands that bleed are mine and no other man's. I ain't no slave out here. While I'm on my own, I'm as good as free, and being free is everything."

His story sounded to me like one of Amos Frogge's ballads—coming across the country by wagon, escaping from a drunken master, fleeing alone into the wilderness to search for gold, living as a runaway slave.

One thing I didn't understand. "What's it mean being a slave?" I knew about slaves in ancient Rome, but somehow I didn't think Mr. Sawyer planned to feed Joe to the lions.

"A slave is a fella who belongs body and soul to another fella and has to do what he is told and go where he is bid and gets beat if he don't do it fast enough or good enough."

"Like being a child," I said.

"Nowhere near, missy. Chil'ren is loved and taken care of. A slave don't even own his own life or his wife or babies. A slave is a thing, like an axe or a bucket. Can be bought or sold or killed, whatever his owner wants. Ain't no light thing for a man to be a slave." He threw his pan high into the air and caught it with a grunt. "And I ain't one, not out here."

As the nights began to grow cold, I worried for Joe, sleeping in his bedroll on the shores of Ranger Creek and living on nuts and wild greens.

"Mama, with winter coming, we're going to have some empty beds, aren't we?"

"I reckon, but not too many, I hope," said Mama, who was chopping potatoes and onions for rabbit hash.

"Couldn't we rent one to my friend Joe? I know he could pay. He's had some luck washing for color."

"Who's Joe?"

"The brown man I told you about, at Ranger Creek."

Mama stopped chopping for a minute.

"Lucy," she said, "I can't rent a bed to a colored man. All my other boarders would leave."

"Not Jimmy."

Mama commenced chopping vigorously, as if she had to make up for that minute of rest. "Probably not Jimmy, but everyone else."

"Why?"

"Because lots of people think colored folk aren't fit to live with white people."

"Why not?"

"I don't exactly know why not. Scared maybe. Anyway, Mr. Scatter would never allow it."

"But, Mama, what will happen when it rains and snows and the ice—"

"Lord, Lucy, don't pester me. Your friend can sleep in Sweetheart's old shed and I'll make him breakfast and supper for ten dollars a week if he'll eat it outside. That's all I can do."

I ran back to Ranger Creek and told Joe.

"Now that's mighty nice, young lady, but I'll be fine—"

"No, you won't be fine when it rains ice for days at a time and you have no food and no fire and no shelter. Be reasonable, Joe."

"I suppose I could manage ten dollars a week if I traded some of this dust and maybe got me a town job. But..."

"But what, Joe? Spit it out." I sounded to my own ears like Mama.

"Out here where I see no one but you, I am a free man. But I worry that Mr. Sawyer or some other white man will find me and take me off to be a slave again. A town, even a little town, is too dangerous for me. I best stay out here."

"You have to come. You've never seen winters like we got here, with ice storms and buckets of rain." Besides, I liked having him around. We were friends. I enjoyed his stories, and he admired my reading. Not many people admired anything I did. "Please, Joe."

Joe was silent. Then he sighed. "Well then, Miss Lucy, now I got me this fine place to live, all I need is a name."

I stopped my gleeful hopping and spinning to ask, "Isn't Joe your name?"

"Mr. Sawyer, he called all the men Joe so's he didn't have to bother remembering who was who. I think I need me a real name that belongs only to me."

I thought of
The Count of Monte Cristo
under my pillow. "Maximilian," I said. "Maximilian is such an elegant name."

Joe rubbed his chin. "Maximilian don't seem to suit me, missy."

"Ivanhoe or Damian or Appassionato?"

"No, seems like I don't feel like an Appassionato, thanks all the same."

A few days later, when Joe showed up to claim his bed in the shed, I said, "I have a present for you."

"You ain't got no call to get me presents, missy."

"Nevertheless, here it is." I stretched out my fist and slowly opened it. The hand was empty.

Joe looked at me.

"It's a name. For you. My father's name. Bernard."

"Bernard." Joe rubbed his beard. "Bernard. It's a mighty fine name, missy. A name I'd be proud to carry. Bernard."

"There's more," I added, sticking out my other fist. "A last name." He blinked.

I opened my hand. "Freeman," I said.

S
PRING
1851

In which a wandering preacher saves Butte's body
and Amos Frogge's soul, and my new
Massachusetts scheme goes awry

Clyde Claymore came riding into Lucky Diggins with the wildflowers the next spring. He was a big man, tall and bulky, dressed in rusty black linsey-woolsey and a wide-brimmed black hat. He rode into town on a mule so small that Clyde's enormous square-toed boots dragged in the mud. I thought Clyde could more easily carry that mule than the mule carry Clyde.

I first saw him from the boarding house porch, where the broom and I were engaged in our constant war against mud.

"Young lady," he boomed as though calling in a canyon, "where is the town of Lucky Diggins?"

"This is it," I said.

"The rest of it, I mean."

"This is all."

"All? This little place?"

Surprised, I looked around. California was now one of the great United States of America, and Lucky Diggins was booming. The town boasted Mr. Scatter's saloon and a new drinking place opened by a gambler called Poker John Lewis, a general store of wood as well as the boarding house with a real porch, the smithy, the card parlor, a supply store with picks and axeheads and shovels, a restaurant that served flapjacks, beans, and bacon, and ten or so cabins and tents in town and maybe fifty more stretched up and down the river. And on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights when miners came down from the hills, the population swelled by hundreds and there weren't nearly enough places for them all to eat and drink and sleep.

Now I saw Lucky Diggins again through the eyes of a stranger. Small and dirty, the town smelled of privies. The streets were mud and dust, littered with oyster tins, ham bones, and broken shovels. Nearby trees had been butchered to stumps in order to erect the ugly raw wood buildings rising along the street. Worst of all, it wasn't Massachusetts and never would be.

I turned my back on the stranger and went into the kitchen to stir the supper beans. My pickle crock, I thought. It had been sitting there untouched for months. There was no way to earn money in the winter unless I could sell mud to someone, but now that spring was here, I determined to get out the crock, dust it off, and start working my way back home once more. Time to fire up the pie business again.

I sighed. More getting up early, traipsing up and down the river, and trying to avoid crazy men in their union suits.

The big man came into the kitchen. "Young lady," he boomed.

"Ma!"

"Don't shout, Lucy. I'm here. Want a bed, mister?" she asked, wiping her hands on her apron and giving a cold, appraising eye to the stranger and the mud on his boots.

"I do indeed, ma'am, praise the Lord. I am Brother Clyde Claymore, minister of the Free and Independent Church of Christ's Brethren, come to save souls, and I wonder if there is about here a family that might like the pleasure of taking me in for a spell in Jesus' name."

Mama frowned. Our pastor in Massachusetts had baptized and married and buried Whipples for forty years and had eaten Sunday suppers and Tuesday lunches with them and had his socks darned and his coat pressed by one Whipple woman or another. But he had refused to bury Pa because Pa was not a church-going man, and ever since, Mama said she had no use for religious men. Said they left a bad taste in her mouth, like old mushrooms.

Finally she answered him. "There ain't many families around here at all. There are the Flaggs, but you won't like staying there unless you like sleeping with coyotes, them being the wild sort. Mr. Scatter might do, but he has an unmarried daughter with marriage in mind, and most of the rest live in shacks or tents and don't have room to swing a cat by the tail, much less take in a stranger. This is about the only place in town to stay."