Sarny Read Free

candletaken from the big house under a blanket with little Delie and Tyler holding the blanket off the flame and read the paper again. Read not what it said in words but what it said in thoughts.
    Words were bad. Battles were going fine, it said, Confederacy winning wherever it fought, it said, big battle at a place called Gettysburg up in a North state named Pennsylvania. Said the Confederate states won a “resounding victory.” All that it said in words.
    But there were more words than those. Words in the back, two solid pages of names of the Confederate dead who died at Gettysburg in the fighting. Small print, names on top of names on top of names, each one a dead soldier and I don’t know nothing of battles and how they fought wars but I knew you didn’t win battles by having all those names of dead men. That’s how you lost battles, and lost wars, and I felt good. Not for the dead names. Might I hate them, every one was still some mother’s child and I felt bad for the mothers. But Lord it was good to think the North was winning.
    More words. Talked of how there wasn’t any more sugar, how people couldn’t ship cotton because of Northern ships closing harbors, how flour was getting on to being four andfive dollars a pound in the city. People winning wars don’t be paying five dollars a pound for flour—that comes from losing.
    So I told the rest that it was nigh over and that could we just hang on, hang on, soon we would be free when the North won the war.
    Except Waller he got more drunk and lost more and more playing cards in the town and one day he came out with another man.
    Tall man, greasy face narrow like a hand ax. Had a transport wagon with rings bolted in the floor boards to old chains. For transporting people. For moving slaves.
    But it came empty. Waller he wasn’t buying slaves.
    He was selling. Found later he had lost and lost more at cards with no money left and all he had to sell was slaves.
    Had us to sell.
    We all knew it was coming and we all hid in the quarters or in the barns or in the bushes thinking couldn’t he see us he wouldn’t think to sell us, crazy thinking. He took Billy for the wagon and another man named Tuck who had been watching me and I had looked at a time or two. And then Waller he found me in the quarters and took little Delie and Tyler and bolted them in the wagon.
    “No!” I screamed it and he turned fromthe wagon and hit me once with the whip, not to mark just to get my attention but I didn’t care.
    Couldn’t take my children.
    Sweet things, my heart, part of Martin part of me things, sweet little darling things that were all my soul and breath and what I lived for, all my memories and all my thoughts were little Delie and Tyler and that low man he chained them into the wagon with the two men.
    “They’ll fetch good,” he said to the man driving the wagon. “Those two pups. They’ll bring good …”
    I ran to the wagon and said, things, wild things, said I would do anything for him only please don’t take my children, not my heart, not all of me, not that.
    But he paid me no more mind than he’d pay a braying mule and when the wagon left I started to run after it but he grabbed me and dragged me back and put a shackle on my wrist and tied me to the same chains on the wall where they tied Delie to whip her.
    I watched the wagon, pulled at the chains and watched the wagon until it went around some trees and I couldn’t see it, and then I listened to the squeak of the wheels and the rattle of the chain until I couldn’t hear it and then I listened to the memory of the wagon inmy mind, every sound, every sight of it until it was dark and somebody brought me some corn bread and a piece of pork fat.
    First I didn’t eat. First I just squatted against the wall bound tight by chains and had dark thoughts, thoughts of what I would do to Waller when I got loose. Kill him, cut him, use an ax on him and then go for my children.
    But the thoughts wouldn’t work