The Good Lord Bird

But truth be to tell it, it weren’t killing me to be with the Old Man. Lazy slob that I was, I growed used to being outside, riding the plains looking for ruffians, stealing from Pro Slavers, and not having no exact job, for the Old Man changed the rules for girls in his army after he seen how I’d been put to scrubbing back and forth. He announced, “Henceforth every man in his company has to shift for himself. Wash your own shirts. Do your own mending. Fix your own plate.” He made it clear that every man was there to fight slavery, not get his washing done by the only girl in the outfit who happened to be colored. Fighting slavery is easy when you ain’t got that load. Fact is, it was pretty easy altogether, unless you was the slave, course, for you mostly rode around and talked up how wrong the whole deal was, then you stole whatever you could from the Pro Slavers, and off you went. You weren’t waking up regular to cart the same water, chop the same wood, shine the same boots, and hear the same stories every day. Slave fighting makes you a hero, a legend in your own mind, and after a while the thought of going back to Dutch’s to be sold down to New Orleans, and barbering and shining shoes and my skin smacking against that rough old potato sack I wore versus the nice soft, warm wool dress I had begun to favor, not to mention the various buffalo hides I covered myself with, growed less and less sweet. I weren’t for being a girl, mind you. But there was certain advantages, like not having to lift nothing heavy, and not having to carry a pistol or rifle, and fellers admiring you for being tough as a boy, and figuring you is tired when you is not, and just general niceness in the way folks render you. Course in them days colored girls had to work harder than white girls, but that was by normal white folks’ standards. In Old Brown’s camp, everyone around him worked, colored or white, and fact is, he busied all of us so much that at times slavery seemed no different than being free, for we was all on a schedule: The Old Man woke everyone at four a.m. to pray and mumble and blubber over the Bible for an hour. Then he put Owen on me to teach me letters. Then he throwed Fred on me to teach me the way of the woods, then he throwed me back to Owen again, who showed me how to throw a bullet into a breechloader and fire it. “Every soul has got to learn to defend God’s word,” the Old Man said. “And these is all defenses of it. Letters, defense, survival. Man, woman, girl, boy, colored or white, and Indians, needs to know these things.” He teached me himself how to make baskets and bottom chairs. How you do it is simple: You take white oak, split it, and then it’s just a manner of folding. Inside a month I could make any kind of basket you wanted: musket basket, clothes basket, feed basket, fish basket—I caught catfish big and wide across as your hand. On long afternoons while we waited for the enemy to cross the trail, Fred and I went and made sorghum syrup from sugar maple trees. There weren’t nothing to it. You sap it out the tree, pour it in a pan, fire it over a fire, skim them skimmings off the top with a stick or fork, and you done. Most of your job is to put the syrup away from the skimmings on the top. When you cook it right, you got the best sugar there is.

I come to enjoy that first winter with the Old Man’s army, especially with Fred. He was as good a friend as a feller—or a girl who was really a feller—could want. He was more like a child than a man, which meant we fit together well. We never run short on playthings. The Old Man’s army stole everything from the Pro Slavers a child could want: fiddles, saltshakers, mirrors, tin cups, a wooden rocking horse. What we couldn’t keep, we used for target practice and blasted up. It weren’t a bad life, and I growed used to it and forgot all about running off.

Spring came on like it always did, and one morning the Old Man went out scouting by himself, looking for Pate’s Sharpshooters, and come back driving a big schooner wagon instead. I was setting by the campfire, making a fish basket when he rolled in. I looked up at the wagon as it rolled past and saw it had a busted-up back wheel with the hardwood brake shorn off. I said, “I knows that wagon,” and no sooner had I said it than Nigger Bob and five Negroes tumbled out the back.

He seen me right off, and while the rest tumbled out to follow the Old Man to the campfire to eat, he cornered me.

“I see you is still working your show,” he said.

I had changed over the winter. I had been out some. Seen a little bit. And I weren’t the meek little thing he had seen the fall before. “I thought you said you weren’t going to join this army,” I said.

“I come to live large like you,” he said happily. He glanced ’round, seen nobody was close, and then whispered, “Do they know you’re ... ?” and he done his hand in a wiggly way.

“They don’t know nothing,” I said.

“I won’t tell,” he said. But I didn’t like him having that on me.