The Book of Lost Friends(62)

“My Lord,” I say again, louder this time. “He’d be a old man by now. A old man, off down in Texas, and him still looking. And word’s come all the way to here, in that paper.”

My mind swells like the river after a hard rain. Grows and turns and runs and picks up everything that’s been heavy in my soul, that’s been laid up on the banks for months and years. I float myself along to where I ain’t been able to let myself go before. Are my people up there on that wall? Mama, Hardy, Het, Pratt…Epheme, Addie? Easter, Ike, and Baby Rose? Aunt Jenny, or li’l Mary Angel, who I saw the last time in that slave pen when she was just three years old and the trader’s man carried her off?

She’d be growed big by now, Mary Angel. Just three years younger than me. Fifteen, I guess. Maybe she’s gone to one of them schools for colored folks. Maybe she’d write in one of them little squares on the newspaper. Maybe she’s there on that wall, and I don’t even know it. Maybe they all are.

Need to find out. Learn what each of them little squares say. “Tell it to me. All that’s up there,” I ask Juneau Jane. “I can’t go from this place without knowing. I lost my people, too. When the Yankees kept coming up the river in their gunboats, Old Mister made a plan for all us to go refugee in Texas till the Confederates could win the war. Missus’s nephew Jep Loach stole some of us away, instead. Sold us all along the road, in ones and twos. I was the only one the Gossetts got back. The only one in my family that ended up refugee in Texas with him.”

We can’t leave this place. Not today. When the woman and the child come, I’ll think what to tell them, but hearing all them papers matters most.

“What’s that next one say?” First time in my life I ever been hungry for words, but I’m hungry for these like I been starved since a six-year-old child. I want to know how to look at the scratch marks up there and turn them into people and places.

Juneau Jane reads me another. Then another, but I don’t hear her Frenchy voice. I hear the rasp of a old woman, looking for the mama she ain’t seen since she was a little child like Mary Angel. Still carries that pain in her heart, like the wounds on the body, blood all dried up, but only way they’ll heal is to find what’s been lost.

I stand next to Juneau Jane, pick one square, then a different one, then another far across the wall.

A sister sold from her brothers in South Carolina.

A mother who carried and bore from her body nineteen babies, never let to keep any past four years old.

A wife, looking for her husband and her boys.

A mama whose son went off with his young master to the war and never come back.

A family whose boy went to fight in the colored troops with the Federals, them left with no way to know, did he die and was put under the ground on some blood-covered field, or is he living yet, in a place far off, up north even, or just wandering the roads, still lost in his own mind?



I stand there looking at the wall, counting the squares in my head, ciphering. There’s so many people there, so many names.

Juneau Jane drops off her tiptoes after a while, rests her hands on her britches. “We must depart this place, you said this yourself. We must travel from here while enough time remains to us. The horses are saddled.”

I look over at Missy Lavinia, who’s huddled herself in the far corner of the building, the quilt clutched up to her neck. She’s staring at the little rainbows tossed over the room by that one pretty cut-glass window. “Might be if we wait a day, Missy would come to her mind by then, be less trouble to us.”

“You made mention of your concern that the old woman who brings our goods has become suspicious.”

“I know what I said,” I snap. “I’ve done some more considering on it. Tomorrow would be best.”

She argues with me again. She knows we can’t be safe here much longer.

“You just a little fancy girl,” I spit out finally, sharp, bitter words that pucker my mouth. “Prissy and been spoiled all your years so far, be some man’s pet the rest of your years. What do you know about the things in them papers? About how it is for my kind? How it is to yearn after your people and never know, are they alive, are they dead? You ever going to find them again in this world?”

She can’t see that the squares on the paper are like the holding pens in a trader’s yard. Every one, a story. Every one, a person, sold from here to there. “Long time after the war, long time, on all the plantations, the mamas and the pappies, they still come—just walk up the road one day, say, ‘I am here to get my children. My children belong to me now.’ Some been tromping over the whole country, gathering up their kin. The old marses or missuses can’t stop them after the freedom. But nobody ever comes up the road for me. I wait, but they don’t come and I can’t guess why. Maybe this is the way I find out.” I stab a finger toward the papers, say again. “I got to know, or I ain’t leaving here. I won’t.”

Before I can do a thing about it, Juneau Jane starts ripping down papers. “We’ll bring them with us, for reading as we go.” She even picks up the cut scraps from the floor.

“It’s thievin’,” I say. “Be wrong to take them from here.”

“Then I will burn them.” She hurries to the stove, cat quick, and opens the door. “I will burn them, and we will have nothing left for disagreement.”