CHILD OF THE SOUTH
A sequel to The Road from Chapel Hill

Chapter 1

THE TRAIN was rickety and jam-packed with what seemed a thousand Negroes. Men and women of all ages, children of all sizes, laughing, shouting, boisterous with liberation, craned their necks to peer around each other at the passing world. With each lurch forward, the luggage racks shook fearfully, threatening to rain down trunks and boxes, buckets, pans and kettles onto unsuspecting heads. Bundles of clothes and bedding filled the spaces in between the seats like stuffing in a mattress and leaked out into the aisle, babies sleeping in the hollows and small children, fly-eyed and runny-nosed, perched triumphantly on top.

A clot of Rebel soldiers stood at one end of the carriage, half a dozen Yankees further down. The Negroes ignored the Rebels, but the Yankees they treated with jocularity, shouting back and forth across them, laughing when their blank faces showed they could not understand a word. I had never seen so many joyful blacks together in one place. The slaves back at the gold mine had been a miserable, suffering lot, intent on running off at any opportunity. These people reveled in each other like a great big family reunion, the few white civilians on the train bearing their noisy company with impassive resignation, only the flicker of a nostril or the turning of a shoulder hinting at emotions more extreme.

Their joy enchanted me, but at the same time it disquieted. All my life, Negro gatherings had been banned for fear of plots and insurrections. They are free now, I told myself, they can gather if they wish.

In the rush aboard I had not managed to secure a seat, and so clung resolutely to a seat back, half suffocated by the mass of bodies, my small bundle of possessions dangling from my other hand. From the conversations going on around me, I gathered that the Negroes were headed for the city in hopes of finding work that did not involve the dawn-to-dark hard labor of the farm. One spoke of signing for the Union army, another of taking ship north to a brand new life. I slipped my hand into my pocket, fingering my last few tiny bits of gold. With the price so high it was enough—I hoped it was enough—to support me until I also could find paying work.

The train progressed at a lamentable pace, rattling and creaking and heaving itself along the track like an old mule raised from sleep and inclined at any minute to fall back into it. I became breathless from the closeness, nauseated by the stench of bodies. I had eaten but a bowl of thin potato soup the night before and that morning had taken nothing. I let go of the seat back and began to push my way toward a window where I could lean out into the air, but trapped between the backs of two enormous Negroes, I felt faintness overcome me and the next thing I knew I was being passed hand to hand along the aisle and deposited in a broken-bottomed seat beside a window where the rush of air revived me. A woman with a basket on her knees sat on my other side and she was kind, calling out to the jostling legs and backs, "Get on out of the way, this poor thing is like to passed into eternity."

Here I found myself knee-to-knee with another white woman, very pale and thin, who gazed about her as though in bewilderment and did not return my nod of greeting. Next to her was a Negro woman with a washboard jammed between her knees and a baby in her arms, the child fussing and coughing and rolling up its eyes, the mother soothing it and humming, although the child was so feverish and sick that the minute I set my nurse’s eye on it I knew that it was done for.

Time rattled on, the train alternating between a crawling pace and a complete wheezing stop while it seemed to contemplate the wisdom of progressing. The sky darkened, the streaming air grew chill, and a rainstorm clattered overhead. The pale woman set up a wail for somebody to close the window. It was broken, however, and no amount of tugging by an obliging pair of strong black arms could get it closed, and all the other windows in the same forlorn condition. I pulled my cloak across my hair and crossed my arms and hunched my body to keep warm, from time to time scratching at myself—greybacks, perhaps, from my companions on the train. Or bedbugs from the roominghouse in Goldsboro where I had spent last night bedded with a large fat woman so afraid of being robbed that she packed her bags and bundles into bed around her, forcing me so close to the edge that I spent the night grateful to be barely more than skin and bone.

Now, dazed with sleeplessness, I fell asleep and dreamed about Mama. She stood above me, brushing out my hair with hard, unsympathetic strokes. And then her voice, "Such curl, it is unnatural," and the wrenching downward stroke, bringing tears into my eyes. Confused sounds, images of faces that I seemed to know, and I was standing by her grave. It was open, nothing there but bones.

A dreadful shrieking startled me awake—a passing train—and I sat shaking and disoriented, my cloak fallen to my shoulders and one hand raised as though to fend off an attacker.

"Lord, lord, now the poor child is having nightmares," said the old Negro woman next to me. Shifting her basket on her knees, she took my hand, and bringing it gently down, nudged against me with a sympathetic shoulder.

"Child, ain’t no one goin’ hurt you now."

For one disoriented moment I wanted to fling myself face-down onto this kindly woman’s lap and weep, but the basket saved me from myself, squatting there as if to say it owned the space and no intruders were allowed. And so I turned my concentration to the window, watching the damply swimming sky grow blue and bluer until all traces of the storm had vanished back behind.

We rocked through countryside where here and there a farmhouse regarded us with melancholy burned-out eyes, as though in mourning for the naked fields, which at that time of year should have been vigorous with newly sprouting crops. Negroes seemed everywhere about, walking, walking, bundles on their heads and children dragging on behind. The pale woman watched them through the window. She looked across at me. "Wandering," she hissed, "just wandering. It cannot come to any good."

I did not respond. I was thinking about Tom. Where was he now? Had he made it all the way to Canada? Perhaps, with the war over, he was heading home with all the rest. Perhaps if I watched closely I would spy him. Perhaps if I had not left Chapel Hill so hastily, I might have . . . no, I had to leave. I had to make this journey. I had to know the truth.