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Willie got up from his cot and walked unsteadily behind the mess hall and picked up the severed pieces of rope that had bound his wrists and ankles and the salvia-soaked gun rag that had been stuffed in his mouth and the sticks that had been threaded under his knees and pushed back in his teeth. He crossed the parade ground to Corporal Clay Hatcher's tent and went inside.
A small oil lamp burned on the floor, a coil of black smoke twisting from the glass up through an opening in the canvas. Hatcher slept on his side, in a pair of long underwear, his head on a dirty pillow, his mouth open. The inside of the tent smelled like re-breathed whiskey fumes, unwashed hair, and shoes someone had worn for long hours in a dirt field.
Willie kicked the cot. Hatcher lifted his head uncertainly from the pillow, his pale blue eyes bleary with sleep.
Willie threw the sticks and pieces of rope and thong into his chest. "God love Jim for his loyalty to a friend. But you finish your work, you malignant cretin, or one morning find glass in your mush," Willie said.
Hatcher sat up, his lips caked with mucus. "Finish my work?" he said stupidly.
"Did your mother not clean your ears when she dug you out of her shite? You and Atkins do your worst. I'll live to piss in your coffin, you pitiful fuck."
Hatcher continued to stare at Willie, unable to comprehend the words being spoken to him, the bad whiskey he had drunk throbbing in his head.
Willie started for him.
"I'm coming. I got to relieve myself first," Hatcher said, jerking backward, clutching his groin under the coarse cotton sheet. His throat swallowed in shame at the fear his voice couldn't hide.
EXCEPT for the house servants, Ira Jamison's slaves were free to do as they wished on Sunday. Until sunset they could visit on other plantations, sit upstairs at a white church, play a card game called pitty-pat, roll dice, or dance to fiddle music. Even though Jamison's slaves were forbidden to possess "julep," a fermented mixture of water, yeast, and fruit or cane pulp, Jamison's overseers looked the other way on Sunday, as long as no slave became outrageously drunk or was sick when he or she reported for bell count on Monday.
On Sunday mornings Flower usually put on her gingham dress and bonnet and walked one and a half miles to a slat church house, where a white Baptist minister conducted a service for slaves and free people of color after he had completed services at the white church in town. He was considered a liberal minister and tolerant man because he often allowed one of the congregation to give the homily.
This morning the homilist was a free man of color by the name of Jubal Labiche, who actually never attended services in the church unless he was asked to give the sermon. He owned slaves and, upstream from town, a brick kiln on Bayou Teche. Behind a long tunnel of oak trees on the St. Martinville Road he had built a house that sought to imitate the classical design of his neighbors' houses, except the columns and porch were wood, not marble, the workmanship utilitarian, the paint an off-white that seemed to darken each year from the smoke of stubble fires.
He was a plump, short man, his eyes turquoise, his skin golden, his hair flattened with grease against his scalp. Even though it was warm inside the building, he wore a checkered silk vest with his suit, a gold watch as fat as a biscuit tucked in the pocket.
"No one loved God more than St. Paul. He was bound and jailed and whipped, but no matter how great his suffering, he never listened to false prophets. When the Ephesians were of a rebellious mind, this is what he told them..."
Jubal Labiche fitted on his spectacles and looked down at the Bible that rested on the podium in front of him.
" 'Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ,'" he read.
The people seated on the plank benches knotted their hands in their laps uncomfortably or looked at their shoes, or glanced furtively at the white minister, a sheep-shorn rail of a man with a long nose and pointed chin. Some of the people in the congregation nodded assent, before anyone perceived a glimmer of dissent in their eyes.
Flower looked directly into Jubal Labiche's face. He stared back at her, then raised his eyes, as though he were caught in a sudden spiritual moment. He began a long prayer of thanks to God during which the congregation would say in unison "Amen" or "Yes, Lord" whenever he paused.
After the service Jubal Labiche was climbing into his carriage when Flower walked past him. He stepped back down in the road and automatically started to touch his hat, then lowered his hand.
"You seemed to have great interest in the homily," he said.
"St. Paul wrote down that slaves is s'pposed to do what the master say?" she asked. /
"He's telling us to put our faith in the Lord. Sometime the Lord's voice comes to us - through those who know more about the world than a simple servant such as myself," he replied, bowing slightly.
"How come we cain't learn from the Bible ourself? How come it got to be read to us?"
"I guess I'm not really qualified to talk about that," he said.
"I guess you ain't," she said.
She turned and walked down the dirt road through the cane fields, her bonnet in her hand, her hair blowing. She could almost feel his eyes burrowing into her back.
BUT all the way home she found no release from the words Jubal Labiche had read to the congregation. Was it the will of God that people should own one another? If that was true, then God was not just. Or was the Scripture itself a white man's fraud?
She warmed a tin cup of coffee and fixed a plate of corn bread and molasses, peas, and a piece of fried ham and sat down to eat by her back window. But her food was like dry paper in her mouth. She felt a sense of abandonment and loneliness she could not describe. Outside, the wind was hot blowing across the cane fields, and the blue sky had filled with plumes of dust.
God wanted her to be a slave and Jesus, His son, was a teacher of submission?
She looked through her front door at the empty yard and laundry house. The widow who ran the laundry for Ira Jamison was away for the day, gone with a suitor who owned a hunting cabin on stilts back in the swamp.
