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"You're right, it is, and I think you're too willing to do that, Flower," Abby said. She turned and looked into Flower's face.
"You worry for my soul?" Flower asked.
"The commandment is that we don't kill one another," Abigail said.
"Rufus Atkins and those men who raped me already tried to take my soul. They wanted to take my soul, my heart, my self-respect, my mind, my private thoughts, everything that was me. If they could, they would have pulled off my skin. Pray to God men like that never get their hands on you, Miss Abby."
They rode in silence the rest of the way to the cottage. But that evening Abigail carried the pistol and the gunpowder, bullets, and caps for it to Flower's cabin.
"I was unctuous at your expense. There's no worse kind of fool," she said, and handed the gun and ammunition through the door.
In the evenings and at night Flower read. She now had sixteen books in what she called her "li'l library," the books propped up neatly on her writing table between two bricks she had wrapped and sewn with pieces cut out of a red velvet curtain a white woman down the street had thrown away. Some of the books were leather-bound, some had no covers at all; many of the pages in her dictionary were dog-eared and loose in the binding. Each day in her journal she recorded the number of pages she had read, the new words she had learned, and her observations about characters and events that struck her as singular.
Some of her entries:
"Mr. Melville must have known his Bible. Ishmael and Hagar were cast out and unwanted and I think that is why the story of Moby Dick is told by a sailor with the name of Ishmael. I think Mr. Melville must have been a lonely man."
"I like Mr. Poe. But nobody can tell a story like Mr. Hawthorne. He tells us about the Puritans but what he tells us most about is ourself."
"I saw ball lightning in the swamp last night. It looked like a mess of electric snakes rolling across the water, bouncing off the trees. I wish I could write about it in a way other people could see it but I cannot."
For the remainder of the war she did not see Rufus Atkins or Ira Jamison. As with the mutilated ex-soldier, she sometimes experienced feelings for Jamison that made her angry at herself and ashamed of her own capacity for self-delusion. When she had last seen him, on the lawn at the Shadows, he had walked her to the street, his hand biting into her arm, and had fastened the gate behind her, without speaking, as though he were locking an animal out of the yard. But she found excuses for him. Hadn't she deliberately embarrassed him in front of his friends, making him somehow the instrument of the assault on her person rather than his overseer, Rufus Atkins? In fact, for just a moment, she had enjoyed her role as victim. For once she had left him speechless and awkward and foolish in front of others.
But just when she had almost convinced herself that the problem was perhaps hers, not his, and hence her attachment to him wa
s not a form of self-abasement, she remembered the hospital in New Orleans, Jamison's letter to General Forrest referring to the "unwashed niggers" who tended him, and the murder by his men of the young Union sentry. Then she burned with shame at her own vulnerability.
In moments like these she emptied her mind of thoughts about her father by concentrating her anger on the men who had raped her. Each day she hoped she would recognize one of them on the street. It should have been easy. Each was defective or impaired in some fashion. But the rapists seemed to have disappeared into the war, into the broad sweep of the countryside and the detritus of armies whose purposes made less and less sense. The injury done to her had become just another account among many told by the victims of Union soldiers, jayhawkers, Confederate guerrillas, stray minie balls and artillery rounds and naval mines, or wildfires that burned homes and cabins and barns to charcoal.
Most of the Yankee soldiers had gone somewhere up in the Red River parishes. The windows of their paddle-wheelers, headed up the Teche with supplies, were darkened at night because of sniper fire from guerrillas, but otherwise the war had simply gone away. Flower came to believe wars didn't end. People just got tired of them and didn't participate in them for a while.
On a Sunday in April 1865 she was sitting on a bench in the park when she picked up a discarded New Orleans newspaper and read an article that perhaps told more about the future of her race than she wanted to know. The article was about Ira Jamison and described his wounding at Shiloh and how his slaves had fled their master's protection and goodwill after his fields and storehouses had been burned by Yankees. But Flower sensed the article was more a promotion for a new enterprise than a laudatory account about her father. Ira Jamison was transforming Angola Plantation into a penal farm and would soon be in the business of leasing convict labor on a large scale.
The writer of the article said most of the convicts sentenced to Angola came from the enormous population of Negro criminals who had been empowered by the Freedmen's Bureau and turned loose upon the law-abiding whites of Louisiana. The writer also said the cost of convict labor would be far less than the cost of maintaining what he termed "servants in the old system."
A shadow fell across the page she was reading. She turned and looked up at the face of Todd McCain, the hardware store owner on Main Street. He had just come from church and was wearing a narrow-cut suit with a vest that made him sweat and a stiff white shirt with a high collar and one of the new bowler hats.
"I heard you could read," he said.
She folded the newspaper on her lap and looked through the oak trees at the sunlight on the bayou. His loins brushed the top of the backrest on the bench.
"I read that same article this morning. I don't agree with everything that's in it. But there's a mess of criminals out there belong on a chain gang, you ask me," he said.
"I d like to read my paper, suh," she said.
"I got a lot of colored customers nowadays. I could use a clerk. I'll pay you fifty cents a day."
"Please leave me alone."
It was quiet a long time. "You're an uppity bitch, ain't you?" he said.
"Bother me again and find out," she replied.
"What did you say?"
She rose from the bench and walked out of the coolness of the trees into the sunlight, hating herself for her rashness. When she got to the drawbridge and looked over her shoulder, Todd McCain was still watching her.
ABIGAIL did not believe in omens, but sometimes she wondered if human events and the ways of the season and four-footed animals and winged creatures did not conspire to weave patterns whose portent for good or evil was undeniable. If God revealed His will in Scripture, should He be proscribed from revealing it in His creations?
