Fragments of the Ark , livre ebook

Fragments of
the
Ark
A Novel
Louise Meriwether

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
© 1994 by Louise Meriwether
Cloth edition published by Pocket Books, 1994
Paperback and ebook editions published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2013
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Meriwether, Louise.
Fragments of the ark / Louise Meriwether
    p. c.m.
ISBN: 0-671-79948-7
1. South Carolina—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Fiction.
2. Afro-American men—South Carolina—Fiction. 3. Slaves—South Carolina—Fiction.I. Title.
PS3563.E788F73   1994
813'.54—dc20
93-29504
CIP     
ISBN 978-1-61117-282-9 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-61117-283-6 (ebook)
 
 
This one is for my brothers Kenneth and Edward Jenkins, for my niece, Eugenia; and for Joan Sandler and Rosa Guy whose loving friendship nurtures me.
Author's Note

I must give thanks to Robert Smalls, the Sea Island slave whose life was the inspiration for this work. More than twenty years ago I wrote a biography of him for little children and have been bugged ever since to do a fuller work. So I sat by his grave in Beaufort, took off my shoes, wiggled my toes in the grass, and begged his assistance. “I'm in over my head,” I moaned. “For God's sake, help me.” He did. The historical research that underpins this story was massive and is faithfully recorded. And although most of my characters are based on historical figures, their personal relationships—the words uttered by them when they made love or interacted with others beyond the interests of recorded history—have been developed by me.
I would like to acknowledge my lifeline, the research books I clung to as though demented, but they are too numerous. However, I must mention A Brave Black Regiment by Luis Emilio, which gave me an eyewitness account of the bloody war; Rehearsal for Reconstruction by Willie Lee Rose; and Dorothy Sterling's Captain of the Planter . Her thorough bibliography was a gold mine. And so were the stacks at Columbia University libraries and the librarian at the South Street Seaport Museum, whose brain I picked over the telephone. Talking about gold, let me not forget fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation.
Kind friends nurtured me during this stint: Temma Kaplan, Eileen Lottman, Connie Sutton, Antonio Laria, and Bill Ford—gone to his rest—and all my other darlings, including my Charleston cousins, Edna Robinson and Robert Birch. When I was desperate for refuge, Curtis Harnack always welcomed me warmly at Yaddo, as did the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I bless my agent, Ellen Levine, for keeping the faith. And my editor, Molly Allen, for her perceptive, gentle persuasion. I love you all.
Contents

Book One In the Beginning
Book Two Home on the Sea Islands
Book Three Hostages of War
Book Four The End Begins Again

Book One
In the Beginning

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home, Your house is on fire and your children will burn .
—NURSERY RHYME
1

Charleston, South Carolina November 10, 1861
H e had to go. The Swanee was delivering a company of artillerymen to Fort Beauregard in the morning before dawn. The bells of St. Michael's had already chimed curfew but still Peter hesitated, reluctant to leave without making peace. He stood in the kitchen facing Rain, his hand on the doorknob. Her hand held a bar of lye soap, her unbraided hair wild and tangled making her small face appear smaller.
“I is got to go,” he said, not moving.
She nodded, not looking at him, her eyes sad, eyes you could drown in, Peter thought, and not know what swamped you because when you felt you knew Rain she was across the room or out the door, any place but where you expected her to be.
A wound had opened up between them, freshly cut, still bleeding, and he didn't know how it had happened. Rain could rush into a wall of silence so swiftly that her skirts rustled. Or else she spoke in tongues. Might as well be a foreign language for all he understood. She would mumble to herself, a low incomprehensible murmur, and when he inquired what she was talking about her answer was “Nothing.” Aggravating. Nothing.
Peter reached out now to pat her shoulder, a gesture of reconciliation, but she backed away, angering him.
“What's wrong with you?” he yelled. “Suddenly I is poison? Talk to me, woman.”
His raised voice startled their child who woke up crying.
“Hush,” Rain said to them both.
She went into the front room separated from the kitchen by a sliding door that no longer worked. As she bent over the bed her distended belly looked as though it was about to drop between her knees. Awkwardly, she pulled the two-year-old girl into her arms.
“Hush, Glory. You daddy ain't hollering at you.”
“I ain't hollering at nobody” Peter hollered. He stepped away from the door and attempting to be calm lowered his voice. “Just tell me why you is acting so daft.”
Defiantly Rain retorted, “It gon be just another noose ‘round your neck.”
“I done told you, another chile ain't no noose.”
Rain sucked her teeth, a sound of disgust to intimate that he was a liar. She had accused him of overlooking the first signs, the swelling of her belly, the heaviness in her small breasts, because he didn't want to see them. But why, he had countered, had she taken so long to tell him? He had yet to receive a reply.
Rain put Glory down and the child ran to hug her daddy's legs. He had been looking fierce, his craggy face made more rough-hewn by a short, bristly beard, his bushy eyebrows colliding in a frown. But the fierceness fell apart when he gathered Glory into his arms, his sunshine child, born in these two rooms he had secured by shoveling horseshit. Born in the only bed he had ever slept in, obtained for a suckling pig. Their table had cost him a bucket of shrimp, their stove a peck of corn. He was a bartering man with an eye for quality junk.
Before the war in order to earn extra money, since his regular wages went to his slavemaster, Peter had sold produce to a regular string of customers, produce he bought from slaves on James Island. And he had secured these two rooms in exchange for keeping the stable below clean and the horse groomed for his landlord. For her part, Rain brought home leftover food from her chambermaid's job and did sewing. For two years they had pinched every penny until it cried, watching their savings multiply to make good their plan, his plan that he had wrenched into existence. They had been bone weary but happy until things went amiss and Rain started talking in tongues. Such nonsense. A baby being a noose around his neck.
Glory bounced around in his arms and Peter kissed her, staring at his wife who was too pretty and tiny, he felt, to be so aggravating. Her face was a burnished brown as if the sun had set behind it and left its light in her eyes. They were a startling auburn color and her thick hair was a dark brown cloud. So naturally Peter had attempted to call her Brownie, which Rain said she hated. “Sounds like you is calling you dog.” “No,” he had whispered, kissing her, “you ain't no dog. You is my brown buttercup baby.” She was also his honeybunch, his sweet li'l bits and his baby cakes. He couldn't seem to find enough cuddly names for her. Sometimes, smiling shyly which made her more adorable, she called him sugarfoot. And when had she last said that to him? Not since revealing with downcast eyes, as though ashamed, that they were going to have another child.
Peter walked toward the door. “I has to go,” he repeated.
“Don't get youself hurt,” Rain whispered.
That was better than speaking in tongues, he decided, grateful for small favors. He eased his daughter out of his arms.
“I is gone.”
The Swanee was a whore, the fastest paddlewheel steamer sailing the inland waterways who had sold herself body and soul to the Confederates. A 24-pound howitzer mounted on her fantail and a 32-pounder on her bow had converted her from a trading vessel carting rice and cotton down Wappoo Creek into a military lady capable of transporting a thousand troops. Peter loved the steamer, whore though she was, but he despised working for the Confederates. Slaveowners were required to support the war effort by contributing laborers, and his master had loaned him to the navy.
On schedule, the Swanee had deposited the artillerymen at Fort Beauregard. On the other side of Port Royal Sound was Fort Walker and together the two ramparts guarded its entrance. At the moment fifteen Yankee gunboats in the harbor were blasting away at both fortifications with every piece of artillery on their decks. A returning fusillade of grape and shell burst against the hulls of the ships, exploding the sea into volcanic eruptions. The cataclysmic roar shook the little cove the Swanee was scurrying into for safety to allow her officers and seven-man slave crew a chance to watch the battle before sailing back to Charleston.
In the pilothouse Captain Regan was grim at the helm. “Peter,” he yelled over the booming gunfire, “take the wheel.”
“Aye, aye, suh.”
He moved past the storage bench to grab the wheel as the captain relinquished it and they brushed past each other, both of them short, muscular, and barrel-chested, innate river men whose sturdy sea legs seemed to have been a deliberate act of God. But there the similarity ended. The stamp of Africa was on Peter, in the brownness of his face, the fullness of his lips and the curl of his hair. There was also a fullness around his jaw that promised jowls if he lived long enough.
Captain Regan was older and ruddy-cheeked, his signature the broad-brimmed hat he always wore aboard ship tilted at a rakish angle, his hair falling beneath it to his shoulders. He looked like what he was, a rough riverboat captain proud to be dressed in Confederate gray.
He picked up his field glasses from his writi