Prologue: Testimony — The Rule
Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, Savannah Unit. Folder 41. Interview conducted at the home of the informant, McIntosh County, Georgia, the fourteenth of April, 1938. Field worker: W. Palmer.
The road out to her place is not on the county map, which I have learned in eleven months of this work means only that the man who drew the map did not go down it.
I walked the last mile and a quarter. There was a boy of about nine at the turning who told me she was home, she was always home, and that I should not sit in the chair on the left because the leg was bad. Then he ran off through the corn without telling me his name, and I went on, and I have thought about that boy since, because he was the last person that day who told me a plain thing in a plain way.
Aunt Cissy Roundtree is ninety-one years old. She was born in the spring of 1847, she says, on the Wingate place up the Ogeechee road, and she has the year from her mother and the season from the fact that her mother always said she came in with the shad. She is small and very upright. She keeps her hands in her lap unless she is making a point, and then they come up like two birds and go back down again.
She was shelling peas when I came into the yard. She did not stop shelling peas for two hours.
I had my questions with me. The Project gives us a list. There are forty of them and they are printed on a folded sheet, and they ask about the informant’s parents, the size of the plantation, the food, the clothing, what happened at Christmas, whether the master was kind. I have asked those forty questions in a year and a half to more people than I can count, and I had come to think of them as a fence — a thing you put around a conversation to keep it from wandering off.
I got through four of them.
I asked her where she was born and she told me. I asked her about her mother and father and she told me, and told me about a brother besides, and about her uncle Ollie, whose name I wrote down without knowing yet that I would be writing it fifty more times. I asked about the size of the place and she said Wingate had thirty-one people on it when she was a girl and forty-four when the war came, and she gave me both numbers without pausing, the way another woman would give you her children’s ages.
Then I asked her the fifth question, which is: What do you remember best about those days?
And she stopped shelling peas.
“You want the best or you want the truest?”
I said I supposed I wanted whatever she wanted to give me.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “You got a paper there tells you what you want. That’s all right. Everybody comes with a paper. Man came in nineteen and twelve with a paper. Church lady came with a paper. They all want the Christmas and the possum and how we sang so pretty.”
She looked at me for the first time then, straight on. Her eyes are very light. I have seen that in old people before, the color going out of them like cloth in a window.
“You from Savannah?”
I told her I was from Philadelphia and had come down in ’thirty-six.
“Philadelphia,” she said. “Then you don’t know nothing.”
I said that was probably true.
That made her laugh, and she laughed a good while, longer than the thing deserved, and when she was done she picked up the pan again and started shelling, and she talked for two hours without me asking her one more question off the sheet.
I am going to set it down here the way she said it. Mr. Kessler has asked us to render the informant’s speech faithfully but to keep it readable, which is a thing that is easier to write in a memorandum than to do at a table with a pencil. I have kept her words. I have not kept every sound of them. She said herself, at one point, “Write it how you hear it, baby, not how they hear it,” and I have decided to take that as permission.
Here is what she said first, and I want it first, because it is the only part of the whole afternoon she said twice.
My grandmama told me stories.
She told me a lot of things and most of them I lost. I was a child and a child don’t know what’s worth the keeping. But she told me stories about a river, and them I kept, because she made me keep them. She’d take my chin like this. She’d say, Cissy. She’d say, You listening or you just being still?
And she’d say: If you hear singing at night, you run.
Don’t matter if you hear your mama. Don’t matter if you hear your own name in your mama’s own mouth. Don’t matter if you hear God. You keep running.
Now.
You want to write that down before I go on, because everything else I’m going to tell you sits on top of that.
I waited. She waited. I wrote it down.
“Read it back.”
I read it back to her.
“Again.”
I read it again.
“All right,” she said. “Now I can tell you about my uncle.”
But she did not tell me about her uncle, not that afternoon. That came later, in June, on the second visit, and I will set it in its place. That first day she went a long way around, the way she does, and I have come to understand that the going around is not a failure of the telling. It is the telling. She circles a thing three times before she will put her hand on it. I have started to think this is not because she has forgotten how to get there directly. I think it is because she remembers exactly where it is.
What she talked about instead, that first afternoon, was water.
Every river got a job, she said. Some of them carry. Some of them feed. Some of them just lay there and take what you put in.
But there was one up the county that had a different kind of job, and folks knew it, and folks that didn’t know it found out.
The white folks called it by a name off a map. She said the name and I have not been able to find it on any map since, though I have looked at four.
She said her people never called it that.
We called it the Singing Water, she said. Wasn’t nothing pretty in that name. We didn’t mean it pretty.
She said that in the fall of the year eighteen and sixty-two, in a night that everybody in that county spent indoors whether they had a door or not, two armies came down to that river from two sides.
She said both of them sent their colored men into the water first.
She said the white men stood on the bank.
She said, and here I am copying it exactly as I have it, because I did not want to smooth it and I do not want to smooth it now:
Ain’t but one of them two groups came out of that night whole. And it wasn’t the ones standing where it was dry.
Then she asked me if I wanted some water, and I said yes, and she sent me to the pump myself, and by the time I came back she was talking about her mother’s cornbread.
I put the pencil down and let her talk about cornbread for twenty minutes.
I want the record to show that I did not believe her. Not that afternoon. I want that in the folder, because I have been asked to render these accounts faithfully and I think that means rendering the person taking them down faithfully too.
I thought: this is a haunt story. Every county in this state has one. I have collected nine of them since January and they are all cousins of each other — a light on the road, a woman in white, a thing in the trees that takes children who go out after dark. I thought I would write it up as folklore, file it under Superstitions and Beliefs, and Mr. Kessler would cut it to a paragraph.
I want that in the record because of what happened in June.
It is enough to say here that I went back four times, that the fourth time I did not bring the sheet of forty questions at all, and that there is a version of this account which I typed up in September and did not submit.
What follows is the other version.
Blue
There were sixty-two of them when Isaiah Brooks started counting, back in June, and there were fifty-one now, and he could tell you where every one of the eleven had gone.
Four dead of the fever in the wet part of August, which the surgeon wrote down as camp diarrhea and which Amos Greenlee called the same thing it had always been called, which was the flux. Two dead of a wound each, both of them taken on a foraging party up the Frederica road where there had been no reason to expect anybody and there had been somebody. One drowned in the marsh at night for reasons no man could reconstruct. Three walked off in September when the news came down that the regiment had been disbanded, which turned out to be only part true, but by the time the whole truth arrived those three were gone and nobody went after them. And one, a man named Peter Sams, had gone up to Beaufort in a boat to see about his sister and had simply not come back, and Isaiah did not put him with the dead and did not put him with the runaways, and kept him in a category of his own.
Fifty-one.
He did the count every morning while the light was still gray, standing at the end of the company street with his hands behind his back like a man considering the weather, and he did it silently, and nobody had ever asked him what he was doing. Amos knew. Amos had figured it out sometime in July and had never said a word about it, which was one of the reasons Isaiah could stand to be near him.
That morning the count came out fifty-one and Isaiah’s shoulders came down a quarter of an inch, and then the drum started up on the parade and the day began.
The company drilled at six because Captain Ryan had read somewhere that the men should be drilled early, before the heat, which was sound thinking in July and pure formality by the end of October when the heat was a memory and the mornings came in off the water with an edge on them. They drilled in a field that had been a cotton field and was now mostly sand and broom sedge, under live oaks so old and so wide that the moss on them moved even when the air did not. Fifty-one men in ranks. Springfield drill by the book, except that not one man in the company had a Springfield.
What they had were.69 caliber smoothbores that had been condemned by somebody in Massachusetts in 1858 and had come south by a route nobody could explain, and which threw a ball and three buckshot in the general direction of a thing you were pointing at, and which had been converted from flint to percussion by a contractor who had evidently been paid by the piece. Eleven of them would not hold a cap. Sergeant Pike had gone through the whole company in September with a scrap of wire and a file and had fixed six of the eleven and had written a requisition about the other five, and the requisition had gone to St. Simons and to Beaufort and to Hilton Head and had not, so far as anybody could determine, gone anywhere after that.
“Right shoulder shift,” said Pike.
Fifty-one muskets went up. Forty-nine of them went up together.
“Titus.”
“Sergeant.”
“You’re a beat behind the man next to you.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“You been a beat behind the man next to you since June.”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
“You planning on catching him?”
“Working on it, Sergeant.”
“Work faster.”
Nobody laughed. That was Pike’s doing too — he had a way of running a drill where the correction came and went and left nothing behind it, no sting, no audience, and a man could take it and be done with it. Isaiah had been in enough situations in his life to know exactly how rare that was and exactly how little it was worth in the end, and he held both facts at once without difficulty.
They drilled an hour and a half. Then fatigue.
Fatigue that week was the causeway out to the north landing, which was a stretch of sixty yards where the road went under at high water and had gone under at high water for as long as anybody had been driving a wagon on that island, and which the engineers had decided would be raised. Raising it meant oyster shell and marsh mud and pine logs, and it meant carrying all three from where they were to where they were not, and it meant standing thigh-deep in pluff mud in October pulling a log into place while the mud made a sound like something swallowing every time you moved a foot.
Company D did the causeway. The Forty-Eighth New York did not do the causeway. The Forty-Eighth New York drilled in the morning and drilled in the afternoon and played baseball in between, and their band practiced, and on Thursday nights they put on entertainments in a shed with a curtain made out of a condemned tent.
“They got a man plays the bones,” Titus said. He was on the far end of the log with his shoulder into it, seventeen years old and built like a fence rail, and he talked while he worked because he could not do one without the other. “In their show. Plays the bones and does a voice.”
“Uh huh,” said Isaiah.
“You ever see it?”
“No.”
“They let you stand at the back.”
“I know.”
“You could stand at the back.”
“I could.”
“So how come you don’t?”
Isaiah shifted his grip on the log and let two seconds go by. “’Cause I know what the voice is.”
Titus was quiet for the length of one step, which for Titus was substantial. Then he said, “Oh,” and then, a step later, “Yeah,” and then they got the log where it was going and let it down.
Amos Greenlee straightened up out of the mud with both hands on the small of his back and made a sound like a door. He was fifty-eight and he was the oldest man in the company by nine years and the engineers had put him on the causeway with everybody else.
“They is going to bury me in this marsh,” Amos said, “and it going to take them four days to find enough of me to bury.”
“Sit down a minute,” Isaiah said.
“Can’t sit down. Sit down, I don’t get up.”
“Then lean.”
Amos leaned on the log. Out past the reeds the tide was going, and the marsh showed its ribs, gray-green and shining, and the smell of it came up warm even in the cold, that low sweet rotten smell that Isaiah had known his whole life and that he had never once minded. Somewhere a clapper rail went off like a wooden rattle.
“Ain’t no worse than rice,” Amos said, after a while.
“No.”
“Man told me the Army was going to be different from rice.”
“Man told you a lot of things.”
“He surely did.” Amos worked his shoulders. “He surely did, Isaiah.”
Here is what Company D was, in the fall of 1862, as a matter of fact and paper.
In May, a general had raised a regiment of Black men out of the plantations of the Sea Islands, some of whom had come willingly and some of whom had been taken off the fields at the point of a bayonet by white soldiers, which was a detail that never made it into the newspapers up north and never once left the memory of the men it had happened to. Nobody in Washington had authorized this. Washington was informed and Washington did not answer, which in an army is its own kind of answer. In August the regiment was disbanded. The men were told to go home, and most of them did, and some of them had no home to go to and stayed where they were, and one company — one — was kept in service, because there was work that needed doing and because the officer in charge of that company had not gotten around to reading the order that dissolved it until three days after everyone else had.
That officer was Captain William Ryan. He told the story often. He told it as a joke on himself, the man too busy to read his own mail, and men laughed, and Isaiah had watched him tell it nine times and had watched the joke get a little smoother each time, and had come to understand that Ryan was not lying and had also never once, in twelve tellings, mentioned the men.
So: Company D existed. It drilled, it worked, it stood guard, it wore the uniform of the United States. It had never been paid. Not once, not a dollar, not since June, because the paymaster’s clerk had a form and the form had a line for the regiment and there was no regiment.
They had been told this would be fixed.
They had been told it in June and again in July, and in August they had been told that the whole thing was over and then two days later that it was not, and in September a lieutenant from Hilton Head had come down and made a speech in the company street about patience and the great cause, and had gone away again on the evening boat, and Reuben Dolan had stood there through the entire speech with his hat in his hand and his jaw working.
And there was the other thing. The thing nobody made speeches about.
If Company D was captured, Company D was not a body of prisoners. A Black man taken in Federal uniform in the state of Georgia in 1862 was, depending on which piece of paper you consulted, either property being restored to its rightful owner or an insurrectionist to be dealt with under the laws of the state, and the laws of the state on that subject were short and did not require a courtroom. Every man in the company knew this. It was not discussed. It changed the way a man carried a musket in a way that no drill manual accounted for, and it meant that when the Forty-Eighth New York went out on a picket and got shot at, they came back and told the story, and when Company D went out and got shot at, they came back and did not.
Isaiah thought about it the way he thought about the tide. It was there. You built around it.
He cleaned his uniform on Sundays.
It was not vanity and it was not, in any way he could have explained, pride. It was maintenance, the same as the musket. The coat was dark blue wool, single-breasted, nine brass buttons down the front with an eagle on each one and a shield on the eagle’s chest, and the buttons went green if you let them, and Isaiah did not let them.
He had a scrap of chamois and a tin of paste that he had traded two days’ ration of sugar for in July, and every Sunday afternoon he sat on an upturned crate outside the tent with the coat across his knees and did the nine buttons one at a time, working the cloth in a small circle, and by the time he was done a man could see the shape of his own face in every one of them.
Reuben Dolan had watched him do it for four months and finally, in September, asked him why.
“Because they issue you a thing,” Isaiah said, “you take care of the thing.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the one I got.”
Reuben sat down on the ground with his back against the tent pole. He was twenty-four, free-born, from Philadelphia, and he had a way of arranging himself before he spoke that told you a paragraph was coming.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Reuben said. “I think you shine them because it’s the only part of this that’s kept its word.”
Isaiah kept working the chamois.
“They didn’t pay us,” Reuben said. “They didn’t muster us right. They won’t say what we are. But they gave us the coat, and the coat is real, and every button on it says United States.” He picked up a pine needle and turned it over. “So you keep the buttons bright. Because as long as the buttons are bright, the promise is still out there somewhere.”
Isaiah held a button up and turned it in the light and let it go.
“Reuben.”
“Mm.”
“That’s real pretty.”
“Thank you.”
“I shine ’em ’cause a inspecting officer got to find something and I’d rather he find something I already fixed.”
Reuben laughed — genuinely, head back — and Isaiah let one corner of his mouth go, and they sat there while the light got long. And it was true, what Isaiah said. It was also not the whole of it, and Reuben was closer than Isaiah was prepared to say out loud, and that was as much as either of them got of each other that day.
Ryan came down the company street at four o’clock with Corporal Meade half a step behind him.
He was forty-one, sandy, thickening in a way that had come on him fast in the last year, and he wore his sword because he had been told at some point that an officer of infantry wore his sword and he had never revisited the question. He was, in his own accounting, an extremely busy man. He walked everywhere at the pace of a man late for something, and when he stopped, he stopped suddenly and completely, and he gave you all of his attention, and that was the thing about William Ryan that made him so much more difficult to hate than he deserved.
“Brooks.”
Isaiah stood. “Sir.”
“How’s the causeway.”
“Twelve yards, sir. Be another eight days.”
“Eight days.” Ryan looked out toward the north landing as though he could see it from here, which he could not. “Engineers said five.”
“Engineers said five with two hundred men, sir.”
“Did they.”
“That’s what the lieutenant said, sir. Two hundred.”
“Well.” Ryan put his hands behind his back and rocked once on his heels. “Well, we’ll do what we can with what we have. That’s the whole of soldiering, Brooks, doing what you can with what you have. You know I’ve written about your men.”
“Sir.”
“To my wife’s father. He’s not without influence in Boston.” He said this the way a man mentions the weather in a place you have never been. “I told him plainly. I said, these are soldiers. I said, I have seen them work in mud to their waists for eight hours and form ranks after. I said the country will be ashamed one day of what it hasn’t decided about them.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He’s a great friend of the Governor’s.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ryan looked at him then, and something crossed his face, and Isaiah recognized it because he had seen it every week for six weeks: the small, exact moment when Captain William Ryan remembered the letter he had promised to write about a woman and a child on the Wingate place and remembered that he had not written it and decided, in that instant, without malice, without even quite admitting to himself that a decision was being made, to say something else instead.
“You’ve a good deal of patience, Brooks.”
“I got some, sir.”
“It’ll be rewarded.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ryan nodded twice, satisfied, and went on down the company street at the pace of a man late for something, and Meade went after him, and Isaiah sat back down on the crate and picked up the chamois and finished the ninth button.
That night Amos Greenlee came and sat on the ground by the tent with his legs out in front of him and his back against the crate, and neither of them said anything for a long while, and the fires went down one at a time along the street.
Out past the trees the surf was doing what it did. You stopped hearing it after the first week and then some nights you heard it again for no reason and could not stop.
“You counted twice this morning,” Amos said.
“I did.”
“How come?”
“Lost it the first time.”
“Mm.” Amos was working something over in his hands, a bit of cord, tying and untying. “Fifty-one.”
“Fifty-one.”
“That New York regiment got nine hundred and something.”
“Nine hundred and forty.”
“You count them too?”
“I read it on a paper,” Isaiah said, and then stopped, and Amos did not look up from the cord, and after a second Isaiah went on in a slightly different voice. “Heard a clerk say it.”
“Mm,” said Amos.
The cord went around and through and came loose.
“Isaiah.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever it is you waiting on that man for.” Amos tipped his head very slightly up the company street, toward the officers’ tents, where there was still a light. “It ain’t coming.”
Isaiah didn’t answer.
“I ain’t saying stop waiting,” Amos said. “Man got to wait on something. I’m just saying, don’t put all of it in one hand. Especially not a hand that pretty.”
“You done?”
“I’m done.”
“All right.”
Amos got himself up in stages, the way he had to, and stood a moment getting his back to agree with him.
“Fifty-one,” he said. “That’s a good number. Hold on to it.”
He went off toward his tent, and Isaiah sat out there a while longer with the coat folded across his knees and nine brass buttons catching what light there was, and forty miles inland, up the Ogeechee road, his wife was either alive on the Wingate place or she was not, and there was no way on God’s earth for him to find out, and the not knowing sat where it always sat, just under the breastbone, patient as a stone.
He went in and slept. In four days a dispatch would come down from Hilton Head about a ford on a river none of them had ever heard of, and by then there would be fifty-one men in Company D still, and after that there would never be fifty-one again.
What It Cost to Get Here
He had left in March, on a Tuesday, in the rain, and he had not told her.
That was the whole of it and it had taken him seven months to stop turning it over, and he had not stopped turning it over, he had only gotten better at doing it quietly, the way a man gets better at walking on a bad ankle.
The Wingate place sat on a rise above a creek that fed into the Ogeechee, and it had been in the Wingate family since a grant in 1786, and everything about it was thirty years past its best. The house had columns that had been a good idea once. The gin house leaned. The road up from the county road had a wallow in it that the wagons went around instead of through, so that over forty years the road had migrated eight feet to the left of where it had been surveyed, which Isaiah’s father used to say was the most honest thing on the property.
There were forty-four people on the Wingate place when the war started. Isaiah had been born on it, and sold off it at six to settle a debt, and bought back onto it at nineteen when the debt came around the other way, and if you wanted to understand Isaiah Brooks that was the fact to hold: he had learned before he was seven years old that a place you were born was not a place you were from. It was just where you happened to be standing when somebody did the arithmetic.
He met Cassie in 1851, at a burying.
Not a courting occasion. But there is a stretch of a burying, after the singing and before the eating, when people stand around in twos and threes because nobody has yet said the thing that lets everybody go home, and in that stretch a young woman had come and stood next to him and looked at the cedar post they had just put in the ground and said, “That was a good man,” and Isaiah had said, “It was,” and she had said, “You didn’t know him,” and Isaiah had said, “No, I didn’t,” and she had laughed with her mouth closed and gone off to help her aunt.
He thought about that for fourteen days and then went four miles on a Sunday to find out her name.
They were married in the spring of 1853 in the yard behind the quarters with a broom and a preacher named Nesbitt who came around every fifth Sunday and who married them under both authorities available to him, God’s and Wingate’s, and told them privately afterward that only one of those was worth the breath. Delphine came in 1855.
Cassie hummed.
That was the thing about her that got into a person and never came out. She hummed while she worked and she was working from before light until after dark, so she hummed most of a day, and it was never a song. That was the strange part. Isaiah had lived among singing people his whole life, church people, field people, people who could put a line out and get a line back across two hundred yards of cotton, and Cassie could do all of that and did, on Sundays, in the arbor, with the best of them. But when she was alone with her hands busy she did not sing anything. She hummed a shape. Four notes down, a pause, three notes back up, and around again — and it was not any tune he had ever heard anywhere else, and he had asked her once where it came from and she had genuinely not known what he was talking about.
“I don’t hum.”
“You hum all day.”
“I do not.”
“Cass. You humming right now.”
She had stopped, and listened to herself the way you listen for a sound in another room, and then she had said, “Huh,” and gone back to the beans, and inside of a minute it was going again.
For nine years he woke up to it and went to sleep to it. He could find her in the dark of a cabin full of people by it. Delphine picked it up at about three, badly, and the two of them would go at it in the evening at cross purposes, Cassie’s four notes down and Delphine’s approximation coming in a half beat late and a whole tone wrong, and Isaiah would sit in the doorway with his back against the frame and let it happen.
In January of 1862 word came up the road that the Yankees had the islands.
It came the way everything came — sideways, from a man driving a load somewhere, from a woman whose sister worked in a house where a letter had been read aloud, from the white folks’ own mouths when they forgot who was standing behind the chair. It came in pieces and the pieces did not agree. The Yankees had the islands. The Yankees had burned the islands. The Yankees were taking colored folks and selling them to Cuba. The Yankees were giving out land. The Yankees would be up the Ogeechee by planting time.
What was certain, and what everyone was certain of by February, was this: people were going. From places all up and down the coast, people were going, and getting there, and not coming back. A whole family gone off the Rutledge place in one night, seven of them. Two brothers off Kilkenny. A man named Fortune from four miles down who was said — said — to have been seen on Saint Simons in shoes.
And Wingate did what every white man in the county did that winter, which was to speak more sharply, patrol more often, and count more.
Isaiah did not decide to go in one moment. He decided it in about thirty small ones over six weeks, each of which he could have gone back on, and the last of which came on a Tuesday afternoon when he was shoeing a mule and Marcus Wingate stood in the door of the shed and told him, conversationally, that the family was thinking of sending some of the people up to a cousin’s place in Burke County until the trouble passed.
Some of the people.
He did not say which. He may not have known which. He may have been saying it only to watch what it did to a man’s hands.
Isaiah finished the mule.
Here is what he thought, and he has never told it to anyone, and he thinks it at least once a week for the rest of his life.
He thought: if I tell her, she will say go.
That was the first thing and it was true. Cassie would have said go. She would have said it in about four seconds and she would not have cried in front of him, and she would have made him take the good blanket, and she would have stood in the door of that cabin and watched him walk down toward the creek and then she would have gone back in and lain down next to their daughter and stared at the roof until morning, and then she would have gotten up and gone to work and hummed.
And then, for however long it took — a month, a year, forever — she would have been a woman whose husband had run. There is a difference between a woman whose husband has run and a woman whose husband disappeared, and the difference is measured in a white man’s questions. Where’d he go. When’d he go. What’d he tell you. He tell you. He tell you, Cassie. Look at me. He tell you where he was going.
And she would have had to lie, over and over, for as long as they cared to ask, and she would have been lying about a thing she knew, and a person can hear that.
So he did not tell her. He told himself it was to protect her and he half believed it and the other half he kept in a locked place, because the other half was simpler and worse: that if he had looked at her face while he said it, he would not have gone.
He left on the ninth of March in the rain, at about two in the morning, with a knife, a fire-steel, twelve pieces of cold cornbread wrapped in sacking, and no blanket, because taking the blanket would have told her.
He stood over the two of them for what he later estimated at four minutes. Delphine was seven and slept the way children sleep, flat on her back with both arms up beside her head like a woman surrendering. Cassie was on her side facing the wall. He put his hand about an inch above her shoulder and held it there and did not put it down.
Then he went out and pulled the door to behind him and did not let the latch make its sound.
The going took seven nights.
He went south and east through country he half knew for two nights and country he did not know at all after that. He lay up in the day in whatever there was: a cane brake, a fallen cypress, once a corn crib, once — for a whole day, in terror, unable to move — in a ditch under a road while a wagon went by twice.
He was seen once, on the fourth night, by a white boy of about ten carrying a bucket, and the boy stopped and looked at him for the length of a breath, and Isaiah looked back, and then the boy went on toward the house with the bucket and never turned around, and Isaiah has never known and will never know what that boy did with the rest of his evening. He ran anyway. He ran four miles.
He was helped twice. Once by an old woman in a cabin behind a smokehouse who gave him a piece of fatback and a direction and never asked him one question. Once by a man on the Sapelo road who did not give him anything but who stood in the road and pointed with his whole arm, a long steady point, and said, “Not that way,” and Isaiah went the other way and heard dogs an hour later, well off to the north.
And on the eleventh night, he came to water.
It was not the Nettahatchee. He wants that understood, in his own head, for the rest of his life: the first river he crossed was not that river. It was a tidal creek off the Altamaha two hundred yards wide at the point where he came to it, and it was March, and the water was so cold that going into it was like being hit.
He could swim. Barely. Enough not to drown in a place where you could stand up in half of it.
He went in and he got about forty yards and the cold shut something down in his chest and he stopped being able to make his arms do the thing, and he turned over on his back, which he had heard was what you did, and he lay there in the black moving water with the sky going by and thought, with perfect calm, that this was where it was going to end and that it was a stupid place for it.
And then he heard humming.
He wants that understood too. There was nothing in that creek with him. There was no voice on the bank. What happened was that a man half dead of cold thirty feet from a marsh in the middle of the night heard four notes down, a pause, three notes back up, in his own head, in his own wife’s mouth, and got angry.
That is the entire miracle, and it was enough. He turned over and swam.
He came out on the far bank on his hands and knees with his whole body ringing like a struck bar, and he threw up creek water, and he lay in the reeds until the shaking became a thing he could stand up inside of, and then he stood up, and walked, and two days later a Union picket on the north end of Saint Simons pointed a rifle at his chest and asked him what he was.
Isaiah, who had had two days to think about it, said: “I’m a man wants to enlist.”
He had told exactly one person about the humming in the water, and that was Amos, in July, both of them drunk on a jug of something a Forty-Eighth New York man had traded for a pair of gloves.
Amos had listened all the way through without a sound. Then he had said, “That’s your wife.”
“That’s my own head.”
“Boy.” Amos had taken the jug back. “Ain’t nobody said them two things different.”
And Isaiah had let it go, because he was drunk, and because the alternative was arguing, and because some part of him had wanted to hear it said out loud by somebody who was not him.
He thought about that conversation exactly once more in his life, seven weeks later and forty miles inland, standing chest-deep in freezing black water at three o’clock in the morning while something in the treeline hummed four notes down, a pause, and three notes back up.