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the box she kept under her bed and thrown its contents into the flames that
had climbed out of the laundry's windows.
The fact that their uniforms were blue didn't matter, she thought.
Their kind hated books, just as the paddy rollers did and Clay Hatcher and
Rufus Atkins did and all those who feared knowledge because of what it could
reveal to others about themselves.
The cannon fire had stopped and there was no sound of either horses or wagons
in the streets, but she believed the quietness outside and the easy sweep of
wind in the trees were like the deceptions that had always characterized the
world she had grown up in. Nothing was ever as it seemed. A child was born in
a cabin to a mother and a father and believed it belonged to a family not
totally unlike the one that lived in the columned house up on the hill. Then
one day the mother or the father or perhaps the child was sold or traded,
either for money or land or livestock, and no was supposed to take particular
notice of the fact that the space occupied by a human being, made of flesh and
blood, a member of a family, had been emptied in the time it took to sign a
bill of sale.
But Flower had come to believe that moral insanity was not confined to people
who lived in columned houses.
That day Yankee soldiers had come hot and dirty across a burned field, and
while a Union flag flapped from a staff above their wagon, they had lined up
to rape two fifteen-year-old girls whose mother was beaten back from the scene
with a barrel slat.
Abigail Dowling loved human beings and nursed the dying and risked her life
for the living and was detested as a traitor.
Willie Burke taught her to read and write. Then served in an army that had no
higher purpose than to keep African people in bondage to ignorance and the
overseer's lash.
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She thought she had freed herself of her anger by helping other slaves escape
up the Mississippi to Ohio. But an English poet in one of her books had used a
term she couldn't forget. The term was "mind-forged manacles." They didn't get
left on the banks of the Ohio River, she thought. They were the kind people
carried to the grave.
What if she set about teaching others to read and write, just as Mr. Willie
Burke had taught her, she thought. Each person she taught would in turn teach
another, and that person another. If the Yankee soldier who stood guard in the
hospital in New Orleans had not been murdered by Ira Jamison's men, she would
have been able to give him what Mr. Willie had given her. But now she could
create an even larger goal for herself. She could do something that was truly
grand, influential in ways she had never imagined. By teaching one person at a
time, she had the potential to empower large numbers of people to forever
change their lives.
The thought made the blood rush to her head and she wondered if she was not
indeed vainglorious and self-deluded. She heard the wind chimes tinkling on
the gazebo and through the back window saw the moonlight inside the oak
branches and shadows moving on the grass when the wind blew through the limbs
overhead. Then a darkened steamboat passed on the bayou, its stacks blowing
sparks on a roof, its wake slapping hard against the cypress trunks.
For just a moment she thought she saw the silhouette of a man on the bank, a
stick figure backlit briefly by the red glow off the steamboat's stacks. She
got up from the kitchen table and walked out into the yard. But the boat was
gone and the bayou was dark again, and all she could see along the bank were
the heart-shaped tops of flooded elephant ears beaded with drops of water as
fat as marbles.
She went back inside the kitchen and sat down at the table and put her head
down on her arms. She wondered where Ira Jamison was. She wondered what he
would do when Yankee soldiers swept across his lands and drove off or killed
his livestock and fired his barns and cotton fields and freed his slaves and
gutted the inside of his house and perhaps stacked his furniture in the front
yard for burning. She wondered what he would have to say when he was
powerless, sick, and alone.
Then she wondered why she even cared.
When would she ever free herself of the father who not only refused to
recognize her but who in a letter to Nathan Forrest said he was "quite sick of
being tended by unwashed niggers"?
Maybe one day some of them would tend him in hell, she thought.
But the clear, bright edges of her anger would not hold, and again she fell
back into the self-hating thoughts that invaded her soul whenever she
meditated long upon the name of Ira Jamison.
An image flicked past a side window, like a shard of light out of dream. She
raised her head off her arms and stared out in the darkness, wondering if she
had fallen asleep. The air smelled like leaves burning on a fall day. A twig
snapped in the yard and she heard feet moving fast across the ground, then a
shadow went across the kitchen window.
She locked down the boll on the back door and walked to the Iront of the
cottage and stepped out on the gallery. She looked up and down the street, but
no one was there and the only lamp burning on the block was in the house of a
mad woman. Then the riderless white horse thundered across the lawn and
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