Red River

  Copyright © 2007 by Lalita Tademy

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: January 2007

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-7134-1

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part One: Before 1873

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Two: After

  Chapter 21: 1882

  Chapter 22: 1886

  Chapter 23: 1891

  Chapter 24: 1896

  Chapter 25: 1907

  Chapter 26: 1907

  Chapter 27: 1911

  Chapter 28: 1915

  Chapter 29: 1918

  Chapter 30: 1918

  Chapter 31: 1918

  Chapter 32: 1919

  Chapter 33: 1925

  Chapter 34: 1933

  Chapter 35: 1935

  Chapter 36: 1935

  Chapter 37: 1935

  Chapter 38: 1937

  Chapter 39: 1937

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Lalita Tademy

  Cane River

  For Nathan Green Tademy, Jr.

  Daddy, I owe you

  Prologue

  1935

  C ome closer. This is not a story to go down easy, and the backwash still got hold of us today. The history of a family. The history of a country. From bondage to the joy of freedom, and almost ten hopeful years drinking up the promise of Reconstruction, and then back into the darkness, so fearsome don’t nobody want to talk about the scary time. Don’t nobody want to remember even now, decades removed, now things better some. Why stir up all that old mess from way back in 1873? I don’t hold with that point of view. I was there, watching, like all the women done, up close some of the time but mostways from a distance. They all dead and buried now. I outlast each one, using up my time on earth and some of theirs too. One hundred last birthday, trapped in this wasted body. All I do now is remember and pray the story don’t get lost forever. It woulda suit Lucy fine, everybody forgetting. Lucy and me, that the only thing we usta argue about, when we was both clear-minded and had more juice to work up, but those talks never last too long. She just shut her mouth and shut her mind, refusing the truth. I still got heat around the subject, but where to put it now? Lucy gone last year. She turn one hundred five before she left this earth. Was two of us held on for such a long time, me and Lucy. Outlasting our men—our husbands, our sons, even some grandsons. We all had it hard, but the men, they had it worse, ’specially those what come up on life from the front. Women is the long-livers at the base of the Tademy family tree.

  They don’t teach 1873 at the colored school. Wasn’t for my husband, wouldn’t be no colored school for Colfax, Louisiana. That the kind of man Sam Tademy was. Could carry a vision in his head and stick to it no matter what the discouragement. Some men good providers, got a way with the soil or a trade. Some men been given a singing voice take you to glory, or magic in they bodies to move in dance and make you feel alive. Some men so pretty you gaze on them with hunger, or so smooth they get hold of words and make you believe any nonsense come out they mouth. Some got the gift to make you laugh out loud, and others preach strong and spread the word of God. My man, Sam, he quiet after his own way, look after his family, not afraid of the tug of the plow. He done some preaching, and some teaching, but always thinking about the rest of the colored. Not wanting to get too far ahead without pulling forward everyone else willing to work hard at the same time. Education mean everything to that man. Once he set his head on a colored school in Colfax, wasn’t nothing could crush the notion. He mortgage his own sons to the plan, and it come to pass.

  We been writ out the history of this town. They got a metal marker down to the courthouse tell a crazy twisting of what really happen Easter Sunday sixty year ago. The ones with the upper hand make a story fit how they want, and tell it so loud people tricked to thinking it real, but writing down don’t make it so. The littlest colored child in Colfax, Louisiana, know better than to speak the truth of that time out loud, but the real stories somehow carry forward, generation to generation. Those of us what was there catch a retold whisper, and just the mention got the power to stir up those old troubles in our minds again like they fresh, and the remembering lay a clamp over our hearts. But we need to remember. Truth matters. What our colored men try to do for the rest of us in Colfax matter. They daren’t be forgot. We women keep the wheel spinning, birthing the babies and holding together a decent home to raise them in. We take care of them what too young or too old to take care of theyself, while our menfolks does battle how they got to in a world want to see them broke down and tame.

  Was a time we thought we was free and moving up. When forty acres and a mule seem not only possible but due. First we was slave, then we was free, and the white call it Reconstruction. We had colored politicians. Yes, we did. It was our men vote them in, before the voting right get snatched away. We losing that sense of history, and it seem wrong to me. Young ones today, they don’t carry memory of our colored men voting. Like those ten years of fiery promise burn down and only leave a small gray pile of ash under the fireplace grate, and don’t nobody remember the flame. Not like the locals made it easy, but we had our rights then, by law. We was gonna change the South, be a part of the rebuilding after the War Between the States. We owned ourself and was finding our voice to speak up. Some on both sides of the color line talked about us going too fast. No matter how hard times got then, when wasn’t food enough for the table and the debt growed too fast to pay off at the general store, or a homegrown pack of the White League terrorize us or string up one of our men to keep us in our place, still our hearts and heads swole up with the possibilities of Reconstruction. Our men was citizens. We had the prospect of owning a piece of land for ourself. Ten years. Don’t seem so long when you reach over one hundred years in your own life, but more hope and dreams in those ten years than the slave years come before or the terror years after. Back then hope was a personal friend, close to hand. Seem anything could happen. Seem we was on a road to be a real part of America at last.

  I think on those colored men in the courthouse every day. They was brave, from my way of seeing, dog-bone set to fight for a idea, no matter the risk. Not all the old ones see it the same. Lucy used to say by stepping up, the colored courthouse men bring the white man down on us, but what foolishness is that? Some white folks never change from thinking on us as they own personal beasts of burden, even after freedom. Those ones down on us already.

  But we got the strength to outlast whatever trials is put before us. We proved it. There a special way of seeing come with age and distance, a kind of knowing how things happen even without knowing why. Seeing what show up one or two generations removed, from a father to a son or grandson, like repeating threads weaving through the same bolt of cloth. Repeating scraps at the foot and the head of a quilt. How two men never set eyes on each other before, and, different as sun and moon, each journey from Alabama to Louisiana and come to form a friendship so deep they families twine
together long after they dead. How one set of brothers like hand and glove, but two others at each other throats like jealous pups fighting for the last teat. How two brothers from the same house marry two sisters, sets of bold and meek. How men come at a thing nothing like what a woman do, under the names dignity, pride, survival. The words alike, but the path not even close between man and woman, no matter they both trying to get to the same place. Making a better way for the children. In the end, making a better life for our children what we all want.

  Eighteen seventy-three. Wasn’t no riot like they say. We was close enough to see how it play out. It was a massacre. Back in 1873, if I was a man, I’da lift my head up too and make the same choice as my Sam and Israel Smith and the others, but there was children to feed and keep healthy and fields to harvest and goats to milk. Those things don’t wait for history or nothing else. But I saw. I cleaned up after. I watch how 1873 carry through in the children that was there, and then in they children years later.

  My name is Polly. I come to the Tademys not by blood but by choice. Not all family got to draw from the bloodline. I claim the Tademys and they claim me. We a community, in one another business for better or worse. How else we expect to get through the trials of this earth before the rewards of heaven?

  Figure 1. Nathan-Green “Ted” Tademy’s pedigree

  Part One

  Before

  1873

  Chapter

  1

  Lucy pushes herself up from their bed an hour earlier than usual, quiet and purposeful. Off to start the cooking fire, Israel thinks, fully awake now, but he says nothing. The sleeping room of the small cabin borders on pitch-dark, with only a hint of the moon’s light coming from a single small window. He intended to be first up this morning, and gone before the inevitable rehash of last night’s quarrel and resulting standoff, but that’s no longer an option. The Bottom is calm the way only early morning brings, before the rooster’s crow, and Israel’s mind races, thinking about going into town, into Colfax. Yesterday he heard from a neighbor sharecropping the next plot that the last steamship from New Orleans had come and gone, with no Federal troops on board. The new officeholders arriving today would need local protection from the colored men of Colfax.

  Lucy pauses to smooth the quilt over their boys, still asleep on their shared moss-filled mattress, and then slowly pads her way toward the front of the cabin. Her step is heavy with the additional weight of the new baby she carries inside her, a soft, rhythmic waddle as her wide feet slide across the planked floor, oddly reassuring. Israel assumes she knows he is awake. Lucy always recognizes his moods and his habits, and he follows her unspoken signal and gets up too, drawing his cotton shirt and pants on over his sleeping union suit, and gathers up his worn leather boots from the corner. He stops at another bed in the room to shake two of the boys awake. He lets the younger children sleep.

  “David, Noby, get on up, you covering my chores today,” Israel whispers.

  Since he has missed his early getaway, he heads out to the shed in the darkness to relieve the cow of her morning’s milk. By the time he enters the cooking room of the cabin with a half-filled pail, the fire is lit and starting to blaze up in the fireplace, and Lucy has already pulled on her faded housedress and wrapped her hair in a tight kerchief. She is packing up cold foods for him to carry away in a bucket, an acknowledgment that she has lost the argument. Deep circles under her eyes give away her exhaustion.

  “Pone, tack, and taters,” she says. “Three days’ worth.”

  “More than enough,” Israel replies. “Might be home tonight.” He pulls the straight-back chair to the old traveling trunk that serves as their eating table and begins to eat the biscuit and fried chicken’s egg Lucy lays out for him. “Soon’s the Federals come, I hightail it back, least in time to preach Sunday’s sermon. You’ll see.”

  “Can’t nothing but grief come from you showing yourself like this.”

  “We been over this, Lucy. I’m going.” Absently, with his thumb, Israel rubs the length of an old scar like a question mark split deep along his cheek and down to his jaw, lighter in color and raised like a welt.

  “We free and movin’ up, Israel, and you throwing away our work of the last seven years.” She whispers, but her tone is urgent. “We come from nothing, less than nothing, and now we owns our own wagon, and the cow. We got the Reconstruction, and laws be on our side. Colored politicians sitting side by side with white down in New Orleans, and our colored men up here vote different-thinking men in to Colfax, fair and square too. We might could own this land one day if we keeps low, but not if you go down to the courthouse and rub the white man’s nose into the politics. Stay home. This not like you.”

  Israel doesn’t look forward to confrontation, either at the courthouse or in his own home. Against his better judgment, he steps into the carryover of last night’s row.

  “Why the colored man risk everything to vote if the Republicans we vote in just be turned back when the time come to take office? That’s all we trying to do. Get the old guard in Colfax to stand down long enough for the new appointees to catch hold.”

  “This not like you,” Lucy says again. “Mixing in white man’s business. We done fine by keeping out the gaze of white. Let the new sheriff handle it.”

  “We got a sheriff coming in today, elected, but they got a sheriff too, don’t want to give up his place. Colored men meeting at the courthouse ’cause we got a job to do till the Federals come. White business and colored business not so separate no more.”

  David and Noby shuffle barefoot into the cooking room, still sleepy-eyed, dressed in the shabby mismatch of their everyday homespun shirt and trousers. David is two years older and over a head taller than his younger brother, rail-thin legs too long for an eleven-year-old boy. His skin is pale and heavily freckled, and the light sandy hair falling into his face without curl or nap makes it seem he has been accidentally left with the wrong brown-hued family. His fierce gray eyes, so light as to be mistaken sometimes for blue or green, scrutinize and judge everything around him, and never seem to leave Israel’s face, as if searching for clues. Noby, at nine, is somewhere between the caramel color of his mother and the walnut tinge of Israel, and although it is difficult to know when the growth spurts will start and stop, he seems to be a little replica of his father, brooding brown eyes, high forehead, nappy-headed, sturdy of body.

  The boys approach cautiously, waiting in the morning chill to see which way the household wind is blowing. Not once last night or this morning have they heard their parents’ voices rise above a regular speaking tone, but there is a tautness in the air of unresolved difference. Their mother almost never answers back against the wishes of their father, and they have seldom heard so many words at once from their father unless it is Sunday and he is delivering a sermon. Despite the tension, David separates himself from Noby and steps forward.

  “Papa, if you go to town, can I come too?” he asks.

  Finished, Israel pushes his tin plate aside and jams his hat on his head. “Noby might’s well come with me,” he says.

  “Why take the boys?” Lucy asks.

  “This a man’s job, a citizen’s job,” Israel pronounces carefully. “Noby need to understand.”

  “Then take David.” Lucy moves quickly toward the two boys and throws her fleshy arm around David’s shoulder. “David the oldest.”

  “David need to stay and cover the chores,” says Israel. He motions to Noby, and when the smaller boy comes to stand near his side, Israel touches him lightly at the neck to shepherd him outside. David’s pale face flushes deep red, and he flinches as if struck, but Israel is already on the move away from the table.

  “That’s settled,” Israel says, satisfied. “We be gone, then.”

  Lucy keeps her arm around David, but he shakes her off and trails behind Israel and Noby for a few steps as they move toward the front door of the cabin.

  “All right,” Lucy says. “We watch over things here till y
ou home again.” Suddenly, she seeks out the straight-back chair at the table and sits down hard, as if her wind has given out.

  “You see us soon,” Israel says. He lifts both his and Noby’s jacket from the wall hook, and the two of them head off down the twisting, mud-crusted road on foot.

  David shadows his father and his brother as far as the edge of the yard in front of the cabin, near the vegetable patch, staring at their backs until they are obscured from view by the thick of pine trees to the north. Neither father nor son looks back.

  The steely sky with its dark-tinged clouds feels heavy, and for Israel it is almost as if he carries an extra burden, like a woman balancing a heavy wash basket on her head as she walks. The sun struggles to punch through, and intermittently succeeds, but Israel and Noby get caught in several brief showers, only enough wetness to damp down the dust and muddy the cow and horse trails. In long-leaf Pine Hills country, they pass a small cluster of naked cypress trees, the spindly, brittle branches seemingly dead, used up, bare and sheathed in gray, with a few curled brown leaves that still refuse to drop. Spanish moss hangs from the gray trees like rotting flesh from a skeleton, ghostlike.

  “Spring coming,” Israel tells Noby. “Them Resurrection trees gonna get green again soon.”

  They walk in silence, and when they come to Red River, Israel and Noby follow the bank, paralleling the course of the water through the bottomlands on their way to Colfax. A large brown heron begins flight at the river’s edge, outstretched wings so heavy they bat the water several times before the bird gains the air, creating brief ripples before settling. Noby runs to the bank, picks up a rock, and skips it along the river’s surface.

  Some of the good cropland they pass remains fallow, not planted out since the last flood, but of the land in cultivation, most is in cotton and corn, the rest in sugarcane. It is unusual to head into the village for a purpose other than to bring back supplies from the general store. Colfax isn’t such a far distance from The Bottom, but Israel makes the journey to town only two or maybe three times a year, a few more if you count the visiting trips to nearby Smithfield Quarter.