Mankillers

“Emma was young then, maybe sixteen or seventeen—she wasn’t sure—but not more than twenty. She’d come to Jasmine with your momma, as her personal servant. Then Marcellus showed up on his buckboard. He was visiting all the local plantations, selling his wares to owners and overseers, anybody with money, mostly for their children. Pe

“He and Emma hit it off on first sight. I reckon she was a fetching lass as a teenager. She figured Marcellus was maybe ten years older, in his mid-twenties—he probably didn’t know himself—and to hear her tell it, he was as bright and handsome as they came, quick-witted and smooth-talking with all the charm and self-confidence of a plantation owner’s son.”

Buck thought of Clay who fit that description perfectly.

“Marcellus hung around here longer than was profitable—he’d sold all anybody was going to buy—and he had to move on, but not before he’d proposed to Emma. They had two problems though. First, she was a slave owned by Mildred, and your momma wasn’t about to emancipate her. Second, Marcellus didn’t have the kind of money it would take to buy her freedom, ten-thousand dollars at least, when he was earning less than a hundred dollars cash a year. And that was assuming your poppa would even countenance selling her.”

“Especially to a black man,” Buck pointed out harshly. “Father had very definite ideas about people staying in their place and what they had a right to.”

“Nevertheless Marcellus swore he’d find a way to raise the money, that he’d come back, buy her freedom, they’d get married and go off, maybe out west, to raise a family of their own. He didn’t have a ring to give her, so before he left, he presented her with a baby Jesus he’d carved out of hickory as his token of their engagement.”

Buck stared at Miriam. “My God!” he exclaimed. “You’re not talking about the one Momma used in our Christmas crèche every year? Surely not that one.”

Miriam paused, then nodded. “When your momma discovered it among Emma’s things, she accused her of stealing it. Emma swore he’d given it to her and explained why. Mildred only half believed her is the way Emma explained it to me, so for safekeeping, to make sure nobody stole it from her, your momma took it and promised to return it to Emma when Marcellus came back for her.”

“I can’t believe Momma would—” Buck shook his head. “Did he?” But he already knew the answer.

“Emma never saw or heard from him again.”

Buck hung his head. “What happened to him?”

Miriam gave a fatalistic little shrug. “When Emma told me about Marcellus Deeds last month, I put out inquiries to see if any of my sources or their contacts had information about him, but it’s been forty years since he disappeared. Maybe he’d lied to her and never intended to come back. Maybe he died of a fever, had an accident, or was killed for some real or imagined offense. Free blacks have always lived precarious lives. Maybe he was a runaway slave posing as a freed man and got caught. There’s no telling. He might even have found someone else. Personally, I like to think he was sincere and something beyond his control prevented him from keeping his promise.”

“But she never forgot him,” Buck murmured, saddened by this new revelation.

Miriam nodded. “Emma was a smart woman. She’d figured out a long time ago he wasn’t coming back, but she couldn’t abandon all hope that someday he might turn up. I imagine every time an unfamiliar wagon pulled into the delivery yard her heart did a little lurch, wondering if it was him.”

Forty years of waiting for the man who’d promised her freedom. Freedom finally came, but too late for her to enjoy it. The man never did. May she rest in peace.

“What about the horseshoe? What does it have to do with this Marcellus Deeds?”

“Just before he left, his horse threw a shoe. He replaced it himself and tossed the old one in the junk pile. When your momma took the baby Jesus, Emma went to the pile and got the shoe and nailed it over her door. She took consolation in knowing no one would bother her about a worthless old, worn-out horseshoe.”

“And the baby Jesus?”

“She asked your poppa for it when your momma died, but Raleigh refused to give it to her, claimed she had no right to it. Emma looked for it after the house fire but never found it.”

Buck wasn’t unmindful of the irony. The big, imposing, proud plantation house had been destroyed, along with the graven image of the messiah who would come one day to set the world free of sin. Yet the tiny, insignificant, humble slave shack had survived, along with a rusted old useless piece of iron.

“Why didn’t Emma take the horseshoe with her when you brought her to your house?” he asked.

“After she told me her story, I asked her that very question. She said it didn’t matter anymore.”

So Emma had at last lost hope, yet Buck couldn’t imagine her falling into despair.

“After a lifetime of serving others,” he noted, “everything and everyone that had meant anything to her was gone.”

“Except you.” Miriam stated emphatically. “She liked the kind of man you’ve become, what you’ve done with your life, how you’ve always helped people.”

Would she have felt the same way if she’d found out he’d become a mankiller, that he’d killed Job’s uncle? He’d never know, and perhaps that was just as well. He’d done what he had to do, like cutting off men’s arms and legs while they screamed in agonizing pain. But hadn’t she delivered babies while their mommas screamed as well. Maybe she would understand after all.

What truly appalled him was his mother’s behavior. How could she have been so heartless as to take away the symbol of a young woman’s hope? Did she really think it would be stolen from Emma’s cabin? Or was this another example of the paternalism that was so ingrained and automatic in the slaveholding aristocracy? Safeguarding the delicately carved wooden figurine would have been one thing, but to then put it proudly on display every Christmas as if it were her own for all her friends to admire, in the very presence of the chattel-slave who had the moral claim on it, was, in Buck’s estimation, an act of inexcusable cruelty. Yet for thirty years Mildred Thomson had done exactly that, and during those same thirty years Emma had served her mistress faithfully and even warmly.

What an incredible woman she was. The parable of the widow’s mite wasn’t exactly right. Others didn’t give great treasure, they took it. But Emma still gave all she had. Buck recalled another verse from St Matthew: And the Master said, Well done, my good and faithful servant.

#

Gus ambled to the porch rail. “Miriam, we’re ready to leave. We need to hurry. I don’t want to be on the road after dark. We’ll drop Ruth off at her house on the way home.”

“Take Rex’s pistol with you,” Buck instructed him. “In case you run into trouble.”

“You’re thinking Drexel—”

“Highly unlikely,” Buck cut him off. “If he’s even gotten to Columbia from Charleston, I seriously doubt he knows where we are, so the likelihood of an ambush between here and there is not very high, but—”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“Amen.”

Miriam shot worried glances between the two men. “I have no problem with you carrying a gun,” she told her husband. “You may not be the crack shot Buck is, but you’re competent.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “However, I think it would be wise to keep the weapon hidden. The last time Ruth rode into Columbia—”

“You’re right, of course,” Gus said. “This day has been upsetting enough. She’s already concerned that Sarah isn’t going back with us.”

“We’ll be fine,” Buck assured her. “We have four men accompanying us, and they’re all armed.”