Freedom's Comet: Signs

By Matt Rayamaki

The protagonist of this trilogy, Bill Gresham, says it best. "All the histories of the war I’ve read have been written by the Northern victors or Southerners trying to rewrite the Northerners accounts to save face. Not one has told what it was like to live through the war as a black slave. Not one has told what it was like to be your father and brother’s slave. Not one has told what it was like to have the war crush and dismember a city as cosmopolitan, wealthy, and important as Macon, Georgia. Not one has told about the fratricidal war, a civil war within the Civil War, that consumed Georgia. Georgia was hardly a united front! But every account has portrayed us slaves as being dimwitted and lacking any God-given intelligence. Yes, nearly all of us were uneducated--most whites demanded that we be kept that way keep--but few of us lacked intelligence. What we lacked was schooling. The writers of all these histories ignore the fact that despite not having maps to guide us, and lacking the ability to read or write, thousands of us slaves successfully navigated across hundreds of miles of enemy lands, with bounties on our heads and hounds on our heels and achieved freedom. Everyone ignores the fact that in the end we all did achieve our freedom--and it was six hundred thousands whites who died."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Rayamaki
• Release date: Dec 26, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465861870

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Freedom’s Comet

- Signs -

By Matt Rayamaki

Copyright 2012 by Matt Rayamaki

Smashwords Edition

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Preface

Freedom’s Comet is a trilogy of historical fiction set during the Civil War. Although its spine is based on the daily dairies written by LeRoy Wiley Gresham of Macon, Georgia, the story is told through the eyes of LeRoy’s personal slave and valet, Bill Gresham. The Gresham family was one the Macon’s most prominent and wealthy families in a city that was both a strong cultural and economic center for the South. Although the 1860 Slave Census shows that John Gresham, LeRoy’s father, owned scores of slaves, including one male mulatto Bill’s age, Bill’s blood relationship to the Gresham family is fictional. Slave-children were not uncommon in the South and I created this fictional bond to explore this relationship. Most slave-children received no preferential treatment by their father/master, but the records show some did. All the surviving historical documents show that John Gresham treated his slaves well and once wrote that God brought the war for the punishment and reformation of the South’s because of slavery. If John Gresham had a slave-son, I believe he would have treated him as I have portrayed in this series. In creating this relationship I mean not to disparage the legacy of Gresham family or their descendants in any way.

Nearly every character in this series were real people in LeRoy’s life. All the historical events he witnessed and captured in his diaries day by day have been verified with various accredited Civil War histories. All the natural phenomena, including the comets and eclipses, have been verified with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Although I have relied heavily on LeRoy’s diaries for historical content, I have supplemented missing details with accredited Civil War histories, including Civil War Macon, by Richard Iobst.

This first book of this series, Signs, covers the fall of Fort Sumter in April 1861 to the war’s first abattoir battle at Shiloh in April 1862. The second book, Jubilation, continues from Shiloh and ends in April 1864 with Sherman noose closing on Atlanta. The last book, Deliverance, starts with the siege of Atlanta and ends in April 1865, shortly after the assassination of President Lincoln.

Due to the stiff resistance put up by Macon’s people to Sherman’s troops, the area just east of the city bore the brunt of the March To the Sea. Unlike its culture and people, Macon’s buildings emerged from the war virtually unscathed and still retain their antebellum glory. The Gresham mansion is now known as the 1842 Inn, a highly rated and popular bed and breakfast. And nearly all the other grand mansions from LeRoy’s days, including the Johnstons, which is now known as the Hay House part and is part of The Georgia Trust, also survive and continue to thrive. LeRoy’s diaries have survived too, and were donated to the Library of Congress by an ancestor and can be found in that capitol of Yankeedom, Washington, DC.

Introduction

I was sitting at the oak desk in my law office when I read the front page headline of the Macon Daily Telegraph that announced my father’s death: John Jones Gresham, Dead at 78. The color drained from my face. I rose from my chair and closed the door to my office. Like withered ghosts, a cloud of brown leaves rattled outside the window. Despite being his son, it sounds so wrong to say that for the first half of my life I was his slave, but I was. It was such a different time then. How far I’d come since those days when I was called Albus and I hid my intelligence and played the fool. It’s been twenty-five years since then, twenty-five years since I last saw him, twenty-five years since I left the ruins of Georgia, moved north, attended college in Oberlin and became a barrister.

Although its now 1890, the dawning of a new century, Macon will always be with me. How could it not be? It was where I was born, where my white living half-brother and half-sister live, and where now both my parents and my three white half-brothers are buried. It is tattooed on my soul. After I established my practice, every year I’ve paid the Telegraph to send me a week’s worth of their dailies. Being in the center of the war news, old habits die hard and I’ve always had a deep-seated need to know how my hometown and its people are faring.

My leather chair groaned as I sat to read the article. My heart swelled with pride at the tributes Macon bestowed upon my father and his life’s work: mayor, state senator, philanthropist, church elder, lawyer, businessman, community leader. After the war the city even named a white high school in his honor. But when they wrote about his efforts during the war, in an instant the ghosts of all those long-buried memories, the ones I’d stomped down for the last two and a half decades awoke and rushed over me with a tornado’s fury. My nostrils filled with the smell of wet burnt wood from the rabid Confederate and Unionist arsonists who tried to burn each other out. My heart wilted remembering the death of my white half-brother, LeRoy, and the terrible suffering he endured the years before he passed. My ears rang with the clacking of the telegraph’s key that brought the latest war news. Once again my tongue tasted the bitterness of robin pie, the only food we could find after Sherman destroyed Georgia’s breadbasket. Terror surged into my veins when the specter of Tom Payne with his withered arm flashed into my mind. But most of all, my heart swelled with joy at the great arcing comets that filled the night skies and foretold not only my freedom, but freedom for all us slaves. I’m amazed at how quickly these beautiful comets have all but been forgotten! Perhaps with the dawning of a new century and its promises of great technological advances, believing in ‘signs’ and ‘augers’ has become an embarrassment. My head fell into my hands and I wept hard. And I wept long, the longest since LeRoy’s death

With my desktop still dappled with my tears, I grabbed my pen and some lose paper. All the histories of the war I’ve read have been written by the Northern victors or Southerners trying to rewrite the Northerners accounts to save face. Not one has told what it was like to live through the war as a black slave. Not one has told what it was like to be your father and brother’s slave. Not one has told what it was like to have the war crush and dismember a city as cosmopolitan, wealthy, and important as Macon, Georgia. Not one has told about the fratricidal war, a civil war within the Civil War, which consumed Georgia. Georgia was hardly a united front! But every account has portrayed us slaves as being dimwitted and lacking any God-given intelligence. Yes, nearly all of us were uneducated--most whites demanded that we be kept that way keep--but few of us lacked intelligence. What we lacked was schooling. The writers of all these histories ignore the fact that despite not having maps to guide us, and lacking the ability to read or write, thousands of us slaves successfully navigated across hundreds of miles of enemy lands, with bounties on our heads and hounds on our heels and achieved freedom. Everyone ignores the fact that in the end we all did achieve our freedom--and it was six hundred thousands whites who died.

I dabbed the nib in the inkwell. I will tell the story. I will tell the whole story.

Chapter 1

Usually, when a new servant comes to the house, Howard said as he got up to pour me another cup of coffee, he spends the first week with me. His wiry gray hair atop his pear-shaped head shined in the firelight of their small cabin. Although dawn was just breaking, set in his coal-black face, the whites of his big round eyes were easy to see. He was somewhere north of fifty, and had been Master Gresham’s valet and right-hand man since his college days, and was a man of unwavering loyal to those he liked. I counted myself in that group. To show him the ropes. Eveline, his common-in-law wife of seven years, draped the black trousers she was ironing over the back of a chair and laid a white cotton shirt on the ironing board. She was slender with aquiline features, and her pumpkin-colored skin was darker in the firelight. Her hair just started showing the first hint of mid-thirties gray. She was more a practical sort, not given to flights of emotion, and always knew who buttered her bread. But as you’re fixing to care for Master LeRoy inside the house, you’ll be with Eveline. He winked at me. She rules the roost inside that house.

Howard! Eveline said, her voice sliding up.

Just telling him like it is, honey. He handed me the coffee then sat next to me by the fire. Miz Gressum thinks she runs the house, but my Eveline is the one who really makes that house tick.

Miz Gressum knows what she’s doing, Eveline replied, her long round vowels rolled off her tongue like pearls. She gathered up the clothes and handed me the warm pile. Put them on in the bedroom. Leave your homespun, Julia Ann will wash it.

My skin was rubbed raw from last night’s bath, the first in a long time, and I felt every soft stitch of my still-warm new clothes. I’d always admired clothes with buttons, and here I was buttoning my first fine white cotton shirt with bone buttons. I glowed with pride. I was eighteen at that moment, and had just been brought up from Master Gresham’s plantation in Houston, Georgia, to become part of the mansion’s staff. He’d been my only owner, and was my parent’s owner when I was born. In fact, Master Gresham named me. It wouldn’t be until the end of the war before I was told the true reason as to why I was brought up on April 17th, 1861, right after the fall of Fort Sumter, but at that point I thought it was because I’d done such a good job at the plantation. I ran my finger down the sharp crease in my new trousers and looked at my finger to be sure I hadn’t cut myself.

Lord, will you look at him! Eveline said as I opened the plank door. He looks like a house servant. I held up the tie. With a rope I could tie a halter in a jiffy, but I hadn’t a clue how to tie this. They laughed and Howard came over and showed me how to tie my first tie.

After we put out the fire Howard changed into his uniform, and the three of us walked across Madison Street to the mansion. Like most of the mansions on the hill, the servants’ closely packed cabins were on small squares of land directly behind their owner’s mansions. We entered the property at the gate in the high brick wall. The orchard, in the fresh morning light, held apple and peach trees with plump buds ready to burst. They were a full week ahead of the trees at the plantation. The rooster crowed as we passed the stable, and at the kitchen, a stand-alone building in case of the all-to-common kitchen fire, Howard went into the mansion. I followed Eveline to College Street to face the front of the property.

I’d been to the mansion hundreds of times. In fact, I was brought up from the plantation when I was age eight to be Master Gresham's sons’ playmate, and I lived here for the next two years. I was a year-and-a-half older than his oldest son, Thomas. Nearly five years older than his middle son, LeRoy. And nearly seven years older than, Minnie, their only daughter. Despite all my visits here, the mansion still took my breath away. Although I didn’t have the words for it then, it looked like some Greek god’s temple. It stood fully forty feet high, and was nearly fifty feet in width and breadth. Marble steps led from the front yard up to a porch with six mammoth white columns that soared up to support the house’s hipped roof. Above the front door, protected by the roof, hung a large half-oval balcony. Black louvered shutters hugged every huge window. White clapboards wrapped the house, and like Zeus’ crown, a white captain’s walk capped the roof. The gardens to the left and right of the house were fragrant with sprays of azaleas, tulips, and hyacinths. The house was built in 1844, when I was two, as Master Gresham’s wedding gift to Miz Gresham, and over the next sixteen intervening years, it had aged well.

Now, Eveline said, I’ve known you to be nothing but respectful on your visits to the house, but as you’ll be working in the house, there are rules you need to know. You’ve probably heard them all, but I need to know that you understand them. She didn’t know me well yet and didn’t how quick-witted I actually was. First, she said and pointed, do you see that beautiful white front door? My skin color, like nearly everyone else who worked in the house was light like hers, was more of a light leather color rather than pumpkin. Don’t use it unless you’re with a white person. We only use the back doors. Second, she looked around to make certain that we were alone, and then leaned in, I know you’ve heard this one before, but don’t use your smarts around here. Whatever happens, play the fool! The Gressums are kind people, but with the exception of me and Howard, they expect all their house servants to be illiterate, happy, and superstitious Negroes. Her words and diction betrayed her education. Six years ago Miz Gresham’s first head maid, Maggie, died from the congestive chill. As the head maid was the person who greeted callers and created the first impression of the family, Miz Gresham needed another educated light-skinned head maid. Through a friend they heard about Eveline. She was born, raised, and educated in Virginia where they were less strict about teaching slaves to read and write. Once they meet her they immediately bought her. Her fine diction, intelligence, and light features were the perfect combination. The third rule, and the most important, she said straightening up, we’ll talk about tonight. Now let’s get breakfast.

The smell of coffee filled the kitchen. I walked over to the stove and poured another cup and waited in the corner to be out of the way. Coffee was a luxury I tasted only at the mansion. Ella and Betty, the other housemaids, scurried about bringing the white china plates to Mary, the cook. Mary portioned out eggs, ham and grits, and when the platters were full of plates, Ella and Betty carried them off to the family. Milo and Johnson, the other house hands, and my new cabin-mates, came in and like me, moved to a corner to drink coffee and be out of the way. Julia Ann, the family’s seamstress, stepped over. She was a couple years older than me, with a pretty straight and frank face, wide set eyes, full lips, and a narrow nose. Her hair was done up in a hundred inch long pig tails. Even as a child she’d always been something of a rebel, so her first master tattooed three vertical inky lines from her bottom lip to her chin. In the event she ever ran away she could easily be identified. She looked me over from head-to-toe, pulled at my cuffs and my waist to check the fit, and then winked. My heart fluttered for her even then.

I’d come to Macon, the center of Bibb County, every couple of months on the weekly provision run from the plantation, so we all knew each other. I’d arrived after dinner last evening, and everyone I hadn’t seen yet welcomed me to the mansion’s staff. At the plantation, we slaves had already heard that the South had just attacked and captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina and discussed it amongst ourselves. But now, hidden under Mary’s din, everyone squeezed in to whisper to me the news that President Lincoln had asked for seventy-five thousand volunteers for the Northern army to bring us back into the Union. War with our former country looked certain. None of us, not even most of the whites, truly understood what this would mean for Georgia and the South. But for now, the talk of war and secession, even amongst us slaves, was grand excitement.

After the china was cleared from the house, the nine of us sat at our long pine table in the corner for our breakfast. As I lifted my first fork-full of food to my mouth, Julia Ann rushed over and tucked a napkin in my collar. No need to mess up those fine clothes before Miz Gressum sees you, she said. Now, without the cover of Mary’s din, we talked of safer subjects. Everyone wanted to hear how the spring planting was going at the plantation.

When I added my wooden bowl to the pile on the washboard Eveline said, I’ll see if Miz Gressum is ready for us. Butterflies I never knew before fluttered in my stomach. This was the first time I’d see my childhood friends in over eight years and I couldn’t wait! Back then Thomas, LeRoy, and I were best friends. During the two years I last lived here, we gamboled about the property, and all of Macon was our playground. Sometimes after a big rain, we’d cross the City Bridge over the Ocmulgee River and collect the arrowheads and lumps of yellow bone that washed out from the Indian mounds in East Macon. We held great tournaments of skill and daring. LeRoy, despite being the youngest, was always the best tree climber for he was fearless! At night, we’d set out lamps and collect the evil looking bugs that haunted the night. When I turned ten, as was the way with slaves, I was moved back to the plantation and set to work caring for the plantation’s animals. Over the next several years, when I did came up to the mansion, Maggie shooed me away from the house, saying my place was at the plantation now.

Eveline returned and I followed her