in Alexandria, with a Mr. Franklin. They were to be sent to New Orleans. Their names were Jarvis, George, and Maria Gains. Any information of them will be thankfully received. Address me at Aberdeen, Mississippi. Cecelia Rhodes.”
“My Lord,” I whisper. “Read me another.”
She tells the story of a little boy named Si, five years old when a Mister Swan Thompson passed and all his worldly goods, including the folks he owned, were divided up by his son and daughter. “It was in eighteen…” Juneau Jane stands on tiptoes to read the paper. “Eighteen thirty-four. Miss Lureasy Cuff was standing in the house and talking to my mother and saying, ‘I think Pa should give Si to me because I raised him to what he is.’ Uncle Thomas drove the wagon when Mother left. She had two children then, Si and Orange. Address me at Midway, Texas. Si Johnson.”
“My Lord,” I say again, louder this time. “He’d be a old man by now. A old man, off down in Texas, and him still looking. And word’s come all the way to here, in that paper.”
My mind swells like the river after a hard rain. Grows and turns and runs and picks up everything that’s been heavy in my soul, that’s been laid up on the banks for months and years. I float myself along to where I ain’t been able to let myself go before. Are my people up there on that wall? Mama, Hardy, Het, Pratt…Epheme, Addie? Easter, Ike, and Baby Rose? Aunt Jenny, or li’l Mary Angel, who I saw the last time in that slave pen when she was just three years old and the trader’s man carried her off?
She’d be growed big by now, Mary Angel. Just three years younger than me. Fifteen, I guess. Maybe she’s gone to one of them schools for colored folks. Maybe she’d write in one of them little squares on the newspaper. Maybe she’s there on that wall, and I don’t even know it. Maybe they all are.
Need to find out. Learn what each of them little squares say. “Tell it to me. All that’s up there,” I ask Juneau Jane. “I can’t go from this place without knowing. I lost my people, too. When the Yankees kept coming up the river in their gunboats, Old Mister made a plan for all us to go refugee in Texas till the Confederates could win the war. Missus’s nephew Jep Loach stole some of us away, instead. Sold us all along the road, in ones and twos. I was the only one the Gossetts got back. The only one in my family that ended up refugee in Texas with him.”
We can’t leave this place. Not today. When the woman and the child come, I’ll think what to tell them, but hearing all them papers matters most.
“What’s that next one say?” First time in my life I ever been hungry for words, but I’m hungry for these like I been starved since a six-year-old child. I want to know how to look at the scratch marks up there and turn them into people and places.
Juneau Jane reads me another. Then another, but I don’t hear her Frenchy voice. I hear the rasp of a old woman, looking for the mama she ain’t seen since she was a little child like Mary Angel. Still carries that pain in her heart, like the wounds on the body, blood all dried up, but only way they’ll heal is to find what’s been lost.
I stand next to Juneau Jane, pick one square, then a different one, then another far across the wall.
A sister sold from her brothers in South Carolina.
A mother who carried and bore from her body nineteen babies, never let to keep any past four years old.
A wife, looking for her husband and her boys.
A mama whose son went off with his young master to the war and never come back.
A family whose boy went to fight in the colored troops with the Federals, them left with no way to know, did he die and was put under the ground on some blood-covered field,