Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [196]
“Get out of here,” Charles said in a shaking voice.
“This is what Missy Caroline done for me. I’m a free man. I got a wife and a son. That’s more than you got. You got no family, no money, no future . . . you just like a slave. Except no one took all those things from you—you threw them away. We changed places, Massa Charles. You want to know whose side God’s on? Look at what you got left and tell me if you think God believes in states’ rights. Missy Caroline done right. You the one who’s wrong. You ought to be asking her to forgive you.”
“Get out of here and leave me alone!” Charles shouted. He didn’t think he could bear to hear her name one more time.
“No sir, I ain’t leaving yet. I come here to give you this.” He removed the burlap bag that was slung over his shoulder and pulled out a ragged stack of paper, tied together with string. “Tessie say for you to read this. Missy Caroline don’t know I’m giving it to you.”
Charles stared at the bundle of paper Josiah had shoved into his shaking hands. It looked like ragged sheets of wallpaper from Caroline’s foyer. It was covered with her beautiful handwriting. He recognized it from all the letters she had faithfully written to him, and he felt a pain greater than any of his other wounds.
“Tessie say Missy still loves you. You didn’t lose everything. She still loves you. You sent her away because you won’t try to understand the reason why she helped us or forgive her for it. Now her Yankee friend Robert’s coming around, offering her his love. Says he’ll give her a new start in a new town. She don’t love him, but she awful lonely. This your last chance . . . you gonna throw it away?”
“I listened to you because you saved my life,” Charles said in a trembling voice. “I owed you that much. But what goes on between Caroline and me is none of your business.” The anger and rage that gnawed at him swelled from a dull ache to an agonizing pain. All he could do was lash out. “The Yankees are here and you have your freedom, Josiah. Go flaunt it someplace else.”
“I won my freedom long before the Yankees came,” Josiah said quietly. “I was free the moment I picked you up and decided to forgive Missy Caroline and her daddy. You can start living as a free man, too, once you forgive. Maybe then God will start giving back all the things you threw away.”
Josiah turned then, and walked away. When he was gone, Charles sank down onto the charred beam and buried his face in his hands. Pain and anger filled every inch of him, until he thought it would consume him. But even in the blind heat of his rage, he knew two things: that Josiah had spoken the truth and that the reason he so deeply resented facing that truth was because the man who had spoken it was a Negro.
Against his will, Charles remembered his first few encounters with Caroline, how her outspokenness had angered him. He knew, now, that it was because she had shone a beam of light on the darkness that was inside him, exposing the racism that he’d never wanted to admit was there. He’d seen a little Negro boy as a thief, not a hungry child. He’d seen a Negro carriage driver as a convenience, not a man.
But hadn’t that also been what had drawn him to Caroline from the very beginning—the deep compassion she had for all people? The light that had shone so brightly from her?
Charles looked down at her handwriting on the ragged pile of paper on his lap. Then the words slowly slid into focus. He began to read:
As I write this by candlelight, Union troops have my beloved city of Richmond under siege. The hall clock tells me that it is well past midnight, but I am unable to sleep. I no longer know what tomorrow will bring, nor do I know when my arrest will come—but I’m now quite certain that it will come . . . I’m not sure anyone will ever understand