Devil's Dream - Madison Smartt Bell [35]
He looked across at Benjamin as he tuned. “What you aim to do?”
“Do bout what?” Ben had taken another, bigger piece of cedar from his pocket and was whittling; you couldn’t yet tell what it meant to be.
“Mist’ Forrest goen to war tomorrow, what them say.”
Ben looked away along the alley of the quarters, where Nancy was coming along barefoot toward Zeb’s cabin, between the rows of other cabins Ben had built.
“I spec to go with him,” he said.
Zeb shook his head and tuned up three more notes. With hammer strokes he sounded each against the fretless fingerboard.
“Boy, are you outen yo mind?” he said.
“What you mean to do yoself?” Ben asked him. He was watching Nancy as she sat down beside Alma on the chunk of the stone; Alma shifted over to make room for her. Nancy glanced up once at the men on the porch, then looked over the way, where a file of speckled chickens were flapping up to roost in a hackberry tree. Ben turned his piece of wood under the knife blade in his hand; the red cedar smell sprang up as he worked.
“Plant cotton. Chop cotton. Pick cotton. Pluck on the banjo evenens and Sundays …” Zeb rolled an arpeggio on the four lower strings. “Live till I die.”
He began tuning up the short fifth string, wincing a little as the note climbed higher. There was only one lone extra string, till he might get his hands on more gut sometime. The fifth string held and didn’t pop. Zeb picked out a quick melody line, thumbing the high drone note. As he fell into frailing the chords, the women on the stone below began to hum the tune. “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” The children who were already there smiled and nudged each other; more children had begun to come.
“Don’t see what you want to go for,” Zebulon said.
“Listen at what you playen, Zeb.”
“Just playen. Ain’t singen a word.”
“You know you want to get free same as I do,” Ben said.
At the word free, the grown folks who’d started drifting in the direction of the banjo all looked everywhere except at each other. Nancy and Alma hushed a minute.
“You be lucky you don’t get dead,” Zebulon said. He stopped playing and muted the strings with the heel of his palm. “Yankees get here, they set us free.”
“You don’t know they gone get here,” Benjamin said, “and you don’t know what gone happen effen they do.”
“How you know the Old Man word be good for what he say?”
“Forrest don’t tell no lies,” Ben said, scraping shavings more urgently from the cedar. He was talking to Zeb, but looking over the porch rail at the back of Nancy’s head. The knot in her kerchief, lying between the cords of her neck. “He got a mean mouth, and don’t we all know it. Hot temper and a hard hand, I know it better’n most.” Ben touched the scar that flashed out of his temple. “But I ain’t never known him to lie to nobody, and neither have you.”
A murmur of assent went round the group. Most of the quarters, young and old, had by now assembled, standing or squatting in a loose semicircle before Zebulon’s cabin.
“Jerry goen,” somebody said.
“Go on,” said Zeb. “Sho Jerry goen. Jerry go everwhere the Old Man go. Jerry ain’t never gone be free no way. Ain’t no freedom in that man head. You give him that free paper yesterday—he won’t be free today.”
Having pronounced the syllable free four times, Zebulon pressed his lips together and started playing another tune. Alma and Nancy were rocking their heads and when the chorus came around they took up singing like they couldn’t help it.
Wade… in the water …
God gone to carry the wa-ater…
Zeb broke off his playing sharply, as if the secret meanings of the song had spooked him. The women’s voices disappeared. Doves called, like breath across a bottle, as they rose to the shadowed eves of the cabins.
Zeb played the opening run of “Devil’s Dream.”
“White folks’ music,” Benjamin said.
“Ain’t no sech a thing.” Zeb kept the tune rolling. “All music for everbody, what I say.”
Sampson broke