Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [71]
"Don't know. Don't think so. Haven't really looked."
Kilrain paused. "He sure is black, and that's a fact."
"Did you get his name?"
"He said something I couldn't understand. Hell, Colonel, I can't even understand them Johnnies, and I've been a long time in this army " The black man drank more of the coffee, put out both hands and took the cup, drank, nodded, said something incomprehensible.
"Guess he was a servant on the march, took a chance to run away. Guess they shot at him."
Chamberlain looked at the bald head, the ragged dress. Impossible to tell the age. A young man, at least. No lines around the eyes. Thick-lipped, huge jaw.
Look of animal strength. Chamberlain shook his head.
"He wouldn't be a house servant. Look at his hands.
Field hands." Chamberlain tried to communicate. The man said something weakly, softly. Chamberlain, who could speak seven languages, recognized nothing. The man said a word that sounded like Baatu, Baatu, and closed his eyes.
"God," Kilrain said. "He can't even speak English."
Bucklin grunted. "Maybe he's just bad wounded."
Chamberlain shook his head. "No. I think you're right. I don't think he knows the language."
The man opened his eyes again, looked directly at Chamberlain, nodded his head, grimaced, said again, Baatu, Baatu. Chamberlain said, "Do you suppose that could be 'thank you'?"
The black man nodded strongly. "Tang oo, tang oo, baas."
"That's it." Chamberlain reached out, patted the man happily on the arm.
"Don't worry, fella, you'll be all right." He gestured to Kilrain. "Here, let's get him up."
They carried the man down out of the rocks, lay him on open grass. A knot of soldiers gathered. The man pulled himself desperately up on one elbow, looked round in fear.
Kilrain brought some hardtack and bacon and he ate with obvious hunger, but his teeth were bad; he had trouble chewing the hardtack. The soldiers squatted around him curiously. You saw very few black men in New England.
Chamberlain knew one to speak to: a silent round-headed man with a white wife, a farmer, living far out of town, without friends. You saw black men in the cities but they kept to themselves. Chamberlain's curiosity was natural and friendly, but there was a reserve in it, an unexpected caution. The man was really very black. Chamberlain felt an oddness, a crawly hesitation, not wanting to touch him.
He shook his head, amazed at himself. He saw: palm of the hand almost white; blood dries normally, skin seems dusty.
But he could not tell whether it was truly dust or only a natural sheen of light on hair above black skin. But he felt it again: a flutter of unmistakable revulsion. Fat lips, brute jaw, red-veined eyeballs. Chamberlain stood up. He had not expected this feeling. He had not even known this feeling was there. He remembered suddenly a conversation with a Southerner a long time ago, before the war, a Baptist minister. White complacent face, sense of bland enormous superiority: my dear man, you have to live among them, you simply don't understand.
Kilrain said, "And this is what it's all about."
A soldier said softly, "Poor bastard."
"Hey, Sarge. How much you figure he's worth, this one, on the hoof?"
"Funny. Very funny. But they'd give a thousand dollars for him, I bet. Nine hundred for sure."
"Really? Hell." It was Bucklin, grinning. "Whyn't we sell him back and buy outen this army."
Chamberlain said to Kilrain, "He can't have been long in this country."
"No. A recent import, you might say."
"I wonder how much he knows of what's happening."
Kilrain shrugged. A crowd was gathering. Chamberlain said, "Get a surgeon to look at that wound."
He backed off. He stared at the palm of his own hand. A matter of thin skin. A matter of color. The reaction is instinctive. Any alien thing. And yet Chamberlain was ashamed; he had not known it was there. He thought: If I feel this way, even I, an educated man... what was in God's mind?
He remembered the minister: and what if it is you who are wrong, after all?
Tom came bubbling up with a message from Vincent: the