"Dunno, sah."
"What do you want to do?"
"Anything."
"Fight the rebs?"
"Wal, I kin du it."
"What"s your name?"
"Nimbus."
"Nimbus? Good name--ha! ha: what else?"
"Nuffin" else."
"Nothing else? What was your old master"s name?"
"Desmit--Potem Desmit."
"Well, then, that"s yours, ain"t it--your surname--Nimbus Desmit?"
"Reckon not, Mahs"r."
"No? Why not?"
"Same reason his name ain"t Nimbus, I s"pose."
"Well," said the officer, laughing, "there may be something in that; but a soldier must have two names. Suppose I call you George Nimbus?"
"Yer kin call me jes" what yer choose, sah; but my name"s Nimbus all the same. No Gawge Nimbus, nor ennything Nimbus, nor Nimbus ennything--jes" Nimbus; so. n.i.g.g.e.r got no use fer two names, nohow."
The officer, perceiving that it was useless to argue the matter further, added his name to the muster-roll of a regiment, and he was duly sworn into the service of the United States as George Nimbus, of Company C, of the---Ma.s.sachusetts Volunteer Infantry, and was counted one of the quota which the town of Great Barringham, in the valley of the Housatuck, was required to furnish to complete the pending call for troops to put down rebellion. By virtue of this fact, the said George Nimbus became ent.i.tled to the sum of four hundred dollars bounty money offered by said town to such as should give themselves to complete its quota of "the boys in blue,"
in addition to his pay and bounty from the Government. So, if it forced on him a new name, the service of freedom was not altogether without compensatory advantages.
Thus the slave Nimbus was transformed into the "contraband" George Nimbus, and became not only a soldier of fortune, but also the representative of a patriotic citizen of Great Barringham, who served his country by proxy, in the person of said contraband, faithfully and well until the end of the war, when the South fell--stricken at last most fatally by the dark hands which she had manacled, and overcome by their aid whose manhood she had refused to acknowledge.
CHAPTER V.
NUNC PRO TUNC.
The first step in the progress from the prison-house of bondage to the citadel of liberty was a strange one. The war was over. The struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part of the South, was ended, and fate had decided against them. With this arbitrament of war fell also the inst.i.tution which had been its cause. Slavery was abolished--by proclamation, by national enactment, by const.i.tutional amendment--ay, by the sterner logic which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man could claim his service or restrain his volition. He might go or come, work or play, so far as his late master was concerned.
But that was all. He could not contract, testify, marry or give in marriage. He had neither property, knowledge, right, or power.
The whole four millions did not possess that number of dollars or of dollars" worth. Whatever they had acquired in slavery was the master"s, unless he had expressly made himself a trustee for their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed, a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded, penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless, nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions.
Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them all might lift his hand in a daughter"s defence. Uncle and aunt and cousin, home, family--none of these words had any place in the freedman"s vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still color-blinded by the past.
The fruit of slavery--its first ripe harvest, gathered with swords and b.l.o.o.d.y bayonets, was before the nation which looked ignorantly on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not comprehend its work; the South could not comprehend its fate. The unbound slave looked to the future in dull, wondering hope.
The first step in advance was taken neither by the nation nor by the freedmen. It was prompted by the voice of conscience, long hushed and hidden in the master"s breast. It was the protest of Christianity and morality against that which it had witnessed with complacency for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie.
While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bought and sold had hidden this evil from the eye of morality, which had looked unabashed upon the unlicensed freedom of the quarters and the enormities of the barrac.o.o.n. Now all at once it was shocked beyond expression at the domestic relations of the freedmen.
So they made haste in the first legislative a.s.semblies that met in the various States, after the turmoil of war had ceased, to provide and enact:
I. That all those who had sustained to each other the relation of husband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application to an officer named in each county, be registered as such husband and wife.
2. That all who did not so register within a certain time should be liable to indictment, if the relation continued thereafter.
3. That the effect of such registration should be to const.i.tute such parties husband and wife, as of the date of their first a.s.sumption of marital relations.
4. That for every such couple registered the officer should be ent.i.tled to receive the sum of one half-dollar from the parties registered.
There was a grim humor about this marriage of a race by wholesale, millions at a time, and _nunc pro tunc;_ but especially quaint was the idea of requiring each freed-man, who had just been torn, as it were naked, from the master"s arms, to pay a snug fee for the simple privilege of entering upon that relation which the law had rigorously withheld from him until that moment. It was a strange remedy for a long-hidden and stubbornly denied disease, and many strange scenes were enacted in accordance with the provisions of this statute. Many an aged couple, whose children had been lost in the obscure abysses of slavery, or had gone before them into the spirit land, old and feeble and gray-haired, wrought with patience day after day to earn at once their living and the money for this fee, and when they had procured it walked a score of miles in order that they might be "registered," and, for the brief period that remained to them of life, know that the law had sanctioned the relation which years of love and suffering had sanctified. It was the first act of freedom, the first step of legal recognition or manly responsibility! It was a proud hour and a proud fact for the race which had so long been bowed in thralldom and forbidden even the most common though the holiest of G.o.d"s ordinances. What the law had taken little by little, as the science of Christian slavery grew up under the brutality of our legal progress, the law returned in bulk. It was the first seal which was put on the slave"s manhood--the first step upward from the brutishness of another"s possession to the glory of independence. The race felt its importance as did no one else at that time. By hundreds and thousands they crowded the places appointed, to accept the honor offered to their posterity, and thereby unwittingly conferred undying honor upon themselves. Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless.
The distance from zero to unity is always infinity.
The county clerk in and for the county of Horsford sat behind the low wooden railing which he had been compelled to put across his office to protect him from the too near approach of those who crowded to this fountain of rehabilitating honor that had recently been opened therein. Unused to anything beyond the plantation on which they had been reared, the temple of justice was as strange to their feet, and the ways and forms of ordinary business as marvelous to their minds as the etiquette of the king"s palace to a peasant who has only looked from afar upon its pinnacled roof.
The recent statute had imposed upon the clerk a labor of no little difficulty because of this very ignorance on the part of those whom he was required to serve; but he was well rewarded. The clerk was a man of portly presence, given to his ease, who smoked a long-stemmed pipe as he sat beside a table which, in addition to his papers and writing materials, held a bucket of water on which floated a clean gourd, in easy reach of his hand.
"Be you the clerk, sail?" said a straight young colored man, whose clothing had a hint of the soldier in it, as well as his respectful but unusually collected bearing.
"Yes," said the clerk, just glancing up, but not intermitting his work; "what do you want?"
"If you please, sah, we wants to be married, Lugena and me."
"_Registered_, you mean, I suppose?"
"No, we don"t, sah; we means _married_."
"I can"t marry you. You"ll have to get a license and be married by a magistrate or a minister."
"But I heard der was a law---"
"Have you been living together as man and wife?"
"Oh, yes, sah; dat we hab, dis smart while."
"Then you want to be registered. This is the place. Got a half-dollar?"
"Yes, sah?"
"Let"s have it."
The colored man took out some bills, and with much difficulty endeavored to make a selection; finally, handing one doubtfully toward the clerk, he asked,
"Is dat a one-dollah, sah?"