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Pearl fell forward to her knees and clasped her hands. Dear
God Jesus, she whispered, make a place fer dis good woman
beside you. An me, yore Porhl, teach me to be free.
Slowly, the slaves, with their belongings wrapped in bundles
or carried in old carpetbags, walked up to the main house and
distributed themselves out front under the cypresses. They
looked into the sky as if whatever it was they were told was
coming would be from that direction. They wore their Sunday
clothes. There were seven adultstwo men, the elder Jake Early
and Jubal Samuels, who had but one eye, and five women,
including the old granny who could not walk very welland
three small children. The children were unusually quiet. They
stayed close by and made bouquets of weeds or pressed round
stones and pebbles in the earth.
Jake Early did not have to counsel patience. The fear they had
all seen in the eyes of the fleeing Massah and Mistress told
them that deliverance had come. But the sky was cloudless, and
as the sun rose everyone settled down and some even nodded
off, which Jake Early regretted, feeling that when the Union
soldiers came they should find black folk not at their ease
but smartly arrayed as a welcoming company of free men and
women.
He himself stood in the middle of the road with his staff and
did not move. He listened. For the longest while there was
nothing but the mild stirring of the air, like a whispering in
his ear or the rustle of woodland. But then he did hear
something. Or did he? It wasn't exactly a sound, it was more
like a sense of something transformed in his own expectation.
And then, almost as if what he held was a divining rod, the
staff in his hand pointed to the sky westerly. At this, all
the others stood up and came away from the trees: what they
saw in the distance was smoke spouting from different points
in the landscape, first here, then there. But in the middle of
all this was a change in the sky color itself that gradually
clarified as an upward-streaming brown cloud risen from the
earth, as if the world was turned upside down.
And, as they watched, the brown cloud took on a reddish cast.
It moved forward, thin as a hatchet blade in front and then
widening like the furrow from the plow. It was moving across
the sky to the south of them. When the sound of this cloud
reached them, it was like nothing they had ever heard in their
lives. It was not fearsomely heaven-made, like thunder or
lightning or howling wind, but something felt through their
feet, a resonance, as if the earth was humming. Then, carried
on a gust of wind, the sound became for moments a rhythmic
tromp that relieved them as the human reason for the great
cloud of dust. And then, at the edges of this sound of a
trompled-upon earth, they heard the voices of living men
shouting, finally. And the lowing of cattle. And the creaking
of wheels. But they saw nothing. Involuntarily, they walked
down toward the road but still saw nothing. The symphonious
clamor was everywhere, filling the sky like the cloud of red
dust that arrowed past them to the south and left the sky dim,
it was the great processional of the Union armies, but of no
more substance than an army of ghosts.
Excerpted from The March by E. L. Doctorow Copyright © 2005 by E.L. Doctorow. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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