When We're Home In Africa

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When We're Home In Africa: book excerpt

Introduction

My name is Themba Umbalisi. I did not know my great-great-great-grandfather, for he was dead some 40 years before I was born. I do not even know the name he had when he was born, or which he used in his young life. I did know the family stories, or legends, rather, for the tales were vague, as if people were talking about a ghost or a myth rather than a man of flesh, bone and blood.

Yet, when I found out more about my ancestor, I discovered that he was all flesh, bone, and blood, with a good dash of iron and guile into the bargain. Above all, he was a man with a man’s virtues and weaknesses.

I considered myself as South African until the recent attacks on foreigners in Jo’burg and other parts of the country. That was five years ago in 2015. I was aware that I did not look quite like my neighbours, and I was neither wholly Zulu, Xhosa, nor any of the other peoples in this rainbow nation, but I was born and brought up in the country and lived here all my life. I was certainly not one of the Boers or others of European stock, yet the mob singled me out as not belonging and forced out of Jo’burg.

When the mob burned our house, very little survived of our family possessions, except a chest that we used as a seat. I had seen it every day, but family tradition dictated that nobody should ever open it.

The mob threatened me with death unless I fled Jo’burg and South Africa, although I had no other place to call home and knew nothing except the rainbow country.

As I sat beside the road on the high veldt, with the flames of my burning home reflecting on the moody grey clouds, I kicked at the chest in frustration. It was a family tradition not to open that box, but I was the only member of the family present. Who would know? And in our current situation, who would care? Forcing open the ageing lock, I pushed up the lid, hoping to see treasures inside. I felt immediate disappointment, for there was very little.

I found a very tattered and much-repaired blue uniform jacket and a couple of faded sepia photographs of ancestors I did not recognize. There was also some battered Zulu clothing and what I thought was the remains of ostrich feathers and the rusted blade of an assegai. Finally, I saw an ancient pipe with a curved stem and an old British Martini-Henry rifle. I had hoped for something more useful, such as a bag of gold dust, but I contained my disappointment. Indeed, I was so sick at heart that I nearly missed the slim, leather-bound volume tucked into the bottom of the chest.

When I lifted it, I knew at once that the book held something important. I cannot explain the feeling; I can only say that I felt something surge through me, making all my nerve-ends tingle.

Sitting beside the road, with the memory of the mob fresh in my mind, I examined the book. The leather was rough like the hide of a buffalo, inexpertly tanned. The pages within were thin leather or thick parchment and uneven as if the writer had no access to any manufactured paper. Even the ink was unusual, faint in some places and dark in others. With nothing else to do and no hope for the future, I began to read what my distant ancestor had written.

I found the journal inspiring and will reread it whenever I feel down. I hope some of the readers do, too. I did not alter the journal much for publication. I merely tidied up some of the spelling and sent it to a publisher, with the result that you see here.

Themba Umbalisi

JOURNAL OF A WANDERING INYATHI

I Am Freed from Slavery and Join the Army

I write this with a reed for a pen and a mixture of soot, ash and animal blood for ink. I have no paper, so I am using the dried hide of an impala instead. It has been many years since I last lifted a pen, or tried to communicate in English, so please excuse my mistakes in spelling or grammar.

I was born a slave and grew up on a plantation in Georgia. I don’t remember much about my early years except constant fear and the whistle and crack of the whip. I will write what little I remember. We worked six days a week, from sunup to sundown, with an overseer or a slave driver, ensuring we did not stop working.

The overseer could be a white man, while the slave driver was black like ourselves. I remember my mother telling me that white slave owners were the devil’s assistants and slave drivers were worse. We hated the drivers. I did not know my father because our owner gambled and lost him in a game of cards. I do not even remember how he looked. I loved my mother until the fever took her when I was young; I do not know how old I was. Perhaps I was ten, mebbe I was younger. For the same reason, I do not know how old I am now, so any ages within this journal are only a guess. As nobody else knows or cares, my age does not matter much anyway.

We lived in fear of the whip and in fear of being sold. We lived in fear of the master and the slave driver. Most of all, we lived in fear of the mistress, who was a pretty blonde with a vicious temper. I remember her smile and the sudden curl of her lips as she ordered a slave, male or female, young or old, to be whipped.

Apart from that, I remember very little.

I do remember the day that freedom came. We heard the firing early in the morning and saw the smoke rising in the north and east. Our masters, as we called them, were mostly away in the war, and the few white men left on the plantation were either too old to fight or already disabled in battle. I saw all the white folk hurry away, and then the blue-uniformed soldiers marched in. They fed us, told us we were free and torched the plantation house.

I remember my first day of freedom. I sat, waiting to be fed, waiting for somebody to tell me what to do, waiting. The blue-coated soldiers had destroyed everything and then marched away, leaving a smoking ruin of the only home I had ever known, and I waited.

“What’re you waiting on?” Emily, a slave like me and much older, asked.

“I’m waiting to see what happens now,” I said.

“Ain’t nothing going to happen now,” Emily said, “less’n you make it. You’re a free man.”

“What do I do as a free man?” I asked.

“Whatever you want, boy,” Emily said. “You’re free to do anything you damned well want. That’s what freedom means.”

“I want to eat,” I said, “but the blue soldiers burned the stores.”

Emily cackled. “You wanted freedom,” she said. “Now, you have it. Either earn some food or hunt it.”

I stared at her without understanding. I was very young and a lifetime on a plantation was not the best training for a life of freedom. Without any idea where I was going, I walked beyond the confines of the plantation and never looked back.

I don’t know where I went or for how long I walked. I only remember walking through a scorched countryside, with smoking houses and broken fences, with the occasional dead bodies on the ground. I was always hungry and ate what I could scrape from fields, or find in the charred, deserted farmhouses.

“Hey, boy,” a soldier in a blue coat said to me. “You want to eat?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He tossed me the heel of a loaf. “Join the army, boy,” he said. “Free food and clothes.”

“Where can I join?” The offer of free food was too good to miss.

“Why, boy, right over there,” he pointed to a tented camp.

And that is how I became a soldier.

“We don’t want negro soldiers in the Union army,” the sergeant was tall, red-faced and loud as she shouted in my face. He looked me up and down. “I suppose you might be useful to take a shot meant for a real soldier.”

I said nothing to his insults. I only wanted to ensure that Lincoln’s bluecoats won the war and I would be a free man. I wanted to end slavery forever. More than that, I wanted food.

“You see,” the sergeant jabbed the end of his stubby pipe into my chest. “This war has got a deal of fighting in it yet, and the Rebs are a-going to kill a load of Union soldiers before we lick them.”

I nodded, moving further away to avoid the painful prods from the sergeant’s pipe.

“The way I see it,” the sergeant said, following me up, “the more Negroes join our army, the fewer white men will die.” He leaned back, thrust his pipe back in his mouth, quite satisfied with his logic. “After all, boy,” he said, “it’s your damned war we’re fighting. It’s about time you lifted your hands and did something for yourselves.”

When he began to prod with his pipe again, I forgot that I was only a first-day recruit and he was a non-commissioned officer and therefore God’s representative on Earth.

“Sergeant,” I said slowly. “Has anybody ever hit you?”

He widened his eyes as if surprised at the idea. “Lordy, no!” he said. “Nobody would be that foolish.” After that, he jabbed me again, harder, with that damned pipe until I took a swing at him.

I was big and strong and fast and missed completely. A sergeant in the Union Army did not achieve that rank without being able to fight. He dodged my punch without seeming effort and treated me, and all the other recruits, to a boxing lesson that had me floored in seconds.

“Up you get, Johnny Negro,” he said. “I’ll larn you to attack a superior.”

And larn me he did. I did not give up. I rose and swung and punched and jabbed, and every time I missed, and he hit me with a fist like a steam hammer. Eventually, when I was a bloodied wreck on the ground, he stood over me with his pipe in his mouth, smiling.

“You damned foolish Negro,” he said. “You’ll never beat me. Get up.” He landed a kick in my ribs.

I crawled to my feet, lifting my fists to fight again.

“You’re a game one,” the sergeant said. “Once we train you how to fight, you might even make a soldier. Now get back in the ranks.”

The other recruits watched me as I limped painfully back into the ranks. I won’t go into many details of that war of liberation. I was young, bewildered and often afraid, as I marched, counter-marched, camped and fought beside my fellow ex-slaves. I was one of the nearly 180,000 Negro soldiers that fought in the forces of freedom and marched for the glory of the lord. Even now I can sing every word of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword

His truth is marching on; His truth is marching on.

Glory, glory, Hallelujah! Glory, glory, Hallelujah!

Glory, glory, Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I can see us now, the long columns marching with Old Glory at the head, the dust rising around us and the hopeful, eager black faces wearing the proud blue uniforms. And I can see the shattered, broken bodies lying in the mud and dirt, with blood soaking into the ground while powder-smoke bites into eyes and noses. I can see us sitting around camp-fires, weary under the lash of the rain, and preparing for battle, counting our ammunition, sharpening the long bayonets and praying the Lord spared us in the imminent carnage.

Glory glory.

About one-in-six of us died, and only God knows how many still carry the wounds on our bodies or inside our heads. Yet, we showed the slave owners that we could face them and outfight them on their own terms. We fought from Fort Wagner to Cold Harbour, Fort Pillow to the Crater at Petersburg.

Fort Pillow put a chill into our stomachs and iron in our hearts. The Confederates overran a Union garrison of mixed black and white soldiers and massacred the Negroes as they tried to surrender. I was not present there, but we heard the stories and swore vengeance if we ever got a slave-owner at the point of our bayonets. We hid our fear and marched on. Glory, glory hallelujah.

I was at the Crater, on the bloodiest day of my war and a battle I can still see in my nightmares. I have heard it tell that men become war-hardened, so that blood and death and slaughter do not bother them. That may be so, to a degree. Some men become insensitive to human suffering, and we learned to sleep on a battlefield with a comrade’s corpse for a pillow as the wounded screamed around us. For most, however, the memories remained. At night, sixty years later, I relive the horrors and wake up with the fear of a Confederate bayonet snaking towards my guts, or the sound of the whimpering wounded in my ears.

Sometimes I relive that battle of the Crater. It was at the Crater that General Ambrose Burnside – the man after whom sideburns are named – sent me forward with General Edward Ferrero’s Fourth Division of United States Colored Troops, as they called us. Federal forces had blown a mine under the Confederate positions, killing hundreds of Rebels and leaving a Crater and a gap in their defences. The original plan saw our Fourth Division attacking around the flanks of the Crater. Instead, the general sent a white unit forward, and they ran into the Crater. The Confederates recovered and mauled the white troops, and then we were sent in to rectify the position.

Burnside was a fool, one of the most inept commanders in an army not known for its tactical skills. In my opinion, the Union won that war by having massive manpower and resources, with few of the higher commanders fit for their positions. In that battle alone, hundreds of black soldiers fell.

All I recall of that day is the bank of white powder smoke, the constant flare of massed Confederate musketry and the hideous sound of the Rebel battle cry above the moans and cries of the wounded: that and the stubborn bravery of the black infantry.

From time to time, unrelated images emerge in my mind, usually at night as I wake from sleep, or struggle in the grip of some nightmare that soaks my coverings with sweat. My wives come to wake me, then, and I remember that the past is gone and can’t return. Yet still, I remember the man with only half a head and his brains seeping out, the soldier staring as his intestines slithered from his body, and the young boy begging me to end his agony by killing him.

I did, God forgive me. I shot my comrade in the head and killed him dead.

When the general ordered the retire, many of us refused to run from the men who had held us as slaves, and the Confederates shot us down like rabbits. I was one of the casualties. When the battle ended, I lay on the battlefield with two Confederate balls in me, one in the shoulder and one in my left leg.

I lay there for hours, bothered by questing flies until a black corporal and a white private carried me to a field hospital. If a battlefield is hell on earth, a field hospital is the devil’s playground. It is a place of pain, suffering, death and disease, of amputated limbs and screaming wounded, of callous medical orderlies and brave men howling, of sickening wounds and buzzing flies. If anybody ever thinks that war is glorious, let him work in a field hospital for one night, and I defy him to ever don a uniform of whatever hue or colour. Politicians who wish to start a war should be forced to work in there for a week, just one week, to let them see the horrors their decisions inflict on men.

I returned to duty five months later, but without seeing any more significant action in that war. I did have the satisfaction of being involved in liberating some plantations. In one, I chopped down the whipping post and wanted to tie up a slave driver we captured, to see how he felt on the receiving end. Our lieutenant, a young man from Vermont, seemed quite taken with the idea, but the captain would not hear of it. The slave driver escaped, although I heard that an ex-slave woman found him a year later and shot him dead. I hope that is true.

After all the blood and bravery, after all the dust had settled, after we helped the Union crush the proud Confederacy, what did we gain? Ten dollars a month, a third less than the white soldiers. And we got the Ku Klux Klan, a measure of false freedom, and the sinking feeling of despair that we would never be equal in the United States of America.

“You’ll have to learn to walk before you can run,” the sergeant of a white New York regiment said to me.

I did not believe him. I thought we had won our freedom. I did not know how deep the white man’s prejudice sank beneath his colourless skin. We marched and fought for a freedom we thought we had gained.

Peace brought disbandment, and, for me, disillusionment. I found the reality of freedom did not meet my expectations.

In theory, all black slaves in the United States were free. In practice, we had to work to earn money to eat, and the only work I could do was plantation work or soldiering. As I hungered, new state laws reintroduced slavery in all but name. After the war, the army quickly disbanded its black regiments, and I refused to work on a plantation again, slave or free. As a consequence, I drifted for a while. I picked up a little labouring work here and there, thought of heading west to the Frontier and contemplated becoming an outlaw or a gold prospector.

I was wandering one day, with my head down and my uniform tattered, faded and dusty, when I heard a voice calling to me.

“Soldier!”

I looked up to see a white woman at the side of the road. I’d reckon she was thirty, so at least ten years older than me, not ill-favoured but worn down with hardship. “You looking for work?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Winter’s coming on,” she said bluntly. “I need a man to keep my cabin waterproof, do the labouring, that sort of thing. No wages, but food and board. You’d sleep in the barn.”

“I’ve slept in worse,” I said, following her.

The woman was the widow of a soldier, a corporal who had died at Bull Run, and she treated me well. “Folks will wonder at me for giving work to a Negro,” she told me openly. “Well, as I see it, you’re a soldier boy like my Tom was, and that’s an end to it.”

I worked that winter and stayed with the widow-woman, a Mrs Ebenezer Wilson. I learned a lot those four months. I learned how to ride a horse. I learned that a poor white woman was not too proud to accept help from a poor black man, and I learned that by standing together, they could face poverty better than they could alone.

We shared many things that winter of 1865 and early spring of 1866, including Mary’s bed. It was a rough night, I recall, with the rain lashing at the wooden barn like an overseer’s whip, and the wind whistling through the boards like the devil calling up the demons of hell. I lay there on the straw with an old horse blanket over me and a saddle for a pillow when I became aware of Mrs Wilson standing in the doorway. She was looking at me.

“You’ll be cold,” she said, a statement rather than a question.

“I am,” I agreed.

“It’s warmer in the house,” she said, turned and walked away.

I followed and stepped into the two-room shack, where a small fire sparked in the stone fireplace and food sat in bowls on the table.

“Eb made that table,” Mrs Wilson said. “He cut the trees, sawed the planks and made the table. He made the chairs too, and built the house.”

I nodded, unsure what to say.

“We had the place looking fit, and the damned war came along.”

I nodded again. I had thought the war a good thing, for freeing us slaves, but it had not been good for Mrs Wilson, or tens of thousands of women like her.

“Damned useless war,” Mrs Wilson glared at me, as if challenging me to argue.

I was sensible enough to keep my peace and enjoy the warmth of the fire.

“Your clothes are wet,” Mrs Wilson said. “Take them off.”

She watched as I obeyed, nodding. “I haven’t known a man since Ebenezer died,” she said.

I nodded again, feeling her eyes scrutinizing me.

“You’ll do,” she said. “Come on.”

Mrs Wilson was not the first woman I had known, but the others had been whores, women of the street, the riff-raff who follow every army. Mrs Wilson was not of that type, she needed the comfort of a man’s body as I needed the comfort of a woman’s, and it was with regret that I said farewell. It was the summer of 1866, and the road was calling. I liked the woman, but not sufficient to remain with her, with the inevitable trouble such a union would bring to us both. Except on the wildest of frontiers, the world does not smile on a black man with a white woman. I did not wish to survive slavery and the war to die at the end of a lynching rope. As the buds turned to leaves and the birds greeted summer with elaborate mating calls, I took the highway northward and did not look back.

In the high summer of 1866, Congress realised the mistake they had made in disbanding the black regiments. After deliberation, they authorised six Negro regiments to fight for the reunited United States. I did not see myself as an itinerant labourer, working for white folk for the rest of my life, and at least in the army, I was with my own kind, doing work I understood. A man feels proud when he carries a gun, and a black man had little chance to bear arms in 1866. I was no lover of the South and thought they owed me for past suffering, so stealing a horse did not disturb my conscience. After years of slavery and fighting with the Union army, I had little conscience to disturb. I had enough of marching in the Civil War, so I looked for a recruiting station and put myself forward for the cavalry. I headed south again and rode to the headquarters of the 9th Cavalry at Greenville, Louisiana.