Read Online Freeman by Leonard Pitts Jr. - Free Book Online Page B

was Mary Lincoln herself. And as she climbed into a gleaming black carriage, she glared across the street with unmistakable malice at the theater where her husband had been killed.
    And the people knew. They knew.
    The carriage clattered away. They waited.
    A group of soldiers turned onto 10 th Street carrying a pine box. And now an anguished moan went up from the crowd. Sam clasped his hand to his mouth. His tears flowed freely. His voice was strangled, guttural, without words.
    The soldiers carried the box up the stairs and into the house. Not a proper casket, but just a box, a shipping crate. Moments later, they brought it out again. They strapped it to the back of a horse-drawn wagon. The driver touched the horses lightly with his reins and the wagon began to roll. Soldiers and officers fell in behind the wagon. A crowd, most of them colored, fell in behind that. Lucy walked among them, her head down, crying inconsolably.
    Sam took a step, two, as if the carriage were a ship and he was pulled irresistibly in its wake. Then he stopped. He stood watching the tragic procession until it was gone.
    “What you suppose they do now?” Sam started. It was as if Ben had read his mind.
    “I have no idea,” said Sam.
    “I pray to God they catch him. Want to see him strung up good.”
    “I agree with you there,” said Sam. He started walking. Suddenly, he wanted nothing so much as to leave the capital city behind. Ben fell into step beside him.
    “You say you lookin’ for your wife?” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “What her name?”
    The question brought a soft smile he had not intended. “Tilda,” said Sam. “At least, that’s what I called her.”
    “Must be some kind of woman,” said Ben.
    “Why do you say that?”
    “See it in your face when you say her name.”
    They stepped around a hog, snuffling and grunting in the mud. “Me, I can’t wait to see Hannah and my little baby girl. Leila her name. Prettiest little thing in the world. Wasn’t even walking, last time I seed her.”
    “I hope you find them,” said Sam.
    “Maybe we might travel together?”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Make sense, don’t it? We both goin’ the same way, lookin’ for the same thing. We maybe might could help each other. Maybe might need each other.”
    Sam looked at him. “No, I do not think so,” he said. “No offense.” Ben nodded. “None taken,” he said. Then he said, “How you come to talk like that?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You sound like you ’most white.”
    “I am sure I have no idea what you are referring to,” said Sam. “I strive to speak proper English, nothing more.”
    Ben responded with a smile Sam couldn’t read, and Sam was grateful when they parted company at the corner. He walked back the way he had come, head down, lost in reverie. Around him, the city was already wreathed in black bunting and American flags.
    “Is it true? Is the president shot?” A white woman, old and stooped beneath her black shawl, intercepted him. Her voice was a whisper. Her eyes shone with the hope he would say no. And with the dread that he would not.
    “Yes,” he heard himself say. “He died just an hour or two ago.”
    She began to cry. “What will happen to us now?” she implored. The question wasn’t rhetorical. She stared up at him with gleaming eyes. She waited for him. She needed his answer.
    “I do not know,” he said. He walked on.
    All about him people were beseeching one another for news. Women cried. Men did the same.
    Someone brandished a newspaper. “It says here he was shot last night. Maybe he is only wounded.”
    “No,” cried another man. “He died this morning.”
    “Stop saying that!” ordered the first man. “Stop spreading rumor.” He pushed the second man, but it was a weak and peevish gesture and the second man did not respond.
    “That’s what I heard,” the second man protested. “I heard that he died.”
    Sam found it unsettling, this new idea that a president could