Chapter 3: The Railmaster
The Railmaster blew on the tin whistle he carried, and everyone working on the tracks sighed a huge sigh of relief as they put their tools down. The workday was over. They took their picks, spades, and mallets, put them into the barrow that held all the tools, and gathered around as the railroad cook brought out his customary huge pot of evening stew. The men jostled each other for the privilege of being the first in line; the ones who lost got to the end unwillingly. By the time they got to the front of the line the stew would be cold.
The water girl inched close to the men, trying to slip between the press of bodies to get into the front of the line, but found herself jostled and bumped all the way back to the end. She sighed. There wouldn't be anything left this time either. The cook seemed to take special care never to have anything left for her; there would be maybe a spoonful at most in the bottom of the pot when she got up there. She would lick at the plates furtively when she was washing dishes afterward, hoping to appease the hunger that constantly gnawed in her belly, but that never did much. She was so hungry tonight!
"Uh-uh!" A heavy hand fell on her shoulder as she started to step forward. "Remember the scene you made today? No supper for you tonight, and no breakfast for you tomorrow."
A small squeak of dismay escaped her lips. She clamped her lips tight, feeling tears well up in her eyes. The gruel Elizabeth had brought had been digested long ago, and it had not been that much either. She was desperately hungry.
"No food for this one tonight!" The Railmaster barked at the cook. "See that she doesn't lick the plates tonight before she cleans them!" She turned pink.
Doing dishes was an endless job, made worse by the fact that there were so many plates to clean and she was so hungry. Her stomach growled angrily at her and cramped painfully, and she was almost weeping when she finally put the last stack of tin plates in the cook's wagon. She tied up the flap, went to relieve herself (darkness finally afforded her some privacy) and trudged to the slaves' boxcar.
It sat at the end of the section of completed track, and as she neared it she saw that the Railmaster was waiting for her. She came to a stop in front of him, eyes cast down to the ground. Usually he would roughly grab her collar, attach the chain to it, and pull her into the car, fastening the chain to an eyebolt on the wooden floor. But tonight he didn't reach for the chain immediately. Instead he looked at her for a long time, not speaking. She didn't dare fidget, but she was wildly wondering if he was going to keep her standing out here all night when he spoke.
"I was thinking about what the stranger said today," he said. "And I realized I've never heard you speak. I know you can, I've heard you scream when I hit you. Are you just dumb?"
She didn't answer. She never answered. She had learned that silence was her only safety. If she said nothing, they couldn't hurt her.
This wasn't the first railroad camp she'd been in. She had memories of being in one similar to this one, as part of a group of Chinese indentured servants. She had worn clothes; dresses that at the time she thought with childish vanity were shabby and unfit to be worn. She had no idea how lucky she had been. And then, before that, a vague memory of a small house somewhere with a lot of trees, a house full of warmth and laughter and love, and people who hugged her and called her 'baby'. She had called them Mama and Papa, and she loved them, and she thought they loved her. And then one day they had simply gone away, and she had never seen them again, never heard from them again. In their place was a gruff older man who had spanked her mercilessly when she refused to stop crying for her mother. She had started crying for her father. Enraged, he'd grabbed a knife, dragged her hair back, and pressed the point of the knife against her tongue, drawing blood, and told her to shut up or he would cut her tongue out. So she had shut up.
Later, when she found herself at the servants' camp, she had seen white men beating other servants when they said something the men didn't like. The then-seven-year-old hadn't understood which words they were being beaten for speaking, and so decided not to say anything at all. They had thought she was a mute, and left her mostly alone from pity or disgust, she didn't know. And she didn't care. As long as they told her what to do and left her alone to do it, she didn't care what they did.
Then a band of hostile Indians had swept through the camp, killing all the soldiers and grown men. She had been the only child in the camp, and had stared at the Indians in terror. They had stopped at the sight of her, asked her something in a language she didn't understand, and again, thinking they would hurt her, she stayed silent, cowering in fear and terror because she was fourteen and she knew she didn't want to die. The Indians had said something else, and then they had taken care of the bodies, made a fire and cooked a lot of food, and told her with gestures that she could eat that until more men came to find out what happened to the servants. So she had subsisted on the food, living in one of the covered wagons until one morning the locomotive carrying the Railmaster and dragging a boxcar full of African male slaves came up the railroad tracks from the east, heading west. Relieved to see people again, she had sighed with relief when she climbed into the boxcar and the locomotive went on.
It was only after the train had stopped here at the end of the finished railroad line and the Railmaster could talk to the smith in Jonesboro did she realize what happened. She had seen the collars, wrist cuffs, and leg shackles on the African men, but hadn't realized that she was going to be expected to wear them too. The smith had fashioned them hurriedly, not taking the time to file the inner edges smooth, and the metal bands had been placed around her neck, wrists, and ankles. She fought like a wildcat, screaming wordlessly, but when the Railmaster placed the locks on the bands she had given up. She waited silently while the chains were placed around the shackles on her ankles, keeping her from running by limiting her movement, then went to the pump when directed to by the Railmaster and took her place. Every day and every night after that she had worn those shackles, every day and every night for three weeks now. And it seemed likely to go on until she dropped dead of hunger and exhaustion.
She kept her eyes cast to the ground and her lips shut. She had learned in her first few days that saying anything in front of this man could earn a beating. She had adopted the eyes-down method some of the other slaves used to avoid getting in trouble; she knew her blue eyes, so unusual in someone of her racial descent, were too expressive and could say what she would not. The most heavily scarred slaves in the boxcar were the ones who held their heads high, who looked into the face of the Railmaster. She had seen the Railmaster flog a man into unconsciousness before, and she lived in terror that someday he might tie her to the town's whipping post and flog her as brutally as he had whipped that man.
"You won't speak? Or you can't speak?" The Railmaster demanded, cupping her chin in his hand. "Look at me girl! You won't speak?" She refused to look up, choosing instead to close her eyes. She felt his hand leave her chin, and she dropped her chin, squeezing her eyes shut. As a result, when he hit her he caught her by surprise.
He didn't use the long bullwhip he usually carried coiled in one hand or coiled on his belt. He struck her with the heavy chain he used to secure her every night. The chain snapped through the air and struck her with a dull thud that knocked her off her feet and left a dark bruise on her lower leg. "I will have an answer, girl! Won't?" he waited for her nod, didn't see one. "Or can't?" she was still stunned by the first blow, and didn't respond. He raised the chain again.
The fourth time he hit her, her stoicism broke, and she screamed in pain as something in her side flared into white-hot agony. She shook her head in agony, and as luck would have it, she had just asked her "Won't?" He assumed the headshake was from her saying she wouldn't speak, and reached down, snapping the chain to her collar. "Ah. So you refuse to speak voluntarily. Well, tomorrow I shall have to see what I can do to change your mind. For tonight, however…" He dragged her across the dirt to one of the hitching posts by the horse corral and fastened the chain to a hook used to tether horses. "You can stay out here tonight with the biting insects. Maybe they can motivate you to speak." He crouched to put his face directly in front of hers. "I want you to hear you speak. Ask me to let you in to sleep. The shirt that stranger gave you will cover your upper body, but it won't do anything for your legs. When you're going mad from the biting you'll talk. My car is right there, I'll hear you." He wrenched her hands away from her throbbing side and tied them roughly behind her back with rope. "You can't defend yourself. Remember, when you ask me to come in, I'll let you in and you can sleep without the insects biting you." He laughed and walked away.
She curled up against the pole, but she couldn't sleep. As he had predicted, the insects came down in droves. He had chained her to the pole in the corner of the corral where they dumped the horse manure, and the smell of rotting feces drew the insects. They stayed because they had a source of fresh blood.
She would not beg. She wouldn't. Fear had crystallized into pure hatred of him, and now she would rather die than ask him for anything. Besides, the pain in her side kept her from drawing a deep enough breath to call his name, and the painful cramping of her empty stomach distracted her further. The biting night insects went away as day broke, and when the Railmaster came out of his car an hour after sunrise to wake the slaves to begin the day's work, she was still curled up against the pole refusing to say a word. He was furious. He yanked the chain roughly off the post and pulled her to her feet. "All right, if discomfort won't work, let's try something a bit more basic. The men can draw their own water today. You'll not touch water until you ask for it. And it's going to be hotter today than yesterday, or so the almanac says, so you should be needing that water real soon." He chained her to a post in the middle of the packed dirt area between the unfinished railroad and the main street of town. She was close enough to the pump for her to smell the water and hear it splashing when the men came for drinks, but not close enough to touch it.
The sun climbed higher. Her legs swelled to twice their normal size from the night insects. Itching from the bites tormented her. She was frantic with thirst as her mouth dried, and she licked at her cracked, bleeding lips for the bit of moisture she could get from her own sweat. It wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. She was sweating; the shirt was soaked. She grabbed the collar of the shirt and sucked it dry, but it still wasn't enough.
One of the slaves came up to get water, and he deliberately took a mouthful and swallowed it slowly, staring at her all the while. She yanked on the collar, straining to reach him, but he laughed scornfully.
She suffered and suffered. And, just as she started to open her mouth to call for the railmaster, to beg for water, that she saw Elizabeth coming out with the noon plateful of gruel. She wanted that plate. She needed the water that that gruel was made with. Elizabeth was just holding it out to her when the Railmaster came up. "No food or water until she asks for it," he told the girl. "She doesn't speak because she can't, it's because she's too stubborn to. I'm going to break that out of her today."
Elizabeth's eyes widened as she saw the water girl's anguished look as the plate was taken from her reach, but she had no choice but to obey. She took the plate to the pump, washed the gruel off the plate, and carried it, still dripping, past the water girl. The child froze as she saw a single, clear drop hanging off the end of the plate. With a sudden move, she flew at the other girl, snatching the plate from her and licking the water off it greedily, thirstily. She was so intent she never saw the Railmaster come up behind her.
The first stroke of the whip across her swollen legs caught her by surprise, and she screamed and lunged to the end of her collar chain, trying to avoid the lash. The Railmaster grabbed one of her braids and yanked backward, causing her to lose her grip on the plate. It fell to the hard ground and shattered.
"You've stolen a plate and broken it." The Railmaster's words whirled around in her fevered, water-starved brain. "You know what the penalty for stealing is, right?" he unhooked her collar from the pole and untied her hands, seizing her wrist firmly, and began to drag her into town, into the square, where the dreaded whipping post sat embedded in the ground.
The water girl struggled, fighting him, screaming incoherently in terror, her bravado gone. The penalty for stealing was ten lashes. She would never survive it. He dragged her inexorably into the town square, and the townsfolk gathered around after him. She would not be able to escape that knot of people around her even if she wanted to.
The ring at the top of the post was set at a man's height, too high for a skinny little waif. The Railmaster actually had to lift her off her feet to tie her wrists to the post. Then he reached for his belt knife and cut the back of the shirt open, baring her back. Her chest was pressed against the rough wood, and the pressure on her wrists was terrible from the weight of her body hanging from it. She screamed in terror, her feet flailing, trying vainly to find solid ground. She couldn't see it, but her toes were a foot off the dust at the base of the whipping post.
"Now," the Railmaster said, "I'll make you talk. You'll beg me to stop!" He uncoiled the whip, twitched it back, and brought it forward in a full overhand stroke. The lash hissed through the air and bit into the exposed flesh of the child's still badly sunburned back.
The girl screamed in sheer agony. She had never been whipped like this before. The few times his whip had touched her body it had been close enough that it didn't hurt as badly. Now at the far end of the whip, she hung by her purple, numb hands and screamed.
Elizabeth screamed too, in horror and terror, and ran home. Seconds later her mother looked out, saw the slave girl hanging from the whipping post, and firmly closed the door and went to comfort her sobbing daughter. Outside, the whipping went on.
The Railmaster waited until the pain from the first lash subsided before striking the child again. Again she went through a frenzied dance of pain, ignoring the splinters going through the fabric to prick her skin. "STOP!" the girl finally screamed at the top of her lungs, her toes scrabbling frantically against the post. Trying to get enough air into her lungs to scream from her hanging position was a torture all in its own. "Stop, oh God, you're killing me!" and she screamed again as the lash hissed down for the third time.
