From the sliver of lights in the broken shutter I seen my Pie in there on a straw bed on the floor, buck naked, on all fours, and behind her was Darg, holding a little tree switch about six inches long, and he was just doing her something terrible, just having his way with her and striking her with that whip at the same time. Her head was throwed back and she was howling while he rode her and called her a high-yellow whore and turncoat for turning in all them niggers and revealing their plot. He whipped her with that switch and called her every name he could think of. And she was hollering that she was sorry and had to confess it to someone.
I kept a two-shot pepperbox revolver under my dress, fully loaded, and I would’a busted in there and put both loads in his head right then, but for her look of liking the whole business immensely.
I never said nothing to nobody about what I seen. I done my duties around the Pikesville Hotel like normal. Pie come to me a few days later and said, “Oh, sweetie, I been so terrible to you. Come on back to my room and help me out, for I wants to work on my letters.”
I didn’t have the spirit for it, to be honest, but I tried. She seen I weren’t shining up to her like normal, and got mad and frustrated and throwed me out as usual, and that was the end of it. I was turned out in a way, changing, and for the first time was coming to some opinions of my own about the world. You take a boy and he’s just a boy. And even when you make him up like a girl, he’s still a boy deep down inside. I was a boy, even though I weren’t dressed like one, but I had my heart broke as a man, and ’cause of it, for the first time I had my eye on freedom. It weren’t slavery that made me want to be free. It was my heart.
I took to spilling a little rotgut down my throat in them times. It weren’t hard. I growed up around it, seen my Pa go his way with it, and I went with it. It was easy. The men in the tavern liked me, for I was a good helper. They let me help myself to the suds at the bottom of their mugs and glasses, and when they found out I had a good singing voice, throwed me a glass of rye or three for a song. I sung “Maryland, My Maryland,” “Rebels Ain’t So Hard,” “Mary Lee, I’m Coming Home,” and religious songs I heard my Pa and Old John Brown sing. Your basic rebel was as religious as the next man, and them songs moved ’em to tears every time, which encouraged them to throw more happy water in my direction, which I put to good use, sousing myself.
It weren’t long before I found myself the life of the party, two sheets to the wind, staggering around the saloon, singing each night and tellin’ jokes and making myself handy the way my Pa done. I was a hit. But a girl in them times, colored or white, even a little one, who drinks and carouses with men and acts a fool, is writing an IOU that’s got to be cashed in sooner or later, and them pinches on my duff and old-timers chasing me ’round in circles at closing time was getting hard to take. Luckily, Chase appeared. He’d tried his hand at cattle rustling in Nebraska Territory and got broke at it, and he come back to Pikesville heartsick about Pie as I was. We spent hours setting on the roof of Miss Abby’s, drinking joy juice and pondering the meaning of all things Pie as we stared out over the prairie, for she wouldn’t have squaddly to do with neither of us now. Her room on the Hot Floor was for only those who paid now, no friends, and we two was clean out of chips. Even Chase, feeling low and lonely, tried his hand at getting fresh with me. “Onion, you is like a sister to me,” he said one night, “even more than a sister,” and he groped at me like the rest of them old-timers in the tavern, but I avoided him easily and he fell flat on his face. I forgived him course, and we went on like sister and brother from then on, my kidnapper and me, and spent many a night drunk together, howling at the moon, which I generally enjoyed, for there ain’t nothing better when you sunk to the bottom to have a friend there.
