FEATURED STORY
Daughter of the Crossroads
By Lin Lucas
Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana
May 20, 1864
The burial detail looked half dead when they returned from the outer perimeter of the Union camp.
Lieutenant Simms, his bristly sergeant, and four scraggly freedmen dressed in threadbare clothing,
set their shovels down outside the makeshift supply shack before trudging to the large cook pots that
boiled over an open flame at the center of camp.
The shanty encampment, set up after a harrowing retreat from the blood-soaked cane fields of
Yellow Bayou, was a death-trap all its own. The sultry air was thick with insects that oozed from the
surrounding marshes. A miasma of despair enveloped the regiment in a silence broken only by stac-
cato outbursts of coughing fits and a steady chorus of fluid-filled lungs that rattled with each fiercely
drawn breath. Combat weary soldiers who had, by divine grace, survived the fearsome engagement
with rebel forces, watched and waited now for the cold comfort of death to claim their stricken com-
rades.
Cathay Williams ladled a piss-thin chicken broth into the lieutenant’s tin cup.
“Much obliged,” The young officer said without meeting her eyes. The lanky dark-skinned girl
bowed her head in acknowledgement before serving the sergeant who accepted her deference matter-
of-factly.
The Black gravediggers kept a respectful distance until the soldiers retreated to their respective
tents, then the colored men surged forward, tin bowls cupped prayerfully.
Having fled the familiar bondage of their southern masters for sanctuary in Union ranks, they were
no longer slaves but “contraband”—the spoils of war. Like Cathay, their value had yet to be deter-
mined. They treaded the new frontier between past horrors and future hopes with caution.
At present, there were more than twenty Negro refugees in the camp. Most had flocked to the regi-
ment in the wake of skirmishes with rebel forces, others had threaded their way across no man’s land,
alone or in small, terrified packs. These ragtag Freedmen were the fortunate ones; each had survived,
having watched war’s inferno consume friends, family, and all that they had known of home.
The men huddled round the cook pot.
“My name Silas,” the oldest of the gravediggers said to the serving girl. He was a big nappy-headed
man with speckles of gray in his patchy beard. “Seems like you been in this camp longer than most,
Miss.”
Genesis Science Fiction Magazine Winter 2017
3