He looks for the general in the crowd. Maybe if he can find him, he can convince him to circle back to the wheelbarrow and look for the necklace one more time, this time with Gilbert’s help. A large group of men in fine coats stands near what used to be the theater’s gallery door, and Gilbert trudges toward them.
He passes a group of young boys and one looks at him, then whispers something to the others and runs off. A few men, gathered behind them, also turn to stare. Gilbert is used to being watched by white men, but this is something different, and the feeling unsettles him.
Someone in the crowd shouts at him, and he searches for the source. There are a couple of customers he recognizes, but no general. “Gilbert Hunt!” comes the voice a second time, and a man wearing a riding coat steps forward.
Gilbert can’t know what the man wants with him, so he holds his breath, waiting to find out. But then the man does the most peculiar thing. He brings his hands together and begins to clap. And the next thing Gilbert knows, the fellow beside him is clapping, and then all of the men in their fine coats are putting their hands together, too. The applause moves like a ripple through the crowd, and before Gilbert knows quite what is happening, more groups on other parts of the theater green have joined in. Men set down their shovels and rakes to put their hands together. The man who sat at the table has risen to his feet. Even the man at the wheelbarrow is clapping now. Gilbert whips his head around, trying to take in the whole green at once.
The applause is thunderous. Gilbert points at his own chest, trying to decide whether all this fuss can really be for his benefit, and the man in the riding coat nods and shouts over the noise, “You saved my sister last night.”
Another man steps forward. “And my daughter.”
“My wife,” comes a voice from the crowd.
“My mother.”
For a brief moment, Gilbert thinks of Kemp. If he didn’t like Twaits and that other actor fawning all over Gilbert this morning, he’s surely not going to like Gilbert getting this kind of attention. And he’s bound to find out about it. But a little voice inside Gilbert’s head tells him not to think of Kemp now—that this moment belongs to him and to Dr. McCaw and to all the men and women who worked to save the lives of folks in the theater.
A few yards away, the newspaper man, Thomas Ritchie, is jotting down notes in his little book. Even though Gilbert knows the paper doesn’t run stories—or even the obituaries—of Black folks, he pictures Ritchie taking those notes back to theRichmond Enquirer’s offices and turning them into a piece that is every bit as magnificent as the way all this applause makes him feel.
The individual faces of the men and women on the green blur, and Gilbert realizes his eyes have begun to tear up. He doesn’t dare dab at them in front of so many people, so he just nods his head slowly. Gilbert always tries to do the right thing, by himself and the people around him, but he doesn’t know if he’s ever been recognized for it, and this recognition—now, in front of so many people—leaves him feeling overwhelmed. Everybody in this city has lost somebody in that fire, and if these men can stand before him on this sad day and demonstrate their gratitude, like he is an honest-to-God citizen of this city and not just somebody’s property, then maybe there is hope for him after all.
SALLY
After Dr. Foushee sets Margaret’sleg, Archie makes a big show of writing down the instructions for her care, but Sally can’t bear to witness the performance.
Archie means well—she knows he does—but the very idea that he’s going to clean Margaret’s wound, keep the leg wrapped, and watch for signs of fever is ridiculous. Ultimately, the job will fall to Mrs. Cowley and Sally, and eventually Effie, back at home.
“Are you hiding?” Mrs. Cowley asks Sally when she finds her upstairs in Mr. Scott’s room.
“I can’t be down there right now.”
“That’s understandable,” she says.
Sally knows she should probably leave well enough alone, but she can’t help it. So, she asks, “Do you really think Dr. Foushee and Archie were right? To keep the leg?”
“No,” says Mrs. Cowley decidedly. “But nothing I said was going to change their minds.”
“You don’t know that,” Sally argues. “You’re an experienced practitioner, who—as far as I can tell—knows a great deal more than Dr. Foushee does.”
“But I did not go to the University of Edinburgh.” She says the wordEdinburghwith contempt.
“Neither did half the physicians in this town. In fact, I’d wager most of them have no real training to speak of.”
“But they are men. And they are white.”
Sally has to admit she is right on both those counts.
“I am allowed to practice medicine because my cures work and because I treat colored patients that physicians like Dr. Foushee would prefer to pretend do not exist,” says Mrs. Cowley. “But, if at any point the powers that be decide I am doing more harm than good, I can be arrested and even killed.”
“But that’s an old slave law. It doesn’t apply to—”
Mrs. Cowley raises a sharp eyebrow in her direction.
“Oh,” says Sally. Suddenly, it all makes sense. The Negroes who’ve been knocking on Mrs. Cowley’s back door, Dr. Foushee’s dismissiveness of Mrs. Cowley’s cures, the men who carried Margaret to Mrs. Cowley’s door but refused to stay. Mrs. Cowley’s skin is the color of cream, but Sally has spent enough years on a plantation to know that a person’s skin color doesn’t always tell the full story. “Was your husband also—”
“An Aboriginal?”
Sally understands then that Mrs. Cowley will never speak to her plainly—not about this.
