Numbering all the Bones

“Yesterday on the way home from the stationer’s in Washington City, I saw the ring in a pawnshop. My brother Neddy’s ring. Sitting there, pretty as you please, on a piece of black velvet, all ready for some woman’s hand. As if it never had been buried in a grave. As if nobody was ever sold away because of it. I stood looking at it, wondering who would buy it, and would it bring them any good fortune. And a whole trainload of thoughts raced through my head, like the trains that used to come through Andersonville three, four, five, even six times a day after the prison was opened. The train in my head dumped off thoughts like those like those trains dumped off prisoners. [...] How Mr. Hampton would say, ‘God is in his heaven, all is right with the world,’ when he heard the whistles. How, once they opened the prison, God wasn’t anywhere.”

Eulinda voices the prologue upon seeing a valuable ring that was lost by Gertrude Kellogg, the first wife of Hampton Kellogg and Eulinda’s former owner when she was enslaved. The presence and value of the ring is a backdrop against which Eulinda’s story unfolds.

“I was a house slave, if you want to get legal about it. But there was nothing about my condition that was legal. I slept in the house, I was educated by Mistis and hardly had any chores. And there was always the promise in the air that I would be taken care of proper-like when Mr. Lincoln’s ‘great measure’ was put into action. Mistis talked a lot about Mr. Lincoln’s ‘great measure.’ She was the master’s second wife. I was his daughter, but not by his first wife. It gets powerful mixed up, here. My mama was the cook in the kitchen before Iris.”

Eulinda describes her unique personal circumstances, introducing the identity she has due to her lineage. Her reference to nothing being “legal” reflects the fact that she is an illegitimate child who has no legal rights because she is enslaved and, having a Black mother and white father, she is legally Black. Gertrude persecutes Eulinda because she is the embodiment of her husband fathering a child with a slave. Mistis, Hampton’s second wife, teaches Eulinda to read and write and teaches her to be well-spoken, though Mistis’s efforts are always to further her own ends.

“And he hated Mistis. ‘She’s no better than his first wife, Miz Gertrude,’ he told me more than once. When I asked him how he could say such when Mistis was a Yankee and had taught him to read and write, he scoffed. ‘She doesn’t do anything unless it’s for her own good,’ he said. ‘Yankee? She’s no Yankee. She’s only down here to make money on the war. If she was for the Yankees why didn’t she let me go join the army when I asked her? I have to run. And she’ll never let you leave neither, sister of mine. You set your cap on freedom on your own. Don’t wait ‘til she gives permission, ‘cause she’s never going to give it. And don’t trust her, ever.’”

Neddy is a person of steely determination who refuses to acknowledge his name while he is a prisoner-of-war, even though it would mean he could leave the prison camp, because doing so would entail his return to slavery. The insights he shared with Eulinda are almost universally correct, demonstrating his better understanding of their relationship with their white counterparts compared to Eulinda’s confusion.