A Separate Country by Robert Hicks Read Free Book Online Page A

costume.
    “Eagles don’t have lips,” I said.
    “That one’s got nigger lips,” said the old, sun-blackened man who would be the King that year.
    “Precisely my question,” I said.
    “It isn’t a question,” he said.
    “Pardon me?”
    “I was just observing that your eagle has nigger lips, which is as it was designed. But, General, if you’d prefer a different costume we can arrange it.”
    “I might like that…”
    “We’ve got a mouse-giraffe with a Hottentot ass, and a pelican-snake in blackface.”
    I kept my costume, thinking it most appropriate that I mask as an eagle because of my service in the war, especially in light of the other options. I marched in a parade of menacing hybrids, a fantasia of men obsessed by purity and breeding, horrified at the notion of their daughters’ future half-negro children. Which is to say, their daughters’
negro
children, as there are no half negroes. To transform their grandchildren into negroes as men from fish and apes seemed, to the maskers on my left and right marching down Canal Street, the worst kind of alchemy.
    About the time I understood the full meaning of the parade I had joined, the stump of my leg began to ache, and so I pulled out and sat down on the banquette and removed my eagle head and, when I had gathered my breath, my wooden leg.
    “That is an awfully scary costume, mister,” said a short, raven-haired boy in a harlequin’s stockings and mask. His parents, dressed as the Pope and His Lover, watched us closely and I smiled. They did not smile back.
    “I reckon it must be hard pretending your leg been et off, mister. That’s what makes the scariness.”
    Later that day the men of Comus attacked some negroes and some Republicans, and possibly one Italian potter hawking his beer mugs along the parade route. The police, many of them colored, beat them all, severely splitting the costumed heads down the middle with their clubs and gouging out eyes when they could find them in the riot of feathers and garland papier-mâché. I, luckily, had given my eagle head to the little harlequin and so I could watch the disaster unmolested.
    This was what had become of our war. We had once fought with honor on the field and now we fought dressed like idiots in the streets. I vowed to avoid politics but I still needed a wife.

    *   *   *

    I began to attend balls, I trimmed my beard a little, I practiced French and Spanish. I bought new clothes. I learned to dance again, and to seduce. I was almost the man I had once been when I was a colonel, when I was strong and fiery and courted the finest women in Richmond, back when I didn’t limp.
    And so it was that I found myself again in a mask, in May of 1867, at a ball in the old part of town. I masked, as they say it here, but I was easily recognizable. After a little while of turning about the edges of the ballroom and greeting the grave chaperones and their flowery charges, I sat down in the foyer and began massaging the stump of my leg until it tingled again, and watched a small, erect, audacious, and insolent young woman march across the foyer to confront me from behind her peacock mask.
    “The Gallant Hood!” she said.
    “I believe it is the protocol of these disguised gatherings to refuse such identifications, ma’am, and so please excuse me if I say, Who?”
    I was tired and bored and could think of nothing wittier to say. I tried to get to my feet in proper greeting, but I forgot my leg on the seat next to me, and so it was easy for the young woman to catch me off balance and ease me back onto the seat. She did not sit, though I made a space, and so I was forced to look up at her. She let her chest heave in a great sigh, she watched me watch her in fascination. Then she chuckled.
    “If you are not Hood, then I must go.”
    It had been years, since before I had been wounded and separated from myself. I had been the tall Kentuckian by way of Texas, spinning round the parlors and dance floors of