Sunday, 2 April 1865, Richmond, Virginia
The nine-block walk west along East Broad Street from the First African Church at the corner of College and East Broad was strangely bustling this Sunday morning at 9:00 a.m. The previous Sunday had been quiet at this time. In fact, Temple's, where Eaton Matthews lived and worked, at Grace and 4th Street, had existed in a garden of quietude the previous week. There had been a period of frenetic evacuation of the Confederate capital by wagon and train during the previous two weeks, and then those determined to stay had hunkered down and remained indoors.
For some reason, though, the movement out of the city had started again this morning in earnest. Eaton wondered if the remaining residents of the city knew something he didn't. That didn't surprise him. He lived in a bubble in Richmond. He rarely left Temple's at all. The early Sunday morning service at the First African Church was virtually the only place he was permitted to go on his own. Any other sojourns outside of the house on Grace were limited-distance errands assigned by Thomas Temple. There were no physical chains on Eaton, but the psychological chains were a matter of clearly understood reality.
Eaton hadn't known any other life, nor could he imagine any other life, than slavery.
He preferred it when the streets were deserted for the nine-block walk along the main thoroughfare on a Sunday morning. He was always embarrassed and slightly fearful of the regard he was given by those he passed on the street. All of the sons of the Confederacy who were his age—barely nineteen—were out in the field, fighting the troops of aggression from the North. Those who weren't in regular units somewhere else now were down in Petersburg, twenty-three miles to the south, helping General Lee hold the outer defense lines of the city. Eaton wasn't there, helping to defend the city. He was here, strutting, or so it seemed, down one of the main streets of Richmond.
What he felt like screaming at those giving him judgmental looks on the street—while knowing he couldn't possibly take that liberty—was that he couldn't fight for the Confederacy, even if he wanted to do so, which he didn't. He had nothing to gain either way; he had no choice in the matter. He was a slave. He had no choice in what he did. And few slaves were fighting for the Confederacy. They increasingly could not be trusted to fight for the Confederacy and with slaves slipping off left and right, the work of those who remained had become a necessity for their masters.
The issue with Eaton was that he wasn't fully black. He was a quadroon—one-fourth black—and that one fourth was recessive. He was the spitting image of a young James Matthew, his natural-born white father. And his mother was the daughter of a black slave woman and a white plantation owner father. Eaton had been raised in the plantation house. For those on the street, he appeared to be a small, but very fit and attractive, white patrician. And thus he appeared to be a shirker of his duty to the Confederacy, a Confederacy that everyone in Richmond realized, but would not openly acknowledge, was entering its death throes.
In response, Eaton hurried his pace, dodging between people making trips from row houses in the Fan District to wagons at the curb, while residents decided what they needed to take with them when they deserted a city that they fully believed would soon be in flames.
He was flushed and nearly on the run when he mounted the stairs of the large row house at Grace and 4th and entered the foyer, where Thomas Temple was impatiently awaiting his return.
"Good, you are here. There is a young man here for you."
Eaton looked at the hands of the grandfather clock in the foyer to ensure that it not yet was 11:00 in the morning, a Sunday morning. That was when his time, in the only morning that he had his own time before once more becoming fully chained to Thomas Temple's time, ran out. It was not much later than 10:00, but Eaton dare not point that out to Temple. There was, in fact, no time that wasn't Thomas Temple's time.
"Where is he?" Eaton asked.
"In your room, waiting for you. It's the cavalry captain who has asked for you before when you were not available. I doubt if he is patiently waiting."
"The city is on the move again," Eaton said. "I saw many wagons being loaded on my way from church. Could that mean—?"
"It's inevitable that Lee can't hold in Petersburg for much longer," Temple said. "It's nearly time for me to put the other flag out and put the photographs of my Philadelphia relatives out on the piano."
"We will be staying in the city?"
"Of course we will. Union soldiers are as much men, with men's needs, as Confederate soldiers are."
Eaton didn't dare mention that Union troops occupying Richmond would make a crucial difference in at least one regard—his own status. He doubted that Temple even thought that the fall of the capital meant the realization of emancipation for him. He would be free in fact, free of a master and of the obligations of his life between these four walls.
But then, as if Temple could see Eaton's thoughts in his face, he said. "When the Union troops get here, you can, of course, leave this house. But don't think you can leave this life. I can give you protection and limit the demands on you. If you choose to leave here and make your own life on the streets, you'd best give second thoughts to what you lose and gain. You may think that men in the North are fighting for your freedom, but they are men like any men and will use you like any other man would. This city will be laid open to their ravishing just as any conquered city is. What you give here in exchange for protection, food, and lodging will be taken from you in the streets without compensation."
He, of course, was right, Eaton knew. Although a black slave, Eaton had been educated and taught to think and to deliberately consider what his limits were and how he best could maneuver within them. He knew he couldn't just jump at freedom in a city under occupation by troops who had had to fight hard and had seen comrades die in the stubbornness of this city to give in. He knew that, if Temple could give him protection, his safest place until the city settled down again was here.
"I will go up to this cavalry officer then," he said, as he started up the stairs to his bedroom on the second floor, the most presentable of the bedrooms in keeping with the higher demand for his services by men in the wartime capital even than those of Temple's women prostitutes.
Eaton could tell that the man was agitated when he entered the room. He had already taken off his boots and his blue broadcloth trousers with the yellow stripe going down the leg and folded and placed them on a straight chair. Similarly, his gray jacket was folded and placed on top of the trousers. He had shrugged out of his bibbed shirt and had his hands on the buttons of his underdrawers fly. He must have started unbuttoning those when he heard Eaton on the stairs.
He'd been pacing the room with nervous energy, and although the scent coming off of him was a manly musk, Eaton could sense something else in it—impatience and fear.
He was a young, handsome devil, much better put together than most of the men who visited Eaton's room. His chest was muscular, his waist narrow. His features were patrician South, his hair, including the tufts under his bulging pecs and on his forearms, were a sandy blond. He had unbuttoned enough of his fly for Eaton to see the same shade of reddish blond in his pubic bush.
"You have made me wait," the Confederate captain growled as Eaton entered the room.
"I'm sorry, sah," Eaton answered. "I was at church. I normally don't work on Sunday mornings."
