Jordan County

by Shelby Foote

  On the fourth day Isaac rode south to Natchez and claimed his share of the Jameson estate in cash and Negroes. Within two weeks of the night he and the trappers made camp by the lake he was back again, with the ten slaves and six mules, clearing ground and bounding the claim he had registered at the land office and paid for in gold. That was the beginning. During the next ten years he was joined by others drawn from the south and east to new land available at ninety cents an acre with few questions asked. Near the south end of the lake, four miles below Isaac’s property, a North Carolinian named Ledbetter established a general store and trading post. Soon this was flanked by a blacksmith shop and a roadside tavern and hostelry called the Ithaca Inn by its owner, who claimed to have been Professor of Greek at an eastern university but who never enlarged on the circumstances that had prompted his change of careers. He did not stay long and soon no one remembered so much as the shape of his face. But that was no matter; by then the crossroads had taken the name of the tavern. When Jordan County was formed — this was 1827; men were leaving the land, abandoning their claims because of the collapse of cotton economy two years before — Ithaca was the leading settlement in the southern district, but Bristol, thirty miles upriver, had outgrown the earlier hamlet and was made the county seat, the legal as well as the industrial center.

  The eighteen hundred acres of Isaac’s original claim were increased to thirty-two hundred in 1826 when his neighbors north and south went broke in the crash. Two years later, though he had named his ten-square-mile plantation Solitaire in confirmation of his bachelor intentions, he got married. It happened almost accidentally. She was the youngest of four daughters; the other three were already married, and she herself was more or less engaged at the time to the blacksmith’s assistant, two doors down the street. Her father, who came from Kentucky, had bought the Ithaca Inn from the wayward professor, and from time to time she took her turn at the tap. Isaac found her tending bar one warm spring evening when he rode down for a drink. He had seen her before, of course, though he had not really noticed. Now he did. He particularly admired her arms, which were bared to the elbows, and her thick yellow hair, worn shoulder length. That night he had trouble getting to sleep. At last he dropped off, however. He did not dream, but when he woke he thought immediately of her. Whats this? he asked himself. He returned to the Inn that evening, and the next. By then he had decided. He spoke to the father first. “I’m willing if Katy is,” the innkeeper said. The daughter made only one condition. She would not marry a man with a beard, no matter what size the plantation he owned might be. So Isaac was clean shaven at the wedding. It was held at the Inn and the blacksmith’s young assistant was there, bulging his biceps, drunk for the first time in his life. He got into three fights that day, though not with Isaac.

  Isaac was just past fifty; the bride was five years less than half his age. Along with the plump arms and tawny hair, she brought to Solitaire the bustling, cheerful, apparently thoughtless efficiency he had admired in the Ithaca taproom. The house, which they moved into on the wedding night, was little different from what it had been seven years ago when Isaac and the slaves first put it up. A cedar shingle roof covered three rooms grouped to form a truncated L and indistinguishable one from another except for the casual presence of a stove to identify the kitchen and a four-poster the bedroom, the whole resembling a combination gunroom, kennel, office, and hunting lodge. It was musty of bachelorhood and cluttered with the incidentals of plantation living, old cotton samples and turkey-wing fans, split-bottom chairs and a Duncan Phyfe highboy, gnawed bones and in one corner half a dozen rusty plowpoints strung on a length of baling wire.

  First Mrs Jameson drove the dogs out. There were eight of them, mostly hounds with long sad faces, scrabbling and yelping beneath her upraised broom. Then, commandeering three of the fieldhands, she had the rooms emptied of their conglomerate litter and scrubbed with lye water, floors and walls and ceiling, until the cypress timbers paled and wore a nap as soft as velvet to the touch. For nearly a week the house was damp and clean, empty of furnishings except for the bed and a box of clothes. She and Isaac left at last for Memphis on their wedding trip. After a single outing, when a clerk in a Main Street store referred to Katy as his daughter, he would not go shopping with her; he was afraid it might happen again. He stayed at the Gayoso bar while she made the rounds of the shops. “Just get whatever you think we’ll need,” he said. “Tell them to send the bill down home.”

  They returned to Solitaire five days later, living again in the almost empty house while Katy waited for her purchases to arrive. When the steamboat blew for a landing she was there with four wagons to supervise the unloading. Four wagons, Isaac thought; why four? Then he found out. He watched with amazement her transformation from girl-bride into mule skinner and section boss (all that was missing was the cursing) while the crates off the steamboat were being transported from the landing, along the twelve miles of road that led around the head of the lake to the house on its eastern shore. They were unloaded in the yard, uncrated there and carried in, carpets and draperies, a dining room table, lyre-back chairs and a grandfather clock, kitchen utensils of every imaginable size and shape and even a bathtub, the first Isaac had seen outside a hotel since he left Natchez. He watched with no less amazement, when the work was done and the house was to her liking, his wife’s retransformation back to the girl-bride she had been before the steamboat blew for the landing. He had been in much the same position as a man watching what he thought was a spring breeze develop into a tornado, then back into a breeze again as soon as the holocaust was done. Standing among the new chairs and sofas and hangings and table lamps, she asked demurely: “How do you like it, Mr Jameson?”

  “I, well, I like it fine. Just fine, Katy.” Isaac looked and shook his head. “But I’m thinking youve spent next year’s crop already.”

  “There will be plenty of years,” she said.

  That ended the first phase of his life, the fifty years spent running hard after trouble in any form, first among men — river bullies at Natchez-under-the-Hill, painted Creeks at Burnt Corn, British regulars at New Orleans; he had tried them all — and then against the cat- and snake-infested jungles of the South. Isaac, however, was not aware that it had ended until two years later, after Dancing Rabbit opened the remaining northern section of the state to settlers, when his neighbors, small farmers and planters alike, were selling their claims for whatever they could get, packing their carts and Conestogas, and heading north into the rich new land that lay between the lake and the Tennessee line. It was then, after they had gone and he had stayed, that Isaac knew his wilderness thirst had been slaked. He still would not admit it, though, either to others or to himself. He claimed it was because he had no one to leave in charge of Solitaire. “I’ll go when I have a son,” he told himself.

  By then he had enlarged the house, first extending the arm of the L so that it formed a U, then closing the rear so that it became a rectangle with a dining room in the center and a kitchen behind it, across the back. What had been the kitchen, dim and hot and airless, became the store room, and in fact there was a general reshuffling of accommodations, much to Isaac’s discomfort though by now he had resigned himself to the fact that it was his wife who ran the house. Its lines were long, by far the most imposing house on the lake, though it still had the low, cedar-shingle roof. This held him to the land but this was not all, for in the summer of 1832 he got what he had claimed would set him free. They had thought there would be many children, since both came from rather large families. For a time, then, he said to himself, “Maybe I waited too long.” But presently his wife was pregnant, and in the summer their first child was born. It was a son and the doctor pronounced it a fine one. He and Isaac leaned over the foot of the bed, looking down at the baby swaddled in flannel beside its mother.

  “A fine one,” the doctor said.

  “You think so?” Isaac asked, wanting to hear him say it again.

  “I do,” the
doctor said. “I do indeed.”

  “Dont shake the bed so,” Mrs Jameson told them.

  A week later the baby died (it was stomach trouble; some kind of obstruction, the doctor guessed; he was not much doctor) and they buried it the following afternoon, three hundred yards south of the house, in a cedar grove which had been set aside for this when the house was built but which so far had remained untenanted. The Episcopal minister had come down from Bristol for the baptising two days before; he had stayed on to make it a three-day visit, as was the custom, and thus he was also there to officiate at the funeral. Again Isaac said to himself, “Maybe I waited too long,” for he blamed the dead baby’s unfitness on his age; young men were the ones for having babies. Yet he discovered that he had been wrong at least about one thing. He had been wrong about the effect of having a son. As he stood beside the small grave, hearing the rector pronounce the service (“Suffer the little children to come unto me”) and then the somewhat muffled slither of loose summer earth being dropped on the box, he knew that now, with flesh of his flesh interred in it, he would never leave this land. He was linked to it for life.

  Mrs Jameson was in bed two weeks, recovering from both the birth and the death of her child. Later, when she moved about the house once more, her eyes were nearly always wet with tears and often she would not reply when spoken to. It gave Isaac a strange, helpless feeling to see her thus; he was not accustomed to facing problems he could not take hold of; yet he knew better than to interfere or offer help until it was called for. At any hour of the night he would wake to find her lying tense with grief, eyes shining as she stared upward at the ceiling. He did not know what to say or do, and he did nothing. Then this period passed, gave way to another in which the grief was lighter because it at least permitted action, but also was sharper because it let up on the dulling of her perception. From the southeast window of their bedroom she could see the cedar grove with its one small mound of raw earth, and now the full extent of her loss became apparent to her. This might have forced her back into her first prostrate condition, but it did not, for she busied herself with running the house. It was really that simple. She became a driver of servants because she could neither be idle herself nor bear to see them idle. All the furniture was rearranged, the carpets beaten, the woodwork scrubbed and waxed. In fact it was almost as thorough as the renovation she had staged when she first moved in. Again at night, too, she turned to Isaac with the old urgency abetted by a certain franticness, a passion that went beyond passion for its uses, and again Isaac observed all this with the amazement of a man watching what he had thought was a spring breeze develop into a tornado.

  Then this passed too, as the other had done. Five months after the death of the infant, this second and furious period ceased. It did not play out: it just stopped, gave way to her original placative manner. The frenzy was finished, gone. She became calm again, almost bovine. Isaac recognized the symptoms, the quiet, careful movements, the attitude of inward listening. Ah, he thought. The child was born in August of 1833, the year the stars fell. (Wartime newspaper editors and, later, historians — Southern historians at any rate — were to make much of this. They saw in it an augury, and it lent a starry glitter to their pages.) Mrs Jameson named him Clive, not for any particular reason; she just liked the name. The dead one had been named for Isaac.

  In the ten following years she bore six more children. They were all girls and were all either born dead or died within a week. They lay in the cedar grove, a row of crosses stretching eastward from the first. Mrs Jameson did not react to these deaths as she had done to the one in ’32. She had become a pleasant-faced, bustling woman, rather full-bodied by now, expending her energy on a determination to keep the Jameson house the finest on the lake.

  This took some doing: for, though nowhere near the extent it would reach ten years later in the expansive early ’50’s, there was already plenty of competition. Cotton was coming into its own, and the lake country was a district of big plantations, thousand- and two- and three-thousand-acre places which the owners ruled like barons. When the small farmers, settlers who had followed Isaac into the region after the Doaks Stand treaty opened the land, moved away to the north after Dancing Rabbit — usually with no more than they had had when they arrived, a wagon and a team of mules or oxen, a rifle and a couple of sticks of furniture, a hound or two and a crate of chickens or shoats, a wife and a stair-stepped parcel of children in linsey-woolsey, and perhaps a widowed mother or mother-in-law — their claims were gobbled up by those who stayed, as well as by others who moved in on their heels. These last, the second wave of comers, were essentially businessmen. They had no gift (or, for that matter, desire) for ringing trees and rooting stumps; their gift was rather for organization. They could juggle figures and balance books and put the profits where they earned more profits. Eli Whitney made them rich and now they began to build fine houses to show it, calling them Westoak Hall and Waverly and Briartree, proud-sounding names in imitation of those in the Tidewater counties of Virginia, though in fact the Virginians were few among them. They were mostly Kentuckians and North Carolinians, arrived by way of East Mississippi or the river, and for the most part they were not younger sons of established families, sent forth with the parental blessing and gold in their saddlebags. Many of them did not know their grandparents’ names, and some of them had never known their fathers. They were self-made men who had risen by ability.

  For this they received due credit, but they also paid a certain price. Outside the field of their endeavor they had scarcely any existence. Few of them were more widely read than Isaac, for instance, who had been through no books at all since his boyhood years in Natchez, and none then except the handful he could not avoid. Their pleasures were few and simple and usually violent, limited mainly to hunting and poker. A favorite Sunday afternoon pastime was for them to assemble around the Jameson barnlot where a stake was driven with a chain attached to its top. A bull was led out and tied to the stake by the horns. Then a forty-year-old fieldhand named Memzy would enter the lot, bareheaded, and butt heads with the bull till the animal bellered with pain. The men cheered and laughed, leaning along the fence to watch, and give him dimes and quarters. “Hardest-headed nigger in all creation!” they cried. They slapped their thighs and shook their heads.

  Isaac’s original L-shaped structure, which he and the ten slaves had put up in 1820 soon after their arrival, had grown now to a two-story mansion with a brick portico and concrete pillars; the roof had been raised so that now all the bedrooms were upstairs. It was still called Solitaire though the name no longer fit. Isaac himself had grown handsomer with age. He was still a big man, six feet four, but he looked slimmer and, somehow, even fitter and more hale. Gray hair became him. Dressed habitually in broadcloth and starched linen, he had a stiffness, a formality that resembled an outward show of self-satisfaction and pride. In 1848, when he was seventy, people seeing him on the street in Ithaca, with his straight-backed manner of walking and his careful way of planting his feet, would point him out to visitors. “Thats Ike Jameson,” they would say. “He was the first man into these parts. Fine-looking, aint he. How old would you take him to be?” The visitor would guess at fifty or fifty-five and his host would laugh. “Seventy. Seventy, by God. Youd never think it, would you? to look at him.”

  In September of that year he sent his son, who had reached fifteen the month before, to the Virginia Military Institute. This was at the boy’s insistence, and Isaac was willing: not because he wanted him to become a soldier (he wanted no such thing; he had known too many soldiers in his time) but because in preparation for the life of a planter it did not much matter what form the schooling took. In fact a military school was probably best, since the boy would be less likely to become seriously involved with books. A young man’s true education began when he was through with school and had come back home to learn the running of the plantation, the particular temper and whims of cotton as well as the temper and whims of the people
who worked it, meaning Negroes. Besides, the Mexican War was recently over. Young men throughout the South were admiring General Winfield Scott and old Rough-and-Ready Taylor, Captain Bragg the artilleryman who “gave them a little more grape,” and Colonel Davis from down near Natchez who formed his regiment, the Mississippi Rifles, in a V at Buena Vista and won the battle with a single charge.

  Early in June, nine months later, when Isaac went to Bristol to meet him at the station, Clive was in uniform, the buttons bright against black facings on the slate-gray cloth. All down the platform, people were looking at him. Isaac was impressed.

  “I declare, boy, you look almost grown to me.”

  “Hello, papa,” he said, and extended his hand. Always before that they had kissed.

  Three Junes later, when he came home from graduation, tall, slim, handsome, blond, nineteen, he was the catch of the lake. It was not only his looks; he could be amusing, too, as for instance when he gave an imitation of his mathematics instructor, T. J. Jackson, who wound up every lecture covered with chalkdust and perspiration and who sometimes became so interested in solving algebra and trigonometry problems that he forgot the students were present and just stood there reasoning with himself and Euclid. Clive had much success with this; “Give us Professor Jackson,” they would beg him in houses along the lake. Soon, however, his social horizon widened. He was one of the real catches of the delta. Isaac and Mrs Jameson were impressed, and so were the various girls; but the ones who were most impressed were the girls’ mothers. They preened their daughters, set their caps, and laid their snares. At dances and outings he moved among them, attentive, grave, pleasant, quite conscious of the advantages of his position; they found it really infuriating, the way he took what was offered as his due.