A Reluctant Belle

by Beth White

  The barkeep laughed. “Now, now, son. Reverend Thomas ain’t a bad man. I see him in town on occasion, and he’s always nice and polite. Even seems to be somewhat educated. Don’t know the one called Perkins.” He slopped his towel onto the bar and wiped. “Now that you mention it, though, it does seem odd that Beaumont was the one directly hit.”

  Schuyler put his finger beside his nose. “I’d be willing to bet somebody decided to put a stop to his interference. Heard there was a lot of armed men out there.”

  “Well, if you want to know who did it, I’d attend the hearing this morning. That’s why Judge Teague is in town.” Barkeep glanced over at the table where Levi sat engaged in conversation with the judge. “You mind me asking what you’re doing here—and what you need with a Yank for your lawyer?”

  “That’s personal, but you seem to be a man who can keep a secret.” Inwardly cringing at the inanity of that statement, considering the dump of information he’d just pulled from the garrulous bartender, he lowered his voice to a mild roar. “I’m in a little trouble with the federals myself. Just a little . . . ‘dustup,’ as you say, over a lark with my fraternity brothers over in the colored part of town.”

  Barkeep chuckled. “Oh, a ’Bama boy, huh? I think this is only the second time I’ve seen you in here. New student?”

  “No, sir.” Schuyler listed to the left on his stool. “I go to Ole Miss. But things got a little hot, shall we say, over in Oxford. My pa said I’d better get across the state line until things calm down.”

  “I’d tell my boy the same thing. And I’d also tell him to go easy on the ale before noon.” With a wink the barkeep responded to a request for service at the other end of the bar, leaving Schuyler to reflect that what he’d just heard served to confirm the sheriff’s account. And to congratulate himself that he’d established his relationship with Levi as business underlaid by mutual contempt.

  He’d wasted quite enough time here. Jerking his tie and collar into a semblance of Hixon’s state of perpetual disarray, he left a two-bit piece on the bar and meandered out to the street. Levi could follow at his leisure.

  Schuyler stopped to look up at the clock tower on the west end of the courthouse, located on Sixth Street just south of the old capitol. He should have time to talk to the accused before Judge Teague started the hearings at nine. A short walk took him to the two-story jail next door to the courthouse. As the door was ajar, he knocked and pushed on it.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” Poking his head in, he found a scruffy bejowled deputy reading a newspaper behind a battered oak desk.

  Looking like a hound dog who’d been awakened from a nap, the deputy scowled over the top of the paper. “You’re in the wrong building, son. Saloon’s down the street.”

  Was there something on his forehead that said “Intoxicated college boy below”?

  Schuyler gave the deputy an amiable, sloppy salute. “Yes, sir. I found it. But one of my professors back in Oxford is related to Mr. Frye, and I promised to check on him before his hearing.” He reached into his pocket for another two-bit coin, flicked it upward with his thumb, and caught it. “With your permission, I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Frye is one of those Negro-lovin’ Lincolnites. I doubt he’s got any friends.”

  “Didn’t say ‘friend,’ I said ‘relative.’ You don’t choose your kin, know what I mean?” Schuyler flipped the coin again, and it landed on the desk. “Oops.” He let it spin there as he stumbled toward the stairs. “Kindness is kindness, and I really want an A in that class.”

  The deputy shrugged and went back to his newspaper. “First cell on the left.”

  At the top of the stairs, Schuyler found two rows of cells lining the barnlike building. Two of the cells on the right contained well-dressed Negro men, and on the left he found a squirrelly white man with thinning brown hair and large, innocent brown eyes behind a pair of rimless spectacles. Seated on his bare cot with a Bible on his lap, he wore an ill-fitting suit of brown worsted and boots that looked like they might have been cobbled during the War of 1812.

  Schuyler walked right up to the white man’s cell. “Mr. Frye?”

  The man stared at him with myopic disinterest. “Yes. I’m Frye. Do I know you?”

  “No. I’m Schuyler Beaumont. But if the deputy asks you, you have a cousin teaching physics at the University of Mississippi. He sent me to see to your needs.”

  “That would be a lie.”

  Schuyler nodded. “Yes, but it’s my lie, not yours. Besides, I am going to send over a meal from the tavern after the hearing. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “They’re taking care of our meals, so there’s no need to do that.”

  Schuyler sighed. Some people were entirely too legalistic for their own good. “Fine. No food—”

  “Better send some, young boss,” interrupted the elder of the two black men. “Schoolmaster’s been giving us his meals, since they barely fed me and Perkins after they threw us in here last week.”

  Schuyler stared at Frye. Scrupled and legalistic. “I’m sorry to hear that. All right. I will. Now, Mr. Frye, I’m going to tell you the truth here, since you seem to be fond of that commodity. My father was the one killed in that riot last week. I don’t think you did it, and I don’t think you beat up that third colored man—what does he call himself?”

  “Moore,” said the Negro who’d asked for the food. “Harold Moore.”

  “Thank you,” Schuyler said. “And what’s your name, sir?”

  “Josiah Thomas.”

  Thomas. The minister who’d been on the balcony with Schuyler’s father. “Reverend Thomas, what are you and Perkins accused of?”

  “Arson and disorderly conduct. They said we set fire to the livery stable.”

  “But they let Moore go and kept you two? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No sir, it sure don’t,” Perkins said. “None of us ever saw Moore before that day. Just showed up here in town, apparently for the rally. Then when he got rounded up with us two after the fire, he goes to screamin’ that Mr. Frye had beat him up. All Mr. Frye ever done was teach our children how to read and write.”

  Schuyler gave the schoolteacher a thoughtful look. “That true, Frye? Did you lay a hand on Moore?”

  Frye laid his Bible on the cot and folded his arms. “I’m not sure I’d recognize him if he walked in here.”

  “Why would he accuse you of such a thing?”

  “There are a lot of folks around here who want me to go away, Mr. Beaumont. They say educating Negroes is equivalent to handing them a club to wield over white people.” He shrugged. “I disagree, and I’m not going away.”

  Schuyler knew a certain red-haired young lady who felt the same way. Looking through the bars at Frye’s pale, hungry face, marred by a swollen welt running from his cheekbone into his hairline, Schuyler felt a chill of foreboding shiver through him. What if Joelle drew this sort of censure from her Tupelo neighbors? Because of her femininity and stature in the community, no one would get violent—he thought—but there had certainly been gossip about the “odd” Daughtry women.

  “Hey, you three,” came a voice from the stairway. “Time to go.” The deputy appeared in the doorway, a hand on the pistol at his belt. “You’d best get out of here, boy, so I can take my prisoners over to the courthouse.”

  “Yessir, I was just leaving.” Schuyler peered through the bars of Frye’s cell. “I meant what I said, Mr. Frye. I’ll be at the hearing, and I’ll be by to check on you afterward. Godspeed, sir.” He stepped around the deputy and clattered down the stairs.

  Joelle rubbed her scratchy eyes with cramped fists. Since Selah was checking linens in the big house with Horatia, Joelle had taken over the desk in the office of the manager’s cottage. Usually she wrote piled up in bed in the little bedroom she shared with Aurora, blocking her sister’s chatter with wads of cotton stuffed into her ears. But today she’d felt she needed a more concentrated work space and access to her fa
ther’s library. Papa had been a coldhearted blackguard, but he had good taste in literature.

  She had worked on the article all afternoon on Sunday and late into the night, then she’d risen with the first cry of the rooster and dressed in the dark. Leaving Aurora sound asleep, she visited the privy, then tiptoed over to the kitchen to wash her hands and face. Horatia and Mose hadn’t arrived for the day, so she found a loaf of bread in the larder, spread it with butter and fig preserves, and headed back to the cottage, munching. Then she’d settled in to write.

  Waving her notebook to dry the ink, she glanced out the window, open to the breeze. Her story still wasn’t finished; in fact, there were a few more people she wanted to interview before “T. M. Hanson” turned his masterpiece in to Mr. McCanless. But it was nearly noon, she was hungry, and if she didn’t get up out of this chair, she was going to atrophy. Yawning, she went to the bedroom to stuff the notebook under the mattress in the center of the bed. Should be safe there. She’d been hiding manuscripts in the attic of the big house since she was little, but lately there had been too much renovation activity to make that a viable choice.

  She ought to find out if Selah or Horatia needed her for anything, but it occurred to her to wonder about Charmion’s progress on her new dress. Grabbing a sun hat off the hook by the door, she headed for the Vincents’ new cottage over by the blacksmith shop. Daughtry House was fortunate to have secured the ablest blacksmith in the county and his wife, a gifted dress designer and seamstress.

  Through the open screened windows, Joelle could hear Charmion singing a hymn. She stood on the little porch listening for a moment, enjoying the rich alto, but as Charmion reached the end of the verse, Joelle knocked. “Hello, Char, it’s Joelle!”

  “Coming!” Slow, heavy footsteps approached, and the door opened. Charmion, a hand supporting her large belly, greeted Joelle with her big white smile. “Oh, I’m glad to see you! I’m working on your dress, and I wanted to try something on you.”

  Joelle couldn’t help staring at the round shape under Charmion’s gingham housedress. “How much longer before the baby comes? You look like you’re about to explode!”

  Charmion laughed and backed up to let Joelle in. “Maybe another month. Nathan swears I’m taking up enough room in the bed for three people!”

  “Well, that’s rude.” Joelle laughed at herself. “I guess I was rude too. I’m sorry!”

  Charmion sighed as she cleared a pile of scraps off a chair for Joelle. “Don’t matter. It’s true. I’ll be glad when this little mite gets here so I can put him down occasionally, ’stead of lugging him around twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I can imagine. Well, not really, but you know what I mean.”

  Charmion grinned, used to Joelle’s meandering style of conversation. “Yes’m. Now let me show you what I’ve been putting together. This is the prettiest material! You have such good taste!”

  “Aurora picked it out,” Joelle said, watching Charmion handle long swaths of the shimmery brown fabric. “I don’t know voile from sateen.”

  “You should learn,” Charmion said. “Girl with your coloring could wear just about anything except pink.”

  “Even I know not to do that!” Joelle laughed. “I’d look like a flamingo!”

  Charmion snorted. “Come on, stand up, let me slip this over your head.”

  “Over my clothes?”

  “Yes, we measured before I began, remember? I just want you to get an idea of what I’m doing here.”

  Joelle submitted to being draped, reflecting that the dress she had on was so thin from washing that it was close to being underwear anyway. Charmion pinned and hummed and twitched and muttered to herself, and after a few minutes she stood back to survey her handiwork.

  Charmion sucked in a breath. “Oh, Miss Jo. You gonna turn a head or two.”

  Joelle did not want to turn heads. Generally she wanted to fade into the curtains and hope nobody noticed her. But if she was going to take on some of the responsibility from Selah, she had to look more like a professional hotelier than the second upstairs maid. And she had noticed that when she made an effort with her appearance, certain people took her more seriously.

  She didn’t see a mirror, which was just as well. Her hair was probably a rat’s nest of red curls, which she had wadded in a net at the back of her head in the dark. She looked down at the rows of tiny pintucks cinching the waist of the princess-style dress, the elegant gores of the skirt sweeping to her feet. Gleaming copper fabric puddled on the floor around her. She lifted her arms to admire the medieval bell sleeves, falling under the arm to a graceful point.

  “There will be some simple tatted lace edging on the sleeves,” Charmion said, “and a little bit along the neckline. I didn’t want to take away from the beauty of the fabric.”

  Joelle blinked at the Negro girl, once her slave and now her friend. “You are an artist,” she breathed. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say you’ll tell everybody who made it.” Charmion laughed.

  “Of course I will. Where did you get this idea? I haven’t seen anything like this outside of my fairy-tale book.”

  “That’s what made me think of it. When we were girls, I’d sneak in your room after everybody was asleep and get that book and find a patch of moonlight and just stare for hours at the pictures.”

  Joelle swallowed, crushed by guilt. She tried to speak, but Charmion put out a hand to brush the sleeve of the dress.

  “You don’t know what you don’t know, Joelle. I’m so happy now, Nathan and me, and you and your sisters gave us this chance.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy. But you know, if I could crawl inside your skin and feel what you feel, I’m sure I’d do things differently every day.”

  Charmion cupped her hands under her belly. “If you could crawl in my skin, you’d be looking for the privy every five minutes. But I appreciate the thought.”

  They laughed together, and Charmion began to unpin the dress so that Joelle could slip out of it. “This is so exquisite, I’m not sure I’ll want to wear this for daily—”

  “Charmion!”

  Joelle, back to the door, turned to find big, muscle-bound Nathan Vincent leaning in. Sweat poured off him and his face was grim.

  Charmion dropped the material in her hands. “What’s the matter?”

  “I got to go out to Shake Rag. The church has burned down.”

  thirteen

  THE SECOND-FLOOR TUSCALOOSA COURTROOM, like a hundred others scattered across the South, provided the circuit court judge with a lofty perch from which to view his minions below. The jury box to one side of the raised bench and witness stand to the other were faced by rows of wooden pews designed for maximum discomfort, with tables for the litigating parties center front.

  Positioned halfway back and to the right of the defense, Schuyler scanned the packed room from beneath drooping lids. Fortunately, as a seasoned church sloucher, he had developed a spinal column flexible enough to find comfort in the most rigid of seats. His thoughts were not as sanguine as his posture would indicate. He could see Levi sitting toward the front, three rows behind the accused. The two Negroes, Thomas and Perkins, both flinched at every sudden noise, while their white codefendant sat beside them in stoic silence. If Frye was nervous, he hid it well.

  Schuyler couldn’t think of anything practical he could do to help. And he found, to his surprise, that he did want to help. He kept picturing Mose or Reverend Boykin or Nathan seated at that table, with no one to speak for them. But he must sit here pretending lazy interest, as if he were a bored student with nothing better to occupy him. Levi had to be worried too. Though he pretended to be an attorney, he had no authority to affect the outcome for the defendants.

  At the plaintiff’s table sat a light-skinned Negro of about thirty years who bore livid marks of a beating. He had to be Moore. Every so often he would turn his head and glare at Frye. Bad blood evidently flowed there.

  Schuyler wished he’d ha
d a chance to confer with Levi before the hearing. Doubtful the judge would have shared his thoughts about the case, particularly with a Yankee lawyer. But Levi would have at the least developed a general impression as to what to expect from the proceedings.

  Before he could jeopardize his lackadaisical cover by moving down front to speak to Levi, an elderly court officer shuffled in from a side door. “All rise for His Honor, Judge S. Marmaduke Teague,” the man intoned as he positioned himself near the bailiff’s chair.

  Schuyler unfolded himself and stood along with the large crowd of spectators. He recognized the tall, burly sheriff, the deputy from the jail, plus a second deputy, and a well-dressed unidentified white man, all seated on the front row. Undoubtedly they would be called as witnesses.

  As the judge dropped into his chair, the assemblage also settled, with a sigh and shuffle of feet. Teague laced his fingers together atop the desk and surveyed the courtroom, his expression bland with a soupçon of cynicism under the magnificent mustache. “Now, let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this mess.” His gaze lingered on the plaintiff. “Are you Mr. Moore?”

  The small Negro man’s scowl relaxed into an expression of deference. “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. I realize some of the information I’m looking for has already come out in the preliminary hearing before the justice of the peace, but since he had to leave town for a family emergency, we’ll need it again for our records today. Will you please stand and state your full name and place of residence.”

  Moore rose. “I be Harold Moore of Tremont, Mississippi, in Itawamba County just across the state line.”

  “All right, Mr. Moore, what is your business here in Tuscaloosa?” The judge’s tone was polite but firm.

  Moore seemed reluctant to answer for a moment. He finally said, “I been deputized to bring back some field hands what took off a month or so ago.”