North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  “Grady doesn’t want to speak to milksops and whores,” Virgilia said with a toss of her head. Her hair was uncombed, dull, dirty. “Our brand of abolitionism is Mr. Garrison’s.”

  “Burning the Constitution? That’s what you favor?” Tubbs shook his head. On Independence Day, Garrison had caused a national uproar by touching a match to a copy of the Constitution at a rally near Boston. Virgilia obviously thought he had done the right thing.

  “Why not? The Constitution is precisely what Garrison called it: a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

  “Such statements only alienate the people we need most—” Tubbs began.

  Virgilia sneered. “Oh, come, Mr. Tubbs. What kind of attitude is that—if you really believe in the cause?”

  Again his eyes flashed. “Perhaps I demonstrate my belief in a different way than yours, Miss Hazard.”

  “By refusing to take risks? By dressing so splendidly and hobnobbing with bigoted white people? By refusing to sacrifice your own personal comfort and—”

  He exploded then, striking the table. “Don’t prate at me about risks or sacrifice. I grew up as a slave in Maryland, and when I was fourteen I ran away. I took my younger brother with me. We were caught. Sent to slavebreakers. They left me this”—he slapped his bad leg—“but they did worse to him. He’s had a deranged mind ever since.”

  Grady was contemptuous. “And you don’t care about paying them back?”

  “Of course I care! Once, nothing else mattered. Then I escaped to Philadelphia, and in a year or two, when the furor and fear of pursuit abated, I began to think. I’ve become less interested in revenge for myself than in liberty for others. It’s the system I hate most—the system I want to abolish.”

  “I say let it end by violence!” Virgilia exclaimed.

  “No. Any movement in that direction will only guarantee the prolongation of slavery, and all the repressions that go with it—”

  Tubbs faltered, noting their hostility. He rose, carefully placed his stovepipe hat on his gray head. “I’m afraid I’m wasting my breath.”

  She laughed at him. “Indeed you are.”

  Tubbs pressed his lips together but said nothing. He turned and limped toward the door. Virgilia called in a nasty voice, “Be sure to close it on your way out.”

  There was no reply; the door shut softly but firmly.

  Grady had been sitting very straight in his chair. All at once his shoulders slumped. “Not that closing the door will do a blessed bit of good.” He shuddered, partly from cold, partly from despair. “Throw some more wood in.”

  “There isn’t any more wood—and only enough money to get me to Lehigh Station.” She wasn’t angry, just stating facts. She spooned gruel into a tin bowl and set it in front of him. “I’ll have to go home again.”

  Grady peered into the bowl, grimaced, and pushed it away. “I don’t like for you to do that. I hate to have you beg.”

  “I never beg. I tell them what I need, and I get it. Why shouldn’t I? They have enough. They squander more in a single day than all the people here in niggertown spend in a year.” She stood behind him, trying to warm him by kneading his neck with her fingers. “Soldiers at war don’t expect to live in luxury.”

  “Tubbs doesn’t think we’re at war.”

  “Eunuchs like Tubbs have been too comfortable, too long. They’ve forgotten. We’ll win the war without them. The jubilee will come, Grady. I know it.”

  Listless and unconvinced, he reached for her hand while she stared into space. Snow continued to blow in through cracks in the wall, settling on the blankets that served as their bed. In a corner, where there was an even larger crack, the snow had already formed a fluffy loaf on a big pile of rags. Grady picked rags to keep them alive. When there were no rags, he stole. When even that method failed, Virgilia went back to Lehigh Station for a few days.

  “I can’t feel any heat from the stove,” she said. “We’d better crawl under the blankets for a while.”

  “Sometimes I feel so bad for getting you into this kind of life—”

  “Hush, Grady.” Her cold fingers pressed his mouth. “I chose it. We’re soldiers, you and I. We’re going to help Captain Weston bring the jubilee.”

  Grady’s look reproved her. “You aren’t supposed to say his name out loud, Virgilia.”

  She laughed, angering him with her white woman’s superiority. “Surely you’re not taken in by that nonsense? All those code names and cipher books? Dozens of people know the true identity of the man who calls himself Captain Weston. Hundreds know about his activities, and millions more will know in a few months. After we’ve helped him free your people down South, we’ll deal with mine up here. We’ll deal with every white man and woman who opposed us actively or by indifference. Starting, I think, with my brother Stanley and that bitch he married.”

  Her smile and her whispered words scared Grady so badly he forgot his anger.

  “I don’t mind going home for clothing or food,” she assured him as they settled themselves under the cold blankets, which smelled of dirt and wood smoke. “But I wish you’d let me take you along someti—”

  “No.” It was the one point on which he never bent. “You know what people would do to us if we showed up together in that little town.”

  “Oh, yes, I know,” she sighed, pushing herself against him. “I hate them for it. God, how I hate them, my darling. We’ll repay them, too. We—oh.”

  What she felt startled her. Even in the cold he wanted her. Soon they were fighting off their mutual misery in the only way they knew.

  The fringe of the winter storm passed over Lehigh Station, dusting the ground and the rooftops with white. It was still snowing intermittently when Virgilia arrived on the night boat. Next year she would be able to make these trips in a heated railway coach with no concern about whether the river had frozen. The Lehigh Road had announced plans to extend service to Bethlehem and on up the valley.

  Much as she hated her family, she understood that it was only their tolerance that made it possible for her to survive in Philadelphia. Specifically, the tolerance of her brother George and his wife, who let her stay a night or so at Belvedere and permitted her to steal away with a burlap bag full of cast-off clothing or a valise loaded with tins and paper-wrapped packages of food. Despite her steady drift into the mental set of a revolutionary, a certain practicality remained in Virgilia’s makeup. She really knew better than to bring Grady to Lehigh Station, and she tried to time her arrivals so that darkness concealed them. Certain bigoted citizens of the village might actually attempt to harm her if they saw her. She knew who they were and had marked them for elimination at the proper time.

  Clad only in thin woolen gloves and a coat too light for the season, she struggled up the hill in blowing snow. By the time she reached Belvedere, the snow had turned her hair white. A buggy and blanketed horse stood at the hitching post. She let herself in—George allowed that—and heard voices from the parlor: Constance, George, and another she recognized as the local Roman Catholic priest.

  “What is a Christian response to the Kansas issue?” the priest was asking. “That is the question which plagues me these days. I feel obliged to discuss the matter with each of my parishioners, so I will know their—”

  He stopped, noticing Virgilia in the doorway. George looked at her with surprise, Constance with some dismay.

  “Good evening, George. Constance. Father Donnelly.”

  “We weren’t expecting you—” George began. They never knew when she would arrive; he made the same remark each time. Lately she had begun to find him tiresome.

  An insincere smile acknowledged his statement. Then she said to the priest, “There is no Christian response to the situation in Kansas. It is so-called Christians who have enslaved the Negroes. Any man who dares to bring a slave over a territorial border invites—demands—the only response which is possible. A bullet. If I were out there, I’d be the first to pull a trigger.”

&nbs
p; She made the statement in such a reasonable way that the elderly priest was speechless.

  George wasn’t. Livid but controlled, he said, “You’d better go upstairs and get out of those wet clothes.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “Of course. Good evening, Father.”

  After the priest left, George paced up and down, fuming. “I don’t know why we tolerate Virgilia. Sometimes I think we’re fools.”

  Constance shook her head. “You don’t want to treat her the way Stanley does. She’s still your sister.”

  He stared down at the little puddle of melted snow left by Virgilia’s shoes. “I find it increasingly hard to remember that.”

  “But we must,” she said.

  Later that night, George woke in bed to find Constance stirring in the dark.

  “What’s wrong? Are you sick again?”

  The explanation came to mind because she had been weak for a month or so. She had lost a child spontaneously about sixty days after realizing she was once more pregnant. It was the third time it had happened in as many years, and each loss seemed to produce physical aftereffects that lasted longer than previous ones: dizziness, sweats, and nausea in the night. George was worried not only about his wife’s health but about her state of mind, since the doctor hinted that she might never carry another child to full term.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I must get dressed and leave for an hour. There’s another shipment due.”

  “That’s right. I forgot.”

  “You go back to sleep.”

  He was already putting his feet on the chilly floor. “I’ll do no such thing. The weather’s miserable. You can’t walk all the way to the shed. Let me put on some clothes, and I’ll bring the buggy to the front door.”

  They sparred another minute or so, she telling him he needn’t go out into the cold with her and he insisting. Both knew he would have his way. The truth was, Constance was happy he wanted to accompany her. She felt weak and on the verge of a severe chill. She hated the thought of venturing into the winter night alone, though she would have done it.

  George was glad to go for another reason, too. He could see and perhaps speak with the new arrival. More than all the orators, editorialists, and divines put together, the passengers traveling the underground railroad helped to shape his thinking about the issue dividing the country. He snapped his galluses over his shoulders and patted her arm.

  “I’m going. No more argument.”

  Twenty minutes later, he drove the creaking buggy up to the shed at the rear of the mill property. A lantern glimmered inside. He helped Constance climb down with the valise she had brought from the house. Impulsively, she kissed him. Her lips and his cheek were icy, stiff as parchment. Yet the kiss was warming.

  She hurried to the door and gave the signal: two knocks, a pause, then two more. George crunched through the brilliantly lit snow and felt it spill over the tops of his shoes and soak his stockings. The storm had passed. The moon hung in the clear sky like a fine china plate.

  Belzer, the merchant, opened the door cautiously. He started when he saw a second figure.

  “It’s only me,” George said.

  “Oh, yes. Come in, come in.”

  The passenger was seated at a table with a square of jerky beef in his hands. He was a muscular, reddish-brown man whose cheekbones suggested some Indian blood. He was about thirty-five but all his curly hair was white. George could imagine why.

  “This is Kee,” Belzer said, as proud as if he were introducing a member of his own family. “He comes to us all the way from Alabama. His name is short for Cherokee. His maternal grandmother belonged to the tribe.”

  “Well, Kee, I’m glad you’re here,” Constance said. She set the valise beside the table. “There are boots in here and two extra shirts. Do you have a winter coat?”

  “Yes’m.” The runaway had a resonant bass voice. He seemed nervous in their presence.

  “They gave him one at the station near Wheeling,” Belzer said.

  “Good,” Constance said. “Most times Canada is even colder than Pennsylvania. But once you’re there, you’ll have no more worries about slave catchers.”

  “I want to work,” Kee told them. “I be good cook.”

  “I gather that’s what he did most of his life,” Belzer said.

  George was only partly aware of the conversation, so fascinated was he with the former slave’s posture and mannerisms. Kee’s head seemed to sit low between his shoulders, as if held in a perpetual cringe. Even here, in free territory, his dark eyes showed fear and distrust. He kept darting glances at the door, as if he expected someone to crash through at any moment.

  “—worked for a particularly strict, vicious master,” Belzer was saying. “Kee, show them what you showed me, will you please?”

  The runaway laid the untasted jerky aside. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, and slipped it to his waist. Constance choked softly and gripped her husband’s arm. George was equally sickened by the sight of so much scar tissue. It ran from Kee’s shoulder blades to the small of his back; some of it looked as if a nest of snakes had petrified just beneath the skin.

  Belzer’s mild eyes showed fury. “Some of it was done with a whip, some with heated irons. When did it happen the first time, Kee?”

  “When I be nine. I took berries from master’s garden.” He cupped his fingers to illustrate a small handful. “This many berries.”

  George shook his head. He knew why his own beliefs had become rock-hard in recent months.

  Later, back in bed in Belvedere, George held Constance in his arms to warm them both. “Every time I encounter a man like Kee, I wonder why we’ve tolerated slavery this long.”

  He couldn’t see the admiration in her eyes as she replied, “George, do you realize how much you’ve changed? You wouldn’t have said such a thing when I first met you.”

  “Maybe not. But I know how I feel now. We’ve got to put a stop to slavery. Preferably with the consent and cooperation of the people who perpetuate the system. But if they refuse to listen to reason, then without it.”

  “What if it came to a choice between abolition and your friendship with Orry? He is one of those perpetuating the system, after all.”

  “I know. I hope it never comes to a choice like that.”

  “But if it did, what would happen? I’m not trying to press you, but I’ve been anxious to know for a long time. I understand how much you like and respect Orry—”

  Despite the pain of it, his conscience would permit but one answer. “I’d sacrifice friendship before I sacrificed what I believe.”

  She hugged him. Clinging to him, she soon fell asleep.

  He lay awake a good while longer, seeing snaky scar tissue and dark eyes constantly darting toward a doorway. And after he drifted off, he dreamed of a black man screaming while someone seared him with an iron.

  If members of the Southern planter class represented one extreme that George disliked, his own sister represented another. During her two-day visit at Belvedere they argued about popular sovereignty, the fugitive laws, indeed almost every facet of the slavery issue. Virgilia’s position on all of them left no room for compromise.

  “I would solve the whole problem with a single stroke,” she said as she sat at the supper table with George and Constance. Fearing the conversation would drift into acrimony—it usually did—Constance had already sent the children off to play. “One day’s work in the South, and it would all be over. That’s my dream, anyway,” Virgilia added with a smile that made George shiver.

  She pressed her fork into her third wedge of pound cake, took a bite, then poured on more hot rum sauce from the silver server. She looked at her brother calmly. “You can shudder and grimace all you want, George. You can prate about scruples and mercy until you turn blue, but the day’s coming.”

  “Virgilia, that’s rot. A slave revolution can’t possibly succeed.”

  “Of course it can—properly financed and organized. One glorious
night of fire and justice. Iniquity washed away in a great river of blood.”

  He was so appalled he almost dropped his demitasse. He and Constance stared at each other, then at their visitor. She was gazing at the ceiling—or at some apocalyptic scene beyond.

  George wanted to shout at her. Instead he tried to make light of her remarks.

  “You should try writing stage melodramas.”

  She looked at him suddenly. “Joke all you want. It’s coming.”

  Unintimidated by the chilling stare, Constance said, “You realize, of course, that it is fear of revolution by the black majority that prevents many Southerners from even discussing gradual, compensated emancipation?”

  “Compensated emancipation is a pernicious idea. As Mr. Garrison says, it’s the same as paying a thief to surrender stolen property.”

  “Nevertheless, what Southerners see in the wake of emancipation are freed slaves coming after them with rocks and pitchforks. Your inflammatory speculations don’t help the situation.”

  Virgilia shoved her dessert plate away. “It’s more than speculation, I promise you.”

  “So you’ve said. Repeatedly,” George said in a brusque way. “While we’re on the subject, let me be blunt about something. You ought to sever your connection with Captain Weston.”

  Her eyes flew wide. For once her voice was faint. “What do you know about Captain Weston?”

  “I know he exists. I know Weston is merely a nom de guerre, and that he’s as much of an extremist as the worst Southern hotspur.”

  She managed scorn. “Have you hired spies to watch me?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I have business contacts all over the state, and I know many of the legislators in Harrisburg. All of them hear things. One thing they hear is that Captain Weston is actively fomenting black revolt down South. He’s stirring up tremendous animosity, even among people who would otherwise oppose slavery. You’d better stay away from him, or you’ll suffer the consequences.”