North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  The day before his train left, he and Madeline went walking. It was a dying November afternoon around four o’clock. The sun was slightly above the treetops, ringed by spikes of light. In the west the sky was a smoky white, shading away to deep blue in the east. Somewhere in the far squares of the rice acreage, a slave with a fine baritone sang in Gullah: spontaneous music of a kind seldom heard at Mont Royal any more.

  “You’re anxious to go, aren’t you?” Madeline said as they retraced their route from the great house.

  Orry squinted against the cruciform light around the sun. “I’m not anxious to leave you, though I feel better about it now that Meek’s here.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question, sir.”

  “Yes, I am anxious. You’ll never guess the reason. It’s my old friend Tom Jackson. In six months, he’s become a national hero.”

  “You surprise me. I never thought you had that kind of ambition.”

  “Oh, no. Not since Mexico, anyway. The point about Jackson is, we were classmates. He rushed to do his duty, while I’ve taken half a year to answer the call. Not without good reason—but I still feel guilty.”

  She wrapped both arms around his and hugged it between her breasts. “Don’t. Your waiting’s over. And in a few weeks, when Meek has settled in, I’ll be on my way to Richmond for the duration.”

  “Good.” Peace and a sense of events moving properly for a change settled on him as they drew near the house, long shadows stretching out behind them. Orry fingered his chin. “I saw a lithograph of Tom last week. He has a fine bushy beard. All the officers seem to have them. Would you like it if I grew one?”

  “I can’t answer until I know how badly it scratches when we—”

  She stopped. The houseman, Aristotle, was waving from a side entrance in a way that conveyed urgency. They hurried toward him. Orry was the first to see the rickety wagon and despondent mule standing at the head of the lane.

  “Got two visitors, Mr. Orry. Uppity pair of niggers. Won’t state their business to nobody but you and Miss Madeline. I packed ’em off to the kitchen to wait.”

  Orry asked, “Are they men from another plantation?”

  The irritated slave grumbled, “It’s two females.”

  Puzzled, Orry and Madeline turned toward the kitchen building, the center of a cloud of savory barbecue smells. Nearing it, they recognized the elderly Negress seated in an old rocker near the door. Her right leg, crudely splinted and bound with sticks and rags, rested on an empty nail box.

  “Aunt Belle,” Madeline exclaimed, while Orry speculated about the identity of the octoroon’s companion, just coming outside. She wore field buck’s shoes; the right side of one upper had been pulled away from the sole. Her dress had been washed so often, all color had been lost. She was an astonishingly attractive young girl, nubile and dark as mahogany.

  Madeline hugged the frail old woman, exclaiming all in a rush, “How are you? What happened to your leg? Is it broken?” Aunt Belle Nin had practiced midwifery in the district for a generation, living alone and free back in the marshes. She and Madeline had met at Resolute, where Aunt Belle came occasionally to assist with a difficult birth. It was to Aunt Belle that Madeline had taken Ashton when Orry’s sister got herself in a fix and begged Madeline’s help.

  “That’s a lot of questions,” Aunt Belle said, grimacing uncomfortably. “Yes, it’s broke in two or three places. When you’re my age that’s no blessing. I fell trying to climb into our wagon last night.” Bright eyes deep-set in flesh of mottled yellow studied Orry as if he were a museum exhibit. “See you got yourself a different husband.”

  “Yes. Aunt Belle, this is Orry Main.”

  “I know who he is. He’s a sight better than the one you had before. This pretty thing is my niece, Jane. She used to belong to the Widow Milsom, up on the Combahee, but the old lady perished of pneumonia last winter. Her will gave Jane her freedom. She’s been living with me since.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Jane said, with no curtsy or other demonstration of deference. Orry wondered if he could believe Aunt Belle. The girl might be a fugitive, gambling that no one would check her story in these disordered times.

  In the ensuing silence, someone dropped a pot in the kitchen. One girl spoke sharply to another. A third intervened; soft laughter signaled restored harmony. Jane realized the white people were awaiting an explanation.

  “Aunt Belle’s health has not been good lately. But she wouldn’t give up the marsh house till I convinced her there was a better place.”

  “You don’t mean here?” Orry asked, still not certain what they wanted.

  “No, Mr. Main. Virginia. Then the North.”

  “That’s a long, dangerous journey, especially for women in war-time.” He nearly said black women.

  “What’s waiting is worth the risk. We were just ready to start when Aunt Belle broke her leg. She needs doctoring and a safe place to rest and heal.”

  To the midwife, Orry said, “Your house isn’t safe any longer?”

  Jane answered; her presumption rather annoyed him. “A week ago Friday, two strangers tried to break in. Colored men. There are a lot of them wandering the back roads. I drove them off with Aunt Belle’s old hunting musket, but it was scary. Yesterday, when she had the accident, I decided we should find another place.”

  Aunt Belle said to Madeline, “I told Jane you were a good Christian person. I told her I thought you’d take us in for a while. We have all our goods in the wagon, but they don’t amount to much. Neither of my husbands left me with anything but good and bad memories.”

  Orry and his wife questioned one another with their eyes; each knew the problems the appeal presented. Since Orry was leaving, Madeline decided she must be the one to resolve them. “We’ll surely help you all we can. Darling, would you find Andy, so he can take them to the cabins?” Orry seemed to understand that she had another purpose in asking; he nodded and walked off, leaving her free to speak.

  “Aunt Belle, my husband is going to Richmond in the morning. He’s going into the army. I’ll be in charge here until I join him. I’m only too glad to give you refuge, with one reservation. Right or wrong, the people at Mont Royal aren’t free to go north, as you plan to do. They might resent you or cause trouble for me.”

  “Ma’am?” Jane said, to get her attention. Madeline turned. “There is no right in slavery, only wrong.”

  Madeline’s reply had sharpness. “Even if I agree with you, the practical solution is another matter.”

  Jane reflected on that with a visible defiance Madeline admired yet couldn’t tolerate. At last Jane uttered a small sigh. “I don’t think we can stay, Aunt Belle.”

  “Think once more. This lady is decent. You be the same. Don’t butt in like a billy goat. Bend.”

  Jane hesitated. Aunt Belle glared. The younger girl said, “Would an arrangement like this be agreeable, Mrs. Main? I’ll work for you to earn our keep. I won’t tell any of your people where we’re going or do anything to stir them up. As soon as Aunt Belle can travel, we’ll pack and go.”

  “That’s fair,” Madeline said.

  “Jane keeps her word,” Aunt Belle said.

  “Yes, she impresses me that way.” Eyes on the girl, Madeline nodded as she spoke. Neither woman smiled, but in that moment, liking began. “Our new overseer may not care for the arrangement, but I believe he’ll accept—”

  Voices in the dusk interrupted her. Orry and the head driver stepped into the orange halo of the lantern beside the kitchen door. “I’ve explained matters to Andy,” Orry said. “There’s an empty cabin available. That is—” The pause asked a question.

  “Yes, we’ve worked out the details,” Madeline told him. “Andy, this is Aunt Belle Nin and her niece, Jane.” She described the bargain she had struck with them.

  “All right,” Andy said. Taken with the girl, the young driver smiled in his friendliest way. Madeline felt sorry for him. The girl was in love with an idea.

  “Mr. Orry
says you have a wagon,” Andy continued. “I’ll drive you to the cabin.”

  “Pick up some barbecue in the kitchen,” Orry said. “You two are probably hungry.”

  “Starved,” the tiny octoroon said. “I don’t know you, Mr. Main, but you’re beginning to sound like a good Christian person, too.”

  As the wagon proceeded slowly to the slave community, Andy peeked over his shoulder at Jane. When he had first approached the kitchen porch and saw her there, gathering and reflecting the orange light, he had caught his breath in wonder. He had never set eyes on anyone more beautiful.

  He worked up courage to say, “You speak mighty well, Miss Jane. Can you read?”

  “And write,” she replied from the wagon bed, where she sat with Aunt Belle’s legs resting on top of hers. “I can cipher, too. A year before Mrs. Milsom died, she knew she was going and started to teach me.”

  “That was against the law.”

  “She said the devil with the law. She was a feisty old lady. She said I had to be ready to make my way alone.” The mule plodded; the axle creaked. “Can you read and write?”

  “No.” Then, desperate to make a good impression, he blurted, “I’d like to know how, though. Yes, indeed. A man can’t better himself unless he has learning.”

  “And a man can’t better himself when he’s the property of—” Aunt Belle whacked her niece’s wrist with her fingers. Jane looked chastened as she finished, “I’d be happy to give you lessons, but I couldn’t do it without asking Mrs. Main’s permission.”

  “Maybe we could do that sometime.”

  “Let’s eat first,” Aunt Belle said irritably. “Let’s remember who needs attention here, is that all right?”

  “Just fine,” Andy said, jubilant.

  The wagon rolled into the lane between the slave cottages. At the gnarled base of a mammoth live oak rising between two of them, Cuffy sat with his spine against the bark, a twig in his teeth, and his right hand down between his legs, scratching lazily. Spying the unfamiliar girl in the wagon, he sat up. He had heard nothing about purchase of any new slaves. Who was she? He surely wanted to find out.

  Giving a nasty glance at Andy, who paid no attention, Cuffey watched the wagon pass. His eyes returned to the lush line of the girl’s bosom, and his hand grew busier in his crotch.

  In bed, naked beneath a comforter, Orry said, “I liked that little nigra girl. Peppery; just like the old woman. But I have a feeling you can trust her to keep her word.”

  “I wouldn’t have let her stay otherwise,” Madeline touched him. “Everything will be fine. Let’s not spend your last night worrying that it won’t.”

  “Lord, I’m going to miss you these next two or three months.”

  “Show me how much.”

  In the morning, in a hat and frock coat and cravat suitable for a funeral, Orry kissed his vaguely smiling mother. “Thank you for visiting, sir. Do come again, won’t you?” she said.

  As he kissed his wife she held him fiercely, whispering: “God keep you safe, dearest. One day when I was small, a moment came when I suddenly understood the meaning of the word death. I started crying and ran to my father. He took me in his arms and said I shouldn’t let it frighten me too much, because we all shared the predicament. He said it eased the mind and heart to remember we are all dying of life. It took me years to understand and believe him. I do, but—I don’t want it to happen to you any sooner than necessary. Life’s become too sweet.”

  “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “We’ll be together before long. And I don’t think anyone fires at officers who sit behind desks.”

  He kissed and embraced her once more and went away down the lane, with Aristotle driving.

  41

  CERTAIN AMERICAN CIVILIANS REMEMBERED that two of the chief destroyers of the British Army in the Crimea were dirt and disease. Not long after Sumter fell, these civilians decided to prevent, if they could, a repetition in the Union encampments of those mistakes of half a dozen years ago and half a world away.

  As soon as the plan became public, army surgeons began to scoff and call the civilians meddling amateurs. So did most government officials. The civilians persisted, forming the United States Sanitary Commission. By midsummer, the organization had a chief executive, Frederick Law Olmsted, the man who had designed New York City’s Central Park in 1856 and described slavery in unfavorable terms in a widely read travel memoir.

  Lincoln and the War Department didn’t want to sanction the commission but were forced to do so because important people were connected with it, including Mr. Bache, a grandson of Ben Franklin, and Samuel Gridley Howe, the famous Boston doctor and humanitarian. Even after official recognition, members didn’t forgive the President for saying they were a fifth wheel on the coach.

  Whether the nay-sayers liked it or not, the commission intended to supply soldiers with items they lacked and to police the camps and hospitals to keep them clean. Some of the opposition to this work softened after Bull Run; sixteen commission wagons had driven there to bring out wounded when most of the Union soldiers were fleeing the other way.

  The commission recruited and united great masses of women all across the North, giving focus and direction to volunteer work that had been largely individual during the early weeks of the war. In Lehigh Station, as elsewhere, ladies organized the first of many Sanitary Fairs to raise money and gather goods for the organization.

  While Scipio Brown was bringing the rest of his waifs to the newly expanded building and settling them in with a Hungarian couple hired to supervise the place, Constance was busy planning a Sanitary Fair for the second Friday and Saturday in November. The site was Hazard’s shipping and receiving warehouse down by the railroad tracks beside the canal.

  Wotherspoon kept crews working two days and nights to clear the building by loading huge shipments of iron plate onto a series of special trains. Virgilia helped as a committee member and so did Brett, who justified it on two grounds: her husband was a Union officer and, even if he weren’t, humanitarian concerns in this case outweighed partisan ones. The ultimate aim of the fair and the commission was the saving of lives. Brett’s real problem in connection with the fair was working with Virgilia. It was difficult.

  From the first hour, the fair was a success, drawing huge crowds from the valley. Great loops of patriotic bunting decorated the walls and rafters of the warehouse. The most popular display featured posed photographs of some of the brave boys of Colonel Tilghman Good’s Forty-seventh Pennsylvania Volunteers, the valley’s own regiment, together with a greatly enlarged newspaper likeness of General McClellan. The sketch artist for the local paper exhibited satiric portraits of Slidell and Mason, the reb commissioners to Europe who had been dragged off the British mail packet Trent early in the month; the pair was presently imprisoned in Boston, which outraged the Queen’s government and provoked threats from Lord Lyons, British minister in Washington.

  There were military exhibits—stacked arms, contents of a typical haversack, an authentic canteen authentically pierced by a ball—and booths for collection of food, reading material, and clothing. Virgilia manned the clothing booth. A committee member had somehow obtained a regulation army tunic of dark blue shoddy, from which small squares had been cut. Every fifteen minutes, Virgilia would gather a crowd, then conduct her demonstration. Holding a square of shoddy over a bowl, she poured water on the material. The shoddy disintegrated into little pellets, which she distributed to the outraged spectators, coupling this with a request for decent clothing to be deposited in the barrels provided.

  The work excited her; she was striking a small but useful blow against the South. She also felt quite pleased with her appearance. Constance had loaned her a shawl and Brett a cameo brooch to pin it at the bosom of her dark brown dress. She had done her hair in a silk net and put on teardrop earrings of iridescent opal, also borrowed. Because of her speaking skills, polished by appearances at abolitionist rallies, she was by far the best demonstrator in the hall
. She earned a compliment from her sector chairman and a more important one from a man she didn’t know.

  He was a major from the Forty-seventh. While Virgilia tore the shoddy apart verbally and literally, he watched from across the aisle, in front of the cologne booth; soldiers were begging for perfume to defend against the stench of camp sinks and open drains.

  The officer studied Virgilia during the demonstration. She lost her train of thought and faltered when his eye dropped from her face to her breasts, then shifted back. He left supporting the arm of a woman, perhaps his wife, but those few moments in which he looked at Virgilia were immensely important to her.

  Always before, feeling and looking ugly, she had never appealed to any men except outcasts, like poor Grady. But there had been a sea change, and the major of volunteers had found her, if not beautiful, at least worthy of notice. The profundity of the change couldn’t be denied; realizing it left her euphoric.

  Virgilia experienced a letdown following the final day of the fair. She roved the house and town, knowing she must leave, must find a direction for herself. The days passed, and still she couldn’t.

  Nearly two weeks after the fair, Constance brought a letter to the dinner table. “It’s from Dr. Howe, of the Sanitary Commission. He’s an old friend.”

  “Is he? From where?” Virgilia asked.

  “Newport. He and his wife summered there when we did. Don’t you remember?” Virgilia shook her head and bent to her plate; she had managed to forget almost everything about those years.

  Brett spoke. “Does the doctor say anything about the fair?”

  “Indeed he does. He says ours was one of the most successful thus far. At a dinner party, he reported the fact to Miss Dix herself—here, read it.” She passed the letter to Brett, seated on her right.

  Brett scanned the letter, then murmured, “Miss Dix. Is she the New England woman I’ve read about? The one who’s worked so hard for reform of the asylums?”

  Constance nodded. “You probably saw the long piece about her in Leslie’s. She’s very famous and very dedicated. The article said Florence Nightingale inspired her to go to Washington when war broke out. Miss Nightingale landed at Scutari, in the Crimea, with thirty-seven Englishwomen, and they saved scores of lives that might have been lost otherwise. Miss Dix has been superintendent of army nurses since the summer.”