by John Jakes
“Thought the Yankees had kidnapped you,” Tillet Main said from within the cloud of pipe tobacco hanging over his desk. He quirked the corners of his mouth—which would be all the affection he would display this morning, Cooper suspected.
“I took a day to visit Orry. He’s getting along just fine.”
“I expect him to get along just fine. I’m more interested in what you found out.”
Cooper eased himself into an old rocker beside his father’s ledger-littered desk. Tillet was his own bookkeeper, and examined every bill pertaining to the operation of Mont Royal. Like other low-country planters, he liked to refer to his holdings as a barony, but he was one baron who personally kept track of every coin he owned.
“I found my suspicions were correct,” Cooper said. “There’s a scientific reason for the beams and flywheels breaking so often. If enough of the carbon in cast iron isn’t oxidized—the carbon and some of the other elements, too—the iron isn’t tough enough for machine parts that take a lot of abuse. Now I have to convince that dunce up in Columbia. If I can’t, maybe we can order parts from a foundry in Maryland or even Pennsyl—”
“I would rather keep the business in the state,” Tillet broke in. “It’s easier to put pressure on friends than on strangers.”
“All right.” Cooper sighed. He had just been issued another parental order. He received dozens every week. Pique prompted him to add, “But I made some friends in Pennsylvania.” Tillet ignored the remark.
The head of the Main family was in his forty-eighth year. Already the fringe of hair around his bald head was pure white. Cooper had inherited Tillet’s height and his dark eyes. Yet in this last feature there was a distinct difference between father and eldest son. Cooper’s eyes were soft, speculative, bitterly humorous sometimes. Tillet’s gaze was seldom gentle or merry. It was, rather, direct, unblinking—and occasionally fierce.
Responsible for the behavior and the welfare of scores of human beings, white as well as black, Tillet Main had long ago schooled himself out of a natural shyness. He gave orders as if born to it—which, by virtue of his last name, he was. In summation of his character it could be said that he loved his wife, his children, his land, his church, his Negroes, and his state, and apologized for none of it.
Half the children he had sired hadn’t lived past age four. Cooper’s mother said that was why Tillet smiled so seldom. But the eldest son suspected there were other reasons. Tillet’s position and heritage naturally inclined him to a justifiable touch of arrogance. At the same time, he was the victim of a growing sense of inferiority which he was helpless to control or defeat. It was a malady Cooper recognized in many Southerners these days. His trip had reconfirmed that such a condition was not without good cause.
Tillet studied his son. “You don’t sound very happy to be home.”
“Oh, I am,” Cooper replied, telling the truth. “But I haven’t been up North since my last year at Yale. What I saw depressed me pretty thoroughly.”
“Exactly what did you see?” Tillet’s manner had turned prickly. Cooper knew he should retreat. Stubbornly, he refused.
“Factories, Father. Huge, dirty factories, humming and clanging and fouling the sky like the furnaces of Beelzebub himself. The North’s growing at a frightening rate. Machines are taking over. As for people—my God, I’ve never encountered so many. Comparatively speaking, this is a wilderness.”
Tillet relit his pipe and puffed a moment. “You think quantity counts more than quality?”
“No, sir, but—”
“We don’t want a lot of foreign nobodies crowding us.”
There it was again, that stupid, stiff-necked pride. Cooper snapped, “What was Charles Main except a foreign nobody?”
“He was a duke, a gentleman, and one of the original Huguenot settlers.”
“All very fine, sir. But worshiping the past won’t build factories or help the South’s economy. This is the age of the machine, and we refuse to acknowledge it. We cling to agriculture and our past, while we fall farther and farther out of step. Once the South practically ran this country. No more. Every year we lose respect and influence at the national level. And with reason. We aren’t attuned to the times.”
He stopped short of citing the familiar proof—the peculiar institution to which the South’s prosperity had become shackled as firmly as the slaves themselves were bound to their owners. But he didn’t have to go that far to infuriate Tillet. The older man banged the desk.
“Hold your tongue. Southerners don’t speak against their homeland. At least loyal Southerners don’t. There are enough Yankees doing that.”
The son was caught—squeezed—between his own convictions and his eternal inability to change Tillet’s mind. They had argued like this before, but never quite so hotly. Copper found himself shouting: “If you weren’t so damn stubborn, like all the rest of the barons of this benighted—”
A scream outside brought a temporary end to the quarrel. Father and son ran for the door.
The scream had come from one of the two little girls Cooper had noticed while on his way to the office. Ashton Main and her sister Brett had finished their reading and ciphering lessons a half hour before the sloop docked. Their tutor, a Charleston German named Herr Nagel, had gone off for a late-morning nap, pleased with the younger girl’s eagerness to learn but irked by the sauciness of the older one, as well as her boredom with all things intellectual.
Both girls were unmistakably Mains, yet they were different. Only one was ever noticed by visitors—Ashton, who was going on eight and already beautiful. Her hair was much darker than was typical in the family. In certain lights it looked black. In color and sometimes in ferocity her eyes were exactly those of her father.
Brett was two years younger, not homely but less perfectly featured than her sister. She showed signs of growing up to be slender and quite tall, like Tillet and her brothers; she and Ashton were already the same height. It was an inheritance that would prove a handicap when it came time to attract beaux, as Ashton frequently pointed out.
After their lessons, the girls had gone for a stroll along the river. On a branch in a clump of underbrush, beyond the last square where the green shoots of the March planting stood healthy and tall, Brett had discovered an empty bird’s nest containing a small, pale egg.
“Ashton, come see,” she called.
Ashton approached with a jaunty step that had a touch of swagger. Young as she was, she had a clear awareness of her physical assets as compared to those of her sister. Her sense of superiority showed as she gazed down at the egg.
Brett said, “A green heron left it, I think.” She scanned the river with grave eyes. “Bet she’ll be back to nest soon.”
Ashton noticed her sister’s expression, and for a second or so a little smile played on her pink mouth. “Well, she’ll be disappointed,” she said, bending quickly to scoop the egg from the nest. Then she ran.
Brett pursued her along the bank. “Put that back. You haven’t any right to take a mother bird’s baby.”
“Oh, yes, I have,” Ashton said, tossing her hair. That was that.
Brett knew her sister, or thought she did. The situation called for desperate action, but carried out with cleverness. She pretended to be resigned. Soon Ashton was off guard, walking slowly and examining the prize she held on her upraised palm. Brett ran up from behind and snatched the egg.
Ashton chased her around the great house to the lane—the point at which Cooper, on his way to the office, saw them. The pursuit continued for several minutes. Finally, when both girls were out of breath, Ashton seemed overcome by contrition.
“I’m sorry, Brett. You’re right and I’m a ninny. We should put it back. Just let me look at it once more, then we will.”
Ashton’s sweet sincerity lulled the younger girl. She handed the egg to her sister. Ashton’s smile changed. “If it isn’t mine, it isn’t yours either.” She closed her fist and crushed the egg.
Brett jumped at
her and, being wiry and agile and not very ladylike, easily bore her to the ground. She yanked Ashton’s hair and pummeled her until she shrieked. The outcry brought Papa and Cooper from the office. Papa pulled the two of them apart, got widely varying accounts of the incident from each, then turned them over his knee one at a time, and spanked them—all before their mother dashed out of the house in response to the noise.
Brett bawled to protest the injustice. Ashton bawled even louder. Yet while she threw her head back and grimaced and cut up, her eyes were luminous. At first glance the cause seemed to be tears. Closer inspection showed that she was amused. Clarissa, Tillet, and Cooper missed that.
Brett didn’t.
Roughly three-quarters of a mile from the great house, in a separate little community of the plantation, another fight was taking place about the same time. A black boy and a white boy rolled over and over in the middle of a dusty street, struggling for possession of a bamboo fishing pole.
The street ran between two rows of whitewashed slave cabins. Here, too, carefully separated from the master’s residence, stood the plantation sick house, the small church, and, dominating the far end of the street, a five-room residence raised on pillars of tabby. This house belonged to the Mont Royal overseer, Mr. Salem Jones, a New Englander by birth and a martinet by disposition. Jones had been raised in the South by his widowed mother and about eleven years ago had come to Mont Royal with excellent references from another plantation. Tillet still considered him a Yankee, hence an eternal outsider. Jones’s good performance on behalf of the Mains helped overcome Tillet’s distrust, but nothing could ever dispel it completely.
The two boys were tussling under the casual gaze of little black children and black men too old to work. It was hard to say which of the two was the rowdier or the dirtier. The white boy—seven years old, suntanned, and strong—was Charles Main. Cousin Charles, Clarissa called him, to distinguish him from the Mains in her own family.
Charles was an exceptionally handsome child. But good looks were just about his only inherited assets. He was the son of Tillet’s brother, an incompetent lawyer named Huger Main. Together with his wife, Huger had perished on a New York-bound steamer that foundered and sank off Hatteras in 1841. Charles had been staying with his aunt and uncle while his parents vacationed. He was their only child, and he remained with his relatives after the funeral and the burial of a pair of empty caskets.
It was an easy life for Charles, if a lonely one. With the intuition of the young, he suspected Uncle Tillet hadn’t thought much of his father, hence didn’t think much of him. Charles turned the rejection into a blessing. His aunt and uncle permitted him to go his own way. making no attempt to subject him to the torture of studying with that Dutch tutor. Charles fished a lot and roamed the woods and marshes around the plantation. For friends he had black boys such as Cuffey, with whom he was wrestling for possession of the pole.
Loud voices in one of the slave cottages attracted the attention of the boys and some of the Negroes. Out of the cottage strode a familiar booted figure. Short, bald, and potbellied, with one of the more cherubic faces in the world, Salem Jones found it necessary to emphasize his authority by going everywhere with a quirt in his hand and a thick hickory truncheon in his belt.
The boys stopped fighting. In the process, Charles accidentally broke the pole. As usual, his shirt hung out and dirt streaked his cheeks and chin. Last week’s fight with Cuffey’s cousin James had cost Charles one of his upper front teeth. He thought the gap gave him a dashing air.
“Jones been tryin’ to go at Semiramis,” Cuffey whispered. “He been tryin’ since his wife died six month ago.”
“He was trying a long time before that, only not so’s everybody could see,” Charles confided. “That’s what Uncle Tillet said, anyway.”
Salem Jones walked up the street and disappeared in back of his residence. Charles drifted nearer the cottage occupied by Semiramis and her family. The girl was dimly visible beyond the open door. Charles couldn’t see much of her, but he could picture her vividly. Semiramis had satiny black skin, gloriously perfect features, and a ripe figure. All the boys on the plantation agreed she was something special.
Looking angry, Jones saddled up his horse and rode rapidly toward the fields. Cuffey offered a prediction. “Priam be in for it tonight. Old Jones don’t get what he want from her, he take it out on her brother.”
Charles studied the position of the sun. “I was going to the house for dinner. I think I’ll hang around till Priam finishes with his task.” The family wouldn’t miss him anyway.
Soon he was speculating about what might happen. Semiramis’s brother Priam was a strong, and strong-willed, Negro. Three generations removed from Angola, he still possessed a great sense of the freedom that he had been denied.
Charles could appreciate Priam’s resentment. The boy didn’t understand a system that granted some men freedom because they were white and barred other men from it because they were not. He found that kind of system unjust, even barbaric, although he also believed it to be both immutable and universal.
He had several times discussed certain aspects of the slave system with Cuffey. For example, they had both observed that Semiramis had not the least objection to the classical name given her at birth; her fancy name, Cuffey called it. She did not consider it a sly mockery of her status. Priam, on the other hand, understood the mockery very well. He made no secret of hating his name.
“Priam say he won’t be Mist’ Tillet’s man forever,” Cuffey had once confided to his friend. “He say it a lot.”
Charles knew what was meant. Priam would run away. To what, though? Wasn’t slavery practiced everywhere? Cuffey thought not, but could offer no evidence.
Charles loitered around the slave community as the afternoon wore on. He napped for an hour in the cool, dark church and was seated on a cottage stoop, whittling, when the field hands began to stream in with their hoes canted over their shoulders.
Jones had returned to his house an hour ago. He now appeared on the porch, sweat rings staining his shirt and his quirt and his truncheon very much in evidence.
“You, Priam,” Jones called with an affable smile. The slave, a full head taller and fifteen years younger than the overseer, stepped out of the file of ambling Negroes. He was barely respectful as he answered:
“Yes, Mist’ Jones?”
“Driver tells me you’ve been slack in your work lately. He says you’ve complained a lot, too. Shall I give you a task and a half every day?”
Priam shook his head. “I do every lick I’m ’posed to. I don’t have to like it, do I?” He glanced at the other slaves, his eyes resentful, even threatening. “Driver never tol’ me I wasn’t pleasin’ him.”
Jones swaggered down the steps, but only halfway; going farther would have put the top of his head below the level of Priam’s eyes. “Do you honestly think he’d tell you? No. You’re too stupid to understand. All you’re good for is just what you’re doing. Nigger work. Animal’s work.”
The overseer gigged Priam’s stomach with the truncheon, trying to rouse him. “I’m going to keep you busier for a week or so. An extra half task every day.”
There were soft gasps from some of the Negroes who were watching. One task, one assigned piece of work, was the customary quota on all but the most repressive plantations. An able man could complete his task well before the sun set and then have time to cultivate his own garden or attend to personal chores.
Priam’s jaw set. He knew better than to sass the overseer. But Jones was determined to provoke him. Charles hated the puffed-up little Yankee with his bald skull and whiny nasal voice.
“Got nothing to say about that, nigger?” Jones gigged Priam harder this time. “I could do more than increase your work. I could give you what your insolent stares call for.” He shook the quirt at Priam. “Some of this.”
The one-sided nature of the quarrel propelled Charles off the stoop like a cannonball. “Mr. Jones, you got a
whip and you got a stick, and Priam’s got nothing at all. Why don’t you treat him fair? Give him one or the other and then pick a fight.”
Silence.
The frightened slaves stood motionless. From the river drifted the hoarse bellowing of an alligator. Even Priam lost the murderous look Jones had kindled in his eyes. The dumbfounded overseer gazed down at the boy.
“You taking this nigger’s part?”
“I just like to see him treated fair. Everybody says he’s a hard worker. My uncle says that.”
“He’s a nigger. He’s expected to work hard. To break his back, if need be. And you’re expected to stay up at the great house where you belong. You keep messing around this part of the plantation, I’ll start to wonder why. Does something attract you down here? Does something call to you, like to like? A little nigger blood, perhaps?”
It was the sneer, not the insult, that infuriated Charles. He lowered his head and butted Salem Jones in the stomach. Then he punched him twice and ran like the devil.
He hid out down by the river until twilight. Finally, he decided he couldn’t stay away from the great house any longer. As he walked slowly through the garden, a hiss from behind a shrub caught his attention.
Cuffey’s face shone in the fading light. Grinning, he said the diversion had been successful. After Charles’s attack, Jones had been so mad he had lost interest in bullying Priam.
Hungry and tired, Charles drifted on toward the house. Somehow his victory seemed unimportant. It seemed downright disastrous when he found Uncle Tillet waiting for him, a scowl on his face.
“Jones was here an hour ago. Come in the library. I demand to know what you have to say for yourself.”
Charles obeyed and followed his uncle. The boy had always loved the sights and sounds of the great house at this hour of the day. The silver pots and bowls, the rosewood and walnut furniture giving back the candle and lamplight. The crystal chandelier pendants catching the river breeze and jingling. The house servants murmuring and laughing occasionally as they finished their work. He saw and heard none of that tonight.