“Bet I knows one nigger thinks too high of heself.”
“Course I do. Course I do! Girl, now we properly ’quainted, I propose you leave off bein’ married to that carpenter and run off with me. We go north and seek our fortunes.”
Ruth couldn’t help smiling. “I married today! Don’t you think I could stay married for a little while?”
“I give you one week.” Hercules raised a finger in the air. “Afore I comes for you!”
Coloreds in spotless, perfectly ironed Sunday Best congratulated the young folks starting their family in a Christian manner, praying the couple’d be lucky, that their children would survive infancy and not be sold away and thus be able to comfort them in their old age. That’s what, in their innocence and knowledge, they wished for Jehu and Ruth Glen; they prayed Le Bon Dieu would favor them.
* * *
Sometimes officers of the watch sat in back of the Cow Alley church while Reverend Brown preached of Jesus’ love and great patience and the rewards of eternal life to come, but no whites came to Denmark Vesey’s Bible studies.
Three weeks after Jehu and Ruth’s wedding, Pearl followed her friend out of Denmark Vesey’s Bull Street house. Ruth fanned herself. “Ain’t Charleston ever cool? I can cut this air for pudding.”
“Honey, it ain’t hot. It’s you.”
“Uh-huh. If I wasn’t . . . It too darn hot to think!”
“It were warm inside.”
“He all the time preachin’ Moses. Moses! Moses! Moses! Lord, I wish I could read myownself! What that ol’ Moses got to do with coloreds? Catholics got Mary lookin’ out for us and Saints, and voudou got spirits lookin’ out, but here be Moses, Moses all the time and all the way!”
“Denmark fine preacher.”
“Oh, he am. But sometimes I wonderin’ why he don’t buy he wife and take he family north. Why he don’t think more ’bout them. I thinkin’ he don’t care ’bout nothin’ but Moses!”
Pearl changed the subject. “When baby come?”
“Soon’s she want to! When you marryin’?”
“She?”
“She. When you ’n’ Thomas marry?”
“Soon as Thomas save enough to buy me. Mistress Ravanel let me go for two hundred.”
“Two hundred dollars?”
“Says she’d ’mancipate me herself, for no money, but Colonel Jack, he didn’t get his rice winnowed proper and fetched a poor price, then he went and bought heself ’nother fast horse, which cost a pretty penny.”
“Missus Ravanel got a good nature.”
“Colonel not bad neither,” Pearl confided, “’cept when he drinkin’. When Mistress ain’t to home and Colonel Jack drinkin’, I props a chair under my door latch. I gots to smile when Miss Frances get on him. Big war hero, colonel of infantry, and that gal run up one side of him and down t’other. Colonel Jack drop his head like a little boy. Let’s go back inside. Ol’ Moses ain’t gonna hurt nobody. He been dead long time.”
Ruth said, “I gets to thinkin’ ’bout them Egyptians. They wasn’t so much different than Moses’s people. Maybe some of ’em had laid down with Moses’s women, maybe some Israelites laid down with Pharaoh women. But Le Bon Dieu, He ‘hardens Pharaoh’s heart,’ so Pharaoh, He can’t let Moses’s folks go. He can’t ’cause Bon Dieu won’t allow it! Le Bon Dieu harden Pharaoh heart and Bon Dieu send locusts and them plagues and finally he kills all the firstborn sons of the Egyptians and Pharaoh own son. So Pharaoh heartsick and let Moses go. Pharaoh glad be shut of ’em. So Bon Dieu He harden Pharaoh’s heart again and send he soldiers chasin’ after ’em. They gallopin’ along pretty good and come to the sea, which Moses has divided. Wall of water on one side. Water on t’other. General, he say ‘Forward!’ and they got to obey, so they gallop twixt two walls of water though they horses afeared and snortin’. I s’posed to feel glad them Israelites safe on t’other side, but sometimes, Pearl, I feels like them Egyptians do. Like them water walls gonna come crashin’ in on me.”
“You afeared havin’ a baby.”
“’Deed so. Ain’t never had no baby afore.”
“Me neither. But if no woman never had no baby, you and me wouldn’t be breathin’ this air what is thick enough make a puddin’ of.”
Ruth chortled and they went back to the Bible study, Denmark Vesey, and Moses.
* * *
Unlike most of the Charleston gentry, the Ravanels stayed in sweltering Charleston all summer, although, taking the commonsense precaution, Jack never visited his plantation from sunset to sunrise. Everyone knew that yellow fever killed at night.
The Ravanel town house had a cook but no butler or coachman, and Frances’s young friend Eleanor Baldwin Puryear urged Frances to buy more servants. “Why,” Eleanor said, “how can you ever entertain?”
Young Mrs. Puryear was convinced her inherited wealth wasn’t a sign of the Creator’s favor. It was proof of His appreciation.
“Entertain?” Frances sighed. “We entertain at the Jockey Club more Saturdays than I’d like. Dear Eleanor, a fast racehorse costs far more than its jockey.”
Eleanor’s husband, Cathecarte, wrote poetry, and the Charleston Courier had published several odes to his wife (tastefully disguised as a Greco-Roman goddess). These poems made Eleanor blush, and she “barely glanced at them,” though she could recite any of them by heart.
Cathecarte sometimes appeared in a bright purple cravat and was so proud of his tailor-made Charleston Rangers militia uniform he wore it to every social gathering. Mrs. Puryear—though presently childless—had opinions on child rearing, which she offered Ruth when that servant brought Miss Penny into the withdrawing room to amuse Mrs. Ravanel’s friends. Ruth nodded and smiled. “Yes, Mistress Puryear.”
After a particularly vigorous peroration, Miss Eleanor finally departed, despite Frances’s “Dear Eleanor, would you deprive us of your company so soon?” Once Frances closed the door behind her friend, she slumped against it, sighing. “I must remind myself: Eleanor means well.”
Ruth couldn’t contain her giggle, which infected Penny and then her mother, and the three laughed until they clapped hands over their mouths.
In January, after the rice crop had been sold and plantation Negroes issued their yearly clothing allotment and enjoyed their daylong Christmas revels, their Masters came to town for the gayest social season in America. The Jockey Club and St. Cecilia Society balls were bracketed by grandees’ soirées, sometimes two or three in the same evening. Gossip was fattened by intrigues, rekindled rivalries, rivers of whiskey, and Low Country prickliness, which readily became affairs of honor. Horses raced every day but Sunday, and ruinous wagers were unexceptional.
Jehu chafed. Those who could afford his work were partying. Their homes were busy with comings and goings, and no grandee welcomed the workman’s necessary disruption. At some sacrifice to dignity, Jehu found day work at “on-the-town” wages, fifty cents a day unloading lumber on the Ashley River docks.
Enfeebled Middleton Butler, the indigo planter and Revolutionary War patriot, rarely left his King Street town house. In late February, after planters returned to their plantations for spring planting, he hired Jehu to replace the house’s chair rails and wainscoting.
Ruth was so heavy that delivering Jehu’s dinner bucket to the Butlers’ was hard work, and Frances Ravanel suggested Jehu might carry his own dinner until the child was born.
“But, Missus,” Ruth said. “I likes watch him eat.”
That particular Saturday evening Jehu had just come home and Ruth was laying out their Sunday clothes when she hunched over and groaned, “Baby comin’.”
Jehu had been thinking about the Philadelphia preachers who were to speak at the Cow Alley church tonight, and he blinked and gaped at his wife. Ruth was wet as if she’d peed herself. “Oh,” Jehu said. But he ran into the street for a cab, and not long
afterward Jehu Glen was banging on the door of the Ravanels’ kitchen house. A shutter opened overhead and Pearl poked out her head. When she saw who it was, she clapped her hands, and her feet pattered down the stairs. Jehu carried Ruth upstairs onto Pearl’s bed.
“Put down rags for to lay on,” Ruth whispered. “I leakin’.”
“Don’t you fret, honey,” Pearl said. “We gots soap.”
Mistress Frances dispatched Jehu to the Butlers’ for Dolly, the midwife (and some said voudou priestess). In the cab Jehu framed questions, but Dolly’s snappish demeanor kept them unuttered.
Pearl’s small room was full of women who treated the Master Stair Builder like a bulky, unwanted piece of furniture.
Pearl said, “Whyfor you standin’ round? You want get in the way while you woman howl?”
Ruth said, “Jehu, go to you church service. You been wantin’ go. I fine. Miss Frances and Pearl and Dolly takin’ care of me.”
Yes, Jehu wanted to stay, but when he left that women’s room he felt very free.
* * *
Ruth’s cheeks and forehead glistened with sweat. Dolly put her mouth close to Ruth’s ear. “You sees things, doesn’t you?”
“Sometimes,” she gasped.
“Sometimes I sees ’em too. Baby be fine.”
“I believes you. But I feared.”
“Sure you is. Arybody be.”
All the women prayed, although Frances Ravanel wasn’t quite sure she and the colored women were praying to exactly the same deity. They waited. Mistress Ravanel had her fancywork basket, and Pearl watched every flick of the tiny needle. Pearl wished her fingers weren’t so thick and opined only white ladies were fine enough to make fine stitches. Mistress Ravanel just smiled.
As flat gray predawn light seeped through the small window, they washed Ruth, rubbed oil on her belly and aching breasts, and covered her with a clean, patched linen sheet. Mostly they discussed the seasonality, variety, and condition of produce and fish available at the market. But sometimes they veered off the safe subjects, and Pearl, who could be indiscreet, mentioned the terrible accident, “right on Meeting Street so late Saturday night it weren’t Saturday no more, ’twere the Sabbath morning!” when the very drunk young Master William Bee had trampled his body servant, Hector, under his horse’s hooves.
“Terrible tragedy.” Miss Ravanel assigned the incident to “Acts of God” quicker than Pearl might have wished. Pearl had strong opinions as yet unexpressed.
They braced Ruth while she squatted on the chamber pot, which Pearl carried to the necessary in the yard. Frances Ravanel read comforting psalms, and Dolly recited psalms she’d memorized. It grew lighter, and they heard Cook rattling around in the kitchen and the whoosh as she got the fireplace going. Pearl went down to fetch hot tea. The tip of the teapot spout was broken, so tea dribbled when she poured. Missus Ravanel got the mug with the handle. When Ruth’s breasts got hot, hard, and painful, Dolly milked her into a bowl. They washed Ruth’s face and propped her up so she could drink water. They gave her a leather strap to bite when the pain was bad and daubed her sweat. When the baby’s head emerged, Dolly tugged gently until she could hook a finger into its armpit and the baby came in a rush. Pearl was wide eyed. Dolly cleaned out the tiny mouth and wiped the nose, and the red-smeared chest filled like a balloon for an angry “waaaa,” a sound they found exquisitely beautiful. Dolly snipped the cord and wrapped it in a scrap of blue cotton while Mistress Ravanel pat-washed the baby’s confused red face. Baby waved her fists and scrunched up her face. Dolly set her on Ruth’s teat and tipped Ruth’s nipple into her mouth, whereupon a jolt near as powerful as first breath surged through the infant: first nurse.
Pearl and Dolly and Mistress Ravanel grinned like fools. Ruth’s smile was weary and peaceable. “Name come to me,” she said. “She be Martine. Baby Martine.”
The sun was well up when Pearl and Mistress Ravanel emerged into the yard, where the laundress stirred a steaming cauldron and a stable boy admonished a horse he was feeding. Pearl raised her skinny arms over her head and stretched.
Mistress Ravanel said, “The colonel should come home tomorrow. Probably we’ll own a new horse or two.” She rolled her head, cracking it on her neck stalk, and flexed her fingers. “Penny will be wondering where I’ve got to. Pearl, please collect Ruth’s husband. After Dolly goes home, you and he can tend Ruth. Sometime today, when you get a moment, change my bed linens.”
“Yes, mistress.”
Frances Ravanel hugged herself. “The sweetness of God.”
“Yes, missus.”
After her mistress left, Pearl harked for Martine’s cries, but the baby was quiet. Pearl’s excitement buzzed on the surface of her weariness. She was eager to give Jehu the news. On this soft, quiet Sunday morning, there were too few coloreds on the street and they were wary, so Pearl became wary herself. She stopped a woman she knew. “Been birthin’ a baby all night. What wrong?”
In hushed swift detail, Pearl heard how, near nine last night, with services just commencing, the Watch busted through Jehu’s cherrywood door into the Cow Alley church and arrested everyone.
Though there’d been a city ordinance forbidding colored gatherings between sunset and sunrise, it hadn’t been enforced. Visiting Philadelphia preachers, Reverend Brown, Denmark Vesey, Jehu Glen, and a hundred forty others were locked up in the workhouse.
“Oh my,” Pearl said and hurried back to the Ravanels’. She waited as long as she could to tell Ruth her husband was in jail.
The Charleston City Council sentenced Reverend Brown and four free-colored elders to either “one month in the workhouse or leave the state.” Brown and Vesey chose prison. The Philadelphia preachers were deported to Philadelphia.
Ten congregants, including Jehu Glen, were sentenced to pay five dollars or receive ten lashes. Jehu told the bullwhip man, “I got new baby girl, so five dollars ain’t mine to spend.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, uncoiling his lash.
Until their Preacher was released, Sunday morning services were led by deacons, and, as soon as he could work again, Jehu repaired the church door.
Things returned to normal, and Charleston enjoyed a quiet summer. Sunday afternoons when the weather was fine, the Glens escaped the city’s heat on Thomas Bonneau’s skiff. Although the skiff smelled mightily of fish, with Martine in her arms Ruth felt rather grand as the tiny craft slipped through barkentines, ketches, schooners, and all manner of boats, some of which had crossed oceans. The current bore them downstream to the property Thomas Bonneau’s white father had deeded him. Thomas Bonneau was as proud of his rocky half acre as if it were a Master’s demesne, and, after he tied up, Thomas helped Jehu and Ruth and Pearl onto his dock. “Welcome to my home,” that’s what he said each time.
Thomas lived in a fisherman’s shanty, but a more substantial dwelling was a-building. The four friends burned oyster shells and crushed them before mixing them with sand and water to form the tabby walls of a small square house. “This house be livin’ hundred years,” Thomas boasted. “Not wind nor tide nor hurricano gonna bring Bonneau house down.”
“Hundred years,” Ruth said. “Can’t ’magine so long.”
“My staircases . . .” Jehu began, but Ruth’s flashing grin turned his brag into a smile.
While her parents worked and laughed, Martine lay under a palmetto in the fine cradle Jehu had made. Martine was a burbling, contented child.
The stripes from Jehu’s whipping laddered his sinewy back. “Only part of Jehu Glen what’s white,” he joked.
At noon Ruth provided greens and Pearl a loaf of bread to go with Thomas’s catch. After they ate they paired off in the lazy afternoon. Thomas and Pearl slipped into the grove behind the new house while Ruth and Jehu sat on Thomas’s dock, dangling feet in the cool water as aloof calm sails passed in and out of Charleston Harbor.
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“You ever want be somewheres else?” Ruth wondered.
“Ain’t got no name ’cept here. Low Country builders heard ’bout Jehu Glen.”
Ruth said, “I don’t reckon how white folks can give children over to a Mammy. Ain’t no finer creature than a child.”
“’Count children ain’t Masters yet. Children too puny swing that ol’ bullwhip.”
At Jehu’s words the sun that had been shining so brightly dropped behind a cloud.
* * *
Workdays, Ruth carried Jehu’s dinner bucket to the Butler job and brought Martine for her daddy to admire.
Old Middleton’s nephew, Langston Butler, would be Master when Middleton died and supervised the plantation and most doings at the town house. Had it been up to Langston, he wouldn’t have hired “an overpaid craftsman to rip out ‘perfectly suitable’ pine wainscoting and replace it with ‘very dear’ cherry paneling topped with Honduran mahogany chair rails. His uncle Middleton could be ‘whimsical.’”
Jehu, Ruth, and Martine often ate with Hercules, sitting on overturned buckets in the yard. Hercules was Middleton’s son, but nobody said so. His mother had been sold away after the boy was weaned—some said to Georgia, some Alabama. “Master Langston, he yearnin’ for that old man die. Each day pass with he uncle breathin’ ’nother day wasted. That how Langston reckon. ’Twere I Master Middleton”—Hercules dropped his voice—“reckon I’d be suspicious ’bout arything Langston give me to eat.” He gave his listeners his broadest, most innocent wink. “If you gets what I means.”
Servants see what we don’t conceal from them, because if we must conceal our secrets, servants wouldn’t be our inferiors and deserving their state. Hercules described Langston Butler’s ambitions candidly in terms that would have concerned the young Master if a white man of equal rank knew as much as Hercules.
“Master Langston gonna turn us topsy-turvy. Master Middleton like spend money. Onliest thing Master Langston spend money on is horses, and he ain’t same like Colonel Jack. Colonel Jack, he like horses. Master Langston, he buy horses ’count that’s what Low Country gentlemens do.”
Ruth’s Journey Page 14