Ruth’s Journey

by Donald McCaig

  Langston Butler detested his uncle’s profligacy and neglect of Broughton, their Ashley River plantation. Langston sought to expand rice production, but when he made an offer for adjacent Ravanel acreage, Colonel Jack asked, “Your uncle Middleton knows these plans?”

  Middleton didn’t—which Jack knew perfectly well, and it can be admitted Jack enjoyed Langston’s discomfiture. Hercules said, “White men greedy. They was black theyselves till greed bleach ’em white.”

  Jehu agreed. “Master Langston askin’, how much this wood cost? What you gonna do with leftover? So I leaves all them worthless scraps in a heap. He can do with ’em what he wants.”

  Hercules laughed. “Cook usin’ he fine cherrywood cook supper.”

  Ruth said, “Man always sayin’ how this one and that one cheatin’ him, you know he cheater. He warnin’ like scorpion wavin’ he tail.”

  “Girl?” Hercules grinned. “Who put them ideas in your pretty head?”

  “What make you so saucy?”

  “’Count I is. They don’t send me for sugar ’count I knows how talk to horses.”

  Ruth thought Hercules was just struttin’, the way beautiful young men do, but Jehu got jealous, so they stopped eating in the yard.

  Master Langston Butler excused Hercules’s sauciness but sensed something in Jehu he didn’t like. He inspected Jehu’s work closely and suspiciously. “Ladies will use this room.”

  “Yes, sir.” (Jehu hated calling any man Master.)

  “They won’t remark poor workmanship, but I will.” On his knees, young Master Butler shuffled along the wainscoting, tapping spots where the varnish seemed slightly shinier and trying to get a fingernail under where the chair rail fit. He stood and brushed his trouser knees. Whish, whish, whish. Butler’s smile made Jehu want to ask, “What you want from me? Why you botherin’ me?” but of course he couldn’t.

  “Your work is almost as good as an Irishman’s.”

  Jehu couldn’t help himself. “Colored man want to hold his head up too.”

  Young Master Langston grinned at a grown man his own age, a master of work Butler couldn’t do; a man with a wife and an infant and a good name. His grin was to let Jehu know that should Langston Butler strike him down—perhaps with a fireplace poker; that very poker so near his hand—or took a pistol and shot him dead, the only consequences of Jehu’s death would be blood mess on the parquet and the inconvenience of dragging a dead nigger’s body into the street.

  Despite Butler’s awful grin, Jehu licked his lip and repeated, “Colored man want to hold his head up too.” When Jehu’s words just hung there, suspended in air, he joked, “Least as high as an Irishman’s.”

  Later, when Jehu recounted that conversation, Ruth shivered. “You can’t be saucy, Jehu. You ain’t his uncle’s bastard, and you got no way with horses. You everything to me and Martine.”

  Jehu clinked coins in his pocket. “Man paid me, didn’t he?” he asked. “Fair and square.”

  * * *

  After Thomas Bonneau bought Pearl from Mrs. Ravanel, Pearl worked for her former mistress for twenty-five cents a day. When Reverend Brown married Pearl and Thomas, Frances Ravanel attended the service but didn’t stay for the fete.

  Legal emancipation wasn’t easy, but Colonel Ravanel helped Thomas Bonneau emancipate his bride. When Pearl asked Jehu why he hadn’t emancipated Ruth, Jehu joked, “Can’t deplete my Capital.”

  For nearly a month, Ruth denied him the marital bed until her own needs made that impossible.

  “Whereas the great and rapid increase of free negroes and mulattos in this state by migration and emancipation, renders it expedient and necessary for the legislature to restrain the emancipation of slaves . . . Be it therefore resolved, by the honorable, the Senate and House of Representatives now met and sitting in General Assembly that no slave shall hereafter be emancipated but by act of legislature.”

  SOUTH CAROLINA LEGISLATURE, DECEMBER 20, 1820

  On Meeting Street, with carriages backed up behind him and angry drivers shouting, Hercules gave Ruth the bad news. He took off his hat and didn’t flirt. Martine asked, “Momma sick?”

  Supper that night was silent. Walking to Bible class at Denmark Vesey’s, Ruth didn’t talk, and when Jehu reached for her hand he couldn’t catch it. Vesey’s small frame house was quiet. No coloreds lingered outside, except Gullah Jack on the stoop whittling.

  “Nice night,” Jehu said.

  “’Lessn the watch come by.” Jack wiggled thick comical eyebrows. “’Lo, momma. Spirits been askin’ after you.”

  Ruth set her lips and brushed past. Blankets draped the doorframe and windows, and too many bodies jammed the small room. Jehu and Ruth found floor space in the back. It was close, hot, and airless.

  Denmark Vesey’s Bible was propped up on a stool, and Vesey’s lips moved as he read silently. Ruth wondered why some folks’ lips moved when they read and some folks’ didn’t.

  Some wore caps or kerchiefs. Some heads were bare, shiny or dull, black, bald, or gray. Ruth thought: them which ain’t free can’t never get that way.

  She was still puzzling when Denmark Vesey set his finger to mark his place and spoke. “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.” He tapped the page with a thick workman’s forefinger. “You think Zeachariah talking to us niggers? You think God look down and see how much spoils niggers got? No, He ain’t talkin’ to us; He talkin’ to the Masters. ‘Behold the Day of the Lord cometh.’ How you gonna prepare for that day? You gonna stand in the way or give it a hand? ‘Behold the Day of the Lord . . .’”

  Despite the fug and hot, rebreathed air, Ruth felt a chill roll down her shoulders. The Day of the Lord.

  Denmark Vesey perused, tracing sentences with his forefinger. “Behold,” he whispered.

  The room was so quiet his whisper slipped among them like an old friend. “Tell me, brothers . . . How many you bows to Master in the street? How many you?”

  Some looked down. Some looked off. “So: none of you bows to Master?” He licked his lips. “That the truth? Now you knows and I knows White Masters cruel drunks, fornicators, and unbelievers. You and me knows they is. But you bows to them anyway because—I reckon—they better’n you. Hmmm.” He set a thoughtful forefinger to his chin. “Mercy! Coloreds worse than fornicators and unbelievers and cruel drunks. I ’spect you all damned. You on the road to eternal damnation.” Mock amazement flickered across his hard-used black face. “Jesus Christ, he savin’ the Masters but he ain’t not botherin’ ’bout you.

  “That Master you meets on the street, do he note you bowin’ ’n’ scrapin’, or do he pass by like you was no more’n a hitching post or a horse apple in the dirt?

  “Raise you hands. How many of you bow? How many steps into street let Master pass?”

  Martine wiggled in Ruth’s arms.

  “Worse than anything the Lord hates a liar!”

  Heads lowered as if they had nothing to do with the hands they raised.

  Mock surprise. “Why that’s most all of you. Well, well . . .” Vesey’s smile was a fond uncle’s. He read silently, lips moving, tapping the text before he looked up, apparently surprised to find so many people in his home. “How many you ‘colored gentlemen’ pretend you dumb as that old milk cow Master has you to milk? How many womens roll you eyes and sighs and say, ‘Master, I just colored girl, this too hard for me understand’?”

  Murmurs and humming as if inside a beehive, loud with beating wings.

  “How many you teach your childrens: ‘Master ask you somethin’, you drops your eyes ’n’ look at your toes. If you know answer, give it. If’n you don’t know, answer anyway! More niggers get whipped for not knowin’ than for bein’ mistook.’ You tell your children: ‘Don’t look up at that white man, and whatever he do, don’t dare sass.’
How many you?”

  He removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Mommas and papas, how many of you say that?”

  Thomas Bonneau got up to say, “Childrens get hurt if they doesn’t.”

  “Ah, Mister Bonneau. Happy to hear your Biblical interpretations. But you right, the Master, he got the slave block and he got the gun and the workhouse and Mr. Bullwhip. But ‘Behold, the Day of the Lord is comin’,’ Mr. Bonneau. Behold . . .”

  He closed his big fist and stared at it. “I been carpenter long time. I builds plumb and level, same as ary white. I knows how to hang a plumb bob or check a level. That brown-skinned nigger there, Jehu Glen, he the best stair builder in the Low Country, better’n ary white man. You know it, he know it, white man know it—why Jehu got to bow on the street?

  “You heard ’bout that Thomas Jefferson—White Master were President? Well, he were. President of all these United States. Last week I workin’ on Master Bee’s piazza ’count them walls rottin’ from inside out! White carpenters run Bee’s guttering inside them walls; inside ’em ’stead of outside! ’count that how Thomas Jefferson done it. And I bet you a dime Thomas Jefferson’s walls rottin’ too. Ain’t one Low Country nigger carpenter so stupid he put guttering inside the walls, where guttering get plugged up and you can’t unplug it. Take a white man do that!” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Sometimes, I think Masters should be bowing to us.”

  Laughter started as a chuckle in the back of the room but was deep throated before he silenced it. “I was tearin’ guttering out so to put it on the outside where a man could get to it if it clogged, but old Master Bee’s servant, Archimedes—you all know him: brown-skinned man goes to that St. Philip’s Episcopal. Archimedes fussin’ at me. ‘You don’t want do that,’ he say. ‘White man put it there. Must be right.’

  “Gutters can’t leak because a white man hung ’em?

  “Mercy!

  “Archimedes, he start out same as you ’n’ me. He get he first learnin’ on he Momma’s knee. Afterwards Master tell him so and Master tell him such. Master tell Archimedes, ‘You don’t know nothin’, and who argue with Master, who got all them guns and workhouses and bullwhips!”

  He paused with the air of a man possessing the truth and whispered, “Because you Master don’t make you right! Because you slave don’t make you less’n a man!”

  Vesey lifted his eyes to the low plank ceiling as if he wasn’t talking to them, wasn’t talking to anyone in the room. “I will not step into the street for ary white man. You knows I won’t. Twict I been sent for ‘taste of sugar.’ Twict I felt that old bullwhip.

  “But I ain’t stupid and I ain’t lazy and I ain’t no boy. I’m a man in my prime.” His laugh was a snort. “Well, maybe a little past my prime.”

  Chuckles at Vesey’s self-deprecation. Some cramped muscles shifted, and an old man coughed.

  He pointed his forefinger like Moses’s staff. “You can’t pretend to be a boy ’thout becomin’ a boy. You can’t pretend to be stupider than the white man ’thout becomin’ stupider than what the white man is. Who you pretends you is, you comes to be.

  “The nigger what bows to the Master on the street, who acts the fool, who forgets who he am, that man a slave.” He shut his Bible. “He deserve to be a slave!”

  He whispered into the silence, “The Day of the Lord is at hand.”

  They slipped out by twos and threes. Around the corner, Thomas Bonneau grasped Jehu’s sleeve. “We gots to pretend. We don’t pretend, we whipped or worse. Sometimes I think Denmark Vesey tryin’ to get us killed.”

  Jehu replied, smugly Ruth thought, “Who you pretends you is, you comes to be.”

  Thomas Bonneau let go Jehu’s sleeve and studied his face before nodding slowly and not angrily. The Bonneaus never returned to the Bible studies or the Cow Alley church, and the Glens never again sailed in Thomas’s skiff or ate together, and the Bonneaus completed their tabby house without their help. Sundays after church Jehu, Ruth, and Martine ate on the riverbank, though never on White Point, where only white folks could go.

  * * *

  The social season that winter was disappointing. Money was tight and rice prices poor. The Ravanels had less work for Ruth. Although Frances Ravanel recommended her to Mrs. Puryear, after a lengthy interview Mrs. Puryear offered suggestions on how Ruth might economize. “One needn’t eat beef every supper,” she advised. “Torn socks can be mended.” Although Middleton had asked Jehu to draw up plans for renovating the Broughton farmhouse and Jehu had spent weeks doing so, Langston Butler decided against the project and, as work had not been commenced, paid nothing. When Jehu objected, young Butler told him he might be rehired when rice prices were better, if he stopped whining.

  No work meant more Bible classes, and Jehu often didn’t come home until after midnight. The Watch came to know the Bible students by sight and didn’t demand their passes.

  Hercules didn’t go. “That Vesey, he got too much reasonin’ for me,” he told Ruth. “What he say be right what but it be wrong too. ’Sides, I got me colt to train; he gonna be a bell ringer.”

  “Hercules . . .” Ruth wanted to talk about it.

  “I mean this colt, he special. It’s like him and me, we was born twins.”

  Pearl came to childbed in February. Ruth, Dolly, and Mrs. Rav­anel managed the birthing, but Pearl’s infant died within hours. Ruth and Pearl’s intimacy died with the poor thing. Pearl quit the Ravanels and moved across the river to her tabby house. Ruth hardly ever saw the Bonneaus anymore.

  The late-night Bible studies were too much for Martine, so Ruth and her daughter quit going.

  Not many women had attended, and Ruth was the last. Jehu was relieved. “Bible learnin’,” he said, “is for men.”

  When Jehu came home so late, Ruth pretended she hadn’t waked. She pretended she didn’t hear Jehu pacing and muttering in the other room.

  But she was grateful for her husband’s return, which broke her familiar dream of crouching inside a manioc basket with blood seeping through weave.

  Churchgoing Shoes

  THE SUN WAS high in the sky, the better produce had been sold, and stall keepers were loading to go home.

  Ruth had her eye on a plump yam earlier buyers had overlooked. Sometimes good produce was hidden by worse; sometimes a stall keeper held a fine yam back too late. Ruth’s yam was without blotches or tine scars. It had been dug properly.

  “You best make up you mind.” Empty baskets were already stacked in the stall keeper’s wheelbarrow. “It sundown afore I gets home.”

  “How much you askin’ for that puny, unripe yam?” Ruth inquired for the third time.

  “Half dime.”

  “I can buy better’n that for half dime.”

  The stall keeper yawned and tapped her mouth. She set her basket of unsold peppers atop the empty baskets.

  “It’s hard times, Missus,” Ruth said. “My man ain’t worked since afore Christmas. I got two cent for your yam.”

  Pursing her lips, refusing to meet Ruth’s eye, the woman placed three unsold cabbages in the pepper basket, reshuffling so the peppers were on top. She added two less desirable yams. “I gots to push this barrow up the road home and push it back afore daybreak. This here yam be just as good tomorrow as today. Come morning, fine yam fetch a dime. I gots children and a hungry man. You don’t buy yam, maybe I cook it myownself!”

  Ruth fingered the pennies in the pocket of her apron. Boil it up, dice it for Jehu and Martine, and eat the skin and clingings herself. She craved that yam.

  So she didn’t turn at the shout. Shouts is shouts. But a scream snapped her head around. Scream was the Dread she’d been expecting. Dread am Come! Dread be Here Today!

  Dread was a white rider galloping full tilt down the aisle between the stalls. When his horse jumped a barrow, a hoof clipped it,
barrow upset, and red potatoes spinnin’ and rollin’ on the cobblestones. Coloreds dashing for safety. A drover jerked a mule bucking in his shafts and kicking the wagon box: crash-thump.

  The horseman had his horse’s mane in one hand and his saber in the other, and he was galloping straight at Ruth as if she were the very one he’d come for. Almost too late, he slammed heels into his stirrups and hauled his reins, and his fat white horse dropped onto its haunches and stopped. White boy on a fat white horse. The horse was sweat-slaked, the rider’s eyes were wide and unfocused. “Ho!” His screech started high-pitched and cracked. “Ho! Return to your Masters! Ho! Governor Bennett’s orders!”

  His green Charleston Rangers jacket was one button misbuttoned, and the bird-handled pistol in his sword belt was perilously ready to leave its nest. “Return to your Masters!” he screeched again. “Any niggers found on the street will be considered fair game!” He stood in his stirrups to wave his sword over his head.

  Ruth’s stomach lurched, but she produced a smile. “Young Master Puryear, how you been?”

  Cathecarte Puryear glowered as if a secret had been betrayed.

  “I Ruth, young Master, Miss Penny Ravanel’s Mammy.”

  He didn’t hear. Perhaps he couldn’t. His eyes roamed everywhere and nowhere. His white knuckles gripped the hilt of a bright saber, which yearned for flesh to bite. In an awful monotone he asked Ruth, “Why do you wish to murder us?”

  “Murder you, Master? I hardly knows you.”

  “I’ve been a good Master,” Cathecarte insisted. “I never, never sent a servant for ‘a little sugar.’ I never have. I never took any nigger wench against her will.” Sweat glistened on his cheeks. The curved tip of his saber flicked like a serpent’s tongue. Ruth felt emptiness at her back like a cool breeze. The stall keeper had abandoned her barrow and vanished.