“What do you want done with him?” Richard asked the Georgian.
“Oh—” the Georgian waved a pudgy hand, “put him on the back of the surrey. Tie him with the trunk straps.”
Richard shrugged. He pointed to Jud and to another slave. “You and you. Strap him to the backboard.”
Abel groaned but did not regain consciousness when he was fastened to the back of the surrey, hanging slightly away from the backboard and held a few feet above the ground by straps around his chest, his waist, and his legs. His arms dangled free. His fingertips nearly brushed the dirt.
Ackerly and his party went back with the Georgian to his plantation, which was only a few miles distant. When they arrived at the whitewashed log-and-mortar Great House, Abel was dead.
Ackerly entered the house with the planter to make out a bill of sale and to receive his money.
Jud studied Abel a few moments. Then he turned to stare at the featureless wall of the house.
He listened inside his head to the sound of growing grass.
THE PORTAL UNDER WHICH they passed was formed of two massive marble columns and a marble pediment. The plantation’s name—OLYMPUS—was set into the pediment in stylized Gothic script of black wrought iron. The road—as opposed to the public road, which was dirt—was layered with two inches of white gravel; no visitor to the Ackerly Great House would have to contend with dust or mud.
Richard whooped and kicked his mount. The horse galloped forward, spraying the slaves with tiny bits of gravel, and was soon out of sight. The slaves trotted after him, bare feet padding over the stone. For a short while they moved beneath the bare interlocking branches of stately oaks that towered on either side; then they left the cover of the trees, and a low murmur swept their ranks.
Plum, the boy with the scarred back who’d spoken of his deliverance by Jesus, grabbed his little brother’s hand and cried out: “Oh, Lord! We saved, I tol’ you we saved, Harris. It beautiful as heaven.”
It was not beautiful, but it was the skeleton of beauty, and Plum saw the fulfillment of what it promised. A huge three-story Great House a quarter-mile away dominated the landscape. There was a great rolling lawn that reached from the edge of the oaks to the house. The grass was brown and dry now, but after the rains it would grow lush and green. There was a profusion of leafless willow trees, magnolias, and dogwoods. There were graveled walks. White wooden latticeworks shone brightly in the sun; soon the rain and sun would infuse life into the vines that twisted around them. There were orchards too small to be practical, solely for decoration. There were terraced flower beds. There were . . .
The eye was assaulted by latent opulence, too much to be assimilated at first sight. Several figures were standing in the portico when the two overseers brought the slaves to a halt before the building. Richard was flanked on one side by a stocky, middle-aged man of medium height, and on the other by a dour woman with small, wide-set eyes. There were two other white men, guests; one puffing on a clay pipe, the other wearing a cleric’s collar. A handful of liveried house servants had come out to see the new slaves.
Richard took his father’s arm and led him eagerly to examine the new property. Samuel Ackerly listened attentively as his son described each slave’s particular merits and skills. The older man prodded and poked with practiced fingers, felt muscles, and examined teeth, ears, and eyes. He mumbled to himself, affirming what Richard had said; he noted that Plum’s left eye was a trifle rheumy and should be rinsed. Richard hovered at his side. Samuel was several inches shorter than Richard. His hair was pepper gray and had receded far up his forehead. His face was full, but not jowly. A short thick neck was set upon massive shoulders, and from those shoulders depended heavy and disproportionately long arms. His chest was expansive. He looked as if he had been constructed of heavy metals that had been reduced to their most elemental properties and compressed into an ingot of astonishing density.
“Well,” Richard said when Samuel was finished, “what do you think of them?”
Samuel stroked his bristly jaw. “I—”
“They’re lovely, dear.” Amanda Ackerly swept from the portico to her son’s side with a rustle of her green silk dress. “You have a fine eye for niggers, and your mother is proud of you.”
She spoke slowly and with a more obvious attempt at precision than did her husband or her son. Though she was a Lockwood—a New Orleans Lockwood—and had had a pampered and luxurious childhood, she had not been educated by English tutors as had the Ackerlys, and except in moments of high stress she constantly strove to avoid the more degenerate speech patterns of the South.
“Sound,” Samuel said. “They all seem sound.”
“They are excellent animals, Richard. Your judgment is impeccable.”
Samuel pointed to Jud. “How much did you say you paid for him?”
“Twenty-one hundred.”
“High, too high. I didn’t want you to go over two thousand.”
“He’s worth much more than what you paid for him, dear,” said Amanda to her son.
Samuel dismissed the slaves, telling Benson to have them scrubbed down and issued new pants and shirts.
Amanda took the guests into the drawing room, and Samuel and Richard retired to the study to go over the details of the purchases. Richard idly trimmed a hangnail with a silver clasp knife as Samuel made entries in his books. Richard respected his father’s power—for Samuel Ackerly was a powerful man—but otherwise thought him a boor. Samuel had been born to money and position, but only the repeated hammering of the years had broken him to gentility, and even then not completely.
Richard looked at his father, who was sucking his cheek as he worked, and sneered inwardly. By what right had Samuel criticized the price he had paid for that coal-black nigger, the one whose silence Richard was beginning to interpret as a kind of quiet insolence? He would like to see his father come home with a better bargain. Richard felt his ears redden. If he objected to the price, he could have said so in private, couldn’t he? It wasn’t necessary to mention it in front of the guests, and more mortifying, the house niggers. To say nothing of the new bucks themselves. Particularly that Jud. He thought about the big black. His anger flared.
WHEN THE RAINS CAME, they came in abundance. Large splattering drops fell continuously for four days. The paths between the shanties that housed the plantation’s more than two hundred slaves were ankle-deep with mud. After the first downpour came a week of intermittent storms and showers, and only infrequently did sunlight penetrate the gray-black clouds that lay heavily across the sky.
Jud was busy during the rains. There were hoes and choppers, axes, spades, and hatchets to be fitted with new shafts. There were surrey and buckboard wheels to be repaired, new axles to shape, hubs to bore. The carpentry shop was well equipped and the wood was seasoned and of good quality. He enjoyed the activity and worked hard, much preferring the shaping of wood to the monotony of the cotton fields. Actually, the difference rested not so much in the nature of the work as in the fact that he could be alone while he did it. He liked that.
His foot was working the pedal that operated a lathe, and he was moving the sharp blade of a shaping tool down the revolving length of a new spoke. The door opened, was caught by the wind, and banged against the wall. Samuel Ackerly stomped in, muddying the floor. He took his dripping slouch hat from his head, slapped it against his mackintosh, and wiped some of the larger drops of water from his face with his hand. He closed the door.
Jud continued with his work. He’d noted that his new master wandered through the work areas incessantly, and that the mere fact of his presence signified nothing in itself. As often as not, Samuel would depart without a word, and sometimes without examining a single thing, having come for no reason that Jud or anyone else could discern.
Samuel scratched the bald spot on the crown of his head and muttered to himself. He walked to the wall and checked a sheaf of hoes that Jud had fitted with new handles. He nodded.
“Yes.
Mm-hm. Yes. All right.” Then he singled one out. “No, no good at all. Here, you. Look at this blade. It’s cracked. Yes, I know, just a small crack, but it means that the metal is inferior. I don’t want any faulty equipment on Olympus. Save the handle, but throw the blade out.”
He freed the spoke on which Jud was working from its clamps, held it up, and scrutinized it.
“A fine piece of work. Nicely done. Yes.” He set the spoke down and put his hat back on. “After supper I want you to go to the wenching shed. You spend the night there with Clea. Get a good strong buck from her and when it’s born, you can spend the day idle. Fishing, lying in the sun, whatever you want.”
“Yes, suh.”
Ackerly left. Jud replaced the spoke, pumped the foot pedal, and picked up a concave piece of stone. The spoke had been shaped; it needed only to be smoothed now. He applied the stone to the spinning wood and began to grind down the roughness.
The wenching shed tonight. All right. Where he slept made no difference to Jud.
From the carpentry shop, Samuel went to the stable, where he stayed for a while watching a couple of his blacks pitch hay down from the loft. Later, he stood out in the rain, discussing something with himself.
It was already dark by the time the supper kettle was brought around to the shanties. Cornmeal mush was ladled onto Jud’s tin plate from a huge iron kettle. He was also given a piece of boiled fat meat. One of the shanty’s tin spoons had been broken. Jud was the newest of the four slaves who lived in the single room, so he ate with his fingers. While he prepared to go to the wenching shed, the other three bucks made jokes—anatomical jokes, envious jokes. Clea was pretty.
Jud grinned. Facial expressions were useful. They made other people think you understood them, were one of them. Jud had learned this early; he had practiced before a broken piece of mirror on Tiligman’s plantation. He could portray half a dozen convincing responses, which were more than enough for any nigger.
The wenching shed was a long and low structure partitioned into four cubicles. Weak, dirty yellow light seeped through the cracks of three doors. He tried the first. The couple within interrupted their activities only long enough to give him a brief glance. He tried the second and he found Clea.
She was lying naked on her back, gripping her ankle, leg weirdly bent, and gnawing at the nail on her big toe. She released her ankle when he entered, and she spat something from her mouth and smiled. One tooth was black—dead. She was pretty. A “yaller” of perhaps sixteen years. She had a high forehead, large round breasts, and a fine network of white stretch-scars around her belly testifying that she’d borne at least one suckler.
“Doan jus’ stan’ there,” she said. “Git in, git in.” She threw her head back and laughed. Her breasts jiggled. “Jesus! They sen’ me a nigger who doan know no better’n to come outta the rain. Close that door. It a cold wind a-blowin’. Lemme see you, nigger. Um-mm. You big an’ black. I reckon you about the most black nigger I ever did see. You big all over? Shuck down an’ lemme see.”
Jud walked to the foot of the bed. It was a narrow plank bed. There was a layer of cornhusks on the planks and over these had been thrown a rough woolen blanket. On the wall was a small shelf which contained a clay saucer filled with crude oil. A piece of rag was burning and sputtering in the saucer, providing unstable light and giving off ribbons of black smoke. Jud removed his clothes and dropped them on the floor.
“Big enough,” the girl said, mostly to herself. “But not too big for Clea. Masta Richard, he git me with a wench suckler las’ year, an’ Masta Richard ain’t hardly bigger’n a li’l chile there. You goan git me knocked with a big muscley buck, I ‘spec’.”
Jud said nothing.
“Hey, what the matter with you, nigger? Why you look at me like that? You funny in the head—or jus’ dumb?”
Jud smiled, and hoped it was a friendly smile.
“Tha’s better. You come here next to Clea an’ sit down. We can’t do nothin’, lessen you git yourself inneres’ed. Look.”
She cupped a breast and flipped the nipple with her finger.
“You like that? You try it. Um. Urn. Yas.” She stroked him. “Now you startin’ to be alive. I thought you was a dead nigger.”
Jud followed the lead of his sex. There seemed to be only the remotest connection between him and what he was doing. He remembered dimly something that had happened when he was very young with a dark little girl on Tiligman’s. Reaching, reaching with the moving creature beneath him, he felt the memory straining to clear itself in his mind; then it disintegrated violently and he became one with his act for a brief, intense moment. He gasped. It was gone. Everything was gone.
Nothing had ever been.
His head ached.
Clea sighed, relaxed the pressure of her arms around him, and closed her eyes.
Jud listened to the sound inside his head.
THE SOUND OF THE rain, growing lighter now, was what Richard listened to in the darkness of his room. And the sound of his father’s rumbling laughter, which occasionally rolled out of the drawing room and found its way up the staircase and drifted down the halls of the second story. Richard had excused himself an hour ago from the company of his parents and the two guests, Reverend Hartwell and Major Delmore. As far as Richard could determine, they were still arguing—no, three of them were arguing. The fourth, his father, merely smiled and sat like some impregnable fortress, offering nothing constructive of his own, shaking his head and forcing the others to storm his walls, now and then firing brutal and powerful cannonades at them. Richard had been on the verge of shouting, but a single slashing glance from his mother had silenced him. One does not shout at one’s father in the presence of guests. Richard’s stomach had been rippled by spasms of nausea. He had gone to bed.
He was feverish. He rubbed his hips. He rubbed his thighs. He wanted a wench, one like he’d had at the Bonestelles’. Damn that minister! Damn propriety! Well, Hartwell and Delmore would be leaving tomorrow. But that didn’t help tonight. He squeezed his hands into tight fists. His nails dug into his palms. His forehead was damp. There was a tightening and cramping between his legs. Oh, Christ! Christ. The rain pit-patted against the window. The air was stuffy; it was hard to breathe.
Like it had been in the barn. He could see the bales of hay he had stacked around himself, above himself, leaving only a small opening for air and light. Fifteen years ago. No, he was twenty-four now. Sixteen years ago. Fifteen? What difference? What difference! He was alone, high up in the loft, sweaty, lungs oppressed by the thick sweet smell of the hay. He was on his knees. Oh, the pressure between his legs! The damning, sweet, horrid straining. It wouldn’t stop. He didn’t want it to stop. Oh, stop it, yes. It was destroying him. No, no. More. More! His bloodied hands shook so badly that he could hardly hold the knife. The mutilated, furry little thing that had been a puppy was spread-eagled on the straw. It no longer struggled, only shuddered. It was dying. It was ending. Not yet, a little while longer. Please . . .
He fell asleep, and he thrashed on the bed, became entangled in the blankets, struggled with his pillow. He dreamed he was in the loft of the barn, and his bloodied hands were trembling and the mutilated body of his mother was . . . He woke up with a little cry. He ground his knuckles into his eye sockets and gasped air. A dream. About what? What? He couldn’t remember. He wanted a woman. He wanted to crush her.
IN EACH CORNER OF the drawing room was a standing flambeau imported from Rome. The candles eliminated the shadow that might have been thrown by those smaller but more numerous candles on the crystal chandelier that hung from the center of the high ceiling.
Reverend Hartwell formed a triangle with his hands and rested his chin upon its apex. “Then there are those of my calling who believe that our Lord has set aside a section of heaven specifically for the souls of niggers.”
“Perhaps,” said Samuel, “he visits them there in blackface.”
“Samuel!” said Amanda. “Your vulgarity is not appre
ciated.”
Samuel looked abashed. “Well, it doesn’t seem too illogical that if niggers do have souls and if God has ceded a part of heaven to them, then he might very well manifest himself to them in a guise they could comprehend. Isn’t that possible, sir?”
The minister flicked his tongue over his lips and eyed Samuel with distrust. He cleared his throat. “Ah, well . . . ah, yes. The, ah, labyrinths of higher theology and metaphysics are indeed, ah, complicated and in large part still, ah, uncharted, one might say. It is possible, possible I say, that—ah—granting the first premise, then our Merciful Father might, might, reveal his sacred being to them in a familiar . . . that is, as you say, a form they could comprehend.” He dabbed his forehead with his handkerchief.
“I see,” said Samuel. “And if horses have souls and if God has set apart a corner of heaven for them, then it follows that he might appear to them in the form of, say, a giant stallion.”
Amanda sprang to her feet, scarlet. “You . . . You . . . !”
Samuel rose with deliberate slowness. The major was packing his clay pipe. Reverend Hartwell was studiously wiping his glasses.
Samuel smiled and inclined his head. “You’ll excuse me,” he said, and left the room.
Amanda sat back down. She stared into space, lips drawn into a thin bloodless line.
Major Delmore lighted his pipe and puffed noisily. Reverend Hartwell returned his pince-nez glasses to his nose. There was a moment’s silence.
The minister leaned forward and in a low and solicitous voice said, “You poor, dear woman.”
Amanda demurred with a brushing motion of her hand. She said brightly, “Reverend, what are your own beliefs concerning the nature of niggers?”
It was a brave thing, she thought, possibly heroic. She knew that her guests admired her fortitude.
The reverend observed another moment of silence to demonstrate that he truly did understand and sympathize with her situation. Then he said, “Rather orthodox, my dear. The nigger is a beast created with articulate speech, and hands, so that he may be of service to his master—the White Man.” These words flowed with practiced ease. “Further, he is not simply a beast, but the Beast, to which the Holy Scriptures make so many references. He is the highest order of apes, and . . .”
Slave (The Shame & Glory Saga) Page 4