Mandingo

by Kyle Onstott

  ‘Son, don’t be makin’ too much o’ that young Mandingo buck. He big an’ vig’ous, yes. But he ain’t God. He yourn; you isn’t hisn. He need a little snakin’, pour it on. See whut that larrupin’ done to Memnon; make him a new buck. You got to learn about niggers. They apes. On’y thing they feared of is the snake.’

  ‘Mede ain’t a-needin’ no dose of snake, Papa. Ruin his pride. Jes’ about kill Mede.’

  ‘That buck your pet. That whut he is, your pet. Let him run over you an’ you wants,’ said the old man, swallowing the last of his toddy and peering into the bottom of the goblet to see whether a trace might remain. He could well have drunk another, but refrained from ordering it, lest Blanche incur her husband’s anger by taking another along with him.

  ‘Mede!’ Blanche pounded on the name, repeating it as if it would escape from her memory. ‘This here Mede, who he?’

  ‘Why, it is Ham’s fightin’ buck, Mandingo,’ blurted Maxwell. ‘Ain’t Ham tell you? He won’t talk about nothin’ else; an’ he tote that black boy aroun’, wrapped in waddin’.’ The other man was innocently unaware of saying aught amiss.

  ‘Fightin’ buck? I tol’ you you couldn’t have no fightin’ buck. I tol’ you I not wed you an’ you got one!’ Blanche flared.

  Hammond’s smile was half a sneer. ‘Whut you wants I should do with him? Boil him fer soap grease?’

  ‘You kin sell him, I reckon.’

  ‘But I reckon I ain’t a-goin’.’

  ‘I got sompin’ to say!’

  ‘ ’Bout Tense, you has. ’Bout the rest, you ain’t. I got to run this plantation. You’d be havin’ me plantin’ daisies, ’stead o’ cotton.’

  ‘Ham jest a-keepin’ him fer showin’ off. Don’ never fight him,’ concluded Maxwell.

  ‘I goin’ to. I goin’ to, an’ anybody got one to fight agin.’ Hammond rejected conciliation. He intended to brook no female interference with the plantation economy.

  The girl was trapped. This serious, stern, satisfied, unromantic youth, whom she hardly knew, was her husband. He was an escape from spinsterhood, which even at sixteen had terrified her. The house was plain, drab, gloomy, not even as good as Crowfoot—not what she had pictured. No affluence was apparent to her. The older man she conceded to be kind, but a mere echo of the boy. She resolved to salvage what she should be able.

  ‘Them dresses?’ she proposed. ‘When we goin’ to git ’em?’

  ‘We git ’em,’ Hammond promised again. ‘Cain’t go today. Maybe tomorrer, next day; Sat’day sure. Dressmaker in Benson, ain’t they, Papa?’

  ‘Dresses?’ asked Maxwell.

  ‘My papa never bought me none—that money not comin’,’ Blanche explained.

  ‘Mind me to git some red goods fer Big Pearl and Lucy. I tol’ ’em I would,’ said Ham.

  ‘They——?’ The old man checked his question, looked at his son, who nodded his head. ‘Mandingos,’ he said with satisfaction.

  When they rose from the table, Maxwell stumbled and submitted to Mem’s leading him back to the sitting-room. Blanche hesitated a moment and followed. Hammond tarried. Blanche saw him place his hand on Meg’s shoulder.

  ‘You tell Miz Ellen,’ Hammond in a low tone instructed the boy, ‘to wash good and wait upstairs. Tell her I come. Un’erstan’?’

  The boy nodded gravely.

  Ham spent the afternoon around the plantation, but his mind more often than not was in an upstairs room back at the house. He returned earlier than he had intended and guided Eclipse toward the barn. Without unsaddling him, he turned the horse into his box stall. Then he limped towards the house, entered the kitchen, and made his way toward the stairs. Meg sat on the top step, elbows on his knees and cheeks in hands, waiting. Hammond’s fingers on his lips enjoined the boy to silence.

  From the sitting-room, Maxwell heard the halting step on the creaking stairs, made a surmise, but said nothing to his daughter-in-law who sat across the room from him. He harked in his thoughts back to the time when his own needs had been insatiable.

  When he came down some time later, Hammond stopped at the foot of the stairs to open and slam the front door before he entered the sitting-room. While he embraced his wife, his father disposed of his tobacco in anticipation of the casual kiss he knew his son would give him. Meg brought three toddies, and Blanche raised her eyes to her spouse for his disapproval before she lifted one of them from the tray. He offered no protest.

  ‘They choppin’ right good-like—slow, but ain’t no hurry ’boutn them ol’ weeds,’ Hammond told his father. ‘That Petit Gulf come thick; didn’t rot none like that Tennessee.’

  ‘Littler boles,’ the old man objected.

  ‘But more of ’em, an’ they busts wider.’

  ‘Mayhap,’ nodded Maxwell who had little interest in growing cotton.

  ‘They don’ need no watchin’,’ Ham reverted to the choppers.

  ‘Then we kin go to Benson tomorrow an’ git my dresses?’ Blanche interposed.

  ‘Might as well,’ her husband agreed. ‘Why not?’ Just for a moment he was not reluctant to please her. He gave her a brief half-smile of contentment, the reason for which she completely misunderstood.

  15

  But as it turned out Blanche was joyfully forced to return again and again to Benson to buy linings and buttons, furbelows and trimmings for the dresses and to consult Miss Forsythe, the little dressmaker, and submit to her fittings. For Blanche it was a carnival of pleasant anxiety and anticipations. Twice a week, Hammond was forced to adjourn his work on the plantation and drive his wife to town, which he did without complaint. The leisurely hoeing of weeds in the cotton went on in his absence almost as well as when he was at home. In fact, when Lucretia Borgia could steal the time from her other duties to go to the field for an hour or so, the choppers worked faster for the deputy than they ever did for the master.

  On Saturday afternoons he left Blanche at Miss Forsythe’s cottage while he went to Remmick’s tavern to watch the fights and meet his friends. He had stopped taking Mede along, not because of Blanche’s presence but because no other owners would match their boys against Mede.

  However, everybody talked about Mede, inquired about his health and his training, suggested matches for him, but always with the slave of another owner. Hammond refrained from boasting about the boy, but the pride of ownership gave him constant pleasure.

  ‘I’m a-breedin’ him right now. Ain’t fitten hardly to fight,’ Hammond would explain. ‘The dreen on him pullin’ him down.’

  On the way home, Hammond listened inattentively to his wife’s enthusiastic account of her visit to Miss Forsythe and her prognostications of how beautiful the frocks would be. They were her sole interest.

  For between her excursions to the dressmaker’s there was nothing for Blanche to do. Within the house, everything was done for her, and there was nothing out-of-doors to interest her. Besides, she feared the effects of the sun on her face, the whiteness of which she was at some pains to conserve. Afraid at first of the elder Maxwell, she grew to like him. He was generous, candid, and uncritical. She was a white woman, a Hammond, his son’s wife. He asked no more. Her headaches grew more frequent and more severe. Her father-in-law was indifferent to the number of toddies she drank, even urged them upon her. Hammond did not disapprove the remedy, but neither did he know how much she consumed. He was out of the house much of the time, supervising the chopping of the cotton, seeing to the welfare of his livestock, giving orders and advice in the cabins, training his Mandingo.

  His wife and his father exchanged gossip. She described her dresses to him again and again.

  Maxwell talked of his wife, of her being a Hammond, recounted his son’s childhood and the accident that had crippled him. After the fifth telling, Blanche ceased to attend to what he said, but for want of company she sat with him, wafted a worn palmetto fan, and sipped her toddy.

  She had even less interest in the conversations between her husband and his father about the cr
ops and the weeds and swine and slaves than in the older man’s garrulity about the past. It seemed to her that Hammond was obsessed with the plantation. Every time he entered the house, it was to report the details of whatever project was in hand, the carelessness of some working-man, the cold or cut hand or stubbed toe of some slave child. These minutiae of his stewardship interested his wife not at all, and, except as reflections of his son’s activities, interested the father little more. He expressed his approval of all Hammond did. The concern of the older man was that his young Negroes should feed heartily and grow apace. Cotton was only to keep them moderately busy. He had never built a gin or a press of his own, but had hauled his crop to Benson for processing. It seemed to him that it might be better to devote the entire acreage to corn which the Negroes could eat, than to cotton for sale; he preferred to sell the produce of the plantation on the hoof. But if it amused Hammond to grow cotton, his father had no wish to interfere with the plan.

  Blanche was bored and even nauseated by her father-in-law’s eternal praise of his son, present or absent. If only Hammond would do something amiss, if only he would err, if his father would upbraid him or express in the son’s absence some disapproval of his actions. The only fault the older man could find was that the son worked too hard, and in his voicing of it that fault became a virtue.

  ‘An’ you don’ quit this a-strivin’ and a-drivin’ an’ a-frettin’, you goin’ to bust down with rheumatiz afore that boy is big enough to take a hold,’ he warned.

  ‘Whut boy?’ demanded Ham.

  ‘Why, your boy—the one Blanche is goin’ to have you.’

  Blanche blushed.

  It was a reminder to Hammond. He had neglected his marital duties, which were not entirely pleasant, what with the pallor of the soft white flesh, which he was not forced to see but whose colour he imagined under the heavy nightgown.

  Blanche had found out about Ellen. Hortense, with no evil motive, let the cat out of the bag and answered her mistress’s further questions with an innocent candour that was not intended as a betrayal. Tense had grown up to believe that the slave was at the master’s disposal, and was aware of nothing amiss in Hammond’s relationship with Ellen except that it forestalled her own elevation to his favour, to which she had been taught to aspire. Hortense was able to tell little, from which the mistress surmised much. Blanche quizzed the elder Maxwell as subtly as she was able but his answers were evasive.

  ‘Mayhap,’ he admitted, ‘I don’ know,’ and he didn’t. ‘Ham right considerin’ that way, aimin’ to spare a white lady.’

  Blanche had no desire to be spared, although she dared not say so.

  ‘No ’um, Mist’ess, I ain’t know nuffin’, not nuffin’; no ’um,’ was all Blanche could draw out of Lucretia Borgia, who planted her feet wide apart in her determination not to betray her young master.

  When Blanche turned to Meg, who had overheard his mother’s denial of her knowledge, the boy only hung his head, rolled his eyes, and muttered it was hard to tell what. A lie to a white was an offence, but, in this, he recognized that the truth would be a greater one.

  For once, Lucretia Borgia came to her son’s aid, not for his sake, but for her master’s. ‘He ’on’t know nuffin’, Mist’ess, ma’am. How you ’speck he know nuffin’? That nigger don’ even know whut you astin’ him; ’on’t know whut you talkin’ about. Ain’t no good pumpin’ him.’

  Thus Blanche, for all her seeking, was unable to accumulate the evidence she wanted. She was baffled. Her husband’s philandering with his wenches she would not have resented, but his dalliance with a single wench aroused her ire. She compared Ellen’s beauty with her own, to the slave’s disparagement; and what perversity of taste could prefer black to white? Nor could she credit that it was no preference, a mere concession to a white frigidity, which she could not admit she did not feel. Her mother, with the modesty befitting a daughter of a Hammond, had warned her with circumlocutions that a man’s fidelity was not a lady’s lot and that she should have to submit to a husband’s attentions or neglect with such equanimity as she could muster. But that the neglect should come so soon!

  Blanche could not, for several reasons, present her grievance forthrightly to her husband, charge him with dalliance with the wench. She had no direct evidence; the most she knew was what Tense had said innocently and inadvertently. He would admit a venial guilt, but pretend it was for her own protection. And how would she find words for the indictment, which was a subject too delicate for a lady’s speech? A lady not only possessed no passions but took no cognizance of them in men and menials.

  Moreover and worst of all, the charge would beget recriminations. Hammond, on their marriage night, had found her not a virgin, a matter which, although it was no longer discussed, she knew that her husband had not forgotten. To chide him would but arouse his memory of her own guilt.

  While Hammond did not overtly flaunt his relations with Ellen, he was at little pains to conceal them. Sooner or later Blanche would know. Didn’t every man, every planter, have a favourite wench or two?

  So Blanche concentrated on the one consolation she had, her pretty dresses. About them, Hammond kept his word. And there would be more of them, a never-ending supply. When Hammond on a Saturday evening brought the three frocks home, Blanche could eat no supper nor permit Tense to eat. One after another, with Tense’s help, she laced herself into them and swept down the stairs to show them off to the Maxwell men, whose satisfaction was not in the dresses themselves but in the pleasure the girl took in having them. They did not know how much of a factor in that pleasure was the allure the dresses were counted to have for the husband. She should be irresistible. She contrasted her finery with Ellen in her osnaburgs. She would show that black hussy who was the more beautiful. When, on going to bed that night, Hammond sent Tense to the kitchen to sleep that he might be alone with his wife, she knew that the clothes had triumphed.

  Thereafter, Blanche wore her new dresses constantly, changed them three times a day merely to sit opposite her father-in-law and sip her toddies. Her joy in them soon subsided, however, especially as she went nowhere to show them off and nobody came to Falconhurst. Besides, they were tight. More and more she kept to her room, where she could relax her stays, dressing only to go downstairs to her meals.

  But she missed her gossip with Maxwell, and her toddies. As the weather got warmer, the dresses became ever more uncomfortable and Blanche had Dido make her some Mother Hubbards of blue calico, mere envelopes for her figure, like nightgowns. Hammond did not entirely approve of her wearing such a garb downstairs in his father’s presence, but Blanche pointed out that she wore underclothes with these Mother Hubbards, and shoes and stockings. She was fully clothed and yet comfortable. There was nothing for him to cavil at. He still did not like them, didn’t want his wife dressing like a wench. Somebody might come. In such an event, Blanche said, she would go to her room and dress before the visitors should see her.

  As the summer wore on, the girl dispensed with more and more of her undergarments, leaving off one thing one day, another the next. Despite the warmth of the days, she still drank her toddies hot for her persistent headaches and relied upon the breeze of her palmetto fan to keep her cool. One day she appeared downstairs without her shoes, complained that the heat had caused her feet to swell. Hammond contemplated her unshod feet, but in view of the reason for them withheld his censure. The following day her feet were entirely bare. They were not beautiful.

  Blanche, standing barefooted in a single garment, her stringy yellow hair uncombed, her cheeks blotched red with heat and eyes bleary from whisky, bore little resemblance to the girl girded in the challis dress whom Hammond had accompanied to church a few months before. But she was white; he had married her.

  More and more frequently he used the summer heat as an excuse to absent himself from his wife’s bedroom. In his own separate bed he was not constrained to wear his underclothes, and, alone, Blanche would be free to unbutton the neck of her n
ightgown.

  On one such night late in June, Ellen lay in her master’s bed. It was too hot for dalliance, too hot even for sleep, and they lay apart, the girl on her elbow waving a palmetto fan over his supine body.

  ‘That enough,’ Hammond argued. ‘I right cool now. Lay out an’ git some sleep. Don’ need you should fan me like I goin’ to melt. I ain’t grease, or somethin’.’

  The girl merely stooped to kiss his naked shoulder and continued her fanning. ‘You hot, and you know I like to.’

  ‘Ain’t no call to,’ he said, stretching luxuriously and raising his arms to cradle his head in his hands the better to take advantage of the breeze from the fan. ‘Mind me of the time I was a little saplin’; my mamma had Lucretia Borgia settin’ by my bed a-fannin’ me to sleep warmish evenin’s, sometimes the whole night,’ he reminisced. ‘Lucretia Borgia let me sleep nekid, like I is now, though my mamma reckon I wear a shirt.’

  ‘You had Lucretia Borgia a long time?’

  ‘ ’Fore I was borned; ’fore my papa marry my mamma. Don’t know whure Papa got her at; mayhap he bred her right here at Falconhurst. She gittin’ ol’, mayhap thirty-five. Still breed good though—she knocked again. Beginnin’ to round out too, I noticin’ this mornin’.’

  ‘She says I am,’ the girl announced.

  ‘You is whut?’

  ‘Knocked.’

  Hammond sat upright. ‘When? When Lucretia Borgia say?’

  ‘Yesterday.’ Ellen was casual. ‘I don’t know nothing about it. She says I missed my time of month.’

  ‘Don’t mean nothin’. Nigger talk. Lay back,’ Hammond ordered, and he ran his hand appraisingly over the girl’s abdomen. ‘Breasts hurtin’ you? Notice anything?’

  ‘They itch-like, an’ ache a little, not much. They growin’ some, I reckon.’

  ‘Mayhap Lucretia Borgia know. She right knowin’ about such.’

  ‘You mad?’ asked Ellen contritely.