Mandingo

by Kyle Onstott

  Pleased but baffled, Maxwell breathed, ‘Whut you reckon?’

  ‘Whut I reckon? Whut I reckon is that you could a got more,’ Redfield answered his host’s question literally. ‘That hunch-back ninny was set, dead set on them bucks. He had money left. Didn’t you see? Could a-took it all.’

  ‘Mayhap could,’ Maxwell conceded. ‘Could a leastwise kept the wench’s sucker, only would a-begot a carryin’-on. It old enough fer weaning an’ the Frenchie never looked at it, never know whether she got it.’

  ‘Ain’t you pilfered him enough?’ demanded Hammond. ‘Eleven thousand dollars fer three niggers—two on’y jist saplin’s and a wench comin’ to the end of her breedin’, three, that is, addin’ the sucker.’

  ‘Whut you reckon he wantin’ ’em fer?’ pondered Redfield. ‘Whut he goin’ to do with ’em?’

  ‘Kin grin’ ’em up fer sausage, he a-wantin’. We all gotten our money,’ said Hammond with a toughness he did not feel.

  The party entered the house and Memnon brought them toddies. Blanche, sure that the stranger had gone, came down the stairs, ready for dinner.

  ‘Glad we shet of ’em. They too smart-alecky, too big fer they britches,’ she declared of the twins.

  Hammond sat on the floor and ran the gold lovingly between his fingers, recounted it and stacked it again.

  25

  Dite did her best in the kitchen. Lucretia Borgia had taught her to cook, but the family food, while it was still plentiful and good, lacked the savour that was the result of Lucretia Borgia’s skill. Dite was unable to undertake the other tasks that Lucretia Borgia had carried on without apparent effort, and Hammond was compelled to issue rations to the slaves and assume such other chores as the former cook had vacated. He soon learned how valuable the woman had been, how shrewdly she ruled her fellows, and of what a load she had relieved his busy shoulders. He missed her not only for the work she had done but also for her wisdom and character, her obsequious aggressiveness, her domination of her domain. She had managed things well, and always in the Maxwell interest.

  The labour performed by the twins had been much less important and their functions were absorbed by others. Memnon was again called upon to stir the toddies, and while Maxwell complained that the drinks were not so good as those prepared for him by Meg, it was really the child’s efforts to put on an adult role that the master missed. Ellen served as well as Meg had done in helping Hammond off and on with his boots, which was all the assistance he needed with his simple toilet. Hammond had never roused Meg in the night to call upon him for service, but he now realized that no slave slept outside his bedroom door if one should be wanted. He considered installing another boy, possibly Kitty, whom Lucretia Borgia had partly broken for house service, but postponed detailing him in the belief that no other’s loyalty, amiability, and readiness would be as great as those he was used to. Meg’s going produced a void, small and vague and undefined, in the white man’s existence.

  Maxwell was less happy in Black Willie, Alph’s replacement, for Black Willie smelled. Maxwell sniffed at him every night as he went to bed with Willie at his feet and never failed to find him musky. Dido, by Maxwell’s command, scoured Willie daily, but his master still said he stank. Alph’s musk, such as it was, the old man had not found unpleasant. Willie was larger than Alph, even if no older, dark enough to call black, thicker-lipped, flat-nosed, with gross, broad feet. After Memnon had been called in the middle of successive nights to apply the paddle to Willie, the boy learned to lie across the bed without turning and squirming, and Maxwell thought him as absorptive of his rheumatism as Alph had been, but Willie did not possess the imagination that had taught Alph to ape the old man’s malady and limp and complain upon occasion.

  Maxwell did not relish having Willie crawling at his feet and seldom in the daytime spread him out and utilized him as a reservoir of his pain. Nor did Willie drink out of his toddy goblet. Those thick, black lips would have contaminated the glass, as Alph’s lips had not done. The employment of Willie was purely practical.

  Of course, the addition of the money to the pot buried under the tree to some degree made up for the absence of Lucretia Borgia and her brood. Never did the Maxwells, either of them, express regret for making the sale, but the slaves were not forgotten. The fatuity of Roche, his moustache, his jewels, his coach, his wealth, and his motives were topics of unfailing interest when there was nothing better to talk about. But speculation was vain. Why he should have wanted the twins so much, and still more, why he should have insisted upon having their mother also, was incomprehensible.

  The cotton ripened, what there was of it, and was ginned and sent to market. The corn was laid by. Hogs were killed and the meat smoked or salted. Two of the mature field hands were sold to a passing dealer, and the trip to New Orleans with a small coffle of slaves was postponed, much to Redfield’s disappointment.

  Blanche was again pregnant. She postponed the announcement until she was no longer able to conceal the fact. She was not sure who might be the father of the child she carried. She hoped, as she forced herself to believe, that it was Hammond, though she realized that it might be Mede, even less likely Meg. She tried to formulate excuses if the child should be black, but they were too late. If she had accused one of the Negroes of rape, Hammond would have killed him and the thing would be settled, but it was now too late. Blanche reverted to drinking more and more toddies, which her father-in-law encouraged as being good for her condition, but they did not increase her amiability. Hammond was elated, as was his father, at the likelihood this time of a male heir.

  The arrival of Blanche’s mother in November was unannounced and unlooked for. If her visit was inconvenient, it was concealed from her. Blanche, at least at first, was delighted to see Beatrix, who would commiserate with her over her pregnancy.

  Mrs. Woodford brought tidings of the death of her husband, the Major, who had succumbed to starvation in the belief that his wife and son were poisoning his food. Dick had assumed sole possession of Crowfoot and from an easygoing, open-handed, indolent youth had turned to a cranky niggard, intent upon squeezing from the soil, the slaves, the draft-stock, and from himself the last iota of revenue possible. The Negroes had been placed upon shorter rations with longer hours, and Dick begrudged his mother and himself the food they ate. He rose at daybreak or before and toiled till dark, driving and coercing with whip and cudgel to glean the last boll of cotton, the last nubbin of corn. Only, so, he had assured his mother, should he be able to free the plantation from debt, to the glory of God and the salvation of his soul. He had abandoned his preaching—except the exhortation of the slaves on Sunday—but his religion had taken a turn to diligence coupled with stinginess.

  Beatrix suffered Dick’s quirks as long as she was able, but at length had packed her worn and scanty clothes, summoned Wash to hitch the carriage and driven to Falconhurst for at least a respite from her son. In her hollow, querulous voice, which she was unable to hear, she urged her son-in-law to claim Blanche’s half of the inheritance (Charles being dead, as she believed) and to assume the management of Crowfoot.

  ‘No. Let Dick have it, ma’am, you an’ him,’ Hammond shouted into her ear-horn. She could not hear him, or pretended so.

  ‘Time the debts off, ain’t goin’ to be nothin’ left noway,’ he explained to his father, ‘unlessen the man they owin’ never turn up. Don’ want we should mix with Dick. He lunatic, seem like, bad as the old Major.’ Hammond needlessly lowered his voice, and Blanche evinced no concern about her share of the legacy. She had worries more urgent.

  But Beatrix continued to discourse upon the Major’s death and the estate he had left and insisted upon Hammond’s claiming Blanche’s share. Her empty, unpleasant voice was loud as if she believed the others to be as deaf as herself.

  Hammond, unable to reply to her, turned to his father. ‘Cousin Beatrix tryin’ to take her place back from Dick,’ he said. ‘She ain’t carin’ nothin’ about me and Blanche and our part. Crow
foot, let Dick have it.’

  Beatrix continued to censure Dick without actually accusing him of any definite offence until she saw that her breath was being wasted. Thereafter, seeing that Hammond was indifferent to her plea, she turned on him.

  ‘Men! Men!’ she cried. ‘Men and their lusts. Ain’t got no nigger wenches, seem like. You got to keep your wives always knocked up, always knocked, always in the family way. I tellin’ you when you got married, she young and innocent, but you got to have a baby right away, and now another one comin’. Seem like you’d have some shame and give little Blanche here a rest between. Ain’t no end to whut men does to women.’ Beatrix stopped to sigh.

  ‘I was cravin’ me a boy,’ Hammond called into the horn at her ear, unheard.

  ‘We got to bear. It their duty, an’ their men say. Cain’t git away, got to have white babies!’ Beatrix ranted. ‘Glad I through with it, the Major dead. Me, I wouldn’t have the best man livin’. I wouldn’t believe his say on the Bible. All a man wants is pesterin’. Cain’t tell me nothin’ about ’em. I knows. The Major!’

  Hammond did not feel himself censurable, but was unable to refute the charges because he was unable to make himself heard.

  Her mother’s arrival put an abrupt end to Blanche’s tippling and even Hammond confined his infrequent toddies to the kitchen where Beatrix would not see them. Maxwell, however, was obdurate in his refusal to give up his drinking or to go elsewhere for it. Rather, out of perversity, he drank more than before.

  ‘My rheumatiz,’ he used as his excuse. ‘Oncet I let my rheumatiz git ahead of my drinkin’, I’ll never ketch up to it.’

  Beatrix shook her head, whether in implication of her failure to hear what was said or of her disapproval of Maxwell’s medicament he did not know or care. Her failure to hear was often an unwillingness to consider, although her deafness was real enough.

  To his visitor’s insistence upon family prayers the morning after her arrival, Maxwell made the concession of getting out of the room to avoid participation. Hammond was out of the house, and Maxwell, who took no stock in religious observance, refused to permit the summoning of the household slaves, except Tense, who was Blanche’s own to do with as she might choose. It was Maxwell’s belief and experience that religious practices made his slaves, especially the younger ones, restive and dissatisfied with their state.

  ‘ ’Lessen you comes to Jesus an’ kneel down at his feet, you goin’ to the bad place, sure are a-goin’ straight to the bad place, Cousin Warren, you and Hammond along with you,’ Beatrix threatened him. ‘I hates to think about settin’ up there in heaven with Blanche and a-watchin’ you all burn.’

  ‘I hope, ma’am, I hope.’ Maxwell did not say for what, but it made no difference for his guest failed to hear him.

  When the prayer meeting was assembled—Beatrix, Blanche, Tense, and Old Wash, who had been summoned for the function—Maxwell took his goblet and went into the dining-room. He could hear Beatrix as she haltingly read aloud from the Bible, and later after she and the two slaves had knelt—Blanche being excused because of her pregnancy—the rise in her voice was superfluous as she prayed for his and Hammond’s salvation. Indeed, she prayed long and passionately, with many sobs and sighs, for Charles, and Dick, and the Major, for Blanche and her children, born and unborn, for herself, and incidentally for the slaves. But it was on behalf of the Maxwells, father and son, that her suit was loudest.

  The prayers concluded, Maxwell returned to the sitting-room and rather pointedly, it seemed to Beatrix, called for Memnon to bring him a toddy. Henceforth Beatrix found other places than the sitting-room for her meetings, and while Maxwell was always invited he was never urged to attend them. He cared not at all how much she prayed so long as he was not constrained to listen and so long as his slaves were not demoralized by her proselytizing.

  The primary purpose of Beatrix’s visit was to enlist Hammond to claim his wife’s part in the Major’s estate or at least to oust Dick from its management. Beatrix had not been aware that her daughter was pregnant again, but, when she found Hammond indifferent to the supposed legacy and Blanche so close to her lying-in, she resolved to wait to see her new grandchild. There was nothing to draw her home, and here she at least got enough to eat without Dick’s grumbling. She believed that she was welcome at Falconhurst, as, indeed, she was; for, even if she had not been Blanche’s mother, she was born a Hammond.

  Blanche, when she was questioned, had no notion of the duration of her pregnancy or when it might be expected to terminate. She had lost track of time, and was reluctant to talk of the event. This her mother charged to female modesty. Beatrix had her first grandchild to admire and to dandle while she awaited the second.

  Blanche, who was no longer able to get into her challis dress, gave it to her mother. Somewhat soiled but little worn, it heightened the leathery sallowness of the woman’s lined face, and Hammond, who had been allured more by the dress than by the girl who wore it, speculated whether his wife might some day come to this sour favour. The worn, dark brown woollen in which he had always seen Beatrix was more befitting to her ochre skin and eyes and teeth.

  Beatrix had been at Falconhurst about three weeks when another visitor arrived. The gentlemen were up early, eating their breakfasts of eggs, ham and red gravy. The food was noticeably better than usual, the ham more tender and better done, the gravy richer and redder.

  ‘Dite, she learnin’ how at last,’ commented the older man.

  ‘Lucretia Borgia come back, suh, Masta, suh. That whut! Lucretia Borgia back,’ grinned Memnon, pouring coffee.

  ‘Seem like; taste like. Reckon Dite goin’ to soon learn,’ Maxwell replied to the servant.

  ‘But she back, suh. Lucretia Borgia come last night on a mule,’ Memnon reiterated.

  ‘Got to tear this nigger down agin, I reckon. Lyin’ so. Got so as he cain’t tell true,’ Hammond said. ‘Want I should shuck you down an’ touch you up aroun’ the edges, like the other time?’

  ‘Naw, suh, please, suh, Masta, suh; naw, suh. I good, I tell true. I be good. I ain’t lie to you, Masta, suh,’ the Negro pleaded.

  ‘You lyin’, you know you lyin’, boy,’ Hammond said sternly. ‘Whut fer you want to lie like that?’

  ‘Yas, suh, Masta, suh,’ Memnon admitted the accusation. ‘On’y she back, she here, Lucretia Borgia.’

  Hammond pushed back his chair. ‘You lyin’, I goin’ to hang you up this very mornin’. I goin’ to take the skin off you agin,’ he said as he rose and went toward the kitchen.

  Lucretia Borgia stood before the fire, giggling nervously.

  ‘Lucretia Borgia!’ Hammond exclaimed. ‘Whure you come from? Your masta knowin’ you come back? He say? He lettin’ you?’

  ‘Masta Ham, suh, Masta Ham!’ the woman cried, throwing her big arms around him.

  ‘Whut you doin’ here?’ the master demanded.

  ‘Cookin’ you-all’s breakfast’,’ she answered literally.

  The young man was glad to see her, to have her back, whatever might have brought her. ‘Come ’long with me. Papa is in the dinin’ room. Come ’long and see him,’ Hammond pushed the woman before him.

  If Lucretia Borgia had been white, Maxwell might have believed he was seeing a ghost, but there was no doubting the evidence of his own eyes. ‘Whure you come frum?’ he asked. ‘Lucretia Borgia, you know you sold! Whut fer you come back?’

  ‘I come back from New Orleans, suh, please suh, Masta, suh,’ the woman replied. ‘I cou’n’t stan’ it.’

  ‘You never run away?’ he asked in horror.

  ‘Yas, suh, I reckon I did, suh,’ the woman said contritely. ‘I reckon that whut you goin’ to call it, suh. On’y I ain’t a-goin’ back, I ain’t. You goin’ to whup me. I know you goin’ to whup me. Goin’ to hang me up an’ snake me. You kin, Masta, suh, you kin tear all the skin offn me. On’y I ain’t goin’ back. I ain’t.’

  ‘Oh, yes you is, Lucretia Borgia. You is too a-goin’ back,’ Maxwell said qu
ietly. ‘Correctin’ you, we goin’ to leave that to your masta when he come fer you, but you know whut runnin’ means an’ you know whut he goin’ to do to you. You goin’ back all right. You sure is!’

  The woman broke into tears. ‘Please, Masta, suh, keep me here. This my home. Whup me, you wantin’ to, Masta. Only let me stay with you,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Dry up! Dry up!’ the master commanded. ‘Cryin’ ain’t a-goin’ to save you. Whut fer you run? You know it ain’t right. Your new masta not good to you? He starve you or somethin’? You looks right good an’ fat.’

  ‘Masta, he right good. Feeds good. White vittles,’ Lucretia Borgia specified.

  ‘Then whut?’ asked Hammond.

  ‘It them two varmints. That whut it is, suh, them varmints. Alph and Meg.’

  ‘The twins?’ asked Hammond. ‘How they ac’? Whut they do?’

  ‘I theirn. My masta, he give me to ’em fer theirn. I got to wait on ’em, an’ dress ’em, an’ shuck ’em, an’ wash ’em, an’ do fer ’em, all the time,’ she explained.

  ‘ ’Tain’t right,’ Hammond agreed, ‘givin’ one nigger to another. ‘Tain’t right, only it the way they does in Louisianie.’

  ‘I reckon he never give you to them twins, Lucretia Borgia,’ the older man questioned her story. ‘On’y you their mammy an’ he lettin’ you take care of ’em fer him. Whut he wantin’ of you, whut he bought you fer? Don’ seem he bein’ hard on you.’

  ‘That ain’t all,’ Lucretia Borgia countered. She was at ill ease, not knowing how her charge was to be received. ‘That ain’t all. I got to call them varmints “Masta, suh.” Yas, suh, Masta, suh, I got to say “Masta, suh” to them niggers. I ain’t a-sayin’ “Masta, suh” to no nigger, least not to them two that I had my own se’f, an’ raised up my own se’f, an’ whupped into house niggers fer you-all.’