Benton's Row

by Frank Yerby

  “How the hell you know all that?” Tom demanded. “You ain’t been in these parts long enough.”

  “Looked it up in the court-house records. On purpose, because I’d got tired of that blood-will-tell nonsense. I picked those last five families out, Tom, just to show you. Every one of them, from the standpoint of blood, is from the very best aristocratic stock—every one of them is also related to some of our largest landowners, and I can prove it. The trouble with them is based on a difference in temperament no greater than often exists between two brothers. They just weren’t hard enough, maybe not even mean enough. So they got pushed back into the sub-marginal lands, while the big boys who had it in them to play rough and fight dirty grabbed the best lands, dispensing with those nice, gentle folks because owning negroes freed them in any way from having to depend in any way upon the lesser white man. So those families sank down the scale, their wits dimmed by bad liquor and worse food, by being shut off from any contact with anybody except people just like themselves. And they’re a large part of our population, Tom—that’s what slavery has done to the South.”

  “Done a lot of good, too,” Tom growled. “Most white folks ain’t like that. To my mind, folks like the Ransoms is more typical.”

  “We have to go there,” Randy said. “Jane Ransom wants me to look at her niece—thirteen-year-old kid from Mississippi, up Natchez way. And the Cattlets. Nice sampling of all kind of people in the parish. Hunt Cattlet is the largest landowner, next to you, that we have. Jim Ransom is a typical yeoman farmer—just as you said. And each of them has been victimised by the ‘South’s Peculiar Institution’, to quote our windy orators—in different ways, of course; but definitely and seriously injured by it just the same.”

  “You talk like an abolitionist,” Tom said.

  “I am. The only difference between me and those noisy fools up North is that I have better reasons. They’re right, of course; but only on moral grounds. And you can do damned little with a man by proving to him he’s a polecat, Tom—or even attempting to prove it. Let’s not delude ourselves: nobody but God Himself has the moral right to own a human being; perhaps not even He. Because, if you accept the doctrine of free will, He set us free long ago. But I don’t hammer away at the picture of the poor, down-trodden black, because as an argument it’s ineffective as long as it runs counter to the much stronger argument of human self-interest. I’m way ahead of those reformers up North because I know that even the self-interest is an illusion. Slavery hurts everybody, even those who seem to benefit by it.”

  “That,” Tom said grimly, “is going to take some proving to men like Hunt Cattlet and me.”

  “Come along, then,” Randy said, “and I’ll show you.”

  Nancy Cattlet met them at the door, her serene patrician expression belied by the worry in her eyes.

  “Don’t know what’s wrong with Hunt, Doctor,” she said. “He ain’t sick—I mean not like folks generally gets sick. But he can’t sleep, don’t half eat, and about half of what he does won’t stay in his stomach.”

  Randy looked upward at the little fanlighted windows overlooking the small balcony that nestled high up under the roof of the veranda, behind the enormous two-storey-tall Corinthian columns. The Cattlets had built the first and only neo-Grecian mansion in the entire parish. It had been completed in 1855, fully five years ago; and Randy strongly suspected that the root of Hunt Cattlet’s illness was his growing recognition that neither he nor his son, Ron, was ever going to be able to pay for it. It was an imposing house, huge and white and beautiful. But it was absolutely impossible to heat in winter, it leaked in every heavy rain, and shuddered and groaned whenever the wind rose. The insects of the bayou used it for a parade-ground, so that even on the hottest nights the Cattlets smothered under the thick mosquito-netting hung over their canopied beds—without which sleep would have been impossible.

  Not a half-bad design, Randy mused. But no matter how good a design is, you can’t build a tight house with slave labour. The essence of craftsmanship is pride—and how much pride can a man take in work he’s whipped to? Green lumber sawed on the place, with every joint coming open as it dries and shrinks. Home-made bricks too, crumbling before five years are out because the local clay is too sandy, and nobody knew how to really bake brick, anyhow. The ironwork’s good, though—because it’s a thing that whoever made it could take pride in.

  “Well, Doctor?” Nancy Cattlet said.

  “Sorry,” Randy sighed; “I was just looking at your house.”

  “I,” Nancy Cattlet burst out, “hate this house!”

  Tom stared at her.

  “Why, ma’am?” he demanded.

  “Good and sufficient reasons, Mister Benton. There aren’t but three of us: Hunt, Ron and me. A nice little cottage like you’ve got would be more than enough. But no, Hunt had to go saddle himself with debt to build this monstrosity! I drive myself till I’m half dead trying to keep it clean—and you know what it is to make nigger gals clean. Be easier to do it myself. Then, apart from the fact it’s poorly built, we had to put it here because this is the only ground that’s high and dry on the place. Two miles from the spring-house and the creek. In summer milk sours on the way to the kitchen. Hunt had a well dug, and the water turned out bad-tasting. So we have to send a couple of niggers two miles for every drop of water that anyone drinks, bathes in, or washes clothes and dishes with—and if that ain’t a powerful encouragement towards slovenliness I don’t know what is.”

  “I’d better look at Hunt now, ma’am,” Randy said.

  Hunt Cattlet was stretched out on the big bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “Howdy, Tom,” he said. “Evening, Doctor. Sorry Nancy called you. I ain’t sick—leas’wise I ain’t got the kind of sickness a doctor can cure. My stomach’s gone back on me ‘cause a man just plain can’t worry and digest his vittles at the same time.”

  “Tell me what’s worrying you, Hunt,” Randy said.

  “Everything. First off there’s Ron, who’s turning out to be the wildest young sprig the Cattlets ever produced. Then there’s forty thousand other things, all of which you can lump under the heading of money. Funny thing it all grows out of owning too much: too many niggers, too much land, too many mules, too many expenses.”

  “But,” Tom growled, “cotton calls for bigness, Hunt. It ain’t a crop for small farming.”

  “I know that. But you got to be both big and efficient. I got a Yankee first cousin on my ma’s side. Farms a place up in Ohio. His place ain’t half the size of this one. But he gets more work out of one hired farm-hand than anybody down here gets out of three niggers, and that includes you, Tom Benton. If them abolitionists up there ever have their way, we’re going to find out that it’s us who’re going to be freed, ‘cause be damned if we ain’t the slaves of a passel of worthless, good-for-nothing, trifling, lazy niggers! If they even spent one-half the time working that they spends figgering out ways of getting out of work, I’d be rich.”

  “Hunt,” Randy said quietly, “if a man put you to ploughing and chopping cotton, with an overseer standing over you with a whip, how much ambition would you have? If you could look forward to wearing gunny-sack trousers and eating fatback and collard greens the rest of your life—and beyond that the possibility that Ron could be sold down the river like a boar hog or a stallion, you’d take an interest in seeing that your master made money? Would you, now?”

  Hunt Cattlet stared at him.

  “That’s strange talk, Doc,” he said tiredly, “coming from you. First place, they’re niggers, which means they don’t think like us—if they think at all, which I doubt. They’re happy. They sing all the time, and they’re always laughing.”

  “They are the world’s finest actors,” Randy said. “And if you’d ever bother to listen to the words to their songs, you’d find they’re the saddest things you’ve ever heard. You keep the patrols—the ones the negroes call the paddy-rollers—scouring the woods all night every night because they’
re so damned contented, Hunt? That Fugitive Slave law we jammed through Congress—that was to impress the Yankees? And those advertisements in the papers: ‘Runaway from Toliver, my plantation, my nigger man Brutus, tall, coal-black with a scar on his left cheek,’ and so forth. Hundreds of ads like that, every issue, Hunt. Not to mention the shivers all you plantation owners get every time anybody mentions Haiti, Santo Domingo, Nat Turner and John Brown.”

  “You ain’t making him any easier in mind, Randy,” Tom pointed out.

  “Right,” Randy smiled. “Sorry, Hunt. I’m going to give you a little something to make you sleep. Then I’d suggest that you’d better cut down on your holdings and arrange things so that they can be managed. If you don’t, you’re really going to be a sick man, and that’s not going to do anyone any good.”

  “Not much hope of that, Doctor,” Hunt Cattlet said.

  The Ransoms lived on a small farm just north of the Cattlet plantation. Riding towards it, they were both silent, encompassed round about by that private world into which each man must from time to time retreat, communing there with himself and by himself, alone.

  Another thing, Randy thought: where else in America or perhaps in all the world would a great landowner express himself in a language scarcely more polished than the dialect of his field-hands? I’d wager my last copper that neither Hunt Cattlet nor Tom here has ever read a book except perhaps the Bible in all their lives. But I can’t offend them by saying that. Even the ones who do occasionally read subsist on a mental diet of that romantic idiocy that Scott turned out by the ream. They’ve identified themselves with the notion of chivalry. I guess a man must have some ideal to cling to, but God help the land whose leaders deliberately choose to retreat out of logic into hazy romanticism—Gerald Landsdowne solemnly showed me a genealogical chart tracing his family back to Ivanhoe. And when I pointed out to him that Ivanhoe was a figment of Walter Scott’s imagination, he was furious—not with the charlatan who’d robbed him with that elaborate nonsense, but with me for destroying his dream.

  I love this damned, stupid, high-flown, wrong-headed land; but it’s an anachronism—the whole South is nothing but an anachronism; an entire nation, for they are that, too—marching backwards into the past at the double . . .

  He looked at Tom Benton.

  And you, my friend, he mused, are the type-form of that anachronism—a man who exists in two separate entities: the man you are, and the man you believe yourself to be. But the man you are—the big, animalistic brute; the thief and scoundrel; the seducer and rake—is, after all, in process of becoming the man you dreamed up: the knightly Southern gentleman, courtly for all your ignorance, dignified for all your lack of anything valid upon which to base that dignity—except perhaps your courage. That I will grant you, especially now since it too is becoming something else—not merely the ferocity of a beast; but something strangely like moral courage—the bravery of a man who chooses, makes decisions upon the basis of good and evil—and sticks by them. However you started, Tom Benton, you will end as something very fine— and it is that which defeats me—that and my own honour, if I can be Southerner enough to use the word . . .

  Tom stared straight ahead. Thinking for him was a painful process, since he had none of Randy’s facility of language; and, language being after all the tool of thought, he had to grope for images on which to flash his ideas.

  Randy’s right. And he’s wrong. I can’t explain how come; but he’s right and wrong both. Reckon it is wrong to own a man, nigger or not. But it’s the way we live, it makes possible a kind of living that’s just plumb gracious. Right or wrong, we can’t give it up. It’s like having a wife and a mistress. No question that keeping a gal on the side is wrong; but, Lord God, when she twines her little arms about you in the dark, it’s mighty sweet! That’s the trouble. What folks like Randy is asking us is to give up the sweet, slow living—the riding out over the fields at Broad Acres, so pretty with the sunlight on them—the fact of being somebody, being looked up to. Hell, I like that. I like it when lesser folks comes to me for help and advice. I like it all—all the good, mighty fine things about the way I live. And to ask me to give it up because it ain’t just to pine-barren crackers and a passel of black burr-headed savages, is asking too much.

  They rode into the yard at Jim Ransom’s place. Except for size, it was very nearly identical with Broad Acres, which was not strange, since practically all rural Southerners lived much the same way. From Virginia to Texas it was rare to find a painted house outside the cities, whitewash being employed in a minority of cases, and in the majority nothing at all. Once you left the tide-water counties of Virginia and the delta of the Mississippi, the imposing planters’ mansions all but disappeared; even the rice-growers of the Carolinas lived in a much simpler fashion.

  Randy himself, in his brief sojourn in the North, had seen the sketches of the romantic idea of plantation life, a legend believed with some justification in Yankee-land because the Northerners had Virginia on their doorstep to mislead them, but believed, strangely enough, with even more fervour by the Southerners themselves in spite of their daily contact with the reality.

  And, Randy mused now, it makes little difference how rich they are—they build these one-storey unpainted pine cottages bigger and with more rooms if they can afford it; but they all keep saddles, guns, and sometimes grain in the halls, dry corn and okra on the veranda, and hang bridles, harnesses and whips up over the doors. Even the big ones like Tom here only dress up once in a while—and they all talk alike except those planters who are also politicians or preachers. Men like Jim Ransom are better off. He has only three or four negroes, and is therefore less enslaved by the system. Hunt’s right—economically speaking, negro slavery is the most wasteful, inefficient system ever invented by men. And not because the negro is naturally unintelligent; but because he is both docile and subtle—what he does really is to quietly resist and evade the demands put upon him until the whole slave economy becomes economically self-defeating. And he does it so damned well that the white man doesn’t know he is doing it.

  Jane Ransom came to the door. She was a plump, pretty woman in her thirties, of the type, Tom saw at once, who accepted responsibility only under protest, and then shrugged it off as fast as was humanly possible.

  “I do declare,” she said at once, “this here child’s got me beat! ‘Tain’t like she were my own child, Doctor. Never had no brats, so I reckon I just ain’t used to them.”

  “What seems to be the trouble, Mrs. Ransom?” Randy said.

  “I’ll be blessed if I know. I gave her sulphur and molasses; but it’s more’n spring fever. She won’t eat—won’t hardly talk to nobody; just sits and mopes the live-long day. I’m mightily a-feared, Mister Benton, that I’m gonna have this here child on my hands the rest of my natural life.”

  “Why?” Tom said shortly.

  “She ain’t pretty—won’t never be, I reckon. And she ain’t got much sparkle to her. Be a mighty poor type of man who’ll ever want to get hitched with Mary Ann.”

  “She’s only thirteen, isn’t she?” Randy said. “Appears to me you’re concerning yourself prematurely about marrying her off.”

  “Reckon I am,” Jane Ransom said; “but I kind of have to think that way. Seeing as how we didn’t have no children, it’s kind of hard to be saddled with one this late in life.”

  “May I see her, please?” Randy said, and his tone was edged.

  “I’ll send her out here,” Jane Ransom said. “She’s up and about, and I’ve my chores to attend to.”

  “You run right along and attend to them,” Randy said quickly. “We’ll wait here.”

  “Reckon I know what’s wrong with that child,” Tom said seriously. “Woman like that would drive a mule mad.”

  “It’s more than that,” Randy said tiredly; “though that’s part of it—wait now, here she comes.”

  The little girl came shyly out on the veranda. She was as thin as a lath, and her penny-brown ey
es were wide and frightened. She was a plain child, with her small face covered with freckles, and a trembling mouth that was far too big for the rest of it. Only her hair was truly lovely. It was a soft auburn shade with red-gold highlights, and fell in heavy waves down to her waist.

  Randy took her hand.

  “Tell me about it, missy,” he said.

  “About what, Doctor?” Mary Ann whispered.

  “About things. Just anything—aren’t you happy here?”

  “No, sir,” Mary Ann said.

  “She mean to you?” Tom growled, jerking his head towards the door.

  “No, sir. She fusses a whole lot, but she ain’t mean. I—I don’t know, mister. . . . I reckon I just don’t know how to be happy.”

  “Homesick?” Randy suggested gently.

  “Yes, Doctor,” Mary Ann said, and both of them could see the rush of tears in her eyes.

  “Tell me about home,” Randy said.

  “It—it was nice,” the child said, blinking against her tears. “Wasn’t much different from here; but nicer. We had lots more darkies. Used to play with me, and sing to me, and make me things. Wasn’t no white children around to play with. But here I ain’t got nobody—not even niggers to play with.”

  “Why’d you leave there, missy?” Tom said.

  “Had to. My pa—my pa—he . . .”

  But she couldn’t finish it. She rocked back on her heels, her arms wrapped fiercely about her small body, holding hard against her pain and her grief.

  “He met with an accident,” Randy put in quickly. “He was cleaning his gun. And Mary lost her mother shortly thereafter—so now we’ve a nice new neighbour, eh, Tom?”

  “Yep,” Tom said quietly. “Tell you what, missy—you come visit my kids. ‘Course they’re older than you. Stormy’s seventeen and Wade’s a year younger; but we’d be mighty glad to have you. Wade specially. He’s nearer your age, and I ‘spect he’s a mite lonesome hisself. What you say, missy?”