After the rules had been explained (ten lashes for disobedience, two weeks in the punishment cells for breaking silence), Mr. Tyree spoke his welcome. “I am Acting Keeper Tyree. If you repent, reexamine your conduct, and obey without exception those regulations to which your crime has made you subject, I will not speak to you again. If I speak to you again, you will wish I had not.”
Mr. Tyree’s superior, the governor’s appointed keeper, Mr. Blackwell, listed penitentiary duty among many other duties of a mercantile and governmental nature. The first Sunday of every month, Blackwell attended the penitentiary chapel, where he produced a homily for the prisoners’ edification; day-to-day matters were left to Mr. Tyree.
Whenever Blackwell entered the penitentiary the smile wilted from his face, and Mr. Tyree’s somber attitude did nothing to restore it. In truth Blackwell had no occasion for complaint: no drunken warders, no offenses to morality, and no escapes. The penitentiary books were exact and scrupulous: the income from the clothing woven for the madhouse and orphanages had produced a profit of some ten thousand the year before, and the present work manufacturing blouses for the Confederate army promised even better returns.
The penitentiary did not intrude upon Mr. Blackwell’s attention, and he had Mr. Tyree to thank. Indeed, why should a penitentiary be merry? It should be a solemn place, officiated over by solemn men like Tyree.
If Mr. Tyree had a first name, the keeper didn’t know it. If Mr. Tyree had a home in Richmond, a family, Mr. Tyree must have visited them on Sunday afternoons, which were the only hours he could not be found at his duties.
Sallie’s warder banged the brass door knocker, which was shaped like a crouching lion. “Peters, sir,” he bawled, “with Female Convict Kirkpatrick.”
The entry hall had the smell of a room that wasn’t often used, and moisture had invaded the glass that framed the lithographs. They were “Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham,” “Old Ironsides,” “Lafayette Arriving at Mount Vernon.” Sallie stood downcast and demure.
When Mr. Tyree stepped into the hall, he pulled the parlor door shut behind him.
“You are satisfied here?” His voice was austere.
“Sir?”
“Your treatment has been fair? You have received adequate nourishment?”
“Oh. Yes sir.”
“See that you say so. Are there signs of discontent among the other convicts?”
“I cannot speak for those to whom I do not speak.”
“And I will not abide insolence.”
“Having no knowledge of the overall management of this institution, I can hardly remark upon it.”
Mr. Tyree’s eyes were black as hard coal, as if all the blackness in his chalky complexion had drained into them. His eyebrows were so thin Sallie wondered if he plucked them. He templed his fingertips. “If Jefferson Davis’s daughter had been remanded into my care, she would receive treatment no different from, neither better nor worse than, that received by the bastard daughter of a scullery maid.”
He seemed to expect comment.
“In Keeper Blackwell’s absence I am responsible,” he continued.
Sallie kept silence.
“A man who fails his responsibilities is a low creature.”
Sallie could think of nothing.
“Very well,” Mr. Tyree said. “Just so we understand each other.”
The unofficial parlor of the keeper’s house was identical in size, though not in furnishings, to the grim parlor where prisoners were welcomed. The woman beside the inadequate fire was round on the bottom and round on top. She was round in the face and her arms were round and her hair was pulled back in a round bun. “Good afternoon, dear,” Cousin Molly said in a cheerful tone. “My, we have got ourselves into difficulties, haven’t we?”
And that quick Sallie’s eyes filled with tears and she couldn’t do a thing to stem them.
“You may reply, Female Convict Kirkpatrick,” the acting keeper said. “Mrs. Semple has come to the penitentiary especially to interview you.”
“Why did you locate so near Tredegar’s?” The round woman made a face. “The smoke is dreadful. Just dreadful.”
“I believe we predate Tredegar’s, ma’am,” the acting keeper said.
“Can’t you ask Tredegar’s to smoke less? I know they must be forging guns and swords, but must they be so smoky about it? You’ll have your share of respiratory diseases, I’d venture.” Her eyes were oval, brown, and shrewd.
“Why, I . . .”
“All these people in your care. Malefactors, to be sure, but none of their sentences include death by asphyxiation.” The round woman extracted a silk square from her half-moon recticule and coughed into it. Twice. “Never you mind,” she said, suddenly gay. “I suppose we must all make sacrifices. Now, Keeper, I would not detain you for another minute. I know you have important responsibilities. So many lives in your hands, just imagine. I am sure General Johnson has no greater responsibilities.”
“Well, I did think I might . . .”
“And I am certain you shall, Acting Keeper! I am certain you shall!” She held her beaming smile on Tyree until that worthy closed the door behind him. Cousin Molly took a deep breath. “You do remember me?” she asked in a kinder tone.
“From Christmases at Stratford, yes, ma’am. You always accumulate the children.”
“Say rather that the children accumulate me. They know a sentimental, childless fool when they see one. I am first cousin to Abigail Gatewood, on her father’s side. He was a Semple from Southside. I have always thought Christmas is for children. We adults relive our joys through theirs.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Sallie looked at the floor.
“Well, dear. You have got yourself in a fix, haven’t you?” She gestured at the shabby gentility of the keeper’s parlor. “I mean, all this.”
Sallie looked up. “If you have come to condemn me, madam, there are others with prior claims.”
“Child, I . . .”
“Having no personal or familial acquaintance with me, you have satisfied your duty to your cousin and need not trouble yourself to visit again.”
Cousin Molly laughed, a round woman’s laugh. “I begin to understand how you find yourself in this predicament. Abigail wrote and asked that I look in on you, but at the time we were overwhelmed by the Manassas wounded—I will not describe our confusion, crossed purposes, the needless suffering. By the time we put things right, it was October, and then we moved to Camp Winder and . . . Oh, dear, where was I?”
“I fear I don’t know, ma’am,” and tears began leaking from Sallie’s eyes, and she was ashamed.
Cousin Molly dove into her recticule for a fresh silk square. “My dear, my dear . . .”
While Sallie dried her eyes, Cousin Molly extracted neat packages from that recticule. “I am informed there is no prohibition against supplementing the Commonwealth’s provisions,” she began, “and have provided you with the same parcel we provide to wounded soldiers: some good soap, a square of cheese, a huzzit for repairing one’s garments. I have not included tobacco. You don’t use it”—her eyes grew serious—“do you?”
“Oh no, ma’am.”
“Abigail writes that your father, Uther, is well, though not in the best of spirits. Abigail makes a point of speaking with him at church. Quite a pleasant chapel, SunRise’s, so airy and light. And the singing from the colored loft, how unusually vigorous. In his sermon last Christmas, your Preacher Todd”—she glowered—“heaped overmuch praise on predestination. If a person cannot effect her own salvation, then what is the point of ironing her underthings?”
“Suppose, madam, one were suddenly upset on the street?”
Cousin Molly contemplated the imagined spectacle. “There is that. I suppose one must put a good face on things. Though one’s face might be one’s bottom.”
The two women eyed each other in silence for seconds before Sallie entrusted a timid smile.
“There is always a crowd of men outside the Exchange
Hotel. The gentlemen, one hopes, would avert their eyes. One fears laughter. Or worse, applause.”
Because Cousin Molly visualized the scene so clearly, Sallie, who had never seen the Exchange Hotel in her life, nor its gentlemen, began to see it too. And it was Cousin Molly she pictured, upended, presenting her hind parts to their gaze, and Sallie smothered her giggles in her palm as Cousin Molly beamed.
Sallie begged for news. Cousin Molly said her nephew Duncan had been ill but had recovered. She said there was little war news, but the government had high hopes of British and French recognition. “Since the armies are in winter camp, things are quiet at the hospitals, and I shall certainly find occasion for visits. For my dear cousin’s sake.” She paused. “It is a dreadful fix you find yourself in, but there’s no use complaining. God did not grant us strength because He thought we wouldn’t require it.”
BULLWHIP DAYS
STRATFORD PLANTATION, VIRGINIA
DECEMBER 5, 1861
The Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him,
and the cords that were upon his arms
became as flax that was burnt with fire,
and his bands loosed from off his hands.
—Judges 15:14
THE THIRD TIME he ran, Jesse packed his waist bells with tallow to silence them. When he was caught, Samuel Gatewood ordered a copper rod riveted to Jesse’s iron belt in the back so he couldn’t reach the bells. The copper rod curved over his head like a buggy whip. The waist bells had been sheep bells, but a cow bell dangled from the new copper rod.
“I intend to waste less time hunting you should you run again,” Master said.
Jesse said nothing.
Jack the Driver set Jesse to feeding logs into the sawmill and locked him to the log carriage with a light chain. “I’ll unchain you when you promise you won’t run no more,” Jack said.
Jesse looked at Jack as if Jack were riffraff.
Jesse guided logs to the blade, flopping them to this side and that as the sawyer commanded. At that time they were sawing white oak.
When it got too dark to work, around five o’clock, Jack led Jesse to the root cellar, which was his jail. When Jesse dipped his head to go underneath the low doorframe, the cowbell clanked and everybody knew Jesse was in his jail until morning. Jack brought supper in a tin pan, and sometimes Jesse ate it and sometimes he didn’t.
The root cellar was beneath the curing house, where hams hung until they took the salt. The cellar was stone, eight by ten, with a dirt floor; dug into a rise behind the big house’s kitchen garden. Since only the ceiling was above ground level and since that ceiling was packed with sawdust, the cellar stayed at forty-five degrees, and Jesse was warm enough under a wool blanket. His bed was a wide plank laid across the potato bins, and his mattress was the same plank.
Chilly air came right through the pocketbook-sized ventilation hole in the door, but Jesse left it open because hunkered down, with his cheek pressed against the door, he could see the stars.
Where was Maggie?
Could she see the stars?
That awful night last Christmas, before Omohundhru seized her, Master Samuel himself had decoyed Jesse down here, and when Maggie shrieked out Jesse’s name, called it again and again, there had been nothing Jesse could do but hurl himself helplessly at the thick door clawing until his fingers bled.
After they turned him loose, soon as he could, he ran.
He didn’t run to get away, he ran to be with Maggie, who was somewhere among the stars. Jesse puzzled out which one; it was that bright star just below the cup of the Little Dipper, that star which has a smaller star tagging along with it, which must be Baby Jacob.
Maggie came to love Jesse more as a star than she’d loved him as a woman. Maggie told Jesse all her secrets. Her and the young master. Didn’t mean a thing. Both just children first time it happened, and the pure delicious deliciousness of it. What about us? Well, what about us? We wasn’t the same. It was grown-ups doing it, as man and wife. For us it was just duty.
His first runaway, Jesse found himself a den on Snowy Mountain which might have belonged to a wolf once, only the wolf was gone and Jesse lay under his coat and a mound of dead leaves and he’d talk to the Maggie star, pour out his heart.
Somewhere below, down the mountain, was Stratford plantation.
When he got so hungry he couldn’t tell one star from another, and couldn’t know which was Maggie, he came down to the Kirkpatrick cabin, where Miss Sallie fed him and warmed him by the fire until the slave patrollers came. Jesse knew Miss Sallie and her husband had been jailed on his account, but he didn’t care. They weren’t any worse off than he was.
Second time he ran he’d been harrowing oat ground. Jack found Jesse’s abandoned team grazing quietly at the base of the mountain. Master set ten men to looking, and a week later they found Jesse. That’s when Master had an iron belt fabricated for Jesse and sheep bells attached to it.
Third time was in September, when they were cutting corn. Jesse packed his bells silent with tallow and ran again. Jesse figured Master wouldn’t stop harvest work to hunt a runaway, but Jesse was wrong. The corn got cut late that year, but Jesse was brought home to Stratford.
The whip didn’t cut Jesse sharp as he expected. After the first few slashes, each additional cut was a broad stroke, like a deathblow applied to his whole back at once. Jesse would have screamed but for the rag between his teeth. It hurt him worse than he’d expected, because he didn’t lose his senses until the end.
Jack the Driver stayed the master’s hand, and for an instant it seemed as if Jack might be next. “He ain’t no use to you dead,” Jack said softly.
Panting, blood-spattered, Master Gatewood threw the bullwhip into the dirt. “He’s no use to me alive,” he said. He stepped to the bushes and vomited, which none of the servants were supposed to see, so they didn’t.
Miss Abigail treated Jesse’s wounds with clean water and soft cloths and comfrey poultices, but Jesse wasn’t aware of her, because of the fever that set in. Miss Abigail wanted Jesse moved back to the Quarters, where he could be looked after properly, but Master wouldn’t hear of it.
Corn and wheat prices were double a year ago, but the new money wasn’t as good as the old money. One afternoon at the mill, Master told Jack the war would be over before spring, “soon as Mr. Lincoln knows we mean business,” and Jack said, yes, sir, surest thing in the world. That very night in the Quarters, Rufus said the blacks were like the Israelites in Pharaoh’s day and Father Abraham was going to set them all free. Jack the Driver didn’t like that kind of talk but didn’t know how he could stop it.
“Until that day of Jubilo we all got to work,” Jack said. “And until the quittin’ bell rings on that day, you gonna live by the sweat of your brow, and don’t be gettin’ notions otherwise.”
A Confederate commissary man came out from Warm Springs to buy twenty of Master’s prime cows, and when Master said he didn’t want to sell, the man said the time would come when he’d sell whether he wanted to or not, and Master got hot and said no matter whether tyranny bore the name “Federal” or “Confederate,” it was tyranny all the same. The commissary man said he’d be back.
Local young men signed on with the Highland Mountaineers or the Bath Cavalry, and when the Federals surrounded Colonel Pegram at Rich Mountain, most of those same boys were captured. Masters Gatewood and Byrd had enlisted with a Richmond regiment which missed that fight. The servants didn’t want any harm to come to them and hoped Father Abraham wouldn’t feel it necessary to lay them low. Many heartfelt prayers were uttered in the negro garret of SunRise Chapel on the two masters’ accounts.
One Sunday late in the year, Aunt Opal and Uther Botkin returned to Stratford with the Gatewoods after church, and while Master Uther sat with Master Samuel in the parlor, Aunt Opal went to the root cellar. “Go inside,” Jack the Driver said. “I don’t reckon Jesse’ll hurt you.”
“Wasn’t that gave me pause,” Aunt Opal sniffed. �
�Was the stink.”
Jack the Driver took away the slop jar, though that wasn’t his task.
Jesse perched on the edge of his plank bed, blanket draped around his shoulders.
“I heard you got skinny,” Aunt Opal said. “I brought you a pie.” When he didn’t reach for it, she set it beside him. “You always was a stubborn boy, but you wasn’t no fool. Why you keep runnin’ away? You know Master’s sworn to bring you back.”
“I don’t care about him,” Jesse said in a dull voice.
“Old fool Uther at the big house right now, tryin’ to buy you away. Brought every dollar he got.”
“His ain’t my home either,” Jesse said.
“Don’t talk foolishness,” Aunt Opal snapped. “ ’Course it is. Whatever other home you ever knowed? Uther’s too old for this trouble. I want you promise you won’t run away no more.”
Jesse didn’t say anything.
“I won’t have that. I ain’t no white master. I ask you a question, I’ll have an answer.”
Jesse licked his lips. “I’ll run till I die.”
Opal pushed her face right up to his and examined his eyes. “Weren’t your baby,” she said.
“I made him mine.”
“Your woman always yearned for another.”
“I got my share of faults.”
“God knows where your family is now.”
Jesse knew perfectly well where they were. Every clear night he pressed his face to the splintery plank door and found the patch of stars and talked to Maggie.
Jesse’s dreamy smile fetched a tear from Aunt Opal’s eyes. She rubbed the tear from her cheek with her apron. “They feedin’ you all right?”
Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the War Page 15