by Wayne Grady
When he freed his slaves, he wrote to Heiskell that night, would it be into this nightmare?
In the morning, he made his way to the Mount Clare train station and bought a ticket to Washington. It was his first time on a train; he sat in the coach and marveled at the speed at which the built-up countryside flew past his window and disappeared behind him. Huge buildings, their roofs barely glimpsed above tall wooden fences, rows of blank-faced houses, fenced pastures, then more buildings; they all sped by so quickly his neck ached from trying to see them. Surely nothing was meant to move at such velocity. In Washington, walking to settle his stomach after his midday meal, he admired the White House and the Capitol Building, both of which had been built by slaves. The trading of slaves, though not the owning of them, had been abolished in the capital that September, one of the saner provisions of the Compromise, and the vast holding pens on the banks of the Potomac, the former stockyards of Franklin and Armfield, the biggest slave dealers in the country, were being demolished or converted to cattle pens. The district, surrounded by Virginia and Maryland, both slave states, was like an armed camp under siege. Congress had passed the bill, but even Washington’s mayor had opposed it, and slave trading had simply moved out to the nearby town of Alexandria, named after the ancient slave-trading center of Egypt.
On one of his walks he followed the City Canal to the Anacostia River, where, when he reached the Congressional Cemetery, he stopped to watch a group of grave diggers exposing a coffin. Armed guards, army men in red tunics with gleaming brass buttons, stood at attention at the cemetery gates, and he asked one of them, a corporal, who was being exhumed.
“President Taylor,” said the corporal.
“Zachary Taylor?” Moody said. Taylor had died in July, apparently of food poisoning. “I served with him in Mexico.” God, had it been only three and a half years ago? The Battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma, smoking corpses, buzzards circling overhead, flags hanging limp from unmanned posts. And then home to Annie and Lucas. Burying Annie. “Why’re they digging him up?”
“Moving him to his home in Kentucky. Springfield, they say, but I ain’t never heard of it.”
“Near Louisburg,” said Moody. “Big plantation. Lots of slaves.”
“Well, he’ll lie more peaceful there, I reckon.”
3.
From Washington he traveled south, into the disturbing tranquility of the Virginia countryside. The croplands and plantation houses, slave quarters, quiet, dusty village squares such as he had known in his youth, he now saw with different eyes. He saw fountains and marketplaces where black women purchased food for their white owners, segregated churches and schoolyards in which only white children played. When he stepped down from the stagecoach in Savannah, he felt engulfed by the city’s altered sameness. Although the population had doubled to fifteen thousand in the thirty years he’d been away, it still seemed the same size, especially after Baltimore and Washington. The new folk all seemed to have fit into the old houses, the old churches, to lounge in the same taverns and inns along River and Bay Streets. Change came slowly in small places, where townspeople were more inclined to see change as a threat. If slavery were to hold out anywhere, it would be in these small towns and rural areas of America, which was pretty much what the South consisted of. Savannah was encased in the past, he thought as he walked to the offices of Harley, Chase and Steele, located in a dignified set of row houses on Congress Street, and emancipation was the future.
He crossed through Johnson Square, a still oasis in which colored nannies wearing starched muslin dresses pushed white babies in carriages draped in cheesecloth. Autumn was less advanced here than it had been in Indiana. Plum and cherry trees were still in leaf, the magnolias had lost their cups and saucers but stood sedately beside the footpaths, and on the front lawns of the white houses, colored gardeners on their hands and knees troweled weeds from the black earth at the bases of perennial shrubs. God was in his heaven, at least the Southern God was in this meridional heaven. Moody was conscious of his own clothing, which was almost that of a frontiersman; he felt like Natty Bumppo. He didn’t know whether to knock on the carved oak door or just walk in. He tried the handle, found it turned, and entered.
He was at the front end of a long hall, with a waiting room on his left and, on his right, a small reception area in which an austere, matronly woman sat at a desk sorting papers. He said his name and that he wanted to see one of the partners about the Moody property. She didn’t look up. He took his hat off and watched her for a while, then cleared his throat, realizing too late that in so doing he had identified himself as a Northerner. She would not look up to a Northerner. She pursed her lips and continued sorting, then carried the sorted papers to a filing cabinet and began filing them. Moody retreated to the waiting room and waited. When she had no more papers to file, she turned to him.
“Moody,” she said. “That would be Mr. Chase. I’ll take you back now.”
She led him down the long hall, past an open office in which three visored scriveners labored at high desks, past another open office filled with more filing cabinets, and finally to a closed door with the name Edwidge Chase engraved on it. When Edwidge Chase retired, Moody thought, he would have to take the door with him. She knocked and opened it without waiting for a response, spoke Moody’s name and stood aside to let him enter. The man seated behind a polished wooden desk was small, perhaps twenty years Moody’s senior, with a full mane of white hair arranged in eccentric swirls on his head. He wore a midnight-blue frock coat over a collarless white shirt, and a gold pince-nez swung from a red ribbon around his neck. Moody recognized him, or rather recognized the red ribbon; before Moody had left home, Lawyer Chase had been to the house many times to consult with Moody’s father. Like the city itself, he had grown more corpulent but remained essentially unchanged.
“So,” said Chase, folding his hands on the desk, “it has taken a tragedy to bring you back to Savannah. I refer, of course, to the death of your father.”
“Hardly a tragedy,” said Moody, who thought he could give him tragedies if he wanted them. “He was seventy-eight, and a devil.”
Chase frowned. “True. But as I myself am seventy-three, his death puts a theoretical ceiling upon my own expectation. Five years more,” he said, looking about the office as though deciding what he would take with him. “I was your father’s lawyer for forty years, and it is true he was a devil, but I shall not be yours for nearly so long.”
“Just so,” said Moody. “As I intend to sell the property, I shan’t have need of any lawyer for very long at all.”
“What? Sell? Sell Plantagenet?”
“And the town house. All of it.”
“But that has been the Moody home for three generations.”
“I know, but I am determined to sell.”
“And the slaves?”
“Here is what I would have you do,” Moody said, taking a chair. “I wish to sell both the plantation and the city property, and to free the slaves.”
“Free the—”
“How many are there?”
“Well, barely forty-five at the last census, counting the servants in the city. You would manumit them all?”
“Yes. And more,” he said. “I want to take whatever money I realize from the sale of Plantagenet, minus your commission, of course, and divide it among them, perhaps make some provision for those who have been there longest, so that they will not be destitute and forced to flee to places like Baltimore or New York. They can choose what to do with their freedom. Will you do that for me?”
Chase leaned back in his chair and regarded Moody somberly.
“What shall become of them?” he asked. “Have you considered it? As your lawyer, it is my duty to ask you to give that question some thought.”
“I have considered it,” said Moody. “They shall become free, and they shall have enough money to do as they please.”
“Freedom doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to y
ou and me,” Chase said, trying to sound wise but managing only to remind Moody of Lawyer Fritts. “Some of them were born on Plantagenet. They don’t know anything else. Sikey was your father’s cook before you were born. Would you turn her out with a few dollars in her pocket?”
“If she and the others decide to stay on and work for the new owner, they can do that, we can make it a stipulation of the sale. Since they’ll be freed, the owner will have to pay them a wage.”
“No one will buy Plantagenet under such conditions,” said Chase. “Why would they pay wages to a freedman when they can buy a slave? Unless, of course, they paid him so little he’d be worse off than when he was a slave.”
“Nonetheless,” said Moody, “I mean to free them. Where’s Casgrain?” he asked suddenly. He’d forgotten about the overseer. “I hope you’ve put him out.”
“God beat you to it, I’m afraid,” said Chase. “Thomas Casgrain died five years ago. Your father ran the plantation until he became too befuddled in his final weeks.”
“No one told me.” Moody stood and put his hat on. “Will you draw up the papers?” he asked Chase, who pursed his thin lips and lifted his thin shoulders, as though to say it was Moody’s funeral, not his. “Good. I’ll send someone over with a list of their names, and come back when the papers are ready to sign.”
“It will keep my scribblers busy until week’s end.”
“If you need me, I’ll be at the town house.”
“Please relay my sympathies to Sikey.”
4.
“Massa Virgil?” Sikey exclaimed, stepping back from the door. “That you? They told us you was coming, but I didn’t believe I’d recognize you.” She didn’t seem to be entirely convinced that it was him. “You don’t need to be rapping on your own front door.”
“How are you, Sikey?” he said, embracing her in view of anyone looking up from the street. She was smaller than he remembered, but still so big he could barely get his arms around her, and she smelled of a pleasantly familiar blend of bread dough and raw sugar.
“Well as can be, I guess. Been hard times since your daddy passed, but we managing, we managing. Come along inside, it getting chilly in the shade, Lord bless and keep.”
She swept him into the house, where his senses were further assailed by reminders of his youth: floor wax, snuffed candles, roast beef, cedar sprigs in the linen closets, an essence of roses that seemed to have lingered in the air since his mother died. The rooms were little changed, some of the furnishings had been replaced, carpets and drapes and a chair or two, but only with newer versions of the old ones. He heard movement upstairs, the maids going about their tasks. His father was two months dead, but the house was obviously being run as smoothly as ever, and Sikey told him it was the same at Plantagenet, “the Gullahs even started planting rice,” she said.
“Edwidge Chase thought some of the slaves had run off,” he said.
“They come back when your daddy died,” she said, and they both laughed.
They were sitting at the big table in the kitchen. Sikey had made tea and placed biscuits on a plate with a pot of Georgia peach preserve beside it. He let her eat two before he took one, and Sikey smiled at that.
“If I didn’t believe who you is before now,” she said, “you just proved it. You sure ain’t your daddy’s son.”
“Was his death sudden? Was he in a lot of pain?”
“Can’t say it was sudden, no. Your daddy in pain all his life, but he wan’t your daddy for a long time before he passed, bless and keep. Didn’t hardly know where he was half the time.”
Moody looked about the kitchen. “So little has changed,” he said.
“We been keeping the place going.”
“How?”
“Lawyer Chase give us money from time to time.”
“I didn’t know about Casgrain, either,” he said. “You all been looking after Plantagenet, too?”
“We did what we could. But you the young massa now.”
“No!” he said, more forcefully than he had intended. He bit into his biscuit. “My plan is to sell this house and Plantagenet, and then go back to Indiana.”
Sikey stopped chewing and stared at him. “Indiana?” she said. “Where that?”
“West of here, and north.”
“You going to sell this house?”
“I’ll free you first,” he said. “You and the others. And give you some money.”
“Free us?” she said. “We been free since Casgrain died. Not paper free. Is that what you saying, you make us paper free?”
“Edwidge Chase said I’d be doing you a disservice by freeing you. He said that without whites looking after you, you wouldn’t know what to do or where to go. What do you say to that?”
She regarded him for another half minute, and then started laughing. She laughed so hard she had to hold on to the table to keep from falling off her chair. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and she wiped them with a corner of her apron.
“White folk looking after us?” she said. “That what they been doing? Looking after us? Oh, Lord! After all our years looking after them?” She was laughing in her anger. “Oh, Massa Virgil,” she said, still drying her eyes, “you can free us any time you want.”
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“Go?” she said. “Why would I go somewhere?”
“You mean you’d stay here in Georgia?” He experienced a sensation almost of relief that he wouldn’t be condemning her to Washington or Baltimore. He wouldn’t have to feel guilty about that, too.
“Yes,” she said, “I’d stay in Savannah. I’d stay right here in this house, Massa Virgil, right here where I been since I a child, free or not free.”
She looked around the kitchen with a proprietary air that seemed to take in all of Savannah, all of Georgia, all of the South.
“Of course, it be better free,” she said.
5.
Moody’s old room was on the second floor of a wing of the house his father evidently had not ventured into since Moody moved away. It wasn’t exactly untouched, it had been dusted and straightened, the curtains drawn and shut regularly, since it overlooked Jefferson Street, but in it were the same spindle bed and dresser, the tall mirror and the spool-legged nightstand he’d had all his young life. There was the mark he’d put in the footboard with his first penknife, and in the wardrobe he found, to his amazement, a shirt, trousers and waistcoat that fit him, and a pair of boots he’d worn when he was eighteen that also fit. No winter coat, and he had forgotten to buy one in Baltimore. The view from the window was the same, too, the trees of course taller, or else different trees, the houses across the street the same but with new occupants, or the descendants of the old occupants. As was he. The dormers in the servants’ quarters, high up under the slates, were as blank and dusty as they had been when, as an adolescent, he’d watched them fervently for signs of a woman’s shadow against the curtains.
He took the few things he’d brought with him out of his bag, his razor and hairbrush, some clothes that needed laundering, a copy of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, which he had read on the stagecoach and would keep for Sabetha. He arranged the toiletries on his washstand, dressed in the clothes that had been in the wardrobe, and left the room to reacquaint himself with the rest of the house. He told himself he was looking for his father’s whiskey supply, now his, which had always been kept in a cupboard in the downstairs parlor, along with a decanter and a set of crystal glasses given to his parents at their wedding by his mother’s brother, his uncle Patmore. If it was not there he would not ring for a servant, like a master, and would continue to explore the premises. But it was there, the decanter nearly full and an unopened bottle beside it, as though his father had died after laying in provisions for a siege. The glass was as heavy as stone in his hand, the whiskey adding little to its weight.
He took his second drink down to the kitchen, where Sikey was preparing lunch. The smell of rice and beans reminded him of Mexico, moros y cristianos
, and that made him think of Annie. The six servants seated around the big table were all talking at once, but fell silent and stared down at their plates when he appeared in the doorway. Sikey said she would bring his dinner up to him in the dining room. “Your daddy always took his dinner upstairs.” But he said no, he would sit in the kitchen with the others. The servants looked at one another in vexation. He could tell from their silence that Sikey had told them about his plans to free them, and sensed that they would like to talk about it among themselves without him sitting at the table. But he sat anyway.
“In case you have any questions,” he said. “Or suggestions.”
Sikey introduced them: Bette and Maisie, the upstairs maids; Temperence and Willa, kitchen maids; and Geo and Cane, who worked in the stables behind the house. Geo was old enough to have been there when Moody was, and said he remembered giving the young master his riding lessons. Moody said he remembered that, too, although he did not. Sikey said Geo had worked in the rice fields at Plantagenet until Casgrain died, then had come to the house in Savannah to manage the horses. Cane, his son, was the stableman.
“I’ll be wanting to go out to Plantagenet this afternoon,” Moody said to Geo. “I can ready my own horse,” he said, “but I’d appreciate it if you came with me. Or maybe Cane here. Which of you knows the people at Plantagenet best?”
“I do,” said Geo.
“Will you come, then?”
Geo looked at him noncommittally. “You freeing them, too?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Geo contemplated this for a moment. “What about the land?” he asked.
For a moment, Moody thought he meant was he freeing the land, too. “My plan,” said Moody, “is to sell the land, and this house, and to divide the money among all of you. Maybe give each of you so much for every year you worked for my father. And your free papers, of course.”