Up From Freedom

by Wayne Grady

  “So you be selling the land, but not the people on it.”

  “Yes.”

  “You ain’t going to be living in this house?” asked Geo.

  “I hadn’t planned on it, no,” he said.

  “Who be living here, then?”

  “Whoever buys it, I guess.”

  “Where will you live?”

  “I’ve been living in Indiana these past few years,” he said. “I’ve got a family there. I’ll be taking them to Canada.”

  “That little Gullah girl you took from your daddy?” asked Sikey. “I forget her name.”

  “Annie,” said Moody. “No, not her.”

  There was silence around the table.

  After a while, Sikey cleared her throat. “We thank you for our freedom,” she said. It sounded like a grace. “We ain’t sure about the rest of it. Can we talk about it some more after you see Plantagenet?”

  Moody nodded. He felt uneasily that there was something in Geo’s question about the land that he had missed. He decided to ask him about it when they were on their way to Plantagenet. He picked up his fork and took a mouthful of beans and rice.

  6.

  Under the direction of a tall, dignified man the color of a freshly rubbed chestnut, who gave his name as Reverend Ulysses, the slaves had been running Plantagenet for the five years since Thomas Casgrain’s death. His father had had less and less to do with the plantation, and when he died in September, Reverend Ulysses and a council of elders had moved into the Big House, where they apportioned work and food as best they could without access to the family’s bank accounts and credit. The fall rice had been harvested and sold at market, the canals repaired, the fields replanted, firewood cut and stacked outside the Big House and the slave cabins, and winter clothing distributed. Meals were prepared in the detached kitchen house and served communally at huge harvest tables set up in the barn. Some of the women had established a school in the chapel, where, on Sundays, Reverend Ulysses also preached the Gospel. He showed Moody around, pointing proudly to the results of their work. The house and barns were in good repair, the storage bins rat proofed, the stables clean and well ventilated. Moody was reminded of the North Star and Morning Star communes, and wondered if refugees from New Harmony, Reverend Ulysses himself or perhaps even Lucas and Benah, had made their way to Plantagenet after the raid, instead of going to Canada. His head swam with the irony of it. But the reverend said he had not heard of New Harmony, and knew of no model for what they were doing. They just saw the needs as they arose and found the ways to meet them that worked best.

  “How many of you in the Big House?” Moody asked him. They were standing by the stove in the kitchen house, the very room in which Moody had first laid eyes on Annie. Sumpin’ wrong wid y’arm? The reverend handed him a cup of coffee and they sat at the scarred wooden table on which the jug of cucumber water had sat.

  “Six,” said the reverend, speaking carefully. “Three men and three women. There was always women in the Big House, as you may recall, but it was generally thought prudent for them to be somewhere else when your daddy come to call.”

  “My father?” Moody said, divining his meaning. “It wasn’t just Casgrain, then?”

  “Casgrain,” the reverend said bitterly. “No, it was the young men we had to keep from Massa Casgrain.”

  Moody set his cup down. He remembered the upstairs maids in Savannah who hadn’t come down when he’d arrived that morning, who had kept their eyes down at dinner. His father and Casgrain. For a terrible second he remembered Silas Judd and the overseer, Sam Lerner, and Judd’s semi-insane son J. J., who had come back for the boy Julius but had not taken the girl.

  “I am not my father,” he said.

  “No, we can see that.” Could they? Could he? “Geo tells us you plan to sell Plantagenet.”

  “I intend to free you all,” he said. “Would I be doing the right thing?”

  “It not too late to seek a better world,” Reverend Ulysses said, smiling. “But it don’t matter what I think. The council will want to discuss it with you. How long we got?”

  “Not long,” Moody said. “I have to bring a list of your names to the lawyers in Savannah in the morning.”

  “Then you be staying the night here?”

  “If there’s room.”

  Reverend Ulysses laughed. “We’ll find room,” he said. “Maybe you can sleep in one of the empty slave cabins.”

  Moody laughed. He didn’t think the reverend was serious.

  When they returned to the Big House, the five other council members were sitting around the pedestal table that filled most of the dining room. Moody remembered tense family meals at this same table. Reverend Ulysses and Moody took their seats and the reverend introduced each of them in turn: they were Milo Dingham, Ettamae Cutter, Prissy Porter, Rally Palmas and Jewelle Broadman.

  “This here,” said the reverend, “is Virgil Moody. Right now, he own this plantation and us, because he inherit us from his daddy.”

  “Took his time,” said one of the women, Moody thought it was Prissy Porter. “His daddy died two months ago.”

  “Well, he here now,” the reverend continued. “What he want to do is free us, sell the plantation, then give us the money from the sale of it, so much to each according to our years of service. He ask me to ask you if we think that a good idea.”

  There was some chuckling around the table. “He asking the rabbit if it a good idea to shoot the fox and give him the tail,” said Milo Dingham.

  “And since he ask, I told him it better if he ask us himself. So hear him out. Mr. Virgil Moody, go ahead and ask your question.”

  Moody looked around the table. Only the women were sitting straight up in their chairs with their hands folded in front of them. The men had pushed their chairs back and crossed their legs, or thrown one arm over the chair back. But they were all waiting to hear what he had to say. He wondered where he would start.

  “When I was a young man still living here,” he said, “I told my father I would never own slaves, I would never be like him. I didn’t know why I hated slavery then, but I did, and I wanted nothing to do with it or this place. I had two older brothers and thought I would never have to test that conviction, because I would never inherit this property. It was easy for me to call myself an abolitionist, because it wouldn’t cost me anything. Then my brothers died, and my father died, and now here I am, according to Lawyer Chase and the state of Georgia and apparently the will of God, in whom we trust, the owner of this property and all of you who live and work on it. So what does a good abolitionist do when he finds himself a slave owner? He frees his slaves. And that’s what I intend to do.”

  He looked at the council members in turn.

  “I will not own you.”

  “You could sell us,” said Ettamae Cutter, who was sitting directly across from him. “Then you wouldn’t own us either.”

  “I won’t sell you,” he said, looking straight at her. He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. “I had a wife,” he found himself saying. “Her name was Annie, she was a former slave on this plantation. I took her from here thinking I was saving her. We lived together for a long time, first in New Orleans, then in Texas. She had a son, not by me, and I thought I had saved him, too. But I didn’t save either of them. I tried to do the right thing by them, but it ended up being the opposite. I didn’t free them, and I didn’t save them. So I no longer think I know what the right thing is, for anybody. I need you to tell me. I can’t go back and undo what I did, but I can try not to do it again. So please, tell me what you want me to do.”

  “We can’t tell you what to do,” Reverend Ulysses said quietly.

  “Then tell me what you want.”

  “We can do that. But after that it up to you.”

  7.

  “Please have a seat.” Edwidge Chase was wearing a forest-green velvet coat over a pale-yellow chemise and cravat. He smiled at Moody, a cat’s smile, not so much an indication of pleasure as
a peculiar arrangement of the cheek muscles. The pince-nez swung on its red string, for as Moody entered the office he’d been reading the topmost of a stack of papers on his desk, the first of the free papers his scriveners had completed.

  “I can’t say this is ill-advised,” said Chase, nodding at the papers, “for I myself provided you with good advice not to do it. But here they are.”

  “I have two more names for you,” Moody said.

  “Indeed?”

  Moody wrote on a sheet of paper and slid the paper to Chase.

  “ ‘Lucas Moody,’ ” Chase read. “And ‘Benah Moody.’ ”

  “I don’t know if Benah took Lucas’s last name,” Moody said. “She probably did.”

  “This Lucas, he’s a relation of yours?”

  “I owned his mother.”

  “I see.” Chase frowned, then stood and left the room to take the paper to his scriveners. When he returned, carefully parting his coattails before sitting, Moody leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach, in not entirely unconscious imitation of the lawyer.

  “I have, however, changed my mind about selling Plantagenet,” he said.

  Chase leaned forward in his chair. “But this is excellent news,” he said. “As you know, I think it would be a mistake. You have been out to see the property, I assume?”

  “I have. I spent an interesting night there.” The slave cabin had whistled and clapped throughout the night like a thing possessed. Moonlight had sifted between the roof slats, and mice had gnawed incessantly at the solid brick foundation behind his head. He had had to get up half a dozen times to put more wood in the stove. Seldom had the crowing of the cocks and the faint gray light of morning seeping through the uncurtained windows been more welcome.

  “And you have no doubt seen the shambles to which the place has been reduced since your father’s death,” said Chase. “It must have been very sad. Your father was a fine man, but he was not a good overseer of slaves. Neither, for that matter, was Casgrain. You would be wise to restore the plantation to its proper condition before putting it on the market. It will fetch a handsomer sum.”

  “On the contrary,” said Moody. “The plantation is in excellent condition. It is being run extremely well and is turning a profit.”

  “Run by whom?”

  “By the people who have been living on it,” he said, pointing to the stack of free papers on Chase’s desk. He explained about the council of elders. “I intend to give the plantation to them, so they can continue running it.”

  “Give—?”

  “Or sell it to them for a dollar. Whatever makes it legal.”

  “I don’t know that I…”

  “A freedman can hold property in Georgia, can he not?”

  “Well, yes, technically, but…”

  “This will be a consortium of freedmen,” Moody said. “And women. It will be a company, like Pinkerton or the B&O, only instead of producing adulterers and smoke, this one will produce food.”

  “And the Savannah house? You’ll live there without servants?”

  “No, I’ll still sell that. I’ve talked to Sikey about it. She and Geo and the others will move out to Plantagenet.”

  “But where will you live?”

  “I’m going back to Indiana,” he said. “Town called Freedom, not far from Indianapolis. There’s a lawyer in Spencer, Cliff Parker, you can reach me through him. Will you do this, Edwidge?”

  Chase looked at him evenly. Perhaps he didn’t like the familiar address. But then he smiled his cat’s smile and nodded. “I am a lawyer,” he said, “you are my client. I am bound to do my best to fulfill your wishes.” He removed and polished his pince-nez. “Besides, it isn’t often that I get to do something I haven’t already done a thousand times.” He replaced his pince-nez and looked down at the free papers. “I read the newspapers, too, Mr. Moody, and not all of the books on my shelves are law books. I see the way the world is heading. Emancipation is coming as surely as it came to Britain, although I doubt it will come here as peaceably. The South,” he said, looking through his office window onto Johnson Square, “is a leaking ship. ‘I sigh for the land of Cypress and Pine, / Where the Jessamine blooms and the gay Woodbine.’ I myself have never kept slaves,” he continued, turning from the window, “never mind what my scribblers out there might call themselves from time to time, and like most people I have no particular thoughts about slavery, but I am aware that we are entering a new age, one that favors the North. Machines, manufactories, industry, commerce. Mr. Emerson is right to observe that America is descended from a nation of traders and merchants, that what we do best is to buy cheap and sell dear. How did he put it? ‘The English lord is a retired shopkeeper, and we have acquired the vices and virtues that belong to trade. The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls.’ Something like that. What he says is no doubt truer of the North than it has been of the South, but it is true down here nonetheless. We certainly bought our slaves cheap, and we will sell them dearly.”

  “It was also Emerson,” noted Moody, “who said that ‘If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens around your own.’ ”

  “Your father was much better at selling rice than growing it. He left that to others, and disparaged them for it. But, as you are my client, and therefore,” he said, his smile almost detectably increasing in warmth, “the jewel of my soul, I will do what you bid me do.”

  Moody stood and warmly shook the lawyer’s hand, after which Chase pushed the stack of free papers toward him, along with a pen, inkwell and blotter.

  “I will correspond with your Mr. Parker,” he said as Moody signed the papers. “There will be many more papers to sign and monies to disperse from the sale of the properties. You will let me know your will in these matters, when they arise?”

  “I will,” said Moody. “And you will let me know how the enterprise at Plantagenet fares?”

  “Of course. I myself am very interested in seeing how the new South prospers.”

  8.

  Once again, Moody knocked on the door of the Savannah house, and this time was met by Bette, one of the upstairs maids. She pulled the door open wide and stood behind it, a slight figure in a cotton cleaning frock, her black hair tied back with a white kerchief. When he looked at her she lowered her eyes. Moody told her he had the household’s free papers in his satchel, and asked her to tell the others he would like them all to assemble in the parlor.

  “Yes, Massa,” she said.

  “I hope,” he said, “that that is the last time you shall call me or any other white man ‘massa.’ ”

  She looked at him gravely, gave a small curtsy, and walked back toward the kitchen. He continued into the parlor. While he waited, he let his gaze alight on objects in the room. The clock on the mantelpiece, its face painted with an idyllic Scottish countryside, untouched by the time that revolved constantly over it. The uncomfortable settee on which his mother had crocheted baby caps, which she presented to infants born to her husband’s slaves. It was his most constant memory of her. The two pink wing-backed chairs he had not been allowed to sit on as a child, the stolid oak side table bearing two enormous marble vases, always empty of flowers, the glass-fronted gewgaw cabinet that still held, among other things, his father’s perpetually unconsulted brass barometer, a sextant, and a conch shell from one of the Sea Islands, Jekyll Island, he thought it was, on which his mother’s family had grown indigo before the du Bignon family arrived, introduced slavery and drove the less successful planters, those like his mother’s family without slaves, off the island. The old portrait of his mother hung above the fireplace, the original of the miniature he had kept with him since her death. He had held many long, silent conversations with her, and he consulted her now. Did she approve of what he was doing? She gazed upon him fondly, as she always had, and kept her opinions to herself.

  One by one, the six members of the Savannah household came into the parlor. He had set their free papers on t
he oak side table, between the vases, Geo’s on top and Sikey’s on the bottom. He stood looking through the window onto Jefferson Street, at the large chestnut leaves falling onto the sidewalk, and when everyone was assembled behind him and the rustling had stopped, he turned and began to speak.

  9.

  He hadn’t exactly expected dancing and singing, but still he was surprised by the solemnity with which his father’s former servants received their writs of freedom. It had been the same at Plantagenet. They accepted the papers as though they were the payment of a debt so long overdue that the settling of it was more an embarrassment to the debtor than the occasion of joy to the parties to whom the debt was owed. Geo took his free paper with a tear in his eye, but the younger members simply looked at one another and smiled. They had, it was true, enjoyed a measure of freedom since his father’s death, and they perhaps saw this settlement more as a confirmation, or completion, of that state than as a new degree of emancipation. They’d all elected to move out to Plantagenet and work with Reverend Ulysses and the council. Sikey said she liked the kitchen house out there, with the apartment above it for herself, and Moody noticed that Geo, though he affected an interest in the brass barometer, could not hold back a small smile when she said it.

  When the others left the parlor, Sikey remained behind, and Moody invited her to sit on one of the wing-backed chairs, while he took the other and waited to hear what she wanted to say. She sighed as she settled onto the cushioned seat, put her head back and, holding her free paper in her expansive lap, looked up at his mother’s portrait.

  “I come in here from time to time,” she said, “pretend I’m looking for something or have some chore to do, then just sit here, waiting for the kettle to boil or the bread to rise, and look at her picture. This was her room.”

  “I don’t remember much about her,” Moody said. Hers had been an unnerving sense of calm about to be shattered, of peace bitterly gained by sacrifice and surrender. She was, he suddenly realized, the South for which Edwidge Chase had so elegiacally sighed.