Blood Red Roses

by Russell James

  Several slave women bustled around the dark, oppressively hot kitchen. One looked up at me.

  “What you want?”

  “I’m new. I was told to fetch my supper here.”

  “Washington done thinks he run the house lately. Uppity gyp. You dat new boy?”

  “Jebediah Kingston.”

  She shook her head. A bead of sweat flew from her broad nose.

  “Don’t understand why white trash can’t cook they own food. Ain’t no better than the rest of us.”

  While the phrase would follow me the rest of my life, Beechwood was the first place I’d been called “white trash.” Later it was explained to me that slaves held the lowest class of white society in complete contempt. While the slaves were born into society’s bottom rung , with no hope of advancement, through no fault of their own, a white person alongside them had sunk to such depths by his own volition.

  The woman disappeared into the dark. When she reemerged, she handed me a wooden bowl. I looked in with profound disappointment to see it filled with cornmeal mush. A chunk of dried pork sat on the center.

  The slave noticed my dissatisfaction and laughed.

  “You didn’t think you getting no food from the big house, did you? Boy, why you giving yourself airs?”

  Laughter from the others rolled out of the gloom. I slunk away from the door and slid to the ground beneath one of the kitchen windows. My spoon was little more than a wooden paddle, but I raised the bowl to my lips and gratefully shoveled the soupy mush into my mouth. I’d certainly eaten worse, and the smoked pork had none of the gamey, half-rancid flavor that the meat on my uncle’s farm always had.

  “Another one gone missing,” I heard one of the slaves in the kitchen say. “Don’t know his name.”

  “Name of Percy,” another said. “Mother don’t know nothing, jus’ that she woke up and he done gone.”

  “What you think happened?” a third woman asked.

  “What you mean? Ramses done killed him, that’s what happened. Boys done vanished since he come here, right? Bastard got the bloodlust; I know the look. Watched him tie Wilma to a pole in the sun and leave her there three day. Done it with a smile on his face. You don’t think he smile wider to kill one?”

  “I seen him shoot a runaway before. Use that long rifle. Man made a break for it when he knew he was goin’ under the lash. Cool as evening, Ramses drew that rifle and took a bead on the man. He let him get all the way to the tree line, let him be one step away from a place to hide. Then Ramses done pulled that trigger. Slave’s fool head exploded like an overripe melon. Ramses just grinned and lowered that rifle like he’d shot nothing more than a rabbit. Carved a notch in that gun stock of his right then and there.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck went stiff. Clear as day, I could imagine Ramses in that dreadful scene: cold, efficient, cruel.

  “See,” the first slave said. “He the kind of man who needs to kill, finds an excuse. Probably didn’t kill in a while before he got here, and had to satisfy that bloodlust.”

  “He gonna get caught. You just can’t go killin’ slaves. The sheriff’ll come.”

  That was true. There were laws on the books that protected slaves from murder. A slow, starving death was permitted, but blatant executions might be enough to get an insurrection going. Slaves outnumbered whites in this county. No one wanted an insurrection.

  “Ain’t nobody keepin’ track of us,” the first slave said. “The sheriff don’t care.”

  That was probably also true. The sheriff would investigate large, consistent purchases of slaves, if he investigated anything at all. There were only records of slaves born on the plantations if the owners took the trouble to keep them. Slaves being taxable property, the Powells might not be so precise. It was possible no one would ever know if those boys went missing.

  I scraped all I could from my dinner bowl, then ran my finger around it and licked off every drop. I stood by the kitchen door to return the bowl and was roundly ignored. I left it on the ground and returned to the stable.

  The sun hung low in the sky, low enough to drown the interior of the stable in shadows. At the far end, the silhouettes of the two worn-out nags stared out of their stall doors, inky shapes against the dusky stalls. Victor brooded in the closest stall, invisible, a black horse camouflaged by darkness. But I knew him to be there. I could feel him staring at me, a spider to a fly. I entered the stable and shuffled along the wall farthest from Victor’s stall.

  The day had wearied me, especially as it followed a night plagued with poor sleep and the appearance of the spirit of my father. As no one would be seeking me out the rest of the waning day, the loft accommodations, so initially uninviting, now called like a Siren. I began to ascend the ladder.

  Behind me, from Victor’s stall, came a sound I can only describe as a hiss. My blood chilled in my veins. My hands locked on the ladder rungs. I spun my head about toward the animal.

  From the darkness glowed two eyes, white as bone, suspended in the impenetrable shadow as if floating. The horse exhaled another slithering hiss, followed by a huff and a flash of those teeth that had just tried for a hunk of my flesh.

  I bolted into the loft, scampering up the ladder rungs like a monkey up a palm tree. I crossed into the loft and smacked into an absolute net of spiderwebs. It coated my neck and face like a sticky lace veil. It threatened to clamp shut my eyes and seal my mouth. I clawed and swiped at the cloying mass.

  When I finally cleaned my face, I sat heavily upon the old, dry boards, my heart pounding so hard I could feel its throbbing in my extremities.

  As I calmed myself, I took stock of my new sleeping chamber as best I could in the growing darkness. There was space to sleep, for a boy my size at least. I lay down and slowly stretched my feet onto the abyss at the loft’s dark end, anticipating that they would touch something unknown, or worse, that something unknown would reach out and touch them. At full stretch, I felt nothing.

  I pulled my sack across the floor and made it my pillow. It was just this morning I’d filled it at my uncle’s house, an event that seemed impossibly long ago, on some other planet.

  Outside, night had fully fallen. Many days at my uncle’s farm, I’d prayed for deliverance from that purgatory. My prayers had been answered with admission to hell.

  Chapter Six

  To my astonishment, Victor transformed into the model equine the next morning.

  I’d risen with the false dawn, cognizant of Washington’s warning and aware that Ramses wouldn’t miss a minute of daylight working the slaves in the fields. I opened Victor’s stall door, Visions of the great black beast charging forward and trampling me filled my head. I gripped his limp, unbuckled bridle in my quaking hands.

  But Victor stepped forward, slow, majestic, calm. He wheezed a reassuring chuff and dipped his massive head to present it for the bridle. I slipped it on as smoothly as Cinderella’s glass slipper and buckled it tight. The saddle and the blanket went on as easily as saddling a fence rail. The steed didn’t so much as flinch.

  I thought that perhaps I’d misjudged the horse; perhaps I’d stunk so of fear in my new surroundings that he’d reacted with alarm. Perhaps Victor had to display some sort of dominance, establish the hierarchy in the stable. Whatever the reason, I was much cheered at his changed disposition, and further buoyed by the rosy glow of the rising sun.

  “Victor!” Ramses voice boomed like a cannon from outside the stables.

  Victor practically leaped in response and went straight for the open stable door, bowling me aside in the process. He stopped short of his master, and Ramses hung his whip and rifle on the saddle. He mounted the steed. Ramses passed me one glance from beneath the shadow of his hat. The low sunlight illuminated the silver tent in the center of his face.

  “Boy, have two mules hitched to the plow on the south forty after dinner, you hear?” he said.

  “Yes, sir!” I didn’t even know where the mules were.

  Then Victor took Ra
mses out to the fields.

  I took my breakfast at the cookhouse in the same manner as my supper, and received the same fare. Washington delivered me a sharp warning that Master Powell would be down to the stables this morning, and that all needed to be in order. Given the total disorder of the place, the news resurrected all the dread the day’s promising start had suppressed.

  Later, I led the two horses out to the corral at the stable’s rear. In full daylight, their sorry state aroused great pity within me. They moved with arthritic gaits, painful to behold.

  Off behind a barn, in their own enclosure, I saw the two mules Ramses had demanded. They looked to be in better shape than the horses, more a tribute to their hardier nature than better care, I assumed.

  I reentered the stables. I grabbed a rusting pitchfork and set to mucking out the stalls. While painfully aware of my shortcomings without my father’s copious equine knowledge, I decided that perhaps I could improve Master Powell’s assessment with a clean stable. Whoever had the chore before me had done a poor job, and a solid mass of straw and dried offal caked each corner of the sad horse’s stalls.

  I was hard at work chiseling one of the lumps when a voice rang out behind me.

  “Boy? Stable boy?”

  This voice was far weaker than Ramses’s, reedier than Washington’s. I stepped out of the stall and into the presence of Master Powell.

  Given the imposing stature of his heads of household and field, Master Powell’s appearance took me quite by surprise. A rotund little man, he was short enough that I could look him straight in the eye. A crescent of unkempt silver hair edged his shining bald head and continued down his cheeks into a set of muttonchops. His skin had a pasty color, the opposite of Ramses’s sunbaked brown. Powell wore a full suit despite the heat, with a ruffled shirt, a golden vest and knee britches.

  My station in life certainly made me no judge of fashionable trends, but I’d never seen anyone wear so anachronistic a suit before. It reminded me of a painting I’d seen in the courthouse, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

  “Ah, there you are!” Master Powell seemed relieved, though I had the impression that it was not so much because I was in the right place, but because he’d gotten himself to the right place. “Tell me your name, boy.”

  “Jebediah, sir.”

  He nodded in understanding. Looks of surprise and then consternation crossed his face in quick succession. He perused the walls and roof, more in frantic search than in measured inspection.

  “Have the horses ready, boy.” Apparently my name was already forgotten. “We may call for them after dinner. We may take the carriage into town and attend the Wilkerson’s ball.”

  Without waiting for a response, he turned and marched out of the stables. His head still flicked to and fro as if seeing much, but taking in nothing.

  To make this abominable stable presentable would be a great undertaking, but with time I could make a go of it. But getting the two broken-down nags to drag the collapsing carriage into town would require an Old Testament-level miracle. I quickly envisioned myself at the receiving end of Ramses’s whip.

  “He won’t remember,” a woman’s voice said from the other door of the stable.

  I whirled to see a woman backlit by the daylight, a tangle of long blonde hair illuminated like a halo by the sun’s brilliant rays. She looked in her twenties and wore a dark green dress cut more closely than my eyes had even seen before, with a neckline that plunged to reveal a pair of firm, round, alabaster breasts. Her face had the hue of porcelain, her eyes the jade shade of jewels. My jaw dropped at the unexpected sight of her. My heart fluttered as if to take wing.

  “He never sleeps anymore,” she said. “In the daylight, he is a sleepwalker. Nothing comes of his actions.”

  Her voice floated through the air like filaments of spun gold, devoid of the coarse accent that affected those in my station of life. Instead she spoke with the long, lilting drawl cultivated for generations for the sole purpose of making men wilt.

  “But at night,” she continued. She wagged a finger my way. “Then he must be minded.”

  She proceeded into the stable. There was a slight wobble to her walk, just a hint of the stagger my uncle displayed when he dipped too deeply into his cups. She flicked back her hair and looked me over. Closer now, I noted a slight glaze upon those enchanting eyes.

  “So it’s true we have a new stable boy?” she said.

  Captivated by this apex of pulchritude, I could not summon an answer.

  She passed me and grazed my jawline with her fingernail. I swore I felt sparks. The scent of lilacs wafted from her fingertips. Her head lolled a few inches in my direction, and she flashed a sly smile.

  “Such a pretty boy. I’m Lucinda. I’ll see you again.”

  She walked out the door, following the same path as her father back to the main house. Her hips swayed in a hypnotic cadence with each step, and I was drawn to watch her walk away like a moth to a flame. In all my short life, I’d never seen such a vision, nor even hazarded that a creature so lovely might grace the face of the Earth.

  With the possibility of seeing Lucinda again to buoy me, and the master of the estate a harmless loon, I dared think that life at Beechwood might not be as bleak as I had assumed. My naïveté would nearly cost me my life.

  Chapter Seven

  The dread of delivering the mules for plowing haunted me through the rest of the morning. My encounter with Victor had made me quite wary of the animals here. Worse yet, I had no idea where I was to take the creatures, and I harbored a torturous fear of getting them there late.

  So rather than wait until after dinner, I decided to lead them out before, to provide some insurance against my inexperience.

  The mules proved more compliant than Victor, and only slightly less so than the poor stabled horses. I did not know where the “south forty” was, but I’d seen the sun rise and knew the orientation of south. I led the mules in that direction along the widest path through the cotton fields.

  This was the first time I’d seen a cotton crop up close. The plants grew up waist high to me. The bright green leaves of summer had begun to brown and shrivel. Puffs of white fluff topped spindly, blackened sticks like offerings of the dead to the gods. The rows stretched out for acres to a distant tree line.

  I came upon the slave quarters, deserted in the middle of the workday. The rude cabins were constructed of rough-hewn logs. Crumbling mud chinked the gaps. None had windows and, to my shock, some did not have doors, exposing the occupants to the elements year round. Dirt passed as floors and mildewed, mossy shingles provided haphazard roofing. I’d lived in rough surroundings and had deemed the shed at my uncle’s farm fit for nothing but beasts. But these cabins brought shame to my heart, both for my poor appreciation of my relative abundance, and for the men of my race who would condemn others to such a meager existence.

  I passed a group of slaves working this section of the fields. I was astounded to find that they were women and children. At that young age, I was still quite naïve and had not been exposed to plantation life. I knew in some way that slaves worked the fields. But in my boy’s assumptions, the men did such odious work, while the women and children were home, as the farm children were with me, perhaps engaged in less backbreaking chores. But here they all toiled as men, rags draped over their heads for protection from the raging sun, sweating coursing down their faces. All dragged a cloth bag their equal in size, stuffed with harvested cotton. They bent and stooped and picked and plucked with hands made calloused by the rough, sharp edges of the dead cotton leaves.

  The slaves paid me no heed as I passed. They watched the cotton and their fingertips. The group sang as they worked, but not the lusty type of tune I heard roll from saloon doors, nor the jaunty cadences sung by new soldiers on the way to war. These slaves intoned a dirge, a deep, mournful song of the slaves of Israel and their quest for freedom.

  “Go down, Moses. Way down to Egypt’s land. Tell o-old
Pha-raoh, to let my people go.”

  Since the war’s end, the plight of these people has been laid bare for all to see. But as a boy, I was told the lie we all let ourselves believe. Slaves were happy in their lot; slaveholders were fair and benevolent. This peculiar institution was for the good of all. Even if it took a war, we had to defend it and thus defend true civilization.

  At fourteen, this was my first epiphany. These people did not look happy. These quarters did not look fit. Ramses seemed anything but benevolent, and I’d not seen his worst. Yet.

  To my relief, I saw the plow up ahead by the side of the path, set to turn under the harvested cotton plants. All I wanted to do was get back to my humble stable and wash the memories of these slaves’ sad existences from my mind.

  I brought the mules in place and set their harness to the plow. Across the path and a few yards down, a young female slave sat beside the hard-packed earth. Her shoe was off, and she massaged her ankle. A grimace of great pain twisted her face.

  From farther down the path came the ebony stallion Victor, carrying Ramses at full gallop. Ramses pulled up to the woman and stopped. A cloud of dust from the horse’s hooves coated her. She averted her eyes.

  “What’re you doing there?” Ramses commanded.

  “My ankle, sir,” she said. Her squeaking voice trembled in fear. “I done twisted it, twisted it bad.”

  I did not doubt her veracity. The pained look upon her face and her ministrations to her swollen ankle had preceded Ramses’s arrival, and she had no reason to act such a scene for my benefit.

  “More like malingering,” Ramses said, “when there’s harvesting to be done.”

  The young woman began to quake. Ramses pulled his coiled whip from his saddle. From her position, crouched in terror, face downcast, she could not see the smile that creased Ramses’s face. But I could.

  “Drop your shirt,” he ordered.