Charis in the World of Wonders

by Marly Youmans

  “Now, Sheriff, I have always played straight with you, sir. I can’t let on to things I know nothing about.”

  Oliver’s gaze hardened even more, and the pleasant façade faded. “Toby, I know your pappy and you got into some trouble o’er in Lawson County.”

  “Yessir, I reckon we did”, Tobit sighed. They had been over this many times. “Seems trouble can find a man no matter what he has done, or not done. I told you before that neither my father nor I have ever dealt with the ‘shine. Sheriff Quinn and that old police chief in Harper Bay had other reasons for disliking my father. Reasons I guess we both know, but ‘shining wasn’t one of them.”

  A look of exasperation passed over the sheriffs face as his fingers toyed at the brim of the hat sitting on the seat next to him. He gazed back up at Tobit, trying to look officious, but to Tobit he looked like a flatulent toad.

  “Toby, whatever may be the truth about that, you are likely to hear things. All you colored people are tight.”

  How many times was this man going to work “Toby” into this conversation? thought Tobit, who kept his composure and shook his head ruefully.

  “Not so tight as white folk might think. If they know you don’t hold with something, they aren’t likely to speak of it to you no matter the color of your skin.”

  The round, sweaty, pasty face formed a frustrated frown as the car was put into gear before the sheriff spoke again. “I reckon you had it nice, Toby, back in my grandpa’s day. Ain’t got to be the way it is now, but that’s up to you. I plan on running all the ‘shiners out of this county. I reckon you best remember that it was being uppity that got your pappy run out of Harper Bay. You should take care you don’t make the same mistake.”

  With that the sheriff’s car roared off with a crunch of loose gravel beneath its tires. Tobit steadied Joe-boy before urging him on with a slight pop of the reigns. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder at the sheriff’s car rounding the bend in the road behind him.

  Tobit snorted to himself. Driving the ‘shiners out of the county? More like making sure they paid him to operate in these parts. It was a dangerous game that young man played. The small-time ‘shiners were one thing, but the fingers of big-city gangsters were stretching into these backwoods counties.

  While Tobit was lost in his thoughts, Joe-boy turned by habit into the long lane home. The crunch of the oyster shells Tobit used to gravel the drive brought him out of his musings. Chickens that were looking for bits of crushed-shell calcium protested with indignant clucks as the uncaring mule plodded through their scattering flock.

  On the right side of the lane Tobit’s beehives sheltered in the filtered shade of long, lean pines. On the left side was a small field where he grew strawberries, with a boundary of blueberry shrubs near the edge of his property.

  His home was a white, two-story frame structure. It was beginning to need painting, but that would have to wait, given his money problems. It had been built by freed slaves, from whose heirs Tobit had bought it.

  As Joe-boy made his way to the unpainted barn, Tobit mused on his own mother having been born into slavery, though she never claimed any memory of it. His father had been born a freeman, as had his grandfather. Neither had been born in the Americas.

  His grandfather had been born somewhere in North Africa. There were conflicting stories involving the Tell Atlas mountains, or, conversely, Tunisia. What was more certain was that his family had originated in those mountains and then moved somewhere near Tunis.

  The old man claimed that they were from a holdout clan of Christian Berbers. Given the time frame, midnineteenth century, this seemed unlikely to Tobit, and there had been some insinuation that his grandfather had adopted this story to justify having assisted the French in their conquests in North Africa. Still, his name, Augustine, hinted at some tradition related to the lost Christianity of the Maghreb.

  Augustine had become a runner for the French forces, and hence the surname Messager. At some point Augustine saved the life of a young captain, Tobiel Saint-Sauveur, who belonged to a wealthy and influential French family. He became semiofficially attached to this young, rising officer and served him across the far-flung Second French Empire.

  During that service Augustine wed the daughter of an Ethiopian merchant. They followed the French officer to Martinique, where Tobit’s father, Tobiel, was born, named in honor of the officer. It was there that the officer died as the result of a duel with the offended brother of one dalliance or another.

  Saint-Sauveur’s will stipulated that a generous cash payment be made to Augustine, and the family honored it. With this bequest, Augustine set his eye on the opportunities in the growing American nation. He settled in New Orleans because he thought his knowledge of French would serve him well. He also made his legal name Augustine Freeman Messager, and that of his son Tobiel Freeman Messager.

  The family thrived in New Orleans. Tobiel eventually moved to the coast of the Carolinas to expand the family business, and it was there that Tobit was born and baptized, Tobit Freeman Messager.

  Tobit laughed to himself. All his life other colored folk had been irritated by his middle name. They thought it snobbish and an aspersion on their own slave descent. In truth, while Augustine’s Berber ancestry made him overly proud of his free status, his wife had been colored, and Tobit’s own mother had been born in slavery, so Tobit felt their irritation to be as snobbish as what they imagined from the Messagers—none of which kept him from naming his own son Tobias Freeman Messager.

  As Tobit climbed from the cart to unload the dresser, Okra leapt down to hunt for mice or rats. He was often a timid dog around people, and unsettled by loud noises, but he was bold with rodents. He followed a scent into the cornfields that bordered Tobit’s property.

  Tobit had dreamed of one day buying the fields on either side of his own place. He once had seven acres altogether, enough for his bees, his berries, some fruit trees, and a large garden. A half acre was mostly useless swampy woodland that descended toward Rush-Knott Creek. There were thirty acres of land on either side that he had long planned to purchase and make a proper farm.

  Now that no longer seemed possible, and his jaw set tight as he thought about it. He led Joe-boy into the paddock, offering him an apple in payment for his work. It was the crash of ’29 and that boy-sheriff who had disrupted the dream. The money was gone now, and he had even had to sell two acres along the north boundary so that he could pay off the overall mortgage.

  All he had was four acres, including the swampy land, a cow, and the mule. Even making the taxes was growing difficult. The assessors were harder on Negroes than they were on white folk, and the Lord help you if a white man with powerful friends had set his sight on your property.

  Tobit often did not sleep well as his mind pondered the possibility of losing this place. He knew he was better off than many folk; at least he had enough property for some level of self-sufficiency. Still, it haunted him.

  He sighed. Once he had envisioned buying those acres so that he would have enough land to lease out when he was too old to tend it himself. That would have let his wife, Anna, and him stay on this place and not be a burden to their son, Tobias.

  Tobit shook his head as he checked the wooden handles he had lathed and was curing. When they were dry enough he would do the final sanding. He sometimes found spades, rakes, and such that people had thrown away simply because the handles had broken. He would turn new handles, with a foot-powered lathe he and Tobias had cobbled together, and sell the repaired tools, when he could. Between the unspoken threats of the sheriff and the resentment of many of his own folk, Tobit could not count on anything resembling a fair price.

  The resentment rose from his former position as a purchasing agent for Judge Oliver, combined with his having moved into the county from the city, if Harper Bay counted as a city. It was not that the judge was an unfair man; it was just that any kind of bartering sets up at least a trace of an adversarial relationship. It was worse among h
is fellow Negroes when a white man would be the most significant beneficiary. At the same time they harbored resentment for colored folk who might be building wealth, as if it were a betrayal of their race to do so.

  Then there was also Tobit’s religion. Colored folk in this part of the country had only a little less suspicion of Catholics than did the white Protestants. They appreciated the schools opened by missionary orders, but remained imbued with fundamental distrust of papists. In Tobit’s case, they thought him standoffish and somehow outside of the community formed by the color of their skin.

  As he shuffled about inside the barn musing on these things he saw Anna going from the house to the garden. The basket in one hand and the short-handled metal claw in the other indicated that she was going to dig up some potatoes.

  Her life had become hard, but still she moved with a smooth grace. He could detect the barest beginning of a stoop, but thought it as much the weight on her mind as the physical wear of the world. When Tobit had been dismissed by Sheriff Oliver as the purchasing agent for Oliver Trade and Produce, Anna had taken to cleaning the houses of well-to-do white folk.

  Cleaning houses, clothes, even cooking, whatever she could do—Tobit had thought since first he had met her that he would protect her from such a grinding life. Proud fool, he admonished himself these days.

  She was younger than he by more than a few years. The only daughter of a proud and selfish man whose wife had died when Anna was a young girl, she had taken care of her father at the expense of any real life beyond that.

  Tobit was in his thirty-seventh year and she in her nineteenth when they had met. He was working for the Olivers, and Anna’s father, Walter Wheeler, was farming fifty acres of tobacco. Walter and Anna lived in a house that Wheeler had built by connecting two shotgun bungalows. It was a large but rambling affair, a rabbit run of many small rooms. Wheeler was pleased with its size, even if it was beyond inefficient.

  As Tobit and Wheeler haggled over the purchase price of the leaf the older man was too sick to harvest, they sat in the largest of the many rooms. This one acted as a parlor, though you had to pass through two smaller, nearly useless rooms to access it. Wheeler rang a bell sitting on the table between them, and Anna had appeared with a pitcher of lemonade and a half dozen small cheese sandwiches.

  She seemed older than her years, but only in bearing. She was dark-skinned, with a round face and hair pulled into a flat bun on the back of her head. Other than being a bit tall and shapely, nothing really stood out about her until she lifted her eyes to look at the man doing business with her father.

  “Toby, this is my daughter, Anna”, Wheeler had introduced in his raspy, consumptive voice.

  It was then that she looked up from the floor and the largest, warmest, and most velvety brown eyes that ever Tobit Freeman Messager had seen smote him through his heart.

  He shook his head, coming out of the past and into the grim present. Poor Anna; he could not help but think she deserved more. He glanced down, just outside of the barn door. The yellow dog was looking at him with contemplative curiosity.

  “Well, Okra,” he chuckled, “ain’t much I can do about this situation, it seems to me. But, I can go and help the woman dig up some taters.”

  Anna was tired, but there was still supper to get. At least the workweek was over and she could try to revive her strength and spirit over the weekend. She saw Tobit closing the barn door and heading over toward the garden. That strange yellow dog, seeming to have figured out where the master was going, was trotting ahead of him.

  Tobit just plods nowadays, she decided. Tobit’s footsteps had become slower and heavier the past few years. His arms hung loose and heavyhanded as he mechanically lifted one foot and then another. She had questions for the good Lord about this: why this good man should be so put upon.

  She shook her head to herself. Tobit was so much better a man than ever had been her father. She knew it was not her place to judge, but she could not help feeling that way.

  Tobit’s name was known to her when first her father had introduced them. She was surprised by Tobit’s appearance. Walter Wheeler had been a black man who loathed most everyone of his own race, though he would never have admitted as such. When he talked of Tobit he often made much of the younger man’s “French-Ayrab” ancestry. Anna had thought for sure Tobit would be what folk called a high yellow.

  The man whose gaze met hers was fairly tall, lean but with big bones, and had moderately dark skin. Other than perhaps rather more leanness to his face, he seemed as much like any other Negro as not—except the eyes, which were dark and extraordinary for anyone of any race, with long dark lashes, dark irises, and dark skin as if someone had drawn a fine line around them with ink. Berber eyes, she would decide upon looking at such people in a picture book.

  She had expected Tobit to be haughty and proud, based on what folk sometimes said about him—this Tobit Freeman Messager, this man who worked so high-handedly for the rich, white Olivers. What she found was a man with a quiet, confident pride, and a natural gentleness. He could, at times, be terse, even short-tempered, especially with folk he found suspect. He could also be so stubborn as to make old Joe-boy look solicitous. Nobody was perfect, but most important in Anna’s mind, he was very unlike her possessive, domineering father.

  He was nearly eighteen years older than Anna, but she had always found the young men of her age to be unappealingly clumsy, immature, and self-centered—not so with this man.

  Fate had finally been kind to her. Her often tyrannical father was dying of consumption. That was why Tobit had arranged, for a flat fee, that Oliver Trade and Produce would harvest the Wheeler tobacco and take it to auction. It guaranteed Wheeler a profit, and with only a minor gamble Oliver Trade and Produce should see a larger profit.

  The inevitability of his pending death had removed something of Walter Wheeler’s selfishness. It did him no harm now to let his daughter go, and he thought Tobit a fine man. The great fortune for Anna was one of sheer chance: Tobit was a Roman Catholic, and so was her father.

  Or, so he had been once, since he had not entered a church of any kind since burying his wife. Despite this he remained inordinately proud of his religion. She guessed this was because it set him apart from other Negroes in Chatqua County. He for sure was fond of being set apart.

  Anna liked to think, too, that there was some element of repentance in the old man’s approval of the marriage. So it was that Walter Wheeler went one more time as a living man into a church, for his daughter’s wedding. It was a small affair, since nobody much cared for Wheeler, and few knew his daughter other than as the tall, shapely girl who was burdened with taking care of her ailing and ornery parent. Added to that was the fact that they had to travel nearly fifty miles to the Catholic church in little Washington because Tobit did not dare to step foot in Harper Bay. Among the few folk who would deign to step foot in a Catholic church, even fewer would travel so far to do so.

  She smiled then, thinking about those early years as she set the basket on the ground and knelt carefully so that only her light canvas apron touched the soil. Her father had moved in with them only a few months after the wedding. He was fading fast, though, and died within a year. She had found him easier to love and forgive as he died. Dying had softened him.

  With his death her brother had come back to the county. He was a man much like their father and that was why the two had so often butted heads. The son finally left for a job in Raleigh and had hardly spoken to either of them after that. He rushed home after Walter’s death, and he made much noise about inheritance.

  There was no will, so rather than engage in a bitter, expensive legal battle, Anna and Tobit had acquiesced to most of Elias Wheeler’s demands. In the end, Anna inherited less than a third of the estate. Still, it had helped Tobit in the purchase of this place and gave her a feeling of equality in the possession of it.

  Her reminiscing was interrupted when the yellow dog came bounding into the garden, nosing cu
riously where she was digging potatoes. Anna shooed him away, and he retreated just barely beyond the bounds of disapproval. In a moment Tobit appeared opposite the row from her and dropped creakily to his knees and began brushing aside the loosed soil in search of potatoes.

  “You’ll wear out the knees of your overalls”, Anna fussed.

  Tobit nodded slowly, deliberately. “Reckon so. Don’t recall having ever had a pair of overalls I didn’t eventually wear the knees out of ’em. Well, there was the pair I set afire once, but other than that I’d reckon I’ve killed the knees in all of ’em.

  “Course, now, I’ve got me this clever woman and she saves each pair of overalls so as to use ’em to patch up the knees in the next pair.”

  “Well, if this woman is all so clever as that”, admonished Anna, “she would have married a man who wouldn’t wear out the knees so quickly, and that way save her a lot of work.”

  “I told her many a time she could have done better”, replied Tobit, with a sly smile. Then the smile faded into a somber wistfulness. “I guess that is truer now than ever it has been.”

  “Hush, don’t be feeling sorry for yourself, and for sure don’t be feeling sorry for me”, said Anna. “You are the best thing to ever happen to me, if only because of that boy of ours.”

  Tobit tossed a handful of small potatoes in the basket as he thought of Tobias. “He is a clever young man, that’s for sure. Though what any man or boy sees in those noisy motor contraptions is beyond me.”

  “I don’t know”, mused Anna. “It would be nice to have a car or a truck. We could get over to church in little Washington more often.”

  Tobit nodded as he tossed a larger potato into the basket with a shroud of dusty soil trailing behind it like a shadowy comet’s tail. He and a few of the white Catholics in the county had built a little chapel just outside the county seat, Stonebridge, twenty years back. A priest from Harper Bay would come down to the county for Mass once a month. The little chapel had burnt to the ground one winter. It was so cold that water froze before it could be pumped or even tossed onto the flames.