by Jon Walter
I jump down from the seat and run ahead to be with Hubbard. That way there’ll be two of us if there’s a problem, but it’s OK, the old man don’t hardly give us a second look, just keeps scraping at the earth as we walk on by.
‘You want me to take a turn with the horse?’
‘Sure,’ says Hubbard. ‘Be nice to sit up with Celia for a while.’
I take hold of the bridle and lead us on along the road. It ain’t hard work cos the nag don’t have the strength to pull against me. Our horse sure has got the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen, and she snickers when I rub my hand along the length of her nose. Perhaps she likes being free just the same as we do. ‘When we get there,’ I tell her, ‘we won’t ever make you work again. We’re gonna build you a lovely little shed all of your own and you can stand in it and eat hay all day.’
When we reach a trough that has water, I let her drink till she’s ready to move on. She sure takes a long time, but that don’t matter. We’re going so slowly, another few minutes at the trough won’t make any difference.
Sometimes I think we’ll never get there, but then I look back the way we’ve come and that shack we passed is nearly out of view, so I guess we’ve travelled further than I thought.
The horse lifts her head from the trough, the water still dribbling from her chin, and she looks at me like she’s the one been waiting. I lead her back out on the road.
Up ahead of us that pool of sunshine is still there on the hillside. I don’t think I ever seen grass look so green as it does up there. And we make our way towards it, putting one foot in front of the other, taking each slow step at a time, knowing one day that we’ll get there.
Some time soon I’ll stand in sunshine.
Author’s Note
It’s a common belief that authors have a very clear plan before they sit down to write something. That might be the case for some, but it wasn’t for me – at least not with this book.
This book began as a writing exercise in an Arvon Foundation class – a moment of panic where I had ten minutes to get something down on paper. It had to be a scene that used a sense other than sight, and I wrote about a boy, alone in darkness, thinking he’d been taken by God.
That boy turned out to be Samuel – a child from the American South, who believed completely in a personal, interventionist God. At this point I had no idea where or when he lived and I tried to keep those decisions open as I completed the first scene and then the backstory to it.
So I didn’t set out to write an historical novel. In fact, the idea of writing an historical novel made me wary. It felt like a burden and I think this was because I had an idea that history has an accepted canon of opinion, which you shouldn’t mess with. I didn’t like the constraints that suggested, imagining myself having to chisel away at stone rather than type.
But that’s not how history works. The story of slavery has changed over time, with each generation of historians interpreting and unearthing source material according to their own values and the politics of the period in which they write. Everyone wants to put their own story into history and I came to realize that the America of the Civil War era held a multiplicity of truths, exactly as we do today.
Far from being a burden on my story, history became its inspiration. It didn’t confine me. It held me. It suggested scenes and plotlines. It mapped out themes that intersected with the unformed ideas already in my head. And my task as a novelist was the same as it would be had I set my story in the present or the future. I had to use detail to portray a narrative that was believable and then make choices about how best to illuminate the truths contained within the story.
One of my first choices concerned the use of accent and dialect and I chose to use only a few words that gave the reader a suggestion of the time and place. I thought to do otherwise would be too intrusive. This decision was particularly acute in the use of the word ‘nigger’, which would have been used more commonly in the period by both black and white, but which I chose to use infrequently and – with a single exception – only from the mouths of whites who were invested in slavery. This seemed to me the right balance – to bear witness to the past and still keep sight of the present.
There are several historical accounts that I have referred to or used within the book, mostly because I couldn’t improve on them. The lame man at auction is taken from a famous eyewitness account of a slave auction published in the New York Daily Tribune in 1859.
Reading Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl had a huge influence on my understanding of the ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery. I was particularly moved by her story of a madam who relieved a slave of her life savings to buy a new chandelier, promising to pay the poor woman back when she could. This seemed to me as cruel as any beating and it inspired the scene with Lizzie’s chickens. Her book also gave me the hiding place for Hubbard’s wife and child.
The chapter with the Major contains many references to the works of Walt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau. These are fragmented and scattered throughout the text as the Major reads to Samuel while he is semiconscious. The passage from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, found on p. 303 is pretty much verbatim and I thank him for it. It feels to me like the heart of the story.
Finally, to those who might read the book hoping to plot a precise timeline of the Civil War – you are bound to be frustrated! Some of the place names are invented and the timescale is obscure. Those who know their history might recognize Whistling Dick as a particular gun made famous in the siege of Vicksburg. They will also know that the cotton embargo occurred in the first year of the war. But if they use these as clues to when and where the scenes occurred, they are likely to reveal themselves as red herrings and force the reader to declare that the whole story is impossible and it couldn’t have happened exactly as I said it did because history and geography and all the textbooks in the world tell us otherwise.
But this is fiction, even if it is historical, and the truth is that it didn’t happen at all. At least it might not have done. And probably not exactly as I have described.
The Economics of American Slavery
I thought it could be helpful to give an indication of the economics involved in buying and owning slaves at the time the book is set.
It became illegal to import slaves into America from 1808 and this produced a steady increase in the value of the slaves that were already owned. Although the average prices at auction rose or fell due to factors, such as the price of cotton, this increase continued right up until the Civil War.
Estimates say there were 4 million slaves in America by 1860, with an average worth of $800 a piece.*
The worth of a slave would vary according to many factors, such as whether they were male or female, young or old. It also varied according to the skills a slave might have, such as carpentry or cookery.
Although it is impossible to reach an exact figure, a single slave would represent an investment of between £20,000 and £60,000 in today’s money.
I use the word investment because that’s exactly how it was seen. A slave owner would calculate the cost of keeping a slave over their lifetime and the likely returns in productivity. Though this would mostly be through cotton profits, there was also a market in hiring out slave labour. The high price that Milly commands at the auction is not only due to her sexual desirability and her experience in serving at the house. As a young woman entering childbearing age she would be expected to produce children who would then become the property of her owner, to sell or keep as they wished.
Although most of the slave trade existed to serve the cotton and tobacco industries, it was not uncommon for townsfolk to own slaves as well. About twenty-five per cent of households owned a slave, many of them inherited through wills, and they were regarded as both status symbols and additional sources of income.
Even the outbreak of the war did not immediately undermine the price of slaves, and auctions continued to be held in Confederate states that were not occupied.
As the war drew on, the market for slaves did become increasingly haphazard, as this piece from the New York Times from 1863 illustrates.
Slaves command a higher price in Kentucky, taking gold as the standard of value, than in any other of the Southern States. In Missouri they are sold at from forty dollars to four hundred, according to age, quality, and especially according to place. In Tennessee they cannot be said to be sold at all. In Maryland the negroes upon an estate were lately sold, and fetched an average price of $18 a head. In the farther States of the Southern Confederacy we frequently see reports of negro sales, and we occasionally see boasts from rebel newspapers as to the high prices the slaves bring, notwithstanding the war and the collapse of Southern industry. We notice in the Savannah Republican of the 5th, a report of a negro sale in that city, at which, we are told, high prices prevailed, and at which two girls of 18 years of age were sold for about $2,500 apiece, two matured boys for about the same price, a man of 45 for $1,850, and a woman of 23, with her child of 5, for $3,950. Twenty-five hundred dollars, then, may be taken as the standard price of first-class slaves in the Confederacy; but when it is remembered that this is in Confederate money, which is worth less than one-twelfth its face in gold, it will be seen that the real price, by this standard, is only about $200. In Kentucky, on the other hand, though there is but little buying or selling of slave stock going on, we understand that negroes are still held at from seven to twelve hundred dollars apiece.
* Measuring Slavery in 2011 Dollars by Samuel H. Williamson & Louis Cain, at http://www.measuringworth.com/slavery.php retrieved on 2 April 2015.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone at DFB – Simon Mason, Phil Earle, Anthony Hinton and Charlie Rashid – for taking such good care of me in my first year as an author.
In particular, thanks to my editors, Bella Pearson and David Fickling, who listened while I told them things about the book they already knew before showing me the things I didn’t know myself.
Thanks to Linda Sargent for your astute observations and invaluable suggestions and to Rosie Fickling for not putting the book down and then letting me run away with your notes. Thanks to Talya Baker for a great copy edit and to Andy Smith and Alison Gadsby for producing such a striking cover.
Thank you to Sallyanne Sweeney for all your early work on the text and for believing we should take the time needed to make this book as good as it could be.
Thanks as always to the Lovely Tuesdays for reading and telling me your thoughts – Catherine Smith, Philip Harrison, Same De Alwis, Roz De-Ath, Stuart Condie, Yvonne Hennessey and Judith Bruce.
Thanks to Tracey Fuller and Ali Bishop for your insight and generosity.
Thank you to all my family and friends, for your love and enthusiasm.
And of course, to Tanya, for just being you.
Also by Jon Walter
Close to the Wind
Copyright
My Name’s Not Friday
First published in 2015
by David Fickling Books, 31 Beaumont Street, Oxford, OX1 2NP
This ebook edition first published in 2015
All rights reserved
Text © Jon Walter, 2015
Cover artwork © Andy Smith, 2015
The right of Jon Walter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
ISBN 978-1-910200-74-2