I felt like hell; my mind was cloudy and dark. Coffee was tasteless; eggs were a little runny; grits were a little thick. I collected GPS data at two sites and kicked a pair of points out of the network. I went to set up at those locations and found the county mowing alongside the highway; waiting for the mowers to clear changed the constellation of satellites overhead, so I didn't have as many up as I'd wanted... The barbecue joint was packed, and time was limited, so I settled for a McBurger at lunchtime, which did nothing to improve my outlook.
I called Ellie from the truck after lunch, while Steve drove us to Reynoldston for more GPS work. She answered in her pleasant, professional tone and sounded glad to hear from me. When I asked what she was doing later that night, she said she was going to a movie with Greg. He was between semesters at school, and he didn't have any patients scheduled until the next day, so they were enjoying an impromptu date night. Then, with equal aplomb, she invited me over the next night, Wednesday. Of course I accepted the invitation, but somehow the invitation had lost some of its excitement. In my mind I kept seeing her holding hands with her dumpy, somewhat effeminate husband, beaming blissful contentment in all directions like fuzzy, golden radio waves. The afternoon passed slowly, and I was ready to knock off at five-thirty.
The forty-five minute ride back to Carswell was less than pleasant, too. From the time I crossed the bridge by Roberts Ferry, my mind was consumed with every known detail concerning the rise, fall, and disappearance of the Conleys and their inland empire. All I'd wanted to know was why there was a ten-acre stand of trees in the middle of farmland. Come to think of it, I still hadn't come to that part of the story. Elizabeth didn't even have a baby yet. By anyone. I had to read more, had to know more, even if it would all prove for nothing.
I pressed the buttons to call up Tyler.
“Tyler here,” he answered.
“Kane here. Any word from anyone today? Anything happen I should know about?”
“No, Kane. Nothing at all. I guess you haven't found anything.”
“No, but I'm still reading.”
“Well, it's over now, so I guess you're just reading for pleasure. I suppose I should get those back from you. I'm leaving tomorrow after we meet with the judge.”
“Okay, just give me one more night to see what I can find.”
“No problem, Kane. We'll talk about cemetery maintenance, too. I'd like you to help me find someone.”
“I think I can do that.”
“Is there anything else? Frank and I have some serious drinking to do here.”
“No, Sergeant-Major, that's it. I'll see you tomorrow.”
I sighed and looked at Steve. “How do you feel about getting something to take to the motel?” I asked. “I have a lot of reading I'd like to do tonight, and I need to get started.”
“Suit yourself,” Steve replied. “I'm gonna go eat Chinese. What do you want? Chick Fil-A?”
“That'll do. And lots of beer.”
I sat down with my chicken sandwich, fries, and a cold Harp lager, and I picked up the next diary. It was actually a leather bound journal, approximately eleven inches by fourteen, neatly lined and filled with a firm but delicate, elegant script. I read and read for hours, and I will summarize its content for you.
When Elizabeth stopped crying, she had a new strategy: she would become the sophisticated woman Joseph would want to marry. She wanted to go to New York and talked it over with her grandparents. Having lived there, both of them liked New York, but they thought for her first foray, they should go someplace closer to home. On March eighteenth, she, Grandpa, and Grandma went to Atlanta to see “Parsifal” at DeGive's Opera House. They stayed at the Kimball House and visited with people Grandma and Grandpa knew, including Clark Howell, a newspaperman running for Governor. For the first time, she saw homes more opulent than hers, fancier rigs than even the Polks drove, and well-dressed servants everywhere. She also saw lots of black shopkeepers, business owners, and craftsmen. She was especially impressed with the Crystal Palace, a sixteen-chair barber shop, doubly so when she learned it was owned and operated by a black man. She loved the city's restaurants, retail shopping, crowded streets, and tall buildings, and especially, she loved the bold new world brought about by the practical applications of electricity: the lights, the elevators, the trolley cars moving by magic, with no mule and no steam, up that long, slow hill to Inman Park.
On the train ride home, she admitted to her grandparents that she believed she should have joined Joseph when he invited her, but now she was determined to wait until he returned from Europe to tell him honestly how she felt about him. Her Grandpa informed her that he had learned that because Joseph thought she had married, he had married a French woman. They were planning to live at her place in the French countryside.
Elizabeth wrote that she was thunderstruck by the news. She felt she was drowning at sea, with Dickie some distant port she'd left behind and Joseph sailing away with another woman. She felt she'd been a fool, a silly girl, and she despaired to imagine what sort of husband stock she would find in Sweeney County. She hardly spoke a word to her grandparents for the rest of the journey home, including during the entire day it took to drive from Carswell out to the house.
That night her grandmother brought her two books pertaining to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft, I learned, was a writer who lived in the last half of the Eighteenth Century. She married another writer, political philosopher William Godwin, and died giving birth to yet another writer, a daughter named Mary, who grew up to marry the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and to write “Frankenstein”. Most people know that Mary created a distinct genre in horror fiction: the modern scientist with his dials and devices bending and breaking the laws of Nature. What they don't know is that her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, gave birth to feminist literature in the English language when she wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, which was the first book Elizabeth read of the two.
The book is a response to those of the 18th century who did not believe women should have an education. Most important to Elizabeth, though, was a wholly new idea contained within of what a woman should be. Instead of mere adornments to a man's arm or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft wrote that women are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men and went on to denounce the sexual double standard. Most astonishing to Elizabeth, though was the fact that this book had been written over a hundred years before, and she had never heard of it, nor its author, nor its message. She next read “A Memoir of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, published after Mary died in childbirth by her widower. It is stunningly frank in its depictions of her childhood, her love affairs, her child conceived out of wedlock, even a lesbian interlude.
For two weeks she read, commenting on what she read in her diary. She took great interest in Wollstonecraft's argument that women who succumb to desire are "blown about by every momentary gust of feeling" and the idea that because these women are "the prey of their senses", they cannot think rationally. Now fully possessed of her own thoughts and opinions, Elizabeth wrote a full page of comment on Wollstonecraft's insistence that they should not be constrained by or made slaves to their bodies or their sexual feelings. Elizabeth wrote that
Being completely honest, I admit a strong desire to be with a man, and I imagine that this desire is what keeps us alive as a species. I like babies, too, and I should one day like to have my own; again, I must believe that this desire of mine to mother, to nurture, is inherent in me and is essential to our species' survival. As necessary and vital as these inherent biological functions may be, I have another, conscious drive to experience a man for its own sake. What I have discovered on my own thus far has been quite pleasurable, and I burn to discover if being with a man can make it any more so. I wonder, how many young women such as I have married unhappily for life in order to satisfy a temporary curiosity?
Why is this so? Only because men have ordained it. What
enslaves us is not our passions but the society in which we attempt to satisfy our desires. It is good that I think about these things now, and every young woman should think on these things before agreeing to marriage. How cruel and unjust that a man may satisfy his curiosity on an afternoon, button his trousers, and walk away, but a woman-- such as poor Madeleine Morton!-- may carry the burden of that afternoon for the rest of her life. I pray Dickie satisfied her curiosity then, and that he continues to do so at her pleasure.
What now? The world has decided for me, that I must marry, serve my husband, and sit and sew. I will marry when I wish, to a man who loves me, and I will serve him only as he serves me. I have other things I would like to do before I sit and sew, and whether it please the world or harelip the Devil, I care not!
And yet, I am a Conley, and I now carry the responsibility for maintaining my family's reputation for honor and dignity. War, drought, and financial panic come and go, but reputation survives all of these, and as I must inevitably pass it on to my children, I will not allow myself to tarnish it.
I did not wish to find myself alone at this moment, but I am grateful, for in this moment of solitude have I found my true self. I must not allow myself to be blown about by momentary gusts, nor should I volunteer to be permanently enslaved by momentary weakness or curiosity. I will be forevermore true to myself and my desires; yet just as steadfastly will I guard my family's name and reputation.
I think I should like to see New York City.
Grandpa took her everywhere, teaching her everything he could. In September of 1905 she and her Grandma rode along with Grandpa on a business trip to Carswell. The ladies intended to shop and have ice cream. On the way back, Grandpa told them the nature of his business. In her diary, I read,
Grandpa says the Bible calls it usury, and we should stop. All of our tenants need credit to get their seed and other supplies, and to get things their families require. For a long time, Grandpa's cotton brokerage guaranteed the loans to our tenants, and the tenants were charged ten percent. Since Mr. Burroughs retired, the bank has guaranteed the loans, but at a higher rate to Mr. Foster, so he has been charging our tenants forty percent on everything they get from his store. Grandpa has disposed of the matter in his own style. He has paid Mr. Foster in full for all our tenants' accounts, at ten percent. Mr. Polk, Dickie's father, objected to such a large withdrawal from his bank, but Grandpa reminded him that it was Conley deposits that kept him from closing his doors in '88 and again in '93. Regardless, Mr. Polk says he will not back Grandpa's next business venture, which meant little to Grandpa, as he telegraphed someone in New York and got back approval for a line of credit of up to half a million dollars, should he need it.
Grandpa wants to open a store. Mr. Foster is ready to retire, anyway, and Grandpa is very insistent that our tenants must diversify. Cotton, he says, will never recover its old price. Grandpa wants our tenants to start growing other crops, like orchard fruits and nuts, along with raising beef cattle and pork, but Mr. Foster's store carried only cotton-related merchandise, catering to the Polks, the Mortons, and the like, all of whom are fully invested in cotton. Grandpa wants to open a store for our tenants, one where they can pay a reasonable interest rate on quality goods and find a wider variety of farming goods.
He does not want to run the store himself, and I was quite disappointed when he said he did not think I should run it, either. Instead, he says our role should be to “bankroll” the operation and take our profit when one is earned. He says he thinks he knows a businessman who would like the opportunity. The man is a Negro.
This will not sit well with a lot of people, but what of that? The majority of our tenants are Negroes. Grandpa is only doing as Christ commands, looking out for the least of our brethren. I love him, and I will try my best always to be as strong and as fair as he.
The store opened in the fall of that year and by the following autumn, the enterprise had been declared a success. Those who had raised vegetables had sold them to markets in Augusta, and Fin Conley found opportunity for those who had raised pork. He struck a deal with two German brothers who ran a large butcher shop in Augusta to take shipment on as much prime pork as Conley tenants could deliver. The Roedelheim brothers came upriver during the summer to help locals build pens and a hog-slaughtering operation just down from the Thornton ferry landing. The Conleys hosted Gerhard Roedelheim in the fall, when he came up from Augusta to share German sausage-making techniques with local hog farmers at a valley-wide harvest feast, held at the Conley house. The store broke even in its first year, which Grandpa considered a miracle. Life was pretty good to the Conleys and their tenants. The opinions of Carswell, twenty-five miles to the southwest, meant little at this end of the county.
In December, her wish to see New York was fulfilled when her grandparents took her to see La Boheme at the old Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway. She heard Caruso sing, saw Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt, and in a fantastic Broadway restaurant called Murray's Roman Gardens, she met Albert Mladic, a Serbian-born violinist with the opera. He was the guest of one of Grandpa's friends, and their parties wound up dining together. She was captivated by his big brown eyes, his soft, modest manner, and his large, expressive hands. The dinner was a two-hour affair, at the end of which she was wholly taken with Albert.
He wrote to her every month or so for over a year before the Met played in Atlanta. She was twenty-two, a capable businesswoman. With Grandma's support, she eventually talked Grandpa into allowing her to go alone to Atlanta to see the show. She boarded the train in high spirits, eager to see again the tremendous Caruso (who was, however, indisposed), and to hear the Dresden Philharmonic Orchestra from Germany. Mostly, though, she rode the train from Carswell to Atlanta in breathless anticipation of losing her virginity with Albert in the Kimball House.
She liked it. She stayed in his room until nearly dawn before sneaking back to her own.
After she returned to Carswell, Albert continued to write for awhile, and she wrote back, but she wrote in her diary that she did so mainly out of politeness. Albert was very sweet, but he lacked what Elizabeth identified as the “gentle brutishness, the raw animal power in his walk, and even his dancing, that made Joseph so exciting.” When Albert stopped writing, Elizabeth didn't seem to care as much as her grandparents might have wanted, and they expressed concern. They really didn't need her to take care of them, they told her, and they wished she would get married. In her diary she wrote,
I will desire to marry again when I meet a man of Joseph's equal. Since I know what sort of man might be out there, why should I accept any other than the one I want? Joseph was a fine man, but he was just a man. Surely, there is another.
She filled her time the best way she could, by joining Grandpa's efforts to wean his tenants off cotton. Having established a school for black children on the north side of Sweeney County in 1902, she was approached to help raise funds to build a similar facility on the south side, the domain of Polks, Mortons, Turners, and the other white families, families who had once owned the families now wanting a school. Her efforts faced strong opposition in Carswell that included Randall Polk, Dickie's father. He caught her coming out of a meeting on the subject at the home of another sympathetic white woman and started telling her to mind her own business. She wrote,
Only the fondness I feel for Dickie kept me from telling him right off what he could do with his meddling. When Mr. Polk had finished, I told him and anyone listening that I do what I do out of my Christian convictions, lest I go to Hell. Anyone who opposes me in the Lord's work can go to Hell without me, and the sooner, the better. Nobody said a word. The Polks need us a lot more than we need them, so they will put up with me and like it. I will continue doing as my conscience dictates.
Her new-found independence and sexuality were not going back into the bottle, nor were they to be ignored. In 1909, she took another trip to Atlanta to see the Metropolitan Opera and to reunite with Albert. Arriving in town a day early to visit
family friends on Peachtree Street, she found herself walking Broad Street on Saturday afternoon with time to kill.
She saw a photography studio and was enchanted by the beautiful pictures displayed in the window. She saw beauty frozen in time, safe from its ravages and indignities, and in the window she also saw her reflection. She stepped inside to pose for the portrait of which I had become so fond.
The photographer was thirtyish, with a neat beard and a well-worn suit. He was warm and professional, and he quickly put her at ease. In a large album on the table, she saw a few women posed in the nude, and she inquired about them. He explained that like many photographers, he was trying to elevate photography in the minds of artists and art critics. Instead of it being seen as a mere mechanical trick, he wanted it appreciated as a new form of art, like sculpture and painting, and his idea of how to do this was to have certain women pose as classic Greek nudes. Elizabeth wrote,
I still have no idea what possessed me, but suddenly I wanted such a portrait. I am still uncertain what caused me to say it out loud, but I did, and soon I was undressing behind a screen. He called for me to come forth that he might decide the best pose for me.
The Dead Hand of Sweeney County Page 27