“Caleb!” cried Lucindy as the other three horses turned and began clomping away. Caleb glanced behind him with tears blurring his vision.
Lucindy was silenced again by the master’s hand. He did not stop this time until the back of her dress was sliced and ripped and soaked with the blood of a dozen fresh lashes of the cruel leather thongs. When she came to herself, Caleb was gone and some of the women were tending to her wounds.
Tears stung Lucindy’s eyes at the memory of the cruel parting. She splashed several handfuls of water from the stream into her face, but the coolness could not stop the hot burning flow of tears.
“Oh, Caleb… Caleb,” she whimpered, then began to sob gently.
She knew that if the master or one of his men found her here, away from the slave quarters, and naked besides, she would probably be killed on the spot. But she didn’t care. Today she had stopped being afraid. She had hardly felt the master’s whip. Even with two small children to care for, and a third on the way inside her, at this moment she hardly cared if she lived or died.
She cried for a few minutes. Slowly the tempest of grief passed.
As she sat in the stream, thoughts of the songs they sang about the river Jordan came back to her. She didn’t know how big the Jordan was. Probably it was a huge and mighty river from the way the songs told it. She knew she would never see the real river called Jordan because that was somewhere far away. She didn’t even know where it was. But that river symbolizing the border where people, even blacks, crossed into the land where all people were free no matter what color they were—maybe she could cross that Jordan one day.
The water continued to flow, and as she sank into a reverie, the water of that stream became the water of the river Jordan in her dreams, and a determination rose in Lucindy Eaton’s heart that she would not live the rest of her life only to die in slavery. Somehow she would make sure her children knew freedom, even if to give it to them cost their mother her life. Perhaps she would not cross into that land herself. But like Moses of old she would see them cross into it and enter into the land of promise.
Who would be her deliverer, she didn’t know. How she would get them to that place where freedom lay on the other side, Lucindy didn’t know. But she would not spend her days and die under the shadow of the taskmaster’s whip. She would see the promised land, even if she died gazing upon it from afar. But if she died knowing that her children would know freedom, it would be a happy death.
“God, “she whispered, “he’p me git ter dat ol’ riber, whereber it is, so dat I kin see my chilluns git crossed hit. He’p me, God, fin’ dat road ter freedom leadin’ ter dat Jordan.”
Two
The morning of early April promised warmth.
Spring, arriving a month ago to the plantations of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, had now advanced northward to the verdant growing regions of southern Virginia. Even the hillier portions of the Piedmont Plateau, which diagonally separated the mountainous western half of the state from the eastern Coastal Plain, were beginning to grow warm and fragrant with the budding life of a new season.
A ridge of mountains, however, was not the only thing separating west Virginia from east Virginia. The sympathies of the eastern coast lay with the South. But in the mountains of the west, antislavery sentiment was strong. Virginia was a state destined to feel the brunt of the growing conflict. Neither side would budge an inch from its zealously held convictions.
A woman in a plain blue work dress, one hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun, stood on the porch of an expansive two-story brick plantation house. Her gaze was directed at the figure of her husband across the fields beyond the barn where he was just disappearing into the arbor.
Carolyn Davidson knew why. This was likely to be an important day in his future. Before he set out, he needed to know that he and his God were of one mind.
As she watched him, she glanced about. Nearly everything upon which her eyes fell belonged to them, at least it did until final disposition of the estate was settled… green meadows filled with grazing Red Devon cattle, and beyond them ploughed fields sprouting new wheat, tobacco, cotton, and oats.
The pride she felt in what surrounded her was not in possession, even if theirs was more tenuous than it ought to have been, but in stewardship. They worked hard, the land produced, and God prospered the result. If a creed could be said to dictate her outlook on the life of farmer and plantation owner, as well as that of wife, stewardship would certainly be contained within it. Hers had not always been an easy life, but in most respects she was now a woman at peace—at peace with herself, at peace with her God, and at peace with her role in the divine order of things. There was more than that, of course. That she and her husband had both been married previous to meeting one another contributed in no small measure to the difficulties of arriving at her present outlook. Hers had been a hard-won peace, as peace with God and oneself often is. But the contest had yielded much fruit of character, and a deep sense of God’s being to sustain her. She held dreams of things she would someday like to accomplish. But she was in no hurry.
The soil here was perhaps not so lush as on the low plains further south and east. But neither was the climate quite so humid or hot. And the rolling landscape, with its scattered woods and forests, offered infinite variety of color. There was no other place on earth she would rather be, she thought as she took in the sight. She had grown up in the northwest of the state where the Allegheny Plateau stretched toward Pennsylvania near the panhandle. But since the day of her marriage twenty years before she had called this place southwest of Fredericksburg home. She hoped to spend the rest of her days here, grow old and die here, and be buried in the small Davidson family plot at the northwest corner of the garden.
Glancing to her right, she squinted imperceptibly. On the clearest of days, the Blue Ridge Mountains might faintly be seen to the west. But not today. On this morning, as on most, the characteristic thin blue haze obscured the horizon from sight.
She brought her gaze back in front of her as she saw her husband emerge from the arbor.
Richmond Davidson had also been thinking about their land on this unseasonably warm morning. His visage, however, revealed a distant look, extending far beyond the boundaries of this land that had been his father’s and grandfather’s before him. If his life’s focus took on more complexities than his wife’s, it was not because the intellectual currents of his brain ran more deeply than hers. She was fully his mental equal, an essential sparring partner as they wrestled through issues that confronted them. But his mental shoulders bore the added responsibilities of manhood at a critical time, not only in their lives together, but also in the life of their nation. The time was quickly approaching when he would have to bring politics into his faith, whereas his wife cared little for such thorny issues. “Let men dictate the affairs of state,” she said. She cared only about their people whose welfare God had given them to watch over.
Their home stood about two-thirds of the way to the Maryland border from North Carolina. Fate had placed them where they could not ignore the increasing drumbeats of history. When destiny arrived, they would be drawn into the middle of it, the wife as well as the husband.
Difficult decisions were on the horizon. Would those decisions, Davidson wondered, pit him with or against his Virginian peers? If the latter, he was well aware that the cost to his reputation would be high, though that had never been one of his prominent priorities. The internal compass of his conscience was not oriented in a direction that made heroes in the eyes of men, but toward that which made sons and warriors in the invisible conflict of the ages. Right and wrong made up the components of his matrix of life, not what might add to his advantage according to the world’s ledger of success. Like his wife, this inner equilibrium of spiritual perspective had not been easily won, nor were the struggles to maintain it altogether past. His was a faith he had to work to hold. And the two worked hard together to walk out the life they shared with a tenacit
y that kept them from dwelling on the griefs and questions of the past.
But though he keenly felt the burdens and responsibilities of his position, and though his own personal demons of doubt occasionally seared the memory of his conscience, Richmond Davidson too was a man at peace with himself, his God, and his place in the world.
The year was 1855.
The Davidsons’ beloved Virginia, for two centuries the peaceful foundation stone of the American experiment in democracy—birthplace of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, as well as more recently William Harrison and John Tyler—was feeling the strain of the times.
It was a good and peaceable land. Yet all was not as idyllic as it seemed. Most of Richmond Davidson’s fellow plantation owners, even as far north in the state as Spotsylvania County, shared neither his concerns nor his convictions. As the decade had advanced, the issue of slavery had come to dominate national politics as never before. Some of his fellow landowners and farmers ignored developments and decisions in Washington. Their daily lives went on as they had for generations, though their very way of life sat at the eye of the growing storm. Others, like his closest neighbor and boyhood friend, desired to involve themselves in the political fray.
Had it not been for the gold rush in the West, the conflict might have been forestalled, if not indefinitely certainly for some time. But California’s admittance to the Union in 1850 as a free state broke what had been a deadlock in the Senate—making sixteen free states and fifteen slave states—tipping the balance of power toward the North. With statehood now eventually inevitable for the territories of Minnesota, Oregon, Kansas, and Nebraska, all of which could well become free states, many of his fellow Southerners viewed the future with alarm. If steps were not taken, it seemed that the South would be forever doomed to a subservient role. Such was not a fate its leaders were prepared to accept.
Which direction would determine Virginia’s future as the cadence of approaching conflict grew louder with each passing year?
“Good morning, my dear,” said Davidson, smiling as he walked toward the house.
He was taller than average, perhaps two inches over six feet and of well-proportioned build tending toward slender. His face was angular, with strong chin, wide mouth, narrow lips, and well-defined high cheekbones. His hair was plentiful and unwieldy, with one great clump toward the back permanently standing straight in the air like wild prairie grass, in spite of his wife’s most persistent efforts to tame it. Thick and brown in his youth, his crop was now showing the first hints of approaching gray.
“It is nearly time for us to get you to the station,” said Carolyn, returning his smile. “You look very nice.”
“Thank you, but I am still uncertain whether I should have accepted the invitation.”
“Any new eleventh hour revelations?” she asked.
“Only that, as I did accept,” he replied, “I am to keep the appointment and listen to what they have to say. After that, I’m sure our prayers will become more specific.”
“You still have no idea what it could be about?”
“None whatever. But it must be important judging from the names they told me would be present!”
“Will Denton be among them?” asked Carolyn as they walked inside the house together.
“I don’t know,” replied Richmond. “He was not mentioned, and I am more than a little puzzled by that fact.”
“Have you spoken to him about it?”
He shook his head. “I am still hopeful he will be there.”
“Maybe such will be the case and all your worries will take care of themselves,” suggested Carolyn.
“Perhaps… and if not, whatever it is about, he is sure to know of the meeting in time. Denton and my brother always cherished more political ambitions than I.”
“You cannot run from your destiny, Richmond. You are one of Virginia’s important men.”
“A distinction I would give anything to relinquish!” laughed Davidson. “As secondborn, I never expected this.”
“But you cannot relinquish it, Richmond. And you know it. If for no other reason than because of your grandfather and father, your name in Virginia’s political circles is one that will always bring attention to itself no matter how much you try to shun the limelight. For better or worse, you are a Virginian, and you are a Davidson.”
“Would that it had been Clifford instead.”
“How often have you told me that we cannot second-guess God. You and I of all people know that his purposes extend beyond our limited sight.”
Davidson laughed again. “You sound like your father. Ever the preacher’s daughter.”
“I never had any aspirations to follow in my father’s footsteps any more than you did yours,” said Carolyn. “Preaching is not suited for women.”
“Perhaps, but you are wise and our women depend upon you. I depend on you.” He paused and thought a moment. “I realize that my father’s and grandfather’s reputations live on in the minds of many,” he added. “They assume that I am of a political bent just as they were. So you are right in what you say.”
“Then I will just add this and let it go at that—you must do what God places before you to do.”
“Of course you are right… as always! I will keep an open mind. One never knows what God will do. If my destiny, as you call it, turns out differently than I had anticipated, then I am sure he will prepare me for it.”
“I know you will do what he shows you.”
“But as you say, added Richmond, “it is time for me to go or I shall miss the train! I’ll just run upstairs and say good-bye to Cynthia and Seth and Thomas. Then I’ll hitch the buggy and you can take me to the station.”
Three
As Richmond and Carolyn Davidson rode toward town twenty minutes later, they saw a rider approaching on horseback. Davidson slowed their single horse as he and his brother’s childhood friend reined in.
“Ho, Denton!” he called. “Out for a morning ride just for the pleasure of it, or does business bring you over the ridge to the west?”
“A little of both, my friend,” replied the Davidson’s neighbor Denton Beaumont, scion of a family as deeply rooted in Virginia’s past as Davidson’s. “Good morning, Carolyn,” he said, tipping his hat toward Davidson’s wife. “Where are you two bound?”
“Into town,” replied Carolyn.
“To answer your question, Richmond,” Beaumont went on, turning again to his friend, “I apologize for straying onto your land—”
“Please, Denton, do not even say such a thing,” interrupted Davidson. “Our land is your land and you are welcome anywhere on it.”
A faint expression of irony passed over the horseman’s expression, but his words did not betray the reaction. Indeed, the two plantation houses, though technically neighbors, were more than five miles from one another, separated by a low ridge of hills, the highest point of which, known as Harper’s Peak, was some 2,400 feet in elevation.
“Thank you… you are too generous,” said Beaumont. “In fact I was out checking on some fence work my darkies were supposed to finish yesterday. You can never trust them to do what you say—they’re such a lazy lot. I was near the old Brown land and I rode over and found myself retracing some of our favorite trails. I suppose I lost track of the time. It’s still hard not to think of it as the Brown tract.”
“I know what you mean,” rejoined Richmond. “I find my thoughts straying in such veins as well, even though it has been part of Greenwood since long before my father’s death.”
“Those were great years we had together.”
“Sometimes I think it’s too bad one has to grow up, though everyone does. There was nothing we enjoyed so much,” said Davidson, turning toward his wife, “as being out romping the woods. Denton and I and my brother used to ride every inch of these hills for miles.”
“What adventures we had!” added Beaumont. “We knew every tree and hill and ravine on both sides of the ridge.”
“We called ourselves the three musketeers,” laughed Richmond.
“There were a few who called us rascals.”
“And rogues! But most of our escapades were harmless enough.”
Another peculiar smile passed over Beaumont’s face.
“It sounds wonderful,” laughed Carolyn. “I wish I could have known you both then.”
“Don’t be so sure, Carolyn. You might not have liked the result.”
“I doubt that.”
“Adventures notwithstanding,” said her husband, “we were afraid of Mr. Brown, although my father thought a great deal of him. And there was no denying that his odd methods produced the best crops in the region.”
“Where is he now?” asked Carolyn. “What happened to him?”
“No one knows,” answered Beaumont. “He disappeared and was never heard from again.”
It grew silent a moment.
“Speaking of old Mr. Brown,” said Beaumont at length, “is there still no chance you would sell me part of his land?”
“I continue to think about it,” replied Richmond. “But I am reluctant to part with it for my father’s sake—he had such a tender spot in his heart for Brown. I always regretted never seeing him again after I returned from England. My father always seemed to think that he would return someday to reclaim the land.”
“There seems little chance of that now, after all these years.”
“No, I suppose not. Yet I feel bound to be faithful to my father’s wishes. He never really considered the Brown land ours, though legally I suppose it is by virtue of the fact that we hold the deed. In my father’s mind, we were merely keeping it for Mr. Brown until his return. But as you say, that is certainly unlikely now. Perhaps my desire to retain the land is sentimental. However, I will continue to pray about it.”
“I will make you a generous offer.”
“I’m sure you would!” laughed Davidson. “It may turn out that my cousins will force my hand,” he added more seriously. “Until then, I will have to give you the same answer as before—we shall see, and I shall continue to pray.”
American Dreams Trilogy Page 6