American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “One of ours?”

  “No, suh.”

  “I have no interest in seeing some nigger. Send him away.”

  “He says he be a free colored, suh. He be a mean-lookin’ one.”

  “And he wouldn’t tell you what he wanted?”

  “No, suh—just dat it be somefin you’d want ter hear.”

  His curiosity finally getting the better of him, Denton Beaumont rose and descended the stairs to the front door. By then wife and daughter had disappeared. There stood the man exactly as advertised—big, black, mean.

  “My butler says you’re a freedman?”

  “Dat’s right. I’s got me a paper to prove it.”

  “I’ll take your word for it… for now. What do you want?”

  “I’s be lookin’ fo’ work, Mister Bowmont.”

  “I’ve got more than fifty slaves that I don’t have to pay. Why should I take on one more that would expect a wage?”

  “’Cause I knows dere kind. I knows how ter make dem work harder dan any w’ite man can. Effen I don’t, after a week, you kin git rid ob me an’ you won’t owe me nuthin.”

  Beaumont eyed the man carefully. He had made him an offer almost too delicious to refuse. This fellow could prove useful. This might be just the answer he had been looking for to the dilemma of what to do about Leon Riggs.

  “What’s your name, freedman?”

  “Slade, suh… Elias Slade.”

  Beaumont took in the information with heightened curiosity. Now he remembered the fellow. He had heard about him. Suddenly this man’s showing up on his doorstep had become filled with all the more interest.

  “You do know, do you not,” he said after a moment, “that I could enslave you myself, right now? It has been more than a year since Davidson freed you and you are still in Virginia. That makes you available to any white man who wants you.”

  “I knows it, Mister Bowmont. But maybe you shud be sayin’, any w’ite man who can put his chains on me. I figger you’s smarter’n to try dat, an’ dat I can do more good fo’ you da way I am.”

  The question that had been posed to Cherity Waters about sin came so unexpectedly that for a moment she sat speechless, blankly returning the woman’s earnest gaze. At first she thought perhaps it was a joke. But the look on Mrs. Foxe’s face displayed no hint of humor.

  “I… think so,” replied Cherity at length. “But I really didn’t come here to talk about that.”

  “Nothing is so important, dear.”

  “There was enough about sin and hell and judgment in the sermon. I could make little of it.”

  “Then why did you come here today, dear?” asked Mrs. Bledsoe.

  “I wanted to see if I could learn what my mother found so important that this church played such a large part of her life. I want to know more about her. This seemed like a good place to begin.”

  “We think that is wonderful, Cherity,” smiled Mrs. Foxe. “Everyone in the church loved your mother a great deal. To understand your mother’s faith, dear, you must first come to understand sin. The gospel begins there.”

  “What does ‘gospel’ mean?” asked Cherity.

  “Has your father taught you nothing of such things?” asked Mrs. Filtore.

  “He has taught me to be a good person, to treat people with courtesy, kindness, and respect, always to tell the truth, to say what I mean, and to be the same person on the outside as I am on the inside. But I have never heard him use the word gospel.”

  Three glances were exchanged. They indicated clearly enough that the views of the assembled committee were unchanged regarding the suitability of poor Kathleen Waters’s husband as a father, despite finding the girl in church in a dress. They still, however, had no idea how thorough was Cherity’s ignorance in the learned ways and means, taught phrases and clichés, and ingrained prescriptions and recipes of their fundamentalism. As is often the case with such types—having never considered in depth for themselves the intellectual rigors involved in the transition from unbelief into belief—they assumed a greater universal understanding of the salvation formula than was the actual reality.

  “Gospel means good news, dear,” said Mrs. Foxe.

  “The gospel of Jesus Christ,” said Mrs. Bledsoe, “is the good news that Jesus came to save us from our sins.”

  “That is why the gospel begins with sin,” added Mrs. Filtore.

  “And sin is… good news?” said Cherity. “That doesn’t sound very pleasant to me.”

  “Sin isn’t the good news, dear, but that Jesus saves us from sin. That’s what it means to be saved—to confess one’s sin and accept the atoning blood of Jesus as the propitiation for our sin.”

  Cherity nodded. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I’ve heard things like that, though I’ve never heard that word. But I want to know what it means… in real life.”

  “To find out what it means, one must enter into the saving life of grace,” said Mrs. Foxe, taking up the banner again to press home the victory. “Are you ready to confess your sin?”

  “I don’t know,” said Cherity. “What do you mean exactly?”

  “Admit the wickedness in your heart before God, so that the blood of Jesus can make you clean.”

  The words jarred against Cherity’s brain.

  “My wickedness?” she repeated slowly.

  “Yes, Cherity, dear… your sin,” nodded Mrs. Foxe.

  “In order to repent,” said Mrs. Filtore, “the first thing one must do is recognize his sin.”

  “I don’t feel like a sinner.”

  “The heart is deceitful and wicked. You mustn’t listen to what your heart tells you. We all must repent. To do so we must acknowledge our sinful state under the curse of Adam.”

  “What is the curse of Adam?”

  “Original sin, dear—what Adam and Eve did in the Garden by disobeying God and trying to trust in their own righteousness to save them—”

  “Our own righteousness is as filthy rags,” added Mrs. Bledsoe, on cue.

  “—Which is why Adam and Eve died under the curse of sin,” Mrs. Filtore went on. “But Jesus shed his blood as the atoning sacrifice to pay the price of our sin and take our place under the curse of death. By repenting of our sin and receiving his precious blood, the curse is lifted and we are made righteous unto eternal life.”

  Cherity sat staring, her eyes wide.

  “I am very sorry,” she began. “I do not mean to sound either stupid or rude, but I’m afraid I didn’t understand much of what you just said. What does paying a price have to do with sin?”

  “The wages of sin is death,” interjected Mrs. Bledsoe from her mental cue cards.

  Cherity glanced at her, still confused. The ever vigilant Mrs. Filtore saw the look and was ready with the appropriate reply.

  “Death is what all sin deserves,” she said. “That is simple enough to understand, is it not?”

  “I think so,” replied Cherity. “Badness doesn’t deserve to live… is that what you are saying?”

  The good Harriet Filtore would have preferred one of the more stock phrases. It took her a moment to translate Cherity’s unrehearsed response into the lexicon of her vocabulary to see whether it was acceptable or not. After a second or two she concluded that it would pass.

  “Something like that,” she nodded slowly. “And since sin deserves death,” she went on, “a sacrifice must be made… to atone for that sin.”

  Again, Cherity’s expression went blank. “What does atone mean?” she asked.

  “To make up for the sin.”

  “To wash the sin of scarlet as white as snow,” added the helpful Mrs. Bledsoe.

  “And so a sacrifice must be made for sin,” now said Mrs. Foxe, coming back into the forefront of the discussion.

  “Why?” asked Cherity.

  The enormous significance of the question was so stark in its simplicity, that momentarily it silenced all three women. The fact was, the single-word query—which should have stood front and center as the fo
undational and most vital of all inquiries throughout the nineteen-hundred-year history of Christianity—was one none of the three had ever considered. Nor had it even been hinted at in all the years of their catechistic training to meet every so-called “objection” that might be raised against what they called “the gospel.”

  They sat for a moment in bewildered silence. At last Mrs. Filtore—ever on her toes with a response from the stockpile of platitudes she had memorized for such occasions, although she did not have one which quite fit the present dilemma—spoke.

  “Because God established the sacrifice in the Old Testament to be the remedy for sin,” she said. “His holiness cannot abide in the presence of sin. Sacrifice is the only possible atonement for sin.”

  “But why?” repeated Cherity.

  “Because the death of an innocent must pay the price for sin.”

  “The death of an innocent?” said Cherity.

  “Yes, dear, it is not only a sacrifice that must be made for sin, but the perfect laying down of an innocent victim, shedding his blood in the sinner’s place, thus paying the price instead, and atoning for the sin.”

  “That sounds dreadful—killing an innocent victim so that a guilty sinner can go free. That doesn’t make any sense at all. Who would dream up such an awful arrangement?”

  “A loving and holy God, dear. The sacrifice makes it so that we don’t have to die, but can have eternal life.”

  At last a little light began to break through. “Oh… you mean heaven?” said Cherity.

  Mrs. Filtore nodded. “The atoning sacrifice, where the debt for our sin is paid by another, the innocent Christ Jesus who is willing to pay the debt for us, standing in our place to incur the judgment and wrath of a holy God against sin, which cannot abide in his almighty presence, allows us to enter eternal life rather than suffer the wages of sin which is eternal death and hell.”

  Cherity’s face fell. “I’m sorry,” she said, “You must think me terribly stupid. But again I simply cannot understand how that could be. The innocent dying for the guilty makes no sense.”

  “Not to our sinful minds perhaps. But God’s ways are higher than man’s ways.”

  “The way of the cross is foolishness to them that are in darkness,” interjected Mrs. Bledsoe.

  “But you still haven’t answered why,” said Cherity. “If it’s true, it has to make sense. All truth must make sense, that is something my father says and I agree with him.”

  “It does make sense, dear, but only to the spiritual mind.”

  “Many are called but few are chosen,” said Mrs. Bledsoe. “The way is narrow that leads to life, and few there are who find it.”

  “I am truly sorry,” said Cherity, “but honestly… it doesn’t make sense to me.”

  The three women glanced about hopelessly, silently inquiring of one another, How are we going to help her understand? She is such a babe. Her mind is so darkened by the ways of the world. What can we say that will help her see?

  And well might they ask. Had they but known the Father of Jesus Christ one-thousandth as well as they knew a hundred formulas concerning the work of his Son that they had contorted to fit into their bag of responses, their own hearts might have been opened a chink to receive a flash or two of light reflected from the wonderful, glorious, honest, humble, truth-opening, wisdom-producing, God-discovering, and growth-necessary question that had just been posed out of the mouth of a babe… the single question, Why?

  But they could not see because they would not. They had been so thoroughly schooled in the recitation of pat phrases that they had little practical awareness indeed of the great truths to which those phrases pointed—nothing less than the brilliance of the high Fatherhood of the universe. Nor did they grasp that, in their present form, the axioms by which they tried to enclose those truths actually hid the light of them from shining into the hearts of men—the so-called saved like themselves, along with the unsaved whom they were so anxious to redeem with their blueprints for salvation.

  But the Spirit of God, whom Cherity had come that day seeking without knowing it, had heard her humble cry. And he—her Father and Creator and Savior—would make provision, through the pain of loss, to draw her into his lap and satisfy the thirst she barely knew she had.

  “I am sorry,” said Cherity at length. “I think perhaps I ought to go.”

  She began to rise.

  “But don’t you want to know the joy of salvation that your mother knew?” asked Mrs. Foxe, nearly pleading now. “Your mother had eternal life, Cherity. Don’t you want to know it too?”

  “Perhaps another time,” said Cherity. “My head is swimming right now. I can’t think straight.”

  She left the room, glanced about to reorient herself, tried a couple of the empty corridors, then managed successfully to navigate her way out of the church. There was her father waiting in the buggy.

  “What took you so long?” he said with a smile. “I saw everyone leaving thirty minutes ago. I thought maybe you had decided to stay and have the pastor to baptize you or something!”

  “It wasn’t that,” said Cherity with a sigh of mental exhaustion. “I never exchanged a word with the pastor.”

  “What kept you, then?”

  “Those three ladies wanted to talk to me,” replied Cherity sitting down next to him on the leather seat. “I think they were trying to get my soul saved or something, but I couldn’t make sense of what they were talking about.”

  “What did they say?” asked James, giving the reins a flick.

  “They were talking in circles about sacrifice and debt and atonement and all sorts of other things,” said Cherity as they bounded into motion. “But they never answered why it was as they said. It was like whenever I asked a question, they went into a special language or something.”

  Waters laughed to hear his daughter’s description of the religious parlance that made up so much of church orthodoxy of which he had once been a part.

  “And hell?” he said with raised eyebrow, glancing toward her.

  Cherity nodded. “Yes, hell came into it some too.”

  “It always does. It has always mystified me why the proponents of a religion based on the love of God are always so anxious to talk about hell. Maybe it bothers me now because for so long I spoke that jargon myself without ever pausing to ask if it made sense.”

  “They wanted so badly for me to understand them,” Cherity went on. “I felt bad that I couldn’t. But they just kept going into that incomprehensible way of talking full of so many odd words and explanations that didn’t make sense.”

  Forty-four

  The year 1859 opened with a cloud hanging over Oakbriar. Denton Beaumont had been irritable and morose for the last two months, quick to find fault, more ruthless toward his slaves, given to bursts of temper at the slightest provocation. His change in mood stemmed from two devastating blows to his prideful sense of invincibility.

  First, a slave he despised had successfully run off and apparently made good his escape. No matter what he said in public, he had serious reservations that the man’s bones were really lying up in one of the caves on the ridge that the children of the region feared. His insistence on it, however, would doubtless add yet more to the spooky tales of Indian ghosts and burials and sacrifices that, like a magic elixir of gleeful terror, spread among the young. Now there was a real man who had never been found, whose skeleton or half-rotten corpse they might stumble on at any time. It kept the younger children well away from Harper’s Peak, while drawing to it, always with a friend or two, the more daring of their older fellows.

  The fact was, the man was gone. The reminder enraged Denton Beaumont every time he thought of it. He was worried where it might lead. Always in the back of his mind was the awareness that other of his slaves might gain courage from what Gibbons had done and that before long he could have a rash of escape attempts on his hands.

  But worse than all that, after considering his victory almost automatic—he had not
actually begun to put anything away in a traveling chest, but almost—two months before the election things had begun to take a nasty and unexpected turn. From out of nowhere a series of articles had appeared that, over the course of eight weeks, had devastated his campaign.

  His lead had vanished. When November of 1858 came, his advisors were secretly not optimistic.

  Hoyt had, in fact, trounced him. Not by a landslide, but by enough to make the defeat sting. Now the fool had begun another six-year term, Senator Everett would not come up for reelection for four, and even if he decided to run in ’62, now he had a humiliating defeat to headline his résumé, not to mention having been passed by two years earlier in favor of Davidson and Everett. The party would hardly look upon him as a favorable candidate.

  His brief rise into the political limelight had been quashed before it began.

  Within a few short weeks of his hiring, the Beaumont slaves came to hate Elias Slade more than any white overseer. A turncoat of one’s own kind was worse than an outright enemy.

  Slade had, in a sense, nothing to lose. He could not be flogged or disciplined—if Beaumont tried it, Slade would turn his back and leave, for he was a freedman. And a Negro of his strength could easily find work in either the North or the South, despite his sketchy past. Someone was always willing to pay for raw brute strength. If he got too out of hand, they could, of course, shoot him or hang him. But none of Beaumont’s men relished the thought of tangling with Slade. He could have put any three of them on the ground unconscious in ten seconds. He was a goliath of a man, with massive biceps and forearms and shoulders and legs almost superhuman in size, and a neck as thick as a tree trunk. The steely glint in his eye made it clear from one look that he would have little compunction about the shedding of human blood. He had done so before and, if challenged or roused, would not hesitate to do so again.

  Nor was Slade stupid. He had decided to try the Beaumont estate after bouncing around for a couple of years at a half dozen menial jobs, not more than half expecting much to come of it. He knew Beaumont had no affection for coloreds. But somehow he sensed more opportunity would come his way than at the nearby McClellan plantation where he had spent several of his early years. So as things had turned out, he knew that he had fallen on his feet. He had no intention of provoking an incident. He knew which side his bread was buttered on, and could follow orders well enough when it suited him.