A Dream of Daring

by Gen LaGreca

  The man held two ropes: one attached to the horse and the other to the woman. Two passersby said nothing, unmoved by the sight of a woman on a leash. The owner tugged on the rope, jolting the girl.

  “So, ya wanna run off, do ya? Now you’re gonna do some real runnin’!” he roared maliciously.

  As he was about to ride away, with her on foot and tethered to him, he seemed to have another thought.

  “Wait,” he said, dismounting. “There’s somethin’ we need to do first.”

  Her giant eyes followed his every move.

  “What if you git more crazy ideas ’bout runnin’ off while I’m sleepin’ agin? There’s somethin’ we need to do first, before we git goin’.”

  He reached into his saddlebag and took out a small pair of pliers. “I’ll make it so’s you ain’t never gonna pull that stunt again!” He snapped the tool’s python-like jaws at her. “I’ll pull that purty front tooth o’ yours, so you won’t git far if you try that agin! You be a marked woman from now on.”

  The girl screamed in terror. He grabbed her head in a vise grip with one hand, forcing her mouth open. She kicked him, hit him with her bound hands, and tried to pull her head away, but she was no match for a man of his size. With great effort, he fixed her front tooth in the pliers. Then, his elbow high, he readied himself to pull with all his might.

  Tom was already running down the street toward them, an explosion rising within him.

  “Stop! Stop! Stop this unspeakable act! Stop this instant!”

  He was protesting not only the violence before his eyes but also the violence that had swallowed Barnwell and his tractor, the current of violence that he felt flowing through the town. He felt an urgent need to act against the insidious undertow before it pulled down yet another victim.

  He lunged at the fiend who was his same height but twice his girth, and he wrestled the pliers from him, throwing them on the ground.

  “Just what d’you think yer doin’?” The stench of alcohol wafted across Tom’s face.

  The man tried to grab him by the throat, but with quicker reflexes and a sober mind, Tom knocked him to the ground. As the man’s face twisted in fury and his hand moved toward his gun, Tom pulled out a roll of bills and flashed it in the man’s face.

  “I’ll relieve you of this woman right now.”

  The man’s hand stopped midway to the weapon. He rose, staring at Tom in bewilderment, his anger cooling at the sight of the cash. He took it and counted in disbelief.

  “Eight hundred? For that wench?”

  In handing over the large sum of cash he was carrying for his journey, Tom had just done something he had never done and thought he would never do. Instead of buying a ticket to the new age, he was buying a parcel from the old one.

  “Why, fella, that’s a price ya might pay for a decent plowman, but for that piece o’ trouble . . .”—he pointed to the girl—“that spiteful . . .” The man stopped. He seemed to think better of telling Tom he was paying too much. “Say, you don’t come from ’round here, do ya? You sound like one o’ them Yankees.”

  Tom hadn’t seen the man before. Bayou Redbird brought strangers in and out of its docks, some of whom made their way up the bluff to Greenbriar.

  “Just take the money and go.”

  The man smiled, flashing his decaying teeth. He removed the rope from around the girl’s neck.

  “All right, Yankee, she’s all yours.” He stuffed the bills in his pocket, picked up the pliers, and rode off.

  The parcel and the purchaser looked at each other. Both seemed astonished. Tom untied the rope around her hands. Her wrists were red from the burning cord, but she paid them no attention.

  He walked toward his horse with her following him. He offered her a canteen of water. The eagerness with which she drank told him it was from need, not pleasure. When she’d had enough and returned the vessel to him, he took a cloth from his saddlebag, spilled some water over it, and held it out to her. She rubbed her face with it, removing mud, grime, and blood to reveal the bronze glow of her skin beneath. She put the cloth in her pocket and stared at her new owner.

  He realized he had exchanged no information about his purchase and had no . . . receipt.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  She gave no reply. With her immediate ordeal ended, the abject terror drained from her face, and the defiance he had seen on their first meeting returned. She offered no words of gratitude.

  “Who are you?” he persisted.

  The only response he received was a contemptuous stare, as if all white men were the same rot to her. He took this as a sign that her condition had improved to its normal state.

  He took hold of the horse’s reins and gestured for her to mount. He waited, but she remained on her spot.

  “It’s a long way to walk,” he said.

  She remained motionless, so he mounted. He made room in front of him for her to ride sidesaddle, as women did, and extended his hand to help her up. When she didn’t respond, he started off at a slow pace. She finally ran up and leaped on behind the saddle, straddling the horse like a man.

  Cheerlessly, they rode together in that fashion. With her feathery light weight and keen sense of balance, she endeavored to stay on the animal while avoiding the revulsion of touching him. She succeeded, except for the wind that kept blowing disorderly strands of her long, wild hair across his face.

  CHAPTER 7

  The clip-clop of Tom’s horse was amplified in the silence of his ride with his companion. Greenbriar’s countryside, lush even in February, draped the two travelers in its primeval beauty. After the previous day’s storm, the resurrection fern that attached to the oak branches had turned from brown to green. The plant possessed the amazing capacity to endure dry periods in which it appeared to be dead, only to regain its color with a new rainfall. Tom felt no such resurrection of his parched mood as he rode along the main road through the town’s plantation country. He had lost the man who was like a father to him and the machine that was to launch his future. And now, a precious sum of money was also lost, replaced by the hostile body behind him.

  The young woman proved to be a good rider. Despite the brisk pace that Tom set, she ably kept her balance without reaching to hold on to him.

  As they neared the turnoff to Indigo Springs, he wondered what he might find there. Even though he had been gone only two nights, he felt uneasy. Although the field hands were managed well by his trusted overseer, Nikolaus Bergen, what worried him were the servants in the big house and its dependencies, who were under his direction—or lack of it.

  He felt in constant tension with the slaves he managed. The spark of choice, the great igniter of human energy, had been stolen from their lives, and they, in turn, took what they could from him. He was their enemy, and they were his nemesis. He could harness fuel to produce mechanical power, but he couldn’t harness the human spirit. Perhaps no one could—or should. His overseer had promised to monitor the servants and craftsmen who lived and worked around the big house, but Tom knew that Nick would be kept busy ginning and baling the remainder of last year’s crop and plowing for this year’s planting. What liberties would his servants take? What tasks would they leave undone? What would they steal? He would soon find out.

  He observed a wagon ahead, coming from the opposite direction and turning onto his plantation trail. One of his slaves was hauling a pile of bricks that Tom had purchased to build a new smokehouse. He bristled thinking of the time his servants spent idle while he bought bricks from the outside instead of making them with his own labor. He thought that the bricks would long be mass-produced by machine and hauled with a motor wagon before he would learn the secret of getting first-rate work from people who toiled without will, without gain, without hope, people whom it was against the state laws in 1859 to free, and against his nature to compel, making him feel as chained to them as they were to him.

  Alongside the road, some of his fields came into view. He saw plow teams turning
the soil, with the men looking as indifferent as the earth they tried to stir. His workmen would soon be planting a few hundred acres of corn and other crops consumed on the plantation, then a few thousand acres of the white gold, cotton. In a budding industrial age, these crops would be grown using manual methods of the ancient past, he thought, envisioning the day when a single man driving a motorized tractor could plant an entire field by himself.

  He saw Nick on horseback, presiding over the field hands. Nick and his three brothers had come here from Germany for greater opportunities and were working as overseers on different plantations to earn enough money to buy their own land. The thirty-five year-old immigrant was too busy watching the hands to notice his employer. Growing cotton with gangs of unwilling men required constant scrutiny, Tom thought grimly, but it was better than the whip, which he forbade. He owned their bodies, but how much more would be possible if he could tap their will?

  He took the turnoff to Indigo Springs, traveling along a path lined with towering trees whose seedlings were planted sixty years ago by his grandfather. In spacing the little plants many feet apart, his grandfather must have envisioned the spectacular growth that Tom now saw. He wondered if one day someone would travel this road in a motorized vehicle, realizing the future that he imagined.

  He rode along a path that sliced through some of the richest soil deposits in the world, where his grandparents had started a modest family farm that had grown into one of the largest cotton plantations in the state. Now he planned to create a different and greater future through his invention. Would he ever recover it?

  Through the trees, he glimpsed the roof of a solitary cabin high on a plateau away from the big house and its dependencies. It was the place where he had spent all the time he could spare. To anyone’s casual glance, the simple wood structure looked like an old shack, but to Tom the place was a sanctuary for escaping the old world and a factory for building a new one. It was his workshop.

  Tom had chosen a secluded spot to assemble his invention, with a shed to house the device and an arable field outside to test it. The hands lived a distance away, by the cotton fields, and had no contact with the shed. The household servants paid little attention to the small building removed from their living and working quarters. The pains he took to ensure his seclusion might have been unnecessary because none of the slaves had shown any curiosity about his endeavors. They seemed as content to be left alone by him as he was to be free of them, so his work had proceeded in privacy. When he had left with the invention for his trip, he shuttered the windows and locked the doors. Now, with the product of that shop lost, he felt no urge to ride up the hill and reopen the place. It was the first time he’d passed his workshop feeling no desire to be there.

  The shop vanished from view as he headed toward the big house. He saw four servants walking out of the well house, plodding along lifelessly, hauling two buckets of water among them; it was a job for one person. He saw the laundress carrying a basket of clothes, with two helpers who carried nothing. The faces he saw looked blank, distant, bored. At that moment, when his grief had smothered his desire to do anything, he felt as listless as the servants. Is this what they felt like every day, he wondered, as they faced life without the spark of a goal, a purpose, or a dream?

  Like the fern that covered the oaks, their spirit seemed never to die actually but rather to go dormant. It was resurrected in their leisure time, with the wild revelry of their music and dancing that seemed as much a need as a pleasure. He liked knowing they had an escape. The new numbness he felt seemed inescapable.

  As he rode on the path around the front garden toward the big house, the servants walking about didn’t yet notice him. His arrival was obscured by overgrown shrubs spilling onto the road, shrubs he had directed his servants to prune—how many times? The garden also needed tending, yet the grounds team was nowhere to be found.

  The home up ahead looked fit for a painting: a two-story plantation house, with arching trees brushing the upstairs windows, a gallery wrapping the main level, and a pond partly visible behind the home with ducks wading across the water. Like so much of Greenbriar, he thought, the sight was one of untroubled beauty. A landscape artist would capture nothing more. But what picture lay beyond the painter’s brush?

  He thought of the young woman riding behind him. The scene of her torment was something that never made it onto artists’ canvasses. He wondered how she viewed the site of her new captivity and what he was going to do with her.

  Just then he saw a sight that vexed him. His stable hand and the chief factotum of the plantation, Jerome, was dressed in a satin vest and dress shirt, a carryover from his days as head of Colonel Edmunton’s household servants before Tom had taken charge and demoted him. The lanky slave in his late twenties was neither dressed for the stable nor anywhere near it. In fact, Jerome was coming out the front door of the big house and holding a glass of sherry, looking like the owner. He also held a small object in his hand, which he inspected closely, then placed in his pocket. He availed himself of the rocker that was the colonel’s favorite seat, and began swaying leisurely, enjoying the view—until he spotted Tom approaching.

  In one frozen moment, the rocking stopped and Jerome stared at Tom in utter surprise. Then the resourceful slave sprang to his feet, casually hid the drink behind a pot of ferns, and began shaking the rocker, sitting, standing, shaking it again, as if testing its stability.

  He leaned over the rail and called to another slave who was sawing wood nearby. “Lawd sakes, Sammy, the colonel’s rocker, it’s a-dancin’ ’stead o’ standin’ still. You needs to fix it ’fore Mr. Tom come home—” He was shouting loud enough for Tom to hear. As the inventor rode up, Jerome feigned surprise.

  “Well, well! What we got here? Mr. Tom! Ain’t you went to Philerdelfi?”

  “I had a change in plans.” Tom stopped the horse in front of the house. “I hope I’m not interrupting your afternoon sherry.”

  Jerome laughed smoothly from the gallery. “I wuz inspectin’ the big house, sir. Makin’ sure them good-fer-nothin’ maids keepin’ it clean. Yes, sir, Jerome watch everythin’ when yer gone,” he said with great self-importance as he walked toward Tom. With his fine clothes and shiny boots, he looked ready for a Sunday social, but the day wasn’t Sunday, and he was supposed to be in the stable.

  “What about the drink that’s behind the plant?”

  “Oh!” His lips pursed as he pondered what to say next. “You see, Mr. Tom, I wuz testin’ it, and it gone a tad sour, so I be gittin’ Jimmy to replace it.”

  Jimmy was the butler. Either from their memory of Jerome as their boss under the colonel or from Tom’s failure to supervise them himself, Jimmy and the other servants tended to take orders from Jerome.

  “What’s in your pocket?”

  “Nothin’ to concern you none, Mr. Tom. Jus’ somethin’ I’s meanin’ to do ’fore you return.” He smiled charmingly.

  “Come on, Jerome, let me see what you’ve taken this time.”

  Reluctantly, Jerome removed a small silver object from his pocket.

  “The colonel’s bookmark! How could you, Jerome? You took it from the library. You stole a keepsake from my father!”

  “Why no, sir, I jus’ inspectin’ the house and sees this gotten tarnished, so I takes it to put a shine to it. The colonel, he don’t let his stuff git tarnished, no sir! That disrespectin’ to his memory. You needs to put a strap to them house servants so they be keepin’ things better fer you.”

  “I’m not amused,” Tom said curtly. “Not about this or with the watch or the ivory comb or the scarf pin that’re also missing.”

  From his saddle, Tom stretched his hand down to Jerome, demanding the object back. Jerome gave it to him.

  “And what about the ham that went missing from the smokehouse before I left?”

  The slave sheepishly confessed. “Jerome jus’ move Mr. Tom’s ham from inside Mr. Tom’s smokehouse to inside Mr. Tom’s slave.”

&nb
sp; Tom wanted to punish him roundly. But how? He realized that Jerome’s assessment of the situation was right. If he had stolen Jerome’s entire life, how could he punish the slave for stealing a ham or a bookmark or anything else?

  Tom wished that the attempt he’d made to get rid of Jerome had worked. Some time ago, through contacts at the docks, Tom had learned of a safe house in Cincinnati and of a steamship captain who could be persuaded, with sufficient inducement, to carry a slave there from Bayou Redbird on his route to and from the northern ports. When Tom suggested the possibility to Jerome, the slave was eager to leave, so Tom made the arrangements. He hired Jerome out to work on the captain’s ship and gave him one hundred dollars to deliver secretly to the captain in exchange for leaving him behind in Cincinnati. Then he had Jerome memorize the address of the safe house. Both of them needed to be extremely careful. If Tom were caught aiding a slave to escape, he could go to prison for years, and if Jerome were caught, the consequences could be . . . worse.

  Jerome eagerly embarked on the trip, and Tom thought he had finally seen the last of the incorrigible slave. But then Jerome unexpectedly returned home—without freedom and without Tom’s money given to purchase it.

  Jerome had never boarded the ship to Cincinnati. Instead, he’d spent a few days frequenting the shops at Bayou Redbird and lodging with a free man of color whom he knew. Then he returned to Indigo Springs with a new wardrobe for himself and gifts for his lady friends. To Tom’s exasperation, Jerome resumed all of his old tricks. Although he was assigned to the stable, the unruly slave was often in the big house, bossing the servants, availing himself of Tom’s food and liquor, and stealing little items along his way. The bondsman who managed to fleece Tom of his money and have the run of the house was a chronic reminder of his failure as a slave owner.