by Gen LaGreca
“But Wiley Barnwell was far more than our leader in farming, my dear friends. He was also a moral compass to guide us through turbulent seas. He had an unshakable belief in the goodness of our society. He spoke out proudly about the South. Why, he was the most persuasive and prolific among us to uphold our customs—in our town meetings, in the halls of our legislature, and in newspapers throughout the South and the North. His was the proud voice we depended on to silence those incorrigible Yankee tongues, wagging at us with their wild notions about changing our way of life. Wiley was like a powerful tonic that braced us to withstand their fanatical attacks.”
The crowd listened somberly. They showed no surprise at the turn taken in the eulogy, as if they had come to expect public gatherings of all kinds to lead to the one mounting concern on everyone’s mind in 1859.
“Our beloved senator taught us why we cannot merely remind our Northern foes of how the greatest good of mankind is served by the world cotton economy that we make possible with our domestic institutions. Our enemies dismiss that as mere economic calculation, which they claim cannot right a human wrong. But Wiley Barnwell knew how to answer them. He insisted on holding up the moral character of our cause, because what we do here stems not only from economic necessity but also from our humanity.
“The senator never tired of explaining to our touchy challengers how we do far more for our bondsmen than the North does for its wage earners. While we work our laborers not unduly hard, we also feed, clothe, and shelter them; we minister to their medical needs; we care for their children; and we support them in their aging years, after their productive days are over. Wiley never failed to remind us of what decent and noble folks we planters are. We look after the little people! We relieve the needy and unfortunate class from the pressures of want! While the North offers nothing more than wages to their workers, we offer benevolence, caring, and a lifetime of security to our bondsmen. Why should such a humane society as ours rile the delicate sensibilities of the Northern busybodies?”
The mayor’s voice was rising, his face reddening, and his hands tightening into fists. “Why must they persist in their brazen intrusions into our sanctity that can only lead to peril?” He banged his fist on the podium like a hammer. “The senator often said: ‘I think of my slaves as my children, and they think of me as their father.’ Yes, my friends, there was no kinder, gentler, more beloved master than Wiley Barnwell.”
Tom remembered the faces of the slaves when Charlotte had told them of the senator’s death; not one had shed a tear for their humane master. Why? he wondered. At Polly’s funeral, her slaves had cried openly. He glanced at Rachel and Charlotte. He hadn’t seen them cry, either, for the senator. But then he pushed away his guilty suspicions. After all, he reasoned, the senator’s death was immediate and horrific. Rachel, Charlotte, and their slaves must still be numbed by the shock of it all, he concluded.
“Besides giving us the moral shield to hold high against our foes, Wiley also gave us the spears to repel them,” the mayor continued. “In our town and later in the state legislature, he was a driving force in banning the subversive books and pamphlets bombarding us from the North and fomenting discontent. And he fought ceaselessly to end all manumissions, to increase the penalties for educating the slaves, and to stiffen the sentences for those traitors who give aid and comfort to runaways. Thanks to leaders like Wiley, we now have the laws we need to protect ourselves from any uprisings. We can punish the rogues who commit seditious acts. We can even call for their death!”
A collective gasp was heard from the pews. The women in the audience fluttered their fans, and the men wiped their sweating brows as the tension in the hall became palpable. As if finally sensing he had gone too far, the mayor stepped back, took several calming sips of water, then continued with a softer tone and a smile.
“In conclusion, my dear friends, let us pick up the banner that our fallen leader waved so proudly.”
Tom’s head dropped and he stared down at his hands as disturbing images flooded his mind. He had admired Wiley Barnwell as a cotton planter, but he was unfamiliar with the side of him described by the mayor. He thought of his first encounter with the desperate runaway he later named Solo and how he had wanted to give her money to aid her escape. He thought of how he had done everything possible to help Jerome get to the North. He thought of a dank cell with a hard floor, iron bars, and a dim light floating in from a small rusted window. That cell now housed Cooper, a man charged with murder. Tom wondered about his own fate with the laws enacted. If he had been caught helping Jerome or Solo, would that cell be the place where he would waste away precious years of his life? He thought of the scaffold in the courtyard outside the jail. Could he have met an even worse fate? He wasn’t a slave—he was a free man—yet the tentacles that gripped the slaves seemed to be stretching out to grab him too.
He thought of the coming era and its great promise: to clear the fields of slaves and raise the level of work to heights never before imagined, heights demanding a worker’s free choice and free effort. Was the senator a prime force in thwarting this future?
“To bolster us for whatever trials may lie ahead, we must always remember our beloved statesman. We must always remember the grandeur and glory of the South that he extolled and that we will forever honor and defend!”
After the mayor finished his eulogy, others gave their tributes, but Tom wasn’t listening. His own thoughts preoccupied him. How could the man who fought to defend his invention—and the modernization it promised—be the same man who had enacted measures to punish those who challenged the old ways? Could he cast doubt on the man who had given his life for the tractor? Or did the fault lie with the messenger?
The mayor clearly had his own banner to wave. Invoking the senator’s prestige at such a poignant moment surely helped him further his own cause. Painting the senator in the colors of his own banner helped the mayor spread a message of his own. That must be it, Tom concluded, rubbing his eyes as if clearing away a foreign object that had impaired his sight.
At the end of the service, Tom walked along the street before heading home, feeling an urge to dissipate the tension that had built inside him during the ceremony. As he passed the printer’s shop, he saw stacks of the latest newspaper being loaded onto a wagon. Nothing could bring the senator back, he thought sadly, but there was still one thing that could—and must—be done. The emblem on the sheriff’s badge, the goddess with her scales, flashed across his mind. The newspaper’s headline gave him hope that justice would soon be done to close the matter and give them all peace.
The headline read: Barnwell Murder Trial Set for Late March.
CHAPTER 9
In the weeks following the murder, Tom felt a growing isolation from the townspeople. There were those who blamed their beloved senator’s death on Tom’s invention, a contraption they called foolhardy. Some snubbed him, others criticized him in newspaper columns, and a few withdrew their money from his bank. As a result, he had little interest in dealing with them. He stopped buying the newspapers and limited his reading to farm periodicals. He avoided social functions and went to town only when necessary to manage his bank, retrieve his mail, and buy necessities.
Tom also felt uneasy around Rachel. His visits to her home focused on business matters, such as arranging a loan for Charlotte and helping her manage Ruby Manor and the Crossroads. After his meetings with Charlotte, he made excuses to leave, rather than linger there with Rachel. He was wounded by her curious behavior toward him at the memorial service. Where did she stand, he wondered, with him or with his detractors? But her tragic loss—and his involvement in it—stopped him from raising the issue with her.
He spent all the time he could spare searching for his missing device. He explored potential hiding spots off trails, in clearings, on dry mounds near the swamps, and in other places he thought were accessible by horse in the range Cooper could have covered on the night of the murder. But he found no trace of his tractor. The she
riff conducted his own search, also without success.
Would Cooper’s voice be choked by the hangman, with the secret of the invention’s whereabouts still inside him? Tom wondered, as he rode his horse up to Indigo Springs on a morning in early March. Returning home from one of his overnight searches, he saw the roof of his workshop on the hilltop, and his mind traveled through the locked doors and shuttered windows to the tools lining the walls, his worktable, and the shelves containing his notebooks, experiments, and drawings. It had taken him years to design and fabricate every part of his tractor. He sighed at the prospect of having to repeat the arduous process if he couldn’t retrieve his lost treasure.
With the device missing, there was no reason to enter the workshop now. His journey to the new age had hit a roadblock. The empty space in the center of the shed was matched by a gaping hole in his life. For as long as he could remember, his life had always contained activities that excited him and that he energetically pursued, but now he lumbered through the tasks he had to perform and was left with nothing he truly wanted to do.
In the distance he saw his overseer with a slave team harrowing the fields for the massive cotton-planting operation to begin in a couple of weeks. He thought of the arduous process involved in putting a cotton seed into the ground. It took three laborers: one to make a hole, a second to drop the seed, and a third to cover it with soil. This laborious work was performed for each and every plant sown over thousands of acres.
To streamline the process, Tom had begun using a device developed by prior inventors: a seed drill, which was a small, horse-drawn wood hopper on a wheel chassis. The hopper was filled with seeds that could be dropped into the ground at intervals. He needed to make adjustments to its design to plant cotton more effectively. He also hoped eventually to hitch the seed drill to his tractor, instead of to a draft animal, and advance his dream of mechanizing the planting process.
The seed drill. That was what he could work on. Even with his invention missing, he still could make progress by speeding up the planting operation. He picked up his pace and soon arrived at the big house. After leaving his horse with Jerome, he went directly to the carpenter’s cabin. There he found the seed drill he’d been adjusting and brought it outside to examine it.
Before leaving for his trip, Tom had begun modifying its parts to improve its performance. He stared at the three components of the device designed to plant seed in rows: the blade in front to cut a furrow in the soil for the seed, the hopper that held the seed and released it at fixed intervals to space the plants properly, and the harrow in back that covered the seed with soil. With the blade, the hopper, and the harrow, the seed drill replaced the manual work of three field hands on foot, requiring the work of only one man on horseback to haul the implement. That amounted to reducing labor by two thirds.
He thought of how such a device could enable crops to be grown cheaper and faster. He thought of how customers could buy less-expensive crops and have money left to spend on other things. He thought of how humans freed from the back-breaking toil of manual planting could engage in more intellectual work. He thought of the even greater progress that could be achieved with the development of an advanced type of seed drill, one that consisted of several hoppers over multiple planting rows. Then he thought of the superior new source of power, his tractor, which could drive, perhaps, a dozen seed drills, with one person in the tractor replacing the work of . . . thirty-six . . . human planters—
“’Skuse me, Mr. Tom . . .”
His mind was fathoms away, trying to grasp the profound implications of his reasoning.
“Mr. Tom, sir . . .”
He turned from the device to see one of his house servants, Fannie, who had approached him while he had been deliberating.
“’Tis ’bout my garden, sir.”
The household slaves planted their own vegetable gardens behind their cabins.
“I wuz thinkin’ to start ’nother plot on the side o’ the cabin an’ grow mo’ stuff, sir.”
Tom looked puzzled at the question. “That’s fine, Fannie. But why ask me?”
“The colonel, yer daddy, he wuz fussy ’bout how much we grows. He allow jus’ small plots in back, sir.”
“Oh?” He looked out toward the row of cabins near the big house. “So that’s why all your gardens are in the back.” After eighteen months, Tom was still uncovering rules from his father, which he learned from the slaves as he went along.
“Yer daddy, he wuz a-frettin’ ’bout us takin’ too much time wid our plots an’ sellin’ our stuff at the dock, ’cause then us be neglectin’ our work fer him.”
Tom nodded as if it didn’t surprise him to learn that the slaves would work harder on their own plots than on tasks for his father.
“Maybe I kin grow a little mo’ ’taters an’ carrots an’ corn, sir? Lawd, my boys eat ’nuff fer a small army.”
He frowned at the irony of the predicament he and his slaves were in. They seemed to blatantly disobey his orders on important matters and to ask his permission for trivialities.
“Why don’t you decide? Okay?”
“You mean, you wants me . . .” Fannie looked surprised.
“Yes, yes!” He tried to curb his impatience. “Plant whatever you want around your cabin. Use the front, the back, the sides. It’s up to you.”
Fannie looked confused as if grappling with a new thought.
“Go on, now, Fannie.”
When she walked away, Tom returned to the seed drill, inspecting the parts, considering the possibilities of improving the little device before him. He had an idea—
“Mr. Tom?”
He turned to see another slave approaching him. “What, Hadley?”
“Sir, when you gives out blankets, we don’t need all you given the wife and me. ’Stead, we needs mo’ shoes. Kin us give back a blanket for one mo’ pair shoes?”
Tom stared, expressionless.
“I needs ’nother pair cuz what happen the day o’ the big storm—”
“You don’t have to go into all that, or trade any blankets—”
“Don’t you needs to know? You mean, I kin jus’ ask for somethin’ and I gits it?”
Tom frowned. How could he verify the legitimacy of such requests? Why would he want to spend his time doing that? Was it fair to the slaves if he refused requests for things they really needed? Was it fair to him if the slaves feigned a need and drained his supplies, then sold what he gave them at the docks? He rubbed his hands over his face, as if he wished to wipe away the matter from his mind. How could he end this quickly, so he could get back to his work?
“Tell Corey to make you another pair.”
Corey was the slave who made their shoes.
Hadley seemed surprised at Tom’s reply. “But him needs a order from you, sir.”
Tom nodded wearily. “Right. I’ll tell Corey to make you another pair.”
“Why, thank you, sir!” Hadley smiled and walked away.
Tom returned to the seed drill. He thought of how cotton planting was complicated by the need to drop several seeds in every spot. This, in turn, required an additional laborious task: thinning the seedlings. After the first leaves appeared, workers had to comb the fields again to remove the less hardy plants at each spot and leave the most vigorous one to take a stand and grow to maturity. Tom wondered if the planting could be improved to the point at which only one seed would need to be dropped, a seed with a near-certain chance of hardy development, instead of just one chance in three. That would eliminate the thinning process, saving an enormous amount of labor. What if he modified the harrow on the seed drill—
“Say, Mr. Tom . . . Mr. Tom?”
He looked up to find two more slaves, Lucinda and Patty, awaiting his attention.
“Yes?”
Lucinda spoke first. “I’s sorry, but I can’t be washin’ the laundry no mo’.”
Tom waited to hear more.
“Lucinda, she havin’ a baby,” said Patty.
“’Tis too much fo’ her, sir,” added her friend.
“Then why don’t you carry the basket for her?”
“Oh, no, sir!” wailed Patty. “I ain’t strong ’nuff.”
“Then put the basket in a wheelbarrow and move it that way,” offered Tom.
“But I feels sickly, sir,” said Lucinda, who looked quite healthy.
Involuntarily, Tom’s eyes dropped to her midsection. Was she or wasn’t she? He couldn’t tell. He frowned, unable to decide what to do. Frustration and guilt were wrestling in his mind, as they often had since his return home.
Lucinda could easily be faking her illness, he thought, because she knew he wouldn’t beat her and couldn’t abandon her. He felt he should order her to work. But could he blame her for dodging a job she had never chosen to do? Wouldn’t he, in her place, do the same?
Then there was the possibility that she really was telling the truth. Had he gotten so cynical that he assumed every plea of his slaves was a lie? He sighed at the tugging factions that left him indecisive. Though he dreamed of changing the future, he felt mired in the present.
He disliked having to depend on someone who was eminently unreliable, but at times like this, he saw no alternative. Whenever he tried to demote the person who was his major vexation, he found new reasons to use his services. “Jerome!” He looked at the stable and called to the lanky slave, who was directing a stableboy unloading a wagon of hay.
When he heard his name, Jerome looked pleased at the prospect of being needed. He walked eagerly toward Tom and the two women.
“Jerome, Lucinda has a . . . situation.” He turned to the women. “Talk to Jerome.” Then he said to his grinning stableman, “And let me know the outcome.”
Jerome seemed to increase in height, enjoying the moment. His neck stretched like a proud rooster, and his eyes suddenly came alive as if he were calculating how he might use Tom’s need of him to best advantage.