by David Fuller
This was a day she always dreaded, a day set aside for the "family," her people. It brought together the families of several plantations, and the gathering was often trying. She would have been in better spirits, as she would normally spend the early morning in mental preparation, but her daughter had chosen that particular time to revive her grievance about sleeping arrangements. Genevieve had whined prodigiously when Sarah and Jacob were given the front bedroom while she was relegated to the rear. Time had not diminished her resentment. This morning Genevieve had harped on the fact that even though Jacob had not returned, Sarah continued to enjoy the best bedroom all to herself, while from her back window Genevieve could see the trees that hid the privy and she could almost see the quarters. Ellen had made an early visit to her dressing table and had counted out twice the number of drops of laudanum, which brought her calm but did not diminish her hostility. The liquid within the bottle was precipitously low and she would need to speak to the doctor about obtaining more of the tincture. She disliked asking that man for anything, as he always bestowed upon her his most reproving look.
She had spent the early portion of the gathering the way all gatherings were now spent, listening to the men justify the crisis at hand. The war was a necessity, they informed one another as if it were news; the Yankees conspired to terminate their way of life. If given the chance, the bastards—begging your pardon, ladies—would abolish slavery altogether, not just in particular states. And to steal our slaves was no different than stealing our homes and our land, as financially it would be equally disastrous.
Once that conversation was laid to rest, with all in sober agreement—not that it would not reemerge at some future moment in the evening—Ellen simply had to count the hours and pretend to enjoy small talk until it was time to escape.
Ellen looked over to see Hoke approach Solomon Whitacre from behind. Whitacre was a decent enough gentleman, but it had been a surprise to all when he managed to wed the elusive Willa Jarvis, particularly as Ellen still saw him as the cowardly child he had been growing up. Perhaps that was what led him to be among the first to join the army. His effeminate mannerisms had carried into manhood, mannerisms he attempted to disguise with coarse language and bluster. This led to the occasional odd public moment. She had once witnessed him at a social event with his children and wife, as generous a father and husband as you could wish, when suddenly and from nowhere he appeared to notice his surroundings and erupted with an unpleasant epithet, as if to disguise his breeding.
Hoke clapped Whitacre on the back, and Ellen saw him start.
"How do you do it, Whitacre? Why, you spend more time at home than all our soldiers combined."
Whitacre turned to him, manhood under fire.
"A quartermaster, sir, is required to scour the countryside to feed the army, as you well know."
"Certainly, certainly, but must you continually scour us?" said Hoke with a hearty laugh. Whitacre did not laugh in kind.
"Beyond that, I have damn well been ordered on a special mission!" said Whitacre.
Willa Jarvis Whitacre's lovely head came around at once.
"I beg your pardon, Mrs. Whitacre," said Hoke. "I may have unintentionally provoked your husband."
"My apologies, my dear," mumbled Whitacre. "Upon my honor, I did not endeavor to be coarse."
Willa turned away.
"A mission, you say?" said Hoke. "Is it usual to entrust a quartermaster with special orders, if you would not find that question to be imprudent?"
"General Lee has plans for me, sir."
"General Lee? I see," said Hoke. Ellen recognized this moment. Hoke was drunk and likely to jab the man's pomposity.
"It is serious business, sir, I am to expose a spy."
"Perhaps you might care to lower your voice, Captain, as that sounds as if it may be privileged information," said Hoke.
Whitacre was surprised by Hoke's measured response and he collected himself, his indignation wilting. "You are very good, sir," said Whitacre quietly, red-faced.
Ellen saw that Hoke was not as drunk as she had supposed.
"I am certain you are the very one for the job, Whitacre, carry on and best of luck to you."
Whitacre saluted then, turned on a heel, and marched into the big house.
Ellen looked at her husband with admiration for his discretion, but luck was not on her side. She saw his eyes fall upon the Jarvises' youngest daughter, Mary of fourteen years, a girl of seeming innocence and considerable ripeness. Ellen had lately been spared being witness to his lupine aggression and she was appalled to see him salivate over one so young. She had endured such behavior in the past, and were it not so painful, she might find amusing the way he always appeared stunned by the onset of sexual appetite. She watched his eyes seize adolescent Mary's jaw and glide down her slim neck to her rubbery collarbones, finally resting on her hidden breast. How expressive he is, she thought, watching his inner thoughts warp his face, while he imagines himself impenetrable. He saw women's beauty as an aggressive personal challenge requiring forceful masculine response. Ellen instinctively drew her own collar to her neck, exposing less so that his implicit rejection of his wife would draw less blood.
Ellen saw the Judge, his face blotchy and red, move to block Hoke's view of his daughter. The Judge spluttered, "You, you…" trailing off, unable to find the words, until, at last, he said: "You really must control… your people, Hoke!"
"I have peculiar control over my people, thank you," said Hoke idly. "It is, as they say, a peculiar institution."
But the Judge leaned in. "Control," he said. Then he continued on, and Ellen wondered about his meaning: "Make them fear you; resort to the whip even in the most insignificant of circumstances until they understand you cannot be trifled with."
Ellen finally understood. The Judge had recognized Hoke's lust. Jarvis did not speak of slaves but of his daughter, as she was not to be trifled with. But once embarked on this parallel path, he poured all his bile and outrage into it, allowing himself to be carried away.
"I am surprised, sir, that I need to say this to you of all people," said the Judge. "Expectations in our negroes are a contagion that can only lead to insolent behavior and eventually spread across the county to injure the rest of us."
"Unlike your people, Francis, my people do not require deliberate excessive correction."
"That last one who walked past?"
"Do you refer to Cassius?"
"He made eye contact with me. And he did not look away!"
"Cassius is a good boy."
"That very fashion of coddling is what leads to rebellion. Have you forgotten Toussaint? No sir, beat them down and you will never hear the least murmur of revolt; if you do not, you will one day wake to find nigras in your bedroom brandishing farm tools!"
"You will cease this sordid talk, Mr. Francis," said Frances Jarvis, coming to her feet. "These are our guests."
The Judge pursed his lips, cowed by her disapproval. After a moment's pause he said with effort, "I will bring my friend Hoke another libation and we will speak of Victor Hugo's new book." The Judge turned, looked at his daughter Mary, and with a forceful nod of the head directed her inside the big house, out of sight.
Ellen saw that Hoke nursed injured feelings, but she glared at him so that when his eyes met hers, he sat upright. He said then, "Yes, Hugo, what did you say it was titled?"
"Les Miserables, and I had hoped to dust off my rather dismal French to read it, but with the embargo, well, I know you of all people understand," said the Judge.
"You do realize it has also been published here, in English? The Miserable Ones."
"Yes, yes, and I am having someone up North send me a copy, but
it is so much better to read it in the original language, do you not agree?
Ellen listened to her husband lunge and parry with the Judge and she fretted. She may have disliked the time spent with other planter families, but she also feared that the Howards were excluded from the soc
ial whirl of the county. She blamed her own personality, feeling that her moody, bitter thoughts leaked and made her transparent to others. But as she listened to her husband she entertained the possibility of another villain.
In a moment of horror, she realized Frances Jarvis had been speaking to her. Ellen turned to her hostess. She knew that Frances would infuse the moment with her code of superiority; she would quash all discord with proper manners.
"I must say, I rarely leave Edensong now," said Frances Jarvis.
"Do you not?" said Ellen.
"I do not and I cannot. It is our people, you understand. They need to be watched all the time, it is worse than ever. I am certain that you experience the same, my dear. The simplest requests, and they refuse to do what is expected of them, always doing things you do not wish for them to do, no matter how expressly you tell them. They are such children, and yet, unlike children, they seem incapable of learning the most rudimentary things. Repetition is not enough, oh no, if I am not present at all times the entire household will go to the Devil."
Ellen watched Frances's words sour her face, and she thought of Frances as a repetitive scold, one whose tyranny had undermined her humanity.
A strange and fleeting image entered Ellen's mind, that of a large cage in a small room. The cage was filled with slaves while their masters were outside the cage squeezed and immobile in the narrow space between cage and walls. This was a queer image indeed as both master and slave were unable to reach the fresh air that beckoned through a wide open door. In that tiny vision she thought she might be experiencing a moment of insight, but it came and went so quickly that she was unable to recall it a moment later. She returned to Frances Jarvis's ramble and was eased back into the comfort of what she had always known, that the negro was inferior and required the guidance and assistance of the white planters. We are, after all, benevolent, she thought, and by our generosity, our people are well served, as they are clothed, fed, housed, taken care of in all the small ways that they cannot do for themselves.
"I do not know why they have so little appreciation for what we do for them," said Frances Jarvis. "We take good care of them, there is no way they could do for themselves."
Little appreciation, thought Ellen. She also had seen the look in Cassius's eye. She knew well that when given a taste of freedom, her people were not grateful. Therein lay the danger of benevolence; a small morsel might bring appreciation, while a grand gesture might bring treachery. She feared them at those moments, imagining that they would indeed resort to offensive methods to obtain their freedom, thereby destroying their own wonderful existence. The Judge had it right. And Cassius was the worst of them all.
"Now," said Frances, smoothing her dress, "perhaps you would care to join us in our cartridge class, Ellen?"
"I beg your pardon, Frances, what is a cartridge class?"
"We gather together a small group of the better ladies and load cartridges for the soldiers. Women all over the Commonwealth are doing it."
Ellen Howard had already forgotten that she had, moments before, been fretful about the Howard family's social position, and she said, "Oh, Frances, I do appreciate the invitation, but I believe I will not be able to attend."
Approaching the small barn, Andrew ran ahead to join his friends. Cassius saw individual exhibitions of vibrant color as everyone was dressed in their finery, and amid the bright oranges and yellows and greens and blues were spectacular splashes of bold red. He took note of his own attire. He had worn drab work clothes without thinking. Cassius had unintentionally estranged himself from the festivities. He wandered down to the orchard, where a storyteller rambled through an overlong tale while standing under a tree dense with tiny clenched green apples. Abram was among the judges, and his eyelids fluttered as his chin drifted to his chest only to jerk back up again. Cassius did not see Weyman, so he ducked behind a line of haystacks that separated the storytellers from the stage. He was surprised to discover Weyman holding a jug.
You already done, Weyman? Sorry I missed it, said Cassius.
No sir, mine just comin up, old windbag James been up there huntin for the end of his tale some ten minutes now, and if he don't finish soon, I'm hittin him in the face with a shovel. Uncle Paul there up next. Uncle Paul, y'all any closer to rememberin how your story starts yet? said Weyman.
Paul nodded, looking green.
Uncle Paul, said Weyman with false seriousness, ain't been real successful keepin down his supper.
Never saw you romance a bottle in advance of your event, Weyman, and you got some hard judges out there, said Cassius.
Y'all know a story tells better when lubricated, said Weyman.
Never saw you lubricate in the past, when you won, thought Cassius to himself.
I'll come back, said Cassius in a manageable lie. He left the orchard and went out to the lane where children shucked corn with their mothers. An impressive rig of green-jacketed ears were piled high against the planks of the small barn, unsheathed one-by-one rapidly and tossed to the summit of a rising stack even as the smallest children plundered the pile from below. The corn was from the previous years' harvest, each cob with teeth missing like an old man's mouth, while the remaining kernels were poorly kept with an intimate knowledge of mold. Cassius filched a husked ear and tasted kernels that ground to mush between his teeth and left a queer aftertaste.
He walked past Tempie Easter and Pet seated high on a horseless buckboard. They preened for a pair of hands Cassius did not recognize, and he assumed they were from the plantation called Little Sapling. Tempie appeared snug and dry in her astonishing red dress, a vibrant revelation among even the grandest of outfits. Pet wore a dress she had borrowed from Tempie, but the red of her dress was a shade deeper and the cut was more ordinary, uncomfortably tight on the plump house girl, with underarm stains that were rimmed by salt down near her waist. The smaller Little Sapling man stood on tiptoes to appear taller. It seemed that he thought Pet bulged in all the right places.
Initially, Cassius thought it a trick of his peripheral vision, but when he looked back he saw the edge of it clearly, a small wooden box that Tempie attempted to hide in the folds of her red dress. He recognized the box, he had seen it recently on Hoke Howard's desk; a box for snuff, predominately green with narrow brown strips inlaid. It had taken him a significant number of hours to carve that inlay. He thought her brazen and foolish to have it out in the open, especially if she planned to trade it for a special treat, and perhaps she recognized her error in judgment as he saw her push the box away, to hide it in the folds of Pet's dress. Cassius met her narrowed eyes. He returned to the path.
Banjo George had found a spot that would both serenade the corn shuckers and carry down the lane. Cassius saw he was lit up and suspected the Edensong men had passed the jug early. Banjo George teased Joseph, holding the banjo just out of his reach.
You gonna play for the folks, Joseph? said George, as the banjo wavered in the air.
Joseph lunged to catch it as it appeared that Banjo George would lose his grip, but his reach fell short when George yanked it back.
Not your fault, boy, you just a young dog sniffin 'round the big dog field, you got to earn the right to play this, said Banjo George.
I know, said Joseph, shaking his head, embarrassed to be there and embarrassed that his teacher was making a fool of himself. Joseph stepped back, looking to escape.
You want to be the Man? Then, earn the right to play. You got to live the pain. You got to suffer, can't just pick it up when you feel like it. Tell you what, we go set this blade in the fire, get it red hot and carve a little decoration in your shoulder, prove you can take it, then you be man enough to play this here banjo.
Cassius stopped close behind Banjo George.
No, I don't think so, sir, said Joseph.
Sure, said Banjo George, goading. Prove to me you strong, show off for the ladies.
Must not be man enough, said Joseph, and Cassius smiled at that answer. You play for us,
George.
Not ready to be a man? said Banjo George, louder and with an edge.
Think I'll go check on the dance, said Joseph.
You stay here, said Banjo George sharply.
Cassius stepped in.
You ever see what George here went through to become a man, Joseph? said Cassius.
Reckon not, said Joseph guardedly, thinking two older men now goaded him.
Maybe George'll open his shirt, said Cassius.
His shirt? said Joseph. Banjo George patted his chest.
This man George, he carved so much of his chest, why, if the angels don't weep when he plays, then pain ain't all it's cracked up to be. How 'bout it, George, you ready?
I am ready, sir.
You ready to play like nobody ever played before?
Got me a new song I wrote myself.
A new song, said Cassius in exaggerated awe.
Not just new, this here song inspired by the Lord, said Banjo George, leaning sideways to look around Cassius at Joseph. Lord gifted me when I'se sufferin the great chest tattoo.
Well I'll be switched, George, said Cassius. The Lord.
That so, Cassius, song came with a bolt of thunder from the Lord hisself.
A rumble of lightning, said Cassius happily in the voice of the preacher.
Cassius, on the day I enter heaven, I will sing this song to the Lord.
Cassius's brow furrowed. Didn't you say the Lord gave you this song?
That so.
Well, now you got me wondering. Why give it away? Why didn't the Lord keep his song? If He liked it, you'd think He'd want to hear it regular. I'm thinking the Lord didn't want that song no more.
No, He wanted it—
Maybe the Lord was drunk when he wrote that song.
No sir, Lord warn't drunk when he wrote my song.