“That hurts.”
“I mean it to.” He caught her hand when she raised it again, and she let it go limp until he dropped it. “Did she enjoy you the way I do?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re hateful.”
“You asked me,” he said.
“Did she like any special part of you?”
“She thought every part of me was special,” he boasted to rile her.
She yawned elaborately. “I must get up.”
“I was joking.”
“I have to go. I was about to get up, truly. It has nothing to do with your bragging.” His hands smoothed and soothed her into tarrying. “You’ve been twice lucky, with Nancy and me. Once unlucky, twice lucky. Most men never have even one. They have to be satisfied with their own feeling; they never know a woman’s.”
They were still for several minutes.
He said, “What about—him? You know who I mean.”
“I don’t.” She sounded pleased. “Do I?”
“You do.”
“Oh.”
“Yes!”
“My cousin.”
“When you were both eleven and he came with his mother and sister to stay with your family in Savannah.”
“They visited relatives a lot,” she said. “They were poorer even than we were.”
“Early one morning he tiptoed into your room. You saw him open and close the door, but pretended you were asleep, and you still pretended when he got in bed with you.”
“I wanted to find out what he was up to.”
“And you found out,” he said.
“Fred was his name.”
“I don’t want to be told his name! The thing is, he had you when he was eleven!”
“Well,” she said reasonably, “I was eleven too. You’ve told me you started around then too. Maybe most children do and never talk about it, don’t even remember it.”
“I think they’d remember it,” he said.
She said, “We were together more completely than I’ve ever been with anyone, with anybody since. Even you. Only with him have I not known where one of us ended and the other began.”
“You mean that?” he asked coldly.
“I always tell you the truth.”
“What happened to him? You never said.” He could feel her thinking, but they lay so close he could not look at her directly without changing their positions. “Have you seen him since?”
She almost laughed and sighed and turned her face to his chest. “Oh, yes. Once. Once only. Just before I came to visit here that first summer, I saw him. The summer I met you— and everybody. He married young. He and his wife came to Savannah for her to meet the family, really just to go somewhere away from home and call it a wedding trip. He married the plainest woman in the world, and she hadn’t one single, solitary thing to say for herself, or him, or the cat for that matter. They live in Augusta and have three children now. That was the only time we’d seen each other since the time we were eleven and everything happened, not once but twice. He came and got in bed with me two mornings. Well, he did nothing but fidget and fiddle with his watch and chain. He never looked at me. I mean, he didn’t see me when he looked at me. I thought at first he was nervous, and then I realized he had forgotten!” Benjamin began to laugh, and she pressed her face into the gap between his arm and chest. After a minute she raised herself to rest on an elbow and look at him. “I wasn’t telling the truth when I said I loved no special parts of you the way you do me. I love it under your arms, and the damp, salty hair.” Her hand slipped down under the covers. “I turn to ashes when I touch the smooth—skin—here.” He grabbed her and rolled her over. “See!” she laughed. “You have to grab and hold me and try to put me under you. You can’t bear letting me make love to you!”
He let her go. In the pause, both went still. Over the past year they had drifted into such teasing ways, to avoid monotony, and sometimes they were warmed into further engagement. But today when she moved to rise from bed, he did not stop her. Nor did he watch her dress. She was hurrying, and he knew she would not want him to watch. When she had put on her shoes, he said, “There’s no reason you have to decide anything right away. Remember: you’re Mrs. Saxon too, as much as Aunt Annabel. Your bills will be paid.”
“Ah, buy by whom? I think your Aunt Annabel will make me work hard for her charity.”
“I wish I could make everything right for you, Frankie.” He sounded almost sullen.
Her laugh was against herself, but he was not to know that and pulled the covers up tight around him, shifting in bed so that his back was toward her. She left without saying more. His mind returned to Nancy, at first happily and then with such sadness that he was caught by surprise.
4
Jefferson Davis pounded his fists on the door of the privy farthest from the big house. “What are y’all doing in there? Let me in! I bet I know what you’re doing, you’re fucking your fists!” He pounded again.
After whispers inside, the door flew open and a hand reached out and grabbed him by the hair, yanking him in and slamming the door behind him. “Now, you shut up,” Robert E. Lee told him.
Davy was not inclined to pursue debate; the scene he found himself part of was too interesting. His brother and cousin had removed their trousers, and both had erections. Mute with respect, he watched them return to their masturbating. Presently, he unfastened his own trousers and joined the activity. Leon, red of face and penis, suddenly gasped, “I think I’m coming! Yes, I’m coming! Here I come!” And with the last word a jet of semen flew from his organ. His motion ceased; he merely held and squeezed, head tilted like the Dying Gladiator, a proud expression on his face. The other boys stared at him with awe. “I told you I could,” he said, his voice natural again.
Davy and Bobby Lee resumed masturbating, Leon watching them with mild interest after he had cleaned himself. Presently, both brothers writhed with completion of the act, but neither, alas, achieved the result of their cousin.
Davy said furiously, “I don’t know why he can do it and I can’t!”
“I’ve told you,” Leon said in a kindly but superior tone. “You’re not old enough. I’ll be twelve in April.”
“I’m eleven,” Bobby Lee said quickly. “I ought to be doing it soon, don’t you reckon, Leon?”
“Surely,” Leon agreed.
“I think I almost did that time. There was a little something, but it wasn’t white.”
“You won’t have to wait long,” Leon said encouragingly.
Bobby Lee turned to his brother viciously. “You’re just nine, you little shit-ass. It’ll be a long long time before you can. We’ll be doing it for years and years before you can even hope to.”
“It’s not fair!” Davy wailed.
“Hush up,” Leon said. “I thought I heard Uncle Dan.”
They straightened their clothes and hurried out of the privy as Daniel Todd’s voice came to them from a little distance. “Davy! You, Bobby Lee! Leon? Where are you all?”
Running toward the sound, they found Daniel on the board seat of a wagon drawn up outside the cow barn. “Come on; want you to help me load a cord of wood and take it to your aunt Doreen and Miss Eloise—” He started the mule without waiting, turning the wagon into a road that followed the side of a field into the woods. The boys ran after him, nimbly swinging themselves into the open back of the wagon.
It was a mild Saturday morning in late February. Watching them leave from the window of her office, Sarah decided that she wanted company. She knew she would find it in the kitchen. Their voices reached her before she reached them: Velma’s complaining complacently as Josephine and Mabella and Bruce attacked her about her coming marriage to Hollis Davis.
Josephine shouted jollily, “No use you running to me when Miss Rosalie start giving you a bad time—”
Mabella, giggling, added her barb: “You think our Josie a mean old thing, you wait! You just wait! Miss Rosalie so particular she make you learn
how to cook all over again her way. Say: otherwise, how her Hollis know whether he eatin’ peas and corn bread or lye hominy!”
“What you mean I a mean old thing!” Josephine thundered joyously. “You call me mean; you feel my fist side your head!”
In and out sounded Bruce’s high laughter and Velma’s parrying comments, laced with fears and forebodings that were mostly affected for politeness’ sake, for she had long ago won Rosalie’s approval by her care of Bruce and her own modest deportment. It had been a lucky day for Velma, and she knew it, when Sarah Troy found her and brought her to Beulah Land to wet-nurse Benjamin Davis’s daughter.
Before reaching the door Sarah changed her mind, deciding not to join them. Instead, she returned to the front of the house and was in time to see Benjamin trotting his horse up the carriageway. While Casey lived, there had never been time enough for all she wanted to do. Now she might find herself idle and uncertain how to use an odd half hour. There was in the ordinary way plenty for her to see to, but Saturdays had come to be half workdays, made up of miscellaneous small jobs on the plantation. The holiday mood seeped into the house; and although Josephine saw that all was done that needed doing, the routine was less rigid than on ordinary days. Hence, the laughter and teasing of Velma in the kitchen and Josephine’s easy acquiescence that morning after breakfast when Bruce asked her if she had time to teach her to make the candy called peanut brittle.
Glad to see him, yet a little ashamed of her need, Sarah took a tart tone with her grandson. “Benjamin! Wherever have you been? I’ve been looking all over for you—”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing wrong like the sky falling, but there’s something on my mind I haven’t had time to go into with you.”
“Be back in a minute, Grandma.” He continued to walk his horse along the carriageway toward the barns.
He sometimes understood her better than she understood herself, she realized. She called after him, “Only when you’re ready. There’s no hurry—” He gave no sign of hearing her, for the grateful note in her voice made him feel sorry for her, and pity was something he never wanted to feel for her. It would not have occurred to him before Casey died. He gave her a little time, but not too much, examining a mended harness with Clarence, the boy who took care of his horse, then pausing briefly at the kitchen to share the amusement his grandmother had forgone and to hug Bruce and let her scold him for taking a handful of her shelled peanuts. He was eating them when he joined Sarah.
“I’m worried about Abraham.”
His mouth full, he nodded.
“Give me some.” He leaned across the desk and shared the remaining peanuts about equally. “Since he’s been back he’s learned more than you and Roscoe both knew about running the cotton mill.”
Benjamin swallowed, cleared his throat, and swallowed again before he could speak. “He’s smart, no question.”
“And he’s a good boy,” Sarah said. “He gets on well with everybody, doesn’t he?” She watched him carefully. Benjamin did not answer, but he appeared to be thinking about it. “Oh, he jokes,” she went on. “That’s always been his way, to make a joke. Remember how he kept us laughing when he was a young’un? I don’t know where he got it, for Floyd was never like that, and his mother was solemn as a setting hen.”
“Nancy, maybe.”
“The Negroes at the mill understand he can be playful and still mean what he says for them to do. I don’t worry about that.” She paused and looked at him, wanting him to say more.
“What you worry about is him and the town people.”
“Exactly,” she said as if he had discovered the truth for her. “We’ve spoiled him; everybody that knows him has. We loved him from the time he was born because of his father. Then after he went off to school and came home—” She hesitated.
Benjamin said quietly, “He’ll be all right, Grandma.”
“He talks different from Negroes down here, and people in town think he’s uppity, don’t they?”
“Some do.”
“There. You see.”
“They’ll get used to him. Give them time. He sounds brash because of the jokes and because he’s twenty.”
“Twenty-one. He was twenty when he came home and went to work at the mill. I wish I had some more of those peanuts.”
“Want me to get some?”
“You do think he’ll be all right?”
“We’ll have to see, won’t we? Is it Gene Betchley that worries you, Grandma?”
“He always has,” she admitted, “ever since he went to work at the sawmill and got to like pushing people around.” He said nothing but continued looking at her. “You know he hates us.” Benjamin sighed. “Our giving Bessie a thousand dollars to make Leon a legal Davis only made him hate us the more, though he was the one behind it all, egging her on to it. I never bought or sold anybody in my life, black or white, and I wouldn’t have agreed if Leon himself hadn’t begged us to. It made him feel safer from Eugene. But I didn’t like it.” All of this Benjamin understood, but he let her say it without interrupting. “Well, Gene can’t get at us directly, but he may try to do it through Abraham and the Negroes.”
“There’s been no real what you could call trouble,” Benjamin pointed out.
“Bonard has always been there to step in front of Gene. Up to now.”
They sat without talking for a little while. At last Sarah said, “I’ve tried to be friends with Gene, but I don’t get on with him. I used to think I could manage any man alive.” He smiled. “Well, you know how I get on with most of them. I like men and boys, and they know it and trust me.”
“It’s because you flirt with them.”
“I do no such thing!”
“You make every man you talk to think he’s the only one alive. You could get the devil to lift his hat to you. Oh, what a rounder you’d have been if it hadn’t been for Casey and Dan and me keeping you in line!”
“Benjamin, you’re making fun of me—”
“Yes’m.”
“I’ve a mind to turn you over my knee, big as you are—”
“Now, you see? What grown man could resist you when you offer to take him on your lap? It’s all right, Grandma. I’m watching Gene, and Abraham too.”
5
With normal rainfall, the widest branch of the creeks flowing through the area of Highboro was as full and strong as a river, and it divided a stretch of land still sometimes called the Campgrounds because troops had been quartered and trained there during the war. When James Davis and Bonard Saxon sought a permanent site for their sawmill, the township, nudged by its leading banker, put up the land for sale and the partners bought twenty acres. The creek provided a water supply as well as transportation for the pine and cypress they cut, and the sawmill prospered.
At the time Roscoe Elk conceived the idea of a cotton mill for the district, he bought five acres of the Campgrounds on the opposite side of the creek, knowing he would need power and water. Nothing came of it until November 1881 when he and Benjamin Davis attended the International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta and came home to act on what they had seen. Benjamin made improvements and additions to the cotton gin. No longer was the seed discarded to rot and stink in the rain; new machines housed alongside the gin converted it into oil and fertilizer and cattle feed.
Signing a contract of agreement, he and Roscoe Elk put up the first building of the cotton mill. It was, and remained for a time, a simple, almost primitive operation, nothing on the scale of the mills in Augusta and Columbus which employed hundreds of people. It was started to give employment to such graduates of Roman’s school as did not have a mind to pursue life on the land for wages or shares. In the larger mills of those larger towns Negroes had not been found suitable for the work, the transition from field to factory demanding too great an adjustment, and poor whites were used almost exclusively. But for the Beulah Mill, as it was soon called, the workers had been to school and grown accustomed to working indoors. The poor
whites around Highboro were not encouraged to come to Beulah because of the complexion of its dual ownership. They also shied from working alongside Negroes who had been to school, elementary though Elk Institute was, telling each other, “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s an educated nigger.” But they were jealous of the wages paid, a dollar a day for males, three quarters of that for females.
Without the sawmill’s or the cotton mill’s making a strict policy of hiring by color, the workers facing each other across the creek were nonetheless predominantly white on one side and black on the other. They were not in competition; there was work for all, and they shared the water supply amicably. Beulah Mill was patronized as a pokey poor relation of the thriving sawmill, a minor interest for its owners, who were content to keep it so. It served the purpose it was meant to serve. No armies waited to be clothed and tented from its spindles and looms; no ships at Savannah fixed sailing schedules to its rate of production. Abraham Kendrick, however, had an itch for expansion; and across the creek another ambitious young man, Eugene Betchley, was watching him.
On the evening of the Saturday that Sarah Troy expressed certain anxieties to her grandson, Frankie Saxon received a caller whose identity and errand surprised her. Supper was over and her daughter Fanny practiced a piano piece in the living room, making the same mistake at the same point and then beginning the piece again. Frankie did not understand her daughter; and the patient way the daughter sometimes behaved with her mother, as if their roles were reversed, was not conducive to intimate friendship between them. Her son Blair, Frankie reflected with satisfaction, was more like her. Handsome, conceited, selfish, and charming—he was all that a son may be to warm a mother’s heart and make her complain of a sensible daughter.
It had been an exasperating week and month for Frankie, the shock of widowhood unameliorated by any reassurance of financial security. Her mother-in-law lost no opportunity to remind her how poor and dependent she now was. She came in and out every day at any hour, having decided that since the house was to be sold, it had become common property. Frankie’s appeal to her father-in-law for a month to collect herself before the house was taken from her was granted.
The Legacy of Beulah Land Page 23