A Year in the South (19 page)

12. John S. “Master Jack” McGehee

It may be that death held no terror for him. He was a devout Christian, a pillar of the local Methodist church. And he could die with the assurance that he had a reputation as a generous man and a good neighbor. Local people remembered especially an episode in 1851, when typhoid struck among the slaves of a family whose farm adjoined Master Jack's. It was cotton-picking time, and the family stood to lose their whole crop for lack of hands to gather it. Without a word to his neighbors, Master Jack sent his own hands over to do the job.
17

He was not so esteemed among the blacks, however. Lou, for one, was secretly contemptuous of the old man. He mocked Master Jack's peculiar way of speaking, his habit of repeating a word or part of a word (“I don't know what Edmund is thinking about-out,” Lou heard him say upon first seeing Boss's mansion, “to build such a house-house”). Lou sneered, too, at the old man's bluster. He talked big, Lou recalled in his memoir, but “was the verriest coward when danger was present.” Lou had been at the plantation during the Yankee raid and had seen Master Jack cringing in bed with a pretended stomach ache to avoid facing the enemy pillagers, all the while whining, “Where are they? Are they gone?” and calling for a slave to come nurse him: “Tell Kitty-itty-itty to get me a mush poultice-oltice.” Lou also regarded Master Jack as a harsh slave owner. He had often heard the old man chide Boss for his paternalism, saying it only spoiled the servants. “It will ruin them,” he had muttered while observing Lou and Matilda's marriage ceremony, “givin wedins-wedins.”
18

Master Jack considered Lou not only spoiled but also unreliable. Even before his first escape attempt, Master Jack had warned Boss about him: “Keep you[r] eye on that boy … he is slippery-slippery, too smart-art.” The old man's suspicions were aggravated when, on one of his frequent visits to the Memphis estate, he discovered chalk marks on the side of the barn and correctly surmised that Lou was trying to learn to write.
19

It may have been because Master Jack disliked Lou that he did not put him to work in the Big House when he arrived from the saltworks. Or perhaps he was needed more in the fields. Whatever the reason, Lou now found himself with a hoe in his hand. It was not unfamiliar work. Though he had been primarily a house servant, he had occasionally been sent to the fields by Boss during busy seasons on the Pontotoc plantation, and he had learned how to plow and plant and hoe and pick. Still, it was a great change for him, exchanging his nice suit and shoes and white linen apron for the rough brogans and homespun shirt and pants of a field hand, and leaving behind the polishing and dusting and serving to sweat amid the furrows. Now, too, he had to live in a crowded, dirt-floor cabin with rude wooden furniture and a primitive grease lamp for lighting. (At least his mattress was comfortable: the McGehees had hidden some of their ginned cotton from the Yankees by having the slaves stuff it into their bedticks.) And unless Matilda managed to bring some of the white folks' food back to their cabin, Lou had to eat the common fare of the field hands. This meant a lot of bacon and corn bread. The latter was nicknamed “Johnny Constant” by the slaves; they were treated to wheat bread so rarely that they called it “Billy Seldom.”
20

Of the fifty or so slaves then on the plantation, about half were “full hands,” that is, fully grown but not elderly. Each had his or her assigned task. Most, like Lou, labored in the fields in a work gang supervised by the black foreman, Uncle Peter. One slave, whose name was John Smith, cared for the livestock. Of the women who did not work in the fields, some, including Matilda, spent their days cooking; others did laundry or weaving, worked in the garden, or served as maids in the Big House. The black children on the plantation, including thirteen-year-old Hannah and eleven-year-old Clarke, helped out with various tasks to the extent of their ability. Only the smaller children and babies were exempt from work. They were tended during the day in the plantation nursery by an older slave woman.
21

Six days a week, the slaves labored from dawn to dusk. For Lou and the other field hands this meant rising before daylight and heading for the fields without breakfast. They took along a “morning bite” left over from the previous night's supper and downed it during a brief break. Around noon they halted for dinner, which was usually brought to them in the fields. After eating and resting a while, all hands went back to work until sundown.
22

By arriving late in the season, Lou had missed some of the heaviest field work: pulling the old stalks in the cotton fields and corn fields, deep plowing with a shovel plow to break up the compacted soil, and more plowing with a turning plow to line the fields with furrows and ridges in preparation for planting. He had also missed corn-planting, which was done before cotton-planting. Most of Master Jack's cotton seed was probably already in the ground before Lou got there, too, though there was still time to plant more. This was done by running a scratch plow along each ridge to create what was called a drill, then dropping seeds into the drills and covering the seeds with soil using a hoe. As soon as the corn and cotton plants began to poke above the surface, cultivation began. For Lou and the others in the work gang, this meant long days spent with hoe in hand, bent over and moving slowly through the fields, carefully chopping away weeds and thinning out the sprouting plants. Now and then as the season progressed the hands also had to hitch a bull-tongue plow to a mule and run it down the furrows to destroy weeds and loosen up the soil for better drainage, taking care not to run over the growing plants or cut their roots. On rainy days there were indoor chores to do, including carding and spinning wool and making the oak baskets in which the ripe cotton would be collected in the fall.
23

13. Fredonia Methodist Church still stands in Panola County, Mississippi, virtually unchanged since the days when Louis Hughes and the McGehee family attended services there.

Daylight stretched for well over thirteen hours on these spring days in northern Mississippi. After the sun set, the bone-weary slaves generally just ate their supper and relaxed a bit before turning in. All looked forward to their weekly day of rest. But for Lou it was not altogether restful.
24

On Sunday mornings Master Jack and his family went to church. It took two carriages to accommodate them all—Madam or Mary Farrington must have provided one, since Master Jack had just one of his own now. Lou and George were detailed as drivers, which meant they had to rise early, hitch up the horses, and have the carriages waiting in the yard of the Big House when the McGehees emerged in their Sunday clothes.
25

The family's usual destination was the nearby Fredonia Methodist Church. The McGehees had been associated with this church for decades. Master Jack himself had designed the building back in 1842, and his wife was buried there in the little graveyard; there was a plot next to hers where one day his own remains would be laid.
26

The church sat on a low hill surrounded by cedars. It was a white wooden building with a portico, suggestive of the Greek Revival style but very plain. Arriving at the church, the McGehees would go up the steps and through the double doors. Inside they divided to pews on either side, for here the old tradition of separate seating for the sexes was still observed. Lou and George, after securing the carriages, could also enter the church—not through the main entrance, however, but through a side door. This gave access to a stairway that led to a gallery where the slaves were seated opposite the pulpit.
27

The gallery was not large, for few slaves in that community accompanied their masters to church. The custom was to hold services for the blacks on each plantation on Sunday afternoons. These were sometimes conducted by a local minister who rode a circuit of plantations after his morning church service, visiting each perhaps one Sunday a month. Along with the good news of salvation, this white preacher invariably delivered a message of obedience, reminding the assembled blacks that God had ordained slavery and expected servants to submit to their masters. More gratifying to the black faithful were the words of the slave preachers, or exhorters, who led the Sunday afternoon services in the absence of the white circuit rider. The fervent sermons of these unlettered men of God, so different from the preaching of the white minister, touched the black congregations profoundly. Lou attended many such black-led services on Boss's and Master Jack's plantations and he was always moved by the words of the exhorters, which were at once stirring and consoling. He recalled these times warmly in his memoir: “Many tears were shed, and many glad shouts of praise would burst forth during the sermon. A hymn usually followed the sermon, then all retired. Their faces seemed to shine with a happy light—their very countenance showed that their souls had been refreshed.… These meetings were the joy and comfort of the slaves, and even those who did not profess Christianity were calm and thoughtful while in attendance.”
28

These Sunday afternoon gatherings were generally held out of doors in all seasons except winter, but it was unusually cool in Panola that spring. There was a warm spell in mid-May, but otherwise it stayed cold from the time Lou came until summer arrived with June, cold enough for the slaves to wear their woolen winter clothes and keep the fires going in their cabins all night. It was dry, too—not enough rain to please the planters. The county also endured a plague of sorts that spring: gnats. The creatures were everywhere, pestering and biting people and livestock and poultry alike.
29

While Lou swatted gnats and chopped weeds, Matilda toiled in the kitchen behind the Big House. She was no doubt grateful for the cool weather, for the kitchen was always warm. She was working hard: getting up each day with Lou, carrying her baby in its cradle to the nursery, and cooking breakfast, dinner, and supper for the McGehees while periodically returning to the nursery to breast-feed her baby. But the worst part of her daily routine was having to endure the presence of Madam.
30

Madam and her sister Mary were in charge of household matters on the plantation now that their mother was dead. This meant overseeing the blacks who cooked, cleaned, washed, wove, waited table, and tended the garden and the nursery. Madam's daughter, who was twenty-three, and Mary's son, who was almost fifteen, were old enough to help with these responsibilities and with the care of Madam's younger children, boys ages three and six.
31

Madam was forty-five years old at this time. She had married Boss, who was her first cousin, when she was twenty-one. Three years later, when Lou first laid eyes on her, she struck him as “a handsome, stately lady … brunette in complexion, faultless in figure and imperious in manner.” But the family tragedies of the war years had taken a toll. Her husband's sudden death, in particular, had devastated her; and the abandonment of their Memphis and Bolivar properties had left her without a home of her own. What Lou saw now, in the spring of 1865, was a woman “sadly changed—[she] did not appear like the same person. Her troubles and sorrows had crushed her former cruel and haughty spirit.”
32

Perhaps Matilda, good Christian that she was, had by now forgiven Madam for her cruelties. Lou could not. He remembered how she had terrorized him as a boy, slapping his jaw or pinching his ear for the slightest mistake, or for no reason at all. He remembered the tantrums that belied her image of stateliness, her screaming at him or some other servant, red-faced, stamping her foot, sometimes reaching out to slap a passing servant even as she sat at the dinner table. He remembered the almost daily beatings she inflicted on the black women as she made her rounds about the Memphis estate, all the while railing about the laziness and incompetence she had to put up with. He remembered how he came to dread hearing the words that heralded an especially brutal punishment at her hands: “Ah! You put up at the wrong hotel.” But, more than anything else, he remembered how she had caused the death of his twin babies.
33