Dessa Rose (2 page)

Nehemiah was not a snob and rejected any suggestion of such an attitude; he did not undervalue the yeomanry, the small farmers, merchants, and craftsmen who made up the bulk of the white population in the south. He freely acknowledged that his own father had been a mechanic, owner of a small wheelworks in Louisville. Nehemiah, even now, would be in Louisville earning his livelihood in the family business had not the chance encounter with tales of the Old South—Cavalier Virginia, the landed gentry of Maryland and South Carolina—in a tattered, much circulated literary gazette provided a name for that singular quality that had set him forever apart among the people of his birth: He had taste, an instinct for fine food, fine clothing, fine conversation—fineness in its several manifestations. And there was something in his restless spirit that could not be satisfied by reading alone. He was drawn to the wealthy planters because they possessed many of the
objects of his taste, the clothing and jewelry that delighted the eye, the foods that enchanted the tongue, the houses and furnishings that charmed and gratified some inner sense of continuity and style. He had thought education—schooling—the key to that world and had persisted in his efforts to continue his education despite his father's opposition. Though largely self-taught beyond grammar school, Nehemiah was well read in English literature, particularly the modern period, less so in the natural and physical sciences, and had some knack for mathematics. But land, not learning, was the entrée to planter society.

Nehemiah had turned his hand to first one thing then another, haberdasher, journalist (printing at his own expense a collection of his sketches that he sold, with indifferent success, through subscription), tutor, without penetrating beyond the fringes of society. Only teaching—he had specialized in preparing young men for university entrance—had admitted him to more than passing acquaintance with the better class of planters. The success of the
Guide
had changed that. It was little more than a handbook, the commonplaces of sound management (privately, he spoke of himself as a compiler or editor of its time-tested maxims); its novelty lay in the fact that no one had thought to compile such a volume before and in Nehemiah's constant reference to the practices of the wealthy planters among whom he'd lived as tutor and researcher. Instinct told him that too much emphasis on a knowledge of slave management could compromise the place in society that publication of the
Guide
had won for him. Still, Norton had pressed. A book on slave uprisings, touching as it must upon the secret fears of non-slave holder and slave holder alike, should be an immediate success, easily surpassing the heart- (and pocket-) warming sales of the
Guide
. The book would establish Nehemiah as an important southern author. And researching the
Guide
had opened the doors of countless Great Houses to him; Nehemiah had allowed himself to be persuaded.

Seated now at the makeshift writing table, in a chair rescued from the kitchen so that in his own mind he had dubbed it the “negro chair,” just as one spoke of the rough homespun cus
tomarily worn by darkies as “negro cloth,” his only light two malodorous tallow candles that smoked and flickered, in a stuffy “attic-half” that was little better than a loft, Nehemiah had the grace to laugh at his sanguine optimism. He ought, he knew, to be grateful to Hughes. True, the fellow spoke English little better than a negro (the darky, Sheriff Hughes told Nehemiah, was being held “ex-communion” the extenuating circumstances that had delayed her hanging he called “excrutiating” Nehemiah himself was “Mr. Nemi,” in what seemed a genuine expression of hale-fellow regard), but Hughes had been the soul of cooperation, securing permission for Nehemiah to read the court records—sealed after the trials as too inflammatory for general perusal—even turning over this “spare” room to Nehemiah's use while he questioned the darky. And the property, for all the lack of amenities in the farmhouse itself, was a snug one, a little above three hundred acres, such as Nehemiah himself was looking to purchase in Kentucky or middle Tennessee. But research for the
Guide
had taken Nehemiah into Houses whose beauty was legendary, opening those doors to him and on far more equitable terms than teaching had ever done. He would be less than human, he told himself now, did he not compare that with his subsequent circumstances. Research on this project had taken him into virtually every swamp and overgrown road in southern Louisiana—where, according to Norton, newspaper reports earlier in the year suggested some sort of unrest among the slave population.

The hospitality of that region had been all that one could ask, Nehemiah admitted now, but the reports of plots discovered and insurrections foiled seemed always to originate in out-of-the-way districts. He had seen a slave at Westwego, outside of New Orleans, said to have been cropped as a cohort of the outlaw slave Squire, whose career had ended on the gallows some ten years before. The slave was a big, evil-visaged buck, black as sin, with great flaring nostrils, wide enough—or so it had seemed to Nehemiah—to drive a team through, and dainty holes at the sides of his head where his outer ears had been cropped away. Whatever intelligence the nigra might once have possessed had long since fled, and
Nehemiah had been unable to penetrate the smiling vacuity with which the darky now faced the world.

He had journeyed east to Lafayette on the short-turfed prairies of southwestern Louisiana to investigate a report that house slaves had discovered and betrayed a plot to rebel before it could begin. He had been told of the incident by a chance-met acquaintance at the home of Harrison Evans (second son of the Virginia Evanses) who had served in some measure as his sponsor in New Orleans. White men had actually been arrested in one or two cases, his informant had reported indignantly. There had been several newspaper accounts of reported unrest in the surrounding parishes of Iberia, St. Martin, and St. Landry, so, armed with a letter of introduction from Evans to Mr. James Carpenter, a major landowner in the area, Nehemiah had set out.

Carpenter had proved to be both a gracious host and the owner of the courageous darky Thomas, whose information had foiled the insurrection; he was thus much interested in Nehemiah's project. The plot had been a serious one: Four free negroes and nine of the slaves—over ten thousand dollars in property!—had been hanged; two white men from outside the district had been implicated, but as no negro could give evidence or bear witness in a court of law, they had not been brought to trial. Justice had been content with running the whites out of the area. Carpenter had been forced to give Thomas his freedom and safe passage out of the neighborhood as the only means of preserving his life from the vengeance of the other darkies; his name continued as a curse among slaves in the district.

These events, however, had occurred some seven years before, and though Carpenter spoke of “Uncle Tom's” departure with genuine regret (for the slave had been in the family since Carpenter's boyhood), even the remembered heroism of the loyal retainer had dimmed in his absence. And the planter had shrugged off the most recent rumors. The Creoles were an imaginative and emotional race—not that much better than the nigras as far as that was concerned; and most were nervous in the presence of three or more blacks. “Unless,” he had added, winking at Nehemiah, “the
blacks are women and the Creoles men.” Nehemiah knew, of course, of such relations; more than one master used them as a means of increasing his capital and many used the
droit du Seigneur
to keep discipline in his Quarters. But no man of standing or sensibility made a parade of such practices as the Creoles were wont to do and he disliked hearing Carpenter make a joke of it.

And so it had gone, outdated reports, principals who were dead or moved from the neighborhood. Frustrated, Nehemiah set out on the coastal steamer at the end of May for South Carolina where he would make one of the J. T. Mims party at a newly popular and wickedly expensive resort on Lake Moultrie. He had hoped to be invited to an up-country manor or an island estate where he could while away the fever months safe from the agues that so often swept the low-lying costal areas during the summer. But the invitation from Miss Janet to be part of the select party of family and friends who gathered around the young Georgia couple during the summer months had been too flattering to turn down.

Mims and Miss Janet were among the best representatives of their class, people of means and taste who nurtured their inheritance and so savored its fruits to the fullest. Nehemiah knew there was some element of idealization in his view of the planter “aristocracy.” There were few among them capable of the witty, erudite conversation that he craved; his more outrageous ripostes and marching figures were likely to be greeted with stares holding little more comprehension than that cropped buck's had. Yet, in the best of them, there was little of the ostentatious or affected. The mounds of victuals that so delighted shabby genteel “society” editors had no place on Miss Janet's table. Oh, there was a sumptuous amplitude about all Miss Janet touched. But what delighted, even inspired Nehemiah was not the quantity, but the quality, the subtle piquancy of the red-eye gravy or the feather lightness of a biscuit, sunlight falling across a Brussels carpet, the scrollwork on a ladder-back chair. The planters had wrought immense beauty in the wilderness that still dwarfed the nation and Nehemiah felt privileged to rub shoulders with its creators.

During the stopover in Mobile, Nehemiah had heard the tale of
the uprising on the Wilson slave coffle, barely a month old and still causing shudders throughout the region. He had the tale from several sources; the name of the trader often varied; the coffle was said to have originated in Tennessee, Georgia, and Montgomery, to have been bound for Linden, Jackson, Huntsville. But always one thing remained the same. The slaves had killed white men in the battle in which they were finally subdued, and in the initial hand-to-hand action that had freed the entire coffle. That fact gnawed at Nehemiah. The slaves had killed white men. He had not heard of nigras doing that since Nat Turner's gang almost thirty years before.

Nehemiah rose, yawning. The darky's pregnancy was a stroke of luck; the rest of the ringleaders had been hanged by the time he heard of the uprising. Still, subsequent attempts to get the darky to talk had not been particularly fruitful. Nor, he admitted as he sat on the narrow bunk, was he particularly proud of the way he had handled them. He remembered one occasion in particular. He and Hughes had heard upon approaching the cellar a humming or moaning. It was impossible to define it as one or the other. Nehemiah had been alarmed, but Hughes merely laughed it off as some sort of “nigger business.” The noise had sounded like some kind of dirge to Nehemiah, but Hughes chuckled when he suggested this.

“How else kin a nigger in her condition keep happy, cept through singin and loud noise?” he'd asked with a smug consequential air. “A loud nigger is a happy nigger.”

“You make no distinction between moaning and singing?” Nehemiah asked tartly.

“Why should I?” Hughes replied with a hearty laugh. “The niggers don't.”

Nehemiah had been obliged to rely on Hughes' judgment in the matter; as slave owner and sheriff, Hughes had had far greater contact with various types of darkies than Nehemiah would ever wish for himself. And he had heard much the same thought—a loud darky is a happy one—expressed again and again while doing research for the
Guide
. But the thought reminded him unpleas
antly of Wilson's “Raise a song there, Nate,” and Wilson's empty sleeve.

The sheriff had opened the door and the darky, caught in the stream of light, fell silent. Nehemiah, cautioning the sheriff to prop the door open as he left, descended into the cellar. The darky started to scuttle away and Nehemiah, fearful of being drawn into the shadows, called to her sharply. The darky stopped, crouching just inside the patch of light, and appeared unmoved when he reminded her that though the pickaninny she carried had saved her from a quick hanging, it would not save her from a whipping. Probably, she had seen that for the ruse it was. Except in the most extreme cases, even the meanest owner would not exact such harsh punishment of a darky so close to childbed. And one never threatened a slave. He had heard this axiom over and over again in his research for the
Guide
. One promised; and such promises had always to be kept.

The darky had greeted his statement with a flick of her eyes—almost as though he had been a bothersome fly and her eyes a horse's tail flicking him away. The memory of that gesture still had the power to outrage him; it had infuriated him then, and he had struck her in the face, soiling his hand and bloodying her nose, and stormed up the steps almost before he thought. He was immediately sorry; he had compounded the first error with another. It was seldom necessary to strike a darky with one's hand and to do so, except in the most unusual circumstances, lowered one almost to the same level of random violence that characterized the actions of the blacks among themselves. He was not, he told himself later, the first to have forgotten the sense of his own teachings; and the violence of his reaction had perhaps made any such response unnecessary in the future. Nonetheless, he had prevailed upon Hughes to institute the saltwater treatment: no food and nothing but heavily salted water to drink. That had gotten results; he glanced at where his journal, still open to the day's entry, lay on the makeshift table. Even so light a punishment would probably not be necessary again.

It was ironic, Nehemiah knew, that he who had never owned a
slave—nor wished to—should be counted an expert on their management. He had shrugged off much of the Calvinistic teachings of his father with the same ease with which he had put off the rough homespun his father's parsimonious nature forced the family to wear. But the elder Nehemiah's abhorrence of slaves still clung to him. He no longer saw the institution as quite the threat to white workingmen that his father had. Still, about the only thing a darky could do for him was to wash his linen—and that task he hired out. Such, he reflected, were the vagaries—and rewards—of life. Nehemiah pulled off first one boot, then the other and stood to take off his trousers. He would always take a special pride in the fact that he had been the first to hit upon the idea of compiling the
Guide
, but he felt in his bones that the new book would be an intellectual as well as practical achievement, a magnum opus, far eclipsing the impact of the
Guide
.