Elysium: The Plantation Series Book IV (27 page)

Chamard gave him a sly
smile. "Exactly."

"Some would accuse
you of insincerity, Mr. Chamard."

He arched his brows. "Me?
Never."

Valentine stepped onto
the gallery. "He could have told the man he was getting too old for such
foolishness, but Mr. Chamard, he don’t know he’s getting old."

"I’m not. You’re the
one getting old around here."

And there they went, the
two of them, bickering like kids. They enjoyed it.

"Major."
Valentine interrupted the banter. "Can I bring you a bowl of pineapple?
Got blueberries mixed in with it, it’s good."

"You offering any to
your lord and master, or just Alistair here?"

"Oh, you want some?
Maybe I bring you a bowl, too."

Chamard grinned as he
puffed on his cigar. "Perfect example of what my daddy would have called
‘uppity.’"

"And some still
would," Alistair said quietly.

Chamard sobered and
flicked ash off his smoke. "Yeah. They would."

Alistair swallowed. "And
the neighborhood? Everybody around here all right?"

"Musette’s gone to
town. I took her to stay with Nicolette for a while. None of her friends are in
town this time of year, but Marcel will squire her around, and Finn and
Nicolette are fine company."

Alistair didn’t speak of Musette’s
sad attraction to Thomas. Better they all pretended she was merely his mentor.

"When is she coming
back?"

Chamard gave him an
enquiring glance. "Week or so, why?"

Alistair couldn’t just
show up at Garvey’s place, not anymore, but he needed to see Lily. He’d like to
hear Maddie giggle, too, and have her tell him how her doll Rebecca learned to
speak so many languages.

"You haven’t had a
party in a while. I thought maybe Nicolette might come back with her, sing for
us. I have a mean fiddler on my place."

"I see. And if I
were to have a party, I’d invite you. I’d invite the Johnstons, oh, and maybe
Garvey and Mrs. Palmer."

Alistair nodded gravely. "Sounds
like a good idea, Bertrand. I look forward to it."

Chamard snorted.

Valentine appeared with a
tray. "We having a party, are we? Good. We can order up some ice and when
it comes, I aim to sit on it."

Thomas and his friends
campaigned relentlessly. They hardly used the donated money -- everybody wanted
to feed them, to shelter them, even if that meant sleeping in somebody’s barn
or on the floor of an old slave cabin.

In spite of the Army
presence, every day they dealt with petty harassment, disruptions, heckling.
Thrown tomatoes. One time, the opposition hired a band to play nearby so that
no one could hear him. "Must mean we got old Percy Randolph worried,"
Reynard said.

Thomas was tired, and it
was so damned hot. Sweat trickled over sweat, and the bright sun made his head
pound. He wanted a bath. He wanted to sleep in his own bed. He wanted to see
Fanny.

His fine brown suit was
rumpled and dirty. The starch in his last clean shirt had given up yesterday
and now his linen itched.

One more day and he could
rest. Win or lose, he meant to sleep, eat Mama’s cooking, and sleep some more.

But he had to get through
today. The crowds had been growing the closer they came to the election. They
knew who he was, they knew what he had to say, and they knew what they had to
do. If he could just get them to the polls tomorrow.

Cabel was getting good at
this. His introductions were getting longer, more impassioned, and more
successful at focusing the crowd’s attention on the platform. Reynard had
managed to get him on an actual stage for today’s speech, not just the back of
a wagon, and somebody had invested in yards of bunting to drape the stage.
Coming up in the world, Thomas thought with a smile.

"And so it is my
privilege to introduce the man who will represent you at the Louisiana State
Constitutional Convention. Thomas Bickell!"

Thomas summoned the
courage to face the increasing fear he felt every time he made himself an easy
target. Some days his post office box was stuffed with threats, some of them
specific and terrible. One memorable letter had been wordless, merely a sketch
in black and red ink, the depiction brutal and explicit. Being shot wasn’t the
worst fate by any means.

He quickly scanned the
crowd as he waited for the cheers and applause to die down. Twice in the last
weeks, he thought he’d seen Valmar on the periphery, a rifle in his arms,
Thomas in his sights. Each time, he’d disappeared, simply poofed into thin air.
He had conjured the man up out of his own dread. 

Thomas woke in the night
drenched in sweat, terrified. He reminded himself it was hot. They were all
sweaty. And he was exhausted. But he could do this. He wouldn’t yield to the
terror.

With hands raised and a
grin on his face, Thomas bounded onto the stage to whistles and applause. He began
to speak. In moments, his mind was taken up with the message he had been giving
for weeks now, but it was not stale, not to him. The passion took hold of him,
the crowd quieted, every man turned to him, listening.

Reynard had hired more
guards as the contributions had increased, and in a corner of his mind, Thomas
noted them patrolling the edge of the crowd, on horseback and on foot. The
inevitable hecklers were soon tapped on the shoulder and quietly escorted from
the scene. There were soldiers present, too -- the white men who early on might
have fired their guns into the air or charged into the crowd were forced to sit
back and glower instead.

"I know what you’re
up against," Thomas told the crowd, his voice hoarse after so many days of
speaking. "I know some of you have been told, ‘If you leave the field to
go vote, don’t come back. You won’t have a job.’ Some of you have been told if
you try to vote, you’ll be beaten, your knee caps broken, maybe even your wife
and children threatened. Hard choices."

The people were listening
quietly. They knew what they faced. They needed courage to take what rightfully
belonged to them – freedom, dignity, and power over their own lives.

"You heard what they
did on Curtis Field’s plantation. Maybe some of you were there. The boss said,
‘You work on Sunday, or you don’t work at all. You work for half what you were
promised, or you don’t work at all.’ And what did our people do? They stood up
for themselves, they stood up for justice. And they did that together! They do
not work on Sundays on Curtis Field’s plantation. They do not work for less
than they contracted for.

"It’s a risk, every
day’s a risk. And it’s going to continue this way until we take our own power.
The way to do that is to stick together, to vote. Tomorrow, take that risk – go
to the polls – because unless we vote, all of us, then next year, and the next
and the next, the boss still going to be telling you Do This, Or Else!"

The crowd hurrahed.
Thomas quieted them with a raised hand.

"I see some of you
wearing Union Army caps. I see -- " he pointed to a man wearing a faded
Army jacket, one empty sleeve pinned up – "some of you who fought bravely
to defeat the Confederacy, and paid dearly for that privilege." He looked
over the somber faces. "We honor our soldiers. We honor what they did, for
all of us, when we carry the fight on, not with rifles and artillery, but with
our votes. That is the most powerful weapon in this country – "

More applause. Thomas’s
voice was all but gone. He raised his arm, his hand fisted. "Tomorrow’s
the day! I’ll see you at the polls!"

He waved, accepting the
applause, and clattered off the stage where Reynard waited for him. He grabbed
Thomas’s arm and pulled him through the crowd. Thomas smiled, gripped the
outstretched hands, smiled, and smiled. Reynard got him inside the black-owned
shop on the corner and closed the door on all the well-wishers.

"Drink this,"
Cabel said and thrust a mug of water sweetened with molasses into his hand.

His hands trembled as he
lifted the mug to his mouth. He had nearly faltered during the speech – he’d
seen, no, he’d imagined, a gunman taking aim at him from the edge of the crowd,
and then another and another. He was losing his nerve, and he didn’t know what
to do but to keep going. That’s all he could do, what he had to do. Keep going.

"One more event,
Thomas. Just one more." Cabel rubbed his shoulders. "You can do one
more meeting."

"These men have
invested in you," Reynard said. "They got money, they got influence.
You gone need them right on. So you got to get hold of yourself."

He nodded. "I know
it. Just give me a minute."

A tall man came from the
back room. "He not been sleeping?"

"Valentine." Thomas
was absurdly glad to see him.

"Yeah, it’s me. I
figured I needed to hear one more speech or I might forget to vote tomorrow."

Thomas laughed.

"Drink up. I got you
a bath ready and Peep brought you some clean linen."

"Daddy’s here?"
He strode through the curtains into the back room. All Thomas wanted was to
lean his head on his daddy’s shoulder for a few minutes. To just close his eyes
and lean on Daddy. Instead, he greeted his father with a smile and held his
hand out for a shake.

"Son, I don’t want
to shake your hand." Peep pulled him in for a hug, his arms tight around
him, squeezing. "I am so proud of you, Thomas. So proud."

Thomas nodded, swallowing
hard. "I’m glad you’re here, Daddy."

"Give me the suit
and the shoes," Valentine said. "I’ll see what I can do with them
while you get bathed. You ain’t as sweet smelling as you could be."

Thomas stripped out of
his clothes, his eye on the steaming hip bath. Hot as the air was, he hoped the
bathwater was even hotter, hot enough to loosen every kink in his back.

"Andrew, go fetch
some bread, some cold meat, anything." That was Reynard giving orders. The
last weeks, as Thomas had needed all his energy to campaign, Reynard had evolved
from guard to manager. Without him and Cabel, he couldn’t have kept going.

Thomas startled at the
sound of glass breaking. "What was that?"

"Stay here,"
Cabel said. Thomas started to head for the front. "Stay here, Thomas,"
Cabel barked.

"You half naked
anyway," Valentine said. "Get in the tub. Cabel can handle whatever’s
going on out there."

Thomas eased into the
water and sighed.

"Just set there and
let the water work on you." Peep handed him another mug. "Drink that
while you setting."

Cabel returned. "Just
a brick through the window, couple of white boys. Andrew and some others chased
them off." 

"Do we have enough
to pay for the window?"

"I’ll take care of
it," Reynard said.

Bathed, fed, dressed in clean
clothes, Thomas was invigorated. He met again with the group of black men who’d
been born free and had accumulated influence in the community. He thanked them
for their past contributions and gratefully accepted their pledge of continuing
support.

The meeting over, Thomas
was still energized. Even though his voice was hoarse, he would have been
willing to mount the stage again and start rallying people, but the campaign
was essentially over. Tomorrow, Election Day.

They had supper with
friends and supporters at Raymond Fick’s house, bedded down there, and were up
early to watch the polls when they opened at seven.

For all the U. S. Army’s
presence, there were white men engaged in petty acts of sabotage. First snag
was that the appointed polling place was closed. Nobody there but a handful of
field hands wondering where they were supposed to vote. Thomas was not
surprised. That’s why he had a team in place for the day, to direct people to
the poll and to ensure there was no overt intimidation, no white men
ostentatiously writing down the names of black men who dared to vote, no white
men with arms crossed, pistols on their hips, glaring at black men.

Thomas and his team split
up, chasing down the election officials, threatening formal complaints, until they
finally opened the poll, six blocks away from the advertised location. All day
long, either Agent Witherspoon or Major Bodell himself, his expression
thunderous at the misdirection, stood across the street from the poll, arms
crossed, watching, ready to intervene if there should be trouble.

Right alongside the
lieutenant observing the proceedings inside the polling place, Reynard had an
official position. He watched every man’s ballot go into the jar. When the jar
got full, he watched the poll official empty it into the appropriate box. He
watched the box. And tonight, when they opened the box to count the ballots. Reynard
would watch that too. Between him and the U.S. Army, there would be no
shenanigans.

Percy Randolph, the white
candidate, stood across the street greeting men, slapping them on the back,
laughing with them. The campaign wasn’t over, Thomas realized.

He chose a spot further
down the block and did the same, greeting, encouraging, and thanking the men
who’d gone to considerable trouble, even risk, to be here today.

At seven p.m., all across
the state, the polls closed. Reynard and Cabel stayed with the ballot box.
Everyone else in Thomas’s entourage retired to Raymond Fick’s house again. No
one went to bed that night. Mrs. Fick fed them at eight o’clock, again at
midnight, and again at five. Some of them sipped whiskey or wine, and all of
them watched the hours tick by.

At dawn, Andrew and Fick
took their turn observing the ballot boxes and the ballot counters, standing
elbow to elbow with the soldiers monitoring the election.

At two o’clock in the
afternoon, the Donaldsonville band assembled at the stage hung with red white
and blue bunting. Heavy on the brass and the drums, the band called the
townspeople to gather. The Director of Elections held up his hands for
everyone’s attention. He made the usual bombastic speech, then announced the
winner.

"I give you our
delegate to the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention – Thomas Bickell!"

Cheering erupted on one
side of the crowd. Thomas heard only the blood roaring in his ears. He’d won.
They’d done it – they’d elected a black man to help draft a state constitution.
People were pounding him on the back, grabbing his hand to shake, laughing and
shouting.

Across the street, a
sullen silence prevailed. Mr. Randolph climbed onto the stage with heavy steps.
His speech conceding the election to Thomas was gracious, even-toned, and gave
no notice to the hostile murmurings of his supporters.

Thomas took the stage.
They had agreed during the night that if he won, his acceptance speech should
give no hint of jubilation at having beat a white man in a free election. Keep
it short, express gratitude for the opportunity to serve and indicate his
intention to be a fair and responsible representative of all the people in St.
James and Ascension Parishes.

Thomas gazed at all the
black faces, and the few white faces, among his supporters. His first words
were a mere croak. People laughed, and he started again, managing a hoarse but
audible voice. "Thank you," he began.

He was truly humbled.
These people, brave men every one of them, had taken a chance on him, a young,
untried black man.

As planned, Thomas kept
it short. He thanked them again, waved, and left the stage.

"Wow," Cabel
said. "We did it."

Thomas grabbed Cabel in a
fierce hug. "Yes.
We
did it. All of us together."

"You gone stick
around to be adored a while, or you want to go home now?"

"I want to be adored
at home," Thomas said.

"Then let’s get out
of here."

Once they’d passed
through the happy crowd, eager to congratulate Thomas and even to touch him,
Thomas and his friends walked through the silent white men and women assembled
on the other side of the street. No one spoke to him, no one touched him. But
they stared, their faces grim. George Clampett, whom they knew to be an officer
in the White Camellia, spat at the ground in front of Thomas’s feet.