Spinning Dixie (11 page)

As the lemonade soothed my throat, a tall, fine-boned woman with light brown hair, in her early forties peered into the kitchen. I immediately put down my glass and wiped the chilly moisture from my palms against my khakis.

“You must be Mr. Eastman,” she said.

“He
is,
Mother,” Claudine added helpfully.

“Thank you for letting me visit, Mrs. Polk,” I said, extending my hand. The thought flashed through me that I had once read that a man should not initiate a handshake with a woman. Had I blown it?

Mrs. Polk cautiously met my hand.

“I'm Petie Polk,” she said. “What a nice handshake.”

Petie Polk was dressed in a peach-colored cotton sundress and sandals. She had intense, attractive features, and shrewd laser eyes. Claudine and Indy Six did not look like her facially, but their builds were similar.

“We're very pleased you're here. Claudie says you know your way around stables.”

Get to work, Yankee.

“I do. I've ridden horses since I was little and have worked at stables in the summer.”

“At a racetrack,” Petie said.

“Yes, that's right.”

“My. My. Claudie, have you offered Jonah anything to eat?”

“Ooh, no, Mother.”

“Why don't you. After all he's probably heard about Southern hospitality, he may not be terribly impressed.”

Petie winked, wiggled her fingers, and made herself scarce somewhere on the continent of Rattle & Snap.

I waited, as instructed, in the formal dining room with my lemonade. I was afraid to put it down on the table with Martha Custis Washington snarling at me from atop a marble cutting board.
“What did I do, lady?”

Within moments, a magical plate of chicken salad, fruit, and pumpkin bread drifted before me. Claudine sat down next to Martha Custis Washington, head balanced in her palms, and watched me eat bread that made me feel like a patriot.

Claudine and I cleared the table, ditching Martha, and went out to the front portico. Claudine knocked on one of the pillars.

“See these, Jonah? They're hollow. During the Civil War, George Washington Polk hid his silverware and gold coins in the fourth pillar in case the Union soldiers looted the place. When the war was over, one of the young Polks was lowered into the pillars to retrieve it. Did you ever hear of such a strange place to hide money?”

“My grandfather hides his in Grand Cayman.”

“Where's that?”

“It's an island in the Caribbean.”

“How does he get it there?”

“The newspapers say he wires it.”

“Wires?”
Wharrz.

“I don't understand it myself. I just hope they don't have to lower me down someday to get it.” A newspaper once wrote that Mickey was worth one hundred and fifty million dollars, but I knew this couldn't be true. When people can't see something, they assume there's a lot there when often there's nothing.

“Which one is the fourth pillar?” I asked.

“It depends on which way you look at the house. Only George knew.”

“Did you ever look in there to see if there's any money left?”

Claudine shot me a silly look.

Bluish moonlight in our path, Claudine tugged me east of the mansion where an ancient brownstone church, St. John's Episcopal, rose before a cemetery. Several Polk plantations shared the church that the Fighting Bishop had built. Claudine said it was the oldest known plantation church in the country. It was a small and simple one-room affair with a single spire at its front. The Polks and their slaves had shared the church. They had all attended together and sat together. There had been no segregation—Claudine was adamant on this point. The church had been ransacked during the Civil War and had never been restored to its original form. In a change of plans, restoration was to be one of my main projects for the summer.

Behind the church there were dozens of graves belonging to Claudine's ancestors and Polk slaves. It was still light enough outside to identify the markers for George Washington Polk, Rattle & Snap's original master, and Sallie Hilliard Polk, his wife.

“We can trace back our ancestors to the Battle of Hastings in the year ten sixty-six,” Claudine said. “The Polks were Scottish and Irish.”

“Ten sixty-six,” I repeated.

I noticed one grave that did not contain a Polk. It belonged to Colonel Robert Beckham.

“Who was he, Claudine?”

“Colonel Beckham invented the horse-drawn artillery wagon. He was close to my family. They were toughies. There was a Confederate general who said when he saw this cemetery that it was almost worth dying to be buried in such a place.”

Another grave snared my attention. It bore the name “Mammy Sue.” The stone read:

 

MAMMY SUE

Died January 1872

“Faithful to Every Trust”

The tender loving nurse of the eleven children of

George Washington and Sallie Hilliard Polk

 

In a far corner was a lonely obelisk bearing the name of Independence Polk the Fifth, Claudine's father. I took her hand sympathetically—I envisioned Pajamas crouching behind her father's grave marker—and said I was sorry, but she was stronger than I was.

“It's okay,” she said. “See those headstones next to my father's? Those are for me, Indy Six, Indy Four, and my mother. Maybe even my children.”

I let go of her hand and held her chin. “You know where you'll be, uh, where—”

“I'll be buried,” Claudine answered. “Yes, I know. Right here. That unnerves you?”

“I've lost people before. My parents.”

“Then death shouldn't be so exotic.”

“That's not it. I mean, in a weird way I'm jealous.”

“Of where I'll be buried?”

“No, that you know, that your life is so certain. I feel like I don't know what's going to happen in five minutes.”

“Jonah, I don't know what will happen either, but I know what will happen eventually.”

“Geez, I don't.”

“Sure you do. Our destinies are the same. Our bodies will be in the earth, and our souls, if we are good Christians, will be in heaven.”

Yeee.
I flinched. Claudine noticed.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“What if we're not good Christians?”

“You don't think you're a good Christian?”

Don't tell her yet, Jonah. Not the time. Never assume that others know. Your looks could be almost anything except for Swedish or Namibian. Waffle.

“I'm just not sure how it's defined, that's all.”

“Oh, don't worry about it.”

It wasn't going to heaven that unnerved me. It wasn't even hell. It was prehistoric Claudine and how she knew where the arc of her life would end. My history was fluid, wide open.

Claudine and I walked along the grass past a large pond to the site of the southernmost slave quarters, which had been torn down and rebuilt into little guest apartments in the style of motel rooms. This is where I would be staying. A blacksmith's shop had once been located nearby. A carriage house and a short structure built into the earth were only yards away. Claudine described the ground-level structure as the icehouse, which had been dug into the earth to preserve ice. The plant life around each structure was lush. Even under the moon, the colors were more vibrant than the neon in Atlantic City—perhaps because these colors were made by God, not fugitives.

“You're going to have a visitor to your room,” Claudine told me.

I shuddered, fantasizing that this was a come-on, and felt deflated when she appeared to be stating a fact.

“His name is Elijah Polk. His family has lived here for hundreds of years. He's the last one. Elijah will be showing you your projects. He's responsible for the facilities.”

“Elijah? Like the prophet?”

“I suppose.”

“How's he related?”

“He's not related by blood, but he's family.”

Claudine pushed open the door to the room.

It was laid out like a fifties-style motel room, with knotty pine paneling and old paintings of the plantation on the wall. There was an antique rolltop desk. The top shelf of the desk had a large photograph of a black family from yesteryear. Two twin beds were against the side wall separated by a wicker nightstand.

A soft creaking came from behind us. When we turned around, we saw a tall black man in late middle age. An elegant emblem of toil with reels of history whirring behind his eyes, he was the man who had waved to me when I rode up.

Claudine said, “Elijah, this is my friend Jonah Eastman.”

“So he is,” Elijah said sternly, shaking my hand, studying me.

“It's good to meet you, sir.”

“Sir?” Elijah said, cracking a smile.

“Why not
sir
?”

“Why, son, I don't know,” he laughed, incredulous.

Claudine left me to unpack, so I felt hollow. Elijah gestured to the twin bed farthest from the window. He clearly had something he wanted to say. He was a touch formal, like a teacher who had wandered for ages in search of a pupil.

“Claudine says your family has been at Rattle & Snap for hundreds of years,” I said timidly, knowing full well what that meant.

“Don't have to walk on eggshells with me, son. I know my family was slaves here, if you want to know the truth. That's right, the Polks owned slaves, ninety-nine of them. They never bought, sold, or traded in slaves, though. The slave trade ended in eighteen-oh-eight; Rattle & Snap wasn't built till the eighteen forties. I live up in the mansion. There's rooms hidden there you'd never know. The house goes on and on. Sometimes I come out to this room to be with my thoughts.

“You must know a lot about this place.” Duh.

“A lot? Pretty much everything. We farmed hemp here mostly. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of slavery. My grandfather said that in this life sometimes you don't get the best, you know, options. If he was going to be a slave, he once said, he was glad it was here.

“Never been a family like the Polks. Boggles the mind. People talk about the Kennedys. Those boys were just haircuts next to the Polks. President Jackson—he had no kids, you know—loved his niece, Mary Eastin, and wanted to walk her down the aisle when she got married to Will Polk's son, Lucius, so they had the wedding at the White House. The White House! President Jackson wanted to impress the Polks so much that he added a portico to the White House to be more formal. How about that?”

“Hmm.”

“You ever heard of the Mecklenburg Resolves?”

“Something during the Revolution, right?”

“Started the Revolution, if you want to know the truth. Old Thomas Polk wrote up the Resolves. Know what they said, son?”

“No, sir.”

“They declared King George's laws hooey,” Elijah slapped his knee and howled. “The Polks told the king what he could do with his laws.”

“Then what happened?”

“The Revolution happened. Polks financed a lot of the revolution. Now, say, you're from up near Philadelphia, Claudie said.”

“Right. Jersey, actually.”

“Well, Tom Polk's gang saved the Liberty Bell from the British. A group of his boys hid it out at a church, the Zion Reformed, up in Allentown.”

“What did they think the British would do to it?”

“The British threatened to melt it down to make cannon balls.”

Elijah pointed to my duffel bag, indicating that it was all right for me to unpack.

“I don't mind telling these stories as long as you don't mind listening.”

I dropped a few shirts on the bed. “I love history. The more you can tell me about this place, the happier I'll be.”

“Aw, you'll learn to love it.”

“I already love it.”

“Colonel Will Polk, you know, won Rattle & Snap from the governor of North Carolina. All of Tennessee once belonged to the Carolinas.”

“How did he win it, in a war or something?”

“Why, gambling, son.”

“Gambling?” I fell back onto the bed. “Is this the game rattle-and-snap?”

“You're all right, son. How'd you know that?”

“My grandfather told me about it. He's, uh…he had heard of the game.”

Will Polk had led guerrilla bands during the revolution. He didn't hesitate to throw dice or use a musket. He had been shot in the face during one vicious battle, sparking the legend among the Redcoats that “the colonies had a man who caught bullets with his teeth.” When his comrades approached him thinking he was dead, he just stood up cursing and ran after the British, shooting.

Will had divided the land between his four sons, Lucius, Leonidas, George, and Rufus. George had named his tract Rattle & Snap after the game his father had played to win the five thousand six hundred acres in 1792. This had caused of a scandal among the Polks, who didn't want to advertise the roguish manner in which the land had been acquired. The other brothers chose nobler names like Ashwood, Hamilton Place, and Belle Meade.

“Almost as soon as Rattle & Snap was built, the whole thing was over. After the meteor shower, everything came undone.”

“What meteor shower?”

Elijah explained that many changes in a society were tied to God. God let men know about change through a warning shot. “Something natural-like,” Elijah said. In 1856, a brilliant display of light spread across the Southern heavens, touching off widespread rumors of a slave rebellion. The plantation owners took the meteor shower as an omen of collapse, while many slaves saw it as a divine sprinkling of hope.

Elijah began a hearty guffaw: “You haven't met Indy Four yet, have you?”

“No, sir.”

“You will. My Lord. My best friend. See, I told you about Old Tom Polk, Old Will Polk, but there's many more, that's why I get so holy. Indy Four's obsessed with them, if you want to know the truth. Harding Polk, Indy's uncle, for example, led the campaign against Pancho Villa. Did you ever have an uncle like that?”

“I had an uncle who led the campaign to bring whitefish to Bookbinder's,” I answered. Bookbinder's was a legendary seafood restaurant in Philadelphia.

“Never heard of it, but I'm sure you're proud.”

I half-smiled, like a bombing Borscht Belt comic.

“Indy's got the personality of a cyclone. You'll think he's crazy. Everybody does. He's not. See, he had these cousins who built America, but he never saw war himself and suspects he had it too easy, which he did. Hates himself for it, that old boy, spoiling for a war. Instilling it in his grandson. Goes out hunting with that child, plays cavalry, plots military strategy against varmints…. You're sweet on Claudine.”

“Sweet? No, I don't think so. It's a disease.”

“Ha-ha. She's sweet on you, too. Never seen her like she was when she came back from Atlantic City. Not with that J.T. either. She's been sailing around on a cloud till you got here. You're all right, son. You don't seem like a trivial man. Claudie's the prize that J.T. wants on his mantel.”