Jacob's Ladder (13 page)

A HIGH-HEADED SHEEP

S
UN
R
ISE
, V
IRGINIA
A
PRIL
7, 1861

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars;

see that ye be not troubled.

—Matthew 24:6,
text for Preacher Todd's sermon

ALTHOUGH THE WHITE
congregation of SunRise Chapel was not lacking in Christian devotion, neither was it numerous, and only the larger planters' generosity made a preacher possible. To augment his income, Preacher Todd made cabinets, pie safes, and coffins. He was not a very good cabinetmaker but he was the best in SunRise.

Gangs from Warwick and Stratford had built the chapel three years before, replacing the log house on Pheasanty Run where Presbyterians worshiped when Captain George Washington was building forts against the Indians. It was square and brick, with a squat wooden steeple and two cement columns which filled most of the vestibule. Enclosed stairwells mounted into the servants' garret, which overhung the sanctuary. Although the pews in the sanctuary had been bought in Lexington, Preacher Todd himself crafted the backless oak benches in the garret. The pulpit was carved black walnut. The piano Sister Kate Gatewood played had been donated by the Dinwiddies, though its tone (Grandmother Gatewood often stated) was not refined.

On this Sunday, Preacher Todd descanted on rumors and alarms. He reminded his congregation that Virginia remained in the union and prayed that the federal government would peacefully relinquish Fort Sumter to its rightful master, the sovereign state of South Carolina. Anxiety and distress among the parishioners were remarked. Specifically, it had come to Mr. Todd's attention that some in the congregation—even, he believed, some elders—had entered into contracts for life insurance on rented negroes. The preacher deplored this practice, inquiring, “How can we ask God's help, if we do not trust His Providence?”

His parishioners seemed contrite, so the preacher moved into his closing prayer, wherein he prayed for the congregation's sick or grieving, all magistrates and county officials, and the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Missing from his petition was the President of these United States, dropped from the prayers of the SunRise congregation when Abraham Lincoln assumed the office.

Sister Kate shifted from pew to piano and, with as much flourish as she permitted herself, struck up the recessional.

Several servants in the hot, badly ventilated garret cleared their throats. Gatewood's Pompey hummed a C, and Warwick's cook laid in the harmony.

Since no Christian could object to praising the Lord, the coloreds did so with a will. Their praises overwhelmed the white congregation and the piano itself. Colored singers relished every verse, extended every harmony, and determined Sister Kate's tempo.

When their last note was sung, they remained standing while the preacher led his white congregation out, then filed down the narrow stairs.

The whites gathered at the door, the coloreds in the new graveyard. Just three stones had been emplaced thus far, and the almost empty graveyard seemed like an ill-sown field.

“Ah,” Jack the Driver said, “Aunt Opal. So glad you could come here today.”

In Sunday finery which squeezed her where she wasn't used to being squeezed and itched her where she wasn't used to being itched, Aunt Opal made a face.

“Is Master Uther well?” Jack inquired.

“Last I seen of him he was,” she said. “More'n a fortnight past.”

Jack shook his head sympathetically. “You farin' well?”

“I got myself used to that old fool bein' underfoot.” She coughed. “He in Warm Springs, at Master Byrd's house, until court day.” Opal inspected the throng of brightly dressed negroes as if they were strangers. “I come today to beg you to ask Master Gatewood keep Miss Sallie safe,” she confessed. She added, “Generally on Sundays I washes clothes.”

“Master Gatewood has already spoke up for Miss Sallie,” Jack the Driver said. After a pause he added, “Course I'll talk to Master.”

On the church steps, Preacher Todd and Samuel Gatewood were in serious conversation. Preacher Todd was a founder of the county militia, which Samuel Gatewood had denounced as inflamatory.

Jack said, “Auntie, I was meanin' to come see you anyway. We won't start plowing in the river bottoms until Monday next, and we can spare hands to put in your oats and corn. Is you gonna work the same ground as last year?”

“That five acres below the barn and the three acres beside the creek.” She turned, “This headstone. Who is it?”

“Jim Ervin. He weren't no old man, neither. Was the bloody flux killed him. If you lack seed, we . . .”

“Why do white folks write on their gravestones? They afraid folks forget who they are? Ain't nobody write on colored gravestones.”

Jack the Driver said, “Master Gatewood was thinkin' you might want somebody stayin' with you until they have the trial and Master Uther comes home.”

“Jesse,” Opal snapped. “He can send me Jesse. Jesse already knows where things is.”

Not far away, Franky Williams was flirting with Rufus, who had a foot propped on a gravestone and was chewing on a straw. The straw bobbed up and down when he chuckled.

“Jesse locked up in the root cellar. He's run twice already.”

“You ever wonder why I never took me a man?” Opal asked. “I couldn't bear it was they to sell a child of mine. Better not to have no child. This fool white child—Sallie—break my heart. I told her to her face in that jailhouse, ‘Miss Sallie, you got to humble your pride. You got to get down on bended knee. You tell 'em how you and Jesse was raised under the same roof and Jesse cared for you when you was a tiny baby and when Jesse came knockin' on your door, middle of the winter froze near to death, you let him in, just couldn't help yourself. Tell 'em you know you done wrong, you're sorry and won't ever do it again, and likely they'll turn you loose.' ”

“What she say?”

Opal shrugged and traced the letters on the headstone. “I don't care if I never be in no jailhouse again, 'deed I don't. They keep man and wife apart. Only one to look in on 'em is Old Uther.”

“White folks scared. In Warm Springs they holdin' torchlight parades and marchin' around like soldiers. And Franky's sister, Dinah, who was give to Master Byrd when he married Miss Leona, Dinah says the white folks talkin' hard talk about Miss Sallie and that husband of hers. Miss Ophelia Simmons so feared her servants goin' to murder her in her sleep she lock them in the coal cellar every night before she goes to bed. You know Simmons's Billy? Billy a godly, cleanly man. Billy a Baptist church deacon, and he plumb hate to sleep in that filthy cellar.”

Franky mock-slapped Rufus, pretending offense at Rufus's remarks. Her girlfriends raised eyebrows and giggled.

Jack shook his head. “White folks sayin' Miss Sallie and her husband are abolitionists like Mr. John Brown.”

“You think my Sallie gonna stay in jail?”

“Master Samuel say they done ‘felony,' same as if they was to steal Master's watch or pocketbook.”

“How can you steal a person?” Aunt Opal glared at Jack until he had to look away. She muttered, “Well, it's nothin' to me. She's just a white child, none of my own.”

“Sallie's husband, Master Alexander, is harmin' them; aggravatin' people the way he does.”

“He plumb ruined that girl,” Opal said. “Master Alexander he take up more space just sittin' than any man I ever seed. Don't know how to milk a cow, can't pour oats to the horses without spillin' 'em. Old Uther ain't the handiest man ever walked the earth, but Uther always willing. Old Uther, he pull up a chair by the fire and talk educated talk, all about Mr. Jefferson and such. Do you think that Alexander said a word? Talk goes on long as Uther is moving his mouth. Minute he quits all his fine words fall on the floor lay there looking foolish.”

“I never heard anythin' good about Master Alexander. Nary one good thing.”

“Sallie, she saw somethin' in that boy nobody else can see. Might be if their baby was born, it would have been different. Some men like havin' somethin' more helpless than theirself to care for. Baby'll take some men that way.”

“And some men run from 'em.” Rufus had his arm around Franky's waist and was whispering in her ear. Franky had carried two babies to term but neither had lived. It was supposed that Rufus had been the father, but popular opinion credited Rufus with many infants he did not deserve.

Brow furrowed, Aunt Opal considered Master Alexander. “I had a buck sheep once, called him Henry. Handsome, high-headed sheep. Oh, he was skittery—hated to be touched, and when the other sheep came to the grain he'd hide on the fringe of the woods and wouldn't come out so long as I was near. September—was a full-moon night—and them no-count Stuart boys came down the bottoms coon hunting and their dogs got in the sheep. Next morning there's three sheep tore to pieces and Henry, soon as he sees me he runs down into the corner and tries to bust through the fence. That fence is new chestnut rails six high and when he runs at 'em, he gets knocked back onto his haunches. Makes an awful sound. I can see him thinkin', ‘Should I try that again?' And 'deed he does. Oh, he must have run at that fence eight or ten times tryin' to get away from what wasn't chasin' him before he broke his neck. Oh, he was a good-lookin' buck. High-headed.”

The Gatewood buggy drove away. Pompey, the driver, did not deign to notice lesser mortals.

“Scared out of his wits,” Jack the Driver opined.

“I don't know he was scared. I think something was wrong in his mind. I swear I could see that sheep take thought, makin' up his mind each time to try one more time what hadn't ever worked before and didn't make no sense anyway.”

AT NIGHT THE COFFLE RESTS

B
LACKS
F
ORD
, T
ENNESSEE
A
PRIL
8, 1861

THEY WERE THREE
days east of Memphis on the Big Sandy River. Ellam wanted to see Memphis. He'd heard things about Memphis. Wasn't anything you couldn't find in Memphis. Ellam smacked a mosquito on his cheek. You'd think bugs'd learn that it didn't pay to fool with Ellam Omohundru.

The light was yellow over the Big Sandy and the sky was big, and Ellam wondered why it was so big here and not so big back in Virginia. Already, the slave jail was lost in shadows.

Uncle Silas wanted to get to Vicksburg before the cotton planting. Prices were lower in the winter, when you had to feed a slave and you couldn't get much work out of him, and they'd drop later in the summer, after the Delta planters had all the hands they needed. Ellam belched. Brown beans and cornbread. Wasn't much better than what the niggers ate, except niggers didn't get no ham and they sure as hell didn't get no brandy. Ellam scratched a lucifer across the doorpost and waited until the sulfur stink burned itself out before he lit his cigar. He put a thick boot on the bench set outside the inn for travelers to wait for the ferry or simply admire the sweep of the river, whence the bugs were coming. Cigar smoke helped some.

Ellam Omohundru was a young man with an untested conviction that men of quality would rise naturally in society and that he was among their number. He identified his wishes with needs and needs with rights. Let that goddamned Lincoln try to relieve Sumter. Boys like Ellam Omohundru would give him what for!

Uncle Silas and the others were still inside, digesting politics with their dinner. When you did something—like those South Carolina boys were doing—you pulled all the politics along behind you. Politics was what filled the time between doing something.

Ellam was twenty-two. He wanted to see Memphis. He'd wanted to see Richmond too, but Uncle Silas said they'd get a better price in Tennessee. Uncle had spent the winter putting this coffle together, fifteen prime hands, not one of them over thirty. No lungers, no runaways, no whip scars. Only three missing fingers and one missing eye among them. Uncle Silas walked them across Tennessee like they were on a Sunday picnic: twenty miles a day, meals morning and evening, and under roof any night it threatened rain. It wasn't going to rain tonight, Ellam could tell that, but there they were in the slave jail, which had been a horse barn from the stagecoach days. Now the railroad was putting paid to that line of work. One day they'd have slave jail cars on the railroad and the coffles'd be a thing of the past too.

For two weeks, Ellam had been eyeballing that high yellow girl with the baby. Watched the way she moved, how she held her head so high. Saw her breasts when she gave her baby suck. He liked it and didn't like it: liked the breasts, didn't like the way they were being used, no different from a milk cow's udder. Today, she caught him spying on her, and when the baby was done, she took forever to cover herself. Maggie was her name. Colored girls started younger than white girls did, on account of being more primitive, with stronger animal natures.

The jailer had carefully combed gray hair, a neatly patched vest, and braces embroidered with yellow and black squares.

“They ain't doin' nothin',” he said, gesturing to the judas hole in the door. “One of 'em's prayin', but most the rest are just lyin' in the straw. Last week I watched a pair of them doin' it in there. They was just walkin' from Clarksville to Memphis, so they had plenty of strength. Didn't take long, no longer than a stallion on a mare, just five minutes or so, and I couldn't see much on account of the lantern light don't hardly reach, but I could tell they was doin' it. People on all sides of them, but they didn't care. They was married and goin' to different masters, maybe that's why they didn't care. I'm Oliver. Mighty pleased to meet you.” The gray-haired simpleton stuck out his hand.

Ellam kept his hand in his pocket.

“Less'n I let you, you can't watch 'em,” Oliver said. “They might be your niggers, but this is my brother's jail.”

“I'm Ellam,” Ellam said, looking down to the river, where clouds of bats were sweeping the water. “This is my Uncle Silas's coffle. He brings a big coffle every spring. ‘Buy in the fall and winter, sell in the spring,' that's what my uncle believes. This is my first trip. I was hoping we'd sell 'em in Memphis. Forrest and McMillan has the biggest slave and horse auctions in the west, and I'd surely admire to see 'em. But Uncle Silas says no, we'll get a better price in Vicksburg. I got to inspect them every night. It's my job.” He laughed. “I tuck them in just like they was babies.”

Oliver lit a lantern, and the two went inside. The jail was squat and sprawling. The square openings cut in the stone to pass air and light to horses were barred with iron rods.

Ellam wrinkled his nose. “God,” he said. “God damn.”

“They get new straw in here once a week, and there's a thunder jug every three rings.”

“It's them,” Ellam said. “It's just them.”

Oliver giggled.

One side of the jail was a forty-foot pen bedded with straw. At intervals, rings in the stone wall anchored the blacks' chains. The other side was horse stalls, piled high with broken hubs and axles. A lantern hung from a low beam.

“We didn't want too many lanterns for fear of fire,” Oliver whispered.

A young black was kneeling, facing the stone wall, praying. Every evening, indoors or out, after supper, before he slept, he got on his knees for praying. Never gave any trouble, never talked back, never bucked or tangled his chains. He'd come from Fluvanna County.

Those that weren't asleep eyed the two white men. None of them said a word, but their eyes followed every move. A woman was squatting on a chamber pot. When she finished, she shoved a handful of straw underneath her skirt to wipe herself. She replaced the chamber pot against the wall and lay down on her side.

The high yellow sat back to the wall, baby swaddled in her lap, legs stuck out in the straw. Ellam wondered why she had such skinny legs. “What's this?”

Oliver swung a door open. “Was a tack room. Now we just use it case one of 'em's sick so the others don't catch it. Sometimes when we got a runaway we keeps 'im in here.” The room had a high barred window, and a straw pallet on the stone floor.

Ellam took the lantern from Oliver's hands. “That's all I'll be needin' you for.”

“You intendin' to stay in here? With them?”

“For a little while.”

The young-old man's pale eyes wandered the shadowy room. “You're gonna do it? Which one you gonna do it to?”

“Go on, now. You can see your way to the door. Plenty of light.”

“I'm supposed to stay right here. Particular if anybody's with 'em. We had one to run away once and it was a good thing the patrollers caught him or brother would have had to pay for him.”

Ellam turned his back before rummaging in his pocketbook for a dime. “Here. I won't be but half an hour.”

Solemnly Oliver turned the dime in the lamplight. “Some fellows can do it two or three times.”

“Go on. Get out of here. Close the door behind you.”

No sooner was the door pulled shut than the judas hole opened and darkened as Oliver pressed his face against it.

Quietly, Ellam detached the high yellow's chain. The woman looked at him.

“You'll want somebody to care for the baby,” Ellam said.

Her eyes were big, and in the lantern light, black as well holes.

Wordlessly, a woman held out her arms, and Ellam passed the baby to her, careful not to step on anyone's legs. He could have sworn the baby was awake, but it didn't cry. It smelled cleaner than he expected. The woman cradled the baby in her arms and crooned as Ellam tugged on the high yellow's chain and she came to her feet, all in one motion. He held the door of the tack room open, and when he closed it behind them, he set the lantern on a high shelf and wrapped his end of the chain around his wrist.

“I'm Ellam,” he said.

“Yes, Master.”

“And you're Maggie.”

She had her fingers laced in front of her. Long, delicate fingers.

“Why you lookin' at me like that.” She looked down at her feet. Her feet were pretty good-sized and flat.

“How old are you?”

“I was born the year before the railroad came to Millboro.”

“Where the hell's Millboro? I never been to Millboro.”

“Millboro, that be where they ship our flour, and we saw up a mess of sleepers for them too. Stratford Plantation, that's my home.” A tear started down her cheek, and she sniffled.

“Stop that. You're goin' to have a new home now. You and your baby.”

“They gonna sell us together, Master? I'd be ever so grateful was you to sell us together. I'd fetch a better price too, on account of everybody know I'm a breeder.”

Ellam smiled a tight smile. “Woman for one price, infant for another. Might fetch more that way.”

“Master, that'd be hard! Little Jacob here is all I got to remember his father by!”

Ellam held his key ring to the light to select the key that released her chain. There was a scurrying outside the barred window, like a possum scratching around.

“I might ask Uncle Silas to sell you together,” Ellam said. His throat was curiously tight, and he swallowed. “Uncle Silas, he ain't so wellborn as me, 'n' he'd do most anything to please me. He's teachin' me the business now, but one day I'm gonna run it by myself. Buyin', sellin', travelin' everywhere I want. Hell, maybe I'll get up to Millboro.”

“Stratford's only a half day farther. First there's Warwick Plantation and then Dinwiddie's and then Stratford. After Stratford there's nothing but Snowy Mountain. Stratford last and the best. Oh, you'd want to stay at Stratford Plantation once you got there, Master.”

“Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn't,” Ellam said. “I don't suppose you been to Charlottesville.”

She shook her head.

“Bridgewater? New Market?”

She hadn't.

“Well, there's plenty of towns and plenty of goings-on. Two days hence we'll be passing near Memphis. I might just tell Silas to walk the coffle by himself while I go in for a time. I just might do that.”

“What's gonna happen to us, Master?”

Ellam shrugged. “Most will sell as field hands. Some of those Mississippi plantations got two hundred servants planting and hoeing and picking cotton. Cotton's the South's biggest crop!”

“I'm a house nigger,” she said brightly. “Ever since I was a pickaninny, I served Mistress Abigail Gatewood. I can wash and iron, I can brush a lady's hair, a hundred strokes. I can help her to dress, and while she's out I can clean her boudoir so it looks like nobody's ever laid down in it. I know which are First Families of Virginia and which ain't. I can sew and do fancy work.”

“Can you cook?”

“No, Master,” imploringly, “but I can learn. Miss Abigail many time say she never knew no gal to learn so quick as me.”

“You're pretty.”

Another thud outside the window. Awful big for a possum.

She stared at her feet. She scuffled her feet. She fixed her eyes to his. “That may be so, Master, but it's never been anything but sorrow to me. Many a time I wished I was born with a cast in my eye or a twitch in my shoulder or a foolish look.” And as she described these maladies, she acted them out, casting a bad eye, twitching at will, grimacing like a fool.

Her mimickry of a demented woman was so accurate Ellam found himself grinning. He hadn't come to laugh. “Oh, you're right pretty all right. Light as you are, you're prettier than many a white girl.” His ears tingled. He licked his lips. “You want two bits?”

She looked around the walls of the room as though the walls had messages. Her eyes roamed from the ceiling beams to the straw-strewn dirt floor, never once looked at the pallet on the floor. “I brush Miss Abigail's hair a hundred strokes every morning. Miss Abigail say she never had anybody like me. One night, after a ball, two years ago, she come upstairs and I help her into her sleeping things and Miss Abigail said she cared for me same as a daughter. 'Course the gentlemen always drink a little at a ball, and I expect ladies do too.”

“You ain't her daughter.”

“No, Master. But Auntie Opal says I'm the daughter of Reverend Mitchell, who was drowned when he ordered his buggy drove into the Jackson River when it was in flood.”

“You got a preacher for a pa?”

“I'm not sayin' he was, and I'm not sayin' he wasn't. It's what's been told to me.”

“Preacher lyin' down with a nigger slut. Think of that.”

She was examining her hands, as though surprised at her pale translucent skin. “Master, I don't need a quarter dollar. I got nothin' to spend it on.”