House Divided (15 page)

“I see.”

“But the trouble is,” Faunt reflected, “people will forget the law he broke and remember only the hatred which led him to break it. That wasn't hatred of men; it was hatred of a thing, of slavery. Men in the North will recognize in their own hearts that same hatred; so they will make a hero out of old John Brown, because they feel in themselves the hatred that made him do what he did.”

“I see,” she repeated; and after a moment: “Do you hate slavery, Uncle Faunt?”

“I'm ashamed of it, Anne.”

“Why? Our people are contented, and happy, and they love us.”

He hesitated. “Well, I went to a slave auction at Davis and Deupree's in Richmond, ten or twelve years ago. They put up to be sold a woman much like Big Martha, my cook. She had a husband, a crippled little negro not good for much but the trash gang, and two children, five or six years old. The planter who owned them had died, and all his people were being sold. The auctioneer was a kindly man, and he tried to sell this woman and her family together; but no one wanted them all, since the husband wasn't worth anything, so he sold her alone. She stood there during the bidding, holding herself bravely; and her husband sat on the bench with his arms around the two children and his tears flowing. She was sold to an Alabama man, and the children and the little husband began to wail as though she were dead.”

“Oh Uncle Faunt!” Anne's eyes were brimming; then in sudden proud and happy certainty she cried: “You bought her!”

He smiled, deeply pleased. “Well, yes, I did. I shouldn't have done it. We've more people at Belle Vue than we need. I had gone there not to buy, but just to see what an auction was like. But—yes, I bought her, gave the Alabama man a profit, bought her husband and children.”

“Why, she's Big Martha!” she cried in sudden understanding. “She really is Big Martha!”

“Yes. Little Zeke—you know, he takes care of my horses—is her husband. And the two children are strapping great fellows now.”

“I think you were wonderful to buy them.”

He said gravely: “Well, that's the ugly side of slavery, Anne: selling helpless people away from their families and their homes. That's why men hate it. That's why, secretly, we Southerners are ashamed of it. That's why John Brown hated it.”

Their horses moved quietly, contented side by side. After a little she asked in a low voice: “Uncle Faunt, if we fight the North over slavery, will we be fighting for something that's really wrong?”

He spoke slowly. “I don't believe Virginia will ever fight just to defend slavery, Anne. If the North tries to compel us to—free the slaves, we may fight against that compulsion. If they try to compel us, they will be trying to—well, in a way, you might say they'll be trying to enslave us, to make themselves our masters. We have a right, a duty, to fight to avoid being enslaved.”

She asked haltingly: “But then if it's right for us to fight the North to keep them from making us do things, wouldn't it be right for the negroes to fight us to keep us from making them do things?”

He said, deeply troubled: “Any child can ask questions that the wisest men can't answer, Anne. I can't answer you.”

She touched his arm. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bother you.”

“You didn't bother me. It's my own doubts that bother me.”

When they parted, he thought what a pity it was that men could not see problems as clearly as a child. But—could this problem be solved? To free the slaves seemed simple; yet to do so was to wash your hands, like Pilate, of the responsibility their dependence laid upon you. His people here at Belle Vue were less his servants than his masters. He served them as truly as they served him. To free them overnight would be as base as to turn out of doors a cat or a dog or a horse that was used to expect from you kindness and care, shelter and food.

So thinking he came home. The house which his grandfather had built almost a century ago had long since burned and had been replaced by a smaller structure a story and a half high, the roof extending downward over a small porch in front. To lessen the danger of another conflagration, the chimneys at either end touched the house only to serve fireplaces on the first and second floors, and there was an open space between them and the weatherboarding for five or six
feet below the ridgepole. The house needed paint, it seemed to be crushed under the weight of straggling and untended vines, there was one step broken and a loose board in the porch. The yard was bare and littered, the fence had lost many palings; the ramshackle kitchen and the outbuildings were in a state as bad or worse.

Faunt, living here alone, was indifferent to his immediate surroundings; but the chapel in an oak grove a mile away, under whose flagged floor those he loved were buried, was a place of beauty and peace, surrounded by a tight fence and by well-kept flowers and shrubs. Little Zeke, the stableman, made the flowers his care, but except when Zeke needed help no other Negroes ever went to the chapel, nor any white person except Faunt himself. Each Sunday at first dawn, Faunt if he were at home walked down through the silent oaks to the revered spot and unlocked the door and knelt for a while at the altar rail. Sometimes he stayed, reading in the prayer book; sometimes he gathered from the neat garden outside a few blossoms, and filled a silver vase with water from the run that passed the gate, and brought it to set on the altar; but if he did this, he always came again at dusk that same day to remove the flowers, unwilling to let them wither in this holy shrine.

Today, happy to be at home again, his heart warmed by the welcoming smiles of the people who came to greet him, he gave his horse to a boy and went in to bathe and change. Then as always on his homecomings he turned to the chapel, as though to announce to those who dwelt there that they were no longer alone.

During the days that followed, Faunt's thoughts dwelt on John Brown. He read in the Richmond papers every comment from the North. When John Brown was convicted and sentenced, Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher said his martyrdom would inspire a million imitators; and at this the Richmond
Dispatch
, which had at first been moderate in its tone, cried out in fury:

“If the crown of martyrdom in such a career is so magnificent and glorious, why don't they come on and clasp it to their own swelling temples?” And of the abolitionists: “Brown is the first of the white-livered pack that has attempted to do anything but bark; the first who has come out of his kennel, crossed the Southern line and undertaken to bite. Now they call the hanging of this intruder martyrdom and
call the blood of martyrs the seed of the church; but let them come and sow a little more seed!”

Faunt thought it might have been Redford Streean speaking. Streean and Edmund Ruffin and men like them in the South, Phillips and Beecher and their rabid ilk in the North; it was such venomous irresponsibles who would bring on bloody war. He arranged to receive the Northern papers and found in them passionate tributes to this crazy murderer with his hands still red from bloody crimes in Kansas, this man who dragged harmless strangers from their beds and chopped them to death. Emerson the philosopher said John Brown's hanging would make the gallows as glorious as the cross; even Thoreau called him an angel of light. Faunt tried to find some denial of Brown's purposes, or of his deeds; but there was none. John Brown admittedly had sought to set the Negroes loose like wolves across a peaceful countryside, to put weapons in their hands and urge them on. And it was that avowed purpose which ministers of God and men of presumably balanced minds now openly glorified.

His own pulse beat harder with a rising anger as he read. If there was that ruthless mind in the North, why then such men as old Edmund Ruffin were right. If the North wished to see in the South a carnival of murder and extermination, why then open conflict could not be long delayed.

He had occasion, as the date set for John Brown's execution approached, to remember that little man whom he had heard declaiming to the crowd outside the Exchange Hotel. Late in November Governor Wise sent troops to keep order during John Brown's execution. The Richmond
Enquirer
reported the arrival in Charleston of the Grays and of Company F. “Amongst them,” wrote the correspondent, “I notice Mr. J. Wilkes Booth, a son of Junius Brutus Booth, who though not a member, as soon as he heard the tap of the drum threw down the sock and buskin and shouldered his musket and marched with the Grays to the reputed scene of deadly conflict.”

When, in due course John Brown and the other prisoners were well and duly hanged, Faunt wondered how the little actor reacted to that spectacle; and when he went to Great Oak for Christmas—all the family except Tony and Darrell were there for the merry days together—he spoke to Brett of the scene in front of the Exchange which
had so impressed him. “A curious man,” he said. “I've thought of him more than once.”

Brett nodded. “There's some quality in him, yes. I saw him start off with the Grays that day. They boarded the train on Broad Street, almost in front of the theatre. There was a crowd to see them off, and this fellow came plunging through the crowd and appealed to Lieutenant Bossieux—he was acting captain, since Captain Elliott was commanding the regiment—to take him along. Mr. Kunkel, the manager of the theatre, begged him to be sensible. Booth was supposed to play that night. Kunkel kept saying: ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?' Booth shook him off, said: ‘I don't know, and I don't give a damn!' Captain Bossieux tried to talk him out of it, too; but the crowd and some of the young gentlemen in the Grays were on his side, laughing and urging him on, so they sent for a spare uniform and took him along.” He added: “George Libby—he's in the Grays, went with them—said he kept an eye on Booth at the hanging, and that he turned pale, came near fainting, took a stiff drink of whiskey before he was steady again.”

“I suppose the actor's instinct made him imagine it was he who was being hung.”

“Possibly. I've met the man. He makes me uncomfortable, but he's seen everywhere in Richmond, received everywhere, has a host of friends.”

Faunt nodded. “I can understand that. I'm so reserved myself, so ill at ease with strangers, that I rather envy anyone who can face—yes and captivate—a crowd so masterfully. There's certainly something striking and memorable about the man.”

January–May, 1860

 

W
HEN TILDA came back to Richmond after her mother's birthday, Redford Streean said at once: “Tilda, Cinda's planning to put up at a hotel till her house is ready. I want you to make her stay with us.”

Tilda heard him in something like consternation. Their house, one of a row a few blocks out Franklin Street from the mansion Brett and Cinda had bought, was small, and there were only two servants. Old May, who had nursed Tilda through babyhood, came to her from Great Oak when Darrell was born; but when Darrell one day needed a switching and May gave it to him, Streean in a rage sent her back to Great Oak. “No damned nigger's going to lay a hand on my son!” he declared. Now Tilda's household tasks were in the lazy hands of a fat sloven in the kitchen and a wench named Sally who since Streean bought her had borne two mulatto children, and who treated Tilda with a casual impudence at which Streean was openly amused. Once when Tilda appealed to him, he said if she couldn't manage two niggers she had better learn how, and he said it in Sally's hearing, so that Sally snickered with triumph. With Emma's greasy cooking and Sally's shiftless sweeping and dusting and the two pickaninnies forever squalling in the yard, to have Cinda and Brett here would be a nightmare.

But Tilda made no protest, her desperate thoughts seeking some escape from this necessity, while Streean pointed out that it would be to his advantage if Richmond gentlemen were constantly reminded that Brett Dewain was his brother-in-law, and that Vesta's friendship would open doors for Dolly. Tilda felt no surprise at his frankness; for she
had no longer any illusions about either her husband or her son. For Darrell as a baby she had held fine hopes, and while he was a boy she could smile at the traits that offended others; but by the time he reached his middle 'teens his pranks had become vices and her only defense was to shut her eyes. Long before that, she knew Streean through and through. His father and mother had a worn-out small farm in Spottsylvania County, but he had broken every bond that tied him to them. Having made a successful marriage, and counting on Tilda's eventual inheritance of a share of the Currain fortune, Streean had never sought any gainful occupation. They lived on Tilda's modest income; but while he spent as freely as a gentleman should, Tilda at home must make many small economies.

Streean's orders were explicit, and Tilda tried to do as she was told; but when Cinda declined her hospitable urgencies and went to live at the Arlington, she felt a grateful relief, enduring Streean's anger at her failure.

“But if she won't come here, you can go to her,” he said in open contempt. “At least she won't show you the door.”

So when Brett sent servants from the Plains and Cinda and Vesta began to put the big house on Fifth Street in order, Tilda went there almost every day. But this was hard for her. The house, compared with their own cramped establishment, was generous and gracious, built of brick over which a coat of stucco had been subsequently laid. From Fifth Street, steps led up to a small porch with white columns and flanked on either side by a fenced and brick-paved areaway. The areaway gave entrance to the basement pantries and storage rooms. On the first floor a wide hall from front to rear opened directly upon the double portico supported by great columns. The lower level of the portico overlooked a garden with a retaining wall high above the sidewalk on the Franklin Street side; the upper level looked south and east across the rooftops of the lower city to the river and to the wooded valley downstream. Two great magnolia trees and a sycamore shaded the garden and screened the one-story brick kitchen and the brick quarters for the house servants in the farther corner of the lot. The stable was underneath the servant quarters, opening on the alley that ran from Fifth Street through to Sixth. It was reached by steps that descended from the garden level.

On the Franklin Street side of the central hall there were two large rooms, and two somewhat smaller on the other, with a graceful stair in the side hall between them. The ceilings on this and the floor above were high for coolness; but Mr. Patterson had added an upper story where the rooms, smaller and more numerous, might on a summer day be mercilessly hot.

The interior finish of the house had been of a classic severity; but Cinda changed this. “I'm sick to death of bare plaster walls,” she told Tilda. “And I never want to see another piece of mahogany or veneer as long as I live! Oh, upstairs probably; but I'm going to have everything bright and cheerful downstairs!”

She had taken exact and careful measurements of rooms and doors and windows before she and Brett went to England; and as the boxes and bales and crates were unpacked, each article had a place waiting to receive it. Hand-painted canvas medallions, four to each room, one to each corner, were pasted on the ceilings of drawing room and parlor. The walls were painted to give the effect of an ornate plaster moulding framing large panels. An elaborate plaster frieze joined walls to ceiling, while in a moulded design around the drawing room chandelier, chubby little cupids seemed about to take wing out of a sea of plaster flowers and garlands.

The drawing room was Cinda's particular delight. The plain wooden mantel was replaced with one of white marble adorned with carved grapevines and carved white fruit in huge clusters. On the mantel a gilt clock under a glass bell was flanked by two gilt girandoles hung with glass prisms to match the chandelier. Above each window the workmen under Cinda's jealous eye set a heavy gilded cornice, bright and gleaming, cast in an elaborate and intricate pattern of fruit and leaves and vines. This cornice was continued to connect the two windows overlooking Franklin Street, and below it a mirror as high as the ten-foot windows filled the space between them. The mirror was framed in gilt, and its base was a low, marble-topped table with its legs concealed by a brass skirt moulded in a pattern that matched the cornices. At the windows full lace curtains hung to sweep the floor.

Tilda, watching all these changes, praised everything. “It's lovely,
Cinda,” she declared. “So bright and cheerful! No one could ever be dismal and unhappy in a room like this!”

“Just wait till it's finished!” Cinda told her proudly. When the fine Brussels carpet gay with yellow flowers and charming browns and greens and blues had been laid, Tilda watched new wonders take their places. There was a carved whatnot. “And I've ever so many lovely things to put on it,” Cinda promised. “I'll fill it and the corner cupboard and have treasures left over.” A pianoforte on one side of the room faced a melodeon on the other. They were painted black and decorated with a bright pattern of yellow flowers and green leaves which was repeated on the tiptop table, not only on the top but down the legs. The same design adorned the card table, and the oval, marble-topped table in the center of the room. On this and on the card table, under glass bells, a cluster of wax flowers and a bowl of wax fruit enchanted the eye. The settee and the occasional chairs, of carved ebony, were upholstered in black silk brocade; the foot stools in needlepoint of beads like tapestry.

Tilda swallowed the bitter taste of gnawing envy. “I declare, Cinda, I never imagined anything could be so beautiful.” Her own home seemed when she came back to it as dismal as a tomb; the dark gleam of mahogany, the severe lines of chairs and tables, the decorous mouldings, oppressed and crushed her. She returned again and again to Cinda's as a drunkard to his cups, and she was always able to exclaim at each new treasure, from the huge tapestry which exactly covered one wall of the dining room to the Derby china—dark blue bordered with gilt, pink eglantine centers—and the delicate French porcelain and all the treasures that filled the whatnot and the corner cupboard and overflowed into any corner where there was room for them. But she went home afterward to grieve and suffer wretchedly, and it was no comfort to her that Vesta refused to be enthusiastic about all this new splendor, admitting that she preferred plain old familiar things. Tilda thought Vesta was a silly young idiot with not wit enough to appreciate beauty when she saw it; and certainly the other ladies, Cinda's friends whom she met at Cinda's house, were as delightedly approving as she.

Before they all went to Great Oak for Christmas, the new house was settled; but after Christmas, Streean still drove Tilda to haunt Cinda's
door. Dolly, as shrewd as her father, knew well enough that Vesta's plain, freckled countenance was a flattering foil for her own beauty; and Vesta's friendliness made it easy for them to draw together. Burr had gone back to South Carolina College at Columbia, and Julian presently was banished to the Plains. “He's entirely too young to be footloose in Richmond,” Cinda told her sister. “Brett and I think of sending him to Virginia Military Institute. He's at the age to need some restraint.” She smiled. “But meanwhile he likes the Plains.”

 

In February, Vesta followed Julian southward, to meet the northbound march of spring; but Brett and Cinda stayed on, and one day in early April, Streean spoke to Tilda.

“I'm going to Charleston to the Convention,” he told her. She knew vaguely that Democratic delegates would meet there to nominate a candidate for President in the coming election, and that Streean had sought unsuccessfully to be chosen one of them; and she thought it was like him to go to Charleston even without official purpose. To force himself into the company of greater men was always his delight. “Suggest to Cinda that Dolly go as far as Camden with me, and stop for a visit at the Plains.” He chuckled. “Tell her Dolly's peaked after this long winter, needs southern air. Cinda won't have any excuse to say no.”

Tilda, proud of Dolly's beauty, resented his suggestion that weather could affect it; nevertheless she did as he directed. Cinda, after a momentary hesitation, said generously: “Why, of course! And you come too, Tilda!”

“Oh, Cinda, that's sweet of you!” Tilda's heart leaped with delight at the prospect. “But——”

“No ‘buts' about it,” Cinda laughingly insisted. “It's lovely there this time of year. I'm going down myself next week. Julian's entering North Carolina Military Institute, and I want to get him ready.”

“North Carolina? I thought you said Virginia.”

“I did,” Cinda assented. “That's what we planned, but Julian wants to go to Charlotte, and we're letting him have his own way.” She added: “Brett and I are going down next week. He's going to Charleston too. These men and their politics! But I'll stay at the Plains while he's gone, so do come, you and Dolly both.”

“Won't I crowd things terribly?”

“Nonsense! There's plenty of room.”

“Why—I'll see what Redford says,” Tilda agreed. She was not surprised that he at first thought she should stay at home.

“Dolly'll have a better time without you,” he predicted; but when Tilda repeated this to Cinda, the older sister said sharply:

“Nonsense! Besides, I won't have Dolly without you!” She laughed in a way that took any sting out of her words. “I won't take the responsibility of fighting off her beaux! Don't be absurd! Of course you're coming.”

Streean in the end relented. He even sanctioned the enlargement of Tilda's wardrobe for the occasion. She and Dolly had his escort as far as Kingsville where they waited to take the Camden train; and in Camden, Vesta and Clayton met them with the carriage and they set out at once for the Plains. They crossed the Wateree at the ferry, and beyond they turned up river. The road dipped and rose as it skirted the clay and gravel slopes that rose out of the alluvial bottom lands. In the fields along their way Negroes were planting cotton, and the soft murmur of their voices, laughing together or sometimes singing, came through the still hush of evening. The horses splashed through the ford at Twenty-Five-Mile Creek and turned toward higher ground, the road winding through long-leaf pines whose green crowns glistened in the sun.

“Most of the plantations around Camden are east of the river,” Vesta told them. “We're really off by ourselves here, at the edge of the sand hills, with the tackeys for nearest neighbors; but we always seem to have lots of company somehow.”

The road emerged from pines into an avenue of oaks that led toward the big house, and Vesta said the quarter and most of the work buildings were down nearer the creek, hidden by the rise of ground; but she pointed out the conical peak of the screw where cotton was pressed. “We used to love to ride the mules 'round and 'round when we were little,” she said. Smoke house and kitchen and the cabins of the house servants and the small building which Clayton had put up for a nursery were near the house. The house itself was of wood, painted white, squared pillars ascending from the ground to the roof, and supporting a wide veranda at the first floor level. Tilda saw
azaleas still showing some bloom and exclaimed approvingly, but Vesta said the azaleas and the yellow jessamine and the japonicas were gone. “And the wistaria, of course. That great vine along the balcony railing just smothers this side of the house when it's in bloom. But the real gardens are on the other side, on terraces falling away down toward the creek.”

As the carriage halted where twin flights of stairs led up to the veranda, Cinda and the babies appeared to greet them, and Tilda kissed her sister and said effusively:

“Oh, Cinda, you were sweet to ask us!”

“Don't thank me! Thank Jenny! She's mistress here now. I'm just a visitor, free to enjoy my grandchildren.” She had two-year-old Janet in her arms, Kyle tagging at her knee. “Aren't they sweet, Tilda?”

“They're darlings,” Tilda assured her. “Just perfectly lovely, both of them.”

“Oh, fiddlesticks! They're nice enough, but they look too much like me to be beauties!” Jenny came out of the house, and heard, and smiled; and Cinda told her cheerfully: “If you wanted beautiful children, Honey, you should never have picked me as their grandmother.” Tilda thought Jenny herself was no beauty. Whatever had Clayton seen in her? How did people like Cinda and Jenny manage to win such nice husbands? She felt a familiar twinge of jealous pain.