Jacob's Ladder (15 page)

CONSCIENCE

R
ICHMOND
, V
IRGINIA
A
PRIL
24, 1861

ON APRIL
22, in Warm Springs, Virginia, Judge Robert Ayres sentenced Sallie and Alexander Kirkpatrick to terms of five years in the state penitentiary in Richmond. Nine days previously, Fort Sumter had surrendered, and shortly thereafter, Virginia joined its fortunes to the new Confederacy.

Dismissing Uther Botkin's heartbroken pleas for leniency and Samuel Gatewood's stated conviction that the Kirkpatricks had acted from Christian motives, the judge observed that neither felon demonstrated contrition and Mr. Kirkpatrick had, throughout the proceedings, treated the court with grave disrespect. Furthermore, although, since legally he was a nonperson, Jesse's testimony could not be taken, Judge Ayres understood that the slave was also unrepentant. “These times do not permit mercy to those who, if not abolitionists themselves, are the abolitionists' willing accomplices,” Judge Ayres said.

Since the county possessed no adequate conveyance for transporting felons to the penitentiary, the sheriff hired a closed carriage, with a canvas partition between the seat where Alexander Kirkpatrick and his warder sat and that of Sallie and the warder's wife.

Under command of silence, the warder's wife read her Bible and dozed. Below the curtain the men's footwear could be seen: Alexander's dress shoes, his laces clumsily spliced, next to the warder's blunt brown boots. Sallie avoided looking at them; their mute testimony distressed her. Sometimes Sallie wished she'd been less defiant, had uttered mealy-mouthed lies in the courtroom; but when she'd wavered, a hot coal at her core whispered that betraying Jesse was to betray herself, to betray the sweet hopes she'd had for her own poor infant.

At the trial, Alexander had shown his customary contempt.

The streets of Lexington were thronged with men in bright militia uniforms. Had Sallie not been making this melancholy journey, she would be knitting socks for soldiers or piecing brave new flags. She smiled at her own foolishness: the quality of her needlework restricted her to sock patriotism.

The warder's wife pulled down the shade, so they traveled in musty dimness. What was the woman thinking—that Sallie would cry for rescue?

As the carriage rolled south, the seasons accelerated. There'd been redbuds still on Warm Springs Mountain; in Lexington the dogwoods were in flower. Outside Buena Vista they passed through lilac groves aromatic and spicy, and in Lynchburg peach trees were faintly pinked with blossom.

They tarried overnight in that city's jail.

The roads were dry. They crossed the James at Scottsville and again at Bremo Bluff. Sallie felt like a chip upon the current, willy-nilly in the spring flood. She had always been busy and had no knack for indolence, but now her only duty was obedience—“Step out, here, ma'am,” or “My wife will accompany you to the johnny house.”

The carriage rattled past red clay soil, turned and glistening, awaiting the transplanting of tobacco. In the warm and hazy afternoon, Sallie remembered the baby she had hoped to bear. Alexander had wanted the baby as much as she. The baby was perhaps the only thing Alexander wanted. He had neither sought a new position nor embraced his new circumstances. She did the chores, she brought in the firewood. If Sallie took the trouble to command him, Alexander obeyed—but nothing called to him. Sallie had come to think their baby would disappoint him no less than she had. Alexander expected something . . . extraordinary, a baby who'd give a grown man everything he lacked. Alexander had been so certain the infant would be a son.

Sallie Kirkpatrick had loved her husband for one year and six months. From that day she first heard him speak so brilliantly about the Roman poets until the day after she lost their baby.

As was her custom in those winter days, Sallie had been taking a thoughtful walk beside the Jackson River puzzling about Alexander. That he was intelligent she didn't doubt, but if he was learned, he kept his learning hidden. Ardent in their first weeks together, Alexander was ardent no more. Sometimes Sally fancied he'd simply forgotten marital pleasures were possible.

When the great pain hit her belly, Sallie dropped to her knees, and when bloody fluid started running out of her, she was terrified. She stumbled home quick as she could, trying to hold the wetness inside of her.

The first day Alexander kept her in bed, brought her broth and wash water, helped her to the chamber pot. That night he sat up, staring into the fire. The morning of the second day, Sallie was overwhelmed by a wash of grief so strong it almost choked her. It was her fault: she had failed to eat properly, should have shunned exercise. She said, “Alexander, I should never have walked so much. I should have known better.”

He had looked up from his book with an odd smile. “What would we have done with a baby?” He never mentioned the baby again; and from that moment, Sallie's husband was a stranger to her.

The James was blue-green before it tumbled white through its rapids, and in the soft light of a spring rain the prisoners' carriage rolled across Mayo Bridge into Richmond. When the warder's wife reached to tug down the blind, Sallie gripped her wrist with such ferocity that the woman gasped and rubbed her wrist. Sallie ignored her glare. That river, the rain falling on the canal barges, it was so beautiful Sallie thought her heart might burst. On Cary Street they fell in behind a procession of conveyances: goods wagons loaded with young men, some uniformed, some not, many armed, some not. The young men viewed each other expectantly, and spontaneously one or another wagonload would raise a hurrah. The boardwalks near Capitol Square were jammed with men indifferent to the light rain, curious about each other and every passerby. Although Richmond's homes were shuttered tight, their balconies were filled with gawkers, and the veranda of the Spottswood Hotel couldn't have held one more soul.

“Hurray for Jeff Davis! Hurrah!”

“The Constitution, hurrah!”

Cries rose here and there like the first tremors of a volcano, venting steam, toss-potting rock: anticipating the greater crisis to come. At each hurrah's conclusion, those who'd cheered would shake hands all around as if congratulating themselves upon their invention.

Bold youths dashed into the street to peer through the carriage windows. Surely such a stately conveyance must bear persons of importance, another brave general coming to fight for the Commonwealth, a senator perhaps, resigned in Washington to take up his post with the brave new government. Though the Confederacy's official capital was still in Montgomery, soldiers and office-seekers made their way to Richmond, knowing already what was bound to be.

The rain washed the new green of the leaves and the brownstone housefronts and made the cobblestones glisten. When Sallie shut her eyes her captor's hand flashed to the shade and drew the coach into dimness.

Smoke from Tredegar's ironworks lay low in the gutters and was stirred into full pungency as the carriage trundled toward the stone-and-red-brick prison on its solitary eminence above the James. The blind face of the prison fronted the river. The driver answered a challenge and his horses clopped through the sally port into the courtyard like a birth reversed—out of the daylight and air into the darkness of dependency, unknowing, and fear.

The door jerked open, and Alexander and the warder stepped down. The warder's wife parted the canvas curtain, and the women faced the empty bench where their husbands had sat. Like their own bench, it was slightly softened with thin black cushions.

They have me now, Sallie thought. I am theirs.

“REMARKS BY A MOUNTAIN
AGRICULTURALIST (SAMUEL GATEWOOD)”

as printed in the
Southern Planter,
April
19, 1856

IN MANAGING HIS
fellow negroes, the first aim of the driver should be to obey the master's orders, the second to satisfy his fellows that he is doing so. Naturally jealous of his superiors, as men of a lower rank whether white or black always will be, the common negro cannot be expected to yield that willing obedience which is necessary to his own happiness and the driver's comfort unless he is certain that he is not oppressed or imposed upon. It is evident to all that know negro character that the slave when satisfied as his master proscribes, is in better temper and more submissive. Let him go freely to the master if he has a complaint. If the master is fit to own slaves, as some “good masters” are not, and the driver be a man of good character, no harm can come of it.

The manners of a driver to other negroes should be kind. Kindness, and even gentleness, is not inconsistent with firmness and inexorable discipline. If they require a reprimand, give it privately and in a low tone of voice. Whether it be “mesmeric” I cannot say, but I have noticed that a loud and angry tone, whether addressed to man or beast, excites corresponding emotions, or scares away the wits. The best ox-driver I ever saw only said, “Come boys, go it.” The best wagoner never scolds his team. The best rider never frets at his horse. Our best driver has never lost his temper. A mild expostulation is better than a fierce rebuke, a deliberate warning more effective than a hasty threat.

Nor should a driver ever fret at other negroes. It injures their capacity for work. If they are working wrong, show them how to work right. Have patience and they will soon learn, or if they are too stupid, put them at something else. We have seen negroes injured in value by being fretted at and terrified when young.

The habit of swearing either at or before negroes a driver should never indulge in. If the negro is not allowed to swear because it is disrespectful to the driver, the latter should not swear because it is disrespectful to his Maker. Besides, it shocks some pious negroes, and sets a bad example to all, and is provocative of the very habit of anger and petulance we have been arguing against.

The driver should also aid in promoting cleanliness in the negro cabins, and he should see that their clothes are washed and patched, and their shoes kept in good order. On Sundays he should see that they come out cleanly clad, and if they dress themselves in the ridiculous finery which they sometimes display, and which will often provoke a smile, it should never be made a subject of derision or scornful remark. Rather encourage than repress their taste in dress. It aids very materially in giving them self-respect.

Nothing more reconciles the negro to his work than the driver sharing it with him. If they shuck corn late into the night, let him be present until the last moment; if the sun shines hot, let him stand it as much as they do; if it rains, let them stake his share of it; if it is cold, let him not go to the fire oftener than they do.

We have known drivers to declare that a fellow negro should not complain of them to the master, and they would whip him in spite of the master if he did. This is simply brutal and no man of spirit will permit it. When the servant comes within the general rule which prescribes his punishment, let him be punished, and appeal to the master afterward, if he chooses.

If a negro requires whipping, whip him and be done with it.

The third time Jesse Burns ran away and was retaken, Samuel Gatewood asked what he could amend to guarantee his servant's better conduct.

“Bring Maggie and Jacob home,” Jesse said.

“I cannot. Her presence tears my family apart. I must have your word you'll not run away again.”

“It's a big mountain up there,” Jesse said.

When Gatewood ordered Jack the Driver to punish Jesse, Jack refused, so Samuel Gatewood ordered Rufus, who also refused, which put Samuel Gatewood out of temper, and he whipped Jesse until the man swooned and even for a time afterward.