Leon Uris (16 page)

Horace gauged his adversary. He was one smart black. Of course the question of need had never occurred to Horace. All right, then, let’s play the game.

“Suppose I am willing to grant that we may need you. I need you to do a big favor. I need you to help me get rid of the Leamingtons.”

“I’m not starting out a new life by turning on a white majordomo,” Fancy answered.

“Listen up, Matthew. There are powerful people in Baltimore who are going to jump all over me for freeing my slaves. Believe me, it takes balls to do what I’m doing. The Leamingtons are masters of their game. They can spread rumors and see to it that we are smeared in the press. I need to pack them off to England, quick. Now, can you help me?”

No answer. Switch the appeal. “Mrs. Kerr is in a very delicate
condition. A social scandal would damn near kill her. Do you realize how the Leamingtons could spread lies? I’ll back you up, on my honor.”

“Not to offend your honor, but I don’t see any black man testifying against any white man.”

“Testifying to what?” Horace pressed.

“Study your damned estate ledgers!” Matthew cried.

“What!”

“I’ll say no more.”

“How can you possibly know about such things, Matthew?”

“I knew I had to learn to count and add and subtract to get out of the fields. I learned a hundred words by sight so I was able to go work in the stables. Mr. Kerr, I know how to order a dozen bales of hay and I know when only eleven are delivered.”

“And how’d you learn to speak so well?”

“From a white man named Mr. Fancy, who ran the big Blanton horse farm in Virginia. He’d come from England, like the Leamingtons. Every day he’d paste up a new word for me to learn in the tack room.”

Horace had found the weak spot and slipped an ace up his sleeve to be played at the proper moment. The ash on his cigar grew longer and could have been knocked off with the blink of his eye, yet grew longer still.

Because of the extent of the building and inflated war prices, the Leamingtons had obviously found ways to pump up the estate budget. Horace cursed himself for not doing his homework. What else would he find? Double entries, inflated bids, kickbacks, short deliveries? Those sons of bitches.

“So they’ve been stealing my white ass off.”

Matthew cracked a smile. “Once they felt they were trusted and would not be subjected to monthly audits, the larceny began.”

“What about Miss Daisy?”

“I took the ledgers to Miss Daisy every month to sign off on them. She didn’t want to be bothered. The Leamingtons didn’t fig
ure I could read, but I watched the expenses balloon. I didn’t say anything because I never wanted my black ass whipped again.”

Jesus!

Horace stared at the new Matthew Fancy, seeing an entirely different . . . well, person . . . yes, person. Horace had a finely honed ability to spot mediocre talent, as he had in his brothers and nephews. He had kept them in mediocre positions, but Matthew Fancy was better than the whole lot.

Conversely, when he came across that rare bird with brilliant feathers, he’d win his trust and reward him. Horace never thought of Matthew in normal terms. Matthew could be developed into a first-class piece of personnel. Horace was not going to lose him, despite his color.

“I envision a bright future for you here at Inverness, beyond your wildest dreams.”

“Mr. Kerr, you cannot possibly know what my dreams are.”

Horace was talking, not listening. “This will be a big job, maybe without an official title, but I will send over a top executive from the yard to assist you. You’re perfect, folks will listen to you. They respect you.”

“I do not wish to be a black overseer.”

“Manager, Matthew, manager. Overseers are for fieldhands. We have no disciplinary problems here and you can keep it that way. What do we have at Inverness, sixty or so full-time people, butlers, maids, cooks, gardeners, laundry workers, stable hands, security? These are not agricultural people. Make that a hundred folks including the nonworking children, pregnant women, ill and injured, old folks. Slavery was no good, but I have been on the decent side of it. I’ve allowed families to live together. I’ve never gone in for whippings. I will continue to house everyone, enlarge your personal plots, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These benefits will come to a rather staggering sum.”

“Up to seventy-eight dollars a slave, a year,” Matthew said quietly.

“What about wages?” Horace countered. “Four to eight dollars a month per worker.”

“Mr. Kerr, if you paid all of the people at Inverness for the rest of their lives, it would be more than covered by seventeen days’ profit from the shipyard.”

Jesus!

Matthew Fancy’s calculation came to within a whisper of what Horace and his chief accountant had figured.

“It could seem a little strange to you now, but once you get your induction—,” Horace began.

“I’ve had my induction,” Matthew interrupted. “Permanent stripes over my back. Let me ask you one question, does freedom mean that free Negroes will be able to work at the Kerr shipyard?”

Horace squashed his cigar in an alabaster ashtray and folded his chubby fingers together in the style of a high boss.

“The first time I give a Negro a job at Dutchman’s Hook, the Irish workers, thinking I freed the slaves to get cheaper labor, will riot. God knows how many Negroes will be killed, lynched, burned out, whatnot. I am freeing your people to say that Horace Kerr believes in the Union, and Baltimore and Maryland must remain in the Union.”

“What are your true reasons, Mr. Kerr?”

“This war is being engaged to preserve the United States. As time passes, it will take on the real and most powerful meaning, abolishing slavery in America. Bear in mind, white boys are dying on the battlefield every day and the scars will take years, decades, to heal and can only be healed by the cooperation of enlightened men.”

“The white boys who are dying for the Union hate us.”

Horace Kerr had never seen a fiercer negotiator. The stink of slavery would not conveniently flow away on the next tide. The time has come to quit the bullshit, he thought.

Horace’s eyes teared. “I need you, Matthew, and Daisy needs Laveda.”

Matthew was stunned. He never believed such words would find their way out of a white man’s belly. Horace played his ace.

“If you stay, I will hire the finest teacher money can buy for the exclusive job of tutoring you.”

“Every day?”

“Every day.”

“Laveda as well?”

“Yes.”

“You must be doing this for your own purposes.”

“You’re damned right,” Horace agreed.

“What do you want?” Matthew asked.

“I’ll give you the help you need. Learn what there is to learn. Only one thing I’d ask is when I call all the folks together, I’d like you and Laveda standing at our side so they’ll know this isn’t a trick.”

“I won’t do that.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“What you are giving us may not exactly be slavery, but it won’t exactly be freedom, either. You may be exchanging systems because slavery is bound to die. What you’re giving us may only be slavery by another name and four dollars a month.”

No use railing, Horace told himself. He knew he’d only touched the tip of their suffering. He’d better not lose Mr. Fancy.

“I agree,” Horace capitulated. “How old are you, Matthew?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Huh,” Horace mumbled. “Would you care for a drink?”

“I sure wouldn’t mind.”

Horace did not spare his finest Napoleon brandy. Something wild and incredible, something monumental, was unfolding, and he thanked God Matthew Fancy was with him.

“Anything you need or want, right off?”

“Yes.”

Horace nodded for him to continue.

“When we are in private, you and Mrs. Kerr can address Laveda
and me by our first names, provided we may address you by your first names. When we are in the company of others, we wish to be addressed as Mrs. Fancy and Mr. Fancy.”

Gulp!

Horace arose and very slowly extended his hand. “Mr. Fancy,” he said.

Matthew took his hand. Both of them stared at the handshake.

“Thank you, Horace,” Matthew said.

•
15
•

Matthew Fancy bolted off the starting line and never looked back. Horace Kerr was entirely pleased by his own keen judgment. Matthew’s capacities broadened on a daily basis and brought about a painless transition.

By the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Kerrs had gained a reputation for being compassionate and farsighted in freeing their slaves early, though they personally had ended up as the true beneficiaries of their decision.

A decent executive from the shipyard, Mr. Compton, had been brought in to assist Fancy, but in truth, Fancy needed no assistant. By the end of the war, Matthew all but managed Inverness.

He became the “man,” the buyer who filtered all bids, read all household contracts, and ordered everything from French wines to grass seed, and did so without corruption. When he had deflated the Leamington budget by a third, he pressed Kerr into a salary
raise for the entire staff until they became the best-paid domestic help in Baltimore. No day’s end ever found Matthew Fancy away from his studies.

One night nine years into the relationship, Kerr brought home a contract that had been drawn up between his shipyard and an insurance company and asked Matthew to scrutinize it. It was a jigsaw puzzle. Fancy’s legal mind proved far beyond the ordinary.

Kerr offered him a closet-sized office at Dutchman’s Hook with its own sink and toilet so he could be kept on hand as an adviser, but Matthew refused and did the work at his own desk at Inverness.

This was fine with Horace. If Fancy had come to the yard, it would have been under the subterfuge of being a personal butler or such. As it was, Horace had painted a nice anonymous background so no adversary saw or heard Fancy—but surely they felt him.

Never with a title, never at board or banking meetings, and never in a courtroom, Matthew was shifted, as if by sleight of hand, from slavery to Jim Crow, almost unnoticed until . . .

. . . the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad came to Matthew Fancy to retain him as a consultant on a major right-of-way controversy.

This shook Kerr, immeasurably. Unless Mr. Fancy were given a title and a contract, Horace could not forbid him from taking outside work. To do so would be to lose him. The B&O retainer was soon followed by a Who’s Who of Maryland industries—importers, distillers, insurance companies.

It was all done without public note.

Matthew Fancy’s lifelong agenda was now able to come into play. From the beginning, he had spent hours showing Daisy how the operation worked, and she seemed to come out of a lifelong intellectual stupor. Daisy came to enjoy her expanding knowledge . . . and power. She was, at last, becoming the mistress of Inverness.

Matthew set about training an executive staff, half black, half white, giving Daisy further decision-making ability. Matthew promised to always remain in a supervisory post so Daisy knew she had backup, and she grew quite comfortable with her supervisory duties.

* * *

For several years, Matthew traveled to Washington on a bimonthly basis to lecture at the Howard University Law Department, the first Negro institution of its kind in America.

And now, to be free, at last.

He moved off the Inverness grounds to a small colony of successful Negroes in Skerryton. They had a lovely modern home, and in its rear, he opened a legal consulting firm, manned by two Negro apprentices from Howard University. None held legal certification, but they were sought out by the mighty and the lowly alike.

Giving more and more corporate work to his staff over time, Matthew plunged into a salt mine of labor, taking case after case pro bono to define the rights of former slaves.

Between Inverness, his wealthy clients, and a never-ending line of the disenfranchised petitioning him, it happened. He worked himself to death by heart attack in his late thirties.

There was never the likes of his funeral. Horace Kerr walked in the cortege behind Matthew’s mule-driven coffin, undraped by any flag, with two other white dignitaries and a thousand blacks.