Queen (33 page)

    to ease his aching heart, and this odd ceremony, before a pagan god, had

    some meaning for him, for in it was an unbreakable vow.

"Promise you ain't gwine ever do what yo' pappy done?"

    Jass didn't know what his pappy had done, but promised anyway. He would

    promise Cap'n Jack anything.

    "Promise you ain't gwine ever be yo' father's son?" Jass laughed.

"Promise," Cap'n Jack said sharply.

    So Jass promised that he would never be his father's son, and Cap'n Jack

    was satisfied. In some small, unexplainable way, his revenge had begun.

    He heard the shouts in the distance, Tiara and Angel, Parson Dick and some

    others, all running through the night, calling for Jass. They thought him

    lost.

    Cap'n Jack struggled from his bed, his back screaming in pain, and carried

    Jass to the door.

He called to Tiara.

"The chile," he said, "is found."

    PART TWO

MERGING

The weariness of'wholly.f6rgotten nations I cannot castfirom mly eyelids.

Nor keepfi-om my.frightened soul The silentfalling of'distant stars.

    --HUGO VON HOFMANNSTAHL

    25

"Nigger lover," they chanted, just as always. "Nigger lover! Nigger lover!

Nigger lover!"

    Jass stood there, fists up, waiting for the blow. He never threw the

    first punch because he had not picked the fight, but waited, heart

    racing, for what he knew would happen.

    When it came, it hurt, just as always. Wesley, his opponent, was only a

    year older, but that year represented to Jass a seeming ton weight of

    muscle, and he sprawled back against some of his school friends. The

    slaves, watching impassively in a group near the fence, sighed a

    collective regret, for they had been hoping for another outcome they knew

    to be unlikely. Just as always.

    Jass was not unpopular at school; many of the boys liked him, some were

    his friends, and all respected his father's position, but they all

    enjoyed a fight, and the high ethics of boxing demanded not just a victim

    but also a valid cause. Jass had a good and supple physique for his age

    and was always prepared, however unwillingly, to defend himself with his

    fists, so picking on him could never be called bullying. Wesley would

    start discussing the economics of the Southern states, Jass would suggest

    ideas of diversification away from slavebased agriculture, and before

    long the others would be calling him an abolitionist and a nigger lover,

    and the fight would begin.

    It was sport as much as anything, but it also confirmed Wesley's physical

    preeminence and reinforced certain concepts that most of them preferred

    not to question. These beliefs were reflected in the education given at

    the Reverend Sloss Preparatory Academy for Young Gentlemen, outside

    Florence. The North, their teachers told them, was another country, how-

    ever nominally part of the United States, whence the flowing

    197

198 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

tide of abolition might one day swamp the triumphant sand castle of the

South.

    The South, they were taught, was a unique, essentially pastoral, society of

    unlimited potential, whose survival depended on an endless supply of cheap

    labor. It didn't matter how closely the governance of the South was linked

    to that of the North, or how passionately devoted a few of their teachers

    might be to the federal cause. It didn't matter that the present president,

    Andrew Jackson, now into his second term, was one of their own, a

    slaveholder dedicated to limiting federal power over the sovereignty of the

    states. It didn't matter that the president frequently insisted that the

    Union must be preserved, because the very fact that he said it only

    confirmed what most of them already believed: The Union was under

    considerable strain, with states' rights as the separating issue, and

    slavery as the separating fact.

    Only recently, South Carolina had come to the very brink of civil war. The

    industrial North had successfully demanded high tariffs on imported

    manufactured goods, cloth and clothing, to protect its own industries.

    South Carolina claimed this was destroying the slave-based cotton economy,

    and had threatened to nullify the tariffs. Secession had only been averted

    by the adroit actions of the great president.

    In Southampton County, Virginia, an insurrection had occurred, led by Nat

    Turner, a black preacher, in which fiftyseven whites, including several

    women and children, were killed. It brought back vivid memories of the

    rebellious plot by the free black, Denmark Vesey, ten years earlier, and

    was the Southern nightmare come to bloody life. A sensational manhunt

    followed. Over a hundred of Turner's followers were slaughtered, and the

    ringleader himself was caught, tried, and executed, along with twenty of

    his henchmen. But at the subsequent Virginia Convention, several proposals

    for the emancipation of slaves were only narrowly defeated, and the recent

    foundation of the American Anti-Slavery Society only added to the fortress

    mentality of the South.

    Jass was no revolutionary thinker; he had no great moral argument against

    slavery. He had been brought up with it, had lived with it all his life,

    and every element of his education, except one, contributed to his belief

    in its present necessity.

    MERGING 199

    The exception to Jass's otherwise conventional upbringing as a young

    Southern gentleman was his considerable friendship with Cap'n Jack. Such

    friendships were not, in themselves, unusual. All white boys of his class

    had black nurses, several had been suckled by slave women when their own

    mother's milk went dry, and they had all grown up with varying degrees

    of contact between themselves and the black populations of their

    plantations, farms, or houses. A reasonably energetic white boy, growing

    up secure in his authority, might have a range of friendships that

    covered the complete social strata-until he crossed the limiting

    threshold of puberty.

    A boy can go where a man cannot, and at puberty, several unseen doors

    were closed to him. He had been raised to the concept of the sanctity of

    white women, and now his education began to include, by subtle inference

    rather than outright lecture, the baseness of carnal desire, and the

    profound evils of miscegenation.

    They all had some knowledge of procreation-they saw it in the rutting

    animals on their farms-and now they were taught the sinfulness of giving

    way to these base desires, with women of any class or station but most

    especially with black women, since the resulting offspring would

    eventually defile and dilute the sacred white blood.

    What puzzled Jass was that Wesley's conscience never seemed to bother

    him. He swore he had had intercourse with a slave girt, but no visitation

    was ever made upon him by a wrathful God, nor on any of the others who

    claimed to have followed his braggart path.

    Jass regarded such talk as foul, but his blood ran hot when Wesley first

    announced his ability to bring himself to private climax. Jass felt that

    powerful urge, but tried to resist it. It was wrong, they were taught,

    it was sinful, it was a sign of weakness of personality and sickness of

    the mind, and led to physical deformity. If their need got too desperate,

    Mother Nature herself would provide any necessary release in sweet,

    nocturnal dreams, to which Wesley snickered that sometimes Nature needed

    a helping hand. But the prohibition only intensified the desire, and

    occasionally Jass had succumbed, to be racked with guilt afterward. He

    longed to confide his confusion to someone, but since the death of his

    brother A.J., whose

200 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

neck had been broken in a riding accident at Princeton two years earlier,

Jass's only confidants were his classmates, his cousins, whose knowledge was

as limited as his own, and Cap'n Jack.

    Jass had grown up in the carefree country of reduced expectation that is

    the province of second sons. A.J., heir to the family estate, had given him

    scraps of guidance on matters of the world, but now he was gone, and Jass

    sorely missed him. His cheerful younger brothers, William, Alexander, and

    George, an inseparable trio, were at school in Nashville, and even when

    they came home to The Forks, Jass found it difficult to break into their

    tight-knit group. Three of his older sisters, Mary, Martha, and Mary Ellen,

    were married. Sassy was still at home, but was more interested in potential

    husbands than familiar brothers, and baby Jane, whom Jass adored, was a

    sickly child, and no companion to a teenage boy.

    So Jass's most constant company had been the slaves, with Cap'n Jack as his

    surrogate father, and his tutors in the mysteries of life had been those

    same slaves, his friends at the Academy, and his stem, unyielding

    schoolmasters, who seemed almost to condone the hypocrisy of what they

    taught. While physical contact with black women, any women, was publicly

    condemned, the more secular teachers also hinted that real men, unable to

    restrain their natural urges, should take their relief with whatever slave

    women were at their disposal. Jass found this half world of puberty

    confounding, confused by what he felt, by what he was taught, and by what

    he was experiencing.

    Nor was his father much help to him. James liked Jass but still mourned

    A.J., and found it difficult to communicate with his second son. Cap'n Jack

    wasn't interested in Jass's adolescent problems because he had other,

    unrealistic, ambitions for him. Jass would now inherit The Forks, he would

    own property and slaves, and, determined to raise the young man to be the

    Massa he wanted, Cap'n Jack relentlessly, if amiably, exploited the

    rational side of Jass's nature by divorcing the idea of slavery from race.

    Rather than protesting that the enslaving of blacks was wrong, Cap'n Jack

    cultivated in Jass instead the economic necessity of a move away from the

    reliance on la-

    MERGING 201

bor-intensive cotton, and thus slavery, until slavery itself became

unnecessary. This put Jass desperately at odds with his peers.

    Which is why, just as always, young Jass was defending himself, or his

    ideas, when actually he was well aware of the basic flaw in his own--and

    Cap'n Jack's-position. Economic survival would always depend on manual

    labor, whether it be field hands picking cotton or weavers at the spinning

    jennies in the industrial North, and what did it matter if that labor was

    white, which was unthinkable, or black, which was the status quo?

    Cap'n Jack, a dreamer, not a thinker, had no ready answer for this, and

    Jass found himself caught in another dilemma. He was obstinate rather than

    passionate. He fought hard and well, not to protect a strongly held ideal

    but to protect himself from too much physical injury. Wesley, having a

    cause to defend, was able to inflict severe superficial damage on his only

    slightly smaller opponent. It was a short, sharp fight, which ended with

    Jass on the ground, hand to his bleeding nose, while Wesley towered in

    habitual triumph over him.

    "Won't you ever learn, Jackson?" he crowed. "That's how it is for nigger

    lovers."

    He walked away to the cheers and backslapping of his gang, their slaves

    following them.

    Cap'n Jack sighed and went to comfort his man's wounded pride and tend his

    bloody nose.

"I nearly had him that time," Jass gasped.

    "Sho' thing, Massa Jass, yo' nearly did," Cap'n Jack agreed with the lie.

    He hauled the young man to his feet, sat him on a log, and held a cloth to

    the bloody nose. School friends cantered away on horses, calling greetings

    to Jass. No rancor was held; they had enjoyed the fight, and Jackson was

    always such a damned good sport about it. The reluctant worthy waved an

    aching arm in response, and called as cheery farewells. Then he turned away

    and looked at the river.

    "Wesley bigger'n yo'," Cap'n Jack said, although he knew it to be scant

    comfort. "He be gone in a year or two, Up South, to college."

It didn't help. "It doesn't make any difference. There'll

202 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN

always be another Wesley, somewhere." Jass stared at the river. "I'd like

to beat him once. Just once, that's all."

    He brushed aside regret and took Cap'n Jack's arm for assistance. "Don't

    tell my parents," he ordered mildly, as they walked to the horses.

"I never do, Massa Jass," the slave replied.

    The afternoon was flawless, warm and lovely, the last of the dogwood

    blossoms dappling the countryside like wayward snowflakes. Although the

    school was on the outskirts of town and they had no need to pass through

    Florence on their way home, Jass always enjoyed the long detour, trotting

    on Morgan, his chestnut gelding, through the main street to catch a sense

    of its bustle and purpose. The construction of a new building or some

    improvement in the town's infrastructure gave him a tremendous sense of

    pride.

    My father made this, he thought to himself. If it were not for him this

    would not be here.

    It wasn't strictly true-he knew that his father was only a shareholder

    in the development company that had created the town-but it encouraged

    his sense of the frontier tamed, and of the enormous potential of the

    country. Sometimes he wondered what country he meant, for often he felt

    completely alien from the Northern states, could not conceive of himself

    as a citizen of these United States, and took refuge in the more

    romantic, and possibly then more truthful, America.

    America seemed to him to be without borders or boundaries, except those

    of the mind and the great oceans, and somehow the appendage "United

    States" limited this. He wondered if a fellow from New York or Boston

    could understand the call of the enormous, empty continent that lay just

    at the edges of their known world, and of the adventure that unlimited