Sophie's Choice (5 page)

love and all but a stranger to death. I could not realize then how soon I would encounter both of these things, embodied in the human passion and human flesh from which I had absented myself in my smug and airless self-deprivation. Nor did I then realize that my voyage of discovery would also be a journey to a place as strange as Brooklyn. Meanwhile, I only knew that I would go down for the last time from the twentieth floor, riding the aseptic green elevator to the chaotic Manhattan streets, and there celebrate my deliverance with expensive Canadian ale and the first sirloin steak I had eaten since coming to New York.

Chapter 2

After my solitary banquet that evening at the Longchamps restaurant on lower Fifth Avenue, I counted my money and reckoned my total worth at something less than fifty dollars. Although, as I said, I was without real fear in my plight, I could not help feeling a trifle insecure, especially since the prospects of getting another job were next to zero. Yet I need not have worried at all, for in a couple of days I was to receive a windfall which would rescue me--for the immediate future, at least. It was a bizarre and phenomenal stroke of luck, my receipt of this gift, and like another instance of great good fortune much later in my life, it had its origins in the institution of American Negro slavery. Although it bears only indirectly upon the new life I would take up in Brooklyn, the story of this gift is so unusual as to be worth recounting. It has chiefly to do with my paternal grandmother, who was a shrunken little doll of an old lady approaching ninety when she told me about her slaves. I have often found it a little difficult to believe that I have been linked so closely in time to the Old South, that it was not anearlier generation of my ancestors who owned black people, but there it is: born in 1848, my own grandmother at the age of thirteen possessed two small Negro handmaidens only a little younger than herself, regarding them as beloved chattel all through the years of the Civil War, despite Abraham Lincoln and the articles of emancipation. I say "beloved" with no irony because I'm certain that she did very much love them, and when she recollected Drusilla and Lucinda (for those were their incomparable names) her ancient trembling voice cracked with emotion, and she told me "how dear, how dear" the little girls were to her, and how in the chill depths of the war she had to search high and low for woolen yarn in order to knit them stockings. This was in Beaufort County, North Carolina, where she had spent all of her life, and it is there that I remember her. Every Easter and Thanksgiving during the thirties we traveled down from our home in Virginia to see her, my father and I, driving across the swampland and the flat, changeless fields of peanuts and tobacco and cotton, the forlorn nigger cabins decrepit and unchanging too. Arriving in the somnolent little town on the Pamlico River, we greeted my grandmother with soft words and exceptional tenderness, for she had been nearly totally paralyzed from a stroke for many years. Thus it was at her bedside when I was twelve or thirteen that I heard firsthand about Drusilla and Lucinda, and camp meetings, and turkey shoots, and sewing bees, and river-boat excursions down the Pamlico, and other ante-bellum joys, the sweet chirpy old voice feeble yet unflagging, until at last it gave out and the gentle lady went to sleep. It is important, though, to note that my grandmother never told me or my father about another slave child--he bore the jaunty name of Artiste--who, like Drusilla and Lucinda, had been "given" to her by her father and then soon after had been sold by him. As I will shortly demonstrate through two related letters, the reason that she never mentioned the boy doubtless has to do with the extraordinary story of his ultimate fate. In any case, it is interesting that my grandmother's father, after consummating the sale, converted the proceeds into Federal gold dollars of various denominations, no doubt in shrewd foreknowledge of the disastrous war to come, and placed the coins in a clay jug which he buried beneath an azalea at the back of the garden. This was, of course, to prevent their discovery by the Yankees, who in the last months of the war did arrive with a clatter of hoofs and scintillant sabers, dismantled the interior of the house before mygrandmother's frightened girlish eyes, ransacked the garden, but found no gold. I am able, incidentally, to recall my grandmother's description of the Union troops with absolute clarity: "Dashing handsome men really, they were only doing their duty when they tore up our house, but naturally they had no culture or breeding. I'm certain they were from Ohio. They even threw the hams out of the window." Arriving back himself from the awful war with one eye missing and with a shattered kneecap--both wounds received at Chancellorsville--my great-grandfather unearthed the gold, and after the house once again became habitable, stashed it away in an ingeniously concealed compartment in the cellar. There the treasure might have remained until kingdom come, for unlike those mysterious hoards one sometimes reads about in the news--packets of greenbacks or Spanish doubloons and such uncovered by the shovels of workmen--the gold would have seemed destined to be hidden in perpetuity. When my great-grandfather died in a hunting accident around the end of the century, his will made no mention of the coins--presumably for the very good reason that he had passed the money along to his daughter. When in turn she died forty years later, she did refer to the gold in her will, specifying that it should be divided among her many grandchildren; but in the fuzzy-mindedness of great age she had forgotten to state where the treasure was hidden, somehow confusing the cellar compartment with her safe-deposit box in the local bank, which of course yielded up nothing in the way of this peculiar legacy. And for seven more years no one knew of its whereabouts. But it was my father, last surviving son of my grandmother's six children, who rescued the trove from its musty oblivion amid the termites and the spiders and the mice. Throughout his long life his concern for the past, for his family and its lineage, had been both reverent and inspired--a man quite as blissfully content to browse through the correspondence and memorabilia of some long-defunct, dull and distant cousin as is a spellbound Victorian scholar who has stumbled on a drawer full of heretofore unknown obscene love letters of Robert and Elizabeth Browning. Imagine his joy, then, when going through fading packets of his mother's letters he should discover one written to her from my great-grandfather describing not only the exact location of the cellar cache but also the details of the sale of the young slave Artiste. And so now two letters intertwine. The following communication from my father in Virginia, which I received just as I was packing up to leave the University Residence Club, tells much notonly about several Southern generations but about the great events that were close on the modern horizon.

June 4, 1947

My dearest son, I have at hand your letter of the 26th inst., telling of the termination of your employment. On the one hand, Stingo, I am sorry about this since it puts you in financial straits and I am in no position to be of much help, beset as I am already by the seemingly endless troubles and debts of your two aunts down in N.C. who I fear are prematurely senile and in a pathetic way. I hope to be better situated fiscally in some months, however, and would like to think I might then be able to contribute in a modest way to your ambitions to become a writer. On the other hand, I think you may be well shut of your employment at McGraw-Hill, which by your own account sounded fairly grim, the firm anyway being notoriously little else but the mouthpiece and the propaganda outlet for the commercial robber barons who have preyed on the American people for a hundred years and more. Ever since your great-grandfather came back half-blind and mutilated from the Civil War and together with my father tried to set up a humble trade manufacturing snuff and chewing tobacco down in Beaufort County--only to have their dreams shattered when they were forced out of business by those piratical devils, Washington Duke and his son, "Buck" Duke--ever since my knowledge of that tragedy I have had an undying hatred for the vicious monopoly capitalism that tramples the little man. (I deem it an irony that your education should have been received at an institution founded upon the ill-gotten lucre of the Dukes, though that's hardly a fault of yours.) You doubtless remember Frank Hobbs, with whom I have driven to work at the shipyard for so many years. He is a good solid man in many ways, born in a peanut patch over in Southampton County, but as you may recall a man of such simon-pure reactionary beliefs that he often sounds rabid even by Virginia standards. Therefore we do not often talk ideology or politics. After the recent revelation of the horrors of Nazi Germany he is still an anti-semite and insists that it is the international jewish financiers who have a stranglehold on the wealth. Which of course would send me into hoots of laughter were it not so benighted a viewpoint, so that even though I concede to Hobbs that Rothschild and Warburg are certainly Hebraic names I attempt to tell him that greed is not a racial but a human predilection and then I proceed to tick off such names as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Frick, Mellon, Harriman, Huntington, Whitney, Duke, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. This scarcely makes a denton Hobbs, who in any event is able to direct his bile upon a much easier and more ubiquitous target, especially in this part of Va., i.e., and I do not have to tell you--the negro. This we simply do not talk about much or often, for at aet .59 I am too old to engage in a fist fight. Son, the handwriting is on the wall. If the negro is as he is so often said to be "inferior," whatever that means, it is plainly because he has been so disadvantaged and deprived by us the master race that the only face he can present to the world is the hangdog face of inferiority. But the negro cannot stay down forever. No force on earth is going to keep a people of whatever color in the squalor and the poverty I see hereabouts, city and countryside. I do not know if the negro will ever begin to be re-enfranchised in my lifetime, I am not that optimistic, but he certainly will be in yours, and I would give almost anything I own to be alive when that day comes, as it surely will, when Harry Byrd sees negro men and women sitting not at the back of the bus but riding free and equal through all the streets of Virginia. For that I would willingly be called that hateful epithet "nigger lover," which I am sure I am called already in private by many, including Frank Hobbs. Which brings me in a roundabout way to the main point of this letter. Stingo, you may recall a number of years ago when your grandmother's will was probated we were all baffled by her reference to a certain sum in gold coins which she bequeathed to her grandchildren but which we could never find. That mystery has now been resolved. I am as you know historian of the local chapter of the Sons of the Confederacy and while in the process of writing a fairly lengthy essay on your great-grandfather I examined in detail his truly voluminous correspondence to his family, which includes many letters to your grandmother. In one letter, written in 1886 from Norfolk (he was traveling on business for his tobacco firm, this being just before the villainous "Buck" Duke destroyed him), he disclosed the true whereabouts of the gold--placed not in the safe deposit box (your grandmother obviously became confused about this later) but in a bricked-up cubbyhole in the basement of the house in N.C. I am having a photostatic copy of this letter sent to you later on, as I know of your interest in slavery and should you ever want to write about that institution this tragic epistle might provide you with fascinating insights. The money it turns out was the proceeds of the sale of a 16-year-old negro boy named Artiste, who was the older brother of your grandmother's maidservants, Lucinda and Drusilla. The three children had been orphans when your greatgrandfather had bought them together at the Petersburg, Va., auction block in the late 1850s. All three young negroes were deeded over into your grandmother's name and the two girls worked around the house and lived there, as did Artiste who, however, was mainly hired out around the town to do chores for other families. Then something ugly happened which your great-grandfather speaks very delicately about in his letter to my mother. Apparently Artiste, who was in the first lusty flush of adolescence, made what your great-grandfather calls an "improper advance" toward one of the young white belles of the town. This of course caused a tremor of threat and violence to run immediately through the community and your great-grandfather took what anyone of that time would have considered the appropriate course. He spirited Artiste out of town to New Bern, where he knew there was a trader trading in young negroes for the turpentine forests down around Brunswick, Georgia. He sold Artiste to this trader for $800. This is the money which ended up in the basement of the old house. But the story doesn't quite end there, son. What is so heartrending about the letter is your great-grandfather's account of the aftermath of this episode, and the ensuing grief and guilt which so often, I have noticed, attends stories about slavery. Perhaps you have already anticipated the rest. It develops that Artiste had made no such "advance" toward the young white girl. The lass was an hysteric who soon accused another negro boy of the same offense, only to have her story proved to be a falsehood--after which she broke down and confessed that her accusation against Artiste had also been mendacious. You may imagine your great-grandfather's anguish. In this letter to my mother he describes the ordeal of his guilt. Not only had he committed one of the truly unpardonable acts of a slaveowner--broken up a family--but had sold off an innocent boy of 16 into the grinding hell of the Georgia turpentine forests. He tells how he sent desperate inquiries by mail and private courier to Brunswick, offering at any price to buy the boy back, but at that time of course communication was both slow and unsure, and in many cases impossible, and Artiste was never found. I discovered the $800 in precisely the place in the cellar he had described to your grandmother with such care. Often as a boy I stacked cordwood and stored apples and potatoes not six inches away from that cubbyhole. The coins over the years have, as you might imagine, appreciated in value enormously. Some of them turned out to be quite rare. I had occasion to take them up to Richmond to a coin appraiser, a numismatist I believe he is called, and he offered me something in excess of $5,500, which I accepted since this means a 700 percent return on the sale of poor Artiste. This would be a considerable sum of money in itself but as you know the terms of your grandmother's testament state that the amount shall be divided equally among all of her grandchildren. So it might have been better for you. Unlike myself who was prudent enough in this overpopulous age to sire one son, your aunts--my incredibly philoprogenitive sisters--have brought into the world a total of 11 offspring,all healthy and hungry, all poor. Thus your share of Artiste's sale will come to a few dollars less than $500, which I shall remit to you by certified check this week I hope, or at least as soon as this transaction is completed...