Dawson's Fall

by Roxana Robinson

  She turned away. “So I can’t have children.”

  “I’d rather have you.”

  She looked up, frowning against the winter sunlight.

  “Is that all?” he asked.

  She said nothing. The breeze caught the fringe on the shawl, the wisps of hair around her forehead.

  “Give me six months,” he said. “I’ll ask you again.”

  Duchess galloped suddenly across the field toward them. Wagging, grinning, she made big ragged sideways leaps around them. They greeted her with delight, as though she were a lost child.

  “Duchess! Duchess!” Sarah leaned over the dog, clapping her hands. Inside her wrist was a delta of blue veins. He remembered the weight of her hair in his hand.

  FRANCIS WARRINGTON DAWSON TO SARAH MORGAN

  August 5, 1873

  How was it that we came to attach so much more importance to this day than to any another? It could have been understood if my lips were to have been sealed until the coming of this particular day; but those lips refuse to be sealed, & can no more refrain from telling their love for you & to you than they can cease to breathe the fragrant breath of life. The one will end with the other. Yet we did agree that this should be an eventful day “big with the fate,” not of Cato and of Rome but of a very ordinary man & a very lovely woman … However much either of us may try to ignore it, the certainty is that sooner or later you must decide whether you can bear with me for always, and when, if you desert me, I must learn whether I can live without you. And, whenever the time comes, you will have means of judging that you could not have had six months ago. I think I may say that I have proved that my affection for you is not a mere fancy of a day, or a month, but the deep undying and ever-increasing love of a life-time. I have proved to you that I understand you, & that the greatest intimacy leads to no jarring between us. I have proved to you that even confirmed ill-health, which you dread, will only increase and intensify my tender care of you. I have proved to you that your people are my people, & that they can love me as warmly as I love them. These are things which very few men can say to any woman whom they ask in marriage, but I can say them to you, because you know this truth. I do not press you for any decision. There is time enough for that. I only wish, on this day of all days, to remind you of what time has done, and to repeat to you, solemnly, my vows of constant and unselfish love. And it makes me glad to know that, whether it be requited or not, you never doubt now the truth of my love for you. My one aim in life is to win your hand; that gained, I have gained all that I wish for, more to me, indeed, than riches or public fame, or the honors that most men crave.

  Yours always

  F. W. Dawson

  * * *

  THEY WERE MARRIED in January.

  They were living in Charleston by then. Dawson had found them rooms at Gadsden House, which was tall and distinguished, Georgian brick. They were married in the high-ceilinged front parlor by Bishop Lynch. Sarah had agreed reluctantly to a Catholic service: she would never forgive the Church for her mother’s forced novitiate, but Dawson told her he would not feel married by a Protestant service. Sarah wore her mother’s lace veil and a cream silk dress; at thirty-two she was too old for white. Jem walked her down the little aisle, between chairs carried in from all over the house. She carried a small bouquet of ivory freesias with golden throats, and the fragrance moved with her as she walked. Sally sat in the front row next to Celena Fourgeaud; they both wept. Ella sat beside them, stiff-backed.

  Dawson stood by the bishop, in front of the fireplace. It was cold; they had lit a fire, and he could feel the warmth behind him. He watched Sarah coming toward him slowly. He could see from the veil that she was trembling. She seemed too bright to look at, like the sun. Her eyes were down at first, then she raised them and looked directly at him. It was like looking into the sun, and he felt something inside his chest swell and thicken. He could not speak.

  14.

  NEWS OF THE DAY.

  A shocking murder occurred in Opelika, Ala., on the 23d ultimo, the victim being Mr. Thomas Phillips, an elderly and respectable citizen, and the perpetrator a young man, named John Hooper, a nephew of the author of “Simon Soggs.” Phillips had by accident become an eye-witness, with others, of some scandalous conduct on the part of Hooper. As the matter became the subject of public gossip, Hooper charged Phillips with giving currency to the reports, and, upon his assurance that he had not done so, demanded that he should explicitly deny all cognizance of the subject matter of the scandal. Phillips refused to utter this falsehood, whereupon Hooper deliberately drew a pistol and shot him dead. Hooper then surrendered himself, and, strange to say, was admitted to bail.

  —THE NEWS AND COURIER, JUNE 3, 1873

  15.

  The year 1875 opened brightly for South Carolina … A good understanding between whites and blacks seemed to have been established, and … it seemed certain that, in South Carolina, a peaceful solution of the problems of emancipation and enfranchisement would be found, in a continuous co-operation of the better citizens of all classes and shades of opinion, in the work of governmental reform.

  —THE NEWS AND COURIER, JANUARY 1, 1876

  July 4, 1876. Hamburg, South Carolina

  HAMBURG WAS A small town on the Savannah River, just across from Augusta, Georgia. Three bridges (two train, one wagon) connected the two towns, but Hamburg was in South Carolina, in the old Edgefield District. It lay on low swampy land, and when the river rose the water flooded into the streets.

  The town had been founded thirty years earlier as a market center, selling slaves, whisky, and cotton. The cotton came on wagons from the countryside and left on trains heading down the river. The market was lively, but the town kept flooding, and when the railroad bridges went in, trade moved across the river to higher ground. The town dwindled, and white people moved away. By this time Hamburg held only about five hundred people, mostly Negroes, though also some Jews. The mayor, magistrate, marshal, and police chief were all Negroes.

  Communities like these sprang up after the war. Freedmen didn’t want to stay on plantations, and they moved to towns and cities. Now they could go to school, own land, and vote. In 1872 freedmen held 105 of the 156 seats in the state legislature. Negroes were a majority here, because South Carolinians had been some of the largest slaveholders in the country. Before the war the Negroes were slaves; now they were voters. The change was unsettling to the whites.

  * * *

  HAMBURG CELEBRATED THE Fourth with a reading of the Declaration of Independence and then a parade. The whole town turned out, standing along the edge of the dusty street. Mothers in long skirts and bright kerchiefs held babies in their arms, little children by their hands. Young women, with polished dark faces and white teeth, leaned against each other. Small boys dodged among the grown-ups. Men in dark jackets and straw hats stood watching.

  Sam Cook, the intendant, read the Declaration. At the end of each line, people called out “Amen” or “Yes, Lord.” After the intendant finished, the crowd cheered, and everyone looked up Market Street. Company A of the Ninth Regiment of the National Guard, all Negro, in uniform and in formation, carrying rifles, were marching toward them, heads high, arms swinging. They were singing. A drummer and a fifer on a six-hole cane fife rattled out the song.

  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

  He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

  He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

  His truth is marching on.

  The crowd took it up. They were celebrating two kinds of independence: one from the English king, one from the white master. Not everyone knew the verses, but they all knew the chorus: Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  Captain Dock Adams, chin high, walked beside his men. He was solid, with a barrel chest and short arms. He looked straight ahead. The crowd began to clap. A woman hoisted up her toddler, his back against her shoulder, his feet on her forearm, so he
could see. Company A had been founded six years earlier by the governor. It was a state militia: after the war, when the white people resisted the new laws, the state governments established armed militias to enforce them. Company A was one of these. Its first commander was Prince Rivers, who was now town magistrate. Six months ago, when Dock Adams took over the company, he expanded it to eighty-four members, and started weekly drills on Market Street.

  Market Street ran parallel to the river, from the Augusta bridge to the Edgefield road. It was more like a plaza than a street—over a hundred feet wide, so the big cotton wagons could maneuver. On one side were warehouses; on the other side tall grass stretched all the way to the river. It was flat and smooth, with a carriage track down its center, just wheel ruts through the grass.

  Company A marched in four columns, twenty men in each. The center columns took the carriage ruts; the outer ones marched through the grass, trampling it.

  A horse and buggy had been standing at the far end of Market Street, near the bridge to Augusta. The two white men sitting in it watched as the Declaration was read. The militia marched toward the crowd, their rifle barrels catching the sun. The crowd lined the edge of Market Street. Older ladies fanned themselves. The children were playing, not paying attention; the mothers were talking and laughing.

  When the troops approached the podium, the horse and buggy began to move, heading down Market Street toward the marchers. The horse was a chestnut, smooth and glossy. He jogged slowly, tossing his head. The driver had touched him with the whip, but held the reins tight, making him nervous. The roof of the buggy shadowed the men inside, so it wasn’t until it got close that Dock Adams could see their faces. It was Henry Getzen and Thomas Butler, from Edgefield.

  They leaned forward, staring at him. The horse threw up his head, and flecks of white saliva flew from his mouth. Adams marched his men along the ruts toward the horse. One of the white men shouted, making a sweeping gesture with his arm. But Adams was the officer in charge of a military unit, and these were civilians. He marched his men straight toward the carriage.

  The horse jerked his head up and down and the driver flicked him on the rump. The horse flattened his ears: he was being driven into a herd of humans.

  Along the street everyone grew quiet, watching. People drew back, and the young girls stopped laughing. The woman lowered her two-year-old from her shoulder, sitting him on her hip and wrapping her arm around his ribs.

  Adams, his chin high, marched on, his arm swinging, the rifle on his shoulder. Twenty feet from the buggy he shouted, “Company, halt!”

  At the sound the horse flung his head up and the driver, Henry Getzen, angrily shouted, “Whoa!”

  The men stood in columns. The fife and drum were silent, the singing had stopped. Adams stood at parade rest, his arm stiff at his side.

  The roadway was wide there. The buggy had big wheels, and the land was flat and open. For the white men to give way meant only turning the horse’s head and making a detour of ten feet over the grass. For Adams it was asking eighty-four men on government business to change their course.

  Henry Getzen was twenty-five, and married to Frances, Thomas Butler’s sister. Thomas was twenty-two, son of an Edgefield farmer. Thomas’s father, Robert Butler, owned a plantation in Edgefield, but he was best known for his pack of scent hounds. Before the war, tracking runaway slaves was big business, and his dogs were famous among both whites and blacks.

  All these men knew one another. They had lived in this small community their whole lives.

  “Mr. Getzen,” Adams said, “why you doin’ me this way?”

  “What way?” Getzen asked loudly. His hands were set wide, his legs braced against the buckboard.

  “Aiming to drive through my company,” said Adams.

  “I’m driving on the road,” Getzen said. “Where I always drive.” The horse threw his head up, and Getzen yanked on the reins. “You’re bothering my horse.”

  “There’s room enough outside this for you to drive, Mr. Getzen,” Adams said.

  “These are my ruts.” A certain tone had come into Getzen’s voice. “It’s where I always travel.” His eyes were fixed on Adams. Getzen was stocky, with a broad red face and a thick mustache that drooped at the corners.

  Along the edge of the street, people moved away from the parade, closer to the buildings. Mothers looked around for small children.

  “That’s as may be,” Adams said, “but if you had a company out here I’da not treated you in this way. I’da shown you some respect, and gone around.”

  “Well,” Getzen said, “this is the rut I always travel, and I don’t intend to get out of it for no damn niggers. Now get out of my way.” He was angry; he hadn’t expected Adams to talk about respect.

  The mothers, watching, tightened their holds on the children’s hands. The men frowned, shifting their weight.

  “Get out of the way,” Thomas Butler said.

  Around there, white people didn’t celebrate Independence Day. In Columbia, the state capital, the stores were closed, but only the Negroes celebrated. Southern whites felt resentful at the notion of independence. In Edgefield maybe they felt particularly resentful.

  * * *

  THE SIGHT OF black men marching with guns was disconcerting to these white men. All over the South were quasi-military rifle clubs and gun clubs for white men. They had no official purpose, but the unofficial one was clear. As long as there had been slaves, masters had needed weapons, to remind slaves of their situation.

  Violence is integral to slavery. No one can be coaxed or persuaded into enslavement: physical coercion is necessary. Violence is essential, and so are its infernal aids: whips, collars, bits, shackles, nooses, chains. The threat of death and death itself. The constant reminder, swift and savage, of who owns the body. That was a lesson learned by both sides, black and white.

  Violence was embedded in their lives; slaves must always be aware of the harm that could come to their bodies. They had to witness violence visited upon other bodies. They had to feel it on their own. This had been a part of Southern culture for a very long time.

  Because of slavery, and this need, the South has always been more violent than the North. In the year 1878, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont each reported one murder. South Carolina reported 128.

  So after emancipation white people didn’t like the idea of Negroes carrying guns. They felt that was power—and implied violence—in the wrong hands. Power had always been in the hands of white people.

  They didn’t like the idea of Negroes voting, either. More power in the wrong hands. Negroes wielding any kind of power went against their grain. What slavery had done was make every white man a lord. White men were born with power, which meant they felt they deserved it. Whatever you have feels like yours. The idea of emancipation was directly at odds with this: but how could a government nullify innate power? White people felt they were born with rights over black people.

  That was what many white people believed in South Carolina. The idea of emancipation rankled. It felt like tyranny, and enforcement felt like oppression. Some people still didn’t really believe they’d lost the war. They thought they were in a dip, a pause. Their motto was “The South shall rise again.”

  Many white Southerners felt personally oppressed by emancipation, and they opposed what happened at Appomattox. Had anyone asked them personally to surrender? Many of them wouldn’t have. Many still didn’t accept what had happened.

  Before the war, in South Carolina, a group called the Fire-Eaters supported secession and defended slavery. After the war they were outraged by the new laws. They believed that the races were separate and unequal before God. Hadn’t Negroes always been subordinate to them? They felt, on the deepest level, wronged. They felt the natural order had been challenged.

  They believed this was an affair of honor, and that they were honor bound to uphold a sacred principle. This was the principle of white supremacy. They believed that the war was unfa
ir, and that somehow they were victims (though they themselves started and ended the war). They believed that the South had taken on the holy aspect of a martyr. They believed that the South would rise again.

  Also, they were accustomed to using violence to get their way; they didn’t actually believe in the rule of law.

  * * *

  HAMBURG WAS IN Aiken County, part of the Edgefield District.

  The District lay in western South Carolina, alongside the meandering Savannah River, which separated the state from Georgia. It contained Edgefield County and four others: Aiken, Saluda, Greenwood, and McCormick. White colonials began settling there in the middle of the eighteenth century, part of a wave of immigrants from the Border countries of England and Scotland. These people came to America to find a better life; the one at home was unlivable.

  They were called Scotch-Irish (some were from Ireland), and they arrived in big family groups. They were fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and long-limbed; also proud, tetchy, and violent. Especially violent: this was part of their culture, a long tradition of savage fighting. The border wars between England and Scotland were bloody and brutal, involving families, children, livestock. Houses and villages were burned, stock driven off, belongings stolen. Enemies were ambushed and tortured and killed. One family flayed its enemies, tacking the grisly skins on the outside walls of their houses.

  This guerrilla warfare went on for seven hundred years. Governments were weak and temporary; there was no rule of law. Border people were self-reliant, vigilant, and ruthless. Some clans lived by stealing, plundering, and killing. Kinship was the only trustworthy bond, and families—clans—became small states. Blood feuds burned deep into the community, lasting for generations. Pride, fortitude, and a savage hatred of government intrusion were part of the culture they brought to America.