But now problems of a much different nature confronted them, because they must arrange a deal for their cotton and see that it reached some waiting cargo ship off the Mexican shore, and this threw them into the tremendous chaos of Matamoros, which stood twenty-seven miles inland from the Gulf. More than sixty small sailing craft crowded the river, clinging meticulously to the Mexican half, with each owner screaming: ‘I’ll carry your bales out to the big ships waiting in the Gulf.’ And if one did elect one of these boats, greater confusion followed, for when the open sea was reached, the pilot must turn immediately south and take refuge in Mexican waters, where two hundred ships from all the ports of Europe posted seamen on their decks who bellowed: ‘We’ll take your cotton to Liverpool.’ Off to the north, sometimes less than a hundred yards away, hovered warships of the United States Navy, never leaving American waters but always ready to pounce upon any ship laden with cotton that moved even a foot north of the international line.
Day after painful day the comedy was played out. Cargo ships owned by supposedly loyal Northern merchants in New York sailed blithely to some British or French port—or to any neutral port—where they were instantly issued papers by European powers hungry for cotton. Then, as privileged ships of that nation, they sailed to join the fleet waiting at Matamoros, hoping to acquire a load of cotton. In exchange they would give the Confederates shot and shell, muskets and hardware, cloth and food. If the Confederate government could move its cotton onto a European ship, it could acquire in exchange almost anything it needed.
But how, in this welter of thievery, chicanery and murder, could a slave like Trajan or two boys like Michael and Clem hope to get their bales from Matamoros to the waiting fleet? There was a way. The Confederate government had assigned a clever, manipulative man to Matamoros, and his job was to collect the cotton ferried or swum across the river and move it overland to the improvised Mexican seaport of Bagdad—a line of shacks along an open beach—and there turn it over to an even more ingenious Mexican conniver who saw to it that the bales got aboard ship.
The Confederate was big, jovial Yancey Quimper, dressed in full uniform, ideally qualified as an expediter and willing to pay any graft to accomplish his ends; the Mexican was a dapper man in a bright-red uniform laden with medals known as El Capitán. The two connivers were well matched, with Quimper’s military rank as spurious as El Capitán’s medals, and together they controlled the movement of cotton to the world markets.
The finances of this sleazy operation were interesting: cost of growing, 7¢ a pound; value on an interior Texas plantation, 1 3/4¢; value delivered on the north bank of the Rio Grande, 22¢; on the south bank, 37¢; delivered by General Quimper to Bagdad, 49¢, of which he pocketed 6¢; delivered to a waiting ship by El Capitán, 89¢, of which he pocketed 7¢; placed on the dock at Liverpool, $1.60, of which the shipowner retained a large portion.
Since thousands of pounds were being moved daily, it was obvious that the two expediters were getting rich, but so were many other patriots who managed to escape battle. There could have been unpleasantness over the fact that the captain was stealing a penny more per pound than the general, but Quimper also had a neat plan working whereby he bought for his own account, and not the government’s, five or six bales each day if he could force some unfortunate seller to unload them at bottom price. These bales he disposed of through a special, undocumented arrangement with a Russian ship captain.
One praised a man like Major Reuben Cobb for being loyal to his theory of honor, or Sam Houston for being loyal to his theory of government, but it was also possible for a man to be loyal only to himself and to adjust quickly to every whimsical gale which affected his interests. Yancey Quimper saw in the Union effort to strangle the Confederacy a chance to make his fortune; every situation in which decent men exalt noble sentiments is used as a chance to profit by those who look at such sentiments cynically.
One Confederate soldier assigned to help Quimper in his work, a veteran who had fought at Shiloh, summarized it well: ‘This is a rich man’s war, a poor man’s battle.’ Quimper, evaluating the same evidence, said: ‘When bugles blow, wise men know.’
How had this man of no character and limited talent found himself in so many theaters of the war: at the Kansas preliminaries, at the massacre of the Germans, in charge of the hangings along the Red River, and now supervising operations in the cotton exchange, not to mention months spent tracking down draft evaders hiding in the Big Thicket northeast of Houston? Two reasons: the war was appallingly prolonged, with the nation’s best men dying year after hideous year, and this provided time for those left at home to pursue many activities; indeed, a man like Quimper was forced into them. He was in Brownsville because the Confederacy needed him there. Also, when good men like Somerset Cobb and Otto Macnab were engaged in battle, only the dregs were left to manage scandalous operations like those along the Rio Grande.
It was highly improbable that naïve cotton handlers like Trajan and Michael could bring their bales into Quimper’s maelstrom and end up with any money at all, but they had one advantage: Panther Komax had grown to love Texas, and this meant that he hated Abe Lincoln and the North, and if he had brought his convoy so far, he was determined to see that his bales, at least, reached their proper destination. More important in the present situation, he had once watched helplessly as Yancey Quimper stole his bootmaker, Juan Hernandez, so when he overheard the general trying to pluck off the cotton of his charges, he suddenly leaped from behind a stack of bales, gun drawn and shouting: ‘Quimper! You’ll take these bales to your Russian captain, and you’ll pay nobody, not even yourself.’
Terrified and sweating, with the gun at his belly, Quimper took the boys and their cotton out to Bagdad, waved away El Capitán with the warning ‘This is special,’ and concluded a deal which gave the amateurs an honest profit. And Komax and the boys watched from the beach as the Russian ship raised sail and started for Europe.
In Brownsville, Komax arranged for their funds to be transferred by a letter of credit on an English bank: ‘So they don’t steal them from you on the way home.’ The boys did not trust this, fearing that Panther would cheat them the way General Quimper had tried to, but Trajan, who had seen letters of credit at the mill, although he could not read them, assured the boys that Komax was telling the truth: ‘The money be waitin’ for you when you gits home. Gemmuns do bidness this way.’
But now he had his own problem. From his tireless work swimming the bales across the Rio Grande, he had accumulated more than a hundred dollars, and he knew that if he appeared at the plantation with such funds, he would be accused of having stolen them. So he asked Komax if he, Panther, would write him out a statement explaining that the money really was his. ‘I cain’t write,’ Panther said, but he found one of his men who could, and the precious document was executed:
Brownsville, Texas
9 November 1863
To Who It Concerns:
This sertificate pruves the Slave Known as Trajan erned $139.40 by swiming cotton acrost the Ruy Grandee. The money is his, duttifully erned, and I sware to said.
Johnson Carver
Confederate Army
Trajan had been so preoccupied with financial arrangements for himself and the boys that he failed to notice a development in his group. Now Jaxifer came to him, no longer the noisy young clown whom Trajan had met on the approach to Social Circle, but a powerful man, mature and thoughtful: ‘Micah, he done gone.’ And Trajan realized that Micah had found the temptation of freedom in Mexico too powerful to resist, and was no doubt already in Monterrey.
This presented difficult choices for the three remaining Lammermoor slaves, who discussed them, using the deepest Gullah. When such slaves used their fragmentary English they came up with constructions which sounded funny, like He done gone, but when they spoke in Gullah they had a complete language for the expression of complete thoughts, and there was nothing amusing about it.
‘Why should we three go back to
slavery?’ Jaxifer asked.
‘Micah did no wrong,’ Trajan replied evasively. ‘If he felt he had to be free …’
‘How about us?’
‘There Mexico is, spit across the river. You’ll never be closer.’
‘If I go, will you try to stop me?’ Jaxifer asked, for it was obvious that the third slave, Oliver, would not make the attempt.
Trajan pondered Jaxifer’s question a long time, for it cut to the heart of black-white relations, and also to the core of his own behavior: ‘A man wants to be free, that’s maybe the biggest thing in life. If you feel it in your heart, Jaxifer, go.’
‘How about you?’
‘Well, now. No man wants freedom more than I do. I lost my son because people knew they could steal from a slave, no trouble. I lost my wife, worked to death.’
‘Then join me.’
‘No, I want to be free, more than any of you. But freedom is surely coming in Texas.’ He hesitated before making a point which for him weighed most heavily: ‘Better to work hard for freedom in a good place like Texas than accept it easy in a place not so good like Mexico.’ Before Jaxifer could respond, he added: ‘At night I say to myself: “Trajan, you built Lammermoor as much as any Cobbs. It’s your place too.” I do not want to give up a place I built.’
‘But up there you’ll always be a slave.’
‘Not always.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘If I didn’t, I would cut my throat.’
Jaxifer asked: ‘If I cross the river, will you send soldiers after me?’
‘Oh, Jaxifer! How can you ask?’
‘Then why don’t you come with me?’
Again Trajan thought a long time before answering: ‘I promised Miss Prue and the old man—I’d get the cotton south, I’d collect the money, and I’d bring it home.’
‘But it went home by the bank, you said so.’
‘The money’s home, yes. But now I have to go. Jefferson is where I belong.’
At the edge of the Rio Grande, Jaxifer stared in silence at his longtime friends Trajan and Oliver. Then, turning his back upon them, he strode to where bales waited and pushed one into the river. Terrified though he was, he plunged in, grasping a corner of the bale with both arms and kicking his feet frantically as the cotton carried him to freedom.
It was chance, an intervention of fate, which led Panther Komax to get his homebound convoy on the road when he did, because in early November, Federal troops launched a determined invasion that captured Brownsville, thus terminating the Matamoros-Bagdad trade. To prove that they meant business, the troops also ranged inland at isolated spots, attacking any southbound convoys and burning the cotton, or bursting the bales and scattering it across the landscape until snow seemed to be falling on the brushy plains.
One evening such a foraging party came upon Komax and his stragglers. Panther shouted to the slaves and the boys: ‘Run! Hide!’ but when he and his men turned back to fight off the attackers, a sudden fusillade of Union bullets ended his violent life.
Major Somerset Cobb did not return to Lammermoor until after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Then, his left arm gone, his weight not more than a hundred and twenty, he came up the Red River from the hospital at New Orleans, with the doctor’s benediction: ‘God must have saved you, Cobb. We did damned little.’
At Shreveport he was pleased to see that the Great Raft was still in place, and his heart expanded and he felt something close to joy when the limping steamer, one boiler gone, edged into Lake Caddo and he saw once more the knobby cypresses and the Spanish moss hanging in lovely festoons from the live oaks that crowded the shore.
As always, the steamer sounded its whistle as it approached Lammermoor, and he saw with fresh pleasure that slaves aboard the craft were preparing to unload at that wharf called the Ace of Hearts. With pulsating enthusiasm he explained to a first-time passenger: ‘Our slaves can’t read, you know. We mark shipments Spades or Clubs, showing where parcels go. We’re Ace of Hearts.’
The little vessel docked and the pain of return took command. He saw fields rotten with weeds, buildings unpainted. But the mill still stood, and here came Trajan, best slave a man ever had. Cobb leaped ashore, his empty left coat sleeve pinned up, and embraced him.
‘It’s good to be home, Trajan.’
‘Been a long war, master.’
Slowly, for Sett was very tired, they walked up the slope toward his house, and now a small, fearfully thin woman came to greet him. It was Petty Prue, much smaller than he remembered, much more worn by the last years of war than he could have imagined.
Reaching for his one hand, she said: ‘It was always stupid to have two plantations here. I’ve joined them, Sett.’
She had joined not only the land, but also their lives.
On 23 June 1865 there was great excitement in Jefferson, for a Union captain attended by fourteen soldiers marched in, ordered a bugle to be sounded, and informed the white citizens who assembled: ‘I am here to address your former slaves, too. Call them.’ Stiffly he waited till the latter were gathered, then signaled for another blast on the bugle. A sergeant shouted ‘Silence!’ and the fateful words were spoken:
‘Citizens of Jefferson! On the nineteenth of June instant, General Gordon Granger of the United States Army issued at his headquarters in Galveston General Orders Number Three. All slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality between former masters and their slaves. The new connection between white and black is that of employer and hired workman.’ (Here he turned specifically to the Negroes.) ‘You freedmen are advised to stay at your present homes and work for wages. You are informed, and most strongly, that you will not be allowed to collect at military posts and you will not be supported in idleness. You must find work to do, and it would be best if you continue to work for wages at your present jobs.’
The captain stepped back, pleased with the impression he had made, then signaled his sergeant, who cried: ‘Former slaves! You are free!’
There was a rustle, more of confusion than of comment.
‘Slaves, you are no longer slaves,’ the captain said. ‘You are as free as I am or …’ He looked about for some white person, spotted Cobb, and pointed at him: ‘As free as this man.’
An old slave in the front rank fell to his knees, raised his hands over his head, and shouted in a feeble voice: ‘I lived to see it. Praise God A’mighty, I lived to see it.’
When the reality of what had been announced struck home, there was no wild outcry, no jubilant dancing in the square, and white men were surprised that the former slaves took word of their freedom with such composure. But there were scenes which epitomized that crucial day in Jefferson history. One black woman, obedient to impulses no one could later explain, grabbed her seven-year-old boy and shook him violently, shouting at him: ‘You ain’t no more slave. Now will you mind?’ And she wept.
Major Cobb had come to the meeting anticipating what might happen, and he moved among his former slaves, assuring them that what the stranger said was true: ‘Yes, you’re free,’ but his attempt at conciliation failed when Big Matthew ran up to him, shook a fist in his face, and shouted: ‘Don’t work for you no more.’ When a laundry woman asked Matthew: ‘What I do wid your clothes?’ he roared: ‘Burn ’em.’ And again he shook his fist at Cobb: ‘Don’t work for you no more. Don’t work for your bitch no more.’
Instinctively, Cobb raised his right arm, but a Union soldier prevented any further action.
The meaning of true emancipation—not President Lincoln’s false gesture of some years before—was brought home to Lammermoor the next afternoon when amidst the clamor about freedom, Trajan appeared at the mansion, a place he had rarely entered, knocked politely at the door, and asked to see the master. Standing respectfully, he said: ‘Major Cobb, you got the plantation under control, I’se leavin’.’
‘What?’ The statement was like the explosion of a bomb.
‘I wants a place of my own. I got no more taste f
or livin’ in slave quarters here at Lammermoor.’
‘But you helped build this place. You’re part of it.’
‘Always I builds for someone else. Now I wants to work for myself.’
Cobb called for his wife, and when Petty Prue heard of the former slave’s unexpected announcement, she echoed Sett’s reaction: ‘Haven’t we always treated you decently?’
Trajan would not be sidetracked by any discussion of past conditions. Standing very erect, as he had been taught to do when reporting to a master, he said: ‘I come home from Mexico, two years ago, money I earned swimmin’ the river.’
When he saw incomprehension on the faces of the Cobbs, he produced the paper signed by Johnson Carver during those days of high adventure with the two boys. And there in the silent room, when he thought of those daring lads, so like his son, he hung his head and the terrible grief of this war and these tangled years overcame him. He could not present his case, and the Cobbs let him go, thinking that emancipation had unsettled him.
Next day Major Cobb and his wife invited their former slave to meet with them, in the same room, and this time they asked him to sit down. ‘Trajan, we suppose that with your money … And congratulations on having so much. I know many white families who would—’
Petty Prue, suddenly the more masterful of the Cobbs, broke in: ‘Don’t spend your money on land. You’ve been so faithful and we appreciate you so profoundly …’ She choked and seemed not so masterful after all.
‘What we propose,’ her husband said, ‘is to give you five acres of your own. That land against the oak trees.’
Trajan rose: ‘All these years I got my eye on a nice strip of land, edge of Jefferson. Last night I bought it.’
‘A slave? Buying land?’ The words had slipped away from Petty Prue, who was immediately sorry she had said them.
‘I bought it. I paid dollars and I’m leavin’ this mornin’, and your maid, Pansy, wants to go with me.’
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