Back to Wando Passo

by David Payne

  “Perhaps, but I feel sure that it will never hurt or burn as hot as slavery has.”

  Impertinent! Addie thinks reflexively. But there’s something dignified and even rather sad in Jarry’s face and bearing that has weight, and that weight lingers after reflex fades. She holds her breath and thinks, No, no, you mustn’t speak to him like that. You’ll only hurt your cause.

  “You are ungrateful, Jarry. You are an ungrateful nigger.”

  “I won’t hear you call your brother that,” says Percival.

  “He’s not my brother. It may please you to consider him your son, but a servant and a slave is all he’ll ever be to me. If Jarry were white and capable of a brother’s loyalty, he’d have long since volunteered to see us through the war. We wouldn’t have to ask.” Now Harlan turns to him. “How many Negroes, Jarry, are there in this state, I wonder, standing, as you stand, in your good suit, discussing—is it Byron?—and the prospect of their manumission with their masters? Not many, I can tell you. You should fall down on your knees and thank Almighty God for the privileges you’ve received. This family made you what you are.”

  “What I am,” says Jarry, “is a slave. That is what this family made me.” His voice is strong; his eyes are flashing now. The tense hush in the room is like that which follows the detonation of a bomb.

  Harlan’s face has taken on a sober and forbidding look, and Addie feels her heartbeat in her throat. “God made you black, not me. You’re right, though, Jarry. A slave is what you are, and what Father, practicing a foolish leniency with you these many years, has allowed you to forget you are. What I’ve long suspected and hesitated to believe, I now see is true. I think you know that if you leave us, we’ll be harmed and maybe ruined, and that is not only a matter of indifference, it’s what you seek.”

  Jarry leaves the mantel now. He walks into the center of the room and turns. When he begins to speak, his voice is soft, but he’s panting slightly. Addie sees his shirtfront rise and fall. “You’re mistaken. I’ve never wished this family ill. I understand your goal, that it is to preserve this property for your wife and any future children you may have. If I were in your place, I’d feel the same. But I am forty-two years old and have no wife or child. Since I was fifteen—for twenty-seven years—I’ve worked to make Wando Passo what it is. There’s twice the acreage under cultivation now that there was then. I could have worked no harder had it been mine to inherit, yet I knew I never would, and I never coveted it. I knew the day would come when I’d walk away with nothing but my freedom and the chance to start my life, which Father promised me, sitting in this very room. He gave his word, and I gave mine to him. He shook my hand. I’ve kept my end. Now I ask that he keep his. I have no legal power to compel you, but I believe your honor compels you.”

  “Now you will lecture me on honor? I don’t believe honor can compel a man to break the law and ruin himself and his descendants for the sake of one spoiled, selfish nigger, who’s too great a fool to know his own best interest. I’ll tell you something, Jarry, when and if you ever get the thing you’re seeking, you’ll travel far through the wide world before you find another place where you’ll be treated better than you have been here, or even half as well.”

  “I may be treated worse,” he says, “but I’ll never have to look across the river at those dikes and see the years I put into them, which are lost and which I can’t call back.”

  Harlan narrows his eyes and stares incredulously into Jarry’s face. “You hate us, don’t you, who’ve never done you anything but good.”

  “No, Harlan,” Jarry answers, “it’s you who hate me. That’s what this is about, not the property, which may suffer from my absence, but will still be yours after the war and can always be made right when you return.”

  “I don’t hate you,” Harlan says. “What makes you think I do? Why would I?”

  “Because I have the presumption, as a Negro, to consider myself a human being and a man, like you, and because Father, in his heart, chose me. Not that I was better, Harlan. But there has always been a sympathy between us, an effect of temperament that you’ve resented for as long as I recall. And now you’re asking him to make up to you for the love that you did not receive, which you feel was taken from your rightful share by me, and what you’re requiring him to do to make this right to you is to betray me, to betray his honor and to break his word. And I believe the man I know is too wise and decent to let you win.”

  “That’s a lie,” says Harlan. “All of it is hateful, impertinent lies. This place made a million pounds of rice last year. The nation needs that rice. The army must be fed. Against that and the welfare of this family, what have you to counterpose? Nothing but your selfish wish. In the end, we no more need your leave to keep you than I need Runcipole’s permission to climb upon his back and ride or the permission of the dirt to make my crop. Father may consider you a son, Jarry, but make no mistake, that’s what you are to me, the equivalent of so much pasture, so much paddy in a square of rice. Obey me, and you’ll have your freedom when the war is done. Cross me, and I’ll shove a hoe into your hands and put you on the next flat to the fields and work you like a dray until the day you die.”

  Jarry holds Harlan’s stare, then turns to Percival. “Does he speak for you?”

  The weight of it is in the old man’s face, and all the room attends. Clearly torn, he hesitates, and Addie sees fatigue and age where they have not been fully evident before. “I’m sensible of my promise, Jarry,” he says, looking sunken, grayed, and miserable, “but you must know Harlan can contest the will, and in the courts as they are now, you’d have no chance, my boy, no chance at all. And there’s also truth in what he says. The roads are full of armed men now. Perhaps it would be safer for you to bide your time at Wando Passo till hostilities conclude, and it would be a comfort to your mother, too. Would you consider staying on if you were freed and paid a wage?”

  “That’s not what we agreed.”

  “You see?” shouts Harlan now. “You see, Father?” His look solicits Addie, too. “He doesn’t want to reach accommodation with us.”

  “What I see,” says Percival, “is that you’re angry at me, both of you, yet you turn it on each other. Let me take it. Give me what is mine. Can’t there be peace and common cause between you, at least until the war is done?”

  “There can be peace when he accepts his duty to obey,” says Harlan.

  “Tell me what to do, Jarry,” says Percival, with a despairing face. “If I free you, he’ll have the will annulled and punish you; if I don’t, you’ll feel betrayed.”

  Jarry makes no answer to his father. The expression on his face is one Addie will remember—the failure of surprise, and, more than that, the fatigue, the immense fatigue of an old wound or grievance, resurrected by this interchange, but older in its provenance, which is the thing that makes his eyes both like and, finally, so different from Percival’s. He puts her Byron on the partners desk and walks out without another word.

  Harlan turns to them. “You see? This is what they are.” There is a smirking, mean triumphalism in his face.

  “What they are?” says Percival, erupting. “I will tell you who he is. When Jarry was fifteen, he ran away and was brought in by the dogs. Twice, he tried to kill himself. The second time, I cut him from the rope with my own hands and sat him in this chair. I told him, ‘If you’ll work and reconcile yourself to your position, I’ll free you when I die.’ So while you played and rode and wasted what he made, Jarry rose before first light and came home in the dark each night on the last flat with the last crew. If you have dreams for the future, dreams for your wife and children, Jarry built them. What dream does he have? What has he to show for twenty-seven years of work—a cast-off suit of clothes? A better cut of meat? His one dream was freedom, which he’s long since earned. Now you ask me to go before my maker with a broken promise on my head….”

  “If he’s paid his debt, then free him now.”

  Percival frowns, clearly surpr
ised.

  “Why wait?” says Harlan, pressing his advantage. “This is what I resent, Father. Knowing Jarry’s value to yourself, you never freed him, just as you never did Paloma. Now you ask of me—of us”—he rests his heavy hand on Addie’s shoulder—“a sacrifice you found too onerous.”

  In Percival’s expression, there is brief affront, but it is swiftly followed by a look of acknowledgment. With a tired sigh, he collapses on himself. “So,” he says in a deflated voice. “So. In this at least, I fear you’re right.” The old man looks at Addie now. “I wanted amity between them. I thought, if it could start in this one house…It’s my fault it has come to this.”

  “If you wish to rectify it, Father,” says Harlan, waxing as the old man wanes, “you can do so with a single word. Give me the will. We’ll burn it now and have the matter done. You have my solemn promise I’ll free Jarry as soon as I return.”

  Percival hesitates and looks to Addie, lost. “Perhaps that is the way,” he sighs. “Perhaps the war will not last long….”

  “Your father is tired, Harlan,” she says, standing up. “And we’ve neglected our guests too long. We should leave this to a later time.”

  “Yes,” says Percival. “Yes, I’m tired. I can’t wrestle with this any more today.”

  “I need your answer before I go to Moultrie, Father,” Harlan says.

  “You shall have it. Now, leave me, go.” He shoos them with a weak gesture of the wrist.

  Harlan pulls to the library doors and turns to her. “Addie, you undermined me. I had him at the point.”

  “I’m sorry, Harlan,” she replies. “But you saw fit to include me, and I think it’s a grave thing you’re asking him to do.”

  “Jarry is a nigger, Addie. He’s a slave, our property. We’ve given him everything.”

  “But the issue isn’t to whom one’s word is given, Harlan, is it? I would think it’s whom it’s given by, when the giver is a gentleman, as your father is, as I believe—and know—you are.”

  Now Harlan frowns and his brows gather. “Madam, I’ve been lectured once today upon the obligations of honor by a servant; I don’t need another lecture from a woman, and particularly not my wife. You must be ruled by me in this.”

  “Must I, sir?”

  “Yes, madam, you must indeed. We are married now. I understand that you are used to independent ways, and you shall continue to enjoy them here, within reason. I shall always welcome your opinions, but, in the end, when I’ve rendered mine, I expect your unconditional support. I have a right, I think, to nothing less.”

  Addie’s lips are pressed into a line. Yet she doesn’t contradict.

  “I did this, in large part, for you.”

  “For me…”

  “Have you not grasped what is at stake? I don’t believe you have. What I’m seeking to prevent, Addie, is returning from the war a season hence, or in a year, and finding our gardens overgrown and you wandering the roads in rags, with matted hair, begging crusts of bread. I assume this outcome would be unwelcome to you, too.”

  “It is not a charming picture,” she concedes.

  “We’re agreed then. Come now, let’s not fight. Will you shake?”

  Addie doesn’t smile, but neither does she reject his hand.

  “All this will work out for the best. You’ll see. Now let us smile and join our guests and go to cut the cake.”

  FIFTEEN

  As the motorcade crawled down the strip, Ran saw the CVS approaching and began to sweat. “Pull in, jerkwad,” he advised himself, but Claire’s car was right there in the mirror. Having lied, on balance, it seemed best to stick it out. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. This proposition was one he’d spent the best part of his youth putting to the test. It had not panned out exactly, but maybe he just hadn’t traveled far enough—who knew, it still might.

  And if he’d left his scrip unfilled for a few days—it couldn’t be as much as two weeks already, could it?—hadn’t it been partially unselfish, partly for Claire’s benefit as well? It was the reunion, don’t you see, the thought of making love to her unfettered by the troublous side effects…which in Ransom’s case—to get down to the grim brass tacks—amounted to an inability to come. True, he could get it up—he was one of the lucky ones in this regard, as his physician never tired of pointing out—but to be unable to come, to ejaculate, to jouir—try that for a week sometime, then try it for a year! To Ran, it was a form of punishment, of torture, servitude, which he, in the main, accepted manfully. But when Claire, the hundredth time, said yes, he’d allowed himself to want once more the thing life had apparently decreed that he could never have again: to be himself. He’d thought, Well, maybe, just this once… Was that so damnable?

  And even if he went in now, you see—if he exposed his lie to Claire and gave her further ammo to add to the arsenal she already had—it had taken two weeks to reach this point (not three, surely! Ransom, out of guilt perhaps, had been less than wholly conscientious in keeping count), and it would take another two (or three) to get his levels back to where they’d been. Better to put it off until tomorrow. So there was the decision made, and by then the CVS was far behind them anyway. They’d reached the light, and Ransom, turning, still felt fine. Ran, in fact, felt buoyant.

  He was on a journey—the idea suddenly came clear. “Something’s leading me,” he muttered, “but who, or what? To where?”

  Was it toward his True Self?

  “That must be it!”

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Nothing, Pete.”

  He’d been on this same journey once upon a time. Way back in Killdeer long ago, when he dreamed of Shea and Fillmore East and hitting that impossible riff, art and music had been his fearless path toward uncovering and releasing it. Then something happened. What? Somehow he fell asleep or merely blinked, and when he looked again, half his life had passed. It didn’t matter, though. His eyes were open now; he was awake, and here the path was at his feet! Why had he ever left? It was because of other people, wasn’t it? And why was it that whenever he reached this state of triple XL happiness and clarity of vision they started having problems? Why was his True Self something others seemed to want him to suppress? Whenever he got close, like now, he saw the look of fear and worry; he saw them start to shuffle backward toward the door. And this was true of Claire especially. How sad this made him. Claire wanted him to take the drugs, but what the drugs did, all they did—this was crystal clear to Ransom now—was to separate him from the brightness in himself, to take him farther from the True Self he wished to find, farther from the place it was his destiny and right to go. It suddenly occurred to him that Claire wasn’t free. And why? Why wasn’t she?

  “Is it because of me?”

  Yes! Somehow it had to do with him and something in their history. Was it because, back when, she’d given up her career for his? Was it because his dream had sucked hers down into its undertow? Yes, this was it, and ever since, there’d been an understanding, never stated, that he had to make it up to her, and this was why he had to take the drugs, to protect Claire from his freedom. Or was it to protect her from her own? The bright skein of his logic began to fray, and Ransom wasn’t sure. All he knew was that he didn’t want to take drugs anymore. What he wanted was for Claire to be free, too, and as his partner and free equal to meet him in a place of strength and joy. Such a simple wish, but it was all he’d ever really wanted. Somehow in all these years he’d failed to make it happen, but maybe it was not too late. Maybe he could make it happen yet.

  Deep into the country now, with the children singing in the back, Ransom had begun to think such deep and deeply hopeful thoughts as these.

  “Right over here!” he said, herding them toward the periwinkle patch as soon as everyone had parked. “That’s where I found the pot. And the rotten sill”—he strode back to the house—“right there.”

  “Is our house going to break?” asked Hope.

  “No, sweetie, absolutely not,” said
Claire. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

  “That’s right,” said Ran. “If we left it, we might have a problem. But we aren’t going to leave it. Daddy’s going to fix the rot. See, Claire, Marcel, see how the yard slopes back this way? What I’m thinking is…”

  “I need to pee,” said Hope, crossing one leg over the other. “Can I go in the grass?”

  “Sure, sweetie, sure,” said Ran. “Wherever. A swale…”

  “No, Hope,” said Claire. “Come on, let’s go in the house.”

  Hope looked to Dad.

  “Right, you go in the house with Mommy. You may want to throw on a pot of water for the rice,” he called after Claire as she took the kids and headed in. “Come on, Marcel, I’ll show you the ranch. You haven’t been here, have you?”

  Jones hesitated slightly. “I helped Claire some when she moved in.”

  “Did you? Damn good of you, man. I appreciate that. Come check out the view.”

  They proceeded through the park and came out on the Bluffs. Ran pointed. “Those are the old rice dikes over there. They’re pretty overgrown, but it’s amazing they’ve held up this long. Can you imagine what it was like to build those things?”

  “Not really,” said Marcel.

  “Standing in cold black water to your knees,” said Ransom, helping out, “digging a brick-sized wad of clay out with your hoe, tossing it over your shoulder, clod by clod, until you had a wall six or eight feet high by six or eight feet thick around that whole twenty-acre field. There were over forty fields or ‘squares’ right here on Wando Passo, including a couple on Beard Island, just down there.” Ran pointed south. “Some guy from the College of Charleston, an anthropologist, found a church there a few years ago, all framed out in cypress, steeple and all, and never sided, never used. No one knows what it was doing there. And these fields stretch hundreds of miles—up and down the Pee Dee and the Waccamaw, the Black, the Santee, the Ashley and the Cooper. People compare the effort to the construction of the Pyramids, but if you ask me, it took more. In its heyday before the Civil War, this place produced a million pounds of rice a year. Tara, all that cotton money, tobacco up my way—that was all chump change compared to rice. This was once the richest place in North America.”