The rest waited in the slave quarters while Thorne came to the tortuous conclusion that he would have to pay them with what little legal tender he had. And he knew he was operating on borrowed time. The Bureau was merrily confiscating land left and right, and then leasing it back to the negroes, promising “forty acres and a mule.” He hoped to postpone or mitigate his day of reckoning by appearing well-behaved. In no time, he executed one-year labor contracts with his former slaves, using the Bureau’s boilerplate form. Alice thought Thorne kept a remarkably stiff upper lip during this process. When she told him so, he said, “Well goddammit, I have to make money some way. What else would you have me do—rent my land? Sell it so the Bureau or some Yankee aid society can help ’em build a school on it? Not in a million years.”
Two negroes who didn’t leave, thank God (just a figure of speech, of course), were Jonah and Eliza Tefera. Jonah explained his reasoning to her one summer afternoon as he chopped wood behind his cabin.
“The Lord wants us to stay here awhile longer.”
Alice’s corset seemed to shrink. “Surely you’re exaggerating.”
“Don’t know how else to think of it, Massa Thorne comin’ back the moment we rollin’ out. Yessir, the Lord behind that.”
“I … can’t argue with you that the Lord was behind Thorne’s return, but how do you know He wants you to stay?”
Sweat glistened on Jonah’s shoulders as he shrugged. Bits of wood had stuck there. “Just a feelin’, I guess.”
She sighed with relief. She’d been afraid Christ had directly contacted him. Her opinion of Jonah might change entirely if she thought he was operating under Jesus Christ’s direct orders.
Jonah was looking at her sidelong. “I ain’t talking to no spirits, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“No, not at all. But if you did, that’s your business. You and the other negroes helped me get through the War—with that ritual—and I’m grateful.”
He nodded and then positioned a wedge of wood on his chopping block. “Eliza and me, we can get married. Do it legal.”
It took her a second to realize he’d changed the subject. “Oh, you can—you will. That’s wonderful.”
And it really was wonderful. Negroes couldn’t legally marry until now. Before, it’d been unusual for negroes even to have last names—an informal but very special privilege Abraham Norwick had bestowed on a much younger Jonah.
“Will you change your name back? You once told me—”
“To T’Fara? No, that be the name of my family in Africa. If old Gram was here, he’d have me use it, but I ain’t changing back. Massa Thorne’s grandpa be the one who wrote it wrong, but I liked him.”
Alice could understand why the feeling must have been mutual.
And as the summer went on, she found that she also continued liking the Teferas. It wasn’t just because they were familiar faces. They picked up the slack for her and others, cleaning the house and cooking meals.
The rest of the negroes became lazy in the absence of whips, contract or no contract. For the first time in their lives, they had no responsibilities but to themselves, and there was nothing Thorne or Obie could do to convince them otherwise. Everyday it was a different strategy to get them into the fields: coaxing, scolding, promising more money. They feigned sickness or simply went home when they felt like it, leading Thorne to complain, “The darkeys think if six days raise a whole crop, three days raise half a crop.” Once, Alice even heard the sound of gunfire, but she didn’t ask him about it.
The food shortage helped no one’s mood. All the poultry seemed to magically disappear, and for weeks at a time they lived on rice, corn, and sweet potatoes. Thorne went into a screaming fit when cotton prices didn’t maintain the high they had achieved that summer—prices that had encouraged him to borrow heavily to buy seed, livestock, and supplies to restore neglected fences and outbuildings.
“In the old days, I’d just lose a collateral gang of slaves,” he told her one day. “Now, I’m swimming in red ink.”
The plantation’s only lucky break came in September, a month after Thorne received the letter they’d been fearing from the Freedmen’s Bureau. The letter had appeared to be disaster, for it said in part:
Be it known that your plantation holdings, coming under the head of abandoned property, are being occupied by former owners, who, through contempt of the Government and the President’s authority, have refused to make application for its restoration under law.
Therefore, such property shall be confiscated on the first day of January next unless before that date the owners present themselves before the authorities, take the required oath of allegiance to the Government, and ask for its restoration.
A neat little trap, it seemed, because the Bureau commissioner had also issued a circular saying land could not be restored to fourteen classes of former Confederates, including officers, and that not even a presidential pardon could change this. Thorne applied for a pardon anyway, of course, paying a fee he couldn’t afford to a “pardon broker.”
But for once, someone did their job. The application was moved to the top of the provisional governor’s pile, who forwarded it to President Johnson, where it was signed along with hundreds and then thousands of others. Johnson also countermanded the commissioner’s circular, forcing the Bureau to “restore” the land of amnestied former Confederates.
A lucky break, but scant comfort. All the while, negroes had continued trickling away, chasing rumors of better-paying fields in Mississippi and Louisiana. Thorne ended up with less than fifty field hands to complete the fall harvest.
He often raged in his sleep, waking Alice in her bedroom on the other side of the house. It was at these times that her telepathy woke from its slumber, watching from afar as Thorne battled dream Yankees, gunfire flashing in his head like lightning.
Why can’t we connect to each other? she wondered on these nights. I could help him through this. Then everything would be fine, or so the reasoning went. He would love her, and thus bridge the gap between her and Christ, as she was steadily more convinced that Thorne—conscious of it or not—was Christ’s representative in her life. Why else would Christ have brought him home on that day?
Wanting and doing were two different things, however, and she had no idea how to go about making him love her. (The effort was of course handicapped by her lack of love for him.) She didn’t know how to interest him other than to solicit occasional sex, and even then, Thorne seemed to prefer her as a body rather than as a person. Always, he turned her face-down and never kissed her lips. One night, she was awakened by what she thought was water spattering her bare stomach and breasts. It turned out to be Thorne, standing over her and masturbating. He’d covered her face with her bedsheets.
She might have been encouraged by that except for what her telepathy told her: that he was only using her for lack of something better. She was just a body with the proper organs. Luckily for her—at least she thought she was lucky in this regard—there weren’t any brothels in town. This wasn’t the Frontier, after all.
In time, though, even the sex stopped. Alice then could only guess that Thorne’s main reason for keeping her was the same as in ’60–61, after he gave up trying to impregnate her: she was useful for the household chores she accomplished, and was good for outward appearances during visits from business acquaintances.
Life made her feel worthless—and why not? God’s son had adjudged her family to be spiritual cockroaches, and out of spite had refused to lift that onus. She still envisioned Reverend Forney, standing on his altar and demanding she admit that Momma stole the angel’s wings as a child, when it had obviously been an accident. No, she would not confess to a crime that had never been committed in order to gain “forgiveness.” There had to be another way, and Thorne seemed to be it.
Some days, she would be angry like this, and resolve to seduce her husband, and then hate herself for pursuing someone she didn’t love. She sometimes decided it was time t
o escape the plantation—with or without the Teferas’ help and regardless of the fact that Jesus’s ire would surely follow her—and then she’d scrap that plan in the hopes Christ would finally reclaim the angel’s wings. Sometimes, she decided to commit suicide, then was too afraid, rationalizing her fear with worry that death might precipitate an irreversible banishment to Hell. Her feelings endlessly made the rounds in this manner, like a horse circling a track with no finish line. But when they subsided to the familiar lulls of lethargy and depression, she worried that she was the cause of the South’s misfortune: the logic being that Christ persecuted the South in order to make Thorne unhappy so she would be unhappy.
It was all she could do to maintain her infrequent bursts of activity, and then she did only the minimum necessary to appear worth keeping around. Gradually, she again started to neglect her own hygiene. Well, how could she be expected to concentrate on such things when thinking was so difficult? Secretly, she wrote out long lists in order to remember what to do: “1. Wake up. 2. Get dressed. 3. Open blinds. 4. Eat breakfast. 5. Clean teeth. …” It took practice to keep her lists memorized—because she couldn’t be seen carrying them around—and then it was an effort not to mumble.
Perhaps the only thing that kept her in touch with the world was an old interest: sewing. She didn’t do much these days except mend the rags that everyone wore and make quilts, but it was enough to maintain contact with the world, however threadbare.
Things didn’t improve until the town tailor visited Thorne one day in his study. Alice eavesdropped from the hallway:
“I’ll give you a dollar for every dress she makes,” the tailor said.
“How much you re-selling ’em for?”
When there was no reply, she heard the floorboards creak. Menacingly, Thorne said, “Well?”
The tailor spoke with a strangled voice. “Six. … Six dollars. Please, Mister Norwick.”
She peeked in and saw Thorne choking him.
“Six is most of what I pay a female hand in a month,” Thorne said. “You’re making that with every dress, and you can only give me one dollar apiece?”
“Two.” The tailor’s face had turned red. “That’s my final—please, I can’t afford no more. I got—”
“Agreed.” Thorne let him drop into a gasping heap.
And Alice set to work.
Because the money bought smiles from Thorne, her mood lifted. Soon, she no longer needed lists to function, and she freed herself from other duties to concentrate fully on sewing. By the time the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally abolished slavery, was ratified in December ’65, she had abandoned all pretense of doing anything else. She still mumbled but didn’t worry about it. She even giggled when the weasel wheel popped, marking the spooling-out of another square yard of cloth.
But it still wasn’t enough money, and Thorne came to tell her so just before Christmas. He found her in the study, seated in a rocking chair and wrapped in a quilt she’d made. Feet upon a footstool, Alice stared into the glowing fireplace.
“I’m doing all I can, Thorne.”
“No, it’s not that,” he said, and repositioned a chew of tobacco against his cheek. “I’m not here to crack the whip, so to speak. Bedford and I have a mutual friend near Atlanta. Wealthy. He invited me to his house for three weeks.”
“You’re leaving to ask him for money?”
“It’s either that or mortgage our home.”
“But it’s almost the holidays. Why don’t you wait until—”
“Since when have you celebrated Christmas?”
Heat rose in the back of her throat. “I—we don’t. But it’s a special time for the others, and there’s New Year’s, and I thought … I thought we could …”
“You thought what?”
I thought we could fall in love, she wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come.
“You just let me do the thinking. Sewing’s your job. And you better keep that up while I’m gone.”
She looked away from his hollow eyes, from the beard like a rat’s pelt, the sheen of spittle on his lips. Hating him, she wished she had something to say, some trump card, but all she could do to comfort herself was remember the day she had desecrated the Norwick family Bible. She’d later sent it up this very chimney, and Thorne hadn’t noticed its absence since coming home. She almost wished he would. Oh, not me, she would say. I haven’t seen it. If I had, you know I’d sooner handle cow dung than touch such a thing.
“Move your feet,” Thorne said.
“What?”
“I said, move your feet.”
Sighing, she moved her feet off the footstool. Thorne then used his toe to depress a lever on its side, flipping the top open. He dropped a long stream of tobacco juice into the exposed spittoon.
“Thanks.”
He left the house without another word.
✽ ✽ ✽
When he returned a month later, it was only long enough to sign labor contracts in preparation for the coming year. “I’m looking for property,” he said—but with what money, Alice couldn’t guess—and then was gone again.
Two weeks later, he came back and announced he’d found some attractive land to the west. He wouldn’t say anything about it other than it had nice hills. Alice didn’t think hills would behoove new farm land any more than the Norwick property’s irregular landscape aided it, but she still wished him well when he embarked on yet another trip.
He never did buy more land, but that didn’t matter to her. She found herself enjoying the time without him. With her sewing to keep her busy, and the knowledge that the money she earned was so valuable, she had a reason to get out of bed each morning. This was different than during the War, because there wasn’t now the storm cloud of worry overhead. Nor was there the tension that had filled the house ever since Thorne’s return and which she hadn’t noticed until he was gone again.
Sure, sometimes she wondered if Thorne really needed to take so many trips—and she telepathically tasted the flavor of skulduggery on his thoughts—but she rationalized it as a sign of the times. Thorne had maintained many connections from the War and often corresponded with his old commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Relationships like that required nurturing and perhaps some illegal activities. But if it kept the plantation alive, then she supposed it was all right.
The alternative was not to trust him—to wonder if Thorne were meeting clandestinely with Christian ministers to plot her downfall—but her good mood was too important to invite such despair. What would she do—confront him? Demand to know every detail of his life? Send the angel’s wings across Georgia on spy missions that might fragment her consciousness? No. She had just emerged from an endless night, and the image she saw in the dining room mirror during her weekly telepathic meditations upon herself confirmed this. Granted, Thorne was a deaf, brutish son of a bitch with a big ego, small morals, and an even smaller penis, but he needed her. And Alice needed him—for more than just subsistence.
She became half-convinced that she could work herself into his favor, and thus Christ’s forgiveness, through her dress-making. This seemed logical; as far as she knew, she generated the only income. The cotton crop, in fact, failed the following season. And the year after that, 1867, was even worse because of low cotton prices, bad weather, flooding, and crop pests.
During all this, Thorne continued his business trips to points unknown, perhaps trying to escape the strain of running a dying plantation. When he was home, he filled the air with talk of crops and politics, which Alice thought was avoidance of topics that might bring them together. Sometimes, these talks even led to conflict. Such was the case one fall evening in ’67:
“So I said to the darkey, ‘How will you run for representative when we haven’t been readmitted to Congress?’ And he said, ‘I ain’t gwine be in the U.S. Congress, Mars Thorne, I gwine be a senator!”
Alice sipped her tea as he guffawed. They were sitting on the balcony between their two bedrooms, using the tea set
that Eliza, now three months pregnant, had buried during the War to hide it from looters.
“Uppity,” Thorne said. “Damn uppity. Everywhere I go, I’m told they’re like that. If they’re not spinning dreams about owning land, they’re in ecstasy about what the Radicals are doing to the white man—me—while we have no say in how we’re governed. I tell you, if you put a darkey and a scalawag in a bag, then shake …”
“Thorne.”
“… you don’t know who’d fall out first. What?”
She set down her tea and faced him across the serving table. “I don’t mean to be presumptuous, but I’ve been thinking that if you’re not willing to sell land to the negroes—” Her voice caught when she saw him tense. “Well, I ran into some ladies at the tailor’s the other day …”
“Oh, please.”
“And they said their husbands might lease land next year. The negroes will live on their tracts, pay half their crop as rent, and—”
“Sharecropping?” He slammed his tea cup onto its saucer. Liquid splashed the Macon Telegraph he’d picked up on his last trip. “Obie and I are the only force compelling them into the fields. What makes you think they’d work a regular schedule on their own?”
“I don’t know, Thorne, maybe the knowledge that if you’re not prosperous, then they’re not prosperous. That’s better than working for a cash wage you’re too poor to pay them.”
She immediately regretted saying it. She held her breath as Thorne stared in shock.
“I’m sorry.”
Too late. Anger gathering in his brows, Thorne wagged a finger. “My hands are already chapped from beating the negroes around here.”
Her guts sank into her knees. Perhaps he was lying, perhaps not. A man like Thorne might not let a little thing like Emancipation get in the way of old habits. She should have never presumed to tell him his business.
Cursed by Christ Page 11
