by John Jakes
King Sebastian stood guard at the door. Inside, Charles found the four men directing furious looks at the girl. Her gag had slipped down around her neck. She could have cried out.
She stared at Charles with the same intense gaze, and he at last understood. Perhaps he had understood all along but had been prevented from admitting it by guilt and thoughts of Jeanne. He turned abruptly and hurried out into the steamy sunshine.
Things were growing too dangerous in the Indian slave trade. The conviction stayed with him when he made a belated start next morning. It accompanied him along the swampy trails of the low country, and it was still with him, a hobgoblin riding his shoulder, when he reached the coast.
The clearing was located outside the palisade surrounding Charles Town. The site had been carefully chosen. It was not so close as to be easily detected, not so far as to represent an unduly dangerous trip after dark. It could be reached by riding up the shore of the Cooper River for about ten minutes. In the clearing there gathered half a dozen men Charles silently characterized as Anglican snobs. They were planters from the district, all struggling to find a cash crop whose profits would fulfill their original dreams of Carolina. So far the search had been a failure. The colony was a losing enterprise.
Nevertheless, they persisted in pretending their life was ideal in most respects. They chatted over the latest gossip of the town. They complimented Charles on his offering, though they didn’t stand too close to him while doing so. His smell, as well as his lineage, offended them.
Torches driven into the sandy ground shed a smoky light on the vendue table of split palmetto logs. An auctioneer, another eminently respectable gentleman, handled the bidding in return for a small percentage of the total sale. In town Charles had heard the man prate about the evils of Indian slavery. Such talk was common. Most of those present had owned at least one Indian in the past. What they really objected to was not the immorality of enslaving other human beings but possible impairment of trade with the Indians should the tribes ever unite to protest the practice. The white men also feared an Indian uprising.
But that didn’t prevent them from showing up tonight. Stinking hypocrites, Charles thought.
One by one the four males were sold. Each brought a successively higher price. Charles stood to one side, his resentment easing as he puffed a clay pipe and contemplated his profit.
He listened to conversations. One man spoke of sending his new purchase to the West Indies for what he termed “seasoning.” Breaking the slave’s spirit was what he meant. A second gentleman discussed new land grants being made along nearby rivers and creeks.
“Yes, but what’s the use of owning land if you can’t pay your quitrent and there’s no crop that’s accepted in lieu of cash?”
“Maybe there is such a crop now,” the first man said. He displayed a plump little sack.
The others crowded around, curious. Even Charles drifted up to listen; the auction was stalled while the man with the sack answered a question put to him.
“This is seed. From Madagascar. The same kind of seed that’s growing so well in those overwatered gardens in town.”
A man pointed, excited. “Is that some of the rice Captain Thurber gave Dr. Woodward last year?” Thurber was captain of a brigantine that had put into Charles Town for repairs; Charles had heard the story of some rice brought ashore.
The man with the sack tucked it safely away in his pocket. “Aye. It thrives in wet ground. Nay—demands it, Many in town are agog over the possibilities. There’s a rush for land all at once. And a feeling that a profitable use has been found for these benighted lowlands.”
The doubter had another question: “Yes, but what white man could stand to work in swamps and marshes?”
“Not a one, Manigault. It will take men accustomed to intense heat and nearly unbearable conditions.” The speaker paused for effect. “Africans. Many more than we have in the colony now, I warrant.”
In France, Charles Main had suffered for his religion. But the hypocrisy of schemers like Emilion, and the cruelty inflicted on Jeanne, had all but destroyed the faith that had dragged him into the ordeal in the first place.
His own will, not some supernatural power, had sustained him under the hot irons of the torturers. So, although he still harbored a vague belief in a Supreme Being, his picture of that Being had changed. God was indifferent. He had no benevolent plan for the cosmos or its creatures; very likely He had no plan at all. It therefore behooved a man to rely solely upon himself. It was all right to give God a courteous nod now and then, as you would a doddering uncle. But when it came to shaping the future, a wise man took matters into his own hands.
And yet, in that firelit clearing in the midst of a vast, dense wood that reeked of damp earth and rang with the cries of birds, a curious thing happened to Charles. He felt his old beliefs surge up with unexpected strength. For one intense moment he felt the presence of some outside force that had willed he survive the past couple of years in order to reach this place at this precise instant.
In that instant he set a new course. He wouldn’t put a shilling of his earnings back into trade goods for the station. Whatever it cost to consult one of those twisty lawyers, he would pay, in order to learn how he might secure a grant of land down here, closer to the sea. He would investigate what he had just heard about the Madagascar seed. He was, first and foremost, a man who had worked the land. If he could raise grapes, he could raise rice.
But the labor did present a problem. He knew the inhospitable nature of these lowlands. He wouldn’t last a month working waist-deep in the water that bore disease, not to mention alligators, on its slow, serpentine tides.
The answer was obvious. A Negro slave. Two, if his earnings would stretch that far.
With the warped logic of someone who knows he is guilty and must find a way to prove otherwise, Charles had always considered himself a man who sold slaves without endorsing the system. Deep in him something recoiled from the whole process. Moreover, he never saw what actually happened to the Indians he caught and sold. Perhaps—the ultimate saving sophistry—kindly owners later freed them.
Now, however, conscience had to abdicate completely. He himself had to own at least one prime African buck. It was a matter of economics. Of opportunity. Of survival.
A man did what he must.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” exclaimed the auctioneer. “Too much talk diverts us from the choicest offering of the night.”
Mounting the table, he raised the hide garment so that the girl’s private parts were visible. The men were suddenly attentive.
A man did what he must. That same rule applied to the problem of heirs, Charles realized. If he was to rebuild his fortune in Carolina—and at last he had a glimmer of hope, something he had lacked for year—she had to accept certain realities. He had no intention of leaving his beloved Jeanne. At the same time he could no longer be overly scrupulous about fidelity.
“Gentlemen, who will begin the bidding for this comely tribal maiden? Who will give me a price of—?”
“Stop.” With outward thrusts of his hands, Charles parted the group of men ahead of him.
“What’s that, Main?” said the auctioneer, while the gentlemen Charles had pushed dusted their sleeves and sneered behind his back. He might be a Protestant, but he was also a churl. What else would you expect of a Frenchman?
Standing as straight as he ever had, Charles stared down the surprised, faintly annoyed auctioneer.
“I’ve changed my mind. She is not for sale.”
Slowly he looked to the girl. The auctioneer let her garment fall. Her large eyes were fixed on Charles. She understood.
He knew better than to try to stay the night at a Charles Town lodging house. Not even the most sordid of them, down near the point of the peninsula where the two rivers met and flowed into the ocean, would welcome a white man with an Indian woman who was obviously not his slave.
Instead he found a secluded glade not far from the palis
ade. There, despite the risk of snakes and the threat of insects, he spread his blankets, placed his loaded weapons within reach, lay down beside her in the hot, damp dark, and took her.
He knew only rudimentary words of her language, none a term of endearment. Yet she knew his need and was eager for his touch. His mouth on her mouth, his hand on her belly—this was what she had wanted almost from the first. He had seen it in her eyes and failed to comprehend.
Charles was an accomplished lover, tender when necessary. The knowing, courtly ways had not been completely forgotten. Jeanne’s plight and her need for consideration had assured that. Yet toward the end the style of his lovemaking changed. A slow, lazy rhythm was replaced by a quicker, more purposeful one. His excitement increased. So did hers. Passive pleasure became frantic response. Lying on wet, fertile earth, a hundred kinds of life buzzing or crying out around them and scores of stars pricking the black sky, they clasped each other.
That night he planted his seed as methodically as he was to plant the crops that would create the Main fortune.
At that period Charles Town consisted of something less than a hundred rude homes and commercial buildings. Many of the Barbadian men talked of erecting those spacious, breezy houses typical of the islands from which they had come. But it would take a better economy, a thriving future, to bring that about. The town’s air of gentility was obviously feigned and not a little shabby.
It didn’t seem so to Charles the next morning. The day was bright and clear, the air freshened by a northeast wind off the harbor. He strolled to the wharf with the Indian girl following a step behind. His bearing had changed, touched now with certainty, force.
Charles couldn’t help noticing the scornful stares of the gentry who were abroad. To have a liaison with a woman of color, whether brown or black, was acceptable. To flaunt it in public was something else.
The expressions of the gentlemen soon put a new thought in his head. Most Carolinians were infernally snobbish about their pedigrees. If he sired a child known to be half Cherokee, they would never admit him or the child to their circle, regardless of how much money he might accumulate—and never mind that his lineage was as good as theirs.
Swiftly, he began to concoct a scheme. He knew the Indian girl would become pregnant; he would see to it. Once it began to show, he would contrive to keep her in the back country, set her up in a cabin of her own, unseen by anyone except him and perhaps King Sebastian. He would tell her she would be safer that way.
He could then inform Jeanne that he meant to adopt a male child. He never doubted that the Indian girl would deliver a son, just as he never doubted his own ability to withstand and overcome her fury when he took the child away. He was a man, which gave him an advantage; he was white, which gave him another. He could deal with her forcibly, if it came to that. There was little Charles wouldn’t do to assure the continuity of his line and the future security of any male who bore his name.
Later, he could pass the child off to outsiders as his sister’s orphaned son. The plan excited him, and he couldn’t completely conceal the reaction. The girl was walking at his shoulder now. She noticed his sudden hard smile, which just as quickly disappeared.
He saw her questioning look. Gently he touched her arm, gazing at her in a way she took to be reassuring. His fast, noisy breathing slowed. They walked on.
He inquired about arriving ships with Africans for sale. None was expected for three weeks, he learned. The only noteworthy vessel in port was a merchantman out of Bridgetown, a trading vessel carrying a few passengers: Gull of Portsmouth.
Charles passed a group of five young men who seemed fascinated by the sights of the little port. He had seen their kind before. Indentured boys. They had a whipped look—all except one stocky young fellow with heavy shoulders, light brown hair, and eyes that glowed like ice in the sunshine. He moved with a certain swagger.
Going in opposite directions, each took brief notice of the other. The bound boy was curious about the man with the primitive clothing, aristocratic bearing, and sprouting beard. The former slaver and would-be slave owner was wondering how someone could voluntarily consign himself to slavery.
A mate leaned over the merchantman’s rail.
“Back on board, lads. The tide’s flowing. You’ll find grander sights to gawk at in Penn’s town.”
The indentured boys hurried back to the ship, and the tall aristocrat drifted away in the crowd, his Cherokee woman following with adoring eyes. In the cheerful light of the morning, each man had already forgotten the other.
Book One
Answer The Drum
… In future wars the Nation must look to the Academy for the skill to conduct valor to victory.
SECRETARY OF WAR JOHN C. CALHOUN
TO SYLVANUS THAYER, SUPERINTENDENT,
U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY
1818
1
“LIKE SOME HELP LOADING that aboard, young sir?”
The stevedore smiled but there was no friendliness in his eyes, only avarice inspired by the sight of an obvious stranger.
A few moments ago the driver of the Astor House passenger omnibus had thrown the travel-battered trunk down at the head of the pier. Orry had picked it up by the one rope handle still unbroken and had dragged it scarcely three feet before the stevedore stepped between him and the gangway.
It was a brilliant, windless morning in June 1842. Orry was already nervous about the day ahead. The stevedore’s fixed smile and hard stare only worsened that state, as did the sight of the stevedore’s two associates lounging nearby.
Nerves and cowardice were two different things, though; Orry had no intention of letting the former lead to the latter. He had been warned that New York teemed with all sorts of swindlers, and now it appeared he had finally met one. He took off his tall, stylish beaver hat and mopped his forehead with a linen handkerchief from an inside pocket.
Orry Main was sixteen and stood almost six feet two inches. His slimness accentuated his height and lent him a certain grace when he moved. He had a long, plain face with the good color of someone who spent a lot of time in the sunshine. His nose was narrow and aristocratic, his wavy hair brown. His eyes, brown too, were rather deeply set. Fatigue circles tended to appear under them whenever he slept poorly, as he had last night. The rings of shadow gave his face a melancholy cast. But he was not melancholy by disposition. His smile, which appeared frequently, proved that. He was, however, a deliberate sort. He tended to pause and think before taking any important step.
Impatient, the stevedore put a foot on the trunk. “Lad I asked—”
“I heard you, sir. I can handle the trunk myself.”
“Listen to that,” one of the other stevedores jeered. “Where you from, country boy?” It was Orry’s accent that gave him away; his clothes were far from countrified.
“South Carolina.”
His heart was beating fast now. The three were mature men, muscular and rough. But he refused to be backed down. He reached for the rope handle. The first stevedore grabbed his wrist.
“No you don’t. Either we put it on the steamer or you travel up to West Point without it.”
Orry was stunned by the threat and equally stunned by the ease with which he and his destination had been identified. He needed time to think, time to put himself in a better position to deal with these louts. He shook his wrist to signal that he wanted the stevedore to release him. After a deliberate delay the man did. Orry straightened and used both hands to put his hat back on his head.
Three female passengers, two pretty girls and an older woman, hurried by. They certainly couldn’t help him. Then a small man in a uniform stepped off the gangway, an official of the line, Orry suspected. A sharp wave from one of the stevedores and the official came no farther.
“How much to load it?” Orry asked. Somewhere behind him wagon wheels squealed and hooves rang on the cobbles. He heard merry voices, laughter. Other passengers arriving.
“Two dollars.”
“That’s about eight times more than it should be.”
The stevedore grinned. “Could be, sojerboy. But that’s the price.”
“You don’t like it,” the second stevedore said, “go complain to the mayor. Go complain to Brother Jonathan.” All three laughed. Brother Jonathan was the popular symbol for the nation. A rustic, a Yankee.
Orry was perspiring from tension as well as from the heat. He bent at the waist, again reaching for the trunk. “I refuse to pay you a—”
The first stevedore pushed him. “Then the trunk stays here.”
A grave look concealed Orry’s fear. “Sir, don’t put hands on me again.” The words provoked the stevedore to do exactly that. He tried to give Orry a clumsy shake. Orry had planned his point of attack and rammed his right fist into the stevedore’s stomach.
The official cried, “Stop that,” and started forward. Another stevedore flung him back so hard he nearly pitched off the pier into the water.
The first stevedore grabbed Orry’s ears and twisted. Then he kneed Orry’s groin. Orry reeled away, falling against someone who had come up behind him, someone who darted around him and charged the three stevedores, fists swinging.
A young man not much older than himself, Orry saw as he lunged back to the fray. A shorter, very stocky chap who punched with great ferocity. Orry jumped in, bloodied a nose, and got his cheek raked by fingernails. Frontier-style fighting had reached the New York docks, it seemed.
The first stevedore tried to jab a thumb in Orry’s eye. Before he hit his target, a long gold-knobbed cane came slashing in from the right. The knob whacked the stevedore’s forehead. He yelled and staggered.
“Blackguards,” a man bellowed. “Where are the authorities?”
“William, don’t excite yourself,” a woman exclaimed.
The stocky young man jumped on Orry’s trunk, poised and ready to continue the fight. Now the official by the gangway was joined by two crewmen from the steamer. The stevedores backed off, calculated the rapidly changing odds, and after some oaths that brought gasps from the two ladies who had just arrived, hurried off the pier and disappeared on the street beyond.
