North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  “Still the same sticking place—?”

  Wade nodded. “The question of two nations or one. The President continues to insist on unconditional acceptance of the latter. Davis continues to refuse. That means you’ll have a few more months to sell footwear to the army,” he concluded with a sly smile. He left the hearth, took a plate and fork, and plucked a slice of turkey breast from the silver tray. “I have one more item of news.”

  “I hope it’s the news I’ve been waiting to hear.”

  “Not quite. I can’t get you the appointment as chief of the Freedmen’s Relief Bureau.”

  “You mean Congress won’t establish the agency?”

  “Oh, no. That will be done this month—next month at the latest.” The bureau had been under discussion since last year, when it became clear that the Confederacy would ultimately fall. The bureau’s proposed mission was the regulation of all matters affecting the millions of newly freed Negroes in the South. Everything from land distribution to resettlement. It was an avenue to immense power, but if Stanley correctly read Wade’s behavior—the senator seemed more interested in food than conversation—not only was the avenue closed, but the subject as well.

  This was to Stanley what the inaugural was to Miss Canary. “Ben, I’ve given the party a hell of a lot of money. Thousands last fall alone, just to defeat the incumbent—until it became evident that we couldn’t do it. I think my contributions should at least entitle me to the answer to one question. Why can’t I have the job?”

  “They—ah—” Wade seemed mesmerized by a morsel of turkey on his fork.

  “A straight answer, Ben.”

  Wade whacked the fork down on the plate. A pinhead-sized speck of Isabel’s precious gilt vanished from the edge. Wade jolted Stanley with the impact of his stare. “All right. They want a man with more administrative experience. They’re considering a general. Oliver Howard’s high on the list.”

  Stanley knew what the senator was really telling him. The radical cadre, which decided every important matter these days—the men who privately bragged that they needed no assassin to render the President powerless because they had already done it—had decided he was incompetent.

  Of course the word they was inappropriate, and both men knew it. Wade belonged to the cadre. He had cast a vote. No matter how much black ink filled the profit columns of Lashbrook’s, no matter how frantically Stanley diverted himself with variety-hall dancers or how much whiskey he consumed, he could never escape the truth of what he was. It hurt. He poured another glass of sour-mash medicine.

  “General Jake Cox is also in the running,” Wade said. “God help the rebs if he gets it. You’ve heard what he and Sam Stout propose, haven’t you?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stanley said in a dead voice.

  Trying to jolly him out of his disappointment, Wade went on. “They propose we create a sort of American Liberia from the entire state of South Carolina. This new principality, or whatever the hell you want to call it, would be colonized and ruled by the niggers—whom we, of course, would diligently encourage to move there. Something in it, I’d say,” he finished, adding a chuckle, to which Stanley didn’t respond.

  Wade tried a more direct approach, crossing to his wealthy host and laying a companionable arm across his shoulders. “Look, Stanley. It was never guaranteed that I could obtain the post for you. I can and I will make certain you’re named one of the senior assistants, if you wish. The true power will reside on that level anyway—with the men who write the policy documents and operate the bureau on a daily basis. A Christian namby-pamby like Howard will be a mere figurehead. For that reason, I’m banking on him to get the job. When he does, those of us behind the scenes will be the ones who really make the colored people dance a Republican tune on Election Day. We’ll have the whole country dancing before we’re through. In a year, we can change our status from minority party to the only party—if we give the niggers the franchise but maintain control of it.”

  The glitter of Wade’s gaze, the quiet fervor of his words, soothed and convinced Stanley. Even lifted his spirits a little, much as alcohol did.

  “All right, Ben. I’ll take the highest bureau post offered to me.”

  “Good—splendid!” Wade started to clap his shoulder a second time, but Stanley was already in motion toward the sideboard and the decanters. “Old friend—” Wade cleared his throat “—forgive me for saying this, but I can’t help noticing you’re drinking a lot lately. Frankly, there’s been some talk.”

  Stanley pushed the stopper in, turned, and raised the brimming glass. He gazed at Wade across the shimmery disk of whiskey.

  “So I’ve heard. But if a man has money and distributes enough of it in the right places, no one listens to that kind of talk. No one wants to risk disturbing the flow of generosity. Isn’t that right, Ben?”

  Challenged, Wade chose to lose. He laughed. “Indeed it is,” he said, and toasted Stanley with his empty glass.

  As Cuffey had grown, so had his guerrilla band. It now numbered fifty-two, nearly a third of them white deserters. They inhabited two acres of heavily wooded, relatively solid ground at the edge of a salt marsh near the Ashley. They carried firearms taken from murdered whites caught on the roads, and they lived well on food and drink stolen from homes, small farms, and the rice plantations of the district.

  Three times Cuffey had personally led parties that pilfered hens from Mont Royal. The plantation itself he was saving for a special day. He watched the skies for telltale smoke and regularly sent one of his white boys to Charleston to report on the situation there.

  During the past year, Cuffey had discovered within himself a certain instinctive ability to lead men, whatever their color. He was assertive, foxy, and implacable because of his years in slavery. He took special delight in stuffing himself with the food of the local white people. For that reason he was always hunting for new clothes. His stomach had grown huge, his face round as a cheese wheel.

  In the short, cool days of early February, he scanned the skies with increasing impatience. He knew that Sherman, the general whose style and reputation he worshiped, had passed through Beaufort and Pocataligo and was now marching northward, his ultimate destination presumed to be Columbia. Soon, Cuffey reasoned the Confederate general in Charleston would have to rush most of his troops to the defense of the capital. When he did, the whole Ashley River district would lie open, unprotected—awaiting Cuffey’s pleasure.

  One night in the second week of the month, he lolled by his fire, roasting a dove on a stick and recollecting the pale thrashing legs of the woman from whom he had taken pleasure an hour ago. The band had recruited two white slatterns, both over forty, and a pair of younger mulatto girls to look after that aspect of the men’s needs. Cuffey was fingering himself, wondering if the wench carried vermin, when shouts arose in the dark beneath some live oaks on the far side of the encampment.

  He threw the impaled dove on the ground and jumped up. “Wha’s all that racket over there?”

  “Prisoner,” called a yellow-bearded Georgia boy in a gray jacket. “Caught him on the road.” The Georgia boy was one of Cuffey’s best, a deserter with a fine love of killing. Hands on his paunch, Cuffey watched the boy and two blacks drag a small, bald, frightened man from the shadows.

  “Bring him over here, Sunshine,” he ordered, with the authority he had learned to invoke through voice and gesture. Something about the stumbling captive in grimy clothing struck him as peculiar. The boy nicknamed Sunshine gave the prisoner a prod with a bayonet he carried like a knife. At that moment, Cuffey’s jaw went slack.

  “Lord God—Mr. Jones.”

  “Is it—? Why, I think—” Salem Jones could hardly believe his good fortune. “Cuffey? Cuffey!” He almost slobbered with glee. At another fire, half a dozen men started singing the refrain Sherman’s host had chanted all the way from Savannah:

  “Hail, Columbia, happy land—

  If I don’t burn you, I’ll be damned.”


  “Yes, sir, it’s me,” Cuffey replied, with a grin intended to lull his prisoner. Suddenly his hand shot out. He twisted Jones’s right ear savagely. “The nigger boy you used to cuss and beat and work half to death. I’m the boss now. Boss of this whole damn bunch. I like you t’show me some respeck.”

  One more twist and Jones dropped to his knees, howling. The singing stopped. Jones rubbed his reddened ear; blood oozed from the lobe. Cuffey snickered, retrieved the dove on the stick, and with some difficulty, resulting from his girth, squatted to resume the cooking.

  “What you doin’ away down here in South Carolina, Mist’ Jones? I figured you ran off to jine up with the Yankees.”

  “He ran away from them, too,” Sunshine said, with a giggle and a queer glitter in his blue eyes. With the tip of the bayonet, he touched the dark red D that disfigured Jones’s right cheek. “I know what this yere brand means. D fer deserter.”

  “I heard there was a band like yours somewhere in these marshes,” Jones said, gasping between almost every word. “I was hunting for it, but I never imagined I’d find you in charge.”

  Again Cuffey smiled. “No, sir. Bet you didn’t.” He rotated the bird in the fire. “Well, Mist’ Jones, you cast your lot with a mighty fine group. We livin’ off the fat of the land here—yes, sir, the fat of the land. Tell you somethin’ else you might like to know. Soon as Gen’ral Hardee leave Charleston, we gonna have a real festivity down along the river.” His smile dazzled. “Gonna visit a plantation name of Mont Royal. You ’member that place, don’t you? You white son of a bitch.” He whipped the stick around and touched Jones’s neck with the smoking-hot dove. Jones screamed and fell over sideways.

  Cuffey chuckled and put the bird back in the fire. He was jolly again. “I been savin’ Mont Royal till we could pay a call an’ not worry about reb sojers. Gonna be soon now. Gonna be a grand visit. Mr. Cooper’s there—an’ his wife an’ little girl an’ a stuck-up free nigger wench name Jane. I got a whole bunch of randy boys gonna like meetin’ up with them. Meantime—”

  Cuffey ran his tongue over his rotting upper teeth. “We got you to fool with, Mist’ Jones. Ain’ that right, Sunshine?”

  The Georgia boy giggled again. “Sure is, boss.”

  Suddenly, frantically, Jones flung himself at Cuffey’s legs and clasped them. Only his pleading cry kept Sunshine from running the bayonet through his back.

  “Please don’t hurt me. Let me join up.”

  “What’s that? Wha’d you say?” Cuffey lumbered to his feet with the white man dragging on him.

  “I hate those people, Cuffey. Hate that whole family as much as you do. I hate Cooper Main like poison. His brother disgraced me—discharged me—Look, I know I mistreated you. God, how I know that. But times have changed. Things are all turned around anymore—”

  “Damn if they ain’t,” Cuffey agreed. “Bottom rail’s on top.”

  “Let me join up,” Jones pleaded. “I’m good with a gun. I’ll follow orders, I swear. Please—let me.”

  Cuffey gazed at the man clutching his leg. He smiled a lazy, quizzical smile and glanced at Sunshine, who touched three fingers to his wet lips and shrugged, giggling. One of the mulatto wenches ran through the encampment, shrieking with laughter. Two men chased her; one had his pants open. Out in the marsh, a salt crow called.

  “Well—” Cuffey greatly prolonged the word, tormenting his prisoner “—I might. But you gonna have to beg me some more, Mist’ Jones. You gonna have to beg me a mighty lot before I say yes.”

  He knew he would, though. The prospect of marching on Mont Royal, razing it, obliterating it forever with the former overseer in his little army was just too fine to pass up.

  123

  NEXT MORNING, ABOUT TEN, Charles arrived at the place where the river road intersected the moss-hung lane leading to the great house. His rag robe, infernally hot, weighed heavily on him. His little bit of cigar—the last he had—went out while he stared up the lane at the familiar roof line, the upper and lower piazzas, the thick wisteria vines climbing the chimney.

  Smoke rose from the kitchen building. He saw a Negro girl leave it and hurry to the main house. A crow went swooping across in front of him, and if he had been less tired, he would have laughed. He was home.

  Not in a good season, though. Evening before last, he had passed near the route of march of General Sherman’s vast army and seen fire in the heavens—Kilpatrick’s horse leading the way and signaling its position to the infantry in the rear, a frightened farmer told him. Little Kil’s riders were advancing toward Columbia through an avenue of burning pines. It was that conflagration filling the night sky with a furnace glow and that of the day with plumes of resinous smoke.

  “I heard what them boys is sayin’,” the frightened farmer declared as Charles drank from his well. “They say they’re gonna wipe this hellhole of secession off the earth. The say here’s where treason began and here’s where it’s gonna end.”

  “I wouldn’t take that lightly,” Charles advised. “I’d watch your womenfolk and expect the worst. This war’s turned mean. Many thanks for the water.”

  It now appeared that Sherman, who had vowed to make Georgia howl, then done it, had kept on going due north, bypassing the Ashley district. Charles walked slowly up the lane with a weary wonder in his eyes; the place appeared untouched by the war. Then he began to change his mind. He saw noticeable wear on the buildings and a marked absence of slaves. How many of them had run away?

  The signs increased as he drew closer. Tall weeds grew where lawn had spread before. A wagon without front wheels and axle lay abandoned near the office. He went all the way to the house, a dirty, bearded, ragged specter with a revolver on his hip, and no one opened a door or raised a window.

  A few azalea bushes around the wisteria-clad chimney showed early buds; the weather had been unusually warm. He passed the chimney and continued along the half-oval of the hard-packed drive, spying a woman previously hidden by a pillar. She rose from her chair with a vague smile as he approached.

  He stopped, thankful that he could soon pull off his boots and bathe his blisters. To the small, stout woman on the piazza he said politely, “Hello, Aunt Clarissa.”

  She frowned, studied him—especially the revolver and the wrapped sword under his arm—a few seconds more. Then she raised her palms to her cheeks and screamed in mortal fright to announce his homecoming.

  “That brought people all right. Two of the house servants ran out to take charge of Clarissa. How grizzled and stooped they looked, Charles thought as he waited to be recognized. It took them a minute—they were hovering around his aunt, who struggled—and during the interval he wondered whether none but the old, tired blacks had stayed.

  “Charles? Charles Main?”

  He tilted his hat back but couldn’t manage a smile, even though he was nearly as astonished as Clarissa had been. “Yes, Judith, it’s me. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m dying to ask the same of you.” She rushed to embrace him; felt his arms and torso stiffen at her touch. His garments were filthy. They reeked.

  The two servants, one so old he hobbled, helped Clarissa inside. The hobbling Negro gave Charles a curious stare but no greeting. Charles knew the man recognized him. In the old days, a stern master would have laid on the cane to punish such disrespect. Things had surely changed.

  To answer Judith, he said, “I lost my horse up at Petersburg. I came all the way down here hunting a remount.”

  “Are the trains running?”

  “Some. Mostly I walked. When I left North Carolina, I figured I’d find a horse—or a mule, anyway—before I got this far. Guessed wrong,” he finished soberly, as Orry’s older brother stepped onto the piazza. In shirt sleeves, a ledger under one arm, Cooper recognized Charles and let out his name with a whoop. Husband and wife shepherded the new arrival into the well-loved, well-remembered house, but Charles hardly saw it. One thought obsessed him. Do they know about Orry?

  On the c
urve of the drive opposite the one where Charles had approached, motion stirred a tall, thick row of untended ileagnus. The motion suggested birds squabbling in the dense foliage. In the excitement of Charles’s arrival, no one noticed.

  On the other side of the shrubbery, after the front door closed, a narrow-faced young man with a smooth beige complexion crawled away through the weeds. He was barefoot, and his old jeans pants had a yellowing star on the rump. When the seat of his pants had worn through, his mother, who later died, had patched the hole with white flannel and imagination. The star was the North Star—the freedom star—and when his mama had sewn it on, he had still been property.

  He had been sent to Mont Royal to estimate the number of men still present on the plantation. He had been born there and spent most of his life in the slave community. Now he had some real news to report.

  Charles bathed in a big zinc tub in Cooper and Judith’s bedroom—the same spacious chamber that once had belonged to Tillet and Clarissa and then, he presumed, to Orry and Madeline.

  He had forgotten how it felt to have his long hair so clean it squeaked when he rubbed his palms over it. He put on a shirt and pair of pants borrowed from Cooper and went downstairs. His arrival had caused a great stir. There were nigras swarming all over the house—damn near as if they were Cooper and Judith’s equals, he thought without animosity, just recognition of another remarkable change. He met a muscular, well-proportioned driver named Andy and a handsome black woman named Jane, who shook his hand in a grave way as she said, “I’ve heard of you.”

  Her steady stare, not hostile but not friendly either, conveyed meaning with perfect clarity. What it said was, I’ve heard you’re in the army that’s fighting to keep my people shackled.

  Maybe he was being too thin-skinned, but he thought that was what she meant. Despite her attitude and her reserve, she still impressed him in a positive way.