Profound despondency rode with Faunt on his way across the rolling hills that beyond the Mattapony began to sink into a level plain. The sun was still high when he caught a first glimpse of the Rappahannock still well ahead, and the long blue line of the Northern Neck beyond. He lodged that night in Tappahannock, listening to the talk of the men in the common room, hearing a dozen opinions on the topic that filled every mind. In the morning he boarded the ferry at the end of the long pier for the half-mile crossing. From the ferry landing his road followed firm ground four or five miles along the border of a grassy marsh before he could turn toward Belle Vue; but his horse, sensing journey’s end, was eager, and so when Faunt came up from the riverside to higher levels he took a straight course cross-country toward home, delighting in the spring of the muscular body between his knees, avoiding cultivated fields, threading the forest ways.
As he crossed the Tudor lands adjoining his own, he met Judge Tudor and Anne riding together, and stayed to tell them the news from Richmond and to answer the Judge’s troubled questions. When he proceeded, Anne turned to ride with him a while, and he found as always pleasure in her company, conscious of her frank affection, happy because of it. Today, seeing that he was troubled, she matched her mood to his, trying to understand what it was about the violence at Harper’s Ferry that so disturbed him.
“Isn’t Mr. Brown just crazy, Uncle Faunt?”
He thought of Mr. Ruffin, but he said: “Yes. Violence is a part of him. He had a hand in the Kansas troubles, and one night he and some others took five helpless men from their homes and butchered them.” He said apologetically: “You’re young to hear such things, Anne, but I’ve always talked to you as though you were grown up.”
“I like you to. Papa never treats me like a baby either.”
“The men he killed at Harper’s Ferry weren’t hurting him,” Faunt explained. “He even shot a negro porter off the train because the poor fellow tried to run away when they told him to halt.”
“What will they do to him?”
“Bring him to orderly trial, I hope. Try him and punish him.”
“Punish him how?”
“Hang him, I suppose.”
“Oh, the poor old man!”
He stared straight ahead. “I’m afraid many people will feel as you do, Anne; will think of him as a poor old man—or as a hero, or a martyr.” And he added: “The abolitionists in the North are already doing so. The Richmond paper yesterday quoted Henry Ward Beecher—and he’s a minister—as saying that unless John Brown’s act was part of a plot it was madness; but he said that even if John Brown was a plain criminal, slavery was to blame for provoking him to do what he did.”
“Do they have to hang him, Uncle Faunt? Maybe if they didn’t, people wouldn’t be sorry for him.”
“I don’t know whether I can make you understand. Perhaps I don’t understand myself. But it seems to me John Brown’s not a fact; he’s a symbol. He’s all the hatred built up between North and South by years of lying, abusive talk on both sides; all that anger and hatred personified in one—well, as you say, in one poor old man. Hanging him will do no good; may do harm. But it won’t be men who hang him, you know. It will be the law that he has broken. If you touch a hot stone, you will be burned. That’s one kind of law. If you do murder—and John Brown is a murderer—you will be hanged. That’s another kind of law.”
“I see.”
“But the trouble is,” Faunt reflected, “people will forget the law he broke and remember only the hatred which led him to break it. That wasn’t hatred of men; it was hatred of a thing, of slavery. Men in the North will recognize in their own hearts that same hatred; so they will make a hero out of old John Brown, because they feel in themselves the hatred that made him do what he did.”
“I see,” she repeated; and after a moment: “Do you hate slavery, Uncle Faunt?”
“I’m ashamed of it, Anne.”
“Why? Our people are contented, and happy, and they love us.”
He hesitated. “Well, I went to a slave auction at Davis and Deupree’s in Richmond, ten or twelve years ago. They put up to be sold a woman much like Big Martha, my cook. She had a husband, a crippled little negro not good for much but the trash gang, and two children, five or six years old. The planter who owned them had died, and all his people were being sold. The auctioneer was a kindly man, and he tried to sell this woman and her family together; but no one wanted them all, since the husband wasn’t worth anything, so he sold her alone. She stood there during the bidding, holding herself bravely; and her husband sat on the bench with his arms around the two children and his tears flowing. She was sold to an Alabama man, and the children and the little husband began to wail as though she were dead.”
“Oh Uncle Faunt!” Anne’s eyes were brimming; then in sudden proud and happy certainty she cried: “You bought her!”
He smiled, deeply pleased. “Well, yes, I did. I shouldn’t have done it. We’ve more people at Belle Vue than we need. I had gone there not to buy, but just to see what an auction was like. But—yes, I bought her, gave the Alabama man a profit, bought her husband and children.”
“Why, she’s Big Martha!” she cried in sudden understanding. “She really is Big Martha!”
“Yes. Little Zeke—you know, he takes care of my horses—is her husband. And the two children are strapping great fellows now.”
“I think you were wonderful to buy them.”
He said gravely: “Well, that’s the ugly side of slavery, Anne: selling helpless people away from their families and their homes. That’s why men hate it. That’s why, secretly, we Southerners are ashamed of it. That’s why John Brown hated it.”
Their horses moved quietly, contented side by side. After a little she asked in a low voice: “Uncle Faunt, if we fight the North over slavery, will we be fighting for something that’s really wrong?”
He spoke slowly. “I don’t believe Virginia will ever fight just to defend slavery, Anne. If the North tries to compel us to—free the slaves, we may fight against that compulsion. If they try to compel us, they will be trying to—well, in a way, you might say they’ll be trying to enslave us, to make themselves our masters. We have a right, a duty, to fight to avoid being enslaved.”
She asked haltingly: “But then if it’s right for us to fight the North to keep them from making us do things, wouldn’t it be right for the negroes to fight us to keep us from making them do things?”
He said, deeply troubled: “Any child can ask questions that the wisest men can’t answer, Anne. I can’t answer you.”
She touched his arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bother you.”
“You didn’t bother me. It’s my own doubts that bother me.”
When they parted, he thought what a pity it was that men could not see problems as clearly as a child. But—could this problem be solved? To free the slaves seemed simple; yet to do so was to wash your hands, like Pilate, of the responsibility their dependence laid upon you. His people here at Belle Vue were less his servants than his masters. He served them as truly as they served him. To free them overnight would be as base as to turn out of doors a cat or a dog or a horse that was used to expect from you kindness and care, shelter and food.
So thinking he came home. The house which his grandfather had built almost a century ago had long since burned and had been replaced by a smaller structure a story and a half high, the roof extending downward over a small porch in front. To lessen the danger of another conflagration, the chimneys at either end touched the house only to serve fireplaces on the first and second floors, and there was an open space between them and the weatherboarding for five or six feet below the ridgepole. The house needed paint, it seemed to be crushed under the weight of straggling and untended vines, there was one step broken and a loose board in the porch. The yard was bare and littered, the fence had lost many palings; the ramshackle kitchen and the outbuildings were in a state as bad or worse.
Faunt, living here alone
, was indifferent to his immediate surroundings; but the chapel in an oak grove a mile away, under whose flagged floor those he loved were buried, was a place of beauty and peace, surrounded by a tight fence and by well-kept flowers and shrubs. Little Zeke, the stableman, made the flowers his care, but except when Zeke needed help no other Negroes ever went to the chapel, nor any white person except Faunt himself. Each Sunday at first dawn, Faunt if he were at home walked down through the silent oaks to the revered spot and unlocked the door and knelt for a while at the altar rail. Sometimes he stayed, reading in the prayer book; sometimes he gathered from the neat garden outside a few blossoms, and filled a silver vase with water from the run that passed the gate, and brought it to set on the altar; but if he did this, he always came again at dusk that same day to remove the flowers, unwilling to let them wither in this holy shrine.
Today, happy to be at home again, his heart warmed by the welcoming smiles of the people who came to greet him, he gave his horse to a boy and went in to bathe and change. Then as always on his homecomings he turned to the chapel, as though to announce to those who dwelt there that they were no longer alone.
During the days that followed, Faunt’s thoughts dwelt on John Brown. He read in the Richmond papers every comment from the North. When John Brown was convicted and sentenced, Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher said his martyrdom would inspire a million imitators; and at this the Richmond Dispatch, which had at first been moderate in its tone, cried out in fury:
“If the crown of martyrdom in such a career is so magnificent and glorious, why don’t they come on and clasp it to their own swelling temples?” And of the abolitionists: “Brown is the first of the white-livered pack that has attempted to do anything but bark; the first who has come out of his kennel, crossed the Southern line and undertaken to bite. Now they call the hanging of this intruder martyrdom and call the blood of martyrs the seed of the church; but let them come and sow a little more seed!”
Faunt thought it might have been Redford Streean speaking. Streean and Edmund Ruffin and men like them in the South, Phillips and Beecher and their rabid ilk in the North; it was such venomous irresponsibles who would bring on bloody war. He arranged to receive the Northern papers and found in them passionate tributes to this crazy murderer with his hands still red from bloody crimes in Kansas, this man who dragged harmless strangers from their beds and chopped them to death. Emerson the philosopher said John Brown’s hanging would make the gallows as glorious as the cross; even Thoreau called him an angel of light. Faunt tried to find some denial of Brown’s purposes, or of his deeds; but there was none. John Brown admittedly had sought to set the Negroes loose like wolves across a peaceful countryside, to put weapons in their hands and urge them on. And it was that avowed purpose which ministers of God and men of presumably balanced minds now openly glorified.
His own pulse beat harder with a rising anger as he read. If there was that ruthless mind in the North, why then such men as old Edmund Ruffin were right. If the North wished to see in the South a carnival of murder and extermination, why then open conflict could not be long delayed.
He had occasion, as the date set for John Brown’s execution approached, to remember that little man whom he had heard declaiming to the crowd outside the Exchange Hotel. Late in November Governor Wise sent troops to keep order during John Brown’s execution. The Richmond Enquirer reported the arrival in Charleston of the Grays and of Company F. “Amongst them,” wrote the correspondent, “I notice Mr. J. Wilkes Booth, a son of Junius Brutus Booth, who though not a member, as soon as he heard the tap of the drum threw down the sock and buskin and shouldered his musket and marched with the Grays to the reputed scene of deadly conflict.”
When, in due course John Brown and the other prisoners were well and duly hanged, Faunt wondered how the little actor reacted to that spectacle; and when he went to Great Oak for Christmas—all the family except Tony and Darrell were there for the merry days together—he spoke to Brett of the scene in front of the Exchange which had so impressed him. “A curious man,” he said. “I’ve thought of him more than once.”
Brett nodded. “There’s some quality in him, yes. I saw him start off with the Grays that day. They boarded the train on Broad Street, almost in front of the theatre. There was a crowd to see them off, and this fellow came plunging through the crowd and appealed to Lieutenant Bossieux—he was acting captain, since Captain Elliott was commanding the regiment—to take him along. Mr. Kunkel, the manager of the theatre, begged him to be sensible. Booth was supposed to play that night. Kunkel kept saying: ‘What am I going to do? What am I going to do?’ Booth shook him off, said: ‘I don’t know, and I don’t give a damn!’ Captain Bossieux tried to talk him out of it, too; but the crowd and some of the young gentlemen in the Grays were on his side, laughing and urging him on, so they sent for a spare uniform and took him along.” He added: “George Libby—he’s in the Grays, went with them—said he kept an eye on Booth at the hanging, and that he turned pale, came near fainting, took a stiff drink of whiskey before he was steady again.”
“I suppose the actor’s instinct made him imagine it was he who was being hung.”
“Possibly. I’ve met the man. He makes me uncomfortable, but he’s seen everywhere in Richmond, received everywhere, has a host of friends.”
Faunt nodded. “I can understand that. I’m so reserved myself, so ill at ease with strangers, that I rather envy anyone who can face—yes and captivate—a crowd so masterfully. There’s certainly something striking and memorable about the man.”
8
January–May, 1860
WHEN TILDA came back to Richmond after her mother’s birthday, Redford Streean said at once: “Tilda, Cinda’s planning to put up at a hotel till her house is ready. I want you to make her stay with us.”
Tilda heard him in something like consternation. Their house, one of a row a few blocks out Franklin Street from the mansion Brett and Cinda had bought, was small, and there were only two servants. Old May, who had nursed Tilda through babyhood, came to her from Great Oak when Darrell was born; but when Darrell one day needed a switching and May gave it to him, Streean in a rage sent her back to Great Oak. “No damned nigger’s going to lay a hand on my son!” he declared. Now Tilda’s household tasks were in the lazy hands of a fat sloven in the kitchen and a wench named Sally who since Streean bought her had borne two mulatto children, and who treated Tilda with a casual impudence at which Streean was openly amused. Once when Tilda appealed to him, he said if she couldn’t manage two niggers she had better learn how, and he said it in Sally’s hearing, so that Sally snickered with triumph. With Emma’s greasy cooking and Sally’s shiftless sweeping and dusting and the two pickaninnies forever squalling in the yard, to have Cinda and Brett here would be a nightmare.
But Tilda made no protest, her desperate thoughts seeking some escape from this necessity, while Streean pointed out that it would be to his advantage if Richmond gentlemen were constantly reminded that Brett Dewain was his brother-in-law, and that Vesta’s friendship would open doors for Dolly. Tilda felt no surprise at his frankness; for she had no longer any illusions about either her husband or her son. For Darrell as a baby she had held fine hopes, and while he was a boy she could smile at the traits that offended others; but by the time he reached his middle ’teens his pranks had become vices and her only defense was to shut her eyes. Long before that, she knew Streean through and through. His father and mother had a worn-out small farm in Spottsylvania County, but he had broken every bond that tied him to them. Having made a successful marriage, and counting on Tilda’s eventual inheritance of a share of the Currain fortune, Streean had never sought any gainful occupation. They lived on Tilda’s modest income; but while he spent as freely as a gentleman should, Tilda at home must make many small economies.
Streean’s orders were explicit, and Tilda tried to do as she was told; but when Cinda declined her hospitable urgencies and went to live at the Arlington, she felt a gratefu
l relief, enduring Streean’s anger at her failure.
“But if she won’t come here, you can go to her,” he said in open contempt. “At least she won’t show you the door.”
So when Brett sent servants from the Plains and Cinda and Vesta began to put the big house on Fifth Street in order, Tilda went there almost every day. But this was hard for her. The house, compared with their own cramped establishment, was generous and gracious, built of brick over which a coat of stucco had been subsequently laid. From Fifth Street, steps led up to a small porch with white columns and flanked on either side by a fenced and brick-paved areaway. The areaway gave entrance to the basement pantries and storage rooms. On the first floor a wide hall from front to rear opened directly upon the double portico supported by great columns. The lower level of the portico overlooked a garden with a retaining wall high above the sidewalk on the Franklin Street side; the upper level looked south and east across the rooftops of the lower city to the river and to the wooded valley downstream. Two great magnolia trees and a sycamore shaded the garden and screened the one-story brick kitchen and the brick quarters for the house servants in the farther corner of the lot. The stable was underneath the servant quarters, opening on the alley that ran from Fifth Street through to Sixth. It was reached by steps that descended from the garden level.
On the Franklin Street side of the central hall there were two large rooms, and two somewhat smaller on the other, with a graceful stair in the side hall between them. The ceilings on this and the floor above were high for coolness; but Mr. Patterson had added an upper story where the rooms, smaller and more numerous, might on a summer day be mercilessly hot.
The interior finish of the house had been of a classic severity; but Cinda changed this. “I’m sick to death of bare plaster walls,” she told Tilda. “And I never want to see another piece of mahogany or veneer as long as I live! Oh, upstairs probably; but I’m going to have everything bright and cheerful downstairs!”
House Divided Page 13
