Adam grinned wryly and shrugged but said nothing.
“No white man don’t give a damn ‘bout no nigger ‘cept to work him!” He looked up and down the line for confirmation, then added, “The quicker you knows that, the better off you’ll be, boy!” He glared at Adam for a long moment in stiff silence, then went on in a different voice. “There ain’t no guard on the northeast corner of the far wall after two o’clock in the morning. We got two hacksaw blades. We kin cut that chain on the bunkhouse door in thirty minutes. There’s a trusty on the inside of the outside door who we kin handle. The guard, he go to the guardhouse to eat at one-thirty and leave it without nobody on the outside til he come back.”
Sitting there, hearing him detail the plot, Adam still tried to argue with himself, but the voice he usually listened to got further and further away from him and sounded more and more like a green boy’s voice. The Colonel, if he had ever thought again on what he had told Adam, had surely forgot it by this time. And Adam could feel himself moving through each operation as Trotlucky described it and finally climbing the high white-washed fence and gaining cover and freedom in the woods.
He had just got over the fence with those fellows, in his mind, listening to Trotlucky talk, when a voice, not his own, said to him, Why do they want to take you: you’re a lot younger than they are and didn’t want to go in the beginning and might lag behind in the woods and make trouble for them. Why are they so anxious to take you along? Somehow Adam recognized the voice as the Colonel’s voice and it was a sharp question. He froze back on his seat and spoke it out, “Trotlucky, I just wonder why you all want so bad to take me along?”
Trotlucky jumped up like he might have been waiting for that question. He sort of pranced when he walked, anyhow—like his feet were tender. And he jumped up off the hole with his drawers hanging down and his black backside shining in the light and pranced around in a circle. “For luck,” he said, “for luck! I knows luck when I sees it. Ole Luster over there thinks you be lucky for us, too.”
Adam laughed, but somehow it had a quieting effect on him and after he got back to bed and to sleep that night, he had a very quiet dream, in which the white boy killed in the riot came to him and stood by his bed, and he knew him though he had never seen him before—he was very pale and had a big purple scar on his throat and did not speak, but he shook his head in warning. And on top of the dream, Adam woke up in the morning with the words of the little one-eyed trusty on his mind: “You can git out, but you can’t git nowheres else.”
The hints were plain and he took the warning.
Trotlucky and the other sixteen of them broke jail three nights later. They got out of the lock-up and over the wall and into the woods all right. The warden and the guards did not kick up much of a stir about it. According to the one-eyed trusty the search party used a bob-tailed train with searchlights on it to run up and down the railroad to see that they weren’t following the track and they telegraphed to the sheriffs in various towns around the outskirts of the mountains to pick up the runaways if they happened to get there. But that was all. Everything went along like it had before. The warden didn’t get any stricter and the guards didn’t talk or act any tougher.
They had broke out on a Monday night and it was the next Sunday morning that the first batch—five of them—dragged back to the stockade. They gave up to the guards on the main gate, like they were glad to see them. The warden marched them into the eating hall—it happened to be right at dinner time—in the front door and clear around the hall where everybody could get a chance to see them and then on out the door to the kitchen, not letting them stop for a bite to eat or even a drink of water.
They were scary to look at. They were the worst beat up and run-down animals Adam had ever seen pass for human. Their clothes were torn off of them, they had scratches, cuts, and knots on them, they could barely drag along and they were so famished that their big swollen tongues hung out of their mouths. He, Adam, had been where he could look through the door into the kitchen and he saw the guard finally water them. Most of them just stuck their faces in the dipper and slobbered. But one got hold of the dipper and the guards had to knock him down to get it back.
Three days later four more of them dragged in, looking even worse used up than the first batch. Six of them gave themselves up at the town of Alum Well, to get a drink of water. Nothing was heard from Trotlucky and Luster for several weeks, but finally some hunters found their bodies at the bottom of a ravine, not far from Lost Mountain. A month after the runaways got back, those that did, they were given forty lashes apiece, with a cat-o-nine-tails.
Adam was feeling grateful to the Colonel for his good advice, even if he never did get out of the place, never did get out of it. But just two days after the warden had had the runaways whipped, he got a call to the warden’s office. There was a transportation officer there with a court order to get him another trial. The man took him to a place called Gray, to the Jones County Courthouse. When the man brought him into the courtroom, they found there the Colonel and Mr. Christian DeBow and his mother and the old woman and her husband he had met with under the brush arbor—it was the same old man who had led him to the house, where he, Adam, was sleeping off his liquor when the patrol got him. The Colonel, also, had a paper from Mr. Adam Atwell, to give him a good name. And it didn’t take a full hour with all of these things and the Colonel taking his part, for that second judge and jury to turn him loose—clean free!
But when Adam stood at the foot of the Hightower back steps, under the shade of the chinaberry trees, the image that colored his consciousness was not of his delivery in the Jones County Courthouse, but that of the hostile faces of the white men in lawyer Duke’s office yesterday. It gave him a pervasive anxiety that showed in the solemn dullness of a glassy eye and a monotonous voice, as he reported on the high water still in the swamp field, about the planting going on at his place and the farms of the two other tenants.
At the top of the steps, Mrs. Hightower, in her black skirt and white shirtwaist, listened, the attractive shifting of her reserved gaze giving the only sign that she observed anything unusual in his manner. She asked few questions and when he had finished she nodded and, glancing away distractedly, moved to the milk box and adjusted the stream of water flowing from the faucet. She looked up abruptly, saying, “Adam, did Mr. Hightower ever speak to you of Oswald—Mr. Oswald Paley?”
Adam stiffened, then leaned over deliberately and picked his wool hat up off the steps before he responded. “W-well, yed-yed-yessum,” he said, his stammer hammering out the repeated syllable like a steam drill. He still looked at the hat. “Just how do you mean?”
Mrs. Hightower was conscious of the constraint on Adam and seemed to consider the issue of his reserve, walking back to the steps before she spoke, but she went on firmly, “I mean the sort of man he turned out to be, after all Mr. Hightower had done for him.”
Adam nodded, finally meeting her gaze. “The Colonel spoke to that, too, spoke to it the last time I saw him alive.”
Her grave eyes lifted to the distance. “I just don’t know, Adam!” she exclaimed in perplexity and halted. After a moment she went on with more composure, “Mr. Littleton has been representing to me all along how difficult it was going to be for me to get the land buyer to let me reserve the clay deposits and the Wyche field. Especially the field. He said, as he understood it, the field lay in the middle of a lot and keeping it would involve roads of ingress and egress, not only across that land lot, but two or three other lots Mr. Lincoln is buying. When I held out for these things, Mr. Lincoln talked about calling the deal off, although he already had five thousand acres under option. He even went so far as to go off to the Coast to look at other timber lands.”
Lowering her eyes to Adam, she made, with a certain reserve, a wry face. “Now, almost overnight, it all seems to be changed!” She shook her head in doubt, continuing, “Mr. Littleton tells me that there has been a mix-up all along about where—that is on wh
ich of the five lots they want to buy and the three they want to lease—as to where the clay deposits lie and where the field. Mr. Littleton says that Oswald Paley has come forward—though I don’t know how he got into it!—with the blueprint of a minerological survey made five years ago, showing the clay deposits in the upper swamp; that is, on Lots 132, 131, and 130, not on the lots we had been thinking they were on!” She frowned with impatience. “It’s this confusing business of land lines again! They always appear so geometric and simple on the map and, actually, they seem to give the greatest trouble, not only in running them out, but in running them down afterward. So much trouble to find them, so much uncertainty about where they are! Mr. Littleton asked me if I didn’t have the original of the blue print among Mr. Hightower’s things. But you know”—her gaze now closely examined Adam’s face—“I can’t find any such map!”
Adam winced with a proper concern and then lowered his gaze with a proper thoughtfulness, shaking his head, but nothing in his manner implied any suspicion of Mr. Littleton or Mr. Paley. “That so?” he said.
Still eyeing Adam, her full lower lip quivering for an instant, to be quickly drawn tight, Mrs. Hightower said abruptly, “Yes, it is!” After a moment, her gaze shifted to the distance in speculation. As she continued her thought at length, a slight hesitation came on her pale blue-veined face. It became almost a surface embarrassment as she spoke. “Mr. Littleton keeps saying—anyhow, he feels that we are mistaken, mistaken in our judgment of Oswald Paley. I am speaking of Mr. Hightower and me. Mr. Littleton says that Mr. Hightower had some misinformation, but I can’t go into all of that here, of course—I—Adam”—she broke off and walked over to the milk box, standing there at a loss for a moment, before she turned back ruefully smiling on Adam. “It would be fine if this Paley blueprint were right, wouldn’t it? All of our problems would be solved!”
During Mrs. Hightower’s disjointed recitation the anxiety pervading Adam had come out plainly in his countenance: in the stiff down-setting of his mouth, the melancholy anguish in his liquid eye, and in perspiration. He shrugged, drawing forth his handkerchief. As he mopped his face, he asked in a non-committal voice. “Hit didn’t show the field?"
He was dodging her! But now that the thing was boldly before them, she seemed to welcome his evasion of the point of her inquiry. Under stress of the moment, she responded with a warmth of feeling that she would not have allowed herself in a state of composure. “Let me say, I’m not going to let you down on the Wyche field, Adam! I’m not!”
He turned aside. Still swabbing the sweat on his face that grew, not less, but more, he spoke through the handkerchief with convulsive effort. “Yessum!”
“Were you with them when Mr. Hightower and Mr. Paley and the geologist and all made the survey of the clay deposits back there”—the inflection in her voice flattened out as she added parenthetically, “I think it was five years ago?”
Adam put away his handkerchief with resolution and turning back to her, straightened up. “Y-yesum. I was along. But I never did see the plat when they got through.” His lips moved on, as if there were more he would say, but the sound had dried up on him. He shrugged and turned about again and took a few steps. Looking up to find her still waiting questioningly, he shrugged again and added with reluctance, “I think Mr. Paley borrowed that plat. Or more’n apt he just had a copy of it, but anyhow I think I seen him with one, way back ‘bout the time of the survey. It might have been a blueprint I saw!”
Mrs. Hightower drew her feet together and her slim figure erect at the middle of the stairhead, and composure came upon her. She eyed him, toying with her pince-nez glasses, zipped up to a spring metal button at her left shoulder. “But you were with them on the survey,” she repeated. “And after all, what difference does it make! Adam, you know where the clay deposits are, don’t you?” She was asking, she obviously thought, a rhetorical question.
The mimetic smile that had begun to form on his face vanished and his eyes glazed over and the glistening ginger color of his cheeks took on a grayish tinge, as he stood there in stiffening silence. Finally he swallowed and lowered his head and, with one convulsive jerk of his jaw, said quietly, “Well, ‘um, I thought I did.”
She pulled out her glasses automatically, going on in an almost girlish tone of relief, “I know you know where the Wyche field is!”
“I kind-a thought I did,” he mumbled grudgingly.
“Do now, Adam! You know where all of the land lines are. I know you were with the group when the lines were run out. Mr. Hightower told me before he died that you knew. You know where the land lines are!”
“Yessum,” he said, but his phrase was not affirmative. He did not look up, and after a pause he went on. “I-I hear some talk going ‘round ‘bout an old line—going back behind the ones we run out—back to the olden times. Mr. Jawn spoke about hit. Mr. Jawn Hightower!” He halted, nodding, lifting vacant eyes above her head with an inflection of manner that would raise to issue the whole question of land lines, of whose moral responsibility for whose land lines and finally of his own status to speak on land lines at all, in the disputed circumstances.
Staring at him with open disbelief in the implications of this speech, she stood in shocked silence for a time, then exclaimed, but half-conscious of her words, “John, John, pshaw!”
He avoided her gaze, his face becoming a drawn gray mask, and his voice shaking as he continued his evasion. “N-not only Mr. Jawn, but Mr. Peter and Mr. David Bright and—and a lot more, in this thing!”
She frowned out of a sympathetic fear at his appearance then shook it off. “Pshaw!” she said again, “They don’t know! I won’t listen to them! Mr. Hightower said you know where every land line on the place is!”
“White mens!” he went on, in deadly quiet. “All together!” He finally met her gaze in a grim wry-faced appeal. ‘You-you ought to have that line run out again by the county surveyor? Hit wouldn’t cost so much.”
“County surveyor! County surveyor?” She lifted her head, zipping up the pince-nez, with an air of dismissal. “Adam, we haven’t any money for a county surveyor! It would cost fifty dollars, at the least. I’ll take your word for where our land lines are!”
When he had turned away and moved off toward the gate, she heard—or for a moment she thought that she had heard, a groan.
7.
LUCY HIGHTOWER had seen the letter in the morning mail, but her thorough sense of discipline restrained her. She had gone on with Lena, her negro cook, to the chickenyard to pick out the pullets for Sunday dinner. She had come back by the vegetable garden to see that the hired negro gardener working there suckered the tomato vines. And she had set Lena to her special Saturday cleaning in the house, before she allowed herself to pick up the mail from the ledge of the walnut secretary in the bay-windowed alcove of her bedroom-sittingroom and, lowering the writing board, sit down to read it. She had already seen that the fat linen-paper envelope bore a Charleston postmark, had recognized, not without a quickening of blood, the handwriting of the superscription, and even vaguely apprehended that the letter might bear a peculiarly personal message, though this shadowy feeling she had repressed.
As she sat with her slender forearms resting on the green baize inlay of the board, inserting a brass letter opener under the sealed flap, a hint of pink came into her white pale cheeks and her rather harried countenance was enlivened with a look of expectation. She unfolded and flattened the pages of the letter on the desk and began reading the small, worm-crawl script, closely and interruptedly.
Wellington Arms, 31 Rutledge Avenue
Charleston, S.C.
May 1, 1910
Dear Lucy,
The “celestial city of our youth,” this bright May first morning, has all of the color and salubrious breezes that that old euphemism would celebrate. I was about to add, all of the reminiscences, too. But they don’t appear to me quite as reminiscences. Of course I live here—as we Charlestonians do, you know—as if the city w
ere my shell. And I am scarcely conscious of it, but it is all here with me in the present tense. There has not been the discontinuity to establish a proper sense of reminiscence.
(Lucy Hightower’s slim face limbered in a vague smile, offsetting the sharpness of her slightly knitted brow.)
I was walking on the Battery earlier this morning, and the water was never bluer than under the nine o’clock sun—you know that ethereal indigo hue that sun and distance and season can give the harbor? And as I sit here now, writing, I hear the singsong of a colored fishmonger in the street below, crying (as well as I can make it out) “Shark steaks! They need no gravy!”
(Her lips twisted in a quick automatic sign of her amusement, without altering the focus of her eyes.)
But the wisteria that you mentioned in your last letter was scarcely up to its usual luxuriousness this year and it has all just about gone by.
The description you give of Riverton shocks me. I can quite understand your being there with your husband, while he was developing his enterprises and the ways and means toward the establishment of a permanent home, even in that vicinity. But now that you are widowed and, as you say, utterly unequipped to carry out what he had scarcely well begun, it seems to me that every consideration would indicate your withdrawing to a more tenable position—more tenable for both you and your children, who certainly should not be allowed to grow up amid such backwoods illiteracy.
This is Adam (Lightwood History Collection Book 4) Page 8
