The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

  The Arrival of the Yankee

  In the years before the Civil War, cotton was the dominant crop in the south, and some northerners had relocated to the region to partake in the wealth. Many did not flourish, and the customs were foreign, especially the holding of slaves, which had fallen from style in the north. The weather was oppressive in summers, a punishment to make up for the benevolence of the glorious springs and mild winters.

  One such northerner was a young man named Matthew Thatcher, who, in 1856, had traveled to central Georgia to make his fortune. He was twenty-five years old. While in college, Matthew’s mentor had encouraged him to travel there, where the problem of his mediocre lineage and lack of inheritance would not pose impediments. His mentor was a Harvard graduate but not put off by the younger man’s awkward manner. The mentor staked Matthew one thousand dollars, a chestnut gelding, three tailored suits, and gave him the deed to one hundred eighty acres. Matthew would be required to pay his mentor back within twenty years—so it was really a gift, because the mentor was in his sixties, and most men did not live long in those days.

  “I know you’ll find your way,” the mentor said. “And don’t carry all your money on your person.”

  They were sitting in his library, each on a sofa facing the other. Matthew puffed on a cigar, as if he was used to smoking.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Unknown to the mentor, Matthew had his own money saved; he was good at cards, and several of his wealthy classmates were not. It would be enough to hire three white hands until he could buy his own slaves. The property his mentor had purchased was located on a parcel that abutted Putnam County. The place had formally been owned by the Polcott family, a line of slave traders who’d held auctions out in the country. Yet that family sought to come up in the world, and when they wanted to move their business out from the country, they wanted quick cash. This is how Matthew’s mentor had acquired their land in Baldwin County, paying the Polcott family enough to expand their slave-trading business to the capital city of Milledgeville, as well as to Macon and Augusta.

  When he longed for company, Matthew Thatcher read the books that he had carried on his journey in a small, wheeled vehicle tied with two ropes to his horse, and he went about his business, trying to push away his loneliness, until Samuel showed up one day at the hideous, flat front of Matthew’s abode, riding in the back of an open-faced carriage.

  Before he formally met this Yankee, six months after his arrival, Samuel had seen him at the general store that he owned. Samuel was lonely, too. He reasoned that, at his age—for he was now elderly—a man needed more than female flesh to satisfy him. He needed other men to complete him. Yet the yeomen were not of his rank, and he had failed in his attempts at friendship with the two other wealthy planters in the county. Samuel could understand the social issues of Mr. Benjamin, who was a child of Israel. Perhaps that man’s religion prohibited him from making relationships with those outside his worship circle. But Mr. Sweet was a different matter. He was Christian and from older money than the others in the region; his family was from Savannah and reasonably placed. When he visited Samuel’s store, Mr. Sweet was polite. He shook hands upon entering and upon concluding his business, but he never took off his gloves to do so—cotton in the warmer months, leather in the colder. Once, when he was not aware of being watched, Mr. Sweet had rubbed his gloved hand down the side of his pants after shaking Samuel’s hand.

  Under other circumstances, Samuel would not have sought camaraderie with the likes of Matthew. The young man’s house was built in that tragically ugly New England style known as the “saltbox.” The absent front porch discouraged visitors, even those eager to marry off unattractive daughters. Where were people supposed to sit when they came? How could they take the air? Where was the veranda, for Heaven’s sake?

  In Matthew’s family’s saltbox in rural Massachusetts, Matthew’s parents, siblings, and he had taken the air on the back porch on those summer afternoons when they were not completing chores. And no one took the air in the wintertime in Massachusetts, or not anyone with sense. As a New Englander, Matthew didn’t understand that well-bred southerners craved stories. That’s why they liked front porches. The back of the house was for concealing things southerners did not desire to look at or smell—the realities of a backyard chicken house and hog pen, a vegetable garden, and a green-painted fence that shielded the owner’s privy from the public, but whose color announced something important lay beyond its boundaries.

  The day of his visit, Samuel hopped down without any help from Pompey, and approached the front door that was just stuck out there with no artifice to help it along. It was not the first time Samuel had won over a reasonably well-off man. And even at Samuel’s advanced age, his beauty and charm were worthy matches to the sternest of opponents, but there was no resistance to speak of. The young, white man who answered the door—not even sending his Negro housekeeper to do it—stumbled an eager greeting.

  Samuel graciously accepted the invitation to enter the house, empty of but a few pieces of furniture, walked through to the back porch with no complaint, and sat down in a hard chair that wasn’t even a rocker. As someone who had not attended any university except that called by life’s clarion, Samuel perked up the day the young man mentioned that he was a graduate of Harvard College. And when Samuel left his plantation with Pompey driving the carriage, he somehow felt stronger and clearheaded, and he began to crave the company of the younger man from the north. Samuel liked sitting on the back porch of the ugly saltbox house.

  And he had other purposes for Matthew, for though time had passed since Nick’s running, Samuel had not given up on finding him, and hoped that, with the aid of the Fugitive Slave Law passed years before, he could still recover Nick. He had taken down the runaway flyer, but that did not mean Samuel had given up the ghost. He gave several flyers to Matthew to mail to his acquaintances up north and the younger man made the mistake of sending them to his sister.

  It was a distressing time for slave owners, for, above and below the line drawn by Messrs. Mason and Dixon, tendrils of abolition had thriven. Matthew’s sister Deborah was a reader; she’d gotten ahold of a privately circulated diary written by Fanny Kemble, the former wife of a man in Georgia who owned over a thousand slaves. Mrs. Kemble’s diary detailed gross violence toward Negroes, and Deborah had mentioned it in her letters. It did no good for her brother to explain that growing inland, short-staple cotton was far different—requiring slave labor but far less cruelty—from growing long-staple, because based upon a few words his sister had read in an almanac, she thought herself an agricultural expert. Matthew had not told his family that he owned Negroes, but he assumed they had guessed, as Deborah prodded him in letters, asking him to explain how one man could cultivate nearly two hundred acres of cotton “all by his lonesome,” an unfeasible task, even with his Congregationalist guilt about sleeping late. His sister had digested chunks of the Bible, even more now that, at an age when her parents had despaired, miraculously, she had married Winfred Hutchinson, one of Matthew’s classmates at Harvard who’d since become a minister.

  According to the gossips at the college, Winfred had not been ashamed to visit a brothel (or three), but Matthew was too shy to parry his sister’s veiled attacks with a query about her husband’s proximity to syphilis, or to note that his parents had not refused his bank drafts, sent from his own bank to the one in Boston. But he did his second best to otherwise incense his sister: he sent her a handful of Samuel’s runaway flyers. She was furious and threatened him with the wrath of his parents: “How Mother and Father would grieve to know your fall in the world but I shall keep it from them! I am aghast that you are unaware your soul is in sore peril!”

  Matthew’s feelings were wounded, but he knew he wasn’t a bad man. Abolitionists knew nothing about building a house in southern climes, about growing crops in uncultivated ground. He did not waste his strength or dignity arguing outright with his sister; he was settling into
his new home.

  The Joy of the Season

  Since the infancy of their friendship, Matthew had told Samuel that the distance from his family increased his loneliness. He was startled by his feelings, for he had not been close to his brothers and his sisters previously, and his father had been a difficult man, overly fond of parts of the Bible that struck his mother as cruel-natured, as she went in for merciful devotions herself. The Psalms were the favorite of Matthew’s mother. She was kind, but tired from the tedious work of women on a farm, as well as from a last baby—a girl—who had been born to her after she believed the burden of children had been lifted. (At this point in Matthew’s monologue, Samuel had interjected that the book of Genesis dictated that women should bring forth children in pain. After a few beats of silence, Matthew replied that during his mother’s last lying-in, his father had been fond of quoting from that same portion of Genesis.)

  The winter holidays were an especially black-clouded time for Matthew. A week before Christmas, when his brown-skinned maid, Dori, had walked through the kitchen into the back room that Matthew called a parlor and announced Samuel, the younger man nearly wept with appreciation. Samuel carried a large straw basket of delicacies: airy, risen, light bread; two kinds of cake, pound and fruit; a smoked turkey; a small portion of sugar-cured ham; two crocks of cloth-sealed blackberry preserves; head- and milk cheese; and scuppernong brandy.

  After a year of visits, Samuel asked Matthew if he would do him the honor of spending the twelve days of Christmas with him. He advised that Matthew should hire a patroller to oversee the property in his absence, to keep his Negroes in line. The younger man speedily answered that he would do so, but when he didn’t expound on his plans, Samuel suggested Jeremiah Franklin, the sharecropper and part-time slave patroller. He had a heavy hand with Negroes, and was a rough-hewn sort, but he was reliable.

  Though he knew it was a day early, Matthew arrived on Christmas Eve. Matthew appeared laden with his own gifts of food prepared by his housekeeper, who had not traveled to New England and had not seen the much more practical amounts of food put on tables. Matthew brought several hams that Simon, his head Negro in charge, had smoked, after respectfully chiding his owner over giving all that meat to a man that he’d heard tell had four times as many hogs as anyone in the region. Matthew was in a good mood and had not chastised Simon, only said that he wanted to be neighborly. It would not have been seemly to admit to a slave that he wanted to impress Samuel. It was because of this same good mood that when he hired Jeremiah as temporary overseer during his absence, Matthew admonished him that he did not want to come home to find his male slaves sporting bloody stripes, nor his females crying as a result of molestation; if that was the case, payment would be withheld from Jeremiah. And Matthew ignored the man’s expression of contempt over concern for Negroes. Nothing was going to ruin Matthew’s good mood.

  Samuel installed Matthew in the guesthouse to the furthermost west side of the plantation. The guesthouse was charming, with a parlor, two bedrooms, a sturdy front porch with railings, and polished wood floors throughout. There was an inside privy closet containing a cabinet with a hole cut into the top; when opened, a flowered chamber pot sat inside on a shelf. In the back of the guesthouse was a white-painted outhouse for the use of any slaves. What everyone else on premises knew was that this structure was the former moon house, where Aggie and Lady had spent their bleeding times in years past, renovated and expanded since then.

  Samuel had made sure the guesthouse was very far away from the big house—and the left cabin—as some of his prospective guests had wives. He did not want to offend delicate female sensibilities. Samuel had hoped that rich planters of good breeding, their families, and their slaves might visit, but that had not happened. Matthew was, in fact, his first guest.

  When Matthew had arrived at Wood Place, he’d had no idea that he was the subject of much female speculation. For example, at Christmas Eve dinner, Grace looked at him and then at her husband, who smiled in fawning admiration of the green-eyed Yankee. After five years of marriage, and only four instances of conjugal congress—and after pulling a succession of nine attractive Negresses from the fields to serve as maids, and making sure to place each in Victor’s path, and Victor paying absolutely no mind to any of them—Grace had concluded that her husband’s interest might not lie with women. And now here he was, smiling and offering Matthew Thatcher glasses of port wine.

  Then there was Lady, who, with a mother’s intuition saw that her husband intended to somehow beguile Matthew into marrying the strange Gloria, who was thirty-one years old and never had a beau, despite her bountiful beauty. Lady’s consolation was that Samuel had never abused his daughter. Despite her pure state, however, time had wasted for Gloria—in a decade, she might already be entering her woman’s change. Matthew Thatcher seemed nice enough. And if he wasn’t Lady would find a way to kill him. Though she and Aggie had not been friends—or even on speaking terms—for many years, Lady was certain she would find a way to seek Aggie’s help in killing this Yankee man, if the need arose. If the crime were to be discovered, she would place the blame on Aggie.

  At Christmas dinner, after Venie’s turkey and one of Matthew’s huge hams were served to exclamations, Gloria turned to him. She announced that though he was not as handsome as her father and brother, she wanted Matthew as her beau. And what did he think about that? With his characteristically dark blush, Matthew smiled and shyly dipped his head.

  The Delivery of Meals

  The women of the kitchen house and the yard were not only curious about the Yankee named Matthew Thatcher, they were also anxious, for white men could not be trusted. Yet they were trapped, for they had been ordered to serve him his morning and midday meals, way out at the guesthouse.

  After assuring Aggie and Venie that she would be careful—and after receiving instructions from Pompey that he had placed extra firewood in the guesthouse, which could be used as weapons—Rabbit headed through the woods with her large basket of food that early Christmas morning. She placed the basket on the porch, knocked sturdily, and walked away in case the Yankee liked to sleep late. At midday, she brought another basket. She noticed that the basket on the porch was gone, so she knocked again, but this time Matthew immediately opened the door. He wasn’t a tall man. Even a petite girl like Rabbit could see that. And like Gloria, Rabbit didn’t think he seemed so good-looking, either, though she was prejudiced. Her father and Pop George were the two most handsome men in the world, in Rabbit’s opinion. Yet with her keen sensitivity, she could see he wasn’t dangerous. He was only gawky, and though he was white, she felt rather sorry for him.

  Matthew assessed the tiny girl in front of him as well. To his eyes, she was strikingly beautiful—the most beautiful person he’d ever seen—and he blushed darkly: he knew he should not be thinking about a Negress this way, but already, he had surrendered to his appreciation. And when he smiled at her in his self-conscious way, Rabbit smiled back, and the entire porch was lit with her empathy. And he invited her inside to share the meal in the basket that she’d delivered. After she pointed out the cupboard in the corner, he brought out the china plates and she served his food, but he refused to eat until she had prepared a plate for herself. At first, she demurred: this man was not from this place. His foreignness was apparent, the dark and unattractive winter clothes that were far too heavy for the mild Georgia winter, the blunt accent of his speech, his smiling at a Negro girl and asking her to sit at the same dining table and eat along with him. Yet Matthew was aware that he held the power here, and when he insisted, Rabbit had no choice. She sat at the table with him, her small feet dangling above the shiny floor. Though her sensitivity told her that he was harmless, she was cautious. She kept her chair partially away from the table and trained her sight on the firewood that Pompey had strategically arranged. In the pocket of her dress, there was a razor-sharp kitchen knife, just to be on the safe side.

  There was no need for her precautions, h
owever. Matthew and she only sat together and shared the meal. When that was over, he thanked her and bowed. At supper that evening, he was disappointed to see that Rabbit was not there, serving at the table. And the next morning, the food basket was placed on the porch: she had knocked so softly, he hadn’t heard. The hours between breakfast and lunch dragged for Matthew, as he waited and hoped to see the petite Negro girl again. At midday, he tried not to show too much happiness when he opened the door and saw her there, but failed in that endeavor. Again, they both stood on the porch smiling, until they were aware that they had not moved. And so Rabbit walked inside, and he insisted that she share his meal again.

  A Reluctant Courtship

  When the twelve days of Christmas were over, Matthew didn’t want to leave Wood Place. Back at his saltbox house, he thought of Rabbit constantly. He smiled, remembering her tiny perfection, her feet dangling above the floor. He was afraid to call his constant thoughts infatuation, much less love, for Rabbit was a Negress.

  Unofficially—for not even white men would write such rules down—if Matthew wanted to take Rabbit by force, no one would challenge him. It was not even against the law in Georgia for a white man to ravish a slave woman. If the woman was a white man’s own slave, it was his right. If he ravished another white man’s slave, it was only a crime against property, such as hurting a horse or dog that belonged to another. Yet the thought of violence toward a woman that he cared for filled Matthew with self-disgust. He would rather cut his own throat than to hurt one of the coiled hairs on Rabbit’s head. His gallantry was unusual for his new home: among his own slaves, there were Negroes whose skin color announced that they had been the product of ravishment by white fathers. Though he was the owner of slaves, Matthew considered himself upright, but his sudden feelings for Rabbit fell outside the boundaries of southern society.