For a long moment, the only sound was that of the wind and rain and Uncle Will snoring. Then Big Si said, "He ain't never told me that."
"Far as I know, he ain't never said Carney Thatcher's name from that day to this."
"Then he shows up Juneteenth," Nellie said, "and brings it all back to his mind."
"Well," Maisy said, and said no more. She went to the wood pile and gathered up several large chunks of wood, and without being told, the three children scurried to help her fill all the little stoves; they'd certainly be dry enough and warm enough overnight.
"I'll walk with you back to your house, Miss Maisy," Big Si said, but she waved him off and headed for the back wall of the barn and into one of the stalls where her mules were kept. "I had me a back door put in here," she said, "and laid a stone walkway, when 'Zekiel took so sick a while back. I can get up to the house right quick."
"Well, then, take these things with you," Big Si said, grabbing a burlap bag from the back of the wagon and extending it to Maisy, who accepted it with a questioning look. "Just some few things, Miss Maisy: Some flour and eggs and a couple of rabbits, already skinned and dressed."
She, in return, extended warm thanks, then looked around the barn. "Leave one of these lamps lit so if anybody else comes..."
"We'll take care of 'em good as you took care of us," Nellie said.
Maisy smiled then and her face lit up like a young girl's. "I know you will, Daughter. Now, y'all get some rest so we all can be ready for whatever the rest of this night and the day that's coming is gon' bring us."
The night brought five more seekers of high, dry ground, and, as promised, they were fed, warmed, dried and given a place to sleep. The following morning brought a bright and clear blue sky, close-to-freezing temperatures, and a William Thatcher returned to himself and wondering, loudly, "What we doin' in here? This 'Zekiel Cooper's barn. What we doin' in 'Zekiel's barn?"
It took Big Si several minutes to quiet, calm and soothe Uncle Will, who first refused to believe that he didn't remember why he'd awakened in a barn or the harrowing journey in the middle of the night that had brought him here. Then, as truth and reality set in, his agitation grew into anger. He ordered everybody up and out. "Y'all hurry up. We got to go!"
"We can't just leave, Uncle Will," Nellie said, trying to reason with him. "We got to thank Miss Maisy…"
"Maisy know I'm thankful to her. Now come on. We got to get on home. I don't want my house left. I don't want my house empty. I need to be in my house!"
The return journey was an improvement because it was day and because it wasn't raining in sheets, but the road was every bit as treacherous and dangerous as the previous night; now deep mud sucked at the wagon's wheels and the mule's feet, and debris made the road all but impassable. "I got to go home. I got to get to my house." Uncle Will grabbed Tobias by the arm. "You come with me. Me and him gon' walk. I got to go see 'bout my house."
From the Recorded Memories of Ruth Thatcher McGinnis
Uncle Will said it took more than five years to build their house because they could only work on it when they weren't working for Carney Thatcher, and because they couldn't do it alone, the two of them, Will and Carrie, and Uncle Will said old Carney didn't want to see them succeed at building a house or farming anyway. He only gave them the land so that they would stay and help him work his farm. See, after the end of the Civil War, many of the slaves, when they realized they were free, just took off. Didn't know where they were going, just that it would be away from wherever they had been enslaved. Quite a few others stayed where they were, figuring, as that old saying goes, that the devil they knew was preferable to the devil they didn't. Uncle Will didn't stay because he trusted Carney Thatcher or felt any loyalty to him but because he thought it would be too dangerous to be wandering around, especially for Carrie. Young Colored women, he said, were not safe, free or slave. He also said since they didn't know how to be free, they agreed that they should take some time to figure out what freedom really meant. They knew that Carney needed their help. His two oldest sons had been killed in the War and his other children—two girls and two boys—were too young to be much help. So they stayed, but Uncle Will said they knew Carney still thought of them as his property—as his slaves—and he didn't think he had to pay them. And, too, Carney Thatcher was almost as broke as they were. So, early one morning when they should have been headed to the field, they were headed up the road. Uncle Will said he timed it so that Carney would see them but they'd be far enough away that he couldn't shoot them. Instead, he came running after them, screaming and cursing, waving his arms, shaking his fists, calling them niggers. He caught up to them and wanted to know what they thought they were doing. "We ain't slaves no more," Uncle Will said he told him. "You have to pay us or we're free to go." He said Carney cursed at them for a while, then begged and pleaded with them not to leave. That's when Uncle Will made his offer: He and Carrie would stay in exchange for some land of their own. It took some doing, but Carney finally agreed to give them forty acres near the creek, land that was marshy and swampy because the creek flooded so often. But they took it because now they had something of their own.
Before they could build their house, though, they had to lay a solid foundation, one that wouldn't rot or float away. They dug a rectangular-shaped hole twelve inches deep by twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide and they filled it with rocks and stones, the largest they could find, from the creek bottom and from their land, which was rocky as well as swampy. It took almost a year, during which time they lived in a Union Army tent. Nobody knows where the tent came from but William and Carrie were grateful for it. And to answer your question, Sissy, it took so long because they didn't have any tools other than what they could fashion from sticks and stones and their own hands. Remember, these people had been slaves. They owned nothing, they had nothing. The only reason they didn't starve to death was because the forests and the creek were full of food, and because, as Uncle Will liked to say, things grew in earth touched by Carrie's hands.
After that, things got a bit better for William and Carrie because it got to be known that they were landowners. Many of the former slaves that had run at the first breath of freedom realized they didn't have any place to run to. They had no skills other than farming, no money, no jobs. William and Carrie welcomed former slaves on their land. All together, there were about thirty of them—men, women and a few children. Land was cleared for farming, shacks were built for living, and William and Carrie became the center of a community. Everybody helped Will cut and plane the trees to build his house and it was the neighbors who planted and grew the food on Will and Carrie's farm because they spent their days working for Carney Thatcher. It was years before he knew that a community of tenant farmers lived on his land but not to his benefit. Why didn't he know? Because like all white people of that time, it never occurred to him that Colored people could or would be doing anything of interest or value or concern to him. He only cared about William and Carrie's land because he hadn't wanted them to have it; and once they had it, he assumed that because he had judged it worthless, it would be worthless. And it would have been if not for the ingenuity and creativity of Will and Carrie's neighbors. It's very important for you to understand, Sissy, that these slaves had not lived and worked on large, prosperous plantations like you see in the movies. They had belonged to small farmers like Carney Thatcher, poor, uneducated people, some of them only able to own one or two slaves. But they still were slaves and they had to work harder, in a way, than those on a big plantation where there were thirty or forty or a hundred people to do the work. So, what I'm telling you—what Uncle Will told us—was that these people who now lived on his land were good at figuring out ways to get things done. At how to make a way out of no way. And what they figured out how to do was drain the water from one part of Will's land and send it to another part. What they did, Sissy, was to create an irrigation system. When it rained too much, the water drained off and didn't flood, and
when it didn't rain enough, the drainage ditches funneled water to the crops.
But back to Will and Carrie's house: The stone foundation was finished in the summer of 1869. For more than a year, while all the people who lived and worked on their land felled trees to clear land for planting or to build their shelters, they also dedicated part of their time to planing the boards for William and Carrie's house, and they were ready to start the building. And out of nowhere—and I mean this literally because no one knew where he came from—came the biggest stroke of luck this community of Negroes had experienced in their few years of freedom: A carpenter with two bags of tools slung over his shoulders! He wouldn't tell them his name or anything about himself except to say that he was on the run. His former owner claimed that he'd stolen the tools but Carpenter, as everybody quickly came to call him, said the tools were his, that he'd been hired out and paid for his work, and that he'd bought his freedom, and his tools belonged to him. He was quickly absorbed into the community and just as quickly, he took charge of the building of William and Carrie's house. Uncle Will readily admitted that had it not been for Carpenter, the house likely would have collapsed within a year given how they had planned to construct it. The only thing they had done correctly, according to Carpenter, was to lay the stone foundation. He had the house elevated six inches above the foundation so that the ground moisture wouldn't penetrate the floorboards, and he put smudge pot hooks on the floorboards...what are smudge pots? You modern people could benefit from a healthy dose of old fashioned experience. Smudge pots, or smoke pots, burn substances that are smoky and offensive to critters: Spiders, snakes, mosquitoes. Having a crawl space beneath the house allowed air to circulate so the floorboards wouldn't mold or warp from the constant moisture, and hanging smudge pots in that space kept critters from living there. Anyway, Carpenter saw to it that the first room of William and Carrie's house—the kitchen—was completed before the bad weather set in. It was a beautiful room with a huge fireplace that also was the stove. When Carrie cooked, it was to feed most of the people in their community; that's how big this indoor pit was.
So, the house was started. It was only one room at first but that one room was solid. It was dry and warm and it was theirs, Carrie's and William's, and William loved that house more than anything or anybody—except maybe Carrie.
***
Jonas was accepting of the fact that whenever he wasn't in school, he was to be at one his father's three businesses. "You got to be the one watchin' my money," Jonas's father had said to him, "'cause I don't trust nobody else since your Ma up and died." Jonas didn't bother to argue or complain because, in the first place, he knew it would do no good; beyond that, however, was the unspoken but nevertheless clear quid pro quo nature of the arrangement: Jonas could go to school every day, could even give thought and voice to the notion of going to college in Belle City, if he worked in the stores at all other times. He wasn't thrilled with the arrangement, but there was nothing he could do to change it.
The new business—THATCHER'S DEPARTMENT STORE—represented his Pa's decision to split the function and merchandise of the general store. It now was a food market, and though the two establishments were across the street from each other, they were treated by Zeb, and thought of by him, as completely and totally different entities with no relationship to each other. In fact, he was a different man in each store, wearing an apron in the food market and a suit and tie in the department store; he was Zeb in the food market and Mr. Thatcher in the department store, as if furniture and clothing warranted more respect than food, and the only thing he enjoyed about either enterprise was the fact of his ownership of them and their growing profitability. But it was the pub that Zeb truly cared about because not only could he be himself there, freely and fully, he now lived there.
When Carrie's Creek flooded the previous month, Zeb's already run-down house was all but destroyed; the fresh coat of paint and the patches to the roof were too little, too late to save a structure that had been neglected for most of its existence. The flood did it—and Zeb—a favor: The house, full of mud and debris, was knocked down. So was the barn. The flooded fields were left to the land to reclaim. And Zeb, not only the proprietor of three prosperous establishments in the center of the burgeoning town of Carrie's Crossing, now owned one of the most valuable pieces of property in the area: One hundred vacant acres of developable land adjacent to the main road into and out of town.
Jonas was less pleased with his living arrangement. Shabby as the house had been, it was his home—where he was born and where his mother had lived and died—and no matter how dry and clean and nicely furnished his room above the department store was, it still was a room above a department store, necessitating a trip downstairs to use the bathroom, whether in the middle of a dark, cold night, or first thing in a dark, cold morning. Honesty, though, dictated that he acknowledge that the plusses of his new living arrangement outweighed the minuses, they being that he was but a short walk to school (walking being necessary since his horse had drowned in the flood), and he now could take all of his meals in the Crossing Café.
Jonas also enjoyed a front row seat from which he could witness all the changes that were coming to his hometown, changes that were happening so quickly that unless he wrote daily in his journal, he'd likely miss an important event: the paving of the streets and the laying of sidewalks, the erection of electrical poles and the wires that were strung between them to bring electricity to town, the arrival of the second automobile to be owned by the Baptist preacher (Doc Gray had the first), the groundbreaking for the new Baptist Church, and the arrival of the big, noisy machines that would begin digging the two-lane road that would link Carrie's Crossing to Belle City and the rest of Georgia.
Jonas no longer had any brothers, but he did have two brothers-in-law—Cory, his sister Rachel's husband, and Clem, his sister Esther's husband, and both men now worked for Zeb, which made the old man both proud and wary. He truly was glad to be able to help his daughters, and while he'd never get over the loss of his son, he liked being able to tell his customers and friends how "his boys" were such a big help to him: Cory in charge at the food market, Clem in charge at the department store, and Jonas, "young as he is," Pa would brag to any who would listen, "watches my money better'n the bank." And it was true—Jonas was so good at balancing the books that the owner of the café wanted to hire him to keep his books too, but Pa surprised him by saying no. "He got to keep up with his schooling" was the reason he gave.
The entire experience was teaching Jonas some important things about himself. There was the fact of his natural proficiency with numbers and the understanding he shared with his father about the nature of business; but the other side of that was the fact of his natural preference for those numbers, for his schoolbooks, for his job of twice-daily washing the big front windows of both stores, for any activity that guaranteed his solitude and limited his interaction with the public. In fact, the only people that Jonas really liked, other than his family, were people that he now almost never had occasion to see: Little Si and Ruthie Thatcher, and he missed them so much that it hurt to think about them.
The day after the creek flooded and the water had receded, he'd snuck up the road to their house to see if they were all right. He'd had to take the road because water was still ankle deep in the woods. He was shocked to find their house empty, and it was only after he'd returned home that he realized that though all the land surrounding the house was a swampy, muddy mess, the house itself seemed to be bone-dry. There was a water line up to the third step of the house, but it went no further. There had been no time or opportunity to sneak away since that day; he'd been too busy dealing with the flood's aftermath in his own environment and, given what he'd seen of their farm, they'd be too busy, too. As far as he could tell, though, there wasn't much farm left.
The door to the market slammed open so hard that the bell didn't clang but once, loudly, instead of its usual, gentle tinkle, tinkle, snapping Jonas out of
his reverie. "Y'all better come quick an' see 'bout Zeb 'fore he do somethin' crazy. He's madder'n a stepped on snake." The man delivering this odd message was hopping from one foot to another. Jonas didn't know his name; he only knew that he was a regular at the pub. Clem hurried from behind the counter.
"What's wrong? Where's Pa at?"
"At the Bar, 'long with five or six of them Temp'rance ladies singing they songs 'bout the evils of drinkin' whiskey."
Jonas was off the ladder and out the front door like a shot. He saw the gathering crowd in front of ZEB'S at the same time that he heard his Pa cussing louder than the Christian Temperance ladies were singing.
"Get 'way from here! Get from in front of my place!" Zeb was shouting and jumping up and down and waving his arms, and he was so red in the face that it frightened Jonas. He pushed through the crowd and tried to grab his Pa, and got knocked to the ground; he'd come up on Zeb's blind side—not that it mattered in that moment; Zeb would have knocked down the Good Lord.
Several of Zeb's bar patrons had joined in the verbal assault on the women, then several of the onlookers joined in the song, and that's when the pushing and shoving and name-calling started. Realizing that perhaps things were about to get out of control, the women picked up their skirts and hurried away. Without a focus for their attention, the onlookers drifted away, too. Zeb was panting and sweating like he'd run a mile, and so red in the face that Jonas was on the verge of sending for the doctor.
"You got to calm down, Pa."
"I ain't got to do no such. Them people got to stay 'way from me and my bizness, that's what's got to happen. They got no right to tell me how to run my bizness."
"Pa, listen." Jonas grabbed him by the shoulders, startling him into calming down. "You know 'bout these Christian Temperance Union ladies. I read that newspaper article to you."
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