by Kyle Onstott
‘Goin’ to whup that Memnon hard, ain’t you, Masta?’ Meg would not let the subject rest.
‘I reckon he need it, hard,’ said Ham, resuming his progress down the hall.
‘Kin I help, please, Masta, suh?’
‘Help whut?’
‘Help you in whuppin’ Memnon?’
‘You too little. Cain’t sling that paddle. Have to have Vulcan or Pole or one of ’em.’
Dite on her pallet beside the bed was awakened by the candlelight and the talk. She rose upon her elbow and asked, ‘Whure you want me, Masta, suh, in the bed or on the floo’?’
‘Better git in bed a little. Mayhap I wants you.’
Hammond knelt on Dite’s pallet to pray and Meg knelt beside him and listened. When Hammond arose from his knee and crawled upon the bed, Meg was aware of the girl lying beside him. He looked with abhorrence at her face upon the pillow, and hatred took possession of him. He desired not merely to kill Dite but to annihilate her. He wished that she had never been born, better yet that she had been born black and ugly, at very least that she were out in the quarters and not beside her master in his bed.
Meg pinched out the light of the candle and, finding no excuse to remain, went out of the room and closed the door. He spread himself out on the carpet in the hall as close as he could get to the door. Only when he heard Dite getting out of the bed to sleep on the pallet was he reconciled to sleep.
Hammond lay awake weaving fantasies about his projected journey in search of a wife, whom he was by no means certain he wanted. The errand would be pleasant, even if its objective was dubious. It would offer a respite from the responsibilities and the round of daily duties. He was in a state of somnolence between waking and sleeping when he heard a low-voiced altercation in the hall.
‘Git out o’ here, nigger. Your mammy waitin’ fer you. You cain’t sleep here. This my place.’ It was Memnon’s voice.
‘No, suh, nigger; I goin’ to sleep right here by my masta’s doo’. Don’ talk so loud; you wake Masta Ham, he be mad,’ Meg whispered. ‘I Masta Ham’s nigger.’
‘You isn’t nobody’s nigger. You ain’t hardly no more’n a sucker.’
‘I is too Masta’s nigger.’
‘Masta Ham jest a-coddin’ you, lettin’ you make like bein’ his nigger. Now, go down to the kitchen an’ let me go asleep.’
There was a sound of scuffling and the impact of a blow on flesh. A whining cry followed. It sounded as if it came from Memnon, but it must have been he who had slapped the child. Hammond leapt from his bed and made his way to the door.
‘Whut you mean, you scoun’rel, woppin’ my little buck?’ he demanded of the dark where he could just distinguish moving figures. ‘Now git outn here and keep quiet.’
‘I never hit him. He wopped me right in my mouf, Masta, suh,’ Mem pouted.
‘Never mind. Let Meg alone. Git outn here and stop your bellerin’. Meg, you lay down and go to sleep.’ Hammond closed the door and crawled back into his bed.
Dawn had hardly broken when Hammond was awakened by a small figure in front of the fireplace. Ham stretched and yawned.
‘Wants your wench?’ suggested Meg, kicking Dite with his bare foot. ‘Wake up, nigger. Masta crave you in his bed. Ain’t know nuffin’?’
‘Min’ your business, Meg. I wants Dite, I gits her. I don’ feel like no wench this morning.’
‘Yas, suh, Masta,’ and Meg resumed his squatting position before the fire, coaxing it to flare. He continued so, long after the flames were bursting brightly from the wood, adjusting the chunks across the dog-irons and readjusting them, killing time until the room should warm up and his master should see fit to arise. Dite got up, put on her dress and left the room without a word.
Hammond emerged from the bed, sat on the side of it, rubbed and scratched himself. ‘Pile plenty chunks on. Keep ‘is room hot. I goin’ to wash after breakfas’,’ he admonished.
‘Yas, suh,’ answered Meg, kneeling in front of his master and holding his long drawers for him to slip his legs into. A dexterity in adjusting his master’s garments seemed to be a part of the boy’s nature, since nobody had taught him a valet’s duties. He dressed his master as if he were dressing a baby, tenderly, carefully.
Breakfast was hardly finished when Meg announced, ‘Your tub ready, Masta, suh. Water all carried.’
‘Whut water?’ asked Hammond.
‘Water fer you to wash.’
‘All right. Run along an’ eat. Mem ready to wash me?’
Meg put his arm before his eyes and began to cry silently as he slowly walked toward the door.
‘Whut a matter, nigger? Whut you cry about?’ Hammond was baffled.
‘I wan’s to wash you, Masta, suh. Memnon gits to do ever’thing. I not your nigger at all,’ Meg cried overtly.
‘You too little,’ declared the master.
‘Kin do better’n Memnon.’
‘Aw right, aw right. You kin wash me,’ Hammond promised.
‘You lettin’ that nigger boss you. He be ownin’ you, first you knows,’ objected the elder Maxwell.
‘He right. He better’n Mem. He little, but let him try,’ Hammond placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and said, ‘He my nigger you know, Papa.’ Meg looked at him with the pleased solemnity of a prime minister.
When Hammond returned to his room, before the fire stood a washtub half filled with water from which arose small wisps of steam. A metal pail of water, with which to temper the heat of that in the tub, was on the fire. Towels were laid out on the bed. An irregular piece of home-made soap was on the floor. Fresh underclothing, socks and shirt were methodically arranged upon a chair.
Meg piled another knot of wood upon the fire, lest the warm room should cool off. He slipped his master’s clothes from him as deftly as he had put them on.
Hammond’s knee precluded his squatting in the water. It was necessary for him to sit in it, letting his legs protrude. Meg supported him with his whole strength as Hammond eased himself into the tub. Then the boy got down on his knees and soaped his master’s body, crawling around the tub from Hammond’s shoulders to his knees and legs and feet. Meg splashed himself and the carpet in rinsing the lather away.
He struggled to help Hammond rise, dripping, to his feet, sopped the water from him with a towel, and led him to the bed where the master lay and was rubbed with a dry towel warmed before the fire.
Hammond shoved his legs into his long drawers and submitted to being dressed. He felt refreshed, renovated, clean. Meg slipped himself into his own garments, buttoning the shirt askew in his haste to accompany his master down the stairs. He ran to the kitchen and, without waiting for help, mixed a toddy, which he carried to Hammond in the sitting-room. He stoked and replenished the fire, and drew a low rocker in front of it, brushing its upholstery in an unspoken invitation.
‘Nigger tryin’ to tell me whure I kin set down,’ Hammond commented to his father.
‘I tol’ you that you be his nigger first thing, an’ you give him his head. Plagued if I don’t reckon but he got more gumption than you, a white man washin’ hisself right dab in winter.’
Hammond was restless in the afternoon. There was no work that required doing. He thought of riding to Benson, but the roads were wretched and there would be nobody in the tavern, unless perhaps Brownlee had been delayed by the mire, and Ham had no desire ever to see Brownlee again. To sit by the fire and drink toddies with his father would be to re-hash again plans already formulated and recollections of trivialities best forgotten.
As a relief from ennui, Hammond would with gusto have undertaken the unrelished task of giving Memnon his whipping, but the day was Sunday. For the Maxwells, Sunday was not a day of devotion but a day of rest, to which the servants looked forward. A few of the older slaves, purchased from plantations where there had been religious services, might still recall some of the customs of their youth and say Sunday prayers in their cabins. The Maxwells didn’t know. They did not object to religion in
the quarters, but did not encourage it. They did object to their Negroes learning to read. Besides being against the law for slaves, it gave them ideas they were safer, and, for that matter, happier without. At Falconhurst, no Biblical justification of the institution of slavery was required. Nobody disputed it. No admonition of servants to obey masters was needed. Why suggest to them that there exists an alternative?
Maxwell, by ignoring God, avoided the necessity to dispute authority with Him. Why introduce into plantation economy a being superior to the white master?
Hammond ordered his horse and rode over the plantation. He found the river falling and the dangers of overflow past. The horse picked its way upstream to where Saint Helens Creek emptied into the Tombigbee. Ham noted three of his young Negroes fishing with hooks and lines, reined up his horse to talk to them. They had caught four small catfish, but the current was too swift and the sunshine too pale for good fishing.
One of the Negroes had stepped on a moccasin with his bare foot, but the snake had slithered into the water without trying to bite him. Hammond warned the boy to be more careful. His father had paid six hundred dollars for that boy four years ago, and the bite of a moccasin might have killed him.
A deer crossed Hammond’s path, a pregnant doe, and disappeared in the brush. Later he saw a wildcat with two kittens playing on a log. He drew his pistol and shot at the mother, but was sure he missed her. He saw innumerable quail and some jacksnipes. The horse shied at a rattlesnake, sufficiently disturbed to coil in alarm. Wild life was so copious on the Maxwell property that it failed to excite Hammond’s interest.
He rode back across the fields he intended for cotton, but found them too sodden for ploughing, as he knew they would be. He was impatient to get to that work, which could not be undertaken for another month.
He returned to the stable and gave the horse to a hand with instructions about cleaning and currying it. Meg had seen him set out and was waiting at the stable for his return.
‘A toddy, Masta? Kin I stir you a toddy, suh?’ the urchin begged, following his master toward the house.
‘I reckon so,’ replied Hammond, bored and impatient for something to do.
He saw Big Pearl crossing the open space between the cabins, balancing a bucket of water on her head. She was as lithe and graceful in her way as the blacksnake that had scurried across his path down by the river. Big Pearl saw Hammond too, and, embarrassed by Doc Redfield’s diagnosis of her ailment, hurried forward to avoid a direct meeting.
But he called to her and asked, ‘All right agin, Big Pearl?’
She couldn’t hang her head lest she spill the water, and could only answer, ‘Yas, suh, Masta, I’s well. Didn’t nothin’ ail me, I reckon, nothin’ but jest belly-ache.’
‘Lucy in the cabin?’
‘Yassum, she’m to home,’ Big Pearl was reluctant to have her master and her mother discuss her illness, which she knew was his intention, but there was no way to prevent it.
Hammond turned towards the cabin. Meg would have followed him, but the master wouldn’t permit it. He told him to go to the house and stir his toddy. Belshazzar adjourned his hop-scotch before the door to follow his master into the cabin, where Lucy was picking over fresh, wild greens, the first of the season, she had gathered for supper. Meat was in a pot on the fire.
‘Evenin’, Masta, suh. Come right in. Come right in. Evenin’, suh. Bel, you git your triflin’ self out’n here. Cain’t you see Masta come? Let me move that kittle offn the cheer sosan you kin set down.’ Lucy was flustered at the honour of a visit from her young master. She grabbed a broomstick and began poking nervously at the fire.
‘Evenin’, Lucy. Big Pearl all right agin?’
‘Wasn’t nuffin, wasn’t nuffin at all,’ Lucy disparaged. ‘Jest tomfoolery, I reckon. Wenches gits that way.’
‘Big Pearl craves I should pleasure her?’ Hammond asked without his embarrassment being noticed.
‘She sho’ do. She sho’ do. You isn’t goin’ to, is you?’ Lucy couldn’t credit her fortune.
‘And you thinks I had ought to?’
‘An’ you craves to, I be mighty ’bliged. Of course, Big Pearl craves her master.’
‘Well, git her ready. Wash her good—all over.’
‘Sho’ will scrub that wench, Masta, suh.’
‘And put some red stuff in the water that you gits from Lucretia Borgia. She tell you how.’
‘Red stuff?’ Lucy failed to understand.
‘To kill the musk. Big Pearl powerful musky.’
‘Sho’ is. An’ then I sends her over to you at the big house?’
‘Nev’ mind. I comes back here in little while.’
Hammond left the cabin with a kind of loathing. He flinched at the task he had undertaken, doubtful of his ability to complete it? Would he falter when the time arrived? It would be a shock to his manhood, if he should fail. As a connoisseur of fine animals he was proud of Big Pearl, but he had never thought of her as human. There was something bestial about the chore. He was being used as a mere service jackass, like a stud nigger. Yet his father expected it of him, the wench would feel cheated of her right, Lucy would lose caste if he neglected the daughter she had preserved so carefully for him, the other Negroes took it for granted as a master’s right, and, insofar as a master had any obligation to a slave, a master’s duty. To omit it would not impair his authority, nor excite contempt, except his own; it would beget only wonder, question.
Hammond was hardly out of Lucy’s cabin, when the orgy of preparation for the long-anticipated event began. A tub was brought in and Big Pearl and Belshazzar were sent to the well for water, enough of which to bathe the huge girl required three trips for each. There was no time to heat it, since the master would return in ‘a little while’, and Lucy didn’t know whether he meant in five minutes or at his leisure, and she had feared to ask. She ran to the kitchen of the big house for soap and the red stuff to kill the musk, and Lucretia Borgia took her deliberate time in getting it for her.
‘Hurry up; hurry. Young Masta gwine to rape Big Pearl, an’ I got to git her scrubbed clean,’ Meg heard Lucy tell his mother. ‘Hurry up, please, mam, Miz Lucretia Borgia.’
When Big Pearl got her feet into the washtub there was little room for the rest of her. If she should sit or squat, the water would slop out. Lucy used a dish-rag gourd as a sponge, soaping it and scouring Big Pearl’s body. Then, since Big Pearl could not be soaked in the permanganate of potash solution, Lucy achieved the same result by repeatedly squeezing her sponge over the girl’s shoulders, keeping the body wet.
Big Pearl was too excited to sense the coldness of the water. She listened to Lucy’s injunctions and threats without hearing them.
‘You ack a lady now. Do everything like Masta Hammon’ say—jest like he say—ever’thin’,’ Lucy instructed her. ‘Don’ you dare ask Masta fer nuffin’—nuffin’ at all. Young Masta know whut he want to do to you and know whut he goin’ to give you. If you not a lady, I thresh you. An’ remember to say thankee to Masta Ham. Whether he give you nothin’ or not, say thankee.’ Lucy repeated her cautions with variations over and over.
While Big Pearl dried herself, Lucy scurried to Dido’s cabin to spread the news and to borrow a quilt. Her excitement was unconcealed. ‘Dido,’ she implored, ‘let me have your new quilt. Masta Ham gwine to rape Big Pearl right away, an’ my quilt dirty. I knows you choice of it, but for Young Masta, an’ I knows you let me have it.’
‘Better take along this bolster, too. Yourn ’most ragged,’ Dido suggested.
Lucy hurried home with the bedclothes, and Dido lost no time in heralding the tidings about the neighbourhood, not neglecting to boast that her bedding was better than Lucy’s.
Lucy made the bed anew, ordered Belshazzar to empty the tub and to be gone and not to come back until Hammond should come and go. She replenished the fire and sat down to wait. She was more nervous than Big Pearl, and as happy.
‘You cold?’ she asked the naked girl.
‘No’um,’ Big Pearl replied. ‘Reckon he come?’
‘He come. Give him time,’ said Lucy. ‘You too hasty. White man take his time,’ said Lucy, getting up to smooth an imagined wrinkle from the quilt. ‘Right kind of Dido, borrowin’ her new quilt to me.’
The mother resumed her seat upon a bench by the fire and looked at her daughter. ‘You real purty, Big Pearl,’ was her verdict. ‘Coarsen you ain’t yaller an’ you big. Always was big, bigger’n any sucker I ever had—’ceptin’ that one buck, borned before you, that Ol’ Masta Wilson kept fer his own self when Masta Hammond’s pappy bought me an’ you. I wonders did Ol’ Masta Wilson sell that little buck or is he still at Coign Plantation. Course he big now. He two or three crops older’n you.’
‘Who pleasured you, Mammy; the first time, I means?’ Big Pearl asked.
‘My masta, course,’ replied Lucy candidly. ‘Ol’ Masta Wilson. He gettin’ ol’. I speck he dead now, he so ol’.’
‘You reckon Masta Ham let me take up—after he through with me?’
‘Prob’ly, prob’ly. As is, you wastin’. Could have a nice sucker a’ready. Prob’ly give you to Big Vulc or some of ’em fer awhile. Vulc a right likely nigger, stylish an all. Pole better lookin’ but he no good. Lucretia Borgia ain’t had no sucker fer goin’ on three year now. Pole young an’ strong, but he jest ain’t got no sap.’
‘You don’ reckon Masta Ham aim to take me into the big house fer his bed wench, does you?’ Big Pearl said hopefully.
‘Whut foolishment you talk! Masta don’ crave no big gyascutus like you fer his bed. He wants ’em light and little, like Dite. Dido say he lookin’ at Tense, only she too little yet awhile.’
‘You says you own self that I purty.’
‘You purty, but you big and you right dark. Make a good breeder, mayhap, fer Masta. No bed wench. Ain’t you satisfy?’
‘Yassum.’
When Hammond emerged from the big house, more eyes were watching him than he suspected. Lucretia Borgia saw him through the kitchen window and grunted with envious jealousy. Meg’s jealousy was even greater. From behind bushes and around cabin corners, black faces peered, and all knew his errand and envied Big Pearl the honour they knew he was about to do her.
