Caleb

by Charles Alverson

  His guests laughed drunkenly and nudged each other.

  “This will be good,” said a little man with a dyed black mustache and brown teeth.

  “Master,” said the slave, coming to a halt next to Jardine at the head of the table, half facing the guests lounging around the table.

  “Caleb, my man,” Jardine said drunkenly, “give these people some of your best French.”

  Caleb stood there without speaking.

  “Go ahead,” Jardine insisted. “Just a little. You know, like you did for me that night when you were describing Paris.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t Chinese, Jardine?” called one of the men at the other end of the table.

  “You just wait,” Jardine said. “You’ll see. Go ahead, Caleb.”

  Caleb stood dumbly, looking straight ahead. The people around the table were silent with anticipation, but none expected him to speak French. Two of the women exchanged knowing looks.

  Jardine looked up with annoyance. “What’s the matter, boy? Speak up. These people want to hear some French, and I will have it. You turn, face them, and talk, boy.”

  Caleb turned to fully face the guests. They gaped like huge fish. His eyes were directed at a point above their heads. His mouth remained shut, not stubbornly, but definitely. There was nothing sulky in his manner.

  Finally, the redhead broke the silence with a nervous laugh like a nail being ripped from wood.

  “That’s all right, Jardine,” said a man with a stain of wine down the frilly white front of his shirt. “The boy is nervous. Another time will do. Let’s have another sip of that excellent brandy of yours.”

  Jardine leaped up from his chair with clenched teeth. Spots of color showed on his pale face, and his eyes glittered. “No, it’s not all right, damn you,” he cried. He reached down into his high-topped boot and withdrew his riding crop. He raised the whip and brought it down sharply on the edge of the table, making the glasses jump and startling his guests. He walked around Caleb and faced him, raising the whip again.

  “You see this, boy?” he asked with deadly calm.

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Are you going to talk some French to these people?”

  “No, Master.”

  “Damn you,” Jardine shouted and lashed Caleb across the left shoulder of his white jacket. The riding crop struck with a muffled crack, leaving a thin black mark on his jacket, but Caleb did not cringe or waver. The guests’ eyes grew round as they exchanged looks. One of the women tittered nervously. “Talk!” insisted Jardine, bringing the crop down on Caleb’s right collarbone. Caleb remained unyielding and silent, his eyes looking at neither Jardine nor his guests.

  “Do you defy me?” Jardine asked, his voice rising.

  “No, Master.”

  “Then talk, you damned black rascal, before I kill you.”

  Jardine raised the riding crop to the full length of his arm and brought it down on Caleb’s left shoulder again. “You—will—talk—French!” With each slow, deliberate word, Jardine brought the riding crop down harder on Caleb’s shoulders and chest, alternating between the right and left sides of his body. Still, Caleb remained immobile, staring straight ahead, his face impassive. His body rocked involuntarily with each blow. The crop caught one of the epaulets of his jacket and ripped it off.

  His face now crimson, Jardine paused, panting almost hysterically, and raised the slim whip. He had forgotten all about his houseguests. “Talk!” he bellowed with the full power of his lungs, slashing the crop down across Caleb’s left cheek. A line of blood suddenly appeared on his face, and the recoil of Jardine’s crop sent a thin red spray over his guests as they scrambled from the table.

  “What the hell!” shouted the man with the black mustache. The women clustered together like a flock of pastel hens. They all stared at Caleb’s face as blood welled from the cut and dropped from his jaw to his black-streaked white jacket. Though his left eye blinked involuntarily to rid itself of the blood that had splashed into it, Caleb remained as steady as a rock, staring straight ahead.

  Jardine, still enraged, raised the crop again and brought it down sharply across Caleb’s other cheek. This sent a spray of blood onto Caleb’s right shoulder, but he still did not react. Jardine lifted the crop yet again, but when his arm was as far back as it could go, he suddenly stopped and seemed to become aware of the people behind him. Lowering the whip, he turned around to look at them. Two of the women were clearly shocked, but the redhead stared avidly. Her white teeth showed between vivid lips, and her dark eyes were glittering. The men looked on with an almost sporting interest.

  “Get out!” Jardine said. “Get out of my house!”

  “What?” a few of the guests said in unison, before they all broke out in a gabble of outraged protest as the women caught up their purses. And when Jardine gave them a deadly look and took a step forward with the raised crop, all six of the guests stampeded toward the door, casting wild eyes back toward the madman with the whip. Jardine followed them, stood like a statue in the doorway as they scrambled for their coats, hats, and bags, and then followed them outside. He remained on the veranda until the horses were gathered and hooked up to the brougham and then watched as his guests vanished into the night and the last angry shouts of the men could no longer be heard.

  When Jardine turned to reenter the house, he was surprised to find the riding crop still in his hand. He ran a finger down its length, examined the blood that had rubbed off on his finger, then wiped it on one leg of his trousers.

  Inside, Caleb, still in his smeared and bloody jacket, was supervising the house girls as they cleared the table and washed the dishes. He did not look up as Jardine appeared in the door and stood watching them with an expressionless face. Jardine turned, strode across the hallway to the door of his study, and disappeared into it. The heavy door closed behind him.

  15

  Dulcie smeared her healing ointment onto the cuts on Caleb’s face, and nothing further was said about the incident for almost a week. Caleb went on running the house and waiting on Jardine at dinner. There were no more guests. Jardine drank noticeably less wine and did not ask Caleb to bring out the brandy decanter. Nor did he ask for any more stories about European travel. Communication between master and slave was kept to a minimum of brusque orders and silent compliance.

  Finally, as he was finishing his coffee one night, Jardine said, “Caleb, why wouldn’t you talk French to those people last Sunday night?” His voice held genuine puzzlement.

  Caleb stopped placing dirty dishes on the big silver tray and looked at Jardine. “I am not a performing bear, Master,” he said.

  “Nobody said you were,” Jardine said angrily.

  Caleb said nothing.

  “Damn it, man,” Jardine persisted, “is it too much to speak a few words of French when I want you to?”

  “I have done it, Master,” the slave said soberly. “Many times.”

  Jardine thought this over. “Well, sure, but”—his face grew red—“how many goddamned slaves in this county can speak a damned word of French or German?”

  Caleb did not answer.

  “All right,” Jardine said defensively, “so those people were a bunch of drunken white trash, but . . .” He didn’t know what to say. Suddenly he lashed out at Caleb again. “Damn you! I own you, Caleb. You’re my property. I could sell you down in Georgia, way where they know how to handle difficult slaves. I could even kill you—if I wanted to.”

  After a long silence, Caleb said, “Yes, Master.” He looked directly into Jardine’s eyes, not defiantly, but unwaveringly.

  “Well, then.” Jardine picked up his napkin and then threw it back down on the table. “Oh, get the hell out of here and leave me alone.”

  It was as close to an apology as Caleb would get, but it marked a clear change between master and slave. Gradually, the two men developed
a new relationship.

  Jardine was not the kind of man who sought out his neighbors. And the neighbors, after a few rebuffs, respected his bereavement by leaving him alone. For his part, Caleb found the gap between himself and the other slaves too great to bridge. Aside from his position in the house and his role as Jardine’s unofficial steward, Caleb’s education, background, and accent made him as alien to the field hands as a Martian—and a bit harder to comprehend because he was blacker than most of them. Isolated from their natural peers, master and slave found themselves thrown into a forced intimacy neither expected.

  Jardine began once more to ask Caleb about his travels abroad with Mr. Staunton and Brent. Cautiously, but needing the human communication as much as Jardine did, Caleb resumed relating his youthful experiences and observations. As before, Caleb usually stopped before Jardine got bored or restless. These long sessions, usually held in the evening following dinner, always took the form of questions and answers, with Caleb volunteering very little more than what he was asked.

  “Tell me about the food in Germany, Caleb,” Jardine would demand with just enough edge to his voice to retain his dignity. “Is it true that they eat mostly sauerkraut?”

  And Caleb would dredge his memories for details, keeping his answers as impersonal as a travel lecture. Gradually, naturally, the talks gravitated to the study, with Jardine sitting on the big leather couch and Caleb perched on a straight chair before him. As he listened—and responded with more questions—Jardine would sip at a glass of whiskey, but it never occurred to him to offer Caleb any. Nor did Caleb expect it. There came a time each evening—usually when Jardine became so interested in Caleb’s narration that he started to forget himself—that he would abruptly get up and say something like, “All right, Caleb, you’d better get the house locked down for the night.”

  The house girls, on their visits to the quarter, would tell the other slaves of these mysterious sessions behind the closed door of Massa’s study. For a time, the sessions became the dominant topic of speculation in the quarter, with as many opinions as to what the men were talking about in the study as there were slaves. This only widened the gulf between Caleb and the others. But although the slaves didn’t like him any better, they felt a grudging awe for him that kept insolence in check. His eyes didn’t miss much that was going on at Three Rivers, but he dealt with problems and infractions himself, without taking them to Jardine.

  As Caleb related tales of his travels, Jardine began to ask questions about his life in Boston. They realized they’d both been in Boston during Jardine’s brief stay at Harvard. However, Jardine’s experience was mostly in Cambridge near the college and in sordid areas of Boston that the staid Mr. Staunton hardly knew existed. Caleb told Jardine as much about their life in Kenmore Square as he felt he could without violating Mr. Staunton’s privacy. Even after all this time and all that had happened, he felt protective of that good man.

  One night Jardine burst out, “Well, Christ, Caleb, it sounds to me like you were practically a second son to Staunton—not much of a slave at all. How the devil did he come to own you, anyway? I thought slavery was banned there.”

  “It was, Master,” Caleb said. “My mother was a runaway slave, but she died not long after going to work in Mr. Staunton’s house when I was just about five years old. Nobody knew what to do with me, so Mr. Staunton, a kindly man, agreed to keep me as an indentured servant and companion for Brent until I was twenty-one, and then set me free. He had a housekeeper, Mrs. Finlay, who was very good to me and trained me well. I was very happy.”

  “Then, how the hell did he come to sell you down here? That’s hard to believe.”

  “He didn’t,” Caleb said carefully.

  “Then what happened?” Jardine asked.

  “Five years ago, last June,” Caleb said, “Mr. Staunton died.”

  “And?” Jardine asked. “Who owned you then?”

  “Young Master.”

  “You mean Brent, the boy you were raised up with?”

  Caleb nodded.

  Jardine took another sip. “And he sold you?”

  Caleb nodded again.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jardine exclaimed. “How many years were you together?”

  “Fifteen years, Master. Nearly.”

  “Fifteen years! All that time together, practically your whole lives, and this Brent sold you? He actually sold you?”

  “Yes, Master,” Caleb said. “Mr. Staunton left the house but not much cash money. It wasn’t legal, of course, but before I knew it, money changed hands, and I was in chains headed out of Boston. There was nothing I could do about it. Brent had gambling debts. He didn’t know that I would be sold on down here.”

  “Well, maybe,” Jardine said. “But to sell his childhood companion like that. That’s awfully cold, Caleb. Don’t you feel . . . resentment?” Jardine suddenly sensed that that this exchange was getting into dangerous water.

  “Not anymore, Master,” the slave said. “It’s been a long time.”

  16

  One evening, as Jardine was refilling his glass with whiskey, he noticed Caleb gazing at his father’s books on the shelves of the study.

  “You still big on reading, Caleb?” he asked.

  “Yes, Master.”

  “Well, you help yourself,” Jardine said with an expansive gesture. “Read any of them you like. Not here, of course. Take ’em up to that room of yours. Mind you take care of them. Daddy was a great reader, and I always thought I might look at some of them. But I never seem to get around to it. Now, I suppose it’s too late. You go ahead. It’s either you or the paper beetles, and I think you might make more of them.”

  After that, Jardine would occasionally ask Caleb what he was reading and why. On long winter evenings this often led to Caleb sitting in front of the fire in the study and reading to Jardine from his father’s books.

  “Christ, Caleb,” Jardine would say, “I never knew there was so much in those damned books. Read me some more.”

  As spring blossomed, Jardine became restless again, and he took to disappearing for days at a time, secure in the knowledge that Caleb would keep the plantation running. The house girls were pretty well trained by now, so Caleb was able to spend some part of each day out with the slaves getting the fields ready for the spring planting. Big Mose knew what do to, and Caleb did not interfere with his authority. But he liked to know what was going on.

  One day Caleb rode out on the wagon that took lunch to the slaves in the fields. “Any problems?” he asked Mose.

  “No,” said Mose, “except those two darkies Massa borryed from the Bentleys ain’t worth shit. But we doin’ all right.” Caleb turned to go back to the wagon, but Mose added, “Tell me something.”

  Caleb turned back. He and Mose hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words of personal conversation since he’d moved into the house. “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Same as you. Working for Master.”

  “You know what I mean. You’re educated. I’ve seen you with those books, doing that writin’ in that flimsy thing you carry around. Cassie and the house girls tell us things. We know you ain’t no ordinary slave. You can’t be plannin’ on staying here—not after Boston and Paris and God knows where.”

  “You’re right, Mose,” Caleb said. “I’d be away from here if I could. But my face is just as black as yours, and there are three big states between this farm and a place where a black man can walk down a city street without some white face wondering why the hell he isn’t wearing a dog collar—and doing something about it. I might have it better than you people in the fields, but I’m still a slave. In five minutes, Master could have me back sweating for you in the cotton, or he could sell me away to somewhere a hell of a lot worse than this place.”

  “He could,” Mose agreed.

  “So, I’m just doing my job,” Cale
b said, “and trying not to worry about things I can’t change right now.” He turned toward the wagon again. “Right now, I’m going to go see what those house girls are up to while my back is turned.”

  17

  On one of his increasingly extended trips away, Jardine came back with a new slave in the back of the buckboard. When Caleb came out to greet him, she was climbing out of the wagon. She stared at Caleb uncertainly. Unlike the girl on the platform the day Jardine bought Caleb, this was no teenager. Nor was she high yellow. She was a full-grown woman, looked to be twenty-three or twenty-four, and her skin suggested satin lightly tinted with tea: definitely not white but not approaching black, either. Her nose was a thin blade hinting strongly at Indian blood, and her peculiar blue-gray eyes could have come from anywhere. The woman’s body was mature, but not overripe. If she were a peach, Caleb thought, you’d want to get your teeth into her right away.

  Caleb could see that Jardine wanted to help her down but did not dare to do it. “Caleb,” he said as casually as he could, “this is Missy. She’ll be working in the house with the girls. I believe she’s got some skills. You find out about that.” With a look back at Missy that was meant to be casual and masterly, he strode into the house, leaving Caleb to unload the wagon and then get the boy to take it around to the barn.

  “You got things?” Caleb asked Missy.

  “Just this,” she said, holding up a worn bag sewn from an old coat her former mistress had thrown out.

  “All right,” Caleb said blankly. “Just grab a hold of that bag of flour and follow me.”

  When Caleb entered the back kitchen with Missy, the house girls bunched in a defensive semicircle and looked at her as if she were a stray cat in a hen house.

  “This is Missy,” he told them, echoing Jardine’s words. “She’s going to be working with you girls in the house.”

  “We don’t need no more help!” said Drusilla, one of the house girls. She often acted as unofficial spokesgirl for the rest. She respected Caleb, but she wasn’t afraid of him. She had a tongue on her.