Jacob had seen slaves, back in Tennessee, where just about anybody with a lot of land that wasn’t too hilly would have some niggers around the place. And there was even one family he knew of, up in Newton County not too far from Stay More, who kept a couple of niggers. Jacob had met them. He had never given a thought to having a slave himself, because, the way he saw it, a man shouldn’t have more land than him and his sons could take care of. And he had never been able to understand why slaves all had to be dark-complected. He’d never heard of a light-complected slave. But apparently what he was supposed to do in this convention was listen to all these men talk about joining the Confederacy, and then vote on it. Hell, if some of those states wanted to confederate theirself, he didn’t personally have any objection, but if Arkansas joined up with them, that would mean all of the people of Arkansas supported slavery. Jacob didn’t actually support slavery, but on the other hand he didn’t see anything wrong with it except that all the slaves were dark-complected, and it stands to reason that there ought to be equality and have just as many light-complected slaves.
Then too, there were a lot of things being said in those speeches that Jacob didn’t understand at all. He didn’t know who “John Brown” was. He didn’t know what was meant by “emancipation” and “secession” and “state sovereignty” and “Fugitive Slave Law.” Finally somebody said, “Today’s session is adjourned. You gentlemen will please collect your remuneration at the door.” Jacob didn’t know what “remuneration” was either, but he got in line with the rest of the fellows, and when his turn came a man at the door gave him three dollars cash money, which was a pleasant surprise, and meant that he wouldn’t have to sleep with his horse at the livery stable but could get a bed in a house somewhere. But outside the capitol, there was a fancy-dressed black man hollering, “This way, gemmens and sirs!” and pointing down the street at a big building with a sign on it that said Anthony House. All the other delegates were heading that way, so Jacob tagged along, and when he got there he found that they weren’t even going to charge him anything for his room, and he got a big room all to himself, and they put out a fine big supper downstairs and afterward most of the delegates sat around smoking cigars, and somebody gave Jacob a handful of cigars, and they poured honest-to-God pure whiskey, and drank and swapped yarns and cussed Lincoln and stayed up nearly all night.
Jacob discovered that the Presiding Delegate, David Walker, was the son of the Judge Walker who had “pardoned” Jacob years before when he “stole” his heifer at Fayetteville. Jacob told this yarn to Walker, told it on himself, and they both had a good laugh over it. Then Jacob got chummy with a distinguished-looking old white-haired gent who was the delegate from Ashley County down in the southeast part of the state, and owned a twenty-room house and 340 slaves. Jacob confessed that he wasn’t nothing but a ignorant hillbilly, and he got the old gent to tell him the meaning of “secession,” “emancipation,” “state sovereignty,” “Fugitive Slave Law,” and who “John Brown” was. The old gent was right proud to harangue Jacob’s ear until nearly dawn, and Jacob went to bed thinking that the secessionists sure had a good case for their cause.
Back at the capitol the next day he listened to speeches all day long, and that night at the hotel he asked the old gent from Ashley County to explain anything that he hadn’t understood. This went on for three days, and on the third day the head delegate David Walker stood up and said, “Would the delegate from Newton County care to express his views?” Jacob wondered who the delegate from Newton County was, and after a minute of silence he noticed that several men were staring at him, and then he remembered who the delegate from Newton County was, and he coughed and bobbed his Adam’s apple, and mumbled, “I reckon not.” “Are we ready to vote, then?” asked the head delegate. “AYE!” they all hollered, and David Walker said, “Those in favor of secession, please stand.” Thirty-five men stood up. “Those opposed?” Jacob found himself rising up from his chair, and his chum the old gent from Ashley County was glowering ferociously at him. But thirty-eight other men were also standing. And outside, on the banks of the river, thirty-nine Federal guns were fired in salute of those who had kept Arkansas in the Union. Jacob collected his last remuneration and went back home to Stay More. When any of the Stay Morons asked him, “What was that all about?” he would shake his head and say, “Durn if I know.”
March passed, and then April, and when May came a messenger brought word to Jacob that the convention was reconvening at Little Rock. This time he told Sarah what the other men’s suits had looked like, and she stayed up all night making him one that was fairly like theirs, and the next day he put it on and rode off to Little Rock again. There, Governor Rector gave another fancy one-hour speech, talking about the bombing of a fort called Sumter, and Lincoln’s call for seventy-five thousand volunteers. “I have told him,” Rector said, “that no troops from Arkansas will be furnished. His demand is only adding insult to injury. The people of this commonwealth are freemen, not slaves, and will defend to the last extremity our honor, lives, and property against Northern mendacity and usurpation!” The hall and the gallery up above were packed with spectators, almost all of them hollering “SECEDE!” every time the governor paused for breath. Jacob’s former chum the old gent from Ashley County passed a note to him which said, “You have a nerve to show your head here. I doubt you will leave alive.”
After the governor’s speech, almost all the other speeches were strongly in favor of secession. The only one speaking against it was the head delegate, David Walker of Fayetteville, and his speech was apologetic and half-hearted. When he finished he said, “Well, are we ready to vote, or would the delegate from Newton County care to express his views this time?” Jacob coughed and bobbed his Adam’s apple, and then discovered that he was standing up. He tried to sit back down, but couldn’t. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, then took them out and stuffed them back in. Everybody was staring at him. Then he heard himself asking a question: “How many of you fellers has ever been to Newton County?” Only four or five of them raised their hands. “Wal, you know Newton County is so fur off in the mountains we have to wipe the owl shit off the clock to tell what time it is.” All of the delegates laughed, and Jacob heard some tittering up in the gallery; looking up, he noticed there were women there, and he got very red in the face and mumbled, “Sorry, ladies.” Then he went on. “But the folks up yonder have picked me out to represent ’em at this here convention. I reckon they picked me on account of I feel the same way about most things that they do. And here is what I feel. If you fellers that owns slaves wants to secede, that’s yore right and yore privilege, but I could count all the slaves of Newton County on one hand and still have maybe a couple of fingers still standin, and Newton County is stayin in the Union!” There was applause from a small few of the delegates and from somebody up in the gallery. Jacob tried to go on, but the words wouldn’t come, so he sat down.
The governor stood up and said, “May I comment upon that? If Newton County stays in the Union after Arkansas secedes, there will be worse than owl droppings on your clocks!” The delegates laughed, and the governor said, “Let us vote!”
The vote was taken, and there were only four men besides Jacob who stood up to vote “No,” and those four were also from the Ozarks. One of them, David Walker of Fayetteville, said, “If it is inevitable that Arkansas secede, let the wires carry the news to all the world that Arkansas stands as a unit! May we request that you gentlemen withdraw your votes, to make the result unanimous? I will withdraw mine. All right, we shall take the vote again. All in favor of secession, please stand.” Everybody stood up…except Jacob. “All opposed?” Jacob stood, and stood there alone, in awkward silence, while delegates around him cursed him, and a woman up in the gallery flung a bouquet of flowers which fell at Jacob’s feet, and he looked up and smiled at her, and she blew a kiss to him. The head delegate said to him, “For the last time, sir, will you not withdraw your vote, to make the result unanimous?”
“I will not,” Jacob said, still standing, and the head delegate said, “Very well. The final tabulation is sixty-nine in favor, one opposed. The convention is adjourned until tomorrow, at which time we will begin the drafting of a new Constitution. May I suggest that the delegate from Newton County might honorably resign his seat before then.”
But Jacob did not resign his seat. When he left the capitol that afternoon, the woman who had thrown the bouquet of flowers at his feet was waiting for him. This woman, whose name we cannot know because she was a member of one of Little Rock’s finest families, a family still prominent socially and politically today, took Jacob home with her to her very fine house, which had no slaves, and fed him supper, and gave him to drink, and took him to bed. In the morning she fed him breakfast and sent him off to the capitol, where he claimed his seat and his right to vote for Newton County, and participated in the day’s session. He supported the convention in its work, and voted “No” only on those issues related to slavery and secession.
The convention remained in session until the close of the month, and each night Jacob went to the woman’s house for supper and bed and pleasure. Once she told him that she thought the real reason for the War was not slavery itself but the ungratified sexual appetites of the men involved. It was always men who made war. Jacob felt no desire to fight anybody, but he went on voting “No” at the convention; he voted “No” against the raising of an “Arkansas Army,” he voted “No” against a two-million-dollar “Arkansas War Loan,” he voted “No” against the confiscation of all public lands and money in the state, and finally he voted “No” against a motion to hang Jacob Ingledew for treason and sedition. The motion narrowly passed, however, and might have been carried out if they could have found him, not knowing that he was staying at the house of the woman. That night he lay with her a final time, then took his trousers off the bedpost and announced that he had better get on out of town. She hated to let him go, but knew it was for the best. “My darling backwoodsman,” she said in parting, kissing him and letting him ride off home to his backwoods, where he told nobody that Arkansas was out of the Union, nor that the Union was torn, nor that men were killing one another.
That was, as I say, two years before Eli Willard showed up again carrying a line of Sharps rifles and sidearms, and still nobody but Jacob knew that the country had been at war for two years, except for the scarcity of coffee, tea, black pepper and such, a shortage which, like all shortages, was difficult if not impossible to understand, and so no attempt was made to understand it, rather only to get around it, by using substitutes: parched okra seeds and chicory for coffee, ordinary sassafras for tea, and ground garden pepper for pepper.
Now Eli Willard was selling firearms right and left, in defiance of Jacob, who was fuming and on the verge of demolishing Eli Willard and his wagon. His own brother Noah had been the first to buy a Sharps rifle, and was already demonstrating how he could shoot the eye out of a squirrel from eight hats off.
Jacob couldn’t stand it. Finally he demanded of Eli Willard, “Don’t you know there’s a War on?”
“All the more reason,” Eli Willard retorted.
“War?” Noah said. “What war?”
“Yeah, what war?” the other men joined in.
Jacob wondered how to explain it, or even whether or not to try. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them; that had been his policy for two years. But how much longer could he protect his people from the strife of the nation?
“Why don’t you tell them?” he said to Eli Willard. “You’re a Yankee.”
“Are you a Rebel?” Eli Willard asked him.
“Hell no,” Jacob declared, “but I aint exactly a Yankee either.”
“Well, then,” Eli Willard began, “you see, gentlemen, it’s like this…”
That night Noah sat in his treehouse, fondling his new Sharps rifle and puzzling over what Eli Willard had said. From what we know of Noah, by now, we can assume that he was struck with wonder, no, that he was positively dumbfounded, at the idea of the whole country splitting in two, and of men killing each other. We would not be going too far to imagine that his gaze fell upon the opposite wing of his treehouse and his mind dwelt fleetingly on a different kind of bigeminality: of disjunction, separation, disunion.
Jacob too, in his dogtrot, was taking note of the bigeminality of his dwelling and thinking about how even countries can be divided. His trouble was that he was caught in the wrong wing of the House. And like Noah too, he was fondling a new Sharps rifle.
Chapter six
The prairie schooner, or conestoga wagon, which our example clearly is not, was the prototypical mobile home, although it was less a home than a vehicle to those who used it, and those were all heading west. Conestoga wagons may have been built in the Ozarks, but were not used there, save in passing. The Ozark’s first true mobile home, in the modern sense of that term, i.e., a vehicle more often immobile than mobile although capable of the latter, is illustrated to the left. We do not know who built it, nor whether it was actually built in the Ozarks proper, although that was where it traveled.
The driver was an immature youth called Moon Satterfield. He was silent and humorless; we know very little about him, except that he did not like Stay More, and was eager to move on. The wagon was parked at Stay More for less than two weeks.
The occupant of the other of the two interior chambers of this mobile home (yes, it too was apparently bigeminal) was a barely post-adolescent damsel named Viridiana Boatright, called “Virdie.”
We know much more about her than about Moon Satterfield, but still we do not know exactly who her employers were. When she first arrived in Stay More, it was “norated” around town that a cat wagon had fetched up just outside the village, but two peculiarities were soon noted about this cat wagon: (1) there was only one cat in it, and (2) she wasn’t charging anything. She dispensed her voluptuous favors to any and all willing and able Stay More men, and most of the hot-blooded boys of the town wanted in too, but she wasn’t taking anyone under eighteen, although some of the bolder lads lied about their age to get in. The reason Virdie wasn’t taking anyone under eighteen wasn’t known, but presently it was rumored that she was recruiting, or trying to recruit, soldiers to the cause of the Confederate States of America. When Jacob Ingledew heard this rumor, he went to her at once, waited a minute until her current prospect came out of the wagon, then barged in on her. “Now lookee here, young lady…” he began, wagging his finger in her face, but she threw her soft arms around his neck and buried her full lips beneath his earlobe. He tried to separate himself from her, but she gyrated her hips against his, pressing and stroking and fluttering, and darting her tongue into his ear, which caused his legs to fail him, so that she quite easily pulled him down to her bed.
When she was finished with him, she asked, “Now weren’t thet a heap o’ fun?” Jacob had to allow that it was, that by his three standards of measure, Fanshaw’s squaw, Sarah his wife, and the lady in Little Rock, Virdie Boatright was the best of them all. “Yeah, but I don’t aim to jine up with the Rebels, and I don’t want the menfolks of this here town to jine up neither, so you’d better jist get on back to wharever ye come from.” Virdie laughed. She had a right pleasant and womanly laugh, Jacob had to allow.
“Who,” she asked, “are you to be talkin so big?” “I’m the mayor of this here town,” Jacob informed her, “and what I say gener’ly goes.” “Air ye now?” Virdie exclaimed, her face lighting up right winsomely, Jacob had to allow. “The mayor! Wal, I declare! I never had me a mayor afore. In thet case, let’s do it again!” and before Jacob could protest she spread him out on her bed and employed her full stock of novel therapies to revive and temper his root, whereupon she clambered atop him. He’d never had a woman on top of him before and at first he resented her usurpation of his rightful position, as if, by taking over from him, she symbolized her intention of taking over the town from him. But as she churned and squirmed, rising and falling gently and then
less gently and then much less gently, Jacob reflected that this wasn’t such a bad idea after all, that there was no earthly reason why a man and a woman shouldn’t take turns, trade places ever now and again, and equalize the work, if, as in the case, the woman enjoyed it as much as the man. Virdie cried out, a long low groan, but she didn’t stop, and Jacob realized that if she kept on going like that he might very well cry out himself. But just then a voice outside the wagon called “JAKE! AIR YE IN THAR?” and he knew it was Sarah. “ANSWER ME!” she requested, so he did. “Yeah, I’m in here, but I’ll be right out.” He was bucking beneath the weight of Virdie in an effort to finish. “WHAT’RE YE DOIN IN THAR, JAKE?” Sarah wanted to know. “I’m havin words—” he panted “—with this here Rebel foe.” He was nearly there, although he realized that the wagon must be visibly shaking. Virdie suddenly stuffed her dress into her mouth, but it was not enough to keep another one of her long groans from coming out. “JAKE!” Sarah hollered. “YOU AINT A-HURTING HER, AIR YE?” “Jist a little,” he answered, “to teach her a lesson.” And then he got there, rapturously, reflecting, Godalmighty, if I could git this reg’lar, maybe I’d jine the Rebels after all. Virdie climbed off him, smiling, and while he was buttoning his pants she kept her arms around him and her lips on his face and neck. He moved away from her to the door, opened it, and turned back to say to her, so Sarah could hear: “And jist remember what I said: no menfolks of Stay More air fightin on the Rebel side!” He meant it too.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 14
