Southern Son

by Victoria Wilcox

  It was an awful death that came to take Alice Jane Holliday that warm evening in September, slipping from consciousness as her lungs filled with water and she lay drowning in her bed. Her sisters and brothers, come up from Florida to be with her at the end, tried to comfort one another by speaking of that peaceful land beyond the grave where Alice Jane would live forever in eternal light. But all John Henry could see was the darkness of the world that only his mother’s company could chase away, and in the darkness, the end finally came.

  He waited in the shadows outside her room, listening to the hushed voices beyond the door. He recognized his father’s voice, and Uncle James McKey who was her attending physician, and heard the muffled sound of his aunts’ weeping. And he wanted to go in and wanted to run away at the same time, so he sat transfixed, listening but not wanting to hear. In his hands he held a small, leather-backed photograph of a beautiful young woman in a ruffle-lined bonnet. She held a baby boy in her arms, fair haired and wide eyed, cuddling against her for comfort. He could hardly remember his mother looking like that, young and serene, but he could still feel the warmth and safety of her arms around him, and knowing that he was losing her was more than he could bear.

  Then the bedroom door swung open and his aunts shuffled past him, clinging onto each other and not noticing him through their weeping. His father noticed him though, as he sat on the floor with his back against the wall, his shoulders shaking with the emotion that he could not control.

  “No cryin’, boy. I will not have you cryin’ like some girl. Do you understand me?”

  “Yessir,” John Henry said, his words trembling out.

  “Your mother has gone on to a better life, God rest her soul. A better life than I ever gave her. Maybe she will finally find some happiness now.” And for a moment, his father seemed to be looking right through him and into some other place. Then his eyes focused again on the frightened boy before him, and he said sternly: “Get up from there and do somethin’ to help your aunts. I don’t want to see you cryin’ anymore.”

  John Henry pushed himself up from the floor and tried to wipe the tears from his eyes without his father seeing, but Henry wasn’t looking at him, done giving what little consolation he would, and John Henry hurried past him down the hall to find his aunts. But what he wanted was to go back into that sick room, kneel down by his mother’s bed, and cry himself to sleep at her side.

  His mother would have understood, and let him cry.

  She was buried in a plot in Sunset Hill Cemetery in Valdosta, where magnolia trees shaded the sparse grass and squirrels chased across the graves. And standing by his father, hat in hand and eyes swollen from two nights of silent weeping into his pillow, John Henry felt that his own life was over as well. He’d known his mother was dying; for years he’d lived with the pain of the knowledge of it. For years he’d listened to her struggle for breath until she’d suddenly stopped breathing. No breath, no life, only an empty silence, a void in his life where she had always been, a chasm in his heart that nothing would ever fill.

  But the hardest part of his mourning was having to go back to school, knowing his mother would want him to do well in spite of his loss, knowing his father expected it. Perfect attendance and top marks were still Henry’s requirements for continued education, and John Henry had no choice but to comply, though he often found his eyes so clouded with emotion that he could hardly read the books before him. If only he could talk to someone, share the anguish of his loss, he might be able to handle it all better. But his father had ordered him not to cry, so he kept the pain inside and kept the tears to himself. And when the well-meaning Misses Sallie and Lila Varnedoe expressed their condolences and concern, he couldn’t even bring himself to thank them.

  He was still mourning his mother’s death, feeling lost and alone without her and doing poorly at school because of it, when his father stunned the family by announcing that he would be marrying again. It had been only three short months since Alice Jane had died, and though the usual mourning period of three years might be shortened if the widower had small children at home who needed tending, John Henry was fifteen-years-old and hardly a child anymore.

  “Your mother would have wanted it,” was all the explanation Henry offered his son on that cold December afternoon as he saddled a horse and rode off to marry young Rachel Martin, his neighbor’s daughter. The Reverend Newt Ousley, his mother’s minister, was to perform the ceremony—a deed that seemed nearly as disloyal as his father’s taking Rachel to wife.

  Suddenly, all those visits his father had made to the Martin’s orchard seemed sinister in retrospect, and John Henry remembered the words his Uncle James McKey had thrown at his father one hot summer night: “I hear Mr. Martin’s daughter is comely, and available. If there is anything untoward goin’ on between you and Martin’s daughter . . .” But surely, Uncle James had been wrong. Surely there had been nothing between Henry and Rachel while Alice Jane was still alive. But the hasty marriage brought rumors that rippled all across Lowndes County. Three months was hardly any time at all to mourn a beloved wife. Three months looked more like a hurried engagement before a shotgun wedding, making an honest woman out of a married man’s mistress.

  Though John Henry tried not to hear the talk in town, in the quiet of the country nights he couldn’t help but hear Rachel’s soft laughter from the room next to his own. He was old enough now to know what went on between man and wife, and the thought of Rachel in his father’s arms both fascinated and repulsed him. She was so different from his refined and cultured mother, a raw and earthy farm girl with little education and a fine lust for her new husband. But if the nights were hard for John Henry, the mornings were worse, listening to Rachel’s humming as she cooked breakfast over the big iron stove. And Henry, smug and smiling, would come out of their bedroom and look at her with satisfaction.

  It wasn’t surprising, the way they were carrying on, when Rachel became pregnant. And though she miscarried that baby and then another one, she vowed that she would keep trying until she gave her husband a new son—a pleasure that John Henry secretly prayed she would never have. Henry Holliday already had a son to whom he paid little enough attention as it was.

  But John Henry didn’t have long to suffer feeling like an intruder in his father’s honeymoon cottage, for Henry took a sudden desire to rid himself of the farm and move into town. The cotton crop was failing again, he complained, and business in Valdosta was starting to pick up at last. So the Hollidays sold off some of the plantation land and bought a town house across from the railroad tracks on Savannah Avenue, and just down the road from the store where Henry set out to sell buggies for a living. When the buggies sold well, he signed on as a dealer of tickets in the Georgia State Lottery, and soon he was able to buy his new wife a whole new set of furniture and some pretty new clothes to go with it. Life was good again for Henry Holliday, and John Henry wondered if his father ever even thought about Alice Jane anymore, or remembered that he still had a son who needed him.

  Chapter Five

  VALDOSTA, 1868

  THE HOLLIDAY HOUSE ON SAVANNAH AVENUE WAS TYPICAL OF ITS time and place: a single-storied wooden structure, clapboard-sided and shuttered at long windows, with two bedrooms, a parlor, and a dining room that doubled as a winter kitchen. The floors throughout were wide-planked Georgia heart pine, the plaster walls white-washed, the mantels and moldings Tung-oiled until they shined. The front door, with its sixpaned glass transom and double panels, opened onto a wide front porch that looked over the fenced-yard toward the railroad tracks and the town beyond. Flowers bloomed along the dirt walk that led from the house to the road, and the well in the front yard was shaded by a neatly painted well-house. Altogether it was a pleasant home, as pretty as its mistress, and a place that John Henry stayed away from as much as possible.

  Not that anyone noticed his absence. It seemed that nobody noticed John Henry Holliday these days, or cared that he started staying out later than he should, coming home w
ith a trace of whiskey on his breath. His mother would have noticed and scolded him into repentance, warning him against friends who drank liquor and bet money on cards and made trouble for the town, even if they were all sons of fine Confederate families. But John Henry found them to be good company, still loyal to the Cause, still spoiling for a chance to beat the Billy Yanks who were running their town.

  The Federals were back in force after Georgia had refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment aimed at granting the former slaves full rights as citizens of the United States. Coloreds were, after all, naturally inferior to Whites, and lacking the mental and spiritual judgment that citizenship required. So although the Fourteenth Amendment had already been passed by a majority vote in the North, the Southern Democrats were morally opposed to it.

  With the renewed flood of Federal soldiers came a greedy band of northern politicians, ready to reap a profit off the Yankee occupation. They offered to pay forty acres and a mule to any black man who voted Republican—the forty acres stolen, of course, from the broken-up plantations of the former slave owners. “Carpetbaggers,” folks called those thieving Yankee politicians, saying it like a cussword, and considered them to be only slightly above the turncoat Southern scum called “Scalawags” who sold out their own people to curry the favor of the Yanks. In those turbulent times the Ku Klux Klan arose to protect the rights of white southerners, and Negro Loyal Leagues were formed to defend the newly given rights of former slaves. On both sides of that Fourteenth Amendment battlefield tempers were running so hot it seemed the War might just catch fire all over again.

  Some of those fiery tempers belonged to the hot-headed young men who called themselves “Vigilantes,” sworn to uphold the honor of the South. Though their actions put them somewhere outside the law, their names ran like a roster of some of the finest families in Valdosta: Jack Calhoun, Alex Darnell, Ben Smith, J.J. Rambo—good boys all of them, as long as they weren’t pushed too far and they weren’t drinking too much. But the Yankees were pushing hard, and there was always plenty of whiskey flowing when the Vigilantes got together amid the shipping crates and flour barrels in the back room of Griffin’s general store. Mr. Griffin himself was too busy to pay much attention to what went on back there, as long as the place was left clean and no dry goods disappeared. Only his seventeen-year-old son Sam, who fancied himself a Vigilante too, knew what plans those boys were making. Only Sam, and his pal John Henry Holliday, who spent every afternoon playing cards with the Vigilantes and besting them over and over again at Spanish Monte.

  “Damn you, Holliday!” Alex Darnell cursed, “I’d shoot you for a card cheat if I could figure out how you’re cheatin’!”

  “He ain’t cheatin’!” Sam Griffin said, springing to his friend’s defense. “He’s just better than you, that’s all. Learned it from his Pa’s Mexican servant-boy before the War, ain’t that right, John Henry?”

  “Francisco taught me some things,” John Henry agreed. “But even if I was cheatin’, Alex would never know it. He’s too busy swiggin’ that bottle to pay attention to the hands like he ought.”

  “You talk mighty bold for a youngster,” Alex said darkly, though he was only a few years past being a youngster himself. “You might just stay a youngster forever, if I get anymore sick of listenin’ to your chatter.”

  “Cool down, Alex,” Jack Calhoun cautioned. “You get to fightin’ here, and Mr. Griffin will ask us to find somewhere else to do our drinkin’, and I for one would miss this fine view.”

  The fine view to which Jack referred was a clear sight through the open freight doors of the storeroom and into the alleyway behind. For though the alley was just a muddy track overgrown with weeds and over-hung with shaggy pines, it offered privacy from prying Yankee eyes—and privacy was what plans like theirs demanded.

  “Now y’all listen up,” Jack Calhoun went on, “the time’s comin’, soon enough, and we’ve got to be prepared. There’s a big political rally comin’ at the Courthouse for a carpetbagger runnin’ for United States Congress. Seems to me like we ought to give him a warm welcome, show him what we think of his tellin’ Yankee lies around Valdosta.”

  “Welcome him?” Alex Darnell asked. “Seems more like we ought to chase him out of town.”

  Jack Calhoun shook his head, a weary young War veteran burdened with leading a pack of ignorant, hotheaded boys. But those boys were old enough to load a gun and fire it, and plenty willing to fight with him against the Yankees who had beaten him and murdered his best friend, Dick Force.

  “Chasin’s too good for Mr. J. W. Clift,” Jack replied, “stirrin’ up these nigras to vote for him, tellin’ ‘em how the Yankees saved ‘em, how they owe their salvation to the Republican government. Forty acres and a mule! Might as well promise ‘em the moon!”

  “So what are we gonna do?” Ben Smith asked, “if chasin’ him out of town’s too good?”

  Jack Calhoun took a slow look around the storeroom, his eyes resting for a moment on each of his listeners, before going on in hushed, unhurried tones.

  “I’ve been thinkin’,” he said, “‘bout how easy it would be to set a charge of gunpowder under those Courthouse steps, light it up just when Mr. Carpetbagger Clift starts makin’ his speech. There’s enough space under the steps to set a keg, I reckon.”

  “A keg!” Sam Griffin gasped. “But that much powder could kill somebody! We don’t want to make a murder, do we?”

  “We may have to make a murder,” Jack answered, “to make the point. They won’t be sendin’ no more Yanks to Valdosta after we send this one home in bits and pieces. ‘Course, the Courthouse will take it pretty hard in the blast. But hell, what’s one building compared to what the Yanks have done to us?”

  They all knew full well that sending one Yankee home all rearranged would only bring more fighting to their town—but fighting was what they wanted.

  “So who’s in?” Jack asked. “I want to know right now. Anybody who’s out, get out now before I say anymore.”

  Alex Darnell was the first to break the answering silence. “My father’s got a fresh stock of horses, if murder’s what it comes to. We can all ride out of town as soon as the place goes up. With the commotion it’ll be awhile before anyone comes lookin’ for us.”

  “And where’ll we go, if we do have to run?” J.J. Rambo asked. “They’d look down by the river, where Dick hid out. I don’t mind killin’ a few Yanks, but I don’t relish gettin’ killed myself.”

  “We could go to Texas,” John Henry suggested, as he sat on a crate of dry goods and counted up his penny-ante Monte winnings. “My father was there in the Mexican War. He’s told me about it a hundred times at least. I could get us there without any trouble at all.” At sixteen-years-old he was the youngest of the Vigilantes, but he reckoned that he ought to be able to add his say.

  “The hell you could!” Alex Darnell said. “I wouldn’t follow a youngster like you to Sunday School, let alone all the way to Texas!”

  “Why don’t we just shoot Mr. Congressman when he gets off the train?” Ben Smith asked, raising an imaginary pistol. “I could hide out in the trees on the other side of Ashley Street just like a sharpshooter.”

  “And get yourself caught before he’d even hit the ground,” Jack Calhoun pointed out. “No, it’s got to be the explosion that does it. That way we’ve got the smoke and noise to cover our work. Besides, blowin’ up the Courthouse makes a statement to the Yanks, like I said.”

  “We still haven’t settled on where we’ll ride off to,” said Sam Griffin. “Alex’s horses won’t do us much good if we ain’t got no place to go.”

  “How about my father’s farm?” John Henry said. Though he was disappointed that the boys hadn’t gone for the idea of Texas, a romantic and adventurous destination, the remaining portion of his father’s plantation property was far enough out to make a good stopping place. “It’s past Cat Creek. There’s nothin’ around for miles, and I know all the trails through the woods.”

  “S
ounds good,” Jack Calhoun said with a nod. “If it comes to runnin’, we’ll take Alex’s horses and make a run for Major Holliday’s farm. You sure your father won’t mind us using his place for a hide out?”

  “My father doesn’t give a damn what I do,” John Henry said sullenly. “Does anybody have any more whiskey? I need another lick.”

  “You better stop that drinkin’ for a while,” Jack advised. “You’ll need your wits about you, if you’re playin’ mole.”

  “Playin’ what?” he asked, bewildered.

  “Mole,” Alex Darnell said under his breath, “underground varmint. Just a low-down card cheat . . .”

  “I said that’s enough, Alex,” Jack Calhoun warned again. “Mole’s the one who goes underground, finding out what we’re not supposed to know. I figure your bein’ Major Holliday’s son, you know your away around that Courthouse. Be easy enough for you to wander around without gettin’ noticed.”

  “Not as easy as it used to be,” John Henry said, “since my father’s not Agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau any more. You know they let all the local men go, once Martial Law come back around.”

  “Even so, folks are used to seein’ your face around there. Won’t seem too strange to have you back around again, snoopin’ a little.”

  “All right,” John Henry nodded. “So what do you want me to find out?”

  “Particulars about Mr. Carpetbagger Clift. When he’s comin’ to town, when he’s gonna make his speech. We’ll wait to move on your information.”

  “Sounds to me like everything hangs on Holliday,” Alex Darnell complained. “What if he gets it wrong, and it’s one of our boys who’s on the speaker’s platform? I don’t like trustin’ so much to a youngster, let alone a card cheatin’ one.”