American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “Uh, sure… that sounds great, Mrs. Beaumont,” replied Seth.

  When they were seated alone, Seth glanced out toward the stables, then turned to Veronica. “I thought maybe you would like to go for a ride,” he said.

  “In your buggy—oh, yes… that sounds wonderful.”

  “I meant on horseback. I brought a saddle with me, and that’s why I came with Red Flame.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The thoroughbred there,” said Seth, pointing to his horse where she stood tied to a rail. “She’s my favorite riding horse. Almost the minute she was born, my father knew there was something special about her. You can sometimes tell about horses that way. And he was right.”

  Jarvis appeared with their drinks.

  “Well, I can’t tell one horse from another,” said Veronica when the butler disappeared. “I can’t see why people give them such odd names. A horse is just… a horse. No one goes around naming their cows or their pigs.”

  A look of shock came to Seth’s face. How could anyone compare horses to cows and pigs!

  “A horse isn’t just a horse,” he said, “it’s a horse—one of the most noble and magnificent creatures that walks the earth. I love horses. That’s why people give them such personal names, because they love them.”

  Veronica shrugged and sipped at her lemonade. It all sounded rather juvenile and rustic.

  “So… do you want to?” Seth asked again.

  “Want to what?”

  “Go for a ride… on horseback.”

  “Oh, ugh… no. I don’t like to ride horses. It’s so smelly and sweaty and they make such foul noises and messes.”

  “That’s all part of what makes it so wonderful!” laughed Seth. “We’ll go real slow and I’ll show you how to enjoy riding. Your father must have a horse you like better and feel more comfortable on than the rest. Come on!”

  Seth rose enthusiastically and tried to encourage Veronica to her feet.

  “Seth,” she said firmly, “I really don’t want to change my clothes, after I went to all this trouble to dress up because I knew you were coming, and then go get on the back of a horse just to ride around for no reason. I don’t like it. I’ve only been on a horse twice, and then because my father made me when I was a girl. I hated it and I told him so. I’d much rather sit here and talk. What did you want to come visit for—to see our horses, or to see me?”

  “Well… to see you, of course,” said Seth. He sat down, feeling a little mystified. “I just thought—”

  “That’s all right. I forgive you,” said Veronica playfully. “You didn’t know.”

  Seth took a gulp of his lemonade.

  “Do you like my dress, Seth?” asked Veronica, trying to catch his eye with a smile intended to make him forget horses and concentrate on what quiet talks on porches between young men and young women were supposed to be about.

  “Yeah… yeah, it’s great.”

  “It’s the latest fashion. It’s from Paris.”

  “Yeah… it’s really nice. All the way from Paris, huh?”

  “So is my bonnet… and my shoes. Mother and I bought them down in Charlotte last month. They were very expensive.”

  “What were you doing in Charlotte?” asked Seth.

  “Shopping.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Of course not, silly. Mother takes me shopping twice a year.”

  Seth took another drink from his glass. Veronica glanced inside. What was keeping her mother? Seth was starting to look bored.

  “Do you like this color on me, Seth?” said Veronica, trying to keep the conversation going the only way most people know how, by talking about themselves. “Daddy says red makes me look pretty. What do you think?”

  “Uh… yeah, sure—it looks great on you.”

  “Do you think red makes me look pretty, Seth?”

  “Uh, yeah… sure.”

  The sound of the door opening from the house brought inner sighs of relief to both, though for very different reasons.

  “I am sorry to bother you, dear,” said Lady Daphne, “but poor Mildred is just getting well and I wanted to take some fresh bread to her, but I am not feeling well. Would you mind terribly, Veronica, taking it down to their place?”

  “Of course not, Mother,” said Veronica sweetly. “Seth, why don’t you come with me? We can walk by the river.”

  “Uh… sure, I guess that would be fine.”

  “I will get it,” said Veronica’s mother, then disappeared again into the house. She returned a moment later and handed a basket to Veronica. A brief glance passed between them, though Seth did not see it.

  As Veronica and Seth left the porch, Seth spoke up.

  “Here, let me carry that for you.”

  “Oh, thank you—what a gentleman you are,” Veronica replied, batting her eyelashes again.

  “Who’s Mildred?” asked Seth as they walked.

  “One of the slave women.”

  “It’s nice how you treat your workers,” he said. “That’s the way my parents are too. This is just the kind of thing my mother would do.”

  Meanwhile, a mile away on another part of the estate, Denton Beaumont walked toward the scene of labor where his assistant overseer was supervising ten or twelve slaves in loading several wagons. He watched for a minute or two, hardly satisfied with what he saw, then approached.

  “I see Gibbons isn’t doing much better,” he said.

  “How do you mean, Mr. Beaumont?” said the white man.

  “You know good and well what I mean, Riggs,” retorted Beaumont. “Look at him—he’s the slowest of the lot by half. Have you been using the whip on him?”

  “I haven’t beaten him again, no, sir,” replied Leon Riggs. He thought it best not to add that he didn’t have the heart, and that the man had still not seemed to fully recover from the merciless whipping Beaumont had inflicted two years before that had been so unceremoniously cut short by the intervention of his neighbor. Leon did not consider himself a particularly compassionate man where darkies were concerned, but there was a point beyond which the whip was useless. Nor did he want murder on his conscience.

  Beaumont, however, sensed the reason for the man’s hesitation. Whenever a man couldn’t return his icy stare he knew he was getting soft. He had seen it before.

  “Give me that whip!” he yelled, snatching it from Leon’s hand. “No sense you holding it if you can’t use it. There’s only one thing lazy niggers like Gibbons understand.”

  He stomped off. The next sounds Leon Riggs heard came from the stinging lashes of the tiny leather thong-ends of the whip slicing into Nate Gibbons’ shoulders and back with devilish precision. Riggs did his best to close his ears to the cries of pain and screams for mercy, but he could not. For a few moments he stood like a statue, eyes on the ground. The vicious sounds of the whip, however, proved too much even for his iron stomach. Finally he swallowed hard and took a few steps away.

  Within a minute or two the flogging was over.

  Beaumont instructed several of the slaves to carry Gibbons to the creek, wash him off and revive him, then get back to work, him along with the rest of them. That Gibbons was hardly in any condition to lift his own legs, much less hundred-pound sacks of grain up onto the wagon, was a point neither they nor Riggs himself felt like raising. It was as painful to the overseer as it was to those under his charge to watch Nate Gibbons struggling for the rest of the day to carry the sacks to the wagon and hoist them up when it was all he could do to keep from collapsing.

  But Riggs dared not intervene for fear Beaumont could well appear again unannounced and take the whip to him instead if he saw anything he didn’t like.

  As they walked beside the river, Veronica slipped her hand into Seth’s arm and drew close to him. His pulse quickened. He knew his parents wouldn’t approve of his being alone with her like this. But since they were doing a good deed, he hoped it would be okay.

  Seth noticed a few trout lazily swimming in the
shallower parts of the river. Gradually Veronica slowed their pace yet the more.

  “What will you do, Seth,” she said, “when you become master of Greenwood?”

  “What kind of a question is that?” he laughed. “I am only eighteen. I won’t worry about that for another twenty or thirty years!”

  “But you will take over sometime.”

  “I suppose, but—”

  “Will you have slaves, or will you…” She allowed her voice to trail off.

  “Do you mean will I continue my father’s policies or become a slave owner myself?”

  “It is something a girl, even one who has just turned eighteen herself, might like to know if she…”

  Again Veronica let him guess what she had been about to say. She glanced down momentarily, then peeked out at him from the corners of her eyes with a bewitching smile.

  “As for my father’s former slaves,” he said, “they are free now and there is nothing I could do to change that even if I wanted to. But to answer your question, I would not buy new slaves and I have no intention of becoming a slave owner. I think what my mother and father did took great courage and I support their decision entirely. I only hope I can learn to be as courageous a man as my father.”

  What she thought of such a soupy sentiment, Veronica chose to keep to herself.

  “And your mother?” she asked.

  “What about her?”

  “They say she spends as much time with the slaves as she does at home. That hardly seems right.”

  “She is trying to help them, improve their lives, teach them to read and do things for themselves that they have never learned to do.”

  “My father says it is illegal to teach slaves to read.”

  “I know, but it shouldn’t be.”

  “Isn’t your mother afraid of being arrested?”

  “I’ve never heard her mention it. No one would dare.”

  “It still doesn’t seem proper or dignified.”

  “My parents don’t just want their slaves to be free, they want to help them mature as people who can live at a higher level, and who can grow and develop… as people.”

  Veronica listened with a blank expression. What on earth was he babbling about with those words—mature and grow and develop? She tried to listen politely, but this was certainly not what she had contrived to get Seth alone beside the river for!

  “My mother is a natural-born teacher,” Seth was going on. “She was always teaching Thomas and me things. No matter what would come up when we were young, she would use it as an occasion to give us a little insight or a tidbit of history or something. It was wonderful. My mother made life so interesting that it could never be boring. She is the same with the black ladies and their children. If she doesn’t help them learn things, who will? They will never learn to read otherwise. She can teach anyone to read! There are few things that give her so much joy as to see the light of learning come alive in a child’s or an adult’s face. And when the coloreds read the Bible for themselves… it gives them such a feeling of worth. Maybe that’s the answer to your question of why she is at the colored village so much of the time. There is so much exciting and important work for her to do there.”

  “Exciting?” repeated Veronica with a bewildered look on her face. “What in the world are you talking about, Seth?”

  “Don’t you think learning and teaching and discovering new things is exciting?”

  “I’ve certainly never thought of it that way. I think it’s boring. Surely God didn’t intend for coloreds to read, especially read the Bible.”

  Seth looked at her in disbelief.

  “What are you saying?” he said. “Why not?”

  “The Bible is for white people. Everyone knows that.”

  “The Jews and Arabs, who are the people of the Bible, were people of the desert. They had dark skin. Jesus himself might have been more dark than white. The Bible is for everyone.”

  “But surely… Negroes are different.”

  “How?”

  “You know… they don’t have… they’re not as smart. They’re inferior to whites. They’re not supposed to learn and read and do all the same things we do.”

  The look of disbelief on Seth’s face grew to incredulity. He stopped and stared at her for a few long seconds. Unconsciously Veronica removed her hand from his arm. She could hardly return his stare.

  “Veronica,” he said after a moment, “that’s absurd. It’s absolutely untrue!”

  Her eyes flashed. An angry reply rushed to her lips, but she had the presence of mind to stifle it rather than make this momentary breach between them more serious.

  There was a long and somewhat tense silence. Gradually they began walking again, this time a little apart from one another.

  “Do you support everything your parents do?” Veronica asked after a minute or two.

  “I support them,” replied Seth, “the people they are. I consider my father a wise man. I consider my mother a wise woman. To me, that says everything. I may occasionally disagree with something one of my parents says. That doesn’t change my respect for them.”

  “What have you disagreed with?” asked Veronica.

  “I don’t know. I can’t think of anything at the moment. I don’t look for things to disagree with them about, but to agree with.”

  “And you agreed with his freeing of the slaves?”

  “Absolutely!” replied Seth. “The same will come to every plantation eventually, even your father’s. Slavery cannot possibly survive much longer.”

  Veronica took in his words without further comment in that direction. She was going to have to make more changes in Seth than she had realized.

  Thirty-six

  The night was black and silent.

  Suddenly Lucindy Eaton felt a big fleshy hand clamp down over her lips. At the same instant a voice sounded at her ear.

  “Lucindy, hit’s time,” whispered Amaritta. “You gots ter git yo’ young’un wifout makin’a soun’. Da two bigger chilluns is already gone. Be down ter da washin’ place by da creek in five minutes. You come wif da baby. Git one change er clothes fo’ you an’ dem an all what da baby needs an’ dat’s all.”

  On noiseless feet the housekeeper left the tiny cabin and was gone. Again it was black and silent. As Lucindy came further awake she wondered if it was a dream. But feeling about, she found that Broan and Rebecca were gone. With heart pounding, she rose quietly and gathered what Amaritta had said. Three minutes later, clutching her still-sleeping two year old to her breast, she stole from the cabin into the night.

  When she reached the creek, Amaritta stood with her two shivering and confused older children. But after Amaritta’s stern adjurations to silence, neither uttered a peep.

  “I’s leab you here now, Lucindy, chil’,” said Amaritta. “You ’member dat da good Lor’ is wif you, and ’dat he guides all his chillun to da promised lan’.”

  From the shadows a figure now appeared. Lucindy could not at first even tell if it was a man or a woman.

  “Who dat?” she asked.

  “Dat be yo’ conductor,” replied Amaritta. “You be gittin’ on dat train now an’ you don’t need ter know nuthin’ mo’ dan ter do what he sez. He’ll take you ter da firs’ station. An’ ’member, chil’, effen anythin’ happens an’ you lose yo’ way, you jes’ look up—you see dat pan dere, an’ dat handle up in da sky? Dat’s da drinking’ gord, an’ dat star at da en’er its handle, dat’s da Norf Star, an’ hit’s always pointin’ norf. So effen you gits los’ you just keep walkin’ tard dat star like da ol’ song sez.”

  She leaned forward and kissed Lucindy on the cheek.

  “Good-bye, chil’,” she said, then turned and disappeared, tears in her eyes that Lucindy would never know about, leaving Lucindy and her three children alone with the mysterious conductor in the night.*

  Thirty-seven

  Dinner at Oakbriar several days later had to be delayed for thirty minutes while they awaited the return of
husband and father, along with Wyatt, who had been out all afternoon with several of their men. Denton Beaumont had been unsuccessfully looking for a runaway who had been gone for six hours. He was dirty and tired, and consequently when he sat down his mood was surly.

  As the family sat down and two silent attendant house slaves began to serve them, the discussion took an unexpected turn.

  “What would you think, Mother,” said Veronica, “of you and I going down to our slave village and teaching the colored women to read?”

  There was a twinkle of fun in her eye as she sneaked a glance at her father to see his reaction.

  “Whatever for, dear?” responded Lady Daphne.

  “To help them mature and develop as people, Mother,” replied Veronica in an earnest tone, her face staring across the table with a wide expression of innocence.

  Now the heads of the three male Beaumonts also turned toward her. She stared back blankly at her father, than glanced innocently at Wyatt, as if to convey, “What… why are you looking at me so?”

  “What kind of nonsense are you talking about, Veronica?” said her father at last, looking out from under cloudy black eyebrows.

  “I only wanted to know what Mama would think of us trying to help the slaves improve themselves.”

  “Why… I think it’s a wonderful idea, dear,” said Lady Daphne at last. “But I don’t know the first thing about teaching someone to read. We’d have to find out what to do.”

  “Don’t take her seriously, Mother,” said Wyatt in his deep bass voice. “She’s making sport of us. I can tell. She doesn’t mean it for a minute.”

  At that, Veronica burst out in a giggle.

  “How did you know, Wyatt!” she laughed.

  “Well, for one thing, it’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. For another it’s against the law. Father would be sure to get defeated if we did something like that. And for another, I know you wouldn’t lift a finger to help anyone else unless there was something in it for you.”

  “That’s a mean thing to say!” she shot back, pretending to pout, although in truth she did not see anything so derisive in his assessment.

  “That doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” rejoined her brother.