by Gen LaGreca
Where there is despair, let me sow hope;
Where there is darkness, let me sow light;
Where there is sadness, let me sow joy.
Lord, make me an instrument to sow good.
Where there is ignorance, let me sow wisdom;
Where there is strife, let me sow calm;
Where there is death, let me sow life.
The words seemed to hold a special meaning for Tom. His eyes again traveled through the trees to the red building with the white door. Was the latch closed tightly? Was the item inside safely out of sight of any curious glances? What would he sow with it? he wondered, as Wylie Barnwell took the podium to give the eulogy.
Greenbriar’s state senator and prosperous planter walked imperially. With a rich baritone voice that matched his imposing presence, he gave a moving account of Polly’s kind and generous nature. He described how his sister-in-law’s slaves loved her and cared for her during her long illness and ultimate passing from consumption. Tom noticed many of Polly’s slaves weeping, giving truth to the senator’s words. He also heard the hushed sounds of Rachel and her mother crying near him.
“My brother would have been proud to know that after his untimely death, his young wife confidently seized the reins of the plantation he had recently purchased. With not the firm hand of a man but the gentle touch of her gender, she worked the rich soil on the bluffs, the great gift from the silt deposits of the mighty Mississippi, to produce some of the finest cotton crops in the country—and the world. Now, twenty-four years later, the Crossroads Plantation that she so lovingly tended is her gift to pass on to a new owner.”
The heir to the plantation looked directly at Ted Cooper, a prominent planter in the area. Tom knew that the senator hoped Cooper would purchase the place. At a youthful fifty, Cooper stood out in the crowd. He had the sun-bleached hair, lean frame, and ruddy complexion of a planter still active at his work and looking for new opportunities. With sharply intelligent brown eyes and a shrewd half-smile, he subtly nodded at Barnwell in response.
Tom noticed that Bret Markham was also looking at Cooper. The overseer appeared uneasy, as if he himself were at a crossroads, with his fate hanging on a new owner’s pleasure.
Tom’s thoughts again wandered down the hill: Was he at a crossroads too? he wondered.
The preacher ended the ceremony with the same thought he had used to start it: “Remember, my brethren, what you do today, you are judged by in eternity. Live a life of honor and fear not your final day of reckoning.”
Tom wondered if he would reach the reckoning he sought: recognition and reward for his work on a dream that was the reason he lived. He so keenly yearned for such a day that he was unaware of the evasive eyes and lowered faces of others who heard the preacher’s words, planters who shot somber glances at the slaves.
Four field hands gently lowered the casket into the ground. The guests gathered flowers that had been brought there and placed on a nearby table, and then they filed past the grave and dropped the blooms on the casket in a final farewell.
Rachel didn’t throw all of her flowers on her aunt’s coffin. She kept a few and offered some of them to her mother. “For Leanna,” she said.
Charlotte shook her head. “You go ahead, dear. I’ll wait for you in the carriage. The air here makes me ill.”
Tom accompanied Rachel to the smallest headstone in the burial grounds. It was sculpted in the form of a winged baby kneeling with her head bent and her hands covering her face. The cherub seemed to be crying at a sad turn of fate. When Rachel placed her flowers at the statue’s feet, Tom read the inscription on the stone: Leanna. Stillborn daughter of Charlotte and Wiley Barnwell.
“Is this the sister you told me about?” Tom asked softly.
“That’s Leanna.” She nodded sadly. “I often wondered what it would’ve been like if she had lived. It got frightfully lonely for me growing up here.” She glanced at the countryside, where the plantations carved out of it were often a mile or more apart. Tom looked sympathetically at Charlotte and Wiley’s only surviving child. “I had a doll I called Sis, and I would laugh with her and whisper secrets in her ear.” She smiled at the recollection. “Leanna was only two years younger. If she had lived, I just know we would’ve been the best of friends.”
Rachel bowed her head wistfully before the little angel. Tom put a comforting arm around her shoulder.
* * * * *
The sun hung low amid the gangly oaks when guests gathered outside the big house for refreshments after the ceremony. The house stood high on a bluff outside the town of Greenbriar. A few simple planks for the entrance steps, a cypress gallery wrapping around paneled doors and windows, and a dormered roof displayed the home’s modest beginnings as an English cottage. The train-like additions to the structure, the lacy wrought-iron railings, and the marble statuary around a formal front garden reflected the prosperity that the little cottage had realized through the years.
The silverware and china bore the flowery initials—PB—of the plantation’s deceased mistress. The reception, with generous trays of food and fine spirits that were circulated among well-dressed guests who spoke in subdued voices, was a study in elegance and refinement. On the other side of the hill, out of view, were the slaves’ cabins.
As life has a way of indomitably asserting itself, conversations turned from memories of the deceased to affairs of the living. Sipping punch with Rachel, her mother, and a few powdery-faced matrons with rosy cheeks, Tom looked distracted as they talked about their gardens and households.
When he felt he had conversed long enough to be courteous, he put down his punch cup and excused himself. Rachel looked disappointed as he walked away. He was heading toward the place dominating his thoughts, the old carriage house, when he heard his name called.
“Say, Tom.” It was Wiley Barnwell, leaning over the gallery. “Come here, my boy.”
Tom smiled, trying to hide his impatience at having his departure delayed. In two strides, he climbed the six steps to the veranda, where the senator stood with Nash Nottingham and Ted Cooper under a cloud of cigar smoke. Tom nodded in greeting to the men.
“Have you heard about Royal Cluster, the new seed that Millbank in Woodville is selling?” Barnwell asked Tom.
“The one mentioned in the Cotton Almanac?”
“That one, indeed. Royal Cluster’s supposed to come off the boll easier than Sugar Loaf or Brown’s Prolific.”
“It’s worth trying,” said Tom.
“Got myself ten bushels, and while I was at it, ordered five for you.”
“That’s very nice of you, Senator. How much do I owe you?”
“Nothing at all, my boy. It’s a gift to the son of my best friend.” He put a hand over his heart. “May he rest in peace.”
“Why, thank you. That’s very kind of you, sir.”
“’Twasn’t easy for you, coming back here after the colonel’s passing,” said Barnwell. “You did a mighty fine job.”
Tom felt pleased too with the job he had done in the past eighteen months since his father’s death.
Greenbriar’s scorching summers made possible the heaven-white cotton that gave planters their fortunes, but the torrid climate also brought hellish diseases that made death a palpable presence in every household. With Tom’s mother and only sibling, a brother, snatched from him years ago by yellow fever, and with his father the more recent prey of typhoid, Tom became the sole heir to the two properties of Colonel Peter Edmunton. One was Indigo Springs, the family’s cotton plantation with more than one hundred slaves. The other was the Edmunton Bank, a private concern in the seamy port town of Bayou Redbird, just down the bluff from Greenbriar. Tom’s father had found a business opportunity in the place where the sprawling bayou met the great Mississippi River. There crops were hauled in steamboats to New Orleans for shipment to mills in New England and Europe. Ship after ship stacked thirty feet high with cotton bales brought high finance to the port town and its local bank, so Tom
’s father had done well. But Tom’s interests lay elsewhere.
After heading to Philadelphia for school at the age of fourteen, then remaining to live and work there, Tom remembered how reluctant he had been to return home when his father died. Now, after eighteen months, two demanding cotton harvests, untold sleepless nights spent learning the intricacies of banking and farming, much faltering, and constant exhausting work, he felt pleased with the results. The plantation and bank were doing well, and he was able to resume work on an endeavor that consumed him, a project he had begun in Philadelphia and taken home with him and whose outcome now stood in a small building behind the big house. He looked out at the lush landscape of his childhood with the pride of someone who had found a challenge beyond the countryside and met it.
He smiled at the seasoned planter who had mentored him like a son. “You’ve been very helpful, Senator. I’m much obliged. I’ll try the new seed on ten acres of my richest soil.”
“Wiley, I do believe you rescued this boy from the Yankees,” said Cooper.
Barnwell laughed, puffing a fresh smoke ring into the air. “I reckon he’s now a fine planter.” Barnwell slapped Tom on the back. “A hard worker. And smart too!”
Tom inclined his head in gratitude.
“Yup, Tom’s gonna do well here, growin’ cotton and runnin’ our bank. He’ll make a good family man too.”
Tom wondered how many more ways the senator could show encouragement of his courtship of Rachel.
His rival apparently got the same impression, because Nash Nottingham frowned, his cigar pausing in midmotion toward his mouth. “Maybe one day Tom’ll even stop soundin’ like a Yankee and talk like us again,” he drawled.
After a dozen years in the North, Tom had lost all trace of his Southern accent.
“And what about you?” Barnwell turned to Nash as if just noticing him. “Are you fixing to try the new seed too? And maybe plowing and composting this year with some vigor? Your father, rest his soul, would be shocked to see you depletin’ his soil almost as fast as you’re depletin’ his money.”
Nash bristled at the upbraid; then, like a cunning salesman responding to a skeptic, he raised his head higher and spoke louder. “I like to leave the particulars to the overseer, Senator. And with all due respect, sir, I’m fixing to raise a mighty good crop this year, as I believe you will see.”
Cooper pointed to one of the fields partly visible through the oaks. “I could try the new seed on that fresh-tilled land out there.” He looked at Barnwell. “That is, if we come to an agreement.”
“Tom,” said Barnwell, “Ted here is interested in expanding his holdings.”
“The Crossroads could be a fine addition to the land I have now,” said Cooper. “I say a man can never have too many fields to sow or too much money to reap. And I intend to reap a harvest fit for the good Lord himself.”
“Fit for the devil, I’d say!” quipped Barnwell. “The Crossroads, added to your other holdings, would give you enough cotton-growin’ land to clothe a small country!”
“Unlike virtue, an excess of money never reaches the point of pain. The more you have, the better it feels.” Cooper grinned. He had the swagger of many men who had acquired heady fortunes from the fertile banks of the Mississippi at the peak of cotton’s reign.
“Cooper would sell his own mother for a sack of gold,” said Barnwell.
“Not just gold. Silver’d do too,” replied Cooper.
Barnwell laughed heartily, then turned to Tom.
“Ted will need a little cash to make improvements. You know, get the Crossroads running just like he wants. I suggested we talk to you.”
Although the New Orleans cotton factors—the brokers who sold the planters’ crops to the manufacturing markets in the Northeast and Europe—often advanced money or supplies to their clients during the growing season, the Edmunton Bank also made loans to planters, as well as to shopkeepers, yeoman farmers, and other enterprising townspeople. Through the years, Colonel Edmunton had nurtured the local planters’ business, developing a solid relationship with them.
“Your daddy and I did business many times,” said Cooper. “He gave me good terms, and I must say, he always bet on a winner in me.”
Tom considered the matter. “I’m sure we can discuss that. The land here would make excellent collateral for a loan.”
“Why no,” said Cooper, “this land, like all my properties, would be mortgaged to the hilt. How do you think I expand, boy?”
“Oh? Well, then you can certainly feel free to use your securities to cover the loan, Mr. Cooper.”
“That’s Yankee talk,” said Cooper, sweeping his hand to dismiss the notion. “Here we keep our money in slaves. I’ve got plenty of them to put up.”
Tom studied him for a long moment. “I’m afraid I don’t accept people as collateral.”
His words stunned the other men into an awkward silence.
Finally Cooper replied. “I didn’t say people; I said slaves.”
“And I said what I said.”
“And you’re fixing to do business here?” pressed Cooper.
“I am doing business here.”
Cooper glared at Tom, pointing two cigar-holding fingers in the younger man’s face. “Listen, boy, your daddy made loans like I’m proposing many times. Many, many times.”
“But my father isn’t here, Mr. Cooper. I am.”
Barnwell broke the sudden tension in the air with a friendly laugh. “You might allow me to teach you something about the banking business too, Tom,” he said with fatherly affection. “You’ve been gone so long that those Yankees got to you. But you learn quick. We’ll discuss the matter when you get back from your travels.”
“I declare, it seems you just got here. Going away already?” Nash looked hopeful.
“Only for a few weeks,” Tom replied pointedly, as if to dash any romantic designs his rival might entertain in his absence.
“Tom’s headed to the North,” added Barnwell.
“It escapes me how anyone would want to go where the weather’s cold, the folks are nasty, and the factories are smelly.” Nash turned to Tom. “Can’t stay away, can you?”
“Tom’s got something he’s bringing to Philadelphia,” said Barnwell. “To a contest. That so, boy?”
“Yes.”
“In fact, the thing happens to be right here at the Crossroads,” Barnwell explained. “Tom was fixing to take his trip today, but when he told us he wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral, and Rachel looked so gloomy, I suggested we bring it here, so he could attend the service, then board a steamer with it first thing tomorrow and get to Philadelphia in time for his engagement.”
Tom was grateful to the senator for his suggestion. To please Rachel, he had arranged to postpone his departure until after the funeral. Since the Crossroads was only three miles from the steamboat docks, whereas his plantation was an additional four miles away, he had agreed to bring his cargo here, then continue down to Bayou Redbird with it in the morning.
“What exactly is this thing?” asked Cooper.
Tom hesitated.
“I hauled it here with me so Tom could spend some time patching things up with Rachel in the carriage, but I don’t know much about it. I’m mighty curious,” Barnwell said, hinting.
“Actually, I hadn’t planned to say much about it yet, Senator.”
“Oh, come now, Tom,” Barnwell continued jovially, “if things go as you’re hoping, you’ll need customers, won’t you?”
Tom considered the matter.
“You might be looking at your first prospects right here. And if we like it, why, we’ll tell everybody else up and down the Mississippi and bring you a whole mess o’ business.”
Tom smiled, grateful that the senator wanted to help him. He told himself that such assistance from a prominent man should be encouraged.
“Okay, gentlemen, I’ll show it to you, if you’re interested.”
“It’s in the old carriage house.” Ba
rnwell extinguished his cigar in an ashtray. “Let’s go.”
The men walked the dirt path toward the back of the house. While Barnwell and Cooper moved ahead, discussing the sale of the Crossroads, Nash took Tom aside.
“Say, old boy.” Nash laughed nervously. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about the . . . uh . . . note that’s due.”
“You mean past due.”
“Well . . . all right. It’s a tad late. With you going away, I hope you won’t have that nasty George Jones press me on it.” Jones was Tom’s bank manager.
Nash waited, but the young banker didn’t reply.
“Look, Tom, I can’t quite pay the loan back now. Nothing serious. I had a bad year . . . couple of bad years. That’s all.”
“When the rest of us had good years?” Tom asked curiously, without reproach, trying to understand the man before him who seemed so different from himself.
“I was hoping you could give me more time. And perhaps,” he added tentatively, “you could extend just a little more.”
Tom offered two raised eyebrows in response. He surveyed the sartorial splendor that was Nash Nottingham, from the beaver top hat to the shirt with the gemstone buttons to the shiny leather boots, all looking new and costly.
Reading Tom’s thoughts, Nash laughed. “Like my outfit? After all, a man’s got to buy himself a few decent threads.”
“Is that what you were doing in Paris when you missed the due date on the note?”
“I might’ve traveled and shopped, and neglected a few bills, but that’s a trifle compared to what this year’s crop’ll bring in.” Nash grinned. “Come on, Tom, you haven’t been back long enough to remember how things work here. King Cotton pays all debts.”
“Does it?”
“When you’re at Bayou Redbird tomorrow, do you think you could tell Jones to give me a little more time?”
