The Legacy of Beulah Land

by Lonnie Coleman

  “Then I shall die before I’m thirty.”

  “You please the devil when you mock the Lord.”

  “It is not the Lord I mock, ma’am, and I eat what I please at my own table.”

  “Then may the Lord have mercy on you.”

  “Amen.” He took a pork chop he did not want and sprinkled a little black pepper on his fried sweet potatoes.

  When he finished the last bit on his plate, Mrs. Oglethorpe scraped her chair back as if to leave. Freda entered from the kitchen bearing a new platter high. “Apple tarts,” she said.

  5

  “Bobby Lee! Davy!”

  The quiet was unnatural. Nell had asked that there be no tiptoeing and whispering; she liked the sounds of the house.

  “Robert E. Lee, do you want your bottom blistered? Jefferson Davis, come running!” She changed tactic. “Bobby Lee, you’re the oldest, and I depend on you to act it.”

  She might have been calling the stars in the sky.

  “If you don’t both come this instant, we’ll leave without you!”

  Suppressed giggles guided Sarah through the hall toward the room where soiled household linens were kept. They were washed there on rainy days, although the open yard was preferred when the weather was fair. Outside the door she stopped, and the stifled laughter stopped. She opened the door cautiously, was attacked by two shrouded dwarfs, and screamed. Her great-grandsons threw the sheets back from their heads and, exultant with pity, demanded to know, “Did we scare you, Grandma?”

  She protested that she was faint and collapsed into a chair, as they whooped proudly and climbed into her lap, sharply elbowing each other for preferred positions until she pulled both against her.

  “Tell us a story,” Davy asked automatically.

  “There’s no time.”

  “A short one,” Bobby Lee coaxed.

  “Well,” she said. “Once upon a time there was a place called Beulah Land—” They giggled, content. As she began an anecdote she knew so well she could have repeated it in a fever, another part of her mind cried, “Dear Leon, how you would have loved them!” There was no confusion of loyalty in her heart to the two men she married; each held a distinct place.

  Finding them, Jane began to scold. “Come along, we’re late, and they know all about Lovey and Floyd and Uncle Ezra. They’ve begun to correct me when I get absentminded.”

  The boys slipped to the floor, and Sarah stood, smoothing her dress.

  “Can we sit on the hay box?” Davy asked.

  “If you don’t fight,” Jane answered.

  Zebra had Jane’s buggy at the side door off Sarah’s office, and they were presently on their way. It was a cold, still morning, and the horse was ready to move briskly, his breath as apparent as the steam from a locomotive. As they drew near Elk Institute, Jane, who was driving, said, “I have four stops to make in town, but none need take more than ten minutes. We’ll be back for you in two hours. Are you certain that isn’t too long?”

  “I could stay two days, two months,” Sarah assured her.

  Jane halted the horse, and Sarah stepped down. “Tell them all I said howdy,” Jane said, and Sarah nodded.

  The boys took it up. “Tell them I said howdy.”

  “Tell Uncle Roman to come see us!”

  “Tell Uncle Roscoe to come too!”

  “Say howdy to Aunt Selma!”

  “Say howdy to Aunt Pauline!”

  “Bye, Grandma!”

  “Be good!” Sarah called.

  “You be good too, Grandma!”

  As the buggy turned and headed back to the main road, their continued shouts were lost. Sarah studied the building before her. It was so much like, and so little like, the original house at Beulah Land that had been burned during Sherman’s march. The land it stood on was once Oaks Plantation, the Davis home land, but Benjamin’s father James, blinded in the war, decided that he could not manage it and sold it to Junior Elk at the war’s end. Junior was the son of Beulah Land’s old enemy, Roscoe Elk, long the Kendrick overseer before he became one of the richest Negroes in Georgia. Junior cut Oaks into tenant farms, keeping the largest acreage for himself and building a house on it that copied and mocked the one his father had served and hated.

  This was the house she stood before. As she advanced along the wide brick walk leading to the front door, she thought about the ironies of all their lives. The house was now a school called Elk Institute, giving free education to the Negro children of the county, and the third Roscoe Elk was Sarah’s friend. By the gift of the school after Junior’s death to Junior’s half-brother Roman, he turned the old Elk dream upside down, for Roman had been fathered by Leon Kendrick eight years before Sarah married him and became Sarah’s protégé, the first pupil of what evolved over the years into this school.

  She saw no one as she entered and went quietly down the wide center hallway. Following the sound she recognized as Roman’s voice, she opened a door to find herself at the rear of a classroom of about fifteen Negro children. Roman was at a blackboard behind the teacher’s desk, and his back was to her. He was writing words in chalk in the elegant, ballooning script he used only to teach. Twisting the chalk to make a firm period, he then rolled it between both hands and slowly read the words. “Girls jump rope; boys play ball.” Turning, he saw Sarah, and his thin, rather severe face softened. Instantly noting the change, the children turned to see who had come in. “Attention!” Roman said, tapping the chalk sharply on the blackboard. The children faced front. “It’s five minutes before recess, and I want everybody to write down on his or her tablet what I’ve written on the board, as many times as you can but making each letter clear and perfect. I will examine the tablets after recess. If anybody makes a sound while I’m out of the room, Herman will take the names, and he or she will be boiled in oil.”

  They bent heads over desks, and as Roman came to Sarah, she slipped into the hallway. He closed the door behind them, and she said, “You shouldn’t have stopped. I’ve only a few minutes, but I couldn’t resist putting my head in when I heard you.”

  “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  “Roscoe sent word he’d like to see me.”

  “Why didn’t he go to you?” They entered his office next door to the classroom. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “No. I’ll find out when I see him.” Sitting, she removed her gloves. “You look tired, my dear. How are you?”

  “Sometimes it seems hopeless.”

  “You keep the best school in the county, black or white.”

  “If only we had them longer. The older they get, the less willing the parents are to send them. They want them in the fields. They see no reason for them to learn to multiply and divide when they’ve learned how to add and subtract. I declare we’re lucky to get them full time eighty days a year. That’s only sixteen weeks out of fifty-two. Next year they’ll have forgotten what they learned this year.”

  “You do a great deal. Everybody knows it.”

  “Maybe I’m too old to teach,” he said wistfully.

  “Fiddlesticks. You’re ten years younger than I am.”

  He smiled at her. “When are you going to get old?”

  “Never. How are Selma and Pauline?”

  “They have colds, but they won’t miss their classes, so everyone is going to have a cold.”

  “I’ll stop to see them after I’ve seen Roscoe. Take a day off, Roman; come and spend it with me at Beulah. It’ll do both of us good. We’ll walk all over, as we used to, and talk, talk, talk.”

  “And you’ll tell me c-a-t is cat, but it isn’t.”

  “Aunt Nell would like to see you.”

  “I’ll come soon. Is she herself?”

  “Some days.” Sarah shook her head. “She eats everything, but not as much.”

  “She was always of a delicate constitution,” he said in a girlish tone, mimicking Nell.

  She stretched the fingers of her gloves and stood, and he stood with her. Both felt for thei
r backs and, recognizing the gesture in the other, laughed. “Oh, Sarah,” Roman said, “we can’t be. You sixty-eight and me right behind you.”

  “We just stood up too quickly,” she said. “It could happen to ten-year-olds.”

  He walked with her into the hall. A bell rang, and the classroom doors opened. The children were orderly, as they had been disciplined to be, but they stepped friskily, and Roman became the fussy principal of the school. Clapping his hands together, he ordered: “Don’t push! Slow down. Anybody I see pushing stays inside! Ethel, you’re too big a girl to act like that—come here to me!”

  Sarah joined the crowd in the hall. All the pupils knew her, and the ones closest spoke greetings as she made a path through the games they were forming in the school yard.

  Roscoe Elk had built his house away from the school and planted a row of japonica to act as a screen of sorts, but he liked hearing the children when they were let out to play. Trained in the law in Philadelphia, he spent his days now managing the affairs of the school and the tenant farms his father had set up. Although he had scrapped original agreements and made terms more liberal, the tenant farms were still that. His housekeeper Geraldine let Sarah in, and she was presently seated with Roscoe in his office. As she was most easy in hers, so was he in his; that was one of the things they knew about each other. Geraldine brought coffee and a lemon cake which she said Roxanne had made especially for her. She knew that when he was ready Roscoe would get to his reason for asking her today, so she relaxed and allowed him to pour coffee and cut cake.

  Roscoe was a stout man in the late twenties, homely and ordinary enough except for blue eyes and a sprinkle of freckles he had inherited with light-brown skin from his mother.

  They talked of Nell Kendrick, and then Roscoe, lacking the delicacy of Annabel Saxon, asked the state of health and spirits of Mrs. Benjamin Davis. They spoke a little of Roman. “Oh, he despairs one day and conquers the next,” Roscoe assured her.

  “Perhaps he’s lonely,” Sarah suggested.

  “Lonely here?”

  “Lonely for his dead friend.”

  “We are all his friends here,” Roscoe said softly, understanding her but pretending not to.

  “Lonely for himself. We lose ourselves when we do too much.”

  “Maybe there’s nothing private left for him,” Roscoe suggested.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “If it’s so, then he is lonely. I’ve been down that lane.”

  His hands fidgeted with his cup, and he drained it and set it aside. “How is Miss Jane and her family?”

  He never looked at her when he asked about Jane, for she was at the heart of their long friendship, certainly its origin. When Roscoe and Jane were children, each had been taken by the enemy grandfathers, Roscoe and Leon, to watch the miracle of the train’s coming in and stopping and leaving. That is how they first grew aware of each other’s existence. So much Sarah knew. Later, toward the end of the war, not long before his father sent him away to Philadelphia to be educated, Roscoe had come one night to tell her of hearing Junior Elk and a Union officer named Ponder raise glasses in a toast to the destruction of Beulah Land. The young Roscoe’s warning was their only forecast of that destruction. Finally, Roscoe returned to Highboro the summer Jane was being courted by what Nell complained was “every boy in the county with a pair of shoes to put on.” Sarah had not seen the truth, but Casey had—that Roscoe Elk loved Jane Davis. Only they knew it. Jane did not. They had never spoken of it after the one time. Good friends though they were, Sarah and Roscoe had never, of course, spoken of it at all, aware that friendship must regard privacies to share confidence.

  He smiled now and let her boast about Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis Todd, but she knew his mind was moving closer to the reason he had asked to see her. When she paused as if to say, “Well?” he raised his voice to call his housekeeper. “Geraldine! If Claribell and Luck are ready, tell them to come in.”

  So that is it, Sarah thought.

  Roscoe’s father Junior had been stabbed to death by his drunken mistress when she discovered that he had taken to bed her thirteen-year-old sister Claribell. Subsequently, young Roscoe had been Claribell’s protector, rescuing her from her mother’s eagerness to sell her and putting her in the charge of one of the strong-minded women teachers of the school, a Negro from Philadelphia named Mathilda Boland. Claribell seemed to have no mind of her own, but she learned orderliness and obedience and manners, and although shy, she responded gratefully to the kindness of her new protector. Eight months after the murder of Junior Elk, Claribell bore a child. Pliable in other ways, she was an unexpectedly assertive mother. She decided to call her baby daughter Luck. No one had ever before heard such a name, but Southerners are open-minded about names, and so Luck she was called, and at Roscoe’s insistence: Luck Elk.

  Presently the woman Claribell appeared, neat and plain, bringing by the hand her child. Sarah had seen them infrequently and casually over the years, but she looked at them now afresh, as she knew she was meant to. The woman had bobbed a curtsy on entering. Seeing Sarah, the girl advanced directly. She was, Sarah remembered, between four and five, having been born (why did she remember?) on November 20, 1874. She was blacker than Roscoe. Her hair was tied in pigtails. She wore a pink dress that stood out about her so starchily she could never have sat down in it. Round, intense eyes in a round and shining face appeared to question, even to challenge the visitor, and when she raised her hands, the palms a deeper pink than her dress, Sarah reached to take them.

  The moment was achieved. Luck smiled confidently. Sarah smiled admiringly. Claribell smiled proudly. Roscoe’s feeling was too strong to be contained in a smile; he laughed, throwing back his head in a great bellow. Luck turned and ran to him. He caught her and stood, turning with her in his arms before sitting down to hold her on his lap. Claribell had slipped out of the room.

  Sarah praised Luck’s dress, and Luck explained that her mother had made it and showed how the buttons worked and said her mother and Geraldine took pains tying the sash, so it was like a butterfly, and now it had been crushed against Roscoe’s lap. Roscoe, she called Pa. As eagerly as Roman ever drilled a first class, Roscoe led Luck through a recital of numbers and letters, followed by the days of the week and the months of the year. At conclusion, man and child turned faces from each other to Sarah, and Sarah obliged them with honest applause. Luck was pleased with herself and with Sarah, but when Roscoe told her to leave them and go to her mother, she complied only a little reluctantly, making a firmly executed curtsy before running out.

  “She is a joy,” Sarah said when they were alone.

  “She is the most beautiful thing I know,” he said. His blue eyes had never looked at her more intently. “Do you see?”

  She hesitated. “Not yet.”

  “I must have her,” he said.

  “But you do. She calls you Pa and loves you.”

  “She must be mine so that everybody knows it.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sarah asked.

  “Marry Claribell.”

  She thought about it. “Is it wise?” she then ventured.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What I mean is—I don’t know how strongly you feel about Claribell.”

  “It will be all right,” he said softly.

  She paused to consider. Knowing the dangers of frankness, she reminded herself that he wanted to know what she thought; otherwise, he’d not have asked her to come to him. She said carefully, “You are not yet thirty. You may come to know someone you will love very much and want to marry.” He shook his head. “I was well into my fifties with no thought of marrying again when I came to love Casey—so much that I don’t know how I managed my life without him before he came to me.”

  “I will not have anything like that.” Now it was she who would not look at him, for it was as if Jane had entered the room and stood before them. “I will have Luck—she will be my luck.”

  “
It’s dangerous to put so much love into one small object.”

  “It’s already happened.”

  “Then I am happy for you and her.” She put out her hand, and he took it and shook it and let it go. “If there is any way I can help?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll ask.”

  They were quiet together for a time.

  “What are you thinking?” he said, smiling. “You have an odd expression.”

  “Of how wonderful we are!” she answered immediately. “Your happiness means much to me, as you know. Yet I hated your grandfather and your father of all the men in this world.”

  “You had reason to,” he said. “They hated you and wanted to take Beulah Land.”

  “They had some cause for their hate,” she admitted.

  “Oh, they were greedy too, eager to be big-rich. But yes, they had. Your first husband was Roman’s father.” It was common enough knowledge, but it was the first time it had been said between them. “Now let me see—” His tone lightened. “Roman is my half uncle, and we might say he’s your stepson; so doesn’t that make you and me a little bit kin?”

  “It’s no wonder outsiders throw up their hands at Southerners,” she said. “And now your half-sister is to become your daughter.”

  With a smile he said, “Speaking of someone legitimate, isn’t it time one of us had a letter from Abraham?”

  6

  However disreputable he was considered by the women of the county; their husbands and brothers would once have agreed that Alf Crawford performed a service. At the end of the war, being a practical man and finding himself a widower with five daughters and only a small farm, he looked at what he had rather than what he had not. He made a fair crop of corn, but not much else, so he decided to convert it into whiskey. When men came to buy it, they stayed to admire his daughters. If “going to Crawford’s” was a way of saying they sought the comfort of strong drink, then “going to the barn with one of Crawford’s daughters to look at the cow” came as certainly to mean another kind of ease. The distiller and procurer may, depending upon the viewer’s need, be the welcomest of sights, or the most repellent. Before Benjamin’s marriage, Alf Crawford had often enough been a man he greeted with gladness.