Wash (7 page)

“Take up land. Get it under cultivation. Patent it to put it in your name. Then resurvey as soon as you can to add all the adjoining vacant land to your parcel without having to pay for it. That’s how you do it. Then you keep on doing it because without property, few men are thought much of. How do you think I turned fifty acres into one thousand and a town to boot?”

He’d ask us this favorite question time and again. Just like that, he’d remind us, snapping his fingers then peering at us as if he’d made a joke. And there it was, his land stretching out all around us. His town thriving on the road out of Baltimore. He was insistent about the road. Said that was the key.

“Without a road, a town can never prosper. You must have a good road and the county seat both.”

He said this last part over and over. He still tells me now, in almost every letter he writes, asking about what he hopes is my empire and saying he needs to come see it for himself soon since he’s nearly ninety.

I’m working to make my Memphis out at Chickasaw Bluffs but it’s a hard place. Roughneck boatmen from up and down the Mississippi, along with a muddy mix of frontier settlers and come-to-trade Indians. All of them rowdy with alcohol and difficult. I chose the name Memphis because it means enduring and beautiful and I need it to be both.

Buying the Bluffs was an enormous investment but it should pay off. People warm to my William immediately. I take great pride in this quality of his since I lack it myself. Pretty as he is, he can talk to anybody. Perhaps due to his profound democracy, he is welcoming without seeming weak and this strikes a crucial balance on the frontier.

William knows full well that I sent him out to the Bluffs as much to protect my negroes from his incessant leniency as to give him a good start but he doesn’t let it bother him. He is handy with managing my second store and his eye for reading counterfeit money serves us in good stead.

I still believe the troubles we are having out there stem more from the place itself and its history than from anything William has done wrong thus far. But we’re dug in pretty deep so this venture needs to succeed.

Debt has always been my father’s worst fear. He loves to tell detailed stories of great men, even celebrated ones, who find themselves falling into debt then watch everything they’ve built get dismantled brick by brick. Brick by sodding brick, he’d start repeating whenever he’d had one drink too many.

I remember being determined not to let debt happen to me. I made sure I was the main surveyor measuring every tract before I started buying and selling land myself. My father lobbied hard to secure me the federal commission to draw the Indian boundary line so I could steer it where we wanted it to go, keeping Memphis on our side instead of theirs. Then I had myself appointed tax collector and I still list myself short whenever possible.

I hear my father saying no need to tell everything you know and I see Wash’s book tucked in my liquor cabinet upstairs. I do record some income from it because everyone knows he’s my traveling negro, but no one else knows the true numbers except for Wash. I tuck most of that money straight into my pocket. My farm does not begin to pay my debts and nothing is cheap with ten children and six of them girls.

My wife Mary anchors the far end of my dinner table. She is an appropriate woman. Appropriate and capable. But my eyes don’t catch on her in a room full of people and I have never once gotten that drifting feeling I remember so well from Susannah. That feeling of falling. But Susannah is dead and buried. Now I work to remind myself that expecting love in marriage is a young man’s folly.

Mary gazes at me through luminous blue eyes set wide in her serene face, choosing all the while what she will notice and what she won’t. She’s the kind of person who can walk up to an overlook and not see a thing. By the time she’s near enough to the edge to attain the vista, her mind has already turned back to the picnic she has brought and how best to arrange the spread.

I can see now that, like many people to whom something truly severe has happened, Mary has always refused life at some level. It was late spring when she stood up from working in the field outside her family fort just in time to watch three Cherokee tomahawk her only brother and her father. She ran and hid until I went looking.

She was sixteen to my forty when I took her in and determined to become my wife. I was surprised to find myself drawn to anyone after the deadening that had settled on me in my twenties after the shocking loss of Susannah and our son. But it seemed wherever I turned that fall, there Mary was, eyes shining. Before long, she was pregnant and it was settled.

William and Livia were born before we ever got around to marrying. Back then, thank God, preachers were still scarce. Created a legitimacy problem but I was able to sort it out during one of my legislative terms. Wrote my first two children into law, changing their name from hers to mine.

As luminous as Mary was at sixteen, I can see now that she has always been oddly hard, closed somehow. I attributed this tendency to her trauma and thought it would melt away in the course of our life together, but it has gained ascendancy instead. She chooses not to look too deeply at whatever she feels she can do nothing about. It makes me want to shake her sometimes. Turn her face to the storm.

Especially since she has brought the Bible into all our days, leaning ever harder on it. I fail to see how people can hold that book between themselves and life as if to stave it off. That book with all its horror and lust and bloodshed. But I’ve decided this is not for me to understand. So while I have been Mary’s husband for more than thirty years and have no real complaints, I would not say I’ve had much company.

And yes, I have made family again and again with a woman I neither recognize nor understand anymore. Once the candle is out and I can no longer see that flat look in her eye, I lie down beside her and draw up some kind of wanting. It is during these times that I feel we are not completely apart. And there’s no room for the Bible between us either. There’s no room for the Bible when I feel her palms clutching my back and pulling me to her, when I can feel her wanting something beyond order and the smooth functioning of our household.

But by and large, I feel more connected to the horses I’ve raised, the negroes I’ve owned, and the accounts I’ve tended than to my wife and most of my children. I build a world and they live in it, knowing nothing of its geology. Protected and innocent while I do the work of turning the crank, finding the necessary momentum wherever and however I can. They don’t want to know the details, only the results.

I first laid eyes on Mena in late March of 1796. I remember the year because that’s when Thompson told me his big news. He was doing some final buying for his boys and we’d planned our visits to overlap as usual.

Charleston was in full bloom. You could smell the jasmine even in Auction Square. I had been at the market all morning and was about to leave to meet the old man for lunch when I saw Mena standing in a line along the brick wall that ran down the far side of the yard. She was in a raggedy group from a rogue ship so the prices were low.

Thompson had always warned me to stay away from direct imports, insisting that countryborn were much more manageable than saltwater. And these few did look pretty poorly, scuffling amongst themselves and keeping their backs to us. Mena was the only one facing forward. She stood perfectly still. Tall and thin with her hair cropped close.

Idle curiosity really because I was shopping for men. But then I saw the flat net of muscles across the top of her back and the smooth curve at the shoulder. And she stood evenly on both feet without cocking a hip like so many do.

Then she turned to look at me. You would have thought she felt my eyes on her. She didn’t glance at me and then away like most of them. Mena gazed at me even and steady until I began to wonder what it was she saw.

As the line moved forward towards the block, she took only as many steps as needed to keep her place, trailing her fingers along the wall, coming to a stop when the rest did. All without ever taking her eyes off me. After long enough of that, I had to look away.

I was relieved when I bumped into Edgar, a friend of my brother David, even though he stood there talking at me for a full five minutes without realizing that the smoke from his cigar was drifting into my face and I was not actually listening. I acted as if I saw someone I knew so I could walk away from him.

As soon as there were enough men between us so Edgar could no longer see me, I turned back to the block. Mena was the next one to go and still watching me. She did not quit even after they got her up there. The whole situation gained momentum as the men around me began to comment.

Even the auctioneer noticed and he started in with a familiarity that made my skin crawl. I must have lifted my hand just to put a stop to the whole thing. I don’t know what made me do it and I regretted it instantly. But to say I had not meant to buy Mena makes me seem as if I did not know my own mind.

Edgar stood there, glancing back and forth from her to me, smiling as if he’d discovered some secret.

“I thought you said you came down here to buy a few men. Only men. Must be something else you’re hunting,” he said, letting his voice trail off as one corner of his mouth lifted.

Without even thinking, I told him I planned to lease her out. As soon as I said it, I knew it was a good idea.

After signing for Mena, I went straight to meet Thompson for lunch. He had one restaurant he preferred. Said he wanted gumbo stewed from a roux as dark as the men who cooked and served it.

I was late and he hadn’t been able to wait. He sat in the sun by the window, staring down into an enormous bowl, and didn’t lift his head until I pulled back my chair and sat. He smiled at me through the rising steam, holding a great hunk of torn buttered bread in one hand and his glass of golden ale in the other. I’d never seen him looking so well.

He dipped his bread into the thick brown stew brimming with chunks of pale shining crabmeat. As he lifted that bite to his mouth, he nodded for a waiter to bring me more of the same. We made a point of eating heartily whenever we met, still trying to ease our shared hunger from twenty years ago.

We’d spent most of 1777 chained together on a fetid prison ship anchored in New York Harbor, after being captured early on by the British in yet another sloppy retreat. Thompson was full of stories, and our long confinement on that floating hellhole gave him plenty of time to tell them to me. He said he had to talk to keep his mind off the stench making his eyes sting. I said at least his stories drowned out the sound of our bellies gnawing on nothing.

He loved to tell me how he’d carried his family up from the sugar islands after his father stroked during that last mass poisoning in 1757. One uprising too many, his father had said. These damn Africans will soon gain the upper hand. Too many of them, too few of us.

The stroke had garbled his father’s speech but Thompson said he could understand “get us the hell out of here” whether his father spoke it clear or not. North Carolina had offered them good terms and low prices so they brought the whole family and what few negroes had not been infected by insurrection fever. Sold off the rest to buy fresh.

Sitting there chained to Thompson, listening to him describe how best to manage negroes when we should have been out fighting our Revolution, weighed harder on me than on him. I was still a hothead in my twenties while he seemed old to me at forty.

I listened to him but I was determined to steer clear of slavery whether our Revolution managed to kill it off or not. After growing up around it, I’d already decided negroes were not the way to go. Nothing but complications and there’s no end to it. My plan was to head West. Take hold of this far edge and build towns like my father did. If we lived. If we ever made it off that prison ship.

But Thompson became a kind of father to me during those months and we stayed in touch after our release, visiting every chance we could find. And it turned out his advice has served me well since I’ve ended up far deeper in this business than I ever imagined.

So the news he delivered to me over our bowls of gumbo on that fine spring day in Charleston came as an enormous surprise. He listened intently as I told him about buying Mena almost by accident and not quite knowing what to do with her. Then he set down his empty glass and said maybe he’d take her for long term hire in exchange for a healthy cash loan. His eyebrows jumped as he sat back in his chair.

Thompson told me he was washing his hands of his whole place. All nine hundred acres and two hundred negroes. It was his sixtieth birthday and he was getting out. He was sick to death of running what he called that damn empire patched together with mud from an endless swamp. Sick to death of all those negroes waiting for him to slip up or look away. Said it was those damn Ibos that first showed him he’d never have enough eyes to settle his place down for sure but he’d soldiered on for years before finding his way clear.

When I said would that we all could, he raised his glass. Told me he’d finally made enough money that his children should be able to take over. Campbell was into his twenties and Abigail had wisely married the family banker. Eli would find his way soon enough.

Thompson’s enthusiasm was almost contagious. He’d found a ramshackle house on a nearby island called Nags Head and he was moving out there. All he needed was a brand new negro to take with him. One with no ties yet to anyone or anything. He said Mena sounded perfect. Of course, neither of us knew at the time that she was pregnant with Wash or that it would take me nineteen years to get them back.