Chaneysville Incident (56 page)

“You lost me,” she said.

“Feet. To walk with. Look. The slaves in the South were worth, at this time, about six billion dollars. And that wasn’t a theoretical figure; slaves were money. Actual coin of the realm. The states in the Upper South bred slaves and sold them to the cotton-producing states in the Lower South. So a slave in the Upper South represented a tremendous investment, but his value was only potential. Steal him, and the potential was never realized. The planters of the Lower South not only worked their slaves, they borrowed money against them. The only other collateral they had was the land itself, and the land was worse than worthless without slave labor to cultivate it. Steal the slaves, and the planter had no way to repay his loans, and the bankers had nothing to foreclose on, either. Six billion dollars, and every dollar’s worth had a pair of feet. And to bring the whole system crashing down, all you had to do was to encourage a sizable percentage of those people to use their feet at the same time.

“Now, C.K. was no fool; he knew that it was next to impossible to get that many slaves to run north, especially since most of them didn’t know which way north was. But the beauty of his thinking wasn’t that it was necessary for the slaves to actually escape; all they had to do was to be unavailable for work or sale for a long enough period of time to cause a collapse, or if you wanted to make it even easier, but slower, all you needed to do was get a few to keep running all the time, to drop the profit margin, raise the interest rates because of the added risks, that kind of thing. Never mind that most of the slaves that tried it wouldn’t make it; all you had to do was get them out of the fields, running anywhere. What you needed to do was to promote the idea of escape.

“But that was a problem. Slaves couldn’t read and there wasn’t much travel, and the planters had already set up a strong anti-escape mentality by circulating stories about how Northerners ate Negroes for breakfast and such things—not that that was far from the truth. But C.K. figured out a way around that: the planters talked to each other, and what one planter said to another in the study eventually ended up in the slave quarters, and the thing that planters were most likely to talk about was lost money. So if somehow you could manage to get a lot of women and children to escape—”

“What—?”

“Women and children. A woman was a breeder; an escaped female might represent a loss in breeding potential worth five or six thousand dollars. A child of six represented six years of investment and a return that existed only in potential: a sale value of maybe eight hundred dollars, or twenty years of labor. And these were the slaves the least likely to run. Unless somebody made them. And they were the least likely to escape—unless somebody helped them. And the planters would know that. So if a lot of women and children started disappearing, they’d talk, and the word would get around that Massa was mighty worried about disappearin’ poontang and pickaninnies, and people would get ideas. And any strong man would think, if a woman and a six-year-old can make it, I surely can. And they’d run.

“And so, in the spring of 1850, when C.K. took his whiskey to Philadelphia to market, he asked a few questions and found out who was pretty much running the Underground Railroad in that part of the country. It turned out to be a man named William Still. Still’s operation was fairly passive; the idea was to assist people who managed to make their escape, settling them in places where they were unlikely to be recaptured, or if the pursuit was hot, to try and get them into Canada. That took a lot of money. C.K. made a sizable donation, and used the fact that he was a bankroller of the operation to try and influence Still’s thinking, to encourage him to become more active in promoting escape. Whether that worked I don’t know, because C.K. didn’t write much about it; he probably continued to work on Still, and he gave more money, but he wasn’t involved in the operation. And something else: he was in love.

“Her name was Harriette Brewer, and she was technically a runaway, but only technically; her mother had been three months pregnant when she had left a plantation near Savannah because the child she was carrying belonged to her master, and the mistress of the plantation seemed to have some designs on both her and her child. So she ran away and got to Savannah and stowed away on a ship in the harbor. It was fortunate for her that the captain was something of an Abolitionist, or she could have been sold, but he was, and when he discovered her he took her into his cabin and protected her and delivered her to Philadelphia and set her up as his mistress. So Harriette had been born free, but she could have been taken back at any time; legally she was a slave, the property of her father.

“When C.K. met her she was thirty years old, as beautiful as her mother must have been. But that wasn’t what impressed him. What impressed him was that she was educated and intelligent—her mother had evidently parlayed her attraction for the captain into opportunities for her daughter—and she had what C.K. called the strongest moral sense he had ever encountered in man or woman. She was working with Still, keeping records for him. She had worked out a code, and she kept the records in it, and eventually Still was going to be able to decode and publish the accounts. But she was more than just a talented chronicler. Because of her ancestry and her education, she could pass for white, and she undertook some of the most dangerous jobs, helping to take escapees who had made it as far as Philadelphia on north. She knew the safe routes, and safe houses, and she was tough enough to have killed a couple of slave catchers. And C.K. fell in love with her.

“I don’t know the details of the affair. I know he asked her to leave with him and come back to the hills. But she wanted to put C.K.’s plans into effect. Evidently they argued about it, C.K. insisting that it was too dangerous, and that they were the brains and money of the operation, and didn’t need to get down in the trenches, she insisting that you couldn’t ask anybody to do what you were afraid to do yourself. The argument ended in a compromise: she stayed and worked with Still and tried to put C.K.’s plan into some kind of operational form, and he came back to the hills to make more whiskey, and the agreement was that when he came back in the spring he would look at what she had set up and maybe she would do it and maybe they would do it together.

“That’s the way they left it. C.K. came back and sold his remainders to the locals. He went back to Philadelphia for a while after that, to be near Harriette and work on the plans. He came back to buy corn, went back, came back in September to set up to take delivery of the corn.

“But his mind wasn’t on business, and it wasn’t on the economics of slavery, either; it was on Harriette Brewer. For about two months the journal has nothing in it about plans, and only the barest sketch notes about corn and whiskey-making, but it’s full of really bad sophomoric poetry, imitations of Wordsworth, I think, but I’m not sure. After two months the poetry stops, and there’s nothing much but notes about the whiskey-making, but he didn’t stop writing poetry; he just stopped practicing. Sometime in late December he took the risk of leaving everything to make a quick trip east, to see her and to deliver a whole sheaf of soupy love poems to a publisher in Philadelphia, and when he went back in April, he took delivery of five hundred leather-bound volumes of a book of poems called
Untrodden Ways
, and before he even sold the whiskey he took the whole load to her—”

“Don’t make fun of it,” she said. “I think it’s lovely. And I’ll bet she thought it was, too.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think she ever knew about it. Because sometime in February she had decided that the best way to make plans was to try them out, and she had gone South, and she hadn’t come back.

“C.K. waited. He didn’t know where she had gone; she had written out all her plans, but they were in code, and not the one she kept the other records in; Still couldn’t read them. So there was nothing for C.K. to do but wait, hoping she had just gotten delayed. He sold his whiskey and tried to break the code, but he gave that up eventually. So he started reading every Southern newspaper he could get his hands on. But that didn’t do any good, and it probably wouldn’t; she could have been taken in a hundred ways, for a hundred different things, and it probably wouldn’t have made the headlines anywhere, or perhaps only in some small town that nobody had ever heard of. It was hopeless. After two months C.K. came back and sold his remainders. And he made his plans. And in May he made his first trip south.”

“Looking for her,” she said.

“No,” I said. “Oh, there may have been some hope in it, maybe more than a little. But C.K. was no fool; he knew the South was a big, dark place, and that his chances of finding her were practically nonexistent. He may have hoped that somehow, some sense would guide him, but I think he just wanted to carry on with what they had planned. He may have been angry; it doesn’t show in the way he wrote, and he makes no mention of it, but he may have been. It doesn’t really matter. He went south in May, and by late June he had brought out seven women and six children. He bought his corn in July and went back—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “How did he bring them out?”

“I don’t know. He kept records in code, just like Harriette Brewer; all he kept in plain language was the records of how many people he brought, and their sexes and ages. I don’t know where he brought them from—that’s in code, although it seems, judging from the length of time his trips took, that he was going into the Deep South, Mississippi and Louisiana and Alabama. I don’t know where he sent them when they left here, although I imagine he spirited them north to New York State, maybe through Williamsport; that would have been the easiest and probably the safest route, valley the whole way. I don’t know where he relocated them, if he let them stop in this country or took them on to Canada. But I do know that an important part of what he did had to do with letters. Before he left them he would take down their words, messages to relatives, anybody, and he would help them sign their names. And he’d mail the letters. Of course, the slaves couldn’t take delivery, or read the letters. But the masters could, and did. And in those letters there was always mention of C.K., how he had taken them out past all kinds of dangers. I doubt that the adventures were true ones—they probably would have identified too much. And if they were true, I don’t know why C.K. kept copies. I have the idea that he used a series of form letters, and the adventures were designed to be good stories, and to get repeated enough so that even slaves heard about C.K. Washington.”

“He used his own name?” she said. “Why? I would think it was dangerous.”

“It was. Maybe he was hoping that Harriette Brewer would hear the name and get word to him somehow. Or maybe he was hoping that the word would get back to his old mistress; maybe he was looking for a little subtle revenge. Or maybe he was building his ego. In any case, he built a reputation. By 1852 rewards were posted for him in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi. Five hundred dollars for capture. By 1853 newspapers in the Deep South were printing reports of his activities, warnings about him, descriptions of him. By 1855 the rewards were five thousand dollars for his head—there was no mention made of the rest of his body. I don’t know what his precise activities were, but in those four years he made three trips a year, the first a short one into the Upper South, the other two into the Deep South. They were always well planned; I can tell from the amount of material in code, even if I don’t know how to read it. He had brought out over two hundred slaves—ten men, the rest women and children. It doesn’t sound like much, but that was over two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of slaves, and a tremendous loss in potential, and the planters certainly must have felt it. And if they didn’t mind the loss, they surely minded the propaganda. You could hide which way north was from a slave, but you couldn’t hide the fact that four women and twelve children disappeared one night and they weren’t sold and they weren’t dragged back kicking and screaming.”

“So his plan was working?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to tell. I know his idea never destroyed slavery; it took the Civil War to do that, although the North used a plan very much like C.K.’s to deny the South supplies….”

“They did?”

“The Emancipation Proclamation,” I said. “But I don’t know if C.K. cared about that anymore. I think he did begin to see the whole thing as something of an ego boost, at least in the mid-fifties, when the rewards got very high. And I know he got arrogant and careless, because the third trip he made that year wasn’t coded. And the plan itself was just plain crazy. He started it in the journal, wrote down that he was in need of the physical release that could only be provided by a female, and that in order to ease his discomfort and accomplish his higher aims at the same time, he was going to avail himself of the services of a nunnery.”

She just looked at me.

“C.K. had read Shakespeare,” I said. “He was going to liberate a whorehouse.”

“A whorehouse,” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said. “Now, there wasn’t really a whole lot of prostitution in the South; the fact that Massa could tip on down to the slave quarters and practically any other white man could too, or just pick a woman out of the fields—”

“You mean rape one,” she said.

“Not rape,” I said. “You can’t call it rape if the woman doesn’t have a right to say yea or nay to begin with. Bestiality is more like it—they weren’t people, remember. But that’s beside the point. There wasn’t that much prostitution, except in the cities. There there was a bit. But it wasn’t highly organized and it was mostly white prostitution; hardly a part of slavery, or at least not the kind C.K. was interested in. But the one place where black prostitution was not only highly organized but also an integral part of the social structure was New Orleans. There it was common practice to have spring dances to show off the most beautiful black women of mixed blood, and the white men would come to these—they called them ‘octoroon balls’—to purchase a concubine. Very often a father would pick out a young girl for his son as a birthday present. Sometimes the relationships were formalized by a kind of ‘left-handed marriage.’ But there was a lot of the more traditional whorehouse kind of prostitution, usually for women who were too dark to make it in octoroon society. And C.K. went to steal a whorehouse.