North and South: The North and South Trilogy (22 page)

“I ain’t supposed to hang around the house niggers, either,” the field hand said. “They get uppity if I do.”

“You let me worry ’bout that, nigger. I’m a house nigger for Mr. Calhoun, so if I invite you, it’s all right.” He steered the field hand toward the group. “What do they call you?”

“Priam.”

“Mighty fine name. Have a sip.”

Priam was hot and thirsty. That and Nathanael Greene’s persuasive manner overcame his caution. Greene walked him up to the others. They recognized Priam, of course, and looked at him scornfully until they grasped Greene’s intentions; he was doing a lot of winking and gesturing behind Priam’s back.

The scornful looks disappeared. Priam’s tense face relaxed. At intervals of three or four minutes, Greene whisked the flask from its hiding place and shielded Priam while the latter drank. It didn’t take long for Priam to start chuckling and even laughing out loud. The rest of the slaves, except for two women who didn’t approve of the sport, smirked and nudged one another.

“’Nother drink,” Priam said.

“Sure enough,” Greene grinned. “Come get it.”

He held the flask at arm’s length. Priam shambled forward, reaching for it. At the last minute Greene pulled the flask out of the way.

Priam blundered straight into the table. His outstretched hand knocked a dish of butter beans onto the grass.

Greene laughed. “My Lord, you are one clumsy buck.”

“He’s just a dumb field nigger, that’s why,” someone else said.

Suspicion pierced Priam’s stupor. “Give me that drink,” he growled.

Greene waved the flask with a willowy motion. “Right here it is, nigger. All yours, if you can still see it.”

Loud laughter.

“You give me that!” This time Priam roared.

“My, ain’t he something,” said Greene, still waggling the flask. “Givin’ orders to his betters.”

“Uppity,” another slave said with contempt.

Priam blinked and used his palm to swab sweat from his neck. He watched the flask being waved at him in a tantalizing way. Suddenly he leaped forward, trying to seize the flask in a bear hug. Greene danced back. Priam caught nothing but air. The laughter exploded.

Priam lowered his head, turned, and charged the other Negroes with swinging fists. The women screamed. The men scattered.

The tumult brought Tillet and some of the guests on the run. Tillet’s temper was short because of the heat and because he couldn’t shake the bitter aftereffects of the quarrel with Cooper. It didn’t help when he spied Cousin Charles under one of the tables, a rip showing in the knee of his fine breeches. With gleeful enthusiasm, Charles was calling encouragement to both combatants.

Tillet arrived just as Priam again attempted to grab Nathanael Greene. Calhoun’s slave darted behind three big house blacks. The senator himself arrived just as Greene recognized Mont Royal’s owner and exclaimed:

“That nigger took after me! He’s drunk as a coot.”

Tillet needed no one to help him see that. “Priam, go to your cabin. I’ll deal with you later.”

Fear showed on Priam’s face. He saw that all the house people would side with Greene, and that made him angry all over again. He stepped up to Tillet and pointed to the fallen flask.

“I took a drink out of that ’cause Mr. Calhoun’s nigger gave it to me. He acted friendly, but then he started to call me names.”

Tillet was so affronted he could barely speak. “I am not interested in your explanations.”

Greene gave a little disbelieving laugh. “What’s that nigger saying? Everybody know niggers aren’t allowed to drink spirits. He didn’t get one drop from me. No, sir,” he finished with a soulful look at his owner.

“He’s right,” said a black woman. “The buck was already drunk when he came sashayin’ over here.”

Other house slaves nodded and murmured agreement. For a moment Priam couldn’t believe his own people would do this to him. He looked as if someone had driven a spear into his side.

Righteous and wrathful, Greene shook a finger at Priam. “Don’t you go tellin’ any more lies to get me in trouble, nigger.”

“No,” Tillet said, reaching for his slave’s arm. “Don’t do that. You’re in enough trouble already.”

Priam jerked away from Tillet’s hand. The watchers gasped, a sound like a great wave breaking. Tillet lowered his eyes and studied his hand, as if he couldn’t believe what Priam had done.

Salem Jones appeared then. He slipped up next to his employer, barely able to suppress a smile. Priam stood slightly hunched, his hands fisted and sweat streaming down his cheeks. Orry and George joined the spectators. If Tillet couldn’t see that Priam was dangerously out of control, they could.

“We had best leave,” Calhoun said. “Nathanael, if you will—”

“No,” Tillet said. “It isn’t necessary for you to do that, John. The fault is Priam’s.” Orry recognized signs of an unusual anger building within his father. “You go to your cabin, Priam. Do it now or it will go hard with you.”

Priam shook his head. Tillet stiffened as if slapped. “I’ll order you one last time,” he said.

Again the slave wagged his head from side to side. Tillet’s face grew purplish. Hoping to prevent more trouble, Orry started to speak to his father. Before he could, Tillet made a quick, hooking gesture with his left hand. Jones caught the signal. He whisked his hickory truncheon from under his fancy coat, waved several of the house men forward.

“You, Jim. You, Aristotle. Take him.”

Priam bellowed and started swinging. The men closed in. Priam retreated three steps and fell backward over a table. Bowls of food crashed to the ground and broke or spilled.

Jones let his two black helpers subdue Priam. Then the overseer leaned forward across the shoulders of Jim and Aristotle and whacked Priam with the truncheon. He did it several times. On the last blow, Priam sagged to his knees. A line of blood ran from a gash in his forehead. With hate-filled eyes he looked at his master, who had stepped in front of him.

“I told you it would go hard, Priam. I surely do wish you’d listened.”

Standing close by his father, Orry said, “Don’t you think he’s had his punishment?”

Tillet’s color was still high. He was breathing hard. “No. Priam disrupted the celebration and embarrassed me in front of my guests. I treat my people well, but I will not tolerate ingratitude or a rebellious spirit. I’m going to make an example of this nigger.”

That last word was one Tillet never used in reference to his slaves. It told Orry he had better not try to stop his father from doing whatever he planned.

Priam, too, recognized the master’s uncharacteristic rage. He wept silently as he hobbled away in the grip of the other two slaves.

At Resolute, Madeline turned in her bed for the twentieth time. When she had put on her nightgown and blown out the lights an hour ago, she had known sleep would be slow to come. Too much had happened. Too much was yet to happen, if she were brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to let it.

The bedroom windows stood open in the darkness, but no air was moving. Directly underneath her room, someone was padding through the house, securing it for the night. Outside, the barely perceptible stir and hum of night creatures formed a background for the sound of her own breathing.

Justin wasn’t in the house, thank heaven. He had ridden off to Charleston with his brother, presumably feeling that she needed time by herself to contemplate the enormity of her sins and the punishment that would be hers if the sinning continued.

Bastard,
she thought as her husband’s self-righteous face glimmered in her imagination. It was becoming astonishingly easy to call him vile names. How she wished she could do more than that. How she wished she could confront him with the confession her father had made just before his eyes closed for the last time. How she yearned to smile at Justin and say:

“My dear, it is my painful duty to inform you that you are married to a woman with Negro blood.”

Justin had deceived her during the courtship, so it was poetic justice that he be told, even if belatedly, that she had deceived him. Of course it was unintentional; she hadn’t known or even suspected the truth that her father breathed out through pale lips while she sat at his bedside in the heavily draped room that smelled faintly of candle wax, and sweat, and death.

All his life, Nicholas Fabray had done his best to smooth his daughter’s way, and those last moments were no exception. He cushioned the shock as best he could, spoke slowly but eloquently about Madeline’s mother: how fine she was, how considerate and loving. Only then did he reveal that his wife, to all outward appearances a white woman, was in fact one-quarter Negro. Madeline was an octoroon.

“Why—” She fisted one trembling hand and pressed it against her knee. “Why are you telling me now?”

“Because you would curse my memory if you ever learned the truth from anyone else.” Unspoken was the harsher thought:
Because you are vulnerable to this truth, regardless of my efforts to veil it, unlikely as it is ever to be exposed.

He and his wife had wanted a better life for Madeline than she would have had if she were acknowledged to be of mixed blood. Fortunate quadroons and octoroons could enjoy the favors of white gentlemen and even be the recipients of some of their wealth. But those boons were always temporary because a woman of mixed blood could never be anything better than a mistress, never anything better than a white man’s elegant whore.

Nicholas Fabray had refused to play out that sad little drama so prevalent in New Orleans. He had married the woman he loved, something that took enormous courage. He did not say that, of course. But Madeline understood it and bent over the bed and embraced his frail, half-paralyzed body while tears filled her eyes.

No, Fabray went on, there was nothing to be lost by concealing certain facts about Madeline’s background, and everything to be gained. It was not difficult to maintain the deception, he said, because Madeline’s mother was almost unknown in the twilight world of the city’s quadroons and octoroons. And the dust of time had enhanced concealment. Now Madeline must join the conspiracy of silence and preserve the safety he had so long sought for her.

Finally, he revealed one dominant reason he had wanted his daughter to marry Justin LaMotte. Not only was Justin a kind, decent man—here Madeline averted her head while her mouth convulsed in a sardonic smile—but he also lived far from Louisiana. In South Carolina there would be virtually no chance of her ever being confronted with the truth about her lineage. In New Orleans the possibility, however remote, was present. His voice faltering, Fabray muttered something about a picture of Madeline’s mother.

“A picture, Papa? Do you mean a painting?”

“Yes—a painting.” His eyes were closed again; speech seemed difficult.

“There’s a portrait of her somewhere?”

“Was.” The tip of his tongue inched across dry lips. Then he opened his eyes and tried to clarify his answer, but his voice was so weak, his words so vague, she could make little sense of his statements. She got the impression that the painting had disappeared. When and how, he didn’t say.

Then the thread of the thought was lost as light convulsions began to shake his wasted body. She held his hand and pressed her other to her own cheek, as if that way she could hold back her grief. She called out and told a passing servant to summon the doctor at once. Ten minutes before he arrived, Nicholas Fabray died.

The shock didn’t hit her until the next day, after she had taken care of the last detail of the funeral arrangements. Then she broke down and wept for nearly an hour, stricken by Fabray’s death and by the loathsome secret with which he had burdened her. For a brief period she hated him for telling her; in the South, having even one drop of black blood was the same as having skin the color of ebony.

A great many of the city’s leading politicians and businessmen, Catholic and Protestant, attended the funeral. They brought their white wives, and when Madeline noticed that, she appreciated the skill with which her father had carried off the deception. The last vestiges of ill feeling left her; she mourned and blessed him at the same time.

Lying in the dark, Madeline wondered how she could have brought herself to say yes to Orry’s whispered plea for a secret rendezvous. Her conscience was already torturing her about that, and yet she knew she would go through with this one meeting if she could. Her willingness was a natural reaction to Justin’s cruelty, but it was also a clear violation of the code of behavior she had practiced all her life. Even given Justin’s character, how could that happen? Many women endured similar mistreatment, or worse, till the day they died. What made the difference in her case?

The answer lay in something that could not be fully reduced to logical explanation. Something in the young cadet’s eyes, in his courtly bearing and his shy demeanor, called out to her, spoke to her on a deep and primitive level. That was true despite her fear that, because of his age, he could not possibly be what he seemed.

She laid the back of one hand against her cheek and uttered a small, sad sound. Her life, so carefully and conscientiously put in order by her late father, was growing hopelessly tangled. She was thankful Nicholas Fabray didn’t know.

She imagined Orry’s face. He
was
young. That was a dire risk, and it was just one of several she intended to accept. Another was the risk she’d take when she left Resolute for the rendezvous. Keeping her hand where it was, she closed her eyes and concentrated on a plan to avert suspicion when she rode away tomorrow. She was still lying in that position when she fell asleep and dreamed of Orry kissing her.

Like Madeline, the slave girl Semiramis was unable to fall asleep easily that night. Jones was going to do something terrible to her brother. Quirt him, most likely. Priam had caused a big fuss at the picnic. After it happened, the Mont Royal slaves talked of nothing else for the rest of the day.

Most of the slaves thought her brother was going to get what he deserved. They said mean things about him because they were jealous of his courage. He was always whispering about the North, about fleeing to freedom. The others called him a boaster. Said he’d never do it, just because they knew he might, and they wouldn’t. Of course, he’d never go if his temper got him killed first.