DISTRUST.
“The murky shades o’ care
With starless gloom o’ercast my sullen sky.”
—BURNS.
“WALK in, Mr. Roome; walk in. Glad to see you. Have a chair? Well, what
is the news from Bean Island and Baconsville?”
“Bad, Mr. Elly, bad!” replied Uncle Jesse, as he seated himself, and
took from his hat a huge red cotton pocket-handkerchief, with which he
proceeded with great deliberation to wipe his dusky face and bald head.
“I did not know it was so warm out,” said the courteous host. “This
office is such a cool place that I come up here Sunday afternoons to be
cool and quiet. It is a good place to read.”
“I reckon it is not so warm to most folks. I’m hotter’n I ought to be,
I know; but I’m worreted,” said Uncle Jesse, still wiping industriously
with both hands at once, and then thrusting the handkerchief into his
hat which he had been holding tightly between his knees, he placed it
carefully upon the floor beside him, and putting a hand upon either
knee, he leaned forward, looked earnestly into Mr. Elly’s face, and
with a significant expression, and in a low tone asked, “Is you alone,
Mr. Elly?”
“Yes; or, but—well, Mr. Watta is in the back office, but I can close
the door”—rising.
“No, no,” said Uncle Jesse, raising both hands deprecatingly. “Ask him
in; ask him in. Or, why can’t I go in there?” glancing around at doors
and windows.
“Certainly you can,” replied Elly. “Did you want to see Mr. Watta?”
“I reckon so; yes. Well, now, this is what I call providential; and
I reckon I wa’n’t fur wrong in coming, if it is Sunday. The folks in
No’thern Ohio don’t do no business on Sundays, and money paid Sunday
a’n’t paid at all—can be collected over again; but work is driving
awfully now. The freshet put the cawn back so for awhile; but it is
ketching up now. But I knowed I ought to come.”
Handshakings and preliminaries over, the trio were soon seated around
a large writing table—colored men all of them. Both Elly and Watta
were tall and slender—the former quite black, and the latter very
light—and both had enjoyed the blessing of education at a Northern
school established for the benefit of freedmen, and almost sanctified
to the race by bearing the name of “Lincoln.”
Jesse Roome’s northern experiences had not been with books, save at
evening schools, of which he had eagerly availed himself; but his
naturally well-balanced mind and keen powers of observation had not
been idle; and sensible ideas of common duties and relations of life in
a highly-civilized and enlightened community were his reward.
Elly was a thriving lawyer and ex-member of the State Legislature,
where he had been “Speaker of the House,” and, ever with an eye to
business, he had already scented a fee in his visitor’s troubled manner
and reply.
“You must excuse my abruptness, but I leave on the train for Columbia
in half an hour,” said he, “and you and Watta can talk after I am gone.
Now, what can I do for you?”
“First of all, I want some money for my services as constable; and
second I want to talk about the political situation, and to tell you
some things I have heard men say that is interested. Well, how I got to
know this thing—”
“What thing?” asked the lawyer. “Why, that Elly and Watta and Kanrasp
and some score of other radicals, has got to be killed,” said Uncle
Jesse, lowering his voice to a husky whisper.
“Ha! ha! ha?” roared Elly, throwing himself back in his chair, till his
head seemed in danger of getting wedged between the chair-back and a
bookcase behind him. “Why, Roome, I thought you was a sensible man,”
said he, when he had recovered his breath. “The days of the Ku-Klux
Klan’s are over, and all done in this State. When we punished two
hundred and fifty of the fifteen hundred ‘very respectable gentlemen,’
as they called each other, who were arrested in 1871-’2, the thing was
killed out here, you see.”
“No, I don’t see,” said Roome.
“But do you suppose a man really means what he says when he talks like
that now-a-days?” and the two threatened men laughed, and wriggled in
great apparent merriment, and in true negro fashion, though really
quaking with fear.
“I certainly do believe it, Mr. Elly, and Mr. Watta, and I only hope
the good Laud will show that I’ve been afeared for you for nothing. The
parties was in earnest, and intended it, I’m shor’; and you know I’m
not a old woman, nor a baby to be scart for nothing.
“I’ve took the trouble to resk my life to tell yo’ to take care of
you’n, and now I’ve done my part. I didn’t tell Watta right there to
home, because I reckon as yo’ is a lawyer, Mr. Elly, I’d best tell you
first, and see what is best to do for your protection. I taken trouble
to do this. But Watta is here now, and I’m done,” said the old man in a
grieved tone.
“We are much obliged for your kind intentions, though you needn’t have
been so much scared about us.”
“Well, now, let me tell you,” and the farmer proceeded to narrate
minutely the incidents and facts with which the reader is already
acquainted, and others of similar import.
“Give me names and I’ll put them through in the law, for threats,” said
Elly.
“I can’t do that,” said Jesse, folding his arms tightly.
“Why not?”
“Because I live in the woods, and my life wouldn’t be worth anything;
and I a’n’t going to tell yo’, though you’ll believe me yet.”
“I believe _you_ now, but I don’t believe you’re a white man.”
“You will yet though, I ha’n’t nothing more to say now, but just mind
what I tell you. You is both men that is marked to be killed, because
you is leading radicals; so the white folks says they is gwine to kill
you and a score more right round here close; I can’t help it, but I’ve
done my duty, and you must take car’ of yourselves. It wouldn’t be no
use to prosecute this man. It would only make the whole of ’em mad, and
worse than ever ’em open a hornet’s nest; but I want to ax you this
favor, just remember my life now, as I’ve remembered your’n, and not
tell that I told you this.”
“Oh, we won’t tell, and we’re much obliged to you for your good
intentions but we don’t scare worth a cent, after all.”
Uncle Jesse left the office, and the other men walked down to the
railroad station to meet the through train going north.
“What do you think of the old man’s story?” asked Watta.
“I don’t think much of it. He has maintained such an equivocal attitude
that it is hard to tell whose hands he is playing into. He has been on
one side and then on the other—with the colored people and then with
the whites, till there is no telling where he is now.”
“Elly, you are unfair. That man is just as true as steel; he is solid
gold all through. He is with the side that is right, that is all,
only he has more courage to speak out than some of us have. I reckon
the fact is that the right hasn’t _always_ been the colored side. I’m
afraid it hasn’t, though we’ve had so much the worst chance since
we’ve had a chance at all, and such an outrageous list of grievances to
remember, and to bear, that it isn’t an ordinary man that can look at
things fairly here.”
Now, I have a mind to think there is something serious in this matter,
and that there will be more and more as election approaches. The white
men at Baconsville are _awful mad_, because our Militia Company has
been reorganized lately, and has been preparing for the centennial
Fourth of July. One would think they expected to be massacred in their
beds; and so they go to work and do things that might make every nigger
mad at them. Sensible, isn’t it?
“They are just raving, the white men are, some of them, and they do
talk dreadfully. Old man Bob Baker there, gets into a passion whenever
he sees us drilling on Market street. He hates to see a nigger he has
hunted in the swamps before the war, and his dogs couldn’t catch, or
could, practicing the use of arms with a State gun in his hands, and
the Union flag over his head. He is like a mad bull, and “the stars
and stripes” is the red rag that sets him a roaring and tearing up the
ground.”
Here Watta, the speaker, slapped his companion’s shoulder, and both
broke into a loud laugh.
“He has got an idea,” he resumed, “that all the roads within five miles
of his plantation belong to _him_, I reckon, by the way he swears
whenever he meets or passes the Company. I tell the boys to give the
flag an extra spread whenever he is in sight, and we have it out.”
“It is the flag of the Union that you carry, and you are the National
Guards of South Carolina, too,” replied Elly.
“Well, it _is cutting_ to the old rebel and slave-hunter!” he
continued. His occupation is gone, gone forever; and I don’t suppose he
or his trained blood-hounds take kindly to such cheap game as possoms.
There is a mighty sight of brag and bluster about these southern
whites, though they’ll dodge quick enough at sight of a United States
musket with a Yankee behind it. They hav’n’t forgotten their whipping
yet.”
“Yes, but they’ll dodge back again just as quick, when the musket and
Yankee soldier are withdrawn, and they are fast forgetting the past;
and this centennial year and celebration are unwelcome reminders of it
which they would like to resent.”
“Well, yes, I reckon so. You see the mention of the rebellion as one of
the hard strains which the Union has survived cannot well be avoided,
and so the “red rag,” as you call it, is in their faces pretty often if
they take a newspaper, or steal the reading of one. There are only five
white men, ‘gentlemen,’ who call upon me regularly to get the reading
of my papers, free of course, and call me a ‘nigger.’ They don’t take a
single paper themselves, nor buy one, nor say ‘thank ye’ for mine; nor
always think to ask if I have read it myself.
“Ah, there she comes! right on time;” and Elly closed and pocketed his
gold watch, while the train approached the platform.
“You’ll see, Jesse? Please get that name out of him, and I’ll put the
rascal through for threats; though I’m not afraid of him. Good day,”
and with the grace of a courtier he waved adieu to his friend, as the
train moved away.
He was soon comfortably seated, and gazing out at the window. He was
very well dressed, in strong contrast with a large majority of his race
in the southern States. His tall shining hat lay beside him upon the
crimson plush cushion of the seat, leaving his crisp and glossy frizzed
hair the only covering of his shapely head.
Among the occupants of the car were many “northerners” returning from
winter residences in Florida.
“We talk of the receding foreheads and projecting jaws of the African,”
said a lady sitting opposite, in a subdued tone to her masculine
companion, “but just imagine those two men with hair and complexions
exchanged,” indicating Elly and a man in the seat immediately in front
of him, who was in a double sense, a fair specimen of southern “poor
white trash.”
“‘Now, deil-ma-care about their jaws,
The senseless, gawky million,’
“As Burns says,
‘I’ll cock my nose aboon them a’,’
“For I’m bound for dear New England, away from this land of rags
and dirt, slatterly ways, lazy habits, flowing whiskey and tobacco,
narrow brows and wide mouths, and people of all imaginable shades,
from ebony to cream-color or white,” replied the gentleman. “If you
like to continue studying and comparing these faces, do so; but don’t
suggest it to me, for I long to be where the very air is not darkened
with—‘nigger, _nigger_’ and my ears shall rest from the sound of their
uncouth voices.”
“Their voices are expressive. You should call out the smooth tones.”
“But I can’t always. I’m sure I can’t forget the night of our arrival
at Jacksonville,” he continued, “Thirty, weren’t there _fifty_
black men standing near that train, all _barking_ their loudest for
passengers? Yes, you may reprove me, I know these don’t sound like
the words of an abolitionist. But I am one, I insist; but if upon
oath describing that sound that greeted our arrival in that city, I
must say the voices of ‘thirty yelping curs;’ and to pass through
among them, with their grabbing for one’s baggage, and those frightful
sounds in one’s ears, and the knowledge of the unsettled state of the
country—the antagonism between the races—I’d as lief—well, I don’t
know what I wouldn’t choose!”
“Yes, but if, when that big-mouthed, two-fisted fellow grabbed your
satchel, you, instead of striking him with your cane and umbrella,
had looked kindly into his great-rolling eyes, and mildly said you
preferred to walk and carry it yourself, I think he would have dropped
it as quickly, and more quietly, and been more likely to remember
you kindly. I remember quite similar scenes in the North, with Irish
hackmen. But we have outgrown them; and so will the South, and the
negroes out-grow these scenes; and for me, the more I see these colored
faces, the more that is intelligent and agreeable I see in them.”
Elly’s face had been singularly bright and cheerful before over-hearing
this colloquy; but then a change came, and presently he leaned out
of the window, gazing at a large dilapidated mansion (it could not
worthily be called a ruin,) which stood some rods from the railroad.
Many a day he had played about the door of a poor little cabin in its
rear, or ran at the bidding of his young mistress as she walked in a
small grove the train was just then entering; or had held the bridles
for the gentlemen mounting at the door of “the great house,” watching
well their movements, least, as is the habit of some men to cut their
dogs with their whips and laugh at their yelps and leaps, they should
thus enjoy an exhibition of his agility.
Under that great tree, in the edge of yonder cornfield, his mother
writhed under the lash, for complaining that her task was too heavy;
and obliged to witness the rising of the great welts upon her naked
back, his father had snatched the instrument of torture from the hand
that wielded it, and on an attempt being made to dispossess him of it,
had dealt the overseer a smart blow across the back of his hand.
Then had followed a gathering of “the hands” from that and neighboring
plantations, to witness the “maintenance of discipline,” and Elly’s
father—a valuable specimen of plantation stock—was made, under the
cat o’ nine tails, a physical wreck.
Beside that old decaying cotton-house, now scarcely visible, his oldest
sister was once hung up by her hands and severely whipped, because she
preferred field labor by the side of the father of her child, who was
called her husband, to what was called an easier life—in “the big
house after Missus got sick, and was agwoine’ to die.”
Next, the train rattled over a long stretch of spiling though a
cane-brake, where were familiar trees, under which Elly had paused for
breath, and standing upon their knotted roots, listened to the baying
of pursuing blood-hounds; and so vivid was his recollection of this,
his first attempt to escape from slavery, that the sick, cringing,
trembling feeling returned as he observed the bent canes leaning away
from the half-submerged ties of the railroad track; an involuntarily
moving of his feet upon the car floor, as if again seeking a footing
upon their bent stalks, a semiconsciousness of present circumstances
was restored, through which his mind leaped over the terrible capture
and chastisement, and he seemed again to hear the sounds of the “Yankee
Camp,” and felt the joy of his happy entrance there, a “Contraband of
war,” but a chattel slave no longer.
Then came a realization of the inestimable service the “Yankee
Governess” had rendered him when she stealthily taught him to read,
and spurred his young master’s lazy efforts, by contrasting his
acquirements with those of the listening slave boy.
Through that poor beginning, made in weakness and danger on the
part of both pupil and teacher, when it was a crime, punishable by
imprisonment in the State’s Prison, he had made his way to positions of
honor and emolument.
What meekness, humility and honesty must not a man of such experiences
possess, if, conning them over, pride did not lift up his heart,
resentment make his arm restless, and a sense of robbery long-endured,
make his present powerful position seem a providential opportunity
for retaliation and self-reimbursement! From an abyss of enforced
degradation and ignorance and despair he had emerged into the light and
life of personal and political liberty, equality, respectability and
honor; and the young master whose opportunities he once so earnestly
coveted, and before whose absolute will he was forced to bow, now sued
for favors at his hands, and found “none so poor to do him reverence.”
Was ever the nobility of human nature put to stronger tests than in
these two peoples?
“Good evening, Mr. Elly,” said a broad-browed, florid-faced, red-haired
man in the aisle beside him.
“Good evening, Marmor, good evening;” was the hearty response. “Take a
seat?” removing his hat to make room.
“I will gladly take the seat, if you will just step out and let me
turn over the back of this one in front, so that we can have the use
of the two sofas, for my feet are at their old tricks and troubling
me a good deal. They are easier when I lay them up. One might as well
personate ‘Young America’ in this Centennial year when it makes him
more comfortable.”
“Mind you don’t get them too high now,” said Elly, as they seated
themselves after the change, and he spread a newspaper upon the cushion
before them, to protect it from Marmor’s boot-blacking. “You might
share the misfortune of Ike Partington; and if all your brains _should_
run down into your head, what would become of “The Times?” and Elly
laughed and wriggled, in strange and silly contrast with his usually
dignified manner.
“I don’t furnish brains for “The Times”, said Marmor, “I only publish
it. But what is the campaign going to be, do you think?”
“Oh, of course we shall win.”
Marmor kept his eyes fixed upon his middle finger nail, which he was
carefully cutting, and did not reply.
Elly scrutinized his face awhile, and then asked, “Don’t you think so?”
“I am not so positive as I wish I was.”
“You don’t think the colored voters of the State are going back on the
party that gave them freedom, and the only one that will preserve it
for them? They’ll all vote the Republican ticket, of course.”
“Yes, unless they are intimidated.”
“Now, Marmor, I’ve seen a hint—or what I take for one—in your paper;
but I hope you don’t really think there will be trouble.”
“I _am_ afraid there will be trouble. Hanson Baker told me the other
day that there are fifteen hundred men ready and waiting to come there
and break up the Militia Company in Baconsville, and that they are
going to do it; and it is a frequent boast among the men—the white
Southerners, I mean—that they will carry the election if they have to
do it at the point of the bayonet. They can’t do it honestly, that’s
shor’; but I’m afraid there will be trouble.”
A pause ensued, after which Marmor resumed. “I’m almost tired of
this State, and if my business could be squared up I’d get away; but
I shan’t be driven out. I wish the colored people had the spunk to
emigrate to some of the idle western land. It is a heap better and
richer than this here, by all accounts; and though it might be some
colder, it would make them stronger and smarter, and they’d be heaps
better off than they are here.”
“There _are_ a great many _talking about it_, don’t you know—going by
colonies? It would be a deal better than going to Africa. I shall go
myself if the old Confederates ever get into power here again.”
“See you stick to that, Elly; and, as for me, I reckon I shall have
to go by that time, or before. I was born in South Carolina, and shed
my blood in defense of her (as I thought then), at Fort Sumter, got
wounded there, and I was as good as any of them till I consented to
accept a clerical office under a Republican administration; and then
the old Confederates persecuted me and my wife, till I found out how it
felt to others, and I have seen under what tyranny a man lives here.
He dares not think for himself at all. I served under Hampton in the
war, before I got my eyes open. Like most of the private soldiers,
and plenty of commissioned officers, I was made to believe a lie, or
I never would have raised a hand against the National Government in
the world. I used to say just this way: If the No’th would only let us
manage our State matters ourselves, and would let our slaves alone (you
know I owned a few slaves), I didn’t care if the Territories and new
States were free. But Lincoln, and Garrison, and Greeley shouldn’t come
down here, and take our nigger property away from us; they shouldn’t
be emancipated by the United States Government—the slaves shouldn’t.
Enough others said the same, and dozens of our speakers said it on
the stump and platform, and plenty of the great leaders were right
there—consenting by their silence, if not saying the same things, when
_they_ knew well enough that these were just the principles of the
Republican party—the ‘Unionists’ who elected Lincoln. What did _we_
care for their ‘sympathy for the slaves,’ or their _wishes_ for the
‘constitutional right’ to liberate them, so long as they admitted they
hadn’t got it, and we knew they couldn’t get it short of a two-thirds
indorsement by the States through a direct vote of the people? There
was slave property enough in sixteen of the thirty-four States to make
us pretty sure on that score, in addition to the interests of cotton
manufacturers and sugar dealers in the No’th who wanted our products
and no interruption of business. Then we had the Fugitive Slave Law for
the return of our runaways.”
“But you know the Republican idea was that the new States coming
in, being all free, they could at last secure the constitutional
two-thirds.”
“Yes, at _last_” said Marmor, derisively, “_at the last great day_,
while slave-owners had each a vote for three out of every five of his
slaves without asking their assent. But our hot-headed course hastened
emancipation about a hundred years; and now that it is over I’m glad
of it, though it did cost an ocean of blood and treasure. Slavery
cursed the whites as well as the blacks, and ought to. When I think of
all I saw in that war—I got this difficulty in my feet there (moving
them with a grimace), and of the horrible sufferings it brought on our
people, and how those leading villains knew all the time that they were
deceiving us, I can’t think what wouldn’t be too good for them! And
when that war was over, and the No’th had us in her hand as helpless as
a trapped mouse, she not only spared their lives, but gave everything
back to them which they had forfeited; and now you hear them go on
about the National Government and the northern people, especially any
that come and settle among us and try to develop the resources of the
State, in a way that is simply outrageous! You would think the South
was the magnanimous _patron_ of the stiff-necked and rebellious No’th.
I verily believe the South would have liked the No’th better if it had
put its foot upon her after she fell. Conquer your rebellious child or
yield to his dictation without demur.
“There are some who know no such thing as equality. Somebody must be
the ‘Boss’, in their practice.”
“But republican principles would not allow the government to hold these
States as provinces,” remarked lawyer Elly.
“They should have been held as territories,” said Marmor, “consistently
or not. My blood is German (my father emigrated from Germany to
Charleston when a small boy), but it has got the South Car’lina heat in
it. I’m for _efficiency_.”
“Nineteen-twentieths of what they call carpet-baggers, and make folks
believe are just adventurers, are northern men, capitalists generally,
who in emigrating did not leave their manhood behind. It matters
not how heavy taxes they may pay, nor how long they remain in the
State; if they vote the Republican ticket and maintain the principles
and practice of equal justice for all men in the State, they are
‘carpet-baggers;’ and if they vote Democratic, according to the will
of the confederate whites, though they vote ‘early and often,’ and
at points far removed from each other, they escape the opprobious
epithet.”