Charleston (47 page)

“Despicable,” Alex said when she finished reading. “Sham heroism, and murder to cover his cowardice.”

“Assuming we can believe Mr. Hix's testimony,” Ham said. “I see no reason not to do that. Old Tom Bell, from all I know of him, was common as a pin, and never pretended otherwise. But ever since Adrian and Lydia, position and reputation have been of colossal, not to say paramount, importance on that side of the family.” An acerbic smile. “Of course that remains a tradition in certain quarters of town, doesn't it?”

“What's to be done with the letter?”

“Nothing, unless you wish to expose our cousin. Which
assumes it could be accomplished using a document whose contents can't be corroborated or amplified by the writer. I continue to suspect Mr. Hix has left us.”

“Gibbes?”

“One can only suppose.”

She shivered. If it was true, their cousin was responsible for three deaths, counting Henry Strong and the colonel named Wheat. Surely he deserved punishment, but she didn't want the responsibility.

“I won't want to attack him, Ham. He's deceitful, and a libertine along with everything else, but it isn't my place to conduct a public hanging.”

“Then that finishes it. Almost. There is still one person to whom the existence of the letter is critical. We ought not guarantee him total immunity. The letter returns to the safe at Buckles and Bell.”

 

In April 1866 President Johnson declared the rebellion in South Carolina over. Some occupying troops were withdrawn from the state, but an ample number remained to annoy the Charleston populace, especially with the intemperate and dogmatic Sickles in command.

On Alex's birthday Richard brought a gift, a fine old bracelet of Mexican silver, and a proposal of marriage. Alex clucked over the bracelet's suspected cost to avoid facing the other issue. Privately she could admit she loved him, though with serious reservations.

“Richard, I'm not sure we could get along, feeling so differently about many things.”

“Aren't there issues we can set aside?”

“You mean race, and the course of the state and country? No, I can't. Nor should a husband ask it of a wife.”

They sat on the old bench in the sweet-smelling twilight garden. His flecked eyes brooded. “Then you're refusing me.”

She touched his hard brown hand. “For the present I am.”

“There's hope of a reprieve?”

She didn't know. “May we go inside? I'm chilly.”

 

Mary Hix somehow found money to buy a small burial plot. One balmy afternoon Ham accompanied her to inspect the empty grave dedicated to her husband. Mary had decorated the grave in a way often seen at poor Negro cemeteries: a scattering of small stones, black and white and rust-red; chips of green and purple bottle glass; shards of a blue vase.

Benny scuffed his shoe in the dirt. Little Abby whined about needing a toilet. The Atlantic breeze pushed Mary's hair across her face like a veil. “We'll never find him, will we, Mr. Bell?”

“I would think not.”

“Then what's to be done? Plato told me who—”

“Mrs. Hix, the man your husband named can't be reached by the law. Don't torture yourself wishing it otherwise.”

“It isn't right,” Mary exclaimed. “It isn't right that someone's above the law.”

“But, alas, that is often the case.” Painful to have to say that on a spring day with clouds of innocent white flying in the brilliant blue sky.

“It isn't right,” she repeated furiously as they left.

 

If Charleston was a phoenix, Alex thought, the creature was still mostly buried in the ashes. Too many houses remained roofless and windowless. Too many buzzards scavenged in the open-air markets. Too many reeking street drains overflowed. Too many cow yards threw the stench of dung on the warm wind. Too many barrooms, bordellos, and tenements replaced abandoned homes and shops along East Bay.

Too many street confrontations between loitering blacks and whites reached the flashpoint of violence.

To buffer herself against the restless, unhappy state of the occupied city, Alex cultivated her garden. She planted seeds and bulbs Richard had given her; sheared off the tops of her fast-growing
Fatsia japonica;
thinned the white blossoms of the star jasmine twined on the piazza railings. Little Bob helped, smiling when he got down on his knees with her. His stubby fingers made the dirt fly.

Ham came home with stories of the Union League of America organizing Negroes into political clubs, taking advantage of what he called “the Negro's anxious state of locomotion.”

“The League men say their purpose is honorable, their operation aboveboard, but I hear that some of them use low tactics to frighten members. They don't want what's best for the colored man, they want votes for the Republican party. They want to vote Negroes like herds of cattle.”

Alex devoted three nights a week to her school. Four new pupils had heard of it and come to her door.

Alice Van Epps, forty, wanted to emigrate to Liberia, there to teach African children. Operatives of the African Colonization Society were actively recruiting in Charleston. Nearly three hundred men and women had already signed up to go.

Twin brothers, Jo and Jim Davies, were in their twenties and trained as masons. Jo kept a fat plug of tobacco in his cheek but conscientiously went outside to spit. Where others saw ruins, the brothers saw opportunity. Mayor Gaillard's council had recently passed “An Ordinance to Aid in Rebuilding the Burnt District and Waste Places of the City.” It established low-cost loans for anyone who rebuilt with brick. The brothers wanted to start a small brickworks. They realized they had to read, write, and figure if they were to do it.

Bo Bethea, a shrimper in his fifties, came simply because he felt inadequate without literacy. Bo verified the stories of Union League intimidation. “After we gave a password and pledged allegiance to the flag and sang songs, we had to kiss a Bible and swear to elect only true Union men. They said if we didn't, they'd report us to the President and he'd take away our freedom, we'd be slaves again. Could that be, Miss Alex?”

“Never, and they're wicked to say otherwise.”

Passing through the dining room, Ham said, “Don't get exercised, sister. That's politics. Always has been, always will be.”

 

Gibbes remained in the city during the spring. He had no desire to visit boarded-up Malvern or the ashes of Prosperity Hall. He'd abandoned both places to the weeds and wild pigs, despairing of ever seeing another penny of profit from the land.

Home life was not pleasant. Snoo was constantly in a state, unable to find a colored cook who knew how to prepare a dish unless it swam in fat. Colored laundresses broke buttons on Gibbes's fine shirts and ironed them brown. The hired girls almost laughed in Snoo's face when she reprimanded them. She wept frequently and learned to swear.

A copy of the
Rural Carolinian
chanced across Gibbes's desk. One of the editors, a Col. D. H. Jacques, described
stimulating and invigorating reports concerning deposits of phosphoric rock recently located along the Wando River. Small samples have assayed in a significant way. We have long known of marls rich in calcium carbonate in our tidal rivers, but phosphoric deposits, if present in quantity, could presage a brisk new industry, providing farmers with less costly fertilizer than the Peruvian guano presently employed.
Gibbes snipped out the article and saved it in a drawer. Perhaps his river property wouldn't be worthless forever.

In Washington the damned demagogues of the radical Republican party wanted a constitutional amendment to guarantee the franchise to Negroes. The amendment would be submitted to the states in June or July. Northern papers said representation in Congress would be denied any state refusing to ratify the amendment. Gibbes took up his pen and wrote a letter for circulation among his more affluent constituents.

Over brandy, Folsey criticized Gibbes's screed. “Empty words, friend.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because your own relative continues to teach niggers to read and write and think themselves perfectly fit to vote. And you do nothing about it. It doesn't go unnoticed. You may never win another election.”

 

Richard found Cal a job at the horse barn of the Charleston City Railway. Cal swamped out stalls, carried hay, and didn't seem to worry about his status or lack of it. His disposition improved; he whistled and hummed. The only negative Richard observed was Cal's familiar habit of sneaking drinks in the daytime and lingering too long in grogshops after dark.

Cal and Adah lived in rented rooms in one of the mixed streets above Calhoun. On a warm Tuesday in May he reeled home later than usual, half past ten. He found Adah waiting in the tiny parlor, her arms crossed on her breast. A whiskey bottle stood on an otherwise empty table.

“Sorry 'm late,” he began, reaching for her.

“Stay back.” Adah's eyes were fiery. “I know you still hurt because of the war and your poor mama, but that's no excuse for a man ruining himself.”

Cal's bleary smile vanished. He wiped his sleeve across his mouth. “I could use a swig of that bottle.”

“Take it. I set it out so you could make your choice.”

“Choice? What're you talking about?”

“The drinking or us. You can have one or the other.”

“What the devil do you mean, ‘us'?”

Adah slowly uncrossed her arms and lowered her hands to her belly.

“Oh Lord, Adah. Merciful God, you're going to have…?”

“Yes, but I won't bring up a child with a father who's a
sot. You have to marry me, Cal, and you have to forswear the whiskey, except maybe a toddy at Christmas, or I'm leaving you.”

“Adah, Adah.” He flung his arms around her, buried his mouth in her neck. Her emotional carapace crumbled; tears splashed her cheeks, and his. He picked her up and tenderly carried her to their bed.

Cal Hayward was not seen in Charleston taprooms after that night.

 

The
South Carolina Leader,
a new paper favorable to Northern opinion, praised Alex's school in a long article. The mayor, Peter Gaillard, visited to observe an evening class and chat with the students. General Sickles, he of the glorious mustachios and lecherous eye, spent a similar evening. He managed to bump into Alex several times, caressing her arm or patting her shoulder while apologizing floridly.

Perhaps the most interesting visitor was a Negro whose skin was the color of old ivory. Tall and thick around the middle, he had an unconsciously grand air and flawless grooming. Alex noticed a high gloss on his nails.

Francis Cardozo was a Charleston native, the product of a liaison between a Jewish gentleman and a mother who was part Indian, part black. Education at the University of Glasgow and a London seminary had prepared him for the Presbyterian ministry. He'd held a pulpit in New Haven for a time. After the war he'd returned to help reopen the schools.

“Our lives run parallel, Miss Bell. We both came home to our native city.”

“There are powerful attractions in Charleston, Mr. Cardozo. I ran away from them, but I couldn't escape them.”

“I'm greatly interested in what you're doing here.”

“My little academy is a very small effort to attack a very large problem.”

“But most significant because it's a private initiative. All of your students are Negro, am I correct?”

“I had one white chap. He only stayed a short time.”

Cardozo studied the improvised classroom from the
hallway. “I have a theory on education. I believe the most natural method of removing race distinctions would be to allow children, when five or six years of age, to mingle in school together. Children don't know hatred.”

“That's a laudable vision, Mr. Cardozo.” And one that she found too daring for easy accomplishment, at least in her lifetime.

 

June brought summer's wet again, the kind of weather that stifled breathing and made the skin glisten. Nerves grew strained; tempers were inflamed. Maudie saw a waterspout dancing in the Atlantic. Hurricane season was upon them.

Grumbling thunder woke Alex on her sodden pillow three nights in succession. Next evening at dusk, while she worked in the garden, a carriage stopped at the gate. She was startled to see Gibbes's coupe rockaway, its peeling carmine paint coated with dust. A mule had replaced his handsome gray.