Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (4 page)

WHEN HE WAS courting me, he was mysterious, and I took his aloofness for sensitivity. He was a man who required his linen to be scented and spotless, who could not stay long in the city because the stench from the sewers offended him. When he visited our cottage, I had the parlor scrubbed out and scented with rosewater and vetiver, and my own hair washed with chamomile. He never failed to comment on the agreeable atmosphere in our rooms.

“If he’s fastidious,” my Aunt Lelia said, when she heard of our engagement, “you’d best have my Sarah. She’s country-bred, used to country houses. She’s the best housekeeper I’ve ever had, though she’s not eighteen. She hates the town because she says the dirt walks in the house every time the door is opened. I will give her to you as my wedding gift.”

And that was how Sarah came to this house, six weeks before I did, commissioned to ready it for my arrival. My husband was impressed with her and wrote my aunt himself to thank her for this “prize”; his house had never been so well arranged.

I wonder how my aunt could have dealt my happiness such a blow. Did she imagine my husband was different from hers? Did she think that because I was young and pretty, I was proof against the temptations presented by Sarah?

Or was she only desperate? I learned later, much too late, that my uncle had lost his head when a free man of color offered to buy Sarah so that he might free her and marry her. The free man was in my uncle’s employ, overseeing the construction of an addition to their house, and he fancied that he was in love with Sarah. My uncle fired the man, who straightway sued for damages. This so enraged my uncle that he had Sarah tied up in the kitchen and whipped her himself, in front of the cook. That was when my aunt began to look for someplace to get rid of her.

The day I arrived here, she was standing on the porch with the others, Delphine and Bam, the butler, who is gone now, and Rose, who was just a child, supposedly of use to Delphine in the kitchen. “Here we are,” he said, helping me down from the carriage. “Your new home.”

The house is in the West Indies style, flush to the ground with brick columns below and wooden above. The upstairs gallery is wide and closed in by a rail, but the porch below is open to whatever stumbles across the brick floor, lizards, snakes, and every kind of beetle the swamps can disgorge. Casement doors open across the front, upstairs and down, framed by batten shutters that are only closed in hurricanes or at the threat of revolt. I went ahead of my husband to greet the minimal staff. Delphine gave me a quick curtsy and an open, curious look. I asked her name, greeted her, was introduced to Rose, who couldn’t raise her eyes from my skirt. Bam, a lanky, long-faced, dark-skinned fellow, dressed in a coat that was too narrow in the shoulders and short at the sleeves, gave me a formal bow and said, “Welcome, missus.”

“This is Bam,” my husband said. I nodded, turning to Sarah. I knew who she was, that she was my aunt’s wedding gift. Her appearance was pleasing, tall, slender, light-skinned, neatly dressed, excellent posture. Her hands were folded over her apron. She acknowledged me with something between a bow and a curtsy, but she wasn’t looking at me at all. She was looking past me, with an expression of sullen expectation, at my husband.

FATHER NEVER KEPT more than fifteen field hands and their families. Each year, depending on his crop, he hired extra hands for the picking and ginning. Cotton is a less finicky crop than cane and doesn’t require the bulk of the harvesting and milling to be done all at once under the pressure of a hard freeze. Cane-growers spend Christmas in a panic and the negroes don’t have their party and holiday until after the new year.

Whenever Father went to the hiring barn, the negroes pressed around him and begged him to take them on. They all knew they would be better housed and fed on his farm than on their masters’ grand plantations, and that they would have a full day of rest once a week. Our New Year’s party was famous among them, and once hired, they shouted and slapped one another on the back, congratulating themselves on the feast they would enjoy together.

I remember standing at the window to watch their procession come up from the quarter. The torches were like flaming birds swooping and soaring over their heads. Father stood on the porch with his basket of envelopes, each with a name on the front and a crisp bill inside. There was much laughter, joking, and singing. When each one had received his gift, Father cried out, “And now for the feast,” and led them to the barn, which was all festooned with greenery, with long tables set out, draped in bright red cloths and laden with beef and pork roasts, chickens, turkeys, bowls of greens and mashed potatoes, all manner of fruit, breads, puddings, pies, candies, and, along the walls, barrels of sweet wine and tafia. I was allowed to go with him and see the bustle as they took their places and began piling their plates. Later, in my bed, I heard the first strains of the fiddles and the scraping and shouting as they pulled the tables to the side and began the dancing which lasted late into the night. In the morning everyone slept late and Father arrived at the table as we were finishing our breakfast. “I believe the negroes enjoyed their festivities,” he would say, sitting down to cold coffee and leftover eggs.

Father was strict and fair. None of our people could marry off the farm, indeed they could never leave it unless they had some compelling reason, and visits by negroes from the neighboring farms and plantations were strictly forbidden. He didn’t allow them to work garden patches of their own, as he said it gave them a notion of independence and divided their loyalty, so that they might take more interest in their own patch than in the farm. In order to have peace and harmony, he said, the negroes must recognize that the farm is their provider and protector, that it gives them every good thing, food, medical attention, clean housing, heat in winter, friends and family, that it is the place they come from and where they will be valued and cared for until they die.

He would have no overseer. He had the same driver for fifteen years. He used the whip sparingly and stood by while the driver administered the sentence, for he said it was wrong that any master be seen raising a whip himself; it demeaned him in the eyes of those who stood by.

I was never allowed, as most planters’ children were, to play with the negro children on our farm. Father considered it a perverse practice that resulted in a coarsening of the master’s children and was the source of inappropriate expectations in the negroes, who must feel themselves the equals of their playmates. This familiarity could breed naught but contempt, Father maintained, and so I learned to make companions of my dolls.

Above all, Father deplored the practice of some of his neighbors, who paraded about the town with their mulatto children in tow. That these men were often to be seen singing in church on Sunday morning was one more reason, Father maintained, to have nothing to do with religion. Religion was for the negroes, he said; it was their solace and consolation, as they were ours.

I didn’t know, as a girl, how remarkable Father was. When my mother complained that his death was no accident, I took her charge to be the product of her grief. But now I think he must have had a world of enemies. When our home was gone and we moved to the city, I learned that Father, who was so strong, loving, stern, and fair, was all that stood between my innocent happiness and chaos.

I SOMETIMES THINK Sarah blames me for her fate, though I had nothing to do with it. She sealed it herself shortly after I arrived by getting pregnant. The father was my husband’s butler, Bam. I had noticed that he could not keep his eyes off her when Sarah passed through the room and I was not surprised to learn that they hoped to marry. She told me first and I saw nothing against it. She entreated me to tell my husband, as she feared he wouldn’t agree to the match. This was when she still talked and behaved like a normal servant, asking for permission, eager to please. I agreed to inform my husband of her request. It seemed an advantageous match to me, as it would serve to strengthen their loyalty to the property. These marriages the negroes make are not legal, but they set great store by them.

I wonder now how I could have been such a fool. My husband’s reaction to this news was to leap up from his desk, bellowing like a bull. He bid me send Sarah to him at once and when she came, he pulled her inside by her arm and commenced slapping and hitting her until she was flat on the floor, begging him to stop. It was not to be borne, he swore, that he should be treated in this fashion in his own house. When I spoke a word on her behalf, he pushed me out of the room and slammed the door in my face. Then, while I was standing there, listening to Sarah’s pleas and his curses, I understood everything. Sarah had resisted him all those weeks when I wasn’t there, and now she had tried to outmaneuver him, but she never would again.

My husband called upon Mr. Sutter, who appeared in the dining room just before dinner with two brutish field hands at his side. The three of them dragged Bam off to the quarter, howling that he never had been whipped in his life and would not be whipped now; he would kill himself first. Later we learned that he escaped his captors briefly, took up an ax from a stump, and threatened to cut off his own hand to render himself worthless to his master. The boys rushed him, and in the ensuing struggle one of them got a deep gash in his leg, which so enraged Mr. Sutter that he beat Bam near to death. It was six weeks before he was recovered enough to be transported to the city, where he was sold.

Sarah’s baby, a boy, was taken from her as soon as it was born and sent out to nurse at my brother-in-law’s plantation upriver, with the understanding that when he was old enough to work, he would be sold, and the profit, after his board was deducted, divided between the brothers. Sarah wept, pleaded, then grew silent and secretive. My husband was pleased with himself, though he’d been forced to sell a valuable negro at a loss. When the dealers saw Bam’s scars, they took him for a troublesome fellow and lowered their offers accordingly. By the end of that year, Sarah was pregnant with Walter.