Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Tim Stafford's Stamp of Glory is the first in a four-part series of novels published by Thomas Nelson Publishers. "Put together, these books are meant to chronicle the ways in which faith interacts with social justice," says Stafford. "I consider abolition the most important movement in American history, and also the most interesting, full of drama and tragic irony. The movement sprang out of Christian revival, so it has many insights to lend Christians who want their faith to make a difference today. Politics, protest, violence, race, the question of how 'Christian' America can be and should be—these topics are all front and center." Subsequent novels will chronicle the woman suffrage, prohibition, and civil rights movements.

In the cold, wet months of the winter of 1824, Martin Nichols withered and failed to eat. He showed no signs of disease, no fever or diarrhea, but the sickness cut into him like a north wind. He lost his taste for food, and his sparrowlike limbs grew daintier, his skin more like parchment. In this sickness old Black Mary, the keeper of the house and ruling mother for all the slaves, watched over Nichols night and day, spooning food into his mouth, wiping his chin. He lay like a doll in his mahogany bed, lost in its coarse, woven blankets. She would put one vast hand on the small of his back, lifting him upward toward the teaspoon she wielded in her other hand. When he utterly refused to eat, she occupied the kitchen, concocting delicacies to tempt him toward life. The house was filled with aromas then, as she stewed and spiced the venison with her best magic. Still he had no appetite and would only take a spoonful and then turn his head away. She told him sternly he must eat, but he did not.

Nichols was a planter near Triana, where the broad plain of the Tennessee River created bottomland for cotton. Nichols was old; his body had shrunk down to a frail, childlike frame with wrinkled, yellow skin stretched over the bones. Once he had been a strong, mean-souled Caesar, carving the plantation out of wilderness. Now his sons kept the farm without consulting him about it. Nobody paid much attention to the old man except the house slaves, some of whom were nearly as old as he was, and looked older. Nichols had brought them with him when he came from South Carolina twelve years before, when the country was opening up to settlement. They took their worth from that: the original settlers of north Alabama, Carolinians to the day they died. The head of the field hands said, those house servants don't know they are Negroes.

Nichols kept his bed by the window, so he could see every hint of life on the compound below. He watched the Negroes, mostly. You could rarely find his sons at home. They were out and about, riding and hunting and visiting their reckless friends. Nichols's daughter, too, was usually gone to Huntsville, where she could find society. Black Mary sat with the old man in his cold and forlorn room, unchanged since his wife had died, the French paper darkened with patches of creeping mildew. Mary listened as he pronounced doom on everything and everyone, particularly his sons.

"They're draining it," he said in a high, raspy voice, referring to the value of the land he had bought and partly cleared. "All the labor of my hands is draining away. Mark me, you'll be left with nothing." If you had overheard him you would have thought he expected Mary to feel the same alarm he did. But in reality she was only a slave, not someone he could treat with feelings, even if she did know and understand him more than any of his own flesh and blood.

next page... |  1 of 3

January (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44