The reading of Martin Nichols’s last will and testament took place in the library, a small, shabby, plastered room with only a few worn Methodist volumes on the hand-hewn wooden shelves. A fire had been built, but it barely warmed the damp and drafty room. There was no carpet to cover the plank floor. Birney sat at a small, carved French wooden table, his papers before him. The four children took seats, none close to Birney or near to each other.
Cecilia would be most apt to fly off and storm dreadfully, Birney guessed. Or else Martin, who had not dressed or shaved for the occasion. Martin drank too much and had none of his father’s religion to ballast against barbarism. Brady, just a child, would not understand much. He would monkey the others. Thomas, Birney could not judge. The young man was intelligent, but not sensible.
The will began with a prologue Nichols had dictated, testifying to his lifelong faith in God and warning his children to follow in this path. The children’s stiff, wary appearances quickly degenerated into slouches and bored expressions. They had heard the old man’s religion countless times.
Birney paused, cleared his throat, and went on to read the division of property. Cecilia, known as Sis, inherited all the china, cutlery, crystal, and linens. She also received a horse and carriage of her choice from the stock on hand, and a sum of one thousand dollars. The rest of the plantation—land, stock, buildings—was to be divided between the three brothers, except that Brady, the youngest, was to have his share held in trust by Martin, Jr., until Brady reached the age of twenty-one. The land was not to be sold or divided for twenty years, though by common agreement one of the brothers could buy out the share of another.
The sting came at the tail end. “In the fear of God, the Almighty,” Birney read, glancing curiously up at the four, “and believing it wrong for one man to hold the life of another, I have suffered the injuries of slavery my whole life. I have seen the unchristian effects of this institution on my own self, on my family, and on my nation. I am determined not to pass these evils beyond my generation. I want for my children to learn righteous living, which was impossible for me. Therefore I hereby declare all slaves which I own, ninety-seven in number, as well as their children present and future, free forever.”
Birney glanced up to see the impact on his audience. It did not seem that they understood, for they stared ahead without expression.
He finished the reading, outlining the legal proceedings for making the slaves free. As he began gathering his papers, Thomas stood up in confusion. The news had filtered its way into his head. “Let me see that,” he demanded, grabbing at the will and staring at it. “Crazy old man,” he said. “The land’s no good without slaves.”
“I’m not going to give up Catherine,” Sis said loudly and self-righteously. “I don’t care about the field hands, but the house servants can’t just go off. They’re members of our family.”
Martin rolled his eyes at his sister’s stupidity. He took the papers out of his brother’s hand and turned quietly and seriously to Birney. “You drew these up?” he asked. Martin sat down and began to read them for himself.
“What a ridiculous thing,” Cecilia was telling Brady. “It can’t possibly succeed. I don’t believe Daddy could have done it. Someone put him up to it.”
Birney gradually became aware of noises coming from the kitchen. Then Martin heard them, too, and one by one all four children lifted their heads and listened.
“Sounds like shouting,” Thomas said. “Something going on.” He got to his feet and hurried out, and a few moments later they heard his voice, angrily rising. He came back with his face rigid and blotched with red.
“What happened?” Brady asked in his high child’s voice.
“Nothing,” Thomas told him.
“Come on, Tommy, tell me.”
“It’s nothing, I said.”
“It’s not nothing, we all heard it, and we heard you shouting.”
“The slaves in the kitchen,” Thomas said. “They were celebrating. They thought they were free niggers already.”
“Well, I hope you licked them good,” Cecilia said.
“How did they know?” Martin asked.
Thomas shrugged. His white skin was flushed, his nostrils slightly flared. “I suppose someone was spying on us here,” he said. “Unless Mr. Birney had spread the news beforehand.”
Thomas strode over to Birney and poked a finger in his chest. “You managed this, didn’t you? My father couldn’t have done this unless you helped him. You were the great mechanic turning the wheels; all he had to do was to say yes.”
“Be quiet, Tommy,” Martin said.
“I’m not going to be quiet,” he said, poking his finger in Birney’s face. “Look what you’ve done. You think you’ve done those niggers a favor?”
“They seem to think so,” Birney said coolly.
“That’s because they don’t know a blessed thing. They’ve spent their whole lives never thinking about what to do in the morning. Somebody told them. Somebody fed them.”
“Somebody bought and sold them,” Birney countered.
“Not these niggers,” Thomas shouted. “We take care of them. Now nobody will take care of them, and they’ll wander around like half-wits until they starve or hang. Meanwhile this plantation will go to ruin too. You can’t raise cotton without slaves. It can’t be done, it’s not economical.”
“You may be right about all that,” Birney said with strained courtesy. “You will note that when I gave up my plantation here I sold my slaves to a good master rather than to set them free. But you are quite wrong about my role with your father. He wanted these people freed. At my urging he provided something to help them make a start, because I was concerned about just what you mention. Otherwise it was completely his idea. I merely executed his will.”
“If you hadn’t, he couldn’t have found another lawyer in Alabama to do it,” Thomas shot back.
Thomas wandered out of the house, onto the veranda. Birney would stay for dinner—that was mere courtesy on the frontier, regardless of the hard words they had passed—and Thomas wanted never to see him again.
The land could not be divided for twenty years. Thomas was condemned to work in harness with his older brother, and worse, without slaves. To buy or rent new slaves would cost cash, which only the New Orleans factors could lend. Thomas had read enough and listened enough to know that once the factors had you in their debt, they had your cotton forever. He would never be able to bypass them and go directly to Manchester with his bales.
He felt tight and hot, as though he were squeezed between two iron plates. He would be forty years old before he could even begin to work his scheme. Impossible to wait that long. Impossible to work Martin’s way.
He ambled to the stable and in its dark, warm depths found Charles, the slave with the pony trot, asleep in a corner. Thomas kicked at the small, crumpled body with a boot toe. “Saddle Briar,” he said when Charles jumped up. While Charles did so, Thomas paced in the yard, not even joking with Charles as he usually did.
Behind the house he saw a skinny black girl hanging Birney’s clothing on a line. The sight filled him with loathing, as it called to memory the unpleasant scene he had just endured, and the Negroes he had found with their mouths open in celebration. They must have washed Birney’s soiled garments as though they were angels’ wings.
Down the lane of cedars and into the forest, Thomas rode under the vast, spreading trees that kept the ground in darkness all summer. Cleared ground was still sketchy even in this rich river plain. He passed by a crew of blacks, laboring with axes. Would they know the news already? It made him sick to think so. He would like to bash their heads.
But no, he thought, if they knew they would be beyond the foreman’s control; they’d be dancing and singing, not swinging their axes. Unless swinging at the foreman’s head.
As he came nearer the river, the large trees were fewer and the path he followed grew sandy, working its way through a tangle of vines and scrub. The horse was walking, but Thomas kept urging it forward with his knees until he climbed a small rise into a thicket and suddenly overlooked the Tennessee River—vast, brown, a plain the color of mud, dotted with moving debris. No boats, no buildings, no human life was visible. For Thomas it was a giant and quieting relief to look out over the river’s hugeness.
The Tennessee gave the widest view he ever got. Everything else in his life was hemmed in—by trees, by his family and circumstances. Now, he thought bitterly, he was hemmed in for life.
Of all the Nichols children Thomas had waited with the greatest anxiety to receive his inheritance. His temper was excitable, voluble, easily inflated by triumph and quickly angered by frustration. A handsome twenty-two-year-old, he had white skin and copper hair, with delicate, boyish features that made some women want to mother him, though he was really far too restless to be mothered.
Just the way a boy in Connecticut might fool with machinery, Thomas was inclined toward notions about growing and selling cotton. As a small boy he had made himself a nuisance to the overseers, following the slaves into the fields when they chopped weeds from the new pale plants, brandishing a toy whip that an uncle had presented one Christmas. He had even learned figures just so he could calculate each day’s yield. His father had no use for this; he could tell at a glance whether the harvest was strong, without subjecting his mind to paper squiggles. He always dismissed Thomas’s interest in cotton as nonsense, which had the effect of strengthening it in Thomas.
Alabama was an ideal environment for wild, romantic preoccupations, to the few so inclined. Thomas was so inclined. Living among people who knew little about books or the world, Thomas’s mind could range free, inventing elaborated philosophies and opinions without anyone to contradict him or even to care much what he thought. If he had been raised in Boston or Baltimore somebody would have scoffed or scolded him out of half his ideas, but here he grew free of any such nurturing.
He thought the current system for bringing cotton to market was ruinous to planters, a view that was common along the Tennessee. Planters ragged on the bankers and traders and factors who were stealing from them at every turn. Like farmers everywhere they turned instantly from complaints about their losses to bragging of their latest improvements—buildings and cleared lands and slave populations—without seeing any irony. They were cautious men, rooted in what they knew, and Thomas believed that their caution was wrecking them. He had the idea that he would ship and sell cotton directly to Manchester, bypassing the cotton factors in New Orleans. From reading newspapers he had got enough information to sound knowledgeable, and he spent long hours drawing lists of figures that proved his scheme practical.
But he had not been able to convince his father. The old man was not about to bet his land against the New Orleans factors, who extended credit, bought supplies, and gave advice, conducting all kinds of business that the Nichols family knew nothing about, regardless of newspapers.
So, like many frustrated sons, Thomas had waited, filling his time. He had been bored, and restless, and dissolute. Now it looked as though he would be restless forever.
He sat on his horse for some time watching the water move; then he wheeled and started back on the path.
When he reached a wide stretch he struck the horse and began to gallop, even though the path was rough and there was some risk he might damage the horse. He was headed back, but not to the house. Looking at the river he had thought of a familiar relief to his frustration. He was going to visit Catherine.
The slave cabins stood in a line fifty yards behind the house, small, rudimentary buildings with a hard-packed bare yard in front. A cluster of women stood by a fire, heating a large kettle. They glanced at Thomas with a look that seemed hostile to him, though it was actually empty, all feeling masked. Two tiny, skinny boys ran toward him, laughing, perhaps to beg or to hold his horse. A word from one of the women halted them, and their laughter evaporated.
They know, he thought, they are looking at me with contempt. I would whip them all.
He got down from his mount and stood impatiently, holding the reins. “Well?” he said. “Is someone of you going to take this horse?”
After the swiftest and most minute exchange of glances, one of the women came over. She was stooped and small, her lined face looking older than she could possibly be, since he knew she had birthed a baby within the year. He felt momentarily ashamed as he turned away from her.
The door to Catherine’s cabin was made of three hand-hewn slabs of pine, pegged together. A latchstring of dirty cord hung out of a hole; hands had polished the rough wood all around it to a dark shine. He pulled on the cord, feeling the wooden latch lift inside the door. He pushed the door open without knocking.
Catherine was seated on the bed, reading, or pretending to read as though she had not known he had come. She was just a girl, really. Her face was narrow and small, with deeply hooded eyes and a wide, heavy mouth. Her body, leaning over the book, was lithe and spare. She was beautiful, though he did not think of her so, since she was African. He took a seat on the only other furniture in the room, a chair. She was reading the book he had given her, a primer.
“I came to give you your lesson,” he said.
She glanced at him and did not return his smile. For a moment he saw that soft hesitation, that vulnerability that so excited him, and then it vanished. Her face closed.
“I’m a free woman now,” she said archly.
He had not anticipated that; the master keeps from himself the slave’s resentment.
He turned his head in disgust and spat toward the corner. “Free or not, you want to learn to read, don’t you?” he said. He had been teaching her, which was not yet contrary to Alabama law but was certainly considered foolhardy. Slaves did not need to read, and if they read, the ideas they consumed could not be easily controlled. Knowledge was power, the planters knew that. He had enjoyed the rebellion implicit in teaching her, to say nothing of the closeness of her breathing as she sat by him sharing the book. He had known other slaves before Catherine, but somehow the reading had made her more a woman, less an object of mere lust, which disgusted him when he was done with it.
“I want to read,” she said.
“Well?” he said. His desire for her, dampened for a moment by her mention of freedom, returned. He put out one hand and touched her knee.
She would not look at him. He had liked not only her beauty but the bold way she stared into his face, when other slaves (apart from Mary) would only look at the ground and mumble. He stood up and took her chin, moving her face toward him, but a swift glance was all he caught before she averted her eyes.
He angrily grabbed her wrist. “You’re not a free woman, not yet. You got a paper proving you’re free? You belong to me.”
She tugged, briefly, then let her arm go limp. She had her chin down on her chest, keeping not just her eyes but her whole face from him. He held her face between his hands and forced the head to look up into his eyes. Again he received just a glance, an angry and frightened glance, before her eyes were averted.
“You belong to me,” he whispered fiercely, and kissed her, hard, on the lips.
When Thomas opened Catherine’s door again he was momentarily disoriented. Here, just beyond the door, was a public place with children playing and women washing. Talking ceased before him as surely as if he were the angel of death. None of the women looked up; they continued their business as though he were invisible. One woman had a long stick; she was pushing clothes down into the boiling pot while the others squatted on their haunches around the fire. Only the children stared his way, and even they were silent. Thomas got his horse from where it was tied to a post, mounted, and threw the animal into a canter.
He did not go to the house but down the lane and away from it; still he could not face Birney. He sat straight in his saddle, moving rhythmically with the horse, reliving in his mind his moments with Catherine. He had enjoyed himself; he had asserted himself. A slave owner had this privilege, to act the master.
He urged the horse to a gallop and gave himself to the sensation of speed. The vegetation along the road became a blur. Eventually he slowed to a trot, then a walk.
He had forced her. Never before had Thomas done that; she had always been willing. For all his pride Thomas did not like the thought of forcing her. It spoiled the reassuring value of the act: was he really desired, was he really by nature the master, or was it only violence that made him so?
Teaching her letters had made their relations seem pleasant, almost equal. Of course, had he thought about it from her point of view he would have known that she had never been in a position to choose; no slave could disobey without the risk of paying dearly. Still he had paid her, in a currency she wanted, the alphabet. But he had not thought of it as payment. It was pleasure to him. Now the hint of doubt came in: had it not been pleasure to her?
He discarded the thought. It’s the freedom, he thought. It confuses them. Now she doesn’t know who she is or what she wants.
He cursed his father. Before this Catherine had been very agreeable and had profited from it too. Learning her letters, learning how the white man thought, could keep her in the house and out of the fields. Now, who knew where she might end up?
I’ll leave, he said to himself suddenly. I can’t stand it here. He could not endure twenty years with his brother, raising cotton just to sell it through the factors, in the same old way.
Where would he go? His whole lifetime had been spent anticipating his ascendance here, on this land. South Carolina was a distant memory; he had left there when he was ten.
As the horse walked through the dead winter fields, rusted and wrecked and colorless, Thomas formed a plan. He would sell out his land to his brother. Never mind that they had no cash; his brother could borrow some and pay more yearly from the cotton profits. He, Thomas, would not ignobly quibble over the price; he would accept any reasonable payment. Then he would go, immediately, to New Orleans, to catch a ship for South Carolina. He had an uncle there. He would go into some sort of business, to make money, until he could come back to buy up land and begin his work beholden to no one.
He considered what would be said. He remembered how they had gossiped about Birney, when he lost his land. That had been quite a comedown, from a planter to a law man. But Thomas resolved himself. Money would answer the talk. They said you could grub fortunes in trade, though you had to sacrifice the dignity of life on the land. Well, he would do it. His stomach turned from it, but it would be the brave thing. Immediately he wheeled his horse and headed back to the house, to talk to his brother.
Reprinted with permission of Thomas Nelson Publishers.
Related Elsewhere
Stamp of Glory can be purchased at Worthybooks.com and other bookstores.
See today’s related ChristianityToday.com article by Tim Stafford, ” How God Won When Politics Failed | Learning from the abolitionists during a time of political discouragement.”
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