Orphan of Creation Read online

  Barbara waited in the buffet line and got the second-to-last slice of Rose’s pie, and generous helpings of two or three others of her favorites, and laughed and smiled and chattered away with everyone, and even managed to find a whole chair to herself in the crowded living room. When everyone was settled down with a plate of six kinds of dessert and all diets forgotten until tomorrow, Great-aunt Josephine led yet another grace, thanking the Lord because so many loved ones were there, because those who had “gone on ahead” (as Great-aunt Josephine delicately put it) were still honored and remembered, because those separated by distance or duty were happy and well (though Barbara had a little trouble thinking of her absent and soon-to-be-ex husband Michael as “happy”).

  There was a chorus of loud Baptist “amens” and the noise level suddenly dropped as everyone dug in, finding just room enough for dessert.

  Afterwards, the men wandered out onto Gowrie House’s wraparound porch to start playing pinochle and bridge and dominos by twilight and lamplight. A few of the more daring younger men actually snuck upstairs to get up a poker game, leaving their less rash cousins to mutter in admiration at their brazenness. Gambling, for money, right there in Aunt Josephine’s house! The children raced off to play who knows where, and the women started cleaning up after the meal. Each group went to its place and activity without anyone being told what to do, or even any of the women objecting—for today, at least—about being stuck with the dishes. It was part of the expected holiday ritual, the tradition, and Barbara found something comfortable about being in solely female company, carefully washing and drying the good china and the best silver as the women shared the latest gossip about this or that absent relative, boasting about how well the nieces and nephews were doing in school. Afterwards, the women had coffee and nibbled on the last of the desserts as they talked around the big table in Josephine’s roomy, museum-piece kitchen, a room exactly as it had been when Barbara had been born.

  The evening wore on toward night, and Barbara slipped away from the bright-lit table, collected her sweater from the front hall closet, and went outside for a stroll in the cool night. She stepped down off the porch and went out into the calm darkness, the laughter of the card players faint and close in the freshening breeze. She walked down the winding paved driveway that led to the county road.

  It had been a clear, perfect, blue-sky day, but now the last traces of sunlight went sliding beneath the western horizon and steely clouds rolled in from the south, blanking out the first stars of night even as they appeared. A distant rumble of thunder growled, a strange sound to come from a November night. Barbara stopped a few hundred feet from the house and looked back the way she had come. It was a big old place, and every generation had added onto it, the exterior of the original house nearly lost under a century of remodeling. Solid old oak trees had been planted to shade the house long decades past, and now their uppermost branches swung back and forth, thrown about by the strengthening wind.

  Ghosts lived in Gowrie House, Barbara thought to herself, friendly spirits that taught the ways of family and love and remembrance. There was a comforting presence and strength in the place.

  She heard a fluttering noise and a slight commotion from the porch, looked to see what it was, and smiled. The wind was starting to blow the cards about, and the bridge players were retreating inside, just as the women were finally coming out to join the men. It was the cue to wrestle the card tables into the parlor and form up into new foursomes. She walked back to see if she could get into a game.

  Chapter Two

  It was close on midnight before the last rubber of bridge was done and folks started thinking about turning in. Barbara returned to her tiny bedroom and changed for bed.

  There was just room inside the little corner room’s flocked wallpaper walls for a small dresser, a night table, and one narrow bed, but that suited Barbara just fine—with so many visitors in the house, she was one of the very few who wasn’t sharing a room that night. She realized how used to sleeping alone she had become. Even before the recent split, for most of the last few months, Michael had been on the overnight shift at the hospital.

  Back in Washington, Barbara usually wore something along the lines of an old T-shirt to bed, but somehow that seemed too frivolous and undignified to wear in Zebulon Jones’s house. She always wore a full-length nightgown to bed when she was at Gowrie, and now, as always, she was careful to cover even that with a ladylike robe as she went back and forth from the bathroom.

  A few minutes later, she maneuvered herself into the narrow bed, her face scrubbed, her teeth well-brushed, and her hair combed out. Settling into the too-small bed in the doll-sized room, with the thunder rattling the windows and the rain suddenly coming down, with Zebulon’s journal in her hand and the room lit by the cozy yellow light of the lamp on the nightstand, Barbara felt as if she were a child again, secretly reading her Nancy Drew books under the covers with a flashlight after Mama had tucked her in.

  And Zebulon’s journal was as fine a secret as she had ever found. At last alone with no chance of being disturbed, she opened the book and began to read as the rain splattered down on the windowpanes.

  The handwriting was fine, proud, and precise, clearly an old man’s hand, but the hand of an old man still sure and confident, the phrases couched in the formalized dignity of the 19th-century educated man.

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  I was born a Slave, [it began] and spent the first twenty-five years of my life in that monstrous condition. A quarter-century of such an imprisoned existence left its plain mark on the rest of my life, which I have spent in a search for all the things denied a slave—freedom, dignity, education, prosperity, property, control over one’s own destiny, the chance to provide for one’s family and people, the leisure to treasure the beauties of God’s world.

  In these endeavors, I believe I have in some small way succeeded. I am now approaching the end of a useful life, and I feel that I have made myself ready to meet my Maker. I will not dying willingly, for life is a precious gift none of us dare deny while it is offered. But I strive to be an obedient servant of the Lord, and will go when He at last calls me home.

  If my life has not been Faultless, neither has it been so Blameful that a just and merciful God should deny me entrance to His kingdom. After lifelong battles with His enemies—the Slavemaster, the Lynch Mob, the Klansman, and all the other agents of Hate—I am at peace with God. I have done my duty to him, and to myself. It only remains for me to recount, as best I can, the events of my life, not as a Monument to myself, but as an Instruction to those not yet born as to what it is possible for one Man to do.

  In that connexion, and with the same admonition that what follows is not a Boast, but an Example, I must commence by relating the difficulties ranged against me.

  For a man to say he was a Slave, to say that he was denied a right or that he was treated inhumanely because he was a Negro, is to report so much in so few words that nothing at all is said.

  To be born a Slave in Mississippi in the Year of Our Lord 1824 or 1825 (I confess that I have never known the exact date of my own birth) was to be born not merely into ignorance and poverty, but ignorance and poverty ruthlessly enforced by law, violence, murder, and terror; enforced by the forcible sundering of families, enforced by the fears of the Master and the lies told to the Slave.

  I lived out my childhood sleeping on a pile of filthy rags in a dirt-floor shack, eating out of tin cups and wooden bowls, never with spoon or fork, but merely with my hands, ignorant not only of reading and writing, but even ignorant that such skills existed. I had no playmates, for we were toilers in the cotton fields, and there was no play from the moment I could walk and speak, but only endless work.

  As a child, I was savagely beaten many times—beaten for such grave flaws as laughing, or being afraid, or failing to lift a bale of cotton as large as myself. And yet I was never beaten out of anger, but always in a skilled, calm, scientific manner, nicely calculated to produced the desi
red results—as a blacksmith might pound a horseshoe on an anvil, bending the iron to his will without anger or emotion, without a thought that the metal he worked upon could possibly feel pain or fear or want.

  I believe that I would have preferred to have been beaten in anger. Better the furious punishment of an enraged Master than a calm man methodically forming a tool to suit his needs. Not only in the way they beat us, but in the way they fed us, housed us, clothed us, our former Masters treated us not as men and women, not even as dumb creatures, but as objects—tools to be used up, patched up if it seemed worthwhile, but otherwise discarded without a care or thought.

  Yet I also believe that, when the War came, and Emancipation came, and the end of the “Peculiar Institution” came, slavery had cost the Master far more than it had cost the former Slave. It had cost the Master his Soul.

  How crippling to the heart and soul for a young white child to be raised and trained and schooled to believe that a human being could be less than an animal. How vile, to force oneself to believe that pain did not hurt, that cruelty was blameless. How evil to learn—and then to teach—the techniques of stripping a fellow man of all dignity.

  How horrible to know at the back of one’s mind that all one’s wealth, all one’s peace and prosperity, had its foundations set on Blood, on the Lash, on barbarity carefully hidden from view beneath the most elaborate civility and courtliness. Guilt hung like a heavy, funereal shroud over the white man’s plantation.

  Perhaps it was for pity’s sake, then, strange as that must seem, that while all Slaves hated their servitude, hardly any hated their own Masters, and even after Emancipation, many former Slaves stayed on in service to their old owners, those owners for the most part much reduced in circumstance by the War’s privation.

  To this day, it is with a strained and muted, and all but embarrassed affection, an affection not untinged with hatred, that I recall my own master, Colonel Ambrose Gowrie. No Slave of his household ever felt the lash from the Colonel directly, and his presence was sure to mitigate the severity of any beating. If the White man was debased and brutalized by Slavery, then Colonel Gowrie was far less polluted than he should have been. He retained far more of his humanity than he should have.

  Perhaps that is why I hate him even as I recall him fondly. The owner of such an enquiring, open, brilliant mind should not have been so closed to the evidence of his own senses. Unlike so many of the White men in and about Gowrie town, he could not claim ignorance or stupidity as a bulwark for his beliefs and actions. He, of any of the Masters, should have realized that the Negro was a man and brother. But, of all of them, none was so certain of the Negro’s inferiority. He was a barbarian, sure and certain that his own vile prejudices were the law and word of God.

  So much and no more will I write concerning the general condition of my own background. Much has already been written by more skilled hands who came from similar circumstance, and it would be in vain for me to attempt any improvement upon such accounts.

  I shall instead relate the unique experiences of my life, which I believe have no model in the written word, for I have been many other things than a Slave, and done many other things than bale Cotton.

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  Barbara smiled at that, and closed the book for a moment. On an impulse, she threw the covers back off, got out of bed, drew on her slippers and robe, and stepped out into the upstairs hallway, taking the book with her. She still knew the secret children’s folklore of this house, legacy of the many times she had sneaked downstairs after hours with her cousins. She knew her way around the house in the dark, knew which boards creaked, knew the quietest, safest way to go downstairs without alerting the grownups. With no other light but the far off, flickering lightning, she made her way downstairs by the old servants’ stairs. Zebulon himself must have trod these stairs, in the old days before he bought the place out from under Colonel Gowrie.

  She opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and found herself in the kitchen, now spotlessly clean after all the day’s good cooking and eating. She went through the doorway to the dining room, out into the foyer, and through the wide entrance of the front parlor.

  There was the portrait, over the mantel, dimly seen in the flickering gloom of the storm. She flicked up the wall switch, and the darkness was thrown back by warm yellow light.

  She walked to the center of the room and regarded Zebulon’s face—a good, strong, lean, dark-skinned face, solemn without seeming stuffy. The portrait had been made in later life; his thick shock of hair was snow white, the face weathered and mature. He was dressed in a trim frock coat and waistcoat that showed a form still slender and vigorous. His right hand held the lapel of his coat, and his left was holding a book. The artist had captured well the power and grace of those long-fingered, work-hardened hands. This was the man.

  She reached up and touched the frame, the edge of the painting, then turned and sat down on the stiff old claw-foot sofa and continue her reading in the presence of the author’s image. She opened the journal, flipped the pages back and forth, a few words here and there jumping out at her as the phrases fluttered past her eyes. The fire in the cotton field burned for two terrible days . . . Though Gowrie prided himself on keeping a slave husband and wife together, he thought nothing of selling their children . . . I was twelve before I wore a pair of shoes, and those were crude, splintering wooden clogs cast off by another. . . certain strangely formed Creatures appeared on the Gowrie plantation. . . . Barbara stopped at that last, frowned, and read it again. Creatures? She started again from the beginning of the passage.

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  . . .One of the strangest episodes in my life as a Slave began in what I now suppose to be the summer of 1850 or ’51 (at the time I was almost wholly innocent of dates and calendars). It was at that time that certain strangely formed Creatures appeared on the Gowrie plantation, supposedly to serve as a new breed of Slave.

  I made no sense of the incident at all when it transpired, and could not understand why these Beasts were brought to us, but now I think I understand what was happening: the old slavers, the cruel men who carried their miserable cargoes of captured Africans across the horrible Middle Passage of the Atlantic, were making one last attempt to revive their gruesome trade.

  For centuries, as many Negroes died on those voyages as survived, and at length, the traffic was banned by all civilized nations. In 1808 the United States made the importation of slaves illegal (though of course not in any way alleviating the situation of the Slaves already imported, or born here). Many thousands more slaves were of course smuggled into the South from Africa since ’08. Still, the trade was illegal and risky—and that cuts into the profits. These Creatures were a stratagem to get ‘round the slavery importation law. Since these Creatures were patently not Human beings, therefore, in a lawyer’s logic, they were not Slaves, and therefore they were legal to import.

  The slaver who imported the Creatures, and the men (including Colonel Gowrie) who purchased the beasts, made a d**ning but unknowing admission by taking part in this effort to circumvent the law, for behind the transaction’s claimed legality, based on the assumption that importing non-human Slaves was legal, hid the backhanded admission that Negro Slaves were true men and women, not animals. In spite of all their protestations otherwise, as they bought up the Creatures, the Masters were discarding their sheltering sham belief that the Negro was not a Man. Perhaps that is why I recall the incident so clearly.

  Yet it would be impossible to forget the day Colonel Gowrie brought home his new charges. Stranger creatures I have not seen before or since.

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  Creatures? Barbara hesitated over the page as the lightning flickered outside the parlor wall. She skipped ahead to find if Zebulon had described his “creatures,” and quickly found the passage.

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  They were much of the same form as men and women, their similarities to humans accentuating rather than disguising the vast difference between our kind and theirs.<
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  They stood erect, and had well-shaped hands (which were not so graceful or clever as those of a man, however). Their heads were quite misshapen, and they were weak-chinned, with such bulging jaws and large fierce teeth that they offered an altogether ferocious aspect that was in marked contrast to their timid behavior. Until they became used to us, the smallest child could startle them quite out of their wits.

  They could not speak, but they could convey their wants and desires with astonishing clarity, by means of pantomime, hoots and grunts, grimaces and faces.

  As I have observed, their heads were most strangely misshapen, with a large shelf of bone above the brow, and a sort of crest along the center of the skull, running from the highest point of the skull toward the back.

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  Barbara read further, fascinated. It sounded very much like some of the local gentry had taken to importing gorillas, or perhaps chimps, as farm labor! Zebulon must have revised their appearance in his memory, made them seem to look and act more like humans. None of the great African apes were well known before the 1800s, and the gorilla wasn’t described until 1847. They would not be well known on a sleepy Southern plantation, especially to an uneducated slave.

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  Their bodies were dark-skinned, and covered rather sparsely with coarse black hair. They wore no clothes willingly, and when the White men would try to force them to cover themselves decently, they would tear the rude shirts to shreds and insist upon their lewd nakedness.