THIS PEACEABLE LAND; OR, THE UNBEARABLE VISION
OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
Robert Charles Wilson
“It’s worth your life to go up there,” the
tavernkeeper’s wife said. “What do you want to go up there for,
anyway?”
“The property is for sale,” I said.
“Property!” The landlady of the roadside tavern
nearly spat out the word. “There’s nothing up there but sand hills
and saggy old sheds. That, and a family of crazy colored people.
Someone claims they sold you that? You ought to check with the
bank, Mister, see about getting your money back.”
She smiled at her own joke, showing tobacco-stained
teeth. In this part of the country there were spittoons in every
taproom and Bull Durham advertisements on every wall. It was 1895.
It was August. It was hot, and we were in the South.
I was only posing as an investor. I had no money in
all the baggage I was carrying—very little, anyhow. I had
photographic equipment instead.
“You go up those hills,” the tavernkeeper’s wife
said more soberly, “you carry a gun, and you keep it handy. I mean
that.”
I had no gun.
I wasn’t worried about what I might find up in the
pine barrens.
I was worried about what I would tell my
daughter.
I paid the lady for the meal she had served me and
for a second meal she had put up in a neat small box. I asked her
whether a room was available for the night. There was. We discussed
the arrangements and came to an agreement. Then I went out to where
Percy was waiting in the carriage.
“You’ll have to sleep outside,” I said. “But I got
this for you.” I gave him the wrapped dinner. “And the landlady
says she’ll bring you a box breakfast in the morning, as long as
there’s nobody around to see her.”
Percy nodded. None of this came as a surprise to
him. He knew where he was, and who he was, and what was expected of
him. “And then,” he said, “we’ll drive up to the place, weather
permitting.”
To Percy it was always “the place”—each place we
found.
Storm clouds had dallied along this river valley
all the hot day, but no rain had come. If it came tonight, and if
it was torrential, the dirt roads would quickly become useless
creeks of mud. We would be stuck here for days.
And Percy would get wet, sleeping in the carriage
as he did. But he preferred the carriage to the stable where our
horses were put up. The carriage was covered with rubberized cloth,
and there was a big sheet of mosquito netting he stretched over the
open places during the night. But a truly stiff rain was bound to
get in the cracks and make him miserable.
Percy Camber was an educated black man. He wrote
columns and articles for the Tocsin, a Negro paper published
out of Windsor, Canada. Three years ago a Boston press had put out
a book he’d written, though he admitted the sales had been
slight.
I wondered what the landlady would say if I told
her Percy was a book writer. Most likely she would have denied the
possibility of an educated black man. Except perhaps as a circus
act, like that Barnum horse that counts to ten with its hoof.
“Make sure your gear is ready first thing,” Percy
said, keeping his voice low although there was nobody else
about—this was a poor tavern on a poor road in an undeveloped
county. “And don’t drink too much tonight, Tom, if you can help
it.”
“That’s sound advice,” I agreed, by way of not
pledging an answer. “Oh, and the keeper’s wife tells me we ought to
carry a gun. Wild men up there, she says.”
“I don’t go armed.”
“Nor do I.”
“Then I guess we’ll be prey for the wild men,” said
Percy, smiling.
The room where I spent the night was not fancy,
which made me feel better about leaving my employer to sleep
out-of-doors. It was debatable which of us was better off. The
carriage seat where Percy curled up was not infested with fleas, as
was the mattress on which I lay. Percy customarily slept on a
folded jacket, while my pillow was a sugar sack stuffed with corn
huskings, which rattled beneath my ear as if the beetles inside
were putting on a musical show.
I slept a little, woke up, scratched myself, lit
the lamp, took a drink.
I will not drink, I told myself as I poured the
liquor. I will not drink “to excess.” I will not become drunk. I
will only calm the noise in my head.
My companion in this campaign was a bottle of rye
whiskey. Mister Whiskey Bottle, unfortunately, was only half full
and not up to the task assigned him. I drank but kept on thinking
unwelcome thoughts, while the night simmered and creaked with
insect noises.
“Why do you have to go away for so long?” Elsebeth
asked me.
In this incarnation she wore a white dress. It
looked like her christening dress. She was thirteen years
old.
“Taking pictures,” I told her. “Same as
always.”
“Why can’t you take pictures at the portrait
studio?”
“These are different pictures, Elsie. The kind you
have to travel for.”
Her flawless young face took on an accusatory cast.
“Mama says you’re stirring up old trouble. She says you’re poking
into things nobody wants to hear about any more, much less see
photographs of.”
“She may be right. But I’m being paid money, and
money buys pretty dresses, among other good things.”
“Why make such trouble, though? Why do you want to
make people feel bad?”
Elsie was a phantom. I blinked her away. These were
questions she had not yet actually posed, though our last
conversation, before I left Detroit, had come uncomfortably close.
But they were questions I would sooner or later have to
answer.
I slept very little, despite the drink. I woke up
before dawn.
I inventoried my photographic equipment by
lamplight, just to make sure everything was ready.
It had not rained during the night. I settled up
with the landlady and removed my baggage from the room. Percy had
already hitched the horses to the carriage. The sky was drab under
high cloud, the sun a spot of light like a candle flame burning
through a linen handkerchief.
The landlady’s husband was nowhere to be seen. He
had gone down to Crib Lake for supplies, she said, as she packed up
two box lunches, cold cuts of beef with pickles and bread, which I
had requested of her. She had two adult sons living with her, one
of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she
told me, even with her husband absent. “But we’re a long way from
anywhere,” she added, “and the traffic along this road has been
light ever since—well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn’t
kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there.”
“We mean to be back by nightfall,” I said.

My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just
once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans
with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had
offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. “You’re
very neatly dressed,” she had said.
She was not used to well-dressed black men. The
only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on
the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had
come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress passed the
Labor Protection Act. They did “the jobs white men won’t do,” for
wages to which white men would not submit.
“You’re very prettily dressed yourself,” Percy
Camber said, ignoring the unintended insult.
Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see
him.
“I’m not some radical old Congregationalist,” she
told me, “eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down
the pike. That’s your side of the family, Tom, not mine.”
True enough. Maggie’s people were Episcopalians who
had prospered in Michigan since before it was a state—sturdy,
reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the
lake trade. My father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a
single term in the Massachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera
of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother’s
bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the
subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women’s Suffrage. I came from
a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was
never sure Maggie’s people understood that poverty and gentility
could truly coexist.
“Maggie’s indisposed today,” I had told Percy, who
may or may not have believed me, and then we had settled down to
the business of planning our three-month tour of the South,
according to the map he had made.
“There ought to be photographs,” Percy said,
“before it’s all gone.”
We traveled several miles from the tavern, sweating
in the airless heat of the morning, following directions Percy had
deduced from bills-of-transfer, railway records, and old
advertisements placed in the Richmond and Atlanta papers.
The locality to which we were headed had been
called Pilgassi Acres. It had been chartered as a business by two
brothers, Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi of South Carolina, in 1879,
and it had operated for five years before the Ritter Inquiry shut
it down.
There were no existing photographs of Pilgassi
Acres, or any of the institutions like it, unless the Ritter
Inquiry had commissioned them. And the Final Report of the Ritter
Inquiry had been sealed from the public by consent of Congress, not
to be reopened until some time in the twentieth century.
Percy Camber intended to shed some light into that
officially ordained darkness.
He sat with me on the driver’s board of the
carriage as I coaxed the team over the rutted and runneled trail.
This had once been a wider road, much used, but it had been
bypassed by a Federal turnpike in 1887. Since then nature and the
seasons had mauled it, so the ride was tedious and slow. We subdued
the boredom by swapping stories: Percy of his home in Canada, me of
my time in the army.
Percy “talked white.” That was the verdict Elsebeth
had passed after meeting him. It was a condescending thing to say,
excusable only from the lips of a child, but I knew what she meant.
Percy was two generations out of slavery. If I closed my eyes and
listened to his voice, I could imagine that I had been hired by
some soft-spoken Harvard graduate. He was articulate, even for a
newspaper man. And we had learned, over the course of this lengthy
expedition, to make allowances for our differences. We had some
common ground. We were both the offspring of radical parents, for
example. The “madness of the fifties” had touched us both, in
different ways.
“You suppose we’ll find anything substantial at the
end of this road?” Percy asked.
“The landlady mentioned some old sheds.”
“Sheds would be acceptable,” Percy said, his
weariness showing. “It’s been a long haul for you, Tom. And not
much substantial work. Maybe this time?”
“Maybe.”
“Documents, oral accounts, that’s all useful, but a
photograph—just one, just to show that something remains—well, that
would be important.”
“I’ll photograph any old shed you like, Percy, if
it pleases you.” Though on this trip I had seen more open
fields—long since burned over and regrown—than anything worthy of
being immortalized. Places edited from history. Absences
constructed as carefully as architecture. I had no reason to think
Pilgassi Acres would be different.
Percy seldom spoke out loud about the deeper
purpose of his quest or the book he was currently writing. Fair
enough, I thought; it was a sensitive subject. Like the way I don’t
talk much about Cuba, though I had served a year and a half there
under Lee. The spot is too tender to touch.
These hills were low and covered with stunted pines
and other rude vegetation. The road soon grew even more rough, but
we began to encounter evidence of a prior human presence. A few
fenceposts. Scraps of rusted barbwire. The traces of an old
narrow-gauge railbed. Then we passed under a wooden sign suspended
between two lodgepoles on which the words PILGASSI ACRES in
an ornate script were still legible, though the seasons had
bleached the letters to ghosts.
There was also the remains of a wire fence, tangled
over with brambles.
“Stop here,” Percy said.
“Might be more ahead,” I suggested.
“This is already more than we’ve seen elsewhere. I
want a picture of that sign.”
“I can’t guarantee it’ll be legible,” I said, given
the way the sun was striking it, and the faint color of the
letters, pale as chalk on the white wood.
“Well, try,” Percy said shortly.
So I set up my equipment and did that. For the
first time in a long while, I felt as though I was earning my
keep.
The first book Percy had written was called
Every Measure Short of War, and it was a history of
Abolitionism from the Negro point of view.
The one he was writing now was to be called
Where Are the Three Million?
I made a dozen or so exposures and put my gear back
in the carriage. Percy took the reins this time and urged the
horses farther up the trail. Scrub grass and runt pines closed in
on both sides of us, and I found myself watching the undergrowth
for motion. The landlady’s warning had come back to haunt me.
But the woods were empty. An old stray dog paced us
for a few minutes, then fell behind.
My mother had once corresponded with Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe, who was a well-known abolitionist at one time,
though the name is now mostly forgotten. Percy had contacted my
parents in order to obtain copies of that correspondence, which he
had quoted in an article for the Tocsin.
My mother, of course, was flattered, and she
continued her correspondence with Percy on an occasional basis. In
one of his replies Percy happened to remark that he was looking for
a reliable photographer to hire for the new project he had in mind.
My mother, of course, sent him to me. Perhaps she thought she was
doing me a favor.
Thus it was not money but conscience that had
propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and
ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or
not, in a voice much like my mother’s.
The remains of Pilgassi Acres became visible as we
rounded a final bend, and I was frankly astonished that so much of
it remained intact. Percy Camber drew in his breath.
Here were the administrators’ quarters (a small
building with pretensions to the colonial style), as well as five
huge barnlike buildings and fragments of paving stones and mortared
brick where more substantial structures had been demolished.
All silent, all empty. No glass in the small
windows. A breeze like the breath from a hard-coal stove seeped
around the buildings and tousled the meadow weeds that lapped at
them. There was the smell of old wood that had stood in the
sunlight for a long time. There was, beneath that, the smell of
something less pleasant, like an abandoned latrine doused with lime
and left to simmer in the heat.
Percy was working to conceal his excitement. He
pretended to be casual, but I could see that every muscle in him
had gone tense.
“Your camera, Tom,” he said, as if the scene were
in some danger of evaporating before our eyes.
“You don’t want to explore the place a little
first?”
“Not yet. I want to capture it as we see it
now—from a distance, all the buildings all together.”
And I did that. The sun, though masked by light
high clouds, was a feverish nuisance over my right shoulder.
I thought of my daughter Elsebeth. She would see
these pictures some day. “What place is this?” she would ask.
But what would I say in return?
Any answer I could think of amounted to drilling a
hole in her innocence and pouring poison in.
Every Measure Short of War, the title of
Percy’s first book, implied that there might have been one—a war
over Abolition, that is, a war between the states. My mother
agreed. “Though it was not the North that would have brought it
on,” she insisted. (A conversation we had had on the eve of my
marriage to Maggie.) “People forget how sullen the South was in the
years before the Douglas Compromise. How fierce in the defense of
slavery. Their ‘Peculiar Institution’! Strange, isn’t it, how
people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least
useful to them?”
My mother’s dream, and Mrs. Stowe’s, for that
matter, had never been achieved. No Abolition by federal statute
had ever been legislated. Slavery had simply become unprofitable,
as its milder opponents and apologists used to insist it inevitably
would. Scientific farming killed it. Crop rotation killed it. Deep
plowing killed it, mechanized harvesters killed it, soil
fertilization killed it.
Embarrassment killed it, once Southern farmers
began to take seriously the condescension and disapproval of the
European powers whose textile and tobacco markets they craved.
Organized labor killed it.
Ultimately, the expense and absurdity of
maintaining human beings as farm chattel killed it.
A few slaves were still held under permissive state
laws (in Virginia and South Carolina, for example), but they tended
to be the pets of the old planter aristocracy—kept, as pets might
be kept, because the children of the household had grown fond of
them and objected to their eviction.
I walked with Percy Camber through the abandoned
administration building at Pilgassi Acres. It had been stripped of
everything—all furniture, every document, any scrap that might have
testified to its human utility. Even the wallpaper had peeled or
rotted away. One well-placed lightning strike would have burned the
whole thing to the ground.
Its decomposing stairs were too hazardous to
attempt. Animals had covered the floorboards with dung, and birds
lofted out of every room we opened. Our progress could have been
charted by the uprisings of the swallows and the indignation of the
owls.
“It’s just an empty building,” I said to Percy, who
had been silent throughout the visit, his features knotted and
tense.
“Empty of what, though?” he asked.
I took a few more exposures on the outside. The
crumbling pillars. The worm-tunneled verandah casting a sinister
shade. A chimney leaning sideways like a drunken man.
I did not believe, could not bring myself to
believe, that a war within the boundaries of the Union could ever
have been fought, though historians still worry about that question
like a loose tooth. If the years after ’55 had been less
prosperous, if Douglas had not been elected President, if the
terrorist John Brown had not been tried in a Northern court and
hanged on a Northern gallows . . . if, if, and if,
ad infinitum.
All nonsense, it seemed to me. Whatever Harriet
Beecher Stowe might have dreamed, whatever Percy Camber might have
uncovered, this was fundamentally a peaceable land.
This is a peaceable land, I imagined myself
telling my daughter Elsebeth; but my imagination would extend
itself no farther.
“Now the barracks,” Percy said.
It had been even hotter in the administration
building than it was outside, and Percy’s clothes were drenched
through. So were mine. “You mean those barns?”
“Barracks,” Percy repeated.
Barracks or barns—they were a little of both, as it
turned out. The one we inspected was a cavernous wooden box, held
up by mildew and inertia. Percy wanted photographs of the rusted
iron brackets that had supported rows of wooden platforms—a few of
these remained—on which men and women had once slept. There were a
great many of these brackets, and I estimated that a single
barracks-barn might have housed as many as two hundred persons in
its day. An even larger number if mattresses had been laid on the
floors.
I took the pictures he wanted by the light that
came through fallen boards. The air in the barn was stale, despite
all the holes in the walls, and it was a relief to finish my work
and step out into the relentless, dull sunshine.
The presence of so many people must have
necessitated a dining hall, a communal kitchen, sanitary facilities
at Pilgassi Acres. Those structures had not survived except as
barren patches among the weeds. Dig down a little—Percy had learned
this technique in his research—and you would find a layer of
charcoal for each burned building or outhouse. Not every structure
in Pilgassi Acres had survived the years, but each had left its
subtle mark.
One of the five barns was not like the others, and
I made this observation to Percy Camber as soon as I noticed it.
“The rest of these barracks, the doors and windows are open to the
breeze. The far one in the north quarter has been boarded up—d’you
see?”
“That’s the one we should inspect next, then,”
Percy said.
We were on our way there when the first bullet
struck.
My mother had always been an embarrassment to me,
with her faded enthusiasms, her Bible verses and Congregationalist
poetry, her missionary zeal on behalf of people whose lives were so
tangential to mine that I could barely imagine them.
She didn’t like it when I volunteered for Cuba in
1880. It wasn’t a proper war, she said. She said it was yet another
concession to the South, to the aristocracy’s greed for expansion
toward the equator. “A war engineered at the Virginia Military
Institute,” she called it, “fought for no good reason.”
But it blended Northerners and Southerners on a
neutral field of battle, where we were all just American soldiers.
It was the glue that repaired many ancient sectional rifts. Out of
it emerged great leaders, like old Robert E. Lee, who transcended
regional loyalties (though when he spoke of “America,” I often
suspected he used the word as a synonym for “Virginia”), and his
son, also a talented commander. In Cuba we all wore a common
uniform, and we all learned, rich and poor, North and South, to
duck the Spaniards’ bullets.
The bullet hit a shed wall just above Percy
Camber’s skull. Splinters flew through the air like a cloud of
mosquitoes. The sound of the gunshot arrived a split second later,
damped by the humid afternoon to a harmless-sounding pop.
The rifleman was some distance away. But he was accurate.
I dropped to the ground—or, rather, discovered that
I had already dropped to the ground, obeying an instinct swifter
than reason.
Percy, who had never been to war, lacked that
ingrained impulse. I’m not sure he understood what had happened. He
stood there in the rising heat, bewildered.
“Get down,” I said.
“What is it, Tom?”
“Your doom, if you don’t get down. Get
down!”
He understood then. But it was as if the excitement
had loosened all the strings of his body. He couldn’t decide which
way to fold. He was the picture of confusion.
Then a second bullet struck him in the
shoulder.
“Liberty Lodges,” they had been called at
first.
I mean the places like Pilgassi Acres, back when
they were allowed to flourish.
They were a response to a difficult time. Slavery
had died, but the slaves had not. That was the dilemma of the
South. Black men without skills, along with their families and
countless unaccompanied children, crowded the roads—more of them
every day, as “free-labor cotton” became a rallying cry for
progressive French and English buyers.
Who were Marcus and Benjamin Pilgassi? Probably
nothing more than a pair of Richmond investors jumping on a
bandwagon. The Liberty Lodges bore no onus then. The appeal of the
business was explicit: Don’t put your slaves on the road and risk
prosecution or fines for “abandonment of property.” We will take
your aging and unprofitable chattel and house them. The men will be
kept separate from the women to prevent any reckless reproduction.
They will live out their lives with their basic needs attended to
for an annual fee only a fraction of what it would cost to keep
them privately.
What the Pilgassi brothers (and businessmen like
them) did not say directly—but implied in every line of their
advertisements—was that the Liberty Lodge movement aimed to achieve
an absolute and irreversible decline in the Negro population in the
South.
In time, Percy had told me, the clients of these
businesses came to include entire state governments, which had
tired of the expense and notoriety incurred by the existence of
temporary camps in which tens of thousands of “intramural refugees”
could neither be fed economically nor be allowed to starve. It had
been less onerous for them to subsidize the Lodges, which tended to
be built in isolated places, away from casual observation.
Percy’s grandfather had escaped slavery in the
1830s and settled in Boston, where he picked up enough education to
make himself prominent in the Abolition movement. Percy’s father,
an ordained minister, had spoken at Lyman Beecher’s famous church,
in the days before he founded the journal that became the
Tocsin.
Percy had taken up the moral burden of his
forebears in a way I had not, but there was still a similarity
between us. We were the children of crusaders. We had inherited
their disappointments and drunk the lees of their bitterness.
I was not a medical man, but I had witnessed bullet
wounds in Cuba. Percy had been shot in the shoulder. He lay on the
ground with his eyes open, blinking, his left hand pressed against
the wound. I pried his hand away so that I could examine his
injury.
The wound was bleeding badly, but the blood did not
spurt out, a good sign. I took a handkerchief from my pocket,
folded it and pressed it against the hole.
“Am I dying?” Percy asked. “I don’t feel like I’m
dying.”
“You’re not all that badly hurt or you wouldn’t be
talking. You need attention, though.”
A third shot rang out. I couldn’t tell where the
bullet went.
“And we need to get under cover,” I added.
The nearest building was the boarded-up barracks. I
told Percy to hold the handkerchief in place. His right arm didn’t
seem to work correctly, perhaps because the bullet had damaged some
bundle of muscles or nerves. But I got him crouching, and we
hurried toward shelter.
We came into the shadow of the building and
stumbled to the side of it away from the direction from which the
shots had come. Grasshoppers buzzed out of the weeds in fierce
brown flurries, some of them lighting on our clothes. There was the
sound of dry thunder down the valley. This barracks had a door—a
wooden door on a rail, large enough to admit dozens of people at
once. But it was closed, and there was a brass latch and a padlock
on it.
So we had no real shelter—just some shade and a
moment’s peace.
I used the time to put a fresh handkerchief on
Percy’s wound and to bind it with a strip of cloth torn from my own
shirt.
“Thank you,” Percy said breathlessly.
“Welcome. The problem now is how to get back to the
carriage.” We had no weapons, and we could hardly withstand a
siege, no matter where we hid. Our only hope was escape, and I
could not see any likely way of achieving it.
Then the question became moot, for the man who had
tried to kill us came around the corner of the barracks.
“Why do you want to make these pictures?” Elsie
asked yet again, from a dim cavern at the back of my mind.
In an adjoining chamber of my skull a different
voice reminded me that I wanted a drink, a strong one,
immediately.
The ancient Greeks (I imagined myself telling
Elsebeth) believed that vision is a force that flies out from the
eyes when directed by the human will. They were wrong. There is no
force or will in vision. There is only light. Light direct or light
reflected. Light, which behaves in predictable ways. Put a prism in
front of it, and it breaks into colors. Open a shuttered lens, and
some fraction of it can be trapped in nitrocellulose or collodion
as neatly as a bug in a killing jar.
A man with a camera is like a naturalist, I told
Elsebeth. Where one man might catch butterflies, another catches
wasps.
I did not make these pictures.
I only caught them.
The man with the rifle stood five or six yards away
at the corner of the barracks. He was a black man in threadbare
coveralls. He was sweating in the heat. For a while there was
silence, the three of us blinking at each other.
Then, “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” the black man
said.
“Then you shouldn’t have aimed a rifle at him and
pulled the trigger,” I said back, recklessly.
Our assailant made no immediate response. He seemed
to be thinking this over. Grasshoppers lit on the cuffs of his
ragged pants. His head was large, his hair cut crudely close to the
skull. His eyes were narrow and suspicious. He was barefoot.
“It was not my intention to hurt anyone,” he said
again. “I was shooting from a distance, sir.”
By this time Percy had managed to sit up. He seemed
less afraid of the rifleman than he ought to have been. Less
afraid, at any rate, than I was. “What did you
intend?”
He gave his attention to Percy. “To warn you away,
is all.”
“Away from what?”
“This building.”
“Why? What’s in this building?”
“My son.”
The “three million” in Percy’s title were the men,
women and children of African descent held in bondage in the South
in the year 1860. For obvious reasons, the number is approximate.
Percy always tried to be conservative in his estimates, for he did
not want to be vulnerable to accusations of sensationalizing
history.
Given that number to begin with, what Percy had
done was to tally up census polls, where they existed, alongside
the archived reports of various state and local governments, tax
and business statements, Federal surveys, rail records, etc., over
the years between then and now.
What befell the three million?
A great many—as many as one third—emigrated North,
before changes in the law made that difficult. Some of those who
migrated continued on up to Canada. Others made lives for
themselves in the big cities, insofar as they were allowed to. A
smaller number were taken up against their will and shipped to
certain inhospitable “colonies” in Africa, until the excesses and
horrors of repatriation became notorious and the whole enterprise
was outlawed.
Some found a place among the freemen of New Orleans
or worked boats, largely unmolested, along the Gulf Coast. A great
many went West, where they were received with varying degrees of
hostility. Five thousand “irredeemably criminal” black prisoners
were taken from Southern jails and deposited in a Utah desert,
where they died not long after.
Certain jobs remained open to black men and
women—as servants, rail porters, and so forth—and many did well
enough in these professions.
But add the numbers, Percy said, even with a
generous allowance for error, and it still comes up shy of the
requisite three million.
How many were delivered into the Liberty Lodges? No
one can answer that question with any certainty, at least not until
the evidence sealed by the Ritter Inquiry is opened to the public.
Percy’s estimate was somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000. But
as I said, he tended to be conservative in his figures.
“We were warned there was a family of wild men up
here,” I said.
“I’m no wilder than I have to be,” the gunman
said.
“I didn’t ask you to come visit.”
“You hurt Percy bad enough, whether you’re wild or
not. Look at him. He needs a medic.”
“I see him all right, sir.”
“Then, unless you mean to shoot us both to death,
will you help me get him back to our carriage?”
There was another lengthy pause.
“I don’t like to do that,” the black man said
finally.
“There won’t be any end to the trouble. But I don’t
suppose I have a choice, except, as you say, sir, to kill you. And
that I cannot bring myself to do.”
He said these words calmly enough, but he had a way
of forming his vowels, and pronouncing them deep in his throat,
that defies transcription. It was like listening to a volcano
rumble.
“Take his right arm, then,” I said. “I’ll get on
his left. The carriage is beyond that ridge.”
“I know where your carriage is. But, sir, I won’t
put down this rifle. I don’t think that would be wise. You can help
him yourself.”
I went to where Percy sat and began to lift him up.
Percy startled me by saying, “No, Tom, I don’t want to go to the
carriage.”
“What do you mean?” the assailant asked, before I
could pose the same question.
“Do you have a name?” Percy asked him.
“Ephraim,” the man said, reluctantly.
“Ephraim, my name is Percy Camber. What did you
mean when you said your son was inside this barracks?”
“I don’t like to tell you that,” Ephraim said,
shifting his gaze between Percy and me.
“Percy,” I said, “you need a doctor. We’re wasting
time.”
He looked at me sharply. “I’ll live a while longer.
Let me talk to Ephraim, please, Tom.”
“Stand off there where I can see you, sir,” Ephraim
directed. “I know this man needs a doctor. I’m not stupid. This
won’t take long.”
I concluded from all this that the family of wild
Negroes the landlady had warned me about was real and that they
were living in the sealed barn.
Why they should want to inhabit such a place I
could not say.
I stood apart while Percy, wounded as he was, held
a hushed conversation with Ephraim, who had shot him.
I understood that they could talk more freely
without me as an auditor. I was a white man. It was true that I
worked for Percy, but that fact would not have been obvious to
Ephraim any more than it had been obvious to the dozens of
hotelkeepers who had assumed without asking that I was the master,
and Percy the servant. My closeness to Percy was unique and all but
invisible.
After a while Ephraim allowed me to gather up my
photographic gear, which had been scattered in the crisis.
I had been fascinated by photography even as a
child. It had seemed like such patent magic! The magic of stopped
time, places and persons rescued from their ephemeral natures. My
parents had given me books containing photographs of Indian
elephants, of the pyramids of Egypt, of the natural wonders of
Florida.
I put my gear together and waited for Percy to
finish his talk with the armed lunatic who had shot him.
The high cloud that had polluted the sky all
morning had dissipated during the afternoon. The air was still
scaldingly hot, but it was a touch less humid. A certain brittle
clarity had set in. The light was hard, crystalline. A fine light
for photography, though it was beginning to grow long.
“Percy,” I called out.
“What is it, Tom?”
“We have to leave now, before the sun gets any
lower. It’s a long journey to Crib Lake.” There was a doctor at
Crib Lake. I remembered seeing his shingle when we passed through
that town. Some rural bone-setter, probably, a doughty relic of the
mustard-plaster era. But better than no doctor at all.
Percy’s voice sounded weak; but what he said was,
“We’re not finished here yet.”
“What do you mean, not finished?”
“We’ve been invited inside,” he said. “To see
Ephraim’s son.”
Some bird, perhaps a mourning dove, called out from
the gathering shadows among the trees where the meadow ended.
I did not want to meet Ephraim’s son. There was a
dreadful aspect to the whole affair. If Ephraim’s son was in the
barn, why had he not come out at the sound of gunshots and voices?
(Ephraim, as far as I could tell, was an old man, and his son
wasn’t likely to be an infant.) Why, for that matter, was the
barracks closed and locked? To keep the world away from Ephraim’s
son? Or to keep Ephraim’s son away from the world?
“What is his name?” I asked. “This son of
yours.”
“Jordan,” he said.
I had married Maggie not long after I got back from
Cuba. I had been trying to set up my photography business at the
time. I was far from wealthy, and what resources I had I had put
into my business. But there was a vogue among young women of the
better type for manly veterans. I was manly enough, I suppose, or
at least presentable, and I was authentically a veteran. I met
Maggie when she came to my shop to sit for a portrait. I escorted
her to dinner. Maggie was fond of me; and I was fond of Maggie, in
part because she had no political convictions or fierce unorthodox
ideals. She took the world as she found it.
Elsebeth came along a year or so after the wedding.
It was a difficult birth. I remember the sound of Maggie’s screams.
I remember Elsebeth as a newborn, bloody in a towel, handed to me
by the doctor. I wiped the remnant blood and fluid from her tiny
body. She had been unspeakably beautiful.
Ephraim wore the key to the barn on a string around
his neck. He applied it to the massive lock, still giving me
suspicious glances. He kept his rifle in the crook of his arm as he
did this. He slid the huge door open. Inside, the barn was dark.
The air that wafted out was a degree or two cooler than outside,
and it carried a sour tang, as of long-rotten hay or clover.
Ephraim did not call out to his son, and there was
no sound inside the abandoned barracks.
Had Ephraim once held his newborn son in his arms,
as I had held Elsebeth?
The last of the Liberty Lodges were closed down in
1888. Scandal had swirled around them for years, but no sweeping
legal action had been taken. In part this was because the Lodges
were not a monolithic enterprise; a hundred independent companies
held title to them. In part it was because various state
legislatures were afraid of disclosing their own involvement. The
Lodges had not proved as profitable as their founders expected; the
plans had not anticipated, for instance, all the ancillary costs of
keeping human beings confined in what amounted to a jail (guards,
walls, fences, discipline, etc.) for life. But the utility
of the Lodges was undisputed, and several states had quietly
subsidized them. A “full accounting,” as Percy called it, would
have tainted every government south of the Mason Dixon Line and not
a few above it. Old wounds might have been reopened.
The Ritter Inquiry was called by Congress when the
abuses inherent in the Lodge system began to come to light, inch by
inch. By that time, though, there had been many other scandals,
many other inquests, and the public had grown weary of all such
issues. Newspapers, apart from papers like the Tocsin,
hardly touched the story. The Inquiry sealed its own evidence, the
surviving Lodges were hastily dismantled, and the general
population (apart from a handful of aged reformers) paid no
significant attention.
“Why dredge up all that ugliness?” Maggie had asked
me.
Nobody wants to see those pictures, Elsebeth
whispered.
Nobody but a few old scolds.
It was too dark in the immense barracks to be
certain, but it seemed to me there was nobody inside but the three
of us.
“I came here with Jordan in ’78,” Ephraim
said.
“Jordan was twelve years old at the time. I don’t
know what happened to his mama. We got separated at the Federal
camp on the Kansas border. Jordan and I were housed in different
buildings.”
He looked around, his eyes abstracted, and seemed
to see more than an old and ruined barracks. Perhaps he could see
in the dark—it was dark in here, the only light coming through the
fractionally open door. All I could see was a board floor,
immaculately swept, picked out in that wedge of sun. All else was
shadow.
He found an old crate for Percy to sit on. The
crate was the only thing like furniture I could see. There was
nothing to suggest a family resided here apart from the neatness,
the sealed entrances and windows, the absence of bird dung. I began
to feel impatient.
“You said your son was here,” I prompted him.
“Oh, yes, sir. Jordan’s here.”
“Where? I don’t see him.”
Percy shot me an angry look.
“He’s everywhere in here,” the madman said.
Oh, I thought, it’s not Jordan, then, it’s the
spirit of Jordan, or some conceit like that. This barn is a shrine
the man has been keeping. I had the unpleasant idea that Jordan’s
body might be tucked away in one of its shadowed corners, dry and
lifeless as an old Egyptian king.
“Or at least,” Ephraim said, “from about eight foot
down.”
He found and lit a lantern.
One evening in the midst of our journey through the
South I had got drunk and shared with Percy, too ebulliently, my
idea that we were really very much alike.
This was in Atlanta, in one of the hotels that
provides separate quarters for colored servants traveling with
their employers. That was good because it meant Percy could sleep
in relative comfort. I had snuck down to his room, which was little
more than a cubicle, and I had brought a bottle with me, although
Percy refused to share it. He was an abstinent man.
I talked freely about my mother’s fervent
abolition-ism and how it had hovered over my childhood like a storm
cloud stitched with lightning. I told Percy how we were both the
children of idealists, and so forth.
He listened patiently, but at the end, when I had
finally run down, or my jaw was too weary to continue, he rummaged
through the papers he carried with him and drew out a letter that
had been written to him by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Mrs. Stowe is best remembered for her work on
behalf of the China Inland Mission, but she came from an
abolitionist family. Her father was the first president of the
famous Lane Theological Seminary. At one point in her life she had
attempted a novel meant to expose the evils of slavery, but she
could not find a publisher.
Percy handed me the woman’s letter.
I have received your book “Every Measure Short
of War,” the letter began, and it brings back terrible
memories and forebodings. I remember all too distinctly what it
meant to love my country in those troubled years and to tremble at
the coming day of wrath.
“You want me to read this?” I asked
drunkenly.
“Just that next part,” Percy said.
Perhaps because of your book, Mr. Camber,
Mrs. Stowe wrote, or because of the memories it aroused, I
suffered an unbearable dream last night. It was about that war. I
mean the war that was so much discussed but that never took place,
the war from which both North and South stepped back as from the
brink of a terrible abyss.
In my dream that precipice loomed again, and
this time there was no Stephen Douglas to call us away with
concessions and compromises and his disgusting deference to the
Slave Aristocracy. In my dream, the war took place. And it was an
awful war, Mr. Camber. It seemed to flow before my eyes in a series
of bloody tableaux. A half a million dead. Battlefields too awful
to contemplate, North and South. Industries crippled, both the
print and the cotton presses silenced, thriving cities reduced to
smoldering ruins—all this I saw, or knew, as one sees or knows in
dreams.
But that was not the unbearable part of
it.
Let me say that I have known death altogether
too intimately. I have suffered the loss of children. I love peace
just as fervently as I despise injustice. I would not wish grief or
heartbreak on any mother of any section of this country, or any
other country. And yet—!
And yet, in light of what I have inferred from
recent numbers of your newspaper, and from the letters you have
written me, and from what old friends and acquaintances have said
or written about the camps, the deportations, the Lodges,
etc.,—because of all that, a part of me wishes that that war had
indeed been fought if only because it might have ended slavery.
Ended it cleanly, I mean, with a sane and straightforward
liberation, or even a liberation partial and incomplete—a
declaration, at least, of the immorality and unacceptability of
human bondage—anything but this sickening decline by extinction,
this surreptitious (as you so bitterly describe it)
“cleansing.”
I suppose this makes me sound like a monster, a
sort of female John Brown, confusing righteousness with violence
and murder with redemption.
I am not such a monster. I confess a certain
admiration for those who, like President Douglas, worked so very
hard to prevent the apocalypse of which I dreamed last night, even
if I distrust their motives and condemn their means. The instinct
for peace is the most honorable of all Christian impulses. My
conscience rebels at a single death, much less one
million.
But if a war could have ended slavery . . .
would I have wished it? Welcomed it?
What is unbearable, Mr. Camber, is that I don’t
know that I can answer my own horrifying question either honestly
or decently. And so I have to ask: Can you?
I puzzled it out. Then I gave Percy a blank stare.
“Why are you showing me this?”
“We’re alike in many ways, as you say, Tom. But not
all ways. Not all ways. Mrs. Stowe asks an interesting question.
Answering it isn’t easy. I don’t know your mind, but fundamentally,
Tom, despite all the sympathies between us, the fact is, I suspect
that in the end you might give the wrong answer to that
question—and I expect you think the same of me.”
There was another difference, which I did not
mention to Percy, and that was that every time I remarked on our
similarities, I could hear my wife’s scornful voice saying (as she
had said when I first shared the idea of this project with her),
“Oh, Tom, don’t be ridiculous. You’re nothing like that Percy
Camber. That’s your mother talking—all that abolitionist guilt she
burdened you with. As if you need to prove you haven’t betrayed the
cause, whatever the cause is, exactly.”
Maggie failed to change my mind, though what she
said was true.
“From about eight feet down,” Ephraim said
cryptically, lifting the lantern.
Eight feet is as high an average man can reach
without standing on something. Between eight feet and the floor is
the span of a man’s reach.
“You see, sir,” Ephraim said, “my son and I were
held in separate barracks. The idea behind that was that a man
might be less eager to escape if it meant leaving behind a son or
father or uncle. The overseers said, if you run, your people will
suffer for it. But when my chance come I took it. I don’t know if
that’s a sin. I think about it often.” He walked toward the nearest
wall, the lantern breaking up the darkness as it swayed in his
grip. “This barracks here was my son’s barracks.”
“Were there many escapes?” Percy asked.
I began to see that something might have been
written on the wall, though at first it looked more like an
idea of writing: a text as crabbed and indecipherable as the
scratchings of the Persians or the Medes.
“Yes, many,” Ephraim said, “though not many
successful. At first there was fewer guards on the gates. They
built the walls up, too, over time. Problem is, you get away, where
is there to go? Even if you get past these sandy hills, the
country’s not welcoming. And the guards had rifles, sir, the guards
had dogs.”
“But you got away, Ephraim.”
“Not far away. When I escaped it was very near the
last days of Pilgassi Acres.” (He pronounced it Pigassi,
with a reflexive curl of contempt on his lips.) “Company men coming
in from Richmond to the overseer’s house, you could hear the
shouting some nights. Rations went from meat twice a week to a
handful of cornmeal a day and green bacon on Sundays. They fired
the little Dutch doctor who used to tend to us. Sickness come to
us. They let the old ones die in place, took the bodies away to
bury or burn. Pretty soon we knew what was meant to happen next.
They could not keep us, sir, nor could they set us free.”
“That was when you escaped?”
“Very near the end, sir, yes, that’s when. I did
not want to go without Jordan. But if I waited, I knew I’d be too
weak to run. I told myself I could live in the woods and get
stronger, that I would come back for Jordan when I was more
myself.”
He held the lantern close to the board wall of this
abandoned barracks.
Percy was suffering more from his wound now than he
had seemed to when he received it, and he grimaced as I helped him
follow Ephraim. We stood close to the wild man and his circle of
light, though not too close—I was still conscious of his rifle and
of his willingness to use it, even if he was not in a killing mood
right now.
The writing on the wall consisted of names.
Hundreds of names. They chased each other around the whole of the
barn in tight horizontal bands.
“I expect the overseers would have let us starve if
they had the time. But they were afraid federal men would come
digging around. There ought to be nothing of us left to find, I
think was the reasoning. By that time the cholera had taken many of
us anyhow, weak and hungry as we were, and the rest . . . well,
death is a house, Mr. Camber, with many doorways. This is my son’s
name right here.”
Jordan Nash was picked out by the yellow
lantern light.
“Dear God,” said Percy Camber, softly.
“I don’t think God come into it, sir.”
“Did he write his own name?”
“Oh, yes, sir. A Northern lady taught us both to
read, back in the Missouri camp. I had a Bible and a copybook from
her. I still read that Bible to this day. Jordan was proud of his
letters.” Ephraim turned to me as if I, not Percy, had asked the
question: “Most of these men couldn’t write nor read. Jordan didn’t
just write his own name. He wrote all these names. Each and
every one. A new man came in, he would ask the name and put it down
as best he could. The list grew as we came and went. Many years’
worth, sir. All the prisoners talked about it, how he did that. He
had no pencil or chalk, you know. He made a kind of pen or brush by
chewing down sapling twigs to soften their ends. Ink he made all
kind of ways. He was very clever about that. Riverbottom clay,
soot, blood even. In the autumns the work crews drawing water from
the river might find mushrooms which turn black when you picked
them, and they brought them back to Jordan—those made fine ink, he
said.”
The pride in Ephraim’s voice was unmistakable. He
marched along the wall with his lantern held high so we could see
his son’s work in all its complexity. All those names, written in
the space between a man’s reach and the floor. The letters were
meticulously formed, the lines as level as the sea. Some of the
names were whole names, some were single names, some were the kind
of whimsical names given to house servants. They all ran together,
to conserve space, so that in places you had to guess whether the
names represented one person or two.
. . . John Kincaid Tom Abel Fortune Bob Swift
Pompey Atticus Joseph Wilson Elijah Elijah Jim Jim’s Son Rufus
Moses Deerborn Moses Raffity . . .
“I don’t know altogether why he did it,” Ephraim
said. “I think it made him feel better to see the men’s names
written down. Just so somebody might know we passed this way, he
said.”
Jordan lived in this barracks from eight foot down.
And so did shockingly many others.
“This is why you shot at us,” Percy whispered, a
kind of awe or dread constricting his throat.
“I make it seem dangerous up here, yes, sir, so
that nobody won’t come back and take it down or burn it. And yet I
suppose they will sooner or later whether I scare anybody or not.
Or if not that, then the weather will wear it down. I keep it best
I can against the rain, sir. I don’t let birds or animals inside.
Or even the daylight, sir, because the daylight fades things, that
ink of Jordan’s is sensitive to it. All be gone one day, I suppose,
but I will be too, bye and bye, and yourselves as well, of
course.”
“Perhaps we can make it last a little longer,”
Percy said.
Of course I knew what he meant.
“I’ll need light,” I said.
The fierce, hot light of the fading day.
Ephraim was anxious to help, once Percy explained
the notion to him. He threw open the barracks door. He took down
the wood he had tacked over the south-facing windows. There were
still iron bars in the window frames.
In the corners the light was not adequate despite
our best efforts. Ephraim said he had a sheet of polished tin he
used for a mirror, which might help reflect the sunlight in. He
went to his encampment to get it. By that time he trusted us enough
to leave us alone for a short time.
Once again I suggested escape, but Percy refused to
leave. So I kept about my work.
There were only so many exposures I could make, and
I wanted the names to be legible. In the end I could not capture
everything. But I did my best.
Ephraim told us about the end of Pilgassi Acres. He
had been nearby, hidden half starving in a grove of dwarf pines,
when he heard the initial volley of gunshots. It was the first of
many over the several hours that followed. Gunfire in waves, and
then the cries of the dying. By that sound he knew he would never
see his son Jordan again.
Trenches were dug in the ground. Smoke from the
chimneys lay over the low country for days. But the owners had been
hasty to finish their work, Ephraim said. They had not bothered to
burn the empty barracks before they rode off in their trucks and
carriages.
Ever since that time Ephraim had sheltered in the
barn of a poor white farmer who was sympathetic to him. Ephraim
trapped game in exchange for this modest shelter. Eventually the
farmer lent him his rifle so that Ephraim could bring back an
occasional deer as well as rabbits and birds. The farmer didn’t
talk much, Ephraim said, but there were age-browned copies of
Garrison’s Liberator stored in the barn; and Ephraim read
these with interest, and improved his vocabulary and his
understanding of the world.
Hardly anyone came up to Pilgassi Acres nowadays
except hunters following game trails. He scared them off with his
rifle if they got too close to Jordan’s barracks.
There was no point leaving the barracks after dark,
since we could not travel in the carriage until sunrise. Percy’s
condition worsened during the night. He came down with a fever, and
as he shivered, his wound began to seep. I made him as comfortable
as possible with blankets from the carriage, and Ephraim brought
him water in a cracked clay jug.
Percy was lucid, but his ideas began to run in
whimsical directions as midnight passed. He insisted that I take
Mrs. Stowe’s letter from where he kept it in his satchel and read
it aloud by lamplight. It was this letter, he said, that had been
the genesis of the book he was writing now, about the three
million. He wanted to know what Ephraim would make of it.
I kept my voice neutral as I read, so that Mrs.
Stowe’s stark words might speak for themselves.
“That is a decent white woman,” Ephraim said when
he had heard the letter and given it some thought. “A Christian
woman. She reminds me of the woman that taught me and Jordan to
read. But I don’t know what she’s so troubled about, Mr. Camber.
This idea there was no war. I suppose there wasn’t, if by war you
mean the children of white men fighting the children of white men.
But, sir, I have seen the guns, sir, and I have seen them used,
sir, all my life—all my life. And in my father’s time and
before him. Isn’t that war? And if it is war, how can she
say war was avoided? There were many casualties, sir, though their
names are not generally recorded; many graves, though not marked;
and many battlefields, though not admitted to the history
books.”
“I will pass that thought on to Mrs. Stowe,” Percy
whispered, smiling in his discomfort, “although she’s very old now
and might not live to receive it.”
And I decided I would pass it on to Elsebeth, my
daughter.
I packed up my gear very carefully, come
morning.
This is Jordan’s name, I imagined myself
telling Elsie, pointing to a picture in a book, the book Percy
Camber would write.
This photograph, I would tell her, represents light
cast in a dark place. Like an old cellar gone musty for lack of
sun. Sunlight has a cleansing property, I would tell her. See: I
caught a little of it here.
I supposed there was enough of her grandmother in
her that Elsebeth might understand.
I began to feel hopeful about the prospect.
Ephraim was less talkative in the morning light. I
helped poor shivering Percy into the carriage. I told Ephraim my
mother had once published a poem in the Liberator, years
ago. I couldn’t remember which issue.
“I may not have seen that number,” Ephraim
said.
“But I’m sure it was a fine poem.”
I drove Percy to the doctor in Crib Lake. The
doctor was an old man with pinch-nose glasses and dirty
fingernails. I told him I had shot my servant accidentally, while
hunting. The doctor said he did not usually work on colored men,
but an extra ten dollars on top of his fee changed his mind.
He told me there was a good chance Percy would pull
through, if the fever didn’t worsen.
I thanked him, and I went off to buy myself a
drink.