Artifacts (7 page)

“Well, that’s what Grandma called it. It doesn’t sound like the name of a luxury hotel, but tastes change. I’ve heard of places with names like Tater Island, Hot Coffee, Bowlegs Point, Cow Ford, even Hogtown. Anyway, Grandma said that when my great-great-grandfather died, the property passed to his daughter, my great-grandmother.”

Then came the big question. “Do you have the deed?”

The deed. Such a pesky detail. “No deed has ever surfaced. And no, I don’t have a birth certificate for his heir, my great-grandmother, Courtney Stanton Wells. I don’t think she ever had one, since she was born during the War and her parents were never married. Oh, I forgot to mention that part.” Faye studied the brown backs of her hands. “Courtney’s mother was a slave. My great-great-grandfather owned my great-great-grandmother. If I dwelled on that too much, I’d spend the rest of my life on an analyst’s couch.”

“Well,” Cyril said. “That answers some questions I’ve been too delicate to ask. The years during and after Reconstruction would have been tough for a biracial woman. Are you sure your great-grandmother ever held a legal title?”

“For years, no one questioned the validity of her claim to the remnants of Last Isle, probably because nobody else wanted them. I’ve found records showing that she paid taxes up until 1933, when some white men decided they wanted her land and a kangaroo court let them take it away.”

“I don’t suppose you even have a survey of the land your ancestors owned.”

Faye restrained herself from calling him stupid. “No. Besides, it would be worthless. You’ve been out there. Every twenty years, a hurricane washes away some of what’s left of Last Isle and resurfaces the rest. That’s how they took her land. The adjacent landowners each laid claim to a few pieces of Last Isle and the jury wouldn’t accept the word of a woman whose mother was a slave. She knew which land was hers; everybody in the courtroom knew it. She just couldn’t prove it.”

“This dispute is older than I am. Why are you coming to me now?”

Faye marshaled her wits. This man could help her. She just had to explain to him, in a way that made sense, why it was in his best interests to do so.

“Don’t you see? Some of my land has been absorbed into the wildlife refuge. Let them keep it. It’s not fair, but at least they’re preserving it. Help me get Seagreen Island back. You—and your constituents—oppose the resort being built there. Get me my land back, and no tacky tourists will ever tear up the place. Your voters will be happy, and God knows that will make you happy.”

“You make an interesting point, Ms. Longchamp.” The hazel eyes were still sharp, but there was a glimmer of something else. “I will take your request under consideration.”

Faye was glad to be alone in the elevator. Her guts roiled over the risk she’d just taken. She’d managed to keep Joyeuse out of her conversation with the senator, but anybody probing in court documents and tax records was going to find that her great-grandmother Courtney hadn’t lost everything. The judge had ruled in her favor regarding ownership of Joyeuse because she could show more than a century of continuous occupation. Faye wasn’t eager for Cyril or anybody else to ask any questions about Joyeuse, not until she could afford to answer them.

The elevator doors were opening, so Faye stopped leaning against the cool metal walls and pulled herself into a respectable upright position. Heaven only knew how she planned to pay the taxes on Seagreen Island, even if she did get it back. She couldn’t even take care of Joyeuse. Nevertheless, she was going to regain what was rightfully hers before the resort developers ruined it. She owed that much to her mother and her grandmother and all her ancestors right back to Cally Stanton, the slave girl who had managed to hand such a legacy down.

Joe Wolf Mantooth was knapping flint, making a tiny bird point. He didn’t plan to shoot any birds with it, but he enjoyed the repetitive work and the feel of the rock in his hand, smooth and sharp. The growing pile of stone flakes between his feet gave him a feeling of accomplishment. Truth be told, he would have enjoyed flintknapping even if he never got a useful tool out of the activity, simply because the cracking sound of rock striking rock was so completely satisfying.

Once, long before, Joe had listened as a friend tried to explain the concept of meditation, how it settled the soul and soothed the mind, how it even lowered the blood pressure. Joe had listened until he got tired of feeling stupid, then he’d gone home and flaked a chunk of flint while he studied on his friend’s words.

Joe spent time chipping stone most days and sometimes he mused on things he didn’t understand, like what “blood pressure” meant and how computers worked and why women wore silly shoes. He turned his questions over and over until they clicked together like hard cool rocks and made sense. Sometimes he knapped stone without thinking at all, but when he set down his tools he felt like something somewhere in the world made more sense than it had when he had sat down to work.

The sound of a boat motor startled him from his rhythmic chipping. Joe rose to greet Faye, as he always did. It would no more occur to him to stay with his work and ignore Faye’s homecoming than it would occur to a child to stay with his crayons rather than greet his mother at the door with a sloppy kiss.

By the time he realized that this was not the sound of Faye’s boat, the boat’s sole occupant had seen him.

Joe raised a hand in greeting.

Wally cut his engine, looked Joe up and down, and blurted, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

Joe, who always took the route to the truth that yielded the greatest economy in words, said, “I’m Joe. I live here.” He didn’t have to add, “What are you doing here?” The words were implied.

Wally sputtered something about checking on his stored furniture, but never disembarked. Instead, he cranked his boat and navigated it back toward open water at a rate of speed far too great for the shallow inlet Faye used to harbor her boats. Joe watched him tear away. Another man might have concluded that Wally was upset, even jealous, to find a man living with Faye, but such things were beyond Joe. He simply filed the encounter under “unexplainable.” Joe found almost everything in the modern world to be unexplainable.

Chapter 8

Faye walked through the front entrance of the Museum of American Slavery like any sightseer looking to idle away her lunch hour. With a delicious sense of skullduggery, she browsed through the exhibits as if she’d never seen them. When she was certain that no one was looking, she slid through the door marked “Director” and took a seat at one end of a long conference table.

Douglass Everett took the seat across from her with a cordial, “It’s good to see you again, Faye. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to speak at Senator Kirby’s Seagreen Island press conference. That was a terrible day. Are you all right?”

Faye nodded her head silently, unwilling to talk about something so painful when she was on such an important mission. She opened the large tote bag clutched in her lap and emptied it, one item at a time, carefully unwrapping each piece from its protective packing.

“Douglass, you’re going to like what I’ve brought you today. Look, I’ve got a lace bobbin. Two thimbles: one china, one brass. Twelve buttons: eight made of hand-hewn wood, three that are plain and white, and one made of multifaceted jet. Three pipestems, two pipe bowls. Five handwrought nails: three rose-head and two T-head. A silver dinner fork. An iron pocketknife. Ivory ribs of a lady’s fan. A horseshoe fragment. A chisel. A tiny porcelain horse. Two whetstones. A battling stick for beating laundry clean. A pothook for hanging food to cook over an open fire.”

She sat back and waited for the long, amiable haggling session that was an inevitable part of doing business with Douglass.

He fingered the corroded pocketknife. “Jesus, Faye. Where do you get all this stuff?”

“You ask me that every time, and every time I tell you the same thing. It’s all mine. Do you want any of it?”

“You bet. If it weren’t for you and your artifacts, wherever you find them, I wouldn’t have much of a museum.” He lifted each piece, gingerly separating her hard-won goods into piles of things he wanted and things he didn’t. The pothook, the brass thimble, the battling stick, the whetstone, the chisel, the nails, and the wooden buttons went into the “sold” pile so quickly that she knew they would bring a good price.

The china thimble, the porcelain horse, the remains of the ivory fan, the silver fork, and the jet button went just as quickly into the pile of rejected goods.

“I found every one of those things in the ruins of old slave quarters. Maybe they were gifts, maybe they were stolen, but they were there.” Faye pushed them toward his pile of acceptable goods.

“I can’t display luxury goods in a museum of slavery unless I can prove a link to slavery. Can I reference your testimony about where you found these items?”

“Of course not.”

He pushed the luxury items back toward her. “Then I can’t use them. Where do you get this stuff, Faye?”

“I keep telling you. It’s mine, every bit of it. I just prefer to remain anonymous.”

“Fine. Then keep your fancy goods that you can’t prove a slave ever touched—”

“Sure, they touched them. Somebody had to sew on the button. Somebody had to polish the silver and dust the little horse and clean the rouge off m’lady’s fan.”

“Sorry, Faye. By that logic, I’d have to buy everything you bring me.”

Faye smirked. “And would there be anything wrong with that?” Her expression changed quickly when she saw him shove the lace bobbin into the pile of rejected goods. “No, you have to take that!”

Douglass’ smile said that he had heard a sales pitch before.

“Really, Douglass,” Faye said, “that’s the most significant thing on the table. Slaves with lacemaking skills were rare and highly valued. It would have been quite unusual here on the frontier to invest in training someone in an art that was time consuming, yet put no food on the table.”

Douglass raked the bobbin back into the pile of goods he wanted. “That’s why I like doing business with you, Faye. My other suppliers are just pothunters. They dig up the stuff and bring me what they find. And it’s all in execrable condition. Working with you is like having my own private archaeologist.”

Having decided what he wanted, he turned each piece delicately in his hands, held it up to the light, ran his fingers over it looking for damage or clumsy repair. Douglass was a top-flight businessman. Beneath his poker face, Faye knew he was assessing the worth of each piece—not its worth on the open market and not the price an average antique dealer might put on it. Douglass would pay only what he felt the piece was worth to
him
and if that price were more or less than someone else might pay, it was a matter of no importance to him.

But it was a matter of significant importance to Faye. Her taxes were coming due, her boats wouldn’t quit drinking fuel, her job was on indefinite hiatus, and she had a frenzied need for money. She had brought Douglass everything she had that might remotely interest him. Now came the true test of her sales skills. She had to sell him something truly expensive for which he had absolutely no use.

While her best customer fingered the merchandise, Faye reached back into her tote bag and drew out the most gorgeous things she had ever dug out of the ground, two matching tortoiseshell combs filigreed with finely carved scrolls and arabesques. They had been slightly etched by the sand that covered them for so long, but other than that, their graceful curves were unchanged since the day they had adorned the upswept hair of a great lady.

Douglass caught his breath when he saw them—the man had taste—but he started shaking his head before she laid them on the table before him.

“I’ve thought it through,” she began, with her most persuasive smile. “You need a small display acknowledging the plight of the plantation mistress.”

“What plight? She was waited on hand and foot.”

“That’s the stereotype, but time and again, documentary evidence shows that she worked from dark till dark, dispensing food and supplies to all the slave families, providing medical care, supervising food preservation. One woman wrote of using her spare moments to knit socks for everyone on the plantation—hundreds of people.”

He was shaking his head.

“Listen to me, Douglass. Women, even white women, couldn’t take a walk without a chaperone. They couldn’t own property or vote or leave the plantation without an escort. They were half-slaves themselves. Document after document shows that many of them opposed slavery, but they had no voice, so they just fed and clothed and doctored their husbands’ human possessions. Any drop of human kindness our ancestors received most likely came from them. They deserve a place in your museum, Douglass.”

He kept shaking his head. “You make a good case, but it’s too complex an issue to tackle during the forty-five minutes people spend with my exhibits.”

“I can’t sell them to any of my other customers. I won’t. They’ll turn around and sell them to some fat rich woman who’ll wear them to cheesy costume balls. Buy them for your wife.”

“She couldn’t wear them. Her hair’s shorter than yours. Keep them, Faye. Put them in a glass case and enjoy owning something beautiful.”

Faye hated herself for pushing him so hard. Now she was going to have to close this deal through tears of frustration. She carefully replaced the combs in their box and laid them in the bottom of her tote bag.

She was reaching for the pile of goods that Douglass had rejected, but he caught her hands between his two huge ones.

“You really need the money or you wouldn’t be selling those combs.”

She raised her eyes, humiliated by the tears in them.

He gathered up everything on the table, the things he’d said he wanted and the things he’d said he didn’t. “Keep the combs. I’ll take all the rest. And I’ll pay your asking price for every damn piece.”

Douglass watched Faye drive away in her twenty-five-year-old car and he hurt for her. She had been too—too what?— too upset or embarrassed or desperate for money to stay for their usual post-negotiation chat, and he was sorry. He enjoyed Faye’s company. After they concluded their business, he always poured her a glass of sherry—good sherry because he knew she couldn’t afford nice things—but always in a tiny glass. She had to drive home, wherever home was, and he wanted her to be safe.

He looked forward to sitting with Faye, sipping sherry and enjoying a free-ranging conversation. She was remarkably well-read and so was he, considering that they didn’t possess a college degree between the two of them, and she could be depended upon to view front-page events from a cockeyed angle that made him consider his own opinions all over again.

Faye had her secrets and he understood that, because he had his. She filled part of the hole in his heart that should have been filled by his own children. He wished her a safe drive home. He hoped her home was a safe place, too.

“Think,” Faye said out loud to herself. “Where will the money come from?” The wind whipping through her open car window swept her words into the hot August air.

There was a simple answer: sell Joyeuse. Her island would make a better site for a resort than Seagreen Island. It was closer to land. It rose further out of the water. It had no beach to speak of, but that could be remedied with a judicious application of dredged sand. It was as safe from hurricanes as an island could be. Her home might be swept away by the next big storm—it was always possible—but the fact that it had stood for nigh onto two hundred years was undeniable.

If she sold Joyeuse, she could end the constant economic drain of property taxes. She could satisfy the bill collectors who had lost track of her when she sold her mother’s house and fled to Joyeuse. She could have an apartment with electricity and air conditioning. She could go back to college.

But she would be alone in a world that showed its coldest face to a young woman who refused to call herself black or white, who refused to be anything other than who she was. American society had made great strides in tolerance during Faye’s short life, but it would be a long time before she felt truly at home anywhere but at Joyeuse. If she sold it, she would have no place left to hide.

Okay, she wouldn’t sell Joyeuse. Where else would she get money? What could she sell? She had no more artifacts of any value, except for a few broken pieces of jewelry. Her personal possessions were still more worthless. In subtropical Florida, an old Pontiac without air conditioning probably had a negative blue book value. Besides, she needed her car to deliver artifacts to her paying clients.

Her boats? The
Gopher
wasn’t expendable. It was her cover story, the “permanent address” that staved off all the questions about where she lived. Besides, the skiff was only safe in calm waters. Jettisoning the
Gopher
would leave her trapped on Joyeuse if an unexpected storm blew up. She could raise a piddling amount of money by selling the skiff, but it would cost her in the long run. She used it to get around whenever she could because the
Gopher
simply slurped up fuel. The hike in her fuel bill would eat up any profit on the skiff within months.

What if she got another job, now that her work with Magda was on indefinite hold? Getting another job would be stupid. The jobs she could land with her puny high school diploma paid nothing and they would keep her from her artifacts business, which actually paid quite a lot when things were going well. Taking the job with Magda had been a stupid financial decision, but she had craved a chance to do legitimate archaeology. Too bad the illegitimate stuff paid so much better.

Pothunting was the only answer. It was like playing the lottery. Dig enough holes and you’re bound to find something. Find enough stuff and you’re bound to stumble onto something that makes you rich and saves your home and makes your mother, who is surely busy caring for all God’s children in Heaven, proud of her earthbound daughter.