Michener, James A. (109 page)

There's been constant talk since I can remember. But only by the irresponsibles who seem to flourish in this state and Georgia. Men like you and me, we'd surrender many of our advantages if we broke with the North.'

'Have we any advantages left?'

'Cotton. Every day I live, every experience I have, proves anew that the rest of the world must have our cotton. Cotton is our shield.'

'Even when it can drop from twelve and five-eighths to ... ? What price did you say our upland people got? Four cents plus? That's a two-thirds drop in three months.'

'And we'll see it back to twenty cents as soon as peace is regained and the mills resume weaving.' He leaned forward: 'If a man grows Sea Island, he worries far less, and we grow Sea Island.' On that reassuring note the brothers went to bed.

They rose early, walked down to the plantation landing, entered their long, sleek craft, its six slaves already in position, and started one of America's outstanding short voyages. When they left the pier they had a choice of two routes. They could head east and soon enter the Atlantic Ocean, where a rough thirty-mile sail would carry them to Charleston. Or they could head west and enter a fascinating inland passage that would take them to the same destination, except that on this route, protecting islands would hold off the Atlantic swells, making the voyage a sea-breeze delight.

If the brothers had been sailing alone, they would surely have taken the open-sea route for its challenge, but with their wives aboard, they chose the inland passage, moving through vast marshes until they saw above them the headland on which rested the beautiful homes and imposing trees of Charleston.

Now, with the wind gone, they dropped sail, and the slaves, their back muscles glistening in the sun, leaned on the oars, their voices blending in a soft chantey as they moved the boat toward its docking place near The Battery:

'Miss Lucy, don't you bake him no cornbread, Don't you feed him like you done feed me. Miss Lucy, don't you dare bake him no cornbread Till 1 comes home wid your two possum '

When they broke out of the narrow channel and into the glorious bay which made Charleston so distinctive, they could see dead

ahead the glowering walls of Fort Sumter, unassailable on its rock; and while the sails were being hoisted again, Persifer told his listeners of San Juan de Ulua, a comparable fortress set in another part of the same great ocean.

With deft moves the black helmsman brought the craft about and landed his four passengers on The Battery, one of the nation's majestic streets. It stood on a hill so low it scarcely merited its name, but so pleasingly high that any house atop it caught a breeze off the sea. The stately houses were not positioned like those of any other American street; because a house was taxed according to how much of the precious Battery it took up, the Charleston mansions were not built with the long axis facing the sea, which would have been reasonable, but with the shortest end possible facing east and the longer sides running far back into the town.

'Charleston has always looked sideways at the world,' Persifer said as he saw once more those homes in whose pleasant gardens he had spent the better hours of his youth. There was the Masters mansion, in which he had courted Tessa Mae, and farther along, the Brooks house, where he and Somerset had gone so often to visit Millicent Brooks and her sister, Netty Lou; for almost a year it looked as if the two Cobb boys were going to marry the two Brooks girls, but then Netty Lou met a dashing boy home from Princeton, and Persifer had to settle for the Masters girl. Out on the great plantations and along The Battery it seemed as if a Charleston man did not marry a specific young lady on whom his fancy fell; he married the heiress to some other plantation, some other mansion along the seafront.

The Cobb mansion, which at the present had no girls to marry off, but which soon would when Somerset's daughter matured, was, from the street, a modest red-brick structure of three stories, with two ordinary-looking windows on each floor but no door for entrance. A stranger to Charleston's ways, seeing this plain facade for the first time, would glean not the slightest indication of the quiet grandeur hidden behind the plain walls. But let him move slightly to the left and enter the beautiful wrought-iron gate, set between two very solid brick pillars, and he would come upon a fairyland of exquisite gardens, elegant marble statues from Italy and brick sidewalks wandering past fountains, all enclosed by the long, sweeping, iron-ornamented porch on the right and the high brick wall on the left.

The wall, about ten feet high, was a thing of extraordinary perfection, for its bricks were laid in charming patterns which teased the eye along its immense expanse, and it was finished at the top in graceful down-dipping curves whose ends rose to finials

on which rested small marble urns. On a hot afternoon one could sit on the long porch sipping minted tea and study the variations in the wall as one might study a symphony or a painting

The porch was the masterwork of this excellent house, for it ran almost thirty yards, was two stories high, and was so delicately proportioned, resting on its stately iron pillars, that it seemed to have floated into position. Wicker chairs, placed about round glass-covered tables, broke the long reach into congenial smaller units that could be comfortably utilized by any number of visitors from one to twenty. Flowers adorned the porch, some planted in beds along its front, some in filigreed iron pots hanging decorously from the posts, but its salient characteristic was its sense of ease, its promise of shade on a hot day, the glimpses it provided of the nearby bay, and its constant invitation to rest.

When the Cobb brothers came through the gate they saw, resting on this porch at one of the smaller enclaves, their father, Maximus Cobb, seventy-two years old, his two canes perched against an unused chair. White-haired, with a prim white goatee but no mustache, he was dressed wholly in white, from his shoes to the expensive white panama resting on a table which also held his midmorning tea.

He did not rise to meet his sons, for to do so would have necessitated use of his canes, but he did extend his hands to Persifer, holding on to his older son for some moments with obvious delight and love.

'Suetonius!' he called. 'Come see!' But Suetonius, a slave now in his late sixties and weighted down with dignity, did not appear In his place came a moderately tall, handsome black man in his early thirties, very dark of skin, with close-cropped hair, flashing eyes and a constant smile that showed extremely white teeth. He was not amused by the life about him, for he was painfully aware of being a slave, but he did prefer easing each day along with a minimum of difficulty, and had found that the simplest way to accomplish this was to smile, no matter what absurdity was thrown at him. Now, although he spoke good English, he used the dialect expected of him: 'Suetonius, he workin' wid de cook.'

'Trajan!' Colonel Cobb cried as soon as he saw the graceful figure appear in the doorway, and the slave, having been forewarned by yesterday's messenger that the young master of the plantation was to arrive, smiled with genuine affection and stepped forward to clasp the extended hand.

Three years younger than Persifer, a year older than Somerset, Trajan had grown up with them, had played with them at wild games along the marshes of Edisto and, at their suggestion, been

brought into the Charleston mansion and given a Roman name. He had always liked the boys, finding in them not a single mean streak that the young men of Charleston sometimes displayed in their treatment of blacks, and he had never quailed when one of them became momentarily angry in some game, shouting at him: 'You damned nigger! I'll break your kinky head.' When they had tried, he had fended them off with ease, knocking them about until everyone collapsed with laughter.

Under their tutelage he had dropped his Gullah to acquire proper English, and under his teaching they had learned Gullah, which helped them enormously in dealing with the field hands. He now looked approvingly at the almost emaciated body of his friend Persifer, so debonair in his military uniform, and cried: 'He come home!' These simple words, spoken so obviously from the heart, touched Persifer deeply, and he gripped his slave's hand more tightly.

Maximus Cobb felt, with some reason, that he had only a limited time to spend in any day—for he required long naps—or in the passage of life itself, so with no embarrassment he asked Trajan to tell Suetonius to have the slaves rearrange the porch and move four chairs near his. Then, when the slaves were gone and the two couples faced him, he launched right into the heart of the problem that faced the Cobbs. 'When our ancestors settled Edisto, English law required that family estates be handed intact to the eldest sons. In South Carolina that's no longer the law, but we Cobbs and other families of ancient repute still honor it. just as my father turned the plantation over to me rather than to Septimus, so that I could perfect the Sea Island cotton which has made it flourish, so now it must go to Persifer, who will make the decisions that will enable it to prosper in the new decades.' He nodded to Persifer, who nodded back, taking at the same time Tessa Mae's hand in his.

'When responsibility was given me,' he said slowly, looking now at Somerset, 'my younger brother Septimus felt that a great wrong had been done, and as you know, he hied himself off to Georgia, a terrible self-banishment. I could never persuade him to return, and there he rotted, in the wilderness.' Tears of regret did not come to his eyes, but he did wipe his lashes, for he knew that tears might come at any moment.

'Somerset, I know this must be a difficult situation for you, because you had reason to suppose that your brother would spend his life in the military. That was not to be. He's home, and the responsibility becomes his. I know you'll accept it gracefully, and I do not want you to scuttle off to Georgia like your uncle Sep-

timus. I beg you to stay and assist your brother in running our very large plantation. He needs your help, and so do I.'

Neither Somerset nor Millicent volunteered any response; from the time they received that letter, more than a year ago, in which Persifer first suggested that at the end of the year he was going to quit the service, they had known that this day of decision would inevitably be upon them, and they had often discussed it quietly between themselves, never letting Tessa Mae or the old man know how deeply concerned they were. They had even gone so far as to send Cousin Reuben in the hill country of Georgia a secret inquiry: 'What is the quality of land in your district? And how difficult is it to grow short staple?' He had replied enthusiastically—which they had to discount, because everything Reuben did was marked with disproportionate enthusiasm—that a man was a darned fool to waste his energy on worn-out Carolina plantations making three hundred pounds an acre when his good fields in Georgia were making five hundred and fifty. He had added a paragraph which bespoke ancient grudges:

A man is stupid, insanely stupid, to believe that he is somehow socially superior if he grows a few pounds of long-staple cotton with its easy black seed while his neighbor in Georgia grows an immense crop of short staple with its difficult green seed. The world of cotton is dominated by the short-staple men, and if you have any sense, you'll become one of us.

But such gnawing decisions were relegated to the shadows that evening when Maximus Cobb entertained the Charleston elite in his home by the sea. Now the big gates at the rear were thrown open: six slaves in blue livery guided the broughams and phaetons as they deposited the plantation gentry at the long porch; Suetonius, in gorgeous attire suitable for a French palace, greeted each guest by title and name; and Trajan, in similar garb, led them to the punch table for their beginning glass.

An orchestra played. Couples danced quietly both in the large room and on the porch. Candles in the glittering chandelier from Bohemia and refined whale oil in the lamps along the brocaded walls cast a soft light on the fine faces. Everyone seemed glad to have Persifer back home where he belonged.

The two Cobb boys, as they would always be called while their father lived, passed among the guests, treating each with lavish deference, aware that one day soon they must find husbands and wives for their children from the families here represented. No Cobb within memory had ever married anyone not from Charles-

ton. But if the Cobbs had to be polite to the guests against the day when they would have to seek marriage alliances, so did the guests—-especially those with smaller plantations—have to be especially attentive to the Cobbs, for their children would represent the best catches in the 1850s.

The evening was one of the most festive that the Cobb mansion had known in years, and it was capped when Maximus banged on the floor with one of his canes to announce: 'We welcome home our son Persifer, mentioned in dispatches from the various battlefields in Mexico. Tomorrow he resumes stewardship of our plantations, and we wish him well.' Glasses were raised; toasts to Persifer's success were drunk; and in every carriage that pulled out of the circular driveway at midnight, someone asked: 'And what will young Somerset do now?'

Young Somerset was the gentlemanly kind of man who would never challenge his brother's assumption of the Cobb plantations, but he was not allowed to surrender because his wife, Millicent, one of the sagest women in Charleston, would not. Under her coaching, he spent the closing months of 1848 outwardly calm, apparently preoccupied with the job of instructing Persifer in the complexities of the big plantation on Edisto, and inwardly contemplating a score of practical alternatives which Millicent kept placing before him.

'You must see, Sett,' she said with unwavering determination. 'We really have to leave. And I think it ought to be done before this year ends.'

'No, I'd never quit before the next crop is planted. But go we shall.'

They had six sensible choices, which Millicent reviewed whenever they talked, keeping them in strict order of preference: 'First, buy our own plantation near Charleston, but have we the money? Second, take over the Musgrave place, which their old people have suggested from time to time . . . not directly, of course, but they have intimated. Third, manage one of the great plantations, of which there seem to be many, but I wouldn't care for that, and I'm sure you wouldn't, either. Fourth, with Persifer leaving the army, you could join, but it could only be in the militia, and you'd have to start so low. Fifth, join your cousin Reuben in Georgia, but that sounds so desolate after you've known Charleston. Sixth, pull up stakes and move to fresh new land, new friends in Mississippi.'