Michener, James A. (124 page)

clothes?' he roared: 'Burn 'em.' And again he shook his fist at Cobb: 'Don't work for you no more. Don't work for your bitch no more.'

Instinctively, Cobb raised his right arm, but a Union soldier prevented any further action.

The meaning of true emancipation—not President Lincoln's false gesture of some years before—was brought home to Lammermoor the next afternoon when amidst the clamor about freedom, Trajan appeared at the mansion, a place he had rarely entered, knocked politely at the door, and asked to see the master. Standing respectfully, he said: 'Major Cobb, you got the plantation under control, I'se leavin'.'

'What?' The statement was like the explosion of a bomb.

'I wants a place of my own. I got no more taste for livin' in slave quarters here at Lammermoor.'

'But you helped build this place. You're part of it.'

'Always I builds for someone else. Now I wants to work for myself.'

Cobb called for his wife, and when Petty Prue heard of the former slave's unexpected announcement, she echoed Sett's reaction: 'Haven't we always treated you decently?'

Trajan would not be sidetracked by any discussion of past conditions. Standing very erect, as he had been taught to do when reporting to a master, he said: 'I come home from Mexico, two years ago, money I earned swimmin' the river.'

When he saw incomprehension on the faces of the Cobbs, he produced the paper signed by Johnson Carver during those days of high adventure with the two boys. And there in the silent room, when he thought of those daring lads, so like his son, he hung his head and the terrible grief of this war and these tangled years overcame him. He could not present his case, and the Cobbs let him go, thinking that emancipation had unsettled him.

Next day Major Cobb and his wife invited their former slave to meet with them, in the same room, and this time they asked him to sit down. 'Trajan, we suppose that with your money . . . And congratulations on having so much. I know many white families who would—'

Petty Prue, suddenly the more masterful of the Cobbs, broke in: 'Don't spend your money on land. You've been so faithful and we appreciate you so profoundly . . .' She choked and seemed not so masterful after all.

'What we propose,' her husband said, 'is to give you five acres of your own. That land against the oak trees.'

Trajan rose: 'All these years 1 got 1 >n a nice strip of land,

edge of Jefferson. Last night I bought it.'

'A slave? Buying land 7 ' The words had slipped away from Petty Prue, who was immediately sorry she had said them.

'I bought it. I paid dollars and I'm leavin' this mornin', and maid, Pansy, wants to go with me.'

'But, Trajan,' Petty Prue cried in real confusion "You were so wonderful, helping me. Taking that cotton down to Mexico and coming back home.' She looked at him in near-despair: 'We thought you liked it here.'

Trajan moved to the door, determined not to be swayed by any argument these good people might advance. With tall dignity he told them: 'You can say I was faithful, because I was. And von can say I come back when I could of run away, because 1 did And von can say I was respectful, because I liked the way you handled this plantation with the men gone, Miss Prue. I tried to be a good slave, but don't never say I liked it.' And he was gone.

Not long after, Major Cobb and his new bride entered their carriage, old now and needing refurbishing, and rode in to Jefferson, where on the edge of town they found the small cottage for which their former slave Trajan had paid twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, including an acre of land. The spring flowers were fading, but the Cobbs could see where the summer beauties would soon be peeking out.

'We've come to make you a proposition, Trajan.'

'I been expectin' you.'

'How so?' Petty Prue asked, accepting the chair her former maid Pansy offered. The others would stand, for there was only the one

'Because you need me. You goin' to need me bad, to run your gin, your mills.'

'You're right,' Cobb said. 'We do need y<

'We miss you,' Petty Prue said, 'and we trust you.'

'What I'd be willing to do,' Cobb said enthusiastically, 'is buy this house from you. Give you the land I spoke of, and you could—'

'This is my house,' Trajan said. 'Pansy and I, we live here. You want us to work for you, we walk to work. But when work's over, we come back here.' He said this so forcefully that the Cobbs were stunned; they could not imagine that a black man would surrender such an obvious financial advantage in defense of a principle.

There was silence, broken by a practical suggestion from the major: 'We'll give you a mule so that you can ride to the mill '

i would like that,' Trajan said. Then he added a suggestion of his own: 'To run the mill right, we ought to have Big Matthew back.'

Cobb noticed Trajan's use of we, as if he were once more in charge of things, but the suggestion that Big Matthew be forgiven for his intemperate behavior was too much. 'No,' Cobb said gravely. 'Matthew tried to strike me, and that I cannot forgive.'

'Don't you think he got a lot to forgive?'

Cobb studied this sensible question for some moments, then asked: 'Will he work?'

'He ain't been workin' and he ain't been eatin'. Big Matthew, he ain't dumb.'

When Cobb reluctantly agreed to hire the big man, Trajan brought forth a most unexpected request. 'Major Cobb, Miss Prue, I knowed you would be comin' and I knowed what you was goin' to propose this mornin'. And I knowed 1 would accept, because I loves Lammermoor. But I had to jump the gun a little.'

'You borrowed money?'

'No!' He broke into an easy laugh. 'Smart man like me don't throw money around. I still got all but what I paid for the land.'

'What then?'

'Union officers been houndin' us. In a nice way, but they say all us former slaves got to take last names. They come to me yesterday, very forceful. This is the one they give me'—he hesitated— 'at my suggestion, if you ain't mad?'

He presented the Cobbs with a card bearing his new name: trajan cobb, and Petty Prue said: 'We welcome you to freedom.'

. . . TASK FORCE

The Washington Insider almost wrecked our two-day May meeting in which we were to discuss the effect on Texas history of Southern immigration from states like Georgia and Alabama. Three days prior to our session the magazine revealed in a long think-piece the secret deliberations of a committee that had been assigned the task of selecting a new director of the Smithsonian Institution. The names of the four finalists were disclosed not in alphabetical order but according to their position in the betting, and the committee was astonished to find my name given last but

with the notation 'May be the dark horse. Apparent favorite of the board's intellectuals.'

Before we could open our meeting in Dallas, a pulsating city whose vitality excited me, members of the press wanted to interview me, and when they were through, our own committee took over.

it's a big job,' I said, but immediately I corrected my phrasing: 'Make that 'it would be a big job . . for whoever gets it."

'What are your chances 7 ' Rusk asked, cutting as usual to the crucial question.

'You saw the story. Last in line but still fighting '

'Do you want it?'

'Anyone like me would want it, Ransom. Best job of its kind in the nation. But my chances—'

He cut me off, asked for a phone, and within eight minutes had spoken to his Texas friends serving in Congress, telling them, not asking, to get on the ball and see that I got the appointment He put in a special call to Jim Wright, the representative from Fort Worth, majority whip in the House, asking him for special help.

Much of our first day was wasted in aimless discussion about the possibility of my going to Washington, but the situation was placed in its proper perspective by the arrival in the late afternoon of a senior editor from the Insider, who asked to have cocktails with us and who divulged in the course of our chatting the actual situation: 'I hate to say this, Barlow, but I have reason to believe that the selection committee threw your name in the hopper only to avoid the charge of parochialism. Most of the leading candidates were from the Northern and California establishments and they wanted the news stories to carry at least one Southern or Western name, and you covered both Texas and Colorado. To provide a respectable balance.'

'Wait a minute!' Rusk protested with that automatic defense of Texas which made men like him so abrasive. 'You don't use a Texan for window dressing. Damnit, we'll soon be the most powerful state in the Union—'

'But the University of Texas! A national committee would never—'

Now Quimper broke in to defend the school on whose board of regents he sat: 'Our university takes a back seat to no one.'

in academic circles it does. That miserable show you people put on some years back, that regent Quimper going around firing everyone he didn't like.'

That was my father,' Quimper exploded, 'and you're right. Some people condemned him as a meddler. Those who knew him

considered him a genius. At any rate, Texas now has two first-class public institutions.'

'Which two?' the visitor asked, and I was astonished by Quimper's answer: Texas and A&M' Often at our meetings he had joked about the latter school, denigrating it horribly, but now he was defending it; the difference was that when he joked, he was doing so to fellow Texans; when an outsider presumed to criticize, he became defensive.

They're decent schools,' the Washington man conceded. 'Of the second category.'

'What the hell are you sayin',' Quimper asked, his face growing red and his pronunciation more Texan. The university has Stephen Weinberg, Nobel winner, and A&M has just signed up the great Norman Borlaug, also a Nobel winner for his work on grains.'

'Yes,' our visitor concluded, 'but you hire them long after they've done their best work elsewhere. It's doubtful you'll ever produce a Nobel winner of your own.'

'You Washington know-it-alls make me puke,' Quimper said, retiring from the conversation. But the rest of us accepted the challenge, and in a series of short, impassioned statements we defended the intellectual honor of our state.

Miss Cobb was most effective: 'You must remember, young man, that power is flowing into Texas at an astonishing rate. More congressmen with every census. More industry. More of whatever it is that makes America tick. You unfortunate people in the North will be spending the rest of your lives dancing to a Texas tune. You should accustom yourselves to it.'

There are rules of quality which cannot be evaded,' the editor, a graduate of Amherst and Yale, said. Texas will have the raw power, yes, but never the intellectual leadership. You'll always have to depend on the areas and the schools with higher standards.'

That's the sheerest nonsense I've heard in a long time,' Rusk grumbled. 'In the fields that matter these days, Texas is already preeminent . . . and we'll stay that way.'

'What fields?' the Washington man asked, and Rusk ticked them off: 'Petroleum, aviation, silicon chips, population growth.'

'When your oil wells dry up,' the editor said, 'you become another Arizona. Colorful, but of little relative significance.'

Rusk leaned back and looked at the young expert: 'Son, of a hundred units of oil in the ground in 1900—take any well, any field you want—how much do you suppose we've been able to pump out so far? Go ahead, guess, if you're the last word on petroleum.'

'What? Seventy percent taken out, thirty percent still underground?'

'We've taken out twenty percent. The limitations of present techniques prevent us from taking any more. So eighty percent of Texas oil, and that's a monstrous reservoir, is still hiding down there, waiting for some genius to invent a better pump, a better system of bringing it up to where we need it. And von can be sure we'll invent some way of doing just that.'

Now Quimper snapped back: 'And the man who figures it out is gonna get his own Nobel Prize '

Since the discussion had centered on me originally, 1 felt obligated to make a contribution: i wanted the Smithsonian job. Anyone would. To shepherd the material record of the nation But in a way, these two men are right. That's a museum job. The past The great struggles of the future are going to be fought out herein Texas. Even more than in California.'

The young man had excited our minds so thoroughly that Rusk suggested: 'Some of the things you say make a lot of sense. Have dinner with us.'

During the meal the visitor made two points which kept the pot of agitation bubbling: 'Texas will accrue power, that's obvious, but two deficiencies will hold you back. Because you produce no national newspaper like the New York Times or the Washington Post, you'll not command serious intellectual attention. Newsweek losing its Texas editor, that hurts the opportunities of other Texans like Barlow enormously.'

Before either Rusk or Quimper could leap to defend the young man who had left Newsweek, the editor made a humorous evaluation which ignited the basic fires of patriotism: 'And because your diet is so very heavy and unimaginative, you'll lose ground to California, which eats so sensibly.'

This was too much for Quimper: 'A good chicken-fried steak smothered in white gravy, or a big slab of barbecue with baked beans and potato salad, that's man's food. That keeps the blood circulatin'.'

'And the cholesterol raging.'

i wouldn't be surprised,' Quimper said, 'if quiche and endive salad don't destroy California, grantin' it's still there after the earthquake hits.'

As the night wore on, Professor Garza asked seriously: 'So what are the chances that our boy will land the Smithsonian job?' and our visitor said: 'Nonexistent. They'll have to have someone with more prestige, and from a more acceptable locale, but even listing Barlow was a vote of confidence. Twenty more vears, if things progress as Miss Cobb suggests, someone from Texas will be acceptable.'

'At that point,' Rusk said firmly, 'we'll be sending our young people to see Washington and New York the way we send them now to see Antwerp and Milan. Interesting historical echoes but no longer in the mainstream.'