Roots (94 page)

“Dey says mos’ dese Alamance County white folks’ great-great-gran’daddies come here from Pennsylvania long fo’ dat Revolution War, when wasn’t much nobody herebouts ’cept Sissipaw Injuns. Some calls ’em Saxapaws. But English white so’jers kilt dem out ’til Saxapaw River de only thing even got dey name now—” Irene grimaced. “My massa say dey’d run from hard times crost de water an’ was crowdin’ Pennsylvania so bad dem Englishmans runnin’ de Colonies ’nounced all de lan’ dey wanted be sellin’ in dis part Nawth Ca’liny fo’ less’n two cents a acre. Well, massa say no end o’ Quakers, Presbyterian Scotch-Irishers, an’ German Lutherans squeezed ever’thin’ dey could in covered wagons an’ crost dem Cumberlan’ an’ Shenando’ valleys. Massa say sump’n like fo’ hundred miles. Dey bought what lan’ dey could an’ commence diggin’, clearin’, an’ farmin’, jes’ mos’ly small farms dey worked deyselves, like mos’ dis county’s white folks herebouts still does. Dat’s how come ain’t many niggers as where it’s great big plantations.”

Irene toured Tom on the following Sunday to her massa’s cotton mill on a bank of Alamance Creek, prideful as if both the mill and the Holt family were her own.

After his hard work attending weekly scores of blacksmithing jobs, Tom coveted each next Sunday when the cart rolled past the miles of split-rail fences enclosing crops of corn, wheat, tobacco, and cotton, with an occasional apple or peach orchard and modest farmhouses. Passing other blacks, who were nearly always afoot, they exchanged waves, Tom hoping they understood that if he offered a ride, it would rob his privacy with Irene. Abruptly stopping the mule sometimes, he would jump out and throw into the cart’s rear some rusty discarded metal he had spied while driving. Once
Irene startled him, also jumping out, picking a wild rose. “Ever since I was a l’il gal I’se loved roses,” she told him.

Meeting white people also out driving, or on horseback, Tom and Irene would become as two statues, with both them and the white people staring straight ahead. Tom commented after a while that since in Alamance County he felt he had seen fewer “po’ cracker” type of whites than abounded where he previously lived.

“I knows dem turkey-gobbler rednecks kin’ you mean,” she said. “Naw, ain’t many roun’ here. Any you sees be’s gin’ly jes’ passin’ through. De big white folks haves less use fo’ ’em dan dey does niggers.”

Tom expressed surprise at how Irene seemed to know something of every crossroads store they passed, or church, school-house, wagon shop, or whatever. “Well, I jes’ hears massa tellin’ guests how his folks had sump’n to do wid pret’ near ever’thin’ in Alamance County,” was how Irene explained it, then identifying a gristmill that they were passing as belonging to her massa, she said, “He turn lotta his wheat into flour, an’ his cawn into whiskey to sell in Fayetteville.”

Privately, Tom gradually wearied of what began to sound to him as if Irene relished a running chronology of implied praises of her owner and his family. A Sunday when they ventured into the county-seat town of Graham, she said, “De year dat big California gol’ rush, my massa’s daddy ’mongst de big mens what bought de lan’ an’ built dis town to be de county seat.” The next Sunday, as they drove along the Salisbury Road, she pointed out a prominent rock marker, “Right dere on massa’s gran’daddy’s plantation dey fought de Battle o’ Alamance. Folks sick o’ dat king’s bad treatments took dey guns to his redcoats, an’ massa say dat battle what lit de fuse fo’ de ’Merican Revolution War roun’ five years later on.”

By this time, Matilda had grown irate. It had strained her patience to the limit to suppress the exciting secret for so long.
“What’s de matter wid you? Ack like you don’t want nobody to see yo’ Injun gal!”

Checking his irritance, Tom only mumbled something unintelligible, and an exasperated Matilda hit below the belt. “Maybe she too good fo’ us ’cause she b’longst to sich big-shot folks!”

For the first time Tom had ever done such a thing, he stalked away from his mother, refusing to dignify that with a reply.

He wished there was someone, anyone, with whom he could talk about what had become his deep uncertainties regarding his continuing to keep company with Irene.

He had finally admitted to himself how much he loved her. Along with her pretty mixed black and Indian features, unquestionably she was as charming, tantalizing, and smart a potential mate as he would have dreamed for. Yet being as inherently deliberate and careful as he was, Tom felt that unless two vital worries he had developed about Irene got solved, they could never enjoy a truly successful union.

For one thing, deep within, Tom neither completely liked, nor completely trusted any white person, his own Massa and Missis Murray included. It seriously bothered him that Irene seemed actually to adore if not worship the whites who owned her; it strongly suggested that they would never see eye to eye on a vital matter.

His second concern, seeming even less soluble, was that the Holt family seemed scarcely less devoted to Irene, in the way that some prosperous massa families often came to regard certain household slaves. He knew that he could never survive the charade of mating with any woman, then living apart on different plantations, involving the steady indignity of their having to ask their respective massas to approve occasional marital visits.

Tom had even given thought to what might be the most honorable way, though he knew that any would be excruciating, to withdraw from seeing Irene any further.

“What de matter, Tom?” she asked him on the next Sunday, her tone full of concern.

“Ain’t nothin’.”

They rode on silently for a while. Then she said in her candid, open manner, “Well, ain’t gwine press you if you don’ want to say, jes’ long as you knows I knows sump’n workin’ hard on you.”

Hardly aware of the reins in his hands, Tom thought that among Irene’s qualities that he most admired were her frankness and honesty, yet for weeks, months, he had been actually dishonest with her, in the sense that he had evaded telling her his true thoughts, however painful it might prove to them both. And the longer he delayed would be continued dishonesty, as well as dragging out his bitter frustrations.

Tom strained to sound casual. “While back, ’member I tol’ you how my brudder Virgil’s wife had to stay wid her massa when us got sol’?” It being unconnected with his point, he did not speak of how after his own recent personal appeal, Massa Murray had traveled to Caswell County and successfully had purchased Lilly Sue and her son Uriah.

Forcing himself to go on, Tom said, “Jes’ feel like if I was ever maybe git thinkin’ ’bout matin’ up wid anybody... well, jes’ don’t b’leeve I could if’n we s’pose to be livin’ on different massas’ plantations.”

“
Me neither!
” Her response was so quickly emphatic that Tom nearly dropped the reins, doubting his ears. He jerked about toward her, agape. “What you mean?” he stammered.

“Same as you jes’ said!”

He practically accosted her, “You know Massa an’ Missis Holt ain’t gwine sell you!”

“I git sol’ whenever I gits ready!” She looked at him calmly.

Tom felt a weakness coursing throughout his body. “How you talkin ’bout?”

“Not meanin’ to soun’ short, dat ain’t yo’ worry, it be’s mine.”

Limply, Tom heard himself saying, “Well, whyn’t you git sol’ den—”

She seemed hesitant. He nearly panicked.

She said, “Awright. You got any special time?”

“Reckon dat up to you, too—”

His mind was racing. What earthly sum would her massa demand for such a prize as she was... if this was not all some wild dream in the first place?

“You got to ax yo’ massa if he buy me.”

“He buy you,” he said with more certainty than he felt. He felt like a fool then, asking, “How much you reckon you be costin’? Reckon he need to have a idea o’ dat.”

“’Speck dey’ll take whatever he offer, reasonable.”

Tom just stared at her, and Irene at him.

“Tom Murray, you’s in some ways de ’zasperatines’ man I’se ever seed! I could o’ tol’ you dat since de day we firs’ met! Long as I been waitin’ fo’ you to say sump’n! You jes’ wait ’til I gits hol’ o’ you, gwine knock out some dat stubbornness!” He scarcely felt her small fists pummeling his head, his shoulders, as he took his first woman into his arms, the mule walking without guidance.

That night, lying abed, Tom began to see in his mind’s eye how he was going to make for her a rose of iron. In a trip to the county seat he must buy only a small bar of the finest newly wrought iron. He must closely study a rose, how its stem and base were joined, how the petals spread, each curving outward in its own way... how to heat the iron bar to just the orange redness for its quickest hammering to the wafer thinness from which he would trim the rose petals’ patterns that once reheated and tenderly, lovingly shaped, would be dipped into brine mixed with oil, insuring her rose petals’ delicate temper...

F
irst hearing the sound, then rapidly advancing upon the totally startling sight of her treasured housemaid Irene huddled down and heavily sobbing behind where the lower staircase curved into an are, Missis Emily Holt instantly reacted in alarm. “What
is
it, Irene?” Missis Emily bent, grasping and shaking the heaving shoulders. “Get yourself up from there this
minute
and tell me! What is it?”

Irene managed to stumble upright while gasping to her missis of her love for Tom, whom she said she wished to marry, rather than continuing her struggle to resist her regular pursuit by certain young massas. Pressed by a suddenly agitated Missis Holt to reveal their identities, Irene through her tears blurted out two names.

That evening before dinner, a shaken Massa and Missis Holt agreed that it was clearly in the best interests of the immediate family circle to be sold to Massa Murray and quickly.

Still, because Missis and Massa Holt genuinely liked Irene, and highly approved of her choice of Tom for a mate, they insisted that Massa and Missis Murray let them host the wedding and reception dinner. All members of both the white and black Holt and Murray families would attend in the Holt big-house front yard, with their minister performing the ceremony and Massa Holt himself giving away the bride.

But amid the lovely, moving occasion, the outstanding sensation was the delicately hand-wrought perfect long-stemmed rose of iron that the groom Tom withdrew from inside his coat pocket and tenderly presented to his radiant bride. Amid the “
oohs
” and “
ahhs
” of the rest of the wedding assembly, Irene embraced it with her eyes, then pressing it to her breast she breathed, “Tom, it’s jes’ too beautiful! Ain’t gwine never be far from dis rose—or you neither!”

During the lavish reception dinner there in the yard after the beaming white families had retired to their meal served within the big house, after Matilda’s third glass of the fine wine, she burbled to Irene, “You’s mo’n jes’ a pretty daughter! You’s done saved me from worryin’ if Tom too shy ever to ax a gal to git married—” Irene loudly and promptly responded, “He didn’t!” And the guests within earshot joined them in uproarious laughter.

After the first week back at the Murray place, Tom’s family soon joked among themselves that ever since the wedding, his hammer had seemed to start singing against his anvil. Certainly no one had ever seen him talk so much, or smile at so many people as often, or work as hard as he had since Irene came. Her treasured rose of iron graced the mantelpiece in their new cabin, which he left at dawn and went out to kindle his forge, whereafter the sounds of his tools shaping metals seldom went interrupted until that dusk’s final red-hot object was plunged into the stale water of his slake tub to hiss and bubble as it cooled. Customers who came for some minor repair or merely to get a tool sharpened, he would usually ask if they could wait. Some slaves liked to sit on foot-high sections of logs off to one side, though most preferred shifting about in a loose group exchanging talk of common interest. On the opposite side, the waiting white customers generally sat on the split-log benches that Tom had set up for them, positioned carefully just within his earshot, though far enough away that the whites didn’t
suspect that as Tom worked, he was monitoring their conversations. Smoking and whittling and now or then taking nips from their pocket flasks as they talked, they had come to regard Tom’s shop as a locally popular meeting place, supplying him now with a daily flow of small talk and sometimes with fresh, important news that he told to his Irene, his mother Matilda, and the rest of his slave-row family after their suppertimes.

Tom told his family what deep bitterness the white men expressed about northern Abolitionists’ mounting campaign against slavery. “Dey’s sayin’ dat Pres’dent Buchanan better keep ’way from dat no-good bunch o’ nigger lovers if he ’speck any backin’ here in de South.” But his white customers vented their worst hatred, he said, “’gainst Massa Abraham Lincoln what been talkin’ ’bout freein’ us slaves—”

“Sho’ is de truth,” said Irene. “Reckon leas’ a year I been hearin’ how if he don’ shut up, gwine git de Nawth an’ de South in a war!”

“Y’all ought to of heared my ol’ massa, rantin’ an’ cussin’!” exclaimed Lilly Sue. “He say dis Massa Lincoln got sich gangly legs an’ arms an’ a long, ugly, hairy face can’t nobody hardly tell if he look de mos’ like a ape or gorilla! Say he borned an’ growed up dirt po’ in some log cabin, an’ cotched bears an’ polecats to git anythin’ to eat, twixt splittin’ logs into fencerails like a nigger.”

“Tom, ain’t you tol’ us Massa Lincoln a lawyer nowdays?” asked L’il Kizzy, and Tom affirmatively grunted and nodded.

“Well, I don’ care what dese white folks says!” declared Matilda. “Massa Lincoln doin’ good fo’ us if he git dem so upset. Fact, mo’ I hear ’bout ’im, soun’ to me he like Moses tryin’ to free us chilluns o’ Israel!”

“Well, he sho’ can’t do it too fas’ to suit me,” said Irene.

Both she and Lilly Sue had been bought by Massa Murray to increase his field workers, as she dutifully did in the beginning. But not many months had passed when Irene asked her doting
husband if he would build her a handloom—and she had one in the shortest time that his skilled hands could make it. Then the steady
frump frump
of her loom could be heard from three cabins away as she worked into the nights until well beyond the rest of the slave-row family’s bedtime. Before very long the visibly proud Tom was somewhat self-consciously wearing a shirt that Irene had cut and sewn from the cloth that she had made herself. “I jes’ loves doin’ what my mammy teached me,” she modestly responded to congratulations. She next carded, spun, wove, and sewed matching ruffled dresses for an ecstatic Lilly Sue and L’il Kizzy—who now approaching the age of twenty was demonstrating absolutely no interest in settling down, seeming to prefer only successive flirtatious courtships, her newest swain, Amos, being a general worker at the North Carolina Railroad Company’s newly completed hotel, ten miles distant at Company Shops.