The Bride of Texas (13 page)

“Tell him,” said Cyril’s father, and Cyril translated for him as he said that he didn’t care for the “peculiar institution”, that it was the only thing here he didn’t care for, because as a young man he had experienced another “peculiar institution” and knew what it meant to work for masters, not in exchange for wages but because he was a serf and had no choice. Étienne hid his wooden leg behind his good one, and the older de Ribordeaux twirled his cigar in his fingers, waiting for Cyril to finish translating his father’s ponderous speech into an English that by now was almost fluent. The dinner was over and it was time for brandy. Cyril finished by saying that the best work is done by a worker who is free
.

Mr. de Ribordeaux was finally able to take the floor, and his words were like poetry. Cyril translated them into Czech for his father while his sister’s eyes played with the candles and the dark gaze of the man with the wooden leg and the lace shirt. Mr. de Ribordeaux was no slave-driver, and he didn’t make his slaves work their fingers to the bone. They glowed with well-being. Of course, they were all still young, having been purchased on the way to Texas, to the new plantation. The old ones had stayed behind in Louisiana. No, Mr. de Ribordeaux was no slave-driver. He was a thoughtful man who read books and could quote from the classics. “Of course, the serfdom of Europe is something entirely different from our system of servitude,” he said, avoiding the word “slavery” — that was how Cyril had first translated his father’s references to
the “peculiar institution”, until he realized the word wasn’t pleasing to Mr. de Ribordeaux’s ears. “It’s not a matter of master and slave, but of master and servant. Serfdom is an unfortunate amalgam of freedom and servitude,” explained Mr. de Ribordeaux, and Cyril noticed that Mr. Carson, who had brought them here, winced but remained silent. “Each condition carries an obligation with it. Neither carries any inherent rights. A serf is at the mercy of crop failure on his own fields, and has to beg from his master in time of need. The first harvest is for his master, and only then can he harvest his own. There is nothing like that here,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux. “I bear the risk of crop failure myself. The servants are like my children, and I am obliged to care for them. For that matter, mentally, they.…” Mr. de Ribordeaux drew a deep lungful of cigar smoke. “When their children fall ill — you’ve seen for yourself, after all, Mr. Tuplick.” Before dinner he had taken them around the plantation, and in the nursery they had seen two little black girls and two little white girls covered with the same rash, all in the care of a fat black woman and a young white lady, the daughter of a friend of Mr. de Ribordeaux who was visiting from Louisiana. The small quartet was howling because Dr. Wilmonton, who had been called in from Austin, was just examining them with tickly fingers
.

“Yes,” said the elder Toupelik. “All well and good. But the best thing of all is freedom.”

“Freedom and property,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux solemnly. “What is freedom without property? Of course, you haven’t been to the North, but —”

Lida was now studying the lace crinolines of the Meissen figurines on the mantelpiece. Étienne’s good leg had fallen asleep, and he crossed the wooden limb over the good one but then hid it again, though it was beautifully carved. He squirmed in his armchair
.

“I have,” continued Mr. de Ribordeaux. “I don’t base my conviction on the legacy of tradition alone. We live in the age of
empiricism. I have visited factories in the North. Freedom without property, Mr. Tuplick, when there are no jobs to be had, is something I don’t think you’d like to see. Free workers? My servants couldn’t survive under those circumstances. They’re used to security, Mr. Tuplick, from the cradle to the grave.” Mr. de Ribordeaux’s cigar had gone out, and he reached for a candle to relight it. “Where is Dinah?” He pulled a purple cord and a mellow-sounding gong rang. As he drew on his cigar, the tip turned red, casting a ruddy glow on his face. It was the face not of a slave-driver but of a thoughtful conquistador
.

“We had a neighbour in Louisiana — in fact,” he chuckled, “he was an anomaly of sorts, a rare bird — he owned a sugar plantation and he was” — another chuckle — “a contradiction in terms, sir, a Southern abolitionist.”

“Freedom and property,” echoed Mr. Carson, who had been silent until now. “In the North, some Negroes have acquired property with hard work, and —”

“One in a thousand, at best, Mr. Carson,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux. “Now, this friend of mine, Mr. Collet —”

— past another house, also with decorative pillars. On the sidewalk in front of it, in a gilt armchair, Captain Henry of the Twenty-sixth Wisconsin sat teaching a group of house slaves to sing “John Brown’s Body”. He was an abolitionist and he was plastered, keeping time with a bottle and splashing its contents onto the pavement, where it evaporated rapidly. The sergeant thought of Windischgraetz’s captains — brandy-drinkers as well, but only in the officers’ mess, never in the streets of a conquered city, where Sergeant Kapsa and the others could see them. Sherman’s great army. The captain sang a battle hymn of freedom while a chorus of voices transformed it into a barely comprehensible dialect. There was even a fiddler, and his squawkings made the melody sound like a jig.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave —

The sergeant and the lady stopped. Among the singers the sergeant saw Jan Amos Shake.

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave —

Standing stiffly at attention, Shake was holding a tall pendulum clock close to his side like a rifle, and singing tenor in his beautiful seminary-trained voice.

But his soul goes marching on!

“Private Shake!” Captain Henry tried to sit up in the armchair, but slumped to one side. One of the servants rushed over and propped him up. In the same sharp voice he used to read orders, he hollered, “Private Shake! You’re promoted to corporal. No, as you were! To sergeant!”

That evening, over a disassembled clock — Kakuska had broken one of his new spurs in a skirmish with Hood’s men and he’d asked Shake to keep his eyes open for another clock — Shake was sewing a set of sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve. He spent most of the evening learning to bark orders — not very successfully, for his voice was better suited to liturgy than to military drills — and didn’t finish with the clock until morning.

“— conducted something of an experiment,” Mr. de Ribordeaux went on, “though of course it was his second plantation, the smaller one he had just inherited. He had only about twenty servants there, and he gave them all their freedom and hired white farm labourers. And do you know what those labourers did, first chance they got?”

Cyril translated. His father shook his head. Lida flipped her golden braid around so that it lay on her bosom, retied the red ribbon to make a prettier bow, then suddenly raised her eyes to look directly into the eyes of the one-legged man. He was caught in the lasso
.

“They waited till the harvest and then went on strike. Double our wages, they said, or harvest the crop yourself. Fortunately, the ‘liberated’ ” — Mr. de Ribordeaux’s tone put quotation marks
around the word — “servants had spent their days of freedom hanging around the plantation, stealing chickens, and several had gone to the big plantation, where their relatives lived, and when the strike was two weeks old Mr. Collet called off the experiment. He fired the white labourers, gave the servants a chance to return, and all of them did, except for two that Mr. Collet had apprenticed to a carpenter; they’d gone to New Orleans. The crop was saved at the last moment.”

The elder Toupelik shook his head stubbornly, and Mr. de Ribordeaux continued: “Servitude is simply the most stable form of labour, and the high degree of care required by cotton or sugar-cane cannot be achieved with any less stable form.”

Cyril’s little sister tossed the braid with its fresh bow back over her shoulder, and the man with the wooden leg emerged for a moment from his trance and recited, as if quoting from a textbook: “Our system is consistent with the interests of both capital and labour.” He was no slave-driver either, but part of the younger, better-educated generation. He had studied in France, where he had had the accident that cost him his leg and prevented him from finishing his studies. “Our system of servitude,” he said, but his textbook explication began to falter as the blue eyes opposite stared more intently into his, “our … system of … servitude has resolved the problem that statesmen have wrestled with since the beginning of organized society, that philanthropists have … tormented themselves with for centuries.…” His voice wavered, dissolving in blueness
.

“Mr. de Ribordeaux,” Cyril interrupted, “I’ve noticed that the plots of ground where your servants grow their own melons and greens — now, I could be wrong, but they seem far better kept than your larger fields. I also hear complaints about how, on some plantations, your servants’ tools keep breaking, how they trample the crops, abuse the livestock —”

Mr. de Ribordeaux didn’t wait for Cyril to finish. “Some do,
Mr. Tuplick. As I’ve said, they’re like little children. They even suffer childhood illnesses unknown to white men. Dysaesthesia aethiopica —”

Next morning, Captain Henry was walking briskly past Sergeant Shake’s tent. Shake was sitting outside, still taking apart the clock. Captain Henry suddenly stopped and did an about-face.

“Shake!” he demanded. “What is this supposed to mean?”

“I’m taking apart the clock, captain, so I —”

“I mean this! What is
this
supposed to mean?” He pointed at the new stripes on the sleeve of Shake’s tunic.

Something inside the clock clanged as Shake jumped to his feet. “You promoted me yesterday, sir. To sergeant, sir.”

“You?” The way he said it suggested that the captain had regained his senses if not his memory. “I must have been drunk.”

Shake made no effort to persuade him otherwise. “It was yesterday, when you were teaching the niggers how to sing ‘John Brown’s Body’. Sergeant Kapsa was there.…”

A blank in the captain’s mind began to fill with a street scene in Columbia. His face darkened. He’s sunk, thought Kapsa. Suddenly the captain looked at what Shake was doing and his dilemma was resolved. He scowled. “Are you familiar with General Sherman’s orders before the attack on Columbia?”

Shake’s usually quick wit failed him.

“He said he would punish anyone caught stealing from civilians, except for material needed by the army!” He pointed to the disembowelled timepiece. “Sergeant Shake,” the captain intoned, “for disobeying an order” — though strictly speaking it hadn’t been an order at all, merely something Kapsa had overheard Sherman mention to General Howard — “I hereby demote you to private!”

He turned on his heel, setting aflutter the gorgeous peacock feather in his hat — which he had probably taken, against
regulations, from a lady’s fan. Shake glumly watched him go. Then he ripped off the clumsily applied stripes and sighed, “Ah well, the Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”

“Shouldn’t it be booze giveth?” asked the sergeant. “But then what taketh way? A hangover, maybe.”

Shake’s face broke into a grin. He had survived his demotion with a minimum of shame.

“— is something overseers sometimes mistakenly attribute to the Negro sense of mischief,” continued Mr. de Ribordeaux. “These things may appear deliberate. In fact, however, they
’re
symptoms of an illness caused by the infantility of the Negro mind and his nervous insensitivity.”

Cyril interpreted as best he could, and his father responded, “Well, I don’t know.” But he was impressed by the plantation owner’s erudition
.

“Or take drapetomania,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux. “The symptoms are repeated attempts to escape. It was always rare on my plantation, and with proper medical care it is curable.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Mr. Toupelik repeated
.

“As a matter of fact, I have had only one case,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux. “Jean. I had apprenticed him to a locksmith. My late wife taught him to read and write, so he could avail himself of the literature on his trade. How else would you explain it, Mr. Tuplick? Unfortunately, I failed to get him back. But he did write to me from Canada.” Mr. de Ribordeaux ground out his cigar in a shell-shaped alabaster ashtray with a naked Venus perched on the rim. His son was gazing, mesmerized, at the golden braid. “He worked in a factory up there,” said Mr. de Ribordeaux. “He had lost his hand in an accident. I mustn’t hold it against him, he said. He was grateful for everything, but he’d had to leave. I sent him the money to come back, but he never did. I learned that they made him a sexton in a Methodist church in a place called St. Catharines.” Cyril translated. Mr. Carson held his tongue
.

“Well now, I —” said Mr. Toupelik
.

The door opened and a maid walked in. She was wheeling a cart holding a round bottle of brandy, snifters, and a burning alcohol lamp. “At last!” declared Mr. de Ribordeaux
.

“Sorry, monsieur,” said the maid. “They had to get a new bottle from the cellar.” She poured some brandy into a snifter and warmed the liquid over the flame. Cyril saw but scarcely noticed the bottle, the snifters, the flame licking the curved side of the glass, the warm brown liquid; what he noticed was the hand that held the glass, a hand the colour of a tea-rose. Mr. de Ribordeaux was saying something about the brandy — cognac, he called it — and Cyril heard the words but didn’t listen, for what he saw was an arm in black silk, a lace bodice, a long neck with a velvet ribbon, and above it a face the colour of a tea-rose and burnished copper. He forgot that they had come to talk about cooking oil, for all the beauty of the white world and the black was combined in that face
.

The general did not explain the tradition that gave his army the right to police the city. “As a matter of fact,” he said to the trembling mayor, “I am known for turning a blind eye to sins of intemperance and fornication when they’re committed by soldiers who risk their lives every day. But don’t you find it extraordinary that your God-fearing metropolis has supplies of whisky that would last all the taverns of Dublin half a century?”