Chapter 7: Settling in

By now, everybody was aware that they’d be voting on the new constitution on Jan. 2, 1866. Sam got involved in promoting it in Lowndes County. Sergeant Lincoln suggested that he speak in Montgomery itself. Montgomery County had been full of plantations, and the state headquarters for the Freedmen’s Bureau were located there; so, the countryside was mostly Negro. The city, itself, had been fairly white, and the colored population often house slaves. They, too, could get 40 acres per adult male in the countryside. As there were few residents who could afford house servants anymore, however scant the wages, many had moved out.

Sam wasn’t convinced he could sway any voters, but he had to admit that no Negro orator could sway any whites. He addressed a rally that was set up for poor whites in the city.

“Why should we believe you?” one heckler asked. “You’re a general, a God-damned Yankee general to boot.”

“I run a general store. My daddy runs a general store, and I grew up helping him. In between, I was a general. The people who ran Alabama in 1860 sure didn’t want any shopkeeper’s sons for general. They said to you, ‘You’re mud; we’re in charge, and we’re always going to be in charge. Your job is to take orders.’ I was a cavalryman, and I was a sergeant. I got paid, and I got fed. I been on half rations, but fewer days than most Johnny Rebs were weeks on half rations.”

“You was a general. Of course, you got fed.”

“Towards the end, I was a general, and sometimes some of my troops were somewhere else. But I tell you that I never ate when the troops I was with didn’t. Ask them. This constitution is all about that. You have the same chances as I do under this.

“Remember saying that it was a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight?” he continued. “Well, the poor man lost his fight, and that hurt one hell of a lot of you. I’m sorta sorry, but you were trying to hurt me, too. But that means that the rich man lost his war. The big planters that used to stick up their noses around you? They ain’t so rich, now; many of them ain’t planters now. He got to pour his own drinks.

“He’d tell you that you wasn’t much, but at least you wasn’t a nigger. Well, now, not being a nigger doesn’t raise you much, but not being a planter doesn’t push you down.”

Sam left the meeting not convinced that he had won a single vote. He did think, though, that the Republicans needed to continue to hold out a hand to the poor whites, if only to force the planters to do the same.

Sam worried what he should give Deborah for Christmas, and even whether he should give her anything at all. Clothing would both be too intimate and look like he had taken something from inventory. Besides, he didn’t know enough about ladies’ clothes. Jewelry would probably either look too cheap for her to wear or be too extravagant a gift for their relationship. Besides, it would scream, ‘This is not an engagement ring.’

Finally, he settled on a book, The Cricket on the Hearth. He had heard of Dickens, if not of the book.

On the first Sunday in December, when he brought Deborah back to the school, Miss Purcell met them on the porch.

“General Warren,” she said, “You must stay to dinner. Messalina has already set another place.”

“I’d be grateful, Ma’am.”

They asked him to say grace, and each of them had clearly thought up a question to ask to keep the conversation centered on him. When the meal was over, he took his leave.

Deborah looked around the room. “Thank you, I think.”

“Should we have left you alone to say goodbye so he could kiss you?” asked Jane.

“It would not have helped. The path here from church passes through two groves. Perfect privacy, but he has not yet kissed my cheek, even.”

“What does courting mean in Illinois?”

“Going to barn dances, apparently. The barns in Alabama do not dance well enough.”

The next Sunday, it rained again. Deborah met Sam dressed as elaborately, but she told him that she would not attend that day. She asked him in, and they talked while his coat dripped in a closet and the weather got worse outside.

“Shall I assume that you will not go to church on another rainy day?” Sam asked as he rose to leave.

“That is a good assumption.”

The next Sunday was equally as rainy, and Sam did not come. He rode over well after dinner, though. He was dressed in his field uniform, and he told her that he had attended services that day, “Dressed like this. I’ve ridden longer distances under heavier storms.”

She told him that the school would take all week off for Christmas. “Excuse me a moment.” She went to find Marjorie and asked if she could invite Sam for Christmas day.

“Of course, you may. Or would you rather I did it?”

“It would be better coming from you. He seems to think that he is imposing if I ask him myself.”

So, Marjorie invited him for dinner Christmas day. Sam accepted, and they were left alone in the parlor. The room was her classroom on school days.

“I stocked many toys expecting to sell them for Christmas presents for the children,” Sam said. “Apparently, that is not a practice that the freedmen have taken up, yet.”

“Will that cost you much?”

“I will put the toys away. Some will be bought over the year; perhaps they will do better next Christmas. I will admit, even with my daddy having dolls in stock, most of the dolls my sisters got were corncobs with dresses.”

When Sam got to the Christmas dinner, he handed Deborah a package. “Merry Christmas,” he said.

“Oh, Cricket on the Hearth. It is one of my very favorite books.”

Sam figured that there weren’t enough books in the world that you could find one that a woman with her education hadn’t read.

The meal was pleasant, and the conversation was all about the chances of the constitution.

“I sure hope it passes,” Sam said. “I don’t like everything in it, but I don’t know what we could do if it fails. Congress said, ‘Get some delegates together to write a constitution, and then submit it to the people for approval.’ They never said what happens if the people don’t approve.”

“Well,” said Diane, “I hope it passes and we don’t find out what the alternative is.”

As they found out during the week after the vote, the constitution passed overwhelmingly in most of the state. Sam was interested that it got something between a quarter and a third of the votes from the Appalachian counties.

The winter went on being wet, if not cold by the standards of Sam and the teachers. They were not far into February when one of Sam’s customers asked for credit.

“Whoa!” said Sam. “Didn’t you get a load of money from Mr. Green? Where did it all go?”

The man didn’t know, but it was all gone.

Sam got out his old records and found how much he’d received from the man’s cotton crop. Then he divided that by the months ‘til harvest. When he wrote out a sheet for his credit, he noted that the man could only charge that much a month.

Green started up the weaving mill alongside the spinning mill. Sam went over to see. There were 6 buildings more-or-less in a row by the stream, a cotton warehouse, a spinning plant, Green’s house, a thread warehouse, a weaving plant, and a cloth warehouse. The cloth was only white, as yet. Sam liked what he saw and bought three bolts of the cloth.

The sheriff of Lowndes County was Jeffery Gates, an old mossback who seemed to have been sheriff forever. Sam was fairly certain that he violated the clause about swearing loyalty to the US Constitution and then aiding the rebellion. While the office of sheriff was to be elected the year after the presidential election, all offices in the state were up this November. Gates had already announced that he was running again, and his announcement implied that the election was a mere formality that the “Black Republican” constitution had imposed on him.

Sam called together the men who had been delegates to the constitutional convention. He named them the Lowndes County Republican Committee. They needed a candidate for sheriff.

He got a map of the county and another map of the survey townships; he traced each onto one sheet of paper. Then, he chose the blocks which he would call the political townships. That was really the job of the County Board to decide, but they hadn’t been elected yet.

“I propose that we ask around who wants to run for sheriff. We hold a debate in each township I’ve marked here. Not every candidate will hear about it, not everyone will be able to get to each debate, but for a county-wide race, if you can’t, you don’t stand a chance.

Deborah’s school was the only Freedman’s-bureau school in the county. The teachers knew the people around as well as anybody did, but they knew the people close to the school much better than those farther away. Sam wanted to have a reasonably fair nomination process for sheriff.

He contacted preachers he knew about, asked them three questions, was any of their congregation planning to run for sheriff? What was a good location near the center of the township (he gave a location which was the nearest landmark on his map to the center) for a debate on a Sunday afternoon? Could the preacher list the names of other missionaries and literate colored preachers in the county? Then he sent the questions to them.

When the information began coming in, he started scheduling. First, he arranged with the owners of the locations to schedule the debate, then he notified the potential candidates – mostly through a teacher or a missionary, since few of the candidates could read very well yet.

Then he used the two networks in the area of the debate to announce it.

“I never understood how important your work was,” he confessed to Deborah walking home from church one Sunday. “Elections are devilishly hard work when people can’t read.”

“You thought it was all about reading a book in the evening?”

“Well, no. I had already learned that everything else that a sergeant does – and the sergeants are the heart of an army – has to be done by people who know how to keep records. And I could see how easy it would be to cheat people who don’t read, reckon, or sign their name. Do you know that when I sold on credit that first year, the customers signed with an X?”

“They don’t any more?”

“Most of them write their names. It’s not a proper signature, though.”

“We call it lettering rather than script,” she said.

In some ways, Deborah felt very satisfied with her relationship. Men were always belittling what their wives or girlfriends did. They were important, and the ‘little woman’ was an adjunct to their importance. She was being courted by a man who was truly important. He had been a general – and the subject of newspaper articles – in the war just past. He was becoming politically important in the county and the state. He, however, saw her work as important.

On the other hand, his “courting” seemed to consist of a weekly conversation. She thought that the prisoners would still be in Andersonville if he’d moved this slowly in his rescue of them. She was quite prepared to slap his face when he dared to steal a kiss. She was tempted, though, to stop waiting and slap him, anyway. They could go on from there. What followed the slap, though, was his apology for the kiss, and she couldn’t imagine his knowing that if he didn’t know to take the kiss.

Sam quite enjoyed talking with Deborah. Every time he thought of being married to her, though, he thought of something else he had to do first. The carpentry of the house was not finished, and when it was, he had to furnish the house. He needed a carriage for her, and he needed a stable for the carriage.

He had planted enough corn in his corn patch to feed him when he wasn’t a guest or away from the house. He even fed a little to his horse. He bought meat and vegetables from his neighbors.

Well, a family needed a larger field of corn, and a housewife would need a vegetable garden. (He figured that the henhouse could wait until Deborah asked for one.) Besides, he’d used a big chunk of his old cornfield for his house.

He hired a local named Cassius to clear the larger field, and then to plant the corn. Cassius wasn’t of age; so, he couldn’t claim his 40 acres. He also seemed to be one of the few freedmen who wasn’t interested in the schooling. He did understand farming, though, and Sam kept him on to tend the cornfield.

After harvest time, he had thought that he would, at least, have the money for his needs. Now, though, he was less certain. That was one worry he could bring up with Deborah if he phrased it right.

“More and more of my customers are asking for credit,” he said. “I didn’t mind the first year, although I worried about them. The crop is barely in the ground this year, and they have spent all the money they got from Green. Slaves might have to work and almost never get even a quarter, but when they got the quarter and spent it or lost it, they would still eat.”

“That didn’t make slavery better.”

“No, but freedom is the freedom to make mistakes. ‘Course, Old Massa made the mistake of seceding, and all sorts of others suffered from that. Still, I wish that more of these freedmen were misers and fewer of them were spendthrifts. Partly, that’s for them. Partly, it’s for the man who holds their paper, and that’s me.”

“Sam, I think you worry about them because you’re generous,” Deborah said. He could be infuriating, but Sam Warren had his good points, too. “You could refuse them credit and let them sink or swim on their own.”

“Maybe. That’s not how a storekeeper grows his custom, though.” It was also a bad way to build political support, and Sam was thinking about that more and more.

The very next evening, Sam had another person ask for credit, a boy who worked in the spinning mill.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “You don’t have a crop in. You’re supposed to be paid every two weeks. What do you need so much that you can’t wait another week?”

“General, I’m getting married. I need to buy a whole lot of stuff, and my pay won’t cover it. I’ll pay you off, though.”

“When’s the wedding? Which preacher?”

“Pastor Adams. Two weeks from yesterday. Nellie, she works at the spinning mill, too. We can pay you back. Can I get a ring?”

“Sure. Send the gal here, and I’ll find one that fits her. I’ll set it aside.”

That raised another thing he’d have to buy. The silver-plated rings he kept in stock wouldn’t do for Deborah, and how did he find out her size?

But the next Sunday, after walking to services and back with Deborah, he had to go to the first debate between Sheriff candidates.

He’d told the candidates to be there half an hour early. Since even those with watches didn’t have watches on the same time, he allowed some leeway. Anyone who wasn’t there by a quarter hour – by his watch – after the time he’d set to begin didn’t get to speak. He and the other members of the committee introduced themselves. Then he introduced the candidates, gave each a warning at 4 minutes, and shut them off at 5. Then there was 3 minutes for questions.

One candidate halfway through the program was named Hannibal Warren. He told of coming into the area as part of the Seventh Georgia Colored Cavalry. He’d taken General Warren’s name for his last name. He had fought rebels, and he could fight criminals. He produced a letter from his teacher saying that he was learning to read and write. He handed the letter to one of the committee, and he handed it to Sam. Sam read it to the crowd. Diane Rawlings had signed it.

After the last speaker, the speakers came down to the ground, and stood in a row. Men who had heard them lined up in front of the speaker they wanted to be sheriff. Then Sam counted each line and recorded the number.

Hannibal Warren got a smaller vote than 2 others, but Sam was under the impression that those were locals.

As time went on, they got more candidates, but some of them only came when the debate was in a township near his place.

Sam kept a running count. He would write to a candidate, “We now have held the debate in your township. You did well there. You do not have half the total votes of the front-runner, though. You can keep running if you want, but I recommend that you look for another office.” He didn’t worry about his fancy vocabulary being misunderstood. The candidates had someone else read the letters, and they could explain them.

By now, Hannibal Warren was the front runner. Then, the debate was in his township, and he became the strong front runner.

Meanwhile, the outside of Sam’s house was completed. The crew were working hard on their farms, and they didn’t have time to finish the inside walls.

Many more people had to buy on credit, but they now had crops in the ground and coming along. He felt confident they would pay him off.

The employees of the spinning mill and the weaving plant were still drawing pay, and they were still shopping and giving some to their parents; many parents of mill workers were on a cash basis with him.

Even so, he had to start buying some stock on credit. He had a fine credit rating, though; He had paid off his bills soon after harvest time the year before, and his suppliers were willing to believe he would again.

The spinning mill closed before harvest time. They had almost run out of cotton. The weaving plant still had thread, and Green said that it would keep going until harvest time,

Then it was harvest time. The school closed, the weaving mill closed, and business in the store fell off. Everyone was picking in the field. After a while, Sam walked over to the mills. Green was in the office in his house. He said that he’d expect to make his first cotton purchases the next Tuesday.

Sunday, the congregation was much diminished when Sam had walked Deborah to church. “The plantations picked 7 days a week,” Pastor West said when they spoke with him after church. “The freedmen think that is the right way to act. For that matter, don’t you hold your debates on Sundays?”

“Well, yes. I think the work and the schools are going the other 6 days.”

The next day, he closed the store and rode into Montgomery. Prices were a little lower, but not all that much. People told him that Mobile prices had fallen more, but that the rail rates were now cheaper.

He left the store closed Tuesday, and he took his books to the spinning mill. To his surprise, Deborah was there talking to Mike Green.

“I’m surprised to see you,” he said to her.

“You should also be pleased.”

“I am always pleased to meet you.” She was, indeed, a pleasing sight, but not when she was talking with Green.

The first grower did not owe him anything. He was such an infrequent customer that he must live fairly far away.

The second had been on his books since July.

“I have a suggestion,” said Deborah. “You bought some things from General Warren last year, didn’t you?”

“Yes’m. He has books showing how much.”

“You have money now. Why don’t you pay now for what you are going to buy this year? How much do you owe? Have Mr. Green pay the general two times that, and you can have the rest for pocket money.”

The man agreed. The suggestion was repeated, and often accepted, time and time again.

Although Sam had had less on his books than he had the year before, by the end of harvest time, Sam had a greater deposit to make in his New York bank than he’d ever had to his name in his life.

He made his deposit by mail. A week later, he mailed the checks to his suppliers. The Sunday in between, he asked Deborah whether the adult freedmen could read prices on signs. She thought they could easily. When he had the last year taken care of by paying off his creditors, he started planning his next year.

He had worried both years about the customers on credit. They should pay more than the cash customers who kept him going. Sam might be feeling his way in politics; he might have taken 2 years to learn to be a cavalryman; he had known since childhood about running a store. Instead of charging interest for credit, he would give a discount for cash sales, starting in the new year.

And he would set his prices to make a good profit after the discount. He started making the signs he would put up to announce the prices.

Picking was done. The carpentry crew came back. Sam asked Caligula to build a stable which would also hold a carriage before they went back to work on the inside. Caligula named a price for the work; Sam agreed and went to buy the lumber.

While the building was going on, Sam kept the money he got from the store in the Montgomery bank, or even closer to home. He was buying stock by check on the Chemical Bank, but he had plenty there.

When the stable was finished, He rode into Montgomery and shopped for a carriage and tack. He drove home in a shay with the saddle and riding tack on the seat beside him.

Stepper seemed happy pulling the carriage. With his name, Sam shouldn’t have been surprised. Sam’s experience driving had been more than 5 years before, with a team, and with a wagon weighing more than 6 times as much, empty. Still, he and Stepper soon got to understand each other.

With no hay, Sam stored the shay in the stable and turned Stepper out into the same meadow he’d used before.

Deborah had heard about the carriage before Sam pulled up in front of the school to offer her a ride to the service. With classes for adults, youth, and children, the school got all the gossip. She, however, expressed surprise and admiration. They would get to church ridiculously early, even though the other teachers came out to admire the new shay before they started.

They would be very early, that is to say, unless they spent a long time kissing on the way. She would be insulted if he planned on that. Stealing one kiss, that was appropriate – indeed overdue. Spending a long time cuddling without any previous kisses was going too far, and his assuming that she would allow him to would be taking her for granted.

Sam, however, went at a good clip throughout the journey. He slowed more for the bends in the road than for the groves. The preacher and his family were there when they arrived, but they did not seem ready for anyone else. Sam went to help put up the pulpit that the pastor brought in his cart.

She spoke briefly with the missionary’s wife, then that woman had to deal with her children. She was left to imagine the kiss. She was wearing a bonnet, after all. It was clever of Sam to delay their first kiss for the trip home. Indeed, of the five kisses – that sort of kisses – she had received, only one was given before she had to face a public audience, and that had been a nasty boy who had his ear boxed for his trouble.

But Sam had a beard. He chopped it shorter sometimes; he’d chopped it shorter for this drive, which was one reason she was so certain about the kiss. It was a very full beard, though. When Father had grown a beard, a Lincolnesque goatee, his kisses on her forehead had become scratchy, and she’d had to shut her eyes. Almost all men had beards, now, even some of the younger freedmen. Tommy, the boy she had allowed three kisses had barely begun his beard before he’d marched off, and the last kiss had been a little prickly.

Would kissing Sam be a nice, warm experience, or would it be like pushing her face into a prickly bush? The sermon was probably enlightening, if not enlightening on the subject of her current worries. She heard not a word of it, though.

“Miss Kendrick,” Sam began on the drive home.

“Yes?”

“I said I was going to court you.”

“So you did. I told you that you couldn’t court Miss Kendrick.”

“Deborah,” Sam began again. Then, after a pause, “Deborah, would you marry me?”

“I’ll answer before this drive is over.” She was worried about this kissing business. Marriage involved more, she knew, but she didn’t want to be married to a man when she didn’t enjoy his kisses.

“I have the house a building. They’ll finish the rooms and then hang the windows this season. I don’t have it furnished, but that is only because the house has to be finished and painted first. I can afford them; I swear to you that I can afford them.”

“You were going to build a house, then furnish it, and then marry me?” she asked. Building the house was fine; that was a man’s job. Many a woman moved into a house her mother-in-law had furnished. But furnishing a house in anticipation of marriage? A man‘s furnishing a house in anticipation of proposing? Sam furnishing a house before moving her into it?

“Well, yes. I know a lady like you would never live in the single room I have next to the store.”

“Stop when we’re in the grove.” The minister’s family wouldn’t come this way, and the shay was many minutes ahead of the fastest walkers. He did, and they were sheltered from all eyes, even way up here on the seat of the shay. “Now kiss me.”

His lips were warm. His beard was silky rather than scratchy, and if it was ticklish, the ticklishness was oddly exciting. His hands, if they violated no limits, warmed not only the face and shoulder that they touched; they warmed her heart and something in her belly, as well.

He licked her lips. When they opened for him, their tongues touched for an instant. Somehow, sparks flew from his to hers.

“Does that mean that you will? ... Will marry me?”

That wasn’t what it meant at all. It was a test, but he had passed the test. “Ask me again.”

“Deborah, lovely Deborah Kendrick, will you do me the honor of being my wife?”

“Yes, Sam, I shall.” This solemn an occasion seemed to call for formal vocabulary... “Now, drive on. We don’t want people coming upon us.”

For the next part of their journey, she detailed what she thought the man’s responsibility and authority was in a marriage, and what she thought the woman’s place was. She didn’t want to nag him or hen-peck him, but she thought a woman should select the household furnishings.

“You would do that?” he asked. “I didn’t know how to start. I can lay out an army tent so the rain does as little damage as possible; I don’t know much about real homes. I grew up in one, but Mom brought some things from Pennsylvania, and so did Daddy. I don’t know what’s proper and what was just left over.”

“I would do that.”

“Do you want to see the house next Sunday? It’s nowhere near finished, but they’ll get the walls up and the plaster on this season. We need doors and windows, too.”

She was smiling at him for the last comment when they drove into the other grove. This time, he didn’t need any hint to stop the horse. This time, the kiss was even sweeter, and their tongues touched longer. This time, one of his hands was on her breast. That was going too far, but her own response was going much further.

She felt something melt in the pit of her belly, and her nipples got as hard as they did when she got out of bed on a freezing winter morning. He pulled away from the kiss and drove on. By the time they got to school, her flush had passed away. Sam got out and helped her down. He drove away before she could get in the door.

Marjorie had some comments about the Congregational service. “And how was the Methodist sermon today, Deborah?”

“I have utterly forgotten. On the way home, Sam proposed.”

“And did you accept?” Diane asked. The others were gasping.

“That I did.”

“When is the wedding?” Jane asked.

“We didn’t get that far. It may have something to do with when the house is finished. Right now, he lives in a single room attached to the store. Anyway, I want you all to be my bridesmaids.”

“You should have asked him to stay,” Marjorie said.

“Well, then I would have had to tell you why.”

After dinner, Deborah went up to her room. She wrote her parents: “Dear Mother and Father. You will recall reading about General Samuel Warren in the last year of the war. Well, we have met. General Warren has asked me to marry him, and I have accepted.”

Sam was elated and desperate in turns. She had said she would marry him. There was still so much to do.

One thing he could do was to deal with the feast that he was sure that the teachers would put on for Deborah and him the next Sunday.

Monday afternoon, he told the crew working on the house that he would be gone for several hours. There probably would be few customers, but the workers would let them know when he would be back. Sam had a large cowbell by the door to the store. When he was in his room because the store was empty, any customer who came by would swing the bell.

He rode out to the school and went around to the cook-house. The teachers were busy in the classrooms, and Messalina was busy getting their supper ready.

“Do you know roasting ears?” he asked her.

“Pig’s ears? We mostly grill them – sometimes boil them.” That didn’t sound promising.

“Corn, fresh corn. How do you cook it?”

“Usually,” she said, “I just boil them. We eat them on the cob.”

“Well, next Sunday, I’ll bring some ears of corn. They’ll be other things for dinner, but include that.”