Chapter 9: Learning New Things

When Gabe Lincoln led his delegation to the Republican National Convention in May of ‘68, he realized that the formula for assigning seats had been to their disadvantage. On a historical basis, Alabama had no Republican presence in ‘64 and a census population of less than 800,000. Well, next time would be different, and he was a state party chairman. Since every potential candidate but Grant had withdrawn, he didn’t expect a long affair.

The committee had scrambled to find accommodations which would house colored delegates, but they had assigned some a long way from the other delegates. He brought a resolution from his delegation directing the committee selecting the next site to consider the availability of housing for colored delegates

He didn’t get a chance to present that resolution. Indeed, the chair did not recognize him at any time during the proceedings. During breaks, those white delegates who didn’t go out to drink or eat at establishments which wouldn’t admit him stood around on the floor ignoring their colored fellow delegates.

The one exception was when someone commented that the prisoners at Andersonville went hungry.

“Indeed, sir,” Gabe said, “I was in the force that liberated them, and they looked starved. We had to forage for more wagons to carry the ones who couldn’t walk.”

Another in the group turned to him. “You rode into Andersonville?” He stuck out a hand. “My cousin was in Andersonville, and he rode in one of those wagons. I ain’t never going to tell my aunt that I snubbed a member of the Army of the Savanah.”

Gabe couldn’t figure out how to put it on a sign around his neck, but “Liberated Andersonville” sure brought him a measure of respect that “Chairman of the Alabama Republican Party” did not.

Well, Grant was nominated, and they went home. Before the month was over, though, he called a meeting of the state party. He reported his experiences.

“The Party may have been formed to oppose slavery,” he said, “but not everyone in the party is willing to treat freedmen as human.”

‘“Don’t get your hopes up,” General Warren responded. “The Republican Party was formed in opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories, the expansion of the domain of the slaveholders. You experienced slavery, and it was the most important evil in your life. The people who voted didn’t experience it; it wasn’t part of their lives. My wife thinks that smoking cigars is an evil, filthy habit. But she married me knowing that I smoked. We just agreed that I wouldn’t do it in the house. Most of us thought that owning people was a filthy habit. People who did it should be a little ashamed and not admit it when they could avoid it. Massa, on the other hand, thought it made him better than anyone who didn’t.

“Don’t get me wrong. There were men like Garrison and Thad Stevens who were bitterly opposed to slavery and deeply sympathetic to the slave. It’s just that there weren’t enough of them. In a democracy, you have to have a majority of voters. The people organizing the Republican Party added the white small farmers who didn’t want plantations buying up the land so they couldn’t farm and those northern whites who were damned tired of Massa saying, ‘Give us what we want or we’re going home.’ It turned out to be a majority in enough states.”

“And that started a war?” Lincoln asked.

“Well,” Gilbert Randolph said, “we had just said, ‘Give us what we want, or we quit.’ The north gave us, out of four choices, what we wanted least. It was either quit or admit that we were bluffing.” Randolph was an ex-Whig and ex-banker who was in the meeting of Republican leaders on the basis of having voted against secession.

“Anyway,” Lincoln said, “I don’t think I can represent our state before the national Republican Party and receive the respect that our state deserves, especially the respect that we soon will deserve. We will have a population over a million and be solidly Republican. They treated me as if I wasn’t there. Consequently, I’m resigning my party chairmanship. I’m keeping my county position and my position in the League. Outsider opinion doesn’t matter much there. As it is my color which limits my effectiveness, I don’t believe that any other freedman should take my place.”

“Well,” Randolph said, “looking around the room, that eliminates most of those present. In terms of working with the Republican Party establishment, there are still a lot of former Whigs in the Party, and I could speak to them.”

“I’m sure you could, Mr. Randolph,” Lincoln said, though he doubted many northern Whigs had ever known Randolph’s name. “As I mentioned, though, the one bright spot in my experience over those two days was when I mentioned that I was one of those liberating Andersonville. They didn’t know that until I told them. There is one name, however, that everyone who cares about Andersonville will recognize.” He looked directly at Warren.

“I didn’t know about this,” Sam said. He looked around and saw some faces which showed that they had. “I am not prepared for this. Do you want it?”

“They do,” the speaker said. Sam might have asked for a show of hands if his reading of the faces hadn’t agreed with Lincoln’s.

“Let me put some conditions on this. First, I was planning on running for state senate, Will this interfere?”

Lincoln said, “It shouldn’t. I was speaker first.”

“The next two are harder. Someone sells his vote, the Party doesn’t back him for re-election, and anyone who doesn’t have standard common-school education keeps going to night school.”

“That isn’t a condition on the man,” someone whose name Sam couldn’t remember said. “That’s a condition on the place. Most of us don’t have a school in the county, let alone in reach.”

“Then a man goes to school when he can. Isn’t there a school in Montgomery? Laws should be made by men who can read them; laws should be made by men who represent the men who have to obey them. We can’t do both this year, but we can try to get closer.”

They agreed that they wouldn’t put a man on the ballot for reelection that seemed to them to be shirking his education.

First, Ab noticed that the map was no longer on the wall of the classroom. Then, he noticed that something new was beside Teacher. The lesson in spelling went on for some time, though, before she ended it.

“Who knows what this is?” she asked. Many people said that it was a ‘clock.’ Mostly, those were former house servants and people from Montgomery. “Now, who can tell me the time? Raise your hand?” She chose a wench called Dru.

“Half past eight, Teacher.”

“That is a correct way of saying it, but we aren’t going to be learning that this week. We will call it eight thirty. Right now, it’s closer to eight thirty five.”

She talked about telling time, about the big hand and the little hand. As the hands moved on the clock, she pointed out the big numbers printed on the “face” of the clock or the “clock dial.” She also pointed out the other numbers on the outside. They had been written by one of the teachers, probably Teacher Nelson, and they stood for the minutes. Ab had heard about hours and minutes since he first went into the fields, but this had been the first time he had seen them move.

Hannibal Warren knocked at the door to what he now thought of as a shack, though it was far sturdier than the cabin in which he had spent his first years.

“Niggers use the back door.”

“Cyrus Watkins?”

“I said niggers use...” he opened the door, and the sheriff stuck a paper in his hand.

“You have been served! You know what that says?”

“Doesn’t matter what it says,” the cracker said.

“It matters if you want to keep the property.” Han would have given odds the man couldn’t read.

“Who are you to take away my property?”

“I’m the sheriff, but the law will take away your property and give it to banker Stevens if you don’t show up in court at nine o’clock a week from Tuesday.”

“Why would the law do that? My family been living here near fifty years.”

“Banker says he loaned you five thousand dollars, and you never repaid it. You don’t show up and tell your side, the court will take this property and give it to him.”

“He tell you what kind of dollars?”

“No, and you don’t tell me. You tell the judge.”

“It must have been five years ago. It was five thousand Confederate. This place look to you like it’s worth five thousand Yankee dollars?”

Han thought that was overpricing it by $4,999.50, but he didn’t think it polite to say so. “You got a good story. You tell it to the judge. Banker has a good story, too. Maybe he doesn’t say anything about Confederate money. You have to be there to tell your story, though, unless you have a lawyer. It’s Tuesday after next. One Lord’s day comes; another one comes; it’s two days after that Lord’s day. Nine o’clock; you have a watch?”

“I know what day Tuesday is. Ain’t no ignorant nigger.” Which Han took to men he didn’t have a watch.

“You have to be there when the judge is ready to hear that case. Otherwise, he only hears one side, and you lose. Nine o’clock is when the sun is about a quarter of the way up the sky. Getting to court earlier just means sitting around; getting to court later might mean losing this land.”

“Why you taking all this trouble?”

“I’m the sheriff. I don’t work for you; I don’t work for the banker. I work for the law. Law says that I have to give you that paper. That paper tells you to be in court. Seems to me that the law meant for you to know to be in court.”

Riding back to Lowndesboro, Sheriff Warren figured that the planters and their followers had lashed their slaves, but they hadn’t treated the poor whites all that well. They kept them poor and ignorant, and they cheated them. Watkins probably fought in the rebel army for years, and what had it got him? The right to tell Black men to use the back door. And that meant that when they built a two-room shack, they had to put in a back door.

When Sam had started selling clocks, he thought of creating a Lowndes County Standard time. When it was only his own watch, he set it carefully each time he was in Montgomery against the clock in the Capitol tower. Otherwise, he kept it wound and set it whenever noon was too far away from twelve o’clock on his watch. One advantage of living on your own land which was the result of a government survey was that you knew precisely which direction was south. One disadvantage of living so far south was that the sun was awfully high at noon in the summer. He had taken to hanging a horseshoe by a rope from a tree. When it wasn’t swaying, and the damnedest things could set it swaying, it showed a short shadow in clear weather. That was straight north-south at noon.

As the clocks turned out to sell well, he ordered a sun dial. He wasn’t going to sell them, though he asked for the retailer’s discount. anyway. He would set it up in his yard. He would put a clock like the ones he sold running on his counter, and he would set it and his watch to the sundial’s time. All this depended on the accuracy of the sundial, and he followed directions for setting it up. After supper on a clear night, he took it out and oriented it so that the gnomon was pointing straight at the north star. The angle of the gnomon could be adjusted on a dial showing degrees of longitude. He thought that this would be about the same as Montgomery’s. He wrote to McGregor explaining the reason for his question. He got back two figures, one for the south side of his grant and the other for the north side of it – the value of a government survey, again. The dial wasn’t anywhere near that accurate.

He oiled the face of the sundial so that water would form drops. Then he leveled it so that the drops didn’t run in any direction. He returned to the house conscious of a scientific job well done. Deb was already in bed when he came into the bedroom; Tertius was in his crib, too.

“What took you so long?” Deb asked.

“I was setting up the sun dial.”

“It doesn’t work at night.”

“I know,” he said, “but it has to be set up at night. That little metal stick that sits up on the southern end? it’s a gnomon.” Sam pronounced the ‘G.’ He had never heard the word spoken and had seen it written only recently. “Point it at the north pole, and it revolves around like the earth does. The shadow keeps still, and the dial moves so that it tells the correct time.” Sam had read the explanation several times, and he almost understood it.

“If you say so.” Deborah was the educated one in their family. She was trained to teach more than Sam had learned. Sometimes, she had to resist correcting his grammar. She was happy that he’d learned something academic beyond what she knew, even if it was merely astronomy.

“While we are talking,” Sam said.

“Yes?”

“I’ve told you that I’m going to run for a seat in the state legislature. Sergeant Lincoln thinks I will win. If I go to Montgomery, I’ll need someone to run the store. Even campaigning, I’ll need someone to run the store.”

“And I’ve told you that I can’t run it and deal with Tertius. For God’s sake, if I can’t be a mother and do the job I was trained for, then I can’t do some other job. You never said that I would have to be in the store.”

“If you won’t do it and I won’t be here, that means somebody else. It has to be somebody who can read and write and reckon, the third fairly well. You can’t read somebody’s hand, you call them in to read it to you. They make change wrong, and it can’t be corrected. Anyway, I wouldn’t trust a Confederate, and they wouldn’t work for me. That leaves your pupils.”

“It probably means a student of Jane’s. You want somebody who is taller than the counter, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Sam said. “I keep thinking of the older students as knowing more reckoning, but there are other requirements.”

“I was joking about seeing over the counter, but you want somebody who can tell them to get out of the store without sounding like a child’s tantrum. The older children learn faster, anyway. Their parents learn more slowly, but their parents attend less often -- a few hours twice a week.”

When the teachers visited the next Sunday to see Tertius again, Sam didn’t leave them with Deb. She put the question to them, concentrating on Jane.

“I want somebody who is reliable, honest, and can reckon well, subtraction included,” Sam added at the end. “Multiplication would be a help. The customers have to give him a little respect, too.”

“If I’m going to be alone with the clerk for hours at a time most days,” Deborah said, “I would prefer a girl.”

“Oh, yes.” Sam had been thinking that from before the time he had first mentioned the position to Deb. He just hadn’t thought of a way to say it without sounding like he didn’t trust her.

“If she isn’t going to be available to her family,” Jane said, “that means a large family with somebody else available to take up the slack. Luckily, most of my girls have several younger sisters and brothers who aren’t too young.”

“We already recommended the students we thought were most reliable to Mr. Green,” Marjorie said. “If he found them reliable, they are still working there.”

“Unless they were clumsy,” Diane said.

“I’m not sure that I want to select somebody because she was clumsy,” Sam said. “It pretty well has to be a present employee of Green’s. That means I have to offer more money. But I have to teach her a load of things; coming in with already knowing what it means to work for pay is something she can bring with her.”

“Are you going to offer half-day employment?” Marjorie asked. “Mr. Green does.”

“Well, I’m going to be in Montgomery for a full day.” Sam had stopped pretending that he doubted that he would win. The party state chairman had the nomination, and the Republican candidate had the votes. “I don’t want to train two, and Deborah doesn’t want a boy around all that time.” If a student went to school in the morning, it was a male.

“This puts her in night school at best,” Deborah said. “However, we are looking for one of Jane’s older students. How long would she stay in school, anyway? Look at the advantage. The workers in the mill aren’t using anything we teach them except work habits. This is a job that takes school skills and pays more. When they see one of the top students getting that job, the younger children will want to be a top student.” She might argue the teachers’ position when he was alone with Sam, but she was Mrs. Warren to the rest of the world, even her oldest friends.

They finally worked out a compromise. Jane would find three candidates who seemed to fit Sam’s criteria. Sam would train each candidate on a separate day of the week. One would come to the store instead of to school on Monday and Thursday afternoons, another on Tuesdays and Fridays, and a third on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In Massachusetts, teachers like Jane and Marjorie would never have countenanced students missing two days a week. In Alabama, those would not be conspicuous absences. Nobody would miss a shift at the mill until Sam made his choice.

Jane already had her first three choices in mind. She wouldn’t mention any names until she had spoken with the girls. Her final selection would start at the store the week after next.

Ab was looking at his life as a free man. The first year out of the army, he had lived in a hut, spent almost all his saved-up army pay, and worked harder than he had when Massa Dawes was driving him.

His second year, he had bought Martha, his mule. That had allowed him to plant more, but the money hadn’t come in until the end of the year. He had still worked hard and lived in a hut, but the reward at the end had been real.

His third year, he had bought himself a cabin and bought Martha a stable. That meant that everything he bought from the general had to be on credit, but he still got more cash at the end of the year.

He had decided against the chickens. He had enough corn to feed them, and he would plant enough to keep feeding them. Chickens, though, were a lot of work. The toil was less effort than he spent on cotton, but it was still time he didn’t have.

He had paid too much for ginning his cotton because he needed to do it on credit. He had traded two months of Martha’s work for a few days of wagon hauling because he didn’t have the money to pay for the hauling. He put that money aside. As for the rest, he thought he had a choice.

If he continued living for one more year as he had been, cabin aside, he wouldn’t need any credit from the general, either. Still, he liked the taste of ham; his pants were worse than the ones the sergeant had told him were indecent.

Many of the people went to church in clothes different, and better, than the ones that they farmed in. Even Teacher, who dressed better than any freedwoman for class wore different clothes for church. She moved stiffly on Sunday.

He could live like a slave for one more year without using credit, or he could live better. Next year, he would do without the credit.

When Teacher suggested that the students could buy a clock, that decided him. He would buy a clock; he would buy church clothes.

On a rainy day that would make hoeing weeds even more miserable than usual, Ab saddled Martha and rode to the store.

There was another customer ahead of him, a woman. She was behind the counter. He didn’t know that the general allowed customers behind the counter, but he did know that the general expected you to wait your turn and to be especially polite to women.

The general didn’t wait, though. “Ab,” he said, “meet Belle Freeman. She is helping me with the store. Belle, Ab is the young man who helped with the map.”

“Miz Freeman,” Ab said. He nodded his head. “General, I got a crop in the ground, a good one. Could I pay again after I sell my crop like I did last year?” Ab figured that pointing out that he had paid would make the general trust him more.

“I figure ... Wait a moment. “ Sam had a niggle in the back of his mind that Ab had left some money on deposit. He needed to get to the other room he had made into an office when he moved into the house. He usually locked the cash drawer when he left, but he was going to have to trust Belle with a hell of a lot more fairly soon. “Pick out what you want to buy, and we’ll talk about how you pay for it later.”

It was raining out. and he put his coat over his shoulders. He found the paper and brought it back.

Ab picked out a pair of pants and a shirt. The clocks looked all alike. When he got back to the counter, the general was back.

“Take down both prices and add up each group,” he said to Belle. “You can use the practice. Come here, Ab.” The general put the shirt and then the pants against him to make sure that they would fit.

“Now,” the general continued, “do you remember when you paid some money to me after picking? Some was for what you had bought the year before. Some of it was for what you were going to buy this year.”

“Yes.” Teacher Warren had told him to.

“Well, these are the things you paid for then. You remember take away?” The general showed him the money at the top of the sheet; he showed him the cost of the things he had bought, and he had him take away the second number from the first. That was the “Money he still had on deposit.” Then the general taught him how to set the clock and to wind it.

“The clock on the counter has the right time. Every day when it’s clear at noon, I set it according to my sun dial. You saw it out front.

“So I set my clock to yours?”

“That isn’t so easy. Your clock depends on a pendulum, and it won’t work on horseback. Tomorrow, when you think it’s noon, set your clock to twelve. Then, when you come to the store next, you record the time you leave your place according to your clock; you record the time you get here according to my clock; you record the time you leave here and the time you get home. You travel at the same speed both ways, and you don’t do this when you’re going somewhere else on the way.” The general explained the special rules for ‘take away’ for time on the clock. Then after several calculations, he should set his clock ahead that many minutes if the trip from the store to the house was longer on the clocks than the trip from the house to the store. If it was the other way, he should set his clock back.

“You can use the clock at the school instead of this clock if you travel at the same speed to school and back,” he finished.

Sam was confident. He kept the school clock in agreement with his watch fairly often, and his watch agreed with the sundial every bright noon.

Deborah Warren had got used to her husband’s demands. To be fair to Sam, he had not approached her for the two months after Tertius’s birth when the necessity had been explained to him. After that, there was a brief flurry of two or three times a week. Then they had settled down into a pattern of Sunday after supper. Once she had gone back to her side and Sam had figured out to use fat, it had been easier for both of them.

That is why his approach on Friday night had so surprised her. Tertius was still in their room, and she had persuaded Sam to be quiet for that reason. Friday, though, he was insistent until she turned and made herself available. He’d been energetic and thrust hard afterward.