Chapter 14: Complications

Marjorie Purcell hadn’t sensed her tension grow as attendance dropped off for planting season. She did, however, feel herself relax as attendance grew again. Unlike picking season which took everyone, different family members had different demands on them at different times of planting season.

When the family had a plow, which more than half did by now, the man of the family usually did the actual plowing. Day attendance of the children was little affected; even many women could come to night school.

The actual planting of the seeds could take three persons, including the oldest children. Sometimes, it was the oldest children who didn’t work in the mill. Attendance dropped in all classes, but more in some than in others.

Some families took longer to do their planting than others. Ab, the star in attendance the rest of the year, was among the last to return.

Now, however, almost everybody seemed to be done. Attendance was always spotty, and it was never so high during the summer as it was on clear days in winter. Still, if not what they would have accepted on any day without a storm in Massachusetts, the attendance was at a rate the teachers had learned to deal with.

The situation of the school was, if not easy, in less disarray. The transition at the beginning of the year had gone more smoothly than previous transitions. The night school promotions had not only the advantage of having written instructions given to literate students; those making the transition were all among those with the best attendance record. The people who showed up for the first time in the year in the third week had not been promoted.

As long as the teachers avoided illness, the only adjustments she expected during the coming year were for new students, and the school had a system for new students.

She approached Ab after service with her usual copy of the words to a hymn they would sing the next Sunday. When she had written out the translations of the words that weren’t in most freedmen’s vocabulary, she had thought that she had covered most -- perhaps all -- of them before.

“Teacher,” he said, “can I ask you something?” He started moving against the flow of the leaving congregation.

She had a flare of trepidation, but she suppressed it. The last time he’d asked something like that, it had ended in a good class experience. Ab just expressed himself with an excess of caution.

“Of course, Ab. You may ask me anything.” A teacher is derelict in her duty if she doesn’t use correct English; she is delusional if she expects her students to.

“Teacher,” Ab said when they were far enough away from others that nobody could hear him. He was silent while a group of children ran past playing tag. “Teacher,” he said again. There was a silence longer than the first one.

“Yes.”

“Teacher, what would I have to do so you would think about marrying me.”

“Ab, I couldn’t possibly marry you.” Now, think of a reason. It can’t be race; she had already told him that she approved of interracial marriages, and she did. Just not for her. It couldn’t be that she didn’t like him. She did like him, just not that_ way.

“Ab, you know that I am an educated woman, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, Teacher.”

“Well educated women don’t marry uneducated men -- not men who have not read even one book.”

“Oh, teacher ... Thank you.” And Ab went towards the rail where his mule -- and, by this time, only his mule - was tied.

Now, what had that thanks been for? If it was for letting him down easy, that meant that she had failed to let him down easy. Well, she thought as she walked towards the school building, she was going to prepare the hymn for next Sunday just as though she expected the relationship to go on as it had been. Men who had learned less than Ab had dropped out of the night school. It would be a shame to see him go, but she didn’t know what else she could have done.

Juliet opened the store Monday morning. The store clock did not yet say eight o’clock. The general was a kind man, but he sometimes was behind the counter in the store when she was a few minutes late.

She had only put her dinner on the shelf for her things when a customer came in. Ab was so pale-skinned that he burned in the sun. For all that, he was a good-looking man. He was young but had his own grant. As far as she knew, he didn’t have a woman. That put him high up on the list of desirable men.

The general paid her, but that wasn’t the only benefit of working in the store. She certainly saw more men than she had working mornings in the spinning mill and going to school afternoons.

“Does the general sell books?” he asked.

“Dictionaries?” The store did a steady business in small dictionaries. The school provided spelling books for its students.

“I already have a dictionary.”

“He sells one other kind.” She gestured to the shelf with two, identical books on it.

Ab got the book and paid the cash price. He said, “Thank you” and went out the door.

That is how it went. Trifling boys too young for her spent an hour talking around her and then didn’t have any money to spend when she challenged them. Eligible men with their own land and cash money to spend spent it and left minutes after they came in.

Ab put his book down in the cabin and went back to chopping weeds. All the reading he had done had been in school after dark.

The book was important, though. He had supper while the sun was still in the sky. Then he lit the lantern and sat down with Little Henry and his Beaver.

It was something new. He had read sentences in class, and the paper that Teacher had handed out about changes in the laws had included one sentence for each change. These sentences, though, were connected. What one sentence told you depended on what the sentences before had told you. Reading the songs had been a little like that, but the book went on forever.

Halfway through the first chapter the second time, Ab discovered the paragraph. He didn’t have a name for it, but the blocks of print were each somehow related. He found that reading it aloud to himself helped him understand

“Teacher, can I ask you a question?” Belle said to Jane at the end of morning class.

“Certainly! Let me do two things.” She stopped Marjorie on the way to dinner. “Don’t wait for me but save me something. Student question.” After leaving the building, she detoured to the outhouse. Students could leave he classroom, but teachers had to spend the entire class period holding it in.

She led Belle out into the plantation fields away from the groups opening their dinners and even the barn which should have contained no people at noon, but you never know. If Belle had a question about punctuation, she was wasting a lot of effort, but it hadn’t sounded like a question about punctuation.

“Good land,” Belle said. “School ought to plant it.”

“It’s not really the school’s land.”

“Whose?”

“I think it belongs to the Bureau still,” Jane said. “Is that the question you wanted to ask?”

“Everybody says it hurts the first time.”

“Well, everybody tells me the same thing.” Which made Alice into everybody. Well, she was everybody who had confided in her. Still, she wasn’t married; Belle probably knew that she wasn’t married. She didn’t want her to think she was experienced.

“Others say that it’s only white men busting you that hurts,” Belle said.

“The woman who told me had her first time with a white man. That’s true. But he was a loving husband rather than a brutal slave master.”

“Cal and me are getting tired of the other stuff. Cal would marry me if I catched.”

“If you caught. You catch today; you caught yesterday. We tell you about irregular verbs. Catch is quite irregular.” And, Miss Nelson, is that the question you came out to answer? “If he would marry you if you had his baby, why not marry first and have the sex afterwards? That’s what your preacher would tell you, and he’ll conduct the wedding.” Jane didn’t know where Belle went to church, but it wasn’t the Congregational service.

“Daddy would have them help build a cabin on his land if we had to get married. I think he’d say wait if we didn’t have to. Cal’s a hard worker, but Daddy doesn’t see it.

Jane remembered that Belle was part of the Freeman clan. Amos Freeman had gathered his family into a quarter section. They shared tools and animals; they parceled out the work. Between his children and his grandchildren, they had a real spread of ages. His extended family was getting a good income.

“What about the boy? Cal, isn’t it?” Jane knew two Cals, one still attended the afternoon class; the other had dropped out. And then, of course, he could be in the night school. “Could you live with his family?”

“I wouldn’t want to. We would be in their cabin, and it’s crowded.”

“Well, maybe you aren’t ready to get married.”

“I ain’t,” Belle said. “You are the one who talked getting married.”

“Well, you said you would get married if a baby came. If you engage in sex, you have to expect that a baby will come.”

Sam knew that the store was doing well with Juliet behind the counter. There had been a brief time when he had plowed his land. He read to Tertius and took him for a few walks until Tertius made his preference for “Zeff” clear. He rebelled against the snail’s pace of reading the book and finished it for himself one afternoon.

He filled the wood box, and then he stacked a back-up supply of firewood in a corner of the stable.

He no longer could bear inaction.

Well, his bill establishing a militia had passed the House late in the session. The governor had not suggested that he would veto it. Lowndes was going to need a militia. The bill included no state-wide organization to recruit the body

Before he organized the Lowndes County militia, he would have to know the county outside his little northwest corner of it.

Having warned Deb of his intentions, he began with a train trip to Montgomery. He checked in with the what legislative staff were in the capitol between sessions. Governor Butler had signed the bill.

At the Bureau office, he found that David Clarke was now in control. Clarke let him see the maps covering Lowndes County. He made records of the location of every veteran’s grant. There were more than a thousand of them, which meant that he’d have to winnow them before visiting them. The bureau records included rank at discharge, so he noted the sergeants and the corporals.

Back home, he read to his son, made love to his wife, and mapped out the county. He’d spoken throughout the county twice, and they should know him. He, however, had met only party officials and other candidates except for brief handshakes.

He checked that Deb shouldn’t need Stepper for a few days and headed northeast. After two hours, he had left the customer base of his store far behind. Sam had lived his youth in a surveyed prairie, and township numbers were significant to him. Even so, he had a hard time locating his first corporal. He stopped when he saw a man working in his field close to the road and asked directions to Marcus’s place. The Bureau records didn’t include many last names.

When he got there, he almost went on. The most prosperous farms can look Wobegon, but Corporal Marcus had clearly not prospered. The cabin was closer to a shack, and the two children visible were dressed in rags.

The woman who came out was dressed little better, and she was clearly expecting a third child. Sam dismounted and removed his hat.

“I’m Sam Warren, ma’am, and I’m looking for a veteran named Marcus.”

“He’s yonder.” She gestured towards a man in the field.

“And has he chosen a last name?”

“Tomlinson. His old master.”

Sam walked out to where the man was. “Marcus Tomlinson?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Sam Warren.” He held out a hand which Tomlinson ignored. “Once a general, now in the state senate from this county.”

“General Warren.” Tomlinson sketched a salute, which Sam returned. “We was under Meade, but I heard of you. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve got some names of your neighbors, also veterans. I would like your report on what people think of them and how well they are doing.”

“The ones with a mule are doing fine. That’s all it takes, 80 acres and a mule. Only got a hoe, and 60 of those acres aren’t worth shit.”

“Well, I don’t know which ones have mules.,” Sam said.

The corporal stopped work long enough to listen to the names Sam read off. He only knew a half dozen of the men to the east of him, and Sam had decided to allow a distance between the locations from which militia were recruited in the beginning.

Two of the men Tomlinson recommended said that the Sergeant Ignatius that Sam asked about might be Nate Franklin, and they spoke well of him.

The cabin looked decent. There was a stable besides. When he rode up to the place, a man came out looking fit.

“Nate Franklin?” Sam /asked. He dismounted.

“Who is asking?”

“Sam Warren, once a brigadier general and now senator from this county.”

“General Warren, sir! It’s an honor. I was in the 5th Georgia Colored Infantry, and we relived your forces at the Chattahoochee river.”

“Well, some of us might be getting back in uniform. The state is forming a militia. Have you heard about the night-riding crew that call themselves, ‘The Knights of the White Magnolia’? The militia will be permanent, but those would be the first target.”

“I’ve heard a bit,” Franklin said. “They don’t work around here, do they?”

“Not yet. They are up north. Counties where the whites had the numbers in ‘66, but the Bureau granted a lot of land the next year. Those counties went Republican in ‘68, and that pissed off a lot of the old Confederates. I figure that they get their way in those counties, and lots of the moss-backs in our county will copy them.”

“Makes sense.”

“And I won’t bullshit you,” Sam said.” I’m state chairman of the Republican Party. The Republicans have most of the people, and they have a majority in the House even under the pre-war districts. We have only a narrow majority in the Senate. Senate gives one vote for each county, and there are a lot of lily-white counties with low numbers of people in the northern edge of the state. If they carry those counties and the ones that they are trying to terrorize, they can block everything we want to do.”

“Sounds serious,” Franklin said. “It’s getting along dinner time. Would you eat with us?”

Sam weighed two worries. The cook, whether Franklin’s woman or Franklin himself, could not possibly have anticipated a guest. On the other hand, refusing hospitality would sound like racism. He didn’t ponder long. “I would be honored.”

There was a woman. She looked young, and she looked like she would have a child in a month or two. Her name was Tess.

“She’s from around here,” Franklin volunteered. He hadn’t called her here from Georgia, then.

“I’m not much of a cook, yet,” Tess admitted. “Nate wants rice, but I couldn’t cook it if even he could find where to buy it.”

“This tastes just fine,” Which wasn’t stretching the truth much. Sam had lived for years on the cooking of a bunch of sergeants who had never fried their own bacon before joining up. “Rice is different to cook. He wants it, he can teach you how to cook it. I have a store, and we sell some rice. It’s a ways from here, though.”

He laid out the rules for a militia. “The men elect the company officers, and the company officers elect the regimental officers. For this state, only Union veterans are eligible to be officers. I suspect that we’ll have plenty of veterans to select from. Now, I’m coming to you, and you are going to your neighbors. That makes it likely that your neighbors will look at the possible officers and say, ‘That Franklin fellow looks like a militia leader. For that matter, when the company officers look among themselves, they may think the man who contacted them looks like a county leader.”

“Isn’t that a demotion, though? “ Franklin asked. “General to Colonel?”

“I’ll still be a retired brigadier general. You know? I’m the youngest retired brigadier general in the United States Army. Liable to hold that record, too. There doesn’t look to be another war.”

“But why fight now?” Tess asked. “These flower men aren’t bothering us, are they?” She was looking at her husband, clearly not worrying what dangers Sam risked.

“Right now,” Franklin said, “they are far away. We’d like to keep them far away.”

Sam wasn’t all that much of a tactician. As a strategist, he’d taken his orders from Butler, whom the army’s strategists despised. His only military talent was selecting men, and that single talent had earned him a sterling reputation. Franklin’ answer and the look that accompanied it convinced him that Franklin was a man to rely on.

He left a selection of names with Franklin. He explained how to use survey descriptions to locate people. From the Franklin cabin, he rode another hour along the river before he looked for another possibility.

That night, he had supper with another officer prospect. The family found room -- and fodder -- for Stepper in their stable. They fed him and offered him a bed for the night.

“A roof over my head is better than I prepared for,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor very comfortably. I packed food, not as tasty as this. You must let me add a bit of meat to your larder. Ever eaten veal? it’s calf meat.”

This wife also raised the question of going out looking for trouble.

“If Sherman’s troops had stayed home,” her husband answered, “you and me would never have been free.”

“That’s true,” Sam said. “Besides, the night riders can’t really win in those counties alone. They have to do their raiding in the rest of the state, or they haven’t got their old times back. That, and the local Confederates get almost nothing from suppressing the vote up there. They hear about them winning in Tuscaloosa, and they say, ‘Why do we have to put up with Sheriff Warren?’ We get them in Tuscaloosa, and they see three things: one, they don’t have a successful bunch of allies to call on; two, they have an already-organized militia force that can oppose them when they start; three, their recruits see what the penalties are.”

Tuesday night, he slept close to the border with Montgomery County. He began Wednesday by riding south. After his next conversation, he turned west again. With many exceptions for white-owned land, and, of course, for the sections intended to be rented out to support the schools, the entire County was covered evenly with grants.

He declined supper at his last discussion Friday and left before the family ate. he continued on and got home late. He put up Stepper and crawled into bed.

After a heavy breakfast the next morning, he revised his plans. The next week, he stayed home and took Deb anywhere she would need to go for the next while. The Monday after, he began a trip south and southwest. He took eight days to cover the most western portion of the county.

Ab had seldom worked as hard in the field as he did by lamplight in his cabin. It was strange to him because he had never thought of work outside of sweaty labor. Oh, sure, sometimes what Teacher asked of him required effort, but she asked it in small steps -- smaller steps, though he was not conscious of this, for those who attended every class.