Chapter 17: The Whale

Marjorie Purcell expected little from the brief period between the end of picking and the Christmas break.

The new year was the time for promotions and any new policies to be acted on. The long break for picking was the time for those policies to be decided.

At best, the brief period was a time for reviewing the previous year’s learning and spiking it down in the -- always slippery -- minds of the students.

After services on the cold and wet first Sunday after school started, Ab came up to her. She pulled the explanation of the hymn for next Sunday out of her reticule and thrust it at him.

“Put it in an inside pocket,” she said.” I have it wrapped in oiled cloth, but that won’t be much protection.”

“Teacher, I read the book.”

“Do you have it with you?”

“It is in Martha’s saddle bags,” he said.

“I’ll come with you.” He was going to ride home through the rain, and she would be able to change her clothes before dinner. They started walking towards the hitching rail. “Can you come to see me next Saturday after supper, say eight o’clock.?” she asked.

“Yes, Teacher.”

“Did you read the whole book?”

“Yes, Teacher,” Ab said. He worried, though. He had read every word, but he had only studied what he thought was the mainstream of the story.

He handed her the book, though, and Teacher hugged it under her cloak. They parted, and Ab rode home.

Marjorie hurried into the school and up to her room. She grabbed a towel, removed all her clothes, wiped herself off, and dressed from the skin out.

The teachers, who normally ate Sunday dinner in their church clothes, were all dressed more casually and out of their corsets.

The weather and what it would do to attendance if it persisted were the subject of conversation.

Afterwards, Marjorie stayed in her room. She hadn’t read Moby Dick in years, and she needed enough questions about it to see how deeply Ab had read it and where he had stopped.

Ab attended both nights in the next week. Ab usually did attend, the weather wasn’t awful if it wasn’t good, and this was the season of least farming and -- therefor -- best attendance. Still she wasn’t sure that she could have kept up attendance with the suspense of being examined at the end of the week on a book that had taken her most of a year to read.

She had yet to decide what level of understanding would constitute a pass, nor what his reward would be for passing. She did create a list of questions to see how deeply he had understood the book. Then she created a second, shorter, list to see if he had read it at all.

When Ab came in Saturday night, she took him to her classroom. “Tell me the main story of the book,” she said.

“The man who tells the story decides to go to sea again. He takes a job on a whaling ship after making friends with a harpooneer. Teacher, you have read the book?”

“Yes, Ab.” Did he think she just looked for a long book?

Then I can use these words?”

“If you use a word I don’t recognize, I’ll ask you after you’re done telling me the story.”

“The ship is the Pequod, and the captain is Ahab. It turns out that Ahab is more interested in killing one whale than in killing many whales and filling the ship with whale oil. That whale is Moby Dick, a very big white whale. Whalers know about Moby Dick and other ships have tried to kill him. Captain Ahab tried once before, and he lost a leg, and Moby Dick escaped. They caught some other whales and had some other adventures. Once Queequeg caught a fever and thought he would die. he begged the carpenter to make him a canoe for a coffin. Well, Queequeg got better. He kept the canoe, though, and slept in it. They finally found Moby Dick and chased him for three days. Moby Dick turns on the ship and breaks it up. It sinks, and only Ishmael escapes. The canoe breaks free from the sinking ship, and Ishmael gets in the boat until he is found by another ship.”

Marjorie was clear that he had read the book. Moreover, she was clear that he had understood enough to have followed the main thread though Melville’s meanderings. She asked other questions, but Ab had met any reasonable criterion already.

Soon, she wasn’t asking questions to satisfy herself; she was asking questions to satisfy Ab. If he had spent much of his time for the past year reading the book, she couldn’t cheapen that effort with a ten minute exam. She had always suspected that she was in some way the prize of his efforts, and she would be cheapening herself in his eyes if she told him that he had won before he revealed all that he had accomplished. to win her

He had got few, if any, of the references of the text, but she had missed some, and he had learned to read a book past an obscure reference.

He had missed most of the subtext, but it’s hard to recognize that a fictional event is an argument in a generation-old debate when you have never heard that debate.

“Well,” she said when he seemed satisfied, “you certainly have read the book. It was a long, difficult book, too. What did you expect to happen if you read the book.”

“Teacher, you said you would think about me if I had read a book.” He sounded frustrated.

“Now don’t get disturbed. I want us both to understand each other. I have been thinking about you since almost the first day you attended my class; I was thinking about you, indeed talking with you, the first time you said that. I merely want you to express clearly what you are asking of me. The general asks for clarity on much less important matters, and you give him clarity. If you go into his store and say, ‘I want some cloth,’ he asks, ‘‘what kind of cloth and how long?’ I am certain that you have something very definite that you want from me, but you have not said what it is,”

“You said that if I read a book, you would think about me.”

“I believe,” Marjorie said, “that what I actually said was that an educated woman like me could not consider as a possible mate someone who had not read even one book. That is a little different. You have read a very difficult book, and I respect you for it. You want to court me?”

“What does that mean, Teacher?”

“When a man courts a woman, he tries to persuade her to marry him -- to have her say yes, that she will marry him.” The word had certainly been in her vocabulary before Deb announced that Sam Warren had asked to court her, but that might have been what brought it to her mind.

“That is what I want.”

“Well,” Marjorie said, “that calls for several changes. None of them will be as hard as reading this book. It is your book, by the way, take it with you when you go.”

“Thank you, Teacher.”

“And that is the first change. You don’t court your teacher. Can you say Marjorie?”

“Marjorie.”

“You have been to weddings, haven’t you?” For that matter, she had seen him at weddings after church even if the flood of the first years had settled down.

“Yes.”

“Yes, Marjorie,” she prompted.

“Yes, Marjorie.”

“Well, they are all in first names. ‘Do you John, take Mary... ‘ Well, courtship, the act of courting leading up to marriage, is done by first names, as well.” Not that she had ever been in an actual courtship.

“Yes, Marjorie.”

“And I probably shouldn’t be your teacher, either. I have really enjoyed having you in class. But you don’t court your teacher. We can be one thing, or we can be the other; we can’t be both.” Damn! When was the school going to teach the word, ‘incompatible’?

“I’ll miss that,” Ab said.

“We are going to transfer more students into Miss Rawlings Wednesday-night class after Christmas. Probably, you should go to that class, then. We should figure out how we are going to do this. I will keep giving you the words to the hymns, and the first Sunday in the new year we will talk more.”

“Yes, Marjorie.”

So she walked Ab to the door. They didn’t kiss; it was probably too early in the courtship.

At dinner the next day, she said to Diane, “I’m sending you another night-school student. You know him, Ab.”

“Damn! I never thought you were going to give him up.”

“Me neither,” Said Jane. “What happened?”

“Well, he certainly is well enough advanced.”

Sam Warren figured that the “state militia” actually existed in two or three counties. Lowndes was one, Tuscaloosa was another, and Gabe Lincoln thought his county could bring one together.

Well, the recent elections had seen voter intimidation in all sorts of counties, and there wasn’t enough militia to punish it all. He did think, though, that he could mobilize and arm enough to punish voter intimidation in three counties in a line, Jefferson, Walker, and Fayette. The northern boundaries of those counties were south of the line that the Freedmen’s bureau had drawn as the northernmost line for freedman’s grants. That would mean a large majority of Negros in the county.

If they could duplicate what they had done in Tuscaloosa, they would have a tenth of the counties with more than a tenth of the population with functioning militias. Since he could leave the four northeastern counties to take care of themselves and he planned to ignore the other majority-white counties, that would be a beginning. Besides, the more experienced militiamen and experienced militia officers that he had, the more militiamen he could train.

The northern section of the state contained, as far as he could tell, a near-inexhaustible pool of recruits for the Camelias or other night-riders. Building a tier of counties with militias capable of resisting them might keep them out of the rest of the state. The eastern border of Jefferson reached more than half-way across the state; so going from Jefferson west did more than half the task. Besides, the northeastern Unionists would probably restrain the Camelias from their section.

Jefferson was by far the largest and most populous of the four counties he was targeting. It could also be reached by railroad from Lowndes. Early in January, he entrained four companies of militia at Warren station. The smallest company had nearly as many men as the first group to tame Tuscaloosa. The men rode in boxcars, and the wagons and their teams were in other boxcars. When they got to the raw, new town of Birmingham, three companies started off in three directions. The fourth took another train west.

A day later, the Tuscaloosa militia marched northwest in two columns.

The militia escorted the sheriff -- various deputy sheriffs in Jefferson -- in executing arrest and search warrants.

Their movements being far from secret, they found many people were not at home. As they progressed farther, they found more and more houses where the former owner had left the county and -- apparently -- the state.

When the riders were in jail, the militia broke up into platoons, each commanded by a lieutenant or a captain. Each platoon took one area within a county. They called on former sergeants who had taken veterans’ grants.

“I’m an officer of the Tuscaloosa regiment of the Alabama militia. A militia regiment is being formed in your county. We would like you to be part of it.”

Reponses ranged from “hell no” to “hell yes.” Enough were “hell yes,” however, to start forming companies.

Sam called for companies in Fayette county to elect their officers. Then, he called for a meeting of those officers. The sheriff provided a place for that meeting.

“I’d like to thank the sheriff for his cooperation,” Sam began, “Both the sheriff and the militia are agents for the law. The sheriff is elected by the people of the county to catch law breakers, and the militia is raised by the state to confront people who defy the law. I don’t believe that the sheriff should be part of the militia, but I believe that we should continue to cooperate.”

Then, he called for election of regimental officers. “Since you mostly don’t know each other, I think some campaigning is in order.” They elected a colonel, Reuben Simmons, a lieutenant colonel, and one major. They had enough men listed on the rolls to qualify for another major, but Sam wanted to wait until they saw whether the men on the rolls showed up for drill.

They didn’t have enough rifles for the enrolled men from the three counties. Still, that was the duty of the legislature.

He had a map of the county, and he located where the companies were centered, where there had been no recruitment, and the areas where the companies would be expected to expand.

“I’m leaving a list of veterans with Colonel Simmons,” Sam said. “The list includes their rank when they were discharged. We need men who can read and write for officers; how else can we communicate over an entire county? Colonel Simmons is in charge of recruitment, but I expect each of you to do our part. Probably, he will ask each of you to sign up more men in your company area.”

Sam held quite similar meetings in the other two counties. The militia that had marched north was sent home as soon as the county regiments were organized.

Marjorie decided that the next step with Ab was for them to get to know about the other’s past. They were so different.

She told him a little, and then, she got the same problem the school always had. To tell about something, she had to explain so many other things.

“Well, yes, when I was seven, the things I learned in school were much like the things the seven-year-olds in our school learn. Of course, my father read to me, and, so, I started off knowing what a book was like and knowing how to read my name and knowing my address and how to tell time.”

Ab knew all about biology, and what a father was that way. He had never had a father in the social sense, and his experience seeing Cellus with Tie was only a partial help.

Then, too, her father had not been strict, but what ‘not strict’ meant required an entire social context. And what it meant to meet people who had never heard of you but had voted for your father, what it meant to be expected to read some things because your family read them, all that was foreign to him. And that there were things that good girls didn’t read was something that she kept from him, for now. Good women -- mostly her, but the other teachers had been obviously complicit -- had been urging him to read everything.

His background was nearly as foreign to her. “Why did your father keep you so ignorant?” she asked.

“He wasn’t my father; he was my master.”

Then, the entire story came gushing out. knowing that his mother had been the sexual plaything of a man who had paid someone a good deal of money for her but who could not spare the money to buy her new shoes. The wife taking vicious revenge on the husband’s slave. The half-brother whose only objection to the viciousness was that he had wanted to rape the half-sister first.

She had been raised on the side of the debate that Stowe had not exaggerated, but she had been aware of the debate. Stowe had not written of this, and Marjorie would not have been permitted to read it if she had.

She insisted that they take a break for planting season. She wanted to see Ab, just as he wanted to see her, but he had always taken those breaks, and she understood that he worked harder than others did in that time when everybody worked hard.

‘“Think about this,” she said on the last Saturday before that break, “I have an appreciation now for how my father raised us. You don’t have any favorable picture. Maybe, if we do get married and have children, you should listen to my picture of how a father acts.”

As before. Sam got to the senate long after it had opened. The first thing on his schedule was a meeting of the Committee on Education. Up was a report from the chairman of the state Board of Education, Ralph Pearson.

“The law calls us to establish 100 new common schools a year,” Pearson said. “We nearly met that schedule. The first year, calendar 1870, Alabama furnished most of the teachers required to teach in those schools. Last year, we were able to recruit fewer. Subsequent years are going to necessitate very vigorous efforts to recruit from New England and elsewhere in the north.”

“There are more than enough southern gentlemen capable of teaching school,” one member of the committee objected. “You simply bar them because they are not willing to teach niggers.”

“Yes, Senator. I misspoke. The law calls on us to initiate new schools in 100 townships a year. If the township is unwilling to have an integrated school, then it must have two schools, and two teachers. So, we still must find 100 teachers who are interested in teaching colored children.”

“You could leave the pickaninnies to the mission schools.”

“I could not,” Pearson said. “The call to educate all the children who are willing to attend -- and whose parents are willing for them to attend -- is in laws passed by this legislature. Whether you had a choice in light of provisions in the state constitution and the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution is another question, and not a question for me.”

Sam rose to ask a question, and the chair instantly recognized him. “My question for Mr. Pearson is whether he has any suggestions as to any legislation which would make the task we have laid on him easier.”

“Yes, I have,” Pearson said. “Virtually every township has a section of land to rent out for the support of local schools. In the past, many of the rents have not been collected, many of the collected rents have not supported education, and some of it has been embezzled. We have embarked on a 14 year program to establish schools, and the money accumulated in the last townships to be served by schools will not be safe. I propose that the Alabama Board of Education be authorized to lease out that land, collect the rents, and keep them in escrow for the individual townships.”

“Has your staff put that in legislative language?”

“We have.” Pearson got out some papers.

“Mr. Chairman,” Sam said, I wish to submit this bill.”

“Bills must be submitted to the senate secretariat.”

Sam nodded and sat down.

The discussion alternated among those trying to get information on the past year, those trying to discuss the new request, and those decrying the education legislation of the past two sessions. Since the funding suggestion couldn’t actually become a committee action until Sam submitted it and the president referred it to this committee, Sam was content. As Republican Party chair, his main worry was that the Democrats could woo some Negro votes. Every time a Democrat spoke against Negro education, that got harder for them to do.

As the session went on. Sam called a meeting of the Committee on Roads and Railroads. Weeks before the scheduled meeting, he invited Ben Dawes, the only senator from any of the northeastern counties on the committee, and Ted Russell, the recognized leader of the Republicans in the northeast to supper at his boarding house.

“Now, Sam,” asked Russell, “why do I think you want something from us?”

“Because I’m buying supper,” said Sam. “I’m not trying to keep anything secret. but look what you got from me. The first state roads we built served your area.”

“That’s true.”

“And you have to understand that it will be a long time before you get on the schedule again.”

“I’ll admit that’s fair,” said Dawes. “I was a little surprised that we got both.”

“There were reasons. Partly they were caucus reasons. You four had given us the majority, and everyone remembered that. You aren’t strictly necessary now, and people have short memories. There were road-building reasons, too. There isn’t much of a grid if you only have one north-south road in a region. Then, too, the authorized roads stop well short of the Florida border.”

“They do?” asked Russel.

“They do, Somehow, the people -- like you -- who voted on them didn’t check them on the map. They are being built from north to south, partly so your voters could see the work being done before they went to the polls. I expect screams when the construction crews stop and go home. People who voted against the bill are going to try to amend it to extend the road.

“Now, the next roads to be built will run all the way from the Georgia border to Mississippi. Since that’s shorter, we can afford four of them. I hope Senator Dawes, here, will introduce that bill.”

“Have you consulted the bordering states?” Dawes asked. Sam thought the question didn’t really bear on the issue of whether Dawes would present the bill.