Chapter 5: New Lives

{date:2020-08-10a}

Marjorie Purcell took the two weeks between the last of picking season and the Christmas week straightening out evening-school students who kept coming on the wrong nights – or who came on the wrong night for the first time long after school resumed. She did notice that the good-looking, light-skinned one, Ab, came on the nights he’d been told before the picking break. He attended most nights he should, too.

Only some slavery had ended, she noted wryly. There were a great many more men than women in the evening classes. The women stayed home to care for the children. In the daytime classes she taught, most days there was a lesser imbalance of the sexes. When somebody had to stay home to help with younger children, though, it was a girl who did it. Probably some boys, boys with no sister of the appropriate age, cared for children, too. Marjorie didn’t hear of that.

She stopped teaching in her advanced class one night. “You know that we have beginning classes for your area, don’t you?” she asked. She got the usual enthusiastic agreement. She no longer gave much attention to that; she would have to judge their degree of knowledge for herself.

“How many of the men here have women at home? Raise your hand. I don’t mean women who are in the class now.” A good many hands went up. “They could go to the beginning class next Tuesday; you could watch the children.”

“Got no teats,” one man muttered.

“That’s perfectly true,” she answered. She decided to not repeat the answer. She was a lady, and a lady didn’t mention breasts, much less the word he’d used. “Some nursing mothers must stay home. Others can bring that child here as long as it is too young to walk.” There were already infants in the room, and some toddlers who were not too young to walk, although they tried to emphasize that rule. Once the child was in the building, what could you do? You couldn’t send the mother home without other company. “But the man can take care of the other children, and if the mother isn’t nursing, he can take care of all the children.”

She knew that it was probably a lost cause. Still, there were young women hearing her, and they would remember when they were married, and their husbands tried to leave them behind.

The freedmen had so much to learn! They wanted to learn reading and writing. They knew that this was the mark of a free man. They wanted, the Lord be thanked, to get married. They’d been treated as herd animals too long. Despite constant preaching, they were less eager to wait until the vows had been said. They had no standards of cleanliness, and their former masters certainly had not had New-England standards of cleanliness. Their bodily modesty did not satisfy her standards.

Still the major responsibility of teachers was the reading, writing, and reckoning. General Warren kept pressing them on the reckoning part of teaching. He was correct about its importance; he did not seem to see that everything that they taught was critical. But having your own money gave you little freedom if you could not add and subtract.

They taught some history and geography, too. Many of their students had never seen a map of the World, of the United States, or even of the state of Alabama. Some of them had come from far away, all of the veterans but also many of the freedmen. Some of the older ones had been brought here when their masters came; more of them had been imported in coffles as the fields of Alabama required more and more workers. Some had been the portable property of refugees fleeing the Yankee advance. With the classroom maps, they could trace their journeys, or – at least – the land portion of their journeys.

Attendance was better in the winter than it had been in growing season, despite the prevalence of colds and other illnesses.

Things were starting to straighten out. People knew what days of the week they were supposed to come. If they didn’t come those nights, and attendance was really better than it had been in the summer, they at least didn’t come at other times. Even the attendance of children was better, and their tardiness was less. That might have had something to do with the weather outside being cool and rainy. The new class schedule for the evenings had her repeating less and repeating, at least, not quite the rudiments.

Things were busy, but no longer frantic. She was beginning to believe that they could keep this class arrangement for the entire next year.

And, then, General Warren proposed to Deborah.

Marjorie and the other teachers were happy for Deb, of course, and you couldn’t say that it had been a bolt from the blue. He’d said that he was courting her long since.

Still, an engaged woman needed some time to prepare, and the general could have proposed before they had their schedule arranged. Deb’s evening off was Wednesday, and Marjorie merged Deb’s class with her own for Wednesday afternoon. That allowed the engaged couple one half day a week to furnish their house.

The school took the entire week around Christmas off. The wedding was the Sunday leading up to it. The bride had looked frightened, but the newlywed woman looked happy.

Henry Riding was Chief Justice of the State of Alabama because Ben Butler had appeared before him fairly often and had come away impressed with his judicial temperament and knowledge of the law. He’d been less impressed by Butler. Of successful advocates, there were those who won their cases by a superior knowledge of the law applied with close reasoning; there were those who won by rhetoric. Butler was definitely a rhetorician.

On the other hand, he appreciated the problem he had recently faced, and he appreciated Butler’s solution. The state’s constitution rejected the immediate Confederate past and enfranchised Negroes. Many of the legislators in this session and the majority of voters were Negroes. The lawyers in the state were all white and nearly all ex-Confederates. Their consensus rejected the state constitution and recently-passed statutes. If you put them on the bench, they would have happily enforced the laws and the constitution of the past and ignored current rules.

Butler’s solution, and one foreseen by the current state constitution, was to import judges from the north. A court system, though, is more than a bunch of judges. Each state has a set of procedures, and courts within a state can have subtly different procedures. About a third of the current judges in Alabama had practiced law in Massachusetts, fewer in the rest of New England, fewer yet in the middle Atlantic states. Only a small fraction had come from the Old Northwest, and one each from Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri. The prosecutors had experience about as widely distributed.

If a case came up on appeal because the judge had not followed the procedures required in Connecticut, it might be heard by an appeals court with judges from Maine, New Jersey, and Ohio.

So, he had called judicial councils. The first had been only the state supreme court. They had decided their procedures and had them set in type and distributed to the appeals courts. If you needed a copy of the supreme-court procedures, you were at an appeals court.

The second council had included the supreme court and the chief judges of each appeals court. That has set up uniform appeals-court procedures. Now, he was finishing up the third, and largest, council. This included the second council and one circuit-court judge from each appellate district. He’d held it during sowing time, because the circuit courts couldn’t get a jury then, anyhow. This council was hammering out uniform procedures for the circuit courts. That would move Alabama from a position of chaotic procedures to the forefront of regularity in procedures. Few states had uniform procedures for all their courts of first instance.

“Are we agreed then?” he asked. He would take a majority; if need be, he would take a supreme-court majority. He preferred, though, to talk until they reached agreement. “On the motion of either counsel, the judge may restrict the jury to literate voters.” He recognized a question.

“I would prefer some language that said that the moving counsel must introduce important evidence which the jurors must read. In my circuit, that rule would segregate juries once again.”

“And that the presiding judge retains absolute authority to make that restriction or not, not subject to appeal?”

“Yes, Mr. Chief Justice.”

“Is something like that acceptable to the meeting?” Riding asked. He hadn’t really been a Quaker for decades, but the language still crept in once in a while. “We’ll put it aside, then, and Judge...”

“Marshall.”

“Judge Marshall will bring in suggested language tomorrow. If someone else has an idea for language, consult with Marshall before the meeting.” He thought that they were about to get a set of procedures which would serve them for another decade.

Ab had received a huge amount of money when Green paid him for his cotton. Most of it was left when he paid off the general, the gin, and the man with a mule cart. He wanted to plow the next year, and he went shopping for a mule. That is when he learned that he hadn’t gotten that much money, after all. He found a mule that would cost him less than he had left, but even that mule would cost almost all of it. A mule without a plow wasn’t much use.

Cellus, Ab’s best friend who lived just south of his grant, was older and had a family and a real cabin. Ab was still living in the tent with a pile of branches around it and over it. Tina, Cellus’s wife, had helped farm until she got too big with her second child. They’d taken their cotton to Mr. Green together, and Cellus had brought more cotton than he had. After the general got paid, though, it looked like Cellus didn’t get much cash. Well, Ab hoped he had enough money to buy a plow.

They had taken too eating suppers together on Saturday. Ab contributed more than his share of the makings, but Tina did the cooking.

He was carrying his contribution for the Saturday supper when Tie saw him. Tie was Cellus and Tina’s young son, and when Tie hugged you, you knew you’d been hugged. He lifted the food out of the way and let Tie clasp his knees. A minute later, the tiny boy was running towards the cabin shouting, “Ab, Ab.”

Tina came out and took the chicken and the two onions from his hands. “Wasn’t planning on having chicken tonight,” she said.

“It’ll keep until tomorrow dinner. I wanted to talk with Cellus.” He kept the cornmeal and walked the few steps left to get to the cabin.

Even without the chicken, Tina cooked a much better meal than Ab could have cooked for himself. She was the first real friend he had had who was a woman. He thought her full name, Concertina, was among the prettiest he had heard. Ab was a healthy man living alone, and sometimes he had stirrings about Tina. He kept them under wraps, though. Some women were available, and some were not. That had been true even on the plantation. It was just that out here there were far fewer women, and none of them seemed to be available.

He ate the meal with Tie on his lap. When Tie’s squirming got to be the sort that signaled a need instead of merely a wish to get down, he took him out into the fields. Tie spread his legs and squatted. Ab held Tie’s shirt up and braced him. When Tie had both shat and pissed, he wiped him with the corn shucks he had brought and led him back to the cabin. It was cool weather, and Tina took Tie over to the small bedroll next to the stove. She could hear Ab, but his business was with Cellus.

“We’d get better crops if we could plow all the land,” he started. Cellus and Tina had hoed maybe half the land they had. Ab had done worse by himself.

“Sleep more comfortable in the schoolhouse.” Despite what Cellus thought, plowing, unlike owning the schoolhouse, was possible.

“I have been looking at mules. I can get one that looks healthy and young. It would cost almost all the money I got from Massa Green. The general says he won’t give credit unless you have crops in the ground, and I couldn’t pay for the plow.”.

“So, if you had a plow, you could plant enough to buy a plow. It’s always that way. Them as has, gets.”

“I figured that you could buy a plow.”

“Tie’s a little young yet to pull it,” Cellus said, “and Tina’ll be too far along come planting time.

“But, if you have a plow and I have a mule, then you and I will have a mule and a plow. We could plow both farms.”

“You would do that?”

“Go along with him,” Tina suddenly said. “That’s the first idea that I’ve heard that has us ever getting ahead. We owed most of our crop to Massa Warren, and the Bureau has stopped giving rations. We’ll owe it all come next picking.”

“Well,” Ab said, “the general always told me to plant corn, too.”

“Told everybody,” Cellus said. “They told us that we didn’t have to listen to what white men said. Then they tell us everything.”

Ab thought that there was a difference. When an overseer told you to do something and you didn’t, you might get lashed when he found out you hadn’t. When Teacher told you to do something and you didn’t, she looked real sad and taught you the lesson again. Ab found himself working as hard to avoid making Teacher sad as he’d worked to avoid the riding crops that the drivers carried. Lashings were something else, but they had been rare.

Cellus finally agreed. On Monday, Ab talked to the mule man. They met in Montgomery at the Bureau office. The agent read the contract aloud and saw the mule. Ab signed the contract, counted the money, and handed it to the agent. The agent counted it and handed it to the mule man. The mule man counted it. Then he handed the lead rope on the mule to the agent, who handed it to Ab. Ab led the mule, whose name was Martha, maybe half the time going home, but he rode her bareback the rest of the time.

Early in February, ‘67, the evening was dominated by a cold, piercing rain. Sam Warren drove the shay to pick up his wife from school. He left her off at the kitchen door and drove the shay to the stable. He stayed there to rub down Stepper. When he came in, he stripped in the kitchen and hung his clothes from the chairs and the doorknobs. When he got to the bedroom, Deborah had already changed into nightgown and robe.

“I need to start bread tonight if it’s going to rise by morning,” she said.

“Fine. Take the lantern. I’ll just go to bed.”

Deborah Warren should be planning her lessons for the next day, but she thought about her month and a bit of marriage while she mixed the ingredients for the bread. Being married and living with a man had delivered some shocks. The way Sam had just walked into the room naked as a jaybird was one example. All right, they were married, and a married couple could see each other undressed. Indeed, Sam would have been within his rights as a husband to come into the room and watch her change. That would have bothered her, and he respected her modesty. Still, he had no modesty if his own. Sometimes, that bothered her.

So too, did his hairiness and his occasionally farting in the house. The greatest shock, though, was how often he wanted relations. Almost every night the first week, but that was the first week. It had been new and exciting for her, as well. Since then, though – except when she had her period – he had wanted relations several times a week.

More than making up for that was that she had spent what might have been the warmest January of her life. It wasn’t Alabama. She had been in Alabama, in a palatial plantation house in Alabama, the previous January; she had slept cold. The month before her marriage had been almost as bad. Even when Gladys had run a fever which almost killed her at nine, Deborah’s back and legs had been chilly. Sam not only knew how to bank the fire in the Franklin stove so that the stove was warm into the morning, he surrounded Deborah with his body heat. Apparently sleeping in the same bed with a husband was not lying on your back while he lay on his a foot away. It was curling up around his forearm while he curled around you.

.

“Now, Mike,” Governor Butler asked, “Isn’t the station we’re discussing the most convenient location from the point of view of the mills?”

“Yes. You asked me to choose that.”

“And It will improve the efficiency of operating Warren’s store?”

“It should,” Mike admitted. “The supplies will come in a ten-minute wagon trip away instead of two hours. Still, the mill is going to ship ten times as much through the station as the store. I don’t see the sense of calling it, ‘Warren station.’”

Butler could have told Mike that names were a cheap method of rewarding people when you didn’t want to give them more money. That was why the firm was named, “Green-Butler Fabrics,’ when Green would get 10% of the profits. Green had been a foreman when he’d found him; he was beginning to believe that – while he’d have made a perfectly good plant superintendent – making him general superintendent was maybe pushing him beyond his talents.

“Warren is a friend and was a subordinate,” he said. “Nobody is going to blink that I’m sponsoring a railroad station that will benefit him. On the other side of that, nobody – nobody on the Union-Republican side – is going to go on record as opposing the ‘Hero of Andersonville.’ The way you get political power is that you use your political power mostly on issues where you are on the obviously winning side.”

“You’re the Goddam governor.”

“So I am, and if I’d gone for a Butler Station, there’d be northern papers calling me a dictator.”

Butler was beginning to think that the summers weren’t the only reason for preferring a political career in Massachusetts to one in Alabama. Green was fine on the business side, but too direct to be useful in politics. Directness was subtly different from honesty. Green was scheming to make more than the 10% of the profits he had agreed to. Butler was content as long as his profits were sufficiently high.

Warren was a fine ally, but a bit too honest to be a lieutenant. Then too, his marriage was turning him into an idealist. Butler had expected him to ask for the station, but he wouldn’t ask for patronage.

That afternoon, Sam paced off the land he needed for other purposes than cotton. He had a woodlot, and he decided to increase it. He’d asked Deb how much she wanted for a garden. He would take that from the present corn field and add as much to the other end. They’d need a little more corn, too. He gave Stepper a large pasture because he was planning an orchard in later years, and manure would help that. He could haul some out of the stable, but why not let the horse carry his own?

Aside from the yard around store and house, the rest could be planted in cotton.

The next morning, he began plowing. He finished the corn field and garden before dinner. When he plowed the land that was going to grow cotton, he could guide the plow with half his mind while he thought of other things with the other half.

Just when Ab was worrying about what he would do if Cellus didn’t, Cellus bought the plow and tackle. Right before planting time, Ab and Cellus went to the boundary sticks for both places. Each took two paces in from the stick, and then Ab plowed as straight a furrow as he could toward Cellus. Those furrows would be the edge of cultivation. They didn’t want anyone claiming they were farming anyone else’s land. They wanted even their own farms separate. Ab left a large pasture for Martha, the mule, unplowed. He also left some scrubland which would be his woodlot. He was already harvesting some of that for firewood. Cellus and he plowed most of Cellus’s land.

Once planting time was over, he went back to school. That meant reading his spelling book after dark. He went to the store to get more lamp oil and more paper. his pencil was still fairly long. He had a little money left, but it was less than he would need for the meat he planned to buy this year.

“General,” he said, “I have a crop in the ground, now. Can I buy these on credit?”

“Wait just a minute. Didn’t you get a good chunk of cash from Green? I charge less for cash sales. If you don’t have the cash now, what did you spend it on?”

“Bought me a mule. I plowed almost all my land this year. Ought to grow twice as much cotton.”

“Good enough,” the general said. “I don’t think I sold you a plow.”

“Worked with Cellus. His plow, my mule. Both farms fully plowed.”

“Good idea. You go to the school, don’t you? You might tell the others about working together when you’re walking to school or back.”