Chapter 6: New Relationships

When Deborah Warren had told the other teachers that she was expecting a child, they had all been excited and pleased. She had seen a flicker of worry cross Marjorie’s face. Her question was whether Deb could teach through to picking season.

“Past Christmas, I would think. The babe should come early in the new year.”

“Well, we might as well adjust the schedules before the Christmas break. We don’t want you delivering the child in front of the entire class.”

“No, but I don’t want to deliver it by myself, either. Do you think you have a midwife in one of your evening classes?”

“Are you certain that you don’t want a doctor?” Jane asked.

“I want a Massachusetts doctor. None is available.”

“I certainly have healing women in my classes,” Diane said. “If Marjorie can’t find one to suit you, I’ll ask among them.” As a Down-east woman, Diane was closer to the frontier mentality than the Massachusetts women were.

Ben Butler had been tempted to act when he had first heard that the yellow fever was bad in Mobile the summer of ‘67.

“I know how to deal with fever,” he told Tom Patterson. “I did it in New Orleans. We cleaned up the streets and enforced a quarantine on incoming ships. We only had one case the entire summer.” Patterson was officially his personal secretary. He had been active in the prewar legislature before he spoke out as a conditional unionist. Unofficially, he was Butler’s guide to the sentiments of white Alabama.

“Streets are naturally dirty, Governor; horses shit in them. Are you sure that quarantine e was something New Orleans didn’t already know? I’ve read about it, and I’ve never seen the sea.”

“Rooms are naturally dirty if nobody sweeps them; plates are naturally greasy if nobody washes them. You don’t know Louisianans. They were perfectly familiar with the idea of quarantine. It was the idea of enforcement that was strange to them.”

“Governor, what would you say if President Hamlin ordered a new tax plan for the state? We really need one.”

“We do need one, and if the senate didn’t ignore its duty, we would have one. Still, it’s not the federal government’s business. Are you telling me that the plague in Mobile is none of my business?”

“It’s a purely local matter. They would have objected if a pre-war governor had interfered. A – pardon me – ‘nigger state government and a carpet-bagger governor’ are asking for another civil war if they interfere.”

Now, it was different. At least he hoped that it was.

“The Yellow fever is in three counties, now,” he told Patterson.

“Five counties, Governor. I have the reports here; I had those reports scheduled for later.”

“That makes it a state issue.”

“You have a solid grounds for using state resources to combat the epidemic.”

“Let’s start doing that.”

“What state resources do you have?” Patterson asked.

Deborah drove the shay to school. After evening class had ended, Marjorie introduced her to a possible midwife. Belle Jackson had been one of the Georgia healing women who served The Army of The Savanah when Butler couldn’t get enough doctors. She had married a former patient. She had delivered many babies in Georgia and several in Alabama, and she had borne three of her own whom she had lost to an epidemic in Savanah.

“And,” Deborah asked, “will you wash your hands before delivering mine if I get you warm water and soap?”

“If you say so, teacher. I don’t know how I’ll get to you, though. You live by the store, don’t you. That’s way too far to hear.”

“My husband will come for you. Why don’t I take you home with me now? He can take the first trip tonight.”

They did it that way. She showed Mrs. Jackson the house before Sam drove her home.

“Did you get the route?” she asked him.

“I want to go over the route a couple of times in the daylight. She had never made the trip at night, and she got a little confused.”

“I want you to be able to find her.”

“So do I,” Sam said. “I’ll take the trip a couple of times and get the shortest route in my mind.”

Sunday was terribly hot and threatening rain. Ab could feel the water already in the air. He was glad enough that it was the sabbath and that he was at service instead of hoeing weeds. He started early to allow Martha to go slow.

The girls were in the shade at the south edge of the wood lot, but the boys were running around as usual. The minister’s boy escaped from his mama the instant his father said the last blessing. He ran after the other boys even though he was wearing boots and a formal suit.

He lost track of the boys when he saw Teacher coming his way. She sometimes returned his greeting after the service, and she knew his name.

The boys’ game was some form of tag, and the preacher’s son was running right at them calling some taunt over his shoulder. Ab caught him by his shoulders before they hit hard.

“Stephen,” Teacher said in a curt voice, “you apologize to the gentleman this instant.”

Ab felt betrayed. Teacher never talked to him in that tone of voice. He knew that the white gentleman was never wrong; Mama had told him that since he was younger than this white boy. Still, the child was awfully young to be called a gentleman, and he had run into him. If Ab should apologize for being in his way (and Ab wasn’t sure that was what ‘freedom’ meant), then the scolding tone was too much.

The boy said, “I’m sorry, sir. I shouldn’t have been running.”

Ab’s whole idea of what had been said changed. “Maybe, when you do run, look where you’re going.”

The boy backed away. He was yards away before he started running again, and he looked ahead until Ab lost sight of him in the crowd.

“You were very gentle with Stephen,” Marjorie told Ab.

“If I didn’t catch him, we both would have hurt.”

Marjorie hadn’t been speaking about the physical action. That merely showed Ab’s athletic ability. His words had, however, been gentle. She thought of what a young man in Dalton would have said to a boy who ran into him at full tilt.

“Are you enjoying the services?”

“I have trouble with the words of some of the songs,” He said. Actually, Ab also had trouble with the words of the sermons. He had spent a good deal of the service gazing at Teacher from afar.

“Well, there are hymnals. Wait! Reverend Adams is taking his family home. Can you wait until next week?”

“Yes.”

“I shall get you a hymnal next week,” she said.

Ab would have been equally pleased if she had promised to show him a Bandersnatch the next week. He had never before heard either word. But it meant that Teacher would talk special to him after the next service.

When Sam and Deborah got home from the Methodist service, Sam went through the house flinging open the windows. The last room he reached was the bedroom. He took off his linen coat and hung it in his wardrobe. He loosened his collar. Then he went back through the kitchen to fetch the tub of butter from the wellhouse.

Even though she was still in her church-going dress and – worse – in the corset which the dress required. Despite the heat of the day, she was cooking dried vegetables into a soup as well as pan-frying the sliced ham. The corn bread, at least, had been baked last night. Even though they were just the two of them, they had Sunday dinner in the dining room.

She had a pan of water simmering on the stove. When the meal was over, they carried the dishes to the kitchen sink. She donned an apron to protect the Sunday dress and used the pan of water to wash the dishes immediately. He took a towel made of sacking and began to dry. They had a ritual for Sundays, and Deborah preferred that they didn’t discuss it. Instead, they talked of other things. Yellow Fever had visited Mobile, as it did many summers. This summer, though, there were cases closer to them. The teachers were considering closing the school. Perhaps they will wait and see I the disease comes any further north.

When he finished drying the dishes, he wiped his hands on the same towel and handed it to her. She leaves the apron in the kitchen. Back in the room, he helped her unbutton the dress; then, he removed her corset. She dealt with the rest of her clothing while he undressed. He looked at her lying in bed. The slightest bulge is visible when she is naked, a shallow dome covering the spark of life he put there.

She was even more exciting like this than she had been before. He kissed her mouth, her face, her bosom. When her nipples stood hard from his kisses, he returned to her mouth. His hand stroked her mound, then eased between her legs.

Deborah relaxed and let Sam manipulate her. She knew the short spasm he would bring her, and she knew that she couldn’t fake it well enough to convince him. She could resist it; she had resisted it in conviction that decent matrons don’t feel such things and decent men don’t cause such things in their wives. Sam, however, couldn’t be convinced by words. He would keep trying, and his efforts could abrade her painfully if he continued to manipulate her and she continued to resist.

She relaxed, and the tension which came soon was the opposite of resistance. Sam must have noticed. He went back to his imitation nursing. Before her nipple got sore, a spasm passed through her body.

Sam moved his hand from her center and his mouth from her breast. She spread her knees, and he spread them further. He got between them and entered her. He began his rhythmic motions, and her tension began to return. Before it got too strong, Sam thrust hard into her, gasped, and fell on her body. After a period of uncomfortable pressure and heat, he rolled off.

Surely, she didn’t have to suffer this for the next six months. August had been the hottest month since she came to Alabama, and Jane said it was no worse than the previous summer. Jane hinted that it was Dorothy’s condition that made her feel so hot.

Well, that might be the way to persuade Sam. He always worried about what might hurt the babe. Really, now that she was carrying the babe, they didn’t need to do it at all; they certainly didn’t need to do it every week. The problem was how to persuade Sam of that. Being obvious hadn’t ever persuaded Sam of anything. Well, she would try.

“Do you think your weight on the babe put her in danger?” she asked.

“Could it?”

“Why don’t you speak with Reverend West? He has children. He must know the rules.” And when Reverend West told him that he was endangering his child as well as burdening his wife, Sam might curb his appetite.

The next week, while they were bidding the pastor goodbye, Sam made an appointment to see him Tuesday evening. That still meant that she had another time to bear his weight, but it might be, if not the last, the last on a weekly basis.

They had Sunday dinner with the other teachers, as they often did. Coming back, they passed a very light-skinned man on mule back. He obviously recognized them. He pulled his mule to the side of the road, and said, “Teacher, General.”

“Ab,” Sam said, “good afternoon.”

“I wonder why he’s headed to the school on a Sunday,” he said.

“Their services are well over. Perhaps the Congregationalists have begun a Sunday school.”

“They haven’t.” The other teachers would be almost the only teachers available. Besides, “With only one student?”

Tuesday night, when he picked her up after her teaching was ended, he said nothing about his appointment with Pastor West. Wednesday, she cooked supper, they ate, and they both washed dishes without a word on the subject. After they were in bed, though, he mentioned it.

“Lie facing the window,” he said. “I mentioned our problem to pastor West, and he said that there was another way that doesn’t put any weight on the baby.”

He pulled her nightgown up to her waist in back and snuggled up against her rump. As usual in this weather, he was wearing nothing. She could feel his fingers, and then his organ, on her private place. She stiffened.

“Relax,” Sam said. He manipulated her for a minute; then, she felt his organ pressing into her. It felt larger and raspier, but it didn’t really hurt. He moved his hand to her front and then pressed it between her legs. Then, he was manipulating her again.

At first, she didn’t think it would have any effect. She was all alone; he was dealing with her merely with his organ and his finger. Then, she felt the preparatory stiffness. After a while, she felt almost the same thrill begin. Since he wasn’t holding her down, she moved more when she thrashed.

“Deb, oh, Deb,” Sam said. He stopped moving his finger to grab her hipbone with that hand. He moved back a little then pulled her back while he stabbed her deep with his organ. She could feel it throb within her. Then he relaxed his grip on her flesh. She could hear him breathe. His organ slithered out of her; then she could feel what he’d left in her trickle down her hip.

He always manipulated her; why did this feel more mechanical? Well when she lay on her back and he was beside her, he kissed her. He mostly kissed her bosom, but she could haul his mouth up to hers by his beard. She could tell herself that what was happening was a kiss; the mechanical manipulation was just one more marital intimacy that went with the kiss.

This time, the manipulation was the central action. it was only accompanied by the penetration of his organ, and that was only an inch away.

“I worried that it would be less,” Sam said. “If anything, it felt more arousing.”

“Yes, dear. Let us not talk about such things.”

“Very well.”

At almost the same time that Sam was making his appointment with Pastor West, Ab saw Teacher coming towards him after the service. While there were dozens of people in between them and she politely greeted most of the adults, he was certain that she intended to speak with him.

Sure enough, she said, “Ab,” when she got close.

“Teacher.”

“I brought a hymnal. It might be harder to read than I thought at first.” She handed him a book, and he opened it.

“Go further along,” Teacher said. She took the book back and looked through it. “That is the last hymn we sang.”

Ab had been having real trouble following the words of the songs. The music was clear enough, the people who didn’t know the tune kept silent, and several of the Yankees had loud voices. The words, though, seemed muddled, and Yankee accents didn’t help.

The book was no help. “It is?” he asked.

“Well, it is written differently. Ignore the music.” Teacher waved her fingers over the pretty picture of a rail fence. “The lines go differently from other books. You read the first line and then the first line or the next block of print. ‘A mighty fortress is our God,’ and then, ‘A bulwark never failing.’”

“What is a bulwark?”

“Well, maybe this is the wrong place to start. Do you have more time? I have to have dinner with people I have invited, but could you come back? Start back two hours after you get home. I’ll keep the book, and then I’ll explain it to you inside when we can put it on the table, and both look at it.”

“Come back here later, Teacher?”

“If you could.”

“I will. Ab would walk a lot farther to have a private talk with Teacher.

Marjorie hated the Freedman’s situation. She had read Uncle Tom’s Cabin before the war and been shocked by the lashings. (She thought of the switchings she had received and knew that slave lashings were more painful.) Now, she thought that the ignorance that the slaves had been kept in was the worse of their treatment. Every time you wanted them to learn something, there was something else that they had to learn first.

Marjorie figured that the teachers’ dinner and the conversation afterwards would run more than two hours. She didn’t figure on two things. The first was that Ab not only had to get home and back – and he wouldn’t leave Martha saddled all that time, so he had to remove the saddle and put it back on – but that he had to cook his dinner as well as eat it; the second was that her planned lessons in reading the clock were scheduled for the future. Ab cooked and ate dinner. He waited for what seemed an awfully long time. he saddled Martha and headed back to the school.

On his way there, he saw the Warren carriage coming towards him and moved Martha off the road to make plenty of room for the white folks. The general greeted him politely, and Teacher Warren nodded to his greeting.

When he got to the school, Teacher Nelson told him to go into his usual schoolroom. Teacher came in soon with two books. She asked him to turn to one page. The pages were numbered, though sometimes they skipped a page or a number. The school hadn’t gone past 100, but the general did – though he called it a dollar. It wasn’t all that hard to figure out.

When he got to the page, though, the reading was nearly impossible. He ignored the pictures of a rail fence easily enough, and Teacher told him which line followed the first. He didn’t know enough of the words, though. He’d heard, if not seen printed, ‘Jehovah’; he’d thought he’d known how to spell ‘awful,’ and Teacher always said that words that were spelled almost alike could mean entirely different things. He couldn’t even guess the next word.

“What is that word, Teacher?”

“That one is pronounced like it is spelled, ‘throne.’”

“Who threw it?” Ab asked, “and what did he throw.”

Marjorie explained the words. She taught him the words by sound and then sang the music for him. Ab immediately got the idea of singing an octave lower than she did, though she avoided the word “octave.” She felt that she could teach him to read music when they had dealt with the old-fashioned “religious” words.

She could teach Ab, and she would be happy to teach Ab. Teaching four million freedmen, however, was a daunting task; she shared it with far too few other teachers. The available hymnal would make that task even more difficult. (To be fair to Watt, he wrote the language of his time.) She wrote a letter to the American Missionary.

An appeal to hymn-writers

I teach freedmen in Alabama. I tried to teach a bright student to read the words of a hymn. A great many of those words were ones we had not yet studied. Many, many hymns are written in an artificial, “religious,” language that is totally unnecessary. If we are to teach our students to read the newspaper and to read the hymnal, must we teach them two different languages?

I mean words such as “thy” and “throne.” Some words are actually central to the Christian message, and the freedmen often say “Jesus,” if they need to be taught to write it, they need to be taught to write their own names. If a term is not essential to the Christian message, why should they have to learn it in order to learn a hymn?

The music is fine. If you want to use old tunes, I would be happy. Could we please have some new hymns with only words you can see in the newspaper?

Sincerely,
Marjorie Purcell

MacGregor had held the title of state director of the Freedman’s Bureau for two years. He had mostly functioned as head of the Montgomery office. When new offices had to be opened to the north, he had sent men he trusted. Now, with the pause in new freedmen coming into the state, it was time to see what they had done. He didn’t plan to visit the Mobile office, which he hoped didn’t count as cowardice. The governor was discouraging movement in and out of Mobile until the colder weather slowed down the yellow-fever epidemic. MacGregor thought that colder weather in Alabama was a slender reed.

MacGregor was no farmer, but even he could tell that the land in the hill country wasn’t nearly as fertile as the land in the black belt. The majority of the freedmen were from Louisiana and found everything new. Some of them were used to cotton, which surprised him. He’d thought that the state grew only sugar as a cash crop. Louisiana cotton, though, grew higher and had an even longer picking season. Many of the veterans were from Tennessee, and they had seen whites with smaller farms on steeper land.

MacGregor already had heard stirrings of resentment among white farmers at having Negro farmers among them. Interspersing the races was unavoidable, but his opinion was that having the freedman grants in as compact an array as possible would minimize the number feeling that resentment and provide supporting neighbors for the other freedmen. He established a northernmost range from which grants could be made without permission from the state office. They had to establish new local offices in the territory south of that range which hadn’t been granted yet.

The other problem was almost the antithesis. The Bureau in Washington had finally decided about irregulars. The Confederate states had almost all had a minority of white Union enthusiasts. Some of them had enlisted in the regular Union Army; others had fought as irregulars. Mostly, the irregulars had feuded with Confederate irregulars, and there was a long debate whether this service would qualify them for the eighty-acre grants. (They, unlike the colored veterans who got most of those grant, wouldn’t qualify for any land, otherwise.) Finally, headquarters had decided favorably.

Gabriel Lincoln, the Speaker of the Alabama House and chairman of the state Republican Party, suggested that those grants be all made in the four counties in the northeast corner of the state. These were the white-majority counties in which the Republicans shown, and a good many of the Union raiders came from that area.

“I have always been an integrationist,” MacGregor pointed out, “and I have been scorned for that. Now, I’m hearing a Negro leader advocating segregation.”

“Well, it isn’t the best land, and these men fought for the Union. There are some white men who want us to serve them and bow to them; there are some who want us somewhere distant from them. If they will cooperate in other ways, why not give them that?”

Now, he was heading up into the area to see if that was acceptable to the grantees. “Colonel” Russell had been their leader during the war, and he had promised to gather a representative sample of the men for a discussion with him.

“I have to admit,” he said, “that the land being granted in other parts of the state is often of better quality for farming. As an Ohioan, I find the weather more comfortable up here. Then, too, much of the best land was granted earlier. Not all of it, though. We granted land in wide swatches when we had wide swatches; there are still many corners where the government has title to more than eighty acres in a piece. If you agree that we look in the counties of Madison, Jackson, Marshal, and Dekalb, then you – and the others who rode with you – will have the only grants in these counties.”

“And we won’t have niggers right close?” the questioner had been introduced, but so had a score of others. MacGregor could only remember two names.

“You have to remember that Negroes are free now; they can move anywhere they like, just as you can. What will happen – or, rather, what won’t happen -- is that we won’t grant any land in these four counties to other than your group. If you can read a map, we shall accommodate you as well as we can. You understand that a grant is a rectangle, two furlongs by four.”

Russell rose and looked around the room. “I think that is what we want.” There were murmurs of agreement.

MacGregor had three men with him, and he and they each took a map of an area in a different county to lay out the grants of the men attending that day.

Ab found himself busier than he had ever been apart from picking season. The teachers talked about closing the school, but the fever never got that close. He was hoeing cotton, he was minding Tie two afternoons a week and feeding him dinner, he was tending two vegetable gardens, and he was studying two sorts of lessons. The advanced classes had a list of words to look up in the spelling book and learn.

He kept the song book, and Teacher every week gave him a private letter telling him the number of one song and a list of words she thought he might not know, how to pronounce them, and what they meant. A few times, Teacher listed a word a second time; more often there was a word that he didn’t know, and she had missed. He found himself buying more oil than he had expected.

On the other hand, his first garden was yielding more truck than he had ever eaten. Even always including a vegetable in Tie’s dinner and sharing some with Tina, there was a lot left for him to eat.

There was also Ham every noon that Tie ate with him. Partly, it was a bribe. Tie didn’t appreciate the vegetables, but he knew that he had to finish them before Ab put the ham on his plate. The plates were another expense that Ab had put on his credit with the general.

Sam felt that one problem with keeping a thin inventory was that it taught his customers to shop somewhere else. Another problem, of course, was that you didn’t make any profit on goods that weren’t in stock. He had paid cash for his stock so far this year, but he wasn’t going to be able to pay cash for his next orders. Customers owed him more, but he felt more comfortable about that than he had the year before. Those had almost all paid him up, and he had an arrangement with Mike Green to get his money out of what Green owed the freedmen for their cotton.

Then, he thought of Deb. The AMA paid her; before the marriage, she had bought things at his store and paid for her own wedding dress. She must have been paid in the months since, and he couldn’t think of anything but eggs she bought.

“Darling,” he asked her, “have you saved anything from your pay?”

“Do you need it?”

“It would help get the next set of orders on a cash basis.”

“Here,” she said, handing over what she had. “I could get more the beginning of next month.” Sam kept telling her that the store was doing fine. Now, he seemed to need her own slender earnings to finance it. And she was going to have no earnings and greater expenses next year.

Sam counted the money out. He had known that Deb and the other teachers were underpaid. This confirmed it. Well, the suppliers gave very different terms for credit. He would find the highest-interest suppliers and pay them cash for another month. It would mean a check on Baldwin State Bank from Montgomery rather than Chemical Bank from New York, but they would take it from him.

The teachers had decided to take seven weeks off for picking season and another week off for Christmas. That left an uncomfortably short period of classes in between, but the alternative was to take an indecently long break.

They thought that their solution might work for all the schools in the cotton area, or – at least –all those in the state. Marjorie had sent their suggestion to AMA state headquarters. She had long ago given up on getting a reply.

A reply did come, though. She was summoned to a meeting to discuss the annual calendar for every AMA school in the state. She could bring another teacher with her. Since it was before – if shortly before – picking season, she didn’t see how the school could spare two teachers. She worried how they would cope with Deborah permanently gone. It’s one thing to nurse a child in back of the room while class was in session; it was an entirely different thing to nurse one while teaching the class.

“‘I can’t see why the harvest season for cotton should be so long,” Reverend Johnson said. He was on the national board and came from somewhere in the northwest by his accent. He sounded a lot like the general.

“That is because, Reverend, the board decided to hold this meeting before picking season. They call it ‘picking season, not harvest, and for a good reason. Cotton grows on bushes or young trees. They don’t harvest the bush; they pick the cotton from the plant. The cotton buds at different times, and they go through pick the first open buds, go back through, and pick the buds which open second, and go through again and pick the last buds to open. They work very hard during picking season – from dawn to dark with a brief break at noon to eat when the moon is dark and longer near to the full moon. They couldn’t possibly pick the cotton in a shorter time. Anybody who is able to pick works, the children not much less than the adults. If a child is too young to pick cotton, he is too young to walk to school by himself.

“We keep hearing that these freedmen are eager for education.”

“They are eager. Many are so eager that the walk miles to evening class after a day of hoeing weeds. They are not eager enough to starve, however.”

“Isn’t that being quite dramatic?” Rev. Johnson asked. “Nobody is talking about them starving.”

“Well, what is the alternative to raising a cash crop? The bureau passes out rations only to new arrivals. Few of them raise pigs or chickens; very few have milk cows. Most of them around our area raise corn as well as cotton, but they need to purchase things. Then too, if fewer raised cotton, the mills of England and New England would be closed again.”