Chapter 1: The Journey

In early Spring of the year of Our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Thirty-Nine, I, Robert James MacKenzie, was a strapping lad of sixteen, not fully grown at six feet in height and with the red-topped, raw-boned strength of my ancestors. My father, Robert Bruce MacKenzie, my sister, Elizabeth, who was thirteen, and I lived at Ironwood. My mother, may God rest her soul, departed for her eternal reward in 1827.

Ironwood lay on the flat plains in western South Carolina abutting the Savannah River. It was primarily a cotton and tobacco plantation, but we grew a variety of crops including corn, wheat, barley, and other grains. We had a large garden for our vegetables, an orchard of fruit and nut trees, and cattle, sheep, swine, and poultry for meat and by-products. More than a simple farm, Ironwood was a community producing nearly everything we needed. Houses were built, clothes made, plows mended, horses shod. Unlike some plantations whose owners were less enterprising than my father and grandfather, Ironwood had its own blacksmith shop, tannery and harness shop, and an apothecary. Our midwives assisted in the many births. We needed little that the plantation didn't produce except salt and iron goods.

Farming our vast lands and multiple crops required countless hard days of toil in the fields. All our workers, in truth, all the denizens of Ironwood except my family, were Negro slaves. My grandfather acquired the first slaves when he founded Ironwood over fifty years before. Since then, our slaveholdings had grown as the plantation grew. Many of our slaves were born and raised at Ironwood. Others were acquired from the slave markets in Savannah or other plantations.

Grandfather and Father both treated our slaves far differently than was typical. "I've followed my own father's footsteps, Robert," Father once told me. "I treat my slaves better and give them more than other slave owners. They work harder for the better life." At Ironwood, the whip was rarely used. Rather, uncooperative or unproductive slaves were sold.

Ironwood was the only plantation I knew of where a slave, rather than a hired white-man, was the overseer, as the manager was called. Our overseer was named Jonah. Approximately Father's age, Jonah lived in the largest of the slave houses with his wife, Sarah, who managed the household since Mother died, his two sons, Samuel and David, and his daughter, Constance Anne, who was named after Mother.

We were at dinner one night, seated, as always, with Father at the head, Elizabeth on his left, and I opposite him. Father looked at me and said, "Robert, Mr. Whitfield died and his funeral is day after tomorrow at Whitlands. We'll need to leave in the morning. You'll drive the buckboard and I'll ride alongside."

"Why can't I go?" Elizabeth asked.

"We'll be bringing back slaves," Father replied.

I responded, "I'll be ready, Father." From the corner of my eye, I saw Sarah watching me intently and I wondered why.

Before sunrise the next morning, Sarah awakened me. I dressed in my traveling suit, packed my best clothes to wear at the funeral, and trotted downstairs to eat another of our cook's delicious breakfasts of eggs, ham, fresh made bread, and strong tea. Immediately upon finishing, we gathered our greatcoats to ward off the cold dankness of the early morn, checked and holstered our weapons, and joined Jonah in front of the Great House where he had readied our horses.

I did not like driving the buckboard. The easy gait of horseback was less tiring on my backside than the buckboard's bounce and our riding horses set a quicker pace than the buckboard's paired draft horses. Father hadn't asked my opinion and I, therefore, didn't give one.

With Father on Liberty, his red steed, leading the way, we rode down Ironwood's main road, past the gardens and the fruit tree orchards to the main gate where we joined the common road leading to Whitlands. Father paid me no mind. He was surveying his fields as we rode.

The sun had been up an hour or so when Father raised his hand to indicate we should stop. I set the brake and tied the reins around it before stepping down to stretch my legs and ease my already aching bones. We stripped off our greatcoats and tossed them in back of the buckboard before drinking a bit of water from the canteen Sarah packed for us. The day threatened inclement weather, but as yet the rains of March weren't upon us.

When he was ready for us to begin again, Father surprised me by tying Liberty to the buckboard.

"I'll ride with you, Robert," he said. "Why don't I drive for awhile?

"If you wish," I replied.

I climbed aboard, sitting on the left in the driver's seat as Father loosened the reins, released the brake, and popped the reins on the team's rumps to start us again.

There was only one reason Father would ride with me, for he hated the buckboard as much as I did. He had something he wanted to say. I was silent. He would tell me in his own good time. We passed the main gate to Riverwood, the plantation that adjoined ours, before he began.

"Robert, we need to talk about women and children and life," he said seriously.

Certainly, I was surprised. I knew about reproduction of animals as any farm boy my age would, although I had not yet experienced my own first mating despite a rapidly increasing eagerness to do so.

"Edward Whitfield was a good farmer. Whitlands is a prime property. I want it, and Edward wanted me to have it upon his demise."

I said nothing. Father looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.

"I do appreciate a respectful silence, Son," he said. "But you're welcome to join in the conversation. You will be a man in the blink of an eye."

"Are you going to buy Whitlands?" I asked.

"No, Robert. I have arranged for you to marry Jane Marie."

I choked and gasped, which made him guffaw so loudly he scared birds from the trees. He slapped me on the back.

"I wish you could see your face," he said.

I didn't want to see my face. I'm sure it was red and mottled as it always is when I'm flustered. "Father, I don't want to marry her," I said when I had recovered my tongue.

"Why not? She's a good looking lass."

"It's not that. She's a... a shrew."

"Edward preferred to think of her as high-spirited. She will be a challenge for you."

"Challenge? She'll be the death of me," I said.

"Hardly. She's certainly no worse than her mother."

"Who drove Mr. Whitfield to an early grave," I said, hoping for any point in my favor to worm my way from under this life sentence he had pronounced on me.

"Do you think?" Father asked. I could tell by his tone he was wise to my gambit.

"Of course," I bluffed. "Even I could see the meanness of her spirit."

Father fixed his cool, calm eyes on me.

"Every man has a weakness, Robert. That weakness can be anything. Most often, it's cards or whiskey or women's sweet cunts. Edward's weakness was his relationship with Mary Elizabeth, his own wife. Do you remember September, my mare?"

"Yes, Father," I replied. September was his favorite horse before Liberty. What she had to do with this discussion, I had no idea.

"Do you remember sitting on the fence watching me train her? You might not, you were only eight at the time."

"No, I remember. September was the first horse I watched you break."

"Were you there the day we roped her legs and whipped her?"

"Yes, I was," I answered.

"That day made her docile, more malleable and eager to please. I didn't bring the whip harshly to her at first. I tried softer techniques, but, in the end, the whip brought her to heel."

"Are you suggesting a woman should be treated that way?"

"I'm saying a harsh and demanding hand with a liberal dose of punishment can soften a woman's demeanor, but it should be applied only if all else fails."

"Even Mrs. Whitfield?"

"I think she would greatly benefit from it."

"But we don't whip our slaves," I said.

"No, we don't, and I hope we never will."

"Then why would a man whip a white woman who is his wife?"

He laughed. "Because you can't sell them," he said. He popped the reins and called to the team. They quickened their pace.

I was sorely confused. Here I was still a virgin with bright shining ideas of marriage and baser ideas of the hard coupling of bodies I only knew from hints in books or whispers with my friends, and yet, I was quickly to be a married man shackled to a shrew of a wife with her painful harping blighting my own bleak future.

And whipping? I knew slaves were whipped when their master thought it was needed. At Father's insistence, I had witnessed that harsh punishment of two unfortunate souls at Riverwood, whose owner felt the whip was the only way to bring compliance with his wishes. But a woman? My wife?

Suddenly, a question popped into mind. "Did you whip Mother?" I blurted out.

He looked sharply at me and flicked the reins again.

I hardly remembered my mother, who died giving birth to Elizabeth when I was three. What I do remember was a soft, warm, smiling women who sang to me at night and talked to me in hushed, loving tones, whose eyes sparkled with tender mischief when we played a game. I sometimes stood before her portrait hanging above the fireplace in the parlor and stared, letting her countenance renew my dim memories. I wondered what she was like in flesh and blood, and if my recollections of her arms around me when I was small were as they truly were or figments of my fertile imagination.

I had never thought of her as a woman, only a mother. Father's comments to me that day thrust her into a different light.

Father kept his face from me, but I saw him brush a tear from his cheek. He slowed the rig to a stop, set the brake, and stepped down. I watched him walk away, pretending to check the harness while bringing his handkerchief to his eyes.

Turning to me, he said, "I'll ride for awhile." He untied Liberty's reins from the buckboard, mounted, and kicked the big horse ahead at a gallop. I slid behind the buckboard's reins, released the brake, and followed after him.

What was my mother like?

I had met other women and I knew what they were like. My father's mother was tall and thin, with a perpetually sour face as if lemons were her only sustenance. Except at dinner, I don't remember ever seeing her without a prayer book in her hand or a shawl draped over her bony shoulders. Mrs. Whitfield was a shrew, carping and biting. Mrs. Townsend, of the Savannah Townsends and wife of Father's solicitor, was plump as a berry and bland as oatmeal with nary a thought of her own.

I liked to think Mother was like Elizabeth, my sister, or, I should say, Elizabeth was like Mother. Elizabeth was bright and shiny with eyes that either glowed with happiness or batted petulantly when she wanted her way. Elizabeth was a sprite, a bundle of sweet smelling joy dancing through Ironwood and our lives. Yes, Mother must have been that way. Father's reaction was too strong for anything else.

My thoughts turned to Jane Marie Whitfield, my bride-to-be if Father carried through with his awful plan. Jane Marie was striking with black hair down to her waist and white porcelain skin. Lately, she kept her cute nose high in the air, to everyone's misfortune. And she did have beautiful blue eyes. I knew those eyes when she flirted with me, and Jane Marie had played the coquette more than once. But more often lately I had seen those eyes angry and spiteful. To see her then was like looking in the open gates of Hell. That view of her, and living with it forever, disheartened me.

As to Jane Marie's body, I had some idea since the white women in our region often dressed in flowing gowns, leaving their shoulders bare, with corsets and stays to narrow their waists and raise their bosoms in, for me at least, an unfulfilled promise of treasures to come. I must admit I found the long curve of Jane Marie's neck, the perfect symmetry of her collarbones, and the soft flesh flowing to what appeared to be well-formed breasts quite appealing. However, the gowns they wore and the boots they donned to enhance their shapely feet and the pains with which they applied their makeup, all to attract the attention of men, seemed to be folly, for when we were attracted, they drove us off, huffing that our attentions were unwanted.

The slaves in the fields wore less armament, dressing simply in loose, flowing dresses that moved in the wind as they worked. That wind was an ally to man, sometimes blowing their dresses against their bodies revealing valleys and hills to titillate our thoughts.

I had seen only one woman naked. It was a queer incident of fate lasting only a few moments, but those moments were stamped in my brain as indelibly as the foundry's name was stamped on a plow.

We had a slave named Pearly Bright. She was a house slave, which meant she worked in the house as a maid or cook or laundress rather than in the fields. Her residence, unlike all the other slaves, was adjunct to the Great House itself, allowing her entrance without enduring the weather.

Late one night less than a year ago, I awoke with a deep hunger for the gooseberry pie I knew Cook had left in the kitchen. I quietly slipped out of my bed and padded downstairs in my stocking feet to find the sweetness to dispatch my ache. The moon was bright that night, filtering through the shade trees on the kitchen side of the house.

Before I could light a kitchen candle, I heard a giggle and the patter of feet. I froze, hidden, I thought, in the darkness of the room. In a moment, a female form floated out of the hall and crossed the kitchen toward the door leading to Pearly Bright's quarters. The moonlight reflected from her shiny black skin for she was in all her naked glory. How I wished for the brightness of the sun or a candelabra, at least, to illuminate what I could see-the roundness of her breasts with the long hard tissue jutting from it, the curve of her backside and her legs-and reveal what I couldn't see at all but desperately wanted to see-the hidden secrets of her sex.

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob to her quarters and half-turned to look at me. The brightness of her teeth flashed like a lighthouse beacon with the whites of her eyes reflective counterpoints.

"You needs to ask yo' Pappy for a pretty little girl like me, Master Robert," she said in a tone I'd never heard but knew instinctively represented raw carnality.

She opened the door and was gone, leaving me shaking and unbelieving of what had transpired. I was struck dumb, not recovering my senses until I found myself in my own room with a gooseberry pie in one hand and a painfully stiff manhood in the other. I dispatched the latter before sinking back in my feather bed to eat the former and dream of Pearly Bright.

I knew then Pearly Bright wasn't walking naked through the Great House at Ironwood for no reason. That hall led to Father's bedroom. I didn't ask him about it because of my own embarrassment. Thereafter, I watched him and Pearly Bright. During the day, he treated her no differently than he treated the other slaves, and she was a good servant who acted like she deserved no special preferences.

But I suddenly could see what I suspect had been there all along but invisible to me. I saw the tiny downturn of her head accompanied by those big black eyes staring up at him through her lashes, or the tilt of her body as she served by bowing from the waist to offer to him a glance at her breasts, or other signals of her sexuality, and her eagerness to share it with him.

I realized, too, I had seen those signals other times from her to him, and from other women to other men. I had even seen such signs from Jane Marie Whitfield to me on more than one occasion, but I had been too naive to understand them.

I certainly did wish my Father would provide me with a pretty girl like Pearly Bright to patter to my bed and do with me what I could only imagine, but I did not ask. To do so would have been a violation of the unspoken social contract I felt with him.

I reconsidered Jane Marie and her signals, wondering if they were intentional and for me, or intentional but I was only a surrogate for someone else whether named or unnamed, or unintentional and part of nature's plan her body unthinkingly performed as she grew. Of course, now that I was aware of the import of those subtle signs, I was determined to act upon them.

I saw Jane Marie on a regular basis as our families visited back and forth at one plantation or the other. The next time she passed those signs, I responded, receiving a screech, a slap, and a tongue lashing for my effort, which led me to believe she was a tease. Never once did I consider I might have read the signs incorrectly for I had studied Pearly Bright's movements with the intensity a scientist studies a bug, and felt assured in my conclusions.

We visited the Whitfields again, and again Jane Marie passed me the signs. I did not respond for I knew what to expect. I was slapped anyway and labeled a cad for ignoring her.

Certainly, no man can happily suffer this kind of treatment and I did not look forward to Jane Marie's presence in my life.

I saw Father standing beside Liberty on the edge of the roadway. The sun was high over us now and I suddenly realized my belly was empty. I stopped beside him. As I watered the horses, he opened the traveling basket Cook had prepared and set a table on the buckboard's wide bed. We ate standing up to allow the part of us that most suffered the journey's ride an opportunity to rest.

When our repast was complete, he tied Liberty to the rig and took its reins to drive. I sat silently beside him and waited for him to speak.

"I loved your Mother, God rest her soul. I loved her with all my heart."

The rattle of the buckboard, the chatter of the harness, and the rhythmical plodding of the horses' hooves did not fill the void his silence left. I was contemplating if my newly received permission to enter the conversation at will entitled me to speak here, when Father spoke again.

"I have never told you our story, have I?"

"No, sir."

"Weddings are arranged, Robert, as I have arranged for you to marry Jane Marie. It isn't so with all people. Some of the lower classes wed whoever will have them or whoever first becomes round with their child, but arranged marriages are our way. Your mother and I were an arranged marriage, as were our parents before us and their parents before them. There is too much at risk for it to be left to chance. Ownership of land and businesses pass by marriage. Heritage and family traditions and accumulated wealth all pass by marriage. Do you understand?"

Chapter 2 »