Rhett Butler's People

  Isaiah Watling was the giver of all good things, as well as the source of all punishment.

  Broughton’s whipping post was a blunt black cypress stub five feet six inches high and eighteen inches in diameter. An iron ring was placed where a man’s wrists might be fastened.

  Will had asked the young Master to intercede, and Rhett confronted the overseer. “Watling, I am giving you an order!”

  Isaiah Watling studied the boy as if he were something curious washed in on the tide. “Young Butler, when you defied Master Butler to stay, I asked him who was Master when he was off in town. Master Butler said I was to follow his orders, that you weren’t to give no orders. Now, young Butler, the niggers is here to see justice done and to learn respect. Will’s insolence bought him two hundred.”

  “It’ll kill Will. Damn it, Watling, it’s murder.”

  Isaiah Watling cocked his head as if listening for something faint and far away. “The nigger’s your father’s property. Very few of us, young Butler, get to be our own men.”

  His son Shad’s bullwhip coiled lazily before he popped a trumpet-vine blossom off the well house. The negroes stood silently, men to the fore, women and children behind. Tiny children clung to their mothers’ shifts.

  When Isaiah Watling led Will out of the meat house, the trunk master blinked in the brightness. When the overseer tied Will’s wrists, Will didn’t resist.

  Rhett Butler had not yet come into his adult courage and could not watch his friend be killed. When Watling bared Will’s back, Mistletoe fainted and Rhett bolted for the river, deaf to the whip crack and Will’s grunts, which became screams.

  Rhett jumped into his skiff, loosed the mooring line, and let the river take him away. A rainsquall descended and he got soaked through. His boat went where the current willed. Rain drummed in the boy’s ears and he blinked rain from his eyelids.

  Rhett Butler swore that when he was a man, he would never be helpless again.

  Rain fell on the boy. Rain fell harder. Rhett couldn’t see the bow of his boat. Water lapped at its thwarts.

  His sail exploded into tatters. He lost an oar. When a drifting cypress trunk threatened to roll the skiff, he broke his other oar fending it off. He inspected the stub as if, had he the wit, he might yet row with it. He bailed until his arms ached. When he shouted to ease the pressure in his ears, the wind snatched his shout away.

  The river broached the trunks and flooded rice fields, and sometimes Rhett’s skiff was in the channel and sometimes scudding above what had been acres of Carolina’s finest golden rice.

  Suddenly, as if he’d been washed into a different universe, the wind and rain stopped. In the calm, Rhett’s skiff drifted gently through brightness at the tip of a whirling funnel that rose up, up into a heaven, which was so dark blue, Rhett imagined he saw stars. He had heard about the hurricano’s eye. He never thought he’d see one.

  The current bumped the waterlogged skiff against a jumbled shoreline of uprooted, broken trees. Rhett tied his skiff to a branch before clambering inland toward the sound of hammering.

  As a young man, Thomas Bonneau had been freed by the master who had fathered him. Thomas Bonneau’s white father deeded his son five acres of land on a low rise beside the river, where Thomas built a modest tabby house, whose thick, homely walls had resisted previous hurricanoes. Bonneau and a boy about Rhett’s age were on the roof, nailing shingles.

  “Look, Papa, yon’s a white boy,” the boy, Tunis, said.

  The two slid to the ground and Thomas greeted the half-drowned Rhett. “Come with us now, Young Master. These walls has sustained us thus far. God grant they sustain us a mite longer.”

  Inside his one-room house, Thomas Bonneau’s wife, Pearl, and two younger children were piling trunks, fish traps, a chopping block, and chicken coops onto a rickety mound to clamber onto the ceiling joists.

  “It ain’t hurricano’s rain nor wind kills you,” Bonneau explained as he took his joist. “Ol’ hurricano raises up a mighty tide what drowns you.”

  Tunis passed the youngest children to his father, who set them next to him under his strong arm. When they all were astride a joist, Bonneau spoke in a singsong: “And God said to Noah, ‘The peoples is corrupt and so I will raise a mighty flood. But you and your family gonna swim above the flood. …’” Whatever more he said was snatched away by the wind.

  When it came, the storm surge crashed against the little tabby house and forced the door. Water foamed beneath Rhett’s dangling feet and the joist he straddled vibrated between his thighs. Thomas Bonneau leaned his head back and shut his eyes and the cords of his neck were taut with praising God.

  That was the worst of it.

  As all storms must, this storm ended, the waters receded, and as ever after such storms, the sun illuminated a brilliant new world.

  Thomas Bonneau said, “If I ain’t mistook, that’s a macaw in yon tree.” A bedraggled blue-and-yellow bird clung weakly to a leafless branch. “Lord knows where he been blowed from.”

  They dragged the muddy trunks and broken fish traps outside and Pearl Bonneau stretched a line to dry their clothes. Pearl wore her wet petticoat while her dress dried; the others went naked.

  Tunis and Rhett collected storm-beached fish while Thomas Bonneau started a fire with the dry inner bark of a cedar tree.

  When they were seated around the fire, turning fish on sticks, Thomas Bonneau offered thanks to God for sparing his family and the Young Master.

  “I’m not the Young Master,” the white boy said. “I’m Rhett.”

  Ten days later, when Rhett returned to Broughton, Will had been buried in the slave cemetery and Mistletoe had been sold South. Broughton Plantation was miles of drowned, stinking rice plants.

  Langston Butler was personally supervising a gang repairing breaks in the main trunk while Watling’s gang restored the interior trunks. Men trundled wheel-barrels of fill; women and children emptied pails and buckets in the breaches.

  Rhett’s father’s boots were filthy and he hadn’t shaved in days. His soft hands were cracked and his fingernails were broken. Langston Butler greeted his son, “We accounted you dead. Your mother is grieving.”

  “My mother has a tender heart, sir.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “The free colored Thomas Bonneau saved me from the hurricano. I have been helping his family restore their homestead.”

  “Your duty was with your people.”

  Rhett said nothing.

  His father ran his forearm across his sweaty forehead. “The crop is lost,” he said distantly. “A year’s work destroyed. Wade Hampton asked me to run for Governor, but now, of course…” Langston Butler looked into his son’s unforgiving eyes. “Sir, have you learned anything from the trunk master’s fate?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Humility? Obedience? A proper deference to authority?”

  “I have often heard you say, Father, that knowledge is power. I accept that conclusion.”

  Despite his obligations at Broughton, that same week Langston Butler took his son to Charleston to begin acquiring the education that distinguishes a Low Country gentleman.

  Cathecarte Puryear was Charleston’s most visible intellectual, and the city took pride in him, as they might in any curiosity—a two-headed calf or a talking duck. In Cathecarte’s student years, he’d boarded beside Edgar Poe at the University of Virginia, and, as everyone knows, poetry is contagious.

  Cathecarte Puryear’s contentious essays in the Southern Literary Messenger had twice produced challenges, which he had accepted, but on both occasions, after declaiming his belief that affairs of honor were “designed by the mentally unfit, for the mentally unfit,” Cathecarte discharged his pistol into the air. He was never challenged again. There is no honor—and may be dishonor—calling out a man who will not return fire.

  Cathecarte was president of the St. Cecilia Society, which sponsored uplifting concerts and Charleston’s most popular balls. Most of Charleston’
s intellectuals were clergymen or, like the Unionist Louis Petigru, lawyers by profession, but thanks to his deceased wife’s considerable fortune, Cathecarte Puryear never had to earn his bread. He tutored a few well-bred young gentlemen because, as Cathecarte often explained, “noblesse oblige.”

  Eleanor Baldwin Puryear (d. 1836) was Cathecarte’s sole poetic subject. Philistines said exchanging Eleanor’s handsome dowry for literary immortality was a fool’s bargain.

  Aweary, preoccupied Langston Butler assessed his son for the prospective tutor: “My eldest son is intelligent but defiant. The boy disregards my orders and flouts those distinctions of rank and race that undergird our society. Though Rhett reads, writes, and does sums, gentlemen would not recognize my son as one of them.”

  Cathecarte beamed encouragement. “Every young man’s mind is a ‘tabula rasa,’ sir. We may impress upon that blank slate whatever we desire.”

  Langston smiled wearily. “We shall see, shan’t we?”

  After Langston left, the tutor said, “Sit down, young man. Do sit down. You prowl like a caged beast.”

  In rapid succession, Cathecarte asked: “Aristotle taught which famous general, young man? Please decline amare. Which British king succeeded Charles the First? Explain the doctrine of separation of powers. Recite Mr. Poe’s ‘The Raven,’ Mr. Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci.’”

  After the silence became oppressive, Cathecarte smiled. “Young man, apparently I know many things which you do not. Just what do you know?”

  Rhett leaned forward. “I know why trunk gates are made of cypress. Everybody says the mother alligator eats her own babies, but she doesn’t; she totes ’em in her mouth. Conjure men take four different cures from the jimsonweed. Muskrat dens always have one entrance below the water.”

  Cathecarte Puryear blinked. “You are a natural philosopher?”

  The boy dismissed that possibility. “No, sir. I’m a renegade.”

  After that interview with Cathecarte Puryear, Rhett Butler climbed steep stairs into the heat of an angular room whose window overlooked Charleston harbor.

  Dirty clothes were strewn on one unmade bed and highly polished riding boots rested on the pillow of the other.

  Rhett unpacked his carpetbag, tossed the boots on the floor, and sat by the window, watching the harbor. So many ships. What a vast place the world was. He wondered if he would ever succeed at anything.

  A half hour later, his roommate came clattering up the stairs. He was a slight lad, whose long fingers nervously flicked pale hair off his forehead. He lifted his boots and examined them suspiciously. “You’re Butler, I suppose,” he said.

  “And you are?”

  The lad drew himself up. “I am Andrew Ravanel. What do you make of that?”

  “I don’t make anything of that. Should I?”

  “Well, I guess you’d better!”

  When Andrew cocked his fists, Rhett hit him in the stomach. The other boy slumped onto his bed, trying to catch his breath. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he gasped, “You had no right. …”

  “You were going to hit me.”

  “Well,” Andrew Ravanel’s smile was innocent as an angel’s. “Well, maybe I would. But maybe I wouldn’t have.”

  In the next few months, Rhett understood how lonely he had been.

  Andrew Ravanel was a city boy; Rhett had never lived where gaslights flickered. Rhett looked at the practical side of things; Andrew was a dreamer. Andrew was shocked by Rhett’s indifference to rank: “Rhett, you don’t thank a servant for serving you; serving you is his reason for being.”

  Rhett excelled at mathematics and Andrew liked to show his friend off by asking Rhett to add complex figures in his head. Rhett didn’t know how he could do it; he just could.

  Andrew was an indifferent scholar so Rhett tutored him.

  Cathecarte’s other pupils were Henry Kershaw, a hulking seventeen-year-old who spent his evenings on the town; Cathecarte’s own son, Edgar Allan, who was Henry Kershaw’s acolyte; and John Haynes, heir to the Haynes Shipping Company. John’s father, Congress Haynes, approved Cathecarte Puryear’s pedagogy but not his good sense. Consequently, Congress’s son lived at home.

  As night cooled the great port city, Rhett and Andrew would perch in their dormer window, discussing duty, honor, and love—those great questions every boy puzzles over.

  Rhett didn’t understand the bleak moods that sometimes overwhelmed Andrew. Although Andrew was almost recklessly brave, trifles could prostrate him.

  “But Cathecarte condescends to everybody,” Rhett explained patiently. “That’s what he does. You must not pay him any mind.”

  Rhett could neither reason nor jolly Andrew out of his despair, but since it seemed to help, Rhett sat quietly with Andrew through the darkest hours.

  Though Cathecarte Puryear railed against “planter Philistines,” he never questioned Charleston’s tradition that young gentlemen should raise hell until they were safely married. Andrew’s father, Colonel Jack Ravanel, acquainted Rhett with spirits and escorted the boy on his fifteenth birthday to Miss Polly’s brothel.

  When Rhett came downstairs, Old Jack grinned. “Well, young sir. What do you think about love?”

  “Love? Is that what it’s called?”

  After three years studying with Cathecarte Puryear, Rhett could do calculus, read Latin (with a dictionary), knew the names of every English monarch since Alfred, the fancies of Charleston’s prettiest whores, and that a straight never, never beats a flush.

  In the same year Texas annexation was debated in the United States Senate, Cathecarte Puryear published his notorious letter. Why Cathecarte was impelled to advance his opinions wasn’t clear. Some thought he envied poet Henry Timrod’s growing fame; others said it was the rejection of Cathecarte’s poems by the selfsame Charleston Mercury that published his scurrilous letter (bracketed with its editor’s disclaimers).

  “Nullification,” Cathecarte Puryear wrote, “is stupendous folly; and nullification’s adherents are reckless fools. Can any sane man believe the Federal government will permit a cabal of Carolina ‘gentlemen’ to determine which Federal laws they might choose to obey and which they will not? Some of these gentlemen are whispering the dread word ‘secession.’ I trust that when Mr. Langston Butler and his friends finally commit suicide, they will do so privately, without involving the rest of us in their folly.”

  Although Rhett’s father couldn’t challenge Cathecarte Puryear—“the villain has made a mockery of the code of honor”—Langston could and did remove his son from Puryear’s influence.

  As their carriage rolled down King Street, Langston told Rhett, “Senator Wade Hampton has engaged a tutor for his children. Henceforth, Hampton’s tutor will instruct you too.” He examined his son skeptically. “I pray you are not already infected by Puryear’s treasonous beliefs.”

  Rhett studied his father’s sour, angry face and thought, He wants me to be the man he is. Rhett jumped out of the carriage, darted behind a brewer’s dray, and disappeared down the street.

  Thomas Bonneau laid down the net he’d been mending. “What you doin’ here, young man?” Rhett’s smile was tentative. “I had hoped I might be welcome.”

  “Well, you ain’t. You’s trouble.”

  Glasses dangling from one hand, Tunis came outdoors. He held The Seaman’s Friend in the other.

  Desperately, Rhett pronounced, “That book has ketch rigging wrong.”

  Tunis rolled his eyes. “Daddy, I b’lieve young Master Butler sayin’ he a sailor. You reckon?”

  Rhett wore a short blue jacket over a broadcloth shirt. His trousers were so tight, he dared not touch his toes.

  The Bonneaus were barefoot and Tunis’s dirty canvas trousers were belted with a rope.

  Quietly, Rhett said, “I’ve nowhere else to go.”

  Tunis examined Rhett for a long time before he laughed, “Eight bushel of oysters that book cost me and Young Master here says it’s mistook.”

  Thom
as Bonneau’s cheeks filled and expelled a puff of air. “I expect I gonna regret this. Sit yourself down and I’ll show you how to mend a net.”

  The Bonneaus raked oyster banks below Morris Island and fished off Sullivan’s Island. Rhett rose with them hours before dawn, worked with them, laughed with them, and one memorable Sunday when Thomas, his wife, and the younger children were at church, Rhett and Tunis sailed Thomas Bonneau’s skiff down the coast all the way to Beaufort.

  Young Rhett Butler had never imagined he could be so happy.

  Every negro on the Ashley River knew about Thomas Bonneau’s white “son,” but it was thirteen weeks before Langston Butler discovered Rhett’s whereabouts and Broughton’s launch tied up at the Bonneaus’ rickety dock.

  Langston Butler towered over Thomas Bonneau. “Many legislators wish to exile Carolina’s free coloreds or return them to slavery. That is my view, as well. Should you interfere with my family again, I vow that you, your wife, and your children will toil under Mr. Watling’s lash.”

  On the long pull upstream to Broughton, Langston Butler didn’t speak to his son, and when they landed, he turned Rhett over to Isaiah Watling. “He’s a rice hand like any other. If he runs or disobeys, introduce him to the bullwhip.”

  Watling assigned Rhett a cabin in the negro quarters. Its straw pallet danced with fleas.

  The stretch flow had been drained two weeks previously and the rice was thriving. His first morning in the fields, the mosquitoes and gnats were so thick, Rhett swallowed mouthfuls. Twenty minutes after sunrise, the overheated air sucked his breath away.

  Thigh-deep in mud, he hoed as far as his arms could reach before, extracting one leg at a time, he shifted to a new stance.