Massa Lea returned during the midafternoon, accompanied by another white man on horseback, and from their respective kitchen and blacksmith shop observation posts, both Miss Malizy and Tom saw with surprise that the pair didn’t dismount and enter the big house to freshen up and share a drink, as was always previously done with any guests. Instead, the horses were kept trotting on down the back road toward the gamecock area. Not half an hour later, Tom and Miss Malizy saw the visitor come back riding rapidly alone, holding under one arm a frightened, clucking gamehen, and Tom being outside was able to catch a fairly close glimpse of the man’s furious expression as he rode by.
It was at that night’s usual slave-row gathering when Lewis told what actually had happened. “When I heared de hosses comin’,” he said, “I jes’ made sho’ massa seed me workin’ fo’ I made myself scarce, over behin’ some bushes where I knowed I could see an’ hear.
“Well, after some pretty hot bargainin’, dey come to a hunnud-dollar’greement fo’ dis gamehen settin’ on a clutch o’ eggs. An’ I seen de man count out de money, den massa count it again fo’ puttin’ it in his pocket. Right after den a misunderstandin’ commence’bout de man sayin’ de eggs under de hen went wid de deal. Well, massa commence to cussin’ like he crazy! He run, grab up de hen an’ wid his foot stomped an’ squashed dat nest o’ eggs into one mess! Dem two was nigh fightin’ when all o’ a sudden de odder man snatched de hen an’ jumped on his hoss, yellin’ he’d bus’ massa’s head if he wasn’t so damn ol’!”
The uneasiness of the slave-row family deepened with each passing day, and nights were spent in fitful sleep resultant from worry of whatever might be the next frightful development. Across that 1855 summer and into the fall, with every angry outburst from the massa, with his every departure or arrival, the rest of the family’s eyes involuntarily would turn to the twenty-two-year-old blacksmith Tom, as if appealing for his direction, but Tom offered none. By the crisp November, when there had been a fine harvest from the massa’s roughly sixty-five acres in cotton and tobacco, which they knew he had been able to sell for a good price, one Saturday dusk Matilda watched from her cabin window until she saw Tom’s last blacksmithing customer leave, and she hurried out there, her expression telling him from long experience that something special was on her mind.
“Yas’m, Mammy?” he asked, starting to bank the fire in his forge.
“I been thinkin’, Tom. All six you boys done growed up to be mens now. You ain’t my oldes’, but I’se yo’ mammy an’ knows you’s got de levelest head,” Matilda said. “Plus dat, you’s de blacksmith an’ dey’s fiel’ han’s. So look like you’s got to be de main man o’ dis fam’ly since yo’ daddy gone ’bout eight months now—” Matilda hesitated, then added loyally, “leas’ ways, ’til he git back.”
Tom was frankly startled, for ever since his boyhood he had been his family’s most reserved member. Although he and his brothers had all been born and reared on Massa Lea’s plantation, he had never become very close with any of them, principally because he had been away for years as a blacksmithing apprentice, and since his return as a man, he was at the blacksmith shed, while the rest of his brothers were out in the fields. He had especially little contact anymore with Virgil, Ashford, and L’il George, for differing reasons. Virgil, now twenty-six, spent all his free time over on the adjoining plantation with his wife Lilly Sue and their recently born son, whom they had named Uriah. As for Ashford, twenty-five, he and Tom had always disliked and avoided each other, and Ashford had become more bitter at the world than ever since a girl he desperately wanted to marry had a massa who refused to let them jump the broom, calling Ashford an “uppity nigger.” And the twenty-four-year-old L’il George, now just plain fat, was also deep in courtship with an adjoining plantation’s cook, twice his age, which evoked wry family comments that he would woo anyone who would fill his stomach.
Matilda’s telling Tom that she saw him as the family leader startled him the more since it implied his becoming their intermediary with Massa Lea, with whom he intentionally had very little actual contact. From when the equipment had been bought to establish a blacksmith shop, the massa somehow had always seemed to respect Tom’s quiet reserve, along with his obvious competence at blacksmithing, which brought in an increasing flow of customers. They always paid the massa at the big house for whatever jobs Tom had done, and each Sunday the massa gave Tom two dollars for his week’s work.
Along with Tom’s ingrained reticence to talk very much with anyone was his equal tendency to ponder deeply on private thoughts. No one ever would have dreamed that for two years or more he had turned over and over again in his mind his father’s descriptions of exciting potentials that “up Nawth” offered to free black people, and Tom had weighed at great length proposing to the whole slave-row family that instead of waiting more endless years trying to buy their freedom, they should carefully plan and attempt a mass escape to the North. He had reluctantly abandoned the idea in realization that Gran’mammy Kizzy must be well into her sixties, and old Sister Sarah and Miss Malizy, who seemed the same as family, were in their seventies. He felt that those three would have been the quickest to leave, but he seriously doubted if any of them would survive the risks and rigors of such a desperate gamble.
More recently, Tom had privately deduced that the massa’s recent cockfight loss must have been even greater than he had fully revealed. Tom had closely watched Massa Lea becoming more strained, haggard, and aged with each passing day and each emptied bottle of whiskey. But Tom knew that the most disturbing evidence of something deeply amiss was that by now, Lewis declared, the massa had sold off at least half of his chickens, whose blood-lines represented at least half a century of careful breeding.
Then Christmas came, and ushered in the New Year of 1856, as a heavy pall seemed to hang over not only the slave row, but also the entire plantation. Then an early spring afternoon, another rider came up the entry lane. At first Miss Malizy appraised him as another chicken buyer. But then, seeing how differently the massa greeted this one, she grew apprehensive. Smiling and chitchatting with the man as he dismounted, the massa yelled to the nearby L’il George to feed, water, and stable the horse for the night, then graciously Massa Lea squired his visitor inside.
Before Miss Malizy even began serving the big-house supper, outside in slave row the family members were exchanging fearful questions. “Who dat man anyhow?”... “Ain’t never seen ’im befo’!”... “Massa ain’t acted like dat no time recent!”... “Well, what you reckon him here fo’?” They could hardly await the later arrival and report of Miss Malizy.
“Dey ain’t talked in my hearin’ nothin’ ’mount to nothin’,” she said. “Could be ’cause ol’ missis was right dere.” Then Miss Malizy went on emphatically, “But somehow or ’nother, I jes’ don’t nohow like dat odder man’s looks! Seed too many like ’im befo’, shifty-eyed an’ tryin’ to act like dey’s sump’n dey ain’t!”
A dozen pairs of slave-row eyes were monitoring the big-house windows from slave row when the obvious movements of a lamp told that Missis Lea had left the men in the living room and made her way upstairs to bed. The living room’s lamp was still burning when the last of the slave-row family gave up the vigil and went to bed, dreading the daybreak wake-up bell.
Matilda took her blacksmith son aside at her first chance, before breakfast. “Tom, las’ night wasn’t no chance to tell you private, and ain’t wanted to scare ever’body to death, but Malizy tol’ me she heared massa say he got to pay two mor’gage notes on dey house, an’ Malizy know dey ain’t hardly got a penny! I jes’ feels to my feets dat white man’s a nigger buyer!”
“Me too,” Tom said simply. He was silent for a moment. “Mammy, I been thinkin’, wid some different massa we jes’ might fin’ ourselves better off. Dat is, long’s we all stays together. Dat’s my big worry.”
As others began to come out of their cabins for the morning, Matilda hurried away rather than unduly alarm them by continuin
g the conversation.
After Missis Lea told Miss Malizy that she had a headache and wanted no breakfast, the massa and his visitor ate a hearty one, and then set out walking in the front yard, busily talking, their heads close together. Before very long, they sauntered alongside the big house, into the backyard, and finally over to where Tom was pumping his homemade bellows, sending yellowish sparks flying up from his forge in which two flat sheets of iron were approaching the heating necessary for their conversion into door hinges. For several minutes the two men stood closely watching Tom use long-handled tongs to remove the cherry-red iron sheets. Deftly folding their middles tightly about a shaping rod fixed into the hardy hole of his Fisher & Norris anvil, forming the channel for hinge pins, he then steel-punched three screw holes into each leaf. Taking up his short-shanked cold chisel and his favorite homemade four-pound hammer, he cut the leaves into the H-shaped hinges that a customer had ordered, working all the while as if unaware of his observers’ presence.
Massa Lea finally spoke. “He’s a pretty fair blacksmith, if I do say so myself,” he said casually.
The other man grunted affirmatively. Then he began moving around under the little blacksmithing shed, eyeing the many examples of Tom’s craftsmanship that hung from nails and pegs. Abruptly, the man addressed Tom directly. “How old are you, boy?”
“Gwine on twenty-three now, suh.”
“How many young’uns you got?”
“Ain’t got no wife yet, suh.”
“Big, strong boy like you don’t need no wife to have young’uns scattered everywhere.”
Tom said nothing, thinking how many white men’s young’uns were scattered in slave rows.
“You maybe one of these real religious niggers?”
Tom knew the man was trying to draw him out for a reason—almost certainly to size him up for purchase. He said pointedly, “I’magines Massa Lea done tol’ you we’s mostly a family here, my mammy, gran’mammy, an’ brothers an’ sisters an’ young’uns. We’s all been raised to believe in de Lawd an’ de Bible, suh.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Which one of y’all reads the Bible to the rest?”
Tom wasn’t about to tell this ominous stranger that both his gran’mammy and mammy could read. He said, “Reckon we all jes’ growed up hearin’ de Scriptures so much we knows ’em by heart, suh.”
Seeming to relax, the man returned to his original subject. “You think you could handle the blacksmithing on a much bigger place than this one?”
Tom felt ready to explode with the further confirmation that his sale was planned, but he had to know if the family also was to be included. Through his rage to be dangled in suspense like this, again he probed, “Well, suh, me an’ de res’ us here can raise crops an’ do pret’ near ever’thing a place need, I guess—”
Leaving the seething Tom as calmly as they had come, the massa and his guest had no more than headed out toward the fields when old Miss Malizy came hurrying from the kitchen. “What dem mens sayin’, Tom? Missis can’t even look me in de eye.”
Trying to control his voice, Tom said, “It’s gwine be some sellin’, Miss Malizy, maybe all us, but could be jes’ me.” Miss Malizy burst into tears, and Tom roughly shook her shoulders. “Miss Malizy, ain’t no need o’ cryin’! Jes’ like I tol’ mammy, I ’speck some new place see us better off dan here wid ’im.” But try as Tom would, he couldn’t ease the aged Miss Malizy’s grief.
Late that day the rest of them returned from the fields, Tom’s brothers wearing grim, stricken faces amid the women’s copious weeping and wailing. All of them were trying at once to tell how the massa and his visitor also had come out watching them as they worked, with the stranger then moving from one to another asking questions that left no doubt that they were being appraised for sale.
Until into the wee hours, there was no way that the three people within the big house could have missed hearing the rising pandemonium of grief and terror that arose among the seventeen people in the slave row, most of the men eventually reacting as hysterically as the women as they all became seized in the contagion of grabbing and hugging whomever was nearest, screaming that they would soon never see each other again. “Lawd, deliver us from dis eeeeevil!” shrieked Matilda in prayer.
Tom rang the next morning’s wake-up bell with a prescience of doom.
Aged Miss Malizy had passed by him, making her way to the big-house kitchen to prepare breakfast. Not ten minutes later she heavily returned to slave row, her black face taut with fresh shock and glistening with fresh tears: “Massa say don’t nobody go nowhere. He say when he finish breakfas’, he want ever’body ’sembled out here.... ”
Even sick, ancient Uncle Pompey was brought from his cabin in his chair as all of them assembled, terrified.
When Massa Lea and his visitor came around the side of the big house, Massa Lea’s lurching walk told seventeen pairs of eyes that he had been drinking even more heavily than usual, and when the pair of them stopped about four yards before the slave-row people, the massa’s voice was loud, angry, and slurred.
“Y’all niggers keep your noses always stuck in my business, so ain’t no news to you this place goin’ broke. Y’all too much burden for me to carry no more, so I’m doin’ some sellin’ to this gentleman here—”
At the chorus of shrieks and groans, the other man gestured roughly. “Shut up! All this carryin’ on since last night!” He glared up and down the line until they quieted down. “I ain’t no ordinary nigger trader. I represent one of the biggest, finest firms in the business. We got branch offices, and boats delivering niggers to order between Richmond, Charleston, Memphis, and New Orleans—”
Matilda cried out the first anguish in all their minds. “We gwine git sol’ together, Massa?”
“I told you shut up! You’ll find out! I ought not to have to say your massa here’s a true gentleman, same as that fine lady up in that house cryin’ her heart out about your black hides. They could get more to sell y’all apiece, plenty more!” He glanced at the quaking L’il Kizzy and Mary. “You two wenches ready right now to start breedin’ pickaninnies worth four hundred an’ up apiece.” His glance fell on Matilda. “Even if you gittin’ pretty old, you said you know how to cook. Down South a good cook’ll bring twelve to fifteen hundred nowadays.” He looked at Tom. “The way prices up now, reckon a prime stud blacksmith can easy fetch twenty-five hundred, much as three thousand from somebody wants you to take in customers like you doin’ here.” His eyes scanned across Tom’s five brothers between twenty and twenty-eight years of age. “And y’all field-hand bucks ought to be worth nine hundred to a thousan’ apiece—” The slave trader paused for effect. “But y’all one lucky bunch of niggers! Your missis insists y’all got to be sold together, and your massa’s goin’ along with that!”
“Thank you, Missis! Thank you, Jesus!” Gran’mammy Kizzy cried out. “Praise God!” shrieked Matilda.
“SHUT UP!” The slave trader angrily gestured. “I’ve done my best to convince ’em different, but I ain’t been able. And it just happen my firm’s got some customers with a tobacco plantation ain’t too far from here! Right near the North Carolina Railroad Company over in Alamance County. They’re wantin’ a family of niggers that’s been together an’ won’t give no trouble, no runaways or nothin’ like that, an’ with experience to handle everything on their place. Won’t need no auctionin’ you off. I’m told won’t need no chainin’ you up, nothin’ like that, less’n I have some trouble!” He surveyed them coldly. “All right, startin’ right now, y’all I’ve spoke to consider yourselves my niggers ’til I get you where you’re goin’. I’m givin’ you four days to put your stuff together. Saturday morning we’ll get you moving over to Alamance County in some wagons.”
Virgil was the first to find a stricken voice: “What ’bout my Lilly Sue an’ chile over at the Curry place? You gwine buy dem too, ain’t you, suh?”
Tom burst out, “An’ what ’bout our gran’mammy, Sister Sarah, Miss
Malizy, an’ Uncle Pompey? Dey’s fam’ly you ain’t mentioned—”
“Ain’t meant to! Can’t be buyin’ every wench some buck’s laid with, so he won’t feel lonely!” the slave trader exclaimed sarcastically. “As for these old wrecks here, they can’t hardly walk, let alone work, no customers gonna buy them! But Mr. Lea’s being good enough to let ’em keep dragging on around here.”
Amid an outburst of exclamations and weeping, Gran’mammy Kizzy sprang squarely before Massa Lea, words ripping from her throat, “You done sent off yo’ own boy, can’t I leas’ have gran’chilluns?” As Massa Lea quickly looked away, she slumped toward the ground; young, strong arms grabbing and supporting her, while old Miss Malizy and Sister Sarah screamed almost as one, “Dey’s all de fam’ly I got, Massa!”... “Me, too, Massa! We’s fifty-some years togedder!” The invalid ancient Uncle Pompey just sat, unable to rise from his chair, tears streaming down his cheeks, staring blankly straight ahead, his lips moving as in prayer.
“SHUT UP!” the slave trader yelled. “I’m tellin’ you the last time! You find out quick I know how to handle niggers!”
Tom’s eyes sought and locked for a fleeting instant with those of Massa Lea, and Tom hoarsely fully chose words, “Massa, we’s sho’ sorry you’s met bad luck, an’ we knows only reason you’s sellin’ us is you got to—”
Massa Lea seemed almost grateful before his eyes again bent downward, and they had to strain to hear him. “Naw, I ain’t got nothin”gainst none of y’all, boy—” He hesitated. “Fact, I’d even call y’all good niggers, most of y’all born and bred up right on my place.”
“Massa,” gently Tom begged, “if dem Alamance County peoples won’t take our family’s ol’ folks, ain’t it some way you lemme buy ’em from you? Dis man done jes’ say dey ain’t worth much in money, an’ I pay you good price. I git on my knees an’ beg de new massa lemme fin’ some hire-out blacksmithin’, maybe for dat railroad, an’ my brothers hire out and he’p too, suh.” Tom was abjectly pleading, tears now starting down his cheeks, “Massa, all we makes we sends you ’til we pays whatever you ax fo’ Gran’mammy and dese three mo’ dat’s fam’ly to us. All we’s been through togedder, we sho’ ’preciate stayin’ togedder, Massa—”