laughing, golden, riding rainbows,
Sometimes, too, he would dream of leprechauns, and if one of them looked
exactly like Andrew, it was the generous Andrew of his youth, and he
would take a little dust from the pouch at his side and sprinkle it on
James, and James would
MERGING 319
be riding the rainbow too, sparkling with the magic powder, riding through
iridescent, pfismatic light, the primary colors of life, down toward the
crock of gold that nestled, as the leprechaun told him, at the foot of the
rainbow, faster and faster, falling toward the glittering pfize that shone
before him, failing, failing, until he knew that in a moment he would have
it, the pot of fairy gold, the fabulous treasure that was beyond all
reckoning. Falling, falling to a greater light whose source was only inches
from his touch. But always before he reached it, he would wake up, and when
he woke he was filled with a sense of loss, of something sought and not
achieved, and the lack of it made him yearn to dream again.
Sometimes he would not find the leprechaun in his dreams, and he would be
astride Glencoe, galloping across the dewsoft emerald grass toward a great
city he knew was Dublin. Others would fide beside him for a while, on
animals not as fine as his, and just as he recognized them and waved to
them in cheery greeting, Lord Fitzgerald and Pamela, or Oliver Bond or
Uncle Henry, Eleanor or Sara or Jugs, their horses would fail them, and
they would fall behind. Then Sean would appear, galloping, laughing, always
laughing, until he too could no longer keep pace with the reckless James,
and would fall behind.
He would fide into Dublin, through shouting crowds, and all his friends
would be there again, cheering with the mob, and James knew that he had
just won a tremendous race. As suddenly, everyone disappeared, and he would
be alone in the empty streets of the city, searching for them, and riding
down a tiny, dark alley that led, he was sure, to the Liberties, the
decrepit slums where all his friends were hiding. The houses would slowly
give way to leafless trees and bushes ablaze with flowers, and he would
find himself riding down avenues of endless, fragrant roses.
Those roses stayed with him in his waking hours; he could not rid his mind
of the image that the missionary had conjured up. He could not bear to hear
stories of the Indians trekking west, for all the news that reached him was
of nothing but deprivation and starvation and death. He did not want to
know about the new treaty made with the holdout Cherokee at New Echota, for
however magnanimous it seemed to be on paper,
320 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
he knew it could lead only to the same awful fate, and while he blocked
from his mind the picture of another nation walking west to its doom, the
image that replaced it was one of endless rows, here to the horizon, of
withering, lifeless rosebushes.
Not even the recruitment of local young men for a small army out to drive
the few remaining Lower Creek out of southern Alabama stirred James to
any protest.
There is nothing I can do for them, he told himself. I did everything I
could. Yet even as he said it, he knew how great was the lie.
39
Wiliam Perkins caught a more contagious disease than the congestive fever
that was afflicting James. Eventually it would prove fatal to his
financial well-being and his wife's physical health, but there was no
preventive medicine for it. It was called Land Fever, and an epidemic of
it had swept the frontier states. As ever more Indians were removed, more
Indian land became available for white settlement, and more white settlers
flooded in.
Perkins, a naturally cautious man, thought he was immune, but his wife's
temperature soared as she heard the stories of the easy fortunes that
were being made, and she communicated the virus to him. Perkins thought
long and hard about a course of action, and finally made an eminently
sensible decision. He asked the advice of Thomas Kirkman, who took him
to see his father-in-law, his Uncle James.
James had several reasons for offering generous help. It is always
flattering when a successful student asks his teacher for advice, and
Perkins had sought out and listened to James when he first came to
Florence, and had done well. Now he had money to invest, not a lot but
enough, and wanted to make more, if only to make Lizzie's financial
future, already secure,
MERGING 321
impregnable. James guessed that the redoubtable Becky Perkins had already
made plans to spend a good portion of whatever profit was made, but she
amused him, and he loved to hear the gently told tales of marital woe from
the henpecked husband. And then there was Lizzie.
For whatever reason, James still cherished the notion that Jass and
Lizzie would wed, and the constancy of their friendship gave him
continuing hope. He gave Perkins some good advice, told Thomas to keep
an eye on him, and wrote a couple of letters to influential friends.
It worked like a charm. Perkins was offered and bought shares in a new
development company, and within three months had doubled his money. Under
Thomas's direction he also bought four lots in Tennessee, and within the
same period sold them at four times their original cost.
There was no stopping him now. Caution to the winds, and, increasingly
against Thomas's advice, he bought land wherever he could find it for
sale, only to sell it again, almost always at some profit. It was as if
he had suddenly discovered the secret of Midas, and as his reputation for
canniness increased, so did his profit, for it was generally reckoned
that if he bought land, it was going to double in value overnight, which,
in many cases, it did. Speculators, bankers, and simple settlers all
rushed to the developments with which Perkins was associated, and it made
him, for a time at least, something of a celebrity, and gave him a
formidably increased bank account.
The new money provided Mrs. Perkins with the fuel for her most
extravagant dreams, which she indulged with increasing ostentation. They
owned over eighty slaves on a plantation that needed fewer than half that
number. Where she had once been Becky to her friends, she now preferred
her given name, Pocahontas, and she began to dress in the Oriental style
made popular by Dolley Madison years before, turbaned and overly
bejeweled. The dinners she gave were famous for the sumptuous table she
served and the troops of attendants she provided, a footman to every
chair. She traveled, if only to visit near friends, with a considerable
retinue of footmen and lackeys and page boys. This vulgar display of
wealth made her unwelcome to some of her less fortunate friends, and an
object of derision to the more successful, and so the tolerant Jacksons
322 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
were called upon at least once a week. William Perkins would sit in the
Study with James, supposedly seeking more counsel, but actually unburdening
himself about his wife's demanding excesses. James, amused and astonished
by
his prot6gCs success, gave frequent warnings of prudence, which Perkins ac-
cepted miserably, for his success terrified him.
"There is nothing I can do," he said sadly. "They throw the money at me."
James knew it was true, for he remembered the panic buying that had
attended the sales of the Cypress Land Company, and while Perkins's profits
were not quite in that league, they were still very handsome.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Perkins was perpetual shadow to Sally, wallowing in
self-pity, weeping of the fool that Fortune had made her with this newfound
fortune, and pouring out her grievances with the world. She understood that
the new unfriendliness of so many of her neighbors was caused by "the
green-eyed god," but it still hurt, and she couldn't pretend she didn't
have money. Not when every coup of William's was broadcast in the
newspapers, journals, and taverns as they happened. Nor was it her fault
that William had been so astute in business, and they so obtuse. No one,
it
seemed, understood the problems that fame and fortune brought with them,
and she had only dear Sally to turn to for advice. Not the least of her
difficulties was disciplining the army of nigras she commanded.
Lizzie called at The Forks more frequently than even her parents, and came
because she wanted to see Jass.
Her parents' newly increased wealth, and perhaps time, had calmed Lizzie.
Still an exemplary Southern belle, she had started to develop a morbid fear
that she was going to be left on the shelf. At any social gathering, at any
picnic, ball, or levee, Lizzie was, at the beginning of the occasion, the
center of attention, but she had begun to see that it was not because
anybody actually liked her, but because she wasn't dull. All the most
eligible young men would flirt with her, flatter her, and laugh at her
jokes at the beginning of the evening, but as if they were passing the time
with her until they were able to ascertain which young lady it was that
they really wanted to be with or, in the case of the less bold, had
summoned up enough Southern courage from Lizzie to approach the actual
MERGING 323
object of their affections. Even worse, Lizzie could not avoid the
conviction that people were laughing at her behind her back-once they had
done laughing about her mother.
She dared not voice these fears to her mother, from whom she had learned
her patterns of behavior, and anyway, how could you tell your mother what
the world thought of her? She could not talk to her father because he
would have been hurt, and she had seldom received sensible advice from
her father on anything that really mattered, only the dictum "Talk to
your mother." If she had friends she trusted, she might have confided in
them, but Lizzie looked at her long list of acquaintances and realized
that she didn't have any friends she would trust with such confidences.
Instead she took a long, hard look in the mirror, and tried to work out
what it was she was doing wrong.
She was pretty, she could see, but so strong was her new fear, she could
also see that she wasn't actually much more than pretty, as were most
girls of her age. Certainly she was not flowering into any great beauty.
Her nose was longer than it should be, her lips were thin, and there was
a kind of bland ordinariness to her features. She tried to laugh
flippantly at the image in the mirror, but in a moment of remarkable
selfappraisal for one who was still quite young, she saw that most of her
elaborately cultivated mannerisms simply made her look silly.
Then the most awful truth of all appeared in the mirror. She had always
understood, or been taught by her mother, that boredom was a maiden's
lot, and so Lizzie had endured her boredom, thinking everyone else was
doing the same. Her reflection told her she wasn't bored at all. She was
lonely.
A lifetime of that loneliness suddenly yawned in front of her. She
considered the potential young men who might alleviate the terrifying
prospect, and it dawned on her that her card was seldom filled in after
the first three dances, and then only by older men, married men or
relatives, who might have been taking pity on her. Toward the end of the
evening Lizzie would always find herself sitting on the sidelines with
the older women and, heaven forfend, the spinsters.
Perhaps it was this knowledge that she was not the most desirable catch
around that made her more determined than
324 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
ever to catch Jass, but there was something deeper to it. As she became less
brittle, she found herself liking Jass more. She no longer bothered about
her parents' obvious desire for her to make a good union; she was motivated
by something more intensely personal. She wanted to be with Jass because
when she was with him, she wasn't lonely.
There was another reason why Lizzie enjoyed going to The Forks of Cypress,
and that was James. Lizzie was acutely aware of how ridiculous her mother
looked, with her stupid entourage, and couldn't understand why her father
didn't put some curb on the extravagance. The mirror told her why. Lizzie
had not only subjected herself to the scrutiny of honesty, she had done the
same for her parents. Her mother's vanity and desperate need to prove her
worth and social standing now struck Lizzie as silly, and her father's
subservient acquiescence to whatever her mother demanded seemed pathetic.
This created a void in Lizzie's life, for she had a strong need of paternal
guidance, and what was lacking for her in her own father she found in
James. She would sit with him for hours, reading to him, or chatting,
delighting him with scurrilous gossip of the small town that was their
world, entertaining him, pampering him, and even gently flirting with him.
Free of the constraints of family behavior, she dazzled him, for with him
she could be what she had been trained to be all her life, the perfect
Southern rose.
James came to adore her, and looked forward to her visits with a special
sparkle of excitement that almost no one else could arouse. He became
jealous of her time, and especially of any time she spent with Jass, as if
the father were rival to the son. At the same time, unaware of the
contradiction, he encouraged Jass to see more of Lizzie, convinced of their
suitability for one another. Lizzie, James thought, could give Jass the
edge that he needed, for beneath her magnolia exterior was a determination
of iron.
Sally was suspicious of this new Lizzie at first, believing she was
cultivating James in order to cement the idea of a union with Jass, but she
could not easily ignore the evident affection that th
e two developed for
each other. Sally was sure her first impressions of Lizzie had not been
wrong, but obviously she was making a conscious effort to improve herself,
MERGING 325
which Sally applauded. She doubted that she and Lizzie would ever be close
friends, but she was pleasant company now and, given the wretched excesses
of her mother's behavior, deserved ten out of ten for effort, at least.
Sally disRed cattiness in other women, and controlled any small tendency
to it in herself, but occasionally she would give vent to a tinge of what
she called "womanly smugness."
Perhaps Lizzie has realized she isn~t such a catch after all, Sally
thought, and has decided the rest of us are tolerable company.
Jass, on the other hand, was becoming more and more of a catch, "a
strapping young man" was the way Aunt Letitia described him, and no one
was more aware of this than Easter.
She adored him. She wanted to be with him for ever and ever, and it
distressed her that she was seeing him less and less. He still came to the
weaving house almost every day, but she thought it was from habit rather
than from any real desire to be with her, because the familiarity that had
once come naturally to both of them they now had to strive for. It wasn't
easy anymore. He still sat in the old rocking chair at the end of the day,
and puffed on the cob pipe, and talked about the world, but he avoided any
physical closeness, and because there was this unspoken barrier between
them, a limitation had developed in the way they talked to each other.
Often he was silent for long periods of time, while Easter worked, and if
she asked him what was wrong, he'd shrug and say nothing was wrong, or
that she would not understand. Easter was convinced she understood only
too well. In the old days he would have talked about anything with her,
but now he had secrets, if only in one area. He would never talk about his
feelings toward Lizzie, and the less he said, the more Easter wanted to
know.
That Lizzie was becoming more and more of a fixture in Jass's life was
evident to everyone on the plantation. They rode together two or three
times a week, laughed and joked together, and Jass delighted in showing
her every aspect of the estate. If ever Lizzie expressed boredom with the
details of farm life, Jass would laugh and say, quite loudly, that since
she would be mistress of a plantation one day, she should learn
326 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
how they were run. He never said that she would be mistress of this
plantation, but the current view among the slaves was that it was only a
matter of time. Parson Dick confirmed this to Tiara when he told her that
at
meals she took in the big house, Lizzie sat on ol' Massa's right, and
behaved as if she were already mistress.
"They gwine be married one day," Tiara said to Easter when they were
sitting outside Tiara's shack one evening. Easter lost her temper, called
Tiara an ol' bitch, burst into tears, and ran away to the weaving house.
Tiara took it in her stride, nodded sagely, and looked at Cap'n Jack.
"That gal bustin' her heart for summat she cain't ever have," she opined,
and from then on all the younger slave girls would giggle and whisper
amongst themselves whenever Jass went to the weaving house.
Easter tried to talk about it with Cap'n Jack, but she'd seen little of him
that summer; he was always in the big house nursing the ol' Massa. He spent
what few hours he could with her, and she asked him about Jass and Lizzie.
Cap'n Jack shrugged. -01' Massa want it to be," he said, "but young Massa
ain't made his mind up."
He laughed. "Wait till young Massa go Up South to college," he wheezed. "He
gonna find girls there put Miss Lizzie in the shade of the ol' oak tree."
Which made Easter more miserable than ever. Cap'n Jack knew this, but
didn't try to soften the blow.