wanted to go to Nashville and open a store, John would provide them with
credit and supplies.
BLOODLINES 67
"What are we waiting for?" Washington cried, already chasing bison in his
head.
"Be careful," John said with a smile. "They're rough men there."
He looked at the letter he was holding and passed it to James. It was
from a customer in Nashville, Andrew Jackson-who was not related to
them-and was full of complaints about the supplies he had received from
them, and their prices.
"He's a crusty curmudgeon," John grinned. "He's cross because he sold his
cotton early, and the prices have gone through the roof since. I warned
him, but he wouldn't be told."
He grinned again.
"Nobody can tell Andrew anything," he said. "He's as likely to fight a
duel with anyone who tries."
James had seen some of Andrew's correspondence before, voluminous, irate,
and eloquently phrased. He felt a stirring in his soul, a call to
something extravagant, a feeling he had not known since he first saw the
land of America from the bow of the ship. This was the challenge he had
been seeking, not just of the land, but of the men who inhabited the
land. If his customers, frontiersmen, were all as cantankerous as Andrew,
and if he could survive, and even win, against them, then he would have
reason to be proud of himself. That would be an achievement, and of his
own making, of his own doing.
"He's a good customer," he said. "We'll do well by him."
"Let's go!" Washington yelled, dancing about the room, shadowboxing an
imaginary Andrew.
They laughed, and drank a toast to the new venture. It was three months
before they were ready to leave, but those weeks flew by in a welter of
preparation and planning.
"And watch out for yourselves," Uncle Henry cautioned them, as they were
ready to leave. "There's Injuns there."
Washington whooped, and James tingled with excitement, In all his time
in Philadelphia, he had not seen an Indian. There were a few half-breeds,
shabby, dispirited men mostly, often drunk, and with vacant eyes, as if
they were looking for something they had lost.
But they were not the real thing to James. They were not
68 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
the warriors of the legends. Soon he would see them, the noble
red-skinned savages on line horses, naked but for paint and brilliant
feathers.
Soon he would know the real America.
Soon he would be a true pioneer.
It was so close. Just a few hundred miles away. Just on the other side
of the mountains.
48
The simple thrill of being on the road kept their spirits up for the first
few days, and Washington took unalloyed delight in everything he saw. It
amused James to be guide to his younger brother on their journey of
exploration, for he knew the way, at least as far as Baltimore. They
stayed with their brothers Hugh and Alexander, who were doing well in
business, and organized the supplies to be delivered, at appropriate
intervals, to them in Nashville.
"Land," Hugh told them. "Buy every scrap of land you can, be agents for
others' purchases, accept land as guarantee for credit, but get
yourselves into land as fast as you can."
From Baltimore, they were in virgin territory for both of them, but the
road was well traveled by others, and they headed inland, to the new
capital, at Washington. 'Me days were warm and sunny, the villages they
passed through charming, and they spent the night in an inn where German
was the first language. They arrived at their destination the following
afternoon, and Washington laughed out loud when he saw the capital, a
small village in the middle of a swamp with a few extravagant buildings
rising out of the marsh. There were no rooms to be had at any of the few
inns, so they slept in their wagon, delighted in the fireflies in the
bushes, which they had never seen, and were attacked by mosquitoes all
night long. They played sightseers for a day, gawking at everything, and
stood outside the presidential mansion for half an hour hoping
BLOODLINES 69
to see Mr. Jefferson, but he did not appear. They loaded their wagon onto
a barge and crossed the Potomac, to Alexandria, and suddenly found
themselves in another country.
They could not define why Virginia was different at first, but quickly
realized it was because of the slaves. There was nothing else odd or
unusual-Alexandria was a lovely city, of gracious red-brick buildings,
built on a little hill that rose up from the river, but with more black
people than they had seen anywhere else.
"Slaves," Washington whispered in wonder. "They are all slaves. "
They had seen a few slaves in Maryland, which was also a slave state, and
a slave ship in Baltimore, but it was empty, as was the auction house,
and they felt a little cheated. None of the blacks they saw on the
streets there looked any different from those who were free, in
Philadelphia, but they knew that here almost every black they saw was in
bondage.
They felt cheated again in Alexandria. Everyone, black or white, was
simply going about their business, whatever that might be, and they saw
nothing to justify the sermons they had heard denouncing the trade.
Still, there was something different, some different manner or attitude
between the faces, or perhaps it was only a different accent, or perhaps
it was simply that they knew they had crossed an invisible line, and were
now in unknown territory, where the rules were changed.
They found an inn for the night, and talked freely between themselves
about the slaves they had seen, who were not in any way remarkable, until
they realized that no one else, in conversation, ever used the word
slave. Darkies, nigras, niggers occasionally, if women were not present,
or simply our people, but never slaves. They knew the servants at the inn
must be slaves, but they seemed no different from servants on the
Northern side, and the owners treated them no better or no worse than
servants were treated in the grander houses in Dublin. Again, they were
disappointed that the country they were in, which was exotic, was not
exotic enough. James thought it was rather like going from Dublin to
Liverpool: The accents and manners were different, and the laws, and you
realized you were in a foreign country, but everything else was much the
same.
70 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
The following morning, as they were loading their wagon, they saw something
that jolted them.
A young black man was staggering down the street carrying a large box of
something, and could hardly see over the top of it. Walking directly toward
him were a couple of welldressed white businessmen, deep in conversation.
They were on a collision course with the black youth, who, p
eering over his
burden, saw them in time and, at the last possible moment, swerved out of
the way. But a comer of the box clipped the arm of one of the whites.
Without breaking his stride, or even seeming to look at what he was doing,
the white man raised his cane and smashed it on the black youth's
shoulders. The youth fell to the ground, and there was an awful crash of
breaking glass inside the box he was delivering. The two white men walked
on, and the black youth, after catching his breath, picked up his box and
staggered on. He was weeping, but whether it was from the pain of the blow
or because of the damage to his cargo, James and Washington could not tell.
No one paid any attention to the incident but themselves. They said nothing
to each other, but climbed into the wagon, flicked the horses, and drove
away.
They rode in silence for a while, each trying to come to terms with what he
had seen, until Washington spoke.
" I've seen as bad or worse in Dublin," he said. "The British treated the
croppies no better."
James nodded, for he had seen worse, but the incident soured their pleasure
in their travels, until the countryside, the loveliest they had ever seen,
worked some magic on them, and they thought themselves in Arcady. They rode
through arbors of walnut and oak that bordered pretty farms, where horses
grazed on flawless grass. The farmhouses were neat and ordered and painted
white, and babbling streams and creeks called runs-Four Mile Run, Holmes
Run, and Bull Runfed into lazy rivers.
As the days passed by, they had the sense that they were climbing upward,
higher into the mountains, and daily the scenery became more
beautiful-grand but placid and peaceful. They saw snakes sunning themselves
on the roads, but they slithered away when they heard the wagon. They heard
birdsong that was beautiful, and saw squirrels and deer and
BLOODLINES 71
possum. They learned to be careful when they had to go into the bushes,
because of a nasty little creature called a chigger, an insect that
burrowed into skin and itched like blazes. Kindly innkeepers gave them a
cure for it, a pungent oil based on turpentine, and everywhere they stayed
they were treated with extraordinary civility, and a lazy, casual courtesy
that was overtly friendly, yet curiously reserved.
They never talked about slavery again, did not discuss it even between
themselves, but came to accept the practice as the tradition in this part
of the world. They did not see anything they considered as unfair or
harsh treatment of the blacks, but their standards had adjusted since
Alexandria, and things that might once have set their teeth on edge
became an accepted fact of life.
Each town or village they came to seemed prettier than the one before.
Almost always there was a well-tended square, surrounded by churches with
spires and lovely, white-painted houses, but after Charlottesville the
villages became less ordered, less formal, newer in construction, and
with an increasing abundance of log cabins.
They crossed a small mountain range, and gasped at the splendor of the
valley that lay before them that was called Shenandoah, and found
themselves in another country again, a different and exciting country,
for if eastern Virginia had been Arcady, then this, surely, was Eden.
Their most extravagant dreams came true. They climbed the mountain range
on the other side of the vast valley, and the people were rougher, if
still as hospitable, and pleased to see the strangers, and desperate for
news of the outside world. They had a sense of wilderness only recently
tamed, and while they saw many farms, they also saw true pioneers,
clusters of families who lived in log cabins, miles, it seemed, from any-
where, even their nearest neighbors. Then they would come to a small
town, and the wilderness would recede for a while, only to open up before
them again as they traveled on.
In the evenings they heard fiddlers more frenetic than any they had known
in Ireland, and drank a clear white liquor called moonshine-for it was
made by the light of the moonthat had the kick of a mule and produced a
wondrous, dreaming drunkenness. They saw a revival meeting, the preacher
on a wagon outside a church, practicing a brand of Christianity
72 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
that provoked his congregation of simple hardy souls to an ecstatic fervor
that was moving and slightly frightening.
Sometimes they saw a few Indians, still not the naked, noble savage,
painted and feathered, but a far cry from the drunken half-breeds of the
city, Calm and self-possessed, they came to the little villages or simple
trading posts to sell soft animal hides, or fish they had caught in the
river, or trinkets of beads, and took in return the supplies they needed
instead of money.
They came down from the mountains through stands of magnificent pine or
cedar, past gushing waterfalls and some small mountains that were
perpetually shrouded in a mist that looked smoky. Now they came to
rolling gentle hills, of grass so sweet that in the distance it looked
blue. Up again into the hills, through woods that slowly gave way to
fanns, and they saw fields of cotton and wondered at it, and played with
some bolls of it, although they got prickles in their fingers. The
weather was hot but it suited the land, and they saw slave gangs out
picking the cotton, chanting work songs as they picked, and they thought
it idyllic. Even the overseer flicking his whip occasionally, lazily, at
the blacks, appeared to them to be a necessary functionary. They came to
a river running through a deep gorge and were told it was called the Cum-
berland, and that they were close to their journey's end.
After thirty-five days of traveling, they arrived in the thriving
settlement of Nashville. Dirty, disheveled, and unshaven, skins browned
and necks reddened by the sun, they beamed in delight for they had
arrived almost at the edge of the world, and were happier than they could
possibly have imagined.
9
As far as James was concerned, Nashville was America, and
the rest of the country could go hang. From the moment they
rode into the town, he was so captivated by its simple vigor
and pleasant aspect, its sense of isolation and independence,
BLOODLINES 73
that he could not imagine he would ever want to live anywhere else. It was
Tennessee's oldest town, but established almost within the span of his own
lifetime, so that he could feel part of its growth, and would be able to
tell his children that he had been there from the beginning. It was a
thriving community, with half a dozen brick houses already replacing the log
cabins, and another hundred dwellings of clapboard. There were a dozen small
shops and stores, which drew their supplies, as James and Washin
gton would
do, from Philadelphia and Baltimore to the east, and New Orleans to the
south. The local cotton farmers sent their crop to those same cities, for
export to Europe.
The land around Nashville had been settled by an early pioneer, John
Donelson, who had made a treaty with the Indian tribes, Cherokee, Creek,
Choctaw, and Chickasaw. To the south and southeast were immense tracts of
Indian land, mostly Cherokee in Tennessee and Creek in Alabama, which were
sacred to their traditional owners, and exempt from white settlement.
Constant encroachments were made onto this land in violation of the
treaties, and then the Indians retaliated. The Tennessee Militia, now under
the command of Andrew Jackson, would trounce the raiding parties, and the
usual result was that more Indian land would be ceded to whites. For the
most part, the Indians near Nashville who lived on white man's land dwelt
in uneasy alliance with their conquerors, but resentment simmered among the
younger men, the braves.
In the early days, the main route south from Nashville had been the river,
which connected briefly with the Ohio and then flowed into the mighty
Mississippi, and down into Louisiana. There was still considerable river
traffic, but a new road, the Natchez Trace, a mere remnant of an old Indian
path, led from Nashville, twisting and turning through the forests and
beside the gorges, skimpy wooden bridges fording the streams, to Natchez.
With the influx of settlers and merchants and speculators, the path became
broader and well traveled, linking Philadelphia to New Orleans, a distance
of two thousand miles.
There was a plentiful water supply from the Cumberland River, good rain,
sharp, snowy winters, and high, hot summers. A printing office published a
weekly newspaper. There
74 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
was no hotel or inn as yet, no industry of any kind, and the ambience of the
town was pastoral, uncluttered by machinery or factory.
Of the many settlers who had come to the district, to stay and farm, or
move on in search of that elusive, ultimate, perfect pasture, many had
prospered mightily. Land was abundant and cheap, and fortunes had been
quickly made by some. Not all had been so lucky. The adventurers and
speculators, the entrepreneurs and the farseeing, had taken the best of the
land, and those less fortunate immigrants who had stayed had found what few
acres they could on less productive soil. Dour, hardy, weatherbeaten folk,
worn out by wandering, had pitched tents on rocky plots which could be had
for a cent an acre, or squatted on Indian borders. They scratched out an
existence raising tobacco or corn, and, the women more fertile than the
land, swarms of children. Many of these children did not live beyond their
first few months or years, and those who did were condemned to a life at
least as harsh as their parents', unless they got lucky, or moved on.
West, always west. It was the anthem of the frontier. Somewhere out west
was the elusive crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, and few looked
back to the East, or to Europe, for what they had now, no matter how
little, or how much, was almost always more than what they had left behind.
These white poor gave spice to James's appreciation of his new environment,
for without the less lucky, how could the fortunate appreciate what they
had achieved? While he believed that all men were created equal, and
believed in equal opportunity, he did not believe in a leveled society,
with no rich and no poor. It was the duty of the strong to protect the
weak, but not to become weak themselves.
The population of the town was cosmopolitan, reflecting America. English
and Scottish and Irish and Welsh, German, Huguenot, and Scandinavian, and
a few from the Caribbean Islands. There were blacks-a few free tradesmen,
and enslaved laborers. Some Indians, like the Cherokee chief Doublehead,
had adapted to the white man's ways, and had successful farms. Others lived