Charleston

  Anguishing memories of Henry Strong rushed in. She had never spoken his name to Richard; she’d mentioned her marriage to William Drew only briefly. “I see nothing wrong if two people love each other and are willing to withstand the inevitable public scorn.”

  “But aren’t Negroes inferior?”

  “That’s what we were taught, Richard. Inferior, lazy, dishonest—I heard it over and over when I was growing up. Some are that way, I suppose. Some white people as well.”

  “Could you love a black man?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it isn’t natural.”

  “Really? Did the Lord come down on a cloud and inform you of that personally?”

  “By God you’re an exasperating creature.” His laughter softened the complaint. She turned toward him in the shadows.

  “Richard, you’re carrying a lot of old ideas, like a hundred-pound sack of stones on your back. Put down the burden. Think in new directions. It’s a new day.”

  “Not one that I like very much.”

  “If you keep trying to march into the past, you’ll only be miserable. Change comes like the tides or the periods of the moon. You can’t stop it. You must accept it, live with it.”

  He grabbed her hand. “Time to get out the cards.”

  They both looked down at his fingers twined with hers. Alex suddenly felt vaporish. His embarrassment was evident. He withdrew his hand.

  “I’m sorry. I was forward.”

  She smiled to put him at ease. “I say it again. You’re a true Southern gentleman.”

  “Which, according to you, is not so good.”

  She rose from the swing. “Let’s play poker.”

  It was odd that she liked him even though she couldn’t tolerate many of his ideas. The complexity of human behavior confounded her once again.

  71

  Confessions

  In November, Gibbes took the rain-soaked roads back to Columbia. The General Assembly met on the grounds of South Carolina College, the Senate in the library, the House in the chapel. Members ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, a sour pill to swallow. Gibbes spoke of the need to remember the chameleon, adept at changing its color to protect itself. He urged patience and a fixed eye on the goal: a white man’s government for white men.

  Governor Orr appealed to the legislators to establish rules to protect the thousands of former slaves roaming the state, lost in a society they couldn’t understand or deal with. “It is our humanitarian duty,” Orr said.

  With a nod and a wink Gibbes and his colleagues set about reestablishing elements of slavery in the name of protecting the Negroes. New statutes referred to as the Black Codes did offer a few sops to the freedom of persons of color, defined as all those having more than one-eighth Negro blood. The Codes permitted Negroes to sue and be sued in the courts, testify in cases personally involving them, and enter into legally recognized marriage contracts with others of their race. Interracial marriage was prohibited. “To avoid an inevitable descent into miscegenation—the white race mongrelized out of existence,” Gibbes declared in a speech from the floor.

  The Codes said Negroes could work only as farmers or servants unless they bought an expensive license and paid special taxes. They could not own guns, the exception being one fowling piece allowed to a farmer. The death penalty was mandated for murder, housebreaking, assaulting a white woman, or stealing a horse, mule, or baled cotton.

  Servants could not leave the employer’s premises without permission. Whipping of adult servants was permitted if proper judicial papers were obtained first. Whipping of servants under eighteen could be done at the master’s discretion. The terms master and servant appeared frequently in the Codes, along with a statement that Negroes are not and never shall be entitled to social and political equality with white persons.

  Alex was furious when she read about the Codes in a newspaper. Richard thought the new laws served a useful humanitarian purpose. They quarreled over it and parted angrily at the end of the evening. Two days later he brought her one of Joel Poinsett’s crimson-leafed plants to make amends. She was touched. Richard’s meager salary on the city railway surely didn’t allow for such extravagance.

  The visits resumed, though not without continued controversy. “Did you own slaves?” Alex asked after a hand of poker. She had a pile of twenty wooden matches in front of her. She’d reduced him to four. Rolfe had nailed temporary boards over the shot-out window of the dining room.

  “One, at the freight yard. An honest man and a hard worker. Loretta wouldn’t have a house girl. Said it was wrong.”

  “Did you ever think of freeing your man?”

  “Loretta suggested it before I joined up. Never did it. Jacob disappeared while I was up North. Look, I wasn’t one of your damn Low Country grandees running a hundred or two hundred slaves. There weren’t many like that in the whole state.”

  “Enough to hold power and preserve the system.”

  “I don’t think owning just one slave is—”

  “It’s the same as owning a hundred or a thousand, Richard.”

  “Lord, why do I take this punishment?”

  “Because you’re a decent man, and I think that down deep inside something tells you I might be right.”

  “Cut the cards.”

  Alex hated the way he clung to old ideas, yet she wanted to continue seeing him, to chip away at them, and honor Drew’s plea for forgiveness of enemies, difficult as that was sometimes. There was also another, more emotional reason she couldn’t admit to anyone. She liked the recalcitrant rebel more than she should. She wondered why a middle-aged woman had night thoughts that properly belonged in the head of an adolescent girl.

  A military messenger delivered a cream-colored envelope from General Sickles’s headquarters. It contained an engraved invitation to attend the general’s Christmas levee at the newly reopened Mills House.

  “How on earth did he get my name?” Alex wondered.

  “Cedric, probably,” Ham said. “He and Mrs. Buckles are going. You know Sickles has an eye for charming ladies. I’ll be happy to escort you and protect your virtue.” She laughed and swatted his nose with the envelope.

  “We might have a good time, Alex. The town’s very tense. Awash with rumors of a Negro uprising at Christmas.”

  Alex shook her head. “Every year. Will it ever end?”

  A week before the levee Richard took her to see a traveling dime museum and menagerie set up in a tent near the Ashley. The menagerie consisted of a llama, an ocelot, and an old lion in a cage who yawned and refused to rise off his haunches. The museum featured a one-armed albino woman who folded paper into clever animal shapes, a small dolphin lethargically swimming in a wooden tank, a glass blower, and a magic show presented by one Mr. Nostra Nostradamus. It was a tawdry affair, but she enjoyed herself.

  Walking home through the mild December night, she mentioned General Sickles’s invitation. Richard whipped off his slouch hat and slapped it against his leg. “You mean you’d actually hobnob with that man? Not only is he a Yankee, he’s a drunkard and a lecher.”

  “I have no direct evidence of that. I’d like to meet him.”

  “I met him on the horse car and I can tell you he’s an arrogant toad. I wouldn’t come within ten yards of him.”

  “So there’s no possibility that you might escort me?”

  “What? Are you ragging me? I ought to turn you over my knee and swat the foolishness out of you.”

  She separated her arm from his. “That wouldn’t be advisable. I’m not some spineless thing you can order about. You’re getting very dictatorial, Richard. I don’t like it and I don’t understand it.”

  He stopped by the stucco wall of a darkened house. “Oh, you don’t? Why do you think I trot around to your house like a puppy? I like you, and I shouldn’t, because you don’t like me, what I am or what I was. But I still come back for more. I don’t want that little Yankee viper to lay one finger on you.”

  “Why,
you sound jealous of General Sickles.”

  “You bet I am, woman.” She gasped as he pulled her into a clumsy kiss.

  The pressure of his mouth, the tobacco scent of his skin, stirred her unexpectedly. She slid her left arm around his waist. They kissed for nearly a minute under the bright December stars.

  When they broke the embrace, she patted her hair, though not a strand was out of place. “Richard, I am fifty-two years old. I don’t need this kind of complication in my life.”

  “You think I do? Don’t know what’s come over me.”

  Perhaps the same thing that had come over her with unexpected stealth: she cared for him. He aroused feelings that she thought had died with Drew. They walked homeward in tense silence. Near South Battery he stopped again.

  “I tell you, Alex, this is the most confusing damn situation I’ve ever lived through, except maybe the war. Poor Loretta in her grave, and I’m carrying on like a lovesick boy.”

  “Lovesick?” Her legs wobbled.

  He turned away, his profile visible against lights of a steamer crossing in front of the ruins of Sumter. “You heard me.”

  She took his hand.

  “I’m flattered, Richard, but I don’t want you to feel guilty about your wife because of me. We can go on as we have, just being friends.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too late for that. I’ve got to ask—do you want me to stop calling on you? If you do, say so.”

  She remembered his kiss; how good it felt after all the long, lonely years.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I can’t change my ways.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” she said, and kissed him again.

  The kiss left her warm and fulfilled. She hummed “A Better, Brighter Morning” as they approached the garden gate. A provost guard on horseback trotted by, saw they were white, touched his cap, and rode on. After a quick peck on Richard’s cheek she darted inside. She was in terrible trouble, and so happy, she covered her mouth and giggled.

  72

  A Blackmailer Intrudes

  For the second time in less than a hundred years, Charleston was an occupied city. Nearly 7,500 U.S. army officers and men garrisoned South Carolina. Some residents made plans to emigrate to Latin America. Brazil offered farmland at twenty cents an acre; in Vera Cruz bands greeted arriving expatriates with “Dixie’s Land.”

  The Johnson government refused to seat the state’s newly elected congressional delegation. Delegations from other Confederate states were similarly turned away. Alex declined the invitation to General Sickles’s levee, without regret. She and Richard had crossed a boundary by admitting more than casual interest in one another.

  The next boundary was intimacy. She confessed to herself that she wanted to make love despite fears that she was a dried-up old woman. She never spoke of this to him, or even hinted. The consequences for both of them were unknown and potentially hurtful. Loyalty to Henry and Drew deterred her as well.

  For Christmas she bought Ham and Richard ready-made white silk shirts from a reopened King Street haberdashery. She snipped a tag from Richard’s shirt that identified Brooklyn, New York, as its place of manufacture. Little Bob received a smaller shirt, with scant enthusiasm. Maudie liked her hand-painted flask of English scent.

  Richard gave Alex a sweet-grass basket of things for the garden: grape hyacinth and crocus bulbs, small seed packets fashioned from newspaper. “I’ve marked them. Blue larkspur. Portulaca sativa—think that’s how you pronounce it. Oriental poppy—didn’t get many of those, they’re dear. And this is pink alyssum. I was told the variety’s uncommon.”

  “So are you. All this must have been frightfully expensive. You shouldn’t have spent—”

  “Don’t tell me shouldn’t at Christmastime. I wanted to give you something you’d like.”

  “Oh, you did. Thank you.” She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Ham surprised her with a Van Hagen banjo guitar. “Found it at Riley’s junk shop. Looted from someone’s home like most of his goods, I suspect.”

  She was thrilled. The banjo guitar incorporated features of both instruments. It was fretted like a guitar but had the banjo’s short extra string on the side. Ham included a copy of Frank B. Converse’s New & Complete Method for the Banjo With or Without a Master. Converse was a celebrated minstrel man. With good things to put in the ground and an instrument to play, Alex felt the world returning to a sunnier time.

  The holidays passed without racial unrest. On New Year’s Day, Sickles declared the Black Codes illegal and abrogated. Gibbes and his like-minded colleagues went into temporary retreat to await a new opportunity to further their cause.

  After New Year’s the dreary winter of dark skies, dank air, and fitful spits of rain settled over the Low Country. Papers announced that the National Savings Bank and Trust Company planned to open a Charleston office, competition for the Crescent. Meanwhile, Folsey and other gentlemen with cash carried on a brisk private loan business, charging interest of twenty-five and thirty percent.

  New firms opened: a sash and door company; a factory that stamped sheet tin into milk pans and bucket bottoms; a seed-pressing firm marketing a substitute for linseed oil. Small enterprises like these set the city’s commercial machinery in motion again, but labor, like capital, remained scarce. The Chamber of Commerce sent an agent abroad to promote South Carolina to potential immigrants in Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia.

  Northern steamship companies resumed service. The New York & Charleston line signed an agreement to dock its steamers Champion and Manhattan at Bell’s Bridge, and Ham hired a new superintendent. The man’s unfortunate name was Wofford Crawford. He answered to Slim because he was not. Tubby, bowlegged, and in his late thirties, Crawford was a veteran of the Charleston Light Artillery and a lay preacher in a breakaway Baptist sect. He didn’t hide his scorn for Charleston’s sybaritic style of life. Crawford let the contract for a swing-out passenger gangway to be built on the wharf. The first steamer docked without it, unloading several more Yankee speculators lugging fancy carpetbags.

  Ouida lived in a constant state of near-hysteria over conditions at Prosperity Hall. Gibbes rode out there at least once a week to attempt to soothe her. He couldn’t count on her son to do it. Calhoun remained a burnt-out sot.

  Gibbes’s humanitarian missions met with little success. Ouida remained Ouida, her hair perpetually disheveled, her clothes tattooed brown by an iron clumsily applied. Her spectacles trebled the size of her irises.

  “Gibbes, I can’t endure this. Mama never taught me to cook or sew. Every time I drive my buggy to the crossroads, all I can buy are root vegetables or weevily biscuits. I hate that swarthy storekeeper too. I’ll bet he has nigger blood.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. The Pertwees have been marrying and mingling in the Low Country for years.”

  “But what am I to do? I wasn’t raised to conduct myself like a scullery maid.”

  “Neither were scores of other women of your station and breeding. They survive. So must you.”

  “Oh, Gibbes, I don’t think I can.” Wailing, she tore off her glasses and ran from the room. She blundered against the newel post as she fled upstairs. Gibbes sighed, bereft of any serviceable solution to his sister’s problem.

  To the office of Buckles & Bell one dark day in late February came a shabbily dressed man with two fingers missing from his right hand. He introduced himself as Plato Hix and asked to see Mr. Hampton Bell, Esq., please. Ham took the visitor to his gloomy office; at midday it had the look of twilight.

  Hix sat fiddling with his soiled gray kepi, under a charcoal portrait of James Petigru done at Ham’s request. “Sir, I’ve read of you in the papers. You’re the good lawyer that got those nigger soldiers off, aren’t you?”

  “I was one of the attorneys, yes. Mr. Mitchell was lead counsel.”

  Out of Hix’s pocket came an envelope pasted together from stiff paper. Ham saw the words Property Mr. & Mrs. P. Hix, and an ad
dress on Prioleau Street, written in a poor hand.

  “Like to hire you to keep this for me, sir. How much would you charge?”

  “What you’re requesting isn’t exactly a regular legal service, Mr. Hix. The Marburg bank can give you a locked box.”

  “No. I come to you because your name’s Bell. It’s an old and good name, even if some of the Bells aren’t so—” He bit off the sentence. “’Scuse me.”

  “You were saying?”

  “No, sir, never mind.”

  Ham tapped the envelope. “What’s in this?”

  “Private information, is all.” Ham had heard the truth shaded and evaded in court testimony many times; he heard it again in Hix’s answer.

  “Why do you require someone to take care of it?”

  “’Case anything happens to me, sir.”

  “Your life’s been threatened?”

  “Oh, no, sir, no.” Despite the chill in the office Hix was sweating. “It’s just a family matter, but there could be some trouble over it. I wrote down some facts about it till it’s all settled.”

  “The contents of the envelope are secret?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Hix, I appreciate your confidence in me, but I can hardly take money for stowing an envelope in our safe. I’ll be happy to do you the favor at no charge. Just be sure to come back and claim it when this family matter is resolved.”

  On his feet, Hix exclaimed, “Yes, sir. We’ll have it settled soon, a week at most. Then I’ll be back. God bless you, sir.” He grabbed Ham’s hand and shook it violently.

  Ham wanted to open the envelope, see what could throw an apparently law-abiding man into a state of nerves. He suppressed his curiosity and placed the envelope in the firm’s black iron safe.