Florida 250 pounds
Tennessee 300 pounds
South Carolina 320 pounds
Georgia 500 pounds
Alabama 525 pounds
Louisiana 550 pounds
Mississippi 650 pounds
Arkansas 700 pounds
Texas 750 pounds
‘Could these figures be real?’ Cobb asked, astonished by that last line. ‘We think so,’ the editor said, ‘but we’re going to double certify. If they prove out, we’ll print them. So you and your cousin both ought to move to Texas. Looks as if it’s to be our major cotton state.’
When Cobb started to ridicule the idea, the editor returned to his gloomy summary, tapping it with his pen: ‘The lesson, Cobb, is that cotton prospers, and you and I prosper, when things around the world are kept in order. Why would the French throw out a perfectly good king? Why would the damned Chartists raise trouble in England, along with those idiotic revolutionaries in the Germanys and the Austrian Empire? For that matter, you tell me why the abolitionists are allowed to rant and rave in this country?’
‘They’d better not rant and rave in South Carolina.’ In swift, inevitable steps Persifer Cobb had progressed from being against any war, to defending the Union in case of trouble, to championing the South.
‘The world would be so much better off,’ the editor said, ‘if only people would remain content with things as they are. Tell me, in Texas did you hear any agitation against slavery?’
‘In Texas I heard nothing except the buzz of mosquitoes.’
‘I envy you that plantation on Edisto. One of the world’s best.’
‘I aim to keep it that way.’
Edisto Island was a low-lying paradise formed in the Atlantic Ocean by silt brought down the Edisto River, a meandering stream that wound its way from the higher lands of South Carolina. An irregular pentagon about ten miles long on the ocean side, the island’s highest elevation was six feet and its dominant physical characteristic large groves of splendid oak trees, some deciduous but most live, which were decorated with magnificent pendants of Spanish moss. Its fields were miraculously productive, with soil so soft and even that it could be plowed with a teaspoon.
About fifty white people lived on the island’s great plantations, and fifteen hundred black slaves. Except for small family gardens and some acreage of rice, the only crop grown was Sea Island cotton: sown in March, ginned in September, shipped to Liverpool in Edisto ships in January.
Every white family who owned a plantation home on Edisto—handsome affairs, with white pillars supporting the porch—also maintained a grander home along The Battery in Charleston, twenty-four miles away. In that congenial city the spacious life of the Carolina planter unfolded, and Cobb was most eager to renew his acquaintance with it. Both his father and his wife would be in Charleston, and he longed to see them, but he felt it his duty to report first to the plantation, where his brother would be in charge.
He liked Somerset, four years younger than himself, and had felt no qualms about turning the plantation over to him when he enrolled at West Point. His letters from the Mexican War had testified to their continuing rapport—they were more like those of a friend than of an older brother—and he was impatient to see Sett, as the family called him.
He therefore ended his homeward journey at a road junction some twenty miles west of Charleston; here the Cobbs maintained a small shack in which lived an elderly slave whose duty it was to drive members of the family down the long road to the ferry that would carry them across to Edisto. This slave bore the extraordinary name of Diocletian, because an earlier Colonel Cobb had loved Roman history, believing the gentlefolk of the South to be the descendants of Romans. He had named all his house servants after the emperors, except his personal servant-butler-valet, whom he invariably called Suetonius, on the logical grounds that ‘Suetonius was responsible for all we know about the first Caesars. He wrote the book. So you, Suetonius, damn your hide, are responsible for all the Caesars in this house.’ He usually worked it so that he had twelve house servants, which permitted him to make the joke: ‘My Suetonius and his Twelve Caesars.’
Diocletian, an artful onetime house slave who knew that his welfare depended upon keeping various masters pacified, created the impression of being deliriously happy at seeing the colonel home from the wars. ‘Get dem horses!’ he shouted at his sons. ‘We gwine carry Gen’ral Cobb to de ferry!’ But when he was alone with his aged wife he predicted: ‘Ol’ Stiff-and-Steady back with his big ideas. Don’t look good for Somerset.’
Rapidly a buggy was prepared, and with Cobb holding the reins, he and Diocletian started the pleasant nine-mile ride to the ferry. As they rode, the slave spoke of events on the island, and since he had for some years served as a house servant, he could speak English rather well, but he was basically what was called a Gullah Nigger, and as such, used the lively, imaginative Gullah language, Elizabethan English spiced with African Coast words. Since Cobb had learned it as a boy, he encouraged Diocletian to use it as they talked of familiar things:
‘E tief um.’ He stole it.
‘Ontel um shum.’ Until I saw her.
‘Wuffuh um sha’ap?’ Why is she so smart?
‘Hukkuh im farruh ent wot?’ How come his father isn’t worth much?
‘Um lak buckra bittle.’ He likes white man’s food.
‘Bumbye e gwine wedduh pontak Edisto.’ By-and-by it’s going to rain upon Edisto.
But now, as they passed the interminable wetlands whose lazy waters and wind-blown reeds pleased Cobb, for he had not seen them in five years, Diocletian switched subjects, and as he spoke of Cobb affairs he used English: ‘You wife, Miss Tessa Mae, she never better. Sett’s wife, Miss Millicent, she not too well, two chir’ns now.’
‘Boys, aren’t they?’
‘Boy ’n’ a girl, bofe fine.’
Diocletian said that he himself had ‘two gramchir’n, bofe fine.’ When the buggy approached the ferry, he began to shout and snap the whip, which he had taken from Persifer, and in this way he roused the boatman, who also gave the impression of being delighted to see the colonel after such a long absence.
‘How dem Mexicans?’ he wanted to know. ‘Dem Mexican womens, dey all dancey-dancey like dey say?’
The three men discussed the war, after which Diocletian bade his master farewell: ‘We hopes you bees here long time, Colonel. Dis yere’s you home.’ In fluent Gullah, Persifer thanked the slave for the pleasant ride and immediately thereafter boarded the ferry, allowing its keeper to pole him across the shallow North Fork of the Edisto River.
Before the little craft landed, slaves on the island side had saddled a horse for the colonel, dispatching one boy on a mule to alert the big house that Persifer was about to appear after his long absence. Down the tree-lined roadway the boy sped, kicking his mule in the sides as he shouted to everyone he met: ‘Colonel Cobb, he come home!’
It was about seven miles from the ferry landing to the gracious two-story white house in which Somerset Cobb, as plantation manager, lived with his wife, Millicent, and their two children, and as the ride ended, it became apparent that the messenger had spread his news effectively, for everyone inside the house, and from outlying work houses too, had crowded beside the long lane leading to the colonnaded porch, prepared to give him the kind of enthusiastic welcome he expected. Ten whites and about fifty blacks stood waving as he and his attendant cantered through the spacious gateway. Modestly but with no excessive show of subservience, the slave slowed his horse and stopped it by the side of the roadway while Persifer rode on ahead, wearing the uniform of his country but with no insignia marks to show that he had once been a colonel.
He stopped and gazed in surprise, for from the porch came someone he had expected to be in the more salubrious climate of Charleston. It was his wife, Tessa Mae, daughter of a leading Carolina family, a slim, self-possessed young woman who rarely said anything thoughtlessly, and for that reason commanded his attention as well as hi
s affection. ‘Darling,’ he cried. ‘How wonderful to see you!’ Easily he swung his right leg free of the saddle, leaped to the ground and took her in his arms.
Over her shoulder he saw his brother, a bit heavier now but with the same manly appearance he remembered so well. He was dressed, Persifer was glad to see, in expensive boots from England; trim trousers, made to order by a Charleston tailor; an open-neck shirt, of good French cloth; and a soft beige scarf from Italy, tied loosely about his neck. He was a fine-looking fellow of thirty-one, rather retiring in disposition, who appeared to have managed plantations all his life and intended continuing. Although he was quiet, there was about him none of the softness which so frequently attacked second sons of planter families when they realized they would not inherit the family estate and life goals became indistinct. It was also apparent that he liked his older brother very much, and he now waited for a proper chance to show it.
‘Somerset!’ the colonel cried, moving on to his brother. ‘I’ve thought of you and this house whenever I sent you a letter.’
‘How wonderful they were!’ Millicent Cobb interrupted as she moved forward to receive an enthusiastic kiss. ‘You should be a novelist, Persifer. I could see your Panther Komax coming at me through the woods.’
‘That would be a very bad day for you, Lissa, when that one came at you.’
‘Did he wear a panther cap?’ the Cobb boy asked, and Persifer said: ‘Indeed he did, and he smelled like a panther, too.’
Turning to his wife, he asked, ‘And where are our children?’ and she replied: ‘At school. In Charleston.’
It was quickly agreed that the four older Cobbs would leave at once for Charleston to go to the great house on The Battery, and orders were sent to the plantation ferry—a much different one from the general ferry which Persifer had used to get to the island—to prepare the boat and the rowers for the delightful voyage to that golden city of the southern coast. But now Millicent, who seemed frail in everything but determination, put her foot down: ‘We shall not go today. Persifer is tired, whether he realizes it or not, and we can go just as well in the morning.’
However, the brothers felt that servants should be sent ahead in a smaller boat to alert their father of his son’s return, and Millicent saw nothing wrong with that: ‘I’d have preferred a surprise, and so would Father, I judge. But let it be.’
Talk turned to cotton prices, and Persifer reported what the New Orleans editor had said about how adverse conditions in Europe affected them.
‘What the German barons ought to do,’ Persifer said, ‘is line those agitators up and spread a little canister about.’
‘Give them time, they will.’
They both thought it unfair for peasants in Europe and especially in Ireland to be causing disturbances which unsettled the Liverpool market, and Somerset was astounded when his brother informed him of the collapse of Liverpool’s Royal Bank: ‘Good God! Rioters tearing down a great bank! I was damned pleased, Persifer, when you told us how your Texans handled those rioters in Mexico City. What they need in Europe is about six regiments of Texas Rangers.’
‘Please!’ the colonel said. ‘Don’t send them anywhere. Not even to the Ottoman Empire.’
Later in the evening, when the brothers were alone, each realized that he should speak openly of the altered situation on the plantation now that Persifer had resigned his commission, but each was loath to broach this delicate question, so Persifer raised one of more general significance: ‘In New Orleans men spoke openly … well, not directly, but you knew what was on their minds. They spoke of a possible rupture between our oppressors at the North and ourselves. Have you heard any such talk, Sett?’
‘There’s been constant talk since I can remember. But only by the irresponsibles who seem to flourish in this state and Georgia. Men like you and me, we’d surrender many of our advantages if we broke with the North.’
‘Have we any advantages left?’
‘Cotton. Every day I live, every experience I have, proves anew that the rest of the world must have our cotton. Cotton is our shield.’
‘Even when it can drop from twelve and five-eighths to …? What price did you say our upland people got? Four cents plus? That’s a two-thirds drop in three months.’
‘And we’ll see it back to twenty cents as soon as peace is regained and the mills resume weaving.’ He leaned forward: ‘If a man grows Sea Island, he worries far less, and we grow Sea Island.’ On that reassuring note the brothers went to bed.
They rose early, walked down to the plantation landing, entered their long, sleek craft, its six slaves already in position, and started one of America’s outstanding short voyages. When they left the pier they had a choice of two routes. They could head east and soon enter the Atlantic Ocean, where a rough thirty-mile sail would carry them to Charleston. Or they could head west and enter a fascinating inland passage that would take them to the same destination, except that on this route, protecting islands would hold off the Atlantic swells, making the voyage a sea-breeze delight.
If the brothers had been sailing alone, they would surely have taken the open-sea route for its challenge, but with their wives aboard, they chose the inland passage, moving through vast marshes until they saw above them the headland on which rested the beautiful homes and imposing trees of Charleston.
Now, with the wind gone, they dropped sail, and the slaves, their back muscles glistening in the sun, leaned on the oars, their voices blending in a soft chantey as they moved the boat toward its docking place near The Battery:
‘Miss Lucy, don’t you bake him no cornbread,
Don’t you feed him like you done feed me.
Miss Lucy, don’t you dare bake him no cornbread
Till I comes home wid your two possum.’
When they broke out of the narrow channel and into the glorious bay which made Charleston so distinctive, they could see dead ahead the glowering walls of Fort Sumter, unassailable on its rock; and while the sails were being hoisted again, Persifer told his listeners of San Juan de Ulúa, a comparable fortress set in another part of the same great ocean.
With deft moves the black helmsman brought the craft about and landed his four passengers on The Battery, one of the nation’s majestic streets. It stood on a hill so low it scarcely merited its name, but so pleasingly high that any house atop it caught a breeze off the sea. The stately houses were not positioned like those of any other American street; because a house was taxed according to how much of the precious Battery it took up, the Charleston mansions were not built with the long axis facing the sea, which would have been reasonable, but with the shortest end possible facing east and the longer sides running far back into the town.
‘Charleston has always looked sideways at the world,’ Persifer said as he saw once more those homes in whose pleasant gardens he had spent the better hours of his youth. There was the Masters mansion, in which he had courted Tessa Mae, and farther along, the Brooks house, where he and Somerset had gone so often to visit Millicent Brooks and her sister, Netty Lou; for almost a year it looked as if the two Cobb boys were going to marry the two Brooks girls, but then Netty Lou met a dashing boy home from Princeton, and Persifer had to settle for the Masters girl. Out on the great plantations and along The Battery it seemed as if a Charleston man did not marry a specific young lady on whom his fancy fell; he married the heiress to some other plantation, some other mansion along the seafront.
The Cobb mansion, which at the present had no girls to marry off, but which soon would when Somerset’s daughter matured, was, from the street, a modest red-brick structure of three stories, with two ordinary-looking windows on each floor but no door for entrance. A stranger to Charleston’s ways, seeing this plain façade for the first time, would glean not the slightest indication of the quiet grandeur hidden behind the plain walls. But let him move slightly to the left and enter the beautiful wrought-iron gate, set between two very solid brick pillars, and he would come upon a fairyland of exquisite g
ardens, elegant marble statues from Italy and brick sidewalks wandering past fountains, all enclosed by the long, sweeping, iron-ornamented porch on the right and the high brick wall on the left.
The wall, about ten feet high, was a thing of extraordinary perfection, for its bricks were laid in charming patterns which teased the eye along its immense expanse, and it was finished at the top in graceful down-dipping curves whose ends rose to finials on which rested small marble urns. On a hot afternoon one could sit on the long porch sipping minted tea and study the variations in the wall as one might study a symphony or a painting.
The porch was the masterwork of this excellent house, for it ran almost thirty yards, was two stories high, and was so delicately proportioned, resting on its stately iron pillars, that it seemed to have floated into position. Wicker chairs, placed about round glass-covered tables, broke the long reach into congenial smaller units that could be comfortably utilized by any number of visitors from one to twenty. Flowers adorned the porch, some planted in beds along its front, some in filigreed iron pots hanging decorously from the posts, but its salient characteristic was its sense of ease, its promise of shade on a hot day, the glimpses it provided of the nearby bay, and its constant invitation to rest.
When the Cobb brothers came through the gate they saw, resting on this porch at one of the smaller enclaves, their father, Maximus Cobb, seventy-two years old, his two canes perched against an unused chair. White-haired, with a prim white goatee but no mustache, he was dressed wholly in white, from his shoes to the expensive white panama resting on a table which also held his midmorning tea.
He did not rise to meet his sons, for to do so would have necessitated use of his canes, but he did extend his hands to Persifer, holding on to his older son for some moments with obvious delight and love.
‘Suetonius!’ he called. ‘Come see!’ But Suetonius, a slave now in his late sixties and weighted down with dignity, did not appear. In his place came a moderately tall, handsome black man in his early thirties, very dark of skin, with close-cropped hair, flashing eyes and a constant smile that showed extremely white teeth. He was not amused by the life about him, for he was painfully aware of being a slave, but he did prefer easing each day along with a minimum of difficulty, and had found that the simplest way to accomplish this was to smile, no matter what absurdity was thrown at him. Now, although he spoke good English, he used the dialect expected of him: ‘Suetonius, he workin’ wid de cook.’