“She the woman who changed churches?”
“Yes, she became a Quaker, up in Philadelphia. Mr. Grimké told Papa that his sister left because of slavery. His other sister, Angelina, may be next. She’s already going to the Quaker meeting here. People like Uncle Simms and Ouida sneer and scorn her for it. But, Henry, if a person hates slavery—”
“I surely do.”
“—must the person go somewhere else?”
“Don’t see any other way, ’less you want to try Vesey’s way and get hung.”
Alex shivered, clasped his hand. “Let’s go outside. This place is too gloomy.”
Alex’s relationship with her cousins hadn’t improved. Gibbes continued to chase her. Each time they met, he sidled up and tried to whisper flattery or tell a joke in a lame effort to be entertaining. Alex always rebuffed him, to the point of being insulting. It didn’t seem to stop him, so she avoided him whenever possible.
She had less chance of avoiding Ouida, who was finishing her studies at Miss Fancher’s. Ouida would receive no further education, nor would Alex. All that remained for Miss Fancher’s young ladies was marriage and motherhood, or the one profession open to women, teaching. Alex resented that.
Puberty had brought Ouida from her childhood cocoon but failed to turn her into a beautiful butterfly. She was, Alex thought with a definite tincture of dislike, a drab moth who hid the drabness with rouge, powder, and pretty clothes. Ouida had weak eyes, tended to squint. She needed thick spectacles but she was vain and wouldn’t wear them. This produced collisions with furniture and, sometimes, people. If Ouida bumped into a slave and hurt herself, she punished the slave. She was known for mistreating the Negroes at Sword Gate and Prosperity Hall. Lydia had taught her well.
Though just sixteen, Ouida appeared to have a gentleman interested in her. “Oh pooh,” she protested when questioned. “Dr. Hayward’s twenty-nine. Old as Methuselah.”
“But he calls on you regularly, doesn’t he?” a classmate asked.
“No. He calls at our house, because Mama gets the vapors, and he’s her doctor.”
Alex had met Dr. Xeno Hayward at a Christmas levee. A stout man, he had a lovely warm smile and an easygoing manner. She wondered what he saw in Ouida. Beyond her wealth and position, of course. Perhaps that was all he needed to see, Charleston being Charleston. There was just no accounting for choices in love.
Alex’s assumption was speculative; nearing fourteen, she had no experience with the subject. Because of her height, her dislike of coquetry, and the quirky way she thought about things, perhaps she never would.
In a rosy spring twilight Alex and Henry strolled in White Point garden, observing barges anchored near a harbor shoal where army engineers were starting construction of a fort. Alex had brought her new banjo, as white people called the instrument. She wanted to show it off to Henry. His father had helped make it, over Cassandra’s continuing objections.
The banjo’s round body, or ring, came from a wooden cheese box. Hamnet had sculpted the underside of the neck with his screw-crank lathe, then finished the piece and attached it using hand tools. Old Drayton, who was losing his eyesight, somehow found a tanned coonskin for the head. Humoring his daughter, Edgar brought home strings made of sheep’s gut. It wasn’t a beautiful or expensive instrument, but it produced a ringing tone. Drayton had taught Alex to play it with an upstroke of thumb and forefinger. She learned the guitar downstroke on her own.
The garden was nearly deserted; long shadows lay on the rose-tinted paths. Henry looked around cautiously, then flopped on a cast-iron bench. “Play me something.” Alex happily obliged.
“Possum up a gum tree,
Tink dat none can folla.
Him damn mistaken,
Raccoon’s in de holla.”
He interrupted. “You allowed to say damn?”
“I guess I am if I do, Henry.” She sang the rest of the song, culminating in the coon’s downfall, removal from the tree by a clever black man who caught hold of his tail.
Henry grinned and applauded. On South Battery a seller of gooseberries and strawberries with a basket on his head wearily chanted his offerings. Alex retuned two of the four strings, played and sang again.
“Little Henry Strong,
At a tender age
Hankers to be acting
On the public stage.”
He blinked. “Where’d that come from?”
“Me. I made it up.”
“You make up songs?”
“Yes. I don’t play them for anyone.”
“You played one for me.”
“I can trust you not to make fun.”
“Why’d I make fun?” He leaned back, brawny arms draped over the bench. “Tune’s nice. I don’t much like the ‘little’ part.” He pumped himself up with a deep breath and showed a muscle. Alex laughed and touched his bare arm, just as a handsomely dressed stranger walked by. The gentleman dug in his heels, poked Alex’s arm with the ferrule of his cane.
“You’re Attorney Bell’s daughter. What are you doing in the public garden with him?”
“Henry is a free person of color, sir. He’s my friend.”
“He’s a nigger. Mixing is against the laws of God and nature. Stop your folly or you’ll come to grief. There are people in Charleston who will see to it. As for you”—he jabbed Henry—“it will soon be curfew.”
Henry jutted his chin. “But it ain’t yet. Sir.”
The stranger pointed the cane at Alex. “Your father handled a breach-of-contract suit for me. He’ll never handle another.” He wheeled and walked off. Alex and Henry exchanged looks.
She told Edgar of the experience, and of the stranger’s belligerence. He hugged her, murmured that it didn’t matter, Henry was a fine young man. Alex wondered if he was secretly disappointed, or worried about her indiscretion. If so he kept it to himself.
31
Visitor from the Midlands
A meeting of the Fortnightly Club brought some of Edgar’s like-minded friends to the Battery. These included Mr. Petigru and Mr. Grimké, fellow attorneys; banker Marburg; the stout and stentorian Judge Beaufurt Porcher, retired from the bench but still handing down opinions; Mr. Poinsett, who had given Cassandra an exotic Christmas plant with brilliant red leaves, discovered while he served as America’s first minister to Mexico. It was a balmy spring evening, so the members gathered on the piazza. Despite the presence of biting midges,5
5Today we call these unpopular creatures no-see-ums. The term, supposedly of Indian origin, entered the language in the mid-1840s.
windows were raised to catch a breeze in the house. Alex and Ham lingered downstairs to listen, at his insistence. “You don’t want to be a dumbbell, do you? You want to know what’s going on, don’t you?” Alex said no, and yes, but she really wanted to run off and practice the banjo. Edgar had forbidden it while he entertained.
Judge Porcher presented the evening program, a review and commentary on something called the South Carolina Exposition and Protest, printed in Columbia and endorsed by the legislature last December. “An ably reasoned document, gentlemen, though pernicious in one respect. Its author puts forth his arguments but withholds his name. Washington swirls with rumors that Jackson suspects his own vice president, Mr. Calhoun of Fort Hill and Pendleton. Doubts of Calhoun’s loyalty to the Union have thus arisen, together with suspicions that he is protecting his good name because of well-known presidential ambitions. Such dissembling sadly soils the record of a man who for so long was the Union’s steadfast promoter and defender.”
A lantern on a small table lit the judge’s perspiring face. “Calhoun now interposes himself between state and Federal governments. He continues to stand against internal improvements, characterizing them as schemes to benefit Northern industry at the expense of Southern agriculture. The so-called tariff of abominations is of course a particular target. On major issues Mr. Calhoun is less and less a national man, more and more a man of narrowing provincialism, not to
say isolation.” The judge’s vocal volume steadily increased, until Alex imagined that people could hear him in Broad Street.
“Inspired by the Exposition and Protest, which does not in itself advocate antigovernment violence, those less moderate are thumping strange new tubs and tooting dangerous new horns. I hear a cry of ‘disunion,’ a term lately coined by Mr. Turnbull. I hear, in reference to Federal laws deemed unfair to South Carolina, a call for ‘nullification’ of those laws, by the very author of that term, our esteemed governor, Mr. Hamilton. Many moderate men abhor these clamors, while hotter heads utter them as threats. I speak not of crazed nobodies, but of respected, educated men, including the governor, and the fiery Mr. Rhett, whose Mercury newspaper has the ear of the public.”
Sunk in his chair, Thomas Grimké muttered unhappily, “He’s my cousin.”
“You may add our own Congressman Lark,” Edgar said. “God alone knows why the electorate chose that self-serving coxcomb for Congress.” Ayes and hear-hears sounded in the soft darkness. The judge seconded Edgar’s comment and continued.
“The Exposition and Protest pushes us all that much farther down the road to a national schism. Men of sense and propriety must stand up and declare themselves in opposition, lest our beloved state go too far and lead us to the unthinkable. Those who threaten disunion do not understand the potentially sanguinary consequences of that which they so blithely promote. But that is another topic. I entertain your questions and responses.”
The guests applauded. Crouched on the floor by the window, Alex asked Ham the meaning of schism. “A split, a division. What it means to the judge is trouble. Terrible trouble.”
On a bright and breezy April day Miss Fancher suffered a toothache and sent her pupils home at noon. An hour later a runner for Buckles & Bell brought a summons from Edgar. Would Alex come to the office and bring Maudie? Alex tossed aside her trowel, stomped out of the garden, and went to make herself presentable.
She and Maudie reached the office within the hour. At seventeen Maudie had ripened into a gorgeous young woman. Alex envied her figure. Wherever Maudie went, she attracted attention from men of both races. She was now a house servant, because Alex had insisted she no longer needed or wanted a personal slave. The two of them remained best friends.
They found Edgar and the cheerfully obese Argyll Buckles with two visitors. Edgar presented a tall, lean man with russet chin whiskers. “Mr. Anson Riddle, of Columbia, and his son, Richard.” Riddle and son sprang from their chairs. The young man’s hat tumbled off his lap. He grabbed for it, but it rolled across the floor and fell against a cuspidor.
“And this is my daughter, Alexandra, and Maudie, one of our house girls.”
Richard Riddle mumbled, “How do you do?” Alex had never seen such an unpromising youth. As tall as his father, he was a weed that had grown too fast. His dull brown coatee fit badly; two inches of linen hung out at the cuffs. He had a prominent Adam’s apple and a horrid skin problem. His eyes were his only attractive feature; large and brown, speckled with gold, they reminded her of a cat’s.
“Mr. Riddle owns a freight company,” Edgar explained. “His Conestoga wagons haul cotton for several planters in the midlands. He is searching for a factor to represent the group, and Bell’s Bridge is under consideration. While we discuss the matter, would you and Maudie entertain Richard? Maudie will chaperone them,” he assured Mr. Riddle. “Please return by half past four, Alex.” Alex felt put upon. The floor creaked under Argyll Buckles as he showed them the door.
“What would you like to do, Mr. Riddle?” Alex said in the anteroom. “I can show you the town. Or we could go for a sail, out to the new fort.”
“Either would be fine.” Alex rolled her eyes. Had she said they could stand on their heads for an hour, he’d probably find that fine too.
“A sail, then. The boat’s at Bell’s Bridge. Follow me.” She marched out.
Maudie caught up, whispering. “Not room for three in the skiff.”
“I’m sure you’ll find someone to talk to while we’re gone.” Maudie grinned and covered her mouth. A certain young stevedore with skin like black ivory had taken notice of Maudie recently.
Bell’s Bridge swarmed with men loading cotton bales onto a Liverpool steamer. A slave helped Alex down the slippery stairs to the little blue-bottomed skiff, then the visitor. “Have you sailed before?” Alex asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Then please sit there and follow orders.”
She gauged the tide and the offshore wind, then hoisted her skirts to step over Richard. She cast off the bowline, clambered back to the stern, and cast off there. As the tide bore them away from the stairs, she called thanks to the black man and raised the sail. She handed the boom line to Richard. “Keep that taut and cleat it when I tell you.”
“Cleat it?”
“That’s a cleat, there, on the gunwale.” She stifled a comment about the lumpy mess he made of tying the line.
The sail snapped, caught the wind, and filled. They sped into the channel. Alex pushed her flying hair out of her eyes and kicked off her shoes. Richard looked startled. “I suggest you put your hat under the thwart unless you want it to cross the Atlantic,” she said. He didn’t understand thwart. “What you’re sitting on.”
“Oh.”
Alex was a good sailor. She maneuvered the skiff between larger vessels coming and going. Soon they were skimming across the harbor, making for three barges anchored at the site of the new fort. The day was so fair and invigorating, the water so gloriously bright with silver sparkles, Alex’s mood soon improved.
“They’ve been planning the fort for two years, but they’ve only just gotten started.”
“Does it have a name?”
“It’ll be called Sumter, after the general.”
“Why does Charleston need another fort?”
“To defend the harbor, I suppose.”
“Against who?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. Papa’s friend Judge Porcher says politicians never explain, they just spend money. If they’re forced to explain, it’s mostly lies. May I ask your age, Mr. Riddle?”
“Seventeen. Won’t you call me Richard?”
“All right, Richard.”
“Is it impertinent to ask how old you are?”
“Fifteen.”
He struggled for a compliment. “Really. You’re very…tall.”
“Yes, and I don’t like it. Put your head down, we’re coming about.” She did it so quickly, she nearly brained him with the boom.
She brought them close to the barges. Two surveyors stood ankle deep on the shoal, using a theodolite on a tripod. Negro workmen transferred granite blocks from the barge to the start of a foundation wall. Three white men, noncommissioned army artificers, bossed the work gang. Richard listened carefully to Alex’s comments about the work but made none of his own. When she thought it time to leave, they sailed back in silence. His poor blotchy skin oozed and glistened in the sunshine. She felt sorry for him. Boys and girls had to suffer that while maturing, though girls had other burdens as well. Fortunately Alex was sturdy, never forced to halt her activities and rush to bed with cramps once a month.
After tying up she put on her shoes and searched for Maudie, whom she found behind a rampart of cotton bales, chatting and laughing with her handsome malingering stevedore. On the way to the law office Maudie remained a respectful two steps behind Alex and the visitor.
Near the alley leading to the office the young man cleared his throat. “Let me thank you for that interesting trip. I enjoyed your company. I wish”—it took him a moment to bring out the rest—“I do wish I could call on you.”
“Well, I don’t live in the midlands, and I don’t expect to visit, so I guess you can’t.”
He smiled in a shy way. “You surely don’t talk like ordinary girls, Miss Bell.”
“Because I’m not like ordinary girls. I can introduce you to plenty of those.”
“No, than
k you. I’d rather have your company.”
“If you were around me a lot, you probably wouldn’t like me. I have only one male friend, and he’s a Negro.”
“Reckon he knows a good thing, whatever the color.”
For once she didn’t know how to reply. She stepped into the alley ahead of him, experiencing a curious mix of annoyance and pleasure.
They found Riddle, Edgar, and Argyll Buckles concluding their discussion. Edgar promised a written proposal in a few days. After Richard enthusiastically described the sail to his father, Alex said good-bye to the visitors. When Richard shook her hand, he gave her a piercing look with those luminous, flecked eyes. It made her spine tingle oddly.
As she and Maudie trooped homeward along East Bay, Maudie said, “Looked to me like you didn’t care for that boy too much.”
“Funny thing is, right at the end, I did. Well, he’s gone.” She tossed her head, her unpinned hair flying. “There are other fish in the sea.”
“That’s true, but I recollect you never go fishing. Fact is, you hate fishing.”
“You’re too smart for your own good, Maudie.”
Maudie laughed and they walked on.
The midland cotton planters rejected Edgar’s proposed fees as too costly. Anson Riddle and son disappeared from the lives of the Bells. In a few weeks Alex forgot her visitor.
32
Lark and Angelina
The Bell family’s box pew at St. Michael’s was third from the front on the left side of the aisle as you faced the altar. Here the family had worshiped since Tom Bell’s time.
Somehow the parvenu Crittenden Lark managed to buy a pew across the aisle and one row back. On a Sunday of clouds and drizzle the congressman appeared in his finery—high collar, canary vest, garishly checked fawn trousers, violet-blue coat—with his wife, Sophie, and his son by a previous marriage, Folsey, who was a friend of Gibbes Bell.
Sophie was Lark’s second wife. His first, deceased, had been a von Schreck, of good social standing. That couldn’t be said of the former Sophie See, a voluptuous creature whom Lark obviously had not married for her brains or pedigree. Sophie’s father raised pigs near Orangeburg. When Sophie snared Lark, she put her low origins behind her and pretended to be wellborn. She still had not convinced the Charleston elite, who joked about it, but never in Crittenden Lark’s presence, fearing his temper. Whenever the Larks attended church, Alex fancied she felt a burning on her neck, as though the heat of their animosity was a physical thing.