young. She guessed that she had become used to motherhood, and didn't
worry so much whether she was doing the right thing. So she could shout
at them, and cuff their ears, and laugh at their games, or simply tell
them to get out from under her feet when she was too busy with other
things. Whatever her other duties though, she tried to set an hour of
each day aside, exclusively for them.
Running a household as large as theirs was never easy for Sally, least
of all in the summer months when they had so many visitors. Although she
could rely on Parson Dick, and Julie, the cook, several of the younger
girls needed constant supervision, were frequently sick or forgetful of
their duties. Sometimes, Sally thought, the more house slaves you had,
the more work there was to do. She envied those few Northern hostesses
she had met who, employing domestic staff, could sack them if they were
incompetent or lazy, for it seemed
252 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
excessive to Sally, but not to some others, to have a slave girl whipped
or sold away for neglecting to empty a chamber pot or dust under a bed.
Her various female relatives understood this-they shared the problem-but
still they made demands on her time, for she was one of the reasons they
had come.
Jass found it hard work trying to remember all the family connections.
Elizabeth, his mother's daughter by her first marriage, had married his
cousin Tom, which meant she was both his half sister and his first cousin
once removed. But what about Sam, their young son? Was he first cousin
twice removed, or second cousin once removed, or half nephew? These
things seemed to matter in a family, especially to the women. Aunt
Letitia Hanna was the family authority, and very sharp with Jass whenever
he flunked a relationship. "You will have to find an intelligent bride,"
she had admonished once, clearly dismissing him as a dunderhead. "Someone
has to remember all their birthdays."
The cotton ripened, the buds bursting with the white gold that was their
fortune. It was going to be a good yield, over a bale an acre, and with
the recent reduction of tariffs demanded by South Carolina, the profit
would move from the good to the spectacular.
The work songs of the picking gangs could be heard everywhere on the
plantation, drifting in to James through the open windows of his study,
where he sat for hours on the sultry, sweaty summer days, counting his
wealth, as if knowledge of the scale of it was insurance against its ever
being taken away. When not in his study, he spent time at the stables
inspecting his lucrative stallions and watching their training. He still
fretted about John Coffee's visit, but the horses calmed him, or
distracted him, and he put on a jolly, Irish face for his relatives,
especially when they were Irish.
It pleased him, too, when rich landowners came with their wives and
daughters to call, the girls doing their best to make an impression on
young Jass. The aristocratic families of the South were always plotting
their survival, and although Jass was too young to be in a serious race,
it was never too early to start building alliances. It pleased James, and
thrilled Jass, that he was the object of these welcome attentions, and
it amused Sally that any visit by a family with a daughter to
MERGING 253
dispose of was quickly followed by a visit from Lizzie Perkins and her
mother. Sally watched with approval as Jass grew better and better at
conducting himself in the presence of young ladies, and toward the end of
summer, Sally realized that Jass was going to be a considerable catch.
She had always thought him a good-looking boy, but the Jass who was
measured for his new clothes at the beginning of summer was not the Jass
who was fitted into them at the end, even though allowance had been made
for growth. The cuffs of his trousers had to be let down a solid inch,
and the sleeves of his jackets. His chest had filled out and his neck
thickened, so that his new shirts were already tight, and Sally clucked
in despair.
That clucking stopped when he tried on his new evening clothes, and
presented himself for her inspection, grinning because he knew they
suited him.
The elegant velvet coat, the pearly white jabot, flowing in elaborate
ruffles from his neck, and the beautifully cut stovepipe pants changed
him, before her very eyes, from a boy bursting out of his scams to a
strikingly handsome young man.
"What on earth are you crying for?" he laughed. And Sally laughed too,
and could not tell him why.
The end of summer also brought the last of their visitors and, for James,
the most welcome.
Sara came from Baltimore with her family, and for a few days James tried
to lose himself in an orgy of Irish reminiscence, and music, and stories
of their youth.
Sara could see that something was troubling her brother but, like Sally,
knew it was useless trying to provoke him to talk before he was ready.
The two women discussed it at length, but Sally could shed little light
on the matter.
It had begun with the visit of John Coffee, she said, and she was sure
it was related to Andrew and, somehow, the Indians. James scanned the
newspapers avidly when they arrived, but was interested only in that one
subject. A few weeks before, some reporters from the Washington
newspapers had come to interview James, but he had refused to discuss his
private business dealings.
Then John Coffee died, of a chill he had caught coming back from
Washington. James had ambivalent feelings about
254 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
the death. He tried to mourn the friendship they had once enjoyed, but had
grieved enough for that long ago. He sent his condolences to the family,
and attended the funeral, and said all the appropriate things, but there
was a constant sense of relief in the back of his mind that John, at
least, would no longer trouble him. He did feel a genuine sense of loss
at this evidence of the passing years.
Toward sunset, on the day before she was due to leave, James asked Sara
if she would like to visit the stables with him. They walked to the
racecourse arm in arm, gossiping, and leaned on the fence to watch the
horses being exercised. Lauderdale, grazing in a paddock, came trotting
over to his owner.
"He's from Miss Shipton, and he's going to make me a fortune," James
said, stroking the stallion's nose and feeding him the apple he had put
in his pocket for the purpose.
Sara laughed. "All you've talked about this last hour, this last week,
is how much money you've made. As if you were scared of losing it."
James smiled. She could read him like a book. That was why he had brought
her here. If anyone could make sense of it, it was Sara.
The story came pouring out of him, in flooding relief. He told her
eve
rything, kept nothing back. Except his present feelings about the
Indians.
Sara felt keenly her brother's distress, and was not surprised that
Andrew was at the heart of it. She wanted to crow in triumph, "I told you
so." She wanted to box her younger brother's ears for getting involved
in the sordid mess, but knew that would get them nowhere.
"You lent Andrew money," she said. "What Andrew did with it is his
business. You've been lending him money for years. Did he ever pay a
penny of it back?"
James stared at her, trying to come to terms with the simplicity of the
statement. It was true. All he had done was lend Andrew a sum, admittedly
a very large sum, of money. And that was all.
"Oh, James--there was a trace of sadness in Sara's voice, but she
couldn't resist the dig-"we've been trying to warn you about Andrew for
years, Sally and 1. Why didn't you listen?"
MERGING 255
She knew the answer. James had wanted to be part of something grand,
something magnificent, and ambition had clouded his mind. Men leave such
a mess behind them wherever they go, Sara thought. 'Tis women have to do
the cleaning up.
"The only evidence of anything is in those letters," she said. "As long
as they remain under lock and key, your nose is clean."
Sara wasn't sure what he was thinking now, but pushed her case. Living
in Baltimore, closer to the heart of things than James, tucked away on
the other side of the Appalachians, she had heard the stories about
Andrew coming out of Washington. He was already an old man when he first
became president; now his years in office were said to be making him more
and more cantankerous, more vindictive toward his enemies, less and less
tolerant of opposition. She wanted James done with Andrew, and she feared
his great, soft heart might lead him to actions he would regret.
"Don't give them to Andrew, I beg you. Who knows what the old devil would
do with them?"
She knew it was useless to publish them. The resulting scandal would
surely harm James, but Andrew, as usual, would find a way to wriggle out
of it. And she didn't completely disagree with Andrew on the matter of
the Indians.
"As for the Indians," she continued, as if guessing his moral dilemma,
"there's nothing you can do. We can't give back every square inch of land
to the bloodthirsty savages, go back where we came from and pretend we
were never here."
She was smiling, he knew, teasing him with the absurdity of the idea.
Then she became serious again. "This isn't the British in Ireland, Jamie.
This was wasted land before we came."
She hadn't used his pet name since he was a boy, and he almost laughed
in relief. Sara's analysis of the settlement of America was so very
realistic. He couldn't alter the past; he couldn't unmake history; he
couldn't pretend the European migration to America had never happened and
send everyone home again. That would create a new race of dispossessed,
the children who were born here-they had no other home to go back to. His
guilt at the piteous plight of the Indians had clouded his objectivity,
and he now saw that he had been an
256 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
easy victim to John Coffee's blackmail. John had simply been telling him to
shut up, to keep quiet about what he knew. James would oblige.
Still, Sara was wrong. There was something he could do. He could still talk
to Andrew, try to persuade him to end the removal of the native people. But
he would do so with a considerably lighter heart.
Sally, on the veranda, could see them talking and guessed they were
discussing whatever it was that had so been distracting James these last
several weeks. She felt a mild twinge of jealousy that her husband should
choose to discuss these things with his sister and not with his wife, but it
quickly passed. When they walked toward her, Sally could tell, from James's
laughter and the energy in his stride, that Sara had resolved whatever
problem had been vexing him so. She blessed her sister-in-law for being a
practical, pragmatic woman, and waved cheerily to them as they came up the
hill.
31
in the first week of September the family traveled to Nashville. It took
them a full day to cross the river at Muscle Shoals; their carriage had to
be ferried across, and then the luggage wagon and the slave cart. Jass spent
most of the day at the water's edge, fishing or, with Cap'n Jack, chatting
with the black laborers, and from one of them he bought a few freshwater
pearls. They were silly, small, irregular things, but the man hadn't wanted
much money, and Jass thought they would be a nice gift to some young woman,
even Lizzie perhaps, for he was intent on cultivating relationships with
girls. Sally and Sassy sheltered from the sun at the inn on the northern
shore, so he saw little of Easter. She was wide-eyed at this exotic new
adventure of travel-she had never left The Forks before-but she was taking
her new duties as Sassy's maid seriously, and hardly left Angel's side.
MERGING 257
The Trio had stayed behind at The Forks. They were not invited to the
wedding, and were not returning to their school in Nashville. much to
Sally's relief. She hated sending these youngsters so far away from home to
school, too young, she told herself, for such separation from a mother's
watchful eye and warm embrace. A.J. had done it, and Jass, and she'd hated
that as much, but they'd had little choice-the Stevens School in Nashville
was the nearest suitable institution. Since then, Reverend Sloss had opened
his Preparatory Academy in Florence, but that had no facilities for
elementary education. James had murmured platitudes about character
building, which left Sally entirely unimpressed, and the only consolation
Sally could find was that the boys would be under the careful eye of
Eleanor. Now, and not before time, thought Sally, the reverend gentleman
had extended the age limits of boys he would accept, and the Trio were to
go there, as did Jass, and could live at home.
The journey was slow, the pace dictated by the slave cart. The carriage was
hot and uncomfortable, jarring their bones as it bounced over the rough
roads. Sometimes Jass rode on Morgan, but he didn't want to tire the horse
unnecessarily, and mostly kept him tethered to the slave cart. Then Jass
preferred to ride on the box with Samuel, the coachman, who claimed to have
covered all this territory before, in the few short days of his freedom,
when actually he had never left the outskirts of Florence, and knew the
road only because he had driven the coach to Nashville and back many times.
Ephraim drove the luggage wagon, and Easter and Angel were with Cap'n Jack
in the slave cart.
Each evening they would stop while it was still light at travelers' hotels,
around which small settlements had grown, and Jass was al
lowed to join his
father in after-dinner conversations with the older men or, in the hour
before sunset, free to explore the surroundings.
Jass had made the journey many times, but as a boy, going to and coming
from his school, and he now saw the adventure with a young man's eyes. This
is still the frontier, he thought, and it thrilled him and horrified him.
He saw a slave being mercilessly lashed in public for some hurt, real or
imagined, to his master, and he had turned away, for it provoked sub-
258 ALEX HALEY'S QUEEN
conscious memories of another lashing he had seen, as a boy, to a man who
was now his friend and walked beside him. Once he saw a white man shoot
another to death with a pistol, in full view outside the hotel, for what
Cap'n Jack, talking to other slaves, discovered was a question of honor.
Conversely, he experienced hospitality from almost everyone he met, a sense
of welcome to a stranger, which his father assured him was the nature of
these people. He knew his family occupied a privileged position-because of
his father's status, because they were guests traveling to an important oc-
casion, and because they had made the journey so often that many of the
innkeepers and their families remembered thembut even so, the generosity
that was extended to them warmed his heart.
The later discussions with older men, in his father's company, both
intrigued and bored him. Alfred and Gracie's wedding was on everyone's
lips, a source of amusement to some, evidence of the increasing uppitiness
of niggers to others, and this led to discussion of the man Jass called
Uncle Andrew, who, however, was not related to him and whom he had never
met.
Here in the West, Andrew's actions as president had only increased his
already legendary status. He was seen as champion of the little man, the
settler, the battling individual. People here believed him dedicated to
enfeebling the bureaucracy in Washington, reducing the undue influence of
the industrial Northeast over their lives, and by removing the federal de-
posits from it, curbing the outrageous power the centralized bank had
previously enjoyed. Only a few speculators and businessmen dissented from
this view, and then vehemently.
It had always been the same, his father explained. Andrew was an
extraordinary man, capable of arousing violent passions in people, both
toward him and against him.
Above all else, Andrew was seen as the salvation of the white settler from
the bloodthirsty savages, the consensus being that the sooner the land was
rid of all Indians, the better life would be. It puzzled Jass that his
father would walk away every time this subject was raised, nor would he
discuss it with Jass.
MERGING 259
Easter had hoped to see more of Jass on this journey than she had done all
summer, but she knew something had happened in their relationship,
something he had to come to terms with for himself. He didn't ignore her,
he still visited the weaving house, but now he kept a distance between
them, as if determined to avoid actual physical contact with her, and she
missed the easy familiarity they used to- enjoy. Here on the journey, when
he was riding Morgan, he'd trot beside the slave cart for a while,
pointing out new things to her, but Angel and Cap'n Jack were an obvious,
inhibiting influence to any intimacy between them.
At night she'd be too busy to see him, for she and Angel had to unpack
the trunk, prepare the clothes for the morning, and see to their
mistress's comforts before they could even begin to think about their
own. They ate and slept in the dingy slave accommodations attached to the
hotels, and while she enjoyed listening to the slaves of other travelers,
she was too shy to voice opinions of her own. Up from well before sunrise
to iong after dark, drowsy on some uncomfortable cot in a lousy communal
shed, Easter decided that traveling was an overrated experience and