Jacob's Ladder (17 page)

BULLWHIP DAYS

S
TRATFORD
P
LANTATION
, V
IRGINIA
D
ECEMBER
5, 1861

The Spirit of the Lord came mightily upon him,

and the cords that were upon his arms

became as flax that was burnt with fire,

and his bands loosed from off his hands.

—Judges 15:14

THE THIRD TIME
he ran, Jesse packed his waist bells with tallow to silence them. When he was caught, Samuel Gatewood ordered a copper rod riveted to Jesse's iron belt in the back so he couldn't reach the bells. The copper rod curved over his head like a buggy whip. The waist bells had been sheep bells, but a cow bell dangled from the new copper rod.

“I intend to waste less time hunting you should you run again,” Master said.

Jesse said nothing.

Jack the Driver set Jesse to feeding logs into the sawmill and locked him to the log carriage with a light chain. “I'll unchain you when you promise you won't run no more,” Jack said.

Jesse looked at Jack as if Jack were riffraff.

Jesse guided logs to the blade, flopping them to this side and that as the sawyer commanded. At that time they were sawing white oak.

When it got too dark to work, around five o'clock, Jack led Jesse to the root cellar, which was his jail. When Jesse dipped his head to go underneath the low doorframe, the cowbell clanked and everybody knew Jesse was in his jail until morning. Jack brought supper in a tin pan, and sometimes Jesse ate it and sometimes he didn't.

The root cellar was beneath the curing house, where hams hung until they took the salt. The cellar was stone, eight by ten, with a dirt floor; dug into a rise behind the big house's kitchen garden. Since only the ceiling was above ground level and since that ceiling was packed with sawdust, the cellar stayed at forty-five degrees, and Jesse was warm enough under a wool blanket. His bed was a wide plank laid across the potato bins, and his mattress was the same plank.

Chilly air came right through the pocketbook-sized ventilation hole in the door, but Jesse left it open because hunkered down, with his cheek pressed against the door, he could see the stars.

Where was Maggie?

Could she see the stars?

That awful night last Christmas, before Omohundhru seized her, Master Samuel himself had decoyed Jesse down here, and when Maggie shrieked out Jesse's name, called it again and again, there had been nothing Jesse could do but hurl himself helplessly at the thick door clawing until his fingers bled.

After they turned him loose, soon as he could, he ran.

He didn't run to get away, he ran to be with Maggie, who was somewhere among the stars. Jesse puzzled out which one; it was that bright star just below the cup of the Little Dipper, that star which has a smaller star tagging along with it, which must be Baby Jacob.

Maggie came to love Jesse more as a star than she'd loved him as a woman. Maggie told Jesse all her secrets. Her and the young master. Didn't mean a thing. Both just children first time it happened, and the pure delicious deliciousness of it. What about us? Well, what about us? We wasn't the same. It was grown-ups doing it, as man and wife. For us it was just duty.

His first runaway, Jesse found himself a den on Snowy Mountain which might have belonged to a wolf once, only the wolf was gone and Jesse lay under his coat and a mound of dead leaves and he'd talk to the Maggie star, pour out his heart.

Somewhere below, down the mountain, was Stratford plantation.

When he got so hungry he couldn't tell one star from another, and couldn't know which was Maggie, he came down to the Kirkpatrick cabin, where Miss Sallie fed him and warmed him by the fire until the slave patrollers came. Jesse knew Miss Sallie and her husband had been jailed on his account, but he didn't care. They weren't any worse off than he was.

Second time he ran he'd been harrowing oat ground. Jack found Jesse's abandoned team grazing quietly at the base of the mountain. Master set ten men to looking, and a week later they found Jesse. That's when Master had an iron belt fabricated for Jesse and sheep bells attached to it.

Third time was in September, when they were cutting corn. Jesse packed his bells silent with tallow and ran again. Jesse figured Master wouldn't stop harvest work to hunt a runaway, but Jesse was wrong. The corn got cut late that year, but Jesse was brought home to Stratford.

The whip didn't cut Jesse sharp as he expected. After the first few slashes, each additional cut was a broad stroke, like a deathblow applied to his whole back at once. Jesse would have screamed but for the rag between his teeth. It hurt him worse than he'd expected, because he didn't lose his senses until the end.

Jack the Driver stayed the master's hand, and for an instant it seemed as if Jack might be next. “He ain't no use to you dead,” Jack said softly.

Panting, blood-spattered, Master Gatewood threw the bullwhip into the dirt. “He's no use to me alive,” he said. He stepped to the bushes and vomited, which none of the servants were supposed to see, so they didn't.

Miss Abigail treated Jesse's wounds with clean water and soft cloths and comfrey poultices, but Jesse wasn't aware of her, because of the fever that set in. Miss Abigail wanted Jesse moved back to the Quarters, where he could be looked after properly, but Master wouldn't hear of it.

Corn and wheat prices were double a year ago, but the new money wasn't as good as the old money. One afternoon at the mill, Master told Jack the war would be over before spring, “soon as Mr. Lincoln knows we mean business,” and Jack said, yes, sir, surest thing in the world. That very night in the Quarters, Rufus said the blacks were like the Israelites in Pharaoh's day and Father Abraham was going to set them all free. Jack the Driver didn't like that kind of talk but didn't know how he could stop it.

“Until that day of Jubilo we all got to work,” Jack said. “And until the quittin' bell rings on that day, you gonna live by the sweat of your brow, and don't be gettin' notions otherwise.”

A Confederate commissary man came out from Warm Springs to buy twenty of Master's prime cows, and when Master said he didn't want to sell, the man said the time would come when he'd sell whether he wanted to or not, and Master got hot and said no matter whether tyranny bore the name “Federal” or “Confederate,” it was tyranny all the same. The commissary man said he'd be back.

Local young men signed on with the Highland Mountaineers or the Bath Cavalry, and when the Federals surrounded Colonel Pegram at Rich Mountain, most of those same boys were captured. Masters Gatewood and Byrd had enlisted with a Richmond regiment which missed that fight. The servants didn't want any harm to come to them and hoped Father Abraham wouldn't feel it necessary to lay them low. Many heartfelt prayers were uttered in the negro garret of SunRise Chapel on the two masters' accounts.

One Sunday late in the year, Aunt Opal and Uther Botkin returned to Stratford with the Gatewoods after church, and while Master Uther sat with Master Samuel in the parlor, Aunt Opal went to the root cellar. “Go inside,” Jack the Driver said. “I don't reckon Jesse'll hurt you.”

“Wasn't that gave me pause,” Aunt Opal sniffed. “Was the stink.”

Jack the Driver took away the slop jar, though that wasn't his task.

Jesse perched on the edge of his plank bed, blanket draped around his shoulders.

“I heard you got skinny,” Aunt Opal said. “I brought you a pie.” When he didn't reach for it, she set it beside him. “You always was a stubborn boy, but you wasn't no fool. Why you keep runnin' away? You know Master's sworn to bring you back.”

“I don't care about him,” Jesse said in a dull voice.

“Old fool Uther at the big house right now, tryin' to buy you away. Brought every dollar he got.”

“His ain't my home either,” Jesse said.

“Don't talk foolishness,” Aunt Opal snapped. “ 'Course it is. Whatever other home you ever knowed? Uther's too old for this trouble. I want you promise you won't run away no more.”

Jesse didn't say anything.

“I won't have that. I ain't no white master. I ask you a question, I'll have an answer.”

Jesse licked his lips. “I'll run till I die.”

Opal pushed her face right up to his and examined his eyes. “Weren't your baby,” she said.

“I made him mine.”

“Your woman always yearned for another.”

“I got my share of faults.”

“God knows where your family is now.”

Jesse knew perfectly well where they were. Every clear night he pressed his face to the splintery plank door and found the patch of stars and talked to Maggie.

Jesse's dreamy smile fetched a tear from Aunt Opal's eyes. She rubbed the tear from her cheek with her apron. “They feedin' you all right?”

“Oh, I got everything I'm needin'. It's astonishin' how much I got.”

In Samuel Gatewood's parlor, Uther Botkin sat with his hat in his lap. “I have brought a fair price for Jesse,” he repeated.

A wan Samuel Gatewood sat in the window seat, the thick drapes drawn. “After the triumph of our arms at Manassas, I expected Mr. Lincoln to abandon his invasion. Surely he knows he cannot force a sovereign people to submit.”

“Have you received news from . . .”

“My son-in-law writes frequently. Catesby's has not been a bloody war, thank God. My daughter, Leona, could wish no better news. Leona is with child, and as you know, she has always been delicate. I pray she receives no shock before her delivery. I will not sell Jesse.”

“Samuel, why torment yourself? Jesse will never be happy here.”

“Mr. Botkin, we are not put on earth for happiness but to fulfill our Christian duty. Jesse is my chattel. If I fail in my resolve, what will my other servants think? One man's rebellion may well become general.”

“But Samuel, surely Jesse's circumstances are . . . unique.”

“It is, alas, not uncommon for servant families to be separated. Who will do our work? Orphans? Bachelors? Those with no family connections at all? Now, Mr. Botkin, if you will excuse me.”

Uther stood, gripping his hat in his hands. “Is there no end to this suffering? My Sallie . . .”

“As you know, I did everything in my power for your daughter and can do no more. I am grateful for your neighborly concern, sir, but this affair is between Jesse and me, and until he accepts his lot, it will go hard with him.”

Prior to November 26, 1861, the nearest free state was Ohio, two months' hard walk over the mountains, and few runaways completed the journey. But western Virginia voted to secede from Virginia, and Federal troops were making its secession good. That Jordan River so many slaves yearned to cross had come nearer.

Mrs. Dinwiddie took up a subscription to increase the slave patrollers, no easy task with so many men with the army. Some nights elderly planters made rounds, Samuel Gatewood among them, and hardly a week went by without their capturing some runaway. One young servant had walked all the way from Georgia.

“Where're you going, boy?” Gatewood inquired.

“North,” the boy answered.

And one morning when Rufus's gang formed to go out in the woods, two men were missing. Gone.

“How I'm gonna get tasks done without hands to do them?” Jack the Driver asked.

Patrollers caught the runaways. When they were returned, all the servants were turned out and Jack did the whipping.

“This is what happens to runaways,” Samuel announced. Then his face contorted, “What do you people want? Do you want my family to starve?”

That night after dark, Rufus slipped up on Jesse's cellar; he snuck down the stairs quiet as a cat and set his butt on the lowest step. “It's me. Rufus. Cold out here, yes, sir.”

Rufus heard a sound between a whisper and a sigh.

“Stars bright on the colder night,” Jesse breathed.

“Yeah. Goose bumps bigger too.”

They sat for a time before Rufus ventured, “Jesse, when you run, why you run up the mountain instead of north? If you run north, maybe you be free by now.”

“I knowed that mountain all my life. Never been to the North.”

“Past Strait Creek, everything's changed. Past Strait Creek it ain't Confederate no more. Nigger get across Strait Creek and don't get caught, he a free man.”

“Look! One of them fallin' stars. Wonder what makes them fall that way? You think they lonesome?”

“Jesse, how long I been knowin' you?

“Long time. Been a long time.”

Rufus drew his jacket up around his shoulders. “You gone mad, Jesse? I got to know if you took leave of your senses.”

Another silence then, plenty of time for Rufus to roll his head around on his stiff neck.

“Rufus, I don't know whether I'm crazy or not. Most of what used to fret me don't fret me no more. I wonder why there's so many stars.”