Silence for a moment. She seemed to struggle with some burden, then fling it off, sitting straighter. "I have Negro blood. My mother was a New Orleans quadroon."
Brett's admiration gave way to a rush of dizziness. She held still, not daring to move for fear she would shame Madeline, who continued to speak as calmly as if she were reciting a primer lesson. "You know what that means in the Confederacy. One drop of black blood and you're a black person." She paused. "Will that be true in Lehigh Station?"
Constance answered first. "Absolutely not. No one will know. You needn't have told us."
"Oh, no, I felt obligated."
Light-headed, Brett wasn't sure how she felt. Scipio Brown was forgotten as she struggled with the idea that this woman who shared her brother's bed and love — and the family name — was a Negro. Of course she didn't look it, but the truth was exactly as Madeline had stated it. Looks didn't measure blackness; only ancestry. Confusing emotions, childhood-deep, engulfed her.
"Are you positive it makes no difference?" Madeline asked.
"None," Brett said, wishing it were so.
"If I'd stayed on the river road, they'd have caught me sure," Andy said. "They popped out of the palmettos — two of 'em on mules — but I know some of the back paths and they didn't. That's how I got away."
"Well, sit down, rest yourself," Philemon Meek said, giving up his own chair. "I'm thankful you're all right."
The heavy air of a July twilight filled the plantation office. Meek paced, swinging his spectacles from his bent index finger.
How old he's grown, Cooper thought from the shadowed corner where he stood, arms folded.
After Andy came dashing up the lane, sweat and fright on his face, Meek insisted the three of them confer here rather than in the great house. In the office, the overseer explained, they wouldn't be overheard, thus would not alarm Cooper's wife and daughter or the house servants. It was the house people Meek worried about most. He didn't want them to run off.
Cooper went along with Meek, but he had fewer illusions than the overseer. The house people knew the guerrilla band was encamped nearby, its ranks growing weekly. The only person unaware of the danger was Clarissa.
"If I'd known an ordinary errand would be so dangerous, I wouldn't have sent you, Andy," Meek said. "I'm sorry. Hope you believe that."
"Yes, sir. I do." Cooper marveled. The apology and the response demonstrated the immense change the war had wrought on the plantation.
Meek stopped swinging his spectacles. "Now I want to be clear about this. You saw white men this time."
"That's right. Two in regular army gray, three in butternut. Those butternut coats didn't look like much. Still, you could tell they belonged to soldiers — either the ones wearing them or the ones they stole 'em from."
The overseer pronounced the verdict they all knew: "If white deserters are joining the nigras, then we've twice the reason to fear." He swung toward the possessor of final authority. "I have little doubt they'll attack us, Mr. Main. This is the largest plantation still operating in the district. I think we should arm some of the slaves — assuming we can find anything to arm them with. The attack may not come for a while, but we've got to be ready when it does."
"Is that the only way?" Cooper snapped. "Fighting?"
The overseer was momentarily stunned to silence. Andy didn't know what to make of the questioning response. After a few seconds, Meek said, "If you can suggest another, I'll be glad to hear it."
Stillness, filled with insect sounds. Up toward the house, a woman chanted the melody of a hymn. From a great distance they heard the raucous cry of a salt crow, answered by another. Andy peered out the window anxiously.
Cooper recognized defeat, sighed. "All right. I'll go to Charleston to see whether I can find some secondhand guns." Brusquely and with urgency, Meek said, "Soon, please?"
In Richmond next day, Orry packed the last of the few personal things with which he and Madeline had furnished the rooms on Marshall Street. The items went into a crate he nailed shut with a hammer wielded easily in his powerful right hand. Pounding the precious rusty nails one by one, he wondered if he would ever see the box after he consigned it to a local warehouse. He felt despondent about his negative answer, but comforted when he recalled that it was not an isolated reaction. Throughout the South, expectations sank daily.
He squeezed uniforms and gear into a small dilapidated trunk for which he had paid a barbarous price. He tagged the trunk with appropriate information and set it on the landing. Late in the afternoon, a white-haired Negro teamster appeared. The man's shoulders were round as the top of a question mark. Orry offered him a tip, but the man shook his head, gave him a sadly resentful look, and took the trunk away, making certain Orry heard his groans as he descended the stairs.
At dusk he donned his best gray uniform, locked the flat, and handed the key to the landlady. Carrying a small carpetbag containing items he didn't want to risk losing — his razor, a bar of soap, and two thin books of poetry — he walked to the marshaling yard where his transportation was waiting — a supply wagon bound south, seven and a half miles, to Chaffin's Bluff. There, Pickett's Division anchored the right end of the Intermediate Line, one of the five defense lines ringing the city.
The teamster invited Orry to sit next to him, but Orry preferred to ride in back, along with several unmarked boxes, his trunk and carpetbag, and his thoughts. He was happy to leave Richmond, but the prospect of joining Pickett's staff had not really lifted his spirits the way he had hoped. He was still shamed by Ashton's treachery and shocked by his callous disposal of Elkanah Bent. His loneliness since Madeline's departure could better be termed despondency. He prayed that she had reached Washington and would continue to think he was working in relative safety at the War Department.
Orry had always tried to draw lessons from experience. He had attempted it again after the entire government appeared to turn on his wife solely because she had a Negro ancestor. He found the lesson was familiar. Cooper had preached it for many years, and Orry had just as consistently ignored it until both sides had gone too far down the steep, dark road to war.
To this very day, the South was a stubborn pupil, rejecting the lesson even after the teacher's stick beat the pupil until he bled from mortal wounds. What would bring the Confederacy to an inglorious end was the same thing that had so foolishly created it: a rigidity of thought, a clinging to old ways, a refusal to adapt and change.
That was it, Orry saw with a little frisson of revelation. The fatal flaw. Minds of stone — pugnaciously proud of the condition.
Examples abounded. The South needed soldiers in the most desperate way, yet those who urged the enlistment of blacks were still called lunatics.
Were not the rights of states supreme? Of course they were. Thus the governor of Georgia needed no other grounds to exempt three thousand militia officers from army service and five thousand government workers besides. Using the same justification, the governor of North Carolina stockpiled thousands of uniforms, blankets, and rifles under the banner of state defense. Such right-thinking, principled men were more destructive than Sam Grant.
Orry wasn't a strong strategic thinker, but in sorting through probable causes of the inevitable defeat, he thought he had found another important one in newspaper dispatches describing the opposing presidents. At the start of the war, both Davis and Lincoln had personally directed military policy. Lincoln had even told McClellan the precise day on which he had to march to the peninsula.