“Well, try,” Percy said shortly.
So I set up my equipment and did that. For the first time in a long while, I felt as though I was earning my keep.
The first book Percy had written was called Every Measure Short of War, and it was a history of Abolitionism from the Negro point of view.
The one he was writing now was to be called Where Are the Three Million?
I made a dozen or so exposures and put my gear back in the carriage. Percy took the reins this time and urged the horses farther up the trail. Scrub grass and runt pines closed in on both sides of us, and I found myself watching the undergrowth for motion. The landlady’s warning had come back to haunt me.
But the woods were empty. An old stray dog paced us for a few minutes, then fell behind.
My mother had once corresponded with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a well-known abolitionist at one time, though the name is now mostly forgotten. Percy had contacted my parents in order to obtain copies of that correspondence, which he had quoted in an article for the Tocsin.
My mother, of course, was flattered, and she continued her correspondence with Percy on an occasional basis. In one of his replies Percy happened to remark that he was looking for a reliable photographer to hire for the new project he had in mind. My mother, of course, sent him to me. Perhaps she thought she was doing me a favor.
Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s.
The remains of Pilgassi Acres became visible as we rounded a final bend, and I was frankly astonished that so much of it remained intact. Percy Camber drew in his breath.
Here were the administrators’ quarters (a small building with pretensions to the colonial style), as well as five huge barnlike buildings and fragments of paving stones and mortared brick where more substantial structures had been demolished.
All silent, all empty. No glass in the small windows. A breeze like the breath from a hard-coal stove seeped around the buildings and tousled the meadow weeds that lapped at them. There was the smell of old wood that had stood in the sunlight for a long time. There was, beneath that, the smell of something less pleasant, like an abandoned latrine doused with lime and left to simmer in the heat.
Percy was working to conceal his excitement. He pretended to be casual, but I could see that every muscle in him had gone tense.
“Your camera, Tom,” he said, as if the scene were in some danger of evaporating before our eyes.
“You don’t want to explore the place a little first?”
“Not yet. I want to capture it as we see it now—from a distance, all the buildings all together.”
And I did that. The sun, though masked by light high clouds, was a feverish nuisance over my right shoulder.
I thought of my daughter Elsebeth. She would see these pictures some day. “What place is this?” she would ask.
But what would I say in return?
Any answer I could think of amounted to drilling a hole in her innocence and pouring poison in.
Every Measure Short of War, the title of Percy’s first book, implied that there might have been one—a war over Abolition, that is, a war between the states. My mother agreed. “Though it was not the North that would have brought it on,” she insisted. (A conversation we had had on the eve of my marriage to Maggie.) “People forget how sullen the South was in the years before the Douglas Compromise. How fierce in the defense of slavery. Their ‘Peculiar Institution’! Strange, isn’t it, how people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least useful to them?”
My mother’s dream, and Mrs. Stowe’s, for that matter, had never been achieved. No Abolition by federal statute had ever been legislated. Slavery had simply become unprofitable, as its milder opponents and apologists used to insist it inevitably would. Scientific farming killed it. Crop rotation killed it. Deep plowing killed it, mechanized harvesters killed it, soil fertilization killed it.
Embarrassment killed it, once Southern farmers began to take seriously the condescension and disapproval of the European powers whose textile and tobacco markets they craved. Organized labor killed it.
Ultimately, the expense and absurdity of maintaining human beings as farm chattel killed it.
A few slaves were still held under permissive state laws (in Virginia and South Carolina, for example), but they tended to be the pets of the old planter aristocracy—kept, as pets might be kept, because the children of the household had grown fond of them and objected to their eviction.
I walked with Percy Camber through the abandoned administration building at Pilgassi Acres. It had been stripped of everything—all furniture, every document, any scrap that might have testified to its human utility. Even the wallpaper had peeled or rotted away. One well-placed lightning strike would have burned the whole thing to the ground.
Its decomposing stairs were too hazardous to attempt. Animals had covered the floorboards with dung, and birds lofted out of every room we opened. Our progress could have been charted by the uprisings of the swallows and the indignation of the owls.
“It’s just an empty building,” I said to Percy, who had been silent throughout the visit, his features knotted and tense.
“Empty of what, though?” he asked.
I took a few more exposures on the outside. The crumbling pillars. The worm-tunneled verandah casting a sinister shade. A chimney leaning sideways like a drunken man.
I did not believe, could not bring myself to believe, that a war within the boundaries of the Union could ever have been fought, though historians still worry about that question like a loose tooth. If the years after ’55 had been less prosperous, if Douglas had not been elected President, if the terrorist John Brown had not been tried in a Northern court and hanged on a Northern gallows …if, if, and if, ad infinitum.
All nonsense, it seemed to me. Whatever Harriet Beecher Stowe might have dreamed, whatever Percy Camber might have uncovered, this was fundamentally a peaceable land.
This is a peaceable land, I imagined myself telling my daughter Elsebeth; but my imagination would extend itself no farther.
“Now the barracks,” Percy said.
It had been even hotter in the administration building than it was outside, and Percy’s clothes were drenched through. So were mine. “You mean those barns?”
“Barracks,” Percy repeated.
Barracks or barns—they were a little of both, as it turned out. The one we inspected was a cavernous wooden box, held up by mildew and inertia. Percy wanted photographs of the rusted iron brackets that had supported rows of wooden platforms—a few of these remained—on which men and women had once slept. There were a great many of these brackets, and I estimated that a single barracks-barn might have housed as many as two hundred persons in its day. An even larger number if mattresses had been laid on the floors.
I took the pictures he wanted by the light that came through fallen boards. The air in the barn was stale, despite all the holes in the walls, and it was a relief to finish my work and step out into the relentless, dull sunshine.
The presence of so many people must have necessitated a dining hall, a communal kitchen, sanitary facilities at Pilgassi Acres. Those structures had not survived except as barren patches among the weeds. Dig down a little—Percy had learned this technique in his research—and you would find a layer of charcoal for each burned building or outhouse. Not every structure in Pilgassi Acres had survived the years, but each had left its subtle mark.
One of the five barns was not like the others, and I made this observation to Percy Camber as soon as I noticed it. “The rest of these barracks, the doors and windows are open to the breeze. The far one in the north quarter has been boarded up—d’you see?”