Cora was still squinting over his idiocy when she got her first bowl of the soup. White man trying to kill you slow every day, and sometimes trying to kill you fast. Why make it easy for him? That was one kind of work you could say no to.
She found Lovey, but did not ask her what the girls whispered about Caesar and Frances. If he was serious about his plan, Frances was a widow.
It was the most any young man had talked to her since she moved to Hob.
They lit the torches for the wrestling matches. Someone had unearthed a stash of corn whiskey and cider, which circulated in due course and fed the spectators’ enthusiasm. By now, the husbands who lived on other plantations had come for their Sunday-night visits. Walking miles, time enough to fantasize. Some wives were happier at the prospect of marital relations than others.
Lovey giggled. “I’d wrestle with him,” she said, nodding at Major.
Major looked up as if he heard her. He was turning out to be a prime buck. Worked hard and rarely forced the bosses to raise the whip. He was respectful to Lovey because of her age and it wouldn’t surprise if Connelly arranged a match one day. The young man and his opponent twisted in the grass. Take it out on each other if you cannot take it out on the ones who deserve it. The children peeked between their elders, making bets they had nothing to back up with. They pulled weeds and worked in trash gangs now, but one day the field work would make them as big as the men grappling and pinning each other to the grass. Get him, get that boy, teach him what he needs to learn.
When the music started and the dancing commenced, they appreciated the extent of their gratitude for Jockey. Once again he picked the right day for a birthday. He had been attuned to a shared tension, a communal apprehension beyond the routine facts of their bondage. It had built up. The last few hours had dispelled much of the ill feeling. They could face the morning toil and the following mornings and the long days with their spirits replenished, however meagerly, by a fond night to look back on and the next birthday feast to look forward to. By making a circle of themselves that separated the human spirits within from the degradation without.
Noble picked up a tambourine and tapped it. He was a fast picker in the rows and a joyful instigator outside of them; he brought both kinds of dexterity to this night. Clap hands, crook elbows, shake hips. There are instruments and human players but sometimes a fiddle or a drum makes instruments of those who play them, and all are put in servitude to the song. So it was when George and Wesley picked up their fiddle and banjo on days of carousing. Jockey sat in his maple chair, tapping his bare feet on the dirt. The slaves moved forward and danced.
Cora did not move. She was wary of how sometimes when the music tugged, you might suddenly be next to a man and you didn’t know what he might do. All the bodies in motion, given license. To pull on you, take both of your hands, even if they were doing it with a nice thought. One time on Jockey’s birthday, Wesley treated them to a song he knew from his days up north, a new sound none of them had heard before. Cora had dared to step out among the dancers and close her eyes and twirl and when she opened them Edward was there, his eyes alight. Even with Edward and Pot dead — Edward strung up after shorting the scale by loading his sack with stones and Pot in the ground after a rat bite turned him black and purple — she shrank from the idea of loosening her leash on herself. George sawed with his fiddle, the notes swirling up into night like sparks gusted from a fire. No one approached to pull her into the lively madness.
—
THE music stopped. The circle broke. Sometimes a slave will be lost in a brief eddy of liberation. In the sway of a sudden reverie among the furrows or while untangling the mysteries of an early-morning dream. In the middle of a song on a warm Sunday night. Then it comes, always — the overseer’s cry, the call to work, the shadow of the master, the reminder that she is only a human being for a tiny moment across the eternity of her servitude.
The Randall brothers had emerged from the great house and were among them.
The slaves stepped aside, making calculations of what distance represented the right proportion of fear and respect. Godfrey, James’s houseboy, held up a lantern. According to Old Abraham, James favored the mother, stout as a barrel and just as firm in countenance, and Terrance took after the father, tall and owl-faced, perpetually on the verge of swooping down on prey. In addition to the land, they inherited their father’s tailor, who arrived once a month in his rickety carriage with his samples of linen and cotton. The brothers dressed alike when they were children and continued to do so in manhood. Their white trousers and shirts were as clean as the laundry girls’ hands could make them, and the orange glow made the men look like ghosts emerging from the dark.
“Master James,” Jockey said. His good hand gripped the arm of his chair as if to rise, but he did not stir. “Master Terrance.”
“Don’t let us disturb you,” Terrance said. “My brother and I were discussing business and heard the music. I told him, Now that is the most god-awful racket I’d ever heard.”
The Randalls were drinking wine out of goblets of cut glass and looked as if they had drained a few bottles. Cora searched for Caesar’s face in the crowd. She did not find him. He hadn’t been present the last time the brothers appeared together on the northern half. You did well to remember the different lessons of those occasions. Something always happened when the Randalls ventured into the quarter. Sooner or later. A new thing coming that you couldn’t predict until it was upon you.
James left the daily operations to his man Connelly and rarely visited. He might grant a tour to a visitor, a distinguished neighbor or curious planter from another neck of the woods, but it was rare. James rarely addressed his niggers, who had been taught by the lash to keep working and ignore his presence. When Terrance appeared on his brother’s plantation, he usually appraised each slave and made a note of which men were the most able and which women the most appealing. Content to leer at his brother’s women, he grazed heartily upon the women of his own half. “I like to taste my plums,” Terrance said, prowling the rows of cabins to see what struck his fancy. He violated the bonds of affection, sometimes visiting slaves on their wedding night to show the husband the proper way to discharge his marital duty. He tasted his plums, and broke the skin, and left his mark.
It was accepted that James was of a different orientation. Unlike his father and brother, James did not use his property to gratify himself. Occasionally he had women from the county to dine, and Alice was always sure to make the most sumptuous, seductive supper at her means. Mrs. Randall had passed many years before, and it was Alice’s thought that a woman would be a civilizing presence on the plantation. For months at a time, James entertained these pale creatures, their white buggies traversing the mud tracks that led to the great house. The kitchen girls giggled and speculated. And then a new woman would appear.
To hear his valet Prideful tell it, James confined his erotic energies to specialized rooms in a New Orleans establishment. The madam was broad-minded and modern, adept in the trajectories of human desire. Prideful’s stories were hard to believe, despite assurances that he received his reports from the staff of the place, with whom he’d grown close over the years. What kind of white man would willingly submit to the whip?
Terrance scratched his cane in the dirt. It had been his father’s cane, topped with a silver wolf’s head. Many remembered its bite on their flesh. “Then I recollected James telling me about a nigger he had down here,” Terrance said, “could recite the Declaration of Independence. I can’t bring myself to believe him. I thought perhaps tonight he can show me, since everyone is out and about, from the sound of it.”