“Why you going up there, Little Boss?” Dan asked. “Ain’t nothing there,” he kept on saying. But once I set my feet down on the floor of that low-ceilinged loft — you had to crouch to go anywhere — I began to look around. It was in a broom closet that I made the unpleasant discovery of one of their lunch buckets, filled to the brim with the sweet wine. I also found a cache of tinned sardines and biscuits and jellies stashed beside it.
“Dan,” I called down to him. “Come here.” And when he climbed up and I showed him the evidence of their theft, I asked: “What could you have been thinking?”
“Mr. Kennicy put us up to it at first. He said, ‘Give me half — you take the other half.’ A lot of Scotch and rye bottles are low, too. I didn’t want to, Mr. John, but I swear, we were put up to it.”
“Well, then,” I asked, “if you were me, what would you do?”
“I don’t know. But I’m asking myself, what’s a few ounces of such and such a cheap wine to a business with so many thousands of things all around? Heck, they’ll make the money anyways — they wouldn’t be doing this otherwise — and Mr. Kennicy, he steals more from this place than any poor Negro ever could.” Then: “Mr. John, what will you do?”
In their defense, I thought to propose that it was a lapse of judgment that provoked such an action. Finally, seeing how frightened and contrite Dan seemed to be, I resolved to drop the matter, but no sooner did I think this than I heard someone else climbing the ladder: It was Mr. Kennicy himself, who, finding the evidence, slapped poor Dan across the face and, calling out into the store, declared: “I’ve found the thief!”
Shortly both slaves were called into Mr. Speake’s office. By then, Mr. Stanley was standing in the corner, gravely observing the proceedings. On Mr. Speake’s desk lay the bucket of Malmsey wine and another of sweet syrup, found stashed in the backyard under a cloth, behind a tree where Samuel often sat. Along the way Mr. Kennicy had produced a number of other goods — candles, cans of sardines, and hard candies that he claimed he found hidden in another corner. Shortly an interrogation of the slaves began.
“How is it,” Mr. Speake demanded to know of Dan, “that these items were found hidden in your loft?”
“Seems likely they could have fallen out a box,” said Samuel. And Dan added: “I swear I’ve never seen those things before. Lord knows how they got there.”
“Come, now, then — how can you explain this theft?”
They had no answer, though Samuel did his cause good by getting down on his knees and begging for Mr. Speake’s forgiveness. Not so with Dan, who showed a bedeviled side of himself that I had never seen before. “I ain’t ’pologizing to nobody. I did what I did, that’s all.”
“Then you shall be instantly dismissed,” said Mr. Speake. And with that he took a rod and struck Dan across the face, then hit him in the back as he turned and tried to run away. I wanted to put a stop to the punishment, but Mr. Stanley laid his hand firmly on my shoulder. Looking down at me, he said, “You’ve done a fine thing today, Mr. Rowlands. But do not concern yourself with what you cannot change.” By then, Mr. Kennicy had taken his switch and started beating both slaves. They were curled up on the floor, his blows striking all over their bodies, tearing their clothes and leaving slicks of blood on each. Their cause was not helped by Dan’s stubbornness and the curses he put on Mr. Speake: “You been a good boss, but I hope you die, and soon!”
Constable McPhearson soon arrived, and, putting them in chains, he led them away, Dan cursing the white men and Samuel lamenting, “Oh, my po’ children, my po’, po’ children; what will they do?”
Back then I was softer-hearted: For all I had already seen of the abuses that men put upon other men, I could not help but think about Dan’s expression whenever he’d sit out front during his lunchtime, eating with delight a piece of biscuit with some jam on it, his innocence and thorough pleasure bringing to mind the joys of a child. Mr. Stanley, seeing my disturbed state, said, “I know what you’re thinking, young man — that the punishment awaiting them is far greater than the crime. Feel no grief for them — they brought it on themselves.”
The same afternoon they were stripped practically naked, tied to a post, and publicly flogged, after which they were confined to a windowless shed in the constable’s yard for a month. Eventually forgiven, Samuel was reinstated in the warehouse, while Dan, sound of body, was put up for auction and sold to an Arkansas planter for four hundred and fifty dollars, his days to be spent upriver working from the early morning to night, picking cotton. For his actions Mr. Kennicy was given a raise of two dollars a week, a fair sum in those days. As for myself, Mr. Stanley, on his way out of the warehouse, gave me his card and invited me to his house on St. Charles Avenue the next Sunday for a breakfast banquet with his wife and some of their friends.
WHEN THAT AUSPICIOUS DAY CAME I put on my newly bought finery and made my way into the prosperous neighborhood where Mr. Stanley and his wife, Frances, resided. Like so many of the other grand domiciles on St. Charles Avenue, it was of a neoclassical construction and finely painted white. It had a wide portico entranceway and a front veranda that looked out over a blossoming garden. Up some grand steps I went, pulling on the rope of a belclass="underline" A well-dressed slave let me inside and led me into a small sitting room, much like a library, as it contained many books, where Mr. Stanley and his quaint wife, Frances, were waiting.
“This is the clerk I told you about — John Rowlands, the one who reads the Bible,” Mr. Stanley said. And with that, his wife, a frail-seeming but delicately featured little woman who wore an angelic white dress, rich with embroidered silk, extended her little hand toward me and told me to sit beside her.
“My husband tells me you possess a fine character. But I am wondering what you can tell me about yourself, so that I will have something to say to our gathering about you.”
“Well, I am eighteen years old, from Wales, and, I think, fairly well educated for my class. And good with numbers and facts. I can read Latin and Greek, and I can speak French fairly well, though I’ve never been to France, and the Welsh dialect.” Then: “I have begun to read Plutarch’s Lives.”
“And of your mother and father, what can you say?”
“I have none, ma’am.” I looked away. “But I know the difference between right and wrong, as I was taught so from an early age.”
“Then you should know,” she told me, “that you are most welcome here; you see, we have no son of our own.”
And getting up, with the assistance of Mr. Stanley, she led the way into the dining room, where their guests, about a dozen or so of New Orleans’s finest citizens, bejeweled and perfumed, were gathered around a long table and already in the midst of various discourses. Once Mr. Stanley had taken his place at the head of the table and led the group in a prayer, an Irish maid came in to serve the dishes.
It was the consensus of the group that the prosperity of the South was built upon the necessity of slavery, that it was no one’s right to interfere with such a proven tradition, and that in countries where the slave trade had been reduced, such as the British West Indies, conditions for the slaves and planters only worsened. Besides, to free the slaves would be to court disaster: “Think,” someone said, “about the revolt in Haiti fifty years ago, when the slaves rose up and cruelly butchered their white masters, whether man, woman, or child.”
And who among them ever mistreated any slaves or punished a slave who did not deserve it?