Savannah, or a Gift for Mr. Lincoln, Page 2

  Legrand couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, you’re going to punch him, are you?”

  “Do worse if I could. Night before last, I dreamed I captured a dozen of those blue-bellies. I knew a magic spell to change them into eggs. I climbed all the way to the roof and dropped them off one by one.”

  “Phew. You’re a da—er—blasted little rebel, all right.”

  “Well, I should hope so.” Hattie’s expression changed to one of pensive melancholy. “Pa died for Georgia, even though he never went into battle.”

  Legrand inched over to stand beside her, although he wouldn’t risk slipping his arm around her; she inspired a combination of adoration and wild terror. In the bulrushes bordering a man-made canal on the other side of the river, a marsh hen sang. The vast Atlantic, some ten miles east, filled the air with the unromantic but familiar scent of salt and tidal mud. Legrand said, “Did I tell you James ran off Monday?”

  “Your patroon?” The old term meant “boatman,” a slave usually considered the most important on a rice plantation.

  “Uh-huh. Guess it doesn’t matter much—our barge is wrecked, like yours, and there’s no crop to float to market. James promised to cut us a pine tree for Christmas, confound him.”

  “Do you have any colored folks left?”

  “No.”

  “We don’t either,” she said. “I found our Sam and Cora camped not a mile up the Grove Road. They were nice and polite, but little Braxton stuck out his tongue at me, and Sam said I couldn’t order them back home—jubilee’s come and they didn’t belong to us anymore.”

  “That’s all you hear: jubilee,” Legrand agreed.

  “Pa depended on his nigras, but he was always nervous about it. He told me once that when Governor Oglethorpe started the colony, way back, he made slavery against the law. Didn’t last long—people here wanted to be like the fancy South Carolinians.”

  “The ones who got us into this fix.” Another hesitation. “Do you know something?”

  “Legrand, don’t be annoying. I know lots of things. What is it you’ve been busting to say all afternoon?”

  He looked very stiff and important. “Mayor Arnold is writing up a proclamation. First of the week, he’ll ask all able-bodied men to rally to defend Savannah.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Mr. Sappington.”

  “Why, he’s a hundred and ten years old. He couldn’t defend anybody.”

  “You’re wrong. He’s half that age—plenty young enough to serve.”

  “Then hurrah, we can’t have school without the teacher.” Hattie lifted her skirt an inch and did a quick dance in her odd shoes. “What’s it got to do with you, Legrand? You’re not an able-bodied man—you’re a boy.”

  Legrand flung a stick into the river where it skipped once, then floated peacefully, turning and turning on the outgoing tide.

  Hattie retrenched: “I made you huffy.”

  “Yes, you did. I’m as able as the next body—a lot more fit than those old grandpas who march around the squares in town with canes and broomsticks instead of guns. People take me for sixteen—seventeen sometimes.” He jammed his big-knuckled hands on his narrow hips. “When the call comes, I’m going.”

  “To war?”

  “Well, I don’t mean to some cave.”

  “That’s what you came to tell me?”

  “It is. If we have to defend our land with our blood, we will,” he declared with a sententiousness that went right over Hattie’s head because she was envisioning a red blossom on Legrand’s shirt as he sank and expired with a Yankee ball piercing his heart.

  She wanted to sob; she didn’t, because she hated bawl-babies. She wanted to throw her arms around him, but it wasn’t seemly for a girl to do that, no matter how flushed and dizzied with patriotic passion. Poor, dear Legrand—he was a mere male, but he was also her special friend.

  Barely whispering, she said, “How soon will you go?”

  “Any day now. Before Christmas, for sure. Nobody knows how soon Sherman will get here, or if he will. Nobody knows where he is until he arrives, and then people can only guess where he’s going next. My pa says there’s never been such a crazy march—poling off from Atlanta, telegraphs cut, even Old Abe and those other Washington monkeys”—he bellowed in a fair imitation of a great ape—“they don’t know where he is until and unless he announces himself with artillery and cavalry.”

  Hattie shivered, and not from the cold this time. Though she and her mother regularly worshiped at a little Congregational chapel nearby, Hattie felt she wasn’t on the best of terms with the Almighty. She must rectify that for Legrand’s sake.

  A bell clang-clanged. Hattie said, “Time to pick the crabs.” Amelia had settled herself belly-deep in the sand and appeared to be sleeping. Hattie poked her. The porker reluctantly heaved to all fours, awaiting further instruction.

  “You’re welcome to stay and share some, Legrand.”

  “No, I have to go on home, but thanks.”

  “I think you’re very brave.”

  He preened and puffed up considerably. Hattie scratched Amelia’s head, then pointed off across the weedy rice squares to the distant house. All the trunks in the rice dikes had been closed after the fields were drained for lack of hands to tend a crop. The wind felt stronger, sharper.

  Impulsively, Hattie grasped her friend’s hand. “We can’t win, can we, Legrand?”

  “I don’t think so,” Legrand answered, the contact of hands reddening him. “I think there are too many Yankees. But we can put up a devil of a fight before they drive us down.”

  All at once Hattie remembered Christmas. In the course of the last four years she’d experienced diminishing expectations for the increasingly popular holiday, but this one promised to be the worst. Sherman was coming. And Legrand was going off to fight him.

  The children and the pig walked the checkerboard of rice dikes toward the plantation house. At one point a dike had collapsed. Legrand easily jumped the gap, but Amelia balked and retreated. Hattie rolled her eyes, picked up the pig, and leaped.

  She teetered on the far edge; dirt cascaded into the gap from under her wooden soles. Amelia wriggled out of her arms and ran squealing toward the run-down dwelling half concealed by tall magnolias. Hattie’s father had planted those trees but hadn’t lived to see them mature to their current magnificence.

  Hattie’s parents, Ladson and Sara, never fooled themselves into thinking they stood on the top rung of the social ladder, but neither were they dour-faced crackers who raised peanuts in the hinterlands and came to Savannah only to shop and truculently crack the whips that lent them their name. The Lesters, from Liverpool originally, were a long time in Georgia; nearly a hundred years. They were respected and, before the war, prosperous.

  Ladson Lester was a planter who never stinted on physical labor and who kept neat books when he wasn’t indulging his one fatal vice: consumption of beers, ales, wines, and spiritous liquors. Long-suffering Sara loved him and tried to save him. She took him to church every Sunday and to temperance meetings and tent revivals put on by itinerant preachers. He would swear he’d conquered his demon and would remain pure and clear-eyed for several weeks, but then he’d sneak away and enjoy one of his “bracers,” as he called them, and he’d be off on another tear.

  All the Lester men, Ladson included, were considered strong-willed, assertive in one way or another. People claimed this was because Liverpudlians were cheeky, like Parisians or Berliners. Whether the trait traveled down five generations, and across sexes, is debatable, but there was no doubt that Hattie Lester had a quick tongue and a forward manner. Stiff-necked individuals who disliked those qualities in a girl called her saucy, unfit for proper society.

  Georgia at the outbreak of the War for Southern Independence was a conflicted place. Yes, she was stoutly Confederate and sent her men to fight and bleed for the cause, whether it was preservation of slavery or the right of secession or both. (More than 140 years later, this issue is st
ill debated.)

  Yet Georgia’s fires of rebellion never burned quite so hot as those in neighboring South Carolina. Georgia had a streak of Unionism, sometimes deeply buried in the bosoms of her English and Irish and Scots and German settlers. Ladson Lester, for example, doubted the wisdom of splitting America in two, and he harbored a heavy guilt from owning other human beings. This in no way softened his patriotism or reduced his willingness to serve. In the summer of 1861, he joined a local regiment, the Yamacraw Mounted Rifles, presumably destined for glory on distant, and as yet unknown, fields of battle.

  Each man had to furnish his horse and gun. Ladson bought his horse from a neighbor known for sharp dealing. Ladson didn’t have a good seat; on the third day of drill, he felt compelled to improve his confidence with a generous bourbon bracer. The horse threw him and broke his neck. He died before Sara could reach the drill field. A story went around that the neighbor said Lester should have known better than to buy a horse named Old Bucky.

  After Ladson’s death, Hattie and her widowed mother continued to live in the house built by Ladson’s father, slaves, and Ladson himself when he was eight years old. Sara Lester strove to keep the plantation going, but she lacked her husband’s talent for organization and attention to detail. She hired an overseer who proved to be a thief. He lasted just eight months. She worked in the flooded fields herself, only to fall ill and nearly die of a miasmic fever.

  Disaster piled on wartime disaster. Sherman’s feared army of Westerners rampaged into Georgia from Tennessee, overcame and destroyed Atlanta, and then turned east. The effects were sharply felt at Silverglass. The slaves grew pertinacious. They slipped away by ones and twos until Hattie and her mother were alone except for Amelia, whom they couldn’t bring themselves to barbecue to satisfy their hunger.

  The house built by Hattie’s grandfather stood on a brick foundation. The siding was longleaf pine, peeling now but painted regularly when Ladson was alive, as a sign of the owner’s respectability. The two-story dwelling had piazzas on the east and west, and large windows open to sea breezes but covered when necessary by shutters that kept out hurricane winds and other intruders. Two large rooms opened off the downstairs hall. Two spacious bedrooms flanked the stairs on the second floor. It was to this house that Hattie and Legrand made their way with Amelia trailing.

  Grandfather Lester, as was the custom, had built a covered walk from the residence to a small cookhouse, the cookhouse set apart as a precaution in case of fire. The pigpen was a short distance from the cookhouse, built against the wall of the big rice barn. Down the dirt track leading to the city road, six abandoned slave cabins were falling into ruin among some water oaks.

  Hattie and Legrand cajoled Amelia into her pen. Hattie shut and latched the gate. “Come in and say hello to Mama.” She led the way to the cookhouse. They found Sara at the old iron stove, her cheeks shiny from the heat. After a sojourn in the nippy air, Hattie was soothed by the warmth of the kitchen, although, as usual, the place was in terrible disorder.

  Sara poked a long spoon into the pot of boiled crabs. “Hello, Legrand. Will you join us for dinner?” Sara had a sweet, round face, straw-colored hair she had passed along to her daughter, and a wan complexion compounded of too little nourishment and too much worry. Once, Hattie’s mother had been a willowy beauty; lately she was rushing toward haggard middle age. It made Hattie sad.

  Legrand said politely, “Can’t, Mrs. Lester, but I appreciate the invite. Pa trapped a possum for us.”

  “A possum. How delicious.” Hattie knew her mother loathed the smelly long-nosed creatures, whose meat was favored by the vanished slaves. But Sara was Sara; she would never embarrass a guest. Her late father, a Congregational parson, had taught her that, among many virtues.

  “Any news from the front?” Sara asked as clouds of steam arose from the pot.

  “Last we heard, the Yankees were aiming for Milledgeville.”

  “Oh, horrors.” Sara pressed a hand to her well-shaped front. The capital was the symbol of Georgia’s sovereignty, the home of important state offices and institutions.

  “There’s big news right here, though,” Hattie said. Despite Legrand’s visible embarrassment, she described his decision to serve on the defense lines when called.

  “You’re indeed a brave young man,” Sara said. “We’ll pray for your safety.”

  Legrand thanked her, wished them a happy day, and set off down the dirt track to the main road. Sara hugged her daughter. “Let the water cool awhile. Then you can pick the crabs.”

  “Are they cooked?”

  “Thoroughly.”

  “Good.” Hattie couldn’t stand it when blue crabs were dropped in a pot of scalding water; they made a plaintive noise as they were boiled alive.

  She left for a short visit to the outdoor necessary. She might have liked to change her sweaty frock, but she didn’t have a better dress in her wardrobe; Sara’s spinning wheel was broken. She’d sewn Hattie’s dress out of multicolored scraps from her ragbag.

  A sudden hail from the cookhouse brought Hattie rushing outside again. On the dirt track, a dust cloud rose in the fading daylight. A carriage. Sara stood on the cookhouse porch with a hand shielding her eyes. Hattie ran to her.

  “Who is it, Mama?”

  “I can’t tell. I surely hope it isn’t our nasty relative come to torment us again. He doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of no.”

  Hattie put her arms around Sara’s waist and watched the dust cloud billow.

  A cold gust from the river parted the dust cloud and revealed their unexpected guest. It wasn’t the nemesis Sara feared, Hattie’s uncle by marriage, but Miss Vastly Rohrschamp of East York Street, the city. Miss Vee was Sara’s best friend, a classmate from their boarding days at Pouncefort’s Genteel Young Ladies’ Academy down in Sunbury.

  The visitor’s first name suited her; despite wartime shortages, she weighed, by Hattie’s best guess, at least 270 pounds. Her brown eyes resembled raisins stuck in a plate of dough, but she was uncommonly pretty even so. Miss Vee was patriotic: She refused to pay four hundred or five hundred dollars Confederate to some gouging milliner who offered bonnets imported illegally from shops in Bermuda or the Bahamas. Miss Vee had made her own hat, wheat straw bleached to remove its yellow cast and decorated with chicken feathers that whipped in the wind of her furious driving. She called a stentorian whoa to the lathered beast drawing her carriage and waved.

  “Hello, hello—there’s the most awful news. I rushed out to tell you.”

  Sara ran to the carriage to help her friend alight. The carriage was an old Stanhope gig, its dark green paint faded, the pearl striping too. Miss Vee’s late father was a gentleman physician, and the gig was a gentleman’s conveyance. It was less suitable for a woman as seriously large as Miss Vee. The nag in the traces looked exhausted from hauling her bulk.

  “Awful?” Sara repeated as she danced this way and that, ready to assist yet wary of being crushed if Miss Vee fell on her. “Tell us, for heaven’s sake.”

  “As soon as I catch my breath.”

  Miss Vee came out of the gig backwards. Sara braced herself; Hattie kept her distance. Miss Vee landed successfully, without assistance, and drew a huge handkerchief from her sleeve. She fanned herself as though suffering a heat spell. Hattie couldn’t understand the affection her mother felt for the scatterbrained woman, but the bond was certainly strong. Miss Vee survived in town by giving piano lessons in the house Dr. Rohrschamp had left her.

  Sara repeated the invitation extended to Legrand. Miss Vee declined; she was dining later with parents of a pupil. “Then at least come into the parlor,” Sara said. “Hattie will entertain you while I brew some tea.”

  “Heavens, you have real tea?”

  “Ersatz,” Sara said with a rueful smile. “It’s a wonderful recipe, though—holly leaves and twigs sweetened with a dot of molasses.”

  She dashed off to the cookhouse. Miss Vee took Hattie’s hand, her multiple petticoats rustli
ng. Miss Vee’s dress, of sufficient size to cover a baby elephant, was made of good domestic homespun; not for her any dry goods smuggled through the blockade. The dress was prettily striped in a vertical pattern of blue on white, the direction of the stripes doing little to minimize the visitor’s size.

  As they stepped inside, Miss Vee said, “So many books. I am always astounded by the number of books your dear mother collects.” From the hall onward, the dim interior of Silverglass was crowded with hundreds of volumes in all shapes and conditions, piled everywhere. Hattie didn’t feel it necessary to say that most of the books were acquired before the war brought hard times and penury. Hattie moved Victor Hugo and William Gilmore Simms off the parlor sofa and invited the guest to sit.

  “Oh, gladly. It’s a long way out here.” Two sofa legs creaked ominously under her weight. She took off her straw hat and laid it beside her. For herself, Hattie cleared a rocking chair of privately printed copies of the sermons of her maternal grandfather, Reverend Chider.

  The state of the household frequently put Hattie in a funk. Like her father, she was an orderly person. Sara had many admirable qualities, including a kind heart, but she also had a disregard for housekeeping. The room felt less like a parlor than like a used-book store. Upstairs, under Sara’s bed, more books were concealed: McGuffey primers and hornbooks Sara had used to teach Silverglass slaves to read and cipher. These were never mentioned to outsiders, not even to Miss Vee.

  Of course, teaching slaves broke a long-standing state law, but Sara wasn’t easily deterred. She insisted that regardless of when the Confederacy gave up, the unlettered black souls Lincoln had freed with his proclamation would need basic skills to survive. Ladson Lester had nervously given his wife permission to conduct her lessons in the slave cabins. There, by lamplight, Sara had taught the vanished men, women, and children—including obnoxious Braxton, who’d stuck out his tongue at Hattie.