Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862

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"How are you, old fellow?" he said, unlocking the gate and coming in.

Lamar threw off his wretched thoughts, glad to do it. What need to
borrow trouble? He liked a laugh,--had a lazy, jolly humor of his own.
Dorr had finished drill, and come up, as he did every day, to freshen
himself with an hour's talk to this warm, blundering fellow. In this
dismal war-work, (though his whole soul was in that, too,) it was
like putting your hands to a big blaze. Dorr had no near relations;
Lamar--they had played marbles together--stood to him where a younger
brother might have stood. Yet, as they talked, he could not help his
keen eye seeing him just as he was.

Poor John! he thought: the same uncouth-looking effort of humanity that
he had been at Yale. No wonder the Northern boys jeered him, with his
sloth-ways, his mouthed English, torpid eyes, and brain shut up in that
worst of mud-moulds,--belief in caste. Even now, going up and down the
tan-bark, his step was dead, sodden, like that of a man in whose life
God had not yet wakened the full live soul. It was wakening, though,
Dorr thought. Some pain or passion was bringing the man in him out of
the flesh, vigilant, alert, aspirant. A different man from Dorr.

In fact, Lamar was just beginning to think for himself, and of course
his thoughts were defiant, intolerant. He did not comprehend how his
companion could give his heresies such quiet welcome, and pronounce
sentence of death on them so coolly. Because Dorr had gone farther up
the mountain, had he the right to make him follow in the same steps?
The right,--that was it. By brute force, too? Human freedom, eh?
Consequently, their talks were stormy enough. To-day, however, they were
on trivial matters.

"I've brought the General's order for your release at last, John. It
confines you to this district, however."

Lamar shook his head.

"No parole for me! My stake outside is too heavy for me to remain a
prisoner on anything but compulsion. I mean to escape, if I can. Floy
has nobody but me, you know, Charley."

There was a moment's silence.

"I wish," said Dorr, half to himself, "the child was with her cousin
Ruth. If she could make her a woman like herself!"

"You are kind," Lamar forced out, thinking of what might have been a
year ago.

Dorr had forgotten. He had just kissed little Ruth at the door-step,
coming away: thinking, as he walked up to camp, how her clear thought,
narrow as it was, was making his own higher, more just; wondering if
the tears on her face last night, when she got up from her knees after
prayer, might not help as much in the great cause of truth as the life
he was ready to give. He was so used to his little wife now, that he
could look to no hour of his past life, nor of the future coming ages
of event and work, where she was not present,--very flesh of his flesh,
heart of his heart. A gulf lay between them and the rest of the world.
It was hardly probable he could see her as a woman towards whom another
man looked across the gulf, dumb, hopeless, defrauded of his right.

"She sent you some flowers, by the way, John,--the last in the
yard,--and bade me be sure and bring you down with me. Your own colors,
you see?--to put you in mind of home,"--pointing to the crimson asters
flaked with snow.

The man smiled faintly: the smell of the flowers choked him: he laid
them aside. God knows he was trying to wring out this bitter old
thought: he could not look in Dorr's frank eyes while it was there.
He must escape to-night: he never would come near them again, in this
world, or beyond death,--never! He thought of that like a man going to
drag through eternity with half his soul gone. Very well: there was man
enough left in him to work honestly and bravely, and to thank God for
that good pure love he yet had. He turned to Dorr with a flushed face,
and began talking of Floy in hearty earnest,--glancing at Ben coming up
the hill, thinking that escape depended on him.

"I ordered your man up," said Captain Dorr. "Some canting Abolitionist
had him open-mouthed down there."

The negro came in, and stood in the corner, listening while they talked.
A gigantic fellow, with a gladiator's muscles. Stronger than that Yankee
captain, he thought,--than either of them: better breathed,--drawing the
air into his brawny chest. "A man and a brother." Did the fool think he
didn't know that before? He had a contempt for Dave and his like. Lamar
would have told you Dave's words were true, but despised the man as a
crude, unlicked bigot. Ben did the same, with no words for the idea. The
negro instinct in him recognized gentle blood by any of its signs,--the
transparent animal life, the reticent eye, the mastered voice: he
had better men than Lamar at home to learn it from. It is a trait of
serfdom, the keen eye to measure the inherent rights of a man to be
master. A negro or a Catholic Irishman does not need "Sartor Resartus"
to help him to see through any clothes. Ben leaned, half-asleep, against
the wall, some old thoughts creeping out of their hiding-places through
the torpor, like rats to the sunshine: the boatman's slang had been hot
and true enough to rouse them in his brain.

"So, Ben," said his master, as he passed once, "your friend has been
persuading you to exchange the cotton-fields at Cedar Creek for New-York
alleys, eh?"

"Ki!" laughed Ben, "white darkey. Mind ole dad, Mars' John, as took off
in der swamp? Um asked dat Linkinite ef him saw dad up Norf. Guess him's
free now. Ki! ole dad!"

"The swamp was the place for him," said Lamar. "I remember."

"Dunno," said the negro, surlily: "him's dad, af'er all: tink him's free
now,"--and mumbled down into a monotonous drone about

"Oh yo, bredern, is yer gwine ober Jordern?"

Half-asleep, they thought,--but with dull questionings at work in his
brain, some queer notions about freedom, of that unknown North, mostly
mixed with his remembrance of his father, a vicious old negro, that in
Pennsylvania would have worked out his salvation in the under cell of
the penitentiary, but in Georgia, whipped into heroism, had betaken
himself into the swamp, and never returned. Tradition among the Lamar
slaves said he had got off to Ohio, of which they had as clear an idea
as most of us have of heaven. At any rate, old Kite became a mystery, to
be mentioned with awe at fish-bakes and barbecues. He was this uncouth
wretch's father,--do you understand? The flabby-faced boy, flogged in
the cotton-field for whining after his dad, or hiding away part of his
flitch and molasses for months in hopes the old man would come back, was
rather a comical object, you would have thought. Very different his,
from the feeling with which you left your mother's grave,--though as yet
we have not invented names for the emotions of those people. We'll grant
that it hurt Ben a little, however. Even the young polypus, when it is
torn from the old one, bleeds a drop or two, they say. As he grew up,
the great North glimmered through his thought, a sort of big field,--a
paradise of no work, no flogging, and white bread every day, where the
old man sat and ate his fill.

The second point in Ben's history was that he fell in love. Just as
you did,--with the difference, of course: though the hot sun, or the
perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less
fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid. It was
Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his
dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with true-love defiance of caste.
I think Nan liked him very truly. She was lame and sickly, and if Ben
was black and a picker, and stayed in the quarters, he was strong, like
a master to her in some ways: the only thing she could call hers in the
world was the love the clumsy boy gave her. White women feel in that
way sometimes, and it makes them very tender to men not their equals.
However, old Mrs. Lamar, before she died, gave her house-servants their
free papers, and Nan was among them. So she set off, with all the finery
little Floy could give her: went up into that great, dim North. She
never came again.

The North swallowed up all Ben knew or felt outside of his hot, hated
work, his dread of a lashing on Saturday night. All the pleasure left
him was 'possum and hominy for Sunday's dinner. It did not content him.
The spasmodic religion of the field-negro does not teach endurance. So
it came, that the slow tide of discontent ebbing in everybody's heart
towards some unreached sea set in his ignorant brooding towards that
vague country which the only two who cared for him had found. If he
forgot it through the dogged, sultry days, he remembered it when the
overseer scourged the dull tiger-look into his eyes, or when, husking
corn with the others at night, the smothered negro-soul, into which
their masters dared not look, broke out in their wild, melancholy songs.
Aimless, unappealing, yet no prayer goes up to God more keen in its
pathos. You find, perhaps, in Beethoven's seventh symphony the secrets
of your heart made manifest, and suddenly think of a Somewhere to come,
where your hope waits for you with late fulfilment. Do not laugh at Ben,
then, if he dully told in his song the story of all he had lost, or gave
to his heaven a local habitation and a name.

From the place where he stood now, as his master and Dorr walked up and
down, he could see the purplish haze beyond which the sentry had told
him lay the North. The North! Just beyond the ridge. There was a pain
in his head, looking at it; his nerves grew cold and rigid, as yours do
when something wrings your heart sharply: for there are nerves in these
black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours. Yet
if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now
in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face. Vapid, with sordid
content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the
beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr. The sentry had told him the
Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the Federal
officer keenly.

"What ails you, Ben?" said his master. "Thinking over your friend's
sermon?"

Ben's stolid laugh was ready.

"Done forgot dat, Mars'. Wouldn't go, nohow. Since Mars' sold dat cussed
Joe, gorry good times 't home. Dam' Abolitioner say we ums all goin'
Norf,"--with a stealthy glance at Dorr.

"That's more than your philanthropy bargains for, Charley," laughed
Lamar.

The men stopped; the negro skulked nearer, his whole senses sharpened
into hearing. Dorr's clear face was clouded.

"This slave question must be kept out of the war. It puts a false face
on it."

"I thought one face was what it needed," said Lamar. "You have too many
slogans. Strong government, tariff, Sumter, a bit of bunting, eleven
dollars a month. It ought to be a vital truth that would give soul and
_vim_ to a body with the differing members of your army. You, with your
ideal theory, and Billy Wilson with his 'Blood and Baltimore!' Try human
freedom. That's high and sharp and broad."

Ben drew a step closer.

"You are shrewd, Lamar. I am to go below all constitutions or expediency
or existing rights, and tell Ben here that he is free? When once the
Government accepts that doctrine, you, as a Rebel, must be let alone."

The slave was hid back in the shade.

"Dorr," said Lamar, "you know I'm a groping, ignorant fellow, but it
seems to me that prating of constitutions and existing rights is surface
talk; there is a broad common-sense underneath, by whose laws the world
is governed, which your statesmen don't touch often. You in the North,
in your dream of what shall be, shut your eyes to what is. You want a
republic where every man's voice shall be heard in the council, and the
majority shall rule. Granting that the free population are educated to a
fitness for this,--(God forbid I should grant it with the Snake-hunters
before my eyes!)--look here!"

He turned round, and drew the slave out into the light: he crouched
down, gaping vacantly at them.

"There is Ben. What, in God's name, will you do with him? Keep him a
slave, and chatter about self-government? Pah! The country is paying in
blood for the lie, to-day. Educate him for freedom, by putting a musket
in his hands? We have this mass of heathendom drifted on our shores by
your will as well as mine. Try to bring them to a level with the whites
by a wrench, and you'll waken out of your dream to a sharp reality. Your
Northern philosophy ought to be old enough to teach you that spasms in
the body-politic shake off no atom of disease,--that reform, to be
enduring, must be patient, gradual, inflexible as the Great Reformer.
'The mills of God,' the old proverb says, 'grind surely.' But, Dorr,
they grind exceeding slow!"

Dorr watched Lamar with an amused smile. It pleased him to see his brain
waking up, eager, vehement. As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked
of him like a clod, heedless that his face deepened in stupor, that his
eyes had caught a strange, gloomy treachery,--we all do the same, you
know.

"What is your remedy, Lamar? You have no belief in the right of
Secession, I know," said Dorr.

"It's a bad instrument for a good end. Let the white Georgian come out
of his sloth, and the black will rise with him. Jefferson Davis may not
intend it, but God does. When we have our Lowell, our New York, when we
are a self-sustaining people instead of lazy land-princes, Ben here will
have climbed the second of the great steps of Humanity. Do you laugh at
us?" said Lamar, with a quiet self-reliance. "Charley, it needs only
work and ambition to cut the brute away from my face, and it will leave
traits very like your own. Ben's father was a Guinea fetich-worshipper;
when we stand where New England does, Ben's son will be ready for his
freedom."

"And while you theorize," laughed Dorr, "I hold you a prisoner, John,
and Ben knows it is his right to be free. He will not wait for the
grinding of the mill, I fancy."

Lamar did not smile. It was womanish in the man, when the life of great
nations hung in doubt before them, to go back so constantly to little
Floy sitting in the lap of her old black maumer. But he did it,--with
the quick thought that to-night he must escape, that death lay in delay.

While Dorr talked, Lamar glanced significantly at Ben. The negro was not
slow to understand,--with a broad grin, touching his pocket, from which
projected the dull end of a hand-saw. I wonder what sudden pain made the
negro rise just then, and come close to his master, touching him with a
strange affection and remorse in his tired face, as though he had done
him some deadly wrong.

"What is it, old fellow?" said Lamar, in his boyish way. "Homesick, eh?
There's a little girl in Georgia that will be glad to see you and your
master, and take precious good care of us when she gets us safe again.
That's true, Ben!" laying his hand kindly on the man's shoulder, while
his eyes went wandering off to the hills lying South.

"Yes, Mars'," said Ben, in a low voice, suddenly bringing a
blacking-brush, and beginning to polish his master's shoes,--thinking,
while he did it, of how often Mars' John had interfered with the
overseers to save him from a flogging,--(Lamar, in his lazy way,
was kind to his slaves,)--thinking of little Mist' Floy with an odd
tenderness and awe, as a gorilla might of a white dove: trying to think
thus,--the simple, kindly nature of the negro struggling madly with
something beneath, new and horrible. He understood enough of the talk of
the white men to know that there was no help for him,--none. Always a
slave. Neither you nor I can ever know what those words meant to him.
The pale purple mist where the North lay was never to be passed. His
dull eyes turned to it constantly,--with a strange look, such as the
lost women might have turned to the door, when Jesus shut it: they
forever outside. There was a way to help himself? The stubby black
fingers holding the brush grew cold and clammy,--noting withal, the poor
wretch in his slavish way, that his master's clothes were finer than the
Northern captain's, his hands whiter, and proud that it was so,--holding
Lamar's foot daintily, trying to see himself in the shoe, smoothing down
the trousers with a boorish, affectionate touch,--with the same fierce
whisper in his ear, Would the shoes ever be cleaned again? would the
foot move to-morrow?

It grew late. Lamar's supper was brought up from Captain Dorr's, and
placed on the bench. He poured out a goblet of water.

"Come, Charley, let's drink. To Liberty! It is a war-cry for Satan or
Michael."

They drank, laughing, while Ben stood watching. Dorr turned to go, but
Lamar called him back,--stood resting his hand on his shoulder: he never
thought to see him again, you know.

"Look at Ruth, yonder," said Dorr, his face lighting. "She is coming to
meet us. She thought you would be with me."

Lamar looked gravely down at the low field-house and the figure at the
gate. He thought he could see the small face and earnest eyes, though it
was far off, and night was closing.

"She is waiting for you, Charley. Go down. Good night, old chum!"

If it cost any effort to say it, Dorr saw nothing of it.

"Good night, Lamar! I'll see you in the morning."

He lingered. His old comrade looked strangely alone and desolate.

"John!"

"What is it, Dorr?"

"If I could tell the Colonel you would take the oath? For Floy's sake."

The man's rough face reddened.

"You should know me better. Good bye."

"Well, well, you are mad. Have you no message for Ruth?"

There was a moment's silence.

"Tell her I say, God bless her!"

Dorr stopped and looked keenly in his face,--then, coming back, shook
hands again, in a different way from before, speaking in a lower
voice,--

"God help us all, John! Good night!"--and went slowly down the hill.

It was nearly night, and bitter cold. Lamar stood where the snow drifted
in on him, looking out through the horizon-less gray.

"Come out o' dem cold, Mars' John," whined Ben, pulling at his coat.

As the night gathered, the negro was haunted with a terrified wish to be
kind to his master. Something told him that the time was short. Here and
there through the far night some tent-fire glowed in a cone of ruddy
haze, through which the thick-falling snow shivered like flakes of
light. Lamar watched only the square block of shadow where Dorr's house
stood. The door opened at last, and a broad, cheerful gleam shot out
red darts across the white waste without; then he saw two figures go
in together. They paused a moment; he put his head against the bars,
straining his eyes, and saw that the woman turned, shading her eyes
with her hand, and looked up to the side of the mountain where the
guard-house lay,--with a kindly look, perhaps, for the prisoner out in
the cold. A kind look: that was all. The door shut on them. Forever: so,
good night, Ruth!

He stool there for an hour or two, leaning his head against the muddy
planks, smoking. Perhaps, in his coarse fashion, he took the trouble of
his manhood back to the same God he used to pray to long ago. When he
turned at last, and spoke, it was with a quiet, strong voice, like one
who would fight through life in a manly way. There was a grating sound
at the back of the shed: it was Ben, sawing through the wicket, the
guard having lounged off to supper. Lamar watched him, noticing that the
negro was unusually silent. The plank splintered, and hung loose.

"Done gone, Mars' John, now,"--leaving it, and beginning to replenish
the fire.

"That's right, Ben. We'll start in the morning. That sentry at two
o'clock sleeps regularly."

Ben chuckled, heaping up the sticks.

"Go on down to the camp, as usual. At two, Ben, remember! We will be
free to-night, old boy!"

The black face looked up from the clogging smoke with a curious stare.

"Ki! we'll be free to-night, Mars'!"--gulping his breath.

Soon after, the sentry unlocked the gate, and he shambled off out into
the night. Lamar, left alone, went closer to the fire, and worked busily
at some papers he drew from his pocket: maps and schedules. He intended
to write until two o'clock; but the blaze dying down, he wrapped his
blanket about him, and lay down on the heaped straw, going on sleepily,
in his brain, with his calculations.

The negro, in the shadow of the shed, watched him. A vague fear beset
him,--of the vast, white cold,--the glowering mountains,--of himself;
he clung to the familiar face, like a man drifting out into an unknown
sea, clutching some relic of the shore. When Lamar fell asleep, he
wandered uncertainly towards the tents. The world had grown new,
strange; was he Ben, picking cotton in the swamp-edge?--plunging his
fingers with a shudder in the icy drifts. Down in the glowing torpor of
the Santilla flats, where the Lamar plantations lay, Ben had slept off
as maddening hunger for life and freedom as this of to-day; but here,
with the winter air stinging every nerve to life, with the perpetual
mystery of the mountains terrifying his bestial nature down, the
strength of the man stood up: groping, blind, malignant, it may be; but
whose fault was that? He was half-frozen: the physical pain sharpened
the keen doubt conquering his thought. He sat down in the crusted snow,
looking vacantly about him, a man, at last,--but wakening, like a
new-born soul, into a world of unutterable solitude. Wakened dully,
slowly; sitting there far into the night, pondering stupidly on his old
life; crushing down and out the old parasite affection for his master,
the old fears, the old weight threatening to press out his thin life;
the muddy blood heating, firing with the same heroic dream that bade
Tell and Garibaldi lift up their hands to God, and cry aloud that they
were men and free: the same,--God-given, burning in the imbruted veins
of a Guinea slave. To what end? May God be merciful to America while
she answers the question! He sat, rubbing his cracked, bleeding feet,
glancing stealthily at the southern hills. Beyond them lay all that was
past; in an hour he would follow Lamar back to--what? He lifted his
hands up to the sky, in his silly way sobbing hot tears. "Gor-a'mighty,
Mars' Lord, I'se tired," was all the prayer he made. The pale purple
mist was gone from the North; the ridge behind which love, freedom
waited, struck black across the sky, a wall of iron. He looked at it
drearily. Utterly alone: he had always been alone. He got up at last,
with a sigh.

"It's a big world,"--with a bitter chuckle,--"but der's no room in it
fur poor Ben."

He dragged himself through the snow to a light in a tent where a
voice in a wild drone, like that he had heard at negro camp-meetings,
attracted him. He did not go in: stood at the tent-door, listening. Two
or three of the guard stood around, leaning on their muskets; in the
vivid fire-light rose the gaunt figure of the Illinois boatman, swaying
to and fro as he preached. For the men were honest, God-fearing souls,
members of the same church, and Dave, in all integrity of purpose, read
aloud to them,--the cry of Jeremiah against the foul splendors of the
doomed city,--waving, as he spoke, his bony arm to the South. The shrill
voice was that of a man wrestling with his Maker. The negro's fired
brain caught the terrible meaning of the words,--found speech in it:
the wide, dark night, the solemn silence of the men, were only fitting
audience.

The man caught sight of the slave, and, laying down his book, began one
of those strange exhortations in the manner of his sect. Slow at first,
full of unutterable pity. There was room for pity. Pointing to the human
brute crouching there, made once in the image of God,--the saddest
wreck on His green foot-stool: to the great stealthy body, the
revengeful jaws, the foreboding eyes. Soul, brains,--a man, wifeless,
homeless, nationless, hawked, flung from trader to trader for a handful
of dirty shinplasters. "Lord God of hosts," cried the man, lifting up
his trembling hands, "lay not this sin to our charge!" There was a scar
on Ben's back where the lash had buried itself: it stung now in the
cold. He pulled his clothes tighter, that they should not see it; the
scar and the words burned into his heart: the childish nature of the man
was gone; the vague darkness in it took a shape and name. The boatman
had been praying for him; the low words seemed to shake the night:--

"Hear the prayer of Thy servant, and his supplications! Is not this what
Thou hast chosen: to loose the bands, to undo the heavy burdens, and let
the oppressed go free? O Lord, hear! O Lord, hearken and do! Defer not
for Thine own sake, O my God!"

"What shall I do?" said the slave, standing up.

The boatman paced slowly to and fro, his voice chording in its dull
monotone with the smothered savage muttering in the negro's brain.

"The day of the Lord cometh; it is nigh at hand. Who can abide it? What
saith the prophet Jeremiah? 'Take up a burden against the South. Cry
aloud, spare not. Woe unto Babylon, for the day of her vengeance is
come, the day of her visitation! Call together the archers against
Babylon; camp against it round about; let none thereof escape.
Recompense her: as she hath done unto my people, be it done unto her.
A sword is upon Babylon: it shall break in pieces the shepherd and his
flock, the man and the woman, the young man and the maid. I will render
unto her the evil she hath done in my sight, saith the Lord.'"

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