Read Online Confederates by Thomas Keneally - Free Book Online Page B

soul! Ah’s goin’ to the churchyard to lay this body down.
    â€˜Ah mah soul, ah mah soul! We’s goin’ to the churchyard to lay this nigger down.’
    He’d never heard the massed African voice like this. Why, in the Valley no one owned so many slaves. A wealthy Valley man might have as many as three slaves or even five – house-staff and a ploughman and a waggoner, maybe, if he transported his own produce. But Valley niggers lived far apart and in small numbers and never sang in such voice.
    After two hours, Usaph reached a plantation settlement, screened by trees and standing up in the rich mud flats of the Combahee River. The big house was two storeys high, there were creepers up its walls. It was part-timber, part-brick, and had that unapologising air of blowsy elegance he had, on his train ride, gotten used to seeing. A house-black in a wig and britches opened the door, but there was a large bustling woman of about forty coming down the central staircase, a glass of liquor already in her hand at this hour. For some reason she came straight to the door. Usaph knew through some instinct that if he’d been a planter, or dressed as a planter, he would have been asked in, for she seemed anxious for company. But he was just the son of a Valley farmer, a wearer of solid plain stuff, neither white trash nor white gentry. If he had to live down here, he’d likely end up as a clerk or an overseer like his uncle. And the tall woman knew it at a glance.
    He explained he was looking for his uncle. She bit her lip, put her glass down and called on her black maid to fetch her wrap.
    â€˜I hope this ain’t any trouble,’ Usaph had said.
    â€˜No, no, come with me.’
    As she passed him he felt on his ear her hot brandy breath. In the Valley you drank in the morning only if you had to go out at the peak of winter, or had had an overnight fever. Yet in the Carolinas, he could tell, it was booze for breakfast, summer or winter, well or ill.
    She led him through a kitchen garden. Beyond a narrow road were the shacks of the slaves, a whole village of shacks, shingle roofs, unglazed windows, fading whitewash. Garbage middens stood by the doors, heaps of oyster shell, old rags, broken boots and crockery and chicken feathers. Some old slave-wives sat by the doors laughing their laugh. Their laugh was melancholy and rich and feminine. They tended almost naked pot-bellied slave children, future workers for the Kearsage plantation.
    â€˜I sometimes feel badly about your uncle, boy,’ Mrs Kearsage said. ‘I see him little enough. I hope he understands I have my duties to the slaves. People talk of my having so many slaves. I tell them it’s the slaves who have me. Morning, noon and night I’m obliged to look after them, doctor them, and tend to them in this way and that. If Calhoun and Yancey are right, sir, and we ever have to fight for our way of life, I reckon I can manage the commissary as well as the medical side for the whole militia of this glorious state. There’s your uncle’s place. I won’t come in. But you’re to give him my warmest and best wishes.’
    She turned and walked away, an elegant gait. The hut she had pointed to wasn’t much different from those he’d seen in the slave-quarters, though one of its windows was glazed. Flakes of white on the grey and weathered surface of the timber showed where – about 1845 Usaph would guess – whitewash had once been put on. He knocked. He knew there would be no liveried negro answering at this door.
    A white girl answered instead. She was dressed in an old crinoline. She was dark-complexioned and her eyes were dark. There was something wifely in the way she stood on the doorstep – that was Usaph’s impression, that she was a young wife his uncle had picked up and since she was so beautiful he felt a spurt of jealousy for his uncle. Later, after he’d married this dark-eyed