San Antone. V. J. Banis

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      Joanna felt a pang at some of the unkind thoughts she had had of this woman. No wonder she’d been so glad for some company. And what loneliness of the spirit, what unhappiness, had that tiresome volubility masked?

      At the same time, she found herself wondering: Suppose.... Suppose things had ended differently, that it was Lewis who had been killed, not Alice’s husband. That came very close to happening. Would she be feeling relieved, grateful, set free? Had she unconsciously wanted her husband killed that night? It was a cruel charge to bring against oneself, and in its wake left obligations, debts, duties that inevitably bound you all the more tightly to that other person. There were things you must make up for, things you wouldn’t want left weighed against you in the balance.

      But then, what did one owe oneself? Something, surely.

      Alice was speaking, her voice easy and light. She was not a woman given to introspection, Joanna knew; quite likely Alice had not paused to reflect upon her feelings. Joanna found herself hoping that never happened.

      “If there’s anything you need...,” she said aloud. Alice had made some mention of money; the exact statement had slipped by her. “Anything we can do....”

      “Oh, I don’t think so. Mr. Montgomery was a careful man when it came to money. And his business partner—his former business partner, that is to say; I still have trouble remembering—has made me a generous offer.”

      She smiled and for the first time Joanna realized she must have been exceptionally lovely, that fourteen-year-old girl, virtually sold into slavery by her gambler father.

      “You know,” Alice said, looking suddenly as pleased as if she’d managed it all herself, “I really never expected to be an independent woman.”

      There was a problem with the second wagon. Intending to travel from Galveston to San Antonio in the comfort of a carriage, Lewis had arranged for only one driver, William, who had driven their carriage in South Carolina. The other slaves in Texas with them were maids and household servants. Stable and field hands had been sent on the overland trek.

      William, gifted with a coach and four, balked at handling the cumbersome prairie wagon. “I don’t know nothing about no oxen,” he asserted. “It’s completely different.”

      “I don’t see how you could know that without even trying,” Joanna argued, without real conviction since she herself didn’t know either.

      “I just know,” he said with stubborn dignity, and would not be budged.

      Lewis, of course, blamed her, and seemed to relish the difficulty—it was she, after all, who had insisted on a second wagon for the slaves.

      “I say, let ’em walk, the way I planned to begin with,” was his solution.

      Joanna brought the slaves together to ask if there were any among them with experience handling a team. There weren’t, and none either, it appeared, eager to learn. She coaxed and questioned, pleaded, and finally threatened to leave them all behind to fend for themselves in the unfamiliar city, a threat that produced tears and consternation, but no positive results.

      Joanna was about to concede that Lewis might have been right after all—but she couldn’t let her people walk to San Antonio like cattle, she just couldn’t—when their cook, Lucretia, asked to talk to her. She wanted to know if Joanna had found a driver yet for the slaves’ wagon.

      “No,” Joanna admitted. “William could, I’m sure—it can’t be that much different—but convincing him....”

      “I can get around that William,” Lucretia said confidently. “That man does anything I asks.” She paused, glancing sideways, and then back again directly at Joanna. “Far as that goes, I expect I could learn to drive a wagon easy enough. Don’t look to me like there’s anything to it.”

      Joanna stared at her in surprise. Her efforts to locate a driver had been directed primarily at the men among the slaves. It hadn’t really occurred to her to approach the women. The caste system among the slaves was as rigid as anything known in the East. House slaves simply did not put their hands to outside work—they would have considered it demeaning—and as head cook at Eaton Hall, Lucretia had reigned pretty much as the queen bee among the household slaves. Lucretia was the last person she would have thought to turn to for a solution to her problem.

      “I have a feeling,” she said, “that you’re preparing to negotiate a deal.”

      “I don’t know about no negotiating.” Lucretia’s sly glance belied her innocence.

      “But there is something you want?”

      “Mr. Harte, he says a slave is entitled to what he gets, and that’s all.”

      “Which I suppose, is why you came to me and not Mr. Harte.”

      Lucretia took a while answering, and when she did, it was to make a seemingly unrelated remark. “Folks say...the slaves, they been saying, this here Mr. Lincoln, he’s going to be freeing everyone one of these days soon.”

      “He says that he means to, yes,” Joanna agreed, more puzzled than ever.

      “What do you suppose is going to happen, to us, I mean, to the colored folk, when they is all freed? Who’s going to take care of us if we don’t belong to nobody?”

      “Why, I don’t know. I suppose....” But she had no ready answer; it was a question she simply had never considered. People talked about what would happen to the South, to the great plantations, to the whites—and she had been as selfish as anyone in that respect, hadn’t she? Even when secretly, silently, she’d agreed with Mr. Lincoln that men ought to be free, she hadn’t really thought about how the freed slaves were to fend for themselves in a society that could no longer afford them.

      “Reason I ask,” Lucretia said, indicating that she, at least, had been giving thought to the question, “is, Papa John, he been saying when he gets to this San Antone...”—she put the accent on the first syllable, giving the city an exotic, foreign sound—“...he says, from talk he hears, we’ll be owning half of this here Texas.”

      “I don’t think it’s quite that much,” Joanna said, smiling. “But it is a large piece of land, certainly, more than I can even imagine, to tell you the truth. But I still don’t—”

      “I been thinking,” Lucretia went on with what sounded now like a well-rehearsed speech. “If we had just a small piece, William and me, just a little land of our own—I don’t mean a garden plot like we had at Eaton Hall, I mean our own place—why, we wouldn’t have to worry about what was going to happen to us, do you see? I mean, if this Mr. Lincoln, say, he was to free us, why, William and me, we could just get married like we been wanting to do, and the two of us, we could just look after ourselves. And our children, too. And besides, we’d be right there, wouldn’t we? There’s nothing to say we couldn’t go right on taking care of you folks, too, at the same time. It seems to me, anyway.”

      She stopped and took a long breath, watching her mistress with a look both hopeful and wary, lest she’d gone too far. It was difficult to know, even with Mrs. Harte, who was different from the rest, who’d gone so far as to allow education for some of her slaves. Even with her, Lucretia made a point of pretending that the education hadn’t “taken,” talked a pidgin English intended to reassure that her intelligence СКАЧАТЬ