Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

vintage champagne bottles in the hold. And medicines are lacking for the boys with missing limbs and eyes, arriving daily on the Northern trains, so much soberer than when they marched out in high summer to the sounds of drums. In the Mercury, she reads the names. John Middleton, who got drunk at her wedding and fired off Harlan’s gun—dead, at twenty-one, the first in a long, ghastly toll. Against that black-piped column, those sober boys with pinned sleeves and patches on their eyes, the sight of Lavinia on the stair at the Hibernian in that red Parisian dress, with three-quarters of her décolletage exposed, fills Addie with a premonition she can scarcely name. And the Federals have taken Port Royal Sound and Beaufort, only seventy miles south, where she was wont to summer with her aunt. Is that where Jarry went? When she thinks of him, it’s as if a lightning bolt had struck the earth directly at her feet, and Addie stands there with a pounding heart, hardly knowing what it was or where it went, wanting only what she cannot have: for it to come again.

It’s to distract herself from this that Addie goes to town, and one afternoon at Russell’s, her old haunt, she hears George Fitzhugh, the philosopher, holding forth to an enthusiastic crowd:

“Liberty and equality are not timeless human values,” he maintains, and it’s half a minute by the clock before the clapping, stomping audience can calm themselves sufficiently to take their seats. “They are new under the sun. The free states of antiquity were founded upon chattel slavery. Only France and the Northern states have fully and fairly tried the experiment of a social organization founded upon universal liberty and equality of rights. And what is the result? Let us pose the question to the women and children deep within the bowels of the mines, who drag out their lives in darkness, harnessed like horses to heavy cars loaded with ore. Let us ask the pallid children in the factories, who work fourteen hours a day and go home at night to sleep in damp cellars. The experiment has failed. Riots, trade unions, strikes for higher wages—these are the result. Crime and pauperism have increased up North.

“The apologists of liberty and equality propose to enhance society by encouraging free competition, but it’s chiefly this which defeats well-being among men. My evidence? Look to nature, friends, and tell me what you see…. A war of competition, the result of which is that the weaker or less healthy are continually displaced and exterminated by the strong. Where men of strong wills and self-control come into competition with the weak and improvident, the latter soon become the inmates of penitentiaries. The employer cheapens his employee’s wage; the retail dealer takes advantage of his ignorance, his inability to visit other markets, his want of credit, to charge enormous profits. The free worker is the muzzled ox that treadeth out the straw. Had they been vassals or serfs, they would have been beloved, cherished, and taken care of as our slaves are in the South. Here, we provide for each slave in old age and infancy, in sickness and in health, not according to his labor, but according to his wants. A Southern plantation is the beau ideal of communism.” (Addie, caught off guard, laughs aloud at this and ignores the disapproving stares she gets.) “As love for others is the organic law of our society, so is self-love at the North.

“A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity, and goodwill arise. A state of independence always begets jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his wife and children because they are weak and dependent. When they assert their independence, he’s apt to transfer his affection. But slaves are always dependent. Hence, though men are often found at variance with wife or child, we never saw one who didn’t like his slaves.”

A hearty, general laugh attends the line, and this time Addie’s is the sole dark face.

“Greece and Rome were indebted to this institution for the leisure to cultivate their heads and hearts,” Fitzhugh goes on. “Had they been tied down to Yankee thrift, they might have produced a Franklin, with his ‘penny saved is a penny gained’; they might have invented the spinning jenny, but they never would have produced a Socrates, an Aeschylus. Had the Hebrews believed in freedom and equality, where would be King David and the Psalms?”1

This discourse is interrupted, over and over, by applause, and the women, Addie notes, cheer louder than the men. As she slips out the back, she thinks, How plausible these ideas seemed, and not so long ago, and, now, how wrong.

“And did I not see you? Did I not?” Under her breath, she reproaches Jarry, in his absence, carrying on the conversation in her heart.

And as she hurries south on King that day, passing sights familiar since her birth, among the people, her people, whom she loves, she thinks once more: all this is a lie that everyone believes but me, and Addie feels herself a stranger and a spy in her own home. And what if I am wrong? she thinks. What impudence to put herself in opposition to everything she’s known!

To slay “that Death, the Self,” to learn to suffer without rebellion, she turns to God in prayer, and why she seeks His help is because rebellion is so strong.

No, Charleston leaves her in a restless, anxious state, and she goes home to Wando Passo and throws herself into her work. They’re winnowing the seed rice for next season now, at the little hip-roofed house on stilts beside the barn. Addie watches the rough rice fall through the square hole in the floor, where the wind catches the tailings and carries them over the river in a sifting, golden plume. Under Jonadab, the new steward,