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

heron perched on one leg in the shallows, a row of turtles on a log, the sort called cooters, prized for soup, black and round as salad plates, with heads uplifted toward the sun. Occasionally, he calls the names of birds. They see rufous-sided towhees and indigo buntings, a white ibis, a kingbird’s nest with young. There are summer tanagers and flickers, a red-shouldered hawk. And once they see an alligator, twelve or fourteen feet, sunning on the slick clay bank.

When they leave the creek and sail into the Waccamaw, the whole scene opens up. It’s like God Almighty, Addie thinks, thrusting out His chest to take a deep lungful of air. The world, from here, seems limitless. Things have the gleam of wet shellac. As they make for the wooded western shore of Pawleys Island, a mile distant over open water, a large side-wheeled steamer—two hundred tons or more and a hundred and fifty feet in length—looms up to port. They take her for a riverboat, but, drawing near, they see the gun ports, jury-rigged to fit her added howitzers and Parrott rifled cannon. Crossing her bow—so close, the shadow of the gunboat falls across the sloop—they read the name, Mendota, and, preceding it, the designation, U.S.S. A Federal gunboat in the Waccamaw! Jarry quickly tacks and hauls the sloop upwind, putting distance between them, but not before a Yankee sailor, pissing off the side, catches sight and hails them. “Hey, nigger, can you swim? Half a minute in the drink, and you can be a free man heaving coal for Uncle Abe.”

The encounter and the sailor’s taunt depress the mood. Putting the tiller in his armpit, Jarry trims the main, avoiding Addie’s glance. Fixing on his navigation point, he stares forward with a doleful face, and Addie wishes he would smile again. And what if she told him and the glass wall broke? If it were gone, then what? It suddenly dawns on her that this is what she fears the most. For if it fell, what would be between them then? Nothing—isn’t that the answer? And is that what she came to do? Addie is like one who’s stepped unwittingly into an ambush she herself has set, and the voice she hasn’t heard in weeks speaks up and tells her, Nothing will be right until you do. But what of Harlan? What about her marriage? Your marriage is a lie that everyone believes but you. Yes, but to see the truth and act on it are different things. A part of her is dying to confess, but to advance a black man’s rights against a white man’s whim—this would be an act not just of disrespect but of outright sabotage, and not toward Harlan only, but toward her class, toward Charleston, toward the South…. She’s never contemplated such a drastic action. So, after the pleasant respite of their morning’s sail, Addie is plunged into anxiety again. She no longer sees the charming river scene and is grateful for the hissing of the bow wave parting on the keel, grateful for the drumming of the edge of the taut sail, grateful when Jarry guides the boat into a small salt creek and beaches it near an encampment in the woods.

Here, under a light shed, two enormous copper vats are mounted on brick piers. Under one of them a fire burns, and two slaves—Wando Passo men—are feeding cordwood into it. From a crude chimney, smoke is rising, and from the vat itself, a quivering cloud of steam.

“We took an old boiler from the sugar mill,” Jarry tells her as he helps her from the boat, “a prototype that Father fabricated years ago, and cut it in half for the evaporating tanks.”

A wooden trough—like a small, slanted aqueduct, buttressed with posts—extends a hundred yards into the adjoining marsh, where a scaffold, twenty feet high, is built. On this rests a platform with a handle mounted in the center like the I-shaped lever of a railroad trolley car. Addie shades her eyes and points. “What’s that?”

“There’s a pump in the salt creek,” Jarry says. “At flood tide, when the water is saltiest and the seepage least, we fill the vats and light the fires.”

“So you boil them down.”

He nods. “We boil them down and we get this.” Taking a scoop out of the cooling, second vat, he lets it slough into her hand.

“It’s warm.” Addie smiles and puts her tongue to it. “It’s almost sweet.”

“I prefer it to store-bought.”

“However did you think of this?”

He shrugs, clearly pleased.

“We’ll have some for our hard-boiled eggs?” She lifts the basket.

“Are you hungry?”

“Almost. I should like to stretch my legs a little first. How far is the beach?”

“No more than half a mile.”

“Would you share a walk and dine with me?”

He gives the men instructions, and they strike out east.

“My idea,” he tells her as they walk, “is to take the salt to Mars Bluff with our rice and trade for cotton there.”

“What do we want cotton for?”

“We don’t. We’ll run it down to Nassau.”

“Through the blockade?”

“Through the blockade. There, the British pay in gold. I’ve spoken to Father’s bankers and advisers, and we all think it’s the best way to proceed.”

“I leave it in your hands,” she says. “Honestly, Jarry, I don’t know what we’d do…what I would…”

There’s no need to speak this either. Understanding, Jarry smiles and stares down at the ground, which has turned sandy underfoot. Presently, they hear the boom of surf.

Addie takes her shoes off as they climb the dune. “I swear, I haven’t seen the ocean in I can’t remember when.”

On the east side then, in full view of it, they choose a sheltered spot out of the wind, and Addie spreads the cloth and hands across a cup.

“Coffee is a problem we’ve yet to solve,” he tells her as he pours. “But Mother has devised a substitute from toasted okra seeds. Is there another cup?”

She checks the basket, shakes her head. “We can both drink from that.”

She reaches,