Dessa Rose Read Online Free

of southwestern Louisiana to investigate a report that house slaves had discovered and betrayed a plot to rebel before it could begin. He had been told of the incident by a chance-met acquaintance at the home of Harrison Evans (second son of the Virginia Evanses) who had served in some measure as his sponsor in New Orleans. White men had actually been arrested in one or two cases, his informant had reported indignantly. There had been several newspaper accounts of reported unrest in the surrounding parishes of Iberia, St. Martin, and St. Landry, so, armed with a letter of introduction from Evans to Mr. James Carpenter, a major landowner in the area, Nehemiah had set out.
    Carpenter had proved to be both a gracious host and the owner of the courageous darky Thomas, whose information had foiled the insurrection; he was thus much interested in Nehemiah’s project. The plot had been a serious one: Four free negroes and nine of the slaves—over ten thousand dollars in property!—had been hanged; two white men from outside the district had been implicated, but as no negro could give evidence or bear witness in a court of law, they had not been brought to trial. Justice had been content with running the whites out of the area. Carpenter had been forced to give Thomas his freedom and safe passage out of the neighborhood as the only means of preserving his life from the vengeance of the other darkies; his name continued as a curse among slaves in the district.
    These events, however, had occurred some seven years before, and though Carpenter spoke of “Uncle Tom’s” departure with genuine regret (for the slave had been in the family since Carpenter’s boyhood), even the remembered heroism of the loyal retainer had dimmed in his absence. And the planter had shrugged off the most recent rumors. The Creoles were an imaginative and emotional race—not that much better than the nigras as far as that was concerned; and most were nervous in the presence of three or more blacks. “Unless,” he had added, winking at Nehemiah, “theblacks are women and the Creoles men.” Nehemiah knew, of course, of such relations; more than one master used them as a means of increasing his capital and many used the droit du Seigneur to keep discipline in his Quarters. But no man of standing or sensibility made a parade of such practices as the Creoles were wont to do and he disliked hearing Carpenter make a joke of it.
    And so it had gone, outdated reports, principals who were dead or moved from the neighborhood. Frustrated, Nehemiah set out on the coastal steamer at the end of May for South Carolina where he would make one of the J. T. Mims party at a newly popular and wickedly expensive resort on Lake Moultrie. He had hoped to be invited to an up-country manor or an island estate where he could while away the fever months safe from the agues that so often swept the low-lying costal areas during the summer. But the invitation from Miss Janet to be part of the select party of family and friends who gathered around the young Georgia couple during the summer months had been too flattering to turn down.
    Mims and Miss Janet were among the best representatives of their class, people of means and taste who nurtured their inheritance and so savored its fruits to the fullest. Nehemiah knew there was some element of idealization in his view of the planter “aristocracy.” There were few among them capable of the witty, erudite conversation that he craved; his more outrageous ripostes and marching figures were likely to be greeted with stares holding little more comprehension than that cropped buck’s had. Yet, in the best of them, there was little of the ostentatious or affected. The mounds of victuals that so delighted shabby genteel “society” editors had no place on Miss Janet’s table. Oh, there was a sumptuous amplitude about all Miss Janet touched. But what delighted, even inspired Nehemiah