Dessa Rose Read Online Free Page B

necessary to strike a darky with one’s hand and to do so, except in the most unusual circumstances, lowered one almost to the same level of random violence that characterized the actions of the blacks among themselves. He was not, he told himself later, the first to have forgotten the sense of his own teachings; and the violence of his reaction had perhaps made any such response unnecessary in the future. Nonetheless, he had prevailed upon Hughes to institute the saltwater treatment: no food and nothing but heavily salted water to drink. That had gotten results; he glanced at where his journal, still open to the day’s entry, lay on the makeshift table. Even so light a punishment would probably not be necessary again.
    It was ironic, Nehemiah knew, that he who had never owned aslave—nor wished to—should be counted an expert on their management. He had shrugged off much of the Calvinistic teachings of his father with the same ease with which he had put off the rough homespun his father’s parsimonious nature forced the family to wear. But the elder Nehemiah’s abhorrence of slaves still clung to him. He no longer saw the institution as quite the threat to white workingmen that his father had. Still, about the only thing a darky could do for him was to wash his linen—and that task he hired out. Such, he reflected, were the vagaries—and rewards—of life. Nehemiah pulled off first one boot, then the other and stood to take off his trousers. He would always take a special pride in the fact that he had been the first to hit upon the idea of compiling the Guide , but he felt in his bones that the new book would be an intellectual as well as practical achievement, a magnum opus, far eclipsing the impact of the Guide .
    The Guide had not sold well in Alabama—It had done, Nehemiah amended, a brisk business in Mobile, and he smiled somewhat grimly: The rumors—and actual evidence!—of bands of runaway slaves in the area were too persistent for there not to be a high interest in the management of slaves among even the smallest slave holders. But, in general, Alabama slave owners prided themselves on taking care of their own. And it was true that there were not in the newspapers of the state the regular rash of alarums about rebellion plots discovered in the nick of time or advertisements for runaways that were a leitmotif in the papers and journals of most southern states. News of this uprising, despite the efforts of some civic boosters to keep it quiet, was rippling through the state, spreading consternation and fear in its wake. Hundreds of coffles a year went through Alabama, en route to Montgomery, Natchez, New Orleans—or the next town. Most of them averaged no more than twenty or thirty slaves except in the fall, when all roads in the state seemed to lead to the slave market in Montgomery. Even one desperate slave loose among the populace was fearful to contemplate and Wilson’s had been a relatively large coffle of more than a hundred slaves. And white men had been killed. This was not news that would keep. If it sold noplace else, Nehemiah thought with a chuckle, Roots would do “tolerable” well in Alabama! He adjusted his nightcap, blew out the candle, and climbed into bed. Ah, the work, the Work had begun.
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    June 20, 1847
    The darky demanded a bath this morning, which Hughes foolishly allowed her, and in the creek. She bathed in her clothes and dried in them also—as though there were not another darky on the place to spare her some sort of covering. A chill was the natural outcome, whose severity we have yet to determine. And were that not bad enough, she cut her foot, a deep slash across the instep and ball while climbing up the bank. Hughes thinks it a reasonably clean cut but she bathed near the place where the livestock come to water so there is no way of knowing. He claims that he was so nonplussed, “flustered,” as he phrases it, at