Helen Gardener - An Unofficial Patriot

When the house was to be looked for he said: "See here, Grif, you are a good deal younger than I am, and some of the older slaves are pretty hard to manage. They can't work a great deal, and they get into mischief one way and another. Look at that set oyer in the end cabin – they always did like you best – and since you have been gone so much they are a good deal of trouble to me. They've got to be cared for somehow. I wish you'd take them. They can do a lot of useful things if they are away from the others, and you can get twice as much work out of them as I can. They are stubborn with me, and it wears my soul out to deal with'em. I've needed your help a good many times since you've been away, but I did not like to say much. I think, now you are going to settle down, that you ought to think of your father's needs a little, too."

Grif winced. He recalled that he had always pushed his father's problem aside in his thoughts when he had settled or solved his own. He realized how unfair that was. He felt the force of the Major's complaint.

"Of course, I'll do anything I can, father, to help you; but I can't take a lot of negroes to a village and – "

"That's just it! Just it, exactly! Of course you can't. I didn't intend to ask you just yet, but I want you to give up that foolish idea of taking Katherine to town to live. She can't stand it. You are asking enough of a woman, God knows, to ask her to put up with your sort of life anyhow, let alone asking a girl that has been respectably brought up on a plantation to give all that up and go to a miserable little village. It is not decent to live that way! Cooped up with a lot of other folks in a string of narrow streets! I'd a good deal rather go to jail and done with it. Now, what I want and what I need you to do, is to take that other plantation – the one down, on the river – your grandfather's place – and take some of the hands down there and you can let them work the place. How in the name of thunder do you suppose you and Katherine are going to live on your ridiculous salary? Salary! It isn't enough to dignify by the name of wages – let alone salary! Y' can't live on it to save your lives. Katherine can't – "

"But, father – "

"That farm down there is plenty near enough to town for you to ride in every single day if you want to and – look here, boy, don't you think you owe a little something to your father? I'm getting old. You don't begin to realize how hard it is on me to meet all these difficulties that other men's sons help them with."

The Major had struck that chord with full realization of its probable effect, and he watched with keen relish the troubled and shamed look on the face before him. Griffith made a movement to speak, but the Major checked him with a wave of the hand.

"That farm is just going to wreck and ruin, and I haven't the strength to attend to that and this both. Besides, these negroes have got to be looked after better. Pete is growing more and more sullen every year, and Lippy Jane's temper is getting to be a holy terror. She and Pete nearly kill each other at times. They had a three-cornered fight with Bradley's mulatto, Ned, the other day, and nearly disabled him. Bradley complained, of course. Now, just suppose Ned dies and Bradley sues me? It seems to me it is pretty hard lines when a man has a son and – "

"But, father – "

"Now, look here, Grif, don't 'but' me any more. I've had that house on the other place all put in order and the negro quarters fixed up-. The negroes can belong to me, of course, if you still have that silly idea in your head about not wanting to own them, but you have got to help me with them or – Then damn it all, Grif, I don't intend it to be said that a daughter-in-law of mine has to live in a nasty little rented house without so much as a garden patch to it. It is simply disgraceful for you to ask her to do it! I – "

"Father, father!" said Grif, with his voice trembling; "I – you are always so good to me, but I – I – "

The old Major looked over his glasses at his son. Each understood, and each feigned that he did not. The Major assumed wrath to hide his emotion. "Now, look here, Grif, I don't want to hear anything more about this business! You make me mad! Who am I to go to for help in managing my land and my niggers if I can't depend on you for a single thing? That's the question. Confound it all! I'm tired out, I tell you, looking after the lazy lot, and now you can take your share of the work. What am I going to do with the gang if I've got to watch'em night and day, to see that they are kept busy enough not to get into trouble with each other, and get me in trouble with my neighbors. Just suppose Pete had killed Bradley's Ned, then what? Why, I'd have been sued for a $1,000 and Pete would have been hung besides! I tell you, boy, I'm too old for all this worry, and I think it's about time I had a little help from you. I – "

The young preacher winced again under the argument, although he knew that in part, at least, it was made for a purpose other than the one on the surface. In part he knew it was true. He knew that his father had found the task heavy and irksome. He knew that the negroes preferred his own rule, and that they were happier and more tractable with him than with the old 'Squire. He knew that as the times had grown more and more unsettled and unsettling, his father had twice had recourse to a hired overseer and that the results had been disastrous for all. He knew that other sons took much of this care and responsibility from the aging shoulders of their fathers. He hesitated – and was lost. He would take the negroes with him and live on the other place – at least one year!

But when Miss Katherine brought with her her father's gift of slaves – which Mr. LeRoy had tried hard to make sufficiently numerous to impress the old Major – Grif, to his dismay, found himself overseer and practically the owner of twenty-two negroes – and he on a salary of $200 per year! With a plantation to work, the matter of salary was, of course, of minor importance. But Griffith had not failed to see glimpses of a not far-distant future, in these past few years as he had read or heard the urgent questions of political policy which had now become so insistent in the newer border states – a future in which this life must be changed. Riots and bloodshed, he knew, had followed in the train of argument and legislative action. Slaves had run away and been tracked and returned to angry masters. But the basic question as to whether it was right for man to hold property in man had, so far, been presented to his mind in the form of a religious scruple and with a merely personal application. Should ministers of his Church buy and sell black men? Griffith had definitely settled in his own mind that they should not. But whether they should inherit or acquire by marriage such property, had, until now, hardly presented a serious face to him. And now, in the form in which they came to him, he saw no present way out of the difficulty even had he greatly desired it.

I have no doubt that to you, my friend, who were not born in these troublous times, and to you, my neighbor, who lived in another latitude, the problem looks simple enough. "He could free the slaves which were in his power," will be your first thought. "I would have done that," is your next, and yet it is dollars to doughnuts that you would have done nothing of the kind. Oh, no! I am not reflecting upon your integrity, nor your parsimony – although I have not observed any tendency you may have toward dispensing with your property by gift – but to other and more complicated and complicating questions with which you would have found yourself surrounded, and with which your private inclinations would have come into violent collision, as Griffith Davenport discovered; and surely, my friend, you would not care to be written up in future years as a violator of the law – you who value so lightly "that class of people" that you have often said, quite openly, that you cared very little to even read about them, and deplored the fact that writers would thrust them into respectable literature!