Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Statistics appealed to him very much: “Henry, did you know that just last June, the packet City of Louisiana made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in sixteen hours and twenty minutes?” Then, too, he wrote to me about the books he was reading — Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (which I had known from the little library at St. Asaph’s) and other historical romances having recently caught his fancy. And he would ask me to keep my eyes open for tales of interest that I might pass on to him, as he was a collector of Mississippi lore, and he recommended that I carry with me, as was his habit, a vellum notebook. As he put it in one of his missives, “Surely if we are not brothers by relation, we can be brothers of the written word.”

For my part, I kept him informed as to which steamers Mr. Stanley and I were to take to which destinations on which days. While I thought we would soon enough encounter one another, he remained aboard the Arago , and our paths did not cross on that ship again.

I Go to Arkansas

BY SEPTEMBER, MR. STANLEY, emboldened by an old idea, began to speak to me about the opening of a store upriver, at a “tactical point where such goods as we could offer would be greatly wanted.” He favored a location along the Arkansas River for its rich backcountry and access by steamer to many other points along the greater Mississippi. Often, as we sat eating dinner, he would mention his knowledge of a country store at a place called Cypress Bend, below Pine Bluff on the Arkansas River, owned by a merchant named Mr. Altschul, a Jew who, “though formed by questionable religious proclivities and a natural inward inferiority,” was a good and savvy shopkeeper then in need of a capable assistant. Far upriver from New Orleans, and situated on its own island, Mr. Altschul’s store was the sole provider of grocery goods and other necessities in a region that had recently seen the establishment of many new cotton plantations. It was the kind of place where a bright young man, with numerous skills of the sort I possessed, could learn the workings of such a trade. Though I pointed out to Mr. Stanley that I already had a great knowledge of the running of a store, given my experience at the Speake and McCreary warehouse, he corrected my false assumption that a river outpost could be run in the same way as a big-city store. Mr. Stanley framed the proposition in terms of my learning the river trade “in a more thorough manner”—from the perspective of a clerk working directly with the pioneering planters and the other sorts who frequented those climes.

“What is to be learned from such a place, sir?” I asked him.

“You’ll learn every need and want of the local people. Trust me, young man, should you know their habits, so different from the city folk, you will have the key to the inhabitants of all the Mississippi.”

“But when will I see you, Father?” I asked.

“In time. There is no hurry. This is the South; and in the South things are done in a certain fashion.” Then he told me on one of those evenings: “Hard as it is for me to part from you, I have arranged for you to undertake your apprenticeship in Cypress Bend with the merchant Mr. Altschul. Much will you learn from this, and by much will you profit. Once you have become aware of the particular customs of that place, than we can speak of where we might open our own store, in an advantageous locality. Within a few months of this learning, we will embark on yet a new enterprise: This I promise you, my son.”

TO SOFTEN THE ABRUPTNESS of my transition, my father thought it best that I first become acquainted with the region by staying on the Arkansas plantation of a riverboat acquaintance, a certain Major Ingham, who happened to be in New Orleans on business at the time of our discussion. One night, Mr. Stanley invited him to dinner. An aristocratic Southerner, tall and gallant in manner, he had some newly acquired forestland of many acres that he hoped to clear to make way for the planting of a cotton crop. Mainly slaves worked the property. He made it clear that my labors were to be of a physical nature, an idea that I was not entirely averse to. In no rush to begin work in some distant country store, and thinking it wise to get a sense of the land, I agreed with Mr. Stanley that it would be good for me to spend some time there. Major Ingham was to remain in New Orleans for another two weeks, at which point we were to depart together upriver by steamer, and upon the seventh day, at a point south of a settlement called Longview, enter the Saline, from whose banks Major Ingham’s plantation was a few miles inland. From there I would eventually embark for Cypress Bend, a day’s ride away.

No sooner had this plan been made than did Mr. Stanley receive an urgent letter from Havana, Cuba, informing him that his older brother, Captain Stanley, was quite ill with the yellow fever. Shortly he booked passage and, within a day or so, Major Ingham and I accompanied him and his baggage aboard the brig as it was about to depart from the harbor.

We waited beside him as he calmly began to unpack and review the contents of his portmanteau, crammed with ledgers, documents, and books, and though my father did not speak of it, I knew he was greatly preoccupied over the health of his brother. Finally, the ship’s whistle blew and a porter came down the corridors calling out, “Visitors aboard ship must now depart.” My father followed us out to the gangplank and promised that he would write me as to his doings.

OF THE NEXT EPISODE, WHEREBY I resided at the estate of Major Ingham, I will speak but briefly. It did not remain, as I had imagined at first, a place congenial to my spirits, for within a short time I was put to the hard work of cutting down timber with a broad ax alongside a gang of slaves: I did not mind the manly labor, and found it a poetic thing to be working in the midst of a forest, with its high trees and mysteriously changing light and shade, as if I had been dropped into a fairy-tale setting. I came to like the smell of burning resin from the large fires that dispensed with the wild branches and brush, and in general I looked forward to those mornings when the sun streamed freshly through the woods and the air had never seemed so sweet.

It was neither those labors that offended me nor my accommodations in the major’s large pine-log house, which was staffed by many slaves, mainly females who tended to every domestic service.

No, it was not this that made me come to dislike my brief time in that place; rather, it was the unavoidable and distasteful company of the slave overseer, who, on account of the finery I had worn on my arrival, had taken me as some New Orleans dandy and rode me for it. In short, he struck me as the lowest form of white man, the like of which I hoped was not common to those parts. Like Mr. Kennicy, though in an amplified way, he hated the slaves and carried with him a black snakeskin whip that he cracked at every opportunity.

One morning, while we were clearing a patch of forest, as some fellow was struggling with a heavy piece of log, the overseer gave him an order, and when this fellow did not hear his command, he struck the whip over the boy’s bare shoulders with such force as to leave a deep gash in the skin. The log fell from the boy’s arms and crushed the foot of another slave nearby. When the injured slave cried out, the overseer beat him, too; then as the slave repeatedly pleaded for mercy, and as a few others tried to intercede, the overseer pulled out a pistol, fired off a few shots overhead, and threatened to shoot them if they did not back away. Later, when I sought out Major Ingham about the matter, he was reclining in an easy chair on his porch and seemed perplexed by my concern.