They said their good nights, Prudence left for her boudoir and Tammie led Vick upstairs to the spare bedroom. In the hall Aunt Jessie was waiting to light the way for Jem, a kerosene lamp in her ample hand.
“Where’s Rich, Aunt Jessie?” asked Jem.
“He went out to the bahn, Mistuh Jem,” said the old mammy. “He wanted to make sure them triflin’ stable nigguhs put yo’ horse up right.”
“Well, I won’t wait up for him. When he comes back you tell him I want him to pack up some things tomorrow for a ride north day after tomorrow, early. I want him to go with me to show Mr. Vick the way to the fort.”
Aunt Jessie stuck out a belligerent lower lip.
“You ain’t gon’ do no such thing, Mistuh Jem,” she announced firmly. “The doctor done said you don’ go back to soldierin’ till next week and you’s gonna stay right here and heal that hip like he said.”
Jem laughed.
“Aunt Jessie, I’m not the little boy you can order around, not any more,” he said. “And you can’t tell on me to Miss Vinnie any more when I don’t pay attention to you. I’m goin’ and I’ll be all right. You just see to it Miss Pru doesn’t have any trouble keepin’ the servants in line while I’m gone. Now let’s go upstairs so I can get some sleep.”
“Mistuh Jem, Miss Prudence gon’ th’ow a fit, you goin’ off again so soon when you don’ have to,” she surrendered with a resigned shake of her head. “But you always was a hard-headed little scalawag. Don’ you go off to sleep too quick now, because when Rich gets back I’m aimin’ to send him upstairs to rub some warm salve on that hip o’ yourn.”
Jem was in bed dozing off when Rich appeared to massage his hip with salve. Jem told him what Vick had said and what he had in mind to do. The slave shook his head, his competent hands busy.
“You b’lieve that, Mistuh Jem?” he asked. “That there white man ain’t no Suth’n agent. If he’s sayin’ he knows some Yankee gen’l’s gon’ ride up that road by hisse’f he’s jest tetched in the haid—and if you believes him and goes up there and gets yo’se’f shot by some Yankee in them woods, you’s tetched in the haid.”
Jem chuckled, not taking offense. Jem and the slave had grown up together and there was considerable affection between them. Rich felt privileged to talk straight to him much as Aunt Jessie did.
O mirabile dictu! To be in dreamed-of Gilead, and Gilead as sweet and scented as those dreams! Tammie turning down Vick’s big four-poster bed, Tammie young and black and alive in her simple home-spun frock, was a miracle of substantiality.
He was in the Old South, the historic South, in person, in the body. This gracious land! He felt like hugging the little slave girl—but the gesture probably would frighten her, make her think he wanted something of her tonight he didn’t.
Uncle Toni’s Cabin… the thought quivered with scorn. Tammie and Rich and Aunt Jessie were cared for better, were visibly more content, than the jobless and hopeless blacks in the inner cities of his own 20th century.
When Tammie left and he was undressing for bed Vick felt that in a very real sense he was home again. It was so much like his bedroom in the rambling pre-Civil War house during his boyhood in rural West Tennessee. There had been no slave-girl to turn down the covers but the bed with its tall headboard under the fourteen-foot ceiling wasn’t too different from this four-poster—and the lights were kerosene lamps, the roads were dirt, automobiles were few and he was seven years old before he saw his first radio.
There was no servile “yassuh, mas-tuh” and “nawsuh, mastuh” for young Harry Vick from the colored family always esconced in the cabin across the woodlot to work in the fields. Sometimes when they had rabbit or possum he got to eat supper with them. The black boys of his own age wrestled with him (and usually whipped him) and argued with him over who should get to ride the horse and who was relegated to the mules; the black girls lit on him for inadvertently using the word “nigguh” and his first sex experience was with one of them. Flora, who cooked and kept house, sleeping on a shuck mattress in the little room off the kitchen, fussed at him for not eating a proper breakfast.
But of course racial segregation was strict, and accepted. Despite the informality of his conversation and relations with the black folk on the farm, Harry was the young master, and knew it. Reading books like Two Little Confederates and The Klansman, he was imbued with the viewpoint and values of Southern chivalry by Granny—actually his great grandmother.
Granny had Thurman, their black chauffeur, park the Graham-Paige at the curb in front of Verhine’s Department Store, largest in town. Granny liked Mr. Verhine personally and always greeted him pleasantly on the street, sometimes stopping to chat with him. But she made no move to leave the parked car, instead handing Thurman a list of items to buy in the store.
“Why can’t we go in, Granny?” asked Harry, who liked to watch the overhead baskets traveling across the store with their orders and their cargoes of merchandise.
“I will never set foot in a Yankee store,” replied Granny firmly and righteously.
Granny had lived through “the Wah” and Reconstruction. She remembered the invading Union armies, the burning of once-stately mansions, the ravaged fields, near-starvation, the arrogance and sometimes violence of once-slaves egged on by scalawags and carpetbaggers.
It was largely from Granny’s girlhood reminiscences that Harry acquired his image of the Old South as a gracious land, dreaming peacefully amid its fields and forests and streams, its courtly inhabitants served by loyal, polite black slaves who were cared for and appreciated—treated affectionately, as their own black servants usually were. A South of past nobility and abundance, honeysuckle-scented in imagery so intense it was almost memory.
Vick’s own boyhood resembled that fancied South of hardly more than half a century earlier closely enough for the vast changes in the American scene that began with the Depression and progressed through World War II to jar on him, offend him. Instead of the quiet fields and woods of the remembered farm there was the crude congestion of the cities; instead of horseback across the fields and the relaxed comfort of majestic trains winding through the countryside there were the impersonal superhighways and the inconvenience of crowded airplanes.
If there were only some way he could restore that dreamed-of South whose expiring edges he once had known… somewhere in one of his college history courses he’d come across that information about Grant riding alone up Telegraph Road before the Battle of Fort Donelson.
He hadn’t been quite fair to Dr. Edgington, he had to admit to himself. When, taking advantage of his friendship with the scientist, he volunteered for Edgington’s first time travel experiment he left the impression he planned to go back only a few years and use the M-1 for hunting in his childhood environment. Instead, once in the machine, he set the dial for early February in 1862.
Now back in the Old South of which he had dreamed, Vick slept well that night in the soft warmth of his eiderdown mattress and his quilted comforter.
They loafed around Five Oaks the next day, Rich and some of the other slaves making preparations for their journey. When Jem told Prudence what he proposed to do she took the side of Rich and Aunt Jessie.
“Jem, you don’t know that man,” she protested. “He may be leading you into a trap.”
“A simple lieutenant?” Jem laughed. “The Yankees wouldn’t take the trouble. And if he does know where that Yankee general’s goin’ to be it’s too good a chance to pass up.”