Whenever he let them go at the close of a day, the children would scatter in all directions, shouting as joyfully as if they’d just been released from a Yankee prison camp—or, for that matter, a Southern one; he remembered the skeletons in rags going back to the United States from Andersonville. He wished he could work up that much excitement over school’s getting out. Most days, he just felt tired.
One afternoon when the black gum and maple trees were beginning to change color, he got back to the widow Bissett’s house to find Henry Pleasants sitting on the front porch waiting for him. Grinning, he charged up the steps to shake his friend’s hand. “How did you manage to get the time off to come up and see me?” he asked.
“I have all the time I need,” Pleasants answered. When Caudell looked puzzled, he amplified: “The railroad let me go.”
“They did what?” Caudell said indignantly. “Why would they go and do a damnfool thing like that? Where are they going to find anyone half as good as you?”
“That I don’t know. They don’t either, I’m sure. They let me go anyhow,” Pleasants said.” As for why…shall we go for a walk?” His eyes slid to the house. Caudell heard Barbara Bissett moving around in the parlor. He caught Pleasants’s drift, nodded, and started down the street. Pleasants came with him. A backwards glance showed Caudell the widow disappointedly standing by a front window.
“Tell me,” Caudell said after they’d got out of earshot. He kept his voice low.
So did Pleasants. “It was the way I treated the Negroes, they said.”
“What?” Caudell gaped. Memories of Josephine’s terrified face—and of her sweet, ripe body—surged through him. “You were too rough on them?” He could not imagine Pleasants, whose disposition lived up to his name, producing that kind of fear in anyone.
“Too rough?” His friend stared, too, then started to laugh, rather bitterly. “No, no, no. The railroad let me go because I treated them too much like men.”
“Is that what happened?” Caudell said. He’d heard of other Northerners dismissed from positions for just the same reason.
“That’s what happened, by God.” Pleasants searched for a way to explain himself: “Nate, you’re a teacher. You must know the difference between people who are stupid and people who are only ignorant.”
“Of course I do.” Before he went on, Caudell looked around. They’d walked south from the widow Bissett’s house. A couple of minutes were plenty to get them to the edge of town. No one was around to overhear. “Too many of the people in this county are ignorant. Plenty in my company couldn’t write their names, or read them if they were written out. But I don’t reckon there are more stupid people here than anywhere else. I taught more than one man his letters while we were in the army,” And Mollie Bean, too, he added to himself. “They learned fine, when I gave them the chance they hadn’t had before.”
“I’ve had the same experience, with the Cornishmen and Irish and Germans who work the Pennsylvania mines. They don’t know much, but they’re not idiots or children—show them what they need to do, explain why, and they’ll go on from there. You don’t need to stand over them with a whip. The ones who won’t work, you turn loose.”
“You can’t turn niggers loose,” Caudell pointed out.
“That’s true, but I didn’t want to stand over them with a whip, either. I was afraid I’d have to: you people have kept them pig-ignorant, much worse than the white men who used to work for me up North. But I decided I’d do the same as I did there—I broke the gangs in half, setting ‘em against each other, and I gave half a dollar to each man on the crew that put down the most ties or hauled the most gravel for the roadbed each day. I gave them work quotas they had to meet, or else neither half got paid. I wanted ‘em to have a reason to work besides my say-so, if you see what I mean. And after I gave’ em that reason, I just stood back and let’ em go to it.”
“How did all that work? I know some white men who’d swing a hammer for half a dollar a day.” In summer, Caudell thought, he might have been one of those men himself.
“Don’t forget they only got the money if they did the most work. That went the same as it would in the mines—they got the idea real quick. And inside of a week, somebody in one half-gang figured out a faster way to get the gravel from the freight car to the roadway. The day after that, both half-gangs were doing it the new way. Be damned if I know whether niggers are as smart as white folks, Nate, but they aren’t as stupid as people down here think, and that’s a fact.”
“If you got the work out of them, how could the railroad people complain?” Caudell asked.
“I guess the trouble is, if you treat a Negro like a man, he’s going to act like a man. My gangs started bragging and strutting in front of other laborers, and getting in fights with them, and even talking back to whites who showed they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”
“Uh-oh,” Caudell said.
“Uh-oh is right,” Pleasants agreed. “You ask me, that’s a stupid thing for a Negro to try in this country, no matter how right he is—maybe especially if he’s right. But somebody who feels like a man doesn’t take kindly to orders from a fool. The whole thing was partly my fault, too. My crews were used to telling me when they thought they had good ideas, or if they thought I had a bad one. I’d listen. Why not? Sometimes they were right. Down here, though, if you’re black, you’re wrong.”
“You talk like an abolitionist,” Caudell said.
Pleasants shrugged. “If niggers really are a lot less than whites—if they’re stupid by nature, I mean—I might see some justice in slavery. If they’re backwards just because they’re ignorant, why not enslave ignorant white men, too?”
Caudell pondered that. In his mind, he saw Georgie Ballentine again; and black men in blue uniforms standing up under the fire of AK-47s; and Josephine, lovely flesh to be sold and abused because it came in a dark wrapping. Was that justice? Before the war, he’d taken it for granted. He’d taken a lot of things for granted before the war. He wondered what would have happened had the North won and forced the South to free its slaves. How would they live? Where would they work? “You couldn’t just go and turn them loose all at once,” he said.
“Mmm—maybe not,” Pleasants said, though he didn’t sound convinced. Then he laughed. “I suppose you’d lynch anybody who tried, after you’re just through fighting a war to keep them slaves.”
“The war wasn’t about slaves,” Caudell said. “At least, it wasn’t about slaves till Lincoln made it that way. He lost the war, and he’s not U.S. President anymore, either. And the niggers the Yankees freed while they were holding our land are just going to complicate our lives for the next twenty years.”
“Not if Nathan Bedford Forrest has his way,” Pleasants said. When Caudell looked a question at him, he went on, “By the papers, Forrest would just as soon kill the Negroes he catches as make slaves out of them again.”
“He’s a hard man, by all accounts,” Caudell admitted. “Some folks like to take that line.” As vividly as if it had happened the day before, he heard the bark of an AK-47, saw a grinning Billie Beddingfield standing over the corpses of two Negro soldiers who had tried to surrender at Bealeton.
Pleasants watched the line between his eyes deepen, the corners of his mouth turn down. “You don’t have the stomach for massacre yourself, do you?”
“I guess not.” Caudell felt that in some obscure way he betrayed the Confederacy by admitting his doubts to this man from the North, who happened to be his friend. To keep from having to do it again, he changed the subject: “What will you do now? Head back to Pennsylvania?”