Heaven and Hell: The North and South Trilogy Page 22
Congressman Stout was Virgilia’s lover. For some time he’d kept her in a four-room cottage on Thirteenth Street, up in the Northern Liberties. He refused to do more than that, refused to be seen in public with her, because he was married to a flat-chested drab named Emily, and because he had enormous ambition. This morning he was on the threshold of a great step upward. His speech was intended to remove any doubt about his qualifications.
During the first ten minutes, he had reiterated the familiar Radical positions. The South had in fact seceded, and Lincoln had been wrong to call the act constitutionally impossible. By seceding, the Confederate states had “committed suicide” and so were subject to regulation as “conquered provinces.” Virgilia knew the argument, and the key phrases, by heart.
Knuckles white on the podium, Stout built to his climax. “And so, a philosophic chasm separates this deliberative body from the chief executive. It is a chasm so broad and deep, it cannot, perhaps should not, be bridged. Our opponent’s view of the Constitution and the attendant political process epitomizes all that we reject—most especially a leniency toward the very people who nearly destroyed this republic.”
He expected reaction there, and got it. Below, in special seats on the House floor, several senators led the applause. Among them Virgilia recognized the aristocratic Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, caned by a South Carolina hotspur at his Senate desk before the war; he’d almost died of the injury. So different from Sumner and Thad Stevens in some respects, Sam Stout was like them in one essential way: he believed in the moral lightness of Negro equality, not merely in the political exploitation of it.
“I have a vision for this nation.” he said after the applause subsided. “A vision I fear the chief executive does not share. It is a vision in which I see a willful and arrogant people humbled and rendered powerless, their corrupt society overturned, while another people, an entire race, is lifted from enforced inequality to a new and rightful position of full citizenship. It is a vision the leadership of this Congress must and will fulfill, while casting into ignoble disgrace and ruin any group or individual daring to oppose it.”
His dark eyes raked the audience. “The chief executive has employed time and the calendar to circumvent the elected representatives of the people. While Congress was in recess, he implemented his own illicit program. So let there be no misunderstanding. His actions cannot go unnoticed. Nor can they be forgiven. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down. God bless and promote the noble crusade of this Congress. He will surely bring us victory. Thank you.”
Virgilia rose for the standing ovation. Warm and not a little aroused by the rhetoric, she couldn’t wait to speak to Sam and praise him. The speech had become more openly hostile to Johnson since he’d read her the draft last Saturday. She clapped so hard her hands hurt.
George’s sister was forty-one now, and had the sort of mature, full-bosomed figure that a majority of men considered the ideal. Her monthly allowance from her lover enabled her to dress well, though she was careful never to attract attention with gaudiness. Today her dress and Eton were a deep maroon. Her fur-trimmed winter bonnet, cape, and gloves were a complimentary dark gray. She had learned to use cosmetics to minimize facial scars left by childhood pox.
A tide of frock-coated admirers threatened to engulf Stout on the House floor. Watching, Virgilia was touched with a familiar longing. She loved Sam and still wanted to marry him and bear children for him, even though her age, and his ambition, made the dream hopeless. Worse, she’d lately heard gossip about his seeing another woman. By not speaking to him about it, not confronting him, she was trying to deny the existence of the rumor. Trying and failing.
The Speaker gaveled for a recess. Virgilia fought her way downstairs, where she exchanged enthusiastic words with Senator Sumner. “Brilliant,” he declared. “Exactly on the mark.” As usual, his tone prohibited disagreement.
Stout came through the doors, colleagues behind him, journalists and well-wishers converging in front. Virgilia joined the rush but suddenly pulled up short, her heart plummeting. Stout’s eyes met hers and immediately shifted away, without recognition. She knotted her gloved hands together and watched her lover vanish in the crowd.
A voice startled her. “Wasn’t that a tocsin, Virgilia? Wasn’t that a call to war?”
She turned, struggling to smile. “It surely was, Thad. How are you?”
“Much better since I heard Sam speak. The schism with Congress is entirely in the open now. Johnson will soon be on the run.”
Virgilia had met Thad Stevens at a government function in the spring. He knew her family, and their shared ideals had quickly drawn them together. He had soon become her confidant; he was the only person she had told about her relationship with Stout, and her earlier one with the escaped slave, Grady. There was a new word for mixed marriage, “miscegenation,” but it didn’t apply to her. She and Grady had lived together out of wedlock. Stevens was understanding because of his principles and his great affection for his mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Smith.
He guided her outside to the cool, pale sunshine washing over the Hill. At the other end of the muddy mall stood the unfinished monument to George Washington. Stevens said, “Governor Morton is a wise man to entrust Sam with the appointment.”
Joy animated Virgilia’s face. “You mean it’s definite?”
“By this evening it will be. Sam must leave the Committee of Fifteen because we require nine House members, but he’ll continue to guide our work behind the scenes.”
“I can’t wait to see him and congratulate him.” Stout had promised to take supper with her that evening.
“Yes, well—” Stevens coughed, a curious uneasiness in his eyes. “It would be wise not to expect too much of Sam for a while. He’ll be overwhelmed with the details of the new appointment.”
Virgilia heard the warning but she was too excited, and too ardent about her lover, to pay serious attention.
When the war broke out, Virgilia Hazard had been adrift and emotionally exhausted. The grief of loss coupled with almost twenty years of abolitionist activity had drained her.
During those two decades she’d quarreled often with others in the Hazard family, especially George, over his friendship with the Mains, a clan of slave-owning Southerners. Her strong views had eventually driven her away from the family and into her relationship with Grady, who had been the property of Ashton Main’s husband before Virgilia helped him escape. She and Grady had joined John Brown’s small band of militant abolitionists, and had taken part in his raid on Harpers Ferry in ’59. Army bullets had ended Grady’s life there.
Soon after the start of the war, Virgilia had joined the Union nurse corps. In a field hospital, driven by a need to avenge Grady, she’d let a wounded Confederate soldier bleed to death. Only Sam Stout’s covert intervention had spared her arrest and almost certain imprisonment. After that, they had become lovers.
At the time, Virgilia had thought that what she’d done was entirely right and justified. She had seen herself as a soldier at war, not a murderess. Lately, though, exhausted by regret and a strengthening wish to call back the deed—restore the soldier’s life—she had found a new idealism; an idealism purified by the guilt she expected to live with for the rest of her life.
She no longer despised her brother George for liking Orry Main, or her brother Billy for marrying Brett. She had no wish to punish the South, as Sam and other Republicans did. Merely putting some of the key Republican tenets into law would be punishment enough. That was evident from the so-called Black Codes the various states were enacting to thwart the Freedmen’s Bureau.
Virgilia meditated on all this as she stirred the juice of a pot roast on the cast-iron stove in her little cottage. A light, cold rain had begun to fall at dusk, when her mantel clock chimed half after five. Now it rang half past six. Still no sign—
Wait. Above the pattering rain she heard wheels creak and a horse plopping through mud. She ran to the back door, pushed aside the curt
ain and watched Sam’s covered buggy pull into the little shed at the rear, safe from discovery by anyone passing on Thirteenth Street. A moment later, the congressman appeared, striding toward the house. Virgilia’s smile faded. He hadn’t unhitched the horse.
She opened the door while he was fishing for his key. “Come in, darling. Here, give me your hat. What a wretched night.”
He walked in without looking at her. She closed the door and brushed water from the brim of his tall stovepipe hat. “Take off your cape. I’ll have supper ready in—”
“Never mind,” he said, still avoiding her eyes. He moved through the small dining room to the front of the cottage. Water oozed from his high-topped shoes and glistened on the polished floor. “I have an urgent meeting with Ben Butler.”
“Tonight? What can possibly be so pressing?”
His annoyance showed as he warmed his hands at the fire in the parlor hearth. “My new responsibilities.” He turned as she approached, and she was caught short by what she saw in his dark eyes. More exactly, by what she didn’t see. She might have been merely another constituent, and not a very familiar one.
“Since Senator Ivey can’t serve out his term because of ill health,” Stout said, “Governor Morton has announced my appointment as Ivey’s replacement. In two years I’ll ask the state organization to nominate me for a full term. In the meantime, I’ll be able to push our program through and bring that damned Tennessee tailor to heel.”
She took hold of his shoulders, exclaiming, “Senator Stout! Thad said it might happen. Oh, Sam, I’m so proud of you.”
“It’s a very great honor. And a great responsibility.”
Virgilia pressed against him, relishing the feel of his hard body squeezing her breasts. When she slipped her arms around his waist, she felt him stiffen.
The magnificent voice dropped lower. “It will call for certain adjustments in my life.”
She withdrew her hands slowly. “What kind of adjustments?” He cleared his throat and watched the fire. “At least have the courage to look me in the eye, Sam.”
He did, and in the fire-flecked irises she saw rising anger. “An end to these meetings, for one. People have gotten wind of them, don’t ask me how. It was probably inevitable. Gossip is the grist of this town. You can’t even keep a toothache private. In any case, looking beyond the Senate to higher office—an ambition, I remind you, that I have never concealed—”
In the silence, Virgilia whispered, “Go on, Sam. Finish.”
“For the sake of that future, I must shore up the public side of my life. Be seen more often with Emily, distasteful as that—”
“Is it Emily?” Virgilia broke in. “Or someone else? I’ve heard gossip, too.”
“That remark’s unworthy of you.”
“Perhaps. I can’t help how I feel.”
Emotion hardened his voice. “I am not required to explain myself or any of my actions to you. That was part of our agreement. It still is. Therefore I don’t choose to reply to your question.”
From the iron stove she heard the hiss of the pot roast boiling dry. She smelled the burning meat and paid no attention. Stout laid down the curt, cold syllables one after another:
“I almost expected this kind of reaction from you. That’s why I decided to make short work of parting. I will deposit the equivalent of six months of support in your bank account. After that it will be necessary for you to take care of yourself.”
He walked away. A moment later she shook herself out of stunned immobility. “And that’s how it ends? With a few sentences, and dismissal?”
He kept walking, through the smoke clouding off the stove where the scorching smell thickened. Virgilia’s fingers raked her dark hair, loosening pins. The hair spilled over her left shoulder. She didn’t notice.
“Is this how you treat someone who’s helped and advised you, Sam? Someone who’s cared for you?”
At the back door, hat in hand, he turned again. She saw open hostility.
“I am a United States senator now. Other people have a greater claim on me.”
“Who? That variety hall slut people talk about? Is that who you’re off to see, that Miss Canary? Tell me, Sam.” Screaming it, she ran at him. Her fist flew up. Stout caught her wrist and forced her arm down.
“You’re shouting loud enough for them to hear you at Willard’s. I don’t know this person you’re talking about—” She sneered at him; the lie showed in his eyes. “And although it’s none of your affair, I am spending the evening, as I told you, with Butler and several other gentlemen. The topic is how to thwart Mr. Johnson.”
He pulled the door open. The rain, falling harder, almost hid the shed at the back of the yard. “And now, Virgilia, if I have offered you sufficient explanation, perhaps you’ll grant me leave to go. I didn’t want to part on these terms. Unfortunately you forced it.”
He thumped his hat on his head and stalked down the steps.
“Sam,” she cried, and again, “Sam!” when he raced the buggy down the lane beside the house. The flying hooves of the horse flung up mud. Specks of it struck her cheek as she clung to the post supporting the porch canopy.
The buggy swerved to the right and disappeared.
“Sam …” The word dissolved into sobbing. She flung both arms around the post, trying to hold it as if it were a living creature. The slanting rain soaked her hair and streaked her face, dissolving the mud so that it ran like dark tears.
Early the next afternoon, at her bank, Virgilia inquired about the balance in her account. She found it increased by the exact amount of six months’ support.
Numb, stumbling once, she returned to the chilly winter sunshine and walked all the way home, carrying the burden of her certainty. She had seen the last of Senator Samuel G. Stout, Republican of Indiana. Unless, of course, she joined crowd when he spoke and listened like any other commoner.
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MADELINE’S JOURNAL
February, 1866. Another packet of old Couriers today. This is Judith’s kindness—and my sole link to the world. I am not sure but that I prefer it broken, the news is so bad—nothing but quarreling and vindictiveness, even in the highest office in the land. A crowd serenaded the White House a few nights ago. Mr. Johnson went out to thank them and on impulse spoke extempore, a dangerous habit for him. He called Stevens, Sumner, and the abolitionist Wendell Phillips his sworn enemies. Can such rashness do anything but inspire more enmity? …
March, 1866. Still much unrest in the district; and crowds on the roads, esp. the first Monday of the month, which has become “sale day,” when condemned lands are auctioned, and “draw day,” when freedmen journey for miles to Charleston and other centers, hoping the Bureau will distribute clothes, shoes, rations of corn. The hopeful return empty-handed if the officer in charge is short of supplies, or considers the crowd too large or “unworthy.”
Three classes of people travel on draw day, the first composed mostly of elderly colored men too feeble to work and support themselves. Uncle Katanga is a good example from close by; he hobbles on two canes and is something of a figure because he can boast that he was born in Africa. A proud man, but he is starving. Black women with children, their men gone for whatever reason, form the second group. The third, the ones responsible for some Bureau officers saying “no” so often, are the kind called “low-downs” or “poo
r buckras”—whites, usually trashy, inevitably embittered about emancipation of the Negro, and too worthless or lazy to find honest ways to support themselves. We have one such tribe in the district, a sorry lot named Jolly. I have seen their ragged tents and campfires in the woods near Summerton a few times when desperate necessity has driven me to Gettys’s store …
Captain Jack Jolly and his family settled in a grove of live oaks near the Dixie Store. The family consisted of its patriarch, young Jack, and his two married brothers, twenty and twenty-one years old but already greatly experienced in the ways of surviving without working. The wife of the older had been a whore in Macon; the wife of the younger, fifteen years older than her husband, came from Bohemia, couldn’t speak English, and had arms as massive as a coal miner’s. Three dirt-caked infants lived with the Jollys—none of the adults was quite sure which man had fathered which youngster—and several wild dogs hung around their trash-strewn encampment.
Their tents were made of blankets stolen at gunpoint from the homes of freedmen. They also owned a mule and mule cart gotten the same way. Supplies were obtained by the simple expedient of a trip to Gettys’s store.
On his way there in the dim March twilight, Captain Jolly stepped aside and tipped his old campaign hat as a handsome, big-breasted woman driving a wagon went by, heading in the direction of Charleston. Much taken with the tightness of the woman’s dress, Jolly bowed toward the wagon’s tailgate and called out, inviting her in explicit language to stop and let him pleasure her. The woman flung him a look and drove on. Jolly was amused by her spunk, infuriated by the rejection.
At Gettys’s store, he found what he wanted, a shiny new oil lantern. “This suits me,” he said, starting out.
“Jolly, you’re going to send me to bankruptcy,” Randall Gettys exclaimed. “The price is four dollars.”
“Not to me.” He drew one of his Leech and Rigdon revolvers. “Ain’t that so?”