Beulah Land

Lonnie Coleman

BEULAH LAND

Dedication

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shall be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married.

Isaiah 62:4

PART ONE

1

Savannah was one of the South’s great ports, acting as goods and culture broker between the land mass behind it and the world beyond its shores. Many roads led from Savannah to other, smaller centers. One of these, a town called Highboro, fifty-three miles northwest of Savannah, had its own roads leading to other, smaller towns, and to farms and plantations. The main road out of Highboro was red clay with veins of blue-black. In fair weather it was hard as stone to the hoofs of horses and mules, but when rain fell in more than a brief shower, it became a slippery bog. Two roads led from the main road to the plantation called Beulah Land.

A back road ran through cotton and corn fields that claimed the choicest of the sixteen hundred acres, through the neck of a wood of cypress, oak, and pine, watered by a creek. The road ended with barns, smoke houses, chicken yards, water wells, a kitchen garden, and the forty cabins that housed the Negroes who worked the plantation. These numbered a hundred and fifty, more or less, depending on births and deaths rather than sales, and were never referred to by Arnold Kendrick as slaves, although the phrase he used, “my people,” spoke ownership as well as a kind of kinship.

The front road to Beulah Land curved over a hill through an orchard of plum and peach trees until it settled to a straight, dignified avenue bordered by cedar and oak trees all the way to the front door of the house that was its end and reason for being. The house was a large one, built mostly of wood, and owed whatever distinction it possessed to size rather than design.

Fronting it was a broad porch with squared wooden columns lifting the full two-story height of the house to support the roof. The house was painted gray, its shutters dark green. The work buildings out in back had been left to weather gray and were a softer, warmer shade than the house. The slave cabins were whitewashed, as were the lower trunks of the trees nearest the big house.

The front porch opened directly into a wide center hall, off which, on either side, were living and dining rooms. The stairway to the next floor was in the front left living room, leaving the center hall a clear passage for whatever breezes stirred through the house and the roofed but open-sided breezeway to the kitchens and store rooms where Deborah Kendrick spent much of her time.