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.

Although Lovey, who was about her own age, acted as her deputy, it was Deborah who had trained, or retrained, the house servants and who indeed knew how all the male hands on the place were occupied: who plowed and hoed, who chopped and sawed, and who cared for which animals. Deborah and Lovey were a strange pairing, if anyone thought about it, but no one did, because they had been for so long the pair who ran the house.

Deborah was an erect, quick-stepping woman whose face, because it seemed ever to be scrutinizing and weighing, held no softness or humor. Her dark red hair was parted in the middle and caught at the back of her neck in a bun that grew heavier and larger every year.

Lovey was shorter than her mistress and ampler in bosom and behind, but equally quick stepping. Unlike Deborah, she laughed frequently. Her gestures, like her laugh, were quick and nervous, by temperament rather than reason, for Lovey was afraid of nothing and no one. Her independence of spirit was the thing Deborah had first noticed about her when she came to live at Beulah Land following her marriage to Arnold in 1800.

In the bill of sale that had brought her to Beulah Land a year before Deborah’s arrival, Lovey’s name was given as Laverne La Vey, but this was too fancy to be endured by her new fellows, who soon converted La Vey into Lovey and dropped Laverne altogether.

Laverne La Vey had been plump and attractive, and her temper delighted the other slaves, for their only entertainment was in each other and the turn of events on the plantation. One after another the unattached men made approaches to the girl, who slapped them away like so many flies, declaring that she had no time or mind for men, that, in fact, she despised every one of them and was determined that her distant but eventual grave be virginal. This was taken as an amusing display of spirit, even rebellion, since it was understood that a woman’s function, in addition to performing whatever work she was set to, was to bear the children who would replace her and her man, when their time of usefulness was over. Besides, it was so obviously absurd. How could a girl as pretty and lively as Laverne hope to hold out against the pressing ardor of the young men?

Yet hold out she did for two years until, where youth had failed, age prevailed in the person of a quiet man named Ezra. He was the blacksmith, but more than that. Jobs were assigned, of course, but a man’s aptitudes governed his eventual occupations. Ezra’s understanding of animals other than horses and mules grew as the years passed until, in addition to being blacksmith, he was Beulah Land’s animal doctor. He remembered every remedy he heard about, discarding the ones that failed to work for him and venturing to experiment with local herbs. Ezra’s word was law on the treatment of all animal ills at Beulah Land, and, in time, since the bodies of men and women have much in common with those of beasts, he was consulted on human ills by the other slaves, and sometimes by the Kendricks too; and he began to be called, inevitably, Doctor.

Ezra’s knowledge was held in awe and superstition by his fellow slaves. It was supposed that he knew even more than he did, and field and house gossip made legend of his spells and predictions, although his predictions were always based on clever diagnosis, and he had nothing at all to do with spells.

His attendance on the ill meant that he was sometimes present at deaths, and this led to further duties of “laying out” the dead for burial. Treating thus with the dead made him a further object of awe and superstition, set him apart. It might not have been so had he married, but he had not at the time Laverne La Vey was brought to live and work at Beulah Land, when he was near forty and had long been considered one of those whose concerns turned them away from an interest in women. Ezra was, in truth, lonely, in spite of the busy life he led. The rare times there was no call on his services he spent fishing on the creekbanks or sitting in the cabin that he tended himself. He had not even a pet dog or cat, for when every animal is a man’s concern, he is unlikely to single out one for special attention.

Ezra along with the others noted Laverne’s prettiness and her temper, and found himself pleased as well as amused by her when, alone in his cabin at night, he thought of her—something he had heard her say that day, her laugh, a shout of sudden, transient rage.

Lovey could not say when she first began to notice Ezra, but when she did, it was as though she had always known and trusted him. By that time she had been picked as special helper by the new bride and mistress. Since most of her waking hours were spent with, or within call of, Deborah Kendrick, and since Arnold Kendrick often found himself consulting with Ezra when the work day was done and he and Deborah drew closer for night company, so Lovey and Ezra became accustomed to each other and found themselves easy together.

On more than one dark night Ezra escorted Lovey from the big house to the cabin she shared with Widow Jane and her ugly unmarried daughters, Posie and Buttercup. When he saw that she accepted him as a familiar, that is, that she could be still in his presence, evidently feeling no need to strain and buck and break away as she did in the presence of others, he began to give her such things as were in his power to give: a perfect peach, a nicely trimmed quill to pick her teeth, and once a remedy for earache made of crushed camphor leaves and oil of cloves.

As she grew aware of him, Lovey knew what had happened and what would happen, and to her credit she did not tease the man with vagaries and protestations. Her awareness showing in her eyes emboldened Ezra to speak; and when she listened quietly, to take her hand; and when she did not withdraw, the thing was quickly settled between them.

Deborah and Arnold saw them married in the living room of the big house one Sunday in September 1801. Ezra’s cabin became Lovey’s, and together Lovey and Ezra were those closest to the Kendricks of all who dwelled at Beulah Land. Before her marriage, which to her raucous delight astonished the other plantation hands, Lovey had been in a position of growing, if undefined, power. After it, Ezra’s own maturity extenuating her youth, she was recognized as the mistress of the house—after the Mistress.

Lovey was honest to the bone; it would not have occurred to her to be otherwise; it was part of her independence. Never shy, she found perfectly natural her new role as household harrier. She abominated dirt and laziness and understood that they came together in the persons of bad workers; so her duty was clear to her. She harried, she scolded, she trotted about seeing that work was properly done. Deborah found ease and comfort in her noisiness and nervous good humor. The work got done, and its accomplishment was the satisfaction Lovey took and gave. The girls and women who worked under her supervision resented her, of course, and occasionally, briefly, hated her. But they could not hate her long, because even the dullest of them saw that she was as just as she was relentless. Deborah might now and then choose to appear not to see a piece of slovenly work for what it was; Lovey, never. The house was hers. It would be clean.

And to comfort the sullen and the slovenly, Lovey offered one ridiculous flaw: she was a bad cook. Every other woman on the place took pride in her ability to cook certain dishes better than others could or did, for herself and her family, sometimes for the Kendricks. But Lovey knew and admitted her failing. She said herself that if she stepped through a kitchen door where cake was baking, the cake would fall. Laughing, she declared that the sound of her voice soured cream, encouraged rice to stick and burn. Her not being able to cook, and her generous appreciation of the good cooking of others, made her almost, sometimes popular.

2

Time went by, and the two principal families of Beulah Land remained childless. Lovey conceived and miscarried three times, and gossip offered several explanations: Ezra had so long denied himself a woman that when he got one, the mysterious ways of flesh and spirit would not acknowledge and accommodate each other. Their blood refused to mix; what each was, canceled the other. He old, she young; he silent, she turbulent.

As for Deborah and Arnold, none on the plantation had ever seen them touch, not a hand on hand or arm, so there was less wonder at Deborah’s being barren. Yet both Deborah and Arnold wanted to have children; not because they were a loving pair, but because children were needed to inhabit and sustain Beulah Land. For all their need and wanting, they remained two, alone each and together.

The land flourished, with plenty and to spare. There was increase in the yield of cotton and corn, of cattle, pigs, and fowl. Old slaves died or became so feeble they were good for nothing but sitting in doorways as flies walked undisturbed over the backs of their hands and they wondered when the next meal would be ready. But babies were born—kicked, cried, lived.

Then, in the spring of 1805, both Deborah and Lovey found themselves with child, but waited to tell each other until their figures told for them. As they went about in tandem, their bellies poking out as if in some slow, absurd competition, they were the subject of whispered jokes. The fact that they were never came to Deborah’s attention, of course, and when it came to Lovey’s, she flew into such a rage that nobody dared again to laugh or even smile in her presence until she was delivered of her child.

Deborah’s boy was born on December 24, 1805 and named Leon. Lovey’s boy was born on January 2, 1806 and named Floyd. Neither delivery was complicated, although Deborah’s took longer. She tried in vain to nourish her babe, whereas Lovey’s breasts soon plumped with milk that sometimes seeped from her nipples and made damp patches on the bib of her dress.

Floyd ate and slept. The little milk Deborah produced upset Leon’s stomach and made him fret and cry. Nursing their babies one morning in Deborah’s bedroom as they talked over the day’s duties, Lovey studied poor Leon squirming and kicking against Deborah’s meager bosom; then, without a word, she took him from his mother and gave him her free breast. Both women stared as the two babes sucked life from Lovey’s body. White and brown, they fed until content. Their jaws and mouths relaxed; their fists and feet pushed against Lovey’s soft flesh no longer; they slept. Lovey smiled down at them with pride and satisfaction. Deborah covered her bosom and never offered it to Leon again.

Thereafter Lovey fed both boys at the same time. Her doing so became one of the familiar sights of the plantation day. Deborah was casually grateful to Lovey for freeing her to attend her main concerns as mistress of Beulah Land. There was an epidemic of influenza that winter, and she was more often attended by Ezra than Lovey as she went from cabin to cabin feeling heads and necks for fever and administering a liquid medicine for coughs which Ezra had concocted of peach brandy and sulphur.

When winter ended and spring came warmly on, the plowed, sown fields were fragrant with loamy promise, and the two boy babies were together for most of the day. When they were not feeding side by side, they were set on a quilted pallet which was moved from one place to another as Lovey moved from one activity to another.

The Widow Jane’s daughter Posie was assigned by Deborah to assist Lovey with the little boys. Afraid of them, she found eager assistants in the adolescent girls who were suddenly discovering the wonder of birth and babies and who, when Lovey was out of the room where they were, found entertainment in undiapering the infants and tickling their genitals until erection occurred; whereupon the girls, shrieking with laughter, declared that all males, young and old, had but one thing in mind. Then rediapering the boys with suddenly harsh, punishing hands, they sang them lullabies half remembered and half invented.

That summer Ezra rigged padded pillow cases as swings on the thick-limbed fig tree that grew near the kitchen door. Floyd and Leon, when other matters claimed Lovey’s attention, were set safely upright in the padded swings, swaddled like papooses. They slept and woke, and seeing each other, laughed, as the wind swung them to and fro in the fig-scented air.

3

Deborah’s second, and as it transpired, last child was born in March 1808, and named Selma for Arnold’s mother, long dead. There were five fingers on each of the infant’s hands and five toes on each of her feet. Her legs were two, eyes two, arms two. Head and trunk were what is expected of a baby. Yet from the first she seemed an alien creature. In a lap, on a bed, in her cradle, she did not move or cry. Picked up, she appeared startled. When the time came that she should smile, she would not. She looked at every face that drew close to hers as if it had materialized from the spirit world.

Deborah gave her mainly into Buttercup’s care, but that one was afraid of babies like her sister Posie, especially when she was alone with the little girl.

Lovey miscarried twice again, but in 1809 conceived, and in June of 1810 bore a daughter she named Pauline. Pauline’s tiny hands closed like traps on whatever finger came within their range, and her unblinking wet eyes were dark with distrust. Lovey laughed and shrugged and said she must be Ezra’s, for she could see nothing of herself in the baby and could not fathom her mystery. Ezra laughed, and forgot about her most of the time, Floyd being more glory and wonder than he had ever dreamed possible.

4

“Floyd! You Floyd! Le-on! Where you hiding? Come when I call!”

Lovey fidgeted, one foot tapping the stone step that led to the kitchen. She had been gathering eggs, a morning occupation that put her in good humor because, although some hens laid their eggs properly in nests that had been built for them, others dropped them in odd corners of yard and barn, indeed, wherever spirit and flesh moved them, thereby making the finding of them something of a game. Her apron, caught tightly in one hand, held seventeen hen’s eggs, white and brown and speckled, and four guinea eggs, which she decided she would keep for brooding.

“Come here this minute, both of you!”

They appeared, by magic it seemed, and stood staring up at her. “You hongry?” she asked, nodding her head affirmatively, although it was only an hour since they had eaten. She went into the kitchen, holding the aproned eggs carefully, and they followed her. “Posie! Untie me!” Posie left her butter churn and with one deft yank untied Levey’s apron and caught the eggs in a basket that sat empty on the meat-chopping table.

Frowning, Lovey went to the stove and opened the oven door. Half a dozen biscuits left over from breakfast lay hardening in a flat baking pan. She took two of them, poked a finger in their sides and filled the holes she made with syrup. Each boy grabbed a biscuit and ran out the doorway. But once around the corner of the house they whistled to old Belle, queen of the hounds, who waddled toward them, teats sagging and swaying, tail lifted in expectation. Leon flipped his biscuit in the air, and she caught and swallowed it without knowing what had gone down her throat. Floyd flipped his, and the old dog held it in her mouth briefly before swallowing. Her tail quivered in gratitude, as they laughed and ran away.

5

One of the several qualities that fitted Arnold Kendrick for his role in life was a genuine interest and pleasure in watching other people work, his absorption the keener when he understood and respected the skill of the work being done. This quality drew him often to Ezra’s blacksmith shop. On the same small, hot fire of his foundry Ezra might be stewing an experimental brew of herbs and heating a bar of iron to bend into horseshoe or pot handle or wall hook. Moving unhurriedly and speaking no greeting, Arnold sidled into the open-sided shed and slouched peacefully, like a waiting horse, as he watched Ezra work. The two might be together an hour without acknowledging the presence of each other. Sometimes Arnold, after watching his fill, sidled out again, having spoken no word, his departure as unacknowledged by Ezra as his attendance had been.

However, sometimes they spoke, as when:

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