. . . we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together.

They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.

—Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854

vii

John becomes a farmer. Asia can see that he feels the same despair over this that Edwin once felt facing a future as a carpenter. He leaves the house before Asia rises in the morning and often returns after supper is long over, too weary to eat what Ann Hall has set aside for him. He has that gift, to choose a course of action, however distasteful, and give himself over entirely to it. When Asia asks, he’s always too busy and too tired to work on Father’s biography. Asia struggles on alone and lonely.

She’s grown used to his company, to hours spent before the fire, reading poetry and imagining grand futures for him, palaces of fame. Like so many boys of his generation, he’d read and reread the adventures of Walter Scott and Bulwer-Lytton. He wants to be a soldier, to be tested, to see himself fired like clay in the great kiln of battle. Instead here he is, only just sixteen, grimly torturing grain from barren ground.

Like Asia, Brother John has a great emotional range. He has a temper. He weeps for his losses. In fits of joy, he throws himself onto the dirt, smelling, tasting, inhaling the ecstatic world. Farmer John lives in a narrow box of miserable responsibility. Asia hardly sees him and hardly recognizes him when she does.

A new crew of men are hired to help with the harvest, the cheapest help available, Irish immigrants. These white men won’t take instruction from Joe Hall. John must manage them. This he’s unable to do.

It’s customary for white hands to share the noontime meal with their employer and his family. It’s customary for the ladies of the household to join them at table. But John feels a great distaste for these men, distaste they quickly reflect back. They dislike him for his British blood. They dislike him for the free and familiar way he deals with the local blacks. They’ve heard that he was bastard-born. Who is he to feel superior to them? Most of them are his elders, some by decades.

John refuses to let Mother, Rosalie, and Asia anywhere near these men. By noon, they’re often stripped down, dirty, smelly, and sweaty, not delightsome, Asia observes primly. Their accents are thick, their conversation uneducated. Dining with such would be an insult to the Booth women, John decides. He makes them keep to the upstairs during the noon meal.