Heaven and Hell by John Jakes Page A

cavalry had pillaged, leaving a black waste marked by lonely chimneys--Sherman's Sentinels, all that remained of homes in the path of the barbaric march.
    He stayed the night at a seedy inn outside the city. In the taproom he avoided conversation but listened closely to the impoverished yeomen drinking around him. To hear them, you'd think the South had won, or at least was able to continue fighting for its cause.
    Next morning, he rode on, through heat and haze promising another fierce summer in the Low Country. He traveled on dirt roads left unrepaired after Union supply trains tore them up. A farmer would need a strong new wagon to get through the eight-inch ruts in the sandy soil and reach market with his crop--if he had a crop. Probably the farmer couldn't find a new wagon to buy, or the money for it, either. Cooper seethed.
    Riding on toward Charleston and the coast, he crossed a roadbed; all the rails were gone and only a few ties were left. He met no white people, though twice he saw bands of Negroes moving through fields.
    Just past the hamlet of Chicora, on his way to the Cooper River, he came upon a dozen black men and women gathering wild herbs at the roadside. He reached into the pocket of his old coat and took hold of the little pocket pistol he'd bought for the trip.
    The blacks watched Cooper approach. One of the women wore a red velvet dress and an oval cameo pin, probably, Cooper thought, stolen from a white mistress. The rest were raggedy. Cooper sweated and clutched the hidden pistol, but they let him ride through.
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    A big man with a red bandanna tied into a cap stepped into the foad behind him. "You ain't the boss 'round here any more, Captain."
    Cooper turned and glared. "Who the hell said I was? Why don't You get to work and do something useful?"
    Don't have to work," said the woman in red velvet. "You can't orce us and you can't whip us.
    Not no more. We're free."
    Free to squander your lives in sloth. Free to forget your friends."
    "Friends? The likes of you, who kept us locked up?" The ban 38 HEAVEN AND HELL
    danna man snickered. "Ride on-, captain, 'fore we drag you off that nag and give you the kind of hidin' we used to get."
    Cooper's jaw clenched. He pulled out the pocket pistol and pointed it. The woman in velvet screamed and dived into the ditch. The others scattered, except for the bandanna man, who strode toward Cooper's horse. Suddenly, good sense prevailed; Cooper booted the nag and got out of there.
    He didn't stop shaking for almost ten minutes. Trezevant was right.
    The legislature must do something to regularize the behavior of the freedmen. Liberty had become anarchy. And without hands to labor in the heat and damp, South Carolina would slip from critical illness to death.
    Later, when he calmed down, he began to consider the work to be done at the shipping company. Fortunately, he didn't have the extra burden of worrying about Mont Royal. Decency and propriety had prompted him to make his arrangement with Orry's widow, and she now bore all the responsibility for the plantation to which he held title.
    Madeline was of mixed blood, and everyone knew it, because Ashton had blurted it to the world. But no one made anything of her ancestry.
    Nor would they so long as she behaved like a proper white woman.
    Melancholy visions of his younger sisters diverted him from thoughts of work. He saw Brett, married to that Yankee, Billy Hazard, and bound for California, according to her last letter. He saw Ashton, who'd involved herself in some grotesque plot to unseat Davis's government and replace it with a crowd of hotspurs. She'd disappeared into the West, and he suspected she was dead. He couldn't summon much sorrow over it, and he didn't feel guilty. Ashton was a tormented girl, with all the personal difficulties that seemed to afflict women of great beauty and great ambition. Her morals had always been despicable.
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    The sun dropped down toward the sand hills behind him, and he