A Dream of Daring Page 28

  The sun glowed on Solo, who listened intently.

  “In the new age, you’ll get to use your intelligence.” The breeze sent strands of Tom’s blond hair dancing in the air like a lively fire. “And right now, we can adopt new ways to start us on that path.”

  His audience remained still. Perhaps from habit or distrust, or simply from bewilderment, their faces revealed nothing to their master.

  “Here’s how these new ways will work. You’ll get cocoa beans for completing your tasks. And we’ll open a plantation store with food, clothing, and other things you need and want to have. Then you can use your beans to buy whatever you want in that store. The more work you do, the more beans you get, and the more you can buy. If you prefer to have time off, you can buy that too with your beans. Later on, I think we can convert your beans into real money. Then you can go to town, if you want to, and buy things we don’t keep in our store.”

  Tom glanced at Nick, who smiled in agreement with the plan.

  “Cocoa beans are the key to the new way. Cocoa beans mean that I no longer can take your work for nothing. I have to pay you for it. Cocoa beans also mean that you no longer can avoid your work and get the same provisions you would if you had done it properly. Cocoa beans mean I can’t take advantage of you and you can’t take advantage of me. And they mean you can spend your earnings as you please, not as I determine. You control the beans you get and how you spend them. That’s how you start to become masters of yourselves.”

  Tom turned to the young teacher, whom he had heard expressing a similar theme in her lessons. In their odd way of relating to each other, in which the boundaries of master and slave had blurred, he shot a questioning glance at her as if to ask how he was doing, and she shot back a nod of approval.

  “Like a carpenter or a gardener needs tools, a person who’s master of himself needs tools too. And an important tool that you need is education. I’ll supply that to you, if you want it. I think you all know by now that we started a little school here, which is our own special secret.”

  Like explorers on a new terrain who were encountering an unfamiliar life form, the group studied him cautiously.

  “I’ll pay your teacher in cocoa beans for every class she holds.”

  He politely bowed his head to Solo, and she returned the courtesy.

  “Does anyone want to say something?” Everyone remained quiet. What were they thinking? he wondered. “Are there any questions?” There were none. Tom waited in the awkward silence.

  Then Solo stepped forward. “May I try?” she asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m speaking to the students in my class.” Like a birdcall that could be heard over long distances, Solo’s voice resonated. “You sure do a lot of talking during your lessons. Too much!” Some of them grinned. “Let’s hear from you now. . . . Come on.” She waited. No one stood up.

  Jerome stepped forward to employ his own manner of calling for volunteers. He pointed to his apprentice. “You. Get up!”

  Brook, a hardworking young man whom Jerome had drafted from tending the kitchen garden to cooking, obligingly rose to his feet, his face part fearful, part smiling. “Mr. Tom, when I’s a master o’ myself, kin I go inta town a lot, like Jerome do?”

  “If you do your work here, and if you’re law-abiding when you’re in town, why not go whenever you want to, like Jerome does? I’ll sign the passes.” Tom smiled. “You see, here’s the thing that interests me. I need to produce the cotton crop, so I need your jobs to be done. But outside of that, who am I to regulate your lives, to arrange your affairs for you, to restrict your own inclinations? That’s all your business. When you’re masters of yourselves, that sets me free too.”

  Brook sat back down on the grass; he looked incredulous as he tried to absorb a message that was as simple as it was unbelievable in that time and place.

  Another man stood up tentatively. It was someone who had recently joined Solo’s class. “Mr. Tom, I hear there’s slave musicians who play fo’ massas’ parties on their plantations.” The speaker was part of a talented slave trio that played banjo, drums, and mandolin at social gatherings of the slaves on the plantation. “Can me, Frank, an’ Boone hire ourselfs out fo’ playin’ at them parties?”

  “Why, yes. I can post a notice in town that I have for hire a trio of musicians.”

  The questioner smiled with pride at the last word being applied to him.

  “You can keep what you make from any jobs you get. If you need to buy new instruments or supplies, that comes out of your earnings as the cost of doing business. Being masters of yourselves mean you keep the rewards, but you also pay the costs.”

  The speaker’s hesitation had changed to eagerness. He reached out to tap the shoulder of one of the other musicians, sitting near him. “You hear?” he said. His friend smiled, looking interested.

  “And if you want to be invited back, you’ll bring your manners along with your music to those plantations,” Solo added sternly. The speaker nodded respectfully to his teacher as he sat down.

  The sun had vanished behind the trees. In the deepening blue of twilight, a lone figure stood up at the back of the group. It was a field hand who had mustered the courage to speak.

  “Sir, kin us maybe has our own plots to plant a little cotton? There be bare land a-sittin’ out there, sir.” He pointed in the direction of a stretch of uncultivated land still remaining on the property.

  “What do you think, Nick?” Tom turned to his overseer.

  The obliging Nick nodded his head. “Can be done.”

  The questioner looked stunned by the consideration his idea was getting.

  In his deep German accent, Nick added: “Those of you who want to take more work, I assign plot that you cultivate for yourself. I arrange for field hands who want own plot to work together in same gang, so you can go fast and finish task early to take advantage of new opportunity.”

  Tom added, “Just plant a good crop for me, and you can have your own plot and keep the money you make from it.”

  A ripple of excitement stirred through the crowd. After a lifetime of servitude, their spirit had not been killed, Tom thought. Lying dormant and now being jostled to awaken was the remarkable sleeping giant of personal enterprise.

  Tom had a further thought: “And you can use your profits to buy materials to build additions on your cabins.”

  This possibility—beyond their wildest dreams—caused an outburst, and the slaves chatted among themselves until Jerome hushed them so that the meeting could continue.

  From the middle of the group, someone rose to speak. It was a shy woman who worked in the fields. Tom and the others strained to hear her timid voice. “I likes to ask iffen I kin go to them classes goin’ on in the big house.”

  Tom looked at Solo to respond. The teacher nodded to acknowledge the would-be student. “Who else wants to take classes? Stand up so I can see you.”

  Solo’s sinewy body and wild hair looked primal, while her voice, with its proper diction and grammar, was pure intelligence. She waited, but no one else rose to join the lone woman standing.

  “If you want to be the master of your own music, and the master of your own cotton, and the master of your own comings and goings, you first need to be the master of your own thinking. That’s what learning does for you. It teaches you how to think for yourself. And it gives you knowledge, so you can take care of yourself. Now, how many of you want to take classes? Stand up.”

  Two others rose to join the woman standing. There was what seemed like a long pause, and Tom wondered if any more would rise. Then four more joined them. Then there were ten. Like spring bulbs growing strong enough to break through the surface, twenty standing slaves soon sprouted across the field.

  With the help of his cane, a gray-haired man with bad knees struggled to rise. Two teenage slaves standing nearby assisted so that he could stand with them to request an education.

  Some of the ones who were standing reached down to pro
d their friends and family to join them. More figures rose to stand like silhouettes against the twilight-blue sky. Soon, so many were giving their silent standing ovation to learning that the ones still sitting seemed out of place, so they stood too. Many looked hopeful, others looked scared, and some looked cynical. But in the end, they all stood up to be counted.

  Tom looked astonished.

  Solo looked energized. She spoke to Tom in the optimistic tone of someone eager for a new challenge and already analyzing how to tackle it. “It can be done. I can move the house servants’ classes to the early morning, then teach the field hands in sessions in the late afternoon and evening.”

  Tom nodded. Then he assured the group, “We’ll hold classes for everyone who wants to learn.” Silently, he resolved to build them a new, hidden classroom to keep secret what was becoming a formal school. “We’ll work out a plan for everything we discussed tonight.”

  He turned to Solo. “It appears you’ll be getting a lot of cocoa beans.”

  She flashed one of her rare smiles, and the moment seemed to him more like daybreak than dusk.

  * * * * *

  A few hours later, the candles were extinguished in the cabins, and the slaves had retired for the night. With the stars shining like medals pinned on the clear sky, and the night creatures giving the woods its symphony, there were only three lights still glowing at Indigo Springs.

  Jerome’s light was burning in the kitchen behind the big house. The man who ran Tom’s kitchen, supervised various servants, and operated his own chocolate business frequently worked at night. Especially after he had been away from the plantation during the day, he made up missed chores, prepared chocolate squares for customers, or read from his primer long after the others had gone to sleep. That night, after Tom’s talk to the slaves, Jerome was in the kitchen, but this time he was thinking about his future.

  Solo’s light was burning in the library. She spent many nights in the room with the dusty volumes that were her cherished companions. They were the sages that took her on journeys through history, the explorers that showed her the people and places beyond her sight, and the poets that invited her into their fantasies. That night she was reading a book of short stories to select one to present to her class.

  The third light was Tom’s. It burned in the workshop on the hill. That night he had felt an eagerness to continue his work that he hadn’t experienced since the time of the murder. After the day’s revelations at the Crossroads, he felt strangely free of the guilt that had shadowed him since Barnwell’s death. After his evening talk with the slaves, he also felt free of any allegiance to the precepts of farming imposed on him by his father, Barnwell, and the others. With the new work system at Indigo Springs, he would run his farm his way.

  With his dejection gone, he had felt almost lightheaded entering his workshop for the first time in three months. Regardless of whether Sheriff Duran’s new suspect in Baton Rouge, Ladybug, would lead to the recovery of his invention, he was now ready to move on with his work, building a new prototype if he must.

  He glanced over the shelves and worktable of the orderly cabin that looked like a machine shop. Everything was as he had left it. There were the notebooks recording his experiments and ideas, the texts on mechanics frayed from heavy use, and the numerous articles on the latest advances in machine power. There was the first gas-powered motor he had ever made: a mere flywheel, a belt, and a fuel reservoir on a wood board.

  There were extra parts remaining from his tractor’s assembly: a few valves left over from the ones he had painstakingly adapted from a steam engine for use in his engine block, a scrap from a steam engine’s exhaust pipe that he had adapted to form his cylinders, and two pistons made of iron. There was a crankshaft made in a plant in Baton Rouge that he had used to fabricate various components of his device to his specifications.

  On his worktable he saw the experiment with electricity that he had been conducting before leaving for his trip. He needed a better ignition system. What was the best way to deliver a spark to ignite the gasoline and start the engine? He was trying to find out. He sat down and began working on the experiment as if he had just left it yesterday. . . .

  After a while, Jerome extinguished his light in the kitchen; his white hat could be seen moving in the darkness as he walked back to his cabin.

  Solo fell asleep reading in the library; her light remained on, its reflections bouncing off the red-brown tangle of hair that covered the desk.

  The big house looked peaceful in the darkness, with its mossy oak branches brushing the roof and its one soft light visible beyond the closed drapery in the library.

  Suddenly a stranger appeared, breaking the serenity of the night. He rode up to the big house on horseback, carrying a burning torch. He stopped directly outside the lighted room.

  The trespasser was a man who had been chastised, humiliated, fired, and cast out like a vagabond that day. His sister had verbally boxed his ears in front of the others. Then a man had taken his life and twisted it like the neck of a chicken. That man was behind the curtain in the room he now faced. He had hated men like that his entire life, men who had book learning, who had money, who spoke fancy, who flaunted their silly manners, who thumbed their noses at him and made him feel small. That day everybody thought he’d been beaten. But he hadn’t, he thought, sneering, his breath reeking of alcohol.

  Before tonight, the hatred he had always felt for men like Tom was something he had to hold in check. There was always somebody around that stopped him from expressing his most urgent impulses—first there was his mother, then his sister, then Miss Polly. That day, after the others had left their meeting, his sister hovered over him like an angry hen. He couldn’t even whack a few of the worthless slaves. That would’ve made him feel better, stronger, on top of things again. That would’ve calmed him like a tonic. He tried another remedy, this one from a bottle. But that didn’t stop the rage building inside him, ready to explode. In fact, it stoked the fury he couldn’t contain and wanted so much to let loose.

  That night he needed another cure. They wanted him to be beaten, to stay beaten, and to just swallow it. Well, tonight they’d know he was no patsy. Tonight he’d get respect. Tonight he’d do what he was itching to do. Tonight the bastard behind that curtain who dared to smash him would get his.

  He leaned over the gallery and with a sweep of his arm tossed the lighted torch inside the open window. Then he whirled his horse around and galloped down the road.

  The torch landed on the floor where it caught on the drapes. Soon the flames rose to the windowsill. The breeze blew the sparks against a bookcase. There the growing menace found a feast to devour in the books. With a crackling that was merely a whisper, insufficient yet to announce its fearful presence, the blaze proceeded unchecked in its voracious path to strike, to spread, to engulf everything. Within moments, it transformed the learned words of centuries into a raging wall of flames—while the young teacher slept.

  CHAPTER 25

  On that clear night, with the moonlight blinking between the trees, Tom finished his experiment, closed his workshop, and headed home on his horse. As he was turning onto the path up to the big house, he nearly collided with a man on horseback careening down the road. Tom’s horse reared, almost throwing him. In a flash of moonlight, he saw a face of pure hatred: Markham! The overseer galloped away, leaving a dust storm and the stench of alcohol behind him.

  Suddenly, Tom saw smoke billowing from the direction of the big house and heard a woman scream. He dug his heels into the horse and raced up the road. The only person in the house at that hour would be its other resident, who slept in the tutor’s room and lived in the library: Solo!

  He reached the end of the road and gasped. His house was a fireball blazing in the gray night, with flames shooting out the library windows and smoke clouds funneling into the sky. The blinding flames, the choking fumes, and the desperate screams of a trapped woman catapulted him into action.

  He
leaped off his horse and jumped onto the gallery. Then he pushed open the front door. He ran down the smoke-filled hallway to the library door, where red flames curled like serpents’ tongues around the frame, daring him to approach. His blond hair turned a sooty gray, his eyes burned with smoke, and his face smarted from the intensifying heat by the time he reached the door. A molten beam fell, barely missing him as he rushed into the inferno.

  Inside the library the fire raged. The furniture burned, and scorched ceiling beams caved inward, threatening to collapse. At the far end of the room he saw the source of the screams. Solo, half hidden by the smoke and half spotlighted by the flames, was trapped. Behind her, the windows were blocked by white sheets of burning drapery. Bookcases to the sides of her were aflame, as was the desk in front. Encircled with hellfire, she looked like a woman being burned at the stake. She tried to grab a clear edge of the desk to push it out of her way, but the crackling fire quickly spread to her spot and her hands reflexively shot away from the sting of the heat. Tom veered clear of a shaking chandelier to approach her.

  “Tom! Tom!” she exclaimed, choking, searching for an opening in the flames to reach him.

  “Look out!” he shouted, pointing to her side, where a bookcase came crashing down. She moved away from it in time. The burning books tumbled out, turning the words of centuries into dozens of little torches spilling onto the carpet, igniting new fires along the floor. Tom saw her small figure trapped behind the growing wall of flames closing in on her.

  He moved back toward the door, where he found a table still untouched by fire, draped with a tablecloth, with a lamp and flower vase sitting unharmed on top. In one swift pull, he grabbed the tablecloth, sending the lamp and vase crashing to the floor, adding to the commotion. He returned to Solo and used the bunched cloth to smother the fire on a corner of the desk. Then he gripped the heavy piece with the cloth and flipped it over. It crashed against the wall, making a temporary pathway free of flames under it. Solo ran through the clear patch of floor into his arms. They rushed to the door, racing against flames that were spreading across the ceiling in the same direction. The flames prevailed, and the door frame collapsed in front of them. Their exit was now blocked.