Part Three
1860–1879
Chapter Fifty-Three
In August of 1860, a stranger emerged from around the carriage house of the Toliver mansion and addressed Maddie as she was hanging wash on a clothesline. “Mornin’, aunty,” he said. “Is the lady of the house at home?”
Maddie had never experienced a white man tipping his hat to her. She had the feeling the man had been hanging around the outbuildings of the grounds for some time watching her and the maids at work on washing day. A thread of suspicion wove through her. There was something not quite proper about him, though she couldn’t have put her finger on it. He was a handsome man, presentably dressed in a suit and clean shirt, and had a pleasing manner, perhaps too much so to a black woman. Why had he entered the grounds from the pasture road in back of the house rather than from Houston Avenue?
Maddie responded on impulse, hoping the maids, who had ceased work to give the tall, red-haired stranger their attention, would not dispute her lie. Miss Jessica was alone in the house. “No, suh, she isn’t. I be happy to take a message for her.”
“When will she be in?”
“Not for some time, suh.”
The man cast a furtive look at the gazebo, and, alarmed, Maddie wondered if he was considering waiting there for her mistress to return. “Then I suppose I’ll have to call again,” he said.
“Your name, suh?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, moving off quickly.
Maddie waited until she heard the gate creak before returning to the washtubs.
She would have reported the incident to Jessica, but not long after the man had left, she felt faint of heart and sat down in a back porch chair to fan herself. She closed her eyes and released a sigh. One of the maids found her a short while later, her hand still clutching the straw fan, caught in its final movement upon the earth.
In the cries that went up and the hubbub following her death, the man who had appeared mysteriously in the backyard that morning was forgotten, but a store clerk making a delivery by way of the pasture and service road behind the row of mansions spotted him leaving the Toliver property. The clerk, who knew everybody in town, had never seen him before, a position dangerous for strangers in Howbutker at that time. Local forces were about that did not take kindly to persons of unknown identity traveling around the countryside.
In July, a blaze had started in a small drugstore in Dallas and quickly spread to burn down most of the town’s business district. In the already charged political atmosphere of secession and war talk, exacerbated by a prolonged heat wave that had tempers soaring, suspicions flared that the fire had been set by abolitionists. Similar fires had already destroyed parts of several Texas towns, and a document had been found and interpreted as proof that their cause was the work of roving bands of radical anti-slavery groups bent on using fire, assassination, and destruction of personal property to influence public opinion against Texas remaining a slave state. The groups were suspected of arranging slave escapes, stealing livestock, burning gins, barns, and fields, and poisoning wells. Fear was rampant that a plot had been hatched for a full-scale slave uprising. The match that had lit the powder keg was the conflagration in Dallas. Paranoia spread, whipped up by newspaper headlines screaming of acts of outrageous vandalism, whether accurate or not, and articles written by excitable editors calling for immediate and merciless punishment of the perpetrators. Overnight, secretive bodies and vigilante groups, acting without jurisprudence, formed to investigate and interrogate anyone suspected of being a slave agitator or supporter of the Northern cause. Hapless parties were subjected to terrifying treatment, and if they were not convincing of their innocence, more times than not they were hanged from the most convenient tree.
The clerk slowed his wagon to take a long look as the man mounted his horse, noting how he pulled his hat farther down on the exposed side of his face as they passed. The wagon driver was little more than a boy and riding alone. He was punier in size than the rider. Otherwise, the clerk would have stopped and questioned him. He must be satisfied with the report he’d take to the leader of the vigilance patrol of which he was a proud member. At the meeting tonight, he would tell Mr. Lorimer Davis about seeing a stranger on the road outside the Tolivers’ mansion and keep the fuzzy picture of him clearly inside his head for future identification.
A few weeks later, Jessica joined her reading club in Bess DuMont’s Louis XIV–influenced drawing room, her first outing since Maddie’s death. In meetings during happier years, social-hour conversation preceding the book discussion revolved around lighthearted subjects. A tacit rule of the club was that depressing topics such as death, health and political issues, complaints of children, husbands, and in-laws be left at home. But today talk of the merits of the fashionable hooped petticoat over heavier, hotter, multiple crinolines could not keep at bay an anxious discussion of rumors that a conspiracy was in the works to arm slaves for a statewide revolt. Unspoken but deeply felt and shared among the planters’ wives, the majority in the room, was the terror of sexual assault by black men seeking revenge against their husbands. It was a fear they and their daughters had lived with since marrying into the planter society, and it explained why some of them chose to live in town away from their plantations.
“Lorimer has taken to mandating that all our slaves learn the ten commandments,” Stephanie Davis announced. “He has them recite each one every Sunday morning with stress on ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”
“I’m sure that’s very effective,” Bess DuMont commented, winking at Jessica over the rim of her tea glass.
“And more powerful than the example he sets, I’m sure,” Jessica could not resist remarking, but regretted her outburst immediately. She should not have come today. She was in no frame of mind to be sociable. Many concerns weighed heavily upon her heart, and a series of sleepless nights had left her irritable. She felt the pinch of her corset, which she’d taken to discarding when at home, and the wire cage of her new hoop skirt made it impossible to find a comfortable sitting position. The heat in the room was stifling, unrelieved by the constant motion of her fan and the waft from the rotation of the DuMonts’ newfangled ceiling units that were somehow driven by a water system that turned the two blades.
“What do you mean?” Stephanie demanded.
“We’re all aware of how handy Lorimer is with whip and rope, Stephanie. That’s all I’m saying.”
“But implying so much more,” Stephanie rejoined, her eyes snapping. “Most people around here consider the whip and rope tools of justice which we’re all aware your husband seems opposed to using. Lorimer was so disappointed when Silas refused to join his vigilance patrol. Perhaps he has no interest in keeping peace and order.”
“Perhaps he has no interest in circumventing the law,” Jessica returned.
A shocked silence filled the room. All eyes were upon the two women, who, metaphorically speaking, looked to have removed their dainty gloves for bare-knuckled combat. Not an ice chip tinkled; not a silk skirt rustled.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, if you’d be so kind to answer, Jessica,” Stephanie continued with no apparent intention of letting the matter drop, “who was your male visitor of a couple of weeks ago? He was not one of us. He was quite unknown to our delivery boy when he saw him skulking out your back fence gate. My husband would like to know. He’s interested in strangers in town, especially those who call at the Toliver residence in times like these.”
Jessica set down her tea glass and laid to rest her accordion fan. “Perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell me what you’re talking about, Stephanie. There has been no stranger call at our house.”
“Apparently not at the front door. Otherwise, why would he leave from the back gate?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t say. Maddie would know, but she has left us.”
“How very convenient.”
“Ladies!” Bess DuMont popped up. “Shall we begin the discussion of The Mill on the Floss? I can relate the most divine information about the author, George Eliot. He is really a she. The author’s name is Mary Anne Evans.…”
Jessica wasn’t listening. Stephanie may spread gossip, but she didn’t create it. Now she recalled that one of the maids had mentioned Maddie having died “right after she talked to a white, red-haired man in the backyard.” In the shock of her grief, Jessica had dismissed the man as probably a vagrant looking for a handout and thought no more about it. Lorimer saw potential abolitionists lurking behind every shrub and tree, and, as Stephanie had not so subtly hinted, must have speculated the worst about the Tolivers’ backyard visitor. Jessica would question the maid when she returned home, but good heavens! Had Guy Handley, from wherever he was based now, sent an emissary to enlist her aid for the Northern cause?