XL

AT Portobello during this first half of the year 1863 life went on very much as it had always done. Two or three of the negroes had run away from the quarters and those with children had been sent to the plantation farther away in Concordia Parish. Twelve of the house servants, all women, remained. In much of the country that had fallen into Federal hands, slaves that had run away or been seized either were with the army companies or were collected into camps or in plantation houses under guard. But in Natchez itself, down by the lower town the runaway negroes were established in a kind of stockade, under the eye of a Federal gunboat; Natchez itself was as yet not occupied. The stockades were near the edge of the river, and those who died of the crowding and the epidemics breaking out among them were buried in the sand of the river bars. On the Portobello plantations, with negroes leaving and uncertain management, the working of the land had dropped to a third.

Over this whole part of the country the unrest among the negroes was growing. On January 2nd President Lincoln had made the Emancipation Proclamation. Since then agents had been travelling among the plantation hands, who now heard of Lincoln’s plan to enlist 100,000 negroes in the Northern Army. It was during the siege of Vicksburg that the first negroes were enlisted in the Federal Army. The agents did not spread the information that General Sherman had done this against his will and had declared that as soldiers the negroes were a joke, nor that General Sherman sent out to corral negroes all over the country and held them prisoners, to prevent their being used in trench digging or felling trees in the Confederate blockade of creeks and rivers.

There had always been a sharp division, however, between domestic slaves and slaves under plantation overseers, and Mrs. Bedford handled her servants as if affairs were the same as always. She saw the look in their eyes sometimes, and knew that they were thinking and saying things among themselves, things they did not tell her of. She even suspected that they might have some plot hatching. But she let one day after another run its course nevertheless.

She went about her life, keeping the garden planted, with the help of Uncle Thornton, Mammy’s husband. In the garden the Tom Thumb peas, the corn, okra, potatoes still flourished, and the melon patch was as large as ever. To keep the negroes from stealing the melons and to protect them from foraging soldiers who might come by, Sallie Bedford went out herself early in the mornings and sprinkled flour on the gashes she cut in the melons. She did the same with the meat in the smokehouse. The negroes were afraid to touch anything, and to the soldiers who asked if the meat was poisoned she said, “You can judge for yourselves, gentlemen.”

Up to this time so far as concerned the Federal soldiers that appeared around Natchez, it was only a beginning. At Portobello a panel had been kicked out of a door that somebody forgot to leave open; Silas had led the way to the stables and the horses, all but the Arabian mare hidden in the woods, had been taken, leaving only a mule that the Indian owned. The rest of the molestation had been for food and supplies. The family could still buy tea and coffee and medicines in the town, though at blockade prices, tea 30 the pound, a barrel of flour 300. Mrs. Bedford tore up old silk dresses, carded them, spun that into thread and knitted stockings for herself. She had resolved, whatever else, that she would not give up silk stockings.

The children were now without the governess and in Aunt Sophie’s charge. They had no lessons save those Valette gave them, mostly a song on the piano now and hugs and kisses.

Sophie ran things her own way. She slept in the room with the children, gave them milk and mush before they went to sleep, woke them up before it was light, put on their dressing-sacks, set them by the fire and gave each a sweet potato roasted in the ashes. In the ceiling was a trap door to the loft under the roof. She told them that up there lived old Raw Head and Bloody Bones. If one of them nodded around sleepy in the morning or stayed awake after being put to bed, Aunt Sophie would say that Raw Head or Bloody Bones was coming. Sometimes she turned her eyelids back and looked in the door from the next room with a gray blanket over her head, and Frances, whose imagination was very literal, hid herself under the covers, her teeth chattering. Sometimes, during the day, the children in their turn put on sheets and went down as ghosts to Aunt Sophie’s cabin and she pretended to be terrified. She would moan and groan and cry out, “Look at them hants! Go ’way from here, ghos’es!”

There were visitors to Portobello as of old, but not so many. And on Easter Sunday Valette had sung divinely at St. Mary’s. They drove home in the carriage from Montrose, where there were still horses to be had.

“What are you smiling at, My Dumplin’?” Valette asked, not taking her hand.

“Was My Dumplin’ smiling?”

“You know you were. You chuckled is what you did.”

“Well, honey, I was thinking of Agnes McGehee. I reckon she thinks it’s for the saints that lovely voice rose with such sweet tones of passion. ’Twould be just like your Aunt Agnes to think you were singing of the Resurrection.”

The kind, clear eyes twinkled as they looked at the young face. The sacred history meant very little to her; she would have liked Valette to speak of Duncan, so that they could praise him. Valette did not look at her; she said only, “Maybe Aunt Agnes would.” To herself she said, “You don’t know everything, My Dumplin’.” She felt a wave of resentment pass over her, and that between the two of them, Agnes McGehee in this case might be the wiser; for she herself, with her lover in her soul and her soul arising unto him, believed too that she was singing of the Redeemer arising from the dark grave.

In July of that year Mr. Frank Surget at Clifton gave the first of those ill-fated parties for Federal officers which in the end destroyed him.

He sent his barouche to Portobello, since Mrs. Bedford and Valette could not both ride the mule, and since, also, he and Mrs. Bedford were old friends on grounds more than commonly agreeable to him, which was flowers and shrubs. The gardens at Clifton were so famous that tourists from the North as far as Boston knew that the boat stopped at Natchez long enough for Clifton to be seen.

The Federal colonel, an Indiana gentleman with rings under his eyes, cared as little for the portraits by the great Benjamin West as did Mrs. Bedford. She hated them because of their pompous air, a quality that she had trained herself to endure, since she was obliged to, in her father, but nowhere else. They were soon out of the house and Mr. Surget was speaking of his experiments with the land, circular plowing and horizontal furrows. He promised to show the colonel the manuscripts he had of Sir William Dunbar’s, the friend of Jefferson’s, who had commissioned geological surveys of the Natchez country from him. The colonel praised the Egyptian lotuses, which stood high up from the water in full flower, with their curious heavy fragrance, and beneath them in the water of the pool, the stars were reflected.

“There’s a story for you,” the host said, as the colonel leaned over to see into the centre of a lotus flower. The lotus seed had been sent from Africa to his father by an ex-slave named Prince. He told the colonel the story of a man who, after years as a slave, wrote a letter in Arabic to the consul at Tangier, speaking of his rank among the Timboo tribe, his capture in battle and his sale. The consul sent the letter to President Adams, who, in turn, had Henry Clay inquire for what he could be bought. The owner presented the slave with his freedom; diverse Natchez citizens raised a sum to purchase his wife and a Moorish costume, and the two set off by way of Washington for Morocco.

“Where the sun teems life teems, my father used to say; he was a traveller. And your father?” said the colonel, turning to Mrs. Bedford.

“My father was something of a continent in himself,” she said, laughing, “six foot eight.” She would have liked to say more about her father to this man who was by contrast so restless and agreeable; but she could think up very little besides Latin phrases and stately principles from physics and chemistry.

“Meanwhile, here we are,” Mr. Surget said, as they reached the steps. “We must be gay, if you’ll help us.”

“Dulce est desipere in loco,” she said, suddenly remembering the Horace quotation that her father never tired of quoting when he was tired of himself. “My father, sir,” she added in a mischievous tone that made the sharp little colonel chuckle, “translated that: ‘it is pleasant to relax when a suitable occasion arises.’ ”

At Portobello, it was all changed when Malcolm Bedford unexpectedly came back. Then the war was brought home to them.

By the close of the year 1862 the Vicksburg Campaign was well under way; Malcolm was transferred from his Jackson battalion to Vicksburg, where he was one of the officers in charge of the Yazoo River blockades. He directed the felling of trees and the placing of batteries at points where the invaders might pass. There was rain, the creeks and rivers rose. Even the Yankees, contending with the overflows and mud, made jests about it, calling themselves beavers. At the end of May he wrote that he was suffering from a dysentery ravaging the camp, and hoped for a leave of absence.

When Malcolm Bedford came home one morning, riding out from Natchez on the mule with Dock, the Indian, walking alongside, Frances, running out at the front door to meet him, threw her little arms about his neck and burst into tears. Her mother and every one of the others had to kiss him with the child in his arms. She would not look again at his gray, hollow face, and whenever they tried to take her away she shrieked and buried her face closer in his shoulder, sobbing.