The day after Anna Ruby Mullinax’s memorial service, I went through all my reference books on Southern furniture, looking for a piece similar to the cupboard I’d seen at Beaulieu. But most of the pieces I found were fancier, more high-style.
I sketched the cupboard from memory, then took my drawing pad down to River Street, to the unstylish end, to the last unrestored old cotton warehouse in Savannah.
Lester Dobie fished his glasses out of the breast pocket of his grease-stained cotton sport shirt and held my drawing only inches from his nose. He squinted his eyes, moved the drawing back a little, sighed, and picked his cigar back off the counter where he’d left it burning.
“Burled elm? You’re positive?”
I wavered. Elm pieces were a rarity. The only ones I’d seen for myself were at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, and at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem. A huntboard and a blanket box.
“Pretty sure,” I said. “The color looked like elm. And the grain. The piece was coated in grime, but that’s what it looked like to me.”
“Double glass-front doors above, three shelves, fancy kind of cornice?”
“I’m not an artist,” I apologized. “But I think the sketch is close. The glass was definitely old. Bull’s-eye, probably. It had the waves.”
He rubbed the two-day growth of beard on his chin. Sighed. “And Lewis Hargreaves was looking it over pretty good?”
“There was other stuff in the room. Really nice Canton ware. But I’m betting it was the cupboard he was interested in. He had a camera with him.”
“Lewis knows his stuff. It must be the Moses Weed. Gotta be.”
I looked down at the drawing, back up at Lester, waiting for his approval. Lester Dobie taught me everything I know about antiques. His junk shop, Dobie’s—just that, not Dobie’s Antiques or Dobie’s Ye Olde Shoppe—had been in that cotton warehouse as long as I could remember. It was where I’d bought my first antique, a pink silk and Venice lace Victorian baby pillow. I’d paid two dollars for it, out of my baby-sitting money, when I was fourteen. After that, I was hooked. A week didn’t go by that I wasn’t in his shop, roaming among the old wagon wheels and local-dug bottles that were his specialty.
We’d hit it off because I wasn’t afraid to ask questions. For years, I’d made the rounds of yard sales and junk stores, picking up promising bits and pieces and then taking them to Lester, either to find out about them or to sell them to make back my investment.
“You’ve got a good eye,” Lester told me one day, after I’d tried to sell him a plastic bag full of coin-silver spoons I’d dug out of a kitchen drawer at an estate sale on Wilmington Island. “You can get better prices other places, though. Take that silver over to old lady Dreyer. She likes that snooty-hooty stuff. They’re worth fifty apiece.”
Before I knew it, my Saturday-morning hobby had grown into a business.
“You know who Moses Weed was, right?” Lester chewed his cigar out the right side of his mouth. His hands were busy polishing a small brass barometer.
“Not really,” I admitted.
“He was a slave,” Lester said. “Born at Ashton Place, right outside Charleston. Ashton Place was a huge spread. Moses Weed learned carpentry from an itinerant Philadelphia cabinetmaker named Thomas Elphas. Folks who owned Ashton hired Elphas to come down and make all the furniture for their library, dining room, and parlor. And they put little Moses to work in the shop as an assistant to Elphas. Later on, Weed was sold off the plantation. Brought a lot of money because he was so skilled at carpentry.”
“Sold to the Mullinaxes?” I asked. “Beaulieu?”
“He would have been in his early twenties in 1860,” Lester said. “He only made a few pieces at Beaulieu before the war started. Nobody really knows exactly when he left there, or where he went. Maybe a dozen pieces are attributed to him. Utilitarian stuff, mostly—some benches, kitchen tables, a huntboard, a pair of armchairs. There’s a cradle, carved cherry, attributed to Moses Weed. I’ve seen pictures of it. It’s in a museum in Philadelphia where they have a small collection of Elphas’s stuff.”
“And a cupboard? Like the one I saw at Beaulieu?”
Lester nodded and jabbed my drawing with his stubby forefinger. “Miss Anna Ruby loaned it out to the High Museum in Atlanta for their ‘Neat Pieces’ exhibit of Southern-made nineteenth-century furniture back in the 1970s. Me and Ginger went up and saw it. Beautiful thing. That wood fairly glowed. They called it the Moses Weed cupboard.”
“It’s gotta be the same one,” I told him. “How much? How much is a piece like that worth today?”
He sucked on his cigar and thought about it. “You’d have to have the provenance to sell it to a serious collector. According to Miss Anna Ruby, it was made from elm trees off the property out at Beaulieu. Ain’t no elm trees anywhere around here anymore. That piece was made right there in the plantation carpentry shop. Hand-forged hinges. Moses Weed couldn’t read or write, but they did teach him how to make his mark. Should be on the piece somewhere. But now, if you can’t prove it came directly out of Beaulieu, you can’t prove it’s the Moses Weed.”
“How much?” I repeated.
“Ballpark? Maybe two hundred thousand dollars. More if you sold to one of them museums rolling in dough. But remember—that’s only if you can prove it’s a Moses Weed.”
I closed the sketchbook and put it back in my purse. “It’s a long shot. Maybe there won’t be a sale. Maybe they’ll sell it off before the sale. To Hargreaves maybe. I probably couldn’t afford it anyway.”
Lester looked down at the barometer. The tarnish was gone and it shone with a soft gold luster. “That’s a lot of maybes.”