Freedom Road

Howard Fast, Eric Foner, W. E. B. DuBois

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317470175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Howard Fast makes superb use of his material.... Aside from its social and historical implications, Freedom Road is a high-geared story, told with that peculiar dramatic intensity of which Fast is a master". -- Chicago Daily News

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PART ONE

The Voting

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A Prologue

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THE WAR WAS BONE—THE LONG AND BLOODY STRUGGLE THAT was, at the time, the greatest people’s war the world had ever known—and the men in blue marched home. The men in gray, stunned and hurt, looked about at their land, and saw what war does.

At Appomattox Court House, General Lee laid down his arms, and then it was all finished. And in the warm southland, there were four million black men who were free. A hard-won freedom, a precious thing. A free man counts tomorrow and yesterday, and both of them are his; hunger and there’s no master to feed you, but walk with long steps and no master says go slowly. Two hundred thousand of these black men were soldiers of the republic when the struggle finished, and many of them went home with guns in their hands.

Gideon Jackson was one of them. Tall and strong and tired, a gun in his hand and a faded blue uniform on his back, he came home to the Carolina soil and the Carwell Plantation. The big white house stood much as he remembered it, not damaged by the war, but the gardens and fields were weeds and jungle, and the Carwells had gone away—none knew where. The freedmen, as they returned, took up their lives in the old slave quarters, together with those who had never gone away. And as the months passed, more and more of the freedmen returned to the Carwell Plantation, from the cold northland where they had gone to find freedom, from the ranks of the Union Army, and from their hiding places in the piney woods and the lonesome swamps. They took up their lives with the deep wonder that they were free.

CHAPTER ONE

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How Gideon Jackson Came Home from the Voting

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THE CROWS WOKE RACHEL EARLY THIS COOL NOVEMBER morning, and lying in bed, the old cloth pulled up around her neck, Jenny making a warm spot against her breast, she listened to their singing. They sang from far off, caw, caw, caw, a sad sound, but not unpleasant to someone who had heard it long as Rachel, every morning sun up; a good day or bad, it was all. the same to the crows.

Against her breast, the warm spot of the girl stirred, and Rachel whispered, “Lie easy, my child, gentle and easy and listen to them old crows, just listen.”

But the day begins—you can’t stop it. The straw bag was warm and crunchy, and there Rachel would like to stay, but when the sun suddenly broke the mist, it shot the whole cabin through with light, from where the door sagged and in between all the warped boards. Jeff stretched and kicked his heels against the floor. Jenny, pressed against Rachel, came wide awake, pulled away, and cold slippered over the warm spot where she had lain. Marcus made noises, whooee, whooee, and Jeff poked him, and then they rolled over on the floor, scuffling.

All the sounds that made the morning Rachel knew with her eyes closed. Why did human beings wake so sudden and so raucous, she had asked herself a hundred times? She clung to darkness a moment more, and then came to her feet brusque and pacifying:

“Jeff, you shut!”

He had his legs twisted around Marcus’s belly. He was fifteen but built like Gideon; the boy was a giant before he even knew what made a man, six feet tall and chocolate brown, more her color than the prune-skin shining black of Gideon, but handsome and long-faced the way Gideon was, born to make a sinful life for women. Marcus at twelve was skinny and small, and Rachel snapped at Jeff:

“Let go there with your legs, you big fool!”

Jenny was seven. She ran out of the door, first thing, like that every morning, a creature seeking light. The dog met her, barking his fool head off.

Jeff stood up and Marcus pounded him, a woodpecker pecking at a big oak tree. Jeff was easygoing, like Gideon that way, but without the iron inside of him that made Gideon something; Jeff was slow to anger and then the anger came like fire, but Gideon’s anger was always inside of him.

“Get out, you both,” she told them. “Get on out of here, get out.”

She was laughing already. Small herself, it was a constant wonder to her that these masses of dark flesh were hers, out from between her legs, out of a little bundle tied onto her with a cord. Well, she had a big man; and these were Gideon’s children, she thought with pride. She stirred about the cabin. It was full of sunlight now, the door swung back. Jeff came in with kindling, his head dripping wet from the rain-water barrel. She went out to the barrel herself, doused head and hands, and called to Jenny:

“Come and get your wetting, come on now!”

Jenny hated water. Five times she had to be called before Rachel caught her and dipped her woolly head into the water, and then screaming as if a little cold water could kill her. When Rachel came back into the cabin, Jeff had the fire burning. She took her wooden bowl and mixed the meal, while Jeff blew the fire up to hot coals. The dog lay in front of the fire—leave that to him on a cold, sharp November morning.

At the time of its greatest glory, almost a decade ago now, the Carwell Plantation covered twenty-two thousand acres of good South Carolina soil. A hundred miles inland from the coast, it lay in that gently rolling country that makes a broad belt of demarcation between the flat tidewater and the high uplands. When cotton was king there, a bale and a half was gathered from the acre, and when the bolls opened, there was a sea of white as far as the eye could reach.

The big plantation house dominated the scene. Four stories, twenty-two rooms, the portico columned like a Greek temple, it stood on a tall hill, almost in the geographical center of the plantation. A line of willows made a fine driveway. Live oaks made a protective wall. If you stood at the slave quarters, half a mile away, and looked up at the big house, its likeness to a temple was increased; and when the white clouds scudded across the sky behind it, it made one of the prettiest sights in that part of the country.

That was in the old times. In this year of 1867, there had been no cotton planting at Carwell. It was said that Dudley Carwell was living in Charleston, but nobody really knew. It was also said that the two Carwell boys had been killed in the war. Debt and unpaid taxes had thrown the plantation into that curious state of suspension that had overtaken so many of the great southern manors. It was said that the government owned it now, and it was also said that every former Carwell slave would be given forty acres of land and a mule. That sort of talk ran like fire, but nobody could put his finger on exactly what was to be done. Several times, white folks had driven out from Columbia, poked around, and gone away.

Meanwhile, the freed slaves lived there. A good many of them had stayed on all through the war, putting in crop after crop and caring for the place. Others, like Gideon, had gone off and joined the Union Army. Still others had run away and hidden themselves. But even when emancipation came, most of them stayed, not so much because they feared the dire punishment set out for runaways as that they had no place in particular to go. This was their home, their land, their country—it had always been so.

For a generation, the Carwells had for the most part lived in Charleston, leaving the plantation to overseers. After the third year of the war, Dudley Carwell visited the place only once, and when he left he closed up the house and took the house servants with him. The last overseer went away in sixty-five, and from there on the slaves were left alone. They no longer planted cotton; that was a cash crop, and they had neither the need nor understanding for cash crops. They put in corn and rice in the lowland part of the plantation. They grew greens in the gardens; they had pigs and chickens, and that way they lived.

They were more fortunate than most freedmen. Three times columns of regulars came by and picked the place clean, but they managed to get through those times of hunger. The bitter, defeated troops had only killed four of their number; that was not as bad as what happened in most places where freedmen lived.

And now, from far away, the thing called Congress had given the order for freedmen to go and vote. It was a time of wonder in the land, you may be sure.

Marcus was the first to see Gideon coming back from the voting, and afterwards he remembered that. He and Axel Christ and a few other boys were playing up toward the plantation house; when they got well up on the hillside, they could see two miles of the road stretching out into the sunny, dusty distance. The road was a door into nowhere. Some said, follow it long enough and you’d come to Columbia, but that was hearsay and the world was full of hearsay. To Marcus and his friends, the road just went off—and why should it have to go anywhere?

Four days before, Gideon and Brother Peter had called together all the men over twenty-one years. A lot of it was a matter of estimation, for how can most men know certainly whether he is twenty, or twenty-one or twenty-two or what? Age isn’t a dead reckoning, but something to be set in broader figures. Brother Peter had to search his memory and separate all the multiple small black births, and finally through all the noise and talk, he separated out the cows from the calfs, as he put it. Twenty-seven men in all to go off for the voting.

“Now how about this here voting?” They turned to Gideon for answers.

Marcus recognized it was natural that they should turn to Gideon for questions. Death and God—well, they’d ask Brother Peter, but most everything else, planting and sickness and the rest they’d pile onto Gideon.

And now they were coming back from the voting. Two miles away and down the dusty road, Marcus saw a group of men, walking together and walking slowly for the companionship. Marcus ran screaming down the hillside, “They’re a coming! Whooee!”

The other boys piled after him. They set up a screeching that could be heard a mile off, and everyone came tumbling out of the cabins to see what was up. Rachel thought murder had been done, and she had to slap Marcus twice to get some sense into his talk.

“Who’s a coming?”

“Pa.”

“Gideon?” sister Mary asked, and someone else added, “Lord be praised,” expressing the sentiments of most. This was a mystery thing, this voting, it was ominous. All the men went off, and there was a lonesome waiting on the plantation with the menfolk gone, the more so since nobody really knew what the voting was. The women stayed closer than ever before, and from hour to hour the speculation on what a voting was grew wilder.

Now everyone shaded their eyes and looked down the road. Sure enough, the men were coming back—moving slowly, what with all the miles they had walked, but coming back. Everyone who could count counted, and it seemed that all the men were there. Rachel could recognize Gideon already, his big body bulking so large.

Gideon was a quantity of man, built like a bull, heavy in the shoulders, narrow in the waist, lean in the legs; that kind of man, the saying went, would be bull-like, with brains in his hands, but Gideon was not a man for sayings or proverbs. He was himself, and there was a reason why people turned to him; it was true that he moved slowly, both his body and his brain, but if he had a need to, he could move fast. When he had an idea, he turned it over and over, but when he had it at last, it was his.

He came first, and Rachel made him out; that slow, bent walk meant the miles were behind him. He carried his rifle at trail, the way he had learned in the army. He carried a sack on his shoulders, and in that would be something for the children. Alongside of him walked Brother Peter, tall and skinny and unarmed, the way a man of God should be. Then the two Jefferson brothers, both with rifles. Hannibal Washington, the little one. James, Andrew, Ferdinand, Alexander, Harold, Baxter, Trooper—those were men still with out family names. By and by, a thought would come to them and they’d take names; but a family name was a thing to ponder on, and most men weren’t easily satisfied.

Now Jeff was off, loping down the road to meet the men, a crowd of boys and girls and...