Thirty-Five. Ninety-One People
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ninety-One People
The cart went nine miles down the bayou road in the dark and put them down in a yard, and a man with a lantern counted them twice and took them along a row of cabins and put them in.
There were three cabins standing open. Nelson went into the second one with a man from Amelia County called Fielding, and there were already two men in that room, and one of them got up off the floor with his blanket and went out and did not come back.
That was the whole of Nelson’s first hour on Bergeron’s place. A lantern, a count, and a man leaving a room.
—
In the morning he saw it and it was nothing like anything.
Fair Prospect had been eleven hundred acres with four hundred cleared and twenty-eight people on it and you could stand in the house yard and see three-quarters of everything that mattered.
This was flat. That was the first thing and it never stopped being the first thing.
It was flat all the way to a line of trees so far off that you could not tell what kind they were, and there was no rise anywhere in it, and the whole of it lay behind a levee along the bayou that was higher than the house.
The cane ground went back from the bayou in strips a quarter of a mile wide and two miles deep, cut every few hundred yards by ditches, and the ditches ran into bigger ditches, and the bigger ditches ran to a canal, and every foot of all of it had been dug by hand by somebody.
There were ninety-one people on that place.
The quarters were twenty-two cabins in two rows facing each other across a street of packed dirt, each cabin raised up off the ground on brick piers with a chimney in the middle and a door and a window at either end, two rooms to a cabin and four or five to a room.
The windows had glass in them. Nelson had never lived anywhere with glass in the window.
And the sugar house stood at the top of the street with two chimneys on it, brick, longer than the Ashmore house and three times the bulk of it, and it was shut and cold in January and Nelson looked at it for a long time and could not work out what it was for.
—
He counted the yard in the first three days because he could not do anything else.
Ninety-one. Of the ninety-one, sixty-two were men.
That number would not go anywhere in his head.
At Fair Prospect the men and the women had been in something close to equal numbers, with a yard full of children, and it had been like that at the Beasleys’ and at Fairlawn and at the Dabneys’ and everywhere else he had ever been in his life.
Here there were two men for every woman, and it was not a thing that had happened; it was how the place was made, and they went on buying men.
Of the sixty-two, he could find eleven who had been born on that place.
He got that out of Fielding, who had it out of somebody else, over about two weeks.
Eleven. Everybody else had come up a river or off a road or out of a pen, from Virginia and Maryland and the Carolinas and Kentucky and Missouri, and from four parishes in that state, and from places nobody had heard of.
The people in that street had been assembled the way you assemble a gang. That was the whole of it and it took him a fortnight to see and then he could not stop seeing it.
—
The man who gave the orders was called Numa and he was fifty and he was one of them.
Nelson had a whole day of not understanding that.
He had been looking for the overseer since the first morning and had found him on the third — a white man called Duplessis who lived in a house near the landing and who came out about eleven and rode along the headland and was gone by one, and who Nelson saw four times in the first month and never once spoke to.
Numa was in the ground from before light until dark, every day, and Numa said what happened.
He said it in a language Nelson had never heard.
It was not the French he had heard on the street in New Orleans, or if it was he could not tell, and it ran fast and low and had a shape to it that his ear could not get hold of at all. Numa gave an order and forty people moved and Nelson stood there.
The first two days Numa put him where he wanted him with a hand on his arm.
On the third day he did not.
Nelson was in the second gang laying cane — you take the stalks off the rick and you lay them in the drill end to end with the joints four or five inches apart, and then the third gang comes behind and covers them — and Numa said something from about thirty feet, and the whole line moved back a row and Nelson did not.
Numa came down the row and hit him once, backhanded, across the side of the face, and said the same thing again, and pointed.
Nelson moved back a row.
—
A Black man had hit him in a cane field for not moving, and there was nothing in thirteen years at Fair Prospect that gave him anywhere to put it.
He stood in a cane drill in Lafourche Parish with his face going hot and put his hands back on the stalks, and did the row, and did the next one.
—
He learned four words that first week and he learned every one of them the way you learn a stove.
Vini. Come.
Kouri. Go.
Pran. Take — take hold of it, pick it up.
And a fourth that he never got a clean sound for and could only make in his own mouth as something like doubout, which meant stand up, get up, on your feet, and which was said to him twice on the second day.
That was his whole vocabulary on the eighth of February and he had been able to talk since he was two years old.
—
The other thing was that nobody knew him.
He did not work out what he had lost for a long time, and when he did it was not William and it was not even, at first, his mother.
At Fair Prospect he had been the boy who could feed the machine, who Sowers asked for by name, who had gone to mill by himself at ten and had never given anybody any trouble, who was known at the crossroads and at Fairlawn and at the Dabneys’ and at Beasley’s.
Reuben had given him the near work. Tapp had been told, by somebody, that he was about the house.
Every white man in that county who might have raised a hand to him knew who he belonged to and what he was worth and that there would be a conversation about it afterward.
None of that was a kindness and he had understood since he was thirteen that none of it was a kindness.
It was still all he had ever had, and it had all been made out of thirteen years of a woman working in a doorway, and here it did not exist, and there was no possible way of building it again inside a year.
Here he was a new man in a blue suit with a mark on his back and a story about a smokehouse.
—
His whole business that spring was the week in front of him.
Not William. He thought about William, and there is no describing what those thoughts were like and he did not try; but they came at night and at the end of a row and they were not anything he could use.
Not even his mother, at first. In February and March there were nights when he got to the end of the day and worked out that he had thought about her twice.
What he did instead was learn the place, in order, the way you learn a barn.
Where the water was and which of it was fit.
What the ration was — a peck of meal and three pounds of pork a week, and salt, and it came out on a Saturday.
That the cabins had garden ground behind them and that everybody who had been there more than a year had something in it, and that a man who came in January had nothing in the ground and would have nothing until August. That there was a store on the place and that a man could get credit at it and that this was a worse idea than it looked.
Where the fish were. That was Fielding, who was from a river county and who found the ditch that had catfish in it inside three weeks and told two people, of whom Nelson was one.
—
The man who had got up off the floor and gone out on the first night was called Jonah.
He was about thirty and he was in the room at the other end of the same cabin, four to a room instead of three, and he had been in Nelson’s room for two years before Nelson came.
He was not unfriendly. Nelson watched for that and it was not there. He said what wanted saying — he told Nelson twice in the first month where to put things and once, usefully, that the ditch water at the near end was no good in April — and he did it without any weight on it at all.
And he did not sit with him, and he did not come by, and when the men in that street talked in the evenings Jonah talked to the others.
Nelson noticed it in about the second week and put it in with everything else he could not read yet, which by the middle of February was most of a parish.
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