The White Road

The task system created a hierarchy among the slaves. The most important bondsman was the slave driver, who acted as the mediator between the planter and the labor force. Beneath him were the trained artisans, the blacksmiths and carpenters and bricklayers. It was these skilled workers who were the natural leaders in the slave community, and consequently they had to be watched more closely for fear that they might foment unrest or choose to run away.

But the most crucial task of all fell to the trunk minder, for the fate of the rice crop lay in his hands. The rice fields were flooded when necessary with freshwater collected in reservoirs above the fields on higher ground. Salt water flowed inland with the tide, forcing the freshwater to the surface of the coastal rivers. It was only then that the low, wide floodgates could be opened to permit the freshwater to flow into the fields, a system of subsidiary gates allowing the water to run into the adjoining fields, a drainage technique whose correct application was a direct result of the involvement of African slaves. Any breach or break in the gates would permit salt water to enter the fields, killing the rice crop, so the trunk minder, in addition to opening and closing the main gates, was required to keep the trunks, the drainage ditches, and the canals in working order.

Henry, husband of A

They strapped A

Three days later, Henry, husband of A

They followed him for five days with a party of heavily armed men, for Henry had stolen a Marston pepperbox percussion pistol, and any man who was standing in the way when those six barrels discharged was likely to be meeting his maker that very day. So the riders held back and sent ahead a line of expendable Ibo slaves to track Henry, with the promise of a gold coin for the man who found their quarry.

They cornered Henry at last at the edge of the Congaree Swamp, not far from where a bar named the Swamp Rat now stands, the bar at which Maria

They took three metal rice samplers, hollow T-shaped devices with a sharp point on the end for digging into the ground, and they crucified Henry against a cypress tree and left him there with his balls in his mouth. But before he died, Old Marster drew up before him in a cart, and in the back of the cart sat Henry’s three children. The last sight Henry saw before his eyes finally closed was his youngest boy Andrew being led into the bushes by Old Marster, and then the boy’s cries commenced and Henry died.

That was how it began between the families of Larousse and Jones, masters and slaves. The crop was wealth. The crop was history. It had to be safeguarded. Henry’s offense lived on for a time in the memory of the Larousse family and was then largely forgotten, but the sins of the Larousses were passed down from Jones to Jones. And the past was transported into each new present, and it spread through generations of lives like a virus.

The light had begun to fade. The men from Georgia were gone. From the big oak tree outside the window a bat descended, hunting mosquitoes. Some had found their way into the house and now buzzed at my ear, waiting to bite. I swatted at them with my hand. Elliot handed me some repellent and I smeared it across my exposed skin.

“But there were still members of the Jones family working for the Larousses, even after what took place?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” said Elliot. “Slaves died sometimes. It happened. The folks around them had lost parents, children too, but they didn’t take it quite so personal. There were some members of the Jones family who felt that what was done was done, and should be left in the past. And then there were others who maybe didn’t feel that way.”

The Civil War devastated the lives of the Charleston aristocracy, as it did the structures of the city itself. The Larousses were protected somewhat by their foresight (or perhaps by their treason, for they retained most of their wealth in gold and had only a small fraction tied up in Confederate bonds and currency). Still they, like many other defeated Southerners, were forced to watch as the surviving soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, or “Shaw’s Niggers” as they were known, paraded through the streets of Charleston. Among them was Martin Jones, Atys Jones’s great-great-grandfather.

Once again, the lives of these two families were about to collide violently.

The night riders move through the darkness, white against the black road. It will be many years before an olive-ski

For this is the South Carolina of the 1870s, not of the turn of a new mille