Liberating Atlantis

Watching the way things worked, he noted the plantation's efficiency. The women with the bulging bellies couldn't weed, but they could fetch and carry. The boy who brought the water jug around again was still too small to swing one of these heavy hoes. That didn't make him too small to work, and work he did.

Had the overseer set up this system? Frederick had known about it before, of course, but he hadn't known about it. As a house slave, he hadn't been caught up in it like a grain of wheat between millstones. Had Henry Barford worked it out, or his father before him? Or was it part of the lore all slaveholders knew, the lore they'd put together over hundreds of years? Frederick couldn't have said for sure, but it looked that way to him.

On a harsher plantation, the midday meal might have been smaller, or there might have been none. The break might have been shorter. Henry Barford wasn't cruel for the sake of being cruel, and neither was his overseer. They were cruel simply because you couldn't be anything else, not if you intended to own slaves and to get work out of them.

A handful of free Negroes and copperskins had slaves of their own. From everything Frederick had ever heard, they made sterner masters than most whites. They had to-their animate property was less inclined to take orders from people of their color. They had to use colored overseers, too. That lowered the respect their slaves had for the overseers. But what other choice did such owners have? No white overseer would lower himself to working for someone he thought he should be bossing around. And so…

"Come on, people!" Matthew shouted. "You done wasted enough time! Get to work, and put your backs into it for a change!"

Whatever Frederick's thought had been, it flickered and blew out like a candle flame in the wind. His joints creaked as he started hoeing again. He wasn't used to this kind of work-no indeed. He didn't know whether he dreaded getting used to it or not getting used to it more.

Was this all he had to look forward to for the rest of his days? A hoe and a row? A shovel? A big sack at harvest time? If it was, wouldn't he be better off dead?

III

When the horn's bray woke Frederick for his second day as a field hand, he didn't feel a day over ninety-seven. Every part of him ached or stung. Quite a few parts ached and stung. As he had the afternoon before, he got about a third of the way toward wishing he were dead.

He'd fallen asleep right after supper. He'd come that close to falling asleep in the middle of supper, with his mouth hanging open to show off the cornmeal mush or the chunk of fat sowbelly he'd been chewing when his mainspring ran down. Somehow, he'd kept his eyes open till he and Helen got back to the cabin. But he didn't remember a thing after the two of them lay down.

Beside him, Helen groaned as she sat up. She rubbed her eyes. She had to be as weary as he was. The first words out of her mouth, though, were, "How's your back?"

"Sore," he answered. "Better than it was. Not as good as it's go

"Well, I thought I worked hard back in the big house." She shook her head at her own foolishness. "Only goes to show what I knew, don't it?"

She didn't call him twelve different kinds of stupid, clumsy jackass for costing both of them the soft places they'd enjoyed. Why she didn't, Frederick had no idea. If it wasn't because of something very much like love, he couldn't imagine what it would be.

The horn blared out again. This time, Matthew's warning shout followed: "Last one out's go

Frederick had taken off only his hat and his shoes. Putting the straw hat back on was a matter of a moment. Shoes were a different story. His fingers were stiff and crooked, his hands sore. He had a devil of a time tying the laces.

Then he had to help Helen. Her palms looked even worse than his. "Should've put your ointment on 'em," he scolded.

"I was savin' it for you."

"Well, don't, confound it," he told her. He also kissed her on the cheek, not least because he knew she wouldn't listen to him. Yes, that was love, all right, even if the words the colored preacher'd said over them didn't mean a thing in the rarefied air the Barfords breathed.

They weren't the last ones out. The overseer unbent enough to nod to them as they took their places with the field hands. With the other field hands-Frederick corrected himself. "Ready for another go?" Matthew asked.

"I'm ready," Frederick said shortly. He resolved to die before admitting to the white man that he was anything less.

"Well, all right." Matthew was taciturn, too. But he could have been much nastier. Maybe he was wondering if Frederick and Helen would go back to the big house before too long. If they did, they would be personages even an overseer had to reckon with. Was he hedging his bets now? Frederick could hope so. That might make life a little easier. And even a little seemed like a lot.

When a Negro couple didn't come out, Matthew went into their cabin after them. The shouting and screeching and carrying on made everybody in the labor gang smile. "I slep' through the blame horn!" the male slave in the cabin wailed.

"You'll sleep in the swamp with a rock tied to your ankle if you don't get moving, you stupid toad!" the overseer said. In less time than it took to tell, both the slave and his woman were out there. If some of her buttons were still undone, if he had to bend down to tie his shoes, Matthew wasn't fussy about such things. They were there. Nothing else mattered.

Frederick wolfed down his breakfast. He wished he could have got twice as much. He wouldn't starve on a field hand's rations. But he would wish-he would always wish-he could get more.

Mosquitoes buzzed around him as he ate. They were worse in the close little cabin at night. So the raised, itchy places on his arms and ankles and the back of his neck insisted, though he didn't remember getting bitten. They were worse, then, yes, but they never went away. He wondered if he could get some mesh or screening for the windows. Or would Matthew think something like that was too good for field hands? Slapping at a bug that landed on his wrist, Frederick thought, I can find out.

The overseer glanced at the ascending sun. With a theatrical shake of the head, he shouted at the slaves: "Eat up! You ain't porkers! Master Henry ain't fattening you up. You got work to do."

A Negro pointed to the path that led from the big house to the road to New Marseille. "What's goin' on there?" he said.

"Don't waste my time with your silly games, Lou," Matthew snapped. "You-" He broke off. Lou wasn't playing games, not this morning.

"Dog my cats if them ain't soldiers," another Negro said.

"Cavalry," a copperskin named Lorenzo-a power among the field hands, as Frederick had already seen-added with precision.

It wasn't just that the men were on horseback. Infantry could mount horses when they needed to get from here to there in a hurry. But the soldiers' gray uniforms had yellow piping and chevrons, not the blue foot soldiers would have used. The troopers es corted two supply wagons: smaller versions of the prairie frigates settlers in Terranova used to cross the broad plains there. The copperskins who lived on those plains didn't care for that, but when a folk that had to buy or steal firearms and ammunition bumped up against one that could make such things, the end of the struggle was obvious even if it hadn't arrived yet.

Matthew watched the wagons and their escort come up the path. Absently slapping at a mosquito, he said, "Never seen the like in all my born days. I wonder what the devil they want."