Varina(22)

The older daughter pushed a little sweet pickle around her plate in boredom, and the younger girls whispered and bumped elbows and smothered laughs based on some derisive, isolate humor shared by just the two of them.

Eliza said, An example of Joseph’s innovations is, slave court happens second Thursday of every month, and he rarely involves himself in decisions of crime and punishment unless the sentence is too harsh. And there’s also a health clinic. A doctor comes monthly and inspects the force. And you’ll see their church tomorrow. The slave preachers swap Sundays. Baptist and Methodist. And we’re organizing the older women to take care of the babies so that the young mothers can get back to work.

—I like to think of The Hurricane as a community, Joseph said. A sort of campus.

V said, So, if I’m following the thread, your experiment is to test whether Mr. Owen’s thoughts on labor and capital ownership can be applied under a slave economy?

—The real issue isn’t whether. It’s how. The details shouldn’t concern you.

V—accustomed to arguing every detail concerning art and music and philosophy and history with Winchester—said, But the ideas interest me. Surely the difference between slave workers and paid workers is too enormous for the experiment to succeed?

Joseph, testy, said, Obviously it will require adaptations. Owen’s insistence on educating workers beyond the needs of their task would be foolish. And the improvement of wages he advocates isn’t applicable. But as my brother and I have discussed many times, the economic institution we operate under—the bondman model—solves one of the great problems of industrial capitalism, the conflict between capital and labor. And the value of labor itself. Under an Owenism adapted for the South, labor and capital become one and the same. Labor is capital and has a clear market value.

V paused a moment in disbelief and then said, I suppose the real issue is simply whether anything remains of Owen’s philosophy after all the adaptations for slavery are made?

Joseph shook his head, sighed a deep sigh, and stood and excused himself, saying, We retire early here. Some of us rise early as well.

He walked to the door and turned back and said, Miss Howell, I worry that the pains your father has taken to educate you will result in little but finding himself with a wit on his hands.


V COULDN’T SLEEP. Insects and frogs fell silent. The house made sounds, and the night lay too still to mask them with wind in the trees. A faint two-beat rhythm vibrated all the way from the basement—slaves working the pumps that forced water into the rooftop tank to flush The Hurricane’s amazing toilets.

She turned the day over and over, penciling thoughts in a notebook. She tried to reconstruct every comment she had made at dinner and couldn’t come up with even the feeblest attempt at wit.

Mostly, though, V wrote down thoughts of Winchester’s tenderness leaving her there with the Davises, all their noses sharp and hooked as cheap hawkbill knives, parting the air as they moved through the world with hollow cheeks and ashy, distant eyes. She valued Winchester’s tenderness and his kiss partly because at fourteen she had suffered under a violent crush for at least a month. And every time she flung herself at him he backed away so gracefully, so sweetly, that she never felt unduly shamed by her behavior. She wondered if she had been insensitive to him on the upriver trip—overly taken with the glory of the riverboat, the color of gaslight on gold and burgundy wallpaper and carpet. The tiny private sleeping rooms and the power of the great paddle wheel churning muddy water all night provoking intense, condensed dreams of great significance. And above all, the sheer sensation of travel, being suddenly in motion after so long static on her bluff-top looking down on the river.

She immediately began writing a letter of apology to Winchester.


A HALF HOUR LATER—three quick knuckle raps on V’s door long past the time for that sort of thing. She pulled a dressing gown over her nightgown and opened the door a crack. The oldest daughter, with the questionable name of Florida, bumped right in uninvited, barefoot and wearing just the ultimate layer of thin, ivory night-gear, like she had draped herself in a sheet of linen bandaging. Her dark hair fell loose below her shoulders and her face shaped itself like all the Davises’, narrow and predatory. Florida carried two slim books and an almost-full bottle of red wine. Her gray eyes looked straight at V.

She said, I may be wrong, but I think we could be good friends.

—Well, V said. How do you propose finding out?

—Let’s read our favorite poems to each other, Florida said.

—Of course. I’ll choose a few from the books I have with me, and we can read together on the porch after breakfast.

Florida jabbed her books out at V—two stabs—and said, I meant tonight. Now.

Then she paused and looked down at her feet and flexed her long toes.

She said, I apologize. Was that pushy? It’s so lonely sometimes, and then you came sweeping in and I got excited. And Old Joe gets touchy about Natchez and wagging tongues, and he only likes to hear opinions that agree with his. I worried everything had gone wrong from the start. And then I saw the light under your door. But we can talk in the morning.

—Now would be perfect, V said. This minute. I feel so strange, and I don’t know why I’m here.

—We don’t know why you’re here either, Florida said, very brightly. But we have theories. In a few days, I might tell you some of our secrets.