Chapter five, continued

I wanted war and rumors of war to just go away and let me get on with my life. I knew that none of those things were going to happen.

In that state of daydreaming, my mind slid from subject to subject, and landed on Ben Sayer. I liked him, but I was very uncomfortable around him. I couldn’t fit him into any familiar category. I knew how to be a master to slaves, and I knew how to treat Southern free blacks, but Ben Sayer had a dignity and reserve about him that I had never seen in a negro before. It kept me off balance, and he seemed equally uncomfortable around me.

We had trouble with names. If he had been a slave, I would have called him Ben, and if he had been white I would have called him Mr. Sayer. He was neither, so I didn’t know what to call him, even in my own mind. When we worked together, I would say “you” or point or gesture; I could never call him by either of his names. And he never used my name. Since he was thirty years older than me, he wouldn’t call me Mr. Williams, but he couldn’t call me Matt, or Boy, or Son without seeming too familiar.

Despite that, I liked him. He had easy, friendly ways and he was a master at his trade. He demanded excellence of me, but he was patient even when he was telling me I was doing something wrong.

What it all boiled down to was that I would have liked to have him for a friend, even though he was negro, and that scared me. If I could admit that, it shook the foundations of my whole life.

I shook hands with the Reverend at the door, hoping he would not question me sharply, for I had hardly heard a word he said. It was a good thing that the team knew the way home because my mind was miles away. Some neighbors had dropped Aunt Rachel off after their service, and she was already putting the finishing touches on dinner. It was a quiet meal; Sarah kept stealing looks at me, trying to figure out why I was so distant.

While Aunt Rachel and Sarah cleaned up afterwards, I went into the parlor to be alone. Like most country houses, the parlor was a rarely used room. I had not set foot in it during the week of our stay. The furniture was old, but there was no dust anywhere. I sat on a couch and idly sorted through the pile of newspapers in a rack. They were mostly back issues of a Philadelphia paper, but there were also three issues of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.

Meeker had called Aunt Rachel an abolitionist; apparently he had been right. It was no surprise, but it brought back an old puzzle. If Mother had been the daughter of a Quaker, abolitionist family, why had she married Father, who was a plantation owner and slave holder?

Aunt Rachel came in alone. She said that Sarah had gone up to her room. In the dim light of the parlor, with the light behind her hiding her face in shadow, she looked so much like Mother that I could not speak. She opened the curtains and the spell was partially broken.

She sat beside me and said, “Would you like to tell me what is troubling you?”

*****

I may amuse you to know that Matt’s difficulty with names shows up in the anthropological study of kinship terms. When there is a confusion in appropriate address, as when an uncle is younger than a speaker, people tend to avoid terms of address altogether. The technical term for this is “no-naming”     continued tomorrow