At some point, like flinging a baited hook into a fished-out pond, more to test casting skills than in hope of catching something, V said, Mr. Davis, your peninsula of land, your Bend, is an interesting plot of geography.
—I suppose.
V cast again, Was it cleared when you arrived or did you hack it out of green wilderness? And, how did you and your girls come to move here from Natchez?
She expected a boring story of business opportunity, a shrewd real estate purchase, fertile soil, rising cotton prices, maybe something about favorable slave prices way out here in the wilderness.
But Old Joe clashed his fork down on his plate. The girls around the table looked down at their food.
He said very hot, What have you heard? Are they still gossiping about me in Natchez?
—No, sir, V said quickly. Not that I’ve heard.
After a long silence, Joseph finally answered V’s question about the land. He said, It took a long time, scraping the jungle to bare dirt and burning all the bushes and vines and trees and digging up and burning the stumps to make the land ready for planting cotton.
Eliza said, I wasn’t here then, but it must have been a challenge for the labor force.
—How many acres? V asked.
—Round it to eight thousand, Joseph said. Above all, though, The Hurricane is an experiment. Have you heard of Robert Owen, the Welshman? His famous utopian social philosophies?
—I know the name and little more, V said. His theme is social justice, isn’t it?
—One of them. Democratic socialism is the heart of the matter. A few years ago I met him on a long stagecoach ride west out of Pittsburgh. He was on a speaking tour, explaining the utopian community he intended to build in Indiana. He had owned a factory town in Scotland and developed ideas about fairness between capital and labor. Interestingly, the other passenger was Mister Dickens’s illustrator, Cruikshank, and all I remember him saying was how every country’s artists depict Jesus with their own features. Owen and I, though, talked without stop for ten hours, and I’ve since read every word of his writings available on this side of the Atlantic. Very interesting, his notions concerning the relationship between labor and capital. His sense of a utopian manufacturing community of equity and fairness and justice. That day was transformative for me. I’m trying to apply his ideas here.
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
