fields, he sidled up to her coming back from Celeste and Elias’s cabin and said, “Whatcha been doin, sugar?”
“Ain’t none a your damn business.”
“It be my business cause a what I feel for you.”
“Well, be feelin it somewhere else, cause I don’t want you feelin it here.”
He was trying to be patient so he let her be for two days. At dinnertime Stamford found Gloria in a far part of the field she was working in, and she was eating with Clement, the last slave Henry had purchased before he died. “Whatcha you doin gettin with Gloria for?” he asked Clement.
Gloria laughed and that gave Clement license to ignore the older man. The two went on eating, some biscuit, some molasses.
“I done ask you what you doin with Gloria? She ain’t with you.”
“Look that way to me,” Clement said.
“And look that way to me,” Gloria said.
Stamford leaned over and pushed Clement’s left shoulder. “You leave off now, Stamford, if you know whas good for you,” Clement said.
“All right there now, Stamford,” Gloria said, putting her food back in her pail.
“Leave me off, if you know what’s good for you,” Clement said. He shared the cabin with Stamford and they had always gotten along.
“Oh, I know whas good for me all right. Seem like the only person that don’t know it is you.” He pushed the shoulder again and Clement shoved the hand away. When he pushed again, Clement stood up.
“I’m gonna call Moses on you, Stamford,” Gloria said, also rising.
Stamford slapped Clement and Clement punched him in the face, first with one fist and then with the other. Gloria screamed and the other women near them began screaming, too. Stamford began falling with the second punch and all the screaming seemed to push him down more. Clement was upon him and began pummeling. “Leave me be is all I want,” Clement said. “Just leave me be. Leave me in peace. Leave leave leave.” Gloria ran to get Moses and Elias and the other men, and the women tried to pull Clement away from Stamford, who was now all blood and cuts and lying very still.
“Stamford,” Celeste shouted, “don’t you be dead! It wouldn’t be right,” and Tessie repeated what her mother had just said, word for word.
The women roused Stamford before the men arrived. Then four men carried Stamford back to his cabin and Moses, who was not one of the four, told everyone to get back to work. He did not want to carry the news to the house, to Caldonia: an overseer was supposed to handle all such little matters, as Henry had once told him. But when he got to the cabin and saw the condition Stamford was in, he knew he could not keep it from her. Celeste and Delphie followed him into the cabin and began tending to Stamford. “Lord, whas got into that old fool?” Delphie said. She was three years older than Stamford.
“Do what yall can to get him straight?” Moses told the women. “I be back.”
Stamford was blinking and when he wasn’t blinking, his eyes were focused on a spiderweb hanging in a corner of the ceiling. He wanted to tell the people touching him that the web was the hand of the hant, signaling that he was on his way. He opened his mouth and through the blood and loose teeth said to the web, “JesusJesus …”
Moses reached the house and saw a white man go up the stairs with a big book under his arm. At the back of the house Moses knocked and Bennett, the cook’s husband, opened the door. “Stamford done got hurt,” he told Bennett. “Somebody in here gotta know that.” “He hurt bad?” Bennett said. He had been friends with Stamford. “Maybe dead bad,” Moses said. Bennett said, “Dear Jesus. Lemme tell em up front.”
The white man at the front door was from the Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance Company, based in Hartford, Connecticut. His talking to Calvin at the door was what kept Bennett so long. Calvin eventually came back with Bennett and when Moses told him, Calvin went back and returned with Caldonia, followed by Maude, and Fern Elston. Calvin had told the Atlas man that his sister was not interested in insurance on her slaves. “He hurt bad, Mistress,” Moses said to Caldonia, “far as I can see.” Caldonia said for him to come with her and they all followed Caldonia back through the house, with Maude asking Moses twice if his shoes were clean and Caldonia telling her mother, “Leave him alone, Mama.” Henry, following William Robbins’s advice, had never taken out insurance on his slaves, and his widow, at least on that day, was now following her dead husband.
Maude and Fern stayed in the house and in no time Moses and Caldonia and Calvin were at Stamford’s cabin. His mistress went to him and knelt at his pallet. The man from Atlas Life, Casualty and Assurance Company was out in the road in his buggy by then. The people in Hartford, Connecticut, had taught that a woman was more apt to buy insurance for her slaves than a man was.
“Stamford?” Caldonia said. “What all you got yourself into now?” She took the rag Celeste had and wiped the rest of the blood from the man’s face. “Celeste, get me some more of these, please.”
Loretta, who had healed many a soul on the plantation, came in with a box of clean rags she used as bandages and knelt beside Caldonia.
“What am I going to do with you?” Caldonia asked Stamford as she took rags from Loretta’s box. Stamford stopped blinking and was concentrating on the spiderweb and trying to raise an arm to warn all the people in the cabin. The hant be comin, the hant be comin, he thought he was telling them. His eyes and cheeks were swelling quickly; he didn’t relate that to the punches he had taken. He felt the swelling was from the power of the hant. The door to the cabin was open and with the wind coming in, the web moved furiously. Look at that hant, Stamford thought he was warning. You leave us be. We ain’t done nothin to you. JesusJesus …
After they had cleaned him up, he fell asleep. He woke at about three and Delphie was there with some soup Caldonia had Zeddie the cook bring down from the house. The door was closed as Delphie fed him and somehow in the time he was asleep the spiderweb had been blown away. His face was a swollen ball but Delphie managed to get soup into him. He ate and kept thinking how saying Jesus fast had worked. He had the cabin to himself that day and night, for Moses sent Clement and the other man elsewhere to sleep. Delphie slept on one of their pallets. Loretta came down three more times to check on him—at seven o’clock, at ten o’clock and at five o’clock the next morning. It was the ten o’clock tending to that told her he might yet live. The five o’clock settled things once and for all.
No policy from Atlas would have paid Caldonia for the week and a half Stamford was off from work. Policies for slaves injured during work would not be issued for a few more weeks. (As it happened in the field, she might have been able to get away with calling it a work-related injury, as long as the agent did not come and see Stamford for himself.) Those work-injury policies would come about because an agent in South Carolina would write to Hartford to tell them that many of his clients were asking about insuring slaves hurt while doing their jobs. Men and women were losing limbs, getting sick from any number of ailments directly related to their jobs, the agent said in his letter to Hartford, and his clients wanted some relief for that. At the time of Stamford’s beating, there was a policy, for a premium of 25 cents a month, that would have paid Caldonia if he had died. It would not have paid the price Henry paid for Stamford, $450, because Stamford was now much older. But the money would have gone a long way toward purchasing someone else, someone stronger and no doubt more able to stand up for himself.
The Atlas man had come the day of the beating because Maude had sent word to him that her newly widowed daughter needed all the help she could get. Maude had policies on all her slaves. Riding away that day, the Atlas man noted in his mind that next time he would have to insist on seeing the mistress of the house and not settle on an answer from a male relative who did not know the benefits of Atlas products. A negative response, the people in Hartford had taught, was only the groundwork for a positive one.
Stamford did not go after Gloria again, or Cassandra. Though the hant was gone from his cabin, he began to think that he was not long for the world, that no young stuff would ever love him again. He became most difficult and got into even more fights with men. He even cursed children when an adult was not around to shoo him away. The children in the lane started saying that he was a man who had sworn off all human food. Stamford now ate only nails, they said, rusty nails, and drank only muddy water, the muddier the better.
He met up with a slave from a neighboring plantation and that man gave him from time to time a brew that the man claimed was better than the whiskey white men drank. The basic ingredient of the brew was potatoes that had been fermenting for months. There were other things in it, mostly just what the man happened to find at hand—leaves, dead insects, chicken feet, newspapers, dirty rags, brackish water. It all went into the brew. And for a while a body after drinking it would fall into a nice state, a place the brew man liked to call heaven on earth. The effect was brief and if the drinker did not go to sleep right away, a headache would come on that was worse than a
