He wanted to protect this child. It was an unsettling yet pleasurable emotion. Yet the feeling he had in Aggie’s presence—the shame she called instead of offering him obeisance—roused something in Samuel akin to terror.
The Building of the Left Cabin
After Mamie’s death, Samuel began to stalk his own fields for child victims, but within three years, he decided that was not for the best. He didn’t feel badly for using what he owned, but conducting his pleasures with his Negroes’ own children led to a slowdown of work. And Samuel was a businessman; he could not allow his inclinations to affect his fiscal ventures.
When Samuel would visit the Quarters to seek out the only lasting happiness in his life—Nick—sometimes he would run into Aggie and her deepening frown. And that same ugly feeling would coat Samuel’s skin: Aggie believed he was a horrible person, a man hidden from the glare of God. Thus, he began to avoid the Quarters entirely.
For a time, he again sought out yeoman farmers in the territory and paid to assault their little Negro girls, as he had done in those years before choosing Mamie. Yet within another two years, these moments had stopped satisfying Samuel. He had become a cultivated, rich man, and he decided to act accordingly. He directed Carson to pick strong Quarters-men from the fields to cut down trees, and their labor didn’t take long to build a new structure on the left side of the big house. A beautiful one-room cottage, which Samuel had copied from a picture in a book of Brothers Grimm tales. He ordered new furniture and toys. A hobbyhorse, a dollhouse with tiny furniture of its own, and porcelain dolls dressed in elaborate clothing that matched the children’s dresses he had ordered as well. And he stocked up on infusions of poppy flowers and mixed them with cane syrup, for children loved the taste of sugar.
The day Samuel purchased a mulatta child at Lancaster Polcott’s auction, he was the happiest he’d ever been. Since the government had outlawed the transport of slaves over the Atlantic Ocean, an equally thriving trade for Negroes had erupted along the federal road. And since the expansion of the federal road, the southern transport in slaves was much easier, and the choices in humans were dizzying. The little girl Samuel would buy was a specialty item of Lancaster, who had begun to hold auctions the next county over from Chicasetta. His Negroes were quite expensive: the little mulatta cost Samuel seven hundred dollars, but Samuel was pleased to know she was only nine years old. He thought he’d have several years of use until she blushed into maturity. Lancaster Polcott allowed Samuel to enter the tiny pen where the child was kept. In the corner, a blanket was pulled over a cot fitted neatly with sheets and a pillow: she was special and did not sleep on straw. The child was bright-skinned with long, wavy hair pulled back in a woman’s bun. She wore only a sheer, clean chemise. When Lancaster ordered the child to completely disrobe and turn around slowly, there no marks anywhere on her body. Samuel became quite agitated, as his need came upon him—even though the child was weeping—but Lancaster warned him, he could only look at the child, until money for their transaction exchanged hands, and he delivered her to Wood Place. Samuel told him he wanted to take possession of the child right now. Right this second—he had cash and he had his wagon outside—but Lancaster refused. He gave the excuse that he wanted Samuel to gain control, but really, he wanted to dangle the child over the other man. Lancaster was a churchgoing soul, and though slave trading was an honorable profession—wasn’t it right there in the Bible?—Samuel’s particular appetites turned his stomach. Yet Lancaster reasoned with himself: he had a family to support.
In addition to ordinary field hands （and such）， Lancaster offered a variety of specialty merchandise, such as the little girls and young women for boudoir purposes. He was open in this selling of females, and when he put them on the block, ribald in his language. Yet—though he didn’t dare to speak the words out loud—at other, discreet, unadvertised auctions he also traded boys and young men as expensive “butlers and valets” for the use of white men who paid three times the price for a field slave. Lancaster smelled a lifetime of money, if he could keep Samuel Pinchard—and others like him—on the leashes of their desires.
Samuel would purchase a tall Negro for a discount. He had been the slave of a liberal type in Milledgeville, a minister who had taught his slaves to read so that they would know the Bible. Yet this minister had been in defiance of the new law that forbade anyone to teach slaves to read. The minister had been jailed and could not pay his five-hundred-dollar fine. His two slaves had to be sold to cover the cost. That Negro Samuel had bought, though young and strapping, had only cost one hundred fifty dollars because none of the other white men at the auction wanted a Negro who could read. He was very homely, and his name was Claudius. Samuel would put him in charge of his garden and his barn animals, as well as tending to the landscaping around the cabin he built for his little mulatta. Similar to Rappaccini’s garden in that tale by Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, lush plants had been trained to grow near the gate and between its spokes, obscuring her view. Claudius kept the plants growing in all seasons. Along with studying the science of Negroes, Samuel studied horticulture and would instruct Claudius what he wanted him to plant or cultivate.