It was this hope for his own land that fueled Jeremiah, along with his hatred of the mound that shadowed the cabins where his extended family lived. He nursed an obsession to erode the mound one day. This hatred was like milk, bread, and meat to him.
The New Overseer
The man who would be hired as the new overseer of Wood Place was not what he appeared, but few on the plantation would know this, as he was a quiet man who kept his thoughts to himself. His name was Holcomb Byrd James and he would sire a family with many descendants on our land. But we are not in that time, not yet. We are only at the day of his romantic undoing.
Holcomb hadn’t been seeking a job, only passing through Chicasetta, when he saw a flyer advertising for an overseer at Wood Place at the general store. He inquired of the young man standing behind the counter, Victor, who pointed to his father’s office in the back of the store. Samuel hired Holcomb right on the spot, offering him the top pay of fifteen dollars a month, three dollars more than the going rate: Samuel liked the man’s sturdy, upright carriage, as well as his dark-haired handsomeness. And he liked the fact of hiring someone else other than a Franklin. We already know that hurting people gave Samuel much satisfaction, feeding his mean spirit for weeks to come. However, Samuel also wanted to alert the Franklins that the privilege of Grace’s new, elevated position as the wife of Victor did not extend special favors to her natal brood.
Samuel told Holcomb to head up to the big house he had passed on his journey to the general store. In the kitchen house, the cook would give him a proper meal.
While speaking to Samuel, Holcomb didn’t let the white man know that he didn’t like to stay in any one place too long. He did odd work here and there for his survival. He definitely wasn’t going to inform Samuel that he was a Cherokee man. His mother had not given him a middle name, but Holcomb honored her by taking the name of her clan—she was of the Birds—though he changed the spelling to keep from attention. Yet when he entered the kitchen, there was Venie. She appeared to be crying, and something in her face paired with the tears that streamed, touched him, even when he noticed that she held an onion in her hand. And then the first crack in his fa?ade: he doffed his hat, pressing it to his chest.
Venie leaned back. She’d seen other white men perform the same ritual, but never with a Negro woman, slave or free.
“Did you eat yet, suh?”
She wiped her face with her forearm, as Holcomb worriedly watched. The forearm was attached to a hand that held a knife, which was hovering close by her eyes. He touched her hand softly, then took the knife away.
“No’m,” he said. “I have not ate. Much obliged for the meal.”
Venie had been a child, perhaps twelve or thirteen, when purchased by Samuel—not a “young woman,” the way some would describe slave girls in a future time, calling them hastily into a realm of knowing.
Her previous owner had given Venie, a child mulatta and the by-blow of his older brother, as a present one night to a close comrade. It had been the comrade’s birthday, coming two weeks before his wedding. The comrade was not repelled by her thin child’s body: Venie’s owner had assured him of her precocity. By grace, Venie’s ordeal had lasted but a short while. The comrade had passed out after minutes into the painful act, but not before vomiting on the nightgown and several locks of Venie’s hair, which the maid of her owner’s wife had loosed from her braids. She did not know what was worse, the sharp pains when she walked or her forgetting to wash the blood and vomit from her nightgown. She was punished by her owner for her inability to please his comrade and for ruining the nightgown.
When Samuel had purchased Venie, he’d been bothered by her crying, when it would have pleased him with another child. After a month, he’d thrown her into the fields, but when Tut had died, Samuel remembered that Venie’s skills as an apprentice cook had come recommended by the trader. Thus, Samuel relocated Venie to the kitchen, bringing in a boy to carry the water and bigger pots. Upon tasting her peach cobbler made with a butter crust, Samuel congratulated himself for his unexpected boon.
Venie was a grown woman when Holcomb Byrd James was hired, and in her twenty-some years, she’d never known a man in the voluntary sense, or loved one, and she had no desire to do so. Yet here she was, concerned for Holcomb: He needed training to break him of chivalry toward Negro women. If Samuel heard him “ma’am-ing” her, the man would be sent on his way. And she had taken a liking to the new overseer, seeing his fear for her eyes.