When he longed for company, Matthew Thatcher read the books that he had carried on his journey in a small, wheeled vehicle tied with two ropes to his horse, and he went about his business, trying to push away his loneliness, until Samuel showed up one day at the hideous, flat front of Matthew’s abode, riding in the back of an open-faced carriage.
Before he formally met this Yankee, six months after his arrival, Samuel had seen him at the general store that he owned. Samuel was lonely, too. He reasoned that, at his age—for he was now elderly—a man needed more than female flesh to satisfy him. He needed other men to complete him. Yet the yeomen were not of his rank, and he had failed in his attempts at friendship with the two other wealthy planters in the county. Samuel could understand the social issues of Mr. Benjamin, who was a child of Israel. Perhaps that man’s religion prohibited him from making relationships with those outside his worship circle. But Mr. Sweet was a different matter. He was Christian and from older money than the others in the region; his family was from Savannah and reasonably placed. When he visited Samuel’s store, Mr. Sweet was polite. He shook hands upon entering and upon concluding his business, but he never took off his gloves to do so—cotton in the warmer months, leather in the colder. Once, when he was not aware of being watched, Mr. Sweet had rubbed his gloved hand down the side of his pants after shaking Samuel’s hand.
Under other circumstances, Samuel would not have sought camaraderie with the likes of Matthew. The young man’s house was built in that tragically ugly New England style known as the “saltbox.” The absent front porch discouraged visitors, even those eager to marry off unattractive daughters. Where were people supposed to sit when they came? How could they take the air? Where was the veranda, for Heaven’s sake?
In Matthew’s family’s saltbox in rural Massachusetts, Matthew’s parents, siblings, and he had taken the air on the back porch on those summer afternoons when they were not completing chores. And no one took the air in the wintertime in Massachusetts, or not anyone with sense. As a New Englander, Matthew didn’t understand that well-bred southerners craved stories. That’s why they liked front porches. The back of the house was for concealing things southerners did not desire to look at or smell—the realities of a backyard chicken house and hog pen, a vegetable garden, and a green-painted fence that shielded the owner’s privy from the public, but whose color announced something important lay beyond its boundaries.
The day of his visit, Samuel hopped down without any help from Pompey, and approached the front door that was just stuck out there with no artifice to help it along. It was not the first time Samuel had won over a reasonably well-off man. And even at Samuel’s advanced age, his beauty and charm were worthy matches to the sternest of opponents, but there was no resistance to speak of. The young, white man who answered the door—not even sending his Negro housekeeper to do it—stumbled an eager greeting.
Samuel graciously accepted the invitation to enter the house, empty of but a few pieces of furniture, walked through to the back porch with no complaint, and sat down in a hard chair that wasn’t even a rocker. As someone who had not attended any university except that called by life’s clarion, Samuel perked up the day the young man mentioned that he was a graduate of Harvard College. And when Samuel left his plantation with Pompey driving the carriage, he somehow felt stronger and clearheaded, and he began to crave the company of the younger man from the north. Samuel liked sitting on the back porch of the ugly saltbox house.
And he had other purposes for Matthew, for though time had passed since Nick’s running, Samuel had not given up on finding him, and hoped that, with the aid of the Fugitive Slave Law passed years before, he could still recover Nick. He had taken down the runaway flyer, but that did not mean Samuel had given up the ghost. He gave several flyers to Matthew to mail to his acquaintances up north and the younger man made the mistake of sending them to his sister.
It was a distressing time for slave owners, for, above and below the line drawn by Messrs. Mason and Dixon, tendrils of abolition had thriven. Matthew’s sister Deborah was a reader; she’d gotten ahold of a privately circulated diary written by Fanny Kemble, the former wife of a man in Georgia who owned over a thousand slaves. Mrs. Kemble’s diary detailed gross violence toward Negroes, and Deborah had mentioned it in her letters. It did no good for her brother to explain that growing inland, short-staple cotton was far different—requiring slave labor but far less cruelty—from growing long-staple, because based upon a few words his sister had read in an almanac, she thought herself an agricultural expert. Matthew had not told his family that he owned Negroes, but he assumed they had guessed, as Deborah prodded him in letters, asking him to explain how one man could cultivate nearly two hundred acres of cotton “all by his lonesome,” an unfeasible task, even with his Congregationalist guilt about sleeping late. His sister had digested chunks of the Bible, even more now that, at an age when her parents had despaired, miraculously, she had married Winfred Hutchinson, one of Matthew’s classmates at Harvard who’d since become a minister.