The Day of the Daguerreotype
In 1839, a year before the birth of Rabbit and Eliza Two, a Frenchman with too many first names for us to list here had invented a process that permanently captured the images of humans. M. Daguerre showed the products of his fume-ridden invention, the wages of his camera obscura, in a building before learned men who thought highly of themselves, over the sea in Paris. It had been the sixth day of January. Earlier, M. Daguerre had transfixed a gentleman, M. Gaucheraud, with the capturing of a deceased spider underneath a microscope. So taken was the gentleman that he could not keep his secret and wrote about it in a local newspaper the day before the demonstration, stealing the surprise. His consternation and pleasure over this new toy mingled with his criticism of what the inventor had failed to do: “Nature in motion cannot be represented, or at least not without great difficulty, by the process in question.” The criticism was obligatory. M. Gaucheraud did not want anyone to think him biased.
The invention crossed the sea shortly thereafter, and within years, a man traveling through Putnam County arrived in a covered wagon through the narrow, dangerously pitted portion of the main road, and used M. Daguerre’s invention to capture the members of Samuel’s family: Lady, Victor, Grace, and Gloria, along with his future son-in-law, Matthew Thatcher. And because Samuel felt so smug about finally securing a mate for his daughter, he even paid the man who took that daguerreotype to take an image of Rabbit, Eliza Two, and Leena. The three girls would pose with their arms around each other’s waists. Samuel had only wanted his Young Friend captured, but she had begged him to let the other girls be included. Usually Samuel was not so giving, but he relented. Daguerreotypes such as this were being taken throughout the south, as plantation owners chronicled their lives, their falsely idyllic arenas, the white infant charges with dark nurses dressed in calico with rings in their ears.
The Weeping Time
Samuel splurged in planning for his daughter’s wedding. He had sent away for the ivory silk, and in the months that it took to arrive, there was a tangled network of which he was only vaguely aware that made his request come to fruition: the skeins of thread manufactured by hungry worms in Asia, then sent to France, where the cloth was woven and then shipped to Boston, then Savannah, where Samuel had it transported to his store, and finally, to a particularly gifted slave’s lap, a woman who was owned by a planter the next town over, in Eatonton. She sewed the dress by hand, painstakingly, after Samuel drove Gloria in his carriage for three fittings. The matching lace veil had not taken that long, as it only had been made in some English housewife’s cottage. Samuel decided that his strange daughter would be married the following June.
When Samuel invited Matthew to travel with him to a slave auction in Savannah, Matthew did not want to leave the area; he hoped that Rabbit would forgive him, and his plan would be fulfilled. However, he wanted to please Samuel, who was his only friend—once again—and Matthew agreed to travel to Savannah. Samuel was merry: he meant to enjoy himself. They took the train to the city and stayed at a fine hotel. The rooms were luxurious, with canopied beds, and the further Samuel traveled away from his plantation, the higher his strength rose. He felt like a very young man again.
At the Savannah racetrack, the parcel for auction was huge, over four hundred pieces of slave merchandise—too much to hold the auction in the town square. Samuel paid for his four new slaves with a full bank draft. He did not want to accrue interest, and he advised Matthew to do the same. If he could not, Samuel assured his future son-in-law that with his own investments in the rail line, he could afford to loan Matthew the funds needed to purchase one lonely slave. Thinking of Rabbit, Matthew demurred. He was shocked at the roughhousing at the auction. There were much groping and intimate insults directed at the female slaves. Matthew and Samuel put several feet between themselves and the traders, who were partaking in the merry abuse, and hooting at an unusual sight: unlike the rest of the hundreds of slaves who created a high volume with their lamentations, one Negro man had grinned on the block without coaxing, even when the auctioneer had instructed a crying female to unbutton the Negro’s trousers and expose his member for all. After striking the female several times, the auctioneer further forced her to stroke the naked flesh. It came to massive life.
The auction upset Matthew, provoking not only blushes when the buyers had shouted at the size of the Negro’s member, but a later sickness in his stomach. Matthew had never been afflicted by slave trading. That some men ruled while others did not was an old story, one he hadn’t written. Yet at the auction he had taken in the saddest scene. At the auction, a slave man, Number 319 in the catalog, had approached the white man who had purchased him and begged the man, begging him to buy Number 278, his ladylove. The slave thought he’d been successful, but the sale was bungled, and Matthew watched the man weep inconsolably as his lady was sold away separately. The rain had been unceasing.