Fugue In A Minor Key

CHAPTER ONE

"I’ll see them dead first, every last one of them!" Randolph Hudson slammed his fist on the desk. The sound echoed through the nearly empty building. "No goddamn Yankee, or anyone else for that matter, is going to tell me I got to set them free," he roared. "No one, you hear? No one!"

Hudson’s naturally red face turned a livid shade of purple and he started to choke. Leaping to his feet, Tom Jennings pounded the older man on the back.

"Don’t git yourself so riled up you have a stroke," he admonished the older man in his unpleasant nasal twang. "We’ve gone to war with them Yankees and we’ll lick ‘em too."

"Well, them slaves had just better watch their step," Hudson gasped, "cause if I hear the war’s going badly, I’ll do away with them all - every man, woman and child. Ain’t good for much anyhow." Hudson took another healthy gulp from his glass.

Jennings was astounded. They were slaves, for God’s sake, he thought, and worth a small fortune on the block.

Faith sat trembling on the back steps of the house, her expressive eyes growing larger by the minute. She was a beautiful mulatto girl just 16 years old, with light skin and long wavy hair kept neatly tied back with a scrap of cloth. She never knew who her father was - Hudson or Jennings - and she really didn’t like to think about it. She hated them equally and tried to stay out of their way. Only luck had kept them out of her bed so far, and for that she was grateful.

She glanced upward at the main building looming behind her. This wasn’t a very big house, as plantations go. And there were only about 25 slaves, if you counted the children. They lived in little run down cabins behind the large ramshackle barn. The cabins were made of uneven logs and saplings mud-chinked together with steeply pitched wood shingled roofs and floors of dirt. There were no windows, and only a hole in the wall for a door, but they each had a small slave-built fireplace in one corner for warmth as well as cooking, crude but sturdy. A row of disreputable looking privies stood at one end of the path in front of the slave quarters in plain sight with not even a bush or plant to shield them from view.

The main house was so perfectly proportioned that it appeared spacious, but on a miniature scale, with two stories, a verandah surrounding the house and tall white columns in front supporting a sagging second floor balcony. The paint was peeling in places and the upstairs windows were cracked and dirty. The wide brick steps leading up to the kitchen portion of the verandah ran directly under the office windows. It was a very good spot for eavesdropping, and popular with all the slaves.

Randolph Hudson was an obese white-haired man with a very large ego and a small plantation, fond of drink and women of any age and color, relationships notwithstanding. He was barely able to keep food on the table for his own small white family, although his portly frame gave no evidence of hunger on his part. The slaves had their gardens and if it wasn’t enough, he saw no cause for alarm. "Let them hunt rabbits in the woods if they’re still hungry" was his favorite phrase. He felt he was overwhelmed with slaves, but since he and his overseer had fathered most of them, he wasn’t really worried. As soon as the children were old enough, he planned to make quite a bit of money selling them South. At least he did before the war started. Ever since 1808, it was illegal to import slaves, but you sure as hell could breed them, and since the women were inordinately fond of their little black babies, the threat to sell them was all that was needed to keep them in line. Until then, he put up with the noise and overcrowding.