They were a close-mouthed and stiff-necked family, who kept strictly to themselves and intermarried with their Carolina relatives, and Gerald was not alone in disliking them, for the County people were neighborly and sociable and none too tolerant of anyone lacking in those same qualities. Rumors of Abolitionist sympathies did not enhance the popularity of the Macintoshes.Old Angus had never manumitted a single slave and had never committed the unpardonable social breach of selling some of his negroes to passing slave traders en route to the cane fields of Louisiana, but the rumors persisted.
“He's an Abolitionist, no doubt,”observed Gerald to John Wilkes.“But, in an Orangeman, when a principle comes up against Scotch tightness, the principle fares ill.”
The Slatterys were another affair. Being poor white, they were not even accorded the grudging respect that Angus Macintosh's dour independence wrung from neighboring families.Old Slattery, who clung persistently to his few acres, in spite of repeated offers from Gerald and John Wilkes, was shiftless and whining.His wife was a snarly-haired woman, sickly and washed-out of appearance, the mother of a brood of sullen and rabbity-looking children—a brood which was increased regularly every year.Tom Slattery owned no slaves, and he and his two oldest boys spasmodically worked their few acres of cotton, while the wife and younger children tended what was supposed to be a vegetable garden.But, somehow, the cotton always failed, and the garden, due to Mrs.Slattery's constant childbearing, seldom furnished enough to feed her flock.
The sight of Tom Slattery dawdling on his neighbors'porches, begging cotton seed for planting or a side of bacon to“tide him over,”was a familiar one. Slattery hated his neighbors with what little energy he possessed, sensing their contempt beneath their courtesy, and especially did he hate“rich folks'uppity niggers.”The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash, and their unconcealed scorn stung him, while their more secure position in life stirred his envy.By contrast with his own miserable existence, they were well-fed, well-clothed and looked after in sickness and old age.They were proud of the good names of their owners and, for the most part, proud to belong to people who were quality, while he was despised by all.
Tom Slattery could have sold his farm for three times its value to any of the planters in the County. They would have considered it money well spent to rid the community of an eyesore, but he was well satisfied to remain and to subsist miserably on the proceeds of a bale of cotton a year and the charity of his neighbors.
With all the rest of the County, Gerald was on terms of amity and some intimacy. The Wilkeses, the Calverts, the Tarletons, the Fontaines, all smiled when the small figure on the big white horse galloped up their driveways, smiled and signaled for tall glasses in which a pony of Bourbon had been poured over a teaspoon of sugar and a sprig of crushed mint.Gerald was likable, and the neighbors learned in time what the children, negroes and dogs discovered at first sight, that a kind heart, a ready and sympathetic ear and an open pocketbook lurked just behind his bawling voice and his truculent manner.
His arrival was always amid a bedlam of hounds barking and small black children shouting as they raced to meet him, quarreling for the privilege of holding his horse and squirming and grinning under his good-natured insults. The white children clamored to sit on his knee and be trotted, while he denounced to their elders the infamy of Yankee politicians;the daughters of his friends took him into their confidence about their love affairs;and the youths of the neighborhood, fearful of confessing debts of honor upon the carpets of their fathers, found him a friend in need.
“So, you've been owing this for a month, you young rascal!”he would shout.“And, in God's name, why haven't you been asking me for the money before this?”
His rough manner of speech was too well known to give offense, and it only made the young men grin sheepishly and reply:“Well, sir, I hated to trouble you, and my father—”
“Your father's a good man, and no denying it, but strict, and so take this and let's be hearing no more of it.”
The planters'ladies were the last to capitulate. But, when Mrs.Wilkes,“a great lady and with a rare gift for silence,”as Gerald characterized her, told her husband one evening, after Gerald's horse had pounded down the driveway,“He has a rough tongue, but he is a gentleman,”Gerald had definitely arrived.
He did not know that he had taken nearly ten years to arrive, for it never occurred to him that his neighbors had eyed him askance at first. In his own mind, there had never been any doubt that he belonged, from the moment he first set foot on Tara.
When Gerald was forty-three, so thickset of body and florid of face that he looked like a hunting squire out of a sporting print, it came to him that Tara, dear though it was, and the County folk, with their open hearts and open houses, were not enough. He wanted a wife.
Tara cried out for a mistress. The fat cook, a yard negro elevated by necessity to the kitchen, never had the meals on time, and the chambermaid, formerly a field hand, let dust accumulate on the furniture and never seemed to have clean linen on hand, so that the arrival of guests was always the occasion of much stirring and to-do.Pork, the only trained house negro on the place, had general supervision over the other servants, but even he had grown slack and careless after several years of exposure to Gerald's happy-go-lucky mode of living.As valet, he kept Gerald's bedroom in order, and, as butler, he served the meals with dignity and style, but otherwise he pretty well let matters follow their own course.