Bricks Without Straw | Page 4

I mind now dat all de pore white folks hez got some two tree
names, but I allus thought dat wuz 'coz dey hedn't nuffin' else ter call
dere can. Must be a free feller needs mo' name, somehow. Ef I keep on
I reckon I'll git enuff atter a while. H'yer it's gwine on two year only
sence de s'rrender, an' I'se got tree ob 'em sartain!"
The speaker was a colored man, standing before his log-house in the
evening of a day in June. His wife was the only listener to the
monologue. He had been examining a paper which was sealed and
stamped with official formality, and which had started him upon the
train of thought he had pursued. The question he was trying in vain to
answer was only the simplest and easiest of the thousand strange
queries which freedom had so recently propounded to him and his race.
CHAPTER II.

THE FONT.
Knapp-of-reeds was the name of a plantation which was one of the
numerous possessions of P. Desmit, Colonel and Esquire, of the county
of Horsford, in the northernmost of those States which good Queen
Caroline was fortunate enough to have designated as memorials of her
existence. The plantation was just upon that wavy line which separates
the cotton region of the east from the tobacco belt that sweeps down the
pleasant ranges of the Piedmont region, east of the Blue Appalachians.
Or, to speak more correctly, the plantation was in that indeterminate
belt which neither of the great staples could claim exclusively as its
own--that delectable land where every conceivable product of the
temperate zone grows, if not in its rankest luxuriance, at least in
perfection and abundance. Tobacco on the hillsides, corn upon the wide
bottoms, cotton on the gray uplands, and wheat, oats, fruits, and grasses
everywhere. Five hundred acres of hill and bottom, forest and field,
with what was termed the Island, consisting of a hundred more, which
had never been overflowed in the century of cultivation it had known,
constituted a snug and valuable plantation. It had been the seat of an
old family once, but extravagant living and neglect of its resources had
compelled its sale, and it had passed into the hands of its present owner,
of whose vast possessions it formed an insignificant part.
Colonel Desmit was one of the men who applied purely business
principles to the opportunities which the South afforded in the olden
time, following everything to its logical conclusion, and measuring
every opportunity by its money value. He was not of an ancient family.
Indeed, the paternal line stopped short with his own father, and the
maternal one could only show one more link, and then became lost in
malodorous tradition which hung about an old mud-daubed log-cabin
on the most poverty-stricken portion of Nubbin Ridge.
There was a rumor that the father had a left-handed kinship with the
Brutons, a family of great note in the public annals of the State. He
certainly showed qualities which tended to confirm this tradition, and
abilities which entitled him to be considered the peer of the best of that
family, whose later generations were by no means the equals of former

ones. Untiring and unscrupulous, Mr. Peter Smith rose from the
position of a nameless son of an unknown father, to be as overseer for
one of the wealthiest proprietors of that region, and finally, by a not
unusual turn of fortune's wheel, became the owner of a large part of his
employer's estates. Thrifty in all things, he married in middle life, so
well as nearly to double the fortune then acquired, and before his death
had become one of the wealthiest men in his county. He was always
hampered by a lack of education. He could read little and write less. In
his later days he was appointed a Justice of the Peace, and was chosen
one of the County Court, or "Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions," as it
was technically called. These honors were so pleasant to him that he
determined to give his only son a name which should commemorate
this event. The boy was, therefore, christened after the opening words
of his commission of the peace, and grew to manhood bearing the name
Potestatem Dedimus [Footnote: Potestatem dedimus: "We give thee
power, etc." The initial words of the clause conferring jurisdiction upon
officers, in the old forms of judicial commissions. This name is fact,
not fancy.] Smith. This son was educated with care--the shrewd father
feeling his own need--but was early instilled with his father's greed for
gain, and the necessity for unusual exertion if he would achieve equal
position with the old families who were to be his rivals.
The young man proved a worthy disciple of his father.