MOSANA (THE UNION) - PART VIII
EPISODE 8
Andrea was right. Andrew Flounder was a dangerous man. It only took me a few weeks in that house to realize why the men who had posed as my auctioneers were so desperate not to sell us to the Flounders. And during the months that followed, I realized a lot more.
Andrew Flounder was a businessman. To the ordinary eye, he was just another slave owner with a bunch of slaves that he used to work his farms and feed his animals. But if you looked closer, he was a shrewdly brutal taskmaster who viewed his slaves as tools, parts on very large machinery that he used to further his political ambitions. Even his black wife was a political strategy, a front.
Being a wealthy slave owner wasn’t enough for Andrew Flounder. After Andrea told me the story of Eli Whitney and how he invented the cotton gin when it seemed like slavery was about to die out, I always thought that even if Eli Whitney hadn’t had his idea, and Andrew Flounder had existed by that time, he would have found a way to keep slavery up and running.
Andrew Flounder knew that to aim for one of the senatorial seats, he had to feed the beast – the beast being slavery. Slavery was the lifeblood of the Southside. The backbone behind their economy. Labor throughout the states consisted of thousands of black people being traded from one settlement to the other. The belief was black people were “mentally inferior, but physically superior”. Mr. Andrew Flounder was a staunch holder of this belief. That was why he shot his slaves to death whenever he deemed them unfit for his use.
That, and the fact that he didn’t want to sell them to any other slave owner to whom they could probably reveal his secrets. Not that any slave had access to any of his business dealings anyway.
The things I found out were not really secrets; I simply reported his dealings to the Society every two weeks as instructed. To avoid suspicion, I always mailed my letters with the rest of the letters that Mr. Flounder sent. And by the gods, he sent a lot of letters. If he were to notice the postman removing letters from the mailbox when he himself hadn’t written any, it would look highly suspicious. When it was time for me to mail my report and there weren’t letters from Mr. Flounder, I usually just had to wait a few days, and sure enough, he would have letters to be mailed out. I didn’t mail mine to any address – that was the instruction. The postman didn’t look at the letters he took, so he wouldn’t know who sent the unaddressed letter until he was at the post office. And by then, he would have to do the only thing he could do as a postman – dump the letter in the trash. It had no address, so there was nowhere he could send it. My guess was the Society had someone at the post office whose duty it was to go through the trash and remove the only unassigned letter there.
Sometimes, the Society sent a reply. And they always did it through ridiculous means. One time, I found a note in the trees. It had one word: ‘Sunny?’ It was a rare time when I missed my two-week window to send out a letter, and the Society had felt a need to reach out to me. I quickly wrote my reply back and mailed it out to calm them. Another time, it was a piece of cloth I found billowing in the wind on the cotton fields. This one too had one word: ‘Names’. That’s how I knew they wanted specifics on what I was reporting to them. They wanted names.
But that was a little hard to get. So, I came up with a trick and tried it the next time Mr. Flounder had visitors.
Usually, Mr. Flounder had multiple visitors, but this time, it was one man who looked important by the clothes they wore. I recognized him because he had come before. I was lucky to notice his entrance all the way from the fields where I was working, and I left Andrea in the middle of one of her stories and ran through the back to the house, leaving Andrea with a bewildered stare.
I caught up with Moet, who was ready to take the tray of lemonade and biscuits to the men in the living room. I grabbed the tray in her hands.
“Missus wants me to serve today.”
“What?” Sure, Moet wasn’t the only one that served, but she was the usual one. “She didn’t tell me nothing,” she said, looking at me with her nose turned up.
“Since when does the Missus ask your permission before changing her mind?” I shot back. “Or do you want to go upstairs and ask her?” I fixed Moet with a glare, hoping she wouldn’t be so bold as to actually go upstairs to ask Mrs. Flounder.
With an exasperated sigh, Moet let go of the tray and let me have it.
Good girl.
I walked out of the kitchen and took a deep breath before going out to the living room. As I entered the room, the four men stopped talking. Apparently, what they were discussing wasn’t for my hearing. I set the tray down and poured out the lemonade into glasses. Then I launched my trick.
“Would you like anything else, Mr. Flemings?” I asked, uttering the first name that came into my head and looking directly at the visitor’s feet, with a slight bow of my head.
“Who?” the visitor asked, then laughed. “You must have me mixed up with someone else. I’m Beckett. Geoffrey Beckett.”
I gave my most surprised gasp. I even managed to stammer. “Oh, f-forgive me, sir. I thought-” But I never completed my acting. With a sharp tone, Mr. Flounder said, “Leave.” I gave a quick bow and hurried out of there as fast as my legs could carry me. “Yessir.”
That evening, after we weighed our cotton, Mr. Flounder singled me out. At first, panic seized my chest, but I quickly reminded myself that I had exceeded my quota of cotton. I had picked a whooping 264 pounds.
As soon as the others had dispersed, Mr. Flounder called me to him. He even sent Andrea out. Usually, he didn’t punish anyone without her there. Something told me this may be worse than a punishment. When Andrea left, he faced me. For a long time, he just stood there, looking at me. I couldn’t look back at him, of course, so I just hung my head and waited for whatever was to come.
Finally, he spoke. “Why did you speak his name?”
At that, my head snapped up, and I quickly brought it down to hide my surprise. Was he unto me? Impossible. If he was, this wouldn’t be a conversation, it would be an execution.
I didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. That would be foolery. Then he would know I was hiding something. “Mr. Flemings? I-I mean, Mr. Beckett?” I asked, employing my acting skills once again. Intentionally getting the name wrong again was key to my answer to Mr. Flounder’s question. He had to believe what I had to say next.
He didn’t answer, so I kept talking. “I was trying to be uh, respectful, sir.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir.”
He was quiet after that, and I knew he was studying me, even without raising my head up.
“What do you say when you refer to me, Sarah?”
“Master?” I said tentatively, not really understanding where his question was going. It was until the word had left my mouth that it dawned on me. With dread, I knew what he was going to ask next.
“Exactly. So why not refer to Mr. Beckett in the same vein? After all, he is superior to you.”
I felt a flash of anger at that last statement. Superior to you. I inhaled and forced myself to stir my thoughts away from Mr. Flounder’s statements and back to the question at hand. My brain had already worked up an answer.
“I-I wanted a way to let Mr. Beckett know I was referring to him. If I had only said ‘master’, you might have thought I was referring to you.”
I mentally patted myself on the back. Go, Mo!
Mr. Flounder wasn’t done with me yet. “Why did you think his name was Flemings instead of Beckett?”
Good question, Mr. Flounder. Why did I think so?
I hesitated before answering, praying to all the gods I knew, especially Tricia’s Jesus, that Mr. Flounder would swallow my next lie.
“I have passed by y’all once before in the house and thought I heard the name. And I recognized Master Beckett from both times. I thought he was Fleming, the name I thought I heard.”
“When was this?”
“Sir?”
“When did you ‘pass by us’?” Mr. Flounder asked, taking a step towards me.
I took a step back. Not because I was forced to, but because I knew he'd be expecting it.
“One time, in the house. I was on cleaning duty in the hall by the living room,” I blurted. It was the only thing I could think of.
“You were on cleaning duty? Why weren’t you out in the fields?”
“Missus rotates us sometimes, sir.” This was true. I didn’t know why, but Mrs. Flounder always gave us a day to work in the house, away from the hot autumn sun. Maybe she had once felt our pain. She even rotated us among the different fields on the settlement. Sometimes I worked on the corn fields, sometimes the wheat. Sometimes, it was the animal pens. I knew every slave was grateful for the change once in a while. A day without the saw briars and pack saddle was a boon. “But I went back to the fields right after that.” I said the last part to pacify Mr. Flounder. He would rather have a dirty house than have one slave away from the fields. To him, it would have meant less pounds of cotton recorded for sales.
“So, you just happened to be out in the hall by the living room, doing work you didn’t usually do on a normal day when you heard his name?”
“Yes sir,” I said, not so confidently.
Mr. Flounder went silent again.
Then he said, “Next time, just say ‘sir’, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
He left me standing there, my heart still beating wildly. As I walked back to the sleeping quarters, I imagined what Levi Coffin and the others would think of my next letter.
Geoffrey Beckett.
If I knew the Society well, they would find out all about Mr. Flounder’s visitor and everyone else associated with him. With any luck, he was a fugitive bounty hunter or knew one.
I went to sleep. Tomorrow I would write my letter.
Andrea was right. Andrew Flounder was a dangerous man. It only took me a few weeks in that house to realize why the men who had posed as my auctioneers were so desperate not to sell us to the Flounders. And during the months that followed, I realized a lot more.
Andrew Flounder was a businessman. To the ordinary eye, he was just another slave owner with a bunch of slaves that he used to work his farms and feed his animals. But if you looked closer, he was a shrewdly brutal taskmaster who viewed his slaves as tools, parts on very large machinery that he used to further his political ambitions. Even his black wife was a political strategy, a front.
Being a wealthy slave owner wasn’t enough for Andrew Flounder. After Andrea told me the story of Eli Whitney and how he invented the cotton gin when it seemed like slavery was about to die out, I always thought that even if Eli Whitney hadn’t had his idea, and Andrew Flounder had existed by that time, he would have found a way to keep slavery up and running.
Andrew Flounder knew that to aim for one of the senatorial seats, he had to feed the beast – the beast being slavery. Slavery was the lifeblood of the Southside. The backbone behind their economy. Labor throughout the states consisted of thousands of black people being traded from one settlement to the other. The belief was black people were “mentally inferior, but physically superior”. Mr. Andrew Flounder was a staunch holder of this belief. That was why he shot his slaves to death whenever he deemed them unfit for his use.
That, and the fact that he didn’t want to sell them to any other slave owner to whom they could probably reveal his secrets. Not that any slave had access to any of his business dealings anyway.
The things I found out were not really secrets; I simply reported his dealings to the Society every two weeks as instructed. To avoid suspicion, I always mailed my letters with the rest of the letters that Mr. Flounder sent. And by the gods, he sent a lot of letters. If he were to notice the postman removing letters from the mailbox when he himself hadn’t written any, it would look highly suspicious. When it was time for me to mail my report and there weren’t letters from Mr. Flounder, I usually just had to wait a few days, and sure enough, he would have letters to be mailed out. I didn’t mail mine to any address – that was the instruction. The postman didn’t look at the letters he took, so he wouldn’t know who sent the unaddressed letter until he was at the post office. And by then, he would have to do the only thing he could do as a postman – dump the letter in the trash. It had no address, so there was nowhere he could send it. My guess was the Society had someone at the post office whose duty it was to go through the trash and remove the only unassigned letter there.
Sometimes, the Society sent a reply. And they always did it through ridiculous means. One time, I found a note in the trees. It had one word: ‘Sunny?’ It was a rare time when I missed my two-week window to send out a letter, and the Society had felt a need to reach out to me. I quickly wrote my reply back and mailed it out to calm them. Another time, it was a piece of cloth I found billowing in the wind on the cotton fields. This one too had one word: ‘Names’. That’s how I knew they wanted specifics on what I was reporting to them. They wanted names.
But that was a little hard to get. So, I came up with a trick and tried it the next time Mr. Flounder had visitors.
Usually, Mr. Flounder had multiple visitors, but this time, it was one man who looked important by the clothes they wore. I recognized him because he had come before. I was lucky to notice his entrance all the way from the fields where I was working, and I left Andrea in the middle of one of her stories and ran through the back to the house, leaving Andrea with a bewildered stare.
I caught up with Moet, who was ready to take the tray of lemonade and biscuits to the men in the living room. I grabbed the tray in her hands.
“Missus wants me to serve today.”
“What?” Sure, Moet wasn’t the only one that served, but she was the usual one. “She didn’t tell me nothing,” she said, looking at me with her nose turned up.
“Since when does the Missus ask your permission before changing her mind?” I shot back. “Or do you want to go upstairs and ask her?” I fixed Moet with a glare, hoping she wouldn’t be so bold as to actually go upstairs to ask Mrs. Flounder.
With an exasperated sigh, Moet let go of the tray and let me have it.
Good girl.
I walked out of the kitchen and took a deep breath before going out to the living room. As I entered the room, the four men stopped talking. Apparently, what they were discussing wasn’t for my hearing. I set the tray down and poured out the lemonade into glasses. Then I launched my trick.
“Would you like anything else, Mr. Flemings?” I asked, uttering the first name that came into my head and looking directly at the visitor’s feet, with a slight bow of my head.
“Who?” the visitor asked, then laughed. “You must have me mixed up with someone else. I’m Beckett. Geoffrey Beckett.”
I gave my most surprised gasp. I even managed to stammer. “Oh, f-forgive me, sir. I thought-” But I never completed my acting. With a sharp tone, Mr. Flounder said, “Leave.” I gave a quick bow and hurried out of there as fast as my legs could carry me. “Yessir.”
That evening, after we weighed our cotton, Mr. Flounder singled me out. At first, panic seized my chest, but I quickly reminded myself that I had exceeded my quota of cotton. I had picked a whooping 264 pounds.
As soon as the others had dispersed, Mr. Flounder called me to him. He even sent Andrea out. Usually, he didn’t punish anyone without her there. Something told me this may be worse than a punishment. When Andrea left, he faced me. For a long time, he just stood there, looking at me. I couldn’t look back at him, of course, so I just hung my head and waited for whatever was to come.
Finally, he spoke. “Why did you speak his name?”
At that, my head snapped up, and I quickly brought it down to hide my surprise. Was he unto me? Impossible. If he was, this wouldn’t be a conversation, it would be an execution.
I didn’t pretend not to know what he was talking about. That would be foolery. Then he would know I was hiding something. “Mr. Flemings? I-I mean, Mr. Beckett?” I asked, employing my acting skills once again. Intentionally getting the name wrong again was key to my answer to Mr. Flounder’s question. He had to believe what I had to say next.
He didn’t answer, so I kept talking. “I was trying to be uh, respectful, sir.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sir.”
He was quiet after that, and I knew he was studying me, even without raising my head up.
“What do you say when you refer to me, Sarah?”
“Master?” I said tentatively, not really understanding where his question was going. It was until the word had left my mouth that it dawned on me. With dread, I knew what he was going to ask next.
“Exactly. So why not refer to Mr. Beckett in the same vein? After all, he is superior to you.”
I felt a flash of anger at that last statement. Superior to you. I inhaled and forced myself to stir my thoughts away from Mr. Flounder’s statements and back to the question at hand. My brain had already worked up an answer.
“I-I wanted a way to let Mr. Beckett know I was referring to him. If I had only said ‘master’, you might have thought I was referring to you.”
I mentally patted myself on the back. Go, Mo!
Mr. Flounder wasn’t done with me yet. “Why did you think his name was Flemings instead of Beckett?”
Good question, Mr. Flounder. Why did I think so?
I hesitated before answering, praying to all the gods I knew, especially Tricia’s Jesus, that Mr. Flounder would swallow my next lie.
“I have passed by y’all once before in the house and thought I heard the name. And I recognized Master Beckett from both times. I thought he was Fleming, the name I thought I heard.”
“When was this?”
“Sir?”
“When did you ‘pass by us’?” Mr. Flounder asked, taking a step towards me.
I took a step back. Not because I was forced to, but because I knew he'd be expecting it.
“One time, in the house. I was on cleaning duty in the hall by the living room,” I blurted. It was the only thing I could think of.
“You were on cleaning duty? Why weren’t you out in the fields?”
“Missus rotates us sometimes, sir.” This was true. I didn’t know why, but Mrs. Flounder always gave us a day to work in the house, away from the hot autumn sun. Maybe she had once felt our pain. She even rotated us among the different fields on the settlement. Sometimes I worked on the corn fields, sometimes the wheat. Sometimes, it was the animal pens. I knew every slave was grateful for the change once in a while. A day without the saw briars and pack saddle was a boon. “But I went back to the fields right after that.” I said the last part to pacify Mr. Flounder. He would rather have a dirty house than have one slave away from the fields. To him, it would have meant less pounds of cotton recorded for sales.
“So, you just happened to be out in the hall by the living room, doing work you didn’t usually do on a normal day when you heard his name?”
“Yes sir,” I said, not so confidently.
Mr. Flounder went silent again.
Then he said, “Next time, just say ‘sir’, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
He left me standing there, my heart still beating wildly. As I walked back to the sleeping quarters, I imagined what Levi Coffin and the others would think of my next letter.
Geoffrey Beckett.
If I knew the Society well, they would find out all about Mr. Flounder’s visitor and everyone else associated with him. With any luck, he was a fugitive bounty hunter or knew one.
I went to sleep. Tomorrow I would write my letter.
_________________________________________
Aaaaaaand we're back!
Welcome back, people. I've missed you. Life has been hard. Lagos has been hard. Love has been hard. I think everything that begins with an 'L 'has been hard so far. :-D
But that doesn't mean I have to deny you Mosana. I'm sorry I took so long.
But that doesn't mean I have to deny you Mosana. I'm sorry I took so long.
Forgive me?
xoxo,
Ava
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