Read Triangular Road: A Memoir for Free Online

read or consulted, given the exhumed dust that flew up from their pages once they were opened. Early Southern History was clearly not a popular subject at the university. It proved otherwise for me. Long after the semester began, and with my classes underway, I continued my private crash course in southern history, finally able to redress the truncated, once-over-lightly, deliberately sanitized version of the antebellum South that had been standard in the textbooks of my day in high school and even college.

    I had never, for example, come across so much as a word in any of those pages about the “scrambles” held along the tidal James.
    At long last making up for having been educationally shortchanged!
    One evening, digging in the stacks, I unearthed the despised Edict of 1808:
     
     
    Be it enacted, by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that from and after the 1st day of January, 1808, it shall not be lawful to import into the United States from any of the kingdoms of Africa any Negro with the intent to be sold or to be held to service or labor . . .
     
     
    The furor this caused. The trade to be halted when there was still so much work to be done! Work that needed “the strength and the sinews of the African world!” as one English wag at the time put it. And with so much money still to be
made buying and selling chattel labor! Where there’s a will, there’s, inevitably, the proverbial way, so that the 1808 Edict notwithstanding, a way was quickly found to maintain the supply and to add to it even. The Tidewater big houses: the Shirley Plantation, the Sherwood Forest Plantation, the Flowerdew Hundred Plantation, Monticello, Mount Vernon, the Swan’s Point Plantation et al. began the purposeful breeding and sale of homegrown chattel. The enterprise proved so successful that, by the mid-1800s, there was a surplus of a quarter million chattel labor and more. This posed yet another problem. Again, it was easily solved. The surplus was simply, periodically, herded by cart into Richmond Towne, where it was quickly sold in the Bottom; then, as quickly, packed into the cattle cars of the CSX Railroad and into the holds of the ships at the Manchester Docks to be railroaded and shipped due south, deep south: New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta.
    The river and the railroad provided the final solution.

    “ P aule! Paule! The plantations! Lee’s taking me to see the plantations! I can’t wait!”
    A spring day in the late 1980s. It’s about nine o’clock in the morning and my editor at the time, barefoot and in her nightgown, is at the top of the stairs in the house in Richmond I’ve just entered. There, she’s performing an excited little jig while gleefully clapping her hands. She’s come down from New York to visit me as well as Lee Smith, the white southern writer who’s also one of her authors, and Lee, with whom she is staying, is taking her to visit the Tidewater plantations, a tourist favorite. Unaware of their plans, I had dropped by to leave off a section of the novel I’m presently working on, only to be met by my normally poised, fifty-year-old editor, a quintessential New York type, suddenly behaving like a five-year-old who’s just been promised a trip to Disneyland.
    For a moment I stand there nonplussed, taking in her cute little dance; then, it’s all I can do not to vault up the stairs, grab her by the arm and march her, barefoot and in her nightgown, over to
the campus library and there, treating her as if she’s even younger than five, force-feed her the history in the dusty texts.
    Shortchanged! Although my editor has been impeccably educated (the New England Sister Colleges, the Ivy League graduate schools, etc.), it appears that, like me, she was shortchanged in certain aspects of the country’s history and in need of a crash course similar to mine.
    Equally appalling is the fact that my editor is Jewish. How, I wonder, would