Franklin's Backstory: A Where Fortune Lies Novelette

A Precocious Slave Child

Franklin was born a black slave to black slave parents on a plantation in South Carolina in August the year of 1832. The master of the plantation, Stephen Purdy, was a widower who ran the plantation with help of his two older sons, Will and Edgar, and the overseer Joseph Maclay. A joke that would be resurrected every year or so was that his slaves were 'Purdy' boys and girls.' The Purdy clan wasn't noted for its humor so this pun would eventually meet an icy reception when a wag presented it to them as an original play on words. No, the Purdy men took themselves and the world seriously. They didn't bother with humor and weren't much in the way of congenial in contrast to their plantation owner neighbors who were developing congeniality and other aspects of leisurely living into an art. The Purdies were even too serious to play the role of sporting men. They did, however, possess a firm, lucid grasp of a few ideas.

Franklin's parents were field workers, not house slaves. They, with sixty other of Master Purdy's 'chattel,' cultivated rice and indigo on the swampy soils which surrounded the plantation. Laboring six days a week from an hour before sunrise to an hour after sunset with the tedious sowing, weeding, reaping, threshing, flailing, milling, they raised the sober Purdy and his four sons into the class of landed gentry. The land wasn't as fertile as the land a few miles down the river. Yet the Purdies managed to harvest fourteen to fifteen bushels an acre while their neighbors produced ten to twelve.

"Darky sweat and darky blood done manure dis soil," Franklin's laconic father once said.

It was no wonder that when Master Purdy bought a new carriage, a prize quarter horse or Holstein bull to breed, or acquired something else very fine his slaves felt a measure of pride and took a vicarious pleasure in beholding it.

Mr. Purdy flattered himself as a progressive man and a scientific planter. Thomas Jefferson as a scientific planter was his model; and in the scientific spirit Purdy culled what seemed to be the best ideas from journals and books and applied them to his farm. In his pursuit of efficiency in agronomy he, of course, didn't neglect the labor force. Stephen was fond of saying, "A darky will always get the work done. The question is what he uses up in time and food and broken tools before he gets it done."

Master Purdy had studied the techniques of both hard slave drivers and more liberal taskmasters. The very cruel often had their profits eaten up by the cost of replacement of their slaves or in diminished work capacity. In a fit of pique he had seen owners destroy thousands of dollars of work capacity in a healthy young slave. On the other hand, the easy-going master had easygoing slaves and although those plantations were happier, the slide towards bankruptcy seemed inevitable. It was even bad for the slave because assets were inevitably sold, which meant husbands were split from wives and children from parents. In his experience, a husband who was separated from a wife or a mother from her children never became as good producers as they had been previously, although he thought the mistake came earlier in letting them form familial attachment in the first place.

Master Purdy came to believe that a measured disciplinary approach was best. "I hardly use the whip," he'd say. "But when I do no nigger comes out of it whole. Some of them can be more valuable as an example as to what can happen to a slacker than they ever were as a worker."

Like other planters of a modern bent, Master Purdy thought a dormitory more sensible than cabins for individual families. The more bodies, the more heat and less the need for blankets, wood burning stoves, clothing, and ultimately food. He also knew that once slaves started families their allegiance became divided between their kin and the plantation. The slaves would devote all of their deviousness and extra energy to further the condition of their family rather than improving his plantation. He adhered to this rule with few exceptions.