XVIII

For someone who had been such a vocal proponent of secession, Drake Shoney went to extraordinary lengths to avoid actually fighting for it. When the first conscription act was passed, he placed an entreaty in the paper to hire a substitute. He could scarcely afford one. Thankfully, Linus Poteat was broke after the debacle of the Gar and Drake hired him at a discount in forbearance of his gambling debts. Later, when the hiring of substitutes was abolished, the Confederate government left an exemption from conscription for any white male who owned twenty or more slaves. So Drake went even further into debt and purchased two slaves bringing his total to twenty.

Esmerelda had her hands full as the overseer of Gloaming Birch. Drake seemed to have very little interest in the running of his plantation. He left almost all day-to-day management to her. She did well enough. She learned her trade at Davis Bend under the legendary Ben Montgomery, the slave who managed the Hurricane plantation and its five-thousand acres. Each year she sold the cotton harvest, she brought in tidy profits for her master. So she was frustrated that Gloaming Birch still did not prosper, but it was only a point of personal pride. Drake was actually a generous if flippant master. He was munificent everywhere with his finances. Whatever she needed to improve the living conditions of the estate's slaves, he showed a dismissive largesse. It was not out of benignity, for Esmerelda had long come to the realization that Drake Shoney was just an a**hole.

Fine! Fine! Elzey. You're just about getting on my goddam nerves now. Go and get you and your darky friends instruments then. I don't give a damn. Besides, I'm tired of hearing y'all beating those gourds and s**t in my backyard. You sound like a bunch of mooks out there. And when you get back from town bring me some tobacco. Oh, and if they got some orange juice I need some for my cocktails. And you can use the change to buy you and your darky pals some gum. Just get yer s**t done before you go. Now go on. Get out of here. And don't let me forget to sign your negro papers before you go! 

So she bought instruments and the slaves of Gloaming Birch learned to pick tunes and sing ditties and put their slave spirituals on the strings. With so many slaves working so few acres they had plenty of time on their hands. On cool autumn evenings, they'd play music around the fire like Jimmy Get Your Hoe Cake Done and Rose of Alabama.  Drake was often surrounded by a milieu of bogtrotters, mudsills and low downers he held in his social thrall. They'd sit on Drake's porch and listen to the music and get roaring drunk into the night playing cards and talking about hunting.

Meanwhile Gloaming Birch was in dire financial straits. Drake searched the papers for a Southern victory that would remove the yolk of his Northern creditors. When the Yankees occupied Athens in the Spring of '62, he never went into town.  He grew reclusive and spent more time hunting and fishing and neglecting the estate.  When the Greeks started selling cotton up North during the occupation, he told Esmerelda to change the crop over to corn. He understood he could make more in Confederate dollars selling corn, but did not understand that inflation rendered higher revenues in that currency meaningless.  

None of this concerned Esmerelda. With the war she knew slavery was on its way out.  She could have fled Drake long ago, but she stayed with him.  Besides, the corn he now grew made it even easier to smuggle fugitive slaves through his fields.  She had been running them under Drake's nose for years.