Chapter 11: The Avatar of Efficiency
TL: Hanguk
It's more common than you'd think for a thriving organization to get rattled by factional infighting.
Frankly, the moment more than three people gather, factions are bound to form, and splitting into camps to fight it out is just human nature.
And naturally, the masters who ran the great plantations of this era knew perfectly well that their slaves were carved up into several factions.
Not only did they leave it alone despite knowing, plenty of them actively stoked it.
The more the slaves were divided and at one another's throats, the harder it was for their grievances against the master to fuse into one.
Leo had framed it as the field workers freezing out the house servants, but naturally, the story coming from the other side was a different one.
"Don't the house servants reckon they're a cut above us?"
"Is that so?"
Ben, the head driver who served as something like middle management among the field workers, watched my face warily, fidgeting and unable to settle.
When a slave was summoned alone to the master's room, he couldn't help but read it as an interrogation, so the reaction was only to be expected.
To loosen him up a little, I took out two beer glasses and set them on the desk.
"Want to talk over a drink? I've been meaning to hear some honest talk from the field anyway."
"Sir? I, uh–"
"Drink, drink. A glass or two has to go down before the honest words start coming out."
When I lifted my own glass to my lips first, Ben took the cue and, ever so carefully, raised his own, eyes still on my face.
At my smiling wave to go ahead, he slowly sipped the beer, and I tipped my glass forward to propose a toast.
"To the endless growth of the Sergent plantation."
"T-to its growth."
One glass didn't do much, so I poured him another, and only then could I feel the tension in the air ease, if only a little.
When his second glass was about half gone, I slowly spoke up.
"Do the house servants usually look down on your lot?"
"It's not quite that they look down on us, Master. But since they're the ones close to you, there are times they give off this air that they're a cut above the rest of us. They get their hands on news far faster than we do, after all, don't they? It hasn't been once or twice I've felt them lord that over us, and it sticks in the craw."
"That could well be."
In truth, the field workers, who had almost no time in contact with the master, had no choice but to learn his comings and goings and his moods secondhand from the servants up at the house.
And the house people would have made it plain, knowingly or not, that they were doing the field a favor by passing the word down, so of course it grated.
"But the house folks tell me the field, doing the harder work, sticks so tightly together that it's hard to close the gap. The way I hear it, both sides have their point, don't they?"
"That's, well, probably true. We work in different places, and the line between us is clearly drawn."
"So you, too, see the friction between field and house as coming from the fact that your positions are too far apart and you never mix?"
"Yes. For now, I'd say that's a large part of it."
"Then there's room to mend it before long. There's a regular event I've been planning. I'd like you to play along when it comes."
As Ben heard out the plan I had in mind, his face turned into a smear of wonder, shock, and anticipation.
"R-really? You truly mean to do something like that?"
"What, you think I called you all the way up to my room and poured you beer just to talk nonsense? Drums and other noisy instruments are banned, of course. Not that anyone's likely to notice, but there's always the off chance."
"I... but honestly, I don't understand it. The old master never did anything of the sort, and they say not a single plantation in Mississippi holds an event like that."
"What's there not to understand? The net profit on this month's early haul has leapt far above last year's and the year before's. I've made a lot of money, and I'm rewarding the lot of you who grew it for me, as a way of telling you to work even harder from here on. What's wrong with that?"
Ben couldn't get out a word.
"Or is this approach not to your liking? If the old way was better, I've no problem reverting to it."
"N-no! That's not what I meant, we, we love it. We truly do, it's just, there's worry going around in the field about what we'd do if you, Master, ever took this system away."
"There's exactly one circumstance under which I'd go back to the old system."
Everyone on my plantation must give me their absolute loyalty.
Loyal enough that, in a crisis, I could press them into service as a militia to protect me and my family without the slightest trouble.
"If the plantation's profits fall below what they used to be. In other words, so long as you work the way you do now, there's no reason to crawl back to the old days. Surely, Ben, you don't take your master for an idiot who'd buy himself a loss?"
"N-never! Never, sir! I swear before God, Master, you're, who was it, Solamon?"
"Solomon?"
"Yes, that wise king! Wiser and more merciful even than Solomon."
"No, Ben. When you go back, make this crystal clear to the other drivers and the hands. If you look to me for mercy, there's nothing I can do for you. And could you even live in peace if your treatment swung on my unpredictable moods? Produce results. Do that, and you'll keep living exactly as you do now, on and on."
Ben, grasping what I wanted, nodded for dear life.
Get tangled up emotionally and we both end up worn out, so let's just keep it clean and predictable on our own. That's the deal.
On any ordinary day Ben would've been too busy reading my every twitch to say a thing like that, but sure enough, a little alcohol does smooth a conversation right out.
"All right, Ben, the event's at the end of this month, so tell the drivers to give it everything. And be sure to set their minds at ease that there's no problem as long as they keep on exactly as they are."
"Yes, sir. I'll work myself to death at it."
"Don't go dying on me. If you die, who's going to earn my money? If you so much as feel poorly, you tell me, no exceptions. Understood?"
"Y-yes, sir!"
A man possessed of the firm resolve to keep his slaves running as healthy and illness-free as humanly possible, since the moment they fell sick his labor force dropped.
That's James Sergent for you.
Your master is a man without an ounce of blood or tears in him, so if anything's ailing you, come clean about it at once and get yourself treated. Got it?
*
For the slaves, the first harvest had always been the season they least wanted to face all year.
It was the time when picking clean cotton came easiest, so the masters were inevitably touchy about profits, and just as inevitably, countless whip marks bloomed across the slaves' bodies.
But this time was different.
Hardly anyone was whipped on the job anymore, and with a thorough division of labor by team, even the intensity of the work came down.
And yet profits visibly improved, and just as he'd promised, James handed down small rewards to the teams that posted the best results.
Extra food at ration time, scraps of meat, and assorted privileges of priority.
The field slaves, Ben among them, from the drivers down to the ordinary hands, every last one of them came to carry hope and unease together.
This master truly was something different.
But the world was overflowing with plantation owners who seemed kind at first and then turned on a dime.
After all, the white men of the South didn't think of them as fellow human beings.
This was the very reason Ben had snapped at Leo the other day that hoping for anything would only end in disappointment.
Even a man like that had begun to sense that this time, things might be different.
"Where's the fool who'd stop doing something that's turning a profit, eh?"
"Driver, there's no reason to doubt it, is there? They say profits went up after he changed the system, just like the Master said. So of course it's better for the Master too."
"Right. He nailed it down that we shouldn't expect a scrap of mercy from him. Said instead we'd just take rewards in proportion to the profit we bring in."
"Sounds persuasive to me."
"Me too. The quotas right now really are reasonable, and why else would the Master have us pass the word along? He gave us a clear answer that he'll keep it this way from here on, so we needn't fret."
The other drivers and hands, who'd said at first that they couldn't believe it, had already, every single one of them, swung clean around.
With everyone here, one and all, reeling off reason after reason why James's words just might be true, the mess hall's ration station turned into bedlam in no time.
Ben understood well enough why they'd all turned so logical.
It was that they wanted to believe, wasn't it.
That this reality, here and now, would carry on and on.
That their new master, James Sergent, was exactly what his words made him out to be, a man of extreme efficiency matched with real ability.
It was out of a longing not to see that hope shattered that they kept hunting for plausible reasons.
And just as he'd told Ben, James showed them the proof through action.
The last Saturday evening of October.
The plantation's largest garden was filled with a sight no one had ever laid eyes on before.
Bonfires blazed, lighting up the dark, and over them scraps of meat sizzled, giving off a mouthwatering smell.
On the long tables, fresh-baked bread, warm stew, and beer in enormous casks were lined up in a long row.
Ben and everyone else gaped at the sight before them.
They'd been told, but the master really was laying on a spread like this.
The young new master, sure enough, was not a man to say one thing and do another.
It wasn't as though the South had no such custom at all, like the "Frolic", which married labor to celebration, or year-end events that doled out special food.
But a full-blown "company dinner", a gathering held purely to eat and drink, was without precedent.
"I-is this really for us to eat?"
"I know, right?"
The meat, the stew, the bread were mostly cobbled together from leftover ingredients, but even so, measured against what they usually ate, this was as good as a feast.
In the moment when they were all just watching one another, James Sergent stepped out onto the mansion's veranda and, with every eye on him, began to speak.
"Everyone, attention on me. As you know, the plantation's profit margin through October ran fifteen percent above the same period last year. I've made a great deal of money, and to the lot of you who grew my assets, I intend to give the small reward I promised, as a sign that I expect you to work even harder from here on."
His voice, as ever, was drained of feeling and weighed nothing but reason and efficiency, yet it was sweeter to the ear than any voice out of heaven.
"From now on, this gathering will be called the 'Sergent Plantation Regular Company Dinner'. If, as today, the monthly profit margin or the task completion rate clears its stretch target, then on the last Saturday evening of next month, and the last Saturday of the month after that, you will always be able to have a gathering like this."
"Whoa..."
"E-every month?"
A murmur spread out like a wave.
This was no one-off event.
At a truth they'd hardly dared believe, hope and excitement lit every face.
James savored their reaction at his leisure, then went on.
"And all of this food was prepared by the house servants who work up at the mansion. I'm told that when they heard they could eat and drink alongside you today, they put more care into it than usual, working to coax out even a little more flavor."
The instant those words landed, Ben remembered James's instructions.
And before anyone else, he clapped his hands the hardest and let out a cheer.
"A hand for our brothers and sisters! Whoooo!"
"Thank you! Thank you!"
"Thank you, truly! We'll eat well!"
At Ben's lead, the other field workers came to their senses and joined in, clapping and shouting.
Perhaps overcome with guilt at the subtle distance they'd kept, some had tears welling in their eyes.
The house slaves, getting the biggest cheer of their lives, scratched their heads and flushed, bashful as they were.
As the mood swelled to its peak, James, with a satisfied smile, raised a hand and quieted everyone.
"Good mood in the air. Then I'll hand out one more surprise commendation."
What? That wasn't all of it?
This was something even Ben hadn't been told, so he gazed blankly up at the second-floor veranda.
"To the team that posts the highest task completion rate in a month with a company dinner, I'll grant the privilege of drinking real beer, with no limit, instead of the watered-down, half-strength stuff."
"Oooh!"
"This month's top team is... Driver Henry's Team Two! Step forward!"
"What? R-really?"
"Driver Henry? That's our team! Wahhhhhh!"
"I, I'm drinking real beer for the first time in my life! This isn't a dream, right?"
Henry and his teammates threw their arms around one another and screamed like men who'd been handed the whole world.
That envious gasps and applause poured in from every side hardly needs saying.
At a jerk of James's chin, Leo, who'd been waiting on the ground floor, went over to them, clapped them on the shoulder, and handed over the ration tickets good for unlimited real beer.
"Congratulations. Your hard work paid off."
"Ahh, thank you. Thank you."
"Leo, I, I'm sorry I didn't believe you the other day. No, back then I just didn't know any better."
"That's understandable. We just get along from here on, right?"
A personal attendant who served the master and a work-gang driver, sharing a warm embrace and forging a friendship?
Not long ago, if anyone had said such a day would come, they'd have been told the heatstroke had cooked their brains.
James watched at his leisure as the top team took their ration tickets, then raised his voice.
"You all saw that, I trust? As you know, the teams change every month, so no one can hoard this glory for himself. Take that envy and make it your fuel to work harder next month."
This monthly rotation alone showed that their master was the very crystallization of rationality.
If the rankings hardened into place, the workers' drive would flag, so wasn't he keeping the members shuffled and giving anyone a shot at first place?
"Of course, you're free to get drunk, but bear in mind, anyone who gets drunk and stirs up trouble is barred from next month's company dinner."
Henry, who'd been snickering that he'd drink himself blind, gulped and snapped upright.
A smile spread across every face at the comical sight. And James, last of all, ran his eyes over the food crowding the tables and settled into the chair set out for him on the veranda.
"Too much talk with food sitting right in front of us. I hereby declare the Sergent Plantation's first regular company dinner open! Enjoy yourselves to the fullest, shake off this month's fatigue, and post the same results again next month!"
"Wahhhhhhh!"
"Long live the Master!"
A company-dinner culture they were tasting for the first time in their lives.
Everyone roared at once and charged at the food, laid out buffet-style instead of doled out as rations.
They piled meat and bread onto their plates to their hearts' content, clinked their beer cups, laughed, and made merry.
The quality of the food was wretched and the beer was the cheap, watered-down kind, but what did any of that matter?
"All right, all right, attention! No company dinner is complete without drink, song, and dance. If anyone's got confidence in his singing, belt one out. Whoever sings best earns the right to a glass of this whiskey."
"Oooh! Me! Me! I'll sing!"
"You, sing? You aim to foul the Master's ears! Me, I sing far better than him!"
"No, sir! Master! Those bastards are all a pack of liars! Listen to my song, I beg you!"
James didn't come down into the garden himself, but he sat on the veranda overseeing them, now and then having someone sing and handing prizes down.
"I once was lo-o-ost~~ but~ now~ saved a wretch like me-e-e~"
"Hah, would you look at this one? Playing with the melody like it's nothing. That's soul, alive and kicking. What's your name again? Peter? Today's whiskey is yours."
"Thank you, sir! I, Peter, am about to taste my long-awaited first whis– pffwahh! Cough! Cough! Wh-what is this, what kind of drink...?"
"Hahaha! Drink whiskey like it's beer and that's exactly what happens. It's strong stuff, so take it slow."
Leo came up beside Ben, who was watching the scene in a daze.
"Well? Just like I said, wasn't it?"
"Yeah. You were right. And I was a fool with no eye for people."
"A fool, come now. You just didn't know, that's all."
"True. But now I know. So I won't doubt you again, either."
Having seen this much, there could hardly be any choice left but to believe.
From that day on, Ben and the field drivers resolved to take in whatever information Leo brought them without a shred of doubt.
Little by little, but surely.
Without their even realizing it, they were turning into not the Sergent family's slaves, but James's followers.
*****
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