Chapter 2: Morning in Mississippi
TL: Hanguk
My head was throbbing.
Not so much because I actually had a headache, but because my brain couldn't keep up with this ridiculous reality.
As I sat there staring blankly at the calendar, the young Black man I presumed to be a slave asked cautiously,
"Is something wrong with the calendar, Master? Shall I swap it out for a different one?"
"No, I mean, the date, it's right, isn't it?"
"Sir? It's May 21st, yes. Weren't you going to plan the New York trip together with Lady Kate?"
"Kate?"
Once again, that sensation, foreign and familiar all at once, swept through my whole body.
And at the same time, as if something dormant were waking up, memories that weren't mine came flooding into my brain.
It wasn't so much that they were being overwritten onto me, more that memories I'd forgotten suddenly came rushing back all at once.
The way hot water gets poured over a teabag of compressed leaves, the memories of "James Sergent" dissolved into the self that was "me."
Recalling twenty years of life in the space of barely a few seconds left my whole body trembling, cold sweat running down my skin.
James Sergent.
Born in 1836, he had, just last year, jointly inherited well over several hundred slaves alongside his older sister Kate, two years his senior, when their father passed away.
On top of that, he'd purchased the plantation and slaves of his uncle, Francis Sergent, swelling the number of slaves James commanded to nearly five hundred.
Combined with his sister's holdings, the slave count alone approached a thousand, so it would be no exaggeration to call him one of the lords of a slave kingdom representing the entire state of Mississippi.
In Mississippi itself, just about the only individual who owned more slaves than James was Stephen Duncan, and across the whole South you could probably count them on ten or so fingers.
In other words, he was a fearsome slave king ranking in the top 0.003 percent or so of the nineteenth-century American South.
"Aaagh, tsss."
"Um, Master? Lady Kate will be here soon, so shouldn't we get you ready?"
"Ready?"
"Yes. I'll trim your beard and dress you."
Hahh, right. The memory's definitely there.
For Kim Hyunwoo, a twenty-first-century man, maybe not, but for James Sergent, who had several hundred slaves under him, this was an utterly ordinary daily routine.
The name of this fellow who attended to me personally came back naturally too.
Leo, was it.
An uncommon name for a slave, but, as plantation owners tended to do, it was given deliberately to stand out.
I sat down to receive Leo's attentions and quietly collected my thoughts.
No matter how I looked at it, this wasn't a dream but reality, and I had become James Sergent, the master of a great plantation in 1856 Mississippi.
A man who owned five hundred slaves might not match the annual income of an English duke, but he was at a level that could slap the average nobleman silly.
Of course, his social standing fell well short of that, but there was no denying I'd been born with one hell of a silver spoon in my mouth.
But naturally, I wasn't all that thrilled.
This is bullshit. I said I wanted to live a life on my own terms, not that I wanted to live like the founder of some self-reliance ideology, for crying out loud! [TL Note: A pun in the original. The Korean for "living life on one's own terms" (주체적인 삶) shares the word 주체 ("agency/self-determination") with 주체사상, the "Juche" self-reliance ideology associated with North Korea.]
Whoever dumped me here was no god. He had to be a swindler, like one of those mountain-spirit con men.
Still, isn't it a good thing for a dirt-poor modern guy to become a magnate with hundreds of slaves?
If I'd become a nobleman of comparable wealth instead, I'd have done a handstand and offered up a prayer of thanks to the heavens.
But a slaveholder? In 1856, no less?
It's not that I'm twisted by nature; there's a solid reason I can't help being so sensitive about the year.
Believe it or not, I'm someone who'd spent my life building up general knowledge ever since childhood, studying in spare moments even after joining a major corporation.
I knew perfectly well that in the nineteenth century the United States split itself into two over the question of whether slavery would survive, and fought a civil war.
The War Between the States, the great conflict also famous under the name "Civil War."
If my memory was right, this war, the last war in Anglo-America and the one that killed more Americans than any in history, broke out in the year 1861.
Right. No more, no less, exactly five years from now.
At this point, I have to wonder whether that quack of a fake mountain-spirit deliberately reincarnated me out of pure malice.
The one silver lining in all this misfortune was that I knew this worst-case future and had at least a minimum of time to prepare for it.
Let's think.
There's definitely a way out of this worst-case future somewhere.
For starters,
"Master, I'm finished."
While I'd been lost in thought for a moment, Leo had neatly trimmed my beard and sideburns and stepped back a pace.
Hm, taking a closer look, he's pretty good-looking, manly enough.
With this kind of wealth and these looks, in the South he'd be a top-tier bachelor with marriage proposals lined up out the door.
For all the good it'll do, since later on he'd be immortalized as a wicked plantation owner who oppressed his Black slaves.
"Yeah, clean work. Thanks."
"Sir?"
When I took my eyes off the mirror and said thanks out of habit, Leo's eyes went as wide as saucers.
And then.
Thud.
"Master! If I've done something wrong, please, scold me severely! I beg you! Please! Anything but selling me off somewhere else!"
"Huh? Uh, uh?"
"O-one more chance! Please give me just one more chance! If you tell me what I did wrong, I, Leo, will never disappoint you again. It's me, Leo. The loyal slave you named yourself."
What is he going on about?
I'm pretty sure I just said thanks, so why is he reacting like I told him I'd kill him?
"Hold on. Calm down a little, why are you suddenly acting like this?"
"W-well, you just said you'd been grateful, isn't that you saying my days in this house are over?"
"No, no, no, how on earth do you interpret it that way?"
My words, brimming with disbelief, stopped at a memory that suddenly surfaced.
In the old days, offering a small word of thanks to a slave you were close to wouldn't have been so strange.
But right now, the conflict between South and North over slavery was racing toward its breaking point.
To preserve the existing order, the South was guarding the slavery system more thoroughly than ever, oppressing its Black slaves and treating them as tools.
Because if Black people were human, then the Southerners became villains keeping fellow humans as slaves, and the legitimacy of slavery would be shaken to its core.
So slaveholders had to treat their slaves strictly as tools, and must never show any sign of treating them as people.
Naturally, James Sergent had ridden this same current, dealing harshly with his slaves and beating them down like rats over the slightest mistake.
So when a man like that suddenly said thanks, there was no other way to react but like this.
'Hahh, fuck, this really is a crazy place.'
Having one reflexive word of thanks turn into this kind of groveling, I had no idea what to say to him.
In the end, only after offering an explanation that wasn't really an explanation, that the words had slipped out unconsciously while I was thinking about what to say to my sister Kate, was I able to calm Leo down.
The American South of 1856, where I'd opened my eyes.
The atmosphere on a cotton plantation in Mississippi was this cozy and this fucked up.
***
"Why, James. You came down a little late today, didn't you?"
"Slept in a bit."
By the time I came down to the first floor, having wasted time calming Leo, the eldest daughter of the Sergent family, two years my senior,
Kate Sergent, was sipping her tea elegantly.
To be precise, she was now a married woman who ought to be called Kate Miner rather than Kate Sergent.
"Then come over here and sit. I've been away a while, but this house puts me at ease every time I come back. I do love it."
"Glad to hear it."
Kate had married, just last year, the second son of the Miner family, who held vast plantations in Louisiana and Mississippi.
If my memory was right, John Miner, who would be my brother-in-law, was a peculiar Southerner, very much the gentleman and yet friendly toward the North.
But perhaps because of that, he wasn't actually that well regarded in the South, and Kate too tended to keep a slight distance from her husband when it came to public affairs.
The very reason she'd come here alone was probably something along those lines.
"By the way, James, did you give any thought to what I said last time?"
"Hm? What did you say again?"
"Honestly, this boy lets everything his sister says go in one ear and out the other. I said, before we head up to New York this time, why don't we stop by Bloomington briefly and show our faces at the gathering?"
"Ah, right. It's coming back to me."
James Sergent was scheduled to travel to New York with his sister Kate to take over the enormous fortune of yet another uncle there.
His uncle, Jacob Sergent, was in poor health and had left a will bequeathing his vast estate to me, his nephew.
If I took over the fortune my uncle left as well, wouldn't the number of slaves under me run to over seven hundred?
A Southerner with this kind of fortune at the age of twenty was rare, so like it or not, I was bound to stand out.
The Democratic Party, which championed slavery, kept asking for my patronage, and other slaveholders kept urging me to stand with them and raise my voice.
So far I'd gotten by with "I've only just inherited my fortune, I'm a little baby, I don't know anything, boo-hoo-hoo," but I couldn't keep wriggling out of it forever.
The reason Kate had argued for attending the gathering this time was precisely that we couldn't go on ignoring the requests aimed at our family.
"As you know, that's the day the Republican Party holds its founding event in Bloomington. The local slaveholders and pro-slavery figures are supposed to hold a separate meeting too, so just showing your face there should keep things settled for a while."
"Uh..."
So she's telling me to go to a slavery's-the-best, never-give-up-slavery, slavery-rules kind of event and shake hands with the attendees.
This is insane, just insane.
They say when in Rome do as the Romans do, but in this era this South is the only place among the Western nations still holding on to slavery.
Even by the universal ethical standards of this very age, it's plainly this side that's doing something barbaric, that's what I'm saying.
I'd rather not get tangled up with anyone in the South if I could help it, but given my social position, that was apparently impossible.
"It'd be a big deal if I didn't go, right?"
"To be honest, it gives me a headache too. There's already talk going around that my husband is too friendly toward the North. If you and I just sit still on top of that, our family might get the wrong idea pinned on us, that we've leaned toward the North."
It was sound reasoning, no room for argument.
As a family that owned among the largest numbers of slaves in the South, the Sergent family was in a position where it had to champion slavery.
The moment we obliviously pulled our foot out, we'd become traitors to the entire South, the first to be beaten down and ruined.
But if I went around shouting my undying support for slavery, my name would be immortalized in history forever, this is going to drive me out of my mind, seriously.
"So we just go, say hello, hand over a bit of money, and then we leave because we're busy and have to get to New York, that's it?"
"Right. Actually, they say a room's already been booked at the Pike House, the biggest hotel in Bloomington. Let's stay there exactly one day and just head on to New York. Even so, we might end up having to meet not just Democrats but Republican figures too, so it's probably best to be prepared. There's no doubt we'll get entangled one way or another."
"Republicans, Republicans, huh. The Republicans would definitely be the ones fiercely opposed to slavery."
In the twenty-first century they're the mainstream party leading American politics, but right now they're nothing more than a fledgling party just getting founded.
Hm? But the Republican Party of this period would surely have...
"They're a party built by people opposed to slavery banding tightly together in the first place. You can size up exactly who'll be there just from the attendees, can't you? John Palmer, William Bissell, and, ah, that man was there too. The one who keeps running every time even though he's lost election after election except for just once."
Kate let out a soft chuckle, as if she found it baffling, and spoke that name.
"Abraham Lincoln."
*****
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