Frado's Return from the War

©by Jackson Ragsdale (This is an excerpt from Jack's Civil War novel "Stough Beers has no Father"

“…every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own.” Mary Boykin Chestnut

It was almost dark on a chilly March afternoon when a nearly frozen man stumbled up the road toward Miss Adelaide Delafosse’s boarding house. He might have been war-injured but Belltown was much too far from military action. An injured soldier returning home? Not likely, for this man was black—black indeed, notwithstanding the light color of his skin. He came around the side of the house and laboriously climbed the stairs to the back porch and knocked at the door. Unexpected at that quarter as day turned into night, he immediately possessed the attention of the household. Adelaide and Dosie took him by the arm, supporting him inside to a chair in the kitchen. Their reception was warm but full of concern. “Frado!, Frado!” they called out nervously. They sat him down to discover the source of his suffering.

“Major Randolph is dead,” he said, still breathless. “He died months ago. I brought his sword but the white men snatched it from me the first time I was stopped. I was crossed at every town. A black man cain’t walk the roads in Georgia.”

Frado had gone off to war not as a soldier; but as Major Randolph Beers’ personal servant. His black family and the Major’s white family—except for themselves—were wiped out in the epidemic of 1853 when Frado was only twelve years old. The major had raised the boy with affection and it was generally understood in Belltown that he was Frado’s father. The boy had never lived among slaves. Due to the close friendship between Major Beers and Major Delafosse, Frado’s only childhood companions had been Adelaide and Dosie. His situation was not unique, nor was that of the two girls who were well informed of their origins. In the South it was impossible for a black woman to refuse ANY demand made upon her by her owner.

After Major Delafosse’s death in 1858, when both Adelaide and Dosie turned nineteen, to make a living, they opened Miss Addie’s boarding house. Among their first guests were the Byron Charlesworths, an English couple traveling with their daughter Cecilia. Mr. Charlesworth was an antiquarian who had come to visit the sites of Georgia’s Cherokee villages, their burying grounds and such artifacts as had been discovered. In their month’s stay, Adelaide, Dosie and Miss Cecilia had bonded in a beautiful friendship even as she and her mother shared an intense curiosity about their racially divergent hosts, who were enmeshed in such an intimately compatible relationship.

When the time for their departure came, Miss Cecilia told her American friends “I do so hate leaving. I’m sick of traveling. You are the first friends my age I’ve met on this whole trip, and I’ve come to love you both. I wish I could stay here with you.”

In sentimental gratitude for a happy friendship, Miss Cecilia lavished gifts on her hosts. Among them was a copy of Fanny Kemble’s Journal in which the English actress spoke at length of slavery in the years of her residence in Georgia. Adelaide and Dosie spent many hours going over the tales Miss Kemble told of forced sex between slaves and masters. In grim irony they bantered and laughed à propos their own origins.

"Don’t put on airs with me,” said Dosie to Adelaide in mocking jest. “I am also Miss Delafosse though nobody bothers to call me by that name. You are a little whiter than I, but my skin is prettier,” she declared. “Even so,” Addie replied at her most indelicate, “we are both nothing more than a moment of pleasure for the handsome Mr. León Delafosse,” pronouncing their father’s name in sardonic seriousness.

The girls’ origins were little different from that of Renty, of whom Miss Kemble wrote: “Poor Renty had Mr. King’s features because he had "borrowed" slave Betty,” Renty's mother.

The Negro’s acceptance of slavery, and its diabolical consequences has to be viewed from the prospective of his being captured in violence in Africa, imprisoned and kept on board ship for months under unspeakable conditions. Chained, beaten and humiliated, he saw his ill or uncooperative companions thrown overboard. Fortunate enough to have survived a voyage on which one third usually died, he arrived to be sold and taken away in chains. Forced under the whip to work unbearable hours under appalling conditions, he was destined to live the rest of his life in a windowless hovel, despised, and without the human comfort of those who controlled his life.

In Fanny Kemble’s six thousand word letter to the Times rebutting the London newspaper’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Miss Kemble told of a white overseer who compelled the wife of a “most excellent and exemplary” slave to live with him. She also describes how the wife of another overseer, in a jealous rage at her own husband’s conduct, had three of his slave forced-sex partners flogged. In her depiction of life on a plantation Miss Kemble was not kind. She described the state of affairs as filled with “gross sensuality, brutal ignorance, and despotic cruelty.” She found the Times article totally at odds with the true conditions of slaves in Georgia her own experience had revealed.

As Frado sat in his chair, the two females ministered to his ills. Food and hot drinks were served him; unguents were applied to his bruises and scratches and a pan of hot water was placed by his chair for his sore feet. All the while he was plied with questions. He told how his owner, Major Randolph Beers, had fought a short battle with a small Yankee force at Griswoldville, Georgia, near Macon. With more than three thousand raw recruits, his commander, Georgia militia Brigadier General Pleasant J. Phillips charged a force of one thousand of Sherman’s seasoned veterans armed with the newly issued, much-improved Spencer repeating rifle.

“It was a slaughter,” Frado said of the fifteen year old farm boys and graybeards, who charged the smaller Yankee force under General Walcutt. “It happened in an open field on a sunny afternoon last fall. The war for those boys of tender age lasted only an hour,” he recalled of that ghastly experience.

The date was November 22, 1864. Historical documents state that Georgia militia General Phillips’ orders were not to challenge any Union force he met, but the temptation to gain a victory off easy prey was too enticing for the inexperienced commander. The ugly rumor among grieving wives and mothers was that the general had gone into battle under the influence of alcohol.

That was the beginning of Frado’s troubles. He took the Major’s sword from his still warm body but in the first town, whites he met accused him of robbing a battlefield, abused him severely and took the sword. He never saw it again. It had cost him months to return to Belltown and he was fortunate, just to have escaped with his life.