Chapter One — Green Timber
He came up the river in the last week of February, 1820, on a flatboat carrying eleven hogsheads of sugar and a load of cypress that had been cut the wrong month and would give somebody trouble in about four years, and Samuel — who was nineteen, and had been sold twice, and had been bought this time for his hands specifically — spent most of two days looking at that cypress and not at the country going by.
That is the first thing to know about him and it stayed true for twenty-one years.
He had been trained in Charleston from the age of eight by a Scot named Dunmore who built stairs and interior joinery for the merchant houses on Meeting Street and who owned four men, of whom Samuel was the youngest and the last, and who taught him in the only way that trade has ever been taught, which is by ruining a great deal of expensive material in front of somebody who is willing to explain why. Dunmore was not a kind man. He was something considerably more useful, which was a good one at the work who could not tolerate a thing being done badly in his sight regardless of who was doing it, and by the time Samuel was sixteen he could cut a dovetail that Dunmore would look at for four seconds and put down without saying anything, which was the highest form of praise available in that shop and everybody in it understood the exchange rate.
Dunmore died in 1819 owing money to three people and the estate was settled the way estates were settled.
Samuel was bought at that settlement by an agent acting for a man in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, whom he had never heard of, for eleven hundred dollars, which was better than twice the ordinary figure for a man of nineteen and which Samuel found out about because the agent said it out loud in his hearing, to another white man, in the tone of somebody justifying an expense.
He thought about that eleven hundred dollars for the whole of the river.
He was not flattered by it and he was not frightened by it. What he did with it, sitting on a flatboat with his back against a hogshead, was arithmetic — because a man bought for eleven hundred dollars on account of his hands is a man whose hands are going to be used, and a man whose hands are going to be used is a man who is going to be in a shop rather than a field, and a man in a shop can sometimes be hired out, and a man who is hired out can sometimes keep a portion, and Samuel had known two men in Charleston who had bought themselves that way and had watched both of them do it and had asked both of them a great many questions.
Twenty-two years at the outside, he made it. He was nineteen and he thought twenty-two years was a long time and also that it was a number, which is more than most people in his position have.
He was wrong by one year, and not in the direction he expected.
The place was called Crow’s Rest, which was a joke of some kind that nobody ever explained to him, and it sat four miles back from the river on ground that rose about forty feet over the course of a mile and was therefore, in that parish, considered a hill.
There was a house on it and the house was not finished.
That was the first thing Samuel saw and it was the thing he was there for. It had been put up over the previous three years — brick below, frame above, two full stories and an attic, with a gallery running the length of the south front and eleven bays of windows in it — and it was weathered in and roofed and it was, on the inside, nothing at all. Rough studs. Subfloor. Not a stick of trim anywhere, not a stair beyond a temporary run of planks, not a door hung in any of the openings, not a mantel, not a chair rail, not a length of moulding in the entire building.
The man who had framed it had been a house carpenter and a good one and had gone back to Natchez in the autumn of 1819, and everything from the plaster inward was waiting.
Samuel stood in the middle of what was going to be a hall and turned around slowly with his hat in his hands, and what happened in him in that minute is the reason this account exists, and it was not despair and it was not resentment.
It was the thing that happens to a person who is shown more work than they have ever been shown at one time and who is good at that work.
He was there eleven days before he met the man who owned him.
Nobody was in a hurry about it. He was given a place to sleep in the second of four cabins that stood eighty yards northeast of the house, and he was walked around the property by a man named Absalom who was fifty and had been at Crow’s Rest since it was bought, and he was shown the timber.
The timber is what settled it.
There was a barn on that place with better than four thousand board feet in it, stickered properly, cypress and pine and a quantity of black walnut, and there was a second building that had been put up for no purpose but this and that had in it something Samuel had seen perhaps three times in his life at that volume: Cuban mahogany, come up through New Orleans, in boards up to twenty-eight inches wide.
He put his hand on the top board of the mahogany stack.
“How long’s it been in here?”
“Come in two year ago,” Absalom said. “Ain’t nobody touched it.”
Samuel got a thumbnail into the end grain of the top board and then, when Absalom did not object, worked a board out from about a third of the way down the stack and stood it up on end and sighted along it and turned it over.
It was, by any measure available in Louisiana in 1820, magnificent stock.
Quartersawn, most of it. Dense enough that the board he was holding wanted both hands and had a heft to it that a man who works wood recognizes the way a man who works horses recognizes a good one across a field. There was figure in it — not the loud kind that people who do not know anything get excited about, but a fine even ripple through about a third of the boards that would come up under oil in a way you could not photograph and could not describe and could not stop looking at.
Samuel stood in that shed for a long time.
He was nineteen years old and he had been sold twice and put on a flatboat and moved eight hundred miles from the only city he had ever known, and he stood in a shed in West Feliciana Parish with his hand flat on a stack of mahogany and understood — with a clarity that never afterward left him and that he was never afterward able to entirely forgive himself for — that he was glad.
Not glad to be there. He wanted that distinction and he made it, out loud, once, in 1838, to somebody who did not understand it.
He was glad about the material.
That is the whole of the man and it is the whole of the trouble, and if a person cannot hold both of those facts at the same time then they will not be able to follow anything that happens in this house over the next twenty-one years.
Samuel put the board back in the stack exactly where he had taken it from, which took him about four minutes and which Absalom watched him do without comment and remembered for the rest of his life.
Then he went out and looked at the cypress that had come up on the flatboat with him, and found that it had been cut in the wrong month by somebody who did not care, and told Absalom so, and asked who he should tell.
“You can tell Master Crow,” Absalom said. “He’ll want to hear it.”
Samuel looked at him.
“He’ll *want* to hear it?”
“He’ll want to hear it,” Absalom said, and did not say anything else, and it was eleven years before Samuel understood the way the man had said it.
Chapter Two — A Good Client
Ambrose Crow — and the coincidence of the given name is a coincidence, and it is noted here only because two families in this account carry it and they are not connected — was forty-four years old in 1820 and had made his money in a way that was not agricultural and was not discussed.
He had come into West Feliciana in 1816 with a considerable amount of capital and no family and had bought eighteen hundred acres and a hundred and some people over the following two years, and had put in cotton, and had done well at it in the way that a man does well who arrives with capital in a good decade and does not do anything especially clever. He was not a planter by temperament and everybody in that parish knew it and said so at dinner, generally with the word *fastidious* somewhere in the sentence.
He came out to the shed on the twelfth day.
Samuel had been told an hour beforehand and had spent the hour doing what he had been doing all week, which was sorting the mahogany into three piles by figure, and he was up to his forearms in it and had sawdust in his eyebrows when a man in a good coat came in out of the light and stood in the doorway.
“Don’t stop,” Crow said.
Samuel stopped anyway, because a man does, and Crow made a small impatient gesture and came the rest of the way in and looked at the three piles.
“You’ve sorted it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“By what?”
And Samuel, who was nineteen and had been in that parish for twelve days and did not yet know one thing about the man in front of him, made the decision that governed the next twenty-one years, which was to answer the question properly.
“By figure, sir. That stack on the left’s the plain stuff and it’s the strongest of it — that’s your rails and stiles and anything that’s got to hold. The middle’s got a ripple in it that’ll come up under oil and that’s for anything flat that a person’s going to look at. Tabletops, panels, the face of a stair riser.” He put his hand on the third stack, which was small. “And this is eleven boards that come out of one tree and they’ve all got the same figure running the same way, and I ain’t got any business cutting into them until somebody tells me what the best thing in this house is going to be.”
Crow looked at the eleven boards for a while.
“You can tell that,” he said. “That they came out of one tree.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How?”
Samuel showed him.
That took about twenty minutes and Crow stayed for all of it, standing in a shed in his good coat, asking questions — and they were good questions, and that is the first thing that has to be established about Ambrose Crow and the hardest thing to sit with. He asked why quartersawn behaved differently. He asked what happened to a board that had been dried too fast, and then, when Samuel told him, asked what you could do about it, and then, when Samuel told him you could not do anything about it, said “no, I don’t suppose you can,” with what appeared to be real regret.
He was interested. He was interested for the whole twenty minutes and he was interested eleven years later, and he was not pretending.
That is the fact this book has to carry from here to the end of Part One: **Ambrose Crow was a genuinely good client**, in the specific and narrow sense that trade means it, and Samuel knew it, and every carpenter who reads this account will understand exactly what that is worth and exactly how much damage it can do.
He paid for material. That was the second thing and it declared itself within the first year. Samuel asked for hide glue of a particular grade and got it. He asked for a set of hollows and rounds and got eighteen pairs out of Philadelphia, which was more than he had asked for and better than he had asked for. When he explained, in 1822, that the cypress from the flatboat had been cut in sap and would move on him and that he did not want to put it in the house, Crow looked at him for a moment and then said, “Then burn it,” and it was burned, four hundred and some dollars of timber, in a pile behind the barn, and Crow did not mention it again.
He did not hurry the work.
That was the third thing and it was the rarest and it was the one that did the actual harm, because there is no carpenter alive who is not being hurried and Samuel spent twenty-one years not being hurried. Crow wanted the house right. He said so in about eleven different ways over two decades and he meant it every time, and when Samuel said that a thing would take four months, it took four months, and nobody came out to the shed on the third month to ask about it.
And he talked to him.
That was the fourth thing and it is the one that the people who knew Samuel found hardest to forgive him for afterward, and Absalom said something about it once, in 1834, that Samuel carried around for seven years and did not understand until the last night of his life.
Crow came out to the shop two or three evenings a week for twenty-one years. He sat on a stool. He asked what Samuel was doing and listened to the answer and asked a second question, which is the thing almost nobody does. He brought books out — a copy of Nicholson in 1823, and the Chippendale plates in 1826, and a French thing in 1831 that neither of them could read the text of and that they both went through page by page anyway on three separate evenings, arguing about a cabriole leg.
He never once, in twenty-one years, called Samuel by anything but his name.
And Samuel — who was nineteen, and then twenty-five, and then thirty-four, and who was better at his trade every single year and had nobody else in eight hundred miles who knew what he was looking at — talked back.
That is the arrangement and it needs to be stated without any softening in either direction, because the version that gets told afterward has Samuel toiling under a monster for twenty-one years, and the truth is worse and is the reason the house is what it is.
Samuel Dunmore — he took the name in 1826, off the Scot who had taught him, for reasons he explained to exactly one person — spent twenty-one years working for a man who appreciated him.
He was owned by him the entire time.
Both of those are true and Samuel held both of them, every day, for two decades, and the holding of them is the thing that eventually broke and is the reason there is a book.
In the eleventh month, at the end of a conversation about a chimneypiece, Samuel raised the other subject.
He had planned it for six weeks. He had thought about the hour and the day and what he would be doing with his hands while he said it, and he did it on a Thursday evening in January of 1821 with a cutting gauge in his hand and his eyes on the work, which is the only way that conversation is ever had.
“Mr. Crow. I’d want to ask you about hiring out.”
Crow was quiet for a moment.
“You’d want to buy yourself,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“How long have you been working that out?”
“Since Charleston, sir.”
And Ambrose Crow sat on a stool in a shop in West Feliciana Parish and said, “Well. We’ll have to see what the house needs first,” and Samuel said yes sir, and that was the beginning of it.
He said a version of that sentence for twenty-one years.
Never no. That is the thing. Ambrose Crow never once refused him and never once told him it was impossible and never once got angry about being asked, and every single time — in 1821 and in 1826 and in 1833 and in 1839 — he said some version of *we’ll have to see what the house needs first*, in a tone of a man who considered it a reasonable ambition and had simply not gotten to it.
Samuel worked out in about 1830 that the house was never going to be finished.
He worked out in about 1837 that this was on purpose.
He kept asking anyway, at intervals of about eighteen months, for another four years, and the reason he kept asking is not stupidity and is not hope in any simple form. It was that the alternative was to say out loud to himself that he was going to die in that parish, and there is no man who says that to himself while he still has good hands.
Chapter Three — The Stair
The staircase took him two years and one month and it is the best thing he ever made, and it was the first thing Silas Finch complimented when he walked into that hall in the August of 1858.
Crow had left it deliberately.
That was the sequence and it tells you a good deal: the house had been standing since 1819 with a run of temporary plank steps up the middle of the hall, and Samuel had trimmed out eleven rooms and hung fourteen doors and built two chimneypieces and a sideboard before anybody said one word about a stair, and when Samuel finally raised it in the autumn of 1824 Crow said that he had been waiting until Samuel was ready.
“I was ready in ’twenty-one, sir.”
“You were not,” Crow said, “and I’ll tell you how I know, which is that you’d have used the eleven boards.”
Samuel did not say anything to that, because it was true.
They went round it for the better part of three months. There is no record of those conversations beyond what Samuel said about them afterward and what can be reconstructed from the thing itself, which survives — the stair at Crow’s Rest is still standing, in a house that has been four things since 1900 and is presently a private residence whose owners have been asked not to be identified, and it has been photographed and measured and written about in two books about Louisiana joinery, neither of which names the man who built it. One of them attributes it to “an unknown regional workshop, possibly Natchez.”
It is a geometric stair. That means the string is not carried on newels at the turns but curves continuously, and the handrail with it, so that the whole run goes up and around a single sweep from the hall floor to the second landing without a break anywhere in it — and it means that every riser and every tread in the curved section is a different shape from every other one, and that the handrail has to be built up in laminations and worked, and that a man doing it in 1825 in a parish in Louisiana is doing something that a good shop in Philadelphia would have thought hard about.
Samuel had never built one.
He had watched Dunmore build two, in Charleston, when he was eleven and fourteen, and he had the memory of it and he had Nicholson, and he had a shed full of mahogany and a man who was not going to hurry him.
He made the whole thing twice.
That is the fact about the stair at Crow’s Rest that matters more than any other and it is the one Samuel told people about, in later years, when he told anybody anything: that he built the curved section entire, in cypress, at full size, in the barn, over five months in 1825 — and then took it apart and burned it and started again in mahogany, because the first one taught him eleven things and four of them could not have been learned any other way.
Nobody made him do that. Nobody asked for it. Crow did not know about the cypress one until it was already burning, and came out and stood in the yard and watched it go and said, “Was it any good?”
“It was all right.”
“But not right.”
“No, sir.”
Crow nodded and went back in, and the next morning there was a note in the shop with a figure on it and a line about ordering whatever additional mahogany the work required, and Samuel worked out about four years later that the figure was more than he had ever been told the whole house cost.
He put the eleven boards in the handrail.
They went in as the four longest laminations of the curved section, running continuously around the sweep, so that the same figure out of the same tree carries all the way up and around and comes out at the top under a person’s hand — and it took him eleven weeks to do that alone and it is the reason the rail looks the way it looks in a raking light, and there is not one person who has ever gone up that stair who has been told.
It was finished in the November of 1826.
Samuel was twenty-five years old.
There is a thing that happens to a person who finishes the best work of their life at twenty-five and it happened to him and he did not have anybody to describe it to, and the nearest he ever came was a sentence he said to Cora in about 1834, which she repeated to Eula, which is how it comes down.
*I stood at the bottom of it and I couldn’t get up it.*
He meant it plainly. He stood in that hall in November of 1826 with the last of the scaffold out and the floor swept, and he looked up the sweep of a stair that had taken him two years and one month, and he found that he could not make himself walk up it, and he went out and sat on the step of the shop for about an hour.
Absalom found him there.
“It’s done, then.”
“It’s done.”
Absalom went into the hall and looked at it for a considerable time and came back out and sat down on the step beside him, and the two of them did not say anything for a while.
Then Absalom said the thing that Samuel spent the next fifteen years failing to understand.
“You know he ain’t never going to sell you now.”
Samuel turned his head.
“That ain’t—” He stopped. “He said we’d see what the house needed.”
“That’s right,” Absalom said. “And you just showed him what you can do, and he watched you do it, and he’s been out here on that stool three nights a week for six years learning what it costs to get a man that can do it.” He was looking at the shop door and not at Samuel. “There ain’t eleven men in this country can build that stair. He knows it now. He didn’t know it before and he knows it now, and you’re the one that told him.”
“He’s a good client.”
“He’s the best client you’re ever going to have,” Absalom said. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
Samuel sat on that step for a long time after Absalom went in.
He decided, that evening, that the old man was wrong — that he did not understand the arrangement, that he had never in fifty years had a conversation with a white man about a cabriole leg, that there was a difference between a man who owns you and a man who owns you and knows what you are.
He was right about the difference.
It took him fifteen more years to work out which way the difference ran.