"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Claude, so I was sent to Dorothy Partridge's Boarding School, a strict Methodist place
where I stayed until rescued by Wellesley in 1875.
Some of the girls complained about Wellesley's strictness, but to me it was
emancipation. At Partridge's we had supervised prayer five times a day. Miss Partridge
could read your mind, and she saw nothing there but sin. When we were actually caught
in sin, we were sent to the Forgiveness Room, a dark closet with nothing but a large
candle, a prayer rail, and a chamber pot with no cover. A truly bad sin, like sneaking in
candy, would put you in that room for twenty-four hours, with no food or water and little
air, sore from the switch or the rod. So to me the proctors and housemistresses of
Wellesley were nothing. At worst, they might send me to a detention room, with only a
Bible to contemplate. But that was no punishment at all. I've always enjoyed reading the
Bible, trying to puzzle things out.
At this end of my life, there is much to puzzle over for which the Bible is little
help. But I still read it daily, peering now through a magnifying glass. Even this large-
type version is too difficult for my spectacles alone.
At Wellesley I studied natural philosophy and literature. I suppose it was as good
a preparation as a woman could have, then or now, for the strange trials I was to face
with the Raven.
I shouldn't call them trials, because they were not intended as such. My actual
trials, most of a century's physical and mental pain, have been provided by myself and
other humans, and they have not been as great as most people's.
The odd journey begins.

Wellesley was a gift from my parents and their slaves. Like many people in the South,
they foresaw the end of our "peculiar institution" long before the Emancipation
Proclamation. There was no shortage of investors willing to gamble that they were
wrong, though, and so they sold all of the slaves, and leased the plantation as well. Father
sold all of them as a group, though they would have brought much more at auction. He
didn't want to break up families, and he was disgusted to learn that the babies would not
only be separated from their mothers, but be sold by the pound, like so much beef.
My older brother Roland claimed that at least one of the Negro babies was
Father's own. He was twelve when we came north, so perhaps he was old enough to
know. But he also bore a grudge against Father, because each of us girl children got a
larger stipend than his.
We were lucky to have anything. If Father had delayed the sale another year, he
would have been paid in Confederate currency, ultimately worthless. As it was, he was
paid partly in gold, and hired an agent to bear a small chest of double eagles to a
Philadelphia bank, and there open trust accounts for each of us. We knew nothing of this
until Ronald turned eighteen in 1866, and was granted access to his account, several
hundred dollars, which he spent soon enough, living in a grand style.
By then we were dismally sure that our parents were dead. We had last heard
from them in 1864, a hasty note my mother sent to Aunt Karen. They were abandoning
the general store in Helen's Mill (which they had bought after leaving the plantation),
because Sherman's monsters were only a day away. They moved into Atlanta for
protection.
The Philadelphia paper with Mathew Brady's photographs of the ruins of Atlanta
was kept from me, as I was only eight. Of course, I found them soon enough on my own.
This century's images of Hiroshima and Dresden have a similar impact now. But I knew
no one in those places. The sepia landscapes of Atlanta's ashes are the only memorial of
my parents' time and place of death.