Twelfth Ocean, 55th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): This, the 348th day of the year, marks 39 dozen days. My New Revised Universal Solar Calendar commemorates selected dozens as Ocean days, and this day is the Twelfth Ocean. While there is a 40th dozenth day still this year, that day is Day of the Magic Child, or as some people call it "Christmas." So this, then, is the last Ocean day of 525.

My great-great-grandfather was born in Hartsville, South Carolina. Like all of us, he didn't get to choose how and when he entered this world but as it was he was born on a plantation in 1835. You can pass judgement all you like but as I said, when and where he was born wasn't his decision, nor was the society in which he was raised or the heritage he received. 

Today, I randomly came across the 19th-Century diary of the son of Colonel Law, a prominent Hartsville planter, which gives as good an impression of life on an antebellum plantation as you're likely to find outside of fiction. Hartsville sits in the Coastal Plain of South Carolina between the Great Pee Dee and Lynches Rivers. It is a low-lying, humid area, subject to frequent rains and summer thunderstorms. Like most plantations in the area, the Colonel's consisted of acres upon acres of level, black-soil farmland with rows upon rows of cotton, fields of food crops, and orchards full of generous peach trees. The old Colonel, always on horseback and sometimes carrying an umbrella against the heat of the sun, could often be found out in the fields inspecting his domain. 

The main house was large and roomy, and the porches were capacious and comfortable. The live oaks, cherished by the Colonel, were equipped with swings and joggling boards and provided shade for the children as they romped in and out of the house. In addition to the children, there was the constant comings and goings of the many friends and kin-folks — the Cokers and the Coopers, the Charles and the Edwards, and the Norwoods and the Lides. 

Black Creek flowed through the plantation, clear and limpid, spoiling the Colonel’s boys and girls for swimming in any other spot on Earth. At supper one night, the Colonel asked one of his sons, ‘‘How many times did you go swimming in the creek today?”   

“Only twice, Sir,” the boy answered fervently, hoping he didn’t look too waterlogged from the non-stop swimming all morning and afternoon, taking time out only for dinner. 

Across the road from the main house were spacious barns with dozens of sheep, many heads of mules and horses, and wagons and carriages suitable for the various journeys of the family. To escape the summer heat, the Colonel would take the family on trips to Virginia Springs using two carriages, a rock-a-way, and a spring wagon for the trunks.  

At night, neighboring young folk would visit the house for an evening of music, and the young ladies of the family, with their friends from the Laurensville Female Academy, would vie for the opportunity to chat with the handsome young tutor recently hired to instruct the younger children. On occasion, those young ladies would go off to Charleston, escorted by the Colonel or his sons, stay at the Planters Hotel, and shop for bonnets on King Street.

Eli, my great-great-grandfather, didn't get to enjoy any of that idyllic, antebellum life. He was African American, which in South Carolina in 1835 meant that he was a slave - human chattel, livestock, property of the Colonel. No lemonade on the veranda, no swings under the live oak, no trips to Virginia Springs for Eli - there was cotton to be picked.

In addition to their King Street bonnets, the young ladies  also purchased coarse clothes and knick-knacks in Charleston to be sent back home for the slaves. It was the responsibility of the women, their "mixed bane and blessing" as the diary put it, to provide clothes, food, and medicine for the slaves. The women would instruct them and pray with them off in the slaves’ quarters, situated some distance, of course, from the big house.

The plantation life was ended by what the diary referred to as “the tragedy of the Confederate War.” The sons were sent off to fight in Virginia battlefields, and Sherman’s Army eventually swept across the plantation, burning the cotton gin, ravaging food and fodder, and stealing horses. The slaves broke out into open riot, and it fell upon the old Colonel and his faithful body-servant (i.e., house slave) to hold things together. After the war and when the sons finally returned home, they encountered a new and difficult master-servant relationship. 

Eli was no fool. By 1870, he fulfilled any remaining obligations on the plantation and got the hell out of Hartsville, moving his family down to Jacksonville, Florida and out of harm’s way.