The city was built to look clean from a distance. Whitewashed facades, neat balconies, polite churches with their bells timed to remind everyone that God kept appointments. But the heat that day peeled the varnish off everything. It made men sweat through linen and made horses foam at the bit. It made the river smell like iron and old rot. And inside the auction house on Broton Street, the air was worse, thick with tobacco and sour bodies and the kind of fear that soaked into wood until it became part of the grain.
Thomas Cornelius Pruitt stepped into that building with money in his pocket and a hunger in his chest that had nothing to do with lunch.
At thirty-four, he wore new wealth the way boys wore new boots: proud, slightly stiff, pretending it didn’t pinch. Charleston had taught him how to smile without revealing uncertainty, how to nod at older men and let them believe you were listening while you were really measuring them. His father had left him a fortune and a name that still sounded like a door closing: Cornelius.
Now Thomas intended to open one.
Waverly Plantation waited for him in Chatham County, eight hundred acres along the Vernon River, a big house that needed fresh paint and a roof that needed prayer. The property came “cheap,” people said, because the previous owner died without heirs and without anyone willing to confess how relieved they were.
Forty-two enslaved people came with the land. An overseer came too, hired fast and hungry: Luther Hutchins, lean as a fence rail and twice as sharp. Hutchins had already told Thomas what every planter told every man trying to become a planter.
“You’ll need more hands,” he’d said. “Hands you can trust.”
So Thomas went to Broton Street with the confidence of someone who believed buying human beings could be reduced to arithmetic.
