It was in the early eighties, and the Queen Anne style of
architecture was just coming into great popularity in the South.
Jackson, who could well afford it, had let an architect have full
sway in producing for him a dwelling in the new mode. Ezra
Jackson, a full-blooded negro born a slave, had been a teamster
on his master's Georgia plantation, and after the war that
master, who still maintained friendly relations with his
ex-slaves, gave him a start in life with a mule and a dray. From
this the honest, industrious, and enterprising man had built up a
transfer business which was the best of its sort in town. There
were many teams and drivers now, and Ezra could walk in the garb
of other men of means about him; yet he still wrote his name in
the manner of the kings of old--he produced it as a sort of
landscape effect without any idea of what the separate characters
meant. He was a good citizen, a dignified man; and, except for
his black skin, he would have been an acceptable neighbor to the
Kendricks, and a desirable resident in their quarter of town. The
young wife whom he had married rather late in life, and to whose
taste the Queen Anne house catered, had a good grammar-school
education, gained from those first devoted teachers that the
Freedman's Bureau sent to the Southern negroes in the years
immediately following the war.
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