Reckoning

My last post was about the old word "bargain." This post is about the word "reckon," or reckoning. As with bargain, I come across reckoning in Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina. In this story of the late nineteenth century, reckon can mean to count or account. For instance, when one is conducting business, making an offer, to reckon means to calculate or consider everything that is to be considered. To state that one has reckoned everything out, as Stepan Arkadyevitch does in the novel, is not just to say that one has accounted for everything. More importantly, to make this statement is to give one's word that the transaction is honest.

One of my friends, a Southern lady who has lived all over the world, has told me that reckoning and bargaining belong together. Both are old words that are more than business terms; they belong to a cosmology, a system of beliefs about the order of the universe including the business and politics of humans. One of the key questions that Tolstoy seems to be asking in the novel is if God in fact wills certain relationships, or how marriage fits in the order of things. He asks as well how class fits. Are the monarchy and bourgeoisie divinely appointed? Is Konstantin Levin supposed to be over his peasant workers? They seem to accept their place. They are disturbed when he labors with them. They think that he is in fact disturbing the order.

Certainly, Anna Arkadyevna disturbs the order when she loves someone other than her husband. But, Princess Mayakaya defends Anna, arguing that it is not Anna's fault that more than one man's soul is tacked to her. Mayakaya is suggesting that there exist soul connections that transcend one's earth life. Anna too defends herself. When she believes she faces death, nothing is more important than that she receive her husband's forgiveness for her infidelity, which is not to say that she feels she has been wrong to love another. Yet, she shows us that at death one must reckon or account for what one has done on earth.

This concept of reckoning gives me a way to understand my own ancestors' practice of having their land sold at death and having their executor pay off all debts before disbursing any bequests. This is another form of reckoning at death. I have seen this a number of times in wills including in that of one ancestor whose will was challenged because the request would result in her being expelled from the land where she had lived with her husband. Her case went to the Supreme Court of the State of Mississippi, where she prevailed. She was allowed to remain on the land until death, which unfortunately wasn't long after the case was decided. In this case, the ancestor's reckoning might have included care for his surviving spouse.

The case reminds me of my grandfather, who I knew in my lifetime, his having lived until I was fifteen years old. It would appear that, a couple of years at least before his death, he tried to get his house in order by making sure that my grandmother's needs would be met. This task included purchasing my grandmother a washer and dryer to replace the wring washer she had used for many years. I guess he didn't want to, from his grave, see her working as hard as she had while he lived. Or, maybe Grandma had asked for a new washer and he didn't want that request to go unfulfilled. Whichever is the case, I do see his actions at the close of life as a reckoning, and I very much feel that this was behavior he had learned from his elders and ancestors.

So, if bargaining is an attempt at honest business, reckoning points to an ethic based in the belief that one may be outside the will of God or outside of a certain order if one does not settle, make proper account, of one's earth doings. One may turn in one's grave if things are left unsettled or undone.

Another reason I have been interested in the concepts of reckoning and bargaining is that I think that these may come into play with the activities of African-American soldiers in their own dealings. I am looking in particular at the 63rd USCT, which was a guard unit stationed at Memphis. These men served basically in John Eaton, Jr.'s Department of Freedmen and in the area's contraband camps. Following their service, as well as during, they appear to have sought every benefit that was coming to them. For example, most of them applied for a bounty, which a significant number of them used to get started in farming. Many of them opened accounts with the Freedmen's Bureau Bank. They vouched for each other's service when applying for a pension and informed their wives that they too should apply if they preceded them in death. In short, even though most of these men were former slaves, they appear to have evaluated their experience in the war, systematically, which is to say as a part of an order, and they placed their lives in agreement with that order. I see their various applications as a reckoning, a commitment to discerning God's will in a situation and acting accordingly. This is a theory in need of some work, but these are my beginning thoughts.