Candle in the Darkness

by Lynn Austin

  Jonathan’s older brother, Will, was left in charge of the plantation for a few days. I hadn’t gotten to know Will at all. He was more serious than his easygoing younger brother and told me flatout that he was much too busy to entertain me in Jonathan’s absence. Bored, I turned to my six-year-old cousin Thomas for companionship.

  Thomas’ playmates were the little Negro children who ran around the yard chasing chickens and running errands. They were delighted when I took charge of them, organizing their play, teaching them new games, reading stories to them beneath the pear tree. We quickly became friends, the younger children clinging to my skirts and fighting over whose turn it was to sit on my lap or hold my hand. I tried not to play favorites, but I couldn’t help falling in love with Nellie, the pretty little Negro girl whose job it was to fan my grandmother as she sewed or napped in the sweltering heat of early August.

  One day, Nellie’s little brother Caleb somehow escaped from the old granny who usually tended the little ones down on Slave Row, and he followed her up to the plantation house. He couldn’t have been more than two years old, toddling along behind her, naked as the dawn.

  “Go on! Get back where you belong,” Nellie scolded as my grandmother called impatiently to her from the house. But Caleb wouldn’t go home, and every time Nellie took a step toward the back door to obey Grandmother, Caleb followed her, wailing loudly. “You can’t come in the house!” she told him. “You ain’t allowed!”

  We always left the doors open, and I could see that he was going to follow her right inside. With my grandmother yelling threats, Nellie didn’t have time to take Caleb home.

  “Go on inside, Nellie. Hurry,” I told her. “I’ll take him back.” I lifted the howling boy into my arms and headed down to Slave Row, soothing his tears as I went. He was a beautiful child, with smooth, ebony skin and dark, soulful eyes. Long before we reached his shack, I’d won a smile from him—and lost my heart to him.

  From a distance, I heard babies crying in one of the cabins. Outside, two toddlers no older than Caleb played in the dirt street, unattended. Then the old Negro granny who had interrupted my uncle’s church service emerged from one of the cabins. She peered beneath it, around it, then up and down the row calling, “Caleb! Caleb, where are you, child?”

  “He’s here, Granny. I have him.”

  She watched me approach, shaking her head. “That one always getting away from me. And I got my hands full today with all them sick babies.”

  She scooped up the two squirming toddlers and disappeared into the cabin. I followed her, carrying Caleb. “Go on, set him down here with these ones,” she said, putting her two charges down on the dirt floor. “Time they eat something.”

  She chased a swarm of flies away from a wooden bowl, took a wedge of corn bread out of it, and broke off a chunk for each child. Caleb devoured his, then carefully picked up all the crumbs that had fallen in the dirt and ate those, too. Meanwhile, Granny turned her attention to the squalling babies. There were four of them—all naked, all crying at once—lying crossways on a mattress stuffed with corn shucks. She picked up the first baby, jiggling him in her arms, and ladled a spoonful of water into his open mouth.

  “Got my hands full today,” she repeated. “All four of ’em sick with fever.”

  I picked up one of the other babies, a little girl, and spooned water into her mouth like Granny was doing. The child’s sweaty body was as warm as a baked potato and covered with a nastylooking rash.

  “You should bathe them in cool water,” I told Granny. “It helps bring the fever down.” That was what Tessie always did whenever I had a fever. Granny looked at me helplessly.

  “How I gonna do all that and keep these others from running off, same time?”

  “I-I’ll help you. If you could fetch some cool water in a basin . . . and some clean cloths . . .”

  Caleb clung to my skirt as I worked, wailing for more food. All I could find was the other half of the corn bread, so I divided it among the three children. Too late, I realized it was probably Granny’s lunch.

  She and I worked hard, bathing and rocking the babies—while trying to keep the three bigger ones from toddling away. I didn’t realize how much time had passed until I heard the dinner bell ringing up at the plantation house.

  “I have to go,” I told Granny. “But I’ll come back to help you this afternoon.”

  I hurried up to the house for lunch and found the dining room table spread with food—smoked pork, potatoes roasted in butter, green beans and tomatoes picked fresh from the garden that morning, soft white biscuits spread with melting butter, and sweet potato pie for dessert, still warm from the oven. My cousins Will and Thomas shoveled down their food as if it were their last meal. I couldn’t eat a bite.

  “What’s wrong, dear?” Aunt Anne asked. “You’re not getting sick on me, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m fine.”

  “Then you’d better start eating, or these boys of mine won’t leave you a thing.”

  I ate. But I wrapped most of my lunch in my napkin, hidden on my lap, to bring down to Granny and the children. I was ashamed of myself for ever taking all this food for granted. I kept thinking of the slave who had been whipped for stealing bacon, and of the Bible verse my uncle had quoted: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal . . .” Dry corn bread hardly seemed equal.

  “Aunt Anne, some of the little slave babies are sick,” I told her when the meal ended. “May I please take some ice down there to help cool their fevers?”

  “Our ice?”

  “Yes, please. They don’t have any ice of their own.”

  She frowned as if she was very annoyed, but I knew she didn’t mean anything by it. Aunt Anne had a very kind heart. “You don’t need to concern yourself with our slaves, Caroline. I’ll go down after we have a little rest and see what I can do for them.”

  “Please, ma’am . . . I don’t want to rest. I want to help the babies. They know me now. And I want to bring them my talcum powder. I think the rash must itch them.”

  She studied me for a long moment with the same expression Jonathan often gave me—as if what I’d said was very odd. “All right,” she finally said. “I’ll have one of the darkies carry down some ice for you. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  I bathed the babies, then soothed their itchy skin with talcum powder while Granny and the three older children shared the remains of my lunch. Two of the babies eventually slept, while the other two whimpered softly, exhausted from crying.

  “They have measles,” Aunt Anne said when she arrived a while later. “I pray to the Good Lord that you don’t catch it, too, Caroline. I fear you’ve already been exposed.”

  For the next week, I hurried down to Slave Row early every morning to help Granny tend the sick babies. Unable to eat, they grew very weak. Caleb and the other two toddlers came down with measles, too, then my sweet little Nellie and another child her age fell sick. I nursed them all day and would have stayed all night if my aunt had allowed it. The children grew sicker and sicker.

  “We should pray for them,” I told Granny one day after my aunt had gone back to the house to prepare some more willow bark tea. Granny shook her head.

  “We don’t pray for our babies to live. All they’ll ever know is misery and slavery. Much better if Jesus just take them home right now.”

  “You don’t mean that! No mother would ever want her babies to die!” I thought of my mother, grieving for her dead babies.

  “Well, these here mamas do. They know them babies better off in Jesus’ arms than growing up to be a slave. Better she give them to Jesus right now than to the massa to be sold later on. Then she never have to wonder where her children are at, or if they suffering.”

  I lay in bed that night thinking of Granny’s words. I wondered who suffered more—my mother, who knew her babies were in heaven, or Tessie, who didn’t know where her child was or if she’d ever see him again.

  The next day I didn’t
return to the cabin. I was sick with the measles myself.

  Aunt Anne immediately sent for the doctor. Hovering over my bed day and night, she worried herself nearly to death until it became clear that I would recover. When Jonathan returned, she let him sit with me during the day, reading books to me, telling me all about the grand time he’d had with the militia, playing checkers with me when I finally felt well enough. He’d already had the measles.

  “How are Caleb and Nellie?” I asked him one day. “And all the babies?” I had tried asking Aunt Anne but she only grew vexed with me for pestering her about them.

  “Fine,” he said offhandedly.

  I threw one of the bed pillows at him in frustration. “You’re not telling me the truth. I want to know the truth.”

  “You shouldn’t get so involved, Carrie,” he said, tossing back the pillow. “They’re only slaves. You wouldn’t be sick yourself right now if you hadn’t meddled where you had no business meddling.”

  I felt pulled in two directions at once. I liked Jonathan and I wanted him to like me, but I hated the way he talked about the Negroes, the way he treated them. I knew it bothered him that I cared so much, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d held and soothed and rocked those little babies. I’d fallen in love with Nellie and little Caleb. I needed to know how they were faring. I flung back the covers and lowered my feet to the floor.

  “If you won’t tell me the truth, then I’ll just have to go down there and see for myself.”

  “Over my dead body!” He came out of his chair in a flash, scooped me up as if I weighed nothing at all, and dropped me back into bed. “Now listen,” he said when we were both calmer, “the truth is, I don’t know how any of them are. We’ve all been too worried about you to bother with them. But if you promise to stay put, I’ll send for one of the Negro girls who lives down there. She can tell you what you want to know.”

  That afternoon one of the scrub maids came, a tall, dazedlooking girl about my own age. She showed no emotion at all as she stood in my bedroom doorway and told me the awful truth. “Nellie on the mend now, Miss Caroline. But Caleb and little Kate gone to be with Jesus. All four of them babies gone, too. No help for them, I guess.”

  All the grief that I’d felt over losing Grady returned, magnified tenfold. I wept and wept. I couldn’t stop crying. Even when I was no longer sobbing out loud, the tears silently fell, all that day and into the night. It scared me that I couldn’t seem to stop. It scared Aunt Anne, too. She sent for the doctor.

  “Caroline has recovered from the measles,” he told her. “But I think you’d better take her home.”

  I wept as I watched the servants pack my clothes, along with the bird’s nest and the butterfly’s wings and all the other treasures I’d collected with Jonathan. Uncle William would accompany me to Richmond tomorrow. I was sorry to go, yet I knew I couldn’t bear to stay. Slave Row wasn’t visible from the big house, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about it.

  Later that night, I awoke to the sound of voices in the next room. My aunt and uncle had left their bedroom door ajar, and I could hear them talking as they prepared for bed.

  “Do you suppose her hysteria could have been caused by her fever?” Aunt Anne asked. “She seemed fine the first few weeks she spent with us. A little skittish, perhaps, but she didn’t cry like this.”

  My uncle’s boots dropped to the floor, one after the other. “Her mother’s the same way, Anne. Goes from one extreme to the other. She has terrible crying spells. It’s a real shame, but it looks like the daughter is turning out to be the same way.”

  The thought of being just like my mother started my tears falling all over again.

  “Poor George must certainly have his hands full with two of them like this,” my aunt said. “I had only one of them and I was at my wits’ end. Has he considered an asylum?”

  “Heavens, no! George nearly took my head off when I suggested it.” The bed creaked as one of them climbed into it. “No, my foolish brother wanted to marry that woman—the belle of all Richmond. I tried to warn him that she was high-strung, but he just had to have her. Now he’s living with that mistake.”

  “Jonathan asked me if he could go to Richmond with you tomorrow,” my aunt said after a moment.

  “No. I already told him that he couldn’t.” The shaft of light from their doorway vanished as one of them snuffed out the light. “Caroline is a beautiful girl, Anne, in spite of her moodiness. She has a hypnotic quality about her—a vulnerability—that attracts foolish young boys like Jonathan. From now on, I don’t want him anywhere near her.”

  I heard the haunting song of the slaves the next morning for the last time. As we drove past them laboring in the fields, I looked away.

  Chapter Six

  Richmond, October 1856

  Back in Richmond, my life quickly returned to its old routine. I couldn’t forget everything I’d experienced, but I managed to push most of it from my mind, packing away my disquieting thoughts and my grief like the dolls and other toys I’d outgrown. For the next two years, my mother’s condition seemed to slowly improve. She spent more and more time downstairs in the drawing room instead of in her bedroom, and she even entertained guests for dinner once in a while. One afternoon when I came home from school, Ruby called me to my mother’s sitting room.

  Mother was smiling, and her curtains and shutters were open, but she couldn’t seem to be still. She flitted restlessly around the small room, her hoop skirts swirling, her nervous hands picking up first one object, then another, quickly discarding them again.

  “I have some wonderful news I want to discuss with you, Caroline. In private.” Her voice had that frenzied breathlessness I’d grown to dread. “Ladies don’t talk about such things in polite company, you know.”

  “What things?”

  “You must tell no one, Caroline, but I’m finally expecting another child. I waited to tell you until the doctor was certain I was past the danger point. He says the baby is strong and healthy, and I’m not likely to lose it. But just to be sure, I must stay in confinement for the remainder of my time. I’m not even allowed to go to church.”

  I tried to act pleased, but the news terrified me. I recalled the terrible grief I’d felt after the babies died at Hilltop, and I worried about what would happen to my mother if her baby died. I tried to pray, putting all my worry into Jesus’ hands, as Eli had taught me, but the worry and fear grew and swelled inside me even as the baby grew inside my mother.

  One cold February day when Eli brought me home from school, the doctor’s carriage stood parked by our front gate. Fear gripped my stomach in its fist and wouldn’t let go. “Is Mother sick again?” I asked Eli.

  “Better ask Tessie. She know.”

  “Is it time for Mother’s baby?”

  “Shush! Ain’t fitting to talk of such things.”

  As soon as I came through the door, Tessie was waiting for me. “Where’s Mother? Can I see her?”

  “Now, you best stay down here, child, ’til the baby come.”

  I thought I could hear my mother moaning now and then as I waited nervously in the parlor. Tessie finally took me outside to the kitchen to distract me. Esther had all sorts of pots and kettles going in the fire, as usual, and the fragrant room quickly swallowed some of my fear in its steamy warmth. I sat down at the table across from Eli and watched the cold sleet wash down the windowpane outside.

  “What’s it like to have a baby?” I asked.

  Esther rolled her eyes. “Ain’t no picnic, I tell you that.”

  “What makes Mother cry out so?”

  Eli leaped up from his chair and fled the kitchen.

  “Hush, now,” Tessie warned.

  “Why won’t anyone tell me?” I asked.

  “Because it ain’t fitting to talk about such things,” Tessie scolded. “You find out when the time come. And I ain’t gonna say no more about it, so quit asking.”

  When I heard Daddy’s carriage arrive, I ran back through
the cold sleet to the house. He immediately went upstairs to talk to the doctor, then came down again and asked Gilbert to pour him a drink. I went into the library to see him, but Daddy never did sit down in his chair. He paced nervously across the room to the window, looked out at the doctor’s carriage, covered with slush, then paced back to his desk, over and over again. I grew tired just watching him.

  “Is Mother all right?” I finally asked.

  “The doctor says so.”

  I was afraid to ask about the baby.

  Neither of us ate much of the supper Esther had made, but I saw Ruby carry up a huge tray of food for the doctor. The baby still hadn’t come when it was time for me to go to bed. I slept poorly, listening to Mother’s moans in the night.

  The next morning, Tessie came to sit beside me on the bed, gently stroking my hair. “You mama had a little boy baby last night,” she said softly. “But he all blue, just like the others. He in heaven now, with the angels.”

  “What about Mother?”

  “She okay.”

  “Is she . . . is she going to die?”

  “No, the doctor say she ain’t gonna die. But I think she want to.”

  The doctor was wrong. Before nightfall, my mother was dead.

  Mother’s older sister, Martha, came down from Philadelphia by train for the funeral. Aunt Anne and Uncle William drove into town from Hilltop. Jonathan, who now attended the College of William and Mary, arrived by paddle steamer from Williamsburg. He wrapped his arm around my waist to hold me up as I stood beside Mother’s open grave in Hollywood Cemetery. The gaping hole in the ground, the bare tree branches, the black mourners’ clothes all looked stark against the frozen white ground. I had just turned sixteen, and my first grown-up dress, with long sleeves and proper hoops, was a black mourning gown.

  That night after everyone else had gone to sleep, I slipped from my bed and went down the hall to my mother’s room. Ruby sat all alone on the edge of Mother’s neatly made bed, a single candle on the dressing table casting an eerie light. Ruby looked up as I entered, and I saw that she’d been crying.