He tuned my ear to the poetic phrases of everyday life, and as we drove on errands into the narrow farm lanes off the main highway, he showed me the history of our county, settled by the English almost three centuries earlier. “Pie, see how the banks right here are high?” He braked the pickup to a stop, and I glanced beside us at the five-foot-tall roadsides lined with old cedars. “That means it’s a really old road. Wagons wore it down, through years of mud and ice and horse manure.”
For his true-life tales, usually featuring hapless country people, he used a primitive palette of description from the backwoods where he’d grown up. You could smell the oily scalps. You could hear the mouse’s dying squeaks. You could taste the red dust. Daddy stretched my imagination every time he opened his mouth. He possessed the curiosity of a sociologist, the empathy of a pastor, the sensibilities of a poet. But he didn’t think so. He was optimistic about everything but himself.
Most of us shrug off the little mistakes, but my father saw each one as proof of his incompetence. He misspelled a word on a note to his boss. He dropped and shattered a light fixture at the big house and was therefore hopelessly clumsy. He kept saying “pacific” instead of “specific” in his Sunday school class.
While Mom’s self-hatred centered on her moral worth and her physical features, his was aimed at his intelligence. Though they were constantly affectionate toward me, together, my parents made our house a year-round festival of self-contempt.
The love between them flickered like a dying porch light. Lovey-dovey when with company, they whispered furiously while at home, and their struggle bewildered me. They seldom argued outright. They stewed; they glowered; they sulked. She adored him and longed for more of his tenderness. He rebuffed her mostly, though he did thank her for grooming him as if he were a child. She combed and parted his hair, laid his church clothes on the bed, served up sixty years of nourishing food. Yet he didn’t seem to respect her. She lacked his patience in doing things. She rebelled against recipes and instructions. She dripped paint on the wood floors. When she took black liquid shoe polish to his scuffed brown shoes, he shook his head and walked out of the house. But even as a child, I knew there was more to this story. There was something larger for which my father blamed my mother.
Part III
Our World
5
The Kingdom of the Rich
Mom took this snapshot of the main house at Bridlespur Farm around 1940, shortly after her arrival and its construction.
My parents arrived in Keswick, Virginia, as young adults, each with good reason to feel unconfident. As it happened, they landed in a place that wasn’t inclined to think much, either, of people like them. They were servants in a kingdom of the rich.
In 1940, Mom came to the country crossroads of Keswick, in Albemarle County, and to Bridlespur Farm to be a nursemaid for a rich couple’s baby boy. Daddy, a young farmhand on a nearby estate, fell in love with her and soon went to work in Bridlespur’s fields and barns. They would live there for the next forty years.
As a little girl, I played office with the slick annual reports of major corporations in which the bosses owned stock. I played dress-up with a black satin cocktail hat adorned with the long feathers of a tropical bird. Our bosses’ castoffs became my playthings.
From our house, in the middle of hayfields, we could see three mansions off in the distance. The heirs of great American fortunes were scattered about the neighborhood—Pillsbury, Anheuser-Busch, du Pont. Wealthy people had been flocking to Keswick for hundreds of years, each taking their turn at playing lords and ladies of the manor.
In recent years, I dug into the history of Albemarle County and confirmed what I sensed to be true back then. It never was much like other counties. Albemarle’s settlement by Europeans in the early eighteenth century wasn’t so much by scrappy frontiersmen who crafted rough cabins with their own hard hands. There were some of them, sure, but the people who laid down the dominant culture were the sons of affluent English-descended coastal tobacco planters looking for new fortunes inland. They sent their slaves and overseers ahead of them to tame the wild territories and to set up great British-style estates. The stunning geography finally led the aristocrats to move in and to stay.
At the dead center of Virginia, Albemarle is lush, green, and beguiling. Three-thousand-foot peaks of the Blue Ridge rule the county’s northwestern corner. If you were to fly southeast from there, you’d see green hills rolling on softly through the county seat of Charlottesville and Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village,” the University of Virginia. Just before the Blue Ridge topography submits to the Piedmont’s lumpy plains, it spits out the low-slung Southwest Mountains. Jefferson’s Monticello sits on a knob at the southern end of the mountain range. In the first half of the eighteenth century, his kin and family acquaintances began snapping up royal land grants for land stretching from his birthplace at Shadwell to the hamlets of Keswick, Cismont, Cobham, and on up the twenty-mile chain.
Tobacco wound up degrading Albemarle’s rich soil, so the gentry began to grow wheat, grapes, and apples, as well as the county’s reputation as an oasis of fine living and low taxes for ladies and gentlemen. In Keswick, they set about re-creating English high society, complete with foxhunts, trumpeting brass horns, and a scarlet-coated master of the foxhounds. The new American squires gave their estates names reminiscent of the old country—Cloverfields, Merrie Mill, Castle Hill, Merifields, and my personal favorite, a later one, Tally-Ho.
My section of Keswick sat between two parallel entities: the mountains to the rear and, out by the farm entrances, Virginia State Route 22, a winding two-lane road that had been Jefferson’s carriage route to Washington. Between the road and the mountains lay vast side-by-side plantations, and on each one, a minor fiefdom consisting of a large main house, tenant cottages for workers, and enough outbuildings to look from the mountaintop like a toy farm set. There were stables, barns of all kinds, chicken coops, meat-smoking houses, horse-riding rings, springhouses, silos, miles of white-painted fence, and all of it surrounded by velvety, unspoiled hills. Keswick was British nobility in miniature, and like all the upstairs-downstairs servants who trimmed the boxwoods, poured the highballs, bleached the linen, and made the little crustless watercress-and-cream-cheese sandwiches, my parents were extremely cautious around rich people.
With most kinds of work, there’s at least a little buffer between the laborer and the employer—a union, a human resources department, maybe some midlevel supervisor. But with us, the ratio between Daddy and job security was one-to-one. Our housing, our food, our electricity, our transportation, Daddy’s small monthly check—it all depended on the favor of his bosses. One rash move and they’d put us out.
* * *
I WAS A baby in a carriage when Mommy began shushing me as we neared their house. Later on, when I could walk, I’d toddle beside her down the long farm road. I’d wave to Daddy and the other farmhands in the fields. I’d squeal with glee at the horses, the cows, the sheep, and the dogs.
If I was still carrying on as we approached the big house, Mommy would jerk my hand hard. “Mary COD-ah,” she’d warn in a threatening whisper, “you be quiet. You’ll wake them up.” Our bosses, who’d never worked for a living, slept late. I was not to kick the gravel, laugh, shriek, or in any other way behave like a normal child around the big house. I came to associate wealth with punishing authority.
It may seem strange—I’m in my seventies; I graduated from an Ivy League university; I’ve worked in big cities—but the drawn-out, entitled voice of a rich Southern woman, a voice that takes its time because it can and because it’s accustomed to getting its way, to this day can stop me cold, can nearly paralyze me and render me mute. A few years ago, I confessed this to an elderly African American woman who spent her life cooking and cleaning for the wealthy. I told her I was still scared of rich white people. She shot back with a fierce eye: “You better be.”
* * *
I REMEMBER STANDIN
G in our front yard as foxhunters on tall steeds paused at a gate to Bridlespur’s back acres. The creak of polished boots, gloves, and saddles; the jingle of bits and stirrups; the horse snorts visible in the chill morning air—a hunt was an impressive production. Groomsmen back at each rider’s stables spent hours polishing leather and braiding tails and manes before the hunt. Five feet above my young head, the party of men and women in tight-fitting riding clothes chattered on, literally above it all. They didn’t notice me. I studied the lean and glamorous women—their bone-handled crops, their neatly netted chignons just below their velvet helmets, their perfect lipstick and pancake makeup. I felt sorry for the overburdened horses of the fattest men, who also seemed to be the meanest with their whips as the horses stumbled under their weight.
Often when I went with Daddy to the Keswick post office for our mail and the bosses’ and to pick up groceries at Morris’ Store next door, those same jowly, red-faced men would be lounging beside their wood-paneled station wagons, loudly and drunkenly holding forth. I saw them too when my folks and I sold coffee, hot dogs, and bottles of Pepsi under the grandstand at the Keswick Horse Show as we raised money for a community center. It’s no wonder I came to think of Keswick as a beautiful, ugly place.
Daddy told me that my impression was extreme, that not all Keswick people were arrogant. It’s true there was a well-off woman who sent bags of hard candy and oranges every Christmas for children at my school. And she, or someone else, donated books awarded every spring to the best students.
My all-white Cismont School, in use since 1908, still had outhouses and potbellied stoves when Ronnie went there in the forties and I in the fifties. To reduce dust and soot, teachers kept a coat of oil on the wood floors of the classrooms. At home, mothers rubbed their fingers raw scrubbing our greasy skirt hems and the boys’ grimy pant legs. My best friend’s mother fretted to our principal that her first grader might slip through the hole in the girls’ two-seater Johnny house. School officials had no money to build indoor toilets, so they simply plopped regular wooden toilet seats over the holes to shrink the openings and keep the tiniest kids from sliding into the muck.
Four teachers taught seven grades, with all but one of them doubling up, two grades each. It was the age of ballpoints; our wooden desks still had holes for inkwells. The frame building’s upstairs auditorium was off-limits for fear its squeaking floor would collapse under our weight. Black schools suffered even more. All this was particularly galling in a county that in 1960 ranked number one among Virginia’s rural counties with the greatest number of high-income families. The affluent people of Albemarle County sent their children to private schools, often in far-off places. In my childhood, when the county’s middle class was still tiny, the millionaires dragged their feet about raising taxes to upgrade the antiquated public schools for the rest of us.
When Daddy became our PTA’s president, he commiserated with the county school superintendent about the conditions. The man wept as he told Daddy about the plea he’d made to the county’s governing body, the board of supervisors: Albemarle’s horses had finer quarters than its public school children.
* * *
TO THIS DAY, drivers along Keswick’s picture-postcard Route 22 catch a glimpse of Southern grandeur from centuries ago. Across thousands of preserved acres, they see highly bred horses munching fescue from within white-painted fences, and long, cedar-lined driveways leading to manor houses secluded in groves of tall hardwoods. The charming tableau is backed in the distance by the long expanse of softly rounded mountains. Off the side roads, however, there has always been another story.
Keswick’s social structure cut three ways in my time: First came the upper class, with their estates, country club, golf course, foxhunting club, quaint stone Episcopal church, and rollicking social circuit. Then came the white servant class, living either in tenant houses on the farms as we did or in small homes far off the picturesque highway. We shared a school, a Presbyterian church, and a women’s home demonstration club, an offshoot of the county agricultural extension service, where Mom learned to sew my school jumpers from patterns. The third sector, the most crucial workforce and the most poorly paid, was Keswick’s sizeable black population, clustered in modest homes on the back roads, with their own proud society of small schools and churches. For seventy-hour weeks in 1940, a black Keswick chauffeur earned less than my farmhand grandfather did for sixty hours, and my grandfather was blind.
Slaves built Keswick’s grand homes and made Keswick the handsome, fertile place it continues to be. In 1840, Albemarle County slaves outnumbered free people of both races. Hundreds of slaves once worked on the plantations nearest my home. The history is rich and fraught. Descendants of enslaved carpenters and stonemasons constructed architecturally charming houses for themselves, but in my time many other black men and women subsisted in shacks hidden in the woods. As I was writing this book, a few elderly African American women were still cooking and cleaning for white people, sometimes for offspring of the original boss and occasionally in the very same mansion. A few years ago, an eighty-four-year-old woman was keeping house part-time for descendants of the family she’d first gone to work for at the age of ten.
Out among whites, black servants were exceedingly quiet and careful, and for sound historical reasons. In 1910, eight leading citizens of Keswick accused a visiting black clergyman of being a “race agitator.” They beat him with riding crops and barrel staves in the presence of his black hosts and set him on a train out of there. Keswick’s black elders have long been intensely tight-lipped. Their guarded tongues were a blessing for the elite because Keswick has long been a hedonist’s playground.
To earn extra money, Daddy parked cars for soirees at Bridlespur and other farms. The rich men liked Daddy and slipped him five-dollar bills when he pulled up in their valet-parked Rolls-Royces and Packards after parties on somebody’s terrace. Daddy helped clean up the party mess later and would come home chuckling about the panties he found snagged in the boxwoods.
Many estate owners didn’t have jobs and never had. Their surroundings were sensuous, natural, and luxuriously private. They could spend their days chasing after foxes and their nights chasing each other, and occasionally their servants. Publicly upright, privately naughty—that was Keswick’s reputation.
Writers, movie stars, and aristocrats had long sojourned there. In 1955, twenty-three-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and costar Rock Hudson filmed farm scenes for the movie Giant a five-minute drive from Bridlespur. William Faulkner rode on Keswick foxhunts and sipped liquor at local parties. Decades later, I sat near area resident Sissy Spacek in the waiting room at Mom’s orthopedist and stood beside Ann Beattie as we both picked up clothes at Brown’s Dry Cleaners in Charlottesville.
As a kid, I watched the big shots’ parties only from a distance. Late on a summer night, I could hear laughter and big-band music down by the bosses’ pool. When I squinted, I could make out the torches in the gardens and the movements of couples in cocktail attire. Just up the hill from our house, I once observed a uniquely Keswick kind of party, though I only watched the parade of luxury cars gliding by us on the farm road, and later, from our front porch, I heard the distant merriment. On summer Saturdays nearest a full moon, farm owners still take turns hosting a traditional monthly hill-topping. They have their farmhands mow a scenic hill and invite friends to drive there, circle up, and serve fine foods from the trunks of their cars. They feast on shavings of country ham, sip fine bourbon, tell bawdy stories, and carry on half the night.
Ronnie was bolder than me. As the hours crawled by, people usually became so drunk they didn’t notice him. He crept right up and snuck a ham biscuit when he could. He watched from woods near the Keswick country club’s golf course one night as a young married socialite, naked, engaged in a drunken orgy on the ground with University of Virginia fraternity boys. He turned the sprinklers on them before bolting back into the darkness. Eventually, Ronnie would pay dearly for his snooping.
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6
The People in the Big House
Anne and John S. McIntyre Sr., at their cold-weather retreat in Winter Park, Florida, 1939.
When my folks interacted with their bosses or any other people of means around Keswick, I’d watch their faces take on a childlike docility. They lowered their heads and their voices, like children braced for punishment. It distressed me, and shamed me. Why were they so extremely deferential around more powerful people, even their young doctors? Why did their quick yes-ma’ams and no-sirs seem so reflexive to me?
In midlife, I began to make sense of their sheepishness. Both their fathers had lived and farmed on the land of more affluent people. My parents grew up in subservience. At one point, my dad’s dad was booted from one of the estates, leaving his wife and seven children in the extreme pinch of poverty. On Daddy’s mother’s side, her brother toiled in Bridlespur’s fields years before Daddy got there. And far from Keswick, in more modest rural communities, Mom’s cousins labored for better-off people. I came from a long line of servants.
By the time I transferred to the county high school, most of my Cismont School friends had left the farms. Their parents had landed more independent jobs in town. Because Mom and Daddy remained on Bridlespur for four decades, their sense of dependency soaked longer in their consciousness.
* * *
A HUNDRED YEARS ago, my Granddaddy Bishop was known around Albemarle County as a gifted orchardist. Landowners hired him to look after their apples, peaches, and grapes. When Daddy was a boy, Granddaddy lamented to him that he felt unappreciated. He longed for his bosses to come down from their manor houses and stand with him among the trees. He would show them how he banished this worm and that mold, how he preserved tender blossoms under a threat of frost.
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