That, of course, is the Givens side. What do I tell Mary about the Orpheus side and her mother, Elizabeth, whom everyone thought was an orphan?
First, let us go back to 1828, Erasmus leading Handsome, the escaped slave who had rescued him, back to Orpheus Farms, back to his wife and children, oblivious to the fact that the institution of marriage, like literacy, did not exist for slaves.
Handsome, who had asked Erasmus for help. Handsome, who had never tried to run away, but who had been giving his master, Eugene, trouble because of Delilah, who, at fourteen, was purchased by Eugene’s father from the grandson of a Frankfort man who had bought a shipload of slaves from Angola. I suspect it was to Delilah that Eugene had gone when it was time to lose his virginity. Eugene, who had been kicked hard by a horse in the bollocks when he was only twelve. He would not have cared that his father had used Delilah thusly, nor that Delilah had born a child that came eight Decembers earlier in 1814, a child that was noted in the ledger as “Girl,” later to be called Tilly.
Tilly, a half sister to Eugene and Silas, born of their father and Delilah.
I imagine Eugene stopping his horse and looking at Delilah, assessing her figure. Her hair would be wrapped up in a scarf, her bosom ample beneath the shift. Hey now, he might have said as she drew water from a pump, I hear my daddy’s mighty pleased with you.
Yassuh, said Delilah, her eyes not meeting his. She had a life with Handsome that was good, and if her firstborn child, a girl, had an Orpheus look about her, as did the youngest, well that was the Devil telling her never to forget these Orpheus men.
Eugene could have taken Delilah in a stall at the rear of the horse barn. While he was pumping away, he would lean in close. You do this with Wilbur? Wilbur—the overseer and Bella Mason’s father. Delilah, her checks wet, would shake her head. Since she had been cast off by Eugene’s father, there was only Handsome in her life, and now this shame.
Over the next month, Handsome had started to act up. Wilbur, the overseer who had run the preacher off the fields for exhorting slaves to run away, mentioned it to Eugene. He won’t pick up a broom when I set him to muckin’, said Wilbur. And he looks me straight in the eye.
For Handsome knew something was wrong. Delilah wouldn’t tell him, but Handsome knew how white men were, even though he had been well treated. Delilah wasn’t the same when he held her. And when he touched her privates, he found blood on his fingers.
The preacher who gathered them on the edge of the field had mentioned Potiphar, who had freed his slave Joseph, and Handsome had listened with only one ear. The white people had a fine place to gather—he’d seen the spire—but why should God be interested in a bunch of niggers whose church was a cluster of stumps behind their cabins? Still, the preacher had made an impression, and after Wilbur drove that preacher off, Handsome decided to confront the overseer.
You’ve been harassing my woman.
And Wilbur had laughed, saying, That ugly thing? For Wilbur preferred light-skinned girls, like the firstborn of Delilah named Tilly, who was only fourteen and whom Delilah watched like a hawk.
Handsome struck Wilbur in the face.
And so Handsome was sold on the block when the trader came through, sold as one of the Orpheuses’ famously fine slaves, who were in good condition as well as docile and sweet-spirited, having been treated so well by the Orpheus family.
It was a not-so-docile Handsome who broke from the chain gang, only to encounter a feverish Erasmus one day later.
Thou are truly saved, were Erasmus’s departing words to Eugene Orpheus after he returned Handsome. My brother—Mary’s grandfather—left feeling gratified, for he had seen Delilah rush from the little cabin into the arms of her husband. That Eugene went on to sell Delilah at a bargain price—and not only Delilah, but also her youngest son—Erasmus would learn years later, and this from Handsome himself, who blamed Erasmus for the outcome, wishing Erasmus had done what Handsome had asked in the first place and helped him to escape, seeing as Delilah would have done better had she been allowed to stay, and not only Delilah, but Tilly, the daughter whom Delilah was protecting, for without her mother, Tilly was left on her own, and it wasn’t just Wilbur who had noticed the pretty young thing with the eyes that were almost green.
Erasmus, William’s father, Mary’s grandfather. Mary’s other grandfather, an Orpheus.
I invite you to my wedding night. Recall that I was thirty-one years old when I entered Silas Orpheus’s rooms as his wife—not so old that I shouldn’t have been eager, not so blighted by cholera’s toll that I shouldn’t have found comfort in my husband’s body. He unlaced my chemise and undid my pantelettes, kissing me here and even there, and though I much admired him, I had to will myself not to recoil. He was no virgin. Unlike me, whose only experience had been that fumbling kiss at fifteen, and this with another girl. Who knew that an adolescent memory would eclipse the consummation of my marriage or that I would feel the happiest in my later years in the company of another woman?
That joyless night that should have drawn Silas and me together only pushed us apart. And though we enjoyed that brief period of carnal contentment before he died, Silas seldom pressed himself on me. I had fleeting thoughts that he might be seeking comfort in the brothels, but I knew better. It was not to brothels but to the other bedroom that he went. I felt gratitude to Tilly, and not just for fixing my hair.
Tilly. The green-eyed girl. The birth mother of Elizabeth. Like the begats in the Bible—Nebaioth from Ishmael; Ishmael from Abraham. The Angolan and the shipmate begat an Augusta slave girl who begat a daughter with the overseer, who, with her master, begat a daughter named Delilah, who, with a master named Orpheus, begat Tilly, who, while assisting Silas Orpheus, begat Elizabeth with him. And in a strange way, I have been happy all these years knowing that William’s wife, Mary’s mother, the lovely Elizabeth, was not the progeny of that hideous Eugene, but the daughter of my husband, Silas, who never wanted children of his own.
The monument in Spring Grove sounds lovely and so like William to select limestone of the sort he would have studied, not only as an owner of coal and gold mines, but as a connoisseur.
Becoming a fossil is no small feat, William once told me. You must be buried quickly lest your remains be eaten or washed away.
The fossil is the imprint of the hard stuff. What was soft, mutable, quick to decay leaves no trace, yet with fossils, as with history, it is the tender tissue wherein the story lies. A fin hints at the ability to swim. Find the remnant of a wing, and one can assume flight. But how these creatures spent their days, if they were light-loving, God-fearing, ruthless, or blind, one can only guess, just as one can only guess at conversations long ago evaporated except for the reminiscences of a now-ancient aunt.
There is no earthly trace either of Tilly that I know of, or of Grady, or Delilah. I’m sorry I shan’t be buried next to Theodora, and sorry, too, that Silas shan’t be reinterred in the Givens plot. But Mary seems determined. I don’t know which grandfather she takes more after—my brother Erasmus, who cajoled animal parts as renderings, or Silas Orpheus, who cajoled human bodies for science. Or perhaps there hovers within Mary, my great-niece, a trace of Angola, however faint, that flashes across her face at certain moments, such as when she concentrates on a book as her mother, Elizabeth, did, or when she swore to fight the Confederacy when they briefly threatened our city back in 1864.
I am not long for the world. Mary’s husband, Percy, has bought a ranch of some description in Northern California that used to belong to the Mexicans. Though the train trip sounds far easier than our ocean passage of 1819, I can’t abide with moving west.
Seventy years since we Scots-Irish Givenses washed down that river. Cincinnati is now a mishmash of railroads, not to mention the coming streetcar. I understand that young Mumford-whatshisname, who runs James’s company, has put a wager on electric lights. Even if my vision were good, I shan’t live to see it. I am surprised and not a little sorry that it’s fallen upon m
e and not Erasmus to eulogize the Givenses and the Orpheuses and even the unfathomable ancestors of Tilly. But I shall try to rise to the task. What may I ask, other than that our trespasses are forgiven?
Bury us deeply. Bury us well.
Acknowledgments
With gratitude to my agent, Carole Bidnick, and my fine editor, Jennifer Brehl, who waited a long time for this one. And to my writing group and our decades together: Sherri Cooper Bounds, Phyllis Florin, Donna Levin, Suzanne Lewis, Mary Beth McClure, Alison Sackett—writer-whisperers all, stalwarts of encouragement.
I want to thank Greg McCoy and Shane Meeker at the Procter & Gamble Corporate Archives and Heritage Center, the Cincinnati Historical Society, the Cincinnati Museum Center, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center.
As always, I owe a debt to the support of my husband, Peter, and my children, Chapin and Anna, who believed in this project, and to my ancestors George and Mary Gamble, along with their children, who had the courage and faith to emigrate.
About the Author
Terry Gamble is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan. She lives with her husband Peter Boyer in Sonoma and San Francisco, California.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the eulogist. Copyright © 2019 by Terry Gamble. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs © Lee Avison/Arcangel (woman); © Marie Carr/Arcangel (water)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gamble, Terry, author.
Title: The eulogist : a novel / Terry Gamble.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : William Morrow, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018018492| ISBN 9780062839893 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780062839909 (paperback)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Historical fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3607.A434 E85 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018492
Digital Edition JANUARY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-283991-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-283989-3
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