Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray

by Dorothy Love

  Selina reached through the open window and clasped my hand. The years fell away and she was once again my pupil, my housekeeper, and my confidante. My old affection for her came rushing back. “Oh, Selina, I only wish that—”

  “I got to go now, Miss Mary. You take care of yourself and don’t you be staying out in the cold and damp like you used to. It’s bad for your bones.”

  She briefly squeezed my hand and stood back while Rob and my cousins piled in beside me. The last rose I would ever take from Arlington lay in my lap, a slash of bright pink against the dark silk of my dress. As the carriage rolled down the drive, I looked back to see Selina hurrying down the path, and I thought of one of General Washington’s observations, the first I had memorized as a girl. True friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.

  We had known joy, but we had weathered much adversity. We knew too well the sting of betrayal, the bitter taste of grief.

  Many times when overcome by illness and death, crushing defeat and unremitting physical pain, I wondered whether there is any purpose in human suffering. Whether there is any reward for having borne the unbearable. The poet says the wound is the place where the light enters you. Perhaps it’s true, and it’s only in the broken places that we find healing and grace. I don’t expect to learn the answer this side of heaven. Perhaps the hope of perfect knowledge is enough.

  The carriage slowed, and I looked back. Selina was growing small and indistinct as we neared the bridge. We topped the hill. She lifted her hand in farewell.

  I raised my hand to the window. Good-bye, old friend. Good-bye.

  42 | SELINA

  For weeks after the general died you could read of nothing else in the papers. Emma came to Green Valley to visit one Sunday afternoon a few days after he passed, bringing the Daily Times, which contained accounts of mourning all over the South. Sitting in my parlor that looked out over our vegetable patches, I read the dispatches from Richmond and Selma and New Orleans. Everywhere businesses and shipping concerns closed. People draped their doors in crepe and evergreen. Flags flew at half-mast.

  People couldn’t seem to say enough good things about the general. The governor of Virginia said he filled up the full measure of our conception of a man. Some important judge in New Orleans said he was heroic and honorable and had won the admiration and affection of every heart in the land. Even the New York newspapers that Thornton brought home that autumn called General Lee a noble American. Already there were plans for statues to be put up in his honor.

  It was impossible for me to think of him as somebody about to be remembered in cold hard stone, for in life he was full of warmth and light. It is true he caused a great deal of grief and hardship in my family, and that is something I never could forget. Every time I thought of what had happened to Wesley and Mary, I got that same bees-in-the-stomach feeling I’d had as a child. I couldn’t blame Miss Mary for what the general had done, but Wesley did. Wesley always said the general had freed him twice, that his rage against all the Lees had liberated him long before that snowy December evening when the emancipation letter arrived.

  Still, General Lee had promised my freedom and kept his word. He was a man who made a hard choice in joining the Confederate side, and he saw it through and lost everything. Even if he was going to be remembered forever with statues everywhere, those statues couldn’t make up for what that hard choice had cost him. He and Miss Mary had endured more hardship than comes to most mortals in a lifetime, and their story was still tragic, the same as the Greek heroes you read about in books.

  I wrote to her when I first heard the news. It was some time before she replied. I still have the letter saved in the bottom drawer of my bureau.

  The kindness of everyone is unceasing but life seems so aimless now, so blank. His memory will be cherished in many hearts besides my own. I may soon follow him, but his children—what a loss to them.

  What news is there of Arlington? I long for it still and there is so little hope of my ever seeing it again.

  When she finally did come home to Arlington, we sat in her carriage talking over the old times. That sunny June morning when I saw her carriage coming along the road, I remembered all the years when I had stepped from the door of my cabin to cross the yard and enter the back door at Arlington. Taking those fifteen steps separating slavery and freedom—and back again as the shadows of the evening fell across the yard. And all the time the hope of liberation glittering like a brook when the sun shines on it. On that homecoming day we spoke as equals—Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray—and not as mistress and slave.

  Her appearance that morning shocked me. She looked so old and frail I feared she might not survive the trip back to her kinfolks’ house. I thought of a story Althea had told me once when I was a child. There were slaves who lived on an island, and these slaves could predict when someone was about to die because in the dark, sparks of fire would gather around their heads, spirits from the other side coming to guide them. I hadn’t seen any sparks surrounding Miss Mary, but it felt like something was gathering around her that day. When I watched her carriage head back across the river, I knew I would never see her again.

  “Mother?” Annice stood in the doorway of my home, a bag in her hands. “Brought you some apples from the Green Valley market. Daddy says to tell you he will be home in a little while.”

  “Thank you, child.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. I was woolgathering. For some reason Miss Mary has been on my mind lately.”

  “Oh?” Annice started for the kitchen. “I barely remember her. The papers sure made a big to-do about her visiting here back in June.”

  “She remembered you, though. She recollected the way you looked after animals when you were little.”

  China rattled as Annice made coffee. She came back to the parlor with two cups and Miss Mary’s blue-and-white pitcher on a tray. I had kept it all those years as my own personal treasure.

  Annice lit the fireplace and sat down beside me. “Did I tell you I got a new patient last week? A Mister Morrison. He is a relative of General Jackson’s wife, or so they say.”

  An hour passed while she chattered on. The gray sky outside my window deepened to a silver twilight that settled over the valley. The fireplace popped and hissed. My younger children ran in and out, letting in the raw November air.

  Thornton arrived from the market. He set down his empty boxes and came over to kiss me and his daughter. He had grown stooped in the years since we were young and courting by the light of fireflies, and his hair was threaded with gray. But inside, he was the same determined boy with the teasing eyes who had captured my heart with gifts of lace and newspapers when I was just a girl.

  “How was the market today, Daddy?” Annice rose to fetch a cup for him.

  “Fair to middling. Weather’s turning, and that always sends folks home early.” Thornton warmed his hands before the fire. He reached inside his jacket and took out a letter. “This came for you, Selina. From Lexington.”

  I tore it open, anxious for news of my oldest friend. A silver locket spilled out, the same as she wore on her summer visit to Arlington.

  November 10, 1873

  Lexington, VA

  Dear Selina,

  I know you will be sorry to learn that Death has visited my family twice in the last three weeks, and we who are left behind are in such disbelieving sorrow that cannot be described. Sweet Agnes left this earth on October fifteenth after an illness of some weeks, succumbing to complications of the digestive system the doctor said. You know Mother loved us all, but Agnes was her favorite and the blow of her death was one from which Mother could not recover. Five days ago she expired quietly and has been laid to rest next to my sainted father in the chapel here, along with Agnes.

  You may know that the trustees at Washington College appointed Custis as the new president after my father died. My sister Mary is off somewhere
, leaving Custis and me to rattle around in the house alone. Rooney and Rob are settled elsewhere and I do not yet know what my future plans will be.

  Before her mind began to wander in her final hours, Mother extracted my solemn promise that I would write you with this news. She spoke often of your long friendship, and she remained until her last breath in your debt for your care of Arlington and the treasures that meant so much to our family and our country.

  After my father’s death she was often cheerless, but her visit with you last summer seemed to elevate her spirits, and I had hoped that I might have the comfort of her presence a good while longer. But God has seen fit to take her unto Himself and I know she is happy now in Heaven with her beloved warrior who was the chief object of her lifelong affection.

  In going through her papers this morning I found a note expressing her wishes that her few pieces of jewelry be divided among her children and her servants. You are not a servant any longer, of course, but I enclose this locket knowing she would want you to have it.

  Yours sincerely, Mildred Childe Lee

  It takes a lot to make me cry, but this news wrung every last tear from my eyes. Pain rose up in my chest and wrapped itself so tightly around my heart that I could barely speak. It seemed too much for Miss Mildred and her brothers to bear, that Miss Mary and her sweet girl were gone in one fell swoop. But it is a fact that even the worst pain has a way of eventually knitting itself up, the same as a broken bone. Miss Mary’s children would have to go on because life gives us no other choice.

  I held the locket in my palm and thought about the past. Which is a different place, a faraway speck on the map of life, and the only way to get back there is in memories. Staring into the crackling fire, I could almost see Miss Mary once again singing to us in the schoolroom, bending down to tend her flower garden, sitting beside the fire with her sewing, waiting anxiously for a letter from Texas or St. Louis or Mexico.

  I remembered the way her brown eyes lit up with pleasure on my wedding day and the smell of her dresses when I took them to the laundry—dirt and the oil of roses mixed with paint and lavender. I remembered the hushed busyness outside the birthing room when she brought her babies into the world, and one thrilling ride on a snow sled when purple shadows painted her beloved hills and the nest of stars above us glittered in the winter sky.

  She was born into privilege, but it hadn’t shielded her from the many great sorrows of her life. I prayed her soul was at peace, and I thanked God for the world of books she had opened up for me on those long-ago days in the sunny schoolroom at Arlington. Knowledge is one kind of freedom, and the only kind she could give me back then. My mother once said anytime a slave learned to read and write it was a miracle. It was Miss Mary who sat me down with chalk and slate and primers brought from Washington City so that the miracle could proceed.

  The logs in the fireplace burned down to orange coals. Annice lit the lamps and Thornton went to the door to call our children in for supper. But I sat where I was, Miss Mildred’s letter on my lap, and thought about the day when I first stood with my husband on this worn-out patch of ground and we cried like children because the money Miss Mary had sent meant that finally it would be ours.

  “Mama?” Annice said. “Come on and eat. Your supper’s getting cold.”

  “In a minute.”

  I tucked away the letter and the locket and went to the table and bowed my head while Thornton asked God to bless our meal. Life had not been any kind of easy, but I had a lot to be thankful for. The Bible says that even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow finds a nest where she may lay her young. I thought of the slave cabin at Arlington where I had come into the world, where I had learned to be a wife, where I had birthed my own children. There were some good memories mixed in with the bad. But it was not my home. It never was.

  A bird doesn’t live in the nest where it was born, but in the sky in which it flies.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This novel owes its existence to two fairly recent discoveries of historical materials. In 2007, a trunk belonging to Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of General and Mrs. Robert E. Lee, was discovered in a bank vault in Virginia. Inside the trunk were several hundred items Miss Lee had collected, including papers, letters, postcards, and clippings. Among the papers was an 1872 letter from Selina Norris Gray, a former slave at Arlington, to Mrs. Robert E. Lee.

  In September of 2014, a volunteer for the National Park Service, which maintains Arlington House (now the Robert E. Lee Memorial), spotted a photo for sale on eBay. The seller in England had found it in a box of “unwanted” photos at a British garage sale. The park service volunteer recognized the woman in the photo as Selina Norris Gray. Mrs. Gray had been Mrs. Lee’s housekeeper and personal assistant and had taken charge of Arlington and its Washington treasures when Mrs. Lee was forced to abandon her home at the start of the Civil War.

  As a student of history and especially of the life of General Lee, and as the author of a number of historical novels, I was thrilled with these new finds and intrigued by Selina’s story. At a time when slaves were deserting Arlington, why did Mrs. Lee leave Selina, rather than the white male overseer, in charge? How had such a deep trust developed between mistress and slave? Why did Selina choose to stay when other slaves simply walked away? And how did she come to be recognized as the “Savior of the Washington Treasures”?

  At the same time I had recently read yet another biography of General Lee in which his wife was marginalized, criticized, and denigrated. I set out to write this novel with several goals in mind: to bring Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee out of the shadow of her iconic husband and give her the credit she deserves, and to explore the friendship between Mary and Selina, which lasted until Mary’s death in 1873. Just as important, I felt that Selina’s story, which is largely unknown outside a small circle of historians, deserved to be told.

  From the very beginning of her life, Mary inspires controversy. Almost all historians give her birth year as 1808, but Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote a biography of General Lee as well as Mary’s biography for Encyclopedia Virginia, gives the year as 1807, the same year that Mary’s famous husband was born. One of the Custis family Bibles gives Mary’s birth year as 1808, but the last 8 is smudged, as if a correction has been made. Some historians speculate that someone—perhaps Mary herself—changed the date in order to appear a year younger than her husband. In any case, writers of historical fiction must make choices, and I have chosen to accept Pryor’s date of 1807 as Mary’s birth year, making her just nine months younger than Robert.

  General Lee’s many biographers have had a field day with Mary; she has been variously described as selfish, spoiled, willful, slovenly, ugly, and dull. Typical of this type of characterization is Emory Thomas’s description in Robert E. Lee: A Biography. He writes, “Mary Custis proved a liability [to Robert E. Lee]. She was spoiled and helpless and became even more so when confronted with the obligations of being spouse, adult, and parent.” He goes on: “Mary was accustomed to having her own way. She tended to center attention upon herself . . . she was disorganized . . . and notoriously late, nor was she especially pretty, in sharp contrast to her husband, who was extremely handsome and seemed important when he entered a room.”

  From the glimpses of Mary in her husband’s biographies, and from her own letters and journals, it is clear that she was not in fact always punctual, nor was she the most fastidious of housekeepers, though Robert noted, “She does try.”

  As the only Custis child to survive infancy, Mary was sole heiress to her father’s extensive holdings and grew up surrounded by servants who saw to her every need. It is likely she was indulged and pampered, but in this she was no different from many other wealthy Virginia belles. She may not have been “especially pretty,” but she had several suitors, including Robert E. Lee’s brother Smith and Sam Houston, who would become president of the Texas Republic. Smith Lee took his loss in stride, serving as his brother’s best man, but Mary’s r
efusal stung Sam Houston; he questioned “the good taste and discernment of Mary Custis, who preferred to tie herself by long engagement to that shy underclassman at West Point when she might have been Houston’s bride and the belle of Washington Society.”

  Far from dull, Mary was exceptionally well educated for the times, mastering French, Greek, and Latin and reading four newspapers every day. She was a gifted painter of the landscapes and people of Arlington, eclipsing her father’s talent. One of her watercolors, a 4 × 5-inch study called Enslaved Girl, painted in 1830, sold in 2007 to Colonial Williamsburg for its museum collection.

  At her father’s death she took over the organization of his papers and completed a project he had begun some years before of gathering all of his “recollections” of his stepgrandfather, General Washington—pieces he had published in the paper—into a single volume. Mary added her own memoir of her father, writing with wit and elegance about his early ancestors. She selected an editor, negotiated through him with various publishers, and in 1860 published Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis, with a Memoir of the Author by His Daughter.

  Mary and her mother were active in the American Colonization Society (ACS) and sold flowers from their Arlington gardens to support the cause. They were committed to the emancipation of all the Custis slaves and gave up their claim to the Fitzhugh slaves in exchange for a written promise that the children of those slaves would be free. She and her mother taught those at Arlington to read and write (including, presumably, Selina Norris, who was fifteen years Mary’s junior).

  Organized by Richard Bland Lee (one of Robert E. Lee’s uncles), Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, and supported by President James Monroe, the ACS sometimes purchased the freedom of slaves and outfitted them for immigration to Liberia. Their stated belief was that freed slaves were subjected to such deep racism that they could never succeed in America, and that a new start in Liberia was their best chance at a decent life. In the early 1850s, the state of Virginia appropriated $30,000 a year for five years to support the work of the society. A few other states followed suit.