by Lois Leveen
I wasn’t sure I was ready to forgive the part he’d played at Omohundro’s. But still I asked, “What did you mean, when you said you have a use for me?”
“ ’Tis some work for our side, and you are just the one for it.”
“I already have work, in the prisons.”
“Bet can do such by herself. This will be something only you can do, for you are dark, and smart, and they never expect the two together. None will suspect you for copying out the things you hear and see for Mr. Lincoln’s army, when you be in the Gray House.”
The Gray House, Richmond slang for the Shockoe Hill mansion where Jefferson Davis lived. The building perched pelican sure above Butchertown, its back to most of the city. Since I had no call to pass down Clay Street, that rear wall was about all I ever saw of it. “Why would I be there?”
“Waiting on Varina Davis, what has run an ad in the Enquirer this very day, for a serving gal and maid. She maun be a cruel one, she canna keep free nor slave working for her long. But the slave she’s hired for from me will last the whole war through, I wager.”
It was one thing to play-act at serving Bet, who knew me free and educated. Who gave me both those things herself, when no one else in the world but Mama and Papa thought I deserved them. But to serve the First Lady of the Confederacy, cleaning and tending all day, was something else again. “So while you play the wealthy slave-trader, I’m to be the misused slave?”
“We’d not have much sense to try it the other way round, would we, lass?” Though McNiven wasn’t much for kindly gestures or comforting phrases, he added, “We maun be doing so, for the sake o’ them that canna yet do for themselves.”
I’d come back to Virginia with only the vaguest sense of what I was meant to do, had carved conviction from danger to secret the prisoners’ communications out to the Union, never doubting I’d set myself the proper course. That same surety told me now that McNiven was right—Bet could manage on her own in the prisons. Whether I could manage walking back into the lows and depths of slavery, I wasn’t nearly as certain. But I thought about the woman from Omohundro’s, and about Papa. About the millions of bondspeople that I’d been telling Wilson this war would free.
If my being a slave might hasten the day when Papa and countless others weren’t, I had to try my hand in the Gray House, whatever the risk might be.
I barely had time to take to the plan myself, before I was back home telling Wilson about it. And he made his opinion on it quite clear.
“How am I supposed to feel about my wife working as a slave to some white family?”
“I’m none too keen on it myself. But there’s a war on, and—”
He didn’t so much as let me finish. “Don’t start with all your the war’s going to end slavery, Mr. Lincoln just doesn’t know it yet business. I’ll believe that when it comes to pass, and not a moment before.”
“What if I mean to have a part in making it come to pass?” I put all the indignance and insistence I could muster into what I said out loud. But that was just blustery cover for what I felt deep inside, which was utter trepidation. Not trepidation over what it would be like to wait on the most powerful white man in all of the Confederacy. Trepidation my convictions might cost me Wilson, like they did Theodore. “I thought you loved me because I’m contrary enough to favor doing what’s right over doing what’s easy.”
“I do love you, more than I’ve ever loved any person on this earth. But can’t you see it’s hard for a man to have a wife he can’t protect?”
Looking into my dear husband’s eyes, I couldn’t help but see it. But I could see, too, that Wilson was no easy-smile Handsome Hinton, who adored me only so long as I was willing to be his adornment. “I love you, too. And it breaks my heart to think that though my mama and papa loved each other, they never could look after each other like we do, that so many slaves today still can’t.” I took his hand in mine. “I’m not loving you any less if I work to change that.”
“And I’m not loving you less if I don’t much care for all the worry you put me through when you do.”
We left it that way—neither of us quite satisfied, though at least we each begrudgingly understood the other.
Two mornings later, I had my first good look at the facade facing out from Clay Street and Twelfth. Square and plain, the house was built of gray stucco cut to look like masonry. Bigger but less comely than the Van Lew mansion, and likely to stink all summer long, with the stables set just behind a low wall on the side of the residence.
There wasn’t a soul in the yard, but as I passed through the servants’ entry into the basement, cries and yelps sounded off the whitewashed walls and brick floors. I followed the noise to an unornamented room where three olive-skinned children were shrieking at each other. The eldest, a girl of about seven, had porridge in her hair. Brandishing a lob of butter, she chased her two brothers around a long plank table. As they rounded the corner, the smaller of the boys careened into my legs, howling and flailing against me.
“Where is Nurse? Where is Nurse?” A tall woman in a purple broché morning dress appeared in the opposite doorway, shrilling out the question. Her mannish height and her coloring, as olive as the children’s, set her off from any Richmond matron I’d ever seen. Her eyebrows pinched in permanent glower, and her dark brown hair was pulled back from her face as severely as a plaited mane on a show horse. Though younger than Bet, she was already thick around the middle, with jowls that shook as she spoke. “I have told Nurse a hundred times that she is to keep you quiet while the president is in the house.”
The children scrambled to their places on a low wooden bench before the table. “Nurse says she has too much to do tending Billy, and we are to look after ourselves,” the older boy said.
“She has too much to do?” The woman scowled at the notion of an overworked servant. “The president has too much to do running the Confederacy, and I have too much to do running the household that runs the Confederacy, to have the president’s children tearing about like wild Comanches.”
The girl inspected a spoonful of porridge. “Yesterday you said we were as wild as African savages, Mother. Which is wilder?”
At the mention of African savages, Varina Davis took her first notice of me. “Who are you?”
Before I could answer, the older boy pushed the younger off the wooden bench, sending a creamer tumbling after him. I snatched up the crying child, using my apron to wipe the milk-white splatters from his face.
“She’s as fast on the cream as kitty,” the older boy said.
The observation set his sister whining. “I miss kitty. Why couldn’t we bring her to this dull old house?”
“Kitty could not be brought all the way from Brierfield to Montgomery and then here, as you have already been told. I will not have the president’s children complaining about that animal anymore.” The woman’s eyes bore hard on me as I gathered up shards of porcelain and set them on the table, then passed her the slip of paper McNiven had written out.
“Marse say you hired for me.”
“Hired, indeed. These Richmonders should be glad to give their servants to tend the president’s house, instead of charging us a fortune for such barest of necessities. Richmond grows rich off the Confederacy, while the president himself grows poor.”
I marked the yards of periwinkle silk ribbon that crisscrossed her full skirt. The trim on her jacket alone must have cost more than an army private or a government clerk made in two months’ time.
She tucked McNiven’s note into the clip on her chatelaine. “Go on up to the parlor, you’ll find the rest of them there.” As I passed toward the doorway, she asked, “What do they call you?”
“Mary.”
The girl wriggled along the bench toward her younger brother. “That’s aunt’s name, and Mrs. Chesnut’s as well.”
“Indeed, it will not do to have a negro named Mary about,” her mother said. “We shall call her Molly.”
I hadn’t even set to work fo
r the Davises, and already I felt as used-up as my crumpled, cream-soaked apron. A mistress who took every other sentence to bray about how important her husband is. A gaggle of children competing to be the most ill behaved. A nursemaid no one could find. And not even my own name to see me through. I ticked off all I had to contend with, as I made my way through the basement and up to the dining room, then passed through the entry hall to the parlor.
The ostentatious furnishings on the main floor told me as much about the Davises as the set piece of domestic relations I’d witnessed among the cellars. Every inch of every wall in those rooms was papered, the flocking swirled in garish greens or crimsons. The wall colors clashed with the elaborate patterns of the carpets, which warred in turn with the gaudy upholstery, the ornate brocatelle curtains, and the gilt edging on the mirrors, paintings, and gasoliers.
I found the housekeeper kneeling over a bucket of vinegary liquid, washing the bottom panes of the parlor window. “You the new one, I suppose,” she said with a Deep South accent. She was a dark string bean of a woman, bones nearly poking through her ebony skin. “You can stop staring. Like to burn off what little flesh I got on me, the way you looking.”
She squeezed out the rag and draped it over the edge of the bucket, then stood and looked me hard in the eye. “She keep the food locked up and everything weighed out to the ounce. Be glad you live out, take your own meals stead a eating her scrap.” She leaned over and pinched my upper arm. “Still, she like to work even that much fat off you.”
“My name is Mary, though she say she gonna call me Molly. What’s yours?”
“I outlasted all the rest a her servants ten times over, that’s enough for you to know. Ain’t about to learn your name till you been here a month or more. She run through your kind too quick for me to bother.” She clucked her tongue. “Unless she take a fool’s liking to you, like that shanty Irish nursemaid Catherine, laziest thing I ever seed and them chiljen running raggedy through the house. Or snobby little Betsy, carry on like she royalty herself just cause she dump Queen Varina’s chamber pot.”
Queen Varina—Richmonders were handy with that appellation, some using it with pride at the First Lady’s regal bearing, others with complaints of how snobbish she was. I didn’t have to guess which way the emaciated housekeeper meant it.
She nodded toward a girl gawky with adolescence who was cleaning the mantel dressing. “Sophronia, show this one how I like things done. Don’t look as though she know too much, standing there hanging on to a soiled apron like it were a ten-dollar note.” The housekeeper picked up her bucket and left the room.
“Don’t … mind … Hortense.” Sophronia’s words came out in tiny gulps, like bubbles of air struggling to the surface of a pond. “Plain hates Catherine and Betsy. ’Cause she can’t boss ’em. But she boss me and you. Plenty.”
For the next hour, Sophronia and I cleaned our way through the center parlor and the drawing room, laboring in silence except for her occasional hiccups of instruction about how Hortense insisted a particular chore be done. It had been more than a decade since I’d been set to such grueling work. The intervening years had imbued me with more determination than bodily strength, though the former kept me careful to hide the lack of the latter, even from this Sophronia.
But mine wasn’t the only false front amid the swash and swagger of the Gray House. When I laid the dusting rag along the library mantel, I discovered the seeming marble was nothing but painted cast iron. As I wiped the fakery clean, a hacking started up in the adjoining entryway.
“You’re not going out in this weather, are you, Jefferson?” Varina Davis chirped like a mother robin trying to ward off whatever might upset her nest.
“I must get to the Treasury Building. I’ve meetings all”—a deep voice I took for Jefferson Davis’s twisted into a cough—“day long.”
“The president needs to take care of his health, for the sake of the Confederacy. And the president’s wife needs to take care of him.”
“I must go. The news of the Virginia has everyone hopeful. I must be ready, before that damn Joe Johnston rushes in and takes the credit for himself.”
I thought of the Virginia Guard, the Virginia Infantry, the Virginia Howitzers, and at least a dozen similarly titled military companies that had paraded through Richmond since the war began. Which one did Jeff Davis mean? And what were the Confederates hoping it would do?
“Sophronia,” Hortense cut into my rumination like a jagged-toothed rip-saw, “didn’t I tell you to show that gal how I want things done? She like to smash them Chinee doodads the way she carrying on.”
I looked down and righted one of the large Chinese vases flanking the fireplace, which my skirt had snagged when I turned to hear the exchange between the Davises. “I was just–”
“Ain’t talking to you. Daydreaming and backtalking, another one ain’t gonna last, look like.” Hortense turned back to Sophronia. “Get upstairs and do his office, quick. Who know how long we got before Queen Varina drag him back here, convinced he about to keel over just from a bit a cough and spit.”
Sophronia led me up the narrow servants’ stairs, gurgling out a word or two on each step. “Hate that office. Papers everyplace. Move ’em, he has a fit. Don’t, and she hollers it ain’t clean. Like to burn them all.”
We set to work in the upstairs hall, which with its ornate coat rack and array of straightbacked chairs served as the receiving area for visitors to the president. From there we advanced into a tiny pass-through of a closet that had been commandeered for the secretary’s office. Though the calendar of appointments lying on the drop-front desk piqued my interest, I didn’t dare to more than glance at it with Sophronia crowded so close. She dawdled over the room as long as she could, until finally we stood in one corner, staring through the open door into Jeff Davis’s office.
“Hortense scared to do it herself,” Sophronia said. “That’s why she makes me. Makes us.” A flicker of realization crossed her face, and she pushed me into the room. “Yeah, Molly. Us better get to it.”
Davis’s office seemed nearly stark in comparison to the decor downstairs, with a simple red and brown fleur-de-lis pattern on the beige wall paper, and repeating diamonds of gold and maroon on the carpet. A pair of crossed swords and scattered paintings of military scenes adorned the walls. The walnut and black horsehair furniture sat dark and spare and heavy. An Empire couch, a desk and tufted chair, and a round table with two straightback chairs, all set purposefully around the room. Writing papers were scattered across the desk, and larger pages, probably maps, covered the table.
Sophronia crossed to the far wall. Her face was flat and round as a fry pan, her eyes set wide like the raw yolks of two eggs cracked in to cook. “I better watch you. Make sure you get it right. Go on.”
Like a child forcing himself through his haricots and saving his cake for last, I began dusting the sofa, the paintings, and the large globe and stand, then polishing the wood with our mix of beeswax and turpentine. By the time I finished sweeping the fireplace and cleaning the long, thin tube that connected the desk lamp to the ceiling gasolier, Sophronia had turned her back to me to nod and wave out the window. Watching her pantomime, I guessed she must be carrying on a romance with the groundsman. That was all the opening I needed. Nudging the spittoon that stood sentry beside the desk, I leaked an ooze of brown onto the carpet.
“Hortense have a fit if she see this,” I said, calling Sophronia’s attention to the tobacco juice. “I best run downstairs, fetch a fresh bucket of water to clean it. Is the sink in the cellar?”
“Cellar water too rusty. Got to draw it in the yard. Go myself.” She scurried out of the room, delighted at the prospect of a rendezvous with her groundsman.
I didn’t waste a tick of the mantel clock before I was studying the correspondence scattered on Davis’s desk.
Gosport Naval Yard, Va. February 28,
President Jefferson Davis,
My design for the former Merrimac has been
fully executed. The CSS Virginia sits in Norfolk fully clad in iron, awaiting only her coal before she attacks the Union fleet at the mouth of the James. Our naval men look forward to their historic voyage on behalf of the Confederacy.
Very respectfully yours,
Jn L Porter
Sketched on the bottom of the missive was the oddest-looking maritime conveyance I’d ever seen. She had no sails, and most of the hull sat below the squiggly marks meant to show the water-line. Atop the water, the ship rose into a trapezoid, with slits drawn in for gunnery windows.
On the back of the letter, someone had scribbled technical particulars.
L: 270ft
Armored casement: 24in oak and pine clad with 4in iron plate
Prow: 1500lb iron ram
Armament: 3 9in smooth-bore Dahlgrens, 1 6in rifle on each broadside.
Single pivot mted 7in Brooke rifle in stern and bow gun ports.
This Virginia was an ironclad monster of the sea. Surely able to decimate the Federal navy and destroy the Union blockade.
Before I could search through the next letter, a loud crash sounded through the house. I hurried from the office and down the curving center stair toward the commotion.
In the entry hall, two ornate mahogany chairs were toppled onto the brawling Davis sons, a silver dish and a dozen calling cards scattered across the floor. Queen Varina stood above the boys, howling about how the president’s wife must be able to have her nap without the household going to bedlam. Catching sight of me, she snatched an umbrella from the hallstand and cuffed it hard against my ear. “Infernal servants, too busy prancing about to get their work done.”
As she turned to bark at a befreckled white woman who appeared in the far doorway, I slipped into the library.
Hortense, huddled behind the door, sent no comfort my way. “One a them chiljen like to kill the other, way they fight. Let that Lazy Irish have ’em, we got ’nough to do cleaning up after it all.” Though my ear ached, all she offered was stern command. “Keep to the back stair and keep out of trouble. I got plenty a grief without needing to train a new maid every other day.”