We offered the sisters our forearms and walked up the aisle, overcome by a strange new sense of closeness. It was only as I met my bride’s—and her sister’s—awed and timid eyes that I believed it was true, because I felt that we were one. I barely knew these girls, but it did not matter. They had saved our lives last night, and were saving them again now.
Later that evening, everybody danced the Virginia reel. But before that we had a big supper.
At the main table we dined with our wives, along with Jefferson, Parson Hodge, Mayor Dungsworth, and Mr. and Mrs. Yates. Other guests filled the five tables positioned around us in the dining room. I looked around me and wondered if any of these people were among those who’d tried to kill us the night before.
Just as Chang and I were, Mrs. Yates was sitting on a custom-built bench. To our right, Hodge was constantly laughing and making conspiratorial faces. He seemed to think every utterance was an inside joke.
“The slaves are saying that this is a spirit marriage.” Hodge’s voice was starting to crack and tremble in advance of the laugh coming in his throat. “Voodoo. Now whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know.” He batted his eyelashes.
“Slaves,” said Mayor Dungsworth, “need their rumors of spirits.”
“But so do I!” Hodge cried, and then shrugged his shoulders to exonerate himself from any charge of impropriety. Mr. Yates turned away from Hodge.
“I don’t feel what we are doing is that, you’all,” said Adelaide, shaking her head. “A spirit marriage.”
Sarah looked downward. “I don’t feel that, either.”
Hodge looked at her a long time, as if he wanted to say something but knew he should hold back. “I just mean to say”—he leaned in to whisper—“I sometimes get silly and think I’m not any more civilized than they are. Well, not really—” He chuckled at the thought of being uncivilized, and looked into the space between my brother and me. “Do you ever feel that way, twins? No more civilized than the other nonwhites in Wilkes County?”
Chang opened his mouth but didn’t speak. He was waiting for me to say something. The house creaked sternly.
“Excuse me?” Chang answered finally. Everybody laughed. Chang began to smile, and he nicked me with his elbow as he wiped the sweat from his upper lip.
“Chang and Eng are brilliantly smart,” Mrs. Yates said to the Mayor. “They picked up English themselves, and Eng reads Shakespeare.”
Mayor Dungsworth’s whitish beard, young-looking face, and clear blue eyes gave him an almost regal air. He pursed his lips at Mrs. Yates and nodded. Meanwhile, my father-in-law breathed through his nose, producing a sort of soft, bitter chuckle.
Mrs. Yates waved her meaty hands to get the attention of someone sitting at a table across the room. Then she smiled. “What are you’all laughing about over there?” she shouted. “Everyone’s having such fun at your end, and I’m here with these stuck-in-themuds,” Mrs. Yates went on with mock peevishness, in a baby’s tone of voice. She pouted for an instant, then exploded into a laughter that shook her whole body as she laid a weighty hand on the Mayor’s wrist. I looked away.
Thom and two other Negroes, young Harriet and Brett, who another slave owner had lent out for the night, brought out dinner—green beans, mashed potatoes, roasted duck, and turkey gravy, the latter being presented separately, in silver boats. Thom, as wobbly as he was, had the two slaves shuffling tableware so hurriedly that Harriet’s kerchief was stirring behind her as if she’d been facing a breeze.
I told the Yateses that I found the food delicious. My father-in-law looked at me, his eyes very baggy but he managed not to frown, then resumed looking at his plate.
“You’ll be getting used to this sort of cooking,” said Dungsworth.
“We were going to prepare some rice for Chang and Eng, isn’t that right, girls?” said Mrs. Yates. “But the twins wanted good food, like we was having. Were having.” She grinned and huffed—breathing did not come easily to her.
“I’ll bet this’s an improvement on rice,” said Hodge. He pouted, and waited until he got our father-in-law’s attention before continuing. “Bet it’s an improvement,” the Parson added.
“I’ll venture it is,” Yates muttered. He gripped his fork with a vigor that spoke volumes about his thoughts on the subject.
“This gravy is especially delicious, girls,” I said, not really knowing what I was saying, focusing on my smile and the heartfelt air I could lend it.
“Not that anything wrong with rice,” Chang said.
My wife kept her head down as if her long chin were an extension of her collarbone. Our choice to marry had consequences, I thought. She probably knew this.
“Jefferson likes rice,” Mrs. Yates said, looking at her son. “Isn’t that right, Jeff?”
Jefferson scratched his head.
“Please, Mother,” Adelaide and Sarah said in unison.
“It’s true.” Mrs. Yates nodded with determination. “Not like a Chinaman, but the boy likes rice.”
“I believe I do.” Jefferson’s voice was wobbling on the opening of adulthood. “With chicken sometimes.”
I was not listening: I thought of my hopes that for years had gone unnoticed like bubbles coming off hidden treasure at the bottom of the ocean. I seized on them to feed my appetite for the coming adventure. And my fear of it. Outside the window, mist sat on the front lawn.
After dinner, everyone gathered on the grass and danced the Virginia reel by lantern light. While Hodge stood on the veranda playing the fiddle, the crowd split itself into clapping lines, one of men, the other, of their partners. The pair at the bottom of their respective queues met in the middle, joined hands, and do-si-doed through the space between; and then the next couple echoed the ritual, and so on. This propelled the lines. The ground rumbled. Mist curled around dancing calves.
With our wives, Chang and I retreated to the porch, by Hodge and his fiddle. It was understood we would not dance. We four newlyweds looked out into the dark, mild universe, clapped, smiled and nodded at the bouncing guests occasionally.
Hodge’s fiddle music was high-pitched, based on the pentatonic scale. I thought of a wind slowly blowing through dead trees when Hodge played in the lower register, and when he scratched out the highest notes, it sounded like the regret that left Mother’s lips when she was grieving.
My wife shivered by my side, though it was not shivering weather. “Do you know we play the flute?” I said. Delicatenecked and wondering about the mystery of love, Sarah looked back at me, her eyelashes flittering like butterflies lighting in a meadow.
“I am an abominable dancer,” I said, feeling a warm trickle in my chest that I took to be the start of my future, “and have never in my life asked anyone—”
“And we not even any good at it,” Chang said, turning to his bride on his elbow.
“—But I’m asking you now.” In my wife’s eyes I saw my own smile. “May I have the pleasure of this dance?”
When it was our turn to skip between the rows of guests, there was some confusion. Kicking up more dust than previous dancers, Chang and I skipped out to the center, our hands squeezing each other’s shoulders; and we waited for our brides. The two girls waltzed toward us together, smiling and blushing, facing their new grooms; but when it was time to turn and start dancing through the makeshift lane, Adelaide followed her instincts and tried to take her husband’s inside arm. She realized her mistake and skipped to the outside, but it was too late. People had seen.
My brother’s face showed a pathetic nervous smile; I could feel my own cheeks going flush. The clapping was disrupted and uneven now. Still, we four newlyweds began to dance between our guests. I succumbed to the rhythm and the melody. I closed my eyes. I felt my wife’s sweating and shaking hand in mine. I began to dance.
It was lovely, and with my eyes still closed, I thought it was an exquisite moment—except for the “excuse-me” ’s I heard. I opened my eyes and saw people shuffling to move out of our way as we da
nced up the lane. The lines had been too near one another, the lane too narrow for a double-couple.
The columns billowed out, widening our path: the bedlam of rearrangement. Hodge’s music kept on, though, and the clapping rhythm with it, and I closed my eyes again. A tepid breeze felt good through my hair. My wife was fondling the heel of my palm with her thumb as we danced. All that bustle, and wasn’t she pretty to stroke my hand lightly in hers. I opened my eyes. Everyone was smiling under the lantern light. I knew love. All I had ever wanted was to be alone, and I had gotten just the opposite of that wish. And I was happy for it.
Book Two
The dream of the state is to be one, while the dream of the individual is to be two.
—Jean-Luc Goddard
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Mysteries of the Bridal Bed
1843
Wilkesboro
Our double-wedding coincided with the end of the most blessed age of the variegated American South. Chang and I, two immigrants thinking just of the pursuit of happiness, had been immersed in our own lives and had failed to notice the portents and discontents of America. But after settling down in Wilkes County, one could not fail to mark the emotion in the air, even as early as 1843.
The preservation of the Union, while it seemed less and less possible, had become the golden goal—even, at that point, of most Southerners. The nation was building the roads and canals that Carolina’s favorite son John Calhoun himself had called “a most powerful cement to hold the parts of the nation together.” In time I would fall under the sway of the great politician Henry Clay of the Whigs, whose belief in a high tariff on imports would increase the value of the corn and hogs I would come to raise—but I admired Calhoun as well. His allegiance to states’ rights, the belief that the self-governing components of this body politic should have the power to do as they pleased, was a position for which I of course felt a natural affinity. The seeds of secession were already being planted, however; South Carolina had gone so far as to threaten to secede eleven years before, but she backed down once President Jackson raised an army to head off the defection. No one believed she would yield again, if ever there were another confrontation. And another confrontation seemed inevitable.
It would be some time before I really got caught up in the current of politics. At this point I felt an uneasy kinship with an America that had been my home for as many years as had Siam. Sometimes I looked at my skin and felt ashamed. How far removed were we from Thom in the Yates family’s estimation?
After the wedding, Chang and I decided it would be best if we stayed away from our wives while our new home in Wilkes County was being renovated. This we financed with the money we’d saved after years of touring. My brother and I passed the first weeks of our married lives alone together in the Guion Hotel in neighboring Mount Airy, North Carolina, making minor modifications to our plan regarding how best to decipher the special questions of our marital bed.
This is the method Chang and I decided upon, and told the newspapers about: Whenever one of us needed privacy with his wife, the other was to become “insensate” for the next hour, to become unconscious, allowing each twin to enjoy his wife in seclusion. Though our situation seemed immoral and shocking to the outside world, it was through what we called an “alternate mastery” that we would be certain to remain pure. I would pass immediately into the highest loftiness of trance, trying to raise my spirit out of our bodies, like a mist, to circle the world and vapor toward Siam. In this way we would avoid allegations of improper relations between our wives and ourselves.
Soon enough, what would soon be known as “our house” was said to be ready, and my brother and I went excitedly to examine it before our wives arrived. Our carriage reached the little home well.past dusk. Our new residence was on Trap Hill, a knoll outside of town named after an old hunter who had had a predilection for setting snares to catch wild turkey. The house was a stunted white square, unassuming, sturdy, crouching on a stretch of dust and hillock set back from the dirt road. (“No angry townsfolk would bother us here,” I’d said to Chang.) It had been built with rocks and wood taken from the banks of the Yadkin River, and it had a kitchen, dinner room, and a small parlor on the first floor, as well as an extra-wide stairway for Chang and me. There were two sleeping quarters on the second floor—one with a bed built to accommodate three, and one in which our wives would alternate spending every other night alone—and two more bedrooms for any children we might have.
Leafless, skinny birch trees corralled the house, which had a brown curb roof and two chimneys, one at each side. It was a desolate, peaceful scene, a home blending into the tableau of cotton wagons, wayward livestock, and tottery churches that was Wilkes County. Next to the house stood a barn in which we would shelter our animals and store hay and corn and firewood. In the backyard, Thom’s shed completed our modest estate.
It was dark by the time Chang and I and Thom arrived at this new residence, and no one had been there before us to light any of the lamps inside. With only the full moon lending its light, the dry earth of our property spread out lumpish and gray like cooling lead around our home.
Thom gathered boxes of clothes and books for us and set them down amid the dark oak and hickory furniture.
That first night, alone again at least for one more evening, Chang and I lay in the biggest bed we had ever seen. We had not yet put up shades over our big new windows, and the room was full of moonlight, lending the floorboards the color of white sand. My brother’s green-striped nightcap kept sliding off his head, and he could not sleep either.
“I cannot believe our good fortune,” I said.
Chang answered as if he had been in the middle of a monologue. “That these sisters do this, that they excuse—” His emotionfilled voice was thick as if his mouth were full of rice. “To become a mother is so important to them, that they—” He smiled and we huddled closer together to keep warm. Beneath the blanket Chang’s feet were wandering, silently, like moles digging underground.
“Few other girls would be so—refined,” I said, my nose filled with the sweet smell of the pomade in Chang’s hair. “They saved our lives,” I sighed. The word “wives” slid around in my brain. How many times had Chang and I lain like this, afraid even to talk of marriage?
“Yes, extraordinary,” he said, shifting his arm beneath my neck and absentmindedly tapping my shoulder three times with his hand.
I’d given up trying to find an explanation for our newfound love. Though the sisters were dissimilar in many ways, they were like most siblings in that their conduct, in respect to one another, was baffling to everyone other than themselves. Some sets of siblings adhere to their own ethics, like a society of two.
“Suppose we hadn’t found them,” I said. “These lovely sisters.”
“Why I want to think of that?” Chang did not open his eyes.
“Only this,” I said. “It is odd that we could have needed something so badly and not known it.”
“I know it all along,” said my brother. “I know it all along.”
I could not help wondering about the pleasures and mysteries of the bridal bed. “We are about to receive something else I didn’t quite expect.”
Chang did not respond. He’d fallen asleep.
That night I dreamed I was Sarah and myself at the same time. I knew this was impossible—and impossible to put into words—but I felt I was two genders at once, though I knew a person had fully to be one or the other. I was both, somehow man and woman, she and myself.
The next evening Adelaide and Sarah arrived after supper. It was a cold weekend night; the stoves were heated. We gentled our wives from their carriage and down the path to their new home, while Thom gathered boxes of their cosmetics and clothes and notions and brought everything inside. Church bells were clanging on the other side of Trap Hill. For some reason I felt in a great hurry.
“How are you, Adelaide?” Chang searched his wife’s face before allowing himself a smile.
“How are you, Sarah?” I asked.
“Very well, thanks.” Her voice cracked. “Only I have a bit of a bother in my stomach.”
The girls wore toques and identical long ruffled white dresses with red trim. Above the frilly neckline of their attire, the tops of their chests were more visible than usual, and I admired the tightness of their skin and the little plots of childish freckles scattered across their collarbones.
Their dainty hands in our sweating ones, we brought Adelaide and Sarah to the soft gray couch in the den. Before they’d sat down, Chang and I turned on our heels and ran out of the room, toward the kitchen. Adelaide yelled to us. “Where are you two going?”
We were sprinting down the hall now. “We’ll show you,” I called over my shoulder. “One minute, please,” said Chang over his.
While we rummaged through an open drawer and found our battered oblong flute cases, I could hear the noise of an animated whispering session between our brides in the other room.
In an instant, Chang and I knelt before the girls, facing one another to free our arms. “For you,” we said. Chang, not following our agreed-upon script, added, “For love,” shaping the words around the jagged cadence of his accent.
We’d spent the day practicing for this moment. We opened the instrument cases and fit together our flutes expertly, laying the two instruments side by side like two silver-gilt eels. Then we played. Sarah took her toque off and brought it to her lap. Her blonde hair was parted down the middle, pulled back into a chignon—a perfect, golden setting for the angular splendor of her nose, which seemed carved by an old-world sculptor too covetous to stop sculpting. Her sister was a variation on the same theme.
When Chang and I began to play “O Susannah,” my wife’s eyes took on the respectful focus of someone watching a passing parade. The high notes jumped quickly, free of vibrato, their throaty elegance receding before the greater elegance of my wife. I tried to concentrate on the airholes, my mouth, and the oscillations of breath, but my notes fell to pieces around her.
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