The Emancipator's Wife
Page 13
Saul was gone, just like that. Without warning, without good-by.
Not because of some stupid dispute about honor, thought Mary, that he would have had the choice to take up or leave alone. But because it suited her grandmother to help out Uncle David, and this was the quickest and easiest way.
Marriage, and honor, and sapphire pendants, and not being an old maid—even having a stepmother who sent one away from home for putting spiders in her bed—suddenly seemed insults to the silent agony on Jane's face. The petty luxuries of the free.
Mary gathered up her skirts and went quietly back through the pantry, and up the stairs.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER CASH'S WEDDING, MARY UNDERSTOOD THERE WERE TWO WORLDS in Lexington. She had always been aware of the division between them, but had slipped back and forth across it with the blithe malleability of a child, to whom the fairies in the garden are as real as the horses in the stable. Besides the storybook tales of King Arthur and his knights, and the heroes of Troy, Mary had grown up on Nelson's narrations of talking foxes and clever rabbits and of little boys and their conjure-wise grannies; of the Platt-Eye Devil who waited for bad children in the dark and of the jay-bird who'd fly to Hell every Friday night to tell Satan of little girls' iniquities.
Everyone always said that slavery in Kentucky “wasn't like it was deeper south,” and that, to Mary's mind, had made it all right.
When Granny Parker sold Saul, the division between the worlds sharpened into focus for her: how narrow the gap was, and how abysmally deep.
The world of the whites was itself divided into two: the world of men, of politics, of speculation for new lands opening in the West, of horse-racing and money-making and the casual, noisy, whiskey-smelling friendships of men; and the world of women. Mary wasn't sure which she liked best. She reveled in gossip, in shopping, in flirtations on the porch of Rose Hill and beautiful new dresses—she'd grown adept at coaxing promises from her father, and at holding him to them, if necessary, with tears. She loved afternoon-calls and the intricate ritual of who was at home to whom and who left cards on whom. But she understood that the ultimate power lay with the men.
And the men, who would gallantly offer their arms to help women cross puddles that they assumed the women didn't have the brains to walk around, guarded their power jealously. To get drunk, to shoot or thrash one another, to whip any darky who needed it or gamble the fortunes on which their families depended, were prerogatives not to be shared with addlepated females or Northerners like Mr. Presby who couldn't comprehend what things were like in the South.
Yet it was also a world of enchantment, of sultry evenings on the porch listening to the cry of the crickets, a world of taffy-pulls and dances in the big ballroom above Giron's Confectionary. A world of writing letters to friends and brushing Meg's hair and frantically trying to sneak time to get back to the literary adventures of the blameless Isabelle and her flight from the loathsome and doomed Duke Manfred...
A world of sweet peacefulness where day succeeded quiet day, and season gentle season, in a land where the rules were always clear—if sometimes byzantine and never spoken—and people could be counted on.
On the other side of that narrow abyss lay the world of kitchens, backyards, and dusty alleys in the deep shade of elm-trees, refuges for whoever could get away from their unceasing work for a quick chat with friends who might disappear tomorrow. It was a world of back-fences and the tiny economies of vegetable-plots, fish-hooks, second-run coffee-grounds, and dresses too worn for “the missus” to want anymore.
A world where there was no power, and no redress. Ever.
For weeks after Saul's departure Mary thought of him. She would see him in her mind, chained to the deck of the steamboat going down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans, and thence to harsh labor and early death in the sugar and cotton lands of the deeper South. In her dreams he would gaze silently at the dark walls of trees gliding past, and Mary would sometimes hear the wailing slave-songs that would drift from behind the brick walls of Pullum's slave-yard.
“I'm goin' away to New Orleans,
Good-by, my love, good-by,
I'm goin' away to New Orleans,
Good-by, my love, good-by,
Oh, let her go by.”
Papa would never sell any of our people, she thought, and most of the time truly believed it. But in fact, Mammy Sally and Nelson and Chaney and Pendleton belonged, not to her father, but to Granny Parker. As Saul had done. When that thought came to her, Mary would close her eyes in panic, her heart hammering at the fear of losing her friends.
At the idea of her friends losing their homes and each other, weeping as Jane had wept.
And there was nothing she could do about it, as there had been nothing she could ever do about her mother's death.
When Cash came back from Crab Orchard Springs with Mary Jane, Robert Todd gave a reception for the newlyweds at the new Main Street house. At this party Mary took Cash aside and asked, “Are you an abolitionist, Cash?” She'd heard the word bandied about a great deal, usually as a deadly insult. Even her father would argue that, though opposed to slavery in principle as Mr. Clay was, he was not an abolitionist. Cash looked down at her with his arms folded, his piercing eyes grave.
He said, “Yes, I am.”
“But you own slaves.” He had been left fatherless young, at sixteen inheriting the plantation of White Hall, where they grew tobacco and hemp.
“That will only be until I can establish my brothers in some profession where they can make their own way, and until I can establish myself in a way that will not do injustice to Mary Jane.” He glanced across the spacious double-parlor that had once been the common-room of Palmentier's Tavern. Mary Jane, clothed in the brighter colors and more modish styles of a young wife, laughed with her friends as if she had never felt fear in her life. The company overflowed the double-parlor and filled the family parlor across the hall, and the dining-room beyond that. “Then I will free the people whom my father left to me—and in freeing them, will free myself.”
Mary was quiet. She had heard this before, from Elliot Presby—and had gotten into screaming arguments with the tutor on the strength of it. But from Cash it was different. Cash did understand the South, as the sanctimonious young New Englander never could.
“People in this country talk about slavery as if it were a matter of choice,” Cash went on. “Like the decision whether or not to keep a carriage, or whether to become a Methodist or a Baptist. We have lived with it so long that it seems like that to us, and not what it really is. Not what Mr. Lloyd Garrison has shown us—showed me, when I went to hear him speak at Yale—that it is.”
Cash's voice had grown grave, without his usual edge of theatrical anger. “And it is a sin, Mary. It is an evil, the most wicked of injustices, perpetrated and carried on simply because it is profitable to us to buy and sell black men and make them do work for us. Garrison describes it for what it is, and describes slaveholders—myself still numbered among them—for what they—we—really are: oppressors beside whom Herod and the Pharaoh of Egypt were fiddling amateurs. It cannot be allowed to continue.”
A few days later Cash rode out to Rose Hill in the evening, at the time when young gentlemen customarily called on the girls. In warm weather, chairs would be brought out onto the lawn beneath the chestnut-trees, for Madame frowned on such visits, but in the bitter cold of early spring she relented, and admitted them to the fire-warmed parlor. There she would take out her violin and play, to the accompaniment of her daughter Marie on the piano. Most of the young gentlemen were terrified of her.
Madame had long ago ceased to frighten Mary. When the school-day was done and the day-students went home, Madame and her husband seemed more human, like parents to the handful of boarding-students. Evenings in the big parlor were like the family that Mary had always wished she had; they made up, in part, for the desolation she still felt each time she left her father's house.
She stowed the papers under her mattress, where she was fairly certain no one would find them. The girls made up their own beds each morning, and changed their own sheets on Tuesday nights, the linen fresh-washed and fresh-pressed by Dulcie and Caro. It did not seem, thought Mary, that you could get away from slaves. Once she'd read The Liberator, tucked between the pages of A Young Lady's History of the United States, it seemed to her that slaves were everywhere, in every corner of Lexington.
They did all the laundry. They cut all the wood, for kitchen fires, bedroom fires, heating water to wash clothing and dishes. They ironed sheets and napkins in every house she knew of, from the wealthy plantations like the Wickliffes' Glendower and Dr. Warfield's The Meadows to houses like her father's and Granny Parker's. They worked on road-gangs, cutting trees and leveling grades so that wagons could come and go from Louisville on the river, taking hemp and tobacco down to market or hauling up the batiste de soie and gros de Naples, the feathers and ribbons and buttons of mother-of-pearl that made shopping-expeditions in Cheapside so entrancing. They milked everyone's cows and shoveled out everyone's stables; they spread the manure on everyone's gardens so that roses and carrots and potatoes would grow.
She realized she didn't know anyone—except old Solly, the town drunk and gravedigger—who didn't own a slave.
Yet it was clear to her, reading Mr. Garrison's impassioned writings, that the owning of slaves, the selling of slaves, did more than just make a mockery of the liberty that the United States had claimed as a birthright in separating from England. It was evil in and of itself, in the eternal eyes of God. The men who owned other men were tyrants, the men who sold other men were kidnappers, the men who punished other men for not accepting bondage as their lot were no better than robbers who beat their victims. Garrison's words burned her, left her breathless and deeply troubled.
Because she knew in her heart that they were true. But if she accepted them, she understood that she would have to accept that her father was a tyrant and kidnapper. That Mr. Clay, whom she both admired and loved, was, in Garrison's words, “a patriotic hypocrite, a fustian declaimer of liberty, a highway robber and a murderer.”
Then she would look around her at the friends chatting of beaux and dresses—good people, dear and sweet (except maybe Arabella Richardson)—and she wouldn't know what to feel or think.
She would have liked to talk to her father about this, but on those Saturdays and Sundays when she returned to the Main Street house, her father, if he was home at all, was always surrounded by family: always talking to Ninian—who frequently came up with Elizabeth from Walnut Hill if the couple weren't staying outright at the Main Street house for a few weeks—or admonishing Levi and George, or playing with little Margaret, little Sam, or baby David....Or if he were doing none of those things, Betsey was there, and Mary felt robbed and abandoned all over again.
Even a new pair of slippers or the promise of a new dress did not entirely make up for the ache—and confusion—in her heart.
Nor could she bring the matter up to M'sieu Mentelle without opening the subject of where she'd gotten hold of copies of The Liberator. No young lady at Rose Hill was permitted to receive correspondence that had not been scrutinized by Madame. The parents of her boarders expected her to be aware of such things. And in any case the rule about speaking only French within the house was strict, and Mary did not feel up to discussing “the popular fury against the advocates of bleeding humanity” in French.
One Saturday evening in the summer of her second year at Mentelle's—1833—Mary found her chance. Supper at the Main Street house was done—a reduced group around her father's table, for Ninian had received his law degree not long ago, and had taken Elizabeth north to his family home in Springfield, Illinois, leaving Mary bereft. Mr. Presby had returned to Boston to visit his family, and the Todds had begun to make plans to retreat to Crab Orchard Springs—or perhaps to Betsey's small country house, Buena Vista, five miles outside town, as soon as Mary was out of school for the summer.
Mary herself felt depressed and strange, as if she were going to have a headache later. She had had a nightmare the night before, about the town being flooded with water that shone ghastly green with poison, and the thunderclouds building over the mountains filled her with uneasy dread.
After supper she'd followed her father out onto the rear porch that overlooked the small formal garden that was Betsey's pride, and beyond it the woodland that bordered the stream at the rear of the property. In buying Palmentier's, Robert Todd had also purchased the three town lots surrounding it—practically the only vacant lots remaining near the center of Lexington—so that this green and pleasant prospect would remain his.
This evening he sat smoking in the gloom, listening to the muted burble of the creek. Betsey had retreated early to bed with a headache—she was, Mary suspected, increasing yet again—and Mary herself shivered at the far-off sounds of thunder.
But she sat on one of the cane-bottomed chairs beside her father, and said, “Is Mr. Clay going to run for President again, when Mr. Jackson's term is up?”
Her father grinned, and pinched her cheek. “Always the little politician, eh?” He sighed. “Maybe. Jackson's a sick old man. Even if he could, I don't think he'd court accusations of being a dictator by running for a third time when Washington was content with only two.”
“Mr. Clay is against slavery, isn't he, Papa?” Mary leaned against her father's arm, taking comfort in his bulk and size, in the scent of tobacco and Macassar oil and horses, the faint sweaty smell of manhood in his coat. “Yet he owns slaves, the way you do.”
Her father sighed again. “A man can be against slavery and still not be a crazy abolitionist, Molly,” he said. The darkness, broken only by the faint glow of light from the kitchen windows, seemed to bring them closer; Mary treasured the delicious quiet of the moment, the man-to-man matter-of-factness of her father's voice as he spoke to her. Like a woman and a friend, not like a child.
A closeness better than all the sapphire pendants in the world.
“Slavery is evil. I don't think you can argue that. But simply turning all the slaves loose would bring down a greater evil, in terms of poverty, and chaos, and lawlessness. Darkies aren't like you and me, daughter. They don't understand principles—you know how you have to keep instructions to Chaney or Judy very simple, if you're going to get anything like what you're asking for—and in most ways they're like children. Even a smart darky like Jane isn't more than a few generations removed from the jungle, you know. It wouldn't be any kindness to them to turn them loose to fend for themselves, any more than it would be to let loose your sister Frances's pet canary in the woods.”
Thunder rumbled above the hills. The metallic drumming of the cicadas in the trees seemed to accentuate the heat and closeness of the dark. Mary shivered, hating the electric feel of the air that pressed so desperately on her skull, as if the lightning itself flickered in her brain. Nelson emerged from a side door, descended the back steps, and crossed through the garden to the coach house, in whose attic he and Pendleton had their rooms while the women slaves slept above the kitchen. “But couldn't they do their same jobs at wages?”
He shook his head. “It doesn't work that way, sweetheart. No planter could make a profit if he had to pay wages, and if the wages were low the darkies would go looking for higher ones, and drive white men out of work. No, Mr. Clay's scheme is best. You don't free the Negro race until you're able to provide a home for them. Either colonize them out in the West beyond the Mississippi—which would certainly spark problems with the Indians or the Spa
nish—or set up colonies for them in Africa, where the benefits of what they've learned in this country will gradually civilize the heathen tribes around them.”
“Wouldn't that be like letting loose a canary in the woods?” asked Mary.
“Of course it would, baby.” Her father patted her gently, and glanced longingly at the cigar he'd stamped out the moment Mary had appeared in the dark door to the house. “That's why we have to do this slowly. It's only the abolitionists who want to rush pell-mell into things, to solve the problem their way, in their time, the minute they think they see a solution. They're not thinking about the consequences, to the country or to the darkies themselves.”
Lightning leaped white across the sky, blanching the leaves of the chestnut-trees. Mary screamed—at the same moment the trees bent in the rushing wind, as if reaching for the walls of the house, and thunder ripped the darkness that dropped like a smothering blanket in the lightning's wake. Trembling, she retreated to the house as a second blast of lightning split the night, and torrents of rain began to fall. Her head aching in earnest, she ran up the stairs to the guest-room, flung herself fully clothed on the bed, covered her head with the pillow so she would not hear.
But she did hear. And she saw, through the pillow and her shut eyelids, the white blasts of lightning that ripsawed the night. She heard, too, the hammering of the rain, until it seemed to her that the house and the whole town would wash away. Once she crept from her bed and looked out the window, to see the spring at the bottom of the garden overflowing, its waters spilling everywhere, glittering in the lightning's blue flare. She remembered her dream, of overspilling water bringing poison, bringing death.
The following day, Sunday, the bells of McChord's Church were tolling. Her father came in while the family was seated at breakfast and said, “That was Jim Rollins outside, coming up from the University. There's a woman down on Water Street, where the Town Branch flooded last night, down sick. They're saying it's cholera.”