I had spoken on the telephone with a pleasant woman about the room, and when she offered to assist me with sightseeing or antiques shopping, I seized the opportunity to “warn” her I was black, explaining that the purpose of my visit was to research my enslaved ancestors.
“How exciting!” she exclaimed, but I continued to feel wary. Exploring more than landscape and history, I was venturing into a living culture where slavery had thrived for nearly three centuries and where Jim Crow had been in full force until a meager three decades before my visit.
I drove up the gravel driveway to a small Victorian home. Leaving my luggage in the trunk—just in case—I walked across the lawn. Before I could reach the door, it flew open, and a petite woman with a bouncy ponytail ran out.
“Hi! I’m Pat,” she began, grabbing my hands without dropping her knitting needles and yarn, while shooing away the cat close on her heels. “You must be Bettye. I’ve looked forward to meeting you ever since you called. So, you’re from Boston. That’s neat—Boston, such an interesting history, really pretty in the fall, lots of codfish, lobster, and beans too, museums and colleges galore, I hear. Of course, my husband and I have hosted folks from all over the country, all over the world, really, like England and Japan. Last week, we had a couple from Sweden, or maybe it was Switzerland . . . someplace like that. You wouldn’t think it, would you, yes, right here in this small town, right in this little B and B.”
Dressed in a pink tank top and faded cut-off jeans, she could not have been more relaxed. Pat was a who-you-see-is-who-I-am kind of woman. I smiled, then retrieved my suitcase from the car.
The next morning, I was the lone guest in the dining room while her shy, stout husband, Bobby, prepared and served homemade sausages, butter-soaked grits, and chunks of fresh fruit. After eating more than I should have, I followed his directions to Montpelier.
I parked at the visitors’ center and took the shuttle bus past an antiquated train station and then along narrow roads through a wooded landscape. When the bus rounded a curve, the mansion, a stately, coral-colored jewel set before a sweep of hovering trees, came into view. A lush green lawn draped down the slope in front of the grand house. I had not expected to see a steeplechase track in front.
The moment I set foot on the soil where my ancestors had walked some two hundred years earlier, I felt that I belonged there with them, that they, and this place, would help me become the griotte I wanted to be. I started out on a guided tour with a group of visitors from New York, Wisconsin, and Florida, but I asked so many questions about slavery on the plantation that the guide referred me to the research staff.
I gave a brief overview of my family history to one of the historians, a middle-aged man wearing an ill-fitting jacket and rumpled shirt. He nodded and said, “Come with me.” I followed him down a narrow, dusty hallway to a small room cluttered with papers piled onto every table and chair. “Bettye,” he said, “this is Lynne, our chief archaeologist. Tell her about your family.”
Lynne Lewis had obviously spent many hours on her knees combing through the dirt at Montpelier. She was suntanned, and her jeans were stained with Virginia’s red soil. When I repeated my story, Lynne seemed to understand why it had been imperative for me to come to the plantation. As I soon learned, my research was important not only to me but also to the story of Montpelier, which the staff had recently begun trying to piece together.
“Let me show you something special,” she said. “You’re the first outsider—please forgive the term—to see it. We archaeologists tend to be a bit secretive when we first uncover something. Then, when we’re done with the excavation, we brag about what we found to everyone who’ll listen.”
Lynne took me to the back of the mansion and pointed out a path of bare soil, about three inches deep and sixteen inches wide. Scattered tufts of grass grew along the sides. The path led from the rear entry of the manor to an excavation site about seventy feet away. Lynne knelt down beside a blue tarp and folded it back to expose an irregular rectangle of bricks stacked at one end of what had been the foundation of a small building.
She stood up, shoved her hands into the pockets of her Levi’s, and rocked back and forth on her heels. “This was the kitchen,” she explained, “and that mound of bricks is what’s left of the cooking hearth.”
What I saw was more than a hole in the ground and a heap of bricks, and the path was the groove that had been worn into the earth by generations of cooks walking to and from the kitchen, serving thousands of meals to the Madisons and their many guests in the mansion. My great-great-great-great-grandmother Coreen had walked this path. I stepped into the furrow and traced the length of it, a tether—both tangible and symbolic—that had held her in bondage. My eyes teared. I had not expected to walk so literally in the footsteps of an ancestor.
Stories about Mandy’s first days on the plantation had been told again and again. Mom’s clearest remembrances of hearing them were from the 1920s. She was a student in elementary school back then; Gramps was a schoolteacher in his early forties. When he got ready to tell a story, Gramps, wearing baggy pants, suspenders, long johns—even in summer—and a sweat-stained straw hat, would first lean back in his rocking chair on the front porch or in the squeaky swivel chair at his desk. Next, he would set the scene, then introduce each character with an identifying facial expression, hand gesture, or voice. As the story unfolded, he might imitate various sounds—a clopping horse, the rushing wind, a babbling stream.
Mom would journey with Gramps wherever his voice took her. After describing a West African village, he told her that Coreen’s mother, Mandy, had been captured on the coast of Ghana. As Gramps told Mom about the Middle Passage, he imitated the sound of a creaking ship, and when he said that Madison Sr. bought Mandy, Gramps drew a cube and explained that slaves often stood on a big block of wood in order to be sold at auctions.
As Gramps told it, when Madison took Mandy to the plantation, he assigned her to a small, remote section where cotton was grown to clothe the slaves. There, in the cotton field, she “attracted his attention because she was such a good worker.” I had heard this part of our family’s story many times, but as I became an adult, I had many questions about it: Did Madison send Mandy to the cotton field because it was out of the way, far from scrutiny? Did he watch her for a long time before he decided to satisfy his lust? Did he violate her again and again? Was he brutal?
In the stories passed down by generations of my family’s historians, nothing was said about what happened between Mandy and the master. Instead, the stories skipped from Mandy being a good worker to how Coreen got her name. Gramps wanted Mandy and Coreen to be as real to his children as the family they could see and touch, but he did not want to talk about rape.
The naming story, told in what Gramps believed to be slave dialect, his “slave voice,” goes like this:
After seeing the beautiful little girl who had grown inside her body, Mandy said to the midwife, “Dere’s a big ol’ tree on a hill back home. I wants ta name my baby after dat tree so she grow up strong an’ so she know where her roots is.”
“No,” the midwife replied, “best choose a name from dis place.”
“I’ll name her fo’ de tree but won’t tell nobody . . . but what ta call her out loud?”
“Let’s find somethin’ real pretty. Now let me see . . . you know, Mandy, jus’ yesterday I was pourin’ some fresh cream inta de churn. Dat cream looked so smooth, made you wants ta reach right out an’ dip your fingers in it. I ’member now ’cause de butterfat floatin’ on top was only a bit lighter dan dis here baby girl. What you got, Mandy, is a cream-colored baby.”
“Name her Cream-Colored?”
“Don’t be silly. Maybe jus’ Cream . . . or jus’ Colored,” the midwife teased.
“Fo’ goodness sake!”
The midwife chuckled and said, “Well, if you wants somethin’ a mite longer, how about Coreamy?”
“Oh,” Mandy said, “you de one be silly.”
“Coreen. I likes dat,” Mandy replied. “Yes. Coreen, my little cream-colored baby . . . Coreen.”
At first, Mandy carried Coreen in a sling on her back when she went to the cotton field. When the baby cried, Mandy stopped to nurse for a few minutes. Sawney, the overseer, also a slave, allowed this interruption from work because feeding infant slaves helped sustain his master’s business. Later, when Coreen had grown too big for Mandy to carry, Coreen stayed behind in the quarters with the other young slave children, watched over by a community grandmother. When Coreen was eight, she joined Mandy in the cotton field.
Another story Gramps told in his slave voice describes Mandy teaching Coreen to pick cotton:
“First we got ta thin out dese here l’il bitty plants, give ’em room ta grow. Den we’s go’n chop up one row, down de next. Go’n keep on till we gets ta de end. After dat, go’n turn right back ’round an’ pull out all de weeds. We’s go’n pull up one row, down de next, so de cotton be healthy. Den we go he’p out wit’ de tobacco, or we might get ta sit back a bit an’ watch de cotton get bigger an’ bigger. But near de end of summertime, we go’n be right back out here in de bright sunshine, walkin’ up one row, down de next, pluckin’ cotton an’ stuffin’ it in de sacks, bale after bale, sun up, sun down, sun up, sun down . . .”
Three years after Coreen learned to pick cotton, the head cook chose the young slave to work in the cookhouse. It sat many yards beyond the mansion so that if the kitchen caught fire, as kitchens were prone to do, the flames would not spread to the Big House. Inside the cookhouse was a large fireplace with two or three bake ovens where several fires could burn at once. This was the Madisons’ kitchen, and, except for the years when she assisted the chef in the presidential mansion, Coreen would work here for the rest of her life.
When I came to visit, that kitchen had no walls or roof anymore, but seeing where it once stood and recalling the stories I knew so well brought a tightness to my chest. Coreen had worked here, and close by, she had stood helpless while Dolley sent Jim away.
Later, walking through the Madison family cemetery and trying to read names and dates on weatherworn tombstones, I felt the tightness again. My slave-owning ancestors, the ones who had torn my enslaved family apart, were buried here.
The past two days had taken a toll on me, but I said to Lynne, “I really should see where my black ancestors are buried.”
“The gravesites don’t have any names or dates on them. Besides, I wouldn’t recommend that you go there in those shorts and sandals,” she cautioned. “There’s lots of poison ivy.”
Overwhelmed and tired after spending days in the place where three of my ancestors had been held in bondage—two of them raped and one sold—I was relieved not to go to the burial ground. I needed to get out of there. Some of my ancestors were slaveholders; others were their slaves. The former wielded all the power. The latter were allowed none. I had to claim both.
Next time, I promised myself.
5
Living History
The following morning, Lynne and I met on the front portico, then walked a short distance beyond the northwest corner of the mansion to a small dome supported by ten columns. Like every other structure on the plantation, it had been built by slaves.
“Beneath the miniature temple you see here,” Lynne said, “is an ice cellar. It’s a deep cavern lined with bricks. Back in the days before folks had refrigerators, they went out in the winter and cut big blocks of ice from frozen ponds. Then they put the blocks underground to preserve food year-round. This temple is decorative, but Madison also intended it to symbolize his thoughts on philosophy and politics.” She told me that Madison had built it to resemble a small version of the ancient Roman Forum’s Temple of Vesta. The sacred flame that burned inside the original temple represented the safety, security, and longevity of Rome; in the United States, that fire became a symbol of liberty, what George Washington referred to as “the sacred fire of liberty” in his 1789 inauguration speech, which Madison wrote.
As we headed back to the mansion, Lynne said, “There’s someone I want you to meet—Carolyn French. I’ll set it up. She is the great-great-great-granddaughter of James Barbour. He was big in Virginia history. During the early nineteenth century, Barbour was governor of the state, ambassador to England, and a U.S. senator. He owned a huge plantation not too far from here and probably had some goings-on with one of his slaves. Carolyn is black. Some years back, she and her husband, David, a famous medical doctor, bought the home that used to belong to Barbour’s great-granddaughter Winifred and her husband, John Albert Brown.”
The next day, I drove the short distance from Orange to Barboursville. I found the address Lynne had scribbled down for me and turned off the main road. The car’s tires crunched on gravel as I steered along a driveway flanked by shrubs and trees. I knocked on the front door, and a woman with light tan skin, wavy gray hair, and large, expressive eyes opened it.
“Welcome, Bettye. I’ve been looking forward to your visit,” she said and gave me a hug. Carolyn, whom I guessed to be in her late sixties, was open and down-to-earth, the kind of person my mother would have described as “someone who never met a stranger.” When I told her that my middle name was Carolyn, she laughed, clapped her hands, and declared, “You must be all right!”
She led me on a tour of her house. The original part, built at least 130 years earlier, was a modest four-room home with a central hall. New additions included large, gleaming white rooms with cathedral ceilings and Palladian windows. There was also a swimming pool. Carolyn’s home was a far cry from the shacks where, not far away, three generations of my enslaved ancestors had slept.
As we sat at her dining-room table, sipping lemonade and eating sandwiches cut into dainty triangles, I explained the purpose of my trip to Virginia, adding, “Part of my family story is provocative.”
“Good! I love provocative,” Carolyn assured me, looking impishly over the rims of her glasses. “My family has some juicy stories too. But before we get into that, tell me about you—just the basics, for now.”
“Okay . . . I was born in Tucson, Arizona, because my father was stationed at Fort Huachuca during the war.”
“Born in a desert. That makes you a dune bunny.”
“No one ever told me that, but you must be right. After the war, we moved to Northern California, the Bay Area. I grew up there, so I prefer ocean to desert. My parents have retired now, but Daddy was a doctor.”
“Mine too.”
“And Mom was a teacher.”
“Mine too!”
“My dad’s father was a doctor.”
“My mother’s father was a doctor. That must have surprised quite a few white folks. Most of them didn’t think we should be allowed to learn to read, let alone go to medical school. Looks like our grandfathers knew how to kick Jim Crow in the butt!”
I laughed. “That’s for sure. Nobody was thinking about affirmative action back then.”
“Hardly. But keep going. Your husband?’
“Lee’s a doctor, a neuroanesthesiologist.”
“That’s a mouthful. David’s just an old country GP.”
“Just a GP?”
“I have to keep him in his place,” Carolyn answered, chuckling, the impish look still in her eyes. I would later learn that she enjoyed teasing her accomplished husband, who, it turned out, was not a GP at all. Dr. David French was a noted pediatric thoracic surgeon and a professor of surgery at Howard University. He was also a civil rights activist who had taken care of marchers injured in the Bloody Sunday attempt on March 7, 1965, to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
The more Carolyn and I talked about our upbringings, parents, husbands, and passion for history, the more we realized how much we had in common. Both of us knew that our mixed ancestry had come about because a powerful white male had “visited�
�� a vulnerable black woman.
After about an hour, the doorbell rang. “That must be Ann. I told her you were coming. She wants to meet you. You’ll like Ann,” Carolyn said as she stood up and walked toward the door.
A slender white woman with long brown hair tied at the nape of her neck entered the room.
“This is Ann Miller. She and Thomas Obed Madden Jr. wrote a book called We Were Always Free.”
“I read that!” I said. “I’m really pleased to get to meet you.”
“Would you like to meet Mr. Madden?” Ann asked. “He lives not far from here and loves company.”
“Of course!”
“Then I’ll give him a call tomorrow.”
Ann was an architectural historian, but her knowledge went well beyond architecture. She knew nearly everything about the history of Orange County: dates, names, personalities, adventures, misadventures, legends, and facts big and small.
As a pediatrician, I wondered how slaves, who had limited resources, took care of their infants and young children. One of the questions I asked was whether slave babies wore diapers.
“No,” Ann replied. “In fact, some white babies didn’t wear diapers either. It was quite smelly and messy back then, even in the grandest homes. They had a different standard of hygiene in those days.”
Ann loved Orange County and often described past events as if they were happening now. For her, history lived side by side with the present, and her reverence for truth was paramount to every other consideration, and it was color-blind. “The Madisons enjoy a comfortable life,” she said. “Their slaves take care of their every need. And it seems that Paul Jennings, Mr. Madison’s personal slave, can anticipate his master’s every want. Paul is indispensable to James.”
The Other Madisons Page 5