The Abolitionist's Daughter

by Diane C. McPhail

  “Miss Emily. What you doing out here?”

  “Wandering, Ginny.” Emily realized how infrequently she paid real attention to Ginny’s height. It was so familiar. And regal when she noticed. “Just glad the winter’s finally decided to give up and get gone.”

  “You be wishing for it back come many weeks. Hot don’t tell what summer gone be like.”

  Emily laughed and bent to pick up a daffodil that had slipped from Ginny’s hands. She pulled its bare stem between her fingers. “Ginny, Dr. Slate wants me to marry him.”

  “He do now? You say that like it’s news.” Ginny wiped her brow. “And what is it you want, Miss Emily?”

  Surprise flitted across Emily’s face. “I don’t know.” She chewed at a hangnail. “Ginny, do you ever think of marriage?”

  “No, I don’t.” Ginny allowed the knife and the flowers to hang by her side.

  “Don’t you want a man? Don’t you ever wonder?”

  “No, I don’t wonder, Miss Emily.”

  Emily watched as Ginny leaned forward and cut another thin daffodil.

  “I ain’t got to wonder. After Master sold my mama, his boy got hold of me. He was some kind of mean. Worse than mean; he was the devil in flesh. I don’t never want no man near me again. Not as I can help. And now I can. Back then I was just a child. And all alone.”

  Emily put her hand on Ginny’s arm and Ginny covered it with her own. History makes a mockery of us, Emily thought. All the years of their deep connection and Emily never suspected. Had she been oblivious? So lost in herself. Lost being where she found herself presently. Finding oneself lost, what paradox, Emily thought. I must find myself where I am and stop the fantasy of where I ought to be.

  “I’m so sorry, Ginny.”

  “You ain’t had nothing to do with it. Why you sorry?”

  “I’m sorry not to have known, to have been so caught up in my own life.”

  “Honey, I never told it. Hope I never showed it. And you got some things to be caught in.”

  “But nothing, Ginny, nothing even close—”

  “No, you got your own. We each got our own wilderness to travel. Moses out there forty years. Ain’t never seen the Holy Land. But the people did. You can’t travel my wilderness and I can’t travel yours. Not much I know, Miss Emily. But here’s something I believe I do know. You take care of your own crazy place and I take care of mine, and somehow together we make the world a little bit safer place to wander in.” Ginny handed Emily another daffodil. “Now,” she said, “what you want to do about your life?”

  “No one has ever asked me what I want, Ginny. Not like that.” Emily pulled the bare stem through her fingers again. “No one asked me did I want to go to the Yalobusha Female Institute. But I went anyway. No one asked what church I wanted to attend. Or did I even want to. No one asked if I want to get married. But I don’t want to wind up a spinster.”

  “Um-hmm. Nobody asked you nothing? You sure?”

  “Oh, they asked did I want the solid yellow silk or the green plaid. Or both. Or did I want empress sleeves on my dress? Or did I want fried chicken or ham at Sunday dinner, or both? But, Ginny, no one has ever asked me what I want about the things that determine my life. I can’t imagine how to think about such a question.”

  Ginny leaned forward to cut another two blooms. She is like a great, long-legged heron, Emily thought, all grace. Ginny handed the flowers to her.

  “You got three choices now,” she said. “Just like those three flowers in your hand. You can go right on letting everybody ’round you say what you must do. That’s one. You can say you ain’t doing it. That’s two. Or you can ponder what you want and say it out loud. And that’s three.”

  “Ginny, I don’t know how to know what I really want.”

  “Yes, you do.” Ginny tilted her head and studied her young mistress. “And besides that, I ain’t sure what your papa thinks about them Slates. While you thinking on things, let me hear what you think about Charles Slate?”

  “He’s charming. Intelligent, ambitious.”

  “He good to women?”

  “He seems well-mannered.” Emily hesitated, tapping a daffodil against her skirt. “Belinda used to hint—no, more than hint—that he was quite a ladies’ man. Sometimes she seemed to gloat on it.”

  “She say that, do she? But you don’t believe her?” Ginny stood up tall.

  “Belinda’s apt to say most anything, if it suits her at the moment. I never give much credence to what Belinda says. One thing one minute and the opposite the next.”

  “He kind to his sister?”

  “She said not, said he was always mean to her. Like Jeremiah with me.”

  “You seen it yourself?”

  “Well, no, Ginny. I’ve never been around them together.”

  “So you don’t know what’s true. And you don’t know what you want.” Ginny straightened her shoulders. “The difference in me and you is, you can choose. And since you can, you ought to know. And maybe you gone find that what they think you want and what you do want turn out to be the same. And maybe not. And that’s all I got to say on that.” Ginny stretched. “Now, give me them daffodils so I can get them in some water before I done wasted all my time out here. And you go wander ’round in your head for a while. Won’t take you no forty years.”

  Emily’s thoughts were indeed a wilderness and she found herself lost in them. She was all aflutter, as the expression went, with Charles’s attentions, and his charm made her laugh. She yearned for laughter. He had even taught her some rudimentary dance steps, and she had learned them quite well in spite of feeling clumsy. He focused on her in a way that not even her father did, though Charles could be sometimes unpredictably abrupt, even somewhat harsh. He was handsome in a slightly off-kilter way, boyish still, though enough older to have his medical practice established. He was a good doctor, if his treatment of Nathan were any example. Yet, she felt discomfited and sometimes invisible in his presence.

  Now this choice: not a thing she had ever envisioned. All around her, girls grew up, got married, and had children, often by the dozen. If a woman lived, she grew old. If not, she died, like Emily’s mother. Or her husband died and the woman married again. Her children had children, or they died. The woman grieved and went on. Or no suitors appeared and she became a spinster, someone’s maiden aunt. What other choice had there ever been?

  Emily was young and inexperienced. Except for boarding school, she had never been away from home. The unfamiliar made her anxious: a different home, different people around her, responsibility for a household to manage. Perhaps Ginny was right. Perhaps she might not want to be married. Not to Charles and not to anyone. Was that possible? The life she imagined was the life she had lived: life with Charles as an extension of the life she had experienced. Only she would not be lonely. Except for Ginny and her attentive, but vaguely unknowable father, Emily had been forever lonely. She yearned to be known, to be understood and accepted, to share herself with another. She yearned for everything that seemed to define a normal life: husband, home, children. Yet she carried in her an underlying apprehension of being with a man, of bearing children. The raw physical hunger of Charles’s attentions, his blatant dismissal of convention both enflamed her and frightened her. As Emily examined Ginny’s question, her stomach constricted; her breathing shallowed; her fear amplified into anxiety that bordered on panic. Emily fought the irrational urge to flee from herself. The reality that she had a choice, must in fact make a choice that would determine the remainder of her life, invaded her body, growing exaggerated and ominous.

  Ginny found her behind the shed, counting chickens and sobbing.

  “What you doing out here, Miss Emily?”

  “Ginny?” Emily looked around like a lost child.

  “Honey, why you crying like this?” Ginny reached for her.

  “I don’t know. I truly don’t.” Emily shook her head against Ginny’s arm. “I’m so afraid that I feel crazy.”

  “Le
t’s you and me go set down on the bench and have us a talk now, honey. You ain’t crazy. But you got reason for your fears. You gone be all right.”

  “I can’t do this, Ginny. I want to, but I can’t.”

  “Be married?”

  Emily nodded. “Something is wrong with me, Ginny, something not like other women. I feel all torn up inside. It gets too much and I just go blank. Like when I got my first blood.”

  “You got cause, Miss Emily. And me to blame. You just don’t remember.” Ginny hesitated, struggling with what to tell. “I’ve told you about me; now I’m gone tell you about you. You was there when your mama died.”

  Emily jerked her head, staring at the precision of Ginny’s profile.

  “They let me say goodbye to her?”

  “No, didn’t nobody let you do nothing but me. I was supposed to be watching you, but I wasn’t maybe twelve years old myself and I got to playing and let you get away. And when I found you, it wasn’t no pretty sight. I’m sorry for that.” She reached over and took Emily’s hand, but did not turn her head. “And now I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “Just tell me plain.”

  “Didn’t nobody ever know but me and whoever was tending your mama. I don’t remember who it was. I found you in there. I reckon you seen the whole thing. Wasn’t nobody paying attention except to Miss Liza lying there dead, and that baby crying. And there you was right in the middle of it, them women keening and all that blood.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The courtship was not an extended one. Emily recovered herself. She brightened when Charles came calling, usually bearing flowers from Adeline’s garden. He told stories at the table that focused the attention on himself and entertained the family, all except Jeremiah, who became more and more distant from all of them as Charles inserted himself into the family. Emily paid her brother little attention. He had never been kind to her, had in fact been domineering and spiteful, even in childhood. Charles was indifferent to Jeremiah’s slights.

  “When will you give me an answer?” Charles asked one night as they swayed on the porch swing, its chains creaking.

  “When I know myself,” Emily said.

  “And what will it take for you to know, Miss Emily?”

  “Are you mocking me, sir?” She balled her hand.

  “Not at all.” He pressed his palm into hers, compelling her fingers open. “Soft,” he said, rolling her hand over. “You have lovely hands. Hands that have never had to work.”

  Emily withdrew her hand and slid it into the folds of her wide skirt.

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about,” Charles said, leaning back, rubbing his palms along his thighs.

  Emily looked out across the yard to the night sky. He could not see her face.

  “Have you ever had a servant, Charles?”

  “You mean slaves? No.” He stood and joined his fingers across the back of his head, stretched his elbows. “Emily, I am singularly aware that our lives have been very different. I shouldn’t have thought—”

  “No, Charles.” Emily jumped to her feet. “I’ve made you misunderstand me.” She stopped just short of touching his back. “And yes, our lives have been quite different. But I’ve given a lot of thought to my inexperience, you see. Your remark about my hands, and spending time with your mother now, have made me keenly aware of how little I have had to do for myself. I feel ashamed, Charles. My question came from a sudden realization as to how different my life might be if my hands were not smooth and soft, if, in fact, I used them to work. Or had to.”

  “You will never need to work, as long as you are my wife. I can provide for us. And you will have the slaves you need to help you. I will certainly be able to buy you all you require. You need not worry.”

  “I do not want to buy people, Charles. I want to work, and I want to hire them free.”

  “We can do that, too. There are always slaves ‘to let,’ plenty of them.”

  “But they are still slaves, Charles. Don’t you see?”

  “Your father owns over a hundred, Emily.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Yes, but his illegal school for them? His push to set them free? Emily, the liberation of slaves is a fantasy. Manumission was outlawed in Mississippi two years ago. It is not going to happen. Not in our lifetime. And I pray it doesn’t.” He took her by the shoulders. “The economy of the Southern states depends on slavery. Don’t you know that? And the economy of the country depends on the economy of the South. Emancipation will not happen.”

  “Then, what?”

  “Then, you and I will be good to the slaves in our charge, as your father has been. I do not know that we will be able to buy up all that we see mistreated, as your father has done with Nathan and any number of others. But I will treat them all as well as I have Nathan. I will heal the niggers as I do the whites—what, Emily? What else?”

  Emily pulled her hands loose and turned her back to him. Charles stood for a moment, sighed, and laid his hands loosely on her sloping shoulders. He leaned his face into her neck and whispered.

  “What?”

  “I cannot bear that word, Charles.”

  “Niggers? Ah, is that all? Then I will heal the Negroes as I heal the whites.” He hesitated. “It is a cultural familiarity, Emily. I hear it far more frequently than any proper terminology. It’s just a matter of habit. If that offends you, I can be more careful in your presence. For you, Emily. I can promise that. In fact, I will promise anything you want to hear in order for you to be mine.”

  Charles pressed on her shoulders, turned her toward him, waited for her averted face to come of her own accord. “Do you hear me, Emily? I will promise you whatever I need to.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He took her chin in his hand. She lifted her face to his kiss.

  * * *

  On a Friday evening in late May of 1859, Judge Matthews presided over his daughter’s marriage to Charles Slate. Ginny adorned the parlor with dogwood branches and forsythia from the edge of the woods. Adeline arrived with an armload of pale-pink saucer magnolias. She handed the flowers to Ginny, but followed her about, rearranging a leaf here, a bloom there. Adeline served as witness for her son, and Will for Emily. In her simple dress, Adeline’s earthy dignity pervaded the room. Hammond, handsome and manly, but giddy as a child, stood close by his mother. Thomas Slate was absent, but there was general relief in that. Charles’s black frock coat appeared abnormally formal for him, but a new white vest beneath softened his square face, accentuated by his almost-auburn sideburns and neat mustache. Whatever misgivings the judge had, he hid well. In spite of his attempted warnings, Emily had made her choice and, indeed, seemed to blossom. He would hold his tongue.

  In the end, Jeremiah failed to attend. Knowing his father’s intended gift of acreage to Emily, though it was only a few acres, had somehow enraged him. What did the wife of a doctor need with farmland, however small? Belinda was also absent, even for the marriage of her brother to her closest friend from school. Will’s proposal to Belinda had gone unanswered for weeks into months.

  Now Will stood at the back of the room and spoke little, carrying his own private sadness. No one else was present except Ginny, who had stitched the wedding dress of gray silk—a suitable color for her new name, Emily announced with a smile.

  With the name Emily Slate official, the judge presented her an envelope containing the deed to forty-two acres and a newly finished log house, complete with summer kitchen and outbuildings. In addition, the envelope contained documents conveying to Emily ownership of three slaves: Ginny, who had essentially raised her; Benjamin, whose skills ranged from house service to all aspects of the farm; and his son, Lucian, a sturdy young man of burgeoning intelligence. The three could reliably manage Emily’s farm and chores while Charles attended to his medical practice.

  When the moment for departure came, Emily cried. How would her father pass the evenings without her? Alone by the fire in winter and alone in summer rocking on the po
rch? Her brothers would hardly be at home of an evening to keep their father company as she had done. William would surely marry again, though apparently not to Belinda. Even then he would come and go more than Jeremiah, who would be as erratic as ever. Emily saw that her tears saddened her father. Blinking, she kissed his cheek and caressed the soft white waves of his beard. Emily took Charles’s hand, her smile timid and affectionate, as he lifted her into the buckboard, filled with bright quilts she and Ginny had stitched.

  The rhythm of the horse’s hooves lulled her. She leaned against her husband’s arm. Charles was silent. When the horses halted at the new house, he took the quilts, kissed Emily, and told her to wait while he lit the lamps. Arching her neck, she studied the stars. Although she marveled to think, Emily also mistrusted herself for the night and the things to come, of which she had only hints, gleaned from glimpses of farm animals mating, scenes from which someone had inevitably whisked her away. But her body gave her hint enough: the longing to be touched; the way her breath caught at the thought of his skin against hers; the hardening of her nipples and the flush of moist warmth in her privates; a tingling mystery at the thing not known, yet secretly held in the recesses of her body. She gazed into the depths of the sky, marveling at the clarity of the stars. Like cottonwood in the fall, she wafted nowhere and everywhere. Emily startled when Charles put his arm around her. He slipped his other arm beneath her knees, the gray silk of her skirts rustling in the dark, her hoops awry. Her trance held through the jostling in his arms across the porch, through the door, and the other doors beyond.

  When Charles laid her on the bed, she had little sense of shifting. She murmured to the sound of the silk as he lifted her skirts, spread her pantaloons, touched her, pressed his lips and tongue to her. Her body rose of its own accord. Charles untied the hoops and dropped them to the floor. The wide ruffles of gray silk billowed over her face, smothering her, and the corset inhibited her breath. She struggled against the fabric and gasped at the sudden pain, the stillness, then a slow undulation in herself, filling her, drawing her with it. He quickened and his pace outstripped her. “Wait,” she said, “please wait for me,” but he did not. Faster and harder, he went, leaving her. At his peak, she turned her head aside. With his breath, harsh and warm, against her neck, Emily lay still, then pulled herself from beneath the unfamiliar weight of his arm. He was asleep. She struggled out of the dress and the confines of the corset. What to do with them? Everything here was unaccustomed. Lifting the hoops, she dropped her heavy garments in a corner. Charles was spread across the bed, his face buried in the bedding. She lifted a corner of the covers and slid into the space left her, still in her pantaloons and shift.