Charleston's Daughter

by Sabra Waldfogel

  The bell at the gate jangled and Sophy rose. “Probably for you, with all them callers you get,” she said.

  It was Danny. His elegant suit made him look paler and contrasted with the dark shadows under his eyes. He had been sleepless last night, as she had.

  Sophy took them both in and said, “You look a sight, both of you. What happen?”

  Caro wished she could say, Hush. It isn’t any of your business.

  But Danny was ahead of her. He said to Sophy, “I’ve come to speak to Mrs. Jarvie.”

  “Oh my,” Sophy said. “It come to that.”

  Caro couldn’t contain herself. “You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know a thing!”

  Sophy said, “It ain’t a secret that you like young Danny and that he like you. And it ain’t a secret that his mama hate that you like each other. Is there more?”

  Caro began to protest, but Danny put his hand on her arm. “Yes, there is, Miss Sophy,” he said, and he explained how his uncle had found them together and how angry he had been.

  Sophy said, “Do it occur to you that he act like this because he love you? And he love both his sisters, your mama”—she glanced at Danny—“and yours, too?” She nodded to Caro. “He caught right in the middle, like a fly in a spider’s web. What else can he do but get mad and pull you apart?”

  “Sophy, he meant everything he said to me,” Caro said.

  “What a man say when he mad and what he think later at his leisure, that ain’t the same thing.”

  Danny said, “He’s still angry at me. I know he is.”

  “Did he whup you?”

  “He didn’t have to. He let my mother take off a layer of skin with her tongue.”

  Sophy’s eyes gleamed. She said, “Everyone can be got round. I know it.” She took them both in. “You mighty charming, both of you, when you ain’t hurt and mad. And smart, too. Think about it. How to get round them, the ones who so hurt and mad because they love you.”

  Danny sighed. “I’ve come to speak to your mother,” he said to Caro.

  “I haven’t told her yet,” she said, letting misery flood her.

  He reached for her hand and clasped it hard, for courage. “We’ll tell her together,” he said.

  Caro led Danny through the yard. She had never taken him to the shack. “Oh, Caro,” Danny whispered. “Is this where you live?”

  She saw it afresh through his eyes. The oiled paper. The weathered boards. The door that didn’t lock. She hesitated, then tapped on the door. “Mama?” she called.

  “What is it, Caro?” Her mother’s voice was throaty, as though she’d been asleep.

  “I’ve brought you a visitor.”

  “Not Maria I hope.” She sounded louder. Stronger.

  “No, Mama.” Caro pushed open the door.

  It was too hot in the little house, and the fragrance of the garden was punctuated by the smell from the midden. Danny’s eyes took in the rope beds, the rickety furniture, the tin plates and cups that they never used, since they ate in the kitchen with Sophy. As much as she trusted Danny, at this moment she burned with shame that he saw this.

  Her mother sat on the rope bed, and Caro pulled the chairs close to the bed, as though it were a settee where her mother could hold court.

  Danny settled carefully on the chair. He said, “Mrs. Jarvie, it’s good of you to receive me.”

  Kitty said, “That depends on your purpose here.”

  He held himself very still. He let the fatigue and the worry show in his face, but his voice was level and calm. “I’ve come because I love your daughter.”

  “As I feared,” Kitty said.

  “My mother isn’t glad of it, either.”

  “It doesn’t surprise me.”

  Danny continued to hold himself very straight. “I love her,” he said, his eyes unwavering on her mother’s face. “I love her as my father loved my mother. As Caro’s father loved you.”

  Kitty met his gaze with her own. “Yes, exactly like. Because you can’t marry her.”

  “No, ma’am. I can, and I intend to.”

  “Over your mother’s objections? And your uncle’s?”

  “I’m well aware of their feelings,” Danny said. He clasped Caro’s hand in both of his. “I want to honor your daughter. To cherish her forever. Until death do us part.”

  Caro thought of her mother pleading with Maria. Reminding her that love was greater than wealth. That love had freed her.

  Kitty turned her head away and began to cough, a hoarse, racking sound. The cough grabbed her and squeezed her and shook her until she was weak and trembling.

  Caro had never heard Kitty cough like that. She fell to her knees beside her mother’s bedside and reached for her mother’s hands. Full of guilt and fear, she said, “Mama, shall we call for the doctor?”

  Kitty waved Caro away. “He’ll tell me I have a weak chest. I’ve always known that. What good would it do?”

  As Danny watched, Caro entreated her mother. “What if you’re really sick? You could die!”

  Kitty’s gaze swept over Danny, who had just promised to love Caro as long as he lived. She said, “We are all going to die. We just don’t know when.”

  “Mama, no,” Caro pleaded.

  Caro saw her mother’s face flicker. For a moment, she was Mrs. Jarvie again, the beloved companion to James Jarvie, a lady dressed in silk with diamonds flashing on her earlobes. She said to Danny, “Tell your mother that I will call on her. That Caro and I will both call on her.”

  Then it was gone, and she was thin and haggard and ailing, a slave helpless to take care of herself or protect her daughter.

  As before, Maria greeted them at the door; as before, she offered them no refreshment. Kitty sat quietly on the settee, her posture dignified, and she said to her half sister, “You want to hurt and insult my daughter. I won’t allow it.”

  “She—”

  “She charmed your son, and why shouldn’t she?” Kitty said, her eyes very bright in her flushed face. “Look at her.” Caro felt Maria’s eyes on her, and she mimicked her mother’s posture, with the straight back and grace of a lady.

  Kitty found her old voice, the voice of the mistress of the house. “Gently raised and educated and fair of skin. And lovely into the bargain. Of course your son fell in love with her.” Kitty gazed at her half sister. “Doesn’t she deserve a young man like him?”

  Maria spat out the words. “She is a slave.”

  “Ah, Mimi, we were both slaves once. Don’t you recall? Someone was kind enough to free you, and someone else was kind enough to treat me as though I were free. How can you blame her, when freedom is so much a matter of chance?”

  She began to cough. She strained to stop it, and when she caught her breath again, Maria said, without kindness, “I heard that you weren’t well.”

  “I’m not,” her mother said. “I worry a great deal about Caro. What will happen to her after I’m gone?”

  Caro wanted to cry out, Mama, don’t speak of it.

  But Kitty continued to pin Maria with a level gaze, and she said, “Who will protect Caro and maintain her?”

  “Not my son,” Maria said.

  Kitty said, “After I die, she will be in the hands of Lawrence Jarvie. Who was bid to treat her as a member of the family.”

  “I can’t help that,” Maria said.

  “No, you can’t,” Kitty said. “But you can help her, as the only family she will have, you and Thomas.”

  “She can’t marry my son.”

  “I can’t help that,” Kitty said, mocking her half sister. “But don’t insult her. Don’t hurt her. Don’t cast her away. When God takes my soul, I want to know that someone cherishes her.” She rose. “Let’s go, Caro.”

  Maria’s face looked pinched and ashen, as though she had eaten something that disagreed badly with her. In a voice no less gruff than her greeting, she said, “Wait here. I’ll summon a hansom for you.�
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  “You quiet,” Sophy said to Caro several days later, as they worked together in the kitchen. “It ain’t like you.”

  Caro shook her head.

  Sophy said, “My man Sunday come tonight. Sunday come on Saturday!” It was a small joke, but it was Sophy’s way to cheer her. “Eat with us. You and your mama.”

  To her surprise, Kitty agreed to join them in the kitchen.

  Sunday Desmond came with a bottle under his arm. Pleased, Sophy said, “You working again.”

  He set the bottle on the table. “Busy. That fuss about hiring out, it blow over like I thought it would. Busy all the time now.” He hugged Sophy, and she folded into his embrace.

  She bends with him, when she’s so jagged with everyone else. Love is a strange thing, Caro thought miserably, watching the joy that these two work-worn slaves had in each other.

  When Sunday released Sophy, he hugged Caro, enfolding her, too, a fatherly embrace without any threat in it. He had told her that she put him in mind of his oldest daughter, whom he hadn’t seen since she was sold away to Mississippi.

  He said politely to Kitty, “Miss Catherine, you look peaked.”

  “I’ve had a little cough,” her mother said.

  “I hope you better soon.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  He said softly to Caro, “You look a little peaked yourself. No sass in you today, Miss Sass.”

  “I’m fine,” Caro said.

  “She in love,” Sophy offered.

  “Sophy, don’t tell,” Caro said, irritated.

  Sunday teased a little. “And it don’t go right.”

  Caro sat at the kitchen table and propped her chin in her heads. She felt too weary to tell the story to Sunday.

  Sunday opened the bottle and poured a glass for Caro and another for Kitty. They drank their wine from thick glass tumblers, not crystal glasses, but that didn’t change the taste any. He lifted his glass and said to Caro, “If he jilt you, if he love another, he a fool.”

  Sophy said, “Her young man’s family against it.”

  “Why?” Sunday asked, offended on Caro’s behalf. “Is they rich? Or high-rumped?”

  “Both,” Sophy said. “His mama a Bennett, and his daddy was a rich Israelite.”

  “Sophy, please,” her mother said.

  “What? We love Caro, Sunday and I, and we unhappy that her heart break.”

  Caro said angrily, “He’s free. And I’m not.”

  “Is that all?” Sunday asked.

  “Is that all,” Miss Sass replied. “His mama would rather die than see her son married to a slave.”

  Sunday looked puzzled. “But it happen all the time,” he said. “Free husband, slave wife.”

  “Why would a free man marry a woman who’s a slave? Why would he let his children be born into slavery?” Caro said.

  “My friend Lewis,” Sunday said. “My neighbor.”

  “The drayman,” Caro said. “Mama, he drove us from the wharf. Do you recall?”

  Kitty shook her head.

  Sunday said, “He a free man. Not grand, but he make a good living as a drayman. He fall in love with a slave woman and wouldn’t have no other. He go to her massa, and he ask to buy her.”

  Now Caro was puzzled. “To be his slave?”

  “No. To be his wife. In law, he own her, but in life, he protect her and keep her so that no one can sell her away from him. On paper, she a slave, but she able to live like a free woman.”

  Kitty asked, “And her master agreed?”

  “He softhearted. He say yes, and he let her go for less than she worth. Glad for her happiness.”

  Caro wondered if Lawrence Jarvie had a soft spot for anyone. Kitty asked, “Are there children?”

  “Four children. In law, they his slaves too, but he love them and cherish them while he protect them.”

  Caro said slowly, “And they all live as though they’re free.”

  “Yes, they do.” Sunday raised his glass. “Have a happy life together.” He drank.

  Free husband, slave wife. A husband the master to keep his wife in freedom. Danny couldn’t afford to buy her, even if Lawrence Jarvie sold her cheap. But someone else might. And there was yet someone else who might advise her. Whether her mother liked it or not, she would write to Benjamin Pereira.

  When the reply came from Pereira, she showed it to her mother, who shook her head. “What can he do for us?”

  “How will we know unless we ask?” She took her mother’s hand. “We’ll see him together.”

  “And Danny?”

  “I’ll write to him.”

  She sent Danny a note, admonishing the little messenger boy to give it to young Mr. Pereira, not to Mr. Bennett who owned the shop, adding a dime to fortify his memory. She wrote to Danny to tell him that she had arranged a visit to Mr. Pereira, the lawyer, to ask about the legalities relating to their ability to marry and hoped that Danny would accompany her.

  The messenger boy returned so swiftly that she despaired of what had happened. But he said, “Don’t have a note. Do have word.”

  “From Mr. Pereira? Not from anyone else?”

  The boy regarded her with a contemptuous expression. “I ain’t a fool. Pereira. Young, fair-skinned, got eyes too light for a black man. Hand to him direct and as soon as he see it, he look at me and say, ‘Yes.’ That’s all. ‘Yes.’”

  On the day of their appointment, Kitty dressed carefully to meet with the man who had been James Jarvie’s best friend and had been so cordial to her at the Jarvie dinner table. Once dressed, her hand stole to her earlobe, feeling for the missing earbob as though it were a lost limb. She held out her arm to Caro. “Shall we?”

  “Let’s find a hansom.”

  “It isn’t far.”

  “And you aren’t well.”

  “I’ll bankrupt you,” Kitty said.

  Caro shook her head. It gave her a pang to be the one who worried and took care. “Of course not,” she said.

  As Caro sat in the hansom with her mother, she breathed in the familiar smell of summer in Charleston, floral perfume and rot in the streets, and brushed away the mosquitoes that whined around her face. It was fever season again in Charleston. Emily hadn’t visited for weeks; she had escaped to the pines.

  Caro’s heart ached. Her whole body ached, as though she were her mother’s age and not well herself.

  Caro still hadn’t spoken to Danny, and she worried that he might have changed his mind. Had Uncle Thomas learned something? Or worse still, wormed it from him? Despite the yes, she let herself think of everything that might go wrong. His mother, scourging him again with her anger. Thomas, keeping him a prisoner in the tailoring room. Danny’s own heart, eroded by the family’s antagonism and opposition.

  They waited in the pleasant anteroom. Caro sat on the edge of the comfortable armchair, too wrought up to accept the servant’s offer of refreshment. Pereira’s servant was a light-skinned young man, as well-dressed as a lawyer, and for a sickening moment Caro wondered if he was Benjamin Pereira’s son.

  But they had waited only ten minutes—she knew because the cased clock in the corner ticked away the minutes as well as showing them—when the door opened with a fair amount of force, and Danny burst in. He was soberly dressed in a wool suit that had glazed his face with sweat in the August heat. He greeted Kitty, but all his attention was for Caro. Panting a little, he said, “I’ve deceived Uncle Thomas to be here.”

  Caro rose and held out her hands. “But you came.”

  “Of course I came.” He clasped her hands. “What is our business here?”

  She said, “I thought that Mr. Pereira might have some advice for us.”

  He glanced at her mother. “You thought more than that.”

  Benjamin Pereira was his uncle, too, even though no one admitted to it. “Perhaps he can help us,” she said.

  “You’re not planning on trying to get round Mr. Pereira!”r />
  She recalled the dinners of her girlhood, when Benjamin Pereira would tease her and encourage her and ask her what she read. When he would smile at her mother, a look she now understood as one of longing. “I might. And you might, too.”

  He shook his head and let go of her hands. “What if it isn’t a matter for the law?”

  She thought of the look on Pereira’s face as he tried to interpret her father’s will to Lawrence Jarvie. She said, “Then it might be a matter of family feeling. Of conscience.”

  The servant ushered them into Pereira’s office, and Benjamin Pereira’s pleasant expression, his lawyer’s look, faded away at the sight of her mother. “Oh, Kitty,” he said, in a tone shadowed by his grief for James Jarvie and his unspoken affection for the woman who had been mistress of her father’s house. He could see how diminished Kitty had become, and he took a deep breath to compose himself for the matter at hand.

  Kitty said, “Caro and Danny have business with you, Ben, but I’m the only family she has, and I’m here to help her.”

  Pereira’s smile for Caro and Danny was less fraught. Friendly. He invited them to sit.

  Pereira’s office was very like her father’s study, except that the armchairs were upholstered in leather rather than velvet. Behind the expanse of mahogany desk were shelves full of books bound in leather the color of dried blood, so well used that the gold had rubbed from their spines. The smell of the books was intensified by the smell of the chairs, and her memory of the next-to-the-last time she had sat in her father’s study, to hear Mr. Pereira read her father’s will, came over her in a wave of nausea.

  “So,” Pereira said. “Caro, you wrote to me, but you didn’t tell me much. What brings you to see me?”

  As though they had rehearsed it, Danny took her hand and said earnestly, “Mr. Pereira, Caro and I have fallen in love. We wish to marry.”

  “And if things were going smoothly, you’d be calling on a minister, not on me,” Pereira said. “What is the difficulty?”

  Danny said, “My mother is dead set against it. And my uncle Thomas as well.”

  Pereira asked Kitty, “And you?”