Caro turned to face Bel. “What does it matter to you? The letter belongs to Miss Emily.”
“Then why do it matter who give it to her? Won’t be you.”
Caro remembered the day that her mother had chastised Bel and threatened her with a swift return to a scullery maid’s work on the place on St. Helena Island. “And why should it be you? What would you do with it? You can’t read.”
“Miss Sass,” Bel sneered, and she raised her hand to slap.
Caro grabbed Bel’s wrist. “Don’t you slap me,” she said. “I know I’m a nigger and a slave, but so are you.”
Bel wrenched free and rushed her, hands outstretched, in a gesture that could choke Caro or blind her, depending on how she used her fingers. Caro grappled with her to keep Bel’s hands away from her face.
“I tell Massa on you,” Bel panted.
“Try it, damn you.”
“He send you to the Work House.”
The door opened, and they sprang apart. Susan Jarvie stood in the doorway and said, “What is this?”
Bel straightened her apron and said sulkily, “Carrie steal something of Miss Emily’s.”
Caro addressed Susan, her eyes properly cast down. “Missus, I do the wash, and I find a letter of Miss Emily’s in her dress pocket. Take it to give to Lydia for her.”
Bel said, “She steal it to keep it.”
“Bel, why would she want a letter?” Susan held out her hand to Caro. “Give it to me. I’ll take it to her.”
Caro curled her fingers around the letter with the Ohio address on it. In her most pliable voice, she said, “Missus, I spare you the trouble. Give it to Lydia to lay on her desk.”
“Nonsense. Hand it to me.”
Caro tried to think of another honeyed fib to keep the letter from Susan Jarvie’s hands. Help me, Lord, she thought. Inspire me. But her mind felt dull and blank.
Susan said impatiently, “I don’t have time for your insolence. Just give it to me and be done with it.”
“I tell you she stole it,” Bel said.
Susan said to Bel, “You hold your tongue.” To Caro, she said, “Give me the letter, or I’ll take the switch to you.”
“Missus—”
Susan grabbed her by the ear and twisted her earlobe, an astonishing pain. Tears rose to Caro’s eyes. Susan said, “Is that bad enough? Or do you want the switch? Or the Work House, where they know how to punish a disobedient servant?”
Where Mama and I can suffer and die together. The tears rolled down her cheeks. Caro reached into her pocket and held out the envelope. When Caro spoke, the words came out as a sob. “Missus, stop, please.”
Susan wrenched the letter from her hand. She turned it over to read the return address. She said, “It’s from that man in Ohio who wanted us to subscribe to his magazine. I told Emily to write to him and refuse.” She glanced at Caro. “Why would you make such a fuss about it? Do you really know how to read?”
“What do it say?” Bel asked.
Susan pulled the contents from the envelope. Emily had read many of Joshua’s letters to Caro. My dearest Emily, he would write, with deepest affection from your Joshua. And God knows what words of devotion and rebellion he had written in between.
Susan’s face darkened as she realized what the envelope contained. She stuffed the papers into it. Susan asked Caro, “Did you read this?”
Trembling, sick to her stomach, Caro stared at her shoes as she mumbled, “No, Missus.”
“Did you know about this?”
“No, Missus.”
“I’ll find out who’s lying,” Susan said. “And believe me, you’ll be punished for it.”
Caro knew to expect the slap, the locked door, the switch, and the Work House. She could not imagine what Susan and Lawrence Jarvie had in store for Emily.
It was Ambrose who summoned Emily to the study. “Your daddy and your mama want to talk to you.”
“Did they tell you why?”
“No, miss.” He hesitated, and as though he recalled every time that she had shown him a courtesy, he warned her, “They mighty mad about something.”
When she entered the study, her father sat barricaded behind his desk, and her stepmother stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. Her father’s color was high, as it had been on the day he heard the will, and her stepmother had a pitiless look, as though her switch were close at hand.
On the desk lay an envelope. Her father picked it up with two fingers, as though it disgusted him, and asked, “What is this?”
Her father pulled the contents from the envelope and let them spill onto his desk. He raised the bank draft, holding it so that she could see Lady Liberty. “What in God’s name is this, Emily? Who is paying you?”
That she could answer. “I wrote a story for a magazine called Hearth and Home in Ohio,” she said. “The editor is paying me for it.”
Susan said, “You let them print your name? For everyone to see?”
“I used a nom de plume. No one saw my name.”
“Your name is on the draft!” her father said.
“Only to pay me,” she said. “The readers don’t know who I am.”
“What have you written?” her father asked. His color was unnaturally high. “Was it sedition? Was it filth?”
Shocked, she said, “Of course not, Papa. It’s a magazine for ladies, like Godey’s.” She gathered her strength. “I wrote about life in Charleston and South Carolina. Tales to amuse a lady who doesn’t know us. The City Market. The races. A summer barbecue in the pines. It was all perfectly innocent.”
“Did you write about the peculiar institution?” It was odd to hear the politician’s circumlocution. But of course, he was a politician now.
“No, Papa. The magazine is about dress and household management. They avoid any controversy. I only mentioned it in passing, as anyone would when visiting Charleston.”
Her father crumpled the bank draft in his hand, and she winced, thinking of all the effort that it had taken her to write last month’s pieces. He growled at her, “How dare you, a lady of Charleston, put your name in print, even if you disguise it. And how dare you shame us by earning money, as though you are deprived in any way.” He flung the crumpled draft on the floor. Through her distress, she wondered if the bank would take a draft so badly damaged.
He said, “You are to stop writing for money, do you hear me? You are never to put your name in print again. A lady’s name appears in print twice in her life—when she is married and when she dies. Is that clear to you?”
“Yes, Papa,” she whispered.
Susan leaned over to ruffle the pages of the letter. “And this, Emily,” she said, in the voice she used before she brought down the switch on a slave’s back.
Emily said, “Mr. Aiken is the editor of Hearth and Home. He’s become a friend, and sometimes he writes in a familiar tone. Perhaps I should have discouraged it, but I thought there was no harm in it since I never meet him.”
“Don’t lie to us,” Susan said. “I know who Joshua Aiken is. He’s a distant cousin of mine, and he’s embarrassed his family more than once. Studying up north in Boston. And then refusing to come home. Living in Ohio and soiling his hands by making a living.”
Emily said softly, “Is it so wrong to be enterprising? Since he won’t inherit until his father dies? He occupies himself in making a living.”
“He occupies himself in more than that,” Susan said. “Evidently he’s occupied himself by courting you. He writes as though the two of you are engaged. What have you promised him?” She picked up the letter, without any haste, and held it daintily between her fingers. “What have you given him?”
The promise on the Battery. The truth. A life together, steadfast. “He misunderstood me,” Emily whispered.
Susan said, “I doubt it. When a man writes to a girl like that, it’s because she’s encouraged him. What have you done, Emily? You promised John Ellison, too.”
<
br /> Susan tore the letter in two and tore the halves in two again. Emily stifled a cry at the ripping sound. Susan said, “You’re a liar. A cheat. Will you be a jilt, too?”
There was yet another piece of paper on her father’s desk. He pushed it toward her with his knuckles, not wanting to touch it with his fingers. The Liberator’s masthead entreated her that “thou shalt love thy neighbor,” and reminded her that “we come to break the bonds of the oppressors.” In the central medallion, John Brown, in a Christlike pose, gave succor to a chained, kneeling slave and scourged a man who looked like a South Carolina planter’s son. To the left was a scene of an auction where “slaves, horses and other cattle are sold,” and to the right, a scene of black people jubilantly pointing to a gate labeled Emancipation.
Her father said, “This is sedition, Emily. This is filth. Why has Joshua Aiken sent this to you?”
All the lies fell away. Instead, she said, “Papa, why do you bother to ask? I think you know.”
“I do know,” her father said, with a look she had never seen him give a white person before. “His family has cut him off. His father disowned him. Do you know why?”
Emily was silent because she knew, too.
“Because he despises slavery and despises the South for holding slaves. He is a traitor to his family, to South Carolina, and to the South that gave him birth. And you take money from such a man! You make promises to him! You hope to marry him!”
Susan said, “You’ll break it off. You’ll write to him to tell him so, and after that you’ll never write to him again.”
Emily remained silent.
Susan continued, “You’ll stop foxing with Mr. Ellison. You’ll say yes, and you’ll set a date for the wedding. If decency allowed it, I’d have you married next week.”
Jane Aiken, honorably engaged to a man with three hundred slaves, had taken a year to arrange her wedding. Emily Jarvie, entrapped into marriage against her will, might manage a reprieve of a few months.
A week later, Susan bundled Emily onto the train to Stateburg. When Emily asked why they were going to the pines when they had planned to stay in Charleston while her father campaigned, Susan’s face turned flinty. “We’ll start making arrangements for your wedding,” she said.
In a place where her stepmother, her sister, and her future husband could keep an eye on her.
Emily sat uneasily on the cushioned bench of the first-class car. Susan sat opposite her, her expression icy. Beside her sat Lydia, who made herself small to give her mistress, in her expansive hoops, enough room on the bench.
Emily stared out the window, recalling the trips she had taken when she looked forward to the cool piney air of Sumter County. Now she felt so burdened that it was hard to take a breath of the air that smelled of coal smoke, oil, and pine.
At the house in Sumter County, Lydia unpacked her trunk. Lingering, Lydia offered to brush her hair. Everything about Lydia was soft: her voice, her step, her hands. Lydia’s touch eased the tight feeling in her temples. When Lydia laid down the brush, Emily said, “Thank you, Lydia.”
Still standing behind her, Lydia asked, “Miss, is it true that you’re engaged to be married?”
“Yes, it is. Why do you ask?” Emily tried to smile. “Do you doubt what you hear?”
Lydia rested her hands on Emily’s shoulders. A soft touch. “You look so sad, miss.”
“Just tired, Lydia. It’s been so sudden.”
“Yes, miss.”
Emily turned to look at her servant and saw the beauty in her face, her lidded eyes, her high cheekbones, her sienna lips. “Do you have a sweetheart, Lydia?”
“Oh, miss!”
“It’s all right. I won’t tell anyone.”
Lydia ducked her head. “I do,” she said, her soft smile saying more than words could.
Emily smiled too, even though the tears rose to her eyes. “I’m glad for you,” she said.
The next morning, after breakfast, Emily sat leadenly in the parlor. Despite Lydia’s ministration, her head ached this morning, and her chest felt wrapped in iron bands. The Aikens would find her, she knew. The thought of Camilla’s chatter made her feel even worse.
But the Camilla who came to see her was unfamiliar. She was gaunt, and her face was pale and shadowed. Her fashionable dress didn’t disguise her bones. She wore a scarf over her head, wrapped as the women of the Low Country wrapped theirs. “I look a sight,” she said.
“You’re changed,” Emily said politely.
“It’s kind of you to put it like that. I was ill. I had yellow fever in the spring, and I nearly died of it.”
“Yellow fever? In the upcountry?”
“I went into Charleston for a week. Didn’t mind the night air. When I came home, I burned with fever, and Jane tells me that my eyes looked like hardboiled eggs.” She gestured toward her head. “My hair fell out. Thank goodness my servant knows how to hide it until it grows back.” She laughed a little, a ghost of her former self. “Jane won’t want a bald sister at her wedding.”
“I’m glad you’re well.”
“Mama tells me to thank the Lord because most white people die of it.”
“Don’t joke, Camilla. If God spared you, He had a reason.”
Camilla settled next to Emily, as she had in happier moments, and said, “Now what’s this I hear? That you’re engaged to John Ellison?”
Her bitterness spilled out like water from an overfilled bucket. “He asked for me. I asked him to wait. And then he told the tale in front of my stepmother, and she thought I’d been hiding an engagement.”
“You don’t care a fig for him. You never have, Emily.”
“How do you know?”
“I heard something else,” said Camilla, this odd ghost of Camilla, who had once had glossy blonde curls and a rounded feminine body and the wicked, knowing tongue of a woman twice her age. “I heard that my cousin Joshua wrote you a love letter.”
“Camilla, if I tell you the truth, do you swear you’ll keep it a secret?”
“I believe I already know the truth,” Camilla said, a smile lighting her drawn face.
Emily seized Camilla’s hands. “Then help me. Help me spread the tale of the engagement, and the wedding, and my affections.”
Camilla raised her eyes to Emily’s. Camilla’s recovery had left a lively blue iris in a sea of bright white. Camilla said, “While the truth lies elsewhere.”
“Yes.”
Camilla laughed, a reminder of her previous self. “So that’s why God spared me,” she said.
John Ellison invited her, as the fiancée who would be a bride, to his house for a dinner. He asked if she wanted to see the horses and led her to the stable, where he stroked the black mare’s neck and murmured sweetly to her. Emily recalled Camilla’s sharpness about Ellison’s preference for horses.
As though he’d read her thought, he gave the horse a final pat and turned to the woman. He put his hand on her waist, a touch as gentle as the one for the mare. He met her eyes—the beauty of his eyes surprised her afresh—and asked, “Now that we’re engaged, may I kiss you?”
She didn’t reply, letting him think the reason was maidenly modesty. She cast down her eyes. He surprised her. He came closer, leaned forward, and kissed her decorously on the cheek. His lips were chapped and rough. He said gently, “I won’t press you on that, either.”
“Thank you,” she said.
He took her hand. “Let’s go see the little ’uns before they have their dinner,” he said.
As before, they found the children in the yard, playing while their nurse watched them. Johnny had found a toad and was deeply absorbed in making it leap. “Look, Daddy,” he said, prodding the creature. “Look at how good he jumps.”
Ellison laughed. “Practice on that toad, and when you’re old enough, I’ll give you a pony to teach how to jump,” he said.
Amelia, the crawler, was now old enough to walk and talk as well. “Dad
dy, who that?” she asked.
Ellison laughed and tousled the little girl’s hair. “That’s Miss Emily Jarvie,” he said. “She’s going to be your mama. Would you like that?”
The little girl glanced at her nurse. “Polly’s my mauma,” she said, matter-of-factly, as though everyone knew it, and her father was too stupid to know.
Emily tried to think of these children as orphans who might need a mother. Her spirit failed her as she contemplated the boy who had mastered a toad and a girl who would grow like a cornstalk, whether she had a mother or only a black nurse.
Polly’s baby, which had been a suckling infant on her last visit, had learned to walk, and he staggered the few steps to his mother, where he clutched her skirt and pulled himself upright. Ellison laughed. “That’s a fine little pickaninny,” he said proudly. “Ain’t he sturdy?”
The little mulatto boy had grown into a resemblance with his father. Emily took in the nurse and her child, took in Ellison’s offhand pride in a slave’s increase, and the admonitions of the Liberator echoed in her head. Love thy neighbor. That was easy. It was akin to the Christian charity that she had always tried to practice. Break the bonds of oppression.
Emily thought of being married to a man who treated her with his rough upcountry notion of honor while using a slave for his comfort and his increase. No doubt the little pickaninny would have brothers and sisters. They would be blood kin to her own children, her own increase, and she would be expected to pretend that she was blind to the connection and treat them as slaves.
She thought of Joshua. She thought of Caro. I cannot, said an inner voice. I cannot.
Part 3
Confederates in Slavery
1860
Chapter 14: Slaves Have No Mothers
As Dulcie passed Caro in the kitchen after midday dinner, she whispered, “In the yard. Word of your mama.”
Fear clutched at Caro’s chest. Since her mother had been taken away, there had been no word. Why would a prison send word of a prisoner? Caro had labored in the house in a daze of worry and fear burdened by forcing herself to look pleasant whenever she heard Cressy’s or Missus’s footsteps.
Charleston's Daughter Page 25