Bon Marche (32 page)

“What if she asks me about her?”

“She won't. Mattie hasn't mentioned her mother since she left.”

Lower had guided twenty-two slaves from Fortunata, seventeen of them adults. Dewey's ledger book on the blacks, now kept up to date by Mattie, listed forty-eight slaves in all. Seven of them were women, six were children, including baby Marshall, leaving thirty-five males for the heavy work.

At dinner that night, Charles asked Lower: “What are your plans now, Abner? Back to hunting?”

“No, I don't think so. I've had my fill of it.” He grinned. “It's already cost me a wife. Maybe I'll find something better to do.”

Dewey glanced at Mattie. Then, to Abner: “Would you consider staying here? As overseer?”

Mattie nodded quick agreement.

“Well, I sure do like it here…” A pause for thought. “Sure, why not?”

Mattie reinforced the decision. “It could be an important job, Abner. We've only forty-eight blacks now, but we're going to need more as we grow.”

Charles frowned. “A subject for later discussion, perhaps.”

“Oh, Christ, I almost forgot,” Lower said. “MacCallum sent a letter.” He took a crumpled envelope from his pocket.

Charles eagerly tore it open:

I can't tell you how delighted I was to hear Lower's news of your marriage. I believe you've done exactly the right thing. From Lower's description of her she must be a beauty. But—only eighteen? Are you capable of handling that? (You know, old friend, that that last was meant to be humorous.)

Last night, just before Lower left, I took my leave of Elkwood, screwing up my courage to say good-bye to the Lees. Funston was his usual surly self, but Miss Katherine—I still persist in that mode of address for her—was genuinely charming. She sends her love to you and wishes you well in your marriage. And she asks to be remembered to the children.

Now I go back to New Jersey. Frankly, I'm most happy to be leaving Virginia, although I have some fond memories of it. A final plea: Let's not let our friendship die because of the miles that separate us. Affectionately, Andrew.

Charles folded the letter, smiling.

“Good news?” Mattie asked.

“He says I've done the right thing in marrying you.”

“A perceptive man, your Mr. MacCallum.”

Charles laughed. “You don't realize how perceptive.”

“What does that mean?”

“Later, dear.”

“Charles Dewey!”

“If you insist.” He grinned impishly at both Lower and the tutor Hopkins. “He wonders whether I'm capable of handling … yes, that's the word he used …
handling
an eighteen-year-old.”

Mattie joined the general laughter. “How do you plan to answer that?” she wanted to know.

“I'm going to leave the answer to you.”

“Do you need written confirmation?”

Charles coughed nervously, embarrassed now.

She laughed. “Well, you started it.”

“Gentlemen,” Dewey said, “let this serve as a warning to you: Don't marry a woman of candor.”

IV

N
ASHVILLE
and Bon Marché grew with equal vigor.

Religion came to Nashville when the Presbyterians built a stone church, suggesting permanency. No regular pastor was available, however, and a circuit rider conducted services only one Sunday in four. It seemed enough for the village. New homes were going up quickly, many of them built of sturdy brick on full acre lots. Population soared over one thousand. Farmers from the area built a long, rambling market building on the square, naming the thoroughfare in front of it Market Street. Trade on the Cumberland River increased dramatically, the wide river seeming safer for large boats of ten to twelve tons than either the Mississippi or the Ohio.

A pair of Moravian churchmen, in the area as missionaries to the heathen Cherokees, described the town as “the most attractive place on the Cumberland.”

To Charles, however, the most important development was the establishment of the first newspaper. A printer named John McLaughlin had begun publishing a weekly called the
Nashville Intelligencer,
with a grand subtitle:
The Rights of Man.

Along the Richland Creek, Bon Marché blossomed like a hothouse flower. Mattie's assiduous search for land made the plantation grow to nearly two thousand acres. The first bridge was built across the creek, and a stone dam was thrown up below it to provide power to run the new sawmill, an enterprise that was busy almost every hour of the day. Its products enabled Charles to put up a large circular stud barn with a handsome exercise yard in the middle. It was a barn he had visualized for many years.

The lumber available from the sawmill let Mattie begin, in the summer of 1799, the Bon Marché mansion, patterned after the Barker house in Edenton, North Carolina, which Wilbur Hopkins particularly admired. It was to be a two-and-a-half-story frame house with double brick chimneys at either end, a long sloping roof, and six slim columns across the front supporting a wide porch off the second floor. It was a spacious home, designed to provide separate bedrooms for all of the children, a handsome suite for Charles and Mattie, and accommodations for tutor-architect Hopkins and chief overseer Lower. There were quarters for the house servants—including Horace, Angelica, and little Marshall—in the basement level.

Mattie had wanted a broad circular stairway leading up from an impressive entranceway, but she sacrificed that idea to expediency in her desire to get the home built quickly. Even without the stairway, it was going to be the most impressive house in Davidson County.

How fast the West was growing was evident in what was happening to Davidson County itself. The Tennessee legislature, as the eighteenth century came to a close, carved yet another county from the southern reaches of Davidson, naming it Williamson County and fixing the town of Franklin as its seat.

Charles joked with young Franklin. “You see, son, how famous you've become. They've named a county seat for you.”

The youngster was sober-faced. “Oh, Father, don't be silly. The town is named after Benjamin Franklin.”

“As you are, son.”

“Did you know Dr. Franklin, Father?”

“No, I didn't have that honor. But you can still take pride in the fact that you carry his name.”

Franklin thought for a moment. “Mr. Hopkins tells us that Dr. Franklin might have been as great as Washington or Jefferson.”

“In his way, son.”

“Am I expected to be great, too?”

“You will find, my boy, that greatness comes only to those who are willing to seek it. It's something that has to be earned.”

Another moment of pondering. “I don't think I want to be great, Father. I just want to be like you.”

Dewey's laugh, it seemed, could be heard over all of Bon Marché.

Those were happy times. Christmas that year was particularly joyous. The mansion was beginning to take form, mirroring the rapid growth of the plantation. Everything seemed so right.

As the fire in their log cabin bedroom died to embers on Christmas night, Mattie asked, “Charles, could you be happier?”

“I doubt it.”

“Even if I told you I was going to have a baby?”

“A baby!” a delighted Dewey exclaimed.

“Hush, dear, you'll wake the children.”

“I don't give a damn if I wake the entire world!”

Mattie chuckled. “I doubt that my news merits that.”

“When?”

“August, perhaps.”

“It'll be a fitting start for a new century.”

V

M
ATTIE'S
pregnancy didn't diminish her hard work. There were times when Charles worried about her, but he didn't chide her. She was young and strong and determined, making plans for Bon Marché's first real crop year. Wheat had been planted, and corn, tobacco, indigo. Hay, of course. And a cattle herd had been acquired.

She added more slaves as the work increased.

By March 1800, the list of blacks in the ledger had grown to seventy-five.

“Dear,” he said one night, “I'm concerned about the number of blacks we're taking on.”

“They're needed.” It was a matter-of-fact statement.

“The idea of slavery doesn't bother you?”

His wife shrugged. “I didn't make the system. And the blacks here are well treated. Abner is very good with them.”

“I know, but where does it end?”

Another shrug. “It ends where it ends. We may need a hundred or a hundred and fifty hands to run this estate properly.”

He winced. “So many?”

“Unless you order me to desist.” She was challenging him.

Charles was silent.

“Abner has suggested that he needs help, and I've given him the authority to find two more overseers.”

Charles groaned, but he had no alternatives. And he went back to concentrating his attention on his horses. The horse business needed his full attention; it wasn't going well. Plans for a major track at Nashville, talked of in such glowing terms by Andy Jackson, failed to materialize. To race, Charles was forced to travel—to Gallatin, to Lexington, to Memphis. The travel had a debilitating effect on his horses, it seemed. He won little; his gambling was not much more successful. Availability of cash money was beginning to be a problem.

With the house nearly completed, Mattie began making major purchases of furniture through her father's store—furniture that had to be brought in, at premium prices, from Richmond and St. Louis and even Philadelphia. When she ordered two large mirrors to be placed above the main fireplaces on the first floor, at fifteen hundred dollars each, Charles tried to call a halt.

“Perhaps we should wait on some of this stuff,” he suggested, “until the horse business becomes more stable.”

“And perhaps,” she snapped at him, “you should be more judicious in your gambling.”

“Dear, it's just that—“

Mattie smiled at him, kissing him. “The house is nearly finished, and I
do
want it to be perfect. I thought, Charles, that maybe we'd hold a housewarming on July Fourth to introduce our friends to Bon Marché and to celebrate Independence Day.”

He frowned, seeing more money being spent.

“It will be the greatest social event this area has ever seen,” she continued enthusiastically. “Champagne and music and gaiety—“

“Where's the money to come from?”

“You said yourself, dear, that you ought to consider selling off a few of your young horses. Mr. Fowler has been after you to let him have several runners from the Medley line, hasn't he?”

“Yes, but—“

“Of course it's only a suggestion.” Mattie smiled sweetly. “You must do what you think is best with the horses.”

What was best, Charles decided, was to sell four good two-year-olds to the Kentucky horseman for seventy-five hundred dollars. He would have preferred to keep them to race under his own solid purple colors, but he needed the money.

VI

I
T
was only three weeks after the Independence Day housewarming, on which nearly ten thousand dollars had been lavished, that Mattie awakened him in the middle of the night.

“I think you ought to call Angelica, dear.”

“You're in labor?”

“It's beginning,” Mattie said quietly.

“I'll ride for Dr. Hennings,” Charles said, quickly getting out of bed.

“No, no, that won't be necessary,” she assured him. “Angelica and I can handle this.”

Just before six o'clock on the morning of July 25, 1800, a daughter was born to Charles and Matilda Dewey, exhibiting a lusty voice and displaying a shock of auburn hair.

“She's beautiful,” Charles said to his wife when the baby was wrapped in soft blankets and put in a delicate crib that Mattie had ordered from St. Louis. “Of course, that's no surprise, considering the beauty of her mother.”

“You're an unconscionable flatterer.” Mattie chuckled.

“Are you well, dear?”

“Perfect.” She reached up her arms to her husband. “Ready to do it again.”

He kissed her. There was a long tender silence.

“Charles?”

“Hmmm.”

“I'd like to name her Alma May, after Father's grandmother. I never knew her, of course, but from Father's stories she was an able, strong-willed woman.”

“I like the name. Alma May Dewey it is.”

“You're very dear, Charles.”

He laughed. “I'm aware of that.”

“And I want you to know something.”

“What's that?”

“Charles Dewey,” she said slowly, “I want you to know that I am very much in love with you. As much as any woman could be in love with a man.”

Mattie had said it. Finally. Dewey's world was complete.

24

Can you believe the swift passage of time? Charles wrote to Andrew MacCallum. Yesterday we observed the third birthday anniversary of our son, Thomas Jefferson Dewey; just two weeks earlier it was the fourth birthday celebration for little Alma May. I know I expounded on it earlier, but I continue to be convinced, as improbable as it may seem, that her birth signaled a turnaround in the fortunes of Bon Marché—as if she was a good luck omen given to all of us. But, then, what can you expect from a man who also believes his life is in control of a guardian spirit?

Even Franklin, who was having trouble accepting Mattie as a mother, has come around under the influence of the brilliant light that is Alma May. He adores his half sister, as do all the children. They, and we adults, spoil her outrageously, I'm afraid. Indeed, a competition has developed among the older children for the privilege of caring for her during the day. I've had to institute a schedule, if you can believe that, setting specific days for Franklin to be in charge of Alma May, and George, and Corrine, and the twins. We post the schedule every week on the back of the nursery door.