Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray (5 page)

“Yes, it is. Increasing the desire for freedom only gives them
false confidence and incites rebellion.” He spat a stream of tobacco, barely missing the toe of my shoe. “The trouble with the black man is that he don't know how good a life he's got. He don't have to worry about food or shelter. He gets doctored when he's sick and he's got his church meetings on Sundays.” The interloper fixed me with his snakelike eyes. “They's plenty of white folks in Virginia worse off than your slaves.”

A team of oxen pulled a creaking dray down the street. Somewhere in the distance a church bell pealed.

“Come along, Mary Anna.” Mother took my arm and attempted to press through the gathering.

But I could not let the man's comments pass unchallenged. “It's easy for you to stand there and declare the advantages of the slaves' lives. They may not be educated, but I can assure you they cherish the prospect of liberty, no matter how faint that hope may be.”

The door opened and Mr. Pierce, who chaired our meetings, came out. He glared at the men and offered an arm to Mother and me. “I do apologize for the disturbance. Please allow me.”

We went inside, and the meeting commenced at the appointed hour. The discussion was the usual mix of reports on the progress of fund-raising and the applications of freedmen hoping to emigrate. My mind wandered to Robert's letter and plans for our wedding. Dozens of my friends and cousins were expecting to be bridesmaids. It would take the skills of a diplomat to make the final choices.

When the meeting ended, Mother and I went out to our waiting carriage. The sun had disappeared and now a rainstorm threatened. Daniel urged the horses on, and we got home just as the first raindrops fell.

Mother went upstairs for a nap, and I hurried along the back
hall to the schoolroom where my scholars waited. Today only the Burke sisters and my two boys were waiting at the table where I kept slates and primers and the cast-off books I had brought from Kinloch three years before. The old volumes were well thumbed and falling apart, but the children loved the colorful illustrations and the stories I invented to go along with them.

Selina peeked in, her eyes still swollen from the morning's ordeal. I waved her to a seat and began the lesson. I was not trained as a teacher, but having suffered through years of dull recitations with my own tutors, I made up games to amuse the children while they learned to read and cipher. Today I asked them to write words that rhymed with
bat
. Chalk clicked on the slates as they bent to their task. Afterward they read the words aloud, then took turns reading from the primers I had obtained in the city.

Just as we were closing the lesson with a song, I glimpsed the face of a young boy at the window. I sang louder, hoping to entice him inside, for I wanted to encourage more boys to learn to read. But by the time we finished and I went to the door, he had vanished into the woods, his blue flannel shirt flying out behind him.

Mother met me in the hallway.

“Was that Selina Norris I saw leaving just now?”

“Yes. Why?”

“I banned her from her lessons for the week as a consequence for ruining your dressing gown.”

“Oh, Mother. You didn't! It's the very thing she looks forward to most.”

“It's only a token punishment, Mary. To impress upon her the need for caution when she's handling other people's things.” She patted my arm. “Don't be cross. There's tea waiting in the parlor. Come along before it gets cold.”

T
he first day when Mauma sent me up to the missus, I was shaking so hard I thought she would hear my bones rattling. She took me into the room with Kitty and Liza and two white girls I never saw before. Turns out they was Miss Mary's cousins, come to stay for a while and help with the sewing. The house had wide, open doors that went from one big room to another. They had rounded openings at the top, like doors on churches in one of Miss Mary's books. There was a fire going, and the room smelled like paint.

Outside was Thursday's boy, Nathaniel, painting the window frames. He put his face up to the glass and stuck his tongue out at me. I didn't pay him any mind. He thinks he's funny, but I don't. Nathaniel's aunt Judah makes up bags filled with strange things supposed to ward off evil spells. She calls them jacks. You supposed to wear the jack around your neck. Judah sells the jacks to black folks, and some whites too, but Mauma says they are foolishness, so I never had one and do not know if they work.

Missus set me down at a table. In the middle was a sewing basket the size of a wheelbarrow, and in it was everything you would ever need to make clothes. A purple needle case, scissors in the shape of a swan. Thimbles, pincushions, and some other things I hadn't ever laid my eyes on before. Missus named them
and told us what they was for: bodkin for drawing cord through a hem, seam ripper in case you make a mistake and have to start over, spool caddy for holding different colors of thread, a strip of cloth with numbers painted on it for measuring out the cloth. Missus gave us gloves to wear so we wouldn't get any dirt on the cloth, and we unrolled the bolts of silk and satin and white linen and pressed out the wrinkles with a hot iron.

The two white girls, Emily and Harriett, pinned a pattern to one of the pieces of linen, and Missus cut it up. Missus said it was gone be a pair of drawers, which made Kitty giggle until Missus frowned at her. Sure enough, that stopped her cold. Missus showed us how to thread a needle and made us practice stitching on an old piece of blue cloth she took from a bag of rags. I about poked my fingers full of holes until Missus showed me how to use a thimble, and how the needle would slide through the cloth easier if you pushed it through a cake of beeswax first. Why she didn't say so in the first place is a big mystery.

The first several days, Missus wouldn't let me and Kitty do anything but practice. Then she started us on finishing the legs of the drawers and then Harriett sewed the legs onto a waistband. We made a dozen pairs.

Next was petticoats. Missus tried to teach me how to make tucks in the cloth, but I never could make the rows come out even and she gave up. Instead, she showed me how to do embroidery. It was the same motion with the needle over and over, and after a while I was making little blue flowers all over the bottom of Miss Mary's new petticoat, which seemed silly. Who's gone see the flowers anyway, hid under Miss Mary's skirts? But then again, white folks have lots of notions that don't make hardly a lick of sense when you stop to think about it.

Every day along about dinnertime Missus sent us out to the porch where there was a table set up, and we had bread and butter and milk. If the sun was out we could walk to the garden to see if anything was blooming yet, and then Missus would clap her hands and bring us back to our work.

Afternoons, with a full belly and the sound of the cousins chattering back and forth, it was hard to stay awake. I practiced spelling words in my head. I thought about Thursday and Althea down in the kitchen, and I wondered if Lottie forgot about me already and if she would remember me when the sewing was done and I got back to the dairy again.

After a while we had filled a trunk with chemises, drawers, and petticoats. Daniel brought the carriage around one morning and took the white girls home. Then it was me and Liza and Kitty left to help Missus finish the dressing gowns.

Missus told us over and over to be careful because the silk was dear as gold, and the more times she reminded me of it, the more nervous I got. One day somehow the needle slipped and stuck my finger. Blood dripped onto the hem.

Missus was busy folding another petticoat Kitty had just finished, so she didn't see me when I jumped up and ran out the door with no safe place to go. I didn't dare face the missus, even though she would find out soon enough that I had ruined her finest creation.

I ran as fast as I could, my head filling up with all sorts of terrible things. Every slave at Arlington knew about folks from other plantations who had been sold South for things like breaking a crystal butter dish or leaving the field too soon or talking back. Althea said once you was sold South you wasn't never heard of again. What if Missus sent me South? I'd never see Mauma or
my daddy again. No more helping Ephraim in the garden. No more of Althea's stories. No more Lottie. No more lessons with Miss Mary.

I couldn't go home to Mauma either. She wouldn't send me away, but she would whip me so hard I'd wish for the next boat to anywhere. I was crying so hard I was blinded.

Then Miss Mary called my name. I cried even harder because I had ruined something special that was hers, and even if I survived whatever punishment was coming to me, Miss Mary never would speak to me again. That was the worst part of it.

She gave me her own handkerchief, which smelled sweet. Like flowers or spices or something. “Now, dry your eyes and go back inside,” she said.

“I can't go by myself. You got to come with me.”

She bent down to look me straight in the eye and told me I had to have courage for whatever things happened in life. Then she held my hand and we went back inside.

I wasn't anybody's fool. Mister Robert was bound to take up most of the room in Miss Mary's heart. But I hoped she would save a little spot for me.

R
obert wrote that he was unwilling to wait any longer and would arrive at the end of June. At which time we would become husband and wife and then proceed to his new posting at Fortress Monroe. I chose half a dozen bridesmaids. Robert rounded up an equal number of men to stand as groomsmen and chose his brother Smith to be best man. Papa conferred with our minister, the Reverend Dr. Keith, and the ceremony was set for the evening of June thirtieth.

Servants, both ours and borrowed, were dispatched to ready the house for the guests and our wedding party. Food was prepared, beds made up, silver polished. The china and silver that had once belonged to my great-grandmother graced table and sideboard. The carpets were beaten and aired, the curtains washed and pressed, the woodwork polished to a high gleam. Mother prevailed upon friends and family to lend us mattresses, candlesticks, punch bowls, and cake baskets, and by the eve of the wedding all was in readiness.

Except for the bride. Unable to sleep and seized by a strange melancholy, I wandered through the rooms of the only home I had ever known, pausing at the touchstones of my childhood. The portrait of President Washington when he served as colonel in the Virginia Militia. My great-grandmother's tea table in
the parlor, and her silver service on the sideboard in the dining room where Robert proposed. The chair where I often sat on Papa's lap while he read to me from the newspapers. Porcelain cups on the mantel. Shelves of books I had read over and over.

My new life, fraught with uncertainty, was about to commence.

I went to bed after midnight and slept fitfully until Mother woke me and sent me down to breakfast. I managed to eat a biscuit with a cup of tea and was on my way upstairs when Papa intercepted me in the hallway.

“Mary Anna, you are pale as milk, my girl. Are you sorry now that you prevailed upon me to approve this match? If that be the case, it is not too late to change your mind.”

“Don't tease me, Papa. I am already a ball of nerves.”

“I would be worried if you weren't. Marriage is a serious business.”

“Robert says the wedding service has all the charm of a death warrant.”

He chuckled and tucked my arm through his. “Walk with me awhile.”

We went out into a June morning heavy with clouds. In the garden, Ephraim and Selina were busy cutting roses for the vases in the parlor. Daniel was readying our carriage for the first trip of the day, ferrying family and guests from the river landing to the house for the ceremony.

“I want to speak to you about the matter of your allowance,” Papa said. “I'm thinking that a sum of—”

“You are quite generous, Papa, but no. Robert and I must live only on his military pay if we are to forge a true partnership.”

His brows rose. “Do you know how little a lieutenant earns?”

“It isn't much, but we will be living at Fort Monroe, and
our expenses will be few.” I watched the boats plying the glassy Potomac. “Besides, you have many other financial obligations to consider. Repairs to the house and this wedding have cost a—”

“That's my business, not yours.”

“Anything that worries you worries me. And I know you've spent far more on this bridal than we can afford.”

“My only child deserves the best.” He patted my hand. “At least you won't be completely without comfort and assistance. Your mother insists upon your taking a servant with you.”

“Yes. She's sending Cassie, though I don't know why. Robert says we will be living in officers' quarters. In so small a space there won't be much for Cassie to do.”

The rattle of harness and the creak of carriage wheels announced the arrival of my bridesmaids. “I must go, Papa.”

“I know.” He caught both my hands in his. “I have loved you desperately all my life, and that won't change, Mary Anna, when I am compelled to share your affections with Lieutenant Lee. Wherever you must go, be assured of your father's tender affections, and never forget that Arlington will always be your home.”

He headed toward the garden, and I went back to the house in time to see my cousin Marietta and my friend Angela exiting the carriage.

“Dear Mary!” Marietta dropped her hatbox to embrace me. “Are you not excited beyond words?”

Excited? Yes. But lacking the inner peace I so desperately needed. Everything was moving too fast. Angela embraced me in turn and we went inside. Daniel followed with their trunks. There was scarcely time to get Marietta and Angela settled into their rooms before my other attendants arrived. Mother served a light luncheon, after which a small army of servants appeared
to drape flower garlands in the doorways to the dining room and the parlor.