Varina(16)

Burton escorted V and Ellen and the children through the angry streets of Charlotte to Mr. Weil’s house. In the following days they stayed hidden away, though Burton went out once gathering scraps of news and rumor—the fall of Richmond, the flight of the government, Lee handing his sword to Grant at Appomattox.

*

—I still have that little pistol, V says. I keep it in my jewelry box.

—I can’t imagine, whatever the danger, sending Julie away like that. If it was bad enough to give her a pistol to kill herself with, it would have been bad enough for me to walk away from everything else and try to take her someplace safe.

—Our situation was more complicated, V says. Jeff being president of a rebel country.

—Yes, but all that was over. How many days after we left Richmond did he go?

—I don’t know. Three or four?

—And he didn’t catch up with us for how long?

—Going on two months. And again, it’s a point of pride that we could probably have made it to Cuba if he hadn’t caught up with us.

James says, I told you last week about defending him against black children in South Carolina and white children in Massachusetts and both groups of them fighting me. But all I remember of him is a slim, older white man in a suit. He was much older than you, and I’ve been wondering how you came together.

—It was briers and hurricanes right from the start, V says.





Hurricane & Brierfield


1842


SHE GREW UP OUTSIDE NATCHEZ IN AN OLD-FASHIONED house called The Briers. A house, not a plantation. No fields, no cotton. It sat on a few acres of high bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The ground sloped east to a dry bayou a hundred feet deep, its sides covered with pines and live oaks, and magnolia trees. To the west, deep yellow clay bluffs caved to the river below. The proportions of the house felt right—oversize windows and broad shady galleries across the front and back—but it was largely the river that made it beautiful.

Growing up, she witnessed every day all the dirty business of cotton and slaves, all the criminality and culture of the new country passing in miniature below her on the big brown river. Everything that floated—dugout canoes, and vast timber rafts, and every kind of johnboat, flatboat, keelboat, and barge, all the way to giant white paddle wheel steamboats—coasted down-current or struggled up.

Nights when she was young, looking down from the lawn of The Briers, steamboats passed below her lit up like Christmas. They trailed faint sounds of music and the distant grinding and churning of their great paddle wheels. She stood barefoot in the damp grass and watched their unreal passage below her, as if Venus had shifted its orbit and swooped by, a luminous world of its own, here and gone in minutes, leaving the blank space of wide river even quieter and darker than before.


AT LEAST ONCE A MONTH from twelve onward, dreams rode her nights. Prophetic, horrific, beautiful, mysterious. She never claimed they came true. Others did that, and during the Washington and Richmond years, she became famous for them. Most of them were no more important than anyone’s dreams, but her spooky dreams, the scary ones, sometimes reappeared in the real world in large and small ways.

Twenty years before it happened, she dreamed the balcony and the cobbles and the house where little Joe fell to his death. She dreamed the whole bloody war long before it erupted. It was an epic nightmare that lasted until dawn. She was in Washington at the time, the wife of a freshman congressman, still in her teens and childless, delighted to be invited to parties at the White House and happy that Jeff’s cotton plantation down on the Mississippi provided heaps of money. But she still remembers being yanked out of sleep by the horror of the war dream and getting up and squatting over the porcelain chamber pot in the dark and going back to sleep and the dream catching right back up. All the destruction and blood and punishment. Fallen heroes, victories and defeats, great acts of courage and cowardice. Battlefields muddy with blood, cotton fields full of slaves working ankle-deep in blood, whipping posts like red fountains, and all around a hurricane tide of red waves crashing over everyone. It was biblical in the sense that the Bible is a bloody red book. Even her beloved Greeks, back in the long dizziness of time, were nearly as bad—except for Sappho and a few other outliers. Otherwise, all dripping red down the green and blue globe.

At breakfast the next morning, her first words of the day were, About ninety-nine percent of the time, we’re more awful than any animal you can name. But, in that final decimal, we’re so beautiful.

Jeff said, You look tired. Bad dreams again?


THE BRIERS DID NOT BELONG to V’s father. He leased it. The same thing with the few house slaves. WB Howell’s theories of financial management were simple—why tie money to property when he could invest it in ill-conceived business schemes? WB was the youngest son of an eight-term New Jersey governor back when they held elections every year, and his money came mostly from inheritance and marriage to V’s mother and from her very comfortable Mississippi family. Almost none of WB’s money came from successful speculation, and none whatsoever came from actual work.

At age twenty, WB recognized that his pathways to success might not be so wide open in New Jersey or New York as he had grown up expecting. Older brothers stood in his way, and family politics tended unfavorably. After little more than a flicker of thought, he decided the likeliest place to realize his full potential was the American Southwest. Mississippi, Louisiana. Some town on the big river where he couldn’t help but be the smartest man around. A place still whiffing the last tinge of lawless frontier. And Natchez—being to his understanding the fanciest town all the way from New Orleans to the frozen North where the great brown river arose—he chose it for home.