Varina(19)
When asked by his peers why he ran his plantation as he did—whether he meant something by it or not, whether there was a particular theme to his strange choices—he raised his arms before him and flippered both hands impatiently and said the word slaves with a tone of ambiguous annoyance. Some fellow planters agreed that slaves required constant attention and that for every good worker you also had to support a half-dozen children and a useless granny or two. Others agreed that as an institution, slavery’s time had passed, its golden age behind it, though the Bible and the Constitution of the United States confirmed its holy justice. Others worried Winchester had gone north to school and had lost all his common sense and had abandoned belief in slavery altogether.
Then one mighty day, after months of thought on the topic, Winchester freed all his enslaved workers. He handed them their papers and shooed them on their way. Then he began hiring workers the way Yankees did, cheap and by the carefully measured hour. But, unlike Yankees, he paid everyone the same wages—remnant Choctaw and freed blacks got the same as whites. He hired back many of his previous slaves under the new economics. For those who wanted to live in his housing, he started charging rent. And when it came to food and clothing, he left everybody to manage for themselves. Winchester lived alone and ate mostly bean stews, grits and greens, and other such simple bowl meals that he cooked for himself.
He suffered under the judgment of his fellow rich planters who claimed he had gone crazy. He answered that he had seen the future of capitalism, and believed that if they fully understood it, the planters would embrace it like a favorite New Orleans whore.
V was seven the year Winchester got bored with farming and sold his land and moved in with the Howells under some arrangement with WB that she, even now, doesn’t understand fully, but has celebrated nearly every day of her life when an electric spark of memory delivers a reminder that Winchester valued her far beyond what WB—or anyone else—ever did.
WINCHESTER HADN’T ARRIVED with any intention of being her tutor. He lived out in one of the back cottages at The Briers with his books. He had an office in town and was just a struggling lawyer and not the judge in black robes he later became. He took supper at the family table, but otherwise they saw little of him.
A couple of months after his arrival, though, he volunteered to tutor V and would not accept a penny in pay. Maybe he felt the need to reimburse WB for room and board, or maybe he saw something in V worth his time and interest. She remembers one detail from their first day together as student and teacher. V had recently asked her mother what her odd name meant, where it came from. Her mother said, Your father came up with it. I guess he thought it sounded exotic. V asked Winchester the same question, what her name meant. He said, It comes from the Greeks. A variant of Barbara. It means foreigner. Barbarian. Onomatopoeia. They thought outsider languages sounded like baa, baa, baa, vaa, vaa, vaa. Grunts and chatter. From about that time, Winchester was V’s only teacher and she was his only student—excepting a miserable few months at a school for hateful rich girls in Philadelphia ruled by a despot V ever after called Madame X. WB sent her there believing it would be a grand experience for her. The girls mocked her accent, laughed about her skin color, her height, her seriousness in discussing the fine points of translation. Said to her face that she was so frontier, so unpolished. After only one quarter, much to V’s joy, Madame X sent her home.
All those years together, V thought of Winchester as elderly. Old Winchester. But looking back and doing the sums, he wasn’t much past thirty when she met him. He hadn’t married when he arrived at The Briers and never did.
V couldn’t decide whether her father tried to be kind or cruel when he asked Winchester to escort her upriver to Davis Bend. Maybe WB thought the break would be easier on her if it was clean and quick and final. Or maybe he wanted to send her the message that at seventeen she was old enough to make her own way, that he had cut her loose, shoved her into a world where the contractual nature of marriage was stronger than novels had led her to expect.
Starting right then, and continuing through the rest of his life, she dropped addressing Winchester by any name but Dear Heart.
Right about here, cynics might need reassurance. Male tutors and piano teachers and art instructors hold dim reputations in regard to their behavior toward young female students. Yet as V has said many times over the years—hand to Holy Book—the only touches passing between them all those years, all those thousands of hours alone in the dim silent library and out in the little one-room schoolhouse on the back lawn, were occasional pats on the back of her hand, taps on each temple from his slim forefingers to encourage her to think harder rather than give up when some complex twist of language and thought from Aristotle or Plato or Heraclitus rose like a high gray stone wall between her and the distant brilliant past. Except for that last day at Davis Landing.
DESPITE LIVING ALL HER LIFE with the wide brown flow of the Mississippi as the overwhelming geography of her world—the Pikes Peak and Mont Blanc—V had never traveled on a grand riverboat. So as she and Winchester boarded the Magnolia in Natchez, she was fairly overwhelmed by the scale of the thing. The big stern-wheel vessel—all its grinding and ratchety mechanisms of boilers and cranks and struts and gears and wheels and paddles—pulsed with kinetic power.
V worried about her clothes. Appropriate dress is so easy for men. They mostly want to wear uniforms, so their choices are strict and almost nonexistent. Winchester wore a black suit and a white shirt, and he could have gone to a funeral, a wedding, a baptism, or to testify in a court of law. But V had troubled herself for weeks coming up with a traveling outfit that would place her in the public eye as she wanted to be placed. Slightly more overdressed than underdressed and not looking like a frumpy governess on the way to a first job, but not like a little idiotic curly-haired belle either. She wanted to costume herself for a role that she wasn’t sure existed.