Varina(28)
V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it at about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, the strangeness only. The sense that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed. And that she stood on one side and others stood across—free on her side, enslaved on the other. For the poorest southern whites or northern women and children working fourteen hours a day in the satanic mills of Yankee factories, the line between slave and free might have been only a foot across—but even then it cut deep, a bottomless chasm. Yet the only determinant of which side you occupied was a paper-thin layer of skin, a fraction of blood degree.
After a few months with Winchester as her tutor, she asked him who drew that line. He said some people believed God drew it. He had her read Luke 12:47—about how the slave that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes. Winchester told her that many plantation owners kept that page turned down for quick reference. He told her she would find quite a few inconsistencies in that book and in the beliefs of Christians and suggested she think about the relationship between wealth and power and morality in regard to drawing lines.
As epiphanies go, her young recognition amounted to not much, except it seemed so for her then. Over the years with Winchester she came to know that people have enslaved each other from time immemorial. Spin the globe and point to a location and probably find slaves sometime in history. Study the golden enlightened Greeks and their marvelous language and history and mythology as she did for years, and you’ll see Socrates and his comrades thinking lofty thoughts while pretty slave girls and boys pour their wine and less pretty ones pick and stomp the grapes. The Yankees’ holy Puritan forefathers owned slaves almost from the moment they set foot on the continent. V’s New Jersey governor grandfather owned slaves all through his eight terms. As a teacher, Winchester didn’t advocate beyond adhering to facts as far as we can know them. The context of history ruled. He scoffed if she just talked about what she believed without supporting evidence. So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.
WHEN SHE LEFT DAVIS BEND for Natchez after an intense two months of daily courtship, she and Jeff had not become fully engaged, but they had put a hold on forming other entanglements. She was so young, and her parents needed to weigh in, though Jeff felt confident that her father would not offer an impediment.
Jeff accompanied her to the dock and leaned in for a full-on good-bye kiss. But distracted by memory—its habit of looping and echoing—V thought of Winchester at that same spot. She turned her head at the final second to take a glancing blow on her cheek. She said a confused good-bye and then rushed up the stage to the riverboat.
In a letter written a day afterward, Jeff asked,
When we parted at the river, how did you happen to call me by your Father’s name? I’ve been so worried you are ill.
V wrote back.
My apologies for misspeaking. Take for granted a faint touch of blush on my cheeks. I’ll try not to make that mistake again. From now forward, I’ll simply call you Uncle Jeff, since Florida claims Cousin.
JEFF WAS RIGHT ABOUT HER FATHER, he was ready for a wedding and to wish the couple well and send them on their way. But V’s mother put up a fight. Her judgment was to let the courtship proceed, but no wedding for at least a year—certainly not before V turned eighteen. So all that spring and summer, Jeff’s love letters followed a formula. Each one started out rational and conversational in tone but then soon built to an emotional heft only the French language could bear. Most of them ended with Mon amor, mon petit pomme. He didn’t seem to consider that V’s understanding of the language was a great deal more complete than his and that she would not be impressed with his smatter of misspelled and ungrammatical West Point French. Though to be fair his limited vocabulary did contain more words for artillery pieces and the movements of troops than hers. He saw the French language as a tool, a weapon, rather than a portal into a culture and its history and literature. Eons of loss later, confronted with the reality of Paris—where some of their acquaintances from the war lived in exile—Jeff went twitchy as a squirrel looking at public statuary. V loved the city and was ready to start looking for a nice, cheap apartment with a sliver of river view, but Jeff declared that he could never live in a place where displays of human anatomy flushed themselves in his face every time he took a walk.
As for V’s half of their courtship correspondence, her letters vanished during the war, stolen by the Federal raiders who looted Brierfield and destroyed The Hurricane. Jeff had tied the stack of them with a red ribbon as he had done with Knoxie’s letters. Even the slight possibility that V’s letters survive in a Connecticut or Michigan attic still makes her wish she’d burned them when she had the chance. Most of her correspondence to friends and acquaintances over the decades concluded with a line below the signature: Private—Burn after reading. Happily, she can’t remember a word of her teen love letters to a man more than twice her age.
*
V tells James, I sometimes imagine meeting my seventeen-year-old self. She’s still here inside me somewhere. Maybe one morning in the mirror, there she’ll be. I look at her with affection and understanding and hope. She sees me and backs away in horror while I try to explain why I made the choices I made. Back then, a good marriage didn’t require love. A good marriage meant security—money and position and a man who didn’t knock you around. We all wanted both, of course—love and security—but mostly we settled for the second and manufactured an attraction to keep from acknowledging the arranged, contractual foundation of the relationship, the mercantile nature of it. All those years, I can’t remember one girl from a good family who settled for only love.