Varina(8)

—It was a long and dangerous journey, she says, and we survived day by day, and I’m proud of that. Jeff arrived just in time—a few hours—to get everybody captured by the Federals. I will always maintain that if he had left us on our own, we could have made it to Havana—mainly because I wanted to escape and he didn’t.

V raises a forefinger to signal a pause and then looks toward a bank of tall windows and studies the view of valleys and ridges. James sits within himself and waits. He mostly looks at the cold fireplace and the Emerson. Her face is pale, and she begins taking deep, deliberate breaths.

When she resumes talking she finds a different voice, windless and quiet and gentle. She starts at the beginning of what she knows. How midway in the war, she found him on the streets of Richmond, a skinny, tiny boy taking a hard beating from a big drunk woman swinging a stick of kindling. The woman putting her shoulder into it, practically knocking him down with every blow. But he kept trying to stand up and bear it. V thought the woman was his mother, but when V stepped out of the carriage and went to stop her, the woman said he was a stray, hanging around too long begging food she didn’t have to spare. He was filthy, and V lifted him by the armpits into the carriage and took him home. The only name he would say was Jimmie. The boys recognized him from the Hill Cats Gang but didn’t know his full name, or wouldn’t say it. Down his back he had cuts and bruises, some fresh, some scabbed, some scarred. He was double-jointed, and when he was nervous and uncertain he folded one hand backward and then the other. So Maggie started calling him Jimmie Limber, and soon the other children and V and Ellen did too.

—But on Sundays, V says, when you dressed up for church, you wanted to be called James Brooks. Maybe that was your real name or maybe you made it up. At the end of the war, when they parted you from us, that’s the name I wrote when I begged General Saxton to take care of you.

—I always wondered whether my name is real or if I made it up. I guess that question will never be answered. But my real question is simple. Why did you pick me up? James asks.

—I don’t know. I just did it. You were so small.

—It must have been more complicated than that.

—Maybe so, but I can’t explain it.


—YOU MENTIONED the Hill Cats Gang? James says.

—Little boys roaming streets and alleys and backyards of downtown Richmond. Women in the big houses criticized me for letting my children run wild, but it was good for you. And those women from the old Virginia families had little else to do but gossip and judge. The Hill Cats were enemies of the Butcher Cats from down toward Shockoe Bottom. Sometimes the older boys actually fought each other, but you little ones just threw pebbles and crab apples and yelled high-pitched threats. Police picked up a couple of Hill Cats once and hauled them into the Mayor’s Court charged with throwing rocks at the Spotswood Hotel, but they argued innocence, since it was pieces of coal they threw, not rocks—and they won their case. Things got bad enough after a battle the papers said involved as many as a hundred boys—which probably meant thirty—that Jeff walked down the hill one day to make peace between the gangs. He argued to the Butcher Cats that both gangs were neighbors, separated by only a few blocks, and that they had much in common and should get to know each other, should play together whether it was down in the Bottom or up on the Hill. He explained that it was in everyone’s best interests to stop fighting and like each other. When he was done talking, the leader of the Butcher Cats—probably a boy of ten—told Jeff what a fine gentleman he was, but said that it was impossible that they would ever like the Hill Cats. And equally impossible they would ever stop fighting.

When Jeff came puffing back up the hill and told V of his failure, she said it felt like 1860 all over again.


—BUT COULD WE GO BACK to the simplest parts of Miss Botume’s memoir? James asks. Was I bright and playful, affectionate and tractable?

—Tractable? My God, no. You were spirited and independent. And of course careful and wary when you were uncertain. You had to have been to survive living stray during the shortages of the war. When you felt safe you were certainly affectionate, but you didn’t give it away. It had to be earned. And that’s what first made me love you. But in writing to my old friend General Saxton begging him to take care of you, I wasn’t about to get into nuances. After all, he and my husband were on different sides. And as for whether you were bright, look at yourself now. My question is, what have you done with your brightness over the decades?

—I’ve been a teacher, James says. I’ve taught hundreds of children and adults reading and writing and arithmetic. Back when I started, a lot of my students were former slaves. It seemed like so many of them learned written language and understood the fundamental relationships of numbers almost overnight. They inhaled it like they’d been drowning and suddenly lifted their heads into the air. All they wanted was more.

—When you began classes with our tutor, you learned to read in a month, maybe less. You raced along, impatient to get to the next word, to the next line of text. Forward was your direction. So teaching must be a satisfying profession for you.

—It is. But the difference between a little boy learning to read in the president’s mansion and a woman of fifty who’d been denied it by law for much of her lifetime is large.

—Yes, you’re right. And teaching is truly a noble profession. Little money in it, though. I say that noticing your expensive footwear in particular.