America's First Daughter: A Novel(177)
She was devoted to her father, in spite of his weaknesses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My dear daughter, still as precious as two angels in one . . .
And so Ellen married Joseph Coolidge in the drawing room of Monticello, without her father, her hands shaking so badly she could scarcely hold a prayer book. Her sisters sent her to Boston with gifts they made themselves. Cornelia fashioned for her a painted screen to shade her from the sun, Mary packed a basket of cakes and wine, and Septimia presented her with a bracelet of chinaberries she’d strung like beads. Then our dear, witty Ellen was gone, leaving her grandfather lonely.
My other daughters took turns sitting with him, but Papa confided, “I didn’t know what a void Ellen would leave in our family.”
I didn’t despair at losing Ellen. To the contrary, I gloried in her escape from the sinking ship upon which the rest of us now sailed.
In December of that year, Edgehill went up for auction with all its slaves and livestock. I worried that the notice would attract traffickers in human blood, Negro buyers who’d take my husband’s slaves deep into the South to grow cotton or rice, putting them to such hard use it’d leave them in the ground. And I couldn’t stomach the sorrow of seeing our house servants and their children sold out of the family.
“There’s nothing you can do for them,” Jeff said, trying to reassure me. “I can try to arrange for buyers for them amongst our friends and neighbors, and failing that, I can bid myself on your household favorites, but there’s nothing you can do to spare the slaves from sale at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mother.”
Then why did I feel to blame?
In the face of such a system of injustice, I determined a course of action. Having learned bitter lessons from the unhappy fate of so many ruined friends and relatives, I said, “There is something I can do. If I give up my dower rights in my husband’s holdings, I’m entitled to one-ninth of his estate before the creditors are satisfied. And if I take that value in slaves . . .”
My son’s eyes bulged. “You’d be better off to take—”
“No,” I said, twisting a kerchief in my fists, understanding the import of what I was saying. “I’ll take the slaves.”
And with those desperate words, I agreed to become a slaveholder.
For the first time in my life, I’d own human beings whose entire fate would rest in my hands. It shattered me to do it, but would’ve shattered me more to do nothing. Better that they were mine than given over to some breeding farm or a field in the Deep South.
I spared from the block Sally’s relations—the wives of her brothers. But I did so over Jeff’s objections. “They’re aged, Mother. They wouldn’t have sold for much. If slaves are all you’re taking from the estate, you need strong young men.”
But I went on sparing the women. I took eleven in all, including Burwell’s daughters, though my son thought my choices emotional and without good sense.
What I’d done was all that kept me sane on the bitter winter day of the auction. First on the block was Susan, so bad a servant, so negligent, so heartless, and of a family of such bad disposition generally that we ought to have been glad to be rid of her. But I was overcome with nausea when the auctioneer cried out into the biting winter wind. “Five hundred, five hundred! This nubile girl, strong arms, wide hips. Five hundred, do I hear six?”
The discomfort of slavery I had borne all my life, but its sorrows in all their bitterness I’d never before conceived. Tears slid down Susan’s black cheeks when a man offered a higher bid. And feeling a fracturing in my soul, I lost all sense of decorum.
Rushing to her, I begged that she be allowed to choose for herself amongst the buyers—a thing that embarrassed my son as he pulled me away, mumbling apologies to the bidders. “You aren’t planning to do something even more foolish, are you? You cannot rely now on my father for anything anymore. What you’ve taken in human property is now all you have of your own to provide for the six children you still have in your care, all under the age of seventeen.”
He was afraid that I’d free them. And I might’ve. But just because I couldn’t bear to see these slaves naked on a wooden block for rich men to inspect, didn’t mean I’d cast them out into the world without any way to support themselves. That’s what I was thinking when the auctioneers cried out the price for Edgehill’s parcels, hour after hour. “Sixteen an acre! Do I hear seventeen?”
Standing there as everything Tom and I built was sold away—earth, animal, and human—I felt my husband’s accusing eyes on me. But however much he hated me that day, I hated myself more. I hated myself, and slavery, and Virginia, and everything.
Everything.
For four hours the auctioneers cried out, extolling the virtues of Edgehill, a plantation with the healthiest climate of the whole earth, sheltered from cold winds, well watered with pure springs, nestled amongst woods of oak, hickory, walnut, and ash . . . until finally, at the end of the fourth hour, with bidders beginning to go off, my son offered seventeen and took the whole of Edgehill.
“You swindler,” Tom sneered, drawing so near to my son I thought they might come to blows. “You took advantage of a father’s distress to get possession of his property and turn him adrift in his old age, penniless. You didn’t even raise enough to satisfy my creditors and now they’ll consume my earnings for the rest of my life. You’ve even taken from me a roof over my head—”