Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray (41 page)

After my father
'
s death she was often cheerless, but her visit with you last summer seemed to elevate her spirits, and I had hoped that I might have the comfort of her presence a good while longer. But God has seen fit to take her unto Himself and I know she is happy now in Heaven with her beloved warrior who was the chief object of her lifelong affection.

In going through her papers this morning I found a note expressing her wishes that her few pieces of jewelry be divided among her children and her servants. You are not a servant any longer, of course, but I enclose this locket knowing she would want you to have it.

Yours sincerely, Mildred Childe Lee

It takes a lot to make me cry, but this news wrung every last tear from my eyes. Pain rose up in my chest and wrapped itself so tightly around my heart that I could barely speak. It seemed too much for Miss Mildred and her brothers to bear, that Miss Mary and her sweet girl were gone in one fell swoop. But it is a fact that even the worst pain has a way of eventually knitting itself up, the same as a broken bone. Miss Mary's children would have to go on because life gives us no other choice.

I held the locket in my palm and thought about the past. Which is a different place, a faraway speck on the map of life, and the only way to get back there is in memories. Staring into the crackling fire, I could almost see Miss Mary once again singing to us in the schoolroom, bending down to tend her flower garden, sitting beside the fire with her sewing, waiting anxiously for a letter from Texas or St. Louis or Mexico.

I remembered the way her brown eyes lit up with pleasure on my wedding day and the smell of her dresses when I took them to the laundry—dirt and the oil of roses mixed with paint and lavender. I remembered the hushed busyness outside the birthing room when she brought her babies into the world, and one thrilling ride on a snow sled when purple shadows painted her beloved hills and the nest of stars above us glittered in the winter sky.

She was born into privilege, but it hadn't shielded her from the many great sorrows of her life. I prayed her soul was at peace, and I thanked God for the world of books she had opened up for me on those long-ago days in the sunny schoolroom at Arlington. Knowledge is one kind of freedom, and the only kind she could give me back then. My mother once said anytime a
slave learned to read and write it was a miracle. It was Miss Mary who sat me down with chalk and slate and primers brought from Washington City so that the miracle could proceed.

The logs in the fireplace burned down to orange coals. Annice lit the lamps and Thornton went to the door to call our children in for supper. But I sat where I was, Miss Mildred's letter on my lap, and thought about the day when I first stood with my husband on this worn-out patch of ground and we cried like children because the money Miss Mary had sent meant that finally it would be ours.

“Mama?” Annice said. “Come on and eat. Your supper's getting cold.”

“In a minute.”

I tucked away the letter and the locket and went to the table and bowed my head while Thornton asked God to bless our meal. Life had not been any kind of easy, but I had a lot to be thankful for. The Bible says that even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow finds a nest where she may lay her young. I thought of the slave cabin at Arlington where I had come into the world, where I had learned to be a wife, where I had birthed my own children. There were some good memories mixed in with the bad. But it was not my home. It never was.

A bird doesn't live in the nest where it was born, but in the sky in which it flies.

T
his novel owes its existence to two fairly recent discoveries of historical materials. In 2007, a trunk belonging to Mary Custis Lee, the eldest daughter of General and Mrs. Robert E. Lee, was discovered in a bank vault in Virginia. Inside the trunk were several hundred items Miss Lee had collected, including papers, letters, postcards, and clippings. Among the papers was an 1872 letter from Selina Norris Gray, a former slave at Arlington, to Mrs. Robert E. Lee.

In September of 2014, a volunteer for the National Park Service, which maintains Arlington House (now the Robert E. Lee Memorial), spotted a photo for sale on eBay. The seller in England had found it in a box of “unwanted” photos at a British garage sale. The park service volunteer recognized the woman in the photo as Selina Norris Gray. Mrs. Gray had been Mrs. Lee's housekeeper and personal assistant and had taken charge of Arlington and its Washington treasures when Mrs. Lee was forced to abandon her home at the start of the Civil War.

As a student of history and especially of the life of General Lee, and as the author of a number of historical novels, I was thrilled with these new finds and intrigued by Selina's story. At a time when slaves were deserting Arlington, why did Mrs. Lee leave Selina, rather than the white male overseer, in charge? How
had such a deep trust developed between mistress and slave? Why did Selina choose to stay when other slaves simply walked away? And how did she come to be recognized as the “Savior of the Washington Treasures”?

At the same time I had recently read yet another biography of General Lee in which his wife was marginalized, criticized, and denigrated. I set out to write this novel with several goals in mind: to bring Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee out of the shadow of her iconic husband and give her the credit she deserves, and to explore the friendship between Mary and Selina, which lasted until Mary's death in 1873. Just as important, I felt that Selina's story, which is largely unknown outside a small circle of historians, deserved to be told.

From the very beginning of her life, Mary inspires controversy. Almost all historians give her birth year as 1808, but Elizabeth Brown Pryor, who wrote a biography of General Lee as well as Mary's biography for
Encyclopedia Virginia
, gives the year as 1807, the same year that Mary's famous husband was born. One of the Custis family Bibles gives Mary's birth year as 1808, but the last 8 is smudged, as if a correction has been made. Some historians speculate that someone—perhaps Mary herself—changed the date in order to appear a year younger than her husband. In any case, writers of historical fiction must make choices, and I have chosen to accept Pryor's date of 1807 as Mary's birth year, making her just nine months younger than Robert.

General Lee's many biographers have had a field day with Mary; she has been variously described as selfish, spoiled, willful, slovenly, ugly, and dull. Typical of this type of characterization is Emory Thomas's description in
Robert E. Lee: A
Biography
. He writes, “Mary Custis proved a liability [to Robert E. Lee]. She was spoiled and helpless and became even more so when confronted with the obligations of being spouse, adult, and parent.” He goes on: “Mary was accustomed to having her own way. She tended to center attention upon herself . . . she was disorganized . . . and notoriously late, nor was she especially pretty, in sharp contrast to her husband, who was extremely handsome and seemed important when he entered a room.”

From the glimpses of Mary in her husband's biographies, and from her own letters and journals, it is clear that she was not in fact always punctual, nor was she the most fastidious of housekeepers, though Robert noted, “She does try.”

As the only Custis child to survive infancy, Mary was sole heiress to her father's extensive holdings and grew up surrounded by servants who saw to her every need. It is likely she was indulged and pampered, but in this she was no different from many other wealthy Virginia belles. She may not have been “especially pretty,” but she had several suitors, including Robert E. Lee's brother Smith and Sam Houston, who would become president of the Texas Republic. Smith Lee took his loss in stride, serving as his brother's best man, but Mary's refusal stung Sam Houston; he questioned “the good taste and discernment of Mary Custis, who preferred to tie herself by long engagement to that shy underclassman at West Point when she might have been Houston's bride and the belle of Washington Society.”

Far from dull, Mary was exceptionally well educated for the times, mastering French, Greek, and Latin and reading four newspapers every day. She was a gifted painter of the landscapes and people of Arlington, eclipsing her father's talent. One of her watercolors, a 4 × 5-inch study called
Enslaved Girl
, painted in
1830, sold in 2007 to Colonial Williamsburg for its museum collection.

At her father's death she took over the organization of his papers and completed a project he had begun some years before of gathering all of his “recollections” of his stepgrandfather, General Washington—pieces he had published in the paper—into a single volume. Mary added her own memoir of her father, writing with wit and elegance about his early ancestors. She selected an editor, negotiated through him with various publishers, and in 1860 published
Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis, with a Memoir of the Author by His Daughter.

Mary and her mother were active in the American Colonization Society (ACS) and sold flowers from their Arlington gardens to support the cause. They were committed to the emancipation of all the Custis slaves and gave up their claim to the Fitzhugh slaves in exchange for a written promise that the children of those slaves would be free. She and her mother taught those at Arlington to read and write (including, presumably, Selina Norris, who was fifteen years Mary's junior).

Organized by Richard Bland Lee (one of Robert E. Lee's uncles), Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, and supported by President James Monroe, the ACS sometimes purchased the freedom of slaves and outfitted them for immigration to Liberia. Their stated belief was that freed slaves were subjected to such deep racism that they could never succeed in America, and that a new start in Liberia was their best chance at a decent life. In the early 1850s, the state of Virginia appropriated $30,000 a year for five years to support the work of the society. A few other states followed suit.

The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who originally supported the ACS, in time became its most vocal critic, accusing the members of more selfish motives. But by 1867, some thirteen thousand freed slaves had resettled in Liberia, the capital of which, Monrovia, was named for President Monroe. Among those thirteen thousand were Custis slaves William Custis Burke, his wife, Rosabella, and their children, who sailed for Liberia in November of 1853 aboard the ship
Banshee
, just as I have described it in the novel. Mrs. Lee continued corresponding with the Burkes at least until the late 1860s. Mrs. Lee's funding method for their trip as described in the novel, however, is entirely fictional.

Mary and Robert were married in June of 1831. Between 1832 and 1846, she gave birth to seven children, all of whom lived to adulthood. In addition to her support of the ACS and her work teaching the Custis slaves to read, Mary taught each of her own children to read and write and prepared them for entry into boarding school. She made all their clothes by hand in the days before the invention of the sewing machine. Despite her own worsening health, she nursed the children through a series of serious illnesses and injuries (one of her sons sliced off the ends of two fingers with a straw cutter, and a daughter poked out her own eye with scissors) and oversaw their religious education.

Mary endured years-long separations from her husband while he served in the Mexican War, in Texas, and in the Civil War. In his absence she reared her seven boisterous children alone. During the Civil War she organized her Richmond neighbors into a sort of sock-knitting factory, turning out hundreds of pairs of socks, which she sent to the general for distribution to his soldiers. The incident in Richmond with the young Union
soldier actually happened, another example of Mary's concern for others.

After the war, General Lee accepted the presidency of Washington College (now Washington and Lee University). By this time severe arthritis had confined Mary to her “rolling chair,” and she was unable to take part in the many events going on at the college. However, as she had done when her husband was superintendent at West Point, Mary opened her home to groups of students, continued work for her numerous charities, and answered the hundreds of letters that arrived at the president's residence in Lexington seeking some memento of the general.

Knowing all of this about Mary, I found it unfathomable that anyone could charge her with being a “liability” to her husband. And indeed, one of her husband's most famous biographers, Douglas Southall Freeman, paints a very different picture of her. He writes, “Rarely was a woman more fully a part of her husband's life. This fundamentally was because of his simplicity and her fineness of spirit . . . She did not hesitate to voice a fiery opinion in plainspoken terms. She loved wild flowers and old gardens and evening skies . . . A quick and understanding sympathy was shown in her kindly eye and ready smile . . . Loving her, he saw her best qualities and not her worst.”

General Lee died in October of 1870 and was laid to rest in the Lee Chapel at Washington College. Their daughter Agnes died three years later, in October of 1873, and was interred beside her beloved papa. Mary never recovered from the loss and died just weeks later, on November 5, 1873.

On November 11, the
Tri Weekly Courier
in Rome, Georgia, printed an obituary of Mrs. Lee:

Intelligence has been received of the death of Mrs. Lee on Wednesday the 5th inst . . . Mrs. Lee was a lady of exemplary conduct and unassuming and gentle character. Her funeral was held on November 7th in the Lee Memorial Chapel. WHF Lee, Custis Lee, and Robert E. Lee, Jr. and her daughter were present besides a large concourse of friends . . . Business was entirely suspended in Lexington yesterday, many places being draped in mourning and the obsequicies [sic] were very imposing.