Or Give Me Death (19 page)

"I'm not sure, Pegg, how he'll receive the news," I said.

"He take it. He's a strong, good boy."

"No," I said.

She looked at me.

It was time. Time to tell somebody, I decided. If only for the good of my own soul. And she was waiting.

"I never told anybody, Pegg, but I lied about who is going to inherit Mama's bad blood. It's not me. It's John."

Her brown yellow eyes almost seared me with pain, like fire. "Never thought it was you. Knew you were lyin' to protect somebody. You mean to say tha's what your mama tol' you? John?"

"Yes."

"I thought it was a woman's sickness."

"So does everybody in my family. That's why I got away with the he so long, Pegg. That's why they all believed me."

"But why you
do
this? Why you put the burden on yourself? All these years, takin' Patsy's bad mouth, her orders, her slaps. Never bein' 'lowed to do this or that. Why you didn't say the truth?"

I shrugged. "Because I love my brother, Pegg. Because I knew he would have done the same for me. And because he couldn't have stood what Patsy would have done to him. She would have brought him to insanity. And he isn't a bit addled now, is he?"

"But
why
?" Still she could not understand. "Why not say, if'n you gonna He, that it be Patsy?"

"Because then she wouldn't have wed MyJohn. We needed MyJohn around here. And he loved her so. And after they wed, I still felt the need to protect John."

"Lord," she breathed. "Lord spare us. And now you gots to write and tell him that his daddy wed the lady he love."

I said nothing.

"Now what?"

"I'm hoping that he's strong enough to abide it, Pegg. I'm hoping that's what I helped him be, all these years."

"An' if he ain't?"

"I can't think on that now. Oh, Pegg, I'm a liar. It's what I am. It's what I do," I wailed.

She got up and put her arms around me while I cried.

"It's what you had to be to make it, chil'. It's what everybody in that house do. An' you had to do it, too, or you never make it."

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
from my ride that day, nobody scolded because I had missed breakfast.

Pa had received news that British General John Burgoyne was coming through a hundred miles of howling wilderness to attack America from Canada.

I don't know if he got to write the letter that day to John. But I wrote mine.

I told of the wedding, of how we'd soon be living in the Governor's Mansion. How I hated it already. I spoke little of the wedding, however. I did say I was sorry, and that Pa had never known he, John, was taken with Dorothea.

"I think her spoiled and deceitful for not having told him sooner herself, John," I wrote. "And being such, you should be glad to be rid of her."

I told him about his horses and how well they were doing. And how they'd be ready to be raced when he came home again.

***

I
T TOOK ME AWHILE
to ponder the why of it.
I
suppose my letter got there before Pa's. So that by the time Pa untangled himself from worrying about Saratoga and wrote his, John never opened Pa's letter.

We never found out until months later that John did not open it, until it was returned to Pa from General Washington.

With a note from the general himself.

Although I was not at Saratoga, I have been informed that your son, artillery Captain John Henry, distinguished himself there on the battlefield with great valor. However, after the battle, which was such a victory for us, was finished, young Captain Henry snapped his sword to pieces, flung it to the ground and went raving mad, according to reports, as he walked amongst the American dead and dying, lingering long over the bodies of those he had known so well.

The boy's ill state of health ever since obliged him to quit the service about three months past. I therefore extend to you my sincere concern and best wishes and return to you his letter.

***

P
A SENT BARLEY
with money and clothing to bring John home. John was then in New Jersey.

***

I
T WAS CLEAR
to me. My letter had gotten to him. By the time Pa's came, he knew everything. So he crumbled it up and put it in his pocket and went to war.

The war I could have kept him from, if I had told Ra the truth about him. Instead of keeping it to myself.

As I'd kept to myself the secret Mama had told me. That he was the one to inherit the sickness of the mind.

I did it to protect John. Now I wonder if not telling made things worse for him.

When do you keep a secret and when do you tell a lie? When do you go too far to protect those you love? When is lying to keep them safe wrong?

I know now. Leastwise I think I do.

A
S MANY EXPERTS
on Patrick Henry have said, Henry did not leave a paper trail, like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, so it is difficult to write about him.

It was difficult, indeed; this is the most difficult book I have ever written. And added to the challenge was the fact that no biographer has really reassessed Patrick Henry with an eye cast to the tolerance and understanding our culture has displayed since the 1970s and 1980s, when "secrets" about the founding fathers were aired and the stilted party line given out about them by historians was put aside. When they were finally regarded as human beings and not icons.

I wrote this novel not to sensationalize or diminish Patrick Henry but to acknowledge that in spite of horrendous troubles on the home front, he carried on his work in the cause of liberty. And to illuminate what his sacrifice of time and commitment to his country cost him. And his family.

After deciding to write it, I determined to write the book more from the standpoint of a family adjusting to the mental illness of a mother than from a view of the history of the period.

The Henry family bore the whole burden of the mental breakdown of its wife and mother, Sarah Shelton Henry, because of the attitude toward "lunatics" at the time. In the eighteenth century there were no facilities for people with depression, no mode of treatment, no medicine, and no understanding.

Today Sarah Henry's problem might be diagnosed as severe postpartum depression, and she would be treated with counseling and the proper prescription drugs. In eighteenth-century Williamsburg, Virginia, the only course for Patrick Henry to follow was to put her in that part of the jail in town reserved for "lunatics," to be chained, bled, blistered, given laudanum—the drug of choice at the time—put in a dunking chair, and confined in a cell that was eleven feet square. And recovery was not an option.

Patrick Henry would not do that. He chose the solution of putting her in the cellar of his own home, where, history tells us, he had a slave woman care for her. And, legend has it, when home, he would go down every day to feed her.

Imagine the anguish of this man! And the confusion and hurtful consequences to his children! I thought the story worth telling, but first I had to imagine it, because all the books written on Patrick Henry focus on his greatness (which I never set out to question) and usually only a paragraph is given to his home problems.

So I imagined it, using all my research. The most I could get about the situation was a report from Dr. Hinde, who was caring for Sarah: "Here at Scotchtown his family resided, whilst Henry had to encounter many mental and personal afflictions known only to his family physician. While this towering master-spirit was arousing a nation to arms, his soul was bowed down and bleeding under the heaviest sorrow and personal distress. His beloved companion had lost her reason and could only be restrained from self-destruction in a strait-dress."

Research tells us that Sarah died in early February of 177$, at the age of thirty-seven, just weeks before Henry gave his immortal cry of "liberty or death."

To flesh out the story, I had to ask myself questions. Why was Sarah in a strait dress? And being thus confined, could she not, before her death, have begged Patrick, "Give me my freedom or let me die"?

Could that heart-wrenching cry have lingered in his soul three weeks after, when he went to St. John's Church in Richmond to the Second Virginia Convention? Could those words have found voice in his passionate liberty-or-death speech?

His own mother, referring to that speech, reminded his family that the words "peace, peace" were in the text of Jeremiah that a young Patrick Henry had heard so often when his mother took him to hear George Whitefield, the famous evangelist preacher. And the Reverend Samuel Davies, whose sermons she would make Patrick repeat over and over.

Evangelists delivered sermons with power and drama. It is told to us that on the way home from these sermons, in the carriage, young Patrick would stand and try to echo the style of these men.

My point, made by Anne in the novel, is that if Patrick Henry borrowed from Jeremiah, could he not also have borrowed from his own wife? And so it is that historical fiction writers build on facts and take the leap of imagination.

But what is really true in this story and what is imagination-driven?

It is true that Martha Henry (Patsy), as Patrick and Sarah's oldest child, took charge of the younger children once her mother had a mental breakdown. And it is true that John Fontaine, her intended, was her cousin and helped with the children and the plantation management before and after they wed. Indeed, Patsy is cited as "the glue that held the family together," the person who made it possible for Patrick Henry to pursue the business of inspiring the country to freedom.

But what would that mean to the younger children? How many younger sisters can stand being bossed around by an older one? How many older ones could avoid the trap of abusing their authority?

So I added the tension between Anne and Patsy. History tells us that "Anne was plain and outspoken and had a streak of stubbornness." This fit in nicely with the character I was planning for Anne.

As for Sarah Henry's "second sight," that is my invention, although Sarah certainly did have ravings in her madness. The instances of her trying to drown baby Edward and running off with Betsy in a storm only reflect the need to put her in a strait dress.

Many people of the time feared slave uprisings, and those mentioned in the book did happen, as did the terrible flood. So it is entirely possible that Sarah would be fearful that Pegg was out to poison her.

John Fontaine's name, "MyJohn," is my own invention. I wanted this dear man to have an affectionate name, and it cleared up confusion since he had the same name as Patsy's brother.

The character of Neely (I gave her that name) is taken from history. In actuality, this unfortunate girl belonged to Virginia's official vintner, Andrew Estave. And her story is true, right up to her disastrous end.

At the time of the Gunpowder Plot, in 177$, slaves did flee to the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg to take advantage of the freedom promised to them by royal Governor John Murray Dunmore.

From all these facts, I put together my story, allowing my characters to lead me. Patsy, by being afraid to wed because of her mother's sickness, and Anne, by finding out from her mother that John would inherit the madness, and then lying to protect John. And so the web of family secrets, lies, and mistrust grows, as it does in all families where secrets become a way of life.

And so, in her part of the book, Anne's dilemma: "When do you tell the truth and when do you lie? Do you lie to protect someone? Is it wrong to keep a secret, when, if you tell, someone gets hurt?"

This is a common problem for teens. And adults.

Indeed, John did inherit his mother's proclivity for depression. Just as I have portrayed. He went mad right after the Battle of Saratoga, in 1777, when he snapped his sword and wept on the battlefield as he walked amongst the dead. And this was no temporary grief. Within three months, he resigned from the army. And his father had to send a servant to fetch him home.

Some historians assert that John was devastated because his father married Dorothea Dandridge. Is that why he never opened his father's letter? And General Washington returned it to Patrick Henry when he told him of his son's condition? History tells us John was smitten with Dorothea, that she was the age of Patsy, and that Patrick Henry married her not knowing of the connection she had had with his son John. Although all his other children knew of the romance.

So, then all I had to do was connect the dots.

As for Clementina Rind, her role in my book follows fact. She was a powerful force in the community and an independent woman of the times. All the letters from the
Gazette
are real, with the exception of the one written by Anne.

According to all accounts, Patrick Henry was a wonderful father. He allowed his children freedom of movement and thought. In a forty-three-year period, he had seventeen children. As a history buff and lover of our country's past, I chose to bring his first family to life, to make them human, to give them dimension.

Also, I have always wanted to create a book in which something terrible is going on within a household that makes what is going on in the outside world seem mild by comparison. In this novel, I have come as close to that theme as I could.

P
APERS

News from the Henry Tree,
the Patrick Henry Descendants' Branch Newsletter. Brookneal, Va.

Newsletter of the Red Hill Patrick Henry National Memorial
Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation, Brookneal, Va.

B
OOKS

Campbell, Norine Dickson.
Patrick Henry: Patriot and Statesman.
Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair Company, 1969.

Child, Maria.
The Girl's Own Book.
Old Sturbridge Village: Applewood Books, 1834.

Coffman, Suzanne E.
Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg.
Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1998.