Sarah's Ground (9781439115855) (5 page)

It seems like John Augustine Washington. I think of him often. And with sadness and guilt.

Mr. Herbert constantly talks about refurbishing. The first room he wants to tackle is Mr. Washington's bedroom. He has asked Miss Cunningham for permission to plaster, paper, and paint, as if you could plaster, paper, and paint over memories. He says that if the room had been in order all along, he could have paid a man to guard it and made money besides. Could you just see a man with nothing to do all day but guard General Washington's room?

Sometimes I think Mr. Herbert has notions.

He expects visitors and says we will be able to make money from them. He knows where to get some chairs. From the Lewises, who are kin to Washington. He says they are breaking up housekeeping.

On the other hand, we are lucky to have him. He knows everybody around here. I suppose notions aren't the worst thing a man can have.

He also says the sills in the house will last three or four years, but the roof can no longer be delayed. It is leaking and will ruin everything inside.

The wind was very bad last night, and in it I heard many children's voices. It carried away the covered passage from the house to the kitchen. I thought I heard children laughing as if they were doing great mischief.

It is the twenty-fifth of May and the season is so lovely that I want to fill my eyes with the sights and smells every day. The strawberry vines and fruit trees are laden, and we are already eating asparagus. Everything has blossomed and the greenery is a feast for the eyes. I am starting a small kitchen garden off to the side in back of the house. And I cannot live without flowers. There are some beautiful roses blooming here from years past, and yesterday Mr. Herbert went into Alexandria and got me eight dollars more in seeds. But the news from everywhere is terrible.

On the nineteenth of April, Union troops traveling through Baltimore on their way to duty in the capital were fired upon and stoned by a mob of civilians. It was the exact day that the fighting started up at Lexington and Concord in General Washington's war. There has to be
some connection in that. Does nobody see it but me?

Earlier this month Alexandria was in turmoil. Union troops marched in to take it from the Confederates. The town was wild with excitement, Mr. Herbert said. He was there. A twenty-four-year-old colonel from New York's Fire Zouaves strode right into the Marshall House, went to the upper story, and took down the Confederate flag, and as he came down the stairs Mr. Jackson, who owns the place, stopped him with a blast from a shotgun. The dead soldiers name was Elmer Ellsworth. The Fire Zouaves wear their hair shorn under large red caps and carry big bowie knives. Their behavior, in general, is very wild.

Another Zouave shot Jackson dead. Mr. Herbert said the blood of Jackson and Ellsworth ran together on the stairs.

He saw it as they were bringing out the bodies. He was very shaken when he came home. Ellsworth's body was laid in state in the East Room of the White House, because he was a personal friend of the Lincolns'.

Mr. Herbert made a final trip to Alexandria, aware of the fact that it is now under Union leadership. It was very sad for him. He will not take the test oath, so he will be unable to go there anymore. His brother has a bank there, and he'd pick up the mail and go shopping.

This time he brought a letter for Miss Cunningham. Her mother is ill and she is needed at home immediately.

It was about five days ago that he brought the letter. That night we sat at supper in the kitchen and stared at one another.

“I cannot leave here,” Miss Cunningham said dully.

“And why not?” I was careful to be chipper and stout of purpose.

“Because.” She hesitated then and looked from me to Mr. Herbert and back at me again. “It isn't seemly leaving you here without a chaperone.”

Mr. Herbert had the grace to blush. I didn't.

“This is a time of war,” I told her. “All kinds of unseemly things are going to happen. Look at what happened in Alexandria to that poor Colonel Ellsworth! Anyway, we have the servants. I can't get a minute's peace away from Emily or Priscilla. Why, they're living right in the house with us.”

She sighed. “Yes, you are right about that. But I don't want any shadow of suspicion cast on this project.”

“They've already cast shadows,” Mr. Herbert reminded her, “with this business about Washington's body. Go home, Miss Cunningham. We can stand firm in the face of whatever comes.”

She finally agreed. If I would put an ad in the Alexandria paper advertising for a woman to come and stay If I would write to my friend Mary McMakin, in Philadelphia, and ask her to come.

I didn't want to do either one, but I promised I would. I wanted to be the mistress of Mount Vernon.

We talked, too, about paying or not paying the Nigras.

I brought it up before she left.

“Why, of course we will pay them,” Miss Cunningham said. “I have it in the budget to pay them.”

Mr. Herbert and I looked at each other.

“Why do you seem confused?” she asked.

“You are from South Carolina,” I managed to say.

“We thought …,” said Mr. Herbert, and he waved a hand to dismiss the thought.

“You thought that because I own slaves, I would not pay for these people. But they are not my people,” she said. “And the Association must pay them. Or we will be criticized. It is very important, Mr. Herbert. They must be recompensed for their services. Do you hear?”

“I hear,” he said.

“Then, they are free?” I asked.

But that would be taking it too far. For both of them.

“They work for us,” Miss Cunningham said simply.

“They won't go anywhere,” Mr. Herbert promised.

But were they free? I knew that to push the point would be to create chaos here. And what we were doing, keeping Mount Vernon in order, was more important right now than creating chaos.

So I kept silent. For the moment.

I had to help Miss Cunningham pack, then Dandridge drove us to Alexandria. I stayed in Alexandria with her until she boarded her boat. “I will be back soon,” she said, “I promise.”

The trip home, for me, was uneventful.

H
ere are some of the things that have happened so far in June.

Mr. Herbert had to dismiss a man for drinking, and we found he was in Alexandria sending bad messages to the men here, trying to get them to leave our employ.

I received a box of preserves and orange syrup from Mother.

Mr. Herbert had two washstands in his room and he gave me one.

Dandridge was stopped and searched when he brought a load of cabbages to Alexandria to sell. How could they be suspicious of Dandridge? He is gentlemanly and efficient, our all-around man. I would trust him with my life.

All the rooms have been swept and cleaned, even in the garret. I wanted to cut some carpet for the rooms upstairs, but the workmen were sanding that side of the house and had all the windows closed, and I did not have enough light.

A man in Alexandria is making us a simple but rich single bedstead for fourteen dollars. And a tufted haircloth mahogany chair for thirteen dollars. Mr. Herbert has a
black walnut dining-room extension table in his house that we may borrow. He has brought other items from his house. He calls his place Bleak House. It seems to fit him somehow. He is so very proper. I don't know why Miss Cunningham worried about leaving us together. We work well together, respect and understand each other. Of course, I have not told my people at home yet that she has left. I think Fanny would get on the first train and come right down and fetch me. Well, good that there is a war on, then. Aren't there such things as enemy lines? If not, there soon will be, and she will be unable to come by the time I tell her Miss Cunningham has left. If I ever do.

We must buy some dining-room chairs.

I have gotten a woman to come in once a week to do the washing.

The house sits between the Federal pickets at Arlington and the Confederate muster point at Manassas Junction. A Union commander is said to be occupying Robert E. Lee's house at Arlington, and roads have been made, trees cut down, and earthworks dug all around Lee's place. I understand it was once very beautiful and that when she left, Mrs. Lee was crying.

We paid the servants, finally, one day in June.

“What this be for?” Priscilla asked as Mr. Herbert put the money in her hand. He had assembled them in the foyer, and Priscilla was the first one to feel the money.

“It's your pay,” he said.

In each hand he put some money. And they were in wonderment, like children on Christmas Day.

“We kin spend this?” Dandridge asked.

“Yes, you may spend it,” Mr. Herbert told them.

“I save mine,” Emily said. She pressed the hand with the money in it close to her breast. “I heared about slaves who buy their own freedom.”

Mr. Herbert and I looked at each other significantly. He appeared to be uncomfortable then and had to clear his throat, and he said something noble to them about how dear they were to him. But neither he nor I said that one of these days their freedom would be given to them. Or that slaves didn't get paid. Or that, for all intents and purposes, they were free now.

Or that the only reason they weren't was because he and I were more confused about the issue than a mule in a mud hut.

I should have said something, as a representative of the Association. I know Miss Cunningham would have wanted me to. But I thought it was Mr. Herbert's job. And besides that, I was too much of a prissy boots to begin with.

I feel like a nest-building bird. What kind of bird, I don't know. I think I would like to be a cardinal because then my husband's coat would be bright red.

Speaking of birds, the house has already given me gifts.
I have a pet crow who comes around out back near my vegetable garden and lights on the brick fence around it. Mr. Herbert says he must repair the fence. The workmen around here make their own bricks.

I didn't know crows could be so tame. He looks at me with bright eyes and bobs and weaves to get my attention. I give him some bread from the kitchen scraps, and he stays around while I weed the garden. Then he flies away.

“Didn't you know crows can be harbingers of bad news?” Mr. Herbert asked me.

“Now, that seems like a Southern belief,” I told him. “In Troy we don't think that way. Can't they also be friendly?”

He scowled. “Obviously this one intends to be.” But his scowl was friendly. I think he is often amused by me.

The other gift is the sight of a resident eagle who soars amongst the trees down by the river. Mr. Herbert has been working on the wharf, repairing it, and I have been down there several times watching. He has taken a small boat out to fish for shad, and then he has cooked it as only he knows how.

I am not much of a cook. At home the kitchen belonged to Mother, and my job was to set the table. We had one housemaid, Ella, a silent, disapproving person who set standards I could never possibly meet.

I have, in proper order, written to my friend Mary McMakin, in Philadelphia, and asked her to come and be my chaperone.

She wrote back and said her mother was ill and she could not come at the moment.

I have put the ad in the Alexandria paper to find a girl to come and stay with me. It seems so silly. What will I do with her when she comes? Am I not telling Upton Herbert that I do not trust him by doing this?

“You must do as you are told,” he admonished me. He was standing on the wharf, tamping some tobacco into his pipe for a moment's relaxation. The river and the Maryland shore were behind him. Quite a backdrop. And now that I have been around him for a while, I can describe Mr. Herbert better. He is a lean, brown-eyed man, with the grace of hundreds of years of breeding in his movements. He dresses in brown. His shirts and fingernails are always clean.

“You speak to me as if I'm a child,” I said.

“Aren't you still?”