The Letter Writer (2 page)

"Cripes, what are we complaining about? We've got apples to make into brandy." And so in all those barns of
all those plantations appeared stills to convert the apples into applejack.

'Twas the apples that brought us prosperity again. I say "us" because there's no use in having money if those around you don't have it.

And it was the apples that brought us Nat Turner. But I get ahead of myself.

Mention Nat Turner and I must make mention of my sister by half, Margaret. You see, we don't do anything in wholes in this house, though we pretend to. Looking at Margaret, older than me by four years, you know she's nobody's half, but her own whole self. Beautiful and composed and hitting you on the head with her presence when she walks into a room. And she is only fifteen.

Margaret is out to torture Nat Turner. And there he is again, creeping into the conversation, just like he crept into our lives, loaned to us when everyone got on their feet after the business with the apples. Loaned to us from Mr. Travis, his master, to make furniture for the front parlor. He is good at making furniture.

Margaret treats him like this whole family treats darkies. She won't give him a second glance, though she taunts him by swishing her skirt when he passes, by dropping
her handkerchief, then bending over to pick it up, only he retrieves it first for her and she thanks him and stays bent over so he can get a good look at her bosoms from her low-cut dress.

I've confronted her about it. "You can't do that with negroes," I told her, "like you can with white men."

"Why?" she asked. "Because they aren't in charge of their senses?"

"No, because if he's caught looking at you later, or smiling at you, he can be whipped. And Richard will have it done. It isn't fair."

Margaret isn't one for fairness.

But here I am, Harriet Whitehead, eleven years of age, only half belonging to them, half of me a part of them and half I don't know what. Nobody has ever told me about that half. My father, Mr. Whitehead, Richard and Margaret's father, and Mother Whitehead's late husband, is dead, lost at sea on one of his many vessels.

Perhaps he would have told me about the other half had he lived long enough.

Why is he called "the late Mr. Whitehead," I used to wonder. I know now. Because it is too late for him to tell me from whence I come. Too late for him to help Mother Whitehead by writing her letters for her to her business
associates. Too late for him to tell Margaret to cover her bosoms, and too late to tell Richard to let up on me and stop making me kneel and pray for my sins.

So I take refuge in making up from whence I come. At night I lie in bed and do it. One night my mother might be a princess from India. My father's ships went there, didn't they? Another night she is closely related to British royalty, and so on.

If it is on a day when I have written a letter to Malta for Mother Whitehead, I just know my mother came from there.

You see, this job that has fallen to me to do, I don't mind doing. It is something that awards me a sense of dignity. Because I know all Mother Whitehead's personal and business activities. She writes to almost everyone in Southampton County. She is friends with people in important places. She can tell you who is going to have a child, whose marriage is not going well, who has a terrible sickness, and whose son was put out of Harvard for bad behavior.

There is no one who wouldn't do her a favor.

The week of Christmas last year, Mr. Fitzpatrick, the local drunk, came knocking on the back door. Richard wanted to put him out, but Mother Whitehead insisted
he be let in. He begged her for some money. He had four children and no money to buy them presents. Mother Whitehead gave him a sermon about drinking. He promised he would stop, though both he and she knew he wouldn't.

She gave him some money. He promised he would repay it, though both he and she knew he wouldn't. And he left, bowing and kissing her hand.

That is the way Mother Whitehead is regarded. I'd like to be regarded that way, too, someday. I'd help people, but I'd give a scolding first.

I'd scold Richard good, if I had the chance. Then I'd let him kiss my hand.

If that isn't power, I don't know what is.

I do not recollect much of when I first came here. There was a green baby chair, I recall, that was mine. One day I was put in the kitchen in it, away from the family in the dining room because I was not "behaving" and I was mad beyond anything I can remember. There was the stairway I wanted to climb but was forbidden to, and the marvel of the Christmas tree the day my father brought me home to this plantation in Virginia when I was just past two.

He set me down on the Persian carpet in the parlor in front of everyone.

"This is Harriet," he said.

The tree they had was all prettified, with packages under it. Oh, I'd seen Christmas trees in London far more beautiful in my short life, but this tree stood out because it was decorated with popcorn and someone had cut out a chain of small white angels to go round it. Trees were new in the colonies in 1821, but Christmas was greatly celebrated in the South. The tree dripped with goodies, candy, and cookies; a child's delight. I ran to it.

Someone caught me up just before I got there and pulled me close to his tweed jacket. It was a young man who I later learned was Richard, on his Christmas break home from Hampden-Sydney College, already studying to be a minister.

My father had packages, too, gifts he'd brought, and he handed me over like I was one of them. I just stared at everyone. I stood there on my fat, two-year-old legs, my feet in my black laced-up shoes digging into the carpet. I had tolerable good sense in those days, just as I have now. So I didn't cry. I just stared.

I must say they gave me a welcome that was not exactly as warm as it was curious. That is to say, they fussed over me because I was Papa's "foreign get," as Richard put it. Years later I found out that it meant I was Mr. Whitehead's child from a foreign wife and not the lovely
Mother Whitehead, who sat like a queen in her chair in the parlor, overlooking the scene before her.

I was passed around and greatly exclaimed over. The Whiteheads also had another little girl whose name was Margaret, but she was already six and making her demands known. I was soon toddling after Margaret. We played at dolls, at all kinds of games. Without knowing it, I even accommodated her by not being as beautiful as she was, and that seemed to endear me to everyone in the house. Margaret knew it, too, and never let me forget it.

She knew she was superior to me. It showed in little things. For some reason, when the dressmaker came, she'd get the brightest fabric. She'd get silk while I got cotton. As we got older, she even managed to get Mother Whitehead to agree to low-cut gowns. I wouldn't dare ask for such.

The only one privy to these little hurts was Violet. And she would buoy me up in such times by saying things like: "Don't you let it worry you one bit. Your face has more character than hers, anyway." Violet was "given" to me and Margaret to be our own private "girl." To fetch and carry, to help us dress, and to pick up after us.

Margaret slapped her on occasion. I never did. Light-skinned Violet, with her blue eyes, became a favorite of mine.

I liked her better than Margaret, who soon proved herself a ten-karat pain, insufferable in her demands about dress, quickly bored and always boring, short on imagination and long on dullness, quick to demand compliments and slow to give them. Her one talent was playing the piano. She took lessons at Miss Dangerfield's School for Young Ladies in Jerusalem.

Margaret boarded there all week, which gave us a recess from her. But she came home on weekends with her nose in the air because she was a "private school" girl, and therefore ordained better than us by holy decree.

I soon hated her. And she, me.

Weekends, when she came home, I was always in trouble. Richard was out of the seminary by now and making a good stipend as pastor of the local Methodist church.

My father had left after that Christmas visit when he brought me to stay, promising to come back, but breaking his promise by going off to sea in one of his ships and getting himself killed before I was three.

Things were tenuous enough for me, at best. Mother Whitehead became my guardian, she who had endured the humiliation of having her husband's child by another woman in her home. She took it on herself to raise me.
And she did it with a sense of fairness, justice, and compassion, as she conducted all her affairs.

I ought to know. I write her letters.

Dear Mr. Copley: Yesterday your three cows broke through the fence in my upper five acres and ate a good portion of my corn. I was raising that corn special for the Southampton County Fair and it was superior in texture and substance and consistency. However, us being neighbors for so many years, and your cows being superior in texture and substance and consistency, I am willing to let the matter go. One does not demand payment from a neighbor. Anyway, the fence needed mending, and I neglected it, so the fault is mine as much as yours.

Your neighbor, Mrs. Catharine Whitehead

***

In spite of his duties as a minister, Richard took over as head of the family. He dealt with the overseer, set the rhythm of work on the plantation, disciplined the slaves and us children. Sometimes, with the exception of Margaret, I think we children, Violet and I, fell into the same category as the slaves.

There were times it seemed like Mother Whitehead was oblivious of what Richard was doing. But she knew. She always knew. And she let him go only so far before she stopped him.

He married Pleasant and they moved in with us. Pleasant had been a schoolteacher before marriage and was now appointed my personal tutor. She lived up to her name.

Seven years went by. In that time, when Richard was not aware of it, Pleasant privately tutored Violet, too. Knowing Richard would not approve, Pleasant and I kept it a secret. Having a secret with someone creates a bond between you, and soon Pleasant and I were closer than real sisters.

We shared all kinds of thoughts. I often wondered how my brother, Richard, so stern and tied up inside his head, could win the love of someone like Pleasant. But somehow she kept his edges smooth. God knows what he would have been if not for her.

In those seven years, Pleasant got with child twice. One was stillborn and the other a miscarriage.

When I was nine, Pleasant was brought to bed with a baby boy. They named him William, and he is the
darlingest baby boy that God ever made, and we all love him.

***

I think that School for Young Ladies that Margaret goes to in Jerusalem is a witches' den. She is supposed to be "finished" there.

Well, she has done a few samplers, she can make Richard a shirt with the most exquisite stitching, she can work a quilt, she can make candied violets and pour tea and make small talk to fill the silences at a gathering, when all I can do is sit there like a jackass in the rain.

And she can handle the negroes on the place. She has this way of talking
at
them, not
to
them. And, at age fifteen, she gets them to "yes, Miss Margaret" her and curtsy to her as they leave the room.

I will never know how to order them around. They call me just Harriet. And some of the older ones tell me to sit up straight at the table. And Ormond, our man-about-the-house, who sometimes waits on the table, often has to take my linen napkin out of my hands and stand over me and spread it on my lap. Not one word passes his lips. Not one. He just does this and then moves away.

While across the table, Margaret smirks at me.

Richard not only orders the darkies around, he has them whipped. How he, a man of the cloth who mouths pious phrases in church on Sunday, can oversee the whippings of innocent human beings, both men and women, infuriates and puzzles me.

He will order other darkies to watch.

You can hear the screams all over the plantation.

One particular Sunday I had locked myself in the library with Papa's books, where it was dark and safe, where the blinds were drawn against the summer sunshine and I felt close to my father, who would never countenance such doings as having the negroes whipped.

Mother Whitehead was on the side veranda, which was covered with clematis that cast shadows like angels' wings, sipping one of her cool drinks.

The brass knob of the library door twisted, then the door opened. "Here you are."

It was Margaret, all done up in white with a blue sash, for it was Sunday. Richard never put off whippings because it was Sunday, and he'd preached an especially fiery sermon that morning, which gave him the courage to match his own convictions.

"Aren't you going to come out and see the demonstration?" Margaret asked.

I was poring over a copy of
Romeo and Juliet.
I looked up, horrified. "You were watching?"

"From a distance, yes. Richard wouldn't let me get close. Oh, he deserved that whipping, that evil Henry."

"But he's just a boy!"

"Man enough to peer down my dress when he helped me from the carriage after church this morning. I told Richard." She twirled and inspected herself in a mirror. "Oh, yes, I did. And he's being punished with fifty lashes even now."

"Well, then I'm going to tell Richard that you enticed Henry on purpose. That you always entice the negroes." I got up. The book clattered to the floor.

She laughed. "Do you think he'll believe you? I'm his favorite. You know that. He'll do just about anything for me. Anyway, he's not going to sell himself short in front of the other darkies by calling it off now. They have to learn, and guilty or not, they have to learn here and now." She grabbed the brass knob of the door and turned before leaving. "Aren't you supposed to be attending my mother?"

"Connie is doing that."

"Connie is out witnessing the demonstration. At Richard's orders. You know Mama sees only forms and shapes. You'd best get to her or I'll tell Richard. Then you'll get fifty lashes' worth of words." She laughed again, started out the door, and again paused.