Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Gray (28 page)

I sent for the doctor, but his condition worsened rapidly. Before I knew quite what was happening, he called me to his side, and I could see that he was failing.

“You are a good daughter, Mary Anna.” He clasped my hand. “My dearest love, besides your mother.”

“And Arlington.”

He smiled then. “And Arlington.”

He summoned his grandchildren, took his leave of them in
the gentlest way, and asked for our pastor. But before the elements for administering the sacraments could be prepared, my very kind and indulgent father fell insensible and slipped away.

Unlike Mother's funeral, which was small and personal, his was a very public affair. The Welsh Light Infantry and the Veterans of the War of 1812 joined a thousand mourners who crossed the long bridge over the river and made their way to Arlington. Six of our servants bore his mahogany coffin to the grave next to my mother's.

When the service ended I stood for hours receiving the endless parade of politicians, soldiers, lawyers, artists, newspapermen, and plantation owners swarming the lawn.

The pastor sought me out and took my hands in his. “Mrs. Lee. When your dear mother passed, I had hoped it would be many more years before your father joined her. Four years seems hardly enough time to recover from one loss. And now you have lost them both.”

Overcome with grief and exhausted from days of preparations, I could only nod.

He surveyed the milling crowd. “I haven't seen Colonel Lee.”

“He's on his way home from Texas.”

“I didn't realize he had left West Point.”

“Oh, yes, quite some time ago, and very happy to leave it behind.”

“Well, I'm sorry the burden of this death has fallen upon your shoulders, but I suppose that's the difficulty of military life.”

“One of many, I'm afraid.”

He nodded. “Will you excuse me?”

He crossed the yard, and the mourners began to disperse. I gathered my children and we returned to the house.

Selina was there, taking care of everything with her usual quiet efficiency.

“There's food on the sideboard whenever you all get hungry, Miss Mary. And I put all the calling cards on your desk. There's a bunch of telegrams, too, from people who knew Mr. Custis.”

“Thank you. I will get to them as soon as I can.”

“No need to be in a hurry about it. Colonel Lee can help you sort it out when he gets here.”

Unfortunately for my husband, there were much thornier things to sort out when he finally arrived home. As the only one qualified to be executor of my father's will, he shouldered the difficulties of sorting out Papa's wishes regarding his properties and the disposition of the slaves. Papa left behind a very injudicious will, in which there was no distinction between the good and the bad, and this rendered our task very difficult.

And there were other worries. Some of the servants claimed that on his deathbed, Papa had promised to free them all. Several of them simply left, slipping away into the night. Others dawdled at their chores, broke things, or feigned illness. Anything to disrupt the serenity that had so long reigned at Arlington.

Wild rumors ran rampant.

“Listen to this,” Robert said at breakfast one morning, rattling his copy of the
New York Daily Times
, which Daniel had delivered the previous evening. “ ‘It is already whispered about town that foul play is in process in regard to the Custis Negroes on the Virginia plantations; that they are now being sold South and that all of them will be consigned to hopeless slavery unless something is done.' ”

“But it isn't true.” I stared out at the bleak December landscape.

“Of course not.” He tossed the paper aside. “The servants know full well that I intend to free them as soon as your father's debts are discharged. But I will not sit here and let such vile accusations pass unchallenged.”

He excused himself to paper and pen, and a few days later the
Times
printed Robert's tersely worded correction of the facts:

Mr. Custis left his property to his daughter and only child, and her children. His will was submitted to the Alexandria County Court for probate on the first day of its session after the arrival of the executor at Arlington and is there on record in his own handwriting, open to inspection. There is no desire on the part of the heirs to prevent the execution of its provisions in reference to the slaves, nor is there any truth or the least foundation for the assertion that they are being sold South. What Mr. Custis is said to have stated to his assembled slaves is not known to any member of his family. But it is well known that during the brief days of his last illness he was constantly attended by his daughter and granddaughter and faithfully visited by his physician and pastor. So rapid was the progress of his disease after his symptoms became alarming that there was no assembly of his servants and he took leave of but one, who was present when he bade farewell to his family.

No sooner had Robert quashed those rumors than an outrageous article appeared regarding plantation owners who sought any means to increase the number of slaves as a way of increasing profits. It included a mock obituary of my father:

Among such was the late George Washington Parke Custis, owner of several properties across Virginia, a man of notorious licentiousness which was strictly Virginian in its impartiality for color.

Markie, who had returned to Arlington as the new year arrived, was incensed.

“Oh, Mary, what an ugly lie. You ought to hire a lawyer and sue the lot of them for libel.”

“Robert says we must ignore everything until the public gets its fill of gossip. I don't care if they want to say things about me. I'm alive and can fight back. But attacking someone as fine and generous as Papa now that he's gone is inexcusable. He doesn't deserve it.”

But the following week I made a discovery that changed my mind.

I was still working on his
Recollections
, and his desk was piled high with bills, receipts, half-finished poems and plays, untidy stacks of correspondence from his political friends in Washington, and carefully preserved newspaper clippings about his ancestral home.

Making my way through the mountain of paperwork, I found copies of land deeds and bills of sale for equipment for his mills and other holdings. Tucked into the back of a ragged green cloth letterbook was a note signed in Papa's own hand.

Maria Carter, acknowledged as my daughter on this first day of January in the year of our Lord 1826, is hereby granted complete and permanent emancipation and the parcel of land comprising seventeen acres of land in the . . .

The words blurred before my eyes. Maria Carter, born a slave five years before me, educated at my own mother's knee, wed to Charles Syphax for these many years, was my father's child. My half sister.

I didn't want to know this. I wanted to believe he had been a different kind of man. I put away the ledger, furious at myself for having been so naive, furious at him for having taken his secret with him into the ground. Maria was not the only mulatto at Arlington, but I had never made any connection between them and my father. Now I wondered whether the others were also his children.

The last vestiges of guilt over having sold the ivory wedding box he had given me evaporated. I was glad to be rid of it, for now his entire life seemed to me nothing less than one enormous lie.

1859

S
pring took its own sweet time returning to Arlington, and my children, who slept stacked head to toe like sticks of firewood in the sleeping loft, suffered from the constant chill. Thornton kept the fire going day and night. Judah brought by poultices and tonics every day or so, and Mauma doctored my babies while I kept house for Miss Mary. Her rheumatism had finally got the best of her despite pills and potions and trips to the hot mineral springs, and now she mostly depended on me to do for her, and on crutches or her rolling chair to get around.

So I was surprised one morning in March to see her making her way across the yard to my cabin. I set down the potatoes I was peeling and went to the door. “Miss Mary, what are you doing out here?”

“I'm worried about your children. Especially Annice.”

I glanced at my daughter, who was sleeping on her side, trying to breathe easier. “She is having the worst time of it.”

Miss Mary handed me a bowl. “I had George make some chicken broth for her, but if she is not improved by tomorrow I will send for the doctor.”

She bent stiffly over my sleeping children, laying her hand
against their cheeks. “Oh, I wish I could find more comfortable quarters for you.”

I was wishing the same thing, but there wasn't anything to be done about it as long as we belonged to Arlington. And it didn't seem we would be away from there anytime soon.

Colonel Lee spent most of his time going over books of numbers and trying to keep the abolitionists away. But they came anyway, to the fields and the stables, and talked to the menfolks about nothing but how to run away and how we were now free because old Mister Custis was dead and buried. How all we had to do was rise up and demand our freedom. But every time Thornton told me what they had said, all I could think of was Nat Turner skinned like an animal when I was a girl. The terror of it was never far from my mind.

Miss Mary left me to see to Annice, then went back to the house.

The next morning right after prayers, Colonel Lee called us into the parlor.

“You all know that Mr. Custis demanded little of you when he was alive. And now you are all waiting for manumission. In order to speed that day, I must first put the finances of this house in order. This was the wish of Mr. Custis as stated in his will.”

I stole a look at Lawrence, the market man. He was the one we all looked up to when it came to matters of liberation, but I couldn't make heads or tails of the look on his face.

It was true that Mister Custis let us do as we pleased. As long as the work got done he never raised his voice or his lash. But still, we were his property the same as the sheep and oxen and President Washington's silver. The president had bought and sold slaves too, and Mister Custis didn't see anything wrong with keeping us in
bondage. It was the way he had been raised from his boyhood at Mount Vernon. Keeping slaves was the only thing he knew.

Lawrence looked like he was finally about to speak up, but then he changed his mind, and we waited to see what Colonel Lee was going to say next.

“As much as I disliked breaking up families, I had no choice but to hire out all those who were able to work,” the colonel told us. “This has caused unhappiness among you. I will do all I can to make those of you who remain here as comfortable as possible. In return I ask you to be patient and to remember that Mrs. Lee from her earliest days has done all she could on your behalf.”

I didn't doubt that he believed every word he said. But he had thrown Ruben, Parks, and Edward in jail last fall for sassing him. He wouldn't think twice about doing it again if people didn't mind their tongues.

Miss Mary sat by the window with her hands folded in her lap. She still thought Africa was the answer to the problem of what to do with us, but that idea didn't sit too well with my brother, Wesley, who had been one of the first to be hired out. At twenty-six he was taller than our daddy and strong from working the orchards and the wheat fields. From time to time we got word of him from the place he was working down in lower Virginia.

Colonel Lee dismissed us, and we headed to our chores. I took care of my usual cleaning, dusting, polishing, and mopping chores, changed the linens on the bed, and brought Miss Mary's ten o'clock tea into the room off the parlor where she went to do her reading and work on her book. She had been writing that one thing off and on for many years. It must have been some whale of a story.

“Thank you, Selina.” She poured herself some tea and took a sip. “How is Annice today? And the rest of the children?”

“Annice seems some better this morning. The rest of them are about the same.”

“The doctor will be here this afternoon to see about that burn on Austin's leg. I'll have him look in at your place.”

“Thank you, Missus.”

She smiled. “I think that's the first time you have ever called me Missus. I have always thought of my mother as Missus. I suppose I still do.”

“This is your house now. Reckon you're the mistress over everything.”

“Yes, and it is nothing but a pure trial these days.” She waved her hand over a stack of newspapers on the desk. “I refuse to continue reading these stories about how terribly we are treating you all. Most servants would be grateful to be in such gentle hands.”

I picked up her shawl that had fallen to the floor and folded it. There were times when my children were small and I would come to her with some concern about them, or when I needed an extra loaf of sugar or vinegar for a poultice, that I thought she understood my life. But she had never known how it felt to want more than you could have. How the longing for it made the days seem longer and the endless round of chores harder to bear.

She reached for her shawl. “Tell me, Selina, are we truly being unreasonable in our expectations of our own servants?”

A feeling of dark humiliation rose up in me then. Until the colonel's speech that morning, I had never allowed myself to think that I was a piece of property. Something that could be bought or sold whenever the owner took a notion. I told myself
that I was different from Rose and Kitty and Judah because of my friendship with Miss Mary. Now I saw that despite her kindliness toward me, in her eyes I was just like the others. At the mercy of rules that were made up just for profit. The thought of it burned like fire in my veins.

“Now, Miss Mary, how do you expect me to answer a question like that?”