I am past sixty, now. The British have surrendered, and in just a few weeks, there were no Redcoats left on this shore, and if there are, they wear brown and mind their manners. I have not seen August since that night in July of ’75, when he showed up at my door with no less than General Washington himself. I like to think that somewhere, on some vast ocean, he and beautiful, exotic Anne are standing side by side, watching seagulls swirl above the mainmast as their ship crosses the waves. As Lady Spencer advised, I make believe all my dear ones are not gone, just out of my line of sight beyond some curtain or cluster of people, or tree. I tell no one, of course, though I am of an age when I might be allowed my oddities and still not be considered as frighteningly mad as Goody Carnegie had been. The ruse is most difficult on moonlit nights when I used to wake and behold the outline of Cullah’s profile next to me.
Benjamin and Brendan both came home and make their living together as brothers in trade goods. Roland came home after taking the food to Washington’s army, and though unwounded, he promptly died. We believe his heart gave way. Bertie married and I have given him and his fifteen-year-old wife a section of this land for their own farm. Dolly is a grandmother and that makes me a great-grandmother. Gwenny’s daughter Elizabeth died last year of milk sickness. Alice is still with me. She helps me carry on, though I have continued to encourage her to find a life of her own if she wishes.
Now, too, that my children’s children are grown and I become more useless by the day, I think sometimes of going to Jamaica. There is nothing to stop me. I have a little money. I have time. I have no one to care for who cannot fend for themselves. I think of the house on Meager Bay and when the wind freshens through the upper windows here sometimes I lean out, imagining myself on a ship cresting a wave, headed to the West Indies. My grandchildren cannot imagine that I came from a place with wide white buildings and warm breezes, a place never touched by ice and snow.
I know that I would never return from such a voyage. Whether death found me on the ship or on the shores I remember so well, it would find me, so I choose now to not go. My life is too interwoven here to survive pulling its strings asunder. While I spent my whole being longing, aching for freedom and a chance at leaving this place, I see that I am also free to stay. Free to choose my ties. I will not go because to stay and live here, to die here, will give my children what I never had. Certainty. A headstone to polish. A mother who stayed.
My fingers ache so that I often dream of carrying a heavy iron kettle through the woods, and I wake afraid of bears and Indians, and I rub mutton fat on the swollen knuckles. My hands no longer slide a shuttle as if it were a smooth stone, rippling the warp as if it were water; my back is bent and will not straighten. My fabric has irregularities for which I take full blame. For a long time, I thought that my days mattered little beyond the children I bore and the labors I accomplished, that invisibility was virtue.
Any woman’s life has its heartbreaks and raptures, its evils, its blessings. My life has not been one of pure and even weft, smooth and strong, a warp of courage spanning the loom of my heritage. Out of ignorance or spite, hunger or anger, I have at times done what I must to survive, not thinking of the cost. There were also those times when I hid my tears and faced my enemies, when I won by guile and inner strength, and when I believe I touched, in my mind and heart, the highest capacity in a human for the divine.