Chapter Forty-One
Excerpt from Jessica’s diary:
SEPTEMBER 18, 1836
Silas has been gone now for three and a half months. There are times I believe I cannot endure another day of waiting for his return. Now that I’m feeling better, I’ve packed and arranged for several trunks to be stored in the Conestoga in readiness to leave as soon as possible to Texas when he does arrive. Stephanie is as much on tenterhooks as I. She, too, is tired of having time on her hands and of being cooped in her hotel room with a rambunctious six year old.
Still, I am glad Silas was not here to see me so sick the first months of my pregnancy. I lived by the chamber pot, not a pleasant sight for a new husband to behold. Only these last weeks have I been able to venture out and about, mainly to take the street car to the DuMont Emporium where my presence is to remind Monsieur DuMont of my threat.
Silas had not been gone a day before Henri’s father approached me with an offer to lend out Tippy—“for a wage, of course,” he said, “since your husband tells me the girl is not for sale. He turned down a very handsome offer, too,” he said petulantly, as if still needled by the insult.
I stared at him, my mouth so ajar he understood at once that his offer to Silas was new information to me. “Didn’t your husband tell you? Ah, well, then—” an ingratiating smile heightened the greedy light in his eyes, “perhaps you and I can strike a deal since the girl is your maid to do with as you please.”
I asked him how much he’d offered for Tippy, and when he told me, I very nearly gasped. I do not know how much money my father agreed to pay Silas to take me off his hands, but I would not be surprised if the sum Monsieur DuMont offered did not equal a good portion of it. If Silas had accepted the money, he would have less need for my father’s and fewer years to depend on it. He could then throw the contract into my father’s face.
He could have gotten rid of me.
But Silas had kept his promise never to sell Tippy and did not take advantage of Monsieur DuMont’s offer.
“Well?” My visitor prompted in a tone spiked with impatience.
A heady feeling took hold of me. I would not have been surprised if my body had sprouted wings and lifted me, extra pounds and all, off my feet. “I repeat my husband’s words, Monsieur,” I told him. “My maid is not for sale.”
“Very well then, what do you say to hiring her out to me for…” he pursed his lips in a calculating manner and named a wage. The work would not be hard, he assured me. He rather thought my maid might enjoy it. He wanted to use her in his design room.
I’d see what Tippy had to say about it, I told him. As I saw him to the door, he did not disguise his chagrin that I did not give him an answer on the spot—why was it necessary to discuss his offer with a slave?—but he agreed to return the next morning for my decision.
He could not leave my presence soon enough. I wanted to be alone to think on the implications of Silas turning down so much money. I remembered that our conversation the late afternoon of the party had followed Jean DuMont’s meeting with him, but Silas had kept the reason for his visit to himself. Silas would certainly have realized the consequences to our tenuous relationship if he’d sold Tippy, but why would that loss matter compared to so much gain—including the opportunity to rid himself of the wife he’d been forced to marry!
I placed my hands on the mound that was the fruit of the two nights we’d been together. Here within me was the seed of our destruction. We needed no other. I must accept Silas as a slave owner, but I could not abide our child sharing his endorsement of the purchase and sale of human beings to do another’s bidding without compensation for their labor or the freedom to make the choice.
But that conflict would come soon enough, I told myself. For the moment I was warmed—overjoyed—by the sacrifice I believe my husband had made on behalf of our marriage.
Tippy could not hide her delight at the opportunity to work in the design room of the DuMont Emporium. The wage seemed hardly of interest to her. It was the pleasure of handling silks and satins, brocades, and finely woven cotton and woolen fabrics that set her hands to flapping when she imagined herself creating her marvels in such a place.
“But how will you look after yourself and Joshua with me gone all day?” she cried.
“Joshua and I will look out for each other,” I told her. Already my stepson was the attentive big brother, often laying his head on the swell of my abdomen and talking to it.
“If you’re a boy, I’ll teach you to do the things I like to do,” he’d say. “If you’re a girl, I’ll protect you from bad things.”
At such times, I plant a kiss on the sweet crown of my stepson’s head and wonder if it is possible to love my own child as much as I love this little boy.
Tippy took the job, but only after I had warned Monsieur DuMont that he would answer to my father if she was mistreated or taken advantage of in any way. I also got him to agree to send a carriage to take her to and from his emporium located in the business district upriver of Canal Street. Because people think of Tippy as an oddity, she draws attention wherever she goes, most of it unwanted. New Orleans is exotic, bawdy, sensual, mysterious, an easy city to get swallowed in, and, without my protection, I imagine her assaulted on the street by ruffians, kidnapped by slavers, or spirited away to serve some evil mistress behind locked doors in moss-draped mansions for the rest of her life.
The arrangement has worked well, and were it not for Joshua and the tales Tippy brings home at night of the DuMont Emporium, I might have succumbed to the daily waste of my time and energy in the Winthorp Hotel. Because of boredom and the sameness of the days, there is often little of interest to record. I hope Silas will understand the reason for the gaps between my entries. When I next return to these pages, perhaps I will have something of importance to relate.
SEPTEMBER 19, 1836
Glory be. Last evening I answered a knock on my door and found Silas William Toliver on the threshold.