Chapter Forty-Five
The Carson Wyndhams—at Eunice’s insistence—had brought Willie May with them for a reunion with her daughter, so it was with great pleasure that Jessica conducted another ceremony at the Toliver homestead after her parents’ departure back to South Carolina.
“I hereby set you free, Tippy, my dearest friend,” she said, handing Tippy a document verifying her release from bondage. “Since I have fulfilled the conditions of my father’s contract, he can no longer hold the threat of the sale of your mother over my head.”
Tippy folded the paper and slipped it into the bodice of her dress. Her gown was not made of the costly materials of her clients nor as fashionably designed. Even though Tippy had become a partner—albeit a silent and secret one—in the newly renamed DuMont Emporium, it would never do to appear as well dressed as the white ladies who patronized its showroom. She was paid a salary and shared in the store’s profits. She lived in a small house owned by Henri located down the street from his store. He and Bess and their three children cherished her.
“I thank you, Jessica, my dearest friend,” Tippy said, her dazzling wide-toothed smile tinged with the knowledge shared by the Toliver family that the document tucked next to her bosom did not mean she was free. It would not protect her from the auction block if she were caught outside the lights of the community that held her in a favored position. The color of her skin, regardless of her remarkable talents, amassed as they were in a Negro, still dictated that she must fade into a room’s shadows when in the presence of whites.
“You will, of course, assist my wife in choosing fabrics and colors for our new abode,” Silas said in the formal tone he used when addressing her.
Tippy responded with a small curtsy. “I be happy to, Mister Silas,” she said.
Construction of the house on Houston Avenue began in the summer. Jessica selected a site that would give a view of the entire street, now filling with impressive houses belonging to prosperous merchants and planters whose wives were tired of the arduous duties of overseeing a home and slave compound built in the middle of farm fields. The Warwicks had constructed an edifice on the order of a medieval castle up the street called Warwick Hall, down from the DuMonts’ gray-stone, French-inspired chateau that featured Henri’s love for his native country’s precisely laid-out gardens. One plot over, the Lorimer Davises had erected a square, colonnaded townhouse in the stately Federal style, and next to them, a mansion of Italianate design was going up, owned by another planter of the Willowshire wagon train. The Silas Tolivers stuck with the Greek Revivalist style traditional to Plantation Alley.
It took almost a year to complete the white, three-storied manor house of pillared splendor that reigned over the avenue from an elevation slightly higher than its neighbors. The elegant entrance hall with its gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror and portrait of the Duke of Somerset, the spacious rooms and high ceilings, graceful curving staircase, marble fireplaces and crystal chandeliers, elaborate friezes, deep moldings, and sash windows drew awed praise from all who entered. Silas and Jessica responded with stiff smiles to the often-voiced opinion that fortune had certainly smiled on the Silas Tolivers.
In the spring a year after the mansion’s completion, Jessica watched Jeremy converse with the black men who had delivered a pallet of dressed timber to be used to build a gazebo and rose arbor she had planned for the east side of her new home. “I want to sit in the gazebo in the early morning sun and watch my roses wake up,” she had said to Jeremy.
The Negroes were former slaves Jeremy had set free not long after his arrival in Texas. He had given all his slaves their freedom, but though released from bondage, only a few had left. It was not safe for freedmen to walk abroad, and those who remained worked as employees of the Warwick Lumber Company. They were paid a wage and given housing in a trim, company-built compound known as the Hollows.
Jeremy’s liberation of his slaves had not set well with the other slave owners, and they’d threatened to boycott the Warwick Lumber Company, but it soon became apparent that Jeremy had enough business outside the county to fill his company’s orders without the need for theirs. Besides, they liked Jeremy and his gracious wife, and the inconvenience of buying and hauling dressed timber from miles away became too burdensome.
Jessica had pointed out the successful transition from slave to employee to Silas, who’d responded in a raised voice, “Are you suggesting that I pay a Negro in whom I’ve invested thousands of dollars for his work?”
“Let him earn back the money you’ve paid for him, then hire him as an employee,” she’d suggested.
“I couldn’t afford such wages.”
“Then allow him a share of the crops he tills. It will come to that, Silas,” Jessica had declared, standing her ground. “If there is a war, the South will lose. The North will free the slaves, and the only way you’ll be able to farm your cotton is to permit our Negroes a fair portion of the profits.”
“There will be no war,” Silas stated, refusing to listen to another word from Jessica on the subject of the North’s growing dissatisfaction with the South on the issue of slavery. Their slaves were happy, he said. They sang in the fields. None in Texas could claim to be better clothed, fed, sheltered, and doctored. Each family had a garden, fruit and nut trees, their own milk cow, and Saturdays and Sundays off for rest. He did not separate families. He reminded Jessica that at the disapproval of the other planters for setting an unwarranted precedent, he had granted her every request for the comfort and safety of his slaves and now wanted to hear no more about it.
Jeremy sent the men on their way, brushed the lumber dust off his hands, and joined Jessica on the Corinthian-columned porch that faced the wide boulevard of Houston Avenue, recently paved with bricks from the area’s red clay. It was April 1848.
“Well, Miss Jess, how do your roses grow?” he asked, removing his hat as he sat down and stretched out his long legs.
“I can tell you better after I’ve transplanted them from Somerset,” she said, letting the ironic meaning of her entendre dance between them.
Jeremy laughed. “Ah. Husband and son.”
“I’m not worried about the Lancasters and Yorks.”
Jessica loved these opportunities to share a chat with Jeremy, another compensation for living in town and on this street. Besides Tippy, Jeremy was her best friend. Jessica could tell him anything, more so than Bess and Camellia, more so than Silas. Strangely, their spouses did not see in their special relationship a warrant for jealousy, which made their friendship even more comfortable. Now that the Tolivers had come to live on Houston Avenue, Jessica and Jeremy could pull up a chair together more often.
“Don’t you think it’s time to put a shovel to the plants?” Jeremy said. “Until you do, the place won’t feel like home.”
“Well, like Silas and Thomas, the roses are happier there.”
“They’ll be happy here, too, Jess. It’s a magnificent house.”
“But you said it. The place is a house, not yet a home. I may be happy here, such as I’m capable, but I fear Thomas will not. He loves living closer to his friends, but he misses Somerset, and now that our old log cabin has been turned over to Silas’s overseer, Thomas has no place to lay his head but in his bed on Houston Avenue.”
“Wasn’t that the plan?”
Jessica cracked a small smile. With uncanny perception, Jeremy could always see right through to the core of other people’s designs. “I want my son to have a few hours’ separation from the plantation and…from his father,” she added frankly.
Jeremy raised a brow. “You might as well try to split a hair.”
“Well, I’m going to try,” she said. “I’ve kept my promise to Silas that I wouldn’t voice my contrary views to our son but that I could not speak for my example. So far my example has fallen on blind eyes, but Silas agrees with me that at eleven the boy needs more schooling than either of us can give him. I want Thomas to have choices about what he wishes to do with his life. How will he know of them if he doesn’t have the opportunity of an education? He might wish to study medicine or law, become a journalist or teacher.”
“All well and good, Jess, but how will you accomplish that here in Howbutker?”
“Silas has agreed to hire a tutor.”
“Ah,” Jeremy said, cocking an eyebrow. “With the hope a tutor may achieve what you’ve promised not to do?”
Jessica smiled. Again, Jeremy had read between the lines, which is what Jessica had done when she received a letter from Guy Handley in answer to her reply to his notice in the Positions Wanted section of the Houston Telegraph and Texas Register. In the advertisement he’d described himself as “a teacher of the humanities with special emphasis on classical literature.” Jessica had been caught by the word humanities. In his letter, Guy Handley had explained that he was from Virginia and a graduate of William and Mary College. He was the private tutor of the children of a prominent landowner in Houston until his employer was killed in the Mexican-American War. The man’s widow was moving back to her people in Louisiana, but he wished to remain in Texas. He would be happy to come to Howbutker for an interview if she would please advise him of a time and date.
“He’s coming by coach tomorrow,” Jessica said to Jeremy, “and I hope so much Thomas takes to him and to his studies. He was none too pleased to hear he’ll be in school half a day.”
“And so should all our children be,” Jeremy said, rising and replacing his hat. “The public school won’t open until next year, and we’re not likely to lure the talents of a Sarah Conklin.”
Jessica glanced up at him, startled, and a chill wafted across her skin at the little knowing glimmer she caught in Jeremy’s eyes. Was his remark about Sarah another of his double entendres meant to imply he’d perceived the real reason she hoped to hire Guy Handley? It was as if Jeremy had read the tutor’s letter and seen the tiny circle that served as a dot drawn over the i in “Cordially yours” at the letter’s closing. Ordinarily, the substitution for the proper mark would have meant nothing to Jessica, but in Sarah Conklin’s letters she had noticed a similar circle affixed over the i’s in both their names. Only those aware that codes were a form of secret communication in the Underground Railroad would pay attention to the coincidence. Was Guy Handley, the tutor she hoped to employ to teach her son, an abolitionist?