Chapter Six
Willie May sat amidst the piles of unwashed dishes from the party the night before, indulging in a second cup of coffee and relishing the rare opportunity to be alone with her thoughts in the Big House. It was Sunday morning. Everyone in the house—the master and mistress, Miss Jessica, and the servants, including her daughter—and all the field-workers from the Yard were at church services held today by the creek. There was to be a baptism afterwards, celebrated in the shade of the big pecan and cypress trees by the bank, everybody eating the leftovers from Miss Jessica’s eighteenth birthday party. The DeWitts had gotten off to Charleston and their departure to England on Saturday afternoon, thank God. At least Willie May hadn’t had them to worry about in the hustle of getting fifty guests wined and dined and cleaned up after.
“Now, you all go on to bed,” Miss Eunice had ordered the house servants last night after they’d cleared the tables and put away the food. “The dishes can wait until after church services tomorrow. Willie May, you go to bed, too. You look like you’re dead on your feet.”
She was good that way, Miss Eunice was, always considerate of her housekeeper’s limits, though the mistress had her boundaries. Boundary lines were fine by Willie May. Life was so much easier and simpler when everybody knew their place and accepted it and never bothered about nobody else’s. That was the subject disturbing her this morning in the peace and quiet of the Big House. Boundaries. Tippy didn’t know hers, and that was the fault of Jessica Wyndham. The master’s daughter was going to get her girl in trouble—big trouble. She could smell it coming.
A part of Willie May had knotted up tight as a ball of twine from the day her baby girl—ten years old—had wandered, with Miss Jessica, of course, into the drawing room, where the mistress was in a dispute with her decorator over color and drapery material for the Venetian windows. Willie May had been serving tea when she saw her daughter pick up two swatches of different fabric in matching colors and, calmly, without saying a word, hand them to Miss Eunice.
“Well, I declare,” her mistress had exclaimed. “I do believe this is the perfect color of green and fabric combination. We’ll use the velvet for the valances and the silk for the panels.”
They had all stared at her baby girl, and right then, Willie May had felt that tightening of her innards that had hardly loosened a day since, especially when Miss Jessica piped, “I told you she was smart, Mama!” and beamed at Tippy.
Willie May and Miss Eunice had watched helplessly as the girls’ friendship grew by the day. In the beginning, when the children were blossoming out from infants together, neither mother had paid much attention to their enjoyment of the other’s company. On plantations, it was natural for white and black children to play together, especially if the offspring of house servants lived with their parents in quarters in the Big House. Willie May had been mightily relieved to have her daughter, born missing a lung, brought up under her eye rather than in the Yard, where the other slaves’ children were put to work, and Miss Eunice had been happy that her little girl, with no sisters for companions, had a playmate. Their growing bond had skipped Carson Wyndham’s notice altogether, even when his daughter had insisted that every treat be shared with Tippy and that she be given the same toys and dolls as she. It was Miss Jessica who had given Tippy, christened Isabel, her name. “Tippy!” she had squealed as the girls were learning to walk and her tiny daughter had preferred to tiptoe rather than toddle.
Willie May and Eunice had been slow to do anything about their daughters’ closeness since, in some ways, it mirrored their own. Carson Wyndham had purchased Willie May, not quite twenty, as a maid for Eunice Wyndham when he brought his bride from Richmond, Virginia, to his huge estate, Willowshire. Alone for weeks while her husband was away minding the business of his many plantations, Eunice would have gone mad from loneliness had it not been for Willie May. Snatched from her parents and her village in Africa at seventeen years of age, Willie May understood about separation from home. She had been taught English and domestic service by Anglican missionaries—a lucky find for the slave traders—and she and the mistress had become each other’s confidante, together making their way through new worlds with husbands they barely knew, sharing the joys and travails of pregnancies and childbirths and the management of the most prominent manor house in South Carolina. Eunice was quick to say she didn’t know what she’d do without Willie May, but only because she trusted her housekeeper never to trespass on the bounds of their friendship.
Neither woman could say the same for Tippy, thanks to Jessica Wyndham, and the master had begun to notice.
Just this morning, as the household was leaving for the creek, he had asked in the tone they all dreaded to hear, “Where did you get that dress, Tippy?” Everybody had stiffened, including Miss Jessica, who was finally getting it through her stubborn head that her color blindness was putting Tippy in danger.
“I made it, suh.”
The master had rubbed the material between his fingers. The dress was beautifully and fashionably constructed. “Raw silk. Where did you get it?”
“In Boston, suh. It was a remnant give me by Miss Jessie’s dressmaker.”
The master had shot a glance to his daughter. “Do you have one made of the same fabric?”
Miss Jessica had had the good sense to duck her head. “Yes, Papa.”
To Tippy he said, “Go to your room immediately and take it off. No colored maid of this household will wear a dress of the same material as my daughter.”
Tippy had run from the hall, holding in a cough like the kind that had erupted from her one lung all night.
A few years ago the master wouldn’t have given the dress, or its exceptional tailoring, a second thought. Tippy’s sewing and weaving talents, bolstered by her color sense and eye for design, were well known and even praised in the household, but things had begun to change around Willowshire in 1831. That was the year Nat Turner, a Negro preacher, had led a two-day rebellion of slaves against their white masters in Southampton County, Virginia, where Mister Carson owned a tobacco plantation. He had gone to Virginia to witness the trial and hanging of the men involved and come home a different sort of master.
Then in 1833, to slap tar on resin, a man named William Lloyd Garrison had founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in Boston, the city where Miss Jessica was going to school, attended by the colored maid she treated like a sister. It had not occurred to the master that his daughter would be exposed to the radical teachings of the man and his followers, much less influenced by them, but he was wrong, as Willie May and Miss Eunice now realized.
Willie May got up and tied on her apron. Here at Willowshire, she and her kind had it good. Mister Carson believed in taking care of his property, and he made sure his slaves were well fed, clothed, and housed. They got weekends and Thanksgiving and Christmas off, and the field hands were allowed ten-minute rest periods in the shade and all the water they could drink. They were allowed to establish their own customs and lifestyles with no interference from the Big House so long as they stayed within appropriate bounds. The whipping post still stood in the center of the Yard, but it hadn’t been used in recent memory and only then because a slave had beaten his wife half to death. The master, unlike other planters, didn’t believe in breaking up colored families by selling their children. Carson Wyndham was hard but fair, and he expected his overseers and drivers to be the same. Except for the masters of Meadowlands and Queenscrown, Mr. Carson’s attitude was markedly different from other planters and headmen, who could make a slave’s life miserable. At Willowshire, the living was stable and fairly pleasant.
But times were changing. You could sense it at every turn. Last July, a mob had attacked the Charleston post office and burned anti-slavery literature sent by northern abolitionists to be distributed throughout the South. President Jackson had backed the protest and tried but failed to make it illegal to distribute “incendiary” material through the U.S. Post Office. Patrols had increased, bad men armed with whips and guns who rode the lanes by the light of the moon looking for runaways and uppity Negroes on whom to mete out punishment. At Willowshire, unlike before, slaves were not free to visit other slaves at other plantations without special permission from the master, and word was that Mister Carson’s drivers—slaves put in charge of other slaves in the field—were less friendly to the workers. Several colored overseers had been replaced with white, and “Spit” Johnson, a grumbler whose discontent had heretofore been tolerated, had disappeared one night. Rumors flew that he had been taken away to the auction block in Charleston and sold.
Willie May feared for her daughter under this cloud of changes. Reading and writing and spouting poetry, speaking like a white woman and advising the mistresses what fabric to buy and how to wear their hair were nothing for a young colored girl with one lung to parade before her masters. After today, she wouldn’t be surprised if Tippy weren’t assigned chores less pleasant than keeping Miss Jessica company. She might even be removed from the room next to her mistress and assigned to a cabin in the Yard that she’d have to share with another family. Willie May prayed for her only daughter to have the good sense to mind herself, lest some night horsemen came and dragged her from her bed to make an example of what happened to Negroes who did not know their place.