Ignoring the stench of an unclean plate upon his table in the room beyond, I wrapped my shawl around me. “However much you blame me, surely you wouldn’t make the children suffer.”
“Oh, I do blame you, Martha. But I blame my ungrateful son even more. Understand that if my children step one toe over Jeff’s threshold, you’ll never see them again. Don’t think I can’t do it, for it’s the only thing still in my legal power, and by God, not even your father can stop me.”
I didn’t stay to argue with him.
When I told Ellen, she straightened before the mirror and smoothed her wedding gown. “My father ought not be made to suffer embarrassment because he has no dowry to give me. His pride has already endured too many blows. How could I be happy today knowing I’d brought him low?”
She was devoted to her father, in spite of his weaknesses, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. My dear daughter, still as precious as two angels in one . . .
And so Ellen married Joseph Coolidge in the drawing room of Monticello, without her father, her hands shaking so badly she could scarcely hold a prayer book. Her sisters sent her to Boston with gifts they made themselves. Cornelia fashioned for her a painted screen to shade her from the sun, Mary packed a basket of cakes and wine, and Septimia presented her with a bracelet of chinaberries she’d strung like beads. Then our dear, witty Ellen was gone, leaving her grandfather lonely.
My other daughters took turns sitting with him, but Papa confided, “I didn’t know what a void Ellen would leave in our family.”
I didn’t despair at losing Ellen. To the contrary, I gloried in her escape from the sinking ship upon which the rest of us now sailed.
In December of that year, Edgehill went up for auction with all its slaves and livestock. I worried that the notice would attract traffickers in human blood, Negro buyers who’d take my husband’s slaves deep into the South to grow cotton or rice, putting them to such hard use it’d leave them in the ground. And I couldn’t stomach the sorrow of seeing our house servants and their children sold out of the family.
“There’s nothing you can do for them,” Jeff said, trying to reassure me. “I can try to arrange for buyers for them amongst our friends and neighbors, and failing that, I can bid myself on your household favorites, but there’s nothing you can do to spare the slaves from sale at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mother.”
Then why did I feel to blame?
In the face of such a system of injustice, I determined a course of action. Having learned bitter lessons from the unhappy fate of so many ruined friends and relatives, I said, “There is something I can do. If I give up my dower rights in my husband’s holdings, I’m entitled to one-ninth of his estate before the creditors are satisfied. And if I take that value in slaves . . .”
My son’s eyes bulged. “You’d be better off to take—”
“No,” I said, twisting a kerchief in my fists, understanding the import of what I was saying. “I’ll take the slaves.”
And with those desperate words, I agreed to become a slaveholder.
For the first time in my life, I’d own human beings whose entire fate would rest in my hands. It shattered me to do it, but would’ve shattered me more to do nothing. Better that they were mine than given over to some breeding farm or a field in the Deep South.
I spared from the block Sally’s relations—the wives of her brothers. But I did so over Jeff’s objections. “They’re aged, Mother. They wouldn’t have sold for much. If slaves are all you’re taking from the estate, you need strong young men.”
But I went on sparing the women. I took eleven in all, including Burwell’s daughters, though my son thought my choices emotional and without good sense.
What I’d done was all that kept me sane on the bitter winter day of the auction. First on the block was Susan, so bad a servant, so negligent, so heartless, and of a family of such bad disposition generally that we ought to have been glad to be rid of her. But I was overcome with nausea when the auctioneer cried out into the biting winter wind. “Five hundred, five hundred! This nubile girl, strong arms, wide hips. Five hundred, do I hear six?”
The discomfort of slavery I had borne all my life, but its sorrows in all their bitterness I’d never before conceived. Tears slid down Susan’s black cheeks when a man offered a higher bid. And feeling a fracturing in my soul, I lost all sense of decorum.