Rushing to her, I begged that she be allowed to choose for herself amongst the buyers—a thing that embarrassed my son as he pulled me away, mumbling apologies to the bidders. “You aren’t planning to do something even more foolish, are you? You cannot rely now on my father for anything anymore. What you’ve taken in human property is now all you have of your own to provide for the six children you still have in your care, all under the age of seventeen.”
He was afraid that I’d free them. And I might’ve. But just because I couldn’t bear to see these slaves naked on a wooden block for rich men to inspect, didn’t mean I’d cast them out into the world without any way to support themselves. That’s what I was thinking when the auctioneers cried out the price for Edgehill’s parcels, hour after hour. “Sixteen an acre! Do I hear seventeen?”
Standing there as everything Tom and I built was sold away—earth, animal, and human—I felt my husband’s accusing eyes on me. But however much he hated me that day, I hated myself more. I hated myself, and slavery, and Virginia, and everything.
Everything.
For four hours the auctioneers cried out, extolling the virtues of Edgehill, a plantation with the healthiest climate of the whole earth, sheltered from cold winds, well watered with pure springs, nestled amongst woods of oak, hickory, walnut, and ash . . . until finally, at the end of the fourth hour, with bidders beginning to go off, my son offered seventeen and took the whole of Edgehill.
“You swindler,” Tom sneered, drawing so near to my son I thought they might come to blows. “You took advantage of a father’s distress to get possession of his property and turn him adrift in his old age, penniless. You didn’t even raise enough to satisfy my creditors and now they’ll consume my earnings for the rest of my life. You’ve even taken from me a roof over my head—”
He reached for our son’s bad arm, as if to wrench it, and I stepped between them. “Tom, you can never want for a home while my father possesses one. And our son won’t leave you—”
“I’ll take nothing from a thief.” Tom trembled like a man swept up in a storm, clutching at his chest, all the color gone from him. Then he limped away.
To escape the prying eyes of onlookers, I hastened to the carriage, murmuring, “He’s ill.” For I knew no other name for it. “His health’s failing from excessive anxiety of mind.”
Handing me into the carriage, Jeff said, “I cannot have yours doing the same, so I’ve made arrangements with a common friend to assist him. He won’t accept help from me, but he’ll take it from a friend, and I’ll reimburse that man for his pains.”
I grasped his hand, grateful beyond measure. This’d been no easier on Jeff than on any of us, but he’d borne it. “Your father won’t appreciate it, but I do.”
The tapestry of my life was unraveling, one strand at a time.
Once the grandeur and radiance of Lafayette’s visit was gone, I looked around me and saw everything at Monticello in disrepair. The paint flaked off the walls and railings and molding. The roof let in melting snow and rain. My father, so proud of his house, so fastidious and attentive to its appearance, didn’t seem to notice, and I told myself that Jeff had been too busy with the calamity of my husband’s bankruptcy to give my father’s estate his attention.
But that winter one of my father’s loans had come due . . . and Papa couldn’t pay.
“What can you mean that he can’t pay?” I asked Jeff as the carriage jostled us along, having relied upon my father’s promises to look after me and the children, no matter what befell my husband’s fortunes.
“Grandfather overestimated the value of his holdings,” Jeff told me, gravely. “Monticello is difficult to make profitable. Water and supplies must be hauled up. The house itself requires an enormous amount of firewood to heat it. There’s the expense of supporting the Negroes. We’ll have to move the family to Poplar Forest.”
I didn’t understand what he was saying.
And he braced himself, continuing on. “We’ll take with us only the necessary furniture and a small household of servants. Then we’ll sell or rent the whole of Monticello and auction as many Negroes as we can to pay the debts.”
The blood drained from me so suddenly I sank into the cushions of the carriage in a near swoon. This had already been the ugliest day of a life filled with its share of ugly days, and this blow nearly stopped a heart that was already broken.
Leave Monticello? It’d been the constant star, the steady anchor in all our troubles. Surely Jeff was overstating the financial situation in which we found ourselves. “But the price of crops will go up. They do. Up and down.”
“Mother,” Jeff said, covered in a sweat in spite of the cold. “You’ve no notion of the debts Grandpapa has acquired. More than my father’s debts. More by far. And the crisis is at hand. To delay it will be complete ruin only a few years down the road, without a home to shelter you or the children.”
I couldn’t fathom selling Monticello. It’d be a bitter sacrifice to leave its comforts, but nothing compared to the anguish of seeing my father turned out of his house and deprived in his old age of the few pleasures he was still capable of enjoying. “Have you told your grandfather this plan? It’ll kill him!”