Twelve and a half years separate the family’s two surviving girls. At the time of their father’s death, Rosalie is almost thirty, Asia just seventeen. There is nothing to suggest that they were close, though all those years of sharing a bedroom must have produced an intimacy.
Two sisters have seldom been less alike.
Asia is much the better educated. She’s been to a convent school and also a college for girls, where the standards and expectations were stringent and masculine. Competition was encouraged. Domesticity disparaged. The girls, addressed only by their last names, were told not to be soft. They played all the games of the rougher sex—ball, quoits, archery. Asia excelled at mathematics and science.
Rosalie attended school for only a few months in England. She thinks she liked it, but doesn’t remember for sure.
* * *
—
The farm was Rosalie’s first home. As a child, she ran about with the other children who lived there. She sees how hard Ann and Joe work, every minute of every day, to buy their very own daughters, their very own sons.
She remembers her grandfather’s lectures—
—that freedom is God-given while the law is man-made. So any law that gives one man the ownership of another is a moral deformity and abhorrent to God.
—that, in fact, the word owner should never be used when speaking of slavery, as no man can ever truly own another.
—Quaeque ipse miserrima vidi et quorum pars magna fui, as Grandfather would say, though Aeneas said it first. With my own eyes, I have seen heartbreaking things and even been a part of them.
Rosalie has read the recently published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and wept her way through it.
Asia barely remembers her grandfather. She grew up in the white neighborhoods of Baltimore and the only blacks she saw regularly were the women who did the laundry and the men hired to walk her to and from school. On the farm, she makes a visit every Monday out to the cabins, like a lady of the manor. “They flock around me,” she writes to Jean Anderson, her dearest friend back in Baltimore. “I really think I am beloved by the poor and the black.”
* * *
—
Rosalie is painfully shy. “The Talmud sayeth, ‘Allah sent ten measures of garrulity to earth and the women took nine.’ Rose thinks I got my share and hers, too. For a fact nature cheated her tongue of its right and my brain of its wisdom,” Asia says.
In a year or two, Asia will start referring to Rosalie as an invalid.
She’ll say that her sister has suffered from early childhood with an unspecified ailment. All her siblings routinely call her “Poor Rose.” They use the phrase so often Poor has all but become Rosalie’s Christian name.
Exactly what is so pitiable in her remains unclear. She isn’t housebound—she makes occasional trips to Baltimore, visits friends and goes shopping. But she is reclusive. She prefers books to people and spends much of her day seated. When she walks, she’s slightly askew, which gives rise to rumors of drink.
Asia, on the other hand, is in constant motion, a tomboy who hikes and climbs trees. She dances across the streams, balancing on stones and logs in her full and inconvenient skirts. She and Johnny often ride together, galloping and jumping the horses—sidesaddle for her—the two of them singing loudly as they go.
* * *
—
“Not handsome, but noble,” one neighbor says of Rosalie. It’s the closest thing to a compliment on her looks that Rosalie ever gets and that only the once. Meanwhile, Asia is rarely mentioned without someone noting what a beauty she is. She has black hair, a thin face, enormous eyes.
Asia makes conquests. Dan Burke asks for a daguerreotype of her, her hair parted in the middle, smooth in the front, clusters of curls in the back. George Mattingly, shown the image, sends her a poem entitled “Miss Asia’s Picture.” Jesse Wharton publishes his verses to her in the Harford Gazette. Henry Lee presses a silver ring into her hand and spins stories of a life together in a vine-covered cottage. Sleeper Clarke has loved her since she was eight years old.
Many nights Rosalie drifts to sleep thinking of her lost love, her forbidden love, Jacob, the lion tamer. The relationship was so brief, provides so little fodder, that it requires novelistic augmentation. Years have passed and she no longer knows which memories are real and which a dream. Nor does she even understand that she’s made things up. In her mind, all of it is real.
* * *
—
There is, however, this one thing Rosalie and Asia have always had in common. They share a conviction, held by their mother and Father, too, when he was alive, that the important people in the family are the boys.
iii
Many things on the farm have changed since they lived here last. The trees are taller and so are the Booths. Asia has the strange, disorienting sense as she walks through the property that both her feet and the ground are farther away than they should be. The creek runs narrow through its iced edges when it once seemed wide and fast to Asia. The logs spanning it, the bridges June and Rosalie, Henry and Nelson made as children, are hollow with decay and wouldn’t hold Asia’s weight. The bullfrog is gone.
But the most profound changes are invisible to her and concern the Hall family. A few years back, Rowland Rogers died and his slaves, including Ann Hall, went to his son Elijah, husband of the Booths’ beloved Aunty Rogers. Around that same time, Joe and Ann finally had enough money to buy Ann’s freedom. They now have two little girls, Asia and Susanna Hall, born free as a result, and they’ve managed to buy their littlest boy, Joseph, for one hundred and ten dollars. But the oldest four—Lucinda, Mary Ellen, Pinkney, and Nancy—remain in bondage.
The Hall family resembles much of Baltimore in this respect. Baltimore has the largest community of free blacks in the nation, but mixed amongst them are term slaves, bound until they turn twenty-five, or thirty-five, or older still. And also slaves for life. This was far from the worst thing to come out of slavery, but the complicated, unnavigable family dynamic in which some siblings were free and others were not was surely a terrible evil.
Three of Joe and Ann’s children remain the property of Elijah Rogers. The fourth child, Nancy, lives farther away on the estate of an elderly spinster named Elizabeth Preston. Nancy is five years old.
Ann Hall knows Aunty Rogers intimately and she wants to believe that her oldest children are safe now from sale. But there is no way this particular fear can ever be put entirely to rest, no way for Ann not to be conscious of this in each and every interaction that she and Aunty Rogers have.