Dear Uncle Andrew: My name is Harriet, and depending on how much you can abide my chatter, I am going to be writing to you a great deal over the next year or so. My brother, Richard, demands it, and when he demands something, the angels concur. He says you are a very intelligent man, and though Mother Whitehead says you are touched in the head, you suffer that malignancy no more than most of us in this family. At any rate, he says you are also an art dealer. And the engraving we have in our center hallway of Mary Wollstonecraft was given to Mother Whitehead by you many years ago. Good grief, I have been passing by it for years! I am eleven years old, love to ride horses and read books. My best friend is my “girl” Violet, who somehow came to be half white and almost part of the family. I don’t know how, but this family is so confused it is like Mother Whitehead’s crochet yarn after Piddles, the cat, gets finished fussing with it. Oh, I must go now, they are calling me for Sunday dinner, and if there is anything Richard hates it is one being late for prayers before meals.
Your servant, Harriet Whitehead
Violet was at the edge of the pond in water up to her knees, cutting the cattails. “Oh, look at this one, Miss Harriet,” and she snipped it off expertly with a scissor. “This one’s a beauty.” Her skirt was hitched up between her legs showing her light brown thighs. She didn’t wear ruffled pantalets like I did. Slaves didn’t wear pantalets.
I took the cattail in my hands with the three others. It was a good one. I could cut a sharp point and it would prove to make a good pen when dipped in some lampblack. I’d use it to write my next letter, I decided. Maybe this afternoon.
Neither of us paid mind to the rider approaching on the fat white horse until he was nearly on top of us.
“What are you doing there in that pond?” Richard demanded. “Getting cattails again? Violet, get out and put down your skirts. Harriet, give over those cattails.”
He reached out his hand. I gave them over.
“Going to use these for writing, are you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered.
“They’re known around as slave pens,” he said. “Look on the back of any barn wall and you’ll see their scratchings. Or messages, made from cattails and lampblack. You know what lampblack does to your clothing, Harriet. And how Mama hates it. Yet you do persist. Why?”
“They’re more of a challenge to use,” I answered.
He sighed deeply. “Haven’t you enough challenges in life? Violet, haven’t you anything better to do with your time?”
“It be the Sabbath, Massa Richard. I done went to church. An’ if’n I must say so, you did preach a fine sermon, yessuh.” She used the special voice she always used with my brother, the subservient one with the humble tone.
“Such a fine sermon that you come home and raise your skirts in front of everybody, hey? You’re not a child anymore. How old are you now, Violet?”
She was untwisting her skirt and pulling it down. “Fourteen, suh.”
“That’s right, I keep forgetting. You’re three years older than Harriet. Well, you keep acting like that and it’ll be time to marry you off.”
“But suh, I be Miss Harriet’s girl. I been carin’ for her since she come to us. And I serve Miss Margaret, too, when she come home from that fancy school in Jerusalem. An’ I run and fetch for your mama. They all can’t do without me.”
She was begging. And pompous Richard let her beg.
“At any rate, my sister has letters to write this afternoon. And not with cattails. So you go about your business, whatever it is. And if I catch you with your skirts hiked up again, they won’t come down until I’ve given your legs ten stripes. You hear?”
“Yessuh.” Violet ran.
I looked at him. “You know Mother Whitehead doesn’t hold with having her slaves mistreated.”
“You’re scolding me now? Since when do I report to you?”
“That isn’t it.”
“What is it, then? How does Mama think I keep order around here? Somebody has to put the fear of God into them. Tell me, can you recollect the message of my sermon this morning? Or would you rather spend an hour kneeling on the gravel in the drive?”
I thought desperately. Something about servants. Yes. Oh yes. “Slaves, obey your masters,” I said.
He looked disappointed.
“Mother Whitehead wants you to keep order,” I said bravely, “but she also wants you to do right by them.”
His face got red, not a good sign. Still, he controlled himself. “Now you go on,” he said with quiet dignity, “and look in on Mama. She’s on the front veranda. See if she needs anything. And the less you have to do with Violet, the better off you’ll be. Slaves have no morals. I mean it, Harriet. I can forbid her from being around you if you think I’m fooling.”
“I know you’re not fooling. You never fool. You have no sense of humor.”
He glared at me. I knew he was warring inside between his man-of-the-cloth instincts and his basic brotherly anger, and it tore at his innards. Because I was the only one who caused him such conflict.
I really believe that I was the only one in the family who made him, on occasion, sorry that he had become a minister. I squared my shoulders and walked away.
I always wished I could be as accomplished as my almost-mother, Catharine Whitehead, blind as she was. I wished I could be mistress of a plantation like Whitehead Farms, respected by all, copied in dress and style of living, mistress of sixty negroes, living in a white-pillared house, with a dead husband who owned a fleet of ships.
And all those apples on the ground out there, piled up under the trees and ignored while everyone complained about being poor because the Virginia soil was worn-out from hundreds of years of tobacco growing. (Not us, thank God, we had the income from Father’s shipping business.) And all the while the apples were falling down and hitting people on their heads, until they finally woke up from their tobacco dreams and said “cripes” or whatever it is that one says when God Himself strikes you.
“Cripes, what are we complaining about? We’ve got apples to make into brandy.” And so in all those barns of all those plantations appeared stills to convert the apples into applejack.
’Twas the apples that brought us prosperity again. I say “us” because there’s no use in having money if those around you don’t have it.
And it was the apples that brought us Nat Turner. But I get ahead of myself.
Mention Nat Turner and I must make mention of my sister by half, Margaret. You see, we don’t do anything in wholes in this house, though we pretend to. Looking at Margaret, older than me by four years, you know she’s nobody’s half, but her own whole self. Beautiful and composed and hitting you on the head with her presence when she walks into a room. And she is only fifteen.
Margaret is out to torture Nat Turner. And there he is again, creeping into the conversation, just like he crept into our lives, loaned to us when everyone got on their feet after the business with the apples. Loaned to us from Mr. Travis, his master, to make furniture for the front parlor. He is good at making furniture.
Margaret treats him like this whole family treats darkies. She won’t give him a second glance, though she taunts him by swishing her skirt when he passes, by dropping her handkerchief, then bending over to pick it up, only he retrieves it first for her and she thanks him and stays bent over so he can get a good look at her bosoms from her low-cut dress.
I’ve confronted her about it. “You can’t do that with negroes,” I told her, “like you can with white men.”
“Why?” she asked. “Because they aren’t in charge of their senses?”
“No, because if he’s caught looking at you later, or smiling at you, he can be whipped. And Richard will have it done. It isn’t fair.”
Margaret isn’t one for fairness.
But here I am, Harriet Whitehead, eleven years of age, only half belonging to them, half of me a part of them and half I don’t know what. Nobody has ever told me about that half. My father, Mr. Whitehead, Richard and Margaret’s father, and Mother Whitehead’s late husband, is dead, lost at sea on one of his many vessels.
Perhaps he would have told me about the other half had he lived long enough.
Why is he called “the late Mr. Whitehead,” I used to wonder. I know now. Because it is too late for him to tell me from whence I come. Too late for him to help Mother Whitehead by writing her letters for her to her business associates. Too late for him to tell Margaret to cover her bosoms, and too late to tell Richard to let up on me and stop making me kneel and pray for my sins.
So I take refuge in making up from whence I come. At night I lie in bed and do it. One night my mother might be a princess from India. My father’s ships went there, didn’t they? Another night she is closely related to British royalty, and so on.
If it is on a day when I have written a letter to Malta for Mother Whitehead, I just know my mother came from there.
You see, this job that has fallen to me to do, I don’t mind doing. It is something that awards me a sense of dignity. Because I know all Mother Whitehead’s personal and business activities. She writes to almost everyone in Southampton County. She is friends with people in important places. She can tell you who is going to have a child, whose marriage is not going well, who has a terrible sickness, and whose son was put out of Harvard for bad behavior.
There is no one who wouldn’t do her a favor.
The week of Christmas last year, Mr. Fitzpatrick, the local drunk, came knocking on the back door. Richard wanted to put him out, but Mother Whitehead insisted he be let in. He begged her for some money. He had four children and no money to buy them presents. Mother Whitehead gave him a sermon about drinking. He promised he would stop, though both he and she knew he wouldn’t.
She gave him some money. He promised he would repay it, though both he and she knew he wouldn’t. And he left, bowing and kissing her hand.
That is the way Mother Whitehead is regarded. I’d like to be regarded that way, too, someday. I’d help people, but I’d give a scolding first.
I’d scold Richard good, if I had the chance. Then I’d let him kiss my hand.
If that isn’t power, I don’t know what is.