Nat Turner ate breakfast in the kitchen with the household help. With Connie and Owen and Violet and Winefred, who was the cook, and Ormond. They all liked him. He was polite and pleasant. Winefred heaped his plate with food twice, and he had all the hot coffee he could drink.
He was a likely negro, the kind you wanted to do things for. Today I would get the map of the county for him from Father’s gun room.
At our table in the dining room, I stared at Emilie. It was Thursday, but she wore a Sunday frock with a pink sash around the middle. Her hair was pulled back from her brow and tied with a bow. She was fifteen, the same age as Margaret, yet this morning there was a weariness about her that made her appear ancient.
“Have some fruit, dear,” Mother Whitehead said.
“I’m really not hungry,” she answered.
“Richard,” Mother appealed to him, “she must eat.”
“I’m not her brother, Mother,” he reminded her. “And I’m not her minister anymore since she refuses to come to my church. So I can’t even see to the starvation of her soul.”
Emilie came to life then. “I would come, if you hadn’t thrown my mama out. How can I come now, without her?”
“You should come for her,” he said evenly. “You should come to pray for her. Haven’t my past sermons taught you anything?”
“Yes,” Emilie threw at him, “that you pray for those who are close to God, and those who aren’t, who need Him, you toss away like garbage.”
Everyone went silent. Hooray, I said to myself. How I wish I had the courage to talk to Richard like that. As for my brother, he looked as if someone had thrown a pitcher of cold water in his face. But he kept his dignity. He even smiled.
“If you were one of my sisters, I’d have the pleasure of sending you to kneel on the stones out back and then spend the day in your room,” he said mildly. “But you’re not, so I suppose I must take the insult. Unless, of course, you are prepared to apologize.”
Emilie wasn’t. “I think I’ll have some fruit now,” she said. “I find I have an appetite after all.”
“Come, come, children, don’t fight,” Mother Whitehead cajoled. But she said it in a pleasant way so that, if you knew her, you knew that she was enjoying the whole thing. “Emilie, that isn’t what you came here for, is it? To quarrel with the reverend?”
“No, ma’am,” Emilie said quietly. “I came to visit y’all. And to ask him a favor.”
“Well then, after we’re finished, why don’t you all go into the library and talk, you and Richard? You’ll find him a true man of the cloth, I promise you. Right, Richard?”
He had to agree. He was more fearful of his mother than he was of God. So when breakfast was over he kissed Mother Whitehead on the forehead and he and Emilie went into the library, and he closed the door. Only later did I find out, through Margaret, what she wanted from him.
She wanted him to come to their plantation and speak to her mother. To turn her around so that she would end her affair with Dr. Gordon. Richard told her he had done that already, in church. Emilie said, “Do it again, in the parlor of our plantation. Please.”
Richard said no. “Once is enough,” he said. “I’ll not kneel at your mother’s feet. She’ll have no respect for me. She knows right from wrong.” And he said no, too, when Emilie asked him for a second chance for her mother; to let her return to church. When he said no to that, Emilie said that she wouldn’t return then, either.
Richard told her that everyone has their own God to answer to. And He was a very vengeful God when treated like such. And her mother, and perhaps she, too, would burn in hell for taking such a stand.
Emilie cut short her visit. Margaret and I were both in the room when she packed her things that very afternoon. “I don’t know how you stand it in a house with him,” she told us. “I don’t know,” she said, looking at me, “how you stand having a brother be a minister in the first place.”
I told her it wasn’t easy, that it was awkward at best. That people expected you to walk around with your eyes downcast, praying all the time.
“And they’re always asking, ‘What would your brother say?’” I told her.
Margaret said I was daft. “You get respect,” she told Emilie. “I find that people respect me more because my brother is a man of the cloth.”
“I earn my own respect,” I told Emilie. “I don’t ride the coattails of someone else.”
Margaret looked as if she wanted to slap me. “It helps in school,” she said through clenched teeth. “The teachers are always trying to please me because of Richard. Most of them are in his congregation.”
“So that’s how you get your good marks,” I said in astonishment. “And Mother Whitehead and Richard think it’s because you’ve earned them.”
“Do you two always fight like this?” Emilie asked.
“Yes,” I said. “You could say there’s no love lost between us.”
“I wish I had a sister,” she said wistfully, “just to commiserate with. Just to confide in. I’d never fight with her.”
And then Margaret said the one thing I knew was always on her mind. “She’s my half sister,” she said.
That brought silence into the room. Emilie finished her packing.
“What will you do when you go home?” I asked her. “Live in the house alone with all the servants?”
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I haven’t come to that bridge yet. Mayhap I’ll move in with my aunt Marie Claire in Jerusalem. I’ll let you all know.”
Mother had Nat Turner drive Emilie home. Margaret went with them. Before they left I sneaked some words with Nat Turner. “Talk to her,” I begged. “Tell her that God is not vengeful. Tell her that He is a forgiving God, please.”
He promised he would.