He came to me when I was just eleven, Richard Whitehead did, and asked me to be his mother’s letter writer.
“Her eyesight is failing, you know,” he said of her. “Within a year she won’t be able to write her letters anymore.”
I knew, for I was with her every day. It was my job to know such things. It had, in a household where everyone more or less had a “job,” fallen to me to be her companion when I wasn’t at my lessons. I had reported her failing eyesight to him a while back.
“Mother Whitehead bumped into a chair today, Richard. She may have hurt her knee.” Or: “She misplaced her notebook, and we spent the morning looking for it, and when we found it, she had to bring it up to her nose to read it, Richard.”
But I had to be careful how I said these things. He had a deep and abiding love for his mother. She was not my mother, you see. We both had the same father, dead now, but different mothers. Though I loved Mother Whitehead as my own.
Besides, Richard was the eldest, and, at twenty-six, unofficial head of the family. And if all that was not bad enough, he was a Methodist minister and, as such, was not above making me kneel on the gravel on the back drive for an hour if it pleased him.
And on many occasions, if something was gnawing at his innards, like weevils in the cotton, it could please him. Not only with me, but with my “girl” Violet and even betimes Margaret, his beloved sister whom he so spoiled.
That gravel was hellish on one’s knees.
When he asked me to be Mother Whitehead’s letter writer, he’d had the doctor over to examine her and decided plans must be made.
“Her correspondence means the world to her,” he said to me. “She writes voluminous letters.”
“But I’m only eleven years old,” I protested.
In Virginia, in the year 1830, eleven is considered almost a young lady. You are expected to behave as such. No more tree climbing, no more sliding down the banister, no more playing with dolls, although I line mine up on my bed pillows each morning and still address them by name. Oh, one can still play the game of Lame Chicken or put on men’s clothes in disguise at a party, but for the most part one is considered grown-up at eleven.
“You won’t need to start this writing for about three months, according to the doctor,” Richard told me, “and anyway I’ve seen your penmanship and it is, by far, better than any eleven-year-old’s that I’ve seen. Pleasant has done a good job with you.”
Pleasant, his wife, was my personal tutor.
“What you can do,” he suggested, “is start corresponding with someone for the next few months. Improve your writing even more.”
But with whom? He thought a moment while he rifled through the mail that had been set down on his desk. Then he looked as if he had a brilliant thought and took up an envelope of cream-colored paper that looked as if it had traveled through several continents. He scowled at it. “How about this fellow? Writes to me regularly, asking about the crops, the animals, and other matters about the plantation. He’s our father’s brother.”
“Mother Whitehead says he’s touched in the head.”
“You must understand she was estranged from our father before he died. By the time he had you with your mother in London, things were finished between them. The only reason they weren’t divorced then was because he knew it would destroy her social status. The last time she saw him was when he made that visit and left you here. I think it was kind of her to take you in, being that you were the child of another woman and visible proof of his infidelity. Don’t you?”
I felt my face go hot. “Yes,” I said. And to myself I added, And you never let me forget it.
Whether this was the cause, or it was just the nature of our beings, Richard and I were often estranged from each other. The only closeness we had was when he talked about “our father.” And when he talked I kept a still tongue in my head and listened, because in spite of his overall meanness, he was the only one who ever explained the hopeless entanglements of my family to me.
He cleared his throat. “Uncle Andrew has been hinting lately at being invited here for a visit,” he said. “So I must admit I have a twofold purpose in asking you to write to him. One, to improve your writing and learning. The man is highly educated. And two, to hold him off on visiting. It would put Mother into shock to see him again. Bring back too many sordid memories. I must protect her.”
I nodded yes, said I’d do it.
He was pleased. It didn’t take much to please Richard. Just do as he said, with blind loyalty. Like my older sister, Margaret, did. I longed to be able to be like Margaret. If she were a cat she’d be rubbing against his legs. I couldn’t be like that, and so I was always in trouble with him.
But oh, to think he at least respected me for my dignity. To think if I only had that.
For the next three months I corresponded with Uncle Andrew and got to know him. Or so I thought.