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WPA Slave Narrative Collection

Interview with Henrietta Lee

Sunday, September 13, 1936

You hear about that woman who flew her plane across the country? Markham, that’s her. Don’t that beat all? You know I flew in one of those Jennys once. With Bessie Coleman. Yes, I did. I suppose things are changing a bit. Of course it’s tougher to hide women’s accomplishments with the radio and movies and telegraph available everywhere. When I was up in that plane, the air in my face, looking down at the earth like that, I sure did wish I was younger. You better believe I would have learned to fly. I think on everything I’ve seen in my life and I marvel. I was born in 1844, did you know that? Louisiana. Nah, haven’t been back there since the end of the war. No good memories for me there.

“Travel back in 1877 was slow, especially when you’re twisting and turning through the mountains. Take us ten days to get to Rock Springs from the Hole in a wagon. It was probably a hundred miles as the crow flies, but the only place in the West you could travel as the crow flew was the plains. Doubt there’s an automobile road to the Hole today. Sure as hell too remote for telegraph, then or now. Made it a great place to hide. You could go faster on a horse, of course. I like to imagine what the view would look like flying over the mountains, along the Green River valley that made up Brown’s Hole. I bet it’s a pretty sight. It was pretty on the ground, and that’s a fact.

“Right, right. We got to get going. Meeting the president by the fireside tonight. That radio, Lawd, what an invention that is. My mind spins with all the stuff we have now, it really does. I wish Margaret had lived to see it.

“Margaret made the bet, so we had to come up with a plan. We didn’t have time for Jehu to scout us a target, and anyways he wasn’t interested. He made himself scarce during our planning sessions. I wasn’t sure how smart it was to have Grace Trumbull in on everything, but she argued that this last big job would be a great centerpiece for the book. I let it go. I had plans for Grace Trumbull. And I knew I could kill her anytime I wanted.

“Garet wanted to hit the first bank she robbed, the Bank of the Rockies. Connolly’s bank. She said it would be a fitting end to go back to where she started. I thought there were easier, more remote targets to hit, but since we had to best Spooner, she convinced me we needed to hit a big target, and a Denver bank sure was that.

“We couldn’t rely on Garet’s knowledge from ’73 since Denver had changed a lot in four years. We planned to go to Denver at the end of the summer, after rounding up a new batch of mustangs and spending a few weeks breaking them. We were a working horse ranch, after all, and we couldn’t put it all on hold to go outlawing. We had given ourselves enough time to get to Denver, watch the bank for a week or two, pull the job, and get back to the Heresy before winter set in. We targeted being in Denver by the first of August, pulling the job no later than October first and riding hell-for-leather back to the Hole.

“Grace had been pretty silent, taking notes—which I didn’t like one bit—but when Garet said October first, she startled. She asked what street the bank was on, and when Garet told her, she smiled. She was a suffragist, you see, and had been to a meeting in Denver before leaving on her travels. Colorado was set to vote on women’s suffrage on October second, and the association that was advocating for it was going to have a rally, a march, traveling right down the street in front of the bank. You can use it as escape cover, she said. Garet was impressed, I could tell. I was suspicious and determined to get a look at that book Grace was always scribbling in.

“Jehu and the girls were going to stay at the ranch and keep it running. Hire some cowboys to help, and that was just fine with him. If he didn’t need to be out on the trail, searching for jobs for us, then he’d just as soon be at the ranch taking care of the livestock. The ranch would be ours when Garet passed, and though he’d never said a word against Garet’s running of it, I knew he was eager to be the one in charge. I wasn’t eager to leave him, though. I didn’t like being apart from him, and this job was going to keep us separate for at least two months. It had taken me a long damn time to find a man who loved me like Jehu did, who took care of me in the little ways. Rubbing my shoulders after a long day. Waking me up every morning with a cup of coffee and a light kiss on my forehead. Try as I might, I could never get out of bed in the morning before Jehu to return the favor. I finally gave up trying. I liked the attention too much. He’d bring me little gifts from his trips, a soap with rose petals in it, a lotion he used to rub on the scars on my back. Said it was supposed to help them fade, but it never did. They’d been healed for too long, I suppose. That didn’t mean Jehu would stop rubbing it on my back, though. Course, you know what a good long back rub would lead to. To this day I can’t smell camphor without longing for Jehu’s touch. Never been a sweeter, kinder, or gentler man than Jehu Lee.

“I’ve gotten off track. That’ll happen when I start thinking about Jehu. There’ll be days when I’ll sit here on the porch and think about him, and Garet and the girls, the times we had, for hours. Five years is all it was, but we lived a lot in those five years, and we were happy.”

We take a break here. I help Mrs. Lee into the house and to the bathroom. She uses a cane, but isn’t slump-shouldered like so many elderly women. She has a regal bearing, and I’m struck by the brightness in her copper-colored eyes. She pats my arm before going into the bathroom and says, “I like our chats.” I tell her I enjoy them, too. I get us some iced tea and we settle back onto the front porch.

“I went with Jehu and Stella and some cowboys to round up mustangs, which gave Jehu and me time to talk without Garet around. I told him I suspected Grace was a Pinkerton, and he said I was probably right. That was all I needed to hear. Jehu wasn’t suspicious by nature, and if he had reservations about Grace, then that was as good a confirmation as any that she was against us. We went to Garet with it when we got back, and goddamn if she didn’t smile and say, ‘She may be, but I want to give her a chance to do the right thing.’

“Garet had somehow lost sight of how the right thing to most people would be turning in a gang of outlaws. But she was stubborn about Grace, said that she was damaged, like we all were, and that made the difference. ‘She’s looking for acceptance,’ Garet said. ‘We give her that, and she won’t turn on us.’

“Jehu and I both thought it was a damn fool idea to be trusting our lives on a white woman’s better nature, but Garet said giving her a chance wasn’t the same as trusting her, and my job while in Denver was to shadow Grace, find out if she was a Pinkerton. We could feed her false information about our plans, because wouldn’t it be better to have the Pinkertons looking one way while we were pulling our job the other?

“Damn that Garet, she was a clever woman. I was angry I didn’t see her play from the beginning. While we’d been gone rounding up mustangs, she’d been softening up Grace, getting to know her, getting Grace to trust her. Grace had a crush on Garet, and Garet was fostering it, and she told me it was time to put my animosity on the shelf and to gain her trust. I told her she did trust me, as long as Garet wasn’t around, but that Grace was always going to go to Garet before a colored woman.

“Grace suggested she go to Rock Springs and catch the train to Denver alone, that the three of us traveling together might stand out. We agreed, and Jehu took her in the wagon so he could do another supply run. As I said, the wagon took a while and Jehu might have driven slower than usual, so Garet and I easily outpaced them to Rock Springs by following animal trails instead of the road. I went on to Denver, to pick up Grace when she got off the train. Garet detoured to Cheyenne, took this boy Newt who’d been beaten half to death by his pa, to the doctor, then left him with some friends of ours. She needed to pick up some hemp. Reefer, I think they call it these days. She liked smoking hemp to keep the pain at bay more than laudanum. That opium-laced shit will kill you.

“I knew Grace never suspected I was shadowing her, because if she had, she would have never led me straight to her meeting with Dorcas Connolly. Garet took the news better than I expected. She apologized for doubting me, for not trusting my instincts, but said we’d know if Grace had betrayed us to Dorcas as soon as she walked into Connolly’s office. If she did, I should kill Grace and skedaddle.

“We didn’t have to worry about that, though. She went into the lion’s den and came out with an invitation to stay the weekend at her old ranch. It wasn’t the plan, it was better. It would give her the chance to snoop in Connolly’s office, see which businesses we should hit. The Bank of Denver was a decoy for Grace. The real plan was bigger. Bolder. And a great way to go out.”