Letty Tompkins. Cook. Wife of unknown. Born before 1791. Died date unknown.
Letty Gault. Field hand. Wife of unknown. Born 1795. Died date unknown.
These two women with the same name weave in and out of my research so closely that I cannot always discern who is whom. Sometimes, I think I have a fact about one of them pinned down—a relation, a location, some reference to their work—and then I find no, that information applies to the other Letty. Or wait, maybe it is this Letty. I lose track of which Letty is which all the time.
Letty Tompkins was one of those people who are often listed among the other “single” people at Bremo. On an inventory taken sometime between 1834 and 1840, her entry reads, “Letty Tompkins—Recess—P—Husband owned by T. Shores 2 Grandchildren Morgan and Addison.” The man who owned her husband, Thomas Shores, ran a plantation just on the west side of Bremo; his name is now glittering on a road sign (Shores Road) where his plantation once stood. When people tell you they live over at Shores, this is what they mean. These people are usually black.
On the inventory of families, Letty Gault’s entry says, “Letty—UB—NP—lives with Mother. Husband sold—FH—1 child hired out.” I do not know who her husband was or who hired her daughter. Her mother was named Hannah, and Hannah was a spinner who was one of the original slaves that The General brought to Bremo from Surry County. Letty’s father was named Dick, and she had eight siblings—Sam, Mourning, Katy, Isham, Miama and Julyann (twins), and Jesse.
It is possible that Letty Tompkins (I’m tempted to say Letty T. and Letty G. as we did when we had two Jennifers in our third-grade class) saw her husband at the Shores Plantation. It wouldn’t have been impossible since she could have gotten a Sunday pass or perhaps just met up with him on the property line that joined Shores Plantation with Bremo. At Christmas, her daughter probably came home, too. Maybe The General let her husband join them here at Bremo for the day. Maybe they celebrated together. It could almost sound ideal.
In 1843, The General hires a man named Andrew Maxwell to oversee the work and garden at Recess. As part of that arrangement, The General states that Maxwell will have a certain number of “hands.”
To perform these duties, the following hands will be exclusively under said Maxwell’s direction. Isaac the Gardner, the boy, Polly the milk woman, Polly the cook, and the following named will at all intervals between the times of the duties in the House, render services in the gardens truc, patches, yard, lawn, etc, etc—Solomon, Addison and Letty.
(The document continues, without a hint of irony, to say that Maxwell will be paid $150 a year plus room and board “in consideration of the above duties.” It does not, of course, say anything about pay for Letty or her colleagues.) This woman who works and lives at Recess is almost certainly Letty Tompkins since this inventory lists her as living at Recess. The fact that Addison, Letty Tompkins’s grandson, is also there seems to confirm this fact. If so, the Tompkinses were favored enough to be trusted away from the main house.
But if The General showed some sort of favor for Letty Tompkins’s family, Letty Gault’s family seems to have been out of favor with him. He didn’t often sell people away, and yet, Letty’s husband was sold. Her daughter was hired out. It’s almost as if Letty was punished by having her family taken away, although I doubt anyone at the time—besides perhaps Letty herself—would have seen it that way. But it’s not just Letty who receives less than favorable attention from The General and the men who oversee his plantations. After Isham and Julyann are moved to Alabama with 48 other people in the late 1830s, they are both beaten by George Skipwith, the enslaved man who acted as The General’s overseer. George claimed that Isham was lazy and that Julyann had misplaced her hoe, but I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason they received this treatment was because George had absorbed some of his master’s opinion of the family.
These scant facts and the seeming favoritism and antagonism of The General form all I know about either Letty. The only other scraps I have are a couple of dates where one or the other of them (I can’t always tell which) receives a blanket or is included on an inventory.
It is so easy for me to conflate these two women—to make their two lives tell one story—for a couple of important reasons: they were not that far apart in age, and they both had husbands who did not work here on the farm and were, thus, not listed on inventories. I pulled much of the basis for my profiles from a key inventory that was made in the 1830s, and for most people, a spouse is listed. Without that information or a wide gap in age, it’s so simple to mix these women up and assume they are one person.
To do so, would, of course, mean that their individual lives are not important, that their individual identities are so insignificant that to reduce them to a composite is enough. Thus, I try to take extra care to ensure I am thinking, speaking, writing about the right Letty at the right time.
Still, sometimes I want to shake all these inventories or rip them apart in frustration. I get so weary of hunting so hard for the tiniest scrap of information. Sometimes it feels as if I’m trying to catch fireflies with a net. I only see the facts of these people’s lives for the briefest moments, and when I do see them, their stories often slip through holes stitched big by the legacy of a system that says, “Letty Gault or Letty Tompkins, what does it matter as long as they do their work and abide their place?”
Then, though, I see Letty Tompkins’s face glow with the golden light of a thousand lightning bugs as she walks in from the Recess garden. I see Letty Gault’s calloused hands tuck her elderly mother, Hannah, in at night in the room they share. At those moments, well, then, all the swinging of that big net feels like holy work.