My mother has a flair for personal correspondence. A friend of hers who had traveled from Kentucky to Richmond to attend Winnie’s funeral told me, “Varina writes so engagingly, as if we see each other frequently. Indeed, after I’ve read a letter from her, I feel as though we’ve just had a good, long visit.” In letters to me, however, Mother lets her hair down about whatever’s foremost on her mind at that moment—someone has infuriated her, or she’s elated over a bit of good fortune. Until the most recent tragedy, the main theme usually revolved around her other daughter—Winnie had provoked her and they were not on speaking terms; Winnie was seeing someone secretly and did not want her to know; Winnie was ailing, but would be better soon. The first communication I received about what turned out to be my sister’s fatal illness was not optimistic, but neither did it sound a cry of alarm:
Maggie, dear—A quick note to let you know Winnie has scarcely left her bed since she returned from the Atlanta convention afflicted with gastric upset. I believe she may have caught some rare germ in Egypt, which lay dormant in her system for months, then flared up when she traveled to the Deep South during the most miserable time of the year. On the train coming back, she had a clear hallucination of her own funeral. … Looking on the bright side, the village doctor seems competent, and I approve of his medicinal choices. But oh, how I wish I had gone down to Georgia in her stead!
That last was not true. Mother has never liked traveling to those crowded post-Reconstruction gatherings. She, Winnie, my little boy, and I were slated to travel on the special tour for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Father’s inauguration, but my child came down with scarlet fever soon after we arrived from Colorado. Mother used that excuse to stay at Beauvoir, with us. Had we been on the train as planned, the general from Georgia would have asked Mrs. Jefferson Davis to fill in for her husband when he was too weak to greet the crowd. Winnie and I might have had our names called out and waved dutifully to the crowd, but there would have been no anointing of one of us as a symbol of the Confederacy—like the battle flag, and Father.
After Father died, the South criticized his widow for moving herself and Winnie to New York, but Winnie was not blamed for that decision. Except for a flurry of outrage over her engagement to a Northerner with Abolitionist roots, the old guard’s devotion to its “Daughter” has not wavered in the twelve years since they gave her the title. Now, in the aftermath of her passing, they seem determined to deify Winnie Davis.
An energetic, prideful organization formed a few years ago, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, has taken on the project of procuring a monument for my sister’s grave. My mother put that bee in their bonnets, then sent the committee chairman a paperweight angel, which she described as being one of Winnie’s favorite possessions, for the sculptor to use as a model. I asked her if the women knew that object was given to Winnie by the man they got up in arms over her almost marrying. “I saw no reason to include that information,” she replied.
We have commissioned a life-sized bronze statue of Father for his tomb. The finished piece will depict him in the attire he most favored, a frock coat suit and cavalry boots, holding a slouched hat in one hand. Mother believes this image will help dispel the persistent rumor that the President of the Confederacy tried to escape his captors by disguising himself as a woman.
My recollection of that incident in the woods outside Irwinville, Georgia, is conjoined to another that occurred a few days later. As Father was being transferred from the ship Clyde onto a small launch for the trip to Fortress Monroe, near Norfolk, the Yankee soldiers made cruel sport of seven-year-old Jeff Jr. for begging them to take him to prison too. Shortly thereafter, Mother, Winnie, Aunt Margaret, Robert Brown, Jeffie, Willie, and I were put off the Clyde when it docked at Savannah. Mother had assumed that Father, as a defeated head of state, would be taken to Washington, D.C. Instead, he was treated with utmost contempt as a traitor who had led an “uprising.”
I was aware of stares of curiosity, hostility, and pity as we trudged under military guard to the Pulaski Hotel, carrying what was left of the possessions we had brought with us from Richmond. Most of those had been confiscated in the woods or on the ship. Fortunately, Mother’s sister Margaret had managed to conceal a collection of Father’s papers and books in her trunk, which, after we arrived in Canada, would be placed in safekeeping at the Bank of Montreal. We were insulted by Northerners in the hotel’s dining room and on the street. Mother seldom left the hotel except for brief walks at night with Robert Brown. Although we had no family friends to turn to in Savannah then, there was an outpouring of gifts to us of direly needed clothing from local residents.
Mother was not allowed to correspond with Father. After reading in the daily journals that her husband was in a dying condition, she wrote imploringly to Dr. John Craven, the physician at Fortress Monroe, whose name she had found in a newspaper: “Can these tales be even in part true? I have so often tended him through months of nervous agony, without ever hearing a groan or an expression of impatience. … Will you only write to me one word to say that he can recover? … If you are only permitted to say he is well, or he is better … The uncertainty is such agony.” After her first letters went unanswered, she wrote again, humbly thanking the doctor for “ministering to his necessity” and assuring him, “I daily give thanks to God that he has raised you up as a present help in my husband’s time of trouble.” Eventually, the prison director replaced Dr. Craven for having become too solicitous of the prisoner Jefferson Davis.
Mother spent much of that summer’s confinement composing letters to people who wielded significant influence. She had no qualms about asking the winning side to show charity and compassion to the South’s vanquished leader; he most certainly would have extended mercy to them, had the situation been reversed. During the War, Father was known for being softhearted and not punishing deserters from the Confederate army, unless they joined the enemy camp. His wife proclaimed him innocent of any involvement in the vile murder of President Lincoln and vehemently refuted the rumor that the President of the Confederacy had tried to elude the enemy by disguising himself in women’s clothing. She pleaded that he be treated humanely and that she be allowed to be with him during his incarceration. She would read the text aloud to Aunt Margaret and me—not for our approval or comments, but because the transition from written word to rhetoric added another dimension to her purpose and resolve. Then she would look for ways to get the missives past the inspectors.
The one that made the most impression on me was an eight-page letter to the husband of one of her close friends. It was hard for me to believe the courtly, amiable Montgomery Blair had a connection with Father’s enemies. I did not know that Mr. Blair had been President Lincoln’s Postmaster General, or what that title implied. In my mind, generals of the South had been brave men on horseback who consulted with my father then rode off to do his bidding on their battlefields. Seeing the address on the envelope, I closed my eyes and prayed that by some magical turnaround of time and events we would find ourselves in the nation’s capital, where we used to be, and where all the power was. Mother would be happy again; Father would be famous in a good way instead of a bad way; and we would be invited on Sunday afternoons to Blair House, where the Blairs’ daughter Maria and I would stare out a well-positioned window at the constant promenade on Pennsylvania Avenue.
During that summer in the Pulaski Hotel in Savannah, I would read and reread the copy my mother had kept of her letter to Mr. Blair. Even now, thirty-three years later, I remember almost word for word her description of what to me was the most disturbing part—
Just before day the enemy charged our camp yelling like demons. Mr. Davis received timely warning of their approach. He started down to the little stream hoping to meet his servant with his horse and arms. … Knowing he would be recognized, I begged him to let me throw over him a large waterproof wrap, which had often served him for a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the gray of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl that was around my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat. … When he had proceeded a few yards, the guards around our tents with a shocking oath called out to know who that was. I said it was my mother.
And I can hear the shimmer of desperation in Varina Howell Davis’s clear-as-birdsong voice, just as I did on that deceptively bright May morning in 1865.
Yesterday, when I expressed concern that Winnie’s elaborate monument might overshadow Father’s, Mother said with exasperation, as though I’d bothered her unnecessarily, “I have made sure that will not happen. The figure on hers will be seated; his effigy will be standing.”
But I have a feeling Winnie’s angel will be larger-than-life, as she seems to be.
Mother was unusually pensive this morning. “Are you all right?” I asked.
She said, “I was thinking of Mary Chesnut. Of my deceased women friends, she is the one I miss the most. Do you remember, when the leaky train had stopped in Camden, South Carolina, that she and her husband came down to the cars to see us?”
“Yes,” I said. “And they took us out to Mulberry, where we had a lovely, though meager meal. It seemed so safe there, I wished we could stay.”
“No place in the South was safe then, but Mary was not a handwringer. She could find levity in most situations. Everyone knew the War was coming to an end, and one of the men at the Chesnuts’ spoke as though the struggle was already in the past: ‘The reason we fought was not to keep the system of slavery intact; it was to defend ourselves and our families and our property against an invading force that was hell-bent on destroying all of us and everything we owned. The anti-slavery fanatics had stirred up such hatred for the South, we never stood a chance.’ Seeing how worked up the fellow was getting, Mary said calmly, ‘And yet, the occupying Yankees are contemptuous of the people they have set free. As reported in Richmond, a too-grateful Negro barber threw his arms around a Northern general and hugged him in a close embrace. The Yankee freed himself and shot the man dead; he said it was time to stop that damned nonsense.’”
Mother pressed her hands to her eyes. “The anecdote was too cruel to be humorous, but I laughed.”
I said, gently, “No, you didn’t. If you had laughed even once during those terrible weeks, I would have remembered it.” Father’s final illness began in early November 1889, when he set off alone on an excursion to Brierfield. He would not let Mother accompany him. I believe he realized the trip would be his last to the place where as a young man he had embarked on a different course, and he wanted to revisit that time, which had nothing to do with his wife. Or rather, not with this wife. Strangely, considering her jealous nature where he was concerned, Mother had made us respectfully aware of our father’s great love for his first bride, Knox Taylor, for whom he left the army to become a Mississippi planter. His brother Joseph had provided the land, but Father cleared it and built much of the house himself.
Although Brierfield never became the happy homestead he’d envisioned, the place has had a colorful history. When the Union gunboats began to come upriver, Uncle Joe did the prudent thing and left the area. Both his plantation, Hurricane, and Brierfield were soon occupied by contraband slaves who had followed Ulysses S. Grant’s troops during the invasion of Mississippi. The Union general’s stated purpose was to make of this fertile property “a paradise for Negroes.” Uncle Joe had seen to it that Father’s library and other possessions were stored in the attic of a friend’s house, but someone informed the soldiers of the location of the Rebel president’s personal property, and the place was plundered. Carpets from Brierfield were cut up for souvenirs; the draperies were used for tents. Word reached Father that the Yankees had found a small portrait of him in one of the boxes; they made a game of stabbing the likeness, over and over, until the canvas was shredded. Like many Southern plantations, Hurricane was torched by the Yankees, but Brierfield was left standing. After the War, Uncle Joe sold the whole tract of Davis Bend to Ben Montgomery, the slave he had taught to read when they were boys together, and who as manager of the plantation commissary had shared in the profits. Ben and his sons were to pay the note off gradually, but crop failures due to worm infestation and a severe flood that turned the peninsula into an island drove the Montgomerys into greater debt. In 1881, the Mississippi Supreme Court returned ownership of Davis Bend to Father and the other heirs of Joseph Davis. Ben Montgomery’s son Isaiah prospered by establishing a successful all-black colony, composed mostly of former slaves of the Davis plantations, near Cleveland, Mississippi. My mother communicates regularly with Isaiah, who was the only black delegate to the 1890 Constitutional Convention.
The last time we were together, shortly before she embarked for Egypt with the Pulitzers, Winnie said, as though practicing on me what she might tell some stranger who was ignorant about the old South, “Our mother and her brother-in-law Joseph Davis, even though they couldn’t stand each other, were of the same mind about helping the Negroes advance. They were more farsighted on that subject than most of their peers, including our father. Uncle Joe had provided incentives to his slaves to learn how to be responsible for themselves and their families—”
“You know so much, you should hire yourself out as a governess,” I said.
“I may come to that.”
“No, you won’t. Eventually, you will fulfill Mother’s dream and marry one of those wealthy, portly suitors she finds for you.”
Winnie shuddered. “That projection makes me feel as if a cat is walking over my grave.”
“I’ve never heard you use that expression before.”
“I learned it from a friend in Paris whose mother was a practitioner of Voodoo. They were from New Orleans. …”
At that moment, Mother came into the room, and Winnie’s face, which had become animated with whatever she was about to tell me, assumed its habitual enigmatic expression. I should have shown more interest in whatever secrets she had an impulse to divulge. I have never been particularly curious about how it must have been for her, as a perpetual debutante who allowed herself to be feted and courted but shied away from commitment. The thought of being passed from one dancing partner to another, year after year, is repugnant to me. Although Mother has hinted that Winnie had other proposals of marriage besides Fred Wilkinson’s, Winnie never gave me that impression. She did not discuss, in any depth, either before or after their breakup, her feelings about Fred with me. From photographs, I could see why she would be attracted to him. He appeared to resemble, to a slight extent, our brother Jeff, and also the young Burton Harrison, with whom I had been secretly in love when I was a child and he was ever present at the Richmond White House, doing Father’s bidding and being at Mother’s beck and call. … Did Winnie have any love affairs during the last eight years of her life? If so, I hope the men were discreet. Living as far as I do from New York, Washington, D.C., and the gossipy cities of the South, I have not been exposed to any scandalous tales about my sister. If I had shown concern and interest, she might have felt free to confide things to me that she wouldn’t tell our mother, and I would not have judged her. At least I think I would not have. I have just closed my eyes and said aloud, in case her spirit is hovering around, “Forgive me, Win. I should have done better by you.”
For the first leg of his last journey to Brierfield, Father boarded a New Orleans–bound train that conveniently stopped at Beauvoir for him. He had booked passage on the steamboat Leathers from New Orleans to Vicksburg. That stint of travel on the mighty Mississippi would have been the high point of his trip. He covered the last few miles to Davis Bend in an open cart and a bone-chilling rain, awoke the next morning at Brierfield with deep-chest bronchitis, and stayed in bed for three days. After his wife received a mysterious message from him that began, “Nothing is as it should be,” and a telegraph of concern from the plantation manager, she set out for Brierfield. As she departed New Orleans on the Laura Lee, a riverboat of the same line as the Leathers, Father was reboarding the latter at Vicksburg. The boats met below Natchez and she was transferred to the other vessel.
“How did she know he was on board?” Winnie asked, when she returned from Europe and wanted an account of every single thing I knew about those weeks before and after Father’s death.
“It’s a dramatic story, either way. She had been praying she would get to him quickly, when the revelation came to her that he had left Brierfield and was on his way to New Orleans. As soon as she spotted the Leathers, she knew he must be on it and insisted the captain of the Laura Lee let her board that one. The other version is that Captain Leathers’s son, who was piloting the ship that had Mother as a passenger, learned that her husband was on the other one. He brought his ship alongside, and when Father awoke the next morning, there, watching anxiously beside his berth, was his wife.”
“What if the boats had collided during that exchange?”
“You can put that question to her. She’s all yours now. As a welcome-home present, I’ve decided to give you my entire share of Mrs. V. Jefferson-Davis.”
Winnie looked as if I’d slapped her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a mean-spirited joke.”
“It probably did you good.”
It well may have. After that exchange, I had a period of reprieve from a recurrent memory I never shared with Winnie. In the final days of the War, on the train that took us from Richmond, my mother would chant softly in rhythm with the rotation of the wheels, “God, please save us. Don’t let them murder my children.”
If my strong, brave mother was terror-stricken, how could I not be? But at least, I had reasoned, the baby would be spared that worry: Those frantic prayers would go right over Winnie’s head.
The reunited Davises were met at the dock in New Orleans by Dr. Chaille and Jacob Payne and transported by ambulance to the Paynes’ house at the corner of First and Church Streets, in the Garden District. The residence was then occupied by the Paynes’ daughter and son-in-law, the Charles Fenners. Father was installed in a downstairs bedroom, where his wife could monitor visits from relatives and friends. He apologized to Mrs. Fenner for being trouble for her and told Dr. Chaille, “It may be strange to you that a man of my age should desire to live, but I do. … However, if it is God’s will, I must submit, and I am not afraid to die.” The physicians put him on a regimen of quinine and cordials, and Mother continued to administer the expectorant and calomel she had begun dosing him with as soon as she saw him. She was still trying to give him medicine when he spoke for the last time: “Pray excuse me, I cannot take it.” The last words to flow from his pen had been written in the autograph book of Alice Trainor, the young daughter of the manager at Brierfield: “May all your paths be peaceful and pleasant, charged with the best fruit, the doing good to others.” After a month-long decline that was peaceful, graceful, and filled with dignity, my father died in the first hour of Friday morning, the sixth of December 1889.
He had forbidden Mother to inform me or Winnie, who was abroad with the Pulitzers, of his illness, but I had read about it in a newspaper and was on my way to join them. I got as far as Fort Worth, then missed the connection that might have put me in New Orleans in time to see him before he died. The first thing I heard when I arrived in the city was the death knell of hundreds of church bells. Later, there would be the sound of muffled drums, which Mother said reminded her of the War that had taken so much out of her husband.
“The War took a lot out of you too,” I said.
The remark seemed to surprise her. “Yes, I suppose it did.”
His body had been transferred near midnight from the private residence to a council chamber at city hall. As I arrived there, the glass cover of the coffin was being removed for the sculptor to make the death mask. The Confederate president had been laid out in a gray suit. The pater patriae, whispered by nuns as they knelt briefly at the catafalque, would be reiterated in speeches and articles over the next week. He would have been surprised to hear himself referred to as father of a country that had taken away his citizenship. Journalists in both North and South, including some who usually were hostile to the man, would decry the fact that in Washington, D.C., where Jefferson Davis had served as Chairman of the War Department, flags were not lowered on any government building. During the five days he lay in state at the city hall in New Orleans—beneath Union and Confederate banners and a wreath of electrified bulbs that gave off a future-worldly glow—thousands had filed by the casket. Although a published account would note that the body was “remarkably well preserved,” there were signs of decomposition by the time the coffin was placed on a black-draped caisson for the three-hour procession to Metairie Cemetery, where his wife had given consent for his temporary interment in the Army of Northern Virginia tomb.
Virginia, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Kentucky vied for the honor of providing the final resting place for the Confederate president. He had expressed a wish to be buried beneath a live oak tree at Beauvoir but had left the decision of where his remains would lie to his wife. Beauvoir was ruled out immediately; that was the last place she would wish to be buried when her time came, and the land was too low-lying. In July 1891, my mother wrote to the “Veterans and Public of the Southern States” an eloquent explanation of her decision to accept the offer made by Fitzhugh Lee, for the State of Virginia: “The most strenuous efforts of his life had been made upon her soil and in defense of Richmond, as the capital of the Confederate States. … Every hillside about Richmond would tell of the valorous resistance which he initiated and directed with tireless vigilance.”
The transfer took place in late May 1893. The coffin was taken from Metairie Cemetery to Confederate Memorial Hall in New Orleans for a formal lying-in state; then Winnie and I accompanied it to Richmond on a special train that traveled slowly and made frequent stops. The South turned out full force all along the route. The diminutive station at Beauvoir was hung with wreaths; friends and former neighbors came aboard there to visit with us in the family car. In spite of the rain, elaborate ceremonies went on as planned in Montgomery; thousands paid their respects at the bier in the Alabama Capitol, where Father had taken the helm of the incipient Southern Confederation. At the station in Danville, Virginia, they sang the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”
Mother joined us in Richmond. Jubal Early, wearing Confederate gray (like my father, he seldom appeared in any other color), escorted her in the procession to Hollywood Cemetery. It was a splendid day. In the late-spring sunshine, polished muskets and swords glittered like stars. The caisson that transported Father’s remains to Metairie Cemetery had been drawn by six black horses. This time, the horses were white. Among the gold lace and tall plumes were tattered ensigns of various origin and style—the simplistic Bonnie Blue banner with a single white star, which cropped up in the first months of Secession; the Stars and Bars flag, which was not easily distinguishable in the thick of fighting from the Union’s Stars and Stripes; and the square St. Andrew’s Cross emblem of the Northern Army of Virginia, which became the official Confederate battle flag.
My sister and I did not indulge in much conversation with each other during that train journey. Her demeanor was that of a tragedienne playing her most dramatic role, yet I knew it was not an act; she was truly suffering. Winnie was closer to Father than I ever was. He had spent more time with the boys than with me, which was to be expected; when Winnie was born, the joy of a new baby in the house helped offset his grief over the death of his son Joe and the responsibility he had to face every day of that last dreadful year of the War. I have heard Mother say that, during the time they lived in Fortress Monroe with Father, Winnie had unlimited access to his affection.
He was an innately kind and sensitive man, but I don’t believe he realized that revival of father-daughter closeness, which he instigated at a time when Winnie was almost a young woman, might be damaging to her.
According to journalists, Winnie was the first American woman to be honored with a full military funeral. (The person for whom she was named intends for that honor to be accorded to her also; while the details of Winnie’s were still fresh in her mind, Mother composed a set of instructions for her own entombment and has given copies to both Addison and me. On mine, she wrote: “When I die, don’t you go around in black. It is bad for your health, and will depress your husband.”) The procession began at the Narragansett Pier station. Winnie’s coffin was escorted by an honor guard of Union Army veterans on a special train from Rhode Island to Richmond, where the watch was turned over to a contingent of Confederate Army veterans. From the pageantry involved and the attendant publicity, you might have thought that Winnie Davis was the American equivalent of Joan of Arc.
When she was four, Winnie said she wished I could be a real mother to her.
“Why?” I asked.
“So I would have one to spare.”
“I’m not old enough to be anybody’s mother,” I said.
“But what will happen to me, if ours dies?”
“In that event, I would take care of you. I do most of the time anyway.”
“Do you promise?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” I said.
“Good, then. That’s a big load off my mind,” Winnie said, in unconscious parody of the woman we had just been speaking of.
My sister was the neediest person I have ever known—but not for worldly goods, as might be expected, since the company she moved in exposed her to luxury far beyond her means. What she thirsted for was an ever-flowing font of affection. When she was six or seven, Win would ask other children who had been summoned to play with her, “Do you love me?” If one said “No,” she would punch the child with her fists.
When I became engaged to be married, Winnie begged me not to leave her. I didn’t leave her—although, as it happened, by the time she returned from Germany, I had moved with my husband to Colorado. Had we remained in Memphis, she could have visited us often, and Addison would have been a good influence on her. Neither of our parents seemed inclined to discipline Winnie. I recall one occasion when Mother took us with her to a large social gathering of some kind. Winnie was not yet walking alone, but she was trying to; I kept a firm grip on her pudgy hand and watched to be sure no one stepped on her. Apparently we did not make as grand an entrance as Mother would have wished, as she clapped her hands to get attention, then exclaimed effusively, “I want everyone to meet my baby. Winnie loves being with people.”
As though she understood those words and took them as a command, Win yanked her hand from mine and held her arms up beseechingly to a stranger. Over the next hour, she was passed from one embrace to another, as though she were a tray of cakes. They nuzzled her chubby neck and tickled her under her dress; sometimes all I could see of her was that head full of springy curls bobbing as she was raised and lowered, kissed and squeezed. I silently willed my little sister to howl in protest at the next leering face that bent close to hers, but Win absorbed the adoration as though it were her due; when I finally rescued her, she had gone limp with pleasure.
It never occurred to me to try to dissuade them from enrolling Winnie in a school in Germany. They had left me in schools in Paris, London, Montreal, and Baltimore, and I rather enjoyed the changes of scenery and faces. But except for the two years Father was in prison, I was never away from either of my parents for more than a few months at a time. I missed my mother terribly during those bleak winters in Canada. Robert Brown and I held the household together; poor old Grandmother was not mentally stable, and Aunt Margaret moped about pining for the times when she was popular among the young sets in prewar Natchez and Confederate Richmond.
By the time Win returned to this country, the spoiled, demanding child had become a calm, seemingly self-assured girl, whose height and bearing made her appear older than her seventeen years. Despite the highly publicized article she later wrote condemning the fashionable practice of sending American girls abroad for their educations, that long sojourn apart from our strong-willed parents was the making of my sister, just as my moving with my good husband beyond easy reach of those parents has been the making of me.
After we learned of Winnie’s illness, Addison wired my mother that I would come immediately to be of assistance however I might be needed. The response was swift and precise: “Not now. Maggie can visit when Winnie is well enough to enjoy her company.” Weeks went by, yet I was not summoned. Shortly before noon on September 18, I had a nudge that Winnie was trying to tell me something. When Kate Pulitzer’s telegram arrived informing us of my sister’s demise, I had just placed my packed luggage in the front hall. Addison, the children, and Robert Brown, who had been with my father when he died in New Orleans, would come the following day. It was Robert who reminded me, after I shared with him the letter that mentioned Winnie’s dream of her own funeral, that Jeff Jr. had a similar vision before he succumbed to yellow fever in the epidemic of 1878.
The deaths of my brothers (except for Samuel’s, which occurred before I was born) are etched in my memory, but none so vividly as Jeffie’s. Memphis was under quarantine due to an outbreak of malaria. No one could leave or enter the city, so our parents could not be with him during his last days or attend his funeral. Some months before, when Jeff Jr. had to leave Virginia Military Institute because of poor grades, my husband had found him a position at the same bank where he was employed. But for that bit of providence, my debonair brother would not have been almost engaged to be married in Memphis; he would have returned to Beauvoir and likely to a previous love, in Biloxi. Mother has never verbally blamed me for his death, but I believe she does so in her heart. Although I scarcely left Jeffie’s side for all the days of his illness, I was preoccupied with the recent loss of our firstborn infant; I did not comprehend how seriously ill my patient was. Jeff Jr.’s dying, which was as sudden as if a bullet had pierced his heart, was a terrible surprise. I had assumed that God, having just taken my child, would spare my brother.
It’s been almost six months since Winnie’s passing, and my mother’s eyes are still engorged with that grief. I had intended to spend the journey by train from Colorado Springs to Narragansett Pier giving vent to my personal feelings of loss—Win was my only sister, last remaining sibling—but when I reached my destination, the handkerchief I had clutched the whole way had not blotted a single tear. As I gathered up the basket of needlework I had brought to impress my mother and a stack of magazines Winnie would have enjoyed (I had been saving them to bring when she felt like seeing me), a wave of remorse engulfed me in a single despairing thought: I did not help her with our mother as much as I should have.
Unlike Winnie, I have never been inclined to give in to despair; I fight it the only way I know how, which is to substitute thoughts or memories that have strong optimistic potential. In this instance, I reminded myself of the time, a whole month of June, when Addison and I had Mother and Winnie as our guests in a leased cottage at Narragansett Pier. Win was like a kite cut loose from its string. It was pleasant, seeing her enjoy having whole days to herself and knowing that we were the cause of it. In the mornings, she would bathe in the surf, then relax in a seaside chair and read a book. Some days, she would set up her easel by the pier or the seawall and paint. Despite Mother’s pleas that she not expose herself to the sun’s damaging onslaught, her face and arms took on a lovely shade of biscuit tan that summer, and her hair lightened to the color of hay. Straw-boatered heads would turn to watch the tall young woman from Mississippi stroll the boardwalk and the water’s edge as though her mind were a thousand miles away. In the afternoons, she would ride bicycles or go boating with other youthful vacationers she had found on her own, and most evenings, she would be called for by one of the men in this casual group. None of them showed any interest in getting to know her family. Winnie never seemed concerned about the credentials of her male companions, although Mother would caution her to be selective and not waste her time or risk her reputation by being seen in unacceptable company.
With Winnie thus occupied, it fell to me to keep Mother entertained during that holiday. When I complained to Addison, he reminded me gently, “But we agreed your sister should have every opportunity to spend time away from her.”
Varina, Sr., either loves a place or can’t stand it. During that visit, she became enamored of that particular spot of Eastern seashore, and in her canny, resourceful way, she set about making favorable impressions on innkeepers and others among the established community. Soon my mother and her companion-daughter had become regulars of the summer vacation colony at Narragansett Pier. I was surprised they could afford that annual holiday, but I didn’t ask the question—not even of Addison, who, if he wasn’t actually providing the wherewithal, likely knew the source of it.
When I arrived at the terminal on this sad mission, several people were there to greet me. The head of the delegation explained, “My dear Mrs. Hayes, your mother is too devastated to leave her rooms, but she is eager to see you. This morning she told me, ‘Margaret will be my mainstay during these dark days.’”
Margaret? I could not remember a time, other than when she ordered invitations for my wedding, when my mother has ever referred to me by my real name.
Riding with these well-meaning strangers to the hotel, I felt disgruntlement give way to practical resolve. There would be much to do, and a large part would fall on me. Mother had gone completely to pieces at both of Father’s funerals. At least Winnie was around to help me with her during the second one. The pretty little maid Margaret Connelly, whom I had met on previous visits in New York, answered the door with such a weepy face I wondered if my mother had expired too. The foyer and parlor were crammed with stiff floral arrangements and standing sprays, some in the shapes of hearts and crosses. But the scents of flowers do not mask the smells of illness and death. My eyes had begun to water and itch as soon as I set foot in that suite, and bile was rising in my throat. As I unpinned my hat, the servant who shares my name and doesn’t have to answer to a glib alteration of it said softly, “Mrs. Hayes, Mrs. Davis said for me to tell you her nerves are completely frazzled, she’s had no relief from the pallid opiates the doctor provided—her own medications have been forbidden her by that man—and she’s in her bedroom, waiting for you.”
What was I supposed to do? Impulsively, I followed the first inclination and gave my mother free access to all the vials and bottles that the efficient Margaret, obeying the doctor’s instructions, had put beyond her reach. Mother was like a zombie on the train to Richmond and during the funeral, but on the return trip, she began to shake off the lethargic effects of her own potions; by the time we got back to the Rockingham Hotel, she had come to her senses.
The next item on the agenda was to get her moved from the hotel at Narragansett Pier back into the cluttered, four-room apartment in New York. When I unlocked that door, she waded into the stuffiness and eased herself onto the cushioned ledge of a bay window. “I love this view of the park,” she sighed. “Winnie liked to take solitary walks there. I would sit here and watch her stroll along a curving path until she disappeared into the trees; then I would try not to be anxious until I saw her re-emerge. In the winter, wrapped in beaver, with her hands inside the exquisite ermine muff the Austrian count had given her, she looked like a European princess. She once said Central Park in the snow reminded her of Karlsruhe, and I asked her if that was a good memory. She replied, ‘No, but it was eerily beautiful. That is where I learned that beauty can be terrifying.’”
My mother put her face close to the dirt-streaked glass, as though that effort might produce the vision she longed for. After a moment, she said glumly, “We should not have left her at that school as long as we did. Shortly before he died, your father said to me, with great sadness in his voice, ‘We have done our youngest a grave disservice. We severed her so completely from her roots, there was no chance of any real re-attachment.’ That Winnie appeared to have a foreigner’s perception of this country especially distressed him. After her return to us, she read his treatise, then informed him the States’ Rights philosophy he had championed was unrealistic for a nation as ‘unwieldy’ as this one. She would try to change his thinking about various aspects of the conflict, as though rehashing a chess game. He was both amused at her audacity and hurt by her expressing a viewpoint that wasn’t altogether compatible with his.”
“Winnie was too intellectual and analytical for her own good,” I said. “The people who idolized her, those masses she talked down to from the podiums of the Lost Cause, did not know her at all.”
Mother waved that comment away as if it were a housefly. “She earned every drop of their devotion. Winnie continued that role long after she tired of it, because she thought your father would have wished her to do so.”
“And also, because she had become dependent on the acclaim. She had no intention of relinquishing her celebrity.” I heard my voice go shrill with pettiness, but plunged on: “While Winnie was making charming speeches on those makeshift stages, I was making a home for my husband and children. In case you don’t remember, some of that duty can be quite grueling.”
My mother had both hands firmly pressed on her chest, as though to calm a wildly beating heart. I never know if such gestures are calculated to create an effect, or whether she believes she is about to go into catatonic shock. After a moment of catching her breath, she said softly, “My darling Maggie, you have heeded the most honorable calling a woman can have. If our line continues, it will be through you and your precious offspring. You are the exemplary daughter every mother dreams of having.”
I did not look at her. My eyes were brimming with tears, and I was afraid I might glimpse a trace of mockery in hers.
After my mother finally came back from Europe, still maintaining she would never join her husband in another woman’s house, she made a prolonged visit to Addison and me in Memphis. She complained to others that I asked her to leave, but the truth is, my husband was able to convince her that accepting Mrs. Dorsey’s invitation would put a better face on an awkward situation. The transference was anything but gracious on Mother’s part. Immediately after our arrival at Beauvoir, she created a terrible scene over nothing and ran screaming into the woods. It took a lot of cajoling to calm her. I believe she had suddenly realized, in what she would call a flash of divine intuition, that her rival was not a woman but the seductiveness of that house and setting; it was obvious that her husband had settled in and would never want to move again. After Mrs. Dorsey died and Father became the owner of the property, his wife found her own niche there. Varina Howell Davis’s energy and homemaking talents would render Beauvoir even more beguiling, and for the next nine years, a steady stream of visitors—friends, our numerous relatives, and strangers—would be treated to Southern hospitality that may have been somewhat Spartan on occasion, due to the Davises’ lack of provender, but was never provincial.
Mother had a cupboard built of cypress to hold her Staffordshire china and the everyday blue-and-white willowware. She supervised construction of a pair of octagonal, upholstered benches, which provided seating in the wide, central hall. When tourists came from other states and Europe, she would point out items of special significance: the quilt made for the president by “hundreds” of Confederate women; the French console and pier mirror from the home of Napoleon I, which she had purchased on a trip to Paris; a cup and saucer that had belonged to Lord Byron; and a picture album that had been stolen by a Union soldier and returned to them from Independence, Iowa, by the soldier’s father. She would caress the marble head of her firstborn, Samuel—the small bust had been rescued during the pillaging of Richmond—and run her hands lightly over Winnie’s oil painting of the Davis coat of arms.
According to Mother, Winnie’s beau Fred Wilkinson, on his first visit, reacted to life at Beauvoir as though it were totally different from any place he had ever known. He had been surprised to see photographs of Abraham Lincoln and the martyred Abolitionist John Brown in the collection Father had put together of famous men he admired.
Oscar Wilde, a famous man Father did not admire, had named Jefferson Davis as the person he would most like to see on his American lecture tour. At Mother’s invitation, Mr. Wilde visited Beauvoir between his appearances in Mobile and New Orleans. That evening, as frequently happened, Father was not feeling up to prolonged entertainment and retired to his room after dinner. Mother and Winnie were enthralled by the brilliant conversation they shared with the visitor who, after they too retired, walked alone for hours on the moonlit beach in front of the house. Mr. Wilde left a portrait of himself inscribed, “To Jefferson Davis in all loyal admiration from Oscar Wilde, May ’82.”
Winnie made a will shortly before she left for Egypt last year. I was not surprised to learn she had left Beauvoir to our mother; they were of one mind in wanting the property to become a memorial to Father and a home for indigent Confederate veterans. A few weeks after my sister’s funeral, Mother insisted that she and I make a pilgrimage to Beauvoir, to decide what should be left there and what should go to the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond and other repositories in New Orleans and Montgomery. We have just finished this prioritizing. She wept to see what was familiar but had been long out of sight and mind, such as the dressing gown and slippers her husband had favored but would never wear to the table—even when he was feeling poorly—out of respect for her.
Although Mother and Winnie had brought some of Father’s things with them when they moved to New York, there was still much to be disposed of: papers and documents, cigar cases, pipes, tobacco pouches, and curiosities of the War, such as the hollow doll in which morphine and quinine had been smuggled and a bar of soap that had conveyed a secret message from England for Judah P. Benjamin. She picked up each item, as if holding it in her hands could impart something more of him. Then she did the same with my sister’s odds and ends—the driving whip and guitar, a red satin-lined work box and a messy paint box, and the dainty little watch purportedly given to Winnie by Princess Charlotte (but Winnie never seemed to recall the occasion).
Although I had never lived in that grand old house, seeing my parents’ bedrooms again made me nostalgic. Father’s, with his large, plain furniture, opened onto the porch and an expansive vista of the sea. The leather trunk at the foot of his bed had been with him to the Mexican War and Europe. Mother’s room, which adjoined his and had a view of the rose garden, was more inviting, with canary yellow walls, an overstuffed chair, her airy bentwood rocker, the sewing machine she had acquired in Washington (and had enthusiastically endorsed in the manufacturer’s advertisement), and the tall tester bed with its sky-colored canopy. A homemade fan of wild turkey feathers lay on a table, probably exactly as she’d left it when she and Winnie went to live in New York.
Watching her caress the canopy of the crib in which each of her children had slept, I felt closer to my mother than I had in years. That same day, without her knowledge, I wrote to her friend Mrs. Carrie Phelan Beale and requested the name “Jefferson Davis–Varina Davis Memorial Library” be used at Montgomery’s First White House of the Confederacy, which would also be the recipient of many of the family’s artifacts. I explained, finally, “She is now too old and feeble to do for others as she has always done. I know Winnie would agree with me in wishing our mother’s name honored where she was beloved.”
Now we are back in the apartment that overlooks Central Park, and I am provoked with her again. Every time she tells me how terrible it is to outlive one’s children, I must bite my tongue not to remind her that I, too, had my firstborn taken from me and that the younger three Davises were almost as much my children as hers. I helped take care of those real-life babies when I might have been playing dolls, because our mother was otherwise involved. However, I grant her this: The pursuits that occupied her during those years were not frivolous. She would bustle about the plantation in her calico dresses with a ring of keys jangling at her waist. She cut out and sewed garments in the same serviceable fabric for servants at Brierfield, whom she never referred to as slaves. She nursed and dosed them when they were ill and saw to it that any who wished to had the opportunity to learn to read and do sums. There, and later at Beauvoir, Mother did much of the cooking, preserving, and gardening herself. In Washington, she dressed stylishly and was impeccably groomed. As someone wrote back then, “Varina Howell Davis is like a fruit tree in bloom; she has blossomed in the nation’s capital.”
She was sorely disappointed when Mississippi seceded from the Union and her husband resigned his Senate seat, because it meant they would leave Washington immediately—yet she had confidently expected to return to the nation’s capital in the not-too-distant future. Jefferson Davis had held his own with all the political factions. A highly regarded statesman, he had not been in favor of Secession; he could speak to the sentiments of the pro-Unionists in Boston as well as to those of rabid dis-Unionists in Charleston. With his wife’s encouragement, he had begun gathering his speeches into a pamphlet for distribution. Although my father never admitted that he wanted to run for President of the United States, others were convinced the timing was right, and that the stage was set for him to become a viable candidate. And my mother had not given up that dream. I was present when she told the clever Negro seamstress Elizabeth Keckley, who made her fine gowns for the Washington scene as well as more practical attire for life on the plantation, “We’ll be back here when my husband becomes President of the United States.” Later, when that quotation appeared in a book written by Mrs. Keckley, Mrs. Jefferson Davis denied having said any such thing.
In Montgomery and Richmond, she helped her husband forge a government and advised him on everything from the state of his health to cabinet appointments. I was proud that my busy, energetic mother considered me capable of taking on adult responsibility when I was seven, eight, and nine years old, and with her as my lodestar, I believe to this day that I did whatever she required of me to the best of my ability.
Another fragment has popped up unbidden: In Memphis, as I waited to walk Winnie home from school, she came out with a triumphant smile lighting her face. “Maggie, I know the real name of the War now. It’s the War Between the States.”
I had to burst her balloon. “That’s not its only name. It’s also known as the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression, Mr. Lincoln’s War, the Yankee Invasion, the War for Southern Freedom, the War of the Rebellion—now that’s one you must never, ever dare to call it around Father or Mother—and the Recent Unpleasantness.”
“Oh. Well, then, which should I call it?”
“The last.”
That night at dinner Winnie said to Father, “Aren’t you glad the Recent Unpleasantness is over and done with?”
He glanced at Mother. “I didn’t know it was. But yes, indeed, I’m heartily glad to hear it.”
Winnie’s forthcoming coronation as queen of the most extravagant of all Mardi Gras balls was supposed to be a carefully guarded secret. Of course, Mother passed it on to me weeks ahead of time, so that I could start moving heaven and earth to get my husband and myself to New Orleans. I read the letter silently, then said to Addison, “Whatever can she be thinking of?”
He waited with slightly raised eyebrows for me to provide the answer.
“It’s embarrassing for me to explain, even to you,” I sighed.
“Well, please try.”
“You will recall that Winnie made her bow to society in New Orleans. During that festive coming out in the 1883 Mardi Gras season, she was presented in the courts of masked balls and reigned as queen of one of them, the Knights of Momus. Now, nine years later, she is slated to be queen for another of these organizations, the Krewe of Comus. Mother has reminded me— although I never knew it to begin with—that Father had a special admiration for this men’s secret society because it started right back up the year after the War ended.”
“So what do you find embarrassing?”
“The fact that she has interfered with plans that were made months or years ago. The daughter of a prominent family in New Orleans had already been selected to wear the Comus crown in the coming season. In Mother’s words”—I found the place, and read verbatim—“‘This young lady graciously relinquished the honor on learning that Winnie was to be in the Ladies’ Court, because she could not, in good conscience, put herself ahead of the Southern President’s daughter.’”
“That was a noble gesture,” Addison said.
“The girl probably had no say in the matter. A committee or ball captain was coerced into replacing her with Winnie. Mother will stop at nothing when she wants to accomplish a goal. This time, it’s as though she suddenly decided that you and I should return to Memphis and have another church wedding, to attract attention to the family. ‘The Davises are still here! Don’t forget us!’”
“Perhaps your mother really is convinced that Winnie will benefit from another round of revelry in the city that puts a lot of stock in that sort of thing. And Winnie must agree with her, if she’s going along with it.”
“I doubt my sister was informed before the decision was made. If Winnie balked because of the obvious age difference between her and the other, younger women being presented, Mother would say that doesn’t matter in the least, because she will be the prettiest, the most poised, et cetera. I suspect Winnie just gave in on this one because the deed was a fait accompli when Mother informed her, and living with that woman would be near impossible otherwise.”
Addison said cheerfully, “I suppose we must make the best of the situation and be supportive.”
“I don’t go to the veterans’ conventions to support Winnie’s performance in that arena, and I have no intention of traveling to New Orleans to see another variation of the same. But what excuse can I use?”
“We have a prior commitment?”
“Mother would expect us to cancel it. Perhaps we should plan to be there, and then at the last minute, one of us can come down with something.”
Addison offered, “I could get the measles. I’ve never had those before.”
The invitation, which unfolded into an exquisite depiction of a lotus blossom and arrived in an envelope with a gilt crown embossed on the flap, was so splendid I almost changed my mind. Mother had informed me (in strict confidence; I was not to reveal a single detail) that the pageantry, including the parade, was designed by a foremost artist in that medium as a series of tableaux around the theme of “Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun.” The queen’s elaborate costume of Japanese silk with a jeweled sunburst collar and belt had been made in Paris according to the measurements of the previous nominee and had to be let out in the seams and made longer for Winnie. The jewelry she would wear, also the tiara and scepter, came from France. Mother had been given a peep at the splendid gold cup that would be Winnie’s coronation gift.
Later, after they had returned to New York, I sent them a sincere letter of regret that we had been unable to attend the festivities, especially the parade of floats and the ball at the French Opera House. I knew I should have followed Addison’s advice and been supportive of my sister and mother in this undertaking, if only by swelling the number of family members in attendance. Winnie never mentioned the subject to me, but Mother wrote a full, glowing report: “As the Queen was led down from the dais to promenade around the floor, the applause was deafening, and I have never heard so many compliments paid to anyone as Winnie received that evening. Among her attentive escorts were two distinguished, quite eligible gentlemen—one a widower who lives in New Orleans; the other a near-nobleman from London—so, let us hope something develops along either of those lines.” If something ever did, I never heard of it. Later, Mother would write, rather resignedly, “The portrait of Winnie in the exotic, Oriental costume is quite mysterious looking, and more than one person has noted its resemblance to Da Vinci’s painting of the Mona Lisa. The analogy is appropriate. Even for me—perhaps, especially for me—Winnie is not an easy book to read.”
Addison has been like a real son to my parents. We had not been married a full year before he had to come to Father’s rescue in a financial matter, and unfortunately, that became a pattern. Hardly a month goes by that Mother doesn’t write to my husband requesting assistance. She thanks him promptly, profusely, and piteously: “Whatever would this family have done without you. … ”
But she doesn’t express anything more than perfunctory gratitude to me for stroking her forehead, rubbing her feet, recording and acknowledging numerous tributes in memory of Father and Winnie, spending these weeks with her when I am needed at home, and for the promise she extracted from me this very morning, with my hand on the Bible: that I will not die before she does.