Jefferson's Sons

by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

  Harriet rolled her eyes at Maddy. “They’ll be white,” she said.

  “I can see that,” Maddy said. “I know my colors pretty well by now, thank you.”

  Eston’s head came up. “I’m not so sure—” he joked.

  “I don’t mean the cloth is white,” Harriet said. “I mean it’s for my white person’s clothes—for when I’m living as a white woman.”

  Harriet would never say when she “became a white woman,” or “passed for a white woman.” Harriet said she was exactly what she was. Right now she was living as a slave, later she would live as a free white woman. Who or what she was wouldn’t change one bit.

  No matter who or what Maddy was, he wouldn’t pass for white. Eston would. Maddy still hated being the one left out. Sometimes he wanted to ask Eston to stay black with him, but Eston was only ten years old, and anyhow the question wasn’t fair.

  “I don’t know why you’re worried about clothes now,” Maddy said. Harriet wasn’t even eighteen. She wouldn’t be allowed to leave until she was twenty-one.

  “Time enough we get started,” Mama said. “The sewing will take a while, especially if we do it right, which we will. We’ll take it bit by bit.” She smiled at Harriet. “I’m not sending you out into the world in a ragged shift and old leather shoes.”

  Harriet held out her foot, clad in the rough leather shoes all the slaves wore. “I won’t be sorry to be rid of these,” she said.

  “Get white shoes,” Eston said. “Little white shoes like Miss Cornelia.”

  “Satin shoes,” Harriet said dreamily, “for dancing.”

  “Dancing!” Maddy snorted. What would Harriet do at a white dance? She wouldn’t know the figures. She wouldn’t have the first clue what to do.

  Eston sprang up in the firelight. He stood in front of Harriet and bowed from the waist, like a gentleman. Harriet laughed. Eston took her hand, lifted her from her chair, and swung her around the room. He hummed while they danced.

  Eston, Maddy thought, could make himself into anyone. He asked Mama, “Why aren’t you worried about Beverly’s clothes?”

  In answer, Mama held up the shirt she was sewing. Maddy had assumed it was for Master Jefferson. “No,” Mama said, guessing what Maddy was thinking, “this is for Beverly. I’ve got half a dozen shirts put by, and some fine-hemmed cravats, and a waistcoat. His coat and breeches will come from a tailor’s shop. We’re working on it.”

  “Where are we getting the money for that?” Maddy asked. He knew he sounded snippy. He didn’t mean to, but all their money put together wouldn’t buy tailor-made clothes.

  “Where do we get the money for anything?” Mama replied. “You didn’t think your father would send you out into the world naked, did you?”

  Maddy didn’t know what he thought. Mostly, he thought that Beverly’s twenty-first birthday was only three months away. Three more months until he never saw Beverly again.

  Those three months were nothing but trouble.

  First, Master Jefferson got sick. He went to soak at a famous hot springs for his rheumatism, and something in the water made great big boils break out all over his backside. Eston laughed when Mama first told them, but Mama said it wasn’t funny at all. She said that during the long carriage ride home the boils had gone septic. Infections were serious. Master Jefferson might die.

  Maddy didn’t believe Master Jefferson could possibly die from something as undignified as boils on his backside, but as weeks passed he began to worry. All Master Jefferson could do was lie on his side in bed. It hurt too much to sit and he was too weak to stand. He couldn’t write letters or talk to his visitors. After a few weeks he developed a fever. Mama said the infection had gotten into his blood.

  “If he dies, what happens to us?” Maddy asked. “Will Beverly still leave?”

  “Of course,” Mama said. But she looked so worried Maddy wasn’t sure he believed her.

  Doctors came and went. Mama spent all her time at the great house, nursing Master Jefferson. He grew better, then worse, better, then worse. When at last he was out of danger, and starting to walk again, he looked like he’d aged ten years.

  Then Burwell’s wife died suddenly. Grief laid Burwell and his eight little children flat. The rest of Mulberry Row mourned too.

  Then Charles Bankhead up and stabbed Mister Jeff. Charles Bankhead was the drunken fool who had married Miss Anne, Master Jefferson’s oldest granddaughter. Everyone knew it was a miserable marriage. Charles Bankhead hit people when he was drunk, and he was drunk most of the time. He hit Miss Anne. Miss Martha and Master Jefferson worried that one day he would kill her. They begged Miss Anne to leave him and come back to Monticello, but she wouldn’t, and no one understood why. She had little children. Maddy thought she’d want to stay alive.

  Mister Jeff hated Charles Bankhead for hitting Miss Anne. Charles Bankhead hated Mister Jeff because he hated nearly everyone. They ran into each other in Charlottesville and got into a fight, and Charles Bankhead pulled out a knife.

  A man from Charlottesville rode hard up the mountain just after dinnertime to tell them Mister Jeff had been stabbed, and was dying. Master Jefferson was still too weak to ride, but he called for his horse anyhow and galloped straight down to Charlottesville in the dark. Miss Martha fell to pieces worrying over her son, her father, and Miss Anne. Mama tried to comfort her, but Maddy knew Mama was anxious too.

  Mister Jeff had been stabbed in the gut, which should have killed him, but it didn’t. He was sick a long time. He’d been stabbed in the arm too. His arm never worked right again. The sheriff drew up assault charges, but Charles Bankhead grabbed Miss Anne and their children and fled across the county line to escape arrest. Miss Martha begged Miss Anne to come home. She wouldn’t.

  If a woman won’t leave the man that stabs her brother and leaves him for dead, there’s no hope for her, Mama said. She said Miss Martha’d made a bad choice, marrying Mr. Randolph, and now her daughters were making bad choices too. “Harriet!” she said. “If a man ever hits you, even once, I want you to leave his house! That instant! You come back here if you have to, you hear me!”

  Harriet said, “Yes, Mama. But I won’t have to. If any man hits me, I’ll knock him dead.”

  Maddy laughed, but not Mama. “Beverly,” she said, turning on him, “you take care of your sister. You keep an eye on the kind of man she ends up with. You hear me? You’ve got to take charge since I won’t be there. I want you both with good people—with kind people. You hear me?” Mama’s voice choked. She wiped her eyes.

  “Mama,” Harriet said, “you taught us well. We’ll do fine.”

  “I hope so,” Mama said. “I hope and pray.”

  Beverly said nothing. The closer it came to the first of April, his birthday, the quieter Beverly became.

  Spring 1819

  Chapter Thirty

  Beverly’s Twenty-first Birthday

  On the last day of March, Beverly tried to give Eston and Maddy the kit violin. He polished it, tuned it, and played one final song. Then he put it into Maddy’s hands. “You boys take care of that,” he said.

  Maddy choked and could only nod, but Eston said, “We don’t want it. That old kit violin. You better take that violin with you, Beverly. Otherwise you’ll have nothing to play.”

  “If I take it,” Beverly said, “you won’t have anything to play. How’d you like that?” Maddy enjoyed playing the violin, but he could survive without it. Eston, on the other hand, would die.

  Eston lifted his chin. “Our father will get me another violin,” he said. “A real one, a good one. I can’t make a living playing music on an old kit violin.”

  Eston was not quite eleven. It was hard to believe sometimes, the way he talked like a old man. He looked just exactly like Master Jefferson.

  “You aren’t going to make a living playing music,” Maddy said. “You’ll be a carpenter, like the rest of us.”

  Eston narrowed his eyes. He said to Beverly, “I don’t want your lousy violin.”r />
  Maddy couldn’t believe they were arguing about a violin on Beverly’s last day with them. He said, “Well, I do. You’re just nuts, Eston, if you think somebody’s going to buy us a better one. How much do you think violins cost? You know there’s no extra money. Beverly’ll make good money where he’s going, he’ll be able to buy himself a new violin.”

  Maddy didn’t know where Beverly planned to go. He supposed Beverly had it figured out, but he didn’t want to ask. It was safer if he didn’t know. He also wasn’t sure, even now, that he believed Beverly would be allowed to just walk away.

  “There was money to buy Miss Virginia a new saddle last week,” Eston said. “There’ll be money for my violin.”

  “Arguing with you is like arguing with a tree,” Maddy said. “Only a tree might get old and fall down.” Eston wouldn’t ever budge.

  “You say that,” Eston said, “but you keep arguing anyway.”

  “Oh,” Maddy said, frustrated, “have it your way.”

  Beverly looked at the violin, then shut it up in its case, and slid the case back under the bed. “I’ll fetch it in the morning,” he said.

  “You’re really going?” As soon as Maddy said that, he wished he hadn’t.

  “Tell Uncle John he taught me well,” Beverly said. “Tell him I’m grateful.”

  “Tell him yourself,” said Eston.

  “Eston, show some sense,” scolded Harriet. She was knitting by the fire. Mama hadn’t come in from her work yet, even though it was nearly dark and Beverly’s last day.

  “I’ll send word,” Beverly said. “Once I’ve found a place. A letter—”

  “Send it to Jesse Scott,” Maddy said. “We’ll write back. We’ll put Jesse’s name on the envelope.”

  The door opened. Mama slipped in, her arms full. She sat on the edge of the bed and showed them what she’d brought.

  A tailored white man’s suit of clothes—a coat, and brass-buttoned breeches. A new pair of shoes, with brass buckles. A new felt hat. A knife that fit into a small leather sheath. A leather pocketbook. Mama opened the pocketbook and showed them the money inside. “Fifty dollars,” she said. “With the shirts and socks and neckcloths I’ve made, it should be enough to get you on your way. Uncle John’s set aside a box of tools for you. They’ll be just inside the workshop door.”

  “And the violin,” prompted Eston.

  Beverly looked like he was about to cry. In the morning he slipped away. He took the violin with him.

  He disappeared like a rock falling into a lake without a ripple. No one, not in the great house, not in the kitchen, not anywhere on Mulberry Row, so much as mentioned he was gone. Even little Peter Fossett acted like Beverly had never existed. The overseers didn’t speak of him. Mama didn’t speak of him. Harriet walked around with a closed expression on her face. Eston looked sad, but he held quiet too.

  All Maddy’s thoughts were of Beverly. Could he really pass for a white man? Was he somewhere safe? Was he frightened? Was he happy? The silence wore Maddy down like rough sandpaper on a board. “Uncle John,” he said at last, when they were alone in the woodshop, just the two of them and Eston, “do you think Bev—”

  “Hsst!” said Uncle John.

  “But I just—”

  “Not a word.”

  “But every—”

  “Keep still,” Uncle John said. “Less said the better. Trust me.”

  Maddy didn’t understand why. Mama had promised nobody would try to catch Beverly. “We don’t need folks from Charlottesville knowing our business,” Uncle John went on. “The less they hear about any escaped slaves, the better.”

  “But he’s not—”

  “Hsst!” said Uncle John.

  Eston looked over from the corner of the workroom, from where he was sweeping the floor. He winked at Maddy. Grateful, Maddy winked back.

  On their way home that night, Maddy asked Eston, “Have you stopped thinking about him yet?”

  “Nope,” Eston said. “What do you think he looks like, free?”

  “What do you think he feels like?” Maddy asked.

  When they asked Mama, she said, “Someday, you’ll know.”

  A week later, the laundry room in the north dependency caught fire. It spread to the laundry roof, then down the walkway toward the great house, fueled by a rising wind. Maddy joined everyone on the mountaintop, even Master Jefferson, who was still weak and thin, in beating the fire out with wet gunny sacks, brooms, and snow from the icehouse. Afterward, filthy and exhausted, Maddy slumped to the ground. Peter Fossett climbed into his lap. “That was scary,” Peter said. “I thought it was going to burn up the horses.” The stable next to the laundry had caught fire, but Wormley had gotten the horses out.

  “I know,” Maddy said. “Everything’s okay now.”

  Peter nodded. “Wait ’til we tell Beverly.” Then he clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Mama says we’re supposed to pretend there wasn’t a Beverly.”

  Maddy put his arms around Peter. “There was a Beverly,” he said, “and there still is a Beverly. We’ll stay quiet about him, but we won’t forget.”

  Two weeks after Beverly left, only a few days after the fire, Mama came to the woodshop in the middle of the day, carrying something wrapped in a shawl. “It’s for both of you,” she said, setting the bundle on the workbench.

  Mama unwrapped it. Eston sucked in his breath. It was a violin case. “Is it Italian?” Eston asked.

  Maddy let Eston unsnap the case and lift the violin from its velvet bed. Eston’s eyes shone. He stroked the violin’s face and ran his thumb across the strings. “I’ve never seen this one,” Eston said. “It’s not the one he usually plays.”

  “It’s the violin he played as a young man,” Mama said. “The one his father gave him. Now he’s giving it to you.”

  Eston sucked in his breath again. “To both of us,” he said, very softly.

  Maddy had a moment of understanding, of what Beverly, of what a good brother would say. So he said it. “No, sir,” he said. “You’ll have to let me play it, but you’re the musician in this family. This violin belongs to you.”

  Summer 1819

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Hailstorm

  That summer disaster followed on the heels of disaster. It never rained. The blazing sun burned up the wheat, and then the other crops, one by one, until there was nothing to be sold. The grass turned crisp and brown. The hay crop failed.

  The entire country fell into something called a panic. It meant no money anywhere. Banks failed, which meant, Mama said, that they shut their doors, and if you’d given them your money to keep safe, that was just too bad. Your money was gone.

  Eston wanted to know how money could disappear. He went to his jar on the shelf and pulled out a penny. “It can’t disappear,” he said.

  “Say you buy a farm,” Harriet said.

  “I won’t,” said Eston. “What would I do with a farm?”

  “All right,” Harriet said, shooting him a look, “say I buy a farm. Say it costs a thousand dollars, but I’ve only got a hundred dollars in cash. I pay one hundred, and get a bank loan for the other nine hundred. But my crops fail. I can’t repay the bank what I owe. So the bank takes my farm, and they sell it to somebody else to get their money back.”

  “Who?” said Eston.

  “They sell it to Joe Fossett.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” said Eston. “’Cause he’s got money.”

  “Only Joe Fossett, he’s nobody’s fool. He says the farm isn’t worth a full thousand dollars anymore. Between the hard times all around and no crops growing, there’s a lot of land for sale. The most Joe will pay for the farm is six hundred dollars. So the bank takes it. They gave out nine hundred and only got back six. Three hundred dollars disappeared.”

  Eston said, “The bank ought to wait and sell for nine hundred.”

  “They can’t wait that long.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” Har
riet said. “I’m not a bank. But that’s what’s happening.”

  Mama nodded. “Everyone’s worried. Land isn’t selling, and there isn’t enough work for people to do.”

  They didn’t say it, but they all thought of Beverly. They hadn’t heard from him yet, and they were starting to worry. Beverly was a good carpenter, surely he could find work somewhere. And he had fifty dollars. A man could live a long time on fifty dollars.

  Maddy figured the panic wouldn’t hurt Monticello, because Master Jefferson would never sell his land. No planter would. Mama pursed her lips when Maddy said so.

  “Master Jefferson signed a loan for Mr. Nicholas,” she said. “That means he has to pay the bank back if Mr. Nicholas can’t.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  “Friendship, I suppose. Mr. Nicholas asked him to. And Mr. Nicholas once signed a loan for your father, so your father felt he couldn’t say no.”

  Since Maddy’s first night at Mr. Nicholas’s farm, on his first trip to Poplar Forest, he’d stayed there many times. It sure seemed prosperous. It was kept up much nicer than Monticello. “Why does Mr. Nicholas need a loan?” he asked.

  Mama shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s for twenty thousand dollars, I do know that.”

  Eston burst out laughing. “Mama! You’re making that up!”

  Mama smiled back, but she didn’t look happy. “I’m not, no, I’m not. Twenty thousand dollars.” She stretched the words out. “Twen-ty thou-sand dol-lars.”

  Maddy knew Joe Fossett had over two hundred dollars saved. He made marks on his slate to help count: Twenty thousand dollars was Joe Fossett’s two hundred dollars, a hundred times over. Maddy thought of a hundred men working as hard and saving as long as Joe Fossett had. He tried to imagine all that work turned into a piece of paper Master Jefferson could sign.

  “It’s as much as the government paid for Master Jefferson’s library,” Harriet said.