Willa Cather

by Hermione Lee

  Sapphira and the Slave Girl recreates American history out of these family divisions. Historical facts – the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, by which runaway slaves could be recaptured in the North – occur as part of the background. The Civil War is fought in three pages in the Epilogue, in the form of neighbourhood legend and family stories: it ‘gave people plenty to talk about’. [SSG, p.275] Cather based her novel on the ‘true story’ of Nancy, the runaway slave, whose return visit to Virginia, when Cather was five, was her first memory.

  True story it may have been, but it invoked many others like it. In her reviewing days, Cather had watched the stage version of Eliza’s escape on the ice, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all too often.40 Beecher Stowe’s heartfelt mixture of drama and polemic was not for her. What interested Cather was the everyday life of a family for whom slavery was an existing circumstance, and through whose domestic tensions the weight of history pressed in. So the struggle for survival within family life, which she had written about before, eloquently and often, became in this last novel, in spite of its apparently escapist nostalgia for her earliest childhood, more of a political metaphor. The war is in the household.

  Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, now crippled with dropsy, is a proud, efficient managerial woman from a grander Virginian family who, after her father’s illness, astounded her family friends by marrying his Lutheran miller (of Flemish parentage) and moving to the poorer country of ‘Back Creek’. She brought her slaves with her, to a part of Virginia where they were not regarded as usual, and maintained her authority against her husband’s dislike of the ‘institution’ and the criticism of her widowed daughter, Rachel Blake. Rachel had escaped from her unsympathetic mother by marrying a Washington politician; but after thirteen years of good society and happy domestic life, her husband and son died of an epidemic on a visit to New Orleans, and she has returned to Back Creek with her two little girls. Her conflict with her mother resumes when Sapphira takes against one of her slaves, the attractive ‘yellow’ girl Nancy, the daughter of Sapphira’s reliable black housekeeper Till, and, possibly, of one of Henry Colbert’s loose-living brothers. (Or she may be the daughter of a Cuban painter who came to paint the family portraits, but her paternity is purposely kept vague.) Sapphira becomes jealous of her husband’s affection for Nancy, who looks after his room at the mill. She invites her feckless, predatory nephew Martin, the son of one of the ‘bad’ Colberts, to stay, not quite admitting to herself that she is hoping he will ‘ruin’ Nancy. The girl’s life is made a misery, and she asks for help from Rachel Blake, who secretly arranges for her to escape to Canada via the underground route to the free States. Mother and daughter are estranged, but are reconciled when Rachel’s little girls fall ill with diphtheria, and one of them dies. In all this, the miller plays a distressed, equivocating part. His feelings for Nancy are not quite as chaste as he believes, his admiration for Sapphira is mixed with bitterness. In the crisis he lets the women take action, but would rather not know what is happening.

  Such evasions and negations characterize the family drama, with Sapphira’s obstructive and thwarting figure flanked by the stoical, withdrawn daughter, the conscience-stricken husband and the futile nephew. Colbert leaves his coat by the open window of his mill-room so that his daughter can pick his pocket for Nancy’s escape-money without his having to acknowledge her action; Sapphira breaks off relations with Rachel by sending her a formal sealed note asking her not to call; whenever the husband and wife are really discussing Nancy, they talk instead about Bluebell, the ‘lazy, lying’ daughter of the black cook. The evasion, thinks Sapphira ironically, is ‘almost as good as a play’. [SSG, p.199]

  These fictional details seem, as always, to have the authenticity of fact. Cather said she had collected so much material about the ‘manners and customs’ of Back Creek Valley that when she weighed what she left out, ‘it came to a good six pounds!’41 What is put in gives the sense of what was left out. The characters are deeply, minutely embedded in their time and place. A secure pastoral rhythm of seasonal labour and lush vegetable growth encircles the action: the late summer harvest, the smoking of hams and bacon throughout spring and summer, the cherry-picking and canning and gathering of laurels in June, the October nutting. The indoor work of the women – cleaning the house, looking after the sick, making worn-out clothes into ‘carpet-rags’ for the weaver – goes on side by side with the work of the mill and the farm. The perspective is carefully directed. In the far distance are the Quakers who run the ‘underground railway’, or the ‘bad men’ down at Hoag Creek tavern, or Sapphira’s grand relatives. In the middle distance are the subsidiary but very vivid characters like the abolitionist postmistress (who has her copy of the New York Tribune delivered under plain cover), or the conscientious young schoolteacher from Pennsylvania, or the remarkable Dr Clavenger (a Bishop Latour or Godfrey St Peter in cameo), ‘with his peculiar expression of thinking directly behind his eyes’. [SSG, p.263] Close up are the inward, fully known details of the furnishings and clothes of the household: the green shades covering the parlour windows, ‘painted with garden scenes and fountains’; the ‘chestnut secretary’ that doubles as the miller’s writing desk and bookcase; the house-servant Washington’s striped cotton coat and flapping slippers; Nancy’s hat, ‘an old black turban of Mrs Colbert’s’ with a red feather stuck on by Till, Nancy’s mother. [SSG, p.231] When Till is dressing Sapphira, we see the cloth slippers and ribbon garters that go on her swollen legs; when Rachel sets off to visit a sick friend, one of the poor whites up on the Ridge, we know what’s in her basket: ‘bandages and turpentine ointment and arnica…also a fruit jar full of fresh-ground coffee, half a baking of sugar cakes, and a loaf of “light” bread’. [SSG, p.118] Some of these carefully selected details are nostalgic, like the recollection of the father in his basement toolroom ‘making yellow leather shoes for the front paws of his favourite shepherd dog’, [SSG, p.281] or of the stream that ran through the kitchen cellar. But more often they are used, like the incidental anecdotes (the case of the stolen church-plate, or the heartbroken slave) to give a solid ground of verisimilitude. When the occasion arises, we learn that in these parts of rural Virginia before the war, farmers and countrymen used to wear ‘heavy shawls, fastened with a large shawl-pin’, [SSG, p.53] that notes would be sent folded down, without envelopes, [SSG, p.30, 245] that at every dinner party a servant would walk round the table ‘waving a long flybrush made of a peacock’s tail’, [SSG, p.160] and that to leave a light on in the parlour at night with the front door open was a signal for help. [SSG, p.251]

  As in Shadows on the Rock, whose methods most resemble this novel’s, these authentic descriptive furnishings speak of cultural assumptions in a particular history. The family life of Sapphira and the Slave Girl is a double one; two histories co-exist, at once separate and connected, as the title suggests. The doubleness which was a psychological theme in Lucy Gayheart here becomes a political one. The very geography of the Mill House is duplicated and divided. At the front it is ‘orderly’, with a porch and a lawn and a fence; ‘behind the house lay another world’ of the separated kitchen, the slave cabins, the laundry, the smokehouse, and the backyard littered with ‘old brooms, spades and hoes, and the rag dolls and home-made toy wagons of the negro children’. [SSG, pp.20–21] That adjacent-separation persists in the church, with the slaves singing ‘in the loft’ to the rest of the congregation, [SSG, p.78] and in the graveyard, where the plot is divided into two halves, bespeaking two histories:

  On one side were the family graves, with marble headstones. On the other side was the slaves’ graveyard, with slate headstones bearing single names: ‘Dolly’, ‘Thomas’, ‘Manuel’, and soon. [SSG, p.101]

  Vegetation is a great leveller: the graves on both sides are ‘covered with thick mats of myrtle’. But until this covers up their names, people have to belong to their ‘sides’, whose proximity, and difference, is one of the novel’s subjects.

  There is, as usual
, a great deal about language in the novel. This is still a predominantly oral culture, where newspapers and letters are important events. Back Creek’s damp ‘deep woods’, enclosed by the ‘blue wall’ of Timber Ridge and the North Mountain, feels out of the world, and local talk is itself life-blood. Cather celebrates this in one of the novel’s subsidiary matriarchs, Mrs Ringer, who finds inexhaustible consolation for her son’s deformity (he has a club foot) and her daughters’ weaknesses (they have both been ‘fooled’, and she is bringing up their offspring) in her own kind of communication: the grimness of her life (the novel’s most brutal sub-plot involves her son’s horror at the vicious bullying of a ‘poor white’ boy by two local thugs) is transformed into narrative energy:

  Mrs Ringer was born interested. She got a great deal of entertainment out of the weather and the behaviour of the moon. Any chance bit of gossip that came her way was a godsend. The rare sight of a strange face was a treat: a pedlar with a pack on his back, or a medicine-vendor come from across the Alleghenies with his little cart. Mrs Ringer couldn’t read or write, as she was frank to tell you, but the truth was she could read everything most important: the signs of the seasons, the meaning of the way the wood creatures behaved, and human faces. [SSG, p.119]

  Local speech, dialect and pronunciation, are ‘read’ in the book with Mrs Ringer’s kind of attentiveness. We learn how both Colbert and Sapphira are criticized by the Back Creek natives for their lack of a Southern accent (which could turn, for instance, the name of an itinerant preacher, Leonidas, into ‘Lawndis’ [SSG, p.123]). Terminology is remarked on: blacks call jonquils ‘smoke pipes’; Virginians call the afternoon the evening. In church, Lizzie the black cook appropriates the gospel language she can’t read on the page, sounding her ‘r’s’ with ‘fervent conviction’. Her sloppy daughter makes a sexier transformation of language, calling the song ‘The Gypsy’s Warning’ ‘The Gypsy’s Warming’. [SSG, p.183] Of all these linguistic shifts, the most striking is the child Cather’s reaction to the Canadianized Nancy’s pronunciation of ‘History’. And, indeed, the word has a different meaning for each of them.

  There are two histories, two family trees, and two languages in the story. One is the history of the white colonizers, settling like the Dodderidges on vast tracts of Indian territory, with grants from the first aristocratic English landowners (Sapphira has a coat-of-arms on her carriage), or coming in from all over Europe to work the land, like the Colberts. This is a family tree which can be drawn and dated, going back to Nathanael Dodderidge, who came out of Virginia with Lord Fairfax in 1747, and going forward to the death of Henry Colbert in 1863 and the birth of the narrator (the inheritor of the line) in the mid ’70s. There is ‘bad blood’ in the Colbert lineage, which has ‘come to light’ in the miller’s brothers and their sons, and which he is afraid of finding in himself. When he searches his conscience over slavery, and over his unwelcome sexual feelings for Nancy, he takes what comfort he can from John Bunyan’s Holy War, reading of ‘the state of the town of Mansoul after Diabolus had entered her gates and taken up her rule there’, haunting ‘like a Ghost, honest men’s houses at night’. Like old Mrs Harris, Colbert, a good weak man caught in a historical dilemma, is consoled by Bunyan’s voice, the voice of ‘an honest man, who had suffered much…speaking to him of things about which he could not unbosom himself to anyone’. [SSG, p.211] The affinity with Bunyan is touching, but the picture of Mansoul is an alarming one. As so often, Cather finds in her allusion an image of doubleness, self-haunting; but here the self that is haunted is not just the miller’s, but the whole of the American South’s. Like Faulkner’s macabrely haunted houses, the Colbert-Dodderidge dynasty is shadowed by the double family tree that spooks all Southern inheritances through miscegenation. It may be that Colbert is afraid, not just of his own ‘bad blood’, but of what that might link him to. After all, the slave girl he does not want to be too fond of could be his own niece.

  Cather’s treatment of her black characters is problematic. That she was unaware of this is suggested by a letter to Dorothy, congratulating herself on her accuracy over the ‘darkey’ speech in the novel.42 Her references to Till as not being a ‘gay darkey’, or to Nancy in the cherry tree indulging ‘the foolish, dreamy nigger side of her nature’, [SSG, p.178] her caricaturing of Lizzie the cook and her daughter Bluebell as idle, tricksy slaves, in contrast with Till and Nancy, make embarrassing reading. She clearly has more interest in the miller’s struggle with his conscience, Rachel’s quarrel with her mother and her grief over her sick children, and Sapphira’s complicated personality, than in Nancy’s intolerable predicament, which keeps getting dissolved into picturesque pastoral scenes: Nancy dangling her legs in the cherry tree, or slipping through the flower garden in the misty dawn. Anyone who has read Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple will find difficulty in tolerating Cather’s version of black slavery as anything but a dated historical curiosity. Nevertheless, within the limits of her time and type, Cather was trying to make us aware of a monstrous double history.

  There are two great-grandmothers in the novel: Sapphira, the narrator’s, and ‘Jezebel’, who is Nancy’s. Through Jezebel’s line, Cather encompasses the hundred-year history of slavery, from the African trade of the 1780s to the post-war liberation of the 1880s. Like Sapphira, the ancient Jezebel is proud, ironical, physically reduced, and still alarming to others; but their histories are bitterly contrasted. Cather tells the appalling story, in a tone of historical impersonality, of the capture of Jezebel’s cannibal tribe, their incarceration on the slave-ship, her fiery resistance and taming (‘ “Clean her off and put a bridle on her” ’ [SSG, p.93]), her sale as a powerful healthy animal (‘She opened her jaws’) to the Dutchman who ‘breaks her in’, and her transfer to Sapphira, who ‘entrusts’ her with the gardens. On her deathbed, Jezebel makes a startling joke about how she could fancy a ‘ “li’l pickaninny’s hand” ’. Nancy is shocked, but Sapphira is unmoved: ‘ “I know your granny through and through” ’. [SSG, p.89] The macabre detail reflects on Sapphira’s likeness to Jezebel (she is a kind of cannibal herself), but also on the cannibalizing of a whole people.

  Jezebel’s daughter, Till’s mother, is burnt alive in an accident. Till, who witnessed her mother’s death, is trained as a good house-servant by Sapphira’s Devonshire housekeeper, and married off to what Lizzie the cook calls a ‘capon-man’: ‘Miss Sapphy didn’t want a lady’s maid to be “havin’ chillun all over de place” ’. [SSG, p.43] When Nancy stands in the parlour admiring the Dodderidge family portraits, and hopes they may be the work of her own father, the two inheritances are ironically juxtaposed. Nancy’s story continues the history of sexual exploitation. Though Cather is never explicit, the scenes in which Nancy lies awake at night outside Sapphira’s room, listening for Martin Colbert’s step on the stair, or has to wash his pile of ‘soiled linen’ [SSG, p.158], or is caught by him in the cherry tree (he ‘drew her two legs about his cheeks like a frame’ [SSG, p.181]), make the point clearly enough.

  The novel provides two exits from this double history of injustice and cruelty. One is the astonishing return of Nancy, transformed from the ‘yaller gal’ of the narrator’s childhood legends into the distinguished-looking visitor from Montreal, a ‘tall, gold-skinned woman’ of forty-four, wearing a long black coat lined with grey fur, a turban over her ‘shiny blue-black hair’, and a black silk dress with a gold watch-chain, speaking in a precise Montreal accent of her household responsibilities to her employers and her marriage to their ‘half Scotch and half Indian’ gardener. [SSG, p.285] She is a surprisingly new kind of heroine for Cather, fleetingly released out of this juncture between earliest memory and last writing.

  The other solution offered is not of transforming but of resignation. Henry Colbert, alone in his mill house (like St Peter in his attic study), searching through Bunyan and his Bible (as so many Southerners of the time were searching) for a justification or a condemnation of sla
very, keeps having to fall back on the idea of resignation: that ‘all the black slaves would be free’ according to God’s ‘great designs’, [SSG, p.1111 and that until then, all he can do is to try to act decently and find some virtue in the system: ‘ “Sometimes keeping people in their place is being good to them” ’. [SSG, p.268]

  The novel’s weakness is that it too beats this kind of retreat, and collapses its presentation of the historical dilemma into a simplifying nostalgia. To a worrying extent, being kept in one’s place is felt to have been a preferable alternative to the changed American world that followed the Civil War. Cather’s distaste for motor-cars and pool-halls gives her an alarming affinity with the pre-bellum anti-abolitionists, who argued that a benign feudal system was more to the advantage of the labourer than the heartless exploitation of an industrialized free economy. (It is another version of Rosicky’s distaste for a wage-earning society.) There were plenty of ominous predictions as to what would become of the freed slaves. This is a typical extract from a long poem by the South Carolinan William Grayson (published in 1856, the year of the action of Sapphira and the Slave Girl):

  The negro freeman, thrifty while a slave,

  Loosed from restraint, becomes a drone or knave;