One day Mr. Hunter came into our room holding a piece of folded paper, a pen, and a book. The paper diagrammed the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, the book was the Bible. It was a handsomely bound edition, the gilt edge of which beguiled me immediately. We had had very little religious instruction in Siam, beyond Father talking about reincarnation.
With an overflow of lazy sighs, Hunter ran through the written letters of the language, had us write the phonetic approximation of each one in Siamese, and—as I used this linguistic key—I applied my prior knowledge of English (I knew all the words by sound already) to discover how the Western utterances I had been making actually looked on the page. That is how I learned to read English in such a short time.
The following morning Hunter returned to read from Genesis, and he had us follow along. “I’m going to ask you questions about this the next time we are in public,” he said. “We’ll start with a little interrogation about this first part, about the Lord literally creating the world in six days, you understand. Continue reading, get to know the book. That sounds agreeable, right, Chang? Right, Eng?” He patted us on the head. Something had changed in his character. He too was showing us more respect.
After Hunter left, I read through much of the Old Testament, well into the evening. Though it was painstaking at first—consulting our chart for each letter, then shaping the clauses in my mouth, and enjoying the frisson of recognition each time the jumble of letters suddenly transmogrified into a familiar phrase—I was captivated.
Chang, who wearied of the words hours before I did, said, “Enough, brother, let’s make flip onto laundry pile.”
I ignored him and kept my nose in the book. For personal reasons, the allegory of Noah drew me in. The narrative of the Ark crossing the seas, the paired animals, the lone outcast looking for a new land, it all rang in my soul at full peal. My thoughts, elevated by the ancient and oddly familiar tale, began wandering in imaginary space. Other favorites: And if thy right hand offends thee, cut it off and cast it from thee. For it is profitable that one of thy members should perish and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. But even more than the pious magnificence of the Bible, it was the thrill of learning, it was reading, that had me spellbound.
“Put Bible down, I want to play,” Chang said, looking at the ceiling.
“Hush!”
The legends, the characters so vivid and solemn, the language—how could I stop reading? Our little room at Mrs. Sachs’s house was at that moment a fine cathedral. The altars of dirty piled-up clothes assumed radiance, the musk of the laundry was redolent of God. Eventually Chang fell asleep, leaning on me; refusing his weight, I steeled my spine and read into the night.
Later, just as I was descending into dreams, our door opened. The two young Sachs girls who lived upstairs-bulldog-faced Martha and her oval-faced companion—had come back for another furtive look. Martha, who had been the braver of the two during their last visit, walked up to our bed. Her companion waited at the doorjamb. Chang was asleep.
The sky was not so black that night, with moonlight weeping in through the window, and, though in the low light Martha’s face seemed a patchwork of shadows of varying darkness, I could see the whites of her eyes, her wide-opened eyes—they were yellowish white, like abscesses. As she finished her approach, her patchy skin looked made up of cheese parings.
“Hello?” I said.
She jerked a hand to her chest and screamed; this woke Chang.
“In?” he muttered.
“It talks,” whispered the other girl, who was now cringing by the door in a yellow dress. Martha stood frozen on the spot, hand still against her chest, mouth still opened in fright.
Chang, now almost fully awake, said: “Hello.”
After a long moment—quiet seconds slinking like the maple syrup we had enjoyed earlier that day—my brother and I sat up in bed.
“W-what’s your name?” Martha asked finally.
“Chang and Eng.”
“You speak?” asked the girl in the corner.
“No,” I said. No one laughed.
The woman thought a moment, then said, “I’m Ada, and this is Martha.”
In a hollow presentment of hospitality, Martha, composure unregained, stuttered: “Charmed, I’m sure.”
Neither Chang nor I knew what to say. “Mrs. Sachs is your mother?” I asked.
Ada said, “Yes.” She swallowed a number of times, looking more nauseous after each gulp.
I had been lost in the desire to shake their hands, to touch their skin with my skin, but I managed to recover and ask, “And you are sisters?”
“Yes,” Ada said. “Originally from Tennessee.” She swallowed hard again, and stared at our band. “And are you brothers?”
Chang and I smiled, “Yes.” We kept smiling, until it felt unnatural and my cheeks began to hurt. The sisters were not smiling with us. Ada’s hands, her long ringless fingers, looked elegant and touchable even if they quivered, or perhaps because they quivered. Martha, pale as a ghost now, pivoted and raced out of the room. Without a word Ada followed, her yellow dress puffing up behind her, and before long, soft footsteps sounded their quick retreat up the stairs.
Things are more divine if they seem unreal. When you cannot view an event except with the perplexed eyes of an outsider, when you covet a connection to a world that you believe you can never touch, the most basic facts of life seem miraculous; women appear as miraculous as the cosmos does to a stargazer.
Chang had the sad eyes of a whelp at that moment, and we shared the belief that we would never enjoy any sort of intercourse with the fairer sex other than to witness women screaming and fleeing.
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Last Lingering Clasp
1844–1846
Wilkesboro
We had been two years in Wilkes County and in marriage. Adelaide and I had brushed hands two times in the intervening months, never for more than a second. The touches were on purpose, I thought—but I could not confirm it. She and I never could speak of it, or the why of it. The immorality of the situation was not lost on me, and neither was the absurdity: Her husband always inches away, a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound shadow of flesh and bone, my future an endless labor of guilt and closeness to my goal—banish the thought, I told myself.
I wanted to believe in my ability not to think about the joy my brother’s wife’s hand gave me, and to fight that selfish indulgence with loyalty to my marriage, even though I knew that Sarah had lied to me about her history. I conceived of ways to tell her I knew the truth about her feelings for the slave, but whenever I deliberate about something for too long, it revolves within me until it sinks deep down and I can’t pull it out—and what good would it have done? The only course of action in this situation, I thought, is to trust oneself. Not easy when one is a hodgepodge of fits and pangs, weak and lacking consistency—but oneself is all we are given. Despite my best efforts, however, I found it difficult to remain amiable to Sarah.
I was getting to know all the private little gestures she declined to hide from me. By now I marked the open and close of each day by watching my wife brush her hair every sunup just before she’d fully awakened, and again at night as she began to fall asleep. Slouching, drained either by the demands of rising from bed or by the burdens of a long day, she’d sit on the edge of the mattress, her face bare and tired, and she’d look at the top of her brush. Then she’d clear her throat and wait there, still as ice. What was she waiting for?
She’d stare into the bristles until almost the end of time, and sigh with emotion I could never figure out, then bring the brush to her head, let out another breath as if Chang and I weren’t there, and after hesitating, she began the drawn-out and apparently painful process of brushing. She contorted her face as if she was enduring—barely—the amputation of a favorite limb, she slowly dragged the brush through her hair, and there was the ripping sound of roots unprepared to hold up under pressure. Pouting as though it were someone else for
cing her to undergo this tribulation, as though she had never brushed her hair in this way before to know it would hurt her so—
“Why do you trouble yourself?” I’d say. “Please, no need to do it for my sake.” I tried to appear husbandly. “Just let’s go to bed.”
Sarah would turn to us then and look at me as if I’d spoken too softly to be understood. And she’d begin the whole process again, the slouch, the minutes of staring into the head of her brush, the throat-clearing, the sigh and its double, and, of course, the drawn-out, painful brushing. She did this yet a few more times, and I could predict each move in the routine before it happened. In the morning, I could get us up and leave the room to avoid seeing it, but at night I was a captive audience. I’d have to take a deep breath for relief.
One day, when Chang and I were on the porch, I heard Sarah whistling in the kitchen through the open window. She was watching Thom cook and she was improvising, if you could call it that, making up a tuneless song, and it hurt my ears.
“Please, Sarah,” I called over my shoulder and toward the window, “you are out of key.”
My brother raised his eyebrow at me.
“Don’t be silly, you’all,” Sarah said. In that singsong voice. “How can I be out of key if I’m making it up?”
“You are,” I said. “And please stop using that manner.”
She did not say anything, although the sound of feminine footsteps scurrying out of the kitchen conveyed its own type of message. Chang was still looking at me.
After a minute, Adelaide opened the door to the porch and came outside. “You’re bad-tempered on my sister,” she said in the tone she used to upbraid slaves. “It’s not fair.” But then she gave me a half smile. “Sarah’s upstairs, her stomach in a bunch, I’m sure.”
I wanted to tell her that she was a fine one to talk about being bad-tempered with a spouse, and that I was more than fair in silently watching Sarah struggle to beautify her hair—for whose benefit?—every day and every night. If I could not disengage from my brother, did I have to abide excessive closeness with my wife as well?
I told Adelaide that she was right, and that I’d apologize later.
At the onset of 1846, the country was filled with new tensions. John Calhoun, the separatist South Carolinian politician, introduced his idea of a “concurrent majority” under which America would have a pair of presidents—one to represent the slave states, and another to represent the free—each having the power of veto over the other. I knew better than anyone that this double-headed system would surely lead to secession. In my heart I was not wholly an American, however, and I was too consumed with the knots of my own domestic situation to care much about politics.
We were now thirty-four years old, and our hair was graying (though his more than mine). We also owned a double-plotted farm—one parcel a fertile twenty-six and a half acres, on which we grew corn; the other measured thirty-seven and a half acres, and had proven sufficient for the raising of hogs. But as long and hard as my brother and I worked, and no matter how much we spent on the finest tools and slaves, our costs always exceeded our profits. Farming was filled with hidden expenses. We owned some twenty Negroes, with Thom acting the part of our eyes when we could not watch the other nineteen slaves to make certain they all were working, which they did, for the most part, because we treated them sternly and because they feared our double-shape. We’d paid quite a lot for our slaves, as much as six hundred dollars for a seventeen-year-old boy named Soren.
And so Chang and I began to find ourselves wanting for money. Adelaide had expensive tastes, and Sarah followed suit. And Chang, who had taken to wearing black silk cravats, and who had become more attached than I had to the high-priced sets of argentine combs and brushes we used on our hair—which we wore short in the front and braided in back—Chang now wanted to return to constant touring. But the climate had changed since the time of our last tour.
Chang and I had our own problem with slaves. Our farm was not producing nearly as much corn as it should. After talking to Thom about it and hearing the amiable old Negro’s vague answers, I decided that, rather than purchase more workers, my brother and I should buy more land. Land never has the desire to run away.
Using the little money we’d received from our most recent tour of the South, we acquired another few acres for the farming of tobacco. Actually, it was I who acquired it; Chang had had his own plan to raise money—selling the slaves—which I rejected as worthless by pointing out that we needed the slaves to do the bulk of the work on our crops. “Why is it that your brother got all the brains?”—that was how Adelaide expressed to Chang her dislike of his idea.
Our property had grown large now; our house looked across a green pasture and manicured golden farmland to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a good time and place to farm, though Chang, as I suppose I also did, allowed thoughts of his wife to distract him. He and Adelaide now fought continually. He would do something to annoy her—it could be a kindness he’d extend to her in some awkward embarrassing way, or some idiocy such as his incorrect use of a word—and she would roll her eyes and look at me. And then I’d picture her in a royal silk garment.
We spent a lot of time sitting on our back porch, talking. But mostly we gazed out past the green pasture to the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I enjoyed sitting there, looking at my slaves off in the distance working in the field, and at my land, my home. Despite all the difficulties we still faced, I could not deny the satisfaction I felt now and then. I still had trouble believing that we had done it. Chang and I were American farmers sitting with our American wives.
Adelaide was more restless than her sister was. While Sarah would sit there not wanting to disturb her stomach by moving about, Adelaide from time to time would walk into the house and back, getting something to occupy her, a needlepoint for example. I watched her walk. I watched her sit down and manipulate the sewing needles in her long fingers. I watched her put down the needlepoint and stretch her long frame. Then she would sit down again to fiddle with some lint on her dress, her hands strong, and I would watch that, too.
One morning we were sitting on the porch and talking about the girls’ cousin Emily, who had nearly been hit by a runaway buckboard in Mount Airy a few weeks earlier. Chang and I sat in one wicker chair, the girls in another.
Chang was shaking his head, laughing, and saying, “In this country, carriages everywhere, if you not careful you getting trampled over. It make you crazy.”
“Ain’t ‘this country’ been pretty good to you’all?” Adelaide turned toward him as if he had dropped a china plate. “Obviously you don’t appreciate your good fortune in ‘this country.’ What about me and Sarah here?”
“Oh, Addie,” said Sarah. “I don’t feel well enough to be drug into your fight.” She had a wet washcloth over her head and sat with her eyes closed.
With a strained smile and a weak voice, Chang said, “I am appreciate America, Adelaide, I—”
“—It just makes me so crazed, he is such an ingrate, Sarah,” said Adelaide. “Your one isn’t as bad as that.”
Sarah raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“I only happen to mention about America,” Chang was saying, “an interesting point—carriages everywhere. If you not careful you getting trampled over.” He swallowed, then said, “Sorry.”
Adelaide, knowing she had won the round, refused to look away. With the fingernail of her thumb she absently gave little jabs to her neck. And my heart.
Chang asked, “You are crazed at me?”
“Obviously, I just said I was.” Adelaide’s eyes lit up when she fought.
Like the stillness after a crash, the hush that followed was obtrusive. The four of us listened to the sounds of our lawn for a while, to the sounds we sat there not making, and then Sarah stood, leaving her wet washcloth on the wicker chair.
“My stomach,” she explained, crossing the porch and heading toward our house. Before going inside, she turned to her siste
r, pointed to her stomach and pantomimed crying. After all this time, I had not unraveled any of her puzzlements, the little mannerisms that would come into view just when I imagined there were no more annoyances to discover.
The porch got a little warmer after she left. Chang was looking at Adelaide. She did not return his gaze. “I’m in a hellacious mood today,” Adelaide said, giving a hint of a smile at the end of her sentence and patting her long hands together.
I hazarded a response. “Well”—I tried not to sound too eager—“at least you have some fight in you.”
“Oh, have I?” she said. She brought her slender hand to her throat.
“Yes,” Chang said softly. “You have.”
“Listen, I still have more fire left, Chang, if you provoke it.” She snickered, then pointed a finger at him. “I’m in a hellacious mood, and miserable to boot.”
“If I may say so, it doesn’t seem that way.” I tried to hit a balance in my smile between the appearance of platonic modesty and ardor. “The heat of the fight seems to brighten your aspect. ‘Bright Phoebus in his strength,’ as Shakespeare would say.”
“You, Eng, hush now with your flattery. I think my husband might be near.” And we laughed on this awhile. Of all the people that now made up my world, she was the only one I could joke with. My brother was not laughing.
With no money coming in, Chang and I bought a tract of adjoining land that had come up for auction after the death of a local widow. But Chang’s frequent dejection made it hard to motivate him to work on the farm. This was a problem. Our new acres were in no shape for cultivation. And the slaves were slow to clear and prepare the land, which meant my brother and I were forced to work side by side with these Negroes for three sunny weeks. We cleared away the stones and underbrush, fertilized the soil, dug ditches and plowed, turning under peas and clover. Around us, our sweating slaves popped up and down with their pitchforks and shovels to the cadence of some crude work song—one worker would sing out a phrase, and the rest of the men would repeat it, black men slaving in a row that meandered toward the wood bordering our land. Their voices were dark and foreboding, resonant like thunder on this sunny day.
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