Charleston’s Daughter
Sabra Waldfogel
Charleston’s Daughter by Sabra Waldfogel
Copyright © 2019 by Sabra Waldfogel. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover Design: James Egan of BookFly Designs
Author Photograph: Megan Dobratz
978-0-9913964-2-9—ebook
978-0-9913964-7-4—print book
Sabra Waldfogel, Publisher
https://www.sabrawaldfogel.com/
Published in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Part 1
Chapter 1: A Father’s Love
Chapter 2: A Matter of Conscience
Chapter 3: Goods and Chattels
Chapter 4: The Basket Name
Part 2
Chapter 5: Hearth and Home
Chapter 6: Free Persons of Color
Chapter 7: A Southern Voice
Chapter 8: Love Is Sweet
Chapter 9: Sumter County
Chapter 10: Freedom Is Sweeter
Chapter 11: The Abolitionist
Chapter 12: The Badge of Servitude
Chapter 13: The Purloined Letter
Part 3
Chapter 14: Slaves Have No Mothers
Chapter 15: You Must Be Mad
Chapter 16: We Are All Slaves Now
Chapter 17: The Northern Star
If You Enjoyed This Book
Historical Note
Further Reading
Author Biography
Part 1
Widows and Orphans
1858
Chapter 1: A Father’s Love
Caro lingered in the doorway of her mother’s room to watch as Bel brushed her mother’s gleaming dark hair.
“Don’t pull so, Bel,” her mother said.
Bel was sixteen. She was as brown as a pecan and spoke with the thick accent of her home in the Low Country. She had just arrived at the Jarvie house on St. Helena Island, an hour’s ferry ride south of Charleston. Caro’s father, softhearted about all his servants, had asked her mother to take her on as a lady’s maid, even though Bel had been a kitchen maid all her life.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Bel murmured.
“It’s all right. Give me the brush.”
Bel extended the brush as though it were a stirring spoon. Her mother pulled it from Bel’s hand with a sigh of exasperation. “I’ll do it.”
When Caro was very small, she loved to watch her mother at her dressing table as she brushed her hair. Caro had loved the hairbrush, too, a shining tortoiseshell with a gleaming silver inlay. Her father had given her a similar brush on her last birthday, and as a further extravagance, he’d had it engraved with her initials, CJ, for Caroline Jarvie.
Bel hunched a little as she waited. She muttered, “Ma’am, do you still need me?”
“No. Go downstairs and see if you can help Dulcie.” Dulcie was the cook.
Bel ducked her head. “Yes, ma’am.” Her footsteps echoed heavily on the back stairs.
Kitty sighed. “She acts like she’s fresh from the rice field,” she said. It was unfair. She brushed her own hair and asked Caro, “Do I look all right?”
Caro put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and regarded the dual reflection in the dressing table mirror. “You look lovely, Mama,” she said. Twice Caro’s age, her mother was as beautiful as ever and as proud of praise.
Kitty turned to kiss her on the cheek. “You, too,” she said.
“We look just alike,” Caro said, teasing her.
She ignored it. “Is the dress all right?”
Their similar looks were enhanced by their similar dresses, pretty and made from lightweight cotton, suitable for a warm summer evening at home. Her father liked to see his ladies well-dressed, even if they didn’t go out. “As pretty as mine.”
Kitty shook her head. “Hand me my earbobs. The diamonds.”
The diamond earrings had been a gift from her father when Caro was born. When her mother tossed her head, the diamonds flashed, and the gold gleamed. They dazzled, like the slender, dark-eyed woman whose figure showed no evidence of having borne a daughter eighteen years ago or of having conceived and lost two children since.
Kitty regarded herself in the mirror again and nodded in satisfaction. She held out her arm. “Shall we? Your father is waiting.”
She walked with a sprightly step as they descended the mahogany staircase, which was gleaming from its weekly polish. She glanced at the portraits on the staircase wall. “Dusty,” she said. “Someone isn’t doing her duty.”
Caro peeked at the portraits, which were glossy enough to show the dust. They were pictures of her father as a young man and the wife he had married when he was young. Caro didn’t mind seeing a coat of dust on Eliza Herriot’s flawless face. Eliza had been an heiress as well as a beauty, bringing her own holdings in Colleton County to add to her new husband’s, giving him a thousand acres and five hundred slaves, making him a wealthy planter as well as a successful Charleston lawyer.
She had disappointed him in only one thing: no child had ever survived, and the last one had killed her. After Eliza’s death, James Jarvie bought the house on St. Helena Island as a retreat, not a plantation, and he had buried himself here in grief.
Caro and her mother paused at the foot of the stairs. From the dining room came the soft sound of the table being set. And a voice, not at all soft.
“She tell me I pull her hair like I ain’t suited to be a lady’s maid,” Bel said.
“Talk low,” said Dulcie.
Aggrieved, Bel did not. “Missus Kitty! Missus High and Mighty, and her daughter, too.”
“Bel,” Dulcie said, a tone very like a growl.
“Why shouldn’t I say it? Don’t care how light-skinned they are. How fine they dress. Diamond earbobs!” She snorted. “They slaves, the same as you and me.”
Dulcie said, “Hush.”
They walked into the dining room, Kitty’s step light, her head high. She said, “I heard that.”
Both slaves looked up in surprise.
She continued, “But Mr. Jarvie considers me the mistress of the house. Bel, if you don’t care to obey me, I can send you to the kitchen. Or back to Colleton County to the field. Would you prefer that?”
Bel dropped her eyes. She whispered, “No, ma’am.”
“Go. I need to talk to Dulcie.”
When Bel was gone, Dulcie said, “She full of herself, Miss Catherine.”
Twenty years ago, Dulcie and Kitty had been servants together, housemaid and kitchen maid. Now Kitty acted as the mistress of the house, and Dulcie obeyed her. Her mother had treated Dulcie with kindness. She had persuaded Caro’s father to employ Dulcie’s whole family as house servants, and Dulcie had the satisfaction of seeing her husband serve as the Jarvie coachman and her children as her assistants in the kitchen.
Now Kitty said, “Teach her. And if you can’t, speak to me.”
“I’ll do that, Miss Catherine.”
Caro tightened her arm around her mother’s. “Papa is waiting,” she reminded Kitty.
Her mother shook her head as though to clear it. “We won’t disappoint him,” she said, smiling. Arm in arm, they sauntered into her father’s study as though n
othing had ever troubled either of them.
Caro loved her father’s study. It was full of the books he had bought as a student at Princeton, the tomes he had acquired when he read the law, and all the books since that he read for his own pleasure. Their leather bindings had a living smell, more so on a warm day, and she never minded that their covers gave up their reddish color to stain her hands.
Her father preferred the ancients, in particular Cicero and Cato, and he had taught Caro Latin so she could read them for herself. But he also read history, telling her that it gave an educated person a better perception for the present. He didn’t disdain novels. He was glad that she liked Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens, and he bought the newer authors for her, too, like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. It was an unusual education for a girl, more so for a girl of color. And it was an even better gift than the hairbrush.
He sat in his favorite armchair, the red velvet shiny from years of use, and put down his book. “Macaulay,” he said to Caro. “Since I asked you to read it and give me your opinion.”
He looked older than the man in the portrait. The gold of his hair had dulled a little, and his face no longer had a boy’s smoothness. But his blue eyes were as lively as they had been in his youth, and now they were full of affection.
He rose and put his arm around Kitty’s waist. “You look beautiful, my dearest,” he said, smiling, and he kissed her cheek with more passion than was usually shown in a downstairs room. He hugged Caro with his free arm. “You look lovely, too,” he said. “My darling girls, both of you.”
“Is Mr. Pereira here yet?” Kitty asked.
“He’s waiting in the parlor.”
“Is he here on legal business?”
Benjamin Pereira, who lived in Charleston, was her father’s lawyer, but he was a friend as well. He was the only Charleston man who regularly came to visit.
“It’s good to sit at the table with Mr. Pereira,” Caro said, too bitterly.
“Caro!” Her mother’s voice held a warning.
“Papa, I wish—how I wish—that we could sit at the table whenever your guests come.”
He shook his head. “Don’t wish for such a thing,” he said, very softly. “You know how it pains me to say no to you.” He squeezed Kitty’s hand as he spoke to Caro, and they left the room together.
She hadn’t forgotten the dinner her father gave for the families of the island, even though it had been months ago. He had put it off and put it off until her mother was the one to say, “James, you have to invite them.” Her mother had seen to the dinner and directed the servants to ready the house. But before the guests arrived, she took Caro upstairs, retreating to her room to stay in the limbo between family and servant.
Dulcie’s daughter Peggy, who served as kitchen maid, brought up their meal. Peggy set the tray down on the piecrust table. She asked Kitty, “Ma’am, is there anything else you need?” Peggy, like Dulcie, had a strong Low Country accent. She said, “Is dere anyt’ing else?”
“No, Peggy. You go on.”
On the tray was the dinner put before the guests—the oysters, the shrimp remoulade, and the roast, accompanied by rice and greens—but Caro pushed it away.
As the gentlemen arrived, their voices floated up the stairs, and as they settled into the dining room, their conversation came to Caro and her mother in bursts. The claret they drank made them louder. “Still no Mrs. Jarvie?” someone asked, and the others laughed.
Even now, her father was considered a catch, and all the families of Charleston and the Low Country hoped against hope that he would marry again. Caro hated it, but she knew that the world would never admit that he was already married to her mother.
She was old enough to understand how it had happened, even though no one had explained it to her.
How did a pretty, light-skinned housemaid catch the eye of the widowed planter who owned her? However it had begun, it blossomed into a genuine affection, and once her mother was certain of her father, she allowed herself to feel something besides obligation. After Caro was born, her father gave up any pretense of trying to marry again. He had found the woman he loved, and he loved Caro as his child with equal tenderness.
He had gone to the countryside to bury himself in grief. He stayed there to protect Kitty and Caro and to keep them a secret.
Today, Pereira rose from his chair in the parlor in greeting. “James,” he said, shaking his friend’s hand. “Miss Catherine,” he said, clasping Kitty’s fingers, as he would for any lady. And in a teasing tone, since he had watched her grow up, he added, “And young Miss Caroline. You get prettier every day. Married in no time.”
Caro blushed. “I get smarter every day, too,” she retorted. Pereira knew that her father had educated her.
Kitty said, “And saucier as well.”
That made Pereira laugh. Benjamin Pereira wasn’t a planter. He was the son of a Portuguese Jew from London who had made his money as a merchant. Like her father, Pereira had read the law, but he practiced it and made a living by it, handling the affairs of men many times richer than himself. He was clever, diligent, and discreet. He kept all the family secrets of the men he served, the debts incurred by bad harvests and extravagance at the gaming table, and the surprises and the embarrassments written into the wills. He was younger than James was, with curly black hair and a swarthy complexion that would have cast a shadow over his life in Charleston if he and his family were not so well-known. But his eyes were a blue startling in a man descended from Portuguese Jews.
In the dining room, where the windows had been closed and the curtains drawn against the day’s heat, both were now open to catch the afternoon breeze. The August sunlight slanted over the table, giving the gold-edged English china a greater gilding and turning the claret in the crystal glasses a fiery ruby color. At the long table, big enough for a party of a dozen, they clustered together at one end en famille.
Pereira asked, “What are you reading these days, Miss Caroline?”
She threw a glance at her father. “Thomas Macaulay,” she said. “When I’m not translating Cicero.”
Pereira said, “James, you’re giving the girl a young man’s education. A lawyer’s education. Whatever will she do with it?”
Her father smiled. “She’ll comfort her father in his old age.”
“Why shouldn’t I go to college, as you did?” Caro teased them both.
Her father teased her in return. “As soon as Princeton College will allow it,” he said.
Caro knew as well as he did that the thought of a colored girl at Princeton College was a folly they could all laugh about together. But she knew something else. “There is a college that would admit a young woman of color,” she said.
“Is there?” Pereira asked.
“It’s called Oberlin College, and it’s in Ohio.”
Laughing, Pereira said, “Oberlin College! A nest of vipers, from what I hear. Mad against slavery.”
Kitty said, “Stop it, both of you. Don’t lead her on so.” Her mother’s glance said, Don’t disappoint her so.
Caro sighed and fell silent. After the plates were cleared away, when the men retired to the study, Caro followed her mother to sit in the back parlor.
Unlike the front parlor, heavy with mahogany and velvet from an earlier generation and where portraits of previous Jarvies stared disapprovingly from the walls, the back parlor was Kitty’s room, a lady’s room, bright with new chintz and dainty in its furnishings. Her mother lit the candles against the coming dusk. Outside, the crickets had begun to rasp and the nighttime mosquitoes to whine. The air that came through the open windows smelled of magnolia and the faint odor of the midden from the kitchen, unavoidable in the heat.
Kitty arranged herself on the settee, laying the most recent copy of Godey’s Lady’s Book on her lap, and gestured to Caro to sit next to her. She laid a light hand on Caro’s arm. “Caro, don’t sulk. Come look at what’s newest. Shall we show it
to our dressmaker to be in the latest fashion?”
Her father indulged both of them in the matter of finery. He had their dresses made by a modiste in Charleston.
Caro didn’t reply. Kitty coaxed her. “You’ll need a new dress or two.”
“For the season?” Caro was sharp. “As though we have one!”
“Oh, Caro,” her mother said, a tone of sorrow. “You know why we don’t.”
The conversation at the table still bothered her. “I wish I had some reason to wear it besides showing it to Papa.” She knew better, but she pressed the point. “Like going to a maroon or a ball. As the free people of color in Charleston do.”
The free colored families had a “season,” just as the planter families did. Her mother’s half brother and half sister, residents in Charleston, were free, but Kitty was estranged from them, and Caro had never met them. Their freedom was a sore point with her mother. Caro had never learned the particulars of why they were free and her mother was not, and the estrangement between Kitty and her Bennett relatives had never been explained, either.
Kitty said, “Don’t worry, Caro. We’ll get you married somehow.”
“How? If we have no society, neither white nor colored?”
Kitty didn’t reply. Caro said, “Papa doesn’t know what we’ll do about it.” She needled her mother. “And neither do you.”
With unusual severity, her mother said, “Caro, it won’t be settled tonight. There’s plenty of time to consider it. It isn’t seemly for you to pick at me or your father. Stop it.”
Caro rose.
Kitty asked, “Where are you going?”
“Upstairs to use the necessary. Is that all right?”
Kitty shook her head. “You’re as impertinent as that girl Bel,” she said.
“I’m the daughter of the house, and I can be as impertinent as I like,” Caro said, and she slipped into the hallway to stand in the spot where she could overhear everything that was said in the study.
Her father’s voice was audible through the closed door. “Ben, I need your advice about Caro.”
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