Charleston's Daughter

by Sabra Waldfogel

  “You’re very kind,” she said, meaning it.

  He rose and offered her his arm. “I could do with a spot of supper,” he said. “Could you?”

  She rose and laced her arm through his. “I could,” she said. “What do people eat in Cincinnati? Are they brisk about their food, too?”

  He laughed. “The Aikens feed me much better than my landlady at the boarding house in Cincinnati,” he said. “I take full advantage of it while I’m here.”

  As they made their way back to the light and the noise and the smoky perfume of the house, she asked him, “How much longer will you stay in Sumter County?”

  “For a few more days,” he said. “My mother says she sees me too little and always wants me to linger.”

  As they mounted the steps, Camilla, who stood in the doorway, called out to them. “Cousin Joshua! Where have you been hiding? Have you been flirting with my friend Emily?”

  He laughed, a good, full, rich laugh. “Cousin Camilla, you’re like a force of nature! You’re like a hurricane in the Sea Islands!” He stepped lightly across the threshold into the house, and with the lightest step she had managed in a long time, Emily came with him.

  Several days later, Emily woke to find the maidservant lighting a fire in the bedroom fireplace. “Cold last night, miss,” she said. “Frost come.”

  Emily rose to look out the window. Frost coated the lawn. Fall was over, and so was the fever. She could go back to Charleston, if she wanted to.

  By midmorning the frost had burned away, and it was pleasant enough to sit on the first-floor piazza if she wrapped a shawl around her shoulders. She took Moby-Dick with her—she had read less than usual on this visit—and she had just found her place when Joshua Aiken, buttoned in a wool coat against the cold, bounded up the steps and greeted her with a broad smile.

  “Mr. Aiken!” she said. “It’s brisk today. You must feel comfortable.”

  “Oh, I do, Miss Jarvie. What about you? Are you warm enough?”

  “It’s kind of you to ask. I am.”

  It was strange to see him in daylight. He looked younger without the flicker of candlelight or the glimmer of moonlight. His eyes were a lighter brown than she remembered, and his lips were rosier. He unbuttoned his coat, and today, he wore an ordinary black cravat.

  She gestured to a chair and he sat. He said, “I’m glad to see you again, Miss Jarvie.”

  “Likewise, Mr. Aiken.”

  “I hope your sister doesn’t mind that I call on you like this. On the piazza.”

  Emily said, “If she does, I’ll tell her that you’ve become a Yankee and lost your manners in Cincinnati.”

  “No,” he said, smiling. “Just tell her that my manners have become very brisk.” He said, “I’m returning to Cincinnati tomorrow, and I wanted to see you before I left.”

  Oh, no, she thought. Not to ask to write to me. Not to ask to court me. Not after his kindness at the engagement party. “Mr. Aiken, I am still in mourning.”

  “I hadn’t forgotten,” he said gently. “No, today my purpose is quite different. I’m here in my northerner’s guise. I’m here on a matter of business.”

  She stared at him in surprise. “Business? What possible business could you have with me?”

  “Miss Jarvie, I’m wondering if you might see to writing something for Hearth and Home.”

  She stammered, “I never thought of such a thing. I’ve never set my hand to it.”

  “Might you be persuaded to try?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just a sketch, Miss Jarvie. Something about Charleston or South Carolina. Something you have observed and thought about.”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start or what subject to take up.”

  “Most of our readers are northern ladies,” he said. “The South is a foreign place to them, and an exotic one. Think of something you might show a northern visitor to give her the flavor of Carolina.”

  She was too surprised even to stammer.

  He said, “Nothing inflammatory, please. We’re like Godey’s in that we avoid the topics of the day. We don’t want to offend. But there are many subjects that would interest a lady. I would trust you to find one, and I leave that to your discretion.”

  Emily stared at the book in her lap.

  He broke the silence. “If I’ve overstepped my bounds, or if I’ve offended you…”

  She swiftly raised her head. “No. It’s such a surprise. No one has ever asked me for such a thing before.”

  “Surely you wrote for your teachers at school?”

  She thought of Madame Devereaux’s forbidding face. “At Madame Devereaux’s, we were taught never to put ourselves forward,” she said. “To efface ourselves.”

  He leaned forward, his expression earnest. “Madame Devereaux sounds like a tyrant to discourage her scholars so. You’re no longer under her instruction. It might be time to throw off her tyranny.”

  Startled, Emily said, “You make it sound like an insurrection!”

  He shook his head. “I should never forget that I’m in South Carolina,” he said. “Let me start afresh. I have faith in you as a writer, Miss Jarvie. I would welcome a thousand words, three closely written pages, from you, on the subject of the charms of Charleston, suitable for a lady’s eye. Is that easier to take?”

  “Very brisk,” she said, but the joke was weak since she was still so startled.

  He took a silver case from his pocket and snapped it open. “This my card,” he said. “With my address at Hearth and Home.”

  She took the card and scrutinized the address as though it held an answer. Trembling, she said, “I can only promise to try, Mr. Aiken.”

  The broad smile appeared again. “I look forward to seeing your effort, Miss Jarvie.” He rose, as did she. She held out her hand, and to her surprise, he didn’t press it as a gentleman pressed a lady’s fingers. He shook it, as he would to seal an agreement.

  She watched him walk away and turned the card in her hands. She shook her head in astonishment as she put the card in her pocket.

  Nancy opened the door. Standing in the doorway, she said, “Who was that?”

  “Mr. Joshua Aiken. Jane and Camilla’s cousin. Didn’t you meet him the other night?”

  “I don’t recall. Why did he come to see you? Do I dare hope for a thaw?”

  Emily laughed outright. Her secret warmed her. “He hasn’t a dime,” she said.

  “Well, at least you entertained him. Why did he leave so swiftly? You didn’t send him packing?”

  Emily put her hand in her pocket and curled it around the card. She said, “Of course not. He lives up in Cincinnati, and he’s learned how to be a Yankee. He was in a hurry.”

  Emily returned to Charleston a few days later. Escaping her stepmother’s scrutiny, she excused herself, saying that she wanted to lie down in her room. Upstairs, she waved away Lydia, who wanted to unpack and undress her and fuss over her hair. “It can wait,” she said. “Leave me be for a while.”

  She sat in the chair before the dressing table to look at herself. She looked better than she had when she left Charleston. Livelier, with a better color in her cheeks. The black dress was too severe next to her face, which was made rosier by the air of the pines.

  She stared at herself, trying to see herself as a stranger might. As Joshua Aiken had. The hair brooch, which had become so familiar, was suddenly obvious to her. The hair had lost its living sheen a long time ago, and its silky texture felt like dust under her fingers. She unpinned it and let it rest in her hand. With a resolute motion, she unlocked her jewelry box and laid Robert’s hair inside. She closed the box and locked the brooch away.

  Chapter 6: Free Persons of Color

  Kitty wrapped the portrait of James in black silk and hid it under her bed. She had not lost her fear that someone would accuse her of having stolen it. Caro, who couldn’t bear to put a book on the dirt floor, left the Melville volume in plain
sight on the pine table, where she saw it all the time. It no longer gave her pleasure. It was a reproach, reminding her of a life that she was likely to never have again.

  Her father’s portrait made her mother melancholy. Caro knew that her mother took it out at night to press her cheek against before she fell asleep. The Melville book made Caro irritable, an anger like a heat rash, hidden and miserable and unresponsive to any cure. Her discomfort made her sharp with her mother.

  Sophy had told her, “Don’t talk like that to your mama,” and Sophy’s reprimand made her itch with anger at Sophy, too.

  Early one morning, after breakfast and before the chores of the day, Caro stood in the shack as her mother sat on the rope bed as though it were a settee, arranging her meager skirt as though she still wore a crinoline and hoops. Her mother’s façade of being a lady in their reduced circumstances grated on Caro. They were not ladies playacting at being slaves. They were truly slaves.

  Sophy tapped on the door and called, “Miss Caroline! The wash water all ready, all hot. You come to help me?”

  Caro had come to hate the task of the wash. She hated the feeling of scalding water on her hands. She hated the sting of the soap as it rose in the steam. She hated the weight of the wet cloth, and she hated the task of ironing even more. After a day of wash, her arms and back ached. She thought of the five thin dimes she would receive, a quarter of what she was due, and she hated that, too.

  No, she thought. But she called back, “Yes, Sophy.”

  Her mother, who had never touched a dirty petticoat or held the stirring pole, said to her, “You don’t have to do that, you know.”

  Caro snapped, “Yes, I do.”

  “Sophy will do it.”

  Caro turned to stare at her mother. Through her irritation, she saw the haggard face, the hollows in the cheekbones, the deep shadows under the lovely eyes. Their new life had leached the rosy color from her mother’s lips, turning them dry and pale. It had made her thinner and had worsened her cough. Caro asked, “Who will earn our fifty cents if I don’t?”

  “As though I wanted the task! Or the money!”

  Caro forced herself to stay angry. Otherwise she feared she would start to cry. “As though I do!”

  Her mother said, “We won’t live like this forever.”

  “How? What will we do? When will it be different?”

  Her mother’s eyes grew wide, and they glistened with tears. “I don’t know,” she said.

  At a better time, Caro would have knelt at her mother’s feet to touch her cheek and try to console her. Now she said, “Why don’t we find your relations in Charleston? The Bennetts? Why don’t we go to see them?”

  Now anger enlivened her mother’s face. “We will not,” she said.

  Once the clothes were hung to dry, she sat with Sophy in the kitchen to eat a biscuit smeared with jam. She wiped the crumbs from her mouth with the napkin and asked, “Sophy, do you know of a free man named Thomas Bennett?”

  Sophy set down her coffee cup. “Mr. Thomas Bennett? Free man of color? Run a tailoring business on Queen Street, serve all the best families in Charleston? Everyone know of him. Why you ask?”

  “He’s my mother’s half brother.”

  “Why don’t you go to see him?”

  “My mother won’t hear of it.”

  “Why not?”

  “She won’t tell me. All I know is that they’re estranged.” She said, “I never thought much of it. My father was estranged from his family, too.” Caro asked, “Why is my uncle free and my mother not?”

  “Why do a white man free one slave and not another? Don’t know. He still your flesh and blood. You go to him, he help you.”

  “I wish I could make my mother see it.”

  Sophy put her gnarled hand over Caro’s. “I know you love your mama, and she love you,” she said. “But she act like she lost in the woods in Charleston. Many a way for a Charleston slave to make a life and earn a living.” She clasped Caro’s fingers. “By your own hand. She can’t see that.”

  Five dimes, when she was owed three dollars. Caro returned Sophy’s handclasp. “But I do.”

  “You wise to think of going to your uncle. Whatever happen between him and your mama, he still your flesh and blood. You go.”

  “My mother doesn’t want us to beg,” Caro said.

  “Can you sew?” Sophy asked.

  “Of course I can.”

  “Fine sewing?”

  Caro snorted. “I made myself a trousseau,” she said.

  “He a tailor,” Sophy said. “His wife, her family all dressmakers, and if he don’t have something, they will. You don’t go to beg. You go to ask him about work.”

  Caro looked down at her miserable dress. “Not like this,” she said.

  “We neaten you up a bit, but it help that you go to him looking poor,” Sophy said. “That way, he pity you, and he more likely to help you.”

  “Sophy, I never met anyone better at getting round someone than you.”

  Sophy chuckled. “Why do you think Marse Lawrence trust me so much?” she asked.

  Her apron washed and pressed, her headscarf neatly tied, her shoes cleaned, Caro walked resolutely toward Thomas Bennett’s shop on Queen Street. Not to ask for charity, she reminded herself, but for work.

  Amid the commercial splendor of Queen Street, Thomas Bennett’s shop stood out. The glass of his storefront flashed brilliantly in the sun, and the bell jangled cheerfully as she pushed open the door. Just inside the door was a little sitting area with a pair of good chairs in the Sheraton style and a little marble-topped table between so customers could be served refreshments.

  Thomas Bennett himself stood behind the mahogany counter. He was a light-brown man in a white shirt fierce with starch and a beautifully cut, beautifully made wool suit that advertised his business as a tailor. His expression was smooth, as though he starched and pressed it as well. A customer, a young man in an extravagant top hat and long-tailed coat, leaned against the counter. “I’m particular about my shirt fronts,” he explained to Thomas. “Mind the tucks when you make them up.”

  Next to Thomas stood a young man, making a note as the customer ordered his shirts. He had the palest of brown skin, dark curly hair, and arresting hazel eyes, an oddity in a colored face. Caro tried hard not to stare at him. He was beautiful as her father had been beautiful.

  Caro was miserably conscious of how wretchedly she was dressed. She reminded herself that she was kin to these elegant people. She forced herself to stand up straight.

  When the young man was satisfied, he turned to go. At the sight of Caro, he sniffed and raised his eyebrows. “The back door,” he said, unkindly.

  Thomas said affably, “It’s all right, Mr. Herriot.”

  “Hah!” said the young fop, and the bell jangled as the door shut.

  Thomas inclined his head. “You should have come in the back,” he said. “Who are you?”

  She approached the gleaming wooden counter. Many merchants were satisfied with oak or even pine, but Thomas’s counter was mahogany. She didn’t lean against it. “Caroline Jarvie, sir,” she said. “Kitty Bennett is my mother.”

  Thomas Bennett’s smooth commercial expression faltered. He said, “Kitty’s girl. You’re Kitty’s girl.” He shook his head. “You have the look of her, when she was young.” He righted himself. “I was very sorry to hear about Mr. Jarvie.” His expression was smooth again.

  She was taken aback that he was so cool. But she was relieved that he hadn’t thrown her out. “Thank you, sir.”

  The young man stared at her. She thought, I look even worse than I realized.

  Thomas explained to him, “Caroline is my half sister’s girl. Kitty left Charleston some years ago. I don’t believe you’ve ever met her.”

  The young man continued to gape at her, an expression at odds with his polished appearance, as his uncle said, “This is Danny. My nephew. Maria’s eldest boy.” Thomas
looked askance at Caro. “You know of Maria?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Caro said. “Even though we’ve never met, either.”

  Danny remembered his manners and extended his hand. “I’m pleased to meet you,” he said.

  His fingers were pricked and callused from wielding the needle. She said, “I’m pleased to meet you.” She met the hazel eyes. “Are you a Bennett, too?”

  Danny let go her hand. “Since my father died, we’re called Pereira,” he said. Did the faintest shadow of sadness pass over his face?

  Now she remembered. He was kin to her father’s friend, the lawyer Benjamin Pereira.

  “How is your mother?” Thomas asked, sympathy warming his tone.

  Caro looked up. “She misses him greatly.”

  He nodded, the slightest incline of his chin toward the snowy shirtfront. “How are you faring, the two of you?”

  As though he didn’t know, since the story had undoubtedly made its way from the mouths of the gossips that Sophy knew at Zion Presbyterian to their friends, among them free people of color, like the Bennetts.

  “We’re taking in a little money,” she said. “Doing some laundry.” She forced a light tone, as though she were talking about the newest mode for trimming a bonnet. “But it would be good to bring in more.” She smiled. “That’s why I came to you, Uncle Thomas. I don’t want to trouble you. I wouldn’t ask for charity. But I hoped…” she faltered, and thought of the five dimes in her palm. Her payment. Her underpayment. “Sir, I hoped that you might have some work for me.” The rest of the words came in a rush. “I can do fine sewing.”

  He asked, “Does Mr. Jarvie know that you hire out?”

  “He sends us the laundry himself,” she said, still light. “And he pays us. I don’t think he would mind if I hired myself out.”

  “It would be different if I employed you,” Thomas said.

  “Why? If he doesn’t know and doesn’t care?”