At breakfast the next morning, her first words of the day were, About ninety-nine percent of the time, we’re more awful than any animal you can name. But, in that final decimal, we’re so beautiful.
Jeff said, You look tired. Bad dreams again?
THE BRIERS DID NOT BELONG to V’s father. He leased it. The same thing with the few house slaves. WB Howell’s theories of financial management were simple—why tie money to property when he could invest it in ill-conceived business schemes? WB was the youngest son of an eight-term New Jersey governor back when they held elections every year, and his money came mostly from inheritance and marriage to V’s mother and from her very comfortable Mississippi family. Almost none of WB’s money came from successful speculation, and none whatsoever came from actual work.
At age twenty, WB recognized that his pathways to success might not be so wide open in New Jersey or New York as he had grown up expecting. Older brothers stood in his way, and family politics tended unfavorably. After little more than a flicker of thought, he decided the likeliest place to realize his full potential was the American Southwest. Mississippi, Louisiana. Some town on the big river where he couldn’t help but be the smartest man around. A place still whiffing the last tinge of lawless frontier. And Natchez—being to his understanding the fanciest town all the way from New Orleans to the frozen North where the great brown river arose—he chose it for home.
Sadly, contrary to WB’s hopes, he was not the smartest man in Natchez. In fact, those rubes picked his carcass clean. After marrying well—with a dowry of several thousand acres of land and nearly a hundred slaves, which he fairly quickly sold to raise investment cash—he spent nearly twenty years losing everything in countless failed business schemes. And then, after milking dry every teat he could pull in terms of borrowing, he found his world boiled down to one ugly frank reality. His southern adventure had broken him.
BACK WHEN SHE WAS THIRTEEN—her family at the edge of bankruptcy—V’s father had bet enough money to buy a small farm on a shooting match—a bet that always rested in her mind as the representative scene from that epoch of loss.
She pictured a muddle of wealthy, ignorant gentlemen, drunk and armed with rifles, in a raw patch of new-cleared ground, their horses and slaves shaded at the edge of the woods. A big lone pine tree sported a bull’s-eye target nailed to its alligator-hide bark. Then WB, who would have been drinking heavily, stepped up to test his skill as a marksman. Or—since he had never in his life been able to hit the side of a cow barn from a hundred feet—to test his belief in the possibility of a miraculous light shining itself on him like a beam of Jacob’s ladder.
When he came home he’d not only lost his money, but also misplaced his hat and tie. Red mud rose calf-high on his riding boots. He was reeling drunk, tacking wall-to-wall down the center hall of the house, grabbing unsuccessfully for a handhold on the shallow chair rail atop the wainscoting. Drunk had become a common gambit of his. But it had lost all effectiveness in their household except with V’s mother, who always acted as if he’d unexpectedly suffered a mild stroke. And oh her joy a couple of afternoons later when he arose from his stupor, his recovery complete.
UNLIKE WB, V’s grandfather believed in ownership. He had numerous slaves in New Jersey before, during, and after his governorship. The mansion depended on slaves as much as most every governor’s residence in the country back then. Slaves accomplished everything from construction to maintenance, from cooking and cleaning to growing the kitchen gardens and emptying the chamber pots, all the way to wet nurses offering their weary nipples to somebody else’s babies so that other mothers could get on with their lives. Some years later, V read Frederick Douglass’s claim that he had seen the cotton fields of Mississippi and the pits of Yankee slave markets and considered their horrors about equal. So some version of that horror was how WB grew up. And another version was how V grew up. How everyone grew up then, one way or the other, whichever side of the skin line you chanced to be born on. Children don’t judge their own lives. Normal for them is what’s laid before them day by day. Judgment comes later.
AT SIXTEEN—other than overwhelming scorn and rage—what power do you control? For the pimply boys V knew, it was guns and their prospects for inheritance. Girls had their bodies and minds. That age, you make choices and don’t always know you’re making them. Some don’t matter, but a surprisingly large lot of them haunt forever. Each choice shuts off whole worlds that might have been.
The novels V liked at sixteen—and loved in a different way later—were the ones where young women exist at that precise thrilling hinge of time, the making of a dreadful, possibly fatal, choice. Who to marry, who to reject, which path to take? Whether to
