THE GREAT DIVIDE—rivers change direction and you’re stuck following one flow or the other from then on. That was the trip to Davis Bend. Out of The Briers, into The Hurricane.
In early fall of the year, at the dinner table, V’s father announced that a very attractive and generous invitation had arrived for her. She would be traveling upriver to the plantation of Joseph Davis, a lawyer and planter and former partner of WB’s in a rare successful investment. The Hurricane occupied a several-thousand-acre hunk of land in a big C-shaped meander of the Mississippi that people had started calling Davis Bend. She was to go up at the beginning of December and stay through Christmas and into the New Year, two months at least. Maybe more. Home by Valentine’s Day at the latest. Her tutor, Winchester, would escort her there and then return to Natchez, leaving her in the care of the Davis women, a wife and some indeterminate number of daughters. At which point, her relationship with Winchester—at least as student and teacher—would end. WB suggested V should look upon the trip as a holiday—new places, new people. Important for her to make an impression. Also Joseph had a younger brother who was developing an adjoining plantation called Brierfield, and she would certainly meet him during the visit. Etc., etc. WB even raised his glass in a toast, as if something happy were being celebrated.
V raised her glass right back and said, How welcome. A worthy substitute for the debutante ball next spring, for which I won’t be tapped. So, let’s all drink to wonderful new opportunities no longer available in Natchez or Vicksburg or New Orleans. Here’s to my new life among a band of wilderness strangers.
She delivered her lines with every grain of mighty sarcasm an unhappy teen can summon.
WINCHESTER GRADUATED from Princeton, which swung weight even in Mississippi. But it swung the other way too. He had passed the bar and started a struggling law practice but also knew all about Greek and Latin literature and philosophy and history, which some of WB’s more suspect business friends felt served a similar function to sprinkling colored sugar on cake icing.
People became more indulgent after Winchester’s inheritance. He suddenly owned better than two thousand very fine acres fronting on the Mississippi over on the Louisiana side. Except, immediately upon possession, Winchester began letting most of the fields return to their previous junglous state. He kept only a couple hundred in cotton—figuring that was all the cash he needed to live on—plus another ten in food crops.
When asked by his peers why he ran his plantation as he did—whether he meant something by it or not, whether there was a particular theme to his strange choices—he raised his arms before him and flippered both hands impatiently and said the word slaves with a tone of ambiguous annoyance. Some fellow planters agreed that slaves required constant attention and that for every good worker you also had to support a half-dozen children and a useless granny or two. Others agreed that as an institution, slavery’s time had passed, its golden age behind it, though the Bible and the Constitution of the United States confirmed its holy justice. Others worried Winchester had gone north to school and had lost all his common sense and had abandoned belief in slavery altogether.
Then one mighty day, after months of thought on the topic, Winchester freed all his enslaved workers. He handed them their papers and shooed them on their way. Then he began hiring workers the way Yankees did, cheap and by the carefully measured hour. But, unlike Yankees, he paid everyone the same wages—remnant Choctaw and freed blacks got the same as whites. He hired back many of his previous slaves under the new economics. For those who wanted to live in his housing, he started charging rent. And when it came to food and clothing, he left everybody to manage for themselves. Winchester lived alone and ate mostly bean stews, grits and greens, and other such simple bowl meals that he cooked for himself.
He suffered under the judgment of his fellow rich planters who claimed he had gone crazy. He answered that he had seen the future of capitalism, and believed that if they fully understood it, the planters would embrace it like a favorite New Orleans whore.
V was seven the year Winchester got bored with farming and sold his land and moved in with the Howells under some arrangement with WB that she, even now, doesn’t understand fully, but has celebrated nearly every day of her life when an electric spark of memory delivers a reminder that Winchester valued her far beyond what WB—or anyone else—ever did.
WINCHESTER HADN’T ARRIVED with any intention of being her tutor. He lived out in one of the back cottages at The Briers with his books. He had an office in town and was just a struggling lawyer and not the judge in black robes he later became. He took supper at the family table, but otherwise they saw little of him.
A couple of months after his arrival, though, he volunteered to tutor V and would not accept a penny in pay. Maybe he felt the need to reimburse WB for room and board, or maybe he saw something in V worth his time and interest. She remembers one detail from their first day together as student and teacher. V had recently asked her mother what her odd name meant, where it came from. Her mother said, Your father came up with it. I guess he thought it sounded exotic. V asked Winchester the same question, what her name meant. He said, It comes from
