DAYS AFTER HER TOUR OF BRIERFIELD, V kept trying to understand Jeff and Pemberton. And Benjamin Montgomery as well. She grew up a town girl and their beautiful rental home seldom required more than a cook and a couple of house servants and a man to take care of the lawn and their few horses. Her family never had individual servants around long enough to know them well. They came and went because of WB’s theory—why take on the responsibilities of ownership when you can rent?
She knew true cotton plantations were meant to be horrific places, but Old Joe’s strange version of Owenist social ideas confused her. She resolved to read up on the topic. And Jeff’s friendship with Pemberton also confused her. She assumed that on Jeff’s side of the pair, he had depended on Pemberton for all sorts of things over the years. At West Point, Pemberton would have taken care of laundry, cleaned the room, polished boots, emptied wastebaskets, carried letters to post, transported embargoed liquor in and out of the dormitory. All those student needs. Later, up in the forests of the north wilderness—way past so many furcations of the Mississippi that it cut a path through the land no wider than a common river—she imagined Pemberton’s jobs would have been to chop wood, carry water, build fires, butcher deer, saddle horses, brush dirt off buckskin jackets at day’s end. They had known each other before V was born, and they treated each other as friends. But even then, seventeen, she knew that could not be the full relationship.
A lifetime later—Jeff and Pemberton both dead and V living in New York City, much to the anger of the southern press—she tried to jot a thought about the two men, a memory, a brief note about them for her own memoir, having recently worn herself to the nub finishing Jeff’s after he died in the middle of his opening chapters.
She wrote:
Don’t think about the existence of an artifact representative of that time, the whipping post. It played no direct part in their decades together. One could be with them for days and forget that their fundamental relationship was anything but friendship and respect and mutual responsibility stretching back to youth. But then something would happen. A small shift in Jeff’s tone of voice asking for the second time that some minor task be done, a moment of ignoring Pemberton as if he weren’t there. Flashes of language and particular tones of rudeness revealed that the relationship between the two men was deeply complex. That the fundamental note of their long history together condensed to a simple fact—one member of the friendship was owner and the other was both labor and capital. And then the shadow of that post traced divisions clear and precise as the sweeping shadow of a sundial.
WHEN V FINALLY MADE IT BACK to Natchez in March, sort of engaged to Jeff—but more on that later—she asked around about Pemberton’s dollar worth, describing in general a bondman of his qualifications—his experience, his subtlety, his mannerly way of communicating, his skill in navigating the gulf between owners and workers. She omitted his literacy and his love of newspapers, which might have skewed the results. Estimates were, Pemberton would cost as much as the house a blacksmith or baker or milliner lived in, maybe even as much as Jeff’s finest thoroughbred.
V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it at about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, the strangeness only. The sense that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed. And that she stood on one side and others stood across—free on her side, enslaved on the other. For the poorest southern whites or northern women and children working fourteen hours a day in the satanic mills of Yankee factories, the line between slave and free might have been only a foot across—but even then it cut deep, a bottomless chasm. Yet the only determinant of which side you occupied was a paper-thin layer of skin, a fraction of blood degree.
After a few months with Winchester as her tutor, she asked him who drew that line. He said some people believed God drew it. He had her read Luke 12:47—about how the slave that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes. Winchester told her that many plantation owners kept that page turned down for quick reference. He told her she would find quite a few inconsistencies in that book and in the beliefs of Christians and suggested she think about the relationship between wealth and power and morality in regard to drawing lines.
As epiphanies go, her young recognition amounted to not much, except it seemed so for her then. Over the years with Winchester she came to know that people have enslaved each other from time immemorial. Spin the globe and point to a location and probably find slaves sometime in history. Study the golden enlightened Greeks and their marvelous language and history and mythology as she did for years, and you’ll see Socrates and his comrades thinking lofty thoughts while pretty slave girls and boys pour their wine and less pretty ones pick and stomp the grapes. The Yankees’ holy Puritan forefathers owned slaves almost from the moment they set foot on the continent. V’s New Jersey governor grandfather owned slaves all through his eight terms. As a