Except, while she was still eighteen—honeymoon barely over—Jeff spent a few weeks riding around the district enduring fish fries, hog barbecues, cockfights, and assaults of patriotic music blurted out of bugles and flügelhorns and French horns, and giving political speeches considered good but chilly, though everyone agreed he looked slim and elegant behind a podium. At one of the few rallies V attended, a woman whispered to her that she would be his greatest asset, said that previously he’d had everything he needed for high office except a hostess, but now he has you. And the woman was right—after the vote was counted Jeff became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. V had lived in his strangely designed house only two seasons before they packed up and headed to Washington.
BEFORE RAILROADS, there were two choices for getting to the nation’s capital. The southern route went down the river to New Orleans, and then by many rivers and stagecoaches to Charleston, and from there a ship up the coast to Norfolk, and finally a boat up the Potomac. So many connections to go wrong.
They chose the northern route, upriver past Memphis and onto the Ohio River, which V knew little about. The water was low after Cairo, and the Ohio was a crazy river, nothing but big meanders. But at least they didn’t have to change conveyances every day. The farther up they went, the colder it got. At first the ice sparkling along the riverbanks seemed pretty, but then chunks of ice started floating in the river, and the chunks grew larger and larger until they bumped and scraped the hull, which was alarming at night. V hadn’t experienced snow and ice since her partial school year at Madame X’s in Philadelphia, and she hadn’t missed those two expressions of weather one little bit. But she and Jeff snuggled tight in their cabin under piles of blankets reading books by candlelight. Then, at a narrows, the boat became iced-in by chunks big as johnboats. The paddle wheels wouldn’t turn. After the second day, the situation quit being romantic.
They remained stuck for most of a week until a small boat, jangling its bells, took them to the riverbank where they sat on their trunks until a large farm sled with oak runners could be found. Partway to Wheeling the sled skidded down a twenty-foot bank and bashed into a tree and broke a runner. One of the mules was badly injured and had to be put down. Their one traveling companion—another Mississippi congressman, an old colonel—broke a rib, and V was bruised around the head and shoulders. Jeff—who’d spent many winters up in Wisconsin and Minnesota—knew how to manage ice and snow. He became heroic. He patched the runner together and mostly walked to spare the lone mule. He guided them, assured them, saved them. He was like Florida’s Big Bear Theory made concrete.
They spent nights in farmhouses and inns. It was Dutch country, and every meal featured bratwurst drenched in maple syrup with maybe some mustard and a pickle. Maybe a boiled potato. V craved a bowl of shrimp gumbo with lots of okra, peppers and onions, hot sauce. And a big side of greens.
Eventually they fetched up at the edge of the Alleghenies in Wheeling. V had never seen mountains, so the snow-covered ridges seemed impossibly tall to a girl who’d hardly been out of Mississippi and Louisiana. At the hotel she looked in the mirror and her bruised face looked back in shades of blue and black and green. She felt like an adventurer.
From there it was east over the ridges in stagecoaches, and then little boats on little rivers to Philadelphia. Then a mix of stages and railways to Washington. When they arrived at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel—days late for the opening of Congress—V met Mary Chesnut on her first pass through the busy lobby and couldn’t have cared less how she looked that moment, which was disheveled, bruised, dirty, and excited at the sudden amplitude of her life.
* * *
James leaves The Retreat late, just before dinnertime. He reaches his hand to V in farewell, and she hugs him instead.
At the station, the 6:35 has already left. When the porter sees James on the platform, he comes over and says, I got worried when you missed your train.
—No need, James says. I’ll be on the seven-twenty-nine.
The porter says, Must make it easier roaming the white world in those clothes.
James looks down at himself. He smiles, shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders.
ON THE WAY BACK TO ALBANY, James hunches over his notebook. Trying to remember exact phrases, particular observations. Compounding her unreliable memory with his own.
Very fast, he scribbles a conversation—rehearsing for next week:
—Was I born enslaved?
—I can’t answer because I don’t know. And why should it matter? That world’s dead and gone.
—No, it’s not. The answer won’t change how I feel about myself, but it matters. It’s a fact about my life I need to know.
—That’s not your real question. Just voice it.
—All right, then. Did you ever own me?
Third Sunday
Saratoga Springs
—A DECADE, THAT’S THE NUMBER, V SAYS.
—Pardon?
—The past week I’ve estimated how much of my life since the age of twenty-five I spent wearing mourning. By the second half of the war so many had died that black silk disappeared. After little Joe fell, I had to wear cotton darkened with a muddy brew of walnut hulls and indigo. Those big black dresses wore you
