iii
Many things on the farm have changed since they lived here last. The trees are taller and so are the Booths. Asia has the strange, disorienting sense as she walks through the property that both her feet and the ground are farther away than they should be. The creek runs narrow through its iced edges when it once seemed wide and fast to Asia. The logs spanning it, the bridges June and Rosalie, Henry and Nelson made as children, are hollow with decay and wouldn’t hold Asia’s weight. The bullfrog is gone.
But the most profound changes are invisible to her and concern the Hall family. A few years back, Rowland Rogers died and his slaves, including Ann Hall, went to his son Elijah, husband of the Booths’ beloved Aunty Rogers. Around that same time, Joe and Ann finally had enough money to buy Ann’s freedom. They now have two little girls, Asia and Susanna Hall, born free as a result, and they’ve managed to buy their littlest boy, Joseph, for one hundred and ten dollars. But the oldest four—Lucinda, Mary Ellen, Pinkney, and Nancy—remain in bondage.
The Hall family resembles much of Baltimore in this respect. Baltimore has the largest community of free blacks in the nation, but mixed amongst them are term slaves, bound until they turn twenty-five, or thirty-five, or older still. And also slaves for life. This was far from the worst thing to come out of slavery, but the complicated, unnavigable family dynamic in which some siblings were free and others were not was surely a terrible evil.
Three of Joe and Ann’s children remain the property of Elijah Rogers. The fourth child, Nancy, lives farther away on the estate of an elderly spinster named Elizabeth Preston. Nancy is five years old.
Ann Hall knows Aunty Rogers intimately and she wants to believe that her oldest children are safe now from sale. But there is no way this particular fear can ever be put entirely to rest, no way for Ann not to be conscious of this in each and every interaction that she and Aunty Rogers have.
Tudor Hall is the place where the two women meet most often, Ann working there daily and Aunty Rogers a frequent guest. Asia, who spends a fair bit of time with both, assumes that the two women like each other. There’s no evidence to the contrary, even if she were paying attention, which she isn’t. Rosalie might notice a shift in their relationship, but not Asia.
What Asia does see is how kind and helpful with Mother they both are. Maybe Mother spends more time at the graves of her dead children than seems advisable, maybe her handkerchief is never completely dry, maybe she seems determined to wear her widow’s black until the day her own death takes her. At least her hysteria has passed. She faces each day with a stoic, if afflicted, determination. This leaves room, at last, for Asia’s own griefs and grievances.
Her resolution to love her life on the farm is already forgotten. Tudor Hall is smaller than their home on Exeter. They’re too often trapped inside by weather, bumping against each other, snipping and snarling and without the boys to intercede or lighten the mood.
Asia spends the winter plagued with mysterious abdominal pains, a sharp stabbing whenever she shifts position quickly, so she keeps her movements timid, walking about the house like an old woman.
Liberal doses of iodine do nothing. Mother prescribes a laxative, which Asia refuses to take. The only doctor she’ll consider is the one they used to see in Baltimore, Dr. Smith, though she never liked him before. “His hands are always so cold,” she once told Rosalie. “And his breath smells like something has died in his mouth.” But now, unless she’s allowed to make a visit back, see her friends, Mother can just watch her suffer. Our Lord fits the shoulder to the cross, Asia tells herself, a favored saying of the nuns at her old convent school. She tacks a picture of Job over her bed, begins a quilt in the Job’s tears pattern, and prays for fortitude.
Quite simply, Asia is lonely. There was a round of parties for her when she left Baltimore—dances, teas. Her friends were inconsolable. But Asia’s increasingly sure that, in the midst of their unbroken gay lives, they don’t really miss her all that much. She sits at her desk, writing sorrowful letters—“Why haven’t you written me back? I think you have forgotten me.” She’s long understood that no one will ever love her as much as she needs to be loved. She thinks she was born knowing this.
Her own feelings of love, she writes to Jean, are the best and purest of emotions. At seventeen, she writes that she’s already known the sort of love that will last her lifetime. She won’t divulge the object, only the exciting assertion that nothing can come of it. This is couched as a confession. Back when they were little girls at school, Jean and Asia had promised each other never to fall in love. They solemnized the pledge by trading rings.
They also promised never to marry and to that vow Asia insists she is constant. “It isn’t so awful, being an old maid, is it, Jean?” she writes as only a woman who knows she’ll have many offers can.
iv
Months pass, the calendar turns. Spring arrives to work her magic. The branches of the cherry are budding with tender leaves. Flocks of orioles and mockingbirds gather there. The leaves grow and the blossoms open and soon the foliage hides the birds completely so that the tree itself appears to sing. Violets bloom and scent the forest floor. Daffodils unfurl above the green spears of their stems. Spring turns gracefully into a green and golden summer. Father’s body is taken from the mausoleum and buried at last in the ground of the Baltimore Cemetery.
On a tonic of flowers and sunshine, Asia recovers her health. She acquires a beautiful black Thoroughbred and names her Fanny. The good weather allows her to ride daily. Fanny is fast and smooth. Asia comes home from one such ride, breathless and flushed, to learn from an excited group of children that an urgent letter has arrived on horseback from the rector of St. Timothy’s Hall.
Mother is sunk into Father’s old blue-and-yellow chair, seemingly incapable of speech. Light from the window falls on her. Even dressed as she is, in all her desperate black, she’s the brightest thing in the room. Behind her in a shadowed corner, the spinning wheel sits, lightly coated in dust. Asia remembers Father once saying that there was nothing more beautiful than a young woman spinning though a young woman playing the harp was a close second. Father used to insist that all blankets at the farm be made from their own sheeps’ wool. But no one has touched that wheel in years. Asia has never learned how to spin nor does she wish to.
Mother waves the letter at Asia who takes it from her fingers and silently reads. Van Bokkelen has an ornate hand and the very paper he’s used is weighty with importance. He begins by apologizing for the shock he knows this letter will bring. But duty compels him to tell Mother that a rebellion has taken place on the school grounds. A number of students have left the school and set up camp in the nearby woods. As of the date of this letter, he writes, the boys remain at large, refusing to return to their classes. They’re patrolling the perimeter of their camp, day and night, with rifles they stole from the armory. They’ve threatened to shoot if forced back.
Van Bokkelen says that Mother will be pleased to hear that Joe, whom he pauses to praise as a diligent scholar, did not take part in this insurgency.
But Johnny did. In fact, Van Bokkelen suspects Johnny of being among the instigators. A group of their fathers have agreed to meet tomorrow at the school and force the rebels back to class. A suitable punishment for the miscreants will follow.