“Oh, he did it all right,” said Founder. “Lopsided, like I said. Gave me what I wanted with one hand but took away our freedom with the other.” She laughed. “At least that’s what he thought!”
I looked at Christian. “You sold Belle Meade,” I said quietly.
“Yes. Founder thought of it. As long as the estate was mine, I could do what I wanted. I freed our people, sold the house and land, then moved everyone who wanted to come north to establish Lower Knoll.”
“Had to do it,” Founder said. “Who was gonna honor that freedom if they all stayed down there?”
“But,” I said slowly, “what does this have to do with us?”
“The restriction still exists. It’s possible that if it were discovered that I’m not white, I could lose everything. Any distant family member could challenge my right to dispose of the plantation, including the slaves.”
“That ain’t gonna happen,” Founder said. “Not if you married to the right family.”
I sighed. This I understood. She meant to a white woman. With money.
“That would seal it. No one would doubt a thing. You see how the people round here look up to him. Like that Chamberlain gal.” She pressed a finger against my shoulder. “He marry you? How that gonna look? How long before he’s the talk of the neighborhood and that talk gets around and somebody start asking questions.”
Tears rose in my throat. “Christian, why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’ll tell you why! He thought he was white enough to do what he wanted, just like his daddy. I guess he’s white enough after all.” She planted her hands on her hips. “And I’ll tell you another thing.”
“Founder!” He spoke in a tone I hadn’t heard since the night I’d met him.
“No! She got to know it all! What does it matter, if she loves you like you say!”
She twisted her hips and drew out the word loves in an ugly sneer. I stifled a sob.
“What?” I stammered.
She leered at me. “You wanna know? Ask him how that fire got started—the one that nearly killed you and that little girl.”
Suddenly the room seemed crowded—crowded with questions, with unspoken words. And even more—it was as though Founder had flung the library doors wide open and every soul that owned a role in making this moment had stepped right through: the residents of Lower Knoll, Louis Colchester, my papa, and my mother. The room felt so full I thought I couldn’t breathe. I saw my mother’s face before me—her steady eyes, her stillness.
He was not who I’d thought, and I wanted to believe it didn’t matter, but it did. It mattered for all the people of Lower Knoll, and it mattered that he hadn’t told me any of this himself. He said he loved me. But my mother’s face on my mind made me think of how large a man’s love could be—that he would burn down a house to keep me near him. Her face said that when there was love so big, there was no room for your own. That was why she had looked the way she did in the locket—acquiescence. Because she’d had to carry her love small, like in a pocketbook, out of sight. Or worse—she’d had to carry the small love in her bare hands, the fingers gently clenched as though she were walking around holding two butterflies. With her hands like that, my mama couldn’t hold anything else. Not even me. For all I know, that’s why she died when I was born.
Now, standing there, suffocating in that too-full room, I got a sense of how small my love was. And I felt the stupid girl in me that Founder saw. Christian didn’t come to me through all those souls. He didn’t reach for me or try to hold me. I had no words. I thought of Madame. This was what it was to love and have the heart betrayed. This must have been what she’d felt when she’d realized Papa didn’t belong to her. A kind of crazy did open up inside you, and it would be easy to just fall into it. The crazy felt like it might be comforting, like I could scream and scream all day and no one would pay me no mind because they knew I had a right to do it. Madame had been screaming for years.
From the crazy I could find the right to be uncivil, then the right to be mean. Nothing would matter much after that—I could do any evil that came to mind and call it vengeance. Madame had gone that far.
Why didn’t I go that way? Because I felt what only could have been my mama’s hands, firm but kind, on my shoulders. The force of them turned me, turned me away from the awful I could have released into that room. She turned me away, and I ran.
In my room I sank into a chair and stared out the window. I dropped my head in my hands as his words of the past several months came back to me. How many times had he stressed our similarities? He’d already known: we were indeed exactly alike. But only I, not he, had been prepared to come to the altar on my own and free. He would have had an entire village on his back, and he had tried to hide this burden from me.
I don’t know how long I sat there. I didn’t eat; I didn’t drink. I watched the light shift and fade. I changed into my plain gray dress, removed the lily from my hair, and marveled over the change that had broken my life in only a few hours. I felt too tired and weak to cry. The shock wound its way through my body.
Finally there was a soft knock at the door.
“Come in, Christian,” I said.
His hand grazed my cheek, but I didn’t rise to greet him. He sat on the end of the bed, almost in the exact spot where Founder had been.
“Tell me one thing about Founder,” I said. “Why was she placée?”
“He didn’t have a white wife to complain.”
Like Madame, I thought.
“Neither do I.”
I looked at him sharply. “Do you expect that of me? And then what? You would marry Miss Chamberlain or someone like her?”
“It doesn’t have to be like that,” he said. “I love you.”
“My papa loved my mother.” I took the locket from my neck and placed the opened piece in his hands. “And she died with a white woman screaming over her body. Your father loved Founder, and she lives up there by herself and haunts this house like a ghost. Is that what love does to a life? I don’t want it.”
He closed the locket and returned it to me but held on to my hands. “Then come away.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere we’re not known. No one would have to know that you’re not white. You can pass as I do. You’ve done it before.”
“I did it to save my life,” I said. “My life. Not so that I could live as someone else.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters. I knew what it was to live under another name and have no voice. And I lived in fear, every single day. I won’t live that way again. It would be like being enslaved, only from inside me.” I pulled away from him. “That’s the truth of why you haven’t married before, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were afraid of being found out by your wife! You knew you had to live with that possibility, even more so than you do now, and you’d have even more to lose.”
I stood and paced the room, the realizations coming quickly.
“That’s why you wanted to marry me. Because you knew if I did find out, I wouldn’t leave. I would have to stay. Stay attached to you. And I’d have to live on those terms because—oh my God, Christian—you thought I valued a white husband more than I valued you.”