According to the gossips at the college, Winfred had not been ashamed to visit a brothel （or three）， but Matthew was too shy to parry his sister’s veiled attacks with a query about her husband’s proximity to syphilis, or to note that his parents had not refused his bank drafts, sent from his own bank to the one in Boston. But he did his second best to otherwise incense his sister: he sent her a handful of Samuel’s runaway flyers. She was furious and threatened him with the wrath of his parents: “How Mother and Father would grieve to know your fall in the world but I shall keep it from them! I am aghast that you are unaware your soul is in sore peril!”
Matthew’s feelings were wounded, but he knew he wasn’t a bad man. Abolitionists knew nothing about building a house in southern climes, about growing crops in uncultivated ground. He did not waste his strength or dignity arguing outright with his sister; he was settling into his new home.
The Joy of the Season
Since the infancy of their friendship, Matthew had told Samuel that the distance from his family increased his loneliness. He was startled by his feelings, for he had not been close to his brothers and his sisters previously, and his father had been a difficult man, overly fond of parts of the Bible that struck his mother as cruel-natured, as she went in for merciful devotions herself. The Psalms were the favorite of Matthew’s mother. She was kind, but tired from the tedious work of women on a farm, as well as from a last baby—a girl—who had been born to her after she believed the burden of children had been lifted. （At this point in Matthew’s monologue, Samuel had interjected that the book of Genesis dictated that women should bring forth children in pain. After a few beats of silence, Matthew replied that during his mother’s last lying-in, his father had been fond of quoting from that same portion of Genesis.）
The winter holidays were an especially black-clouded time for Matthew. A week before Christmas, when his brown-skinned maid, Dori, had walked through the kitchen into the back room that Matthew called a parlor and announced Samuel, the younger man nearly wept with appreciation. Samuel carried a large straw basket of delicacies: airy, risen, light bread; two kinds of cake, pound and fruit; a smoked turkey; a small portion of sugar-cured ham; two crocks of cloth-sealed blackberry preserves; head-and milk cheese; and scuppernong brandy.
After a year of visits, Samuel asked Matthew if he would do him the honor of spending the twelve days of Christmas with him. He advised that Matthew should hire a patroller to oversee the property in his absence, to keep his Negroes in line. The younger man speedily answered that he would do so, but when he didn’t expound on his plans, Samuel suggested Jeremiah Franklin, the sharecropper and part-time slave patroller. He had a heavy hand with Negroes, and was a rough-hewn sort, but he was reliable.
Though he knew it was a day early, Matthew arrived on Christmas Eve. Matthew appeared laden with his own gifts of food prepared by his housekeeper, who had not traveled to New England and had not seen the much more practical amounts of food put on tables. Matthew brought several hams that Simon, his head Negro in charge, had smoked, after respectfully chiding his owner over giving all that meat to a man that he’d heard tell had four times as many hogs as anyone in the region. Matthew was in a good mood and had not chastised Simon, only said that he wanted to be neighborly. It would not have been seemly to admit to a slave that he wanted to impress Samuel. It was because of this same good mood that when he hired Jeremiah as temporary overseer during his absence, Matthew admonished him that he did not want to come home to find his male slaves sporting bloody stripes, nor his females crying as a result of molestation; if that was the case, payment would be withheld from Jeremiah. And Matthew ignored the man’s expression of contempt over concern for Negroes. Nothing was going to ruin Matthew’s good mood.
Samuel installed Matthew in the guesthouse to the furthermost west side of the plantation. The guesthouse was charming, with a parlor, two bedrooms, a sturdy front porch with railings, and polished wood floors throughout. There was an inside privy closet containing a cabinet with a hole cut into the top; when opened, a flowered chamber pot sat inside on a shelf. In the back of the guesthouse was a white-painted outhouse for the use of any slaves. What everyone else on premises knew was that this structure was the former moon house, where Aggie and Lady had spent their bleeding times in years past, renovated and expanded since then.
Samuel had made sure the guesthouse was very far away from the big house—and the left cabin—as some of his prospective guests had wives. He did not want to offend delicate female sensibilities. Samuel had hoped that rich planters of good breeding, their families, and their slaves might visit, but that had not happened. Matthew was, in fact, his first guest.