A Reluctant Courtship
When the twelve days of Christmas were over, Matthew didn’t want to leave Wood Place. Back at his saltbox house, he thought of Rabbit constantly. He smiled, remembering her tiny perfection, her feet dangling above the floor. He was afraid to call his constant thoughts infatuation, much less love, for Rabbit was a Negress.
Unofficially—for not even white men would write such rules down—if Matthew wanted to take Rabbit by force, no one would challenge him. It was not even against the law in Georgia for a white man to ravish a slave woman. If the woman was a white man’s own slave, it was his right. If he ravished another white man’s slave, it was only a crime against property, such as hurting a horse or dog that belonged to another. Yet the thought of violence toward a woman that he cared for filled Matthew with self-disgust. He would rather cut his own throat than to hurt one of the coiled hairs on Rabbit’s head. His gallantry was unusual for his new home: among his own slaves, there were Negroes whose skin color announced that they had been the product of ravishment by white fathers. Though he was the owner of slaves, Matthew considered himself upright, but his sudden feelings for Rabbit fell outside the boundaries of southern society.
After those twelve days of Christmas, Matthew was uncertain, but he knew that he could not abide another year until he saw Rabbit again. And he made a choice that was admittedly immoral: he continued to visit Samuel’s plantation, under the pretext of seeing Gloria. As young men in love will do—during one tormented night when Matthew touched himself and pictured Rabbit’s exquisite, stone-chiseled face, he finally admitted that he was in love—Matthew reasoned that the rules of society were made to be broken. There were no rules, except those he made in pursuit of his affection. Thus, he did not flinch when Samuel suggested that he begin to formally court his daughter.
Matthew didn’t know where this deception would end, but he didn’t care, either. He only knew he had to be with Rabbit again. Each visit with her was a chaste one, and he was proud of this. They sat at the table in the guest cabin for an hour and ate the food she prepared. Matthew took out his pocket watch to be careful of time. By his fourth visit to the plantation, they had begun to share secrets, but these two were bound by more than their feelings. Rabbit was a slave, and thus, she would not tell Matthew about the stories every Negro on the premises except the smallest child knew: that Samuel Pinchard was a monster who kept a series of little girls to harm in the cabin on the left side of the big house. That her own sister had been scarred in order to protect her from Samuel’s abuse. Or that her father had run away from Wood Place with her grandmother’s help. And Matthew did not talk about how he could not imagine an honorable future for them, because she was a Negro and a slave. Or that he had become more sensitive to his role as someone who owned human beings.
The First Lover’s Sin
You should know that Matthew and Rabbit mightily tried to avoid consummation during the times that Matthew visited Samuel’s Wood Place three days each month on the false pretext of courting Gloria. That Matthew and Rabbit continued to sit at the table together or outside on the porch, chaste yet burning for an entire year.
They shared more secrets. Matthew confided that he still missed his youngest sister, a baby who had emerged dead from his mother, but had been so loved that Mrs. Thatcher had insisted on naming her and refused to speak to Mr. Thatcher until the man had paid for a gravestone for the dead baby. The little girl had been named Judith and was buried on the family farm. Rabbit finally revealed to Matthew that her father had run away from the plantation—though she still withheld the details—and that Tess had dreams about Nick, as if they were together, instead of separated by distance, and even perhaps death.
And Matthew committed the first lover’s sin: he didn’t admit that he had tried to help Samuel retrieve Nick from wherever he had run to. He was afraid that Rabbit would despise him for a betrayal that had taken place before they’d ever met. And this was a valid concern, for even Matthew’s own sister had scolded him all the way from Boston.
And then we know that these two sweethearts finally gave in to each other, after a year. Sitting closely led to handholding. That led to brief kisses. Those led to longer embraces, and the warmth of need, and that next winter holiday, Matthew crept one night and met Rabbit at the barn where she waited with a lantern: he hadn’t wanted her to trek the long distance to the guesthouse. They walked together to the creek, stopping to kiss and whisper endearments. On the creek bank, they lay down together, fumbling and ignorant. He was twenty-seven to her eighteen, but neither of them had known another. And there was pain that first time for Rabbit but a happiness: this was the union her parents had known.