My Thomas, Roberta Grimes [phonics story books .txt] 📗

most ugly and slothful and making me a servant to her own children. My miniature not even two inches long seemed greater to me than the living lady. As I grew, my mother remained twenty years old, now older sister, now equal friend, until now she begins to be my junior. I protect and comfort her in my turn.

Her miniature shows a lovely beauty, although my Pappa swears it is a pallid likeness. She had red hair that was prone to curl, and a tiny, fine-boned, wistful face, and a look she must have struggled for, as if she did no work at all but she sat on a cushion and smiled all the day. I have had some of her gowns made over for me. She was smaller than I have grown to be, but still I am able to wear them well. What I searched for on Friday was a green brocade with side-hoops and gold lace wrought in flowers. I thought it might go very well with the yellow stomacher and petticoat that my sister Tibby had given me when she passed my own height at the age of twelve.

“Will Tibby’s quilted petticoat move, Betty? Do you think it might do well for dancing?”

“Will you look at that gentleman!” Betty said, sounding vexed. “How are those poor boys ever going to grow up?”

Betty was at the window, looking out at the boys who were gathering cider-apples in the orchard. I went to the window and looked out, too, and there was Mr. Jefferson in a crowd of four or five of the slaves, and two of Betty’s sons among them, showing the boys how to throw an apple to knock other apples out of the trees.

“Mr. Stevens is going to switch them for sure, he sees them doing a thing like that!”

Betty could not call to Mr. Jefferson. I could not call to Mr. Jefferson. Even our overseer, Mr. Stevens, had not the position to reprimand a Burgess for throwing apples.

Mr. Jefferson told me when we talked that evening that the gentlemen were then at their cards and their pipes, and since he neither smoked nor gambled and he meant to plant apples in the spring, he had gone out to see what varieties we had and how they were doing in our ground. When I told him that our overseer would not approve of throwing apples, he said it had been an experiment. He had asked Martin Hemings if throwing would work, and since Martin had not known the answer, Mr. Jefferson had determined there and then to find out.

I needed two gowns, a simpler one for dinner and a gaudier one to wear to the ball. The green, when we found it, was wrong with the yellow, so for the ball I chose my sister Betsy’s apricot lustring trimmed in fine imported Alencon lace that might well never fit her again. Betsy is great with child, and she has put on such a layer of flesh that even her stays are unlikely to help her. For the dinner, which Betty would soon have to serve – she only had time to crape my hair – I chose a pink chintz with a white linen petticoat embroidered in many-colored flowers.

The dinner table for forty people had been set up on trestles on the ballroom floor and spread with a length of homespun linen and laden with the fruits of our three days of work, our quails and sausages and squash-corn salads and kidney-mutton savories and sweet-potato biscuits and our cheese-cakes and moonshines and orange pies.

Some ladies in attendance wore homespun, too. This seems to be a coming fashion, what with the nonimportation resolutions imposed on us by the Association. The King has resolved to tax our imports to pay for business of his own, and this affront has so heated Virginia that gentlemen have been pleased to ban the import of nearly everything. When Governor Botetourt gave a holiday ball, every lady there was in a homespun gown.

For me, however, this banning of imports is taking a switch to one’s own head. If gentlemen had to spin and weave, they would show a greater respect for cloth.

There was such excitement on the air! I could not help but feel it, too, even though I was grim to resist for fear that it might charm me into making one gentleman more important than the rest. My custom is to play the harpsichord as a reason for avoiding most of the dance, and I generally play it even at dinner, before and after I have my bite. Mr. Burwell’s William is a fair hand at the fiddle, so we play together, he and I. We did this while the company gathered, choosing a light Italian tune that I played while William improvised a sprightly gay accompaniment. We really sounded rather well.

Betty has for long been a lady’s maid, but now she is training Bett to be my maid because Ondine has slow rheumatism. More and more, Betty is compelled to assume control of the house. She likes this, I think. Her mind is sharp and restless. So even though she is breeding again and only weeks from childbed, she oversaw the dinner serving, using for waiters mostly her children. Martin and Bob came in from the orchard, and Mary, Betty’s oldest, whose mind is willful, and even little Jim. Nance came in to see the dinner with baby Critta on her hip, and this occasioned one awful moment that makes me shudder even now.

My Pappa has married and buried three wives. The last of them lived for barely a year. That he turned away from marriage after that was a thing that did not surprise me at all, but that Betty’s children began to come paler a year or two after his last wife’s death was a phenomenon I did not understand until after my own marriage.

Our Betty’s father was a sailor named Hemings who left her complexion rather pale. Her four oldest children are tall and dark, but Bob and Jim are bright mulattoes with heads of molasses-colored hair. Baby Critta is a gray-eyed towhead. In the arms of her own dark sister, Nance, she looked as white as any child.

“John!” one of the gentlemen called to Pappa from partway down the table. “John! Is this a grandchild? Who is this?”

Since he knew that a baby at a ball wearing nothing but a threadbare blanket could never be a child of the family, he said this only to tease my Pappa.

“No,” Pappa said. “She is a servant’s child.” Pappa seemed amused by this interplay, but I felt knotted-up with rage. That every lady cast her eyes demurely and every gentleman thought it a jest was a fact I had more reason to rue than any other person there. I grimly looked the length of the table and found Mr. Jefferson sitting in what looked to be a mortified silence. I liked him still better for the look of his face that told me as plainly as if he said it that he found no humor in the thought of a master’s bedding of his slave. I resolved at that moment to make his further acquaintance.

But now it is long past candle-time. Jack is waking from his nap and fussing for milk and bread for supper. And I am tired, but I find that writing all of this down has eased my mind. I am going to like journal-keeping very well.

 

ROBERTA GRIMES is a business attorney who had two experiences of light in childhood. She majored in religion at Smith College, and she spent decades studying afterlife evidence, quantum physics, and consciousness theories in order to understand the fundamentally spiritual nature of reality. She uses fiction to explore human nature and the ways in which spirituality affects our lives.

 

To learn more visit: http://robertagrimes.com/

 

 

 

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Publication Date: 03-03-2014

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