Sheriff Patterson’s two nieces came down from Philadelphia in 1840 for a three-month stay, and he and his wife held one o’clock dinners most Sundays while the young women were there. They would invite folks near and about for small gatherings, and it was on that autumn afternoon that it was John Skiffington and his father’s turn. Patterson’s wife was distant kin to William Robbins’s wife, and Robbins and his wife came as well, though Robbins viewed the Pattersons, to say nothing of the Skiffingtons, as being two or three rungs beneath him and his.
John Skiffington and his father arrived first and John stepped out of a gray day into Mrs. Patterson’s dull blue parlor and saw first thing Winifred Patterson, a product of the Philadelphia School for Girls, an institution with one foot in Quakerism. He was not a shy man and he was bear-large. Winifred was not shy either, an unintended result of being at the Philadelphia School for Girls, and it wasn’t long before he and Winifred-after the arrival of the Robbinses-had retired to a corner of the parlor and begun a conversation that lasted through dinner and into early evening. What surprised him most was why the female sex had not interested him before that Sunday. Where had God been keeping that part of his head and heart?
He saw her often after that, in Mrs. Patterson’s parlor, or in church or on buggy rides accompanied by Mrs. Patterson and Winifred’s younger sister. John became the only regular visitor at the Pattersons’ Sunday dinners, and had to be told a few times by Mrs. Patterson, suppressing a titter, that it was rude and selfish to take Winifred aside before the other dinner guests had a chance to relish the worldliness that the Philadelphia School for Girls had instilled in her. By early January Mrs. Patterson told her husband that things were moving in such a way that it might be best if Mr. Patterson summoned his brother from Philadelphia, that the brother and John Skiffington might want to talk. The brother arrived, the men talked, but Winifred returned to Philadelphia in March, after the second frost that did wonders for gardens that year. Skiffington visited Philadelphia twice, and came away that last time in May with Winifred’s promise that she would marry him.
They married in June, a wedding attended by even the better white people in the county, so liked had John become in his time in Manchester as Patterson’s deputy. His father’s cousin was ill in North Carolina but the cousin sent his son, Counsel Skiffington, and Counsel’s wife, Belle, a product of a very good family in Raleigh. Though John and Counsel had grown up together, as close as brothers, they had no overwhelming love for each other. Indeed, had Counsel not been a wealthy man he would have found his mild dislike of John veering toward something most unkind whenever they met. But wealth helped to raise him above what would have made other men common riffraff and so he was more than happy to come to his cousin’s wedding in a Virginia town whose name his wife had to keep reminding him of. And, too, Counsel hadn’t been out of North Carolina in five months and he had been feeling an ache to walk about under a different sky.
Counsel and his wife, with some discussion from his dying father, brought a wedding present for Winifred from North Carolina. They waited to present it until the reception for family members in the house John had bought near the edge of town for his bride. About three o’clock, after matters had quieted down some, Belle went out to where her maid was in the backyard and returned with a slave girl of nine years and had the girl, festooned with a blue ribbon, stand and then twirl about for Winifred. “She’s yours,” Belle told Winifred. “A woman, especially a married one, is nothing without her personal servant.” All the people from Philadelphia were quiet, along with John Skiffington and his father, and the people from Virginia, especially those who knew the cost of good slave flesh, smiled. Belle picked up the hem of the girl’s dress and held it out for Winifred to examine, as if the dress itself were a bonus.
Winifred looked at her new husband and he nodded and Winifred said, “Thank you.” Winifred’s father left the room, followed by Skiffington’s father. Counsel went on smiling; he was thinking of all those early days in North Carolina when his dislike for his cousin was taking root. The trip up to that nowhere Virginia town had been worth it just for the look on his cousin’s face. “It’s a good way of introducing you to the life you should become accustomed to, Mrs. Skiffington,” Counsel said to Winifred. He looked at Belle, his wife. “Isn’t that right, Mrs. Skiffington?”
“Of course, darling.” She said to the wedding present, “Say hello. Say hello to your mistress.”
The girl did, curtsying the way she had been shown before leaving North Carolina and many times during the trip to Manchester. “Hello. Hello, mistress.”
“Her name is Minerva,” Belle said. “She will answer to the name Minnie, but her proper name is Minerva. She will, however, answer to either, to whatever you choose to call her. Call her Minnie and she will answer. But her proper name is Minerva.” Her first maid, received when Belle was twelve, had had a disagreeable night cough and had to be replaced after a few weeks with a quieter soul.
“Minerva,” the child said.
“See,” Belle said. “See.” The night that Belle Skiffington would die, that first maid, Annette, grown out of a cough that had plagued her for years, would open a Bible in the study of her Massachusetts home, looking for some verses to calm her mind before sleep. Out of the Bible would fall a leaf from a North Carolina apple tree that she had, the night she escaped with five other slaves, secreted in her bosom for good luck. She would not have seen the leaf for many years and at first she would not remember where the browned and brittle thing came from. But as she remembered, as the leaf fell apart in her fingers, she would fall into a cry that would wake everyone in her house and she could not be calmed, not even when morning came. Belle’s second maid, the one who had never been sick a day in her life, would die the night after Belle did. Her name was Patty and she had had three children, one dead, two yet alive, Allie and Newby, a boy who liked to drink directly from a cow’s teat. Those two children would die the third night, the same night the last of Belle’s children died, the beautiful girl with freckles who played the piano so well.
“See,” Belle said again to Winifred. “Now I don’t want you spoiling her, Mrs. Skiffington. Spoiling has been the ruination of many. And, sweet Winifred, I just will not have it.” Belle laughed and picked up the hem of Minerva’s dress again.
“Yes,” Counsel said, winking at John his cousin, “my wife is the best evidence of the ruination that spoiling brings.”
The morning after their wedding night Winifred turned to her husband in their bed and told him slavery was not something she wanted in her life. It was not something he wanted either, he said; he and his father had sworn off slavery before they left North Carolina, he reminded his bride. That was how his father had interpreted the final dream, as well as the ones he had been having for weeks. Wash your hands of all that slavery business, God had said in his dreams. The death of John Skiffington’s mother was just God’s way of emphasizing what he wanted. Don’t leave your wife in North Carolina.