Chapter Four
Tippy drew the brush from Jessica’s forehead down to the end of a long, waxed lock. She had repeated the movement over and over until Jessica’s naturally frizzy hair shone like springy streamers of russet satin on her shoulders. Shortly, Tippy would fashion it into an evening coiffure inspired by the Romantic Era in England called the Madonna. The style called for parting the hair in the middle with ringlets at the crown of the head and sides of the face. A gown of cream brocade hung from a wire dress form shaped to the measurements of Jessica’s figure. The frock featured the latest fashion details designed to show off creamy shoulders, small waists, and slim ankles.
“It’s a perfect style for you,” Miss Smithfield, the seamstress who had sewn the dress, had pronounced in her shop in Boston, but it had been Tippy who had designed it and selected the fabric. Accessories were laid out: square-toed slippers in matching satin, elbow-length gloves, a small evening bag in green to complement the emerald brooch Jessica’s father had presented to her in honor of her birthday.
When sitting straight before the mirror, Tippy directly behind her, Jessica could see only the wispy puff of her maid’s hair (another oddity since it was not wiry like other members of her race and its light brown shade was in contrast to her dark skin), the flare of her ears, and the sharp points of her constantly moving elbows. Hardly taller than a fireplace broom and wafer thin, Tippy had been bestowed with remarkably large ears, hands, and feet that made her look grotesque to those who did not know her or appreciate her talents.
“Whatever was the good Lord thinking to stick all that extra yardage on my girl’s skinny little face and body and then not have enough to make her a second lung?” Willie May was often heard to lament.
Jessica wondered as well. She thought Tippy the oddest-put-together human being she’d ever seen, but she’d found her diminutive frame and disproportionate features enchanting since they were children. With her agile mind and creative imagination, Tippy reminded Jessica of the mischievous sprite in her favorite storybook. Jessica had fancied her a chocolate elf dropped in from another world whose oversized ears and hands and feet, delicate as a fairy’s, could morph into wings and carry her back to the realm from which she came. She had worried about Tippy’s fragility since she was old enough to understand her friend had been born without an important working part, and Jessica might wake up one morning and find the angels had come for her playmate. Looking at Tippy’s swiftly working hands, picturing them picking cotton under the broiling sun, a heavy ducking sack slung from her thin shoulders, was enough to make Jessica nauseated, but her father wouldn’t do that to Tippy. Jessica was sure of it. He knew his daughter would never forgive him, but he could—and would—separate them. She must remember that.
“I don’t have anything to wish for anymore,” Jessica said. “Isn’t that awful, Tippy? To be eighteen and out of wishes.”
“I wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout wishes no mo’ ’cept now I’se home, to hope for sugahcane syrup to go on mah co’nbread,” Tippy said.
Jessica turned from the mirror to frown at Tippy and lowered her voice. “Must you speak like an ignorant field hand when you’re with me, Tippy?”
“Yessum, I do, les’ I forget where I’m at. It’s safer for us bof.”
Jessica turned back around to her vanity. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t leave you in Boston with Miss Smithfield at her dressmaker shop. You would have made a fine living with your needle and thread. There you’d have had many wishes, and they’d have all come true.”
Tippy placed her mouth close to Jessica’s ear and spoke literately, “Your daddy would have sent men for me, but I wouldn’t have stayed anyway. I wouldn’t let you come home without me.”
Jessica listened for her father’s footsteps in the hall. He wouldn’t enter without knocking, especially now that she was grown, but he still allowed little time to answer. Yesterday morning when Tippy was allowed to return to Jessica’s room from the kitchen, Jessica had told her of her mother’s warning, one that Tippy had already heard from Willie May. “They want to separate us because we’re so close,” Jessica had explained, “and Mama has threatened you’ll be sent to the fields if I don’t cooperate. We have to pretend that you’re my maid and I’m your mistress.”
“That won’t be hard to do,” Tippy had said. “I am a maid, and you are my mistress.”
“In name only.”
They agreed they had to be very careful. Willie May had laid it out to Tippy. No more calling Jessica “Jessie” without the Miss attached followed by a little curtsy. No more shared giggles and secrets. No more lazy sessions reading to each other. No more show of friendship. “And,” Willie May had added with a stern eye at Tippy, “no more speaking like a white lady or parading your learning for master and slave to see.”
The girls had hooked thumbs—their ritual to seal an agreement. Hearing only silence from the hall, Jessica said with a smile, “I’ll make sure you get all the sugarcane syrup you want, even if I have to smuggle it up here.”
“No, no, Jessie—Miss Jessie. Don’t show me any—no—favoritism. It’s too dangerous.”
Jessica sighed. “I’m so disgusted with the way things are. The South shames me. My family shames me—”
“Sssh, you mustn’t speak like that. You mustn’t even think like that.”
“I can’t help it.”
“That new teacher comin’ from the No’th…I know what she be up to, Miss Jessie. Please don’t let her get you into no trouble. I’se beggin’ you—”
“Jessie! It’s Papa. I’m coming in!”
The strong voice of the man Jessica both loved and feared boomed through the door. Only a few seconds passed before it flew open and Carson Wyndham strode in, the strike of his knee-high boots hard on the wood floor and their shine dazzling. A short, fit, ginger-haired man of powerful build and brusque manner, he inspired the impression that throngs would part at his appearance and woe to him who did not step from his path.
Tippy, reacting quickly, cocked her head at Jessica’s startled reflection in the mirror and said loudly, as if continuing a dialogue Carson Wyndham’s entrance had interrupted, “…Yoah hair is so pretty jus’ like dis. A cryin’ shame to put it up.”
“I agree,” Carson said, coming to stand by his daughter’s dressing table to inspect the subject of discussion. “Why the devil does a woman feel she has to torture her hair into twists and turns and God knows what all when it’s so much more attractive hanging unfettered as the good Lord intended?” He fingered the delicate mesh of the head covering that hung from a finial of the mirror. Jessica had worn it at luncheon yesterday, her loose hair filling the gold-filigreed, pouch-like bag. “I liked this…whatever it’s called, on you, Jessie. Why aren’t you wearing it this evening?”
“Oh, Papa, a lady can’t wear a hair net with a party gown.”
It was the kind of riposte her father liked to hear from his daughter—mindless and feminine and vain. He favored her with a smile. “I suppose not. Do you like your brooch?”
“I love it. Thank you again, Papa.”
He had presented it to her at the luncheon attended by her parents’ closest friends. The affair was to be part of her birthday celebration, but it had really been held to show off her father’s distant relatives from England, Lord Henry and Lady Barbara, the Duke and Duchess of Strathmore. Had it not been for the delightful company of Lettie Sedgewick, her only contemporary there besides her brother, Jessica thought she would have died of boredom if not from sheer disgust. Conversation had deferred to His Lordship and his opinionated wife and was all about the deplorable rise of the British middle class, the audacious attempt of farm laborers in Dorset to form a trade union , and grouse hunting. Their listeners and servile admirers, except for Lettie, had hung on every imperious word, interrupted only when Michael proposed a toast to honor his sister’s homecoming.
There was much Jessica liked about Lettie Sedgewick. Jessica had looked forward to resuming her association with her former tutor when she returned from Boston, sharing what she had learned in school and exchanging ideas, but Lettie was now engaged to Silas Toliver, a widower Jessica remembered as strikingly handsome who had plans to start his own plantation in Texas. Jessica recalled that Silas’s first wife had died in delivering the little boy who would soon become Lettie’s stepson. Lettie was the highly intelligent daughter of a Presbyterian minister, well versed in language arts. The Wyndhams, members of her father’s church, had engaged her to teach Jessica penmanship and classical literature to supplement her public school instruction before leaving for boarding school. Lettie had gone on to earn a teacher’s certificate at a college in Nashville and now taught in the public school in the small town of her father’s church, Willow Grove. The community was described as a stone’s throw either way between Charleston and the parallel rows of plantations known as Plantation Alley, where the most prominent sugar and cotton estates were located. Silas, like Jeremy Warwick, had not been included in the luncheon party because they did not know Jessica well. They would be attending the ball.
“You would think South Carolina still a colony of the British Empire, considering how slavishly devoted some of us are to all things English,” Lettie had said to Jessica with a twinkle in her eye when they finally had a chance to chat privately.
“Except for slavery,” Jessica said. “The British have had the humanitarian decency to abolish the slave trade.”
Jessica could have bitten her tongue. She’d leaped without looking, but Lettie Sedgewick’s tolerant nature and Jessica’s experience with the minister’s daughter invited controversial confidences. When tutoring Jessica, Lettie had not minded, and had even encouraged, Tippy to sit in on their sessions, albeit secretly. It was against the law to teach slaves to read and write, and the tutor could have endangered her father’s position as minister of the First Presbyterian Church in Willow Grove if she were found out.
Humor flitted across her friend’s countenance. “Quite so,” Lettie said. “I see you haven’t changed much, my dear pupil, but may I caution you to think first where you are before speaking.”
“I must learn to do so.”
“I heard from Silas about the little incident on the disembarkation dock in Charleston yesterday. Jeremy Warwick was in the area to pick up something for Meadowlands. He told Silas that he did not show himself for fear of causing further embarrassment to you and your mother and brother.”
“No doubt Mr. Warwick thought the worst of me.”
“Not at all. He told Silas he thought you awfully brave.”
Or awfully stupid, Jessica thought, looking at her father’s sober face in the mirror. Had Michael told him of the incident in Charleston yesterday, and he was here now to chastise her?
“Jessie,” Carson said, “I want you to look especially nice tonight.”
“We’ll certainly try, won’t we, Tippy?” Jessica said, relieved. “Is there any particular reason other than it’s my birthday?”
“No…no reason. I just want to feel especially proud of my little girl who’s home at last after two years, so please appear your best.” He bent and kissed her cheek. “See you at the party. And Tippy?”
Tippy stood at attention. “Yessuh?”
“See that it happens.”
“Yessuh, Mister Carson.”
He strode from the room, and the women exchanged long, interrogating looks. “What was that all about?” Jessica asked.
“Jeremy Warwick,” Tippy answered promptly.
“Jeremy Warwick?”
“I heard all about it in the kitchen. Your papa wants you to make an impression on him with the hope you two will get together. You’re to be seated next to him at the supper table.”
“Jeremy is Silas’s age—too old for me—and I understand they’re going to Texas together. Why would my father want me to marry him?”
“I don’t know. The Warwicks are rich. Maybe to ward off the bucks who aren’t?” Tippy batted her lashless eyes meaningfully. “Jeremy Warwick is a good man, so they said in the kitchen. A good master. I can’t understand why he’s still unmarried. Maybe your daddy wants you to set your cap for him before someone else snatches him up.”
“No, Tippy, that’s not the reason,” Jessica said in sudden understanding. Hurt plunged through her. Her father had learned about the brouhaha on the dock. Michael would have informed him, and her mother, too fearful to keep secrets from her husband, must have told him about her views on slavery. “My father wants to be rid of me before I cause trouble.”
But only if taken out of South Carolina by a good and rich man. Her father loved her that much, she thought. Jessica felt anger slowly overtake her hurt. Well, she had news for him. She would never marry a slave owner.