The next morning, I couldn’t get out of bed. I tried very hard, but it was as if something in me had dropped anchor. I rolled my face into the pillow. I no longer cared.
During the days that followed, Handful brought me trays of food, which I barely touched. I had no hunger for anything except sleep, and it eluded me. Some nights I wandered onto the piazza and stared over the rail at the garden, imagining myself falling.
Handful placed a gunny sack beside me on the bed one day. “Open it up,” she said. When I did, the smell of char wafted out. Inside, I found my letters, singed and blackened. She’d found Minta tossing them into the fire in the kitchen house, as Mother had ordered. Handful had rescued them with a poker.
When spring came and my state of mind didn’t improve, Dr. Geddings arrived. Mother seemed genuinely afraid for me. She visited my room with handfuls of drooping jonquils and spoke sweetly, saying I should come for a stroll with her on Gadsden Green, or that she’d asked Aunt-Sister to bake me a rice pudding. She brought me notes of concern from members of my church, who were under the impression I had pleurisy. I would gaze at her blankly, then look away toward the window.
Nina visited, too. “Was it me?” she asked. “Did I cause you to feel like this?”
“Oh, Nina,” I said. “. . . You must never think that . . . I can’t explain what’s wrong with me, but it’s not you.”
Then one day in May, Thomas appeared. He insisted we sit on the porch where the air was warm and weighed with the scent of lilacs. I listened as he went on heatedly about a recent compromise in Congress that had undone the ban on slavery in Missouri. “That damnable Henry Clay!” he said. “The Great Pacificator. He has started the cancer spreading again.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. To my surprise, though, I felt curious. Later, I would realize that was Thomas’ intention—creating a little pulley to try and tow me back.
“He’s a fool—he believes letting slavery into Missouri will placate the firebrands down here, but it’s only splitting the country further.” He reached for the newspaper he’d brought and spread it out for me. “Look at this.”
A letter had been printed on the front page of the Mercury, which called Clay’s compromise a fire bell in the night.
It has awakened and filled me with terror. I consider it the knell of the union . . . The letter was signed, Thomas Jefferson.
It’d been so long since I’d cared what was happening out there. Some old wrath sparked in me. Hostility toward slavery must be finding some bold new footing! Why, it sounded as if my brother himself was hostile to it.
“. . . You are sided with the North?” I asked.
“I only know we can’t go on blind to the sin of putting people in chains. It must come to an end.”
“. . . Are you freeing your slaves, then, Thomas?” Asking it was vindictive. I knew he had no such intention.
“While you were away, I founded an American colonization chapter here in Charleston. We’re raising money.”
“. . . Please tell me you’re not still hoping to buy up all the slaves and send them back to Africa?” I hadn’t felt such fervor since my discussions with Israel during the voyage. My cheeks burned with it. “. . . That is your answer to the spreading cancer?”
“It may be a poor answer, Sarah, but I can imagine no other.”
“. . . Must our imaginations be so feeble as that, Thomas? If the union dies, as our old president says, it will be from lack of imagination . . . It will be from Southern hubris, and our love of wealth, and the brutality of our hearts!”