Varina

by Charles Frazier

V has never made any claim of personal high ground. She grew up where and when she did. From earliest memory, owning other people was a given. But she began feeling the strangeness of it at about nine or ten—not the wrongness or the sin of it, the strangeness only. The sense that a strong line cut through all the people she knew and everybody who existed. And that she stood on one side and others stood across—free on her side, enslaved on the other. For the poorest southern whites or northern women and children working fourteen hours a day in the satanic mills of Yankee factories, the line between slave and free might have been only a foot across—but even then it cut deep, a bottomless chasm. Yet the only determinant of which side you occupied was a paper-thin layer of skin, a fraction of blood degree.

He had her read Luke 12:47—about how the slave that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes. Winchester told her that many plantation owners kept that page turned down for quick reference. He told her she would find quite a few inconsistencies in that book and in the beliefs of Christians and suggested she think about the relationship between wealth and power and morality in regard to drawing lines.

Over the years with Winchester she came to know that people have enslaved each other from time immemorial. Spin the globe and point to a location and probably find slaves sometime in history.

So even very young she saw slavery as an ancient practice arising because rich people would rather not do hard work, and also from the tendency of people to clench hard to advantageous passages in the Bible and dismiss the rest.

But sometimes I can’t help missing those days when we all just took care of each other. —We? James asks. —Everyone living together at Brierfield and The Hurricane. —If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that’s true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.