That Dazzling Sun

FOREWORD

FOREWORDBy Mary Spottswood Campbell Robinson

My father, the Reverend Charles Campbell, ought to be writing this Foreword, not I. For it was he who sought out and befriended Isaac Granger Jefferson, the old former slave of Thomas Jefferson, and he who took down the story of Isaac’s journey to Philadelphia with adventures there as a tinsmith’s apprentice, and he who wrote them out in the well-known book A Partial Sun, published in 1855. And it was he who began this book, The Dazzling Sun, which details Isaac’s further adventures in unlikely circumstances among characters both tragic and comic and in momentous confrontation with his Master. Alas, my father turned aside from the project and expended his time upon the Bland Papers and later an extensive history of Virginia, both of which I fear shall soon be out of print and the income from them ended.

So it fell upon my shoulders to complete what he could not, and to write this Foreword as the necessary explanation. The circumstances were these: when I arrived at the Western Lunatic Asylum in Staunton last October I found my poor father in restraints and sedated, caused by “bad headache, ma’am, and fit of nervous tremors agin,” as Job, his n***o attendant, put it. I briefly wished, God help me, that my father would soon expire, for it had fallen to me almost since girlhood to attend him during his spells and even administer the dosages of morphine, and in honest moments brought on by exhaustion, I feared that only with his death could I be free of these duties. For I enjoyed the hopes for happiness which any girl may experience, you see, and hoped to find release in marriage, but came to understand that the young men who courted me expected me to lay aside my hopes and dutifully spend my years in support of theirs. Yet in the end a single woman cannot support herself in any comfort alone. Only in novels, I confess, could I indulge my appetite for a larger and more interesting life. Then came the awful war, with its impoverishment, loss of property, and my father’s service as a soldier and prison camp guard—when he was past sixty years of age. He never fully recovered from the experience, and fell into a profound despondency, which no mineral waters could alleviate.

Yet as I stood at his bedside, a shaft of warm sunlight coming through the barred window lighting his haggard face, he smiled up at me, and I felt again my love for him. That is, until he spoke again his dreadful entreaty: “Please, daughter, finish the Isaac book for me!” As always, I rebuffed him as gently as possible, marshaling a host of reasons: that I had children to raise, the youngest afflicted with a weak heart; that I had the foundry business to run, now that Harold had died from his lingering wounds at Gettysburg; that the house was direly in need of chimney and roof repairs; etc., etc. To these laments he closed his eyes and renewed his entreaty with redoubled fervor. “Please!” he said, pressing my hand between both of his, “I gave my solemn word to the good old n***o! Would you have me die, and fail my oath?”

I pulled loose from his hands and rushed to the barred window and for a piercing moment watched a dark bird sailing in circles high above the green mountain. Tears sprang to my eyes and I nearly bolted from the room. Yet the temptation to flee so scalded my conscience that I turned back from the window, knelt at my father’s bedside, and grasped his thin hand. “Ah, Mary,” he said, in a tender voice, “my dear, sweet, long-suffering Mary. You have borne my weakness too long. Forgive me.”

Then without the doctor’s permission, and despite Job’s begging me not to, I freed him from his restraints, pressed my hand to his forehead, inquired if he would like anything to eat, offered to bathe and shave him, lifted one of his favorite history books out of my bag—Notes on the State of Virginia—and offered to read to him. But he calmly waved away my offerings and instead hitched himself up to a seated position. With some difficulty he took hold of his pillow, brought this around to his front, and held it in his arms like a baby. Then, his eyes growing suddenly wide, he said, “Here is the book! Take it!” He thrust the pillow at me. Startled, I took it to my breast. It rustled of papers as I did so, and indeed one folded paper fell out and dropped to the floor. I leaned over, picked it up, and against my better judgment unfolded it and began reading the words penned gracefully across the page, as follows:

Dear Isaac,

It is grand to feel the great swells of the ocean beneath our beautiful ship Cutlass and see the wind billowing in our sails. How marvelous to stand on deck when the morning sun blazes up over the horizon, exclaiming the new day. Many passengers have been seasick, and I thought I might be, too. Yet I feel quite healthy, resoundingly so. Father speaks of me as having a delicate constitution, but I believe I am a stout sailor. Laugh if you must! I cannot believe that I am really bound for England. . . .

Here, I let fall the letter into my lap, closed my eyes, and gave myself over to feeling those great swells. Oh, indeed, how grand. I saw in my mind’s eye that morning sun, blazing up over the horizon, and thrilled at the sight. And I, like the writer, took umbrage at the words of her father who had cautioned about her “delicate constitution.” For my father had cautioned me likewise, time and again, with precisely these words, and yet here I was, attending him in his weakness, as he had himself admitted. Suddenly, I wished with all my heart, that I, too, could prove myself a stout sailor bound for England. Captivated by the thought of such an adventure, I read the letter attentively through to the end, feeling almost as if I myself had written it, and lingered long over the neat signature.

Then I looked up at my father and saw that he was contemplating me with an amused expression. “Who in heaven’s name is Rachel Bringhouse?” I asked. A look of disappointment darkened his face. “Did you not read the copy of A Partial Sun I gave you, my daughter? You would know if you had.” I had meant to, though merely out of duty, until he had told me it was a “true account,” and I was not interested then in dull, grim truth, but in fancy, and so had hidden the book away at the bottom of my cedar chest.

Ashamed, I equivocated, and then explained that what I had meant by my question was, could he tell me anything else about this Rachel Bringhouse, beyond what was revealed in the book? He nodded meditatively for a moment before answering. “It must have been difficult for the two of them. He an illiterate n***o slave, she the educated daughter of a prosperous businessman and Quaker. They were circumspect at all times, so far as I could tell. But feelings, you know, are not so easily compassed.” I felt an ocean of meaning in his emphasis upon the word “feelings.” Then I grew puzzled, and asked how it could be, if Isaac had been illiterate, that he could have read this letter from Rachel? “Ah, well,” he said, breaking into his native dialect as he sometimes did with me, “she’s the one as taught ‘im!” I stared at him, patted the pillowcase, and asked in a trembling voice if there were more letters. He smiled broadly and told me to “look for myself!” and I promptly plunged my hand in amongst the other papers. But he put out a hand to stop me. “Oh goodness’ sake,” he chastised, “not here, dear Mary. At home, where you can do it properly.”

I felt as though he had tricked me, having slyly arranged this whole episode even to the very letter falling out which would most arouse my curiosity. But trick or no, in truth my curiosity was now strongly aroused. Yet I was annoyed, too. “But this is your pillow!” I said, “I can’t take your pillow.”

“Oh never mind that,” he said, delight fairly shining in his face. “A sack of papers is no fit pillow. Besides, if Dr. Stribling finds you absconding with state property, he may confine you to this madhouse, as well. Now go.” And go I did, the sprightly Job leading me on tiptoe down a back stairway and out of the building, with the pillow of papers swelling underneath my coat as if I were suddenly pregnant with my third child.

Even eight years after the war had ended, train service in Virginia was still unpredictable, and my trip home that day was no exception. Yet I was not bothered by the delays and stoppages, for I knew that my children were well cared for by Mrs. Tubbins, and the foundry, for once, was stocked with orders. Thus reassured, I sat in the dining car and laid out the papers before me on the table. They were puzzlingly loose and disordered, some paginated and some not, but eventually I found an exchange of several letters between Rachel Bringhouse and Isaac Granger, which I laid out in chronological order from the initial letter dated 5 May 1791 to the final letter dated 10 June 1793. Likewise, I compiled many pages in my father’s hand, transcriptions of Isaac’s oral accounting of his experiences. Here and there, I saw that my father had interjected comments of his own, some directly related to the narrative and some not.

I became so immersed in this project of reconstruction that the conductor was obliged to hold the train at my station for nearly fifteen minutes while I returned the papers to their pillowcase in decent order, collected my baggage, and disembarked. The work of developing a coherent narrative from those papers took time, most of it during late night hours after the children were asleep and I had attended to foundry business. Quite often I wrote my father, to answer questions or provide further information or insight, letters which he cheerfully—but not always helpfully—responded to. His health improved markedly, and Dr. Stribling even suggested that he might soon be released. Though this gladdened my heart, I feared that if he returned home in good health he would expect to resume work on a book which I had come to love as my own.

I discovered that I was a better editor than a foundry manager and felt that my father had not adequately represented the character of Rachel Bringhouse, however sincerely he may have tried. So I resolved, where it was warranted, to make her perspective and importance to the action of the story more apparent.

I trust my father will approve of my editorial decisions, should he come to his senses long enough to read the manuscript from beginning to end. For my fundamental aim is in harmony with his own, which is to present Isaac Granger Jefferson and Rachel Bringhouse as being fully alive to themselves and their world, as we are to ourselves and our world. It is strange to think that in fact they may both have since passed into the grave, as we all shall. Yet perhaps that is a premature obituary. Someday, perhaps, I will find out. For now I must be content and entrust you with their story. Perhaps in the end all stories, whether they are historical or fanciful, come down to love, which endures. Love and, too often I fear, hatred and jealousy in their many guises.

My father often chided me for being a chatterbox, so lest I prove the truth of his rebuke, I now close, that Isaac may speak for himself.

Written this day, 10 April 1874

—Mary Spottswood Campbell Robinson