“So she looks like she’s been working,” Peter explained.
In the master bedroom, the white woman lay across her bed, one hand over her eyes. The black woman disappeared from the downstairs parlor, reappeared at the bedroom door. The computer sharpened the images as Sarey keyed in that the women in this scene were the same as the women in the parlor screen.
Martha said, “We’ll have a lip reader check this, but I think that the black woman…”
“Alice,” Peter said.
“…is asking the white woman, my ancestor Ann, if she’d free her.”
Sarey Rose said, “Will she free her?”
“Well, the war…”
“No, Alice is asking if Ann will free her. Did your ancestor leave a will freeing his slaves?”
Martha said, “No.”
Sarey Rose said, “So he lied.”
Martha said, “How can you infer that from such a tentative question?”
Peter said, “We always heard that the master promised to free Alice and his children with her, but the mistress crossed him.”
Martha said, “My family knew that manumitted slaves had terrible lives, so we kept them, never sold them, buried them in the family cemetery.”
“Your people sold one,” Peter said, before Sarey could.
“Your people hated him. We sold him to make your people happy.”
“I’d like to remind everyone that family traditions are unreliable historical sources unless verified by corroborating evidence, like a manuscript will, court records, letters with good provenance…”
“Thank you, Sarey Rose,” Martha said. “I know that. That’s why we’re looking.”
A man came in to the parlor downstairs. The computer sketched him in. Sarey Rose thought that he must be the master of the house. He wore riding boots, and gloves that the computer, after some dithering, painted with marks made by reins. Sarey Rose called up a photo of the house’s founder. The computer tried those features, but threw a query: IS TINT ABSOLUTE?
Sarey typed: NO.
The computer jiggled the man’s features and came up with slightly wider cheekbones and nose than the photo showed, darker skin. Sarey said, “We always said the old man didn’t look pure white. What were your family traditions on that, Martha?”
“We’re not racist,” Martha said.
“Hey, I’m not either,” Sarey Rose said. “But I always wondered why your people just showed up about 1809 without any big lies about your Tidewater kin and their English lord kin.”
Martha said, “If you’re having trouble with that, it’s your own bigotry that’s showing.”
Peter didn’t answer. He was staring at the man who disappeared. Then, in the time it took to walk the hall and go up the staircase to the big upstairs room, he came into the bedroom. The two women froze, cringing, Sarey Rose would guess. Ann spoke. The angle of her face made lip reading impossible. Did you really promise to free this bitch? Can we sell her? If you can have a slave lover, can you buy me a nice white-looking likely boy? Was she saying something like that? They could never know for sure. Sarey Rose said, “Even if we could get something as big as a sound wave through a micro wormhole, we’d still never know what they were thinking.”
“Flint could have been a Cherokee name,” Martha said. “We thought it was just his nickname.”
Flint seemed amused. He spoke. The black woman left the room. The white woman sat on the bed, not looking at him. He took her by the chin. Again, no way to tell what he said. You’re the mother of my children, but she is, too, so try to get along? You’re my white bride who’ll make our children look even more proper? Without you and your family connections, someone might wonder about me? Men prosper the more they get laid, so get over it, bitch?
Ann turned her face. The lips seemed to say, So, you just tell her that to keep her happy.
Flint nodded.
Men, Ann’s lips said.
He must have asked her what she wanted, because Ann seemed to say, a diamond brooch.
Flint grunted and sat down. The black woman came back with a glass full of clear liquid. Flint sat down in a chair and let the black woman pull his boots off. Ann sat on the bed staring out the window.
Flint smiled at both of them.
Peter said, “Her name was Alice. He lied to her, didn’t he? Son-of-a-bitch wasn’t even pure white.”
Martha said, “Cherokee women wouldn’t have let one of their men get away with adultery without him getting mobbed by his wife’s clanswomen. If he were part Cherokee, having access to more than one woman must have been male heaven.”
Sarey Rose said, “You’re not surprised that he looks like this?”
“We’ve wondered. One of the photos we have of him looks like it was retouched. A tintype. When we did a book on the family, we reproduced a copy of the tintype. But, no, I’m not real surprised. Again, I’m not bigoted, am I, Cousin Peter.”
Peter said, “Could this be a history that doesn’t lead to ours?”
“We can theorize alternative histories. We can’t theorize a way to get to them,” Sarey Rose said. She wondered if she was a bigot. So some non-Anglo—octoroon, mestizo—slipped across the Virignia color bar before it became so rigid. Did it matter? Even in the most moralistic of times, the 1950s, 10 percent of all married women gave their husbands other men’s children.
“Just leave it on to record,” Martha said. “Or do you have to constantly monitor it?”
Sarey Rose wondered if Martha thought that she massaged the data to get images she liked. “I can leave it on. The computer has samples of the family photographs.”
“Was your kinsman working for us at this time?” Martha asked.
Sarey Rose said, “All we know is, your kin tried to pay him in slaves and he refused.”
Martha said, “We don’t know what that meant.”
“In 1853, it could have meant anything,” Peter said.
“What did they do with the children?” Sarey Rose asked.
“Half of them died before ten,” Martha said.
Sarey Rose thought about all the dead children on all the sides. She sighed, and set up the machine to continue recording. When she moved to turn off the display terminals, Martha reached for her hand. “No,” Peter said. “We want to watch it.”
Martha said, “You can go now, Sarey Rose.”
High WASP whip in the voice, now.
Sarey Rose knew what they’d ask her: was the machine interpreting correctly, was she interfering with the images? The machine wouldn’t make chimpanzees when the shapes were closer to people, had fifteen gradations of skin color to work with, and with only five minutes of scan at ten feet would be within l/16th of an inch of true facial contours. Would use the reconstructed house to model the past light streams.
The man in the house last night looked mulatto to her. If a man were rich enough, did his face look whiter to his neighbors?
Neither Martha nor Peter looked at her as she came into the office. The master slept with his slave on her special bed. The mistress of the house faced a black man in the parlor who lacked the owned deference Sarey would have expected.
“Rose, we can’t identify this man.”
“I don’t know your slaves,” Sarey Rose said.
“He’s not acting like a slave,” Peter said.