33
Key West
1883
The years have sped by and I have grown old.
About a month after Andrew arrived, we lost Cato when he suffered a stroke picking up my mail at the dock. Soon after, I again offered Bess the money to move to New Orleans, and this time she accepted.
Without servants to disturb our privacy and with only Hagar as day help, Andrew became my husband once again. Ostensibly, he was employed as my handyman. Nobody in Key West knew that he slept in my room instead of in the servants’ cottage. Ebony’s expression when she viewed us together was inscrutable. So as not to confuse her, we were careful not to indulge in any displays of affection when she was around.
Ebony got to know Martha and Timothy when they were home for vacations. Though my children were delighted—and amazed—to see her again, they understood that they had to maintain discretion.
The following spring, I wrote to Charles Baudelaire to ask if he would help me rent an apartment in Paris and a country villa where we could all spend time together, away from prying eyes in Key West.
Baudelaire wrote back immediately. He and Jeanne Duval found us lodgings on the Left Bank in Paris. And to my delight, an artist friend of theirs owned a rambling country villa near Nice and was willing to offer it to us for part of the summer. Our entire family spent a glorious few months in France, living in quiet anonymity. It brought us so much pleasure being together this way that we braved the annual ocean voyage to return to France most summers. For me, it was worth the seasickness I suffered each time.
Timothy was enthralled with French architecture; Martha loved to paint in the olive groves at the villa. Over time, they, and Ebony, became quite ?uent in French. Ebony adored Martha, who gave her paints and paper and often took her on short treks in ?elds and gardens to draw and paint. But while Martha painted nature, Ebony was more inspired by what fashionable French ladies wore, and she liked to sketch their hats and pretty gowns.
If Ebony found any of our life strange, she did not show it. My guess was that being returned to Mrs. Rathbone was her ultimate fear, and if discretion was the price she had to pay, she willingly kept silent. I educated her at home, as I had my other children when we were on Wreckers’ Cay. She was a very clever child and learned fast. And, like her father, she loved music and had a beautiful voice.
My other children ?nished their schooling in New York. Martha married a southerner and lived for a time in Charleston, until her husband joined the Confederate army and was killed at Antietam. She then moved back to Key West with her ?ve children. And Timothy? He became an architect and lives in New York. He has never married. Recently, he con?ded to me that he has a gentleman companion. It is not a relationship that I easily understand, but I have told him that he and his friend will always be welcome in my home.
Ebony was happy to stay in Key West. Her interest in fashion when she was a child in France inspired her to open a millinery shop. I was in awe of her talent, as she created beautiful confections of soft voile, plumes, and brightly colored ?owers and birds, and her hats delighted the ladies in the village. When she was twenty, Ebony, who had been singing in the choir of the new black Baptist church in Key West, caught the eye of the Reverend Everett Sawyer, its handsome young minister. And she fell deeply in love with him. Andrew and I gave her a beautiful wedding, and I ?nanced the building of a home for them on one of my properties. She, in turn, rewarded us with two lively grandsons.
I harbored anger against Dorothy and Tom for a short while, but Andrew would not allow me to let it fester. He insisted I forgive Dorothy, as he had. And Tom remained my attorney. Dorothy did everything she could to befriend Ebony, and my daughter—who knew nothing of the early treachery—came to love her. Eventually, we all became civil again. She was my only sister, after all. But I have to say, I never could trust her as I had before.
Sadly, Dorothy did not live past her fortieth birthday. Like so many other Key Westers, she died of yellow fever. In spite of our differences, her death was a terrible blow to me, and I miss her still.
With Tom’s assistance, I had drawn up documents of manumission to free both Andrew and Ebony soon after they’d arrived in Key West. Thus, when my beloved Andrew left this world, succumbing to a lingering lung disease, he did so as a proud freedman. When he passed away, it was as if a part of me had also died; I was thankful for every day we’d been back together—and rued each day we’d been apart. But we agreed when we found each other again that bitterness was an indulgence. In a world where disease could suddenly end your life, you learned to enjoy every crumb of the cake as if it were your last.
Those precious years had gone, never to be recovered. Yet, in a strange way, our separation had made our reunion and our remaining days together all the sweeter. And, of course, I still had my darling Ebony. She and I grew very close; Key Westers thought she was my companion. And she was, in a way. A wonderful companion. And a great consolation to me after Andrew passed.
My thoughts ramble now. Happy memories of my younger days threaten to be replaced by the sight of co?ns sliding into crypts under gray morning skies. And the names of my departed friends and family can be recited like beads on a rosary. I have become a tiresome old lady, talking about the past. I repeat myself to the point where my listeners no longer hear me, and they hide behind masked yawns. I am Gran reincarnated, and it amuses me when I catch myself tartly complaining of boisterous children and disruptive dogs, or wondering aloud what the world is coming to.
Increasingly, my thoughts shift to Pedro—poor, excessive Pedro, and his bizarre appetites. I look with revulsion at my thinned, shifting skin, my winglike arms, the deep creases of my face, my gnarled hands, and my once-beautiful legs, now so cruelly marred. And I marvel at how anyone could ever have lusted after this body as he did.
With di?culty, I climb the stairs to my widow’s walk to view the Key West harbor, listening to towering masts on proud tall ships chime gently in the breath of trade winds. Before she passed on, Barbara Mabrity, my dear old friend, often joined me there, for she missed the view of Key West from the lighthouse.
When she turned eighty-two, the department discharged Miss Barbara—not for incompetence, for she was still conscientious and nimble on the stairs, but for her pro-Confederate remarks. Florida, a state since 1845, was the third state to secede from the Union and remained a slave state. But early in the Civil War hostilities, a Union army detachment under the command of Captain James Brannan seized Key West in order to intercept supplies heading from the Gulf states to the southeast coast. And because he forbade the Confederate ?ag from ?ying in the settlement, Barbara Mabrity openly rebuked him.
For years before she died, we would explore the ever-changing streets of Key West. By that time, I had ceased to be of interest to anyone, and the gossips no longer murmured about me as I passed. Instead, people greeted us deferentially: “Howd’ye do, Miss Barbara, Miss Emily.” We were just two sweet old ladies taking our constitutional, aging matrons of another era. We would talk about the houses we saw along the way, the people who had once lived in them, and the socials we’d once attended. And because we were old and forgetful and forgiving of repetition, we went over such details with a frequency that would have driven anyone else quite mad.
Clusters of cigar makers’ cottages now dot every district. The factory owners, like Jonathon Levy, have plotted out entire neighborhoods, establishing little ?efdoms, which include a factory at the center, with tiny shacks for the workers, and sundry stores close by. These cigar moguls have bought much of my land, earning me yet another fortune. But remembering Juan Salas’s advice, I have still kept the choice properties on the island for my own family.
As I bring this memoir to a close, there are now around two hundred cigar-making factories in Key West, and I’m told their six thousand or so workers produce almost two million cigars a year.
The wrecking and salvaging industry has also grown more than I ever thought possible—for I had never believed Martin. Key West now has a population of almost 25,000 people. It is the largest and wealthiest city in all of Florida; some even say it’s the wealthiest per capita in all of the United States.
Pedro had predicted it. He always told me that a lot of people would leave Cuba if there was unrest there. And the Cuban revolution for independence from Spain in 1868 sent many cigar workers and wreckers scurrying to our island.
And always, of course, my thoughts return to Andrew. For every elderly person, there is a place in the mind that can be revisited to re-create the happy, ?eeting moments of youth. For me, that place will always be my time at Wreckers’ Cay, when Hannah was alive and Andrew and I and the children were all together and free. For such happiness comes but once, and then only if we are very lucky.