(with the spouse as co-author)

Although Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie has been on my bookshelves for over a decade, I just got around to reading it. In this novel, the unnamed narrator and his friend Luo have been sent to the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution for “re-education.” The two seventeen-year olds find they have a gift for storytelling when they see a movie in a neighboring village and tell their villagers about it. And then they find a cache of Western novels—literature that is forbidden to the Chinese.  Through these books, the boys discover not only new geographic places, but new worlds of experiences, insights, and emotions. The power of the literature spreads beyond the two of them as they tell others, including the beautiful daughter of the district’s tailor, of their new-found stories. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress shows us that literature can expand lives and that literature can be subversive to those who wish to control the lives and minds of others.

While the backdrop to the book is the Cultural Revolution, we learn little about it. If there is a flaw in the book, it is that the re-education seems as if it had been a merely somewhat unpleasant idyll. That is not what I have learned from other books that make clear that that the Cultural Revolution produced senseless, almost unimaginable terrors. And I can’t read or hear about the Cultural Revolution without thinking about the spouse’s lab lieutenant.

The spouse’s lab lieutenant came from Beijing in 1986. I don’t remember how he came to be hired by the spouse, but I do remember first meeting him shortly after he arrived from China. I don’t believe he had ever been abroad before. He spoke English, but his accent then made it hard for me to understand him. (Even today, I sometimes have trouble.) We showed him around New York. He was quiet, but we could see that he was amazed. He was bugeyed in Chinatown by the restaurants and grocery stories. He said that comparable restaurants in Beijing would have been more crowded. People would have stood behind the diners to make sure they got a chair when it became empty; otherwise you would never get a place to eat. The array of choices and the filled shelves in Chinatown grocery stores were startling to him.

The wife of the spouse’s lab lieutenant had preceded him to the United States. An ophthalmologist, she had been selected by the Chinese government to be among the first to emigrate to the U.S. The couple had to leave their infant behind, possibly China’s way of keeping a hold on the couple. She was raised for the first six years of her life by grandparents. On the day of her arrival from China, the little girl, jet-lagged from her long flight, baffled by meeting these strange new people called her “parents,” was whisked off to the spouse’s lab to pay respects to the lab lieutenant’s “boss.” She gave a little bow and said, “Pleased to me you” probably then her only words of English. The next day she entered a suburban American public school.

The spouse’s lab lieutenant was generally quiet, and the spouse reports that it took years before he talked in a personal way. Maybe that was because his English was not precise enough, but it was more likely because his culture had never encouraged or even allowed expressions of personal feeling. The spouse quickly learned that he was a kind, loving, decent, smart, hard-working man. Eventually she learned that the lieutenant had a dry and wry sense of humor. And she also began to learn more about his life during the Cultural Revolution. He had graduated from high school at the heart (a misnomer, if there ever was one) of that period. He, like others of his generation, were taken from their homes, put on trains, transported to the countryside and made to work in the fields, presumably to abate a terrible famine that was gripping China at the time. It was a lonely and humiliating time for the lab lieutenant Ultimately, the government recognized his intelligence and sent him for medical training at Beijing University, but just speaking about it made the lab lieutenant choke up, not something the spouse had seen before, and he changed the topic.

Through the years, the spouse and her lieutenant often sat companionably side-by-side doing an experiment together. In a happy division of labor, she would measure doses of things while he performed the delicate dissections that were required. During one of these experiments, the wife made a novice’s mistake, ruining the day’s experiment. Recognizing her error, she cried, “I should be shot!” “No, Mill,” her lab lieutenant said quietly but firmly. “You should not be shot.” From the way he said it, she realized that his response was not a mere platitude but based on his experiences. She recognized with embarrassment that the horrors he had experienced and witnessed during the Cultural Revolution were no doubt worse than she had ever imagined. The loss of an experiment seemed rather paltry in comparison.

Happy ending, though. That baffled little girl? She landed on her feet. After Harvard undergraduate and Yale Medical School, she lives happily with her husband and baby boy in California.

All my life I have heard conservatives rail against big government, but I have never been sure of the definition of “big government.” Apparently, food stamps, a subsidy to the poor, is big government, but a tariff, another form of governmental subsidy, is apparently not big government. Why is that?

“Wealth beyond one’s comfort has always seemed to me the most boring of possessions, and power beyond its usefulness has seemed the most contemptible.” John Williams, Augustus.

I asked the policeman how the stabbing victim was. He replied, “Ok. He was conscious.” An interesting standard for “ok,” I thought.

After complimenting the chef on one of his dishes, I said to the friend that I had learned that most people like receiving compliments. I continued that, on the other hand, I did not. They make me uncomfortable because I do not know how to respond. The friend, without missing a beat, said that I probably had never received enough compliments to have learned how to respond.

“No one is easier to manipulate than a man who exaggerates his own importance.” Masha Gessen, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

An argument broke out across from me on the subway. A young man and an older woman seating next to him were heatedly exchanging words. I did not see the precipitating event, but I gathered that the woman’s daughter, who was standing and clutching a pole in front of the mother, had apparently tried to pet a dog on the man’s lap. He had objected and snapped at the daughter that she shouldn’t pet his dog unless she first asked for permission. The dog owner struck me as harsh because the daughter looked as if she had Down syndrome. The dog itself, one of those tiny creatures, was calm and did not look as if it had been bothered. The yelling continued, and a different young man came over and confronted the dog owner. He shouted that the rules required that dogs in the subways be in carriers. The dog owner shouted back that the dog was in a carrier (it was) and that the dog was a service dog. Then the dog owner shouted an epithet including the word “faggot” at the intervenor. Before things got uglier, another, older, quite large man stepped in between the two young men. At a subway station, some of the fracas participants got off and it ended. And then I thought, “What’s a service dog!” Could have I have ordered from it a dry martini, straight up, with extra olives? But then I realized that the dog could not have served me because it could not have checked my ID. Maybe I just don’t understand the real requirements of all the people who have service dogs.

After the father’s teaching had given me a modicum of backyard golfing proficiency, the brother and I often joined the parents on the golf course—a family foursome. I did not have a full set of clubs, but I got some pleasure in playing, mostly in seeing how far I could hit a drive. Soon, however, I got the stage where I was as good as I was going to get from merely playing. If I wanted to eliminate some of the frustrations from golf, I was going to have to practice, and not just drives. I was going to have to work on all those components of the game that require “touch”–pitching and chipping and putting. I tried this practicing bit for a while, but I hated it. I was willing to practice other games. I could shag flyball countless times a day, day after day; I could spend hours skating around a rink. I could practice those activities, but golf? No.

Golf was just not active enough. I wanted to be running and jumping and sweating. I loved coming home at the end of a day, stripping off clothes, and finding my ankles caked in that special red dirt of the baseball infield. I liked hitting a baseball hard and then running to first or beyond. Hitting a golf ball solidly and then walking up to it was not the same.

And perhaps there was something more. I played golf only with the parents and the brother. Nothing wrong with that, but I was not a very social kid. My interactions with others my age outside of school were on playing fields, courts, or rinks. I wasn’t aware of missing that when I was playing golf, but perhaps I did. So, at adolescence, I stopped playing golf.

I understand why I stopped, but sometimes I regret it. I regretted it when I returned to golf forty years later. Starting the game again when I was fifty-five assured that I would not be very good at it. (At least that is the explanation I give myself for my lack of skill.) But I still remember much of what the father said about the game and what he tried to teach me. A half-century later, what he tried to impart is still correct. (I absorbed some, but not all, of his golf clothing style. He never owned, nor would he have worn, any of those ridiculous pants and belts many men wore playing golf. I follow him in this, but he never wore shorts on the golf course or anywhere else, even when he lived in Florida. I am fairly confident that in his circles he was not an outlier in eschewing shorts. I don’t remember seeing any of his working-class contemporaries in shorts. I am not sure when growing up that men of his age higher on the economic scale wore them. I don’t remember seeing adult male knees as a Midwestern kid, but I do remember being a bit surprised at seeing bare calves on grown men when I arrived at my eastern college. I, on the other hand, wear shorts playing golf, generally limiting myself to boring solid colors. I wear shorts on many other occasions as well.  On a recent trip to Machu Picchu, I was the only man on the van in shorts. One of my new friends said that he had been to an outing where Tim Allen talked. Allen had said that no man over forty should wear shorts. The new friend said this as if he were imparting some useful lesson to me. I thought that Tim Allen had said many silly things in his life. But I digress.)

I also regret having given up the game because I, without thinking about it, was giving up the activity that I might have continued doing with the father. I have now learned that sometimes you can learn a lot about someone when you play golf together. Perhaps if I had played golf with him when I was an adult, I would have learned more about him and he would have learned more about me. At least, maybe, I would have learned how he had learned to play the game.

I don’t know how the father learned to play golf. I knew that when he was young, he had played baseball, basketball, and ran track, but these, I expect, came naturally out of schoolyard play. He surely did not learn golf from his father or mother; his parents showed no interest in any sport. There certainly was no money in their family for golf lessons or new sets of clubs. This was a working-class family where the father’s father sweated for his pay on a factory floor. I never heard the father talk about being a caddie, an activity through which many blue-collar kids learned to play golf. Still, even though I can’t really imagine how he learned it, my father knew golf.

He was quite good at it. Not great, but by my standards very good. Often when he left to play, he would say, “I’m going to break 80 today.” I don’t know how often he did, but it was not regularly. Still, his scores were usually in the low 80s. He didn’t keep a handicap, but my guess is it would have been a ten or twelve.

He could not afford the local country club even if he had been accepted there. He did not even play at the local public course that attracted some of the “best” people in town. Instead, he drove a half-hour to a tiny village to go to Quit-Qui-Oc, which, when he started playing there, was only a nine-hole golf course.

Although he knew some people at the golf course, he did not have golfing buddies. Instead, golf was a family affair. He had taught the mother to play golf, and she could hit a good ball. I think she enjoyed the game, but it was also her way of getting sun. On the holes far from the clubhouse where she assumed no one could see her, she often stripped off her blouse and played in a halter top.

At an early age the brother and I would go to the course, too. At the beginning, I did not play but walked along, for walk we did. There were no motorized golf carts, and when they started to be employed, the father voiced nothing but disdain for them. Golf meant walking.

There were no caddies, but the parents did not carry their clubs. Instead, they pulled little wheeled carts designed to hold a golf bag. (Until recently, I often played golf alone, and I walked pulling the same kind of cart my parents used. I still can feel the father’s influence. It is not really golf if you ride. A few years back at a golfing event, the pro announced that “real golf” was going to be played. I said to myself, “Oh, we are going to walk.” This seemed unlikely because we were sitting in motorized carts at the time. Instead, the pro meant that the players could not move the balls in the fairway to give a better lie. My first drive came to rest in a fairway divot. But I digress.)

I usually walked in the rough as the parents went from tee to green. I was looking for lost golf balls, and I felt a little excitement every time I found one. More than a half century later, I still get a little thrill in finding a ball in the rough that I can keep. The daughter and I used to do that, and she felt something similar. Maybe that’s why Easter egg hunts are such fun.

Soon, however, the father started to teach the brother and me to play the game. This was done in our backyard, which was quite large for our modest home, but it really did not have to be very large for our lessons. He gave us golf-ball sized whiffle balls to practice with. These objects with more holes than plastic did not travel far no matter how well struck. I don’t know how sophisticated the lessons might have become if I had stuck with the game, but at this point there were two goals: Keeping the head down so that I would not top (or even miss) the ball and swinging inside out so the ball went to the right. (I still struggle with both those things.) The father assured us that a real golf ball starting to the right after an inside-out swing would curve back to the left, and every golfer preferred a hook or a draw to a ball that sliced to the right.

(Concluded on April 9.)

A New York moment. If you had asked me, I would have said that the man walking towards me on a street where cars lined the curb was definitely Hispanic. As I approached him, I heard him say to the woman, whom I took to be his mother, walking with him, “Oy vey! I can’t find the car.”

We were discussing slavery, when the friend brought up the Tenth Commandment, maintaining that “servant” in the injunction actually meant “slave.” In the Bible I was given when I was ten years old, the passage reads: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant, or his maidservant, or his ox, or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor’s.” I do not know if the friend’s interpretation was correct, but I was struck again how God, or at least the Bible, which I was told to take literally, speaks to men but not women, or at least in this case not to heterosexual women. It says don’t covet your neighbor’s wife, but not your neighbor’s husband. I find it increasingly easy to follow this injunction because seldom now do I covet my neighbor’s wife. But I was pleased to realize that I was not enjoined from coveting my neighbor’s daughter.

“Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.” John Banville, The Sea.

I almost moaned when the man sat next to me on the subway and placed a keyboard on his lap. As I expected, he had a patter. He turned to me and said, “You are my demographic. I can play Elton John, Billy Joel, Phil Collins, or Vangelis. What do you want?” I found myself actually thinking about my reply and said, “Phil Collins.” He then announced to our end of the crowded, late-night car, “The keyboard is broken, but I am not.” He started pushing the keys. Not a sound came out. Perhaps in his mind he could hear the accompaniment, but we only heard a soft a cappella version of a Phil Collins song.

“In New York, the space between what you want and what you’ve got create a civic itchiness: I don’t know a content New Yorker.” Adam Gopnick, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York.

When we are down or depressed, many of us have some sort of a coping mechanism to get us out of the funk. What if you have had a good experience that has left you content or happy or up? Are there mechanisms to extend that positive feeling? I don’t think that I have any. Instead, I might think that I will repeat the experience in hopes that once again I will have that pleasurable feeling. I enjoyed that concert; I should go again soon. It is always good to have lunch with Tony; find out if he is available again next week. But if I feel moved or content after the concert or lunch, I don’t have a way to extend that pleasurable feeling but only hopes of renewing it in the future. Do you have mechanisms to extend a good emotion?

I was just a summer employee. The cemetery’s full-time, year-round employees did the core work. They dug the graves; they lowered the casket after a service; they filled in the hole; they landscaped after the burial. Only once in a while, usually on a weekend when enough of the full-timers were not on call, did I assist. On one Saturday when I was helping, I was waiting for the mourners to leave the grave site so that we could shovel in and level the soil. Then we would be finished, and I might have time to make my baseball game. But two or three mourners lingered and lingered. I must have indicated my impatience, and one of the full-time workers quietly but firmly told me to have respect for those still there. That struck me.  This physical laborer, who must have seen a comparable scene many times, could see beyond himself to the humanity of those others. His was not just a job to feed his family, but also one to serve those others. I was embarrassed for myself.

On another Saturday, after the family and friends had left, we went to the grave to do our tasks. The casket was suspended over the grave by one of those machines with canvas stretchers. A crank lowered the casket to the bottom of a six-foot hole. Normally the stretchers were detached from the machine and pulled under the casket and up to the other side. Then the soil that had been put to the side of the grave was shoveled into the grave, and the ground raked. A few days later, after the soil’s settling, this raw ground would be landscaped. But this time, after the lowering, the canvas strips got stuck.

The full-timers tried this and that, but the canvas was not freed. Finally, the crew chief looked at me, pointed at the hole, and told me to deal with the situation. Either free the canvas or toss the loose end back up so the casket could be raised, and the process started anew. To this fit youngster, seemingly no big deal. But, and it was a big but, the grave was only a few inches wider and longer than the casket. I was not really jumping into a six-foot hole; I was really going to leap onto a casket. In an instant, an image stuck in my mind. My feet would crash through the casket, and I would be standing on a dead person. Or I would go through the lid, slip, and be lying face to face with a corpse. And other variations on this theme.

Of course, these were false worries.  The casket was not a pine box loosely hammered together. It was one of the Cadillacs sold by funeral homes to those who probably could not afford them. That lid could handle a lot more than my 148 pounds. It was going to hold more than that when the grave was filled in. I jumped, quickly freed the stretcher, and clambered out without incident. But those images were stuck in my mind. I had nightmares for days, maybe even weeks, and I won’t be surprised if in writing about this, I have nightmares again.

A few weeks later I was called to the cemetery office. The manager was there with a tiny, old man. A small box was on the counter. It contained the ashes of the man’s wife. The manager instructed me to carry the container to a specified place in the cemetery where a hole for the box had already been dug. I was to lower the container and then help the man fill the hole.

I lifted the container. It was heavy. Very heavy. I stumbled a bit, but then moved on. I had never before carried human ashes, and I wondered how they could weigh so much. The man started to talk about his wife as we shuffled on. I half listened, and as I did generally with adults, I tried to say as little as possible. Although I attempted to hide them, he may have seen my struggles with the box and said that it was lined with lead. I wondered why he would have his wife cremated and have the remains in the kind of container meant to prevent decay. He talked more and more about his wife. I could almost touch his love and longing for her.

Then he started to talk about her death. It had been a slow, wasting disease. I could tell it had been awful. He said that by the end he barely recognized her. She did not look like the person he had been in love with for over sixty years. He said that he had wanted an open-casket funeral, but . . . Cremation had not always been the plan.

I had learned some stuff earlier that summer. I was a teenage boy and (therefore) a wiseass, but I had been taught that I should respect the grief of others. But I still had more to learn. After the man had tossed a handful of soil on the box and as I was about to shovel in more, I finally said, “I guess you are going to miss her very much.” He said nothing. He only cried. And I did not know what to say.

Our hosts on Hilton Head said that they wanted to visit a cemetery that was on the National Register of Historic Sites. I was happy to join them. Surely cemeteries have been created to be visited, and I have walked around many always finding them of interest.

Different cemeteries have different charms. Well -aintained ones are often beautiful. Lush landscaping. Mature trees. Birds. Squirrels. The rundown cemetery has the fascination and the wonder of lost stories and forgotten lives. The South Carolina cemetery on Hilton Head is of the rundown and small variety.

Zion Cemetery is at the junction of two busy roads with an entrance easy to miss, which we did on our first attempt. The land has a canopy of lovely trees, but the ground is not lush—no grass. We walked on packed earth.

Zion is labeled a cemetery, but on a previous trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I was told that there was a distinction between a graveyard and a cemetery. A graveyard is part of the grounds of a church while a cemetery is separate from any church. Zion is not now part of a churchyard, but a chapel once stood there when the burials began. That Zion Chapel of Ease did not survive the Civil War, and the grounds today are owned by a local library and historical society. I guess what started out as a graveyard has now been transformed into a cemetery.

The small cemetery is dominated by the Baynard Mausoleum, a structure about ten by twelve feet and ten feet high. It needs repair, but carvings on it of upside down torches are clear. I have been told that these images represent a life cut short. Informative signage indicated that the mausoleum had been built by William E. Baynard a few years before his death in 1849, and that it no longer contained bodies.

Weathered headstones predating 1849 are dotted about the cemetery. A few of the headstones are so worn as to be indecipherable. I felt what I have felt in other cemeteries with stones almost impossible to read. I feel as if the scene is trying to impart some transcendental message, but I never catch it.

Most of the stones in Zion, however, could still be clearly read. A number marked the burial spots of people who fought in the Revolutionary War, including the only American killed in the War of Independence on Hilton Head.  While I saw no orderly arrangement for many of the headstones, the central part was different. Remnants of a fence indicated a space meant to be separated from the rest of the cemetery. It contained maybe a dozen headstones. The names were unknown to me, but it was still striking because it indicated a family that had buried many children. Perhaps six children had died before they were four or five, and this reminded me of many other cemeteries.

I have visited places containing the graves of famous people, but I seldom seek out those burial spots. Instead I wander about looking at random inscriptions.  1880-1942.  1921-2010.  Beloved.  Mother.  You Will Live in Our Hearts Forever.  Somehow this gives me peace except for those like 2004-2008, 1909-1919. Those, like the children’s graves in Hilton Head, just make me feel sad for those who were left behind.

I don’t know if my interest in cemeteries existed before I worked in one.  Until then my contact with the death industry had been scant.  My grandfather, who lived in the upper flat of our two-story house, died when I was in high school.  (He died on his seventieth birthday.  His son, my father, lived until 80.  Ergo, by my impeccable logic, I get until 90.)  Surely there must have been a funeral, but I have no memory of it.

But also when in high school, Mr. Urban died. Although I had no contact with Mr. Urban, he had been an important educational figure in my town and had a school named after him. At his death, I held some position in student government and was among those tapped to be a representative at a funeral-home ceremony for him. Up until then, I had seen dead people primarily on TV and cowboy movies, and these “corpses” always seemed as if they were going to sit up in a moment. But as I entered the funeral home that day, there was not only a group of frightening adults (I did not know them, and I was shy; I tried to avoid talking even to parents of friends), but also an open casket with the remains, my lightning-quick mind concluded, of Mr. Urban. Adults tried to talk to me; I would have found this difficult no matter what, but I kept trying not to look over at the dead guy. And was that makeup?

My first real exposure to a cemetery came in the summer at the end of high school when I had a job in a local cemetery. There I did not look on the dead. Instead, I was the main lawn-watering guy. It was a hot, dry season. A portion of the cemetery did not have underground sprinklers, so hoses were used to water the grass there. Each morning I would do a round turning on spigots that had attached hoses. This took about 90 minutes, and then I made a second round.  I turned off the spigot, walked to the end of the hose, moved the sprinkler to an unwatered patch, walked back to the spigot, turned it on, and then repeated this pattern at the next spigot until the end of the work day when I turned off the spigots. This might seem boring and lonely, but it was not to me.  I had trouble talking with the adults who worked there, but I found the cemetery a place for peaceful contemplation. The work suited. (Except that the hoses were black and black stuff got imbedded in my fingers’ whorls. My hands looked dirty, and that bothered me because this was the summer when I was sure that I was going to unbutton a blouse, maybe unbutton many blouses. But, I feared, not if my hands looked grossly dirty. I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Lava soap was my friend. So was Boraxo. They didn’t really work. We’ll leave the story of the blouses to another day.)

(Concluded on April 2.)

The six around the table were all highly educated and literate, but only one—the spouse—knew the correct pronunciation of “pyramidal,” with the accent on the second syllable—“pi-RAM-i-dl.” I was not sure that I had ever heard or read the word before. Then the next day I saw it in each of the first two chapters of George Orwell’s 1984. I have been looking for some special meaning in these events but have failed.

“In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.” William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

I went to my first Bach at One concert of the season. It was understandable, but I still felt chagrined, that now I had to go through a metal detector to get into St. Paul’s Chapel. I was surprised, but not all that chagrined, that this time no offering plate was passed during the performance.

I wish I had taken a picture of a group of pubescent boys walking across the Brooklyn Bridge as they passed a photo shoot of a six-foot blonde model.  They tried not to stare, but they failed. I, too, tried not to stare.

Why, if the score is tied after nine, do people say the game is going into extra innings? Isn’t it going into an extra inning? Only if the game goes into the eleventh is it extra innings.

“We are all refugees from our childhoods.” Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

I just watched The Darkest Hour, the movie about Winston Churchill in the early days of WWII, and I noticed what I had not seen before in movie credits. Towards the end of these credits, it said (I did not have the time to write down the exact words), that the use of tobacco in the film (Churchill constantly puffed a cigar and others smoked cigarettes) was for historical accuracy and was not intended to promote smoking. That disappointed me because I was going to justify my cigar smoking by referring to The Darkest Hour.

He said his name is Louis. He is in the Coast Guard. His father is a retired military man—twenty years active duty, thirteen years of reserves–from Minnesota near Fargo. His father commanded a tank corps in the Gulf War. His mother was born in Germany. She met his father when he was stationed there. Louis misses the beer and bratwurst of Germany. He said that he hoped to live in Germany again. He likes Texas barbecue. Louis said that when his four-year Coast Guard stint was up he wants to be a Texas state trooper. Louis said he “idolized” his father. After the drydock was completed, Louis’ ship would be sent again to interdict drugs off the South American coast. Louis asked me if I knew of a nearby strip club. Louis is an American. His is an American family.

Apologists have suggested that slavery was seldom brutal and treatment generally quite benign. This was certainly not true when cotton dominated the economy in the nineteenth century as The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward E. Baptist documents. Increasingly torturous treatment of slaves was employed  to boost productivity on plantations. But while methods may have been even worse later, the Mount Vernon exhibits indicate that slavery was hardly benign in the eighteenth century even under the control of the enlightened George Washington. Mount Vernon was not the equivalent of one big happy family. Slaves were whipped at Mount Vernon, and even though Washington hesitated to sell slaves, there were exceptions. He sold several slaves to the West Indies, where conditions were more brutal than in Virginia because, in Washington’s eyes, the slaves had persistently misbehaved. The misbehavior? Trying to run away. Seeking freedom was punishable. It had to be. Slavery could not exist if the slave society did not punish those who sought to escape captivity.

The stories of the two most famous Mount Vernon slaves to escape to freedom are quite telling. The Mount Vernon exhibits explain that Hercules was the personal cook for the Washingtons. His abilities were noticed and appreciated, and Hercules was given privileges not extended to other slaves. He was one of nine slaves brought to Philadelphia when Washington was president. While in Philadelphia, Hercules disappeared. This angered and upset Washington, who did not understand the flight to freedom for this favored slave, and the President unavailingly sought Hercules to bring him back to Mount Vernon.

The enslaved Ona (or Oney) Judge was the personal servant to Martha Washington. She, too, was brought to Philadelphia, and she, too, in spite of her special status, escaped while in that city. Unlike Hercules whose history after fleeing is not known, we know, as did George and Martha, that Ona made it to New Hampshire. Martha was, as George was with Hercules, offended that this favored slave would show the ingratitude of seeking freedom. George and Martha tried mightily, but unsuccessfully, to have Ona returned to Mount Vernon. Instead she remained in New Hampshire, married, had children, learned to read and write, and died in 1848.

Master Washington favored Hercules and expected gratitude for the granted privileges. Mistress Washington favored Ona Judge and similarly expected gratitude. George and Martha were incapable of truly understanding the people that they considered their possessions. Indeed, such empathy would seem impossible if they were to continue being slaveholders. On the other hand, what seems clear is that Ona and Hercules, even if their lives were less harsh than other slaves and even if they did have appreciation for the treatment they received, had to see George and Martha Washington not as the President and his wife, but as a slave master and slave mistress. They had the constant reminder of the fact that overrode every other one–they were not free.

One more interesting tidbit from the Mount Vernon exhibit. As noted above, in his will, George Washington granted emancipation to his slaves on the death of his wife. However, only a year after his death and while Martha was very much alive, she freed his slaves. This was not an act of magnanimity. Washington’s slaves had learned of his will, and suspicious fires had broken out at Mount Vernon. Fearing that the slaves were becoming restive with freedom in sight, Martha freed the slaves.

The emancipation of Washington’s slaves was complicated by the fact that he only owned 123 of the 317 slaves at Mount Vernon. Some had been leased from nearby plantations. The rest were at Mount Vernon because of Martha Washington’s first marriage to Daniel Parke Custis. Custis died without a will, and under Virginia law, that meant that Martha got a life interest in one-third of his estate, including his numerous slaves. Two-thirds of the estate went to their four children. The slaves that came to Mount Vernon with Martha would revert to the Custis estate when she died. Neither George nor Martha could emancipate or sell them.

The Washington and Custis slaves were not segregated at Mount Vernon, and the Mount Vernon exhibits indicate that many marriages (or perhaps that should be “marriages” since the slaves could not legally marry) occurred among them. It is contended that Washington did not free his slaves during his lifetime or even at his death because he did not want to break up those married families. However, questions remain. Surely not all his slaves were married to Custis slaves. Presumably some Washington slaves were married to other Washington slaves. Why weren’t these people freed? And, of course, the odds are high that some of his slaves were adults or near adulthood and not married at all. Yet they remained enslaved.

We can, therefore, question Washington’s stated reasons for delaying manumission. Even so, Washington was the only founding father, as Mount Vernon notes, who emancipated his slaves. However, Mount Vernon is using a different definition of “founding father” from one that I might use. Surely, Benjamin Franklin is a founder, and he freed his slaves before the Revolutionary War. (Oh, yes, Benjamin Franklin owned slaves. So, did, New Yorker and founding father John Jay. Slaves were legally held in New York until the 1820s.) We can agree, however, in granting emancipation in his will, even if the manumission was delayed, Washington did an act that was extraordinary for its time.

(Trivia quiz. Who was the last American President to have owned a slave? Answer: Ulysses S. Grant. Something to contemplate about American history: Of the seventeen Presidents before Grant, eleven owned slaves at some point in their lives. Eight of those eleven owned slaves while President.)

While Washington may have been concerned about breaking up slave families and did provide for emancipation in his will, he was not necessarily a more humane slaveholder than others. Some of his guests indicate in letters that he was a relatively gentle slave master while other visitors noted that stern discipline was enforced at Mount Vernon. Certainly Washington expected hard work. The exhibits indicate that his slaves had to toil without shirking from sunrise to sunset no matter what the weather. (Concluded on March 26, 2018)