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Overview
Without her mother, separated from her twin brother, and oppressed by her cruel and philandering father, Diana McCallum is a rebellious and feisty young woman. Her best friend is a slave girl named Drum, and Diana doesn't care about their differences in status or color. Her disapproving father sends Diana away to boarding school, where her defiance soon gets her expelled.
Later, to escape the torture of a brutal marriage, Diana stows away on a wagon train headed to California. During the grueling journey west, Diana encounters unexpected love, danger, and adventure. And when Drum appears, she brings with her a secret that will change Diana's life forever.
A successful blend of history and fiction, Golden Siblings reveals the emotional turmoil and racial prejudices of pre-Civil War America and explores the lure of the forbidden, the value of independence, the power of secrets, and the irrepressible ties of family.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780595438822 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/11/2007 |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.98(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Golden Siblings
A NovelBy Adora Mitchell Bayles
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2007 Adora Mitchell BaylesAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-595-43882-2
Chapter One
The Twins
1837
They found the twins on the boardwalk, clinging to the handrail. Their chubby, tear-streaked faces were fixed into silent screams, brows furrowed, mouths open wide. Diana's little arm still reached out toward the mouth of the Mississippi River with her hand dangling limp at the wrist. The bright noonday sun created thousands of blinding facets on the river's surface.
"My Mommy floated away on the big boat and she was calling me and now she's gone," Little Diana McCallum wailed when her father limped onto the boardwalk.
Carmen helped Reggie McCallum lead his children, Diana and Paul back to the hotel where they prepared to return home. "Yo mammy done going to that Vee Anna but she come back soon, babies. Now don't you cry," she said, trying to comfort the twins.
Diana felt the soft warm hand of the stately Mulatta woman and listened to the rustle of silk as they tramped along the wooden sidewalk. Carmen was almost white. She wore her wavy black mane high on top of her head and topped it with a diaphanous little hat, which was decorated with silk flowers. She was what the men called a rich man's high yellow wench. Diana looked up at her and observed the low-cut blouse with the creamy breasts bouncing above it. "Is you taking me to my Mommy?" she whimpered.
The woman didn't answer.
It all began when the twins' mother discovered that Flower was pregnant. Flower was a quiet slave but showed such a deep devotion to Gretchen that the two had become fast friends. Flower had borne her secret until she could no longer hide her growing belly. Finally, one day, she had broken down to Gretchen's incessant questioning and admitted that Reggie was the father of her unborn child.
Gretchen McCallum walked briskly into her husband's study. "Reginald, I'm going back to Vienna," she announced angrily.
"Now what do you wanta do that for?" McCallum drawled. He closed the big medical book and stared at his wife. Leaning back in his leather chair, he folded his hands behind his head. "You're the mistress here at Highland Green. You can't run off like that and leave your children."
"Vot do you mean, leave my children? I am taking them with me."
"No." Reggie glared at her. "Go alone. My children are too young to travel."
Gretchen put her hands on her hips and, jutting her jaw in that annoying way of hers, said, "They are five-years-old, which is plenty old enough for children to travel."
"Never!" he roared.
She stomped out of the study and up the stairs. In a moment, her door slammed.
Gretchen Lelgeman McCallum was twenty five years old. She was the ideal mistress for Reggie's Highland Green. But she had been raised a staunch Presbyterian and was appalled at his attraction for slave women. She had overheard his remarks about shiny black skin on white sheets. "It's all pink inside," he would chortle to his men friends. When she confronted him about his infrequent visits to her rooms, he always mumbled something about her birth damage. "I'm afraid I'll hurt you. You had a tough time in childbirth, you know."
Gretchen had her own bedroom, dressing room, parlor and bath. It was decorated in ivory colored linen and lace, with gilded furniture and hand-carved African ivory doorknobs. She fussed over ruffled coverlets, and antagonized her hand maidens over a speck of dust.
The twins were born on September 15, 1832. Diana McCallum was fifteen minutes younger than her brother Paul. Gretchen had carried them all the way to term. Reggie, Dr. Reginald McCallum, her husband, had ordered her to bed in her sixth month of pregnancy. She had terrorized the whole house during her confinement, shouting at Reggie, flinging powder boxes and hair brushes at anyone who crossed her temper and crying loudly if he argued with her. He tolerated her outbursts, realizing her situation. But he had lost all interest in mating with her after those last three months of her tyranny and her constant whining.
The twins were born strong and robust. Spanked at birth by their own father, they exercised their little lungs with lusty cries, which rang throughout Highland Green.
Gretchen insisted her breasts be bound and her waist cinched immediately. She feared she would lose her beautiful figure and that her husband would lose interest in her. Black wet nurses were brought in to care for the babies.
As the months went by, the children bonded with these slave caregivers. They were presented to their mother only when they were clean and dry with full bellies.
Gretchen adored her twins but she was the new mistress at Highland Green. She had seen too many wives let themselves go where she had grown up in Austria. So preoccupied were they with diapers, squalling children, and pendulous, red-veined breasts, that their husbands were forgotten. Many of their husbands had sought less encumbered, better-groomed women. She vowed that childbirth and all that business would never affect her status as the wife of a big plantation owner in America. She must maintain her figure at all costs. She covered her strong, muscular forearms with long-sleeved silk blouses, summer and winter. No one must ever know she developed those muscles milking cows on her father's dairy farm. She was a lady now.
Reggie had sent out an advertisement for a lovely, young blonde, blue-eyed bride with the hope of producing an heir to the plantation. Gretchen had fit his order perfectly.
Taking notice of their language when the twins were three-years-old, Gretchen exclaimed, "They talk like two little pickininnies! Ve must take care of that." She hired a private tutor and began their early education. "No children of mine should speak such bad English. Ve must isolate them from the Nigras," she told Miss Haas, the young white woman she had hired to teach them.
So Diana and Paul McCallum were presented in their best clothes to their new teacher.
The twins' pure white hair grew thickly in every direction. Gretchen and the nurses tried every way in the world to control their hair. With their wild blue eyes and unruly white manes, they looked like two mischievous trolls from Scandinavian folklore. The nannies tried combing lard into their hair and slicking it down but the flies wouldn't leave them alone and they smelled bad. They tried wetting Diana's white mane and tying it into a little knot on top of her head. She was constantly pulling at it and disarranging the whole hairstyle. Little wisps would come loose and stand out straight like fluffy sun rays. Their hair just would not lie down.
Reggie ordered a very short haircut for Paul, who cried indignantly when his angora-like tresses littered the floor.
The twins attended classes every day with Miss Haas. Gretchen had hit on the idea of bringing the two black nannies into the classes to learn along with their little charges. They were not allowed to speak their Negro dialect in the presence of the twins. Gretchen had them subjected to a rigorous language training while the children slept. If they even uttered a word of the dialect, they were soundly switched.
The nannies lived in the children's room and were not allowed to associate with any of the other slaves. Eventually, they were both speaking, reading and writing nearly-perfect English.
Sleeping in separate beds, the twins waited until the nannies had gone to sleep, then Diana would sneak into her brother's bed where they would sleep in each other's arms.
As they grew older, Reggie put them in separate rooms. Diana would wait until the big house was quiet, then leave her bed for her brother's room. Heavy footed, she always got caught. She even tried to sneak out the back and visit the slave cabins at night but someone always heard her and brought her back.
"You've been playing with my children's nannies, Reggie!" Gretchen said indignantly as she stomped into the foyer. "I've tolerated your escapades with those field strumpets. But Flower and Moon are just too close to our children. You touched Flower in the kitchen where everybody could see!" she said shrilly.
"There's no need for alarm, Gretchen." Reggie put his surgical bag on the table and removed his overcoat. "Those women are sworn to secrecy. They know what will happen to them if they say anything to the children, or to anyone." He smiled evilly. "We can raise our own slaves right here on the plantation. No need to go to the auctions. We'll save a great deal of money."
"Vould you like me to hellup you?" Gretchen demanded, forgetting her English in her anger. She gestured and raised her voice to a shrill scream, "Bring me a big black buck and ve supply your plantation mit lots of little yellow twins mit orange hair!" "Gretchen." He turned slowly and glared at her. "Shut up."
"Yes, husband of mine. I vill shut up. You vill never hear my voice again. I'm going back to Vienna where my babies will never have to know what kind of man their father is."
"You just said that this morning. You're all talk, Gretchen."
"You vill see, Reginald McCallum. You vill see," she said softly. She turned to leave and walked quietly up the stairs.
Gretchen took one last climb to the hill where her own private gazebo gave her a broad view of the cotton fields. A group of children joined the adults in the heat after a quick noonday meal under the broad canopy of a great oak tree.
Even the young slave children labored long and hard beside the adults. Gazing longingly at the group, Gretchen stood quietly for a couple of hours. She could hear the soft, sweet strains of a bamboo flute that followed a zephyr to her ears.
A slender boy of light color turned suddenly and gazed back.
Gretchen lifted a graceful hand in a discreet signal. The child nodded, tipped his straw hat and quickly returned to work.
"Good-bye field child," she whispered. A hot tear found its way to the rim of her eye, then fell in a tiny splash on her hand.
Reggie was mystified by his wife's cool attitude, which seemed out of character. Becoming suspicious, he immediately left the house, mounted his favorite horse, and rode away. Within a few days, he quietly took Paul for a ride in the buggy. He returned alone.
"Where is my son, Reggie?" Gretchen demanded as he pulled into the carriage house. Beaux Do unhitched the mule and led her into the stable.
McCallum turned and faced his angry wife, who stood with her hands on her hips. "Paul is not going to Vienna. That's all you need to know."
"Whooee! Dat Missy sure do make a lot of noise when she mad!" Beaux Do put his wrinkled black hands over his ears and grimaced. "Peggy, you wants old Beaux Do to put cotton in you ears? We going to has a deaf mule if I don'ts.
Peggy grunted and pushed her muzzle affectionately onto Beaux Do's chest.
Diana's little shoes made stompy noises on the wooden walkway as she approached the carriage house.
"I hears a Little Miss Diana coming," Beau Do said in his smiling baritone.
"Beaux Do, how you knows it be me?" Diana walked under Peggy and looked up at the grinning old slave.
"Sweetheart, don't walk under that mule. She step on you, then we won't has no mo Little Miss Diana!" Beaux Do said excitedly.
"No she won't," Diana said, and slid between Peggy's forelegs. Scratching the mule's legs, she looked up and pressed her head against the animal's chest, skewing her bonnet to a precarious angle. With one blue eye peeking from under the cockeyed bonnet, she said, "Beaux Do, she likes me."
"You momma going to be mad you mess up you bonnet like that. Now git away from that mule befo she bites you!" Beaux Do said nervously.
"She won't bite," Diana said and walked the full length of the mule, passed behind her and walked along her other side scratching Peggy's sides as she walked. All the time, Peggy was craning her neck, watching the little girl.
Diana giggled when Peggy's skin shuddered and rippled with the scratching. "She's ticklish," she said and giggled again. "Why they calls you Beaux Do?" She said as she climbed onto the stall.
You ax a lot o' questions, Miss Diana. When I was a little yard chile, they done call me Beaux. Then I got bigger and they put me to work. De Massa say, "Beaux, do this. Beaux, do that. So one day I was a' walking by two mans, they was sittin on de fence. One say, 'Who dat?' De other say, 'Dat Beaux Do!' And that's how I gots de name Beaux Do."
"I knows what to calls you. Beaux don't!" She squealed with laughter.
Diana banged her shoes against the stall and giggled mischievously. Beaux Do grinned a crinkly smile and said, "You makes a lot of noise with dem little feets. Folks always knows when you is coming."
"Why?"
"You ax de hardest questions, chile. You got to tip toe, sweetheart. Walk on you tippy toes so nobody hears you."
The air became electrified by the shrill scream that came from the big house. "Dianaaaah!" Gretchen shrieked.
Little Diana's eyes grew wide. Her mouth opened in a loose round "O." She almost fell off the rail as she scrambled to answer the deafening summons. "Beaux Do, don't tell my Mommy I been here!" She left the carriage house and trotted on her tiptoes along the boardwalk and into the big cozy kitchen. Her mother was standing in the middle of the kitchen with a hickory switch in her hand.
"Yes, Mother?" Diana whimpered and shrank back against the door. "I's here."
"Don't say that! Say, 'I'm here!'" she said firmly.
"Yes, Mother, I'm here," she squealed, and tried to protect her buttocks from the stout switch.
"You've set your pretty bonnet all askew. Look at your dirty little hands! You smell like that nasty mule!"
"Peggy's not nasty," she protested. "Beaux Do gave her a bath."
"Diana McCallum," she hissed, "what have I told you about talking to those Nigras? I vant you to speak proper English!" She lightly slapped Diana's apple-red cheek and said, "Let's get you cleaned up now. You must look like a little lady when we go to Grandmother's house."
Gretchen and Diana climbed into the doctor's buggy and seated themselves while Beaux Do held the mule.
"Oh!" Diana exclaimed. She swung down from the carriage before her mother could stop her.
"Diana!" Gretchen growled, trying not to scream.
Diana ignored her and tip-toed around the mule to the patient animal's head.
"Peggy," she whispered, "you take us to Grandmother's house. Now be careful and don't go too fast so Mommy won't be mad and whip you." Peggy grunted her approval.
Gretchen sat in the small carriage and gnashed her teeth. Diana trotted back and climbed nimbly into her seat. Gretchen smacked the mule soundly on the rump with the whip and they left Highland Green at a brisk trot. They rode silently for several miles.
"What were you doing, Diana?" Gretchen said as the mule sped them along the road toward Plum Point.
"I was just telling Peggy not to run too fast so you won't whip her and then I told her to take us to Grandmother's house."
"That mule does not understand English, you foolish child. She is running too fast anyway, you see? She did not understand you."
Diana tried to contain herself but she felt a deep sympathy for the mule, knowing well the sting of the switch. "She runs fast if you hit her," she said and put up both hands to guard her face from the inevitable slap.
"Don't you back-talk me, Diana McCallum," Gretchen said irritably and brandished a gloved hand. She did not strike the child; they had pulled into Alexandria McCallum's drive.
Diana leaped from the buggy with a sigh of relief. Grandmother did not believe in hitting children. And she never screamed. But she was very strict.
Alexandria, Diana and Gretchen took lunch outdoors in Grandmother's garden. Butterflies and bumblebees fascinated the child but Grandmother insisted she remain in her seat until she ate every bite.
Presently, Gretchen arose and kneeled before her daughter. "Diana, Baby, you are staying here with Grandmother for a few days."
"Oh, boy! Can I run after the pretty butterflies?"
"You'll have to ask Grandmother. I shall return in just a little while, then we shall go on a long trip in a big boat."
"Is my brother going with us?"
"No, dear. Father has plans for your brother. He's far away."
Diana began to cry. Sobbing heavily, she screamed, "I want my brother! Why can't Pauli go on a trip in a boat with us? Is Papa going too? Who's going to take care of my brother?"
Gretchen took her parasol and purse, pulled on her gloves and left Alexandria's house.
Diana spread her hands and shouted tearfully, "Is Pauli going to stay home with nobody to take care of him?"
Knowing Grandmother would not spank her, she threw a noisy tantrum. She stomped her feet and jumped up and down. "I want my brother!" she shrieked over and over again.
Strong arms subdued her. Grandmother spread her full skirts and sat down on the Oriental rug in her parlor. Taking the child in her arms, she held her firmly and let her cry herself out. She rocked back and forth and crooned a tuneless lullaby.
Diana adjusted well at Grandmother Alexandria's. The sprightly middle-aged woman allowed her to net butterflies. She even ran gracefully in her big garden, leaping about with a butterfly net, catching specimens for Diana to trap in a glass cage for observation. She even showed her how to impale them on long hat pins.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Golden Siblings by Adora Mitchell Bayles Copyright © 2007 by Adora Mitchell Bayles. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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