The Family Greene (21 page)

I nodded.
Like a father!

But he would never tell. He would face the most savage Indian before he would tell me. He would not allow me to disrespect my mother because of something they might have done a long time ago.

If it was true, he would not allow me to change my allegiances from my pa to him.

And if it were not true, well mayhap, just mayhap, he wanted me to believe, in a small corner of my heart, that there was the remotest possibility that he was my father.

He would never, never tell.

And now, standing there before him in the near dark, I knew that I did not want him to.

"Goodbye, Cornelia," he said.

"Goodbye, General Wayne."

We hugged. He held me close. The hug said all kinds of things we could never say to each other. And the best part about that hug was that we both knew it, when he turned and mounted his horse and rode off into the night.

I
NEVER SAW
General Wayne again.

I did write to him a few times, and he to me. I received a letter from him from Pittsburgh, where he was training his troops. It was in the fall of '92 and he seemed very vigorous and happy.

I wrote him of the arrival, at Mulberry Grove, of a man named Eli Whitney, another Yale graduate, whom Mama had met aboard ship on the way home from New York with Miller. Whitney had been coming to Savannah to teach, but became sick, and Mama invited him to Mulberry Grove to recuperate. I wrote how he and Mama and Miller went on home, and I stayed on the winter in Philadelphia with the Washingtons. And the president asked after him.

And how, when I got back home in the spring, Whitney was still there at Mulberry Grove and toying with an invention he had in mind.

Something he called a cotton gin. He and Miller spent hours poring over it.

I told him Miller and Mama were still not yet wed.

He wrote back that he was going on north and was naming a place in Ohio Greenville, in honor of Pa.

By the next year, I received another letter from a place called Fort Defiance. The battered and spattered envelope had taken three months to get to me. He said Fort Defiance was at the junction of the Maumee and Anglaise rivers, north of this place called Greenville. The Indians had refused his offer of peace. And he was going to meet them.

I said I would pray for him. I told him that we were all together again at Mulberry Grove, that George had finally arrived home, that he was strong and well educated and sent his best hopes and wished he could be with him.

Wayne wrote that I might not hear from him for a while and not to worry if I didn't. And if I had another letter, to send it on to this same address, as it would, sooner or later, find him.

I did have another letter.

I sent it to him that spring of '94, only a few weeks after George returned home.

George had invited a friend named Stits to stay the summer, I wrote. And he and Stits had launched a canoe in the river. They were going in the canoe all the way to Savannah. The river was swollen from the spring rains, and about an hour after they left, Stits came back, scarce able to walk, muddy and ashen-faced. The canoe had overturned. He had barely been able to get himself above water, then could not find either George or the canoe. He walked on the muddy shore back to us. All of the household, I reported to Wayne, went out to search for George. We went in boats, in the direction in which the boys had gone. We searched the rest of the day and half the night. No George.

Then, at dawn, my brother's limp body washed ashore in front of Mulberry Grove. Mama was unable to be consoled, I told him.
And oh, how we needed you. Only you could have consoled her. And I know, sir, that even as I write this I am unfair to do so.

In a return letter, he said he had written to Mama to console her, best as he could. And to me he sent his most profound sympathies for the loss of my brother, who "would most likely have turned out to be as good a man as your pa. I mourn his untimely passing, which is nothing less than a tragedy."

He was in a place called Fallen Timbers, he said, a place the Indians called "the sharp ends of the guns." It was where they broke and ran before his army. "We hope," he wrote, "for surrender within the year in Greenville."

Just about this time, the first cotton gins, invented successfully by Eli Whitney and manufactured in New Haven, came to Savannah. These gins, run by one man and a horse, cleaned cotton so much better than the older machines that took the labor of fifty men. The invention was turning the South upside down. Visitors by the score were coming to our plantation.

Northern industrialists were sending representatives to investigate the possibilities.

One such was a young man named John Nightengale. He was twenty-four and an heir of a prominent New England family. And the possibility he saw was in my sister Martha.

They were married in the spring of 1795 at Mulberry Grove.

Right after that, General Wayne wrote to me that the Indians had surrendered to him at Greenville, Ohio. I thought how fitting that they should do it there, in the place he had named for Pa.

There was a scrawled postscript to the letter.
The truth of the matter you so dearly need, my dear Cornelia, is that I really don't know. Out here in the wilderness I have decided that I owe you the truth, that you are old enough to take it. And that is all the truth I can give. Forgive me.

I clutched the letter to my breast while tears ran down my face.
Dear man. Oh, you dear man, thank you.

I wrote back to him immediately. I congratulated him on his victory. And then I included a postscript that said, simply,
Thank you and God bless you always. There is nothing to forgive. You have given me much. Love, Cornelia.

Mama wed Phineas Miller on the last day of May in 1796. I did not write to Wayne to tell him. I am glad I did not tell him. And I am glad I sent a letter back to him immediately after he wrote to me. I received a last note from him from Detroit, in November.

It said, briefly,
Thank
you,
dear girl, thank you for your forgiveness.
That was all.

General Wayne died on the fifteenth of December of 1796 in Erie, Pennsylvania, on his way home from occupying Detroit.

Mama cried when she found out. I cried with her. And I never told her what Wayne had finally told me.

In April 1801, I married a man named Peyton Skip-with Jr. I was twenty-four. All I will say is that although he was from a leading family from Virginia, he was no pantywaist. He reminded me a lot of Wayne. I followed General Wayne's instructions as to a husband, and I know Wayne would have approved.

In 1803, Dungeness, the home Pa so wanted on Cumberland Island, was finally finished. It was built just as Pa wanted it. And the room on the fourth floor was there.

My sister Martha never claimed that room. Peyton and I stayed in it when we visited.

And every time we visited, I looked for that horse I had seen that day, a lifetime ago now. Several times I thought I saw it, but when I ran to find it, it was gone.

It was as if I were running after a dream. Like I had so often run after the truth of General Wayne being my father.

And now there was always the possibility that he was.

And what was I to do now with that possibility?

Just smile sometimes to myself, and nourish it.

For it is possible, then, that I have had two fathers. Both wonderful. Twice the love. And twice the loss. For I have lost both.

Catharine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, has always been known as one of the most famous women of the American Revolution. She is listed right up there along with Martha Washington and Lucy Knox, wife of artillery officer Brigadier General Henry Knox, and other wives who spent the terrible winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge.

When Caty Greene arrived at Valley Forge in February of 1778, she had left her two children with family in Rhode Island. She had not seen her beloved husband since the summer before. It was here that she met the Marquis de Lafayette, with whom she conversed in French, and the dashing young major general of the Continental Army Anthony Wayne.

It was the time of the French Alliance. There was a great celebration to honor the occasion. Caty Greene rode in the carriage with Martha Washington, who had taken her under her wing, and with whom she had become fast friends, as she had with many others in those trying times. Including General Wayne.

Reading about Caty Greene, often called Kitty, so enticed me that I was driven to go back to her childhood and learn more. That childhood was even more rewarding. I found that she grew up on Block Island, off the coast of New England, twelve miles off Rhode Island. There was, we are told, "a sense of timelessness on the isle." And Caty's life, as a child of a family of means, was sheltered and secluded. She ran free. Her father was "a distinguished man, a deputy to the General Assembly, a man of love, warmth, and fun, who liked to cuddle little children in his lap and tell them stories," according to the book
Caty: A Biography of Catharine Littlefield Greene,
which I mention in my bibliography.

Her mother died when she was ten, and shortly after, she was sent to live with Aunt Catharine Greene, in East Greenwich, Rhode Island.

Caty Littlefield, as she was then, grew in character for me, as is necessary for a personage to do to become a protagonist in my book.

"But what will you do to satisfy my readers?" I asked her.

"You just wait and see," she promised. "You don't know anything about me yet."

Well, I waited. Soon she met young Nathanael Greene, from a good Quaker family, but himself a Quaker no more, for he had other fish to fry. He was near six feet tall, with a firm jaw, with fire in his soul for the Whig cause, yet with clear, quiet eyes and a gentle manner. She introduced me to him. After I got to know Nathanael and his family, she convinced me that she should marry him, despite the difference in their ages.

He was all of twelve years older than she was.

Well, that was something worth sitting up and taking notice of, I supposed.

When she came of age, they wed. Caty Greene was beautiful, lively of spirit, spritely, and gay. And she and Nathanael were wed only a short time when the war came.

***

S
O THEN,
my readers, you ask, is it all true, everything in the book? Did it all really happen that way?

Let me remind you, dear readers, that this is a work of
historical fiction,
which means I am fictionalizing what really did happen. Yes, Caty Littlefield really did grow up on Block Island, her mother did die when she was ten, she was sent to live with Aunt Catharine, she did meet Nathanael Greene, and he was twelve years older than she, all as I have written. But those are the
facts!
It is up to the writer to fill in the story, to tell how they imagine it happened.

And so I did, with part 1.

But then what about part 2?

I wanted to take the book further along. To tell the story of Cornelia, Caty's daughter, to tell of Caty's family.

When I read of how Caty's Aunt Catharine had supposedly had an affair with Benjamin Franklin and it caused so much gossip, of how beautiful Caty herself was, of how her enticing moods and her gaiety kept the men's spirits up at Valley Forge, I likened her to Aunt Catharine. And then I read of Caty's friendships, later in life, with other men, even after she was married to Nathanael. And I read how General Wayne kept coming around to visit her and Nathanael at their plantation in Georgia, a fact that generated more gossip, and I decided to make this all very uncomfortable for her daughter Cornelia.

And so I made the focus of the second part of the book the rumor that General Wayne is Cornelia's father, because she was conceived at Valley Forge and because she, Cornelia, is the only one who has hazel eyes, as has General Wayne.

Her sister Martha, who constantly vies with Cornelia for their father's love, plants this thought in Cornelia's mind to drive her crazy. And so the tension in the second part of the book takes off from there.

None of this really happened in the family of Nathanael Greene. It is pure fiction, and this great and good man had no part in it. It was put in for the sake of story. Of course, he always knew his wife was a flirt, but he put up with it, and as far as anyone knows they had a good marriage. As I say, I did it for the sake of story. It is well known, however, that General Anthony Wayne, hero of the American Revolution, a very real hero, was a ladies' man, and that there were real feelings between him and Caty Greene. I took it upon myself as a writer of fiction to take the whole thing a little further. General Wayne respected and admired his friend General Greene too much to dishonor that friendship in any way.

It is true that Caty's son George did drown in the river, and the manner of Nathanael's death is also true. Her marriage to Phineas Miller is fact, also. In defense of Caty Greene, women did not have it easy in that era. Their presence in the home, their behavior and labor were most important to the survival of their family. They were totally dependent upon their husband, his demands, those of the family, and the social strictures. If they married well and the man was "of good parts," they could be happy. If they married poor or if their husband was mean, they were destined to be miserable. In either case their fate was to have many children, and the wear and tear on their bodies could, and often did, kill them.

As General Wayne told Cornelia in the book: "During the war, the social rules were relaxed, and at Valley Forge we did as we pleased and had a good time. After the war, we expected the same thing. But found that out in the world, nothing had changed. That kiss I gave your mother meant nothing. It was just something like we used to do at Valley Forge."

Was it? It was something that Cornelia, and my reader, must figure out for themselves.

Ann Rinaldi

Berkin, Carol.
Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.