O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [47]
Matthew set about training an executive staff, half black, half white, giving Daisy further decision-making ability. Matthew promised to always remain in a supervisory post so Daisy knew she had backup, and she grew quite comfortable with her supervisory duties.
* * *
For several years, Matthew traveled to Washington on a bimonthly basis to lecture at the Howard University Law Department, the first Negro institution of its kind in America.
And now, to be free, at last.
He moved off the Inverness grounds to a small colony of successful Negroes in Skerryton. They had a lovely modern home, and in its rear, he opened a legal consulting firm, manned by two Negro apprentices from Howard University. None held legal certification, but they were sought out by the mighty and the lowly alike.
Giving more and more corporate work to his staff over time, Matthew plunged into a salt mine of labor, taking case after case pro bono to define the rights of former slaves.
Between Inverness, his wealthy clients, and a never-ending line of the disenfranchised petitioning him, it happened. He worked himself to death by heart attack in his late thirties.
There was never the likes of his funeral. Horace Kerr walked in the cortege behind Matthew’s mule-driven coffin, undraped by any flag, with two other white dignitaries and a thousand blacks.
Matthew Fancy was short remembered outside of Inverness. He left no landmark legal decisions, no righteous speeches, no promising sermons. He was just beginning to do what he wanted and too soon died, doing it.
When all the accounts were settled, it was learned that Fancy had given every penny of his earnings to help former slaves. He left a pregnant wife and a great deal of debt.
Horace Kerr paid off the Fancys’ mortgage and pensioned Laveda with a touch of magnanimity, including some shipyard stock, which would see her through her days in comfort.
Matthew Fancy never really left Inverness. His ghost dwelled in one of the closets in the long corridor and the memory of him infected Horace Kerr’s days.
During her husband’s tenure at Inverness, Laveda played a role nearly as major as his own. While assisting Daisy in the day-to-day running of the home, Laveda also became the nanny to the first two Kerr heirs, Emily and Upton. Twelve years passed until Daisy became pregnant a third time.
During the years that the Kerrs had their children, Laveda had four miscarriages and no children. A recurring disaster seemed to strike her at the beginning of her second trimester and she’d miscarry.
The best white doctor, Daisy’s own, examined Laveda but could only speculate on her problem. There was something in Laveda’s internal makeup that would not allow the womb to hold the fetus in place to full term.
Daisy had gone into her fourth month without problem when Laveda confided she was pregnant again and desperate to save this child.
A month later, Matthew Fancy died.
When Matthew was set down in the Negro cemetery in Skerryton, Laveda was brought back to Inverness, where she could be given bedrest and constant attention.
This fit into Horace Kerr’s scheme of things. He certainly owed that much to the late Matthew Fancy. Moreover, Horace was constantly trying to convince God that he was truly sorry about slavery. Laveda was installed in the finest of the servants’ quarters, an apartment belonging to a departed chief butler.
Amanda Kerr was born first, followed in two months by the screaming, healthy Willow. Laveda was the nanny of one of them, the mother of the other, and wet nurse to both.
The girls played in the same playpen, napped in the same crib, and nursed from the same black breasts. In the germless isolation of Inverness, no special attention was paid, at first. After all, in the old days, many white owners