The country
In the summer of 1742, when this chapter opens, the family that would keep the Christopher VI Bible at a south-side-Virginia seat for the next half-century did not yet have the seat, did not yet have the keeping, and was carried in a single descendant of nineteen who had not yet married and did not yet hold the Bible. The Bible was at Williamsburg, on the writing-desk of a living man. The seat was a decade off and unbuilt. The county that would give the chapter its name had not been cut from the older country around it and would not be for four more years. What the summer held was a young man, a country he was turning toward, and a father at Williamsburg who had a little more than three months to live.
The young man was Anton Tscharner DeGraffenreid. He had been born at Williamsburg on the twenty-eighth of November 1722, in the early evening, eight and a half years after his parents had married at Charleston. He had been baptized there twelve days later by Commissary Blair, with the Honorable Nathaniel Harrison standing as one of his godfathers. He had grown up in the house his father had bought in 1717 on the south side of Duke of Gloucester Street, two blocks east of the Governor’s Palace — the house that would stand into the present century and be shown to visitors under another family’s name. He was the only child of the marriage. His mother, Barbara Tempest Needham of Wymondley in Hertfordshire, who had come across the Atlantic in the winter of 1714 to a colony that had nearly killed the man she came to marry, was dead. The year is not firm in the surviving record, but she was gone before 1742, somewhere in Virginia, in the late 1730s or the first years of the 1740s, and the documents that would say more about her end have not been found. So in the summer of 1742 the Williamsburg house held two men: the father, Christopher VI, fifty-one years old that December; and the son, nineteen, with the country to the south-west opening in front of him.
The country to the south-west was the south side of the James River drainage, the long roll of falling tobacco land between the great river and the Carolina line, drained by the Nottoway and the Meherrin and the Roanoke as they ran south-east toward the Albemarle Sound. It was the planting frontier of Virginia in the 1730s and 1740s — the country into which the tidewater families had been pushing their patents and their second sons for two decades, up the river valleys, onto the red-clay ridges, ahead of the surveyor and a step ahead of the law’s catching up with the survey. The land was tobacco land where it was good and timber-and-grazing land where it was not, and the man who took up a patent on it took it up to clear it and crop it and to leave it to a son who would clear more. The economy the country ran on was the leaf — tobacco as the staple, tobacco as the freight, tobacco as the money in a country that had little coin, the hogsheads rolled down to the inspection warehouses on the river and the river carrying them to the factors at the falls and at the bay. A man’s standing in the country was the acreage he had patented and the hands he had to crop it and the hogsheads he sent down in the autumn. It was a new country in the sense that mattered: it was being made, in those years, by the men who were moving onto it, and a man of nineteen with a name behind him and a little capacity in front of him could make a place in it that his father’s tidewater generation had not had to make from nothing.
The administrative country was Brunswick County. Lunenburg, which would give this chapter its name and would hold the family’s seat for fifty years, did not exist in the summer of 1742; it would be cut from the western reach of Brunswick in 1746, four years on, when the settlement had spread far enough up the drainages to want a courthouse nearer than the old one. So the lane and the standing oak and the long table and the parlor desk that every later chapter of this book returns to were, in 1742, neither built nor in a county that had its later name. The ground was there. The county around it would change its name once before the family’s house went up on it. The historian who wants to be exact says Brunswick in 1742 and Lunenburg from 1746, and lets the reader understand that the land did not move and only the line on the map and the name above the courthouse door did.
Into that country, by descent and by the turn of his own life, came Anton DeGraffenreid in 1742. The descent was Swiss, and it had come to Virginia by way of a colonial venture that had failed. His grandfather was Christopher V, Baron de Bernberg, the Bernese patrician who had carried a charter and a body of Swiss and Palatine settlers to North Carolina in 1710 and founded New Bern on the Neuse, and who had seen the venture broken by the Tuscarora War and by debt, and who had gone home to Switzerland in 1713 with the colony behind him. His father, Christopher VI, born at Worb near Bern in 1690 and educated for two years at a Reformed academy there, had come out to Carolina with the venture as a young man, had survived the war and the fever that had killed the colony’s people around him, and had not gone home with his father. He had stayed in America. He had married an Englishwoman at Charleston in 1714 and had brought her up to Williamsburg, and he had made the turn that the grandfather had not lived to make in the new country. He had stopped being a colonist of a failed Swiss venture and had become a Virginian with a house and a lot and a son. The son was the third generation of it and the first to be born on the ground — Williamsburg-born, Virginia-raised, with the Swiss name and a Swiss grandfather he had never seen and a Bernese formal hand his father had taught him to write, and with no country behind him but this one.
The hand his father had taught him is the thread that matters most to what is coming, and it is worth naming here at the country’s scale before it does its work later at the desk’s scale. The DeGraffenreids kept their family record in a Bible, and they kept it in a particular way. The most important entries — the marriages, the deaths, the births that turned the line — were written on the fly-leaf in formal French, in the keeper’s own hand, deliberately and without haste, the way the Baron had written the death of his own wife at Worb in 1697 and the way Christopher VI had written his marriage at Charleston in 1714 with the smaller English words She came beneath it. It was a Swiss family’s habit carried into an English colony and held there: French for the record, the keeper’s own hand for the record, the fly-leaf for the record, and the Bible as the thing the family came back to. Christopher VI had taught the form to his son as the Baron had taught it to him, pen-cutting and all, beginning when the boy was old enough to hold a pen. In the summer of 1742 the form was a thing the son had been taught and had not yet had cause to use. The Bible on which he would use it was his father’s still, on the desk at Williamsburg, and the keeping of it was his father’s still.
What turned Anton toward the south-side country in 1742 was a marriage. He was to marry Mary Baker, the daughter of Colonel Henry Baker of Chowan in North Carolina — of the Albemarle planter country across the Virginia line, the older country to the south where the Carolina families had been seated since the previous century. The match joined two kinds of people the south-side frontier was joining all through those years: a Virginia family of recent gentry standing and continental origin, two generations off the boat and one generation onto the land, and an established Carolina planter family of the Albemarle, with a colonel’s title and a seat in Chowan and daughters to settle into the new country opening to the north of them. How the match was made the record does not say, and the historian who keeps to the record does not invent the courtship; what the record gives is the colonel, the daughter, the date, and the place far enough along to be sure of: the fifth of July 1742. The name the daughter carried — Baker, her father’s name — would go down the line as a Christian name and then as a woman’s name across the generations this book follows. It came to rest, two generations on, in the heroine of these chapters, who would be christened Mary Baker for the grandmother she never knew. But that is the long reach of it, and it is enough, at the country’s scale, to say that the name came into the family in 1742 with a colonel’s daughter from Chowan, and to let it travel.
So the summer stood at a hinge that none of the people in it could see as a hinge, the way the people in a summer never can. At Williamsburg the father kept his house and his lot and his Bible and had, though he did not know it and the record does not say he was ill, a little more than three months left to live. To the south-west the country lay open and half-made, Brunswick still and Lunenburg not yet, the tobacco land rolling down toward the Carolina line. Across that line, in Chowan, a colonel’s daughter was to be married in July. And between the Williamsburg house and the southern country moved a young man of nineteen with a Swiss name and a hand he had been taught and a marriage in front of him, who would in that one year of 1742 marry a wife, lose a father, and take up a Bible. He would, a decade later, on a ridge of south-side land, build the seat where the keeping he was about to inherit would be done for the next fifty years. The country was the ground of all of it. The chapter begins on the ground, in the summer, before any of it has happened, with the line carried in one unmarried man and the Bible still on another man’s desk a hundred miles to the east.
The Bakers and the match
The daughter Tscharner DeGraffenreid was to marry in July came from across the Carolina line, out of a country older than the one he was turning toward, and out of a family that had made, a generation before his own, the same kind of motion his made now. Mary Baker was the daughter of Colonel Henry Baker of Chowan in North Carolina. The Bakers were Albemarle planters, seated south of the Virginia line in the older Carolina country where the families had held their ground since the previous century. They had come to be seated there the way the DeGraffenreids were about to be seated on the south-side ridges — by a family pushing out of an older tidewater country into a newer one, carrying a name and a little standing and the habit of taking up land and leaving it to a son. The DeGraffenreid motion was continental into Virginia. The Baker motion had been Virginia into Carolina. They met along the same line, the long survey-and-patent line between the James drainage and the Albemarle, that both families had been crossing for two generations in opposite directions.
The Baker descent ran back across that line into tidewater Virginia, to Surry County on the south bank of the James. The first of them the record holds was Lawrence Baker of Surry, a burgess, whose will was proved in 1681. His son Henry Baker took up patents in Surry in 1683 and 1684 and married Mary Blake, a daughter of Colonel John Blake of Nansemond — Nansemond and Surry standing married into the line. And it was out of that Surry-and-Nansemond family that the Bakers crossed into the Albemarle and seated themselves in Chowan, in the person of the second Henry Baker, the colonel whose daughter Tscharner was to marry. So the Bakers had done, a generation earlier, what the DeGraffenreids were doing now. A family of standing in an older country had sent itself onto a newer one, down the river valleys, onto the planting ground, ahead of nobody but the next family behind it. The continental name was moving into Virginia in 1714; the Virginia name had moved into Carolina before it. The two motions met in a marriage in 1742, on a line both families had spent two generations learning to cross.
What the colonel had made of the move was a standing the record carries plainly. Henry Baker of Chowan held Bucklands, a plantation of some two thousand five hundred acres; he was colonel of the colonial militia, and the record carries him also as sheriff, as captain, as burgess, and as a justice of the peace of Chowan, commissioned to that bench in 1731. He held the ferry that crossed the Chowan River — the Henry Baker Ferry, running between the Mt. Gallant fishery and the mouth of the Meherrin, in use before 1722 — so that the river-crossing his country depended on carried his name. This was real standing in the Albemarle, the standing of a man who had patented and held and been trusted with the offices a planting country hands to its substantial men. It is renderable from the record without a scene built around it. The historian who keeps to the documents can say what the colonel was — the acreage, the title, the bench, the ferry — and does not need to invent a day in his life to say it.
Her mother’s people stood on standing of their own. Mary’s mother was Ruth Chancey, the colonel’s second wife, a daughter of Edmund Chancey of Pasquotank — the Honorable Edmund Chancey, a judge under the proprietary government, on the older Albemarle side of the country. Mary was one of the colonel’s daughters by Ruth, set in the record among a houseful of brothers and sisters: John and Blake and David and Zadock, Mary and Sarah and Ruth. So the line the documents fix her into is gentry on both sides at the Albemarle scale — a colonel’s daughter on her father’s side, a judge’s granddaughter on her mother’s — with brothers to inherit the colonel’s land and the colonel’s offices, and a daughter’s place of her own among them.
But the colonel was not living to give her. Henry Baker’s will had been proved in 1739, three years before the July date, and Bucklands had passed to his eldest son, the third Henry Baker; so when Mary married in 1742 she married out of her late father’s country and out of a seat her brother now held, not out of the colonel’s living hand. The country was the colonel’s and the name was the colonel’s and the standing she carried into the marriage was the standing he had made. But the man himself was three years in the ground, and the Baker seat she went from was a brother’s house. The historian does not stage the colonel at the wedding, because there is no colonel to stage. What the colonel gives this chapter he gives from the record and from the grave: a country, a name, a line, and a daughter already three years fatherless when she married north across the line.
This is the documented shape of the joining, and it is worth naming plainly at the historian’s distance, because the distance must not be let to erase the woman inside it. Mary Baker married at about nineteen. She married out of a father’s house that was now a brother’s, a colonel’s daughter without the colonel, into a continental-origin Virginia family two generations off the boat and one onto the land, and she married north across the line into a country newer and rougher than the one she left — the Albemarle for the south-side frontier, an established seat for a patent not yet built on. What the record does not give is how the match was made or whether the choosing was hers, and the historian who keeps to the record does not invent it. What the record does give is the shape of the thing: a young woman of marrying age, her father dead, her family’s seat in a brother’s keeping, joined to a man of nineteen whose own father was alive a hundred miles east and whose own seat was a decade from being built. Where a no was hers to say, the record does not say she said it; where the conditions of an Albemarle daughter’s marriage in 1742 narrowed what a no could have meant — a fatherless daughter, a brother’s house, a country filling up to the north and wanting wives — the conditions are nameable, and the historian names them and goes no closer.
What the match founded was a household, and the household began where the marriage put it — not at Bucklands, which the bride was leaving, and not at Williamsburg, which was the groom’s father’s and not the groom’s, but on the south-side ground Tscharner had turned toward, his own patented land between the rivers. The first dwelling there was rough, a frontier first house on a man’s own ground, the kind a man put up to live in while he made the place. The seat the family would keep for fifty years — the lane, the ridge, the long table, the parlor desk — was not that first house. It was the second, chosen and built a decade on, when the place had been worked into something to hold a seat. So the household the July marriage founded was founded in principle in 1742 and built on the ground in the early 1750s: a marriage first, a rough first dwelling, and then, when the country was made enough to carry it, the seat itself. The ground was there in 1742. The marriage was there in 1742. The seat was a decade off and unbuilt.
And the name came in with her. The name the marriage brought into the family was Baker, and it is the name this book has come to follow. It came in as a wife’s father’s name in 1742 and it did not leave. The first child of the marriage was a son, born on the sixth of August 1744, and he was given the name Baker DeGraffenreid — the mother’s father’s name set in front of the father’s, a Carolina colonel’s surname made a Virginia child’s Christian name. That is the seed of it. The name would go down the line that way, the father’s-name-as-given-name and then, in its turn, a woman’s name, until it came to rest two generations on in the heroine of these chapters, christened Mary Baker for the grandmother she never knew. But that is the long reach, and the record lets the historian carry it only this far cleanly: a colonel’s daughter from Chowan married into the family in 1742, and a son born in 1744 carried her father’s name forward as his own.
So the match that turned Tscharner toward the south-side country joined two families that had each, in their turn, left an older country for a newer one and crossed the same line to do it. On the one side a continental name two generations into Virginia and one onto the land; on the other an Albemarle planter family a generation into Carolina, a colonel three years dead, a seat in a brother’s hands, and a daughter to be married north. The country was the ground of it and the line was the seam of it, and the marriage was made across the seam on the fifth of July 1742, in Chowan, in the bride’s country, in a house the record has not kept the name of. How that day went — who stood up with them, what was said, what the formal hand wrote afterward and where — is the next thing this chapter comes to. Here it is enough to have joined the two families on the page the way the marriage joined them on the ground: the name come in, the line begun, the seat still a decade off, and the Bible, through all of it, still on a living man’s desk a hundred miles to the east at Williamsburg.
The Bible at Williamsburg; the hand-convention at depth
The hand the father had taught the son has already been named in this chapter, at the country’s scale — French for the record, the keeper’s own hand for the record, the fly-leaf for the record, and the Bible as the thing the family came back to — and named there deliberately, to do its work later, at the desk’s scale. This is the desk’s scale. The work is done here, with the historian as close to the page and the object as the surviving record lets him get. In the summer of 1742 the Bible lay where the country’s scale had left it: at Williamsburg, on the writing-desk under the east window of the house on the south side of Duke of Gloucester Street, in the keeping of the living man who had carried it across the Atlantic and made its first entry. It was his book and his keeping, and it would be his through the summer and into the autumn. What this section comes close to is the object itself and the convention it carried — the page the family came back to, and the form in which the entries on it were made.
The object was a small book. It was an octavo, about eight inches by five, bound in dark calf, the kind of family Bible a Bernese house of standing gave a son to carry out into the world. The calf was rubbed at the corners, road-worn from the years it had ridden at the bottom of a sea-chest — Worb to Bern, Bern to London, London to Charleston in the crossing of 1710, and then the long Carolina-and-Virginia road of the years after, before it came to rest on a Williamsburg desk. The Baron had given it to Christopher VI clean, at Worb, on the seventeenth of August 1710, before the son sailed for the New Bern venture; and the front fly-leaf — the recto, the first page — had been left clean on purpose, for the entry the Baron foretold and instructed and would not live near enough to write. Christopher VI had carried the book four years with that page empty. The first thing written on it was written in 1714.
The way the entries were made was the convention the chapter has already named, brought now to the depth where it does its work. The entries that mattered most — the marriages, the deaths, the births that turned the line — went on the fly-leaf, and they went there in formal French, in the keeper’s own hand, written deliberately and without haste. The fly-leaf was reserved. It was not the page a household kept its lesser business on, not the place for accounts or receipts or the dates of ordinary record-keeping; it was the page the line itself was written on. And the rule the family held about it was a rule of weight: that what turned the line was set down in the formal language and the careful hand and on the one page kept for it, so that a descendant opening the book a hundred years on would find the line where the family had always put it. The convention was Swiss in its origin and was held in an English colony unchanged. The keeper wrote French where another family would have written English, and wrote it in his own hand where another family might have let a clerk or a clergyman enter the fact, because in this family the entering of the fact was the keeper’s own office, and the formal language was the mark of the weight the family gave it.
The exemplar of all this, on the fly-leaf in the summer of 1742, was the first entry, the marriage. It had been made at Charleston in February 1714, in Christopher VI’s own hand, in the careful French he kept for the entries that mattered — and it lay now at the head of the page, eight inches by five on the Williamsburg desk, twenty-eight years after the keeper had made it. What the historian reads at the head of that fly-leaf is this:
> Christophe de Graffenried, fils du Baron Christophe V de Bernberg, époux. Barbara Tempest née Needham, de Wymondley en Hertfordshire, épouse. Mariés en l’église du commissaire à Charleston, en Caroline du Sud, le vingt-deuxième jour de février, 1714.
That is the entry the family’s record carries at the level a primary source carries it: the groom named to his father and his father’s title, the bride named to her parish and her county in Hertfordshire, the marriage placed at the commissary’s church at Charleston in South Carolina on the twenty-second of February 1714. It is the convention’s proof — the formal French, the keeper’s own hand, the reserved page, all of it on the one leaf. And beneath it, in a smaller hand, in English, were two words the formal entry above did not contain: She came. The heroine of the first volume of this history had written from England, in the autumn before the crossing, I am coming; and she had come; and the two words beneath the French are the family’s record of that, kept not in the formal language of the entry above but in the plain English of the thing itself. The historian sets the French down as the documented line and the words beneath it as the family’s coda, and keeps the difference straight without letting it cost the page its meaning.
The form had a source, and the source was another book. Before there was a Christopher VI Bible there was the Bernberg Bible, the Baron’s own, kept at Worb; and on its fly-leaf the Baron had written, in 1697, the death of his wife — Christopher VI’s mother — in the same formal French and the same reserved hand. That entry was where the convention came from. Christopher VI had been a child of seven when it was made, and had been taught the form young, pen-cutting and all, the way a keeper’s son learned it along with his letters. What he carried out of Worb in 1710 was two things that have to be kept apart: the form, which belonged to the Bernberg Bible, and the book, which was his own, given him clean for his own line. The convention crossed from the one book to the other. The object did not. The Bernberg Bible stayed at Worb with the Baron; the calf-bound book went into the sea-chest and across the Atlantic, and the form went with the son, in his hand and his memory, to be written first on his own fly-leaf in 1714.
In the summer of 1742 the keeper of both the book and the convention was alive, fifty-one years old, at Williamsburg, in the house he had bought in 1717. He had come out of Switzerland with the New Bern venture as a young man, had outlived the colony and the fever that killed its people around him, and had stayed in America when his father went home. He had become the thing the Baron had not lived to become — a man with a house and a lot and a son, and a line begun on the fly-leaf of his own Bible. He was the living keeper, and the keeping was an office he still held: the book was his, the fly-leaf was his to write on, and the next entry that turned the line, whenever it came, was his to make. He had, in that summer, a little more than three months left to live. He died at Williamsburg in October 1742, on a day the surviving record does not name. But that belongs to October, and the summer did not know it; through the summer the keeper kept, and the book was the keeper’s, and the page waited at the head of the fly-leaf with one entry on it and room beneath for the ones the line would still require.
The son had been taught the form. Christopher VI had taught Tscharner the convention the way the Baron had taught it to him — the formal French, the keeper’s hand, the reserved page, and the cutting of the pen that went with all of it. He had begun when the boy was old enough to hold a pen, so that the form would be in the son’s hand long before the son had any entry of his own to make in it. In the summer of 1742 that was where the teaching stood: the son was nineteen, taught and able and not yet the keeper, the form ready in his hand and no occasion yet come to use it. The Bible he had been taught to write in was not his. It was his father’s, on his father’s desk, with his father living and keeping it. What the son held was the form and the waiting; what the father held was the book and the office; and the distance between them — the taught hand on the one side, the kept book on the other — was the distance the autumn would close. The summer did not close it. The summer held the son taught and the father keeping and the Bible between them on the desk at Williamsburg, the form learned and the line not yet asking the son for an entry.
That was the meaning of the convention, seen at the desk’s scale and to the depth the page allows: the Bible was the thing the family came back to, the fly-leaf was where they came back to it, and the form was how the coming-back was done. It was the same formal French and the same keeper’s hand, written by each keeper in his turn on the one reserved page, so that the line had one place and one language and one weight of entry across the generations, wherever the seat happened to stand and whoever happened to be holding the book. It reached a long way, that page. It would reach down the line this history follows for the rest of the century. But in the summer of 1742 it reached exactly as far as one entry and the room beneath it, and the historian who keeps to what the summer held keeps it there. The Bible was at Williamsburg. The keeper was living. The son was taught and was not the keeper. The first entry stood at the head of the fly-leaf in the keeper’s own French, with the family’s two English words beneath it, and the page waited, on a living man’s desk, for the next thing the line would come back to put there.
The wedding at distance
The day the match became a marriage was the fifth of July 1742, and it was made in Chowan, in the bride’s country. That much the record gives, and gives far enough along to be sure of: the date fixed to the day, the country fixed to the ground the marriage was made on. Mary Baker was married out of her own country and not the groom’s — north of the line was where the new household would go, but the joining itself was made south of it, in the Albemarle, where her people were and her father’s name still stood. What the record does not give is the building. The civil-or-parish house the marriage was solemnized in, and the man who solemnized it, are not in the surviving sources this history has read — a house the record has not kept the name of, the way it did not keep the name of the rough first dwelling the marriage would put on the south-side ground. So the day comes to the historian with its two ends fixed and its middle open: the when of it and the country of it are sure, and the room it was made in and the man who made it are gone. The honest rendering names both the sureness and the gap and invents nothing to fill it — no church, no parlor, no parson set in to stand where the record is silent. The day is renderable to the country; it is not renderable to the room. The building stands where the record left it, unnamed.
What the day joined was the two families this chapter has already set on either side of one line. The geometry was laid in the match — a continental name two generations into Virginia and one onto the land, and an Albemarle planter family a generation into Carolina, the one motion continental-into-Virginia and the other Virginia-into-Carolina, both of them crossings of the same long survey-and-patent line between the James drainage and the Albemarle. The marriage was that geometry made a fact. The line both families had spent two generations learning to cross was crossed once more on the fifth of July, and crossed for good this time, in the one way a line between two families is ever finally crossed — by a marriage that put the one name and the other into the same household and the same children. The seam had been a thing the families kept crossing in opposite directions. The marriage made it a thing they had crossed together.
The colonel whose daughter she was did not stand at the wedding, because the colonel was three years dead. Henry Baker’s will had been proved in 1739, and Bucklands — the plantation, the ferry, the weight of the offices — had passed to his eldest son, the third Henry Baker, so that the seat Mary went from in July 1742 was a brother’s house and not her father’s. She married out of the colonel’s country and under the colonel’s name and with the standing the colonel had made, and she married with the colonel himself three years in the ground. The historian does not stage him at the joining, because there is no man to stage. What the colonel gives the day he gives, as he gave the match, from the record and from the grave — a country to be married out of, a name to carry north, a seat that was a brother’s now, and a daughter who went from it fatherless.
It is worth holding the woman in view on the day itself, because the historian’s distance is exactly the distance at which a bride can go missing from her own wedding. Mary Baker was about nineteen. She was marrying north across the line, out of a brother’s house in an older country than the one she was going to, into a continental-origin family one generation onto the land, to a man of nineteen, her own age, whose father was living a hundred miles east and whose seat was a decade from being built. That is the shape of the day as the record holds it, and the record holds it as shape and not as wanting. And the shape had a direction the geometry of the match does not by itself make plain: of the two who crossed the line that day, she was the one who left it behind. The groom married toward his own country, the south-side ground he had patented and turned to; the bride married away from hers, carried north across the line into newer and rougher ground, to keep a household a country away from the people she had been raised among. The crossing the chapter has drawn as a thing two families did to a line was, for her, a leaving of the country she had known. Whether the choosing was hers, whether the going was glad or borne, the surviving sources do not say; where a no would have been hers to make, they do not record that she made it; and where the conditions of a fatherless Albemarle daughter’s marriage narrowed what a no could have carried, the conditions are nameable and the feeling is not. The historian names the shape and the conditions and goes no nearer. The day was a marriage made. What it was to her inside it is the one thing the day does not surrender to the record, and the distance keeps faith with her best by saying so.
What the marriage founded began where the marriage put it. Not at Bucklands, which the bride was leaving; not at Williamsburg, which was the father’s; but on the south-side ground the groom had patented and turned toward, his own land between the rivers, where a rough first dwelling would do until the country had been worked into something to hold a seat. The household was founded in principle on the fifth of July and built on the ground a decade on. And the day’s first forward fact, the one the record carries clean, was a son — Baker DeGraffenreid, born on the sixth of August 1744, the mother’s father’s name set in front of the father’s and carried forward as a child’s own. The record lets the day reach exactly that far: a household in principle, a seat a decade off, a son in two years’ time. The historian who renders the day reaches with it and no farther.
And through all of it the Bible was a hundred miles east. The book the family came back to lay on the writing-desk at Williamsburg, in the keeping of the living man whose book it still was, and it took no notice of the fifth of July, because nothing was written on it that day. This is the day’s quietest fact and, for the line this history follows, very nearly its largest: the marriage that turned the line toward the name the book would come to carry made no entry on the book. The keeper was alive and a hundred miles from the wedding; the form was in the son’s hand and the office was not; and an entry went onto the fly-leaf only in the keeper’s own French and the keeper’s own hand, which on the fifth of July 1742 meant it did not go on at all. The day made the marriage. It did not make the entry.
There is a rhyme in it the day half-makes, and the historian notices it without pressing it into a meaning. The keeper’s own marriage, twenty-eight years before, had been made in the commissary’s church at Charleston and entered onto the clean fly-leaf in the formal French — the first thing the book ever carried. The son’s was made in a house the record has not kept, under a man it has not named, and went onto no leaf at all that July. The reason it waited is the reason the chapter has been keeping all along: the book was the father’s and the office was the father’s, and the son was taught and was not the keeper. When the marriage came onto the fly-leaf at last, it came there afterward — but that belongs to the autumn, and the fifth of July did not know it.
So the day did the thing it had been coming to do since the chapter opened on the country, and it did it at the distance the record allows and no nearer. The fifth of July 1742 made a marriage in Chowan, in the bride’s country, in a house the record has not kept the name of. It joined the two families across the line both had crossed for two generations. It married a colonel’s daughter out of a brother’s house, the colonel three years in the ground. It founded a household in principle on the south-side ground, the seat a decade off and a son two years on. And it left the book where the book had been all along — a hundred miles east at Williamsburg, on a living man’s desk, the form in the son’s hand and the keeping not yet his, the fly-leaf with the one entry on it and the marriage of the fifth of July not yet added to it. The marriage was made. The entry waited. The summer held the one and not the other, and the historian who keeps to the summer keeps them that way.
The October accession
The summer ended, and the thing the summer had not known came in October.
Christopher VI DeGraffenreid died at Williamsburg in October 1742, on a day the surviving record does not name. He was fifty-one; the December birthday that would have carried him to fifty-two was still ahead of him in the autumn, and now would not come. He died in the house he had bought in 1717, on the south side of Duke of Gloucester Street, where the Bible had lain on the writing-desk through the summer in his keeping. The keeping had been a long one. He had carried the book out of Switzerland with the New Bern venture in 1710, outlived the colony and the fever that took its people around him, stayed in America when his father went home, and held the book and the office for more than thirty years; and it ended on a day the record will not give back. The historian renders the death to the month and the place and no nearer. There is no deathbed in the sources, and he builds none — the day is gone the way the wedding’s room was gone, and the honest course is to name the gone day as a gap and keep the distance from it. What the record gives is the fact and the hinge. The keeper died, and the keeping had to pass.
Two things passed, and the chapter has kept them apart through its whole length: the book passed, and the office passed. The book was the calf-bound octavo Christopher VI had carried out of Worb in 1710 and made the first mark on at Charleston in 1714 — not the Bernberg Bible, which had stayed at Worb with the Baron and was, by the autumn of 1742, a world and a generation away and another keeping’s concern. The book that passed was the one the chapter has watched on the Williamsburg desk all summer, and it passed to the son. The office passed with it: the fly-leaf his to write on now, the next entry that turned the line his to make. Tscharner DeGraffenreid was nineteen. The distance the chapter had drawn at the desk’s scale — the taught hand on the one side and the kept book on the other, the form ready in the son’s hand and the book not his — was the distance the autumn would close, and the autumn closed it. How the book came from the father’s desk to the son’s keeping the record does not say. Whether the son was at Williamsburg when the keeper died or the book was carried to him after, the surviving sources do not give, and the historian does not invent the journey to fill the silence. What the record gives is the end of it: the book that had been the father’s was the son’s, and the keeping with it.
And here the distance the chapter has kept since it opened on the country gives way, because the keeping that passed to the son was not a thing that could be kept at a distance. It had to be done. An office whose substance is the writing of entries is an office held in the hand, and the hand the father had taught took up the book it had been taught for. The pen-cutting came back to the fingers before the mind had finished telling him the book was his to write in now — the cutting the father had drilled into a boy old enough to hold a pen, so that the form would be in the hand long before the line asked the hand for anything. He had been taught the form for years against an occasion that had not come. The occasion had come. What he understood, taking up the book his father had kept since before he was born, was that the waiting the chapter has named — taught and able and not yet the keeper — was over. What lay past it was not the keeping a boy imagines while he learns to cut a pen. It was two entries the same autumn owed the leaf, the gladdest and the heaviest the form was for, his own marriage and his father’s death, come to the page in the same season and the same hand.
So the first thing the new keeper wrote on the fly-leaf was the marriage the summer had left unwritten. He set it beneath the entry his father had made at Charleston twenty-eight years before, in the room the head of the leaf had kept open for the entries the line would still require. He made it the way he had been taught to make it: in the formal French, in his own hand, on the one page the family kept for the things that turned the line. The form was the form he had been taught; what had changed was that the book was his to write it in. What he set down is what the family’s record carries beneath the first entry:
> Tscharner de Graffenried, fils de Christophe de Graffenried, époux. Marie Baker, fille de feu le colonel Henry Baker, du pays d’Albemarle, épouse. Mariés en Chowan, en Caroline du Nord, le cinquième jour de juillet, 1742.
The groom is named to his father, as his father had been named to the Baron; the bride is named to her father, set down as the late colonel’s daughter, three years in the ground when the marriage was made; the marriage is placed to the country and the day. There is no church in it, because there had been none — the marriage was made in a house the record has not kept, and a house has no name to enter where the father’s entry had a commissary’s church to name. The form names the country when it cannot name the room. And there are no words beneath it: the two English words under the first entry were the first volume’s and stayed the only ones; the son added the form and nothing under it. The marriage that made no entry on the fifth of July made its entry now, in the autumn, in the hand of the son who had become the keeper between the wedding and the writing.
The other entry the autumn owed was the one the son would have given much not to make. The same hand, the same French, the same reserved page took the death of Christopher VI — the keeper who had carried the book out of Switzerland and made the first mark on its clean leaf, set down on that leaf at last by the son he had taught to set it down. The historian does not give the words of it. The record gives the fact and the office and not the line, and the weight of the thing is in the office and not the wording: that the first death the new keeper entered was his father’s, and that the form the father had drilled into him served, the first sorrowful time it served, to enter the father. The keeping had passed in the doing of it — not on the day the office came to him, but on the day his hand set his father’s death where his father had set the family’s marriages and dead.
That was the accession: not a ceremony, and not chiefly the settling of a property, though it was partly that, but the passage of the book and the office from the keeper who had held them to the keeper who would hold them next, marked on the one page the family kept its passages on. The summer had held the keeper living, the son taught, and the Bible between them on the desk. The autumn took the keeper, gave the book to the son, and set on the fly-leaf the two entries the line had come back to require — the marriage of the fifth of July the summer had not written, and the death in October the record will not date. The page that had carried one entry through the summer carried three by the end of the year, in the same French as the first, in two hands now, the father’s at the head and the son’s beneath. There was room beneath them still. A son was two years off — Baker DeGraffenreid, born in the August of 1744, the colonel’s name carried in front of the father’s into a third generation — and the page would have him when the line came back. But that belongs to the years after, and the autumn of 1742 reached exactly as far as a marriage entered late, a father entered last, and a book that had become the son’s to keep. The book had been the father’s. It was the son’s now. The line had turned, and the turn was on the page at last, close enough to read, in the hand of the man the line had turned to.