The second volume ends on a fifteen-year-old at a writing-desk in Lunenburg County, Virginia, on a November night in 1779, coming to the foot of a letter and setting down two words she then wrote a second time in the book that stayed in the house. Her name was Mary Baker DeGraffenreid, and the two words were we continue, and the month she wrote them was the month she married a man named Gideon Johnson — the eighteenth of November 1779, by the entry a collateral family kept in their own Bible and by which we can still, two hundred and forty-seven years later, put a date to the wedding. She was the great-granddaughter of the woman who had come down a gangway at Charleston in 1714. She was the first woman in the line to hold the family's Bible in her own two hands, which came to her at her grandfather's death in 1794, and she held it for the rest of her life, and she died on the first of January 1823.
This volume opens fifty years and eight hundred miles from that desk, in a front room on a cleared ridge in north Mississippi, on the last morning of October in 1850, with three women in it. The road between the two rooms is the road this bridge walks, and it is walked, the whole way, by daughters — each one a daughter of the last, each one carrying the keeping into a new name and, twice, into a new country, so that the thing handed down the road was never quite the same book but was always the same act.
Mary Baker DeGraffenreid Johnson had a daughter named Sarah, born on the ninth of October 1780, the first of Gideon Johnson's children by the record the Chadwells kept. Sarah grew up in the Virginia-and-Carolina country the second volume lived in, and in the winter of 1798 — the third of February, by the marriage bond, which survives — she married a man named William Hubbard, and with that marriage the keeping crossed into a second book. The Hubbards started their own family Bible, William and Sarah, and wrote their own names on its fly-leaf in a plain English hand that no one needed a translator for, and the deGraffenreid book with its formal French stayed behind with the elder generation while the young couple carried the newer one west. For the Hubbards were moving. By the first years of the new century the household had come down out of the old seaboard country and onto the Tennessee ground, into Stewart County on the Cumberland, where William Hubbard turns up in the records a working man of the new country — on a jury in 1804, on the tax books in 1806 and 1807, holding land by 1808 and again in 1813.
He died that year, in August of 1813, and he left a will, and the will is the hinge on which a good deal of this family's provenance turns, because it names his daughter Polly. It named her a legacy, too, and the legacy is a thing this book will not walk past. Among the property William Hubbard disposed of to his children was a one-fifth share of an enslaved girl named Anseline, and the fifth that went to Polly is recorded not by guess but by a legal instrument — a power of attorney, dated the twelfth of March 1828, signed by Polly's husband, in which he appoints an agent to go and receive on his wife's behalf the share of the girl Anseline that Polly's father had left her. So the keeping the daughters carried down this road was not an innocent keeping. Before ever the family stood on the Mississippi dirt this volume is about, a father in Tennessee had willed a daughter a piece of a girl, and the daughter's husband had gone to law to collect it. Anseline was a person. She is named here because she was named there, in the will and in the deed, and because a family history that means to be honest about what the daughters carried has to carry that too, and not fold it into the scenery of a migration. What became of her the record does not yet say. The book holds the question open.
The husband who signed that 1828 paper was Reuben Rorie. He had been born on the thirtieth of August 1799, and he had married Polly Hubbard on the twenty-sixth of March 1820, in Stewart County, Tennessee, and with that marriage the keeping crossed into a third book. The Rories started their own family Bible, Reuben and Polly, the way Polly's own parents had started theirs, and on its births leaf, in among the children, is the entry this whole volume rests on: a daughter born to Reuben and Polly Rorie on the twenty-first of November 1832 — set down by a later copyist's uncertain hand as Milbry or Mity Jane, but Mary Jane, the girl who would marry Freeman Searcy and give the line the name on the cover of this book. She was born on the Tennessee ground her grandparents had come to. She would not grow up on it.
Because the Rories moved too, the way the Hubbards had moved before them, the way the whole American century moved the ordinary families of it — west and a little south, off the worked-out older ground and onto the newer, cheaper, harder dirt that was opening beyond the next river. Sometime around 1846 the Rorie household came down off the Cumberland country and into the northeast corner of Mississippi, into Tishomingo County, onto a ridge three miles north of the post road, and Mary Jane came with them a girl of fourteen, so that the Tennessee she had been born in became a thing she remembered the way you remember a house you left as a child. Her grandmother came down after them, the next year, in 1847 — Sarah, who had married William Hubbard and buried him young and married twice more and outlived all of it, a woman near seventy now with the whole traveled length of the line behind her, come to live out the end of it in a daughter's house because there was nowhere else left to go.
And that is the front room this volume opens in. The old woman in the corner bed, propped on the bolster with her white hair in its loose plait, watching her granddaughter throw the shuttle across the loom — that is Sarah Johnson Hubbard, the daughter of the fifteen-year-old who wrote we continue, the granddaughter of the granddaughter of the woman who came down the gangway at Charleston. She had carried the keeping down out of Virginia and across Tennessee and onto this ridge, and she was the far living end of it, and she said, most days, very little. The woman at the churn is her daughter, Mary Polly Hubbard Rorie, who would carry both the Hubbard Bible and the Rorie Bible into her own son's house forty years on, a widow, in her own lap. And the girl at the loom, keeping the count, is Mary Jane — the fourth daughter down the road from Lunenburg, and the one this book stays with, from the last morning she would ever be written down right to the last morning of all.
The record is coming up the road toward that house. It is 1850, and the marshal will be there within the hour. Here is the girl he is coming to count.