Excerpt from Introduction

In the South, stories are the effervescence of conversation, and no stories are more gripping to an audience—relatives and strangers alike—than those about family.

Unlike in the North, where “family” means the existing family—the living, breathing family of siblings, parents, aunts, and uncles—in southern states “family” signifies something quite different. There, in those once defeated yet still proud states of the early colonizers, “family” means “the family,” and “the family” means “the bloodline,” and, for better or for worse, “the bloodline” charts a baby’s fate from the moments of birth and baptism. In the North, it is “old money” that claims the mantle of aristocracy and breeding; in the South, it is “old name.” Bloodlines determine playmates, eligible partners for marriage, children’s names, family dog breeds, and china patterns. Bloodlines are a southern child’s most significant birthright.

As a child I listened to these proud tales of colonization in a state of confusion. I was puzzled and, later, embarrassed by the superior tone of the storytellers. I chafed under the responsibility that came with the stories—the stated charge to remember these stories, to pass them on. I was told that the Clay and Cecil family bloodlines and the accompanying stories were as much a part of my heritage as the sterling silver tea service with each owner’s initials engraved one under the other.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: The Ancient Planter

Although I cannot prove it, I am convinced that John Thomas Claye—the first of my ancestors to come over from England—had brown eyes. This may sound odd, even inconsequential to families who over time have looked into the eyes of relatives that reflect rainbow hues: blue, green, violet, or that luscious yellow that turns to key lime in certain lights. It is not odd, however, to me. My conviction that John Thomas Claye had brown eyes has substance behind it.

All of us, all of the Clays and Cecils—the mothers, the fathers, the sisters, the brothers, the grandparents, the babies—are brown-eyed. Photographs show our dark chocolate eyes for the seven generations that cameras have existed to capture them. Histories of the early settlers of Virginia and Kentucky go even further back. One author speaks of my eighteenth-century relatives not just in terms of their Revolutionary War service or their careers in law and politics but also discusses in surprisingly lush language the family’s dark brunette looks. A husband writes love letters to “my black-eyed baby.” Oral tradition describes “black eyes flashing.”

Consequently, I think that when John Thomas Claye sailed into the Chesapeake Bay in February 1613 he gazed at his new Virginia homeland through irises of brown. I think his dark eyes darkened further when he stepped off the ship Treasurer onto the wharf built just months before on the James River side of the fledgling Jamestown colony. They darkened in stunned disbelief as he walked through the palisade and took in the handful of crude shelters, the deep mud, and the lethargic shamble of the Jamestown colonists who, like him, had invested as land speculators in “The Tresorer and Companie of Adventurers and Planters of the Citty of London for the Firste Colonie in Virginia.”

It is late August 1783, and there is just the beginning of a rustle to the leaves in the first-growth forest that reaches down in chubby fingers behind the house. The large log house sits on a high spot in the rolling landscape of the wide Bluestone River valley. It is a big house, big enough for Phoebe and Mitchell Clay’s fourteen children. The farmland that Mitchell and Phoebe and their children have so painstakingly nurtured tilts gently down to the riverbed. There are a thousand acres—all Mitchell and Phoebe’s land with its rich bottomland fields of wheat and corn, its tobacco patches, the kitchen garden, Phoebe’s orchard.

Phoebe stands by a small window watching Bartley and Ezekiel—her strapping teenage sons—build a fence to keep the cattle out of the grain they harvested with their father the day before. Mitchell got them started on the fence early, then set out hunting. In my mind I can see Phoebe gaze proudly at her boys there on the edge of the pasture. When the wind shifts our way we—Phoebe and I—can hear Bartley and Ezekiel’s teasing banter over the steady rap-tap-tap of their hammers. Now we turn to look at Tabitha. Phoebe’s teenage daughter is down by the river helping the younger girls wash. They are giggling and making rainbows with their soapy splashes.

Then, over the rustles, the laughter, the giggles and splashes, rings the sharp snap of a rifle shot. Phoebe moves quickly to the door. The younger girls are running toward the house crying, “Indians, Momma, Indians! They shot Bartley!” She looks toward the pasture. Bartley lies on the ground. Ezekiel struggles with several Indians who are holding him away from his brother. Tabitha is running toward Bartley. She grabs for the Indian’s knife intended for her brother’s scalp. Startled, he struggles with her, slashing her each time the knife changes hands.

Just then Liggon Blankenship, who has been hunting in the woods behind the house, comes to the back door. He hasn’t seen the Indians. Phoebe pulls him to the front and begs him to shoot the Indian who is wrestling with Tabitha. “Save Tabitha! Save Tabitha!”

Keziah Byce “Kizzie” Clay Burns, my great-great-grandmother, must have made her mother proud. Not only did Kizzie Clay wear her Cecil-ness with head held arrogantly high, she passed on Rebecca Cecil’s dictums regarding Cecil womanhood to the family daughters with such certainty and precision that Rebecca’s words were etched in the psyches of the next four generations. Throughout her life Kizzie Clay wore her famous birthright like a cloak of courtly damask. She, like her mother, never forgot that she was a direct descendent of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. She knew she was a lady of good breeding and she expected—no, demanded—to be treated as such.

For much of her life Kizzie’s expectations were met, including a fairytale courtship with a handsome young prince. This story about Kizzie’s courtship and marriage—a period that may have been one of the happiest in Kizzie’s life—was never told, however, from the young bride’s blissful point of view. Rather, the story—like all of our courtship stories that followed—was told from the viewpoint of a family that prized its bloodlines.

Kizzie’s whirlwind romance began when strikingly handsome John Mavity Burns came to call. It was early 1843 in Louisa, Kentucky, where William and Rebecca Cecil Clay now lived. John was nineteen. Kizzie was fifteen. The courtship was brief. Kizzie alleged to her daughter and granddaughters that it was love at first sight, and the two were married on April 24, 1843. The family saw the betrothal through a darker lens. The problem: John Burns was too handsome.

One evening when I was eleven Mother turned to me while she, my grandmother Wynemah, and I were doing the dinner dishes and said, “You are from a long line of strong women and you will be strong like all the rest. You know your Aunt Lena once had a syphilitic sore on her upper lip. She got syphilis from the man she had an affair with when she lived in New York with her sister Lee. When she had the sore removed, Lee walked straight into the operating room to make sure Lena’s beauty would not be destroyed. Lena was more beautiful after the surgery than she was before.”

It was late summer the first time the Strong Women story was told to me. Lena had recently died, and my grandmother and my mother were still grieving. We were in Wynemah’s kitchen. She was at the sink washing the supper dishes. Mother was drying and handing plates and glasses to me to put away. The last of the day’s sunlight raced across the deep ravine outside the window, streaked across the kitchen, and landed in the tall pedestal bowl of red glass fairy balls on the banquet table in the dining room. As the story unfolded, the glass balls captured the golden evening light and threw it back toward me in waves of hot ember red, a pulsing scarlet fire that in my adolescent mind’s eye inflamed the sore on Aunt Lena’s soft, delicate lips. At age eleven I did not know what a syphilitic sore was, but I did know that beauty was prized in the family.