Historical Afterword

Nancy Randolph was born in 1774 and grew up on the Tuckahoe Plantation, not far from Richmond. After her mother's death and her father's remarriage to Gabriella Harvie, Nancy went to live on the Bizarre Plantation with her older sister, Judy, and Judy's husband, Dick Randolph. In October 1792, there was a disturbance overnight when the family was visiting friends at Glentivar. Enslaved workers reported finding the body of a White infant — or at the very least, signs of a birth and blood — on a pile of shingles near the house. Gossip quickly spread across Virginian society. The Tuckahoe family turned their backs on Dick Randolph, and he and his stepfather, St George Tucker, decided to force a hearing at the Cumberland County courthouse to clear his name. He was represented by two luminaries — John Marshall and Patrick Henry — and acquitted. I have kept as close to the remaining records of this event as possible, including the evidence given by Patsy Jefferson, Nancy's Aunt Page and the Harrisons.

The family returned to Bizarre. Dick died only a few years later, and Nancy remained on the plantation with her sister until 1806. From then until her marriage to Gouverneur Morris in 1809, Nancy's life was full of hardship. In 1815, the illness of her nephew, Tudor, allowed for some thawing of the often very difficult relationship between the sisters, but Jack (better known in American history as John Randolph of Roanoke), Dick's younger brother, bore a strong grudge against Nancy. His wild accusations and her rebuttal really happened, although they took place over an exchange of lengthy letters, rather than the in-person confrontation I've presented here. All the evidence suggests Nancy and Gouverneur Morris had a happy marriage, and his connection to Sarah Morton, whose sister's relationship and suicide was recounted in William Hill Brown's 1789 novel, The Power of Sympathy, encouraged me to believe he would be sympathetic to Nancy about the scandalous rumors in her past.

What really happened at Glentivar remains a mystery. In an oblique letter written in 1815, Nancy admitted to having had a child in 1791. And while she claimed the child was Theo's, his illness and death in February 1791, coupled with her steadfast insistence on Dick's perfections and her care for his reputation, suggest otherwise. In other letters, she describes Dick's visit to her room and his disappointment in his marriage to her sister. The more I considered Nancy's pregnancy, the more I imagined the pressure building over what would happen when the child was born.

John Marshall's notes on Richard Randolph's court appearance include two references to Nancy having a maid with her, both at Bizarre and Glentivar. In Cynthia Kleiner's excellent book, Scandal at Bizarre, she makes three mentions of Nancy having a maid named Phebe who was with her during her difficult days in Richmond and Newport, Rhode Island. In a letter to St George Tucker, one of many held in a collection at the College of William and Mary, Nancy talks of a cold she and "old Phebe's granddaughter" are suffering. In another, she talks about a maid called Polly who was with her at Tuckahoe and then Bizarre. It's my invention that Phebe is the granddaughter of Old Cilla at Tuckahoe and that Thomas Mann Randolph gave Nancy ownership of the young girl when she left the family home. While Phebe's part in the story is fictional, I hope her struggles are representative of the challenges faced by enslaved people during this time in history. Being able to fill in the gaps and give voice to those whose stories were not heard or recorded is one of the great pleasures of writing a novel, rather than a history book.

Judy Randolph did free many of the enslaved people at Bizarre, as directed in Dick's will, although it took some years for her to do so. The settlement where Phebe visits Syphax is talked about in detail in Melvin Patrick Bly's book Israel on the Appomattox. There's no doubt Judy's life was difficult. I picked up on hints that she may have been pregnant when she and Dick were married and found it easy to imagine that the loss of a child and her isolation at Bizarre might cause her to struggle with depression. Her son, Saint, was profoundly deaf. Nancy's work with him is based on the historical treatment of hearing-impaired people at that time, and Saint did attend a specialist school in England. There's no evidence he was responsible for the fire that destroyed Bizarre in 1813, but he spent some time after that in an asylum in Philadelphia. Tudor was as feckless as his uncle Theo had been. During his illness at Morrisania, he borrowed money that was never repaid and he died in England not long afterward. Judy died in 1816 and was buried at Tuckahoe, although the manner of her death, the funeral and the resolution of the mystery about Nancy's child are all fictional.

There are many famous men in this story, and the historical marker in Farmville, where Bizarre once stood, only mentions the Randolph men and none of the women who lived there. In writing this novel, I have endeavored to keep to the known facts as far as possible, while hoping to do justice to three resilient women and how they might have lived.