Sarah

I married my childhood sweetheart. Most of my friends were doing that. I was 15 when we became betrothed and I married Lewis by sixteen. There were stars in my eyes. He was a good looking young man with an arrogant commanding way about him. His family had traveled from Fredricksberg Virginia same time everybody in our town did - as soon as the Revolution opened up West of the Applacians. Lewis' arrogance  was not his most endearing feature. I should have been paying more attention.

My daddy, Jacob LaRue,  was an old man when I was born, but I was still the apple of his eye. He had grand children my age. His children’s children were already having children by the time he married my mama.  

Truth is, I probably saw more of him than all my many older brothers and sisters He was away fighting wars all their lives. He fought in the French and Indian wars and the American Revolution with George Washington all the other men coming out of Fredricksberg Virginia. If there was fighting to be done, my daddy was off in his younger years, doing it. There was always fighting. Between the Indians, French, English folks - we always were settling hostile territories.

Like most of the other young men in Fredricksberg - as soon as the revolution was over - as soon as we had rights to the lands west of those mountains - my daddy came right over that Cumberland Gap and began settling the new frontier. 

My mama’s daddy went over there too, right after the Revolution, but he was killed right off by Indians. My mama’s name was Jane and her mama’s name was Nancy. Nancy didn’t go with her husband, John,  when he first went to Kentucky,  and since he got killed right after he got there, she never did move to Kentucky. Nancy stayed with her husband’s Morgan relatives in Virginia. She died soon after Mama was born and Mama was raised over with her Boone cousins. She ended up staying in Virginia while all the other young folks moved to Bear Creek area in Kentucky. It was her job to watch after all her old family members who never crossed the mountains and retired to their plantations on the Rappahannoch river. 

Anyway, after my daddy’s first wife died, he came back to Virginia to find him another wife that could take care of him in his old age. There he found my mama, a fading bloom of a woman almost thirty - the same age as his oldest children. He married her and brought her to Kentucky, a frontier he’d been settling for the last twenty years with his first wife.

Mama didn’t have any property to speak of, being an orphan and all, but nonetheless, it was a very advantageous marriage for my father. She knew exactly how to run a plantation and how to take care of old folks, but even so, she came with an even bigger advantage - she was in real good standing with Squire and Danny Boone. They were her cousins, their mama had been a Morgan and married a Boone. So even though Mama didn’t come with any property she still brought tens of thousands of acres to the LaRue name. Ole Strange Danny, as my mama used to call him, turned out to be one of America’s most iconic explorers. He loved exploring and claiming land - he’d claim it, and his more literate younger brother Squire would deed it all out to their Fredrickson buddies. Daddy was especially favored for this land acquisition with his new wife, the Miss Jane Morgan, Squire’s favorite cousin and my future mama.

Eventually we owned so much land, they named a county after us, LaRue County.

My older brother was born, then me, then my younger brother, Jesse. My daddy loved me so much. It is a beautiful thing to know you are beloved and this helped me through some really hard times in my life. After growing up in love, I knew within weeks of marrying Lewis that he had no concept of love. The only thing that man loved was satisfying his craven and cruel desires.

I knew love. I loved my children beyond the trauma of their father. They knew love too. Some of their lives reflected that and some didn’t.

I have lived long enough to see most of my children die. I have outlived most of them. It is a curse to grow this old.

I saw the nation my father fought to create, nearly split asunder to justify the cruelty of slavery.

I owned slaves. I lived far beyond the war and I lived a life without slaves too - though never without servants.