Lois in Williamsburg

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Lois in Williamsburg -- Day 2

September 22. Rain began in the night and is still with us in the morning. We force ourselves out into it and go over to a nearby plantation called Carter's Grove, where we walk around under my umbrella, our arms around each other. A friendly african-american woman who yesterday played the role of a household servant at the Wythe house today is showing the slave quarters. The main house, which we also visit, is of interest not as a colonial relic but as a rich person's house of fifty years ago.

Our motel in Williamsburg. No, haha, just kidding. This is the slave quarters at Carter's Grove.

Lois entering slave quarters.

We get to the courthouse in Williamsburg just in time for a reenactment. The chief magistrate chooses his jury from those members of the audience who are males, property owners, and neither jewish nor roman catholic, and so I find myself in the jury box. In one of the three skits the court's bailiff is accused of having gotten a tavern-owner's maid pregnant. Shame on him!

Tom in the jury box with other male property owners.

When we go out into the rainy weather again Lois says she is going to treat me to lunch at Josiah Chowning's tavern, which is right on the corner.

Lois in Chowning's Tavern. What a blissful smile she has. Don't you envy me for being able to look up and see a face like that across from me?
The tavern has a wonderful atmosphere. There are electric lights, but tiny ones shaped like candle flames and giving about as much light.
The items on the menu sounded delicious. Lois ordered welsh rabbit and I ordered the stew. Neither of the dishes (served on pewter plates) was filling or particularly good (the stew was thin and salty), but I was able to fill up on rolls and tea, and the atmosphere was so nice that we still remember it as a particularly wonderful lunch.

From Chowning's Tavern we go to the Randolph house to hear a Learned Disputation between a Woman of Character and an Itinerant Preacher. We visit the cooper's shop and then the carpenter's.

Lois going down a side street towards the carpenter's shop.

Lois outside the carpenter's shop.

It is still raining out, and we are feeling very tired when we leave in the evening. We get on the road at seven-thirty and all I want to do is sleep But Lois turns the radio on and I begin to perk up. She tunes it to a wonderful oldies station from Richmond, one that belts out mostly fifties songs, so that I have a very real feeling that that is where we are, back in the fifties, and that she is my teenage girlfriend, and that we are driving back home to Washington together. A memory of something that never was.

The rain ceases temporarily and the sky is pink with lights of Richmond, but beyond Richmond the warm rain starts up again and keeps up most of the way to Kensington. Lois feeds me grapes one at a time -- the green grapes we bought a couple of days ago in Newport News on our way down to Elizabeth City -- and we get back to Jackie's around ten-thirty. Tomorrow we'll see Mount Vernon, and the day after she flies back to Santa Cruz.

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