American Follies

by Norman Lock

  “Women willing,” remarked Susan. “For men will never allow it.”

  “Why not ‘God willing’?” I asked, hoping to annoy her. I would grow tired of her misandry.

  “He is also a man, and one who sent His ghost to impregnate Mary without so much as a by-your-leave. In this, he was no better than Zeus when he ravished poor Leda.”

  The heat of indignation rose in me like mercury in a glass column. I’m not particularly religious, but the lessons of the Sunday school do stay with one. “Neither God nor His ghost ravished Mary!”

  “I beg your pardon. I get carried away by my own rhetoric. Let us say, then, that God does not think as much of women as He does of men. To be fair, His ministers don’t, since—lacking the omniscience of Madame Singleton—I don’t presume to read God’s mind. But the minds of His spokesmen—Do you hear how men have impregnated our language with their sex? Is this not a kind of ravishment?”

  “Speak plainly, Susan.”

  “Is it not a rape? Men cannot help seeing women as a territory to conquer and occupy.”

  “You’re forgetting good men like Cousin Gerrit, Garrison, Lyman, Wendell, James Mott, Frederick Douglass, Henry Blackwell, and my own misguided Henry, who was once a steadfast ally of women and their cause.”

  “How many of them deserted you when you had the gall to demand a woman’s right to divorce the husband who beats her or squanders her housekeeping money on whores and gin?”

  “Susan, this is not a lecture platform.”

  “Forgive me. I become overheated when I think of how I’m no better than a thing in the eyes of most men!”

  “A battleax!” said Elizabeth merrily.

  “Ellen, you may visit whomever you like,” said Susan in a voice that called to mind a starched handkerchief.

  “You are a free woman, though the world may say otherwise,” agreed Elizabeth with a sniff.

  I sensed their disapproval and was curious to know its cause. “Why did you both frown at the mention of Madame Singleton?”

  “We have nothing against her,” replied Susan. “An unmarried woman must do what she can.”

  Elizabeth picked up the thread, although by the strength of her conviction, it seemed like the steel cable Roebling used to knit the Brooklyn Bridge. “Our argument is with spiritualism. Men see it as frivolous a pastime as tatting doilies. A séance, in their eyes, is nothing but a hen party or a sewing bee. The Fox sisters would have done better by our sex had they joined us at the convention in Seneca Falls and declared themselves men’s equals.”

  “Votes for women!” yelled Susan.

  “Beware, you rapscallions in your boots and whiskers! We will have our day!” cried Elizabeth as she gaveled the table top with a beefy hand.

  “Down with tyrants in pants!” shouted Susan, who then giggled like a parson’s wife who naughtily shows her ankles. Susan bellowed a verse from a suffragists’ anthem:

  Is it because that you can drink

  More whiskey, beer, and wine,

  And not get drunk, and seem to think

  Your majesty divine?

  Elizabeth joined her in the chorus:

  Talk not of freedom, equal rights,

  Cold hearted, selfish knaves,

  While in our land, around our hearths,

  Dwell twenty million slaves.

  “How is Margaret?” asked Susan, prompted, I supposed, by the song’s last line, for she could not view “Barnum’s creature” in any light other than enslavement to the great humbug.

  “She is as you saw her last.”

  “Do you mean ‘abridged’?” asked Elizabeth, still caught up in the madcap current.

  “I mean ‘offended.’”

  “Does she bear us a grudge?” Both women appeared to have been taken by surprise.

  “She did not bother to speak of you,” I replied airily.

  “Ah!” said Susan.

  “Oh?” asked Elizabeth.

  The exclamation of the former and the question of the latter amounted to the same thing—chagrin, a response that would have made me smile had I not taken care to put on a severe face.

  “We are embarrassed for having insulted her,” said Susan regretfully.

  “We hope to make it up to her,” said Elizabeth contritely.

  Unwilling to exhaust the subject, which clearly pained them, I changed it. I wanted to leave something in reserve for their future humbling. As I unfolded the Tribune, a complicated mixture of repugnance and morbid excitement stole over me. “Alferd Packer killed and ate his companions.” Before the ladies could object, I read the account of the cannibal’s testimony:

  Old Man Swan died first and was eaten by the other five persons about ten days out of camp. Four or five days afterwards Humphreys died and was also eaten; he had about one hundred and thirty three dollars. I found the pocket book and took the money. Some time afterwards, while I was carrying wood, the butcher was killed—as the other two told me accidentally—and he was also eaten. Bell shot ‘California’ with Swan’s gun and I killed Bell. Shot him. I covered up the remains and took a large piece along. Then traveled fourteen days into the agency. Bell wanted to kill me with his rifle—struck a tree and broke his gun.

  I was glad not to have been the court stenographer in the case of Alferd Packer v. the People of the State of Colorado!

  “Packer ate five people. James Gould gobbled up ten thousand miles of railroad track and right of way! The plutocrats have made America their dining table, and each day they sit down and devour us!” cried an impassioned Susan.

  “The only difference between Packer and the profiteers is the cleanliness of their linen and the correctness of their grammar!” exclaimed Elizabeth, no less heatedly than her friend.

  “Men are cannibals!” snarled Susan, showing her teeth, which appeared at that moment to have been filed. I marveled at the transforming effect of rage on the human countenance.

  I chose not to mention Elizabeth Donner, who had cooked Samuel Shoemaker’s arm. I was afraid I had lit a fuse that might hoist me with my own petard. The atmosphere in the room was combustible enough to blow Miss Redpath and us to kingdom come. What was Krakatoa’s fury next to that of twenty million women “slaves” incorporated in their most ardent deputies? Neither needed me to set them off, however; they had been well primed at the National Woman Suffrage Association convention.

  “We rebuked the so-called justices of the Supreme Court for declaring Native Americans to be ‘dependent aliens!’” roared Elizabeth, who looked as if she could eat the eminent jurists raw. “It won’t be long until the Indians join the bison in extinction, and when both have been dead and forgotten for a century or so, they’ll be resurrected on our stamps and coins.”

  Had she acquired clairvoyance in Philadelphia? I mused.

  “Overturning the Civil Rights Act of 1875 is shame enough for one year!” fumed Susan.

  The month before, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment did not guarantee blacks a seat on a ’bus or a train, in an eating house or the necessary one. Only the good Justice Harlan dissented.

  “We have Chief Justice Waite and his raven-robed flock of dunces to thank for that particular injustice! There’ve been too many others for one man to take credit for them all.” Elizabeth had worked herself into a rage, which brought color to a usually pallid face.

  “Waite would have the negro wait, wait, wait for his rights!” growled Susan.

  “Negroes may have been emancipated by proclamation and law, but they’ve yet to achieve equality with whites!”

  “White men!” said Susan, glowering handsomely. “In law, women are inferior to black men.”

  “God took Adam’s rib and created woman. Centuries later, man beguiled woman into having one of her ribs removed for the sake of the feminine ideal, which is, in actuality, his own vision of womanly beauty. In exchange for her rib, he gave her a whalebone corset, the second symbol of her bonded servitu
de. Now she pants and faints in wasp-waisted submissiveness, risking death by asphyxiation for her mate.”

  Neither Elizabeth nor Susan would submit to the “murderous contrivances of the corset shop,” as Catharine Beecher described the fashion that kept women delicate, out of breath, and near to swooning.

  I was beginning to fear that my suffragists would rush out of doors, take the first train to the District of Columbia, and burn Chief Justice Waite in effigy—or else dispatch themselves to eternity by a stroke suffered together in perfect accord. Another change of subject was required.

  “The other day on Broadway, I saw—”

  “What did you see, Ellen?” snapped Susan, whose brain was nearly pickled in the vinegar of resentment.

  I thought an account of the Wild West Show would get them going down another track.

  I had stood in the crowd and watched as a General Custer impersonator (the real McCoy having reached an inglorious end at the Little Bighorn), a genuine, if embarrassed, Sitting Bull, and Buffalo Bill led the Congress of the Rough Riders of the World down Broadway. Sitting his horse as he now does his chair in the President’s House, the dude rancher Theodore Roosevelt was conspicuous for his patrician nose pinched by a glinting pince-nez. A bedraggled band of discouraged Indians and a mangy buffalo completed the spectacle, which fired the fancies of onlookers who saw themselves as Buck Taylor, the “King of the Cowboys,” or Miss Annie Oakley, the “Peerless Lady Wing-shot,” who could shoot dimes from between Frank Butler’s fingers.

  At the last moment, I stopped myself from describing the cavalcade, foreseeing that it would only increase the ire of the two women for the exploited Indians, as well as the miserable buffalo. I’d heard enough for one day concerning the inequities of the world, which, according to Susan, had begun in Eden, where Adam had been given sway over everything that flew, swam, crawled, and—after the expulsion—bled monthly between their legs.

  “What was it you saw?” asked Elizabeth, sensing my hesitation and ready to pounce.

  “Alice Vanderbilt’s ‘Electric Light’ gown in Lord and Taylor’s window.” I was pleased with myself for having defused a bomb as deftly as a Confederate miner in the defense of Richmond. Or so I thought; my fiery suffragists were not so easily quenched.

  “Well, I never!” spluttered Susan, looking as if I’d worn muddy shoes into the parlor.

  “Electric Light gown, indeed! It’s a shocking waste, considering the multitude of poor souls who live in unlighted tenements no better than sties!” raged Elizabeth.

  Despite myself, I had provoked them. I blushed shamefacedly and apologized abjectly, asking if they would forgive my frivolity and assuring them both that I was not—at heart—just another “silly female.”

  Passions spent, they let the matter drop.

  “I have a letter to dictate,” said Elizabeth. “If it is convenient.”

  “Yes, of course!” I exclaimed. I would have mucked out the Augean Stables to keep my situation.

  “Your willingness does you credit,” said Susan, her expression softening.

  “As does your ability,” said Elizabeth, to show that I was forgiven.

  Solemnly, I took my place at the typewriter and poised my fingers above the keys as if waiting for a conductor’s baton to release in me the first notes of a heroic overture. The letter, which Elizabeth briskly dictated, was to Julia Ward Howe, president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, a former abolitionist and the versifier who had penned the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” to be sung to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” Mrs. Howe was the widow of Samuel Gridley Howe, who had been a member of the Secret Six, which financed the insurrectionist John Brown and who fled to Canada after Brown’s attack on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry failed.

  September 27, 1883

  Miss Julia Ward Howe

  241 Beacon Street

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Dear Miss Howe,

  I enjoyed the time we three spent together in Philadelphia, and hearing your thoughts concerning the “Ordination of Man as Earth’s Plenipotentiary.” I agree with Susan’s view that the original injustice committed against our sex occurred in Eden with Adam’s cravenness. In our opinion, man and woman were created in perfect equality, and only much later was the story of the Fall altered to depict Eve as a treacherous being at the mercy of her appetite. Whether the alteration was deliberate or due to a copyist’s error, we cannot know. I would tell the story thus:

  “Then the woman fearless of death if she can gain wisdom takes of the fruit. Having had the command from God Himself Adam interposes no word of warning or remonstrance, but takes the fruit from the hand of his wife without a protest.

  “When the awful time of reckoning comes, and the Jehovah God appears to demand why His command has been disobeyed, Adam endeavors to shield himself behind the gentle being he has declared to be so dear. ‘The woman thou gavest to be with me, she gave me and I did eat,’ he whines.”

  After Adam’s despicable conduct, I am amazed that men can claim superiority to our sex or to the meanest dog in the manger.

  Sincerely,

  E.C.S.

  If you are a son, I said silently, apostrophizing the small being growing under my belly’s hill, I trust that you will one day be worthy of your Eve. If you’re a daughter, I hope you will find an Adam who would shield you from God Himself until you’re able to shield yourself with the same laws granted to men. Whether you’re a son or a daughter waiting to take up your life, I wish that your time on Earth will be just and that you’ll take up your future as heir to a legacy left you by people like Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Emerson, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and my two suffragists—an inheritance you are meant to share with others. I wonder if those names will be remembered or expunged from the nation’s faulty memory.

  You should know this much at least about Elizabeth and Susan: They were famous (or notorious) for their militant dedication to the rights of the disenfranchised. In 1848, as a young married woman, Elizabeth found her voice and purpose at the Seneca Falls convention, which sparked a slowly burning fuse that has yet, in 1904, to touch off the powder keg of revolution but must do so in the fullness of time—not God’s, but that of women, who are more patient than He and infinitely more long-suffering. Three years later, Elizabeth and Susan met by chance on a street in Seneca Falls, where each had gone to hear a lecture given by William Lloyd Garrison, who before the war had been slavery’s gadfly and abolition’s fierce and fearless spokesman. As he had done in aid of abolition and suffrage in the pages of his newspaper, The Liberator, so the two women would do in theirs, The Revolution, which they published together in an office of the Women’s Bureau, near Gramercy Park.

  I would not have believed that words could accomplish anything much to ameliorate the conditions of an unjust world—not the hundreds of thousands strung together in knotty sentences by Henry James or the incendiary ones of two elderly women in Murray Hill that I typewrote on my Sholes & Glidden. “You must believe that words can change the world,” said Elizabeth, “if not for the world’s sake, then for your own. The fruit of which Eve ate was a book.”

  A Minotaur in Bellevue

  TOWARD THE END OF OCTOBER, we were visited by Jacob Riis, a police reporter for the New-York Tribune. In a rented room on Mulberry Bend, called “Death’s Thoroughfare,” he wrote about the slums, especially those of the Lower East Side, and photographed the poor who scrabbled in the noisome tenements. His grim pictures—not easy to look at—were pricking the conscience of those who had one and inciting reformists to demand the enactment of laws against exploitation by landlords and sweatshops.

  When we four had seated ourselves and made polite inquiries into one another’s health—even revolutionaries will observe the rudimentary social conventions—Riis explained the reason for his visit.

  “I do not involve myself with the subjects of my photographs,” he said without apology, his English muddied by the Danish he had g
rown up speaking before emigrating to America. “It is for people who see my photographs to involve themselves. I take a picture, like a burglar breaking into a house; I have time to steal only one, and then I must quickly leave. If I asked for permission, the tenants would be suspicious and not let me inside. If they did, they might turn their faces away in shame or put on false ones, which would not tell the truth about themselves. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, and Susan concurred. His question had not been addressed to me, so I thought it best to say nothing.

  “Good!” said Riis. “I knew you would.”

  He opened a worn leather case and took out a print he’d recently made from a dry-plate negative of a girl lying in a stairwell. The way she had folded her arms and legs to make herself compact reminded me of Miss Etta, only the girl was dirty and miserable.

  “She’s no more than fifteen or sixteen,” said Riis. “She is skin on bone, sick; her eyes are sunken. I took the picture and hurried away, as if I’d stumbled on a corpse. Something must be done! I told myself. But what? Would the Female Almshouse on Blackwell’s Island be better than her filthy place under the stairs?” He opened and closed his hands helplessly. “I wonder. Good ladies, what’s to be done?”

  The photograph had spoken in tongues of fire, inflaming the suffragists.

  “In the morning, we will see what can be done!” vowed Elizabeth and Susan, as if they were Grant and Sherman preparing to take Vicksburg. “Mr. Riis, will you show us the way?”

  They arranged to meet at ten o’clock at the corner of Mulberry and Baxter streets, near Ragpickers’ Row. In back alleys, stable lanes, and byways—familiar to rent collectors, if not to health inspectors—men, women, and children hunted for anything that could be eaten, burned, sold, or pawned. Inside ramshackle, foul, lice-infested cavities, the poor (in possessions as well as in spirit) sat waiting, sullen and oppressed, surrounded by the “amenities” the city’s ash heaps and refuse barrels afforded them. For what were they waiting? Eviction, the asylum, death, potter’s field. Perhaps a few Christian hearts still waited for Jesus to roll away the stones from their tombs.