American Follies

by Norman Lock

  White’s claim was true; Susan couldn’t deny it. “What do you want with the child?”

  “To use it as a symbol.”

  “A symbol of what?”

  White ignored the question and continued: “We want to restore the values and principles of the Founding Fathers, many of whom belonged to the Klan.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “History speaks in many tongues. It burns in me. My church is the Pillar of Fire and the Bright Fiery Cross.”

  “Where is Martin Finch?” Susan could have burned a hole through White, so hotly did she glare.

  “At the foot of the cross.”

  Instantly, I recalled that Mary Surratt had foretold that I would meet my infant son there.

  “And where might that be?” asked Susan with plenty of vinegar and nary an atom of honey. Nevertheless, we had caught the pest, and if she’d been a fly, Susan would have pulled off its wings.

  “That, you will never find out!”

  “Ellen, go find a bar of lye soap.” And to White, she said, “Prepare to be purified of your sanctimonious flapdoodle.” I found it in the kitchen. “Now put it in the serpent’s mouth.” I did, and the serpent spat it out. “Again!” ordered Susan. “This time, shove it halfway down her throat.” I did, and White began to choke as her saliva turned to suds. “Now she looks the rabid dog she is.”

  Had I had a mirror, I would surely have seen my eyes glitter. Hatred casts its own lurid light—the hellish one that Milton in his blindness saw flickering on the lake of fire.

  Susan yanked the soap from White’s mouth. The bigot choked on her foaming curses.

  “Where is the child!” shouted Susan.

  With little else but her tongue to show her disdain, she stuck it out at us.

  We left her to stew in her own juices. Standing at the open back door, we listened to the water falling down the wheel and the creaking wooden gears and savored the odors of cornmeal, burlap sacks, and river. A cat sidled against my leg, sat a moment on my shoes to wash its face, and then flattened its belly on the ground in readiness to break its fast on a plump sparrow.

  “I don’t know how to make the damned woman speak!” cried Susan.

  We went into the room below the grain bin. Amid the noise of corn pouring through the tin spout, I heard the shower bath at Sing Sing. I described its construction and torments to Susan. She shut the spout and wrenched it from the hopper.

  We carried White, still tied to the chair, and placed her below the spout. I opened it and watched as grain rained down on her.

  “What now?” asked Susan.

  “We wait for her skull to crack.” A falling kernel of dried corn does less harm than a biting fly, but a torrent of them can bring an elephant to its knees.

  It wasn’t long before White began to fidget.

  “Where is Martin?” asked Susan, having closed the spout.

  She shook her head as a dog does to rid itself of fleas, but wouldn’t answer.

  Once again, Susan let the grain fall, until White began to moan.

  “Where is Martin?” I shouted above the clatter of pelting kernels.

  And still she wouldn’t say!

  I leaned the chair against the wall. The grain got up White’s nose; she gasped for air. She opened her mouth and gulped what would have seemed like cherry pits or gravel.

  Close to raving, she shrieked, “Enough!”

  Susan shut the spout. “Where is he?” And when she hesitated to answer, Susan had only to touch the lever to make White talk.

  “In Memphis!” she cried, the Pillar of Fire all but extinguished in her mind. “Ethan Dorn’s house, on the corner of Second and Poplar!”

  “Who’s Ethan Dorn?”

  “Grand Cyclops of Tennessee.”

  “Why did you take the boy?”

  “To punish Stanton for championing miscegenation and free love. And to punish you”—she thrust her chin at me—“for having practiced it and given the world another bastard, and a black one at that.”

  “Martin’s father is not a negro!” I shouted in a voice so forceful, a distant cobweb shook.

  “Then how did the baby come to be a mulatto?”

  I recalled the duskiness of the baby’s skin when Mary Surratt had unfolded the blanket and looked at his face. But surely night, which engulfed both the child and the woman, had lent its color to the scene!

  “What does Dorn intend to do with him?” asked Susan, who dismissed the question of little Martin’s inheritance as a thing of no consequence.

  “Sacrifice him at the foot of the fiery cross!”

  She started to sing the racist anthem but got no further than “So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cr—” before Susan muzzled her.

  “Could it be possible that I am the mother of a black child?” I asked.

  “For God, as for Barnum, anything is possible.” “But how?”

  “Perhaps He is a negro and engendered in you a black Jesus to save His people from the lynch mob, Jim Crow, and the Klan,” replied Susan earnestly.

  A wasp had crawled into my nose—two wasps, one in each nostril. Oh, how they stung! I opened my eyes and peered into the dusty gray light moiling above the rafters.

  “You fainted again, poor child,” said Susan, stoppering the glass bottle of smelling salts.

  When I call to mind that afternoon at the gristmill, I see the Pillar of Fire as it has come to be in my fancy, with its foot in Hell and its capital underneath the pediment of the Mansion of Happiness. A host of fiery angels are going up and down inside it like fireflies trapped in a glass bottle. They make a noise that might be hymning or gibbering. Who knows how time deforms the truth.

  Turkish Pantaloons

  BEFORE WE KNEW IT, SUSAN AND I had returned to Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse. What is it? Everything we do not know, everything that was not in Barnum’s American Museum nor ever could have been. I’m no more certain today of how we traveled home to Forty-second Street than I am of the means of our arrival in Zarephath. Glimpses of the world that memory draws from the well of forgetfulness are never entirely our own. They are a rich stock of pictures seen, conversations overheard, or books read, stirred together with the bare bones of fact. I had been reading Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon shortly before I went to live at Murray Hill, and thus could have had airships on the brain.

  Margaret was in the sitting room when Susan and I got home. She had told Elizabeth of our meeting with Barnum and the oracle of Broadway.

  “Well?” asked Elizabeth brusquely. “Did you accomplish anything?” I could see she was feeling put out for having been left out of our travels in the hinterland.

  “Pish, Lizzie! It was no picnic.”

  “Forgive me,” she said with a blush that might have been of shame or the effect of choler. (She looked like a child who’d gotten into mother’s rouge pot.) “I forgot myself and the reason for your journey.”

  “What happened?” asked Margaret impatiently.

  Susan sketched an account of our foray, omitting the sensational bits.

  “Then little Martin is in Memphis?” asked Elizabeth, looking to me for confirmation.

  “Yes,” I replied. “At the home of the Grand Cyclops.”

  Elizabeth shivered as Odysseus might have when he beheld the Cyclops on the island of Hypereia. Composing herself, she showed her legendary backbone in the presence of an enemy—be it one-eyed or possessed of a pair of them, hate-inflamed and peeping through two holes cut into a sheet. “Who will go with me to Memphis and rescue our boy?”

  “I will!” I shouted with a mother’s fervor.

  “I will!” exclaimed Susan, incited by her friend’s zeal.

  “I will!” cried Margaret with an enthusiasm disproportionate to her size.

  Elizabeth appeared doubtful. “Can you manage so harrowing a trip, my girl?”

  “I’m not your girl!” snapped Margaret. “And I can!”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, impressed by her pluck. “I believe y
ou can.”

  “Susan?”

  “Yes, Elizabeth?”

  “Get me my bloomers!”

  Susan hesitated. “I don’t think they are quite the thing.”

  “They are just the thing! They will show those nasty swine who have the gall to call themselves Christians and Americans that I mean business.”

  Elizabeth turned to me and explained, “A woman looks Amazonian in bloomers as she strides about the town and countryside unimpeded by lengthy skirts. They are de rigueur for a woman on the barricades—I will not say ‘manning’ them.” She turned again to Susan. “You ought to wear yours, as well.”

  “I cut mine up for rags years ago.” A Quaker, Susan had refused to exchange her delaine dress, relieved with pale blue ribbons, for the short jacket and Turkish pantaloons whose patterns Amelia Bloomer had published in her temperance magazine, The Lily.

  Elizabeth had worn them, to her husband’s dismay and the irritation of her father, Judge Cady, until she grew tired of being teased.

  Heigh-ho! the carrion crow

  Mrs. Stanton’s all the go

  Twenty tailors take the stitches

  Mrs. Stanton wears the breeches.

  “They give one a marvelous sense of freedom!” said Elizabeth as Susan went to get them.

  We could hear her rooting in the trunk room before she returned with the martial apparel and handed it to her friend.

  “I’ll put them on at once!” announced Elizabeth, who marched into her bedroom to the rustling of the black silk dress she often wore during her emeritus years.

  “She’ll never get them on,” said Susan with enough vinegar to pickle an egg.

  Elizabeth returned, chagrined. “I’ve decided not to wear them. If I happen to be lynched, I don’t want to be wearing pants. Unashamed of my sex, I will flaunt it for all to see!”

  At that moment, Gallagher, the Pinkerton man, entered the room without knocking.

  Elizabeth rebuked him, “Decent people do not barge, uninvited, into another person’s sitting room!”

  “I’m a special officer and used to unlawful entry,” he said placidly.

  “Elizabeth, allow me to introduce Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Barnum’s private detective,” said Susan. She’d spoken smugly, as though to gloat over her companion’s ignorance of the fact.

  “I hope he wiped his big boots outside. Mrs. McGinty isn’t due till Tuesday.”

  “What brings you here, Mr. Gallagher?” asked Susan, assuming authority for the special officer in Barnum’s absence.

  “The boss has a private train ready to take you to Memphis.”

  “How the devil did he know we’d be going to Memphis?” demanded Susan. “We just this minute made up our minds.”

  “As to that, there are three possibilities. I detected it.”

  “In your dreams!” jeered Susan.

  “Madame Singleton divined it.”

  “And the third?”

  “I followed you and Miss Finch to Alma Bridwell White’s house and watched through the window as you tortured her. I needed no crystal ball to foresee your immediate descent on Memphis.”

  “Susan, did you torture the bigot?” asked Elizabeth.

  “I did.”

  Elizabeth nodded her stately head in approval.

  “I did, too,” I said, wanting to be praised. In that pandemonium, I forgot you, Martin.

  “I commended you both to Mr. Pinkerton, who wishes you to know that he will hire you as special agents, if you’ve acquired a taste for the business. Ladies, the train is waiting. Mr. Barnum has ordered me to accompany you. My carriage is outside, a horse between the shafts that Alexander the Great would have envied. The horse, I was assured by the master of stables, is unadulterated Arabian and flies like Aladdin’s own carpet.”

  “Wait till we change and pack our cases,” said Susan, whose clothes, like mine, needed to be brushed and aired. Gristmills are dusty and musty.

  “We have no room for cases, ladies. Dress if you must, but the train can’t wait. Mr. Barnum’s influence is great, but that of Mr. Vanderbilt, who owns the railroad tracks, is greater. Margaret, I took the liberty of packing a few of your things. You’ll find them in the Pullman car. Now chop-chop, which is Malay for ‘vamoose!’”

  Like the Almighty, I moved in mysterious ways at that time in my life. And so it was I seemed to awaken in Grand Central Depot, surrounded by—does one say a “clutter of clowns”? There were a dozen of them, including Billy Burke, Joe Kibble, and Charles Bliss. They fussed and frolicked, waiting to pile inside the car at the rear of the train, which they were to share. In addition, a caboose, a Pullman, and a parlor car made up the “Barnum Special,” which followed three freight wagons belonging to the railway.

  “In Mr. Barnum’s opinion, twelve clowns should be sufficient to fluster a Grand Cyclops and turn a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan inside out and upside down,” remarked Gallagher, who had exchanged his derby for a cowboy’s Stetson and his Pinkerton badge for a sheriff’s tin star. “Personally, I’d have brought a pair of hungry tigers—and imagine what Jumbo could do to a picnic of snakes with his big feet! But Barnum knows best because Barnum is boss.”

  “All aboard!” shouted the conductor, waving a flag to the engineer, who answered with three shrill blasts of the locomotive’s whistle.

  Elizabeth, Susan, Margaret, Gallagher, and I hurried aboard as the clowns climbed into the “clown car.” At the last minute, a man stepped from a billow of coal smoke and jumped aboard the caboose.

  Had God not gone silently about His creation, having no one to hear Him but the angels, who shrink at disharmony, the commotion could not have been any noisier than that inside the depot’s vast balloon shed: clattering trolleys, the clunk and clutch of machinery, the powerful exhalations of Baldwin locomotives, the thunder as their iron wheels fought for purchase on the tracks, the ratcheting of cars across rail ends, the hawking of newspapers and patent medicines on the smoky platforms, the shouting of farewells, cautions, and reminders, and the thud of a steam derrick digging yet another track bed. For always the great city must build and rebuild itself in reply to its manifest destiny.

  The Ditch

  “WE STOP IN CHARLESTOWN, where the freight cars will be shunted onto a siding,” said Gallagher, perusing a map. “From there, we go west on the Memphis and Charlestown tracks to the Grand Cyclops’s front porch.”

  “How long will it take?” asked Susan, who ran her affairs according to schedules and itineraries, unlike Elizabeth, who since she’d stopped having babies ignored clocks and calendars.

  “About eighty hours, barring the unforeseen.”

  “Never neglect the unforeseen,” said Susan. “It’s one thing in life we can depend on.”

  “Three days,” I said, dispirited.

  “And nights,” said Gallagher cheerfully. “But thanks to Mr. Barnum’s generosity, you ladies will pass the unconscious hours inside a Pullman Palace car. I’ll sleep here in the parlor car, as is right and proper.”

  “What about breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” asked Elizabeth.

  “The boss has laid on a ‘plethora of comestibles,’ from oysters to strawberries, together with champagne for the tipplers and small beer for the Temperance Party.”

  “Hooray!” crowed Elizabeth, patting her belly.

  “Mr. B. has managed the affair quite well,” said Gallagher. “The tyke is as good as saved.”

  “You’re an ignoramus!” said Susan tartly.

  “Tsk, tsk, your temper is showing, Miss Anthony. It’s turned your face red as your shawl.”

  Susan glared and bared her teeth at Gallagher. “To rescue baby Martin from those devils will take more than four women and a s—”

  “Pinkerton man,” said Gallagher, finishing her sentence for her as he polished a bottle of Old Hickory with his Wild West neckerchief.

  “Souse!”

  “I do my best ratiocinating when staring into a glass of spirits,” he said amiably. “Clear or amber, it
’s all the same to me. And do not forget the clowns, madam! They are formidable.”

  “Twelve loons dressed in silly clothes!” When pressed, Susan was as hot and quick as a lighted fuse.

  “George Bliss has wreaked havoc with his leaping.”

  “Pish!” hissed Susan.

  “Grandees and royal highnesses have lost their heads to Billy Burke’s songs.”

  “Posh!” scoffed Elizabeth.

  “In 1871, a dozen Carthaginians of New York died laughing at Joe Kibble’s comic capering.”

  “Piffle!” jeered the pair of suffragists.

  Undismayed by their skepticism, Gallagher asserted that the clowns would, in the words of the boss, “exfluncticate the vermin.”

  Grave outcomes teeter between outrageous farce and appalling tragedy. What could be more preposterous than a mob of men dressed as hobgoblins, or more dangerous? What is more fabulous than the cross and more harrowing than to see it burning in a black man’s yard? Can you imagine a better subject for a tragicomedy than four women, a drunk, and a parcel of circus clowns confronting an invisible empire of bloodthirsty hellions? Hippocrates may have been right, and humankind does act according to the four humors. If that is true, then the lessons of the Sunday school, the homilies delivered from the pulpit, the transubstantiated bread and wine supped adoringly at the altar rail cannot soften the hearts of those with a disproportion of blood and bile in their natures any more than I can command my eyes to glitter in mirth or weep at the brutalities that one kind of being inflicts on another. Shall we pray for the fire that consumed the wicked of Gomorrah? Will He send it or a brigade of firemen?

  “They’ll eviscerate and annihilate the ‘crackers!’” said Gallagher, pleased with himself.

  We will succeed; we will not succeed; we will s—In time to the train wheels’ clicking over the rail ends, I intoned the hope of a happy outcome, followed by its negation. I might have been picking petals from a daisy to find out whether someone loved me or not. My mind, which had been rational and enlightened, was fuddled by superstitious notions. If I’d had a voodoo doll of Grand Cyclops Dorn, I’d have pierced its heart with a hat pin and then thrown it on the fire, as, once in a nightmare, I had fed mummified cats into a locomotive’s firebox.