Patience & Sarah

by Isabel Miller

  It is hard to believe that Alma Routsong wrote Patience &Sarah in the mid-sixties, before Stonewall, the women’s movement, everything that would seem necessary to enable such brio. Before starting the novel, she had a bad case of writer’s block and a reluctance to contribute to what she saw as the ghastly genre of contemporary lesbian fiction (with all its pulp conventions, suicides and conversions to heterosexuality). It was by deciding to make her mark on the blank slate – the imaginary “green country” – of the unwritten lesbian past, that Routsong was able to summon up psychological and writerly confidence. Historical fiction is often accused of nostalgia, but in this case it seems to have offered more of the visionary, fearless quality of science fiction.

  I had it from Patience that there’d been women like us before, because the Bible complained of them.

  Patience & Sarah can be considered the first lesbian historical novel. Before it came a few fictions of the past which included love between women, a couple of them even by lesbian authors – notably, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show (1936), about the 1848 Paris revolution, and Kate O’Brien’s As Music and Splendour (1958), about opera singers in 1880s Italy – but both of these have a tactful, inexplicit quality; neither puts a female couple center stage and neither is written from and for an emerging lesbian community the way Patience & Sarah so clearly was.

  Writers of historical fiction are always being asked why they set their books in the past – as if it is to be taken for granted that novels should be set in the present. (In fact, if we consider that storytelling originated with tales of a distant past, such as Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, then a case could be made for historical fiction as the default, the original form of fiction.) Also, it is often wrongly assumed that historical novels are written to teach the facts of social history in a palatable form, rather than for riskier, literary aims. In the case of Patience & Sarah, Routsong was inventing a history rather than teaching a known one, which helps give the novel its vigour and zest.

  It is always tricky, in writing historical fiction, to find a balance between the preoccupations of your own time and the facts of the past. Routsong pulls this off with marvellous lightness of touch. She shows a sharp appreciation for the circumstances of the 1810s – the land indentures, seasonal farming tasks, details of Patience’s father’s will – but her prose is never weighed down by research. The book is deeply feminist in its appreciation of women’s bodies, work, and attributes, but manages to be sympathetic to all its male and female characters as they struggle for happiness within the confines of their social and religious codes. They are all very credible nineteenth-century Americans: the doleful, ever-pregnant sister-in-law Martha, for instance, who wishes Patience would keep her caresses “in the family,” or the restless Parson Peel, with his wife, children and buried desire for boys.

  Alma Routsong probably had no idea that she was founding a genre, but by the time she died in 1996 she knew it. In the second half of the 1970s came a trickle of varied lesbian historical fictions by Doris Grumbach, Sarah Aldridge, and Jane Chambers in the US, and Australian author Barbara Hanrahan – none of them echoing the plot of Patience & Sarah, but all of them enabled by that book’s bold project of imagining a lesbian past into visibility. In the 1980s came significant stories and novels of the past by Sara Maitland, Jeanette Winterson, and Ellen Galford in Britain, and Nevada Barr, Alice Walker and Jeannine Allard, in the US, as well as a dozen other authors. In the 1990s some of the outstanding names were the US’s Jewelle Gomez, Paula Martinac, Susan Stinson, Michelle Cliff, Judith Katz, and Elana Dykewoman, and Canada’s Ingrid MacDonald, Ann-Marie MacDonald, and Helen Humphreys. In the early 2000s the queen of the genre is Britain’s Sarah Waters, whose novels of the Victorian underworld have won a huge mainstream audience despite their explicitly lesbian storylines.

  Many of these novels resemble Patience & Sarah – or perhaps adopt the same approach to representing the two main ways women responded to patriarchy – in bringing together a masculine woman and a feminine one. Ellen Galford’s Moll Cutpurse, Her True History (1984) is a quirky romance between a crossdressing thief and an apothecary; Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987) hinges on an affair between a girl who crossdresses to work in a casino, and a married woman; Caeia Marsh’s The Hide and Seek Files (1988) and Jeannine Allard’s Légende (1984) are about female pairs passing as married couples in 1920s Yorkshire and 1840s Brittany respectively; in Judith Katz’s The Escape Artist (1997) a woman disguised as a male magician is recognised, and seduced, by a prostitute. But even romances that hinge on a different dynamic, such as governess/girl or mistress/servant, tend to have at their heart the hunger for “a place for us.” And the influence of Patience & Sarah shows up in all sorts of surprising places: in Sarah Waters’s spooky thriller Affinity (1997), for instance, the spinster heroine has a prior, thwarted love for the friend who became her sister-in-law, just as Patience has. (We could perhaps call this the Emily Dickinson motif.)

  Much has been written about the boom in lesbian crime novels since the 1980s, but very little about the immense growth in lesbian historical fiction. I think it shows a real maturing in lesbian readers that we are hungry to know that our subculture is not a passing phase, not just an offshoot of the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Historical fiction has a crucial importance to communities whose history (in hard facts) is unlikely ever to be discovered. Because there will never be a detailed biography of the life Willson and Brundidge lived, we are all the more grateful for Routsong’s story of (as she puts it in her dedication) “something like it.”

  Where is the hero who bore such batterings for love and stood up before witnesses to ask me to be a hero too? And I am a hero now. Can’t you see? We can be an army of two.… Let the world either kill us or grow accustomed to us: here we stand.

  For all the historical specifics in Patience & Sarah, for all the precise characterisations of even minor characters – it has an elemental, timeless quality. Using the Ouija board to call up Willson and Brundidge (or maybe to shape them in her and Elisabeth Deran’s unconscious, she was never sure), Routsong told her diary “I don’t know why any book I might be able to make of this might not be called divine revelation.”

  Patience & Sarah is an archetypal story of two rebels planning and making their escape. In their quest to find the garden where they may live safe, snug, and free, they will encounter many demons, from well-meaning protectors and violent attackers, to their own fears. In taking the risk of writing about an unknown past, Routsong unleashed her imagination, and gave us a myth with widespread influence and an enduring afterlife.

  Patience & Sarah

  To Miss Willson and Miss Brundidge

  who, quite a while ago, lived something

  like it, this book is lovingly

  dedicated.

  BOOK ONE

  Patience

  (Connecticut, 1816)

  Chapter One

  One way Martha wanted me out of her kitchen, but another way she didn’t want me burning wood to keep just myself warm. Best would have been if I’d died, I guess, but there wasn’t much chance of that, not right off anyway, since I lived a healthy country life and was fairly young, and unmarried. Next best was to make me want to die, but I had enough spite in me to want to live, usually.

  Martha was my brother Edward’s wife. Edward, by the terms of my father’s will, was my keeper. I had half of the house and the furnishings thereof, and the use of the central hallway to get there, which shows that my father knew how much help brotherly love needs for the long haul. I had food, firewood, carded wool, summer cloth, shoes, and rides to church spelled out for me. I was to have, always, the milk of two good cows so I could make cheese for income. My father wrote careful instructions for me about what legal actions to take if Edward or his heirs should ever refuse me these things. Their inheritance depended on giving me mine.

  But there was nothing all my father’s care could do to make them love me.

  I
think Edward did love me, a little, but Martha had to come first. That was just practical. He had his daily peace to hope for, and his children to protect. I didn’t expect him to take my side. I wasn’t even sure I had a side.

  What made me hard to defend was that I couldn’t say what I wanted. I could say what I didn’t want, and maybe that’s a start but no more than a start. For instance, I was still young enough to think of marriage, at least to a widower, but I’d never noticed that marriage made anybody else feel better, and I was modest enough to know that it would be no different for me. And where other young women could be deceived from having just their parents to judge marriage by, I had what could be called special information: I had Edward and Martha, my age (just about), and close up, and daily.

  Well, if a woman’s not going to want marriage, she’d best get busy and want to be a schoolmarm or hire herself out as an embroiderer. All I wanted to be was a painter, but how are you going to admit a conceited think like that to people who are forever taunting you about picking up airs at boarding school? I could just barely admit it to myself.

  All winter I’d helped with the work, but there’s an air you can have even while working that makes people call you lazy anyway. I’d shelled corn, cut and salted meat, strung fruit, boiled soap, made candles. I do want it understood that I really worked. I’m a little touchy on the point. But now it was January and those big tasks were done. Now there were only the endless daily things, like sewing and spinning and cooking and milking, which couldn’t in the nature of things get caught up with, and I wanted a day to myself.

  That was why Martha wanted me dead. She didn’t get a day, or so much as a minute. “Nobody else has time to make pictures,” she said.

  “Nobody else knows how,” I said, kind of quizzing. I wasn’t set yet in my mind to do the picture. It wasn’t clear yet, and it had to be. You can’t risk paper until it’s clear. “Lot’s Wife Looking Back” was what I had in mind. It would be fun to catch her just turning to salt, half salt, half woman. Bottom half salt, dress and all. Green tears falling in rows out of her indigo eyes. Lot stalking off sternly, not looking. Then off in the background Sodom and Gomorrah, a little clump of houses, going up in one big flame like a torch.

  I looked at the kitchen fire to see again how flames went. A very little bit of blue right at the bottom, and then yellow. “Fire’s not red,” I said. “Why, for goodness sake, fire’s not red!”

  “Any fool knows fire’s red,” Martha said, slaving away. She always became a pitiful drudge whenever I thought to make a picture.

  The youngsters sided with me, such as could talk. “Look, Mama! Aunt Patience is right! Fire’s yellow!” They only jangled Martha more and didn’t help me. She wouldn’t look at the fire. She swatted them for sassing and then glared at me to make me feel guilty for getting them swatted.

  By then I was thinking about whether to put tiny curtains at the windows of Sodom and Gomorrah, and maybe tiny flowerpots. And should I make people running and carrying things? No, God wouldn’t let that happen. If You’re going to destroy somebody, You don’t let him run out whole-skinned and healthy and carrying something. That wouldn’t count as destroying. It would hardly hurt at all.

  But already I knew I couldn’t do the picture, not here anyway. The walking baby, little Betty, hadn’t yet been broken of reaching out for things. Well, I know there’s nothing to do about a baby that reaches out but whack its hand, but that’s a process I don’t like to have to be witness to, and most of all I don’t like to be the cause of it, which I would be if I set out a row of bottles filled with beautiful colors. Even a fairly big child, fully broken in, might forget himself and reach out for a sight like that.

  I was thinking I might go to my own place and never mind about wasting heat, when the dogs barked and we heard the chain of a sled clanking in the yard. “Ho Buck, ho Bright!” someone called. It sounded like a woman, but it could have been a boy whose voice hadn’t changed. Pretty soon there came a knock at the door. Martha went. The same voice said, “Where you want this put? It’s the firewood Mr. White asked from us.”

  “Out front.”

  “Would you look and say it’s half a cord?”

  “It’s half a cord,” Martha said, and slammed the door fast. She was just one thoroughly scandalized woman, breathing but excited too, I could tell, and blushing red. “I never,” she said.

  Then she couldn’t understand why the children wanted to rush right out to see. She whacked them and got them bawling and then whacked them for bawling.

  “Who’s out there? What’s the matter?” I asked.

  I’d have got a whack too, but I was just about Martha’s size and she knew she’d get a good one back.

  “Never mind,” she snapped.

  With my fingertip I melted myself a peephole in the frost on the window quarrel, but the woodpile was too far around and I couldn’t see.

  “Is it a woman or a boy?” I asked.

  “Never you mind,” Martha said.

  “If it’s a woman, I’ll get Tobe to unload that wood and ask her to come in,” I said. Tobe was Edward’s hired man.

  “She don’t set no foot in this house,” Martha said.

  “So it’s a she! Do you know her?”

  “No, and I’m not about to. I heard about her. That’s enough. And I’m not about to have my youngsters see her. This a Christian home.”

  I’d heard, too, about Sarah Dowling, and I wanted, after all these years as almost her neighbor, to get a look at her.

  “She’ll have to come in,” I said. “She’ll be here at dinnertime.”

  “Then she can go home and put a dress on first,” Martha said. “It’s in the Bible. Not that she’d know that.”

  That roused the children again. They were wild to see. Poor lambs.

  It breaks my heart to think of childhood, everybody bigger and whacking and shouting and teaching you not to reach for anything or look at anything, and not letting up on you till you get over wanting to.

  I think that when Martha was a baby she had a little less natural interest than some. As for me, well, my father never put his whole back behind breaking me. They say he spoiled me, sending me off to school, and before that he’d made my mother give me candles to read by and draw by, even though they were very expensive in those days. If he was late getting in, she’d never give me the candle, but knowing he was on my side made me strong. If one of your folks will back you up, you don’t get broken.

  So I guess it was my father, even in his grave, who made me able to stand against Martha when I should have been a timid slave thankful to breathe. My mind cleared and I knew just what to do. I took myself a shovelful of coals from the kitchen fire, not looking at Martha, and with my jaw set I marched myself over to my part of the house and I built a fire in my own kitchen.

  It wasn’t a kitchen to compare with Martha’s. You couldn’t cook for reapers in it, but I had no ambitions along that line. The fireplace was adequate, with a good draught. There was no oven, but I had a big iron kettle with a good snug lid that baked just fine.

  My father had built my kitchen for me late, when he was drawing up his will and admitting to himself that I would never marry. I think he didn’t want me to. He told me, during that time, that he’d never met the man he’d be willing to turn me over to, to obey and scurry for. He said he’d thought for sure I’d be a boy, from the way I shook my mother, and when I wasn’t his heart nearly broke for me, wondering how someone with all that go could stand to be a woman. He’d said he’d half hoped naming me Patience would help a little. I suppose he wouldn’t have said all that if he hadn’t known he was dying.

  When I had my fire going strong, I sat and looked at it. Yellow and blue, mostly yellow. And I thought what to feed this wicked Sarah Dowling who’d enlivened a January morning for dull Martha.

  I should say that this was not by any means the first time I’d flounced out of Martha’s kitchen. The issue had never before been whether to shut out some
one with an errand on the place at mealtime, but every few weeks we’d reach a breaking point about something. So I was pretty good at flouncing, and the main thing is, I had some food on hand at my place. First time, I’d had to go back in a few hours to get food. That was hard on my stiff neck and taught me a lesson. So I had flour, meal, salt pork, lard, dried fruit, sugar, salt, a few things like that on hand.

  I could have stayed in my own place happily forever, but, admit it or not, Martha needed me. I’d stay away a few days, making pictures and sewing, singing little songs to myself, and then one morning Edward would come by and say, “Martha’s ailing. Can you help out?” so I’d go back. That hurt her stiff neck.

  But she ailed a lot and had to bend. She longed for a real servant, an orphan girl maybe, that she could beat and that had no other place to go. Edward, with so much land and a flourishing mill, could have afforded to get her one. But he didn’t think of it himself, and when asked to he got bullheaded and wouldn’t. “There are four women in this house already,” he liked to say, ignoring that one was me, and two were infants under five, and the fourth was always on one side or the other of childbed.

  When my kitchen was warm enough to make asking someone into it a kindness, I put on my cloak and went out. It was a mean day, windy and bitter, with little hard snowflakes – more grains of ice than snow – driving hard along the ground. I clutched my hood around my face, immediately cold, and hurried out front to Edward’s huge, show-off woodpile.