“Would the senator consider such a thing?” Legrand asked.
“I think so,” Caroline said.
Charlie Stapleton was sitting on the other side of the table, chatting with the two Legrand sisters. He managed to keep one ear to this conversation. He abandoned the young women to lean forward and say, “When Mother makes that kind of promise, Senator Stapleton always delivers.”
“Hush, Charlie. It’s by no means a sure thing. But I can assure you of serious consideration.”
“I expect to command at least a company in this expedition,” Charlie said.
“You have my promise of a commission, young fellow,” Victor Conte Legrand said.
“That should go a long way to persuading Senator Stapleton,” John Sladen said.
“I don’t know about that. Father hasn’t approved of anything I’ve done since I was about eight years old,” Charlie said.
“I saw your father in the field in Mexico. He’ll approve a soldier son. I guarantee it,” Legrand said.
“Isn’t it despicable, Mrs. Stapleton, how men have all the adventures and we women have to sit home worshipin’ them?” Cynthia Legrand drawled. She had a sensuous, crooning voice that perfectly matched her lush looks.
“Sometimes we can do more than worship,” Caroline said.
“You must teach me how to do that,” Cynthia said. “Maybe I can get Charlie to pay some attention to me.”
“Wait two or three years, Cyntie darling,” Legrand said.
“Then the problem will be how to stop Charlie from paying too much attention,” John Sladen said.
“I wish I could believe that,” Cynthia said with a pretty pout.
“Take our word for it, little girl,” Legrand said.
After dinner, Legrand escorted Caroline on a tour of his town house. On the walls was art from the best painters in France. The halls were filled with Greek and Roman sculpture. The furniture was from Paris, glistening, brilliantly cushioned examples of the sinuous Empire style. The Legrands had been part of Louisiana’s ruling class for over a hundred years. He was delighted to invite the Stapletons to share the spoils.
“Where is Mrs. Legrand? I was hoping to meet her,” Caroline said.
“She seldom leaves our plantation, Bralston, on the river above Baton Rouge. She comes from nearby Cane River and has so many kin, it’s impossible to lure her to New Orleans, no matter how enticing I make the invitation. She’s also frequently indisposed. Her health is not of the best … .”
There was no need to explain the arrangement. A wife was an inconvenience in New Orleans. Caroline let Legrand lead her to a back parlor, where a half dozen Cubans gazed morosely at a painting of the Spanish royal family by Velázquez, the great court painter of two centuries past. Legrand introduced her as the wife of Senator Stapleton. For a half hour she listened to their assurances that Cuba was ripe for revolution and was eager to join the United States. They reiterated their hatred of the greedy corrupt officials Spain sent to administer the island.
Afterward, in a hack with John Sladen and Charlie, Caroline said she was convinced that Cuba was theirs for the taking. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “It sounds like it will be more of a pleasure trip than a war.”
“Let’s see what Madame Leveau tells us,” John said.
“She’s the voodoo queen of New Orleans,” Charlie explained. “Anyone who wants an ex-lover or a husband poisoned, an enemy ruined, his or her future predicted, goes to her.”
In ten minutes they were skirting a wide grassy park, splashed with moonlight and shadows. “This is Congo Square,” John Sladen said. “Madame Leveau’s kingdom.”
“Where are the Africans?”
“They all have to be indoors by nine o’clock. It’s the law,” Charlie said. “To prevent an uprising.”
“Just a precaution,” Sladen said. “We’re perfectly safe.”
They climbed to the second floor of a decrepit building. In a large candlelit room sat a tall, lean black woman with a red turban on her angular head. She wore a necklace of bones that looked suspiciously like human fingers. On the table in front of her was a white cat and a black cat, so real that they seemed about to meow. It took Caroline several minutes to realize they were stuffed. Several human skulls and a large stuffed snake dangled from the walls.
“Greetings, Your Majesty,” John Sladen said. “I’m here to report your medicine worked well. My friends have asked me to give you another payment.”
“Thank you,” Madame Leveau said in a throaty voice. She accepted a fat envelope that John placed before her. Glancing into it, she riffled the banknotes and then handed it to a woman assistant, one of several who stood beside her like ladies-in-waiting around a queen.
“Who are these other people who come to my court?” Madame Leveau said.
“They are people from the North who want to learn to worship your dark god, Your Majesty,” Sladen said. “They have money. Will you look into their futures for them?”
Leveau studied Caroline for a long moment. “This woman has powers of her own. Why does she need me?”
“Her power cannot match yours, Majesty,” John said, glancing wryly at Caroline.
“Stroke the cats and let me see your hand,” Leveau said. “First the white cat, then the black cat.”
Caroline obeyed. Madame Leveau seized Caroline’s wrist and stared into her hand. She spat on it and rubbed the saliva around and around the palm. An assistant took the snake from the wall and wrapped it around Madame’s neck and placed its grinning head in Caroline’s hand. The creature twitched as if it were alive. Madame cried out and leaped from her chair. “There are powers here I don’t understand.”
“What of her future, my queen?” John Sladen asked.
“Her god won’t let me see it.”
“What if she says she has no god?”
“She is not such a fool,” Leveau said, glaring at Caroline.
“What if I said I worshiped your dark god?” Caroline said.
“You can try,” Leveau said in a strangely hostile voice. “But there is another god standing between you and him.”
“What of the young man?” John asked.
Charlie rubbed the two cats and offered the queen his open hand. Leveau peered at his palm for a moment, then peeled back the lids of Charlie’s eyes. “He will marry a beautiful woman. After that I see nothing but darkness behind his eyes.”
“Was that what you saw behind mine?” John asked.
“Behind yours I saw blood. A river of blood.”
Somewhere a drum began to beat. It was joined by a half dozen more drums and a wailing flute. “It will soon be midnight. Do you want to stay for the dance?” Leveau said. “You are welcome.”
Downstairs, the double doors of the house were open. Across the square came forty or fifty Africans, dancing in a strange contorted way, their bodies jerking and twitching to the drums. Some bent to the waist and walked like chickens, others flung themselves in the grass and slithered like snakes. Into the house they sprang while Madame Leveau greeted them with open arms. The ladies-in-waiting distributed flagons of a dark, fragrant drink to all comers. The drumbeat accelerated. By now the room was packed. The visitors swayed back and forth, their arms twined around each other. “Dance, children, dance. Worship the god who will set you free!” Madame Leveau cried.
One of her court pulled back a screen on the wall. In an alcove hung a crucified black dog with a crown on his head. In his mouth was a white hand. “Dance!” Madame Leveau said.
One of the women flung off her clinging blue dress and stamped it beneath her feet. She had a magnificent body with long legs, coned breasts, slim curving arms. She began dancing before the dog, supplicating, undulating, moving her tapered hands up and down her dark flesh. Soon a half dozen other women joined her in defiant naked ecstasy.
Caroline watched, fascinated, horrified. She understood it all. It was the black anaconda worshiping an evil god, in revenge for the white god’s failure to g
ive it freedom. Here in the deepest South, at the mouth of the stupendous river of darkness that flowed through America’s heart, was a vision of the evil she and John Sladen were challenging with their dream of fame. Could they prevail? Caroline’s heart clotted with doubt.
“Now you can see why I like New Orleans,” Charlie said to Caroline. “Can you get more exotic than this?”
“Superstition in action,” John Sladen said with a yawn. “Let’s get some sleep.”
They did not understand. They did not even come close to understanding. Was it because they were men? Trained to think and not feel? While she could do both? Back at the St. Charles Hotel, Caroline was awake until dawn, filling her journal with what she had seen—and understood. Fame in a murderous struggle with evil.
FIVE
“IT’S THE VILEST BOOK I’VE ever read. A slander from cover to cover!”
Julia Gardiner Tyler was seated on the veranda of Sherwood Forest’s white-pillared main house in Charles City County, Virginia. She was no longer the slim beauty of her White House reign. Five children had added matronly curves to her figure, but her face was still a worthy subject for any painter’s brush. It was the fall of 1853 and a new president was in the White House—Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire. But his pronouncements on the topics of the day won little attention. Everyone in the country was discussing the book that Julia Tyler was denouncing with such vehemence—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by a hitherto obscure New England writer named Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“Calm yourself, my dear,” said former president Tyler. “No sensible person believes a word of it. Wouldn’t you agree, Senator Stapleton?”
“Unquestionably, Mr. President. But I worry about how many sensible people we’ve got on the voting rolls,” George Stapleton said.
“What do you think, Caroline?” Julia asked.
“I think it’s a monster that’s likely to haunt all our days and nights.”
“Why do you say that, Mrs. Stapleton?” Tyler asked.
“Because it casts the quarrel about slavery as a fable of sin within a chosen country and the wrongs permitted by God to prepare us for redemption. For anyone who’s religiously inclined, it makes rational argument irrelevant.”
Caroline had already read Uncle Tom’s Cabin twice. She planned to read it again. It was one of the most fascinating books she had ever encountered. No one seemed to see its inner message. Southerners exploded with rage at its crude attack on slavery. Northerners gasped with disbelief at the cruelties the author seemed to expose. Only Caroline saw it was the cry of a tormented soul, trying to understand how a supposedly benevolent God would allow such evil to exist in the world He created.
The Tyler’s liveried butler, Daniel, emerged on the porch with another pitcher of ice-filled lemonade. “But anybody who’s ever visited a plantation knows there never was an overseer like Simon Legree—or a slave like Uncle Tom,” John Tyler said. “Not to mention George, Eliza, and Topsy.”
“Unfortunately, only a handful of Northerners have ever visited a plantation,” Senator Stapleton said.
Caroline heard the weariness in his voice and felt a stir of pity—mingled with savage triumph. For the senator, the presidential election of 1852 had been an excruciating reminder of his wife’s powers of political prophecy. The Democrats had done exactly what Caroline had predicted they would do—they took a leaf from the Whigs’ book of election tricks and nominated a former general. But it was not former general George Stapleton. It was former general Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a handsome vacuity with a wife who was equally stupid.
“I met Mrs. Stowe at a lecture she gave in New Jersey,” Caroline said. “She impressed me as an utterly driven woman, haunted by theological anxiety.”
Julia Tyler stared blankly. She had never had a moment of theological anxiety in her self-assured life. Not even her father’s violent death had given her more than a spasm of routine grief.
Caroline treasured the six-months-old memory of her encounter with Mrs. Stowe. After her lecture, Caroline had given a reception for her at Bowood. As the guests departed and the famous writer was waiting for her carriage, Caroline had said, “I suspect you don’t believe in God any more than I do, Mrs. Stowe.”
Mrs. Stowe had blanched to the color of a table napkin. “There are times when I doubt Him extensively,” she said. “But His saving grace has invariably restored me.”
It was another memory Caroline could not share with anyone, neither Sarah Polk nor George Stapleton nor Julia Tyler—nor her partner in the struggle between fame and evil, John Sladen. She was here at Sherwood Forest in pursuit of the fame Sladen had promised her, a wary husband beside her. Caroline had returned to George’s bed—or to put it more exactly, permitted George to return to hers. It had been an easy quarrel to resolve, once she realized how readily her evil heart allowed her to impersonate forgiveness and reconciliation.
It had been equally easy to reconstitute her Washington salon and invite Julia Gardiner and her husband to shine at its first evening. Dolley Madison was dead, Sarah Polk was in ignominious silence in Nashville, and Jane Pierce was a recluse who rarely emerged from her bedroom. Julia was delighted to become the first lady of Washington society again. .
But always, as Caroline had long since learned, there was the unexpected event, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It had transformed the slavery quarrel from an argument among political and religious theorists to an earthquake that was shaking hundreds of thousands of households in the North. Three hundred thousand copies of the book had already been sold. A stage version was playing in a thousand theaters. Hatred of slavery and of the South was sweeping the North like an epidemic of some virulent fever that could lead to madness and civil war.
Southerners had responded with anti—Uncle Tom’s Cabin novels, which no one bothered to read. What was needed was an answer from someone who could attract national attention. That person was sitting only a few feet away from Caroline. “Have you seen the open letter those English noblewomen have sent to the women of the South?” Caroline asked.
“No!” Julia said. “We get only a local paper down here. It has no news worth mentioning in it”
“This is not the sort of news a Southern paper would print,” Caroline said.
She produced the clipping from the New York Tribune and handed it to Julia, who read it aloud to the company. It was an appeal to Southern women to take the lead in persuading their men to abolish slavery. The authors were the Countess of Derby, the Duchess of Sutherland, the Viscountess Palmerston, and Lady John Russell. Their husbands were all prominent English politicians. To substantiate their case against slavery, they quoted Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
President Tyler, who had experienced British arrogance firsthand in his attempts to settle the Texas and Oregon disputes, exploded like a Fourth of July rocket. He treated them to ten minutes of fervid oratory on perfidious Albion.
“What we need is some American woman of equal rank to give these ladies a serious reply,” Caroline said. “It could also be a response to Mrs. Stowe, without getting into a direct argument with her.”
“I’ll do it!” Julia Tyler said. “If you’ll assist me, Caroline.”
“You’ll have my assistance—and Senator Stapleton’s as well,” Tyler said.
“No!” Julia said. “I think this should be written to women—by women.”
“Mr. President, I think we’ve been outvoted, disenfranchised—and dismissed,” George said. “This might be a good time to give me a shot at some of those ducks you say are thick on the river at this time of year.”
“I agree wholeheartedly, Senator,” Tyler said. “Let us make a dignified retreat—before we’re routed.”
Caroline waited until the men were out of earshot. “I trust you realize the honor of our sex is at stake here, as well as the honor of the South. This must be done well, if it is to be done at all.”
“Let’s get to work,” Julia said.
They retired to Sherwood Forest’s libra
ry, and soon dozens of pages were covered with Julia’s precise penmanship. They worked after supper and after breakfast and dinner the following day, and the day after that, Caroline correcting and suggesting, Julia responding. Finally it was completed, and Julia read it aloud to ex-president Tyler and Senator Stapleton.
Julia began by admitting that slavery was a difficult system to defend. It had “grave political disadvantages” and was “the one subject on which there is a possibility of wrecking the bark of the Union.” But she denied that the system was bestiality in the flesh and questioned the right of these upper-class British women to intervene in an American domestic problem. She declared that compared to the white denizens of London’s appalling slums, the Southern Negro “lives sumptuously.” He had warm clothing, plenty of bread, and meat twice a day. She admitted that slave families were sometimes separated but insisted it was a comparatively rare occurrence. Her husband, who owned more than a hundred slaves, had never separated a family in his fifty years as a master.
She then took the offensive and accused these ladies of mouthing the opinions of their powerful husbands, who had ulterior motives for their abolitionist crusade—the breakup of the American Union, which would guarantee Britain’s world power. Julia reminded the titled ladies that the English were the ones who first enslaved the African and brought him to America. She urged them to concentrate their charitable impulses on the destitute and impoverished people of their own country—particularly the Irish, who had recently experienced a famine that had claimed over a million victims.
“Spare from the well-fed Negroes of the United States one drop of your superabounding sympathy to pour into that bitter cup, which is overrunning with sorrow and tears,” Julia continued. “Go, my good Duchess of Sutherland, on an embassy of mercy to the poor, the stricken, the hungry, and the naked of your own land—cast in their laps the superflux of your enormous wealth; a single jewel from your hair, a single gem from your dress, would relieve many a poor female of England who is now cold and shivering and destitute.”
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