Rosetta had already gone to Oberlin. The boys were ready for trades. Fine, educated boys. “But they must learn a trade,” I’d say. I worried they were too proud. Too proud to take off their coats and chop wood. Too proud to get dirty, work among laborers. They kept saying they be Frederick Douglass’ sons. As though that made life easier. “They still colored,” I say.
Rosetta say, “I want to teach.” That be fine. She could teach colored children. Teach her babies book-learning. Unlike me.
I’d like to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Annie reads it to me. She be my dream child. If it weren’t for her, I’d tell Cousin Time, “Stop fooling. Tell Mister Death to come on.” But Annie, by her own self, could make Time fly with happiness.
I told Freddy he could do what he wanted with the other children. But Annie, my late-in-life child, I’d school as Mam schooled me. I insisted Pastor teach her letters. Freddy thought I didn’t understand the importance of learning. But I did. My children lived in a different world.
With Rosetta gone, the boys at school, making mischief like boys do, me and Annie made a pair. We sang spirituals. She read me the Bible. We cooked. Gardened. Told each other tales. Sometimes I felt scared at how happy I be. Eleven years, Annie’d been in my life. Eleven years, she’d never left home. Never wanted to go. Yet, that didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in doing, in living life full.
Annie was always up under me. Curious. Wanting to know how to make fancy cakes, not plain cakes, how to snip flowers and feed them syrup-water to make them last longer. How to starch curtains so they flapped like angel’s wings. How to make a seed ball for birds to eat in winter. “How do you? How do you?” Questions until my head tired. It be Annie who kissed my brow, brought a blanket when I was cold. Annie—young enough not to be embarrassed saying, “I love you, Mam.”
It be Annie who brought life home from the wild forest. A twig with a spider’s web. A leaf with a cocoon attached. Ants in a box, burrowing in dirt.
It be Annie who wanted to know the old tales: horn-footed devil, skeletons in the sea, spirits of the dead. Even though Mam’s dead, she ain’t dead. I pointed out the star I thought she’d be. The breeze that flapped the curtain when we were stirring grits. “Sometimes,” I told Annie, “Mam be the ladybug, pausing on the porch step.”
In the afternoon, me and Annie rocked in our chairs. Content not to say nothing. Just enjoy the day. After a while, all the animals came visiting. Butterflies hovered. A buck and doe wandered onto the grass. An eagle glided past the roof; we could see its blinking eye. Annie liked ladybugs best. I told her they be good luck if they landed on you. Never told her the old rhyme: “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children are gone.” Seem like we went through that. Before Annie was born.
Annie be the good luck child. No sorrow in her. The promise of a summer morn.
Annie reminded me of me. Before I became a housekeeper. Before I Miz Frederick Douglass.
Freddy didn’t argue when I insisted Annie stay home. Maybe he afraid another white woman schoolteacher send his second girl home too! Maybe he tired from supporting five children and a wife. Cheaper for Annie to stay home. Maybe he knew I wouldn’t back down. Maybe he knew he owed me for years and years of lonely days.
Whatever the reason, I’m glad Annie stayed. I needed her more than she needed me.
Ottilie
“Douglass was going to lose all
because of one unthinking white man.”
—OTTILIE ASSING,
DIARY ENTRY, 1859
“John Brown was a martyr.”
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
NEWSPAPER EDITORIAL, 1861
Rochester
John Brown will get you killed,” I told Douglass. “He’ll get you killed.”
The two had been meeting regularly. Sometimes in Boston, sometimes in Rochester. I distrusted Brown from the start. Ascetic, thin beyond pleasing, rangy and tall. Some say he looks like the politician Lincoln. Except Lincoln has warmth in his eyes. Brown’s eyes are ice. Stone cold.
“Don’t you see how Brown is using you?”
“I’m a grown man of intelligence, Ottilie.”
“I’m not questioning your intelligence. I’m questioning Brown’s.” Indeed, I shuddered when Brown raised his Bible high into the air, proclaiming, “God’s will. Killing to free the slaves is God’s will. Look to the Israelites.”
If Papa was alive, he’d argue history shouldn’t dictate present actions. Papa and Mama both believed in the healing power of love. But what offended me most was Brown’s proclamation, “I am the black people’s Moses.” Such arrogance. Moses, the black driver I first met in America, was more special than this lunatic Brown.
I caressed Douglass’ arm. “Don’t you see? Militancy will make it harder for the slaves.”
“How long, Ottilie? How long? Over twenty years, I’ve been working to free the slaves. Over a hundred years, black bodies have been sold, bartered, and exchanged. Violence may be necessary.”
“This isn’t like you.”
“How do you know? This is me. Angry. Irate. Disgusted by the slow pace. Politics, appealing to whites’ better nature has no effect.”
“Come, Douglass. Let me soothe you.”
He looked at me so angrily, I stepped back.
I’d risked the journey to see Douglass in winter, because my body missed him. I’d risked the journey because I’d heard Brown was in New England enlisting supporters and their money for his “holy war.” I’d risked the journey because only a few months ago, Douglass (foolishly!) let Brown stay in his home and write a new constitution for a free slave territory. I’d risked the journey because I needed him. Needed Douglass to keep himself safe.
“Don’t you see? Anti-Brown supporters have already burnt your home, threatened your children. Don’t you see? Violence begets violence.”
“Wouldn’t you be as militant for the suffragette cause?”
“Picketing isn’t the same as raising a gun.”
“Brown understands the pain of black people.”
“Nonsense.”
Douglass’ sigh was a moan. The sound was wrenched from him. “It makes sense to me.”
“What?”
“It makes sense to me. Just as I fought Covey, Brown is encouraging the race to rise up.”
“Douglass—”
“Sssh, Ottilie.” He kissed me tenderly.
“You’re tired. You look tired,” I said.
“Yes. Bone-weary. Heartsore. Every breath I take as a free man is borne on the backs of slaves. How can I enjoy freedom? Twenty years. I’ve talked myself hoarse. Twenty years. No change. I think Miss Tubman does more with her Underground Railroad than I’ve ever done.”
“Not true.”
He clasped me in his arms. I could feel his strength, almost crushing me, taking my breath away. I caressed his hair. “Douglass, Douglass,” I said.
He pulled back. Tears were in his eyes. “War, Ottilie. There’ll be war.”
“If there is, let the president be the one to start it. Not Brown. He only wants to be a martyr.”
“Don’t we all.”
“What are you saying?” I shuddered. “You’re not planning anything foolish?”
“No more foolish than a white man capturing slaves. No more foolish than another white man believing he’s their savior.”
He blinked like a curtain drawn, a scene shift in a play. He blinked. Firelight shone in his eyes. He blinked and became a shadow of himself.
He picked up his coat and gloves. “I must go. Anna isn’t well.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Tasted blood. I wanted to shout, “Stay!” Instead I said, “Give her my regards.”
Head cocked, face blank, he replied, “I’ll do that.” Then, he opened the door and left.
I stood, shocked and still, in a hotel room. Snow fell outside and I could imagine Douglass, ever proud, walking to his carriage. Only later did I find the money he’d l
eft beneath the tea service. It made me feel like an unused whore.
John Brown. Such a simple name. Anything but a simple man.
John Brown built a shack in the Carolinas. Whispered to free black men, whispered to slaves, “Armageddon is here.” Oh, what an uprising he planned. Nothing less than the murder of every slave owner. Including their wives and children. “Everyone who participates in slavery is a sinner. Wrath to all of them.”
Wrath. John Brown thought he was God’s wrath. The sin of pride he had.
“Hills will keep us safe. A single man can hold off a hundred in the hills.” So, the slaves believed. Some equipped with picks, shovels. Some with guns.
This was the story as I’d heard it:
John Brown led a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. But before that, there’d been warnings. In Kansas, bloody Kansas, the ground ran red. He fought to keep slavery out of the territory.
In Kansas, John Brown shot a man to death. With a broadsword, he hacked to bits two others. They say, “Pieces were licked and chewed by the dogs.” Cruel. Barbaric beyond measure.
Brown said he was establishing a black utopia in the hills. Another Underground Railroad for fugitives. But his grand design was reduced to war. Brown’s small army was on the move. Hiding, ducking, and skirting capture in the South. They disguised their real plan: an attack on the military arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. “We’ll arm every slave. They’ll be a rise of swarming bees,” declared Brown, who crazily argued that Douglass should join him, become “queen bee” to control the swarming blacks.
Douglass said, “No.” For the record, he refused Brown’s call to arms. Refused to follow the words of a man he’d lost faith in.
October 16, 1859
Brown and a group of twenty-two seized the arsenal. Two men were sent out to rally the slaves to revolt. Revolt never came. The army surrounded the arsenal. All Brown’s troops were either killed or captured. Brown was bound, cursing slave owners to Hell, raging like the Devil himself.
And, oh, what hell he wrought.
For days, weeks, months, all throughout the South, whites were in the grip of insanity. Slaves found life much, much harder than before. For the German papers, I told of the vicious attacks on helpless people. Told of heartrending screams. Beatings. The rash of hangings. Every slave, age six to eighty-six, was capable of revolt. Every girl child or old woman was capable of mixing poison. So, no male was left unmarked, no woman untouched by suspicion.
“John Brown will get you killed.”
Douglass was in danger. A note from him was found in Brown’s papers:
“My dear Cpt. Brown, I am very busy at
home. Will you please, come up with my son
Fred and take a mouthful with me?”
The note was published in the nation’s papers. Virginia, Philadelphia, New York. Never mind that it had been written two years before. Virginia’s Governor Wise insisted that President Buchanan send soldiers to arrest Douglass. The charge: “Inciting Servile Insurrection.” To my mind, this was payment for all the times Douglass stood proudly as a man.
History repeats.
“Flee, flee!” I shouted at Douglass. “Flee. Flee,” said abolitionists. Even Garrison begged Douglass to “Flee. They’ll hang you for certain.”
Run for your life.
No time for long good-byes. Run, Douglass. I’ll run with you.
He was in New York when the headlines of his presumed betrayal hit. He stole away to my rooms in Hoboken and spent an anxious, waiting time. How I tried to comfort him. He was the fugitive again. He’d done nothing to help Brown’s raid, but here he was tormented. Blamed.
In the morning, I took a carriage with him as far as Paterson, New Jersey. Douglass took the train with a connection to Rochester. But he wasn’t safe. It was only a matter of days before the Rochester papers printed his letter.
Amy Post carried a letter from William Still, a colored, famous for his Underground Railroad work, warning Douglass to get out. Flee, it said. Run, nigger, run. Douglass left his house. Kissed his family good-bye. Took a boat to Canada.
I never got a good-bye. Not a word. Never got to say good-bye as weeks later, from Canada, he sailed across the Atlantic.
And whom should he meet in England? Julia Griffiths. A “kind” friend, the type who left notes unsigned, wrote and told me.
Julia, now married to Reverend Crofts. But that didn’t matter. Pastor, so liberal in his thinking, would graciously tolerate his wife’s wonderfully famous paramour. So jealous I was. Julia and Frederick! I told myself: “Love is free.” This was the principle my mother and the Romantics taught me. Still I fumed, reading that Douglass was the Crofts’ guest through Christmas and all through January. I wondered if Anna’s illiteracy meant she experienced less pain than I? After all, how would she know of the insinuations, the gossip written in the two-faced spirit of friendship? The lingering touches, the kiss witnessed by a serving girl. The rumors of doors flying open at night … of ghosts ever so tangible, moving from bedroom to bedroom.
I, so smart (not smart enough!), had long known I was not the only (nor even the first) mistress of Frederick Douglass.
Mother married Father and they both loved true. Wasn’t that the Romantic Ideal? Anna never had it. Neither did I.
Or am I just becoming proletarian? I should’ve married William. Been a grocer’s wife.
December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged.
In Britain’s Mechanic’s Hall, Douglass gave a speech, reaffirming himself as a self-made man: “I decide my own course.”
I crumpled the paper and burnt it in my fireplace.
I waited a year.
Then I went looking for him.
Anna
“He ain’t here.”
—ANNA DOUGLASS, 1859
“I should have been there to support your mother.”
—FREDERICK DOUGLASS,
WRITING TO ROSETTA, 1860
Rochester
He ain’t here.” “He ain’t here.” When the militia came. When curious neighbors came. When church gossips came. I said what I got used to saying the last twenty years: “He ain’t here.”
I was glad Freddy was gone. He could be hanged. Limbs loose. Tongue black. Freddy could be hanged, side by side, with John Brown.
I never cared for Brown. He came in my house like he was God or an angel at least. He gonna free the slaves with war. Hallelujah! Why he think slaves gonna follow him? A colored man gets hit twice for each lash given to a white. Sometimes the white man don’t even get punished. Just hang the colored man. Liked they were trying to hang Freddy, saying he was a traitor.
Give America its due: John Brown was hanged. Good riddance, I say. But Rosetta say some papers now called Freddy a “cowardly runaway.” Abolitionists had been swayed to violence. Brown be a martyr. A hero. Freddy, a weak link for the cause. I be so angry. Freddy been speaking all his life against slavery.
Rosetta say, “Mr. Henry Thoreau gave a speech: A Plea for John Brown.”
Everybody North weeped, then rallied to fight. Brown dead, they could now destroy the colored man.
I told Rosetta to write Freddy and tell him to stay safe, law-abiding. To keep quiet ’til he was sure who his friends be. Abolitionists couldn’t be trusted no more.
Lewis came home bloodied one day. Said he fought to prove “Father wasn’t a coward.”
Mercy. My boys too eager to fight. Feeling shame when their Daddy be a good, upright man. Strange world—when abolitionists called the one who felt slavery’s lash a “no-account” weakling. Coward. They would’ve loved him better if he was hung?
I thought Freddy was smart to survive.
I was pleased to say, “He ain’t here.”
“He ain’t here. Ain’t here.”
“Isn’t. Isn’t here.” Rosetta kept correcting me. The words became a sore: “Freddy ain’t here.”
All winter, my mind was on Freddy. I worried sick even though he wrote Rosetta saying he was saf
e in England at the Croftses, with Julia (born Griffiths) and her Reverend husband. Good Christian people. They had opened their home and I was grateful. The scent of war in the air and my boys, tall as oaks, be sniffing the breeze like hounds on a hunt. I wanted Freddy to tell Freddy Junior to stop shooting cans in the yard. Wanted him to scold Charles and Lewis for battling with sticks instead of doing their chores. Many a time, Annie cleaned a grate for Charles, laid down clean straw when the boys were deciding how best to stab a man. Like John Brown, my boys say, “When the first shot is fired, all the slaves are going to rise up.”
“Ain’t that simple,” I told them. “Otherwise would’ve happened.”
The boys roll their eyes. I’m a woman, don’t understand much, but I understood keeping my family alive.
But still. I was blind.
I was so busy fretting, I didn’t see him. Didn’t see Mister Death sliding in the back door (pretending he Father Christmas). He took a good long look at Annie.
It was a cold. A simple cold. Annie, hazel-eyed, curly-haired, my sweet baby girl, one day couldn’t rise from her bed. Couldn’t even rise to eat her Christmas orange or sing carols with the boys. Rosetta calmed me. Told me, “Never fear.” For a while, I didn’t.
Rosetta read stories of Sir Gawain, blessed with purity of heart. “Goodness never died,” read Rosetta. “Goodness brings great strength.”
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