The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Thomas had asked at the Cincinnati House after his friends from Massachusetts, but no one there knew any of them, or rather, everyone at the Cincinnati House who had been in Lawrence for any time at all was ill, and everyone still on his or, mostly, her feet was almost as new to the country as we were. Mr. Graves himself, afraid of infection, only called in at the window—he wouldn’t by any means enter the door. At the Stearns establishment, we were told that almost everyone was at Big Spring for the day, making up a government for the Free Staters to war against the illegitimate government that the Missourians had forced upon the State. I have to say that I heard all this, sometimes sitting in Mr. Graves’s wagon and sometimes leaning against it, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was too busy staring at the building here, the business there, the animals and people walking to and fro from here to there. There was a kind of New England righteousness about it, about the way that the town looked and the way that the people carried themselves. Thomas, who had been a bit of an odd but intriguing duck in Quincy, looked right at home here.

  Thomas did not let either the undesirability of the Cincinnati House or the absence of his friends perturb him now that he was in Kansas, and I found myself taking on some of his equanimity. As we rode down from the top of Mount Oread with Mr. Graves, a man passed us on horseback, and Thomas said, in a voice entirely unsurprised, "There’s Bisket now. Hello, Bisket!"

  Mr. Bisket was an exceedingly tall and thin young man, certainly no older than I. His long arms and legs seemed to gangle around the compact dimensions of his pony. He drew to a halt. "Newton! We stopped looking for you and thought sure you were dead! But you an’t! Halleluia!"

  Mr. Bisket turned his horse and walked alongside our wagon in the deepening evening gloom. Thomas turned to me. "Well, Bisket," he said, "I was delayed in Quincy with Howell, and so I found myself getting married! Lydia, my dear, this is Bisket, Charles Bisket! He’s a member of our company! Bisket, my wife, Lydia Newton!"

  Mr. Bisket leaned over and extended one of his wandlike hands in my direction. I could see that Mr. Graves was waiting to be introduced, as well, just as if he were one of the family. I said, "We’ve been taken under the wing of Mr. David Graves, here."

  "David B. Graves, David B. Graves." Mr. Graves grinned and took the wand into his own paw. Even though Mr. Bisket had generally adopted the garb of the west—blue jean trousers, a blue shirt, a red neckerchief, and a hat with a large brim, the two men looked as if they belonged to different kingdoms—one animal and one plant, perhaps. Mr. Bisket declared that we had missed it this time.

  "What’s that?" said my husband.

  "Well, now. The new governor’s come in the last few days, and they love him up in Westport, and he loves them, too. He’s all for the bogus legislature, and he told those fellows up there that it would be well for Kansas and Missouri institutions to harmonize! He’s proslave all the way!" Mr. Bisket glanced suddenly at David B. Graves, who adopted a look of bland impenetrability.

  Thomas said, "What about our claims?"

  "Aw, that’ll be okay. That’ll work out fine in the end. But I wish I would have gone up to Big Spring for the convention. I bet that was something!" I rather thought that the presence of Mr. Graves, though, modified his enthusiasm.

  "Bisket, here’s my wife! Do we have a place to live?"

  "Well, I’m staying at the Jenkinses’ house in town tonight, and you can stay there with me, and then we’ll see about tomorrow when the others come back. It an’t far—just a little ways up here on Vermont Street."

  He led us off the road we were traveling, and in a few minutes we found ourselves in front of one of those leaning buildings. He said, "It an’t bad here in this weather. Hot and dry makes the hay smell kind of sweet. It’s something in one of them Kansas storms, though. There was one just after we got here that wasn’t like anything I ever saw before in my life for thunder and lightning. Two houses got struck—it come right down the roof beam—and two children got stunned practically to death. They were just sitting there for the longest time, then they got up and started staggering around, and one of them thought she was back in Massachusetts for two days. Lucky they weren’t killed, everybody said. Here’s Mrs. Bush. You remember Mrs. Bush, Newton."

  He dismounted as a handsome, full-figured woman with a youthful face but pure-white hair came through a piece of cloth—a tablecloth, maybe— that had been hung for a door. "Mrs. Bush! Look who turned up! Tom Newton an’t dead, after all! And he’s got himself a wife from Illinois, to boot!"

  Then some other women and another man came out of the building with lamps and candles, and pretty soon we were unloading everything, including the box of "harness," and not long after that I saw Thomas give Mr. Graves four dollars for carrying all of our things, and then he was gone, and I wondered for just a moment if we would see him again—but that was a lesson I learned about K.T.: for all the thousands of folks who came in and passed through and went back to the States, for all the strangers that you looked on every day, there were plenty you thought you would never see again who turned up time after time.

  Mrs. Bush and two of the other women, Mrs. Jenkins and her daughter, Susannah, made much of Thomas, for it appeared that everyone really did think that he had been killed by the Missourians, because no evil deed seemed to be beyond those devils. "Why, there’s a free Negro in town," said Mrs. Bush as she stirred together some corncake batter, "a young man who’s got a claim not far from ours, and they’ve been threatening to go out there and take him back to his master, but they don’t know who his master is! He doesn’t have a master, but you can be sure they’ll find him one! They hate the sight of a free Negro!"

  It was a warm night after an, exceedingly warm day, though a hearty breeze blew through the leaning house and set all the doors and windows to rattling. The house possessed a stove, but the stovepipe stopped a few feet above our heads, and the smoke was meant to issue out of one of the openings at either end of the ceiling. Perhaps because of this unorthodox arrangement, or the wind, or both, the stove was difficult to light, and it took some time for the corncakes to be cooked. The three ladies were friendly and eager for conversation. They asked all about me, and Mrs. Jenkins whispered to me at one point, "Oh, my dear, everyone is so fond of Thomas Newton! He is a good, sober man!"

  Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins, it turned out, were out at Big Spring, at the convention, and the women didn’t know whether to expect them that night or the next day. "But whenever they come," declared Mrs. Bush, "I guarantee you they’ll have done some business, because they were fit to be tied when they left. You know about the gag law?"

  I did not. I didn’t know anything about Kansas politics to speak of, but I quickly learned, because that was all anyone talked about. When Thomas and I arrived, even though K.T. had been open to settlement only a few months, events had very much begun.

  Mrs. Bush pushed up her sleeves and opened the throat of her bodice another button, then hitched up her skirt. When she saw me staring, she laughed and said, "Lydia, Kansas is no place for gowns and petticoats! I an’t going to burn up, is what the women from Missouri say when they cut off their skirts, and for once they’re right! And you’re always having to raise your skirts anyway, owing to the tobacco spittle! Anyway, there’s a law coming in one of these days—"

  "In nine days, on the fifteenth," interjected Susannah, who had finally gotten the fire going and was now giving the corncakes another stir.

  "—that says that if you even talk about freeing slaves, or write about it, or bring a paper like The Liberator into the territory, you can be put to death for it!"

  "Oh, Helen," said Mrs. Jenkins. "Surdy not for just subscribing to The Liberator."

  "Yes, indeed! Doesn’t Garrison advocate freeing the slaves? Doesn’t he advocate conspiring together to do so? There you are. Ten days from now, if they see that paper in your hands, they could arrest you and put you to death."

  We contemplated this. I wondered if Thomas, who I knew was carrying
some eastern papers in his bag, was aware of this law.

  "And," said Mrs. Bush, "if you so much as give a fugitive a drink of water, that’s hard labor for ten years!"

  She flipped the cakes, which were now smoking on the griddle. "But listen to this! This is the worst! You get two years of hard labor just for saying that someone in K.T. doesn’t have a right to hold slaves! I swear!"

  "Helen," said Mrs. Jenkins. "Don’t swear."

  "And if someone gets convicted of one of these offenses, not even the governor can pardon him."

  "That shows they an’t sure of the governor."

  "Well, they weren’t sure of Reeder, but they’re sure of this Shannon." She turned to me. "He’s the new governor. He’s one of them."

  "That Stringfellow is the worst," said Susannah. "He will print anything in that paper of his. It scares me."

  "It don’t scare me," said Mrs. Bush. "It just makes me mad. That cup and saucer are mismatched, Lydia, dear. All my cups and saucers from England that I got for my wedding, all but three cups and two saucers from two different sets, were smashed on the way here. I’m sure I’d like this place better if that hadn’t happened."

  She handed me a cup of tea and a plate of corncakes. I set them on a tiny table at my elbow, which looked to be made of two boxes set one on top of the other. It was dark, because the candles had blown out in the interior breeze, but my eyes had adjusted. Mr. Bisket, Thomas, and the third man, or boy, came in and sat down. Mrs. Bush handed Thomas a plate of corncakes, too.

  I said that they were delicious.

  "Well," said Mr. Bisket, "you need a big hunger for corncakes if you’re going to live in K.T. Though I saw that Mr. Stearns has butter and eggs and apples and plums in his new store."

  "If they’d stick to that store and give over speculating, they might have a business someday," said Mrs. Jenkins, "But half the time both of them are out. Here’s what I think: They say claims are the making of this country, but to me they’re the breaking of it. Nobody wants to settle down to business, because everybody’s distracted by some venture or scheme. And you can’t build this or you can’t plant that, because it might end up that what you think is your claim an’t it at all, and you’ve got to give up what you built or planted to someone you’ve never seen before!"

  Everyone present clucked sympathetically, and later Susannah confided to me that her father had built a nice twelve-by-twelve cabin on their claim outside of town, only to be sued by another claimant for the same bit of property. "We ended up losing the cabin and twenty rods of fencing, and that did set my father back, you know. Kind of took the wind out of his sails."

  "How could you lose your claim?" I asked. "I thought if you claimed it, it was yours. And who is Reeder?"

  "Oh, my dear," caroled Mrs. Bush. "Here you are just arrived, and we talk to you as if you know everything there is to know! We’ve been here a little over a month ourselves, and we feel like old settlers! Reeder was the territorial governor, but they drove him out. You must get to know Dr. Robinson. He is our Winthrop, you know. He seems to have come out here a hundred years ago, but really, he only claimed Lawrence a year ago July. Isn’t that something? Look how far along we are after only a year and a month!"

  Indeed, events moved with considerably more swiftness in K.T. than ever they did in Quincy. Already the territory had finished up one governor (Reeder, the one the Missourians apparently didn’t like) and had just received the second (Shannon, the one the Missourians apparently did like). Already an election had been held (the previous March), and already a scandal had ensued from it. Most of the voters had come over, or been brought over, from Missouri, and they had elected their own slate of nonresident officials, who had, already, made a mess of things, according to Mrs. Bush and the Jenkins ladies. "Those who can read," claimed Mrs. Bush, "are generally too drunk to do so, and they made a terrible botch of the territorial constitution—"

  "It’s not a botch, Helen, it’s a crime!" said Mrs. Jenkins. She turned to me. "My dear, it is a constitution written in the H— of slavery for the imposition of that H— upon others! A sane person cannot read it, simply cannot! Mr. Jenkins tried four times to get through it. It gave him a fever, and he was down for three days. My true feeling is that if he had not tried to read that constitution when he did, we wouldn’t have lost our claim!"

  Mrs. Bush gave me a skeptical glance, but said, "Perhaps not, my dear."

  But the Free-Soil party, to which all my new acquaintances belonged, and which had been surprised and overwhelmed in the spring, was stronger now. "Look at us!" said Mrs. Bush. "We swell the ranks. My own opinion is that Dr. Robinson is far too kind a man, and far too good. He was unprepared by his own virtues for the sheer malice of the other side. And Eli Thayer! Well, he is a cousin of Mr. Jenkins’s mother’s cousin, and I’ve met him, and say what you will about this money and that money, and how much he has and how he got it, he is an innocent babe!"

  I said, "Thomas mentioned Mr. Thayer."

  "He’s our benefactor!" said Susannah. "He founded the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company. He’s a terrific abolitionist!"

  "Such an inspiration," added Mrs. Bush.

  I didn’t know what to think. These people were all so friendly and warm and welcoming, and the leaning house was breezy and quaint, and the corncakes were hot and delicious, but every word that they spoke amazed me. It wasn’t just what they reported—I didn’t doubt for a minute that the men who had challenged us the night before were full of menace and hatred, and that wherever they came from, there were plenty more like them. I didn’t know why the three Missourians had threatened us and then ridden away. But the strangest thing was how differently I saw things in K.T., even after but one or two days, than I had seen them in Illinois. Every river town is full of braggarts and ruffians; Illinois was full of wild-talking Roland Breretons, whose fathers and uncles were from Kentucky and Tennessee. But what I had known about such types—that they would go so far into violence and no farther, that the talk was all—I no longer knew. Rather, it seemed just the reverse—that these new men, or the same men in this new place, preferred hurting us to not hurting us. That was amazing enough, but what was even more amazing was the way my new friends spoke of these events. They deplored them, of course, but in addition to that, if the tones of their voices were to be believed, they were a little thrilled by them. They sounded inured to such things but also fascinated by them, even drawn to them.

  "Who is Stringfellow?" asked Thomas,

  "Ha!" exclaimed Mr. Bisket. "You don’t know Stringfellow? I thought he was famous all over the States. Not so long ago, he made a speech telling his hearers to mark every scoundrel they knew who was in the least bit contaminated with Free-Soilism and exterminate them. He’s always calling for tarring and feathering or lynching or hanging or exterminating or shooting or cutting up or driving out. They love him in Missouri. And his brother’s the speaker of the bogus legislature."

  "That’s not the worst," said Mrs. Bush, and the others nodded, all apparently knowing what the worst was but not daring to say.

  "Remember Park?" said Mrs. Jenkins. "He had a paper over in Missouri, and after the elections he ran an editorial. All it said was that the people in K.T. ought to be allowed to run their own affairs."

  "They attacked his office and threw his presses in the river, and they were about to lynch Patterson, the editor."

  "They had the rope around his neck," said Mrs. Jenkins. "Would have scalped him, too. They do that."

  "But his wife just hung on him and begged for his life."

  "That’s all that saved him," said Mr. Bisket.

  "And he was proslave all the way," asserted Mrs. Bush. "But if you an’t for everything—slavery stealing elections, driving out northern settlers and burning down their houses, and, most of all, extending slavery everywhere—then they hate you as bad as anyone else."

  "There an’t but a handful of slaves over there, anyway, and those are all house slaves. I’m telling you,"
said Mr. Bisket, "a citizen from South Carolina or Louisiana wouldn’t know Missouri was a slave state. And nobody who comes over here to lynch us or burn us out ever actually owns a slave."

  "Well, you know...," said Mrs. Bush.

  "It’s true," said Mrs. Jenkins.

  Susannah blushed, and Mr. Bisket looked at his shoes. Thomas and I exchanged a quizzical glance. After a moment, Mrs. Jenkins said, "Mercy me, you must be tired! I do so wish I could show you a nice chamber with windows and a soft bed! My mother’s house in Ipswich has five bed-chambers! Goodness, I dream about that house as if it were heaven itself! There’s a fireplace in every room." She shook her head. "My mother has such neat ways. It’s almost a failing with her. I don’t know what she’d think of K.T."

  The only possible arrangement, it turned out, was to put up a curtain across the one room of the leaning house and to have the men on one side and the ladies on the other.

  The next day, all the men returned from Big Spring. In addition to Mr. Bush—a little man, smaller than his wife, but with bright, terrier eyes and a cheerful manner—and Mr. Jenkins, who had white hair and a white beard and, beneath his irate manner, an air of resignation, there were four other men, all single: Mr. Smithson, his son, his brother, and Mr. Bush’s nephew, Roger Lacey, who, Susannah told me, had a wife and three children back in Massachusetts, waiting to come out. "But," she whispered, for she was a great whisperer and confider, "he won’t bring her and won’t bring her and keeps saying he’s not ready. Papa says he’s not really all for Kansas, but Mama says he’s not really all for her!" She laughed. We had been sent to the river for water. There were wells, but the leaning house was closer to the river than to the nearest well, and the water was only for washing. We each carried two heavy buckets. "Just wait," said Susannah cheerfully, "till you get out to your claim. You can spend the whole day going after water until you get the well dug."

  She asked me about myself, then said, "Oh, we’re the same age, then. But you seem older, because you’re so tall, maybe. You have beautiful hair. My hair is the bane of my existence, which Mama says is a good thing, because it is a daily rebuke to my vanity. But I don’t see why my vanity needs to be rebuked on a daily basis."