The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  I realized when we lay down for our rest that he wasn’t extremely pleased with me, either, though he was, as always, kind and courteous. He said, mildly, "Mrs. Newton, you always speak up for these western men who have no principles."

  "You mistake them if you think they have no principles—"

  "Principles that are cruel and evil, then, and against Christian charity as well as righteousness."

  "You sound like Mrs. Holmes seeing the work of Satan all around her."

  We settled into our bed tick and pulled up the quilts, for though the days were still warm, the nights were getting cooler. He said, soberly, "I try not to see it that way, but I’m tempted. In what way is the system of slavery not evil incarnate? In what way do the slaveholders not argue like Satan himself, talking themselves and others into seeing good where none exists? They’ve been lying about it for so long that they believe their own lies."

  "But it’s their concern. Slavery is their institution and—"

  "In Kansas, it’s our concern. And anyway, I knew free Negroes in Boston and Medford and on the ship. They were not men that deserved to be excluded."

  "People like to be with their own kind. It’s more comfortable that way for everyone."

  "There’s nowhere I’ve ever been where people may be with their own kind exclusively. And should I consider the Missourians to be my own kind? In what sense? A moral sense? A religious sense? Do they have the same habits as I do? Do they feel a regard for me? Or I for them?"

  "Mr. Graves wasn’t so bad."

  "Mr. Graves was willing enough to do a job for us, and entertaining in his way, but he himself said that when the fighting comes, he intends to stand back and watch. We may count on our friends only." He paused and glanced toward the door, then said, bitterly for him, "Some more than others, it appears."

  My husband nestled down into the bed and pulled the quilts up to his face, as we always did. Even though our bed was on legs and off the ground, there was no telling about the vermin who would come in as soon as we slept.

  But I did not want to let the subject drop. I sat up. "Are you saying that we must associate only with those who think like us in every particular? I don’t know if the Black Law is good in itself or bad. I haven’t thought about it. But perhaps it’s a wise step for the very reason Mr. Bisket stated."

  "So that the other side won’t call us black abolitionists? I am an abolitionist. I don’t mind being called what I am and am proud to be."

  "Husband, you are in the west now, not in Boston. Don’t you realize that westerners hate abolitionists? Abolitionists are people who... who... who keep turning over rocks and making everyone else look at what’s under there or, worse, smell it and touch it. Abolitionists won’t let anyone alone. Westerners hate that."

  "Men and women and children are being sold for profit. They are being beaten and killed, wrenched from their families. Women are being used for breeding, like horses, and their babies are sold away from them. Children are being raised with no sense of God or of their own humanity. People are being treated like animals every day. Every hour of every day!"

  "Since I know you’ve never been in the south, I know that you are getting most of your information from books, and I saw Mrs. Stowe’s book in your case."

  "Is the book wrong?"

  "Surely not entirely wrong, but it’s a story—"

  "If you doubt these things, then, my dear, I am surprised at your ignorance."

  He said this mildly, signaling, I knew at once, that we had arrived at a significant moment in our young marriage, and perhaps in his estimation of me. I had been speaking with fervor but, let’s say, also with good humor, as if all the ground we were on was safe, solid, and well explored. It was not. I knew at once that all his kindness to me, and care of me, and interest in me, which I had come so quickly to rely upon and enjoy, would shift— not in quantity, because he was a kind man, but in quality, because he would see me in a new way and be disappointed. There was a proper answer here, and I had to give it. That I was glad to give it, I immediately realized, told me that I did love my husband, though I hardly knew him. I said, "I don’t doubt them. But I’ve never seen them."

  He nodded his head slightly, acknowledging my reply.

  "You should have asked my sisters. They would have told you I am disputatious."

  "Disputatiousness, even in a woman, even in a wife, is not so unpleasing to me at all. Besides, every woman in Kansas is disputatious."

  "Then I will continue and say what I detest about those Missourians is what they say of us, how they would restrict and injure us. What they do among themselves doesn’t... doesn’t inflame me in the same way."

  We were silent for a few moments. I could tell that he was ready to distinguish between me and Mr. Bisket. I got down into the quilts and laid my head upon his shoulder. Soon after that, I understood that we had agreed to disagree.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Broaden My Acquaintance

  Another branch of good-manners, relates to the duties of hospitality. Politeness requires us to welcome visiters with cordiality; to offer them the best accommodations; to address conversation to them; and to express, by tone and manner, kindness and respect. Offering the hand to all visiters, at one’s own house, is a courteous and hospitable custom; and a cordial shake of the hand, when friends meet, would abate much of the coldness of manner ascribed to Americans. —p. 144

  AFTER THE TOPEKA CONVENTION, our area began to fill up, mostly with folks we knew, or Thomas knew, from back in New England. Many of them, like the Jenkinses and the Bushes, had town lots with some sort of building upon them. Others were in a situation similar to ours—they needed to put up shelter either in town or on their claims before winter. We were one of the few claimers who had built so substantial a cabin; most of our party had been both busy and divided about what to do and where to live, so many of them had simply driven a stake in the middle of what they judged to be a hundred and sixty acres. Since we were all friends, the plan was to adjust things in the spring, at the commencement of planting. Should there be planting. It seemed to me that most of the New Englanders, who had come out to K.T. from towns, weren’t all that eager to get into the country and take up the farming life. Should some mercantile or speculative venture over the winter preserve them from the necessity, I thought most would be relieved.

  Nevertheless, what happened was quite a shock. Mr. Jenkins’s lost claim had been a nice one, along the river. The winner of the dispute was a man of no party except, perhaps, the party of pure self-interest, from Ohio. This man, Mr. James, mostly went his own way, except, of course, he did not want overt conflict with his neighbors, and so we got to know him a bit, and also his wife and child, who was a boy of some four years old. There was no doubt that Mr. James was a hard man and that his wife and child were not built for the country. She was down with the shakes for much of the fall, and the boy was quiet and subdued, seemingly already concerned that he was a disappointment to his father. Mr. James was a very handsome man, with long curling mustaches and thick golden hair, and the wife, whose name was Ivy, looked as though she had been a beauty. I am sure they went to the altar much celebrated and envied. I began to visit Mrs. James every few days, taking along some game each time I went, or wild plums, or honey. Whenever our friends came out from town, they brought us some delicacy or other, because they all liked Thomas so well. Mr. James was such a hard man that most folks bypassed their cabin altogether. Sometimes Mrs. James was strong enough to come to me and drink some tea.

  The track between our cabin and the James cabin meandered through the woodlot and along the river flat. One day, after she had sat down and received her cup of tea, and little Eddie, as well, was seen to, Ivy said, "I see Mr. Jenkins is putting up his cabin at last."

  "If so, then I’m hurt that he hasn’t come by, because I would like to repay him some of the hospitality the Jenkinses showed us in Lawrence."

  "It’s at least sixteen by sixteen. And I saw a window proppe
d up against a tree. I suppose they’re going to have a glass window."

  "Well, their house in town is only a lean-to built of hay. I’m surprised they have the money for something like a window."

  Mr. Jenkins’s new claim, a piece all the members of our party had contributed to, was almost in the middle of the group of claims, and also a piece that all of us knew the location of, including Mrs. James, who was somewhat abashed that her husband had already, or perhaps once again, caused conflict in the community. She wanted only to have friends in a place where he wanted only that others not underestimate him.

  Two days later, I saw the cabin myself, and I also saw that none of those working on it was familiar to me. They were working fast, and the window, indeed a glass one, was already set in place. I was hunting, and soon got onto the track of a turkey, and so forgot the cabin until that evening, when Mr. Bush, Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Bisket came knocking at the door and declared, as soon as they got inside and took off their hats, that some Border Ruffians had jumped the Jenkins claim and were raising a building on it, and furthermore swore that they had three hundred and twenty acres, twice the customary and legal number. Such a large acreage swallowed up everything of the Jenkinses’ and something of everyone else’s as well.

  "They had a Negro woman there working," said Mr. Bisket. "I saw her."

  "You didn’t see anything of the kind," said Mr. Jenkins. "But they’re Missourians for sure."

  "At all events," said Mr. Bush, "they aren’t anyone with our company or anyone we know. It doesn’t matter whether they’ve got ten slaves there or whether they’ve got ten Congregational ministers. They took Jenkins’s claim and some of mine, and some of yours, too, Newton, that bit of a corner there between those two big oaks we marked. I won’t stand for it."

  "We’ve got to make up a party and go over there and see how far the building has gone, and we’ve got to do it first thing tomorrow, before they start moving women and children in," said Mr. Jenkins resolutely.

  "The only woman I saw was that Negro woman," said Mr. Bisket.

  Mr. Jenkins dismissed him with a wave of the hand.

  Thomas said, "Has anyone been over to see them yet?"

  Mr. Jenkins shook his head. "We looked on from the woodlot. I counted five men and a half-grown boy. If there’s going to be an argument, I want to have at least that many men." He paused and looked at his feet for a second. "Though I’ll say this: I don’t think we should go armed for the first talk, or at least well armed. It might be just a misunderstanding."

  "A twenty-by-twenty-foot cabin changes whatever was a misunderstanding into something else, in my opinion," said Mr. Bush, who seemed more exercised by the event than Mr. Jenkins.

  "Mrs. James said she thought it was sixteen by sixteen," I put in.

  "Now, Daniel James might go in with us," said Mr. Bisket.

  "Why would he?" said Mr. Jenkins.

  No one could answer this, so they sat for a moment. Mr. Bisket and Mr. Jenkins pulled out their pipes, and Mr. Bush pulled out his chewing tobacco, then looked at me and put it away. The others lit up.

  "Holmes. Lacey. The Smithsons. We don’t need more than that," said Thomas. "At least for now."

  "One step at a time," said Mr. Jenkins, as if the property weren’t even his. "Maybe I’m better off in town, anyway."

  "Well, I am not going to give away my piece," said Mr. Bush.

  "And," declared Thomas, "if they are Missourians bringing slaves, then we don’t want them in our midst. I care about that more than the property."

  "Then you and I make a good team"—Mr. Bush laughed —"because when it comes right down to it, I care about the property. If they are claiming three hundred twenty acres, well..." He shook his head in disgust, and everyone else smoked in silence. I served tea that Mrs. Jenkins had sent out to me the previous week, steeped in water from our well. I made it weak, so you could see all the way to the bottoms of the cups.

  After everyone had had some tea, Thomas raised the question that interested me. He said, "How could someone start building on your land, Jenkins, and you don’t know it until the cabin’s mostly done?"

  Mr. Jenkins shrugged. "I’ve been in town. Fact is, I lost that other claim and all those improvements, and it took the stuffing right out of me. I don’t have the fire right now to be a farmer. I thought I would plant a crop in the spring and see how it came up, then make up my mind."

  "His land, our land, it doesn’t matter," said Mr. Bush. "Our party’s got all this land spoken for, and the fact is, these folks from Missouri could see that plain as day. The stakes are out there. Your cabin and the Jameses’ cabin are up, and Bisket’s, here, too, and the Holmeses have felled a lot of trees for theirs. This is just Missouri aggression, pure and simple. Pretty soon this’ll be a voting precinct, and it’ll turn out that all five thousand of us have voted for Stringfellow, you mark my words."

  Everyone nodded, including me. This seemed like the truest thing said all evening.

  The others soon left, to go about to the cabins of our other friends. None of the women had come out from Lawrence, and Mr. Bush and Mr. Jenkins were staying the night with Mr. Bisket, whose cabin was now entirely enclosed. At dawn, the plan was, the men would get up and gather at Mr. Bisket’s claim. When they judged that enough of a party had gathered, they would investigate the newcomers in a body.

  I remember getting ready for bed and feeling some surprise that this had come up so suddenly. It didn’t speak well of Mr. Jenkins’s ability to look after his own interests that total strangers had seized his land and established themselves upon it, and he only noticing when everything was more or less complete. I thought of something brother Roland Brereton had sometimes said about why he wasn’t particularly neighborly: "Why should I look after those who can’t look after themselves? When the time comes, they’ll be too behindhand to look after me." But that was Illinois, and this was Kansas, where, as Thomas and I in our separate ways were both coming to know, you had to choose whom there was to choose. Even so, I went to bed in a stimulated but contented state of mind: we’d had company; something interesting was going on; things would work out well enough in the end. And here was Thomas, too. That made things seem fine enough to me.

  Not long after dawn, Thomas rode away on Jeremiah. Not long after that, I got up and began idling about the cabin—smoothing the quilts, driving off the mice and other vermin, sweeping the floors, adding some sticks of wood to the fire we’d kept damped down in the stove all night long. We were well into October, and the nights were, it seemed then, pleasantly cool after the heat of September. The mornings were crisp. I put on an extra shawl and did some chinking of the joints between the logs with a paste of mud, grass, and twigs that I’d mixed together the afternoon before. Then, where the chinking I had done several days earlier had cured, I began carefully to paste up, with flour-and-water paste, leaves of The Liberator and some other papers that Thomas had brought with him from the United States. This, he said, would serve the threefold purpose of advertising our views to our visitors, reminding ourselves of the arguments to be made in the cause, and keeping out the wind. Every leaf, according to the new laws of Kansas Territory, was treasonable.

  Thomas came trotting into the yard late in the afternoon, and he didn’t look happy. I helped him curry Jeremiah and put him in his pen for the night, then we went inside. The fire was still going, so I stoked it up and beat together some corncakes.

  "Holmeses are down with the shakes," he said, as we came into the cabin and he hung up his hat. "Mrs. Holmes is shaking every day. Can hardly get up to feed the children in the morning."

  "I’ll go over there." Neither of us had been eager to improve our acquaintance with the Holmeses, and their claim was far away, though, of course, Jeremiah made any trip short and pleasurable.

  "The Smithsons have put up a mile of fence, but they’re still drinking out of the river." He took off his heavy jacket and hung it below his hat, then he set his rifle beside the door, and too
k the ammunition out of his pocket and looked at it for a second, then put it back into his pocket.

  I waited. He looked at me. He said, "I’m not proud of what went on this morning."

  "No one’s been shot, I hope."

  "Not yet."

  The griddle was hot, and I spooned a bit of grease over it, then some corncake batter. It was lumpy, I knew. I batted at the lumps for a moment. He said, "Well, the fact was, Jenkins was drinking. Bisket said they were up all night after they left here, so there weren’t many cool heads when we gathered this morning, and there was some talk about waiting until tomorrow, but Jenkins wanted to do something by then—"

  "He’d worked himself up to it."

  "Yes, and he wouldn’t talk to Daniel James, claimed this was all his fault, and then James got a little threatening, but he knows he can’t go it alone, and Jenkins knows that he himself is old and James is young and strong. But all the squabbling didn’t cool us off, I must say. And then Bisket fell off his horse. Don’t ask me why—he was behind me—but I think he was that drunk, which wouldn’t take much, since he never had a drop before coming out to K.T."

  We both suddenly smiled, but Thomas sobered in a hurry. "I wish it were funny, but it isn’t. Those Missourians were waiting for us. Been waiting for us, if you ask me."

  I served up the corncakes with some wild plums I’d cut up in honey

  "They picked up their rifles as soon as they saw us, and carried them out to meet us, then they drew up side by side in a long line. Well, I don’t mind telling you they looked like they wanted a fight right there, but I was in the lead, and I kept my head down and just smiled a little like I was making a friendly visit. One man, a short little plug, spoke up and said, ’Lookin’ fur me? This is my claim.’