The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Everyone laughed. Mr. Bisket got red in the face. "They can’t live with us if they think we’re going to steal their slaves every time they turn their backs."

  "They can’t live with us," said Mr. Holmes. "We can’t live with them. We can’t look upon them holding bondmen without going blind to the will of the Lord, nor can we live beside them undirtied by their filth. We have our souls to think of as well as theirs and the souls of their slaves."

  "There an’t one person in ten here in K.T.," said Mr. Bisket, "who thinks like you do, Holmes, and eight of the nine who don’t would like to kill you for that sort of talk. I think if we keep our mouths shut, those slaves’ll disappear from here soon enough. Can’t do anything with them in K.T. They don’t grow cotton here."

  "But," said Thomas, "they grow hemp right over in Missouri, and tobacco, too. Slaves do that work."

  Mr. Bush said, "I give way to no man in my aversion to slavery and the slave power. Eli Thayer is a personal friend of mine, and I feel no less strongly than he does about it. But even so, I hesitate to free a bondman I’ve never met from an owner I don’t know, and send him or her off to a life she may not understand or want. Do we come upon a woman in the night, wrench her from sleep, tell her she’s free, and send her packing? Where does she go? Who are her friends? What funds does she have? I ask myself if I’m prepared to guarantee her for a week or two, to send her to friends. If I’m not, then I’d better not meddle."

  I said, "You might have asked the woman what she wanted to do."

  All the men turned and looked at me. This remark put a stop to the conversation. All in all, I thought, it was no doubt better that the woman had been gone. Northerners, even abolitionists, knew more about how and why to chop down the slavery tree than they ever knew about what to do with its sour fruit.

  There was less discussion, let me say none, about what should be done with the Missourians’ cabin. The Jenkinses moved into it within a few days and did just as we had, though with a degree more satisfaction—they papered over the log-and-mud walls with sheets of the treasonous Liberator. I was pleased to have Mrs. Jenkins and Susannah in the neighborhood, and they immediately became friends with Mrs. James, who was a sweet lady and, Susannah said, not at all like her husband. That the Jenkinses’ new cabin was a considerable improvement over their old one seemed to render them extremely forgiving. Now there was a woman or two every half mile, or even closer. It made the country seem settled and gave our windy cabins a cozy feel.

  I think we all thought we were settled now, that we had passed through a few trials, done some unpleasant but necessary deeds, and established ourselves. Certainly, Thomas and Frank and I felt that way. In the course of our labors, there was much visiting back and forth, sharing tasks, and discussing every little thing.

  Susannah, who now went four or five days between shaking, told me that she liked to come to our cabin above all, and tried to do so every day or two, always bringing along her own bit of tea and a few corncakes, and her own cup and spoon. "You know," she said, "I do like being out here with Mama and Papa, and the cabin is ever so much nicer than the hay house is, but I wonder how my husband is to find me out here. Mama and Papa discussed it the whole night before we came, standing outside the hay house and trying to keep me from hearing." It was true that their place was a little more out of the way than ours, and they had fewer passing visitors.

  I said, "The whole night?"

  "Well, long enough for the subject to become tedious even to me. But they never disagree, you know. When they talk about something, first Papa says one thing, then Mama says another, then Papa says what Mama just said, and Mama says what Papa just said. In this case, Papa said that we couldn’t very well leave the cabin empty, and Mama said that a young, well-grown girl had to be in the way of traffic, not out on the prairie, and then they each said what the other said, and then Papa said, ’Well, what about Mr. Bisket?’ and Mama told him the story about Mr. Bisket."

  "What is the story about Mr. Bisket?"

  "Mr. Bisket courted me for two days some weeks ago."

  "He did?"

  "I suppose so, or maybe he thought so. He came to the hay house and sat beside me, and he asked if I would like to hear a song, and I said that I would, and so he sang ’Camptown Races,’ and then he asked if I would like to hear another, and I said I would, and he sang one I didn’t know, and then some men came in and wanted to talk about Jim Lane, and I suppose that it wasn’t very nice talk, because Papa said they should take their talk elsewhere, and so they did, and Mr. Bisket went with them. But he came back the next day and he sang three more songs—one of them was ’Camp town Races’ again. But you know, I didn’t have a thing to say to him. I’ve just known Mr. Bisket for such a long time, since I was ten and he was fourteen, and I thought it very hard that I should come all this way and after all settle for Charles Bisket, when Mama says there must be four men for every woman in K.T. Mr. Bisket wasn’t considered very enterprising back in Massachusetts. Not nearly so respectable as Mr. Newton."

  Just then, Thomas and Frank came in for their own tea, and our conversation turned to other topics, namely the Jameses. Susannah had stopped there the day before and discovered that Mrs. James’s cow had disappeared. "And you know," she said, "she couldn’t go after it as she might have, because she is in such a condition, and she would have had to carry the boy, and even though he’s not very large, well, he is four, and she isn’t very large herself I told her she might have left the boy off with us, but of course she feels uncomfortable, and so they lost their little cow. She was utterly dejected, and nothing I could do would cheer her up."

  "Cow ken git to Missouri from here," put in Frank, "if it keeps runnin’." This was true. I heard of two or three lost cows being found in Missouri, or so it was said. After Frank and Thomas went out, and Susannah and I were clearing up the cups, she said, "I didn’t want to say this in front of the others, but Mr. James was fit to be tied when he found out the cow was gone. It made me want to leave right there, but I didn’t dare look like I was running away. He has the devil of a temper."

  "Did he abuse her in front of you?"

  "Why, no, and she’s so pretty that you wonder how he ever could, but when he came in, the boy exclaimed, ’Don’t tell Papa about our little cow, don’t tell him!’ and ran and hid in the bed! And then Mrs. James did tell, and he flew out of the house in a rage and didn’t come back while I was there, but she said to me in a low voice, ’He would never hurt us. He has terrible passions, but he would never hurt us. Don’t think that he would!’ Well, after that I left."

  I shook my head, not knowing what to say, then changed the subject. I was torn, for while I didn’t care to be seen as gossiping about my own husband, I knew that Susannah had known him longer than I had, perhaps considerably longer. I hazarded, "Well, if you’ve known Charles Bisket since you were ten, when did you meet Thomas?"

  "Oh, well. Mr. Newton." She glanced out the open door, then looked into my face, then settled her hands on her hips. "He’s not an old friend of ours, like Mr. Bisket. Papa and old Mr. Bisket were schoolboys together, you know. But old Mr. Newton has tremendous means. He makes sails for all the ships, and his father did it before him. They are just the sort of people who would consider someone like Mr. Newton a disappointment to them."

  "They do?"

  "Well, I shouldn’t speak so openly to his own wife, but they are deathly proud, those Newtons. And the brothers are worse than the father, Mama says, but I don’t know about that. The oldest brother is as old as Papa, and the father has run that factory since 1800, if that’s possible." She gave me a look, half sheepish and half impish. "Mrs. Bush said, before we left Massachusetts, ’Thomas Newton is only going with us because he knows his papa will never pass on.’ Though they are great abolitionists, too. Old Mr. Newton is very tall, you know. A head taller than your Mr. Newton."

  And Thomas was a bit taller than I, so his father was possibly the tallest man I had ever heard of. I said, "A
head taller?"

  "At least. He’s well known for it. Mama always said it was a blessing they had no sisters—" But then she looked at me and blushed.

  I said, "Thomas hardly ever speaks of his relations. It makes me wonder if there’s ill feeling."

  "I don’t think so. You could ask Mama. But everyone is always wondering what Mr. Newton thinks. It’s quite a feature of our group. They chose him to bring over those rifles because they thought he was the least likely to divulge the information. Or any information of any kind."

  We couldn’t gossip away the afternoon, because Susannah had duties at home. I saw, though, that there was much to be learned, and I was eager to learn it.

  Thomas, Frank, and I made pleasant companions, and I didn’t at all mind Frank’s presence—for you had to call it that, even though the boy was perennially off doing something. Once he and Thomas had built him a lean-to on the side of the cabin and a little bed to put in it, we weren’t always sure where he was. He thought nothing of running off to Lawrence, for example. Literally running. Thomas and I could walk to Lawrence, if the ground was hard, in half a morning. On Jeremiah it was an easy hour. Some days, Frank would go off to Lawrence before breakfast and come back before supper, his pockets full of bits of things he had found and was keeping to trade, or of pennies and dimes he had gotten through his trades. One night, he said, "I an’t never seen such a place for folks dropping stuff."

  "Haven’t ever seen," said Thomas.

  "I’ll be goin’ along, an’t nobody around anywhere, and here I see a saucer buried in the grass. I picked one up yesterday, all painted with violets and all, gold rim, and it said ’Hampton’ on the bottom. Not a single chip, but no cup, neither. And this morning I got me a perfectly good boot, almost new, hardly even broken in yet. Just sittin’ there. Folks in town is just as bad."

  "Are just as bad," I said.

  "You just got to keep your eyes on the ground. I got me a dollar between today and yesterday. Mr. Stearns give me two bits for that boot, ’cause he said, ’Someday a one-legged fella’s gonna walk into this store looking for a boot, and if it’s the left leg he’s lost, well, then, I’ll fix him right up.’ "

  But for Thomas and me, Lawrence seemed a long way off. We didn’t leave the claim twice in a week, except to go to a neighbor cabin. And it wasn’t only that our work at home filled our days; it was also that we were disinclined to be swept up in the talk and upsets of town. It was easier to deepen our well with a shovel and a bucket and a rope and a pulley, wet and shivering, than it was to know what to think with every new bit about the depredations of the Missourians. Frankly, we considered the Missourians less important to our future well-being than the well. Now that our little area was more thickly settled by our friends, I had to go farther afield for game, and I had to bring more home, too, because I knew that what we weren’t sharing now (and we were sharing some) we would be sharing later. It was a source of wonder to the New Englanders that Frank and I were such successful meat gatherers, and they put this down to our western nature. Mrs. Holmes, for example, asked me if Quincy was in Kentucky, and when I said no, it was in Illinois, she guessed that such places were all the same in the end, weren’t they, and did we have animal skins stretched over the outer walls of our house in Quincy, and did my brother-in-law the farmer have to carry his rifle into the fields with him to frighten off the red Indians? But she thanked me anyway for the meat and told me I would be repaid in heaven, as if she had a personal account there. Well, I didn’t like her, I admit it.

  Every night, Thomas read us something from his store of books. Before Frank, we had been having Mr. Emerson every night, but Frank yawned and sighed and fidgeted so much under Mr. Emerson that Thomas had to try something else. It wasn’t much better with Mr. Thoreau, nor even with Mr. Lowell, but when we got onto Mrs. Stowe, Frank sat quietly with his chin in his hand. I did, too. Those were our best evenings, and even though candles were an expense, we would have given up tea or maybe even corncakes before giving up candles.

  Some nights, we visited others, and the talk wasn’t always of politics and the hardships of our present lives. Now that we were settled, it seemed, for a while, as if we might talk about home a bit. K.T. may have exerted a leveling influence on my friends, but back in Massachusetts, it appeared, they hailed from many different strata of society and knew each other mostly because of the Emigrant Aid Company and their common beliefs in the abolition of the institution of slavery. Mr. Bush, who knew Mr. Thayer and was on an equal footing with many of the rest of them back in the east, had sold his prosperous ship-outfitting business to come to K.T. "You know," he claimed, "I was tired of it. It was all bookkeeping and close work and noting this and writing that, and I barely got off my seat of a morning to look out at the water. My bones were aching for something to do."

  I don’t think Mrs. Bush’s bones had felt the same ache, but Mr. Thayer himself worked on her, for she was the more fiery of the two on the subject of Negro bondage. "After living in comfort all my life," she told me, "it seemed the least I could do. And it is. When I think of all the years that Isaac toiled in the wilderness, I do not consider Lawrence, K.T., a hardship."

  Mr. Jenkins, on the other hand, was one of those being aided by the company, as his farm had failed some years before and he had tried his hand at two or three enterprises, such as buying and selling cattle, picking apples, and teaching school, before coming to K.T Mr. Holmes had just begun his life as a preacher, and as there were few enough churches to be had in New England, there being an abundance of preachers there, Mrs. Holmes’s father, himself a preacher, had financed their journey to K.T, with some help from his members and some help from Mr. Thayer, who liked there to be one minister of good New England stock for every twenty emigrant families (or so Mrs. Holmes said, but I never heard anyone else say this of Mr. Thayer, who was the subject of a good deal of talk).

  The Smithsons had printed books and intended to get into the book-printing trade once again, but upon arrival in K.T., they had lost the money they’d saved for presses and type through being cheated by a gambler. In a year, they thought, they would have replaced their funds through trading town lots or something of the sort, and the older Mr. Smithson said, "Printing is a dangerous business out here, anyway, more so than I care for. My thought was a ladies’ book, with receipts and lace patterns and a few stories. I don’t yet see a spot for that out here, but no doubt the time will come." They intended to while away the time farming or speculating. I thought their interests were peculiar, as there were no Smithson ladies, but Susannah said yes, it was true: Mr. Smithson had told them all the way out from Massachusetts that there was a fortune to be made from reading ladies. He’d kept counting the ladies on every boat and in every town between there and here, alternately pleased and downcast, depending upon how many there were. He even had a stack of bills, which he now used to paper up the walls of his cabin, that advertised "The Western Ladies’ Journal, A Monthly, Published in Lawrence, K.T, for the Entertainment and Edification of All." Another time, Mr. Smithson confided to me that he was disappointed in the Missouri ladies he had seen, many of them barefoot and clearly ignorant. He said, "Lawrence is all very well, but Missouri isn’t Lawrence, and Lawrence is hardly a pockmark on the face of the prairie. I didn’t think it would be that way, from the bills we saw." He was thinking, of course, of his project, but I subsequently found this observation appropriate to every feature of our situation. And once, when Susannah was going on again about whom she might marry and when he might appear, I mentioned the Smithsons, as there were three of them. She stared at me as if I were out of my mind. Finally she said, "In the end, I do think it’s ill advised to know your affianced very well before the wedding." But it was hard to see what she was looking for in the men we saw outside of our group.

  At any rate, we visited and gossiped among ourselves as if we would be friends for the rest of our lives. That was K.T. all over. You had to be acting every day as if your life would go on from
that moment, full tilt, because if you held back, you would settle on nothing—make no claim, dig no well, have no friends. All the same, you could embrace something with all your might and have it turn to empty air only so many times. But I wasn’t thinking about that then.

  At the end of October, the weather turned a bit brisk. On the other hand, Thomas, Frank, and I were well equipped with sturdy clothing and boots we’d brought along, and plenty of quilts and blankets. We had a woodpile stacked as large as the cabin, and the cabin was thoroughly papered and chinked. Jeremiah had a bushy, full coat, with furry ears and fetlocks. The prairie hay was snowless and nourishing, and he trotted around in fine fettle, keeping himself warm and fit. He was a good lookout—a lone horse always is, especially for the approach of any other horse.

  All in all, I could stand at my door and feel satisfied enough with my situation, or I could glance about my little cabin and feel satisfied enough with my situation. Along about then, I received a letter from Harriet, acknowledging the tidings I had sent her of Frank’s safe arrival, which had slightly elided its actual date. She wrote:

  My Dear Sister, and Frank, too:

  I write to assure you that my fears are largely set at rest by yours rec’d today. To be perfectly candid, I will say that on the very day after Frank’s departure, we had news of the Kansas rebels and their so-called constitutional convention at Tomara or someplace like that, Roland knows the name, and I had tremendous fears of the battles that might ensue, because I am here to tell you that the southerners are not going to give anything up without a fight, for you know they are Scotch-Irish, and you know how they are, they invented the terrier dog, Roland says, and it wasn’t without a reason. Now that Frank is gone, Alice’s boys are all clamoring to go as well, and I might as well take to my bed. Alice has had animals in the house for four months, as the two boys found an injured crow, and now they have taught it to talk. It is an ugly black thing and hops all around and even though she leaves the door open as often as you can stand with this cold, it WILL NOT fly away, and Roland says why should it, it has found a home. It is a great storer of provisions, and Alice and Annie are always coming across its caches of trashy things. But that won’t interest you. Lydia, I insist that you protect my child from danger and do not lead him astray as you have so often in the past. I can’t feature what persuaded me to allow this. But now you are a married woman, and you must come to your senses, and keep out of trouble, especially as, though you have not said anything about it, you are no doubt in a condition. I will say that it makes considerable changes in your state of mind, which you yourself will find in no time. Well, just that thought makes me miss you a bit, and so write again right away and let me know how everyone is. We miss you, though I will say that our life is quieter here, esp. as we do not have a crow in the house, that is Alice.