The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

by Jane Smiley

  Mrs. Hopewell asked me if I was praying enough and should she get the minister over? She knew a good one, who could make the hardest criminal pray like a child. More talk, I thought. I told her I was praying all I could.

  Papa elected to drop charges and to pay my way back to Quincy. When the sheriff came to tell me this himself, relief was evident in his face and his manner. He said, "Ma’am, I booked you passage on this boat the Jack Smith.

  "You mean it hasn’t left yet?" This gave me a little smile.

  "Leaves tonight. But there wasn’t any ladies who wanted to be in a room with ya, so I had to pay double. That was forty-four dollars. Mr. Day, he paid for it. You got yerself any money to git from St. Louis to Quincy?"

  "You took the money in my reticule."

  "That shall be returned to you in due time, ma’am."

  "Well, how much is there?"

  " ’Bout thirty-six dollars, ma’am."

  "Well, then."

  "Well, then, I guess you are fixed up. One little word from me, miss."

  "What’s that?"

  "Don’t be comin’ back this way, now. You have used up the goodwill of this office here."

  "I won’t," I said. And I meant that.

  I will pass over the details of my return down the Missouri River. The boat was filled with women and children, mostly Missourians, who were fleeing the Kansas-Missouri war. At any other time, we might have been startled by the various groundings, alarms, stoppages, and rumors of boiler troubles that punctuated our five days aboard, but in fact these mundane incidents were reassuring in a way. To be delayed, to have to get off the boat in the middle of the night, even to contemplate one’s death by boiler explosion, gave one the reassurance of normality when compared to war, the war all of us were leaving our friends to fight. Although I didn’t converse with many others, I did overhear what they had to say, about Atchison’s army and Lane’s army and other armies here and there, all of them, according to rumor, plentifully supplied with weapons, rage, and drink. Under the pressure of these reports, I dreamed so often of Lawrence burning to the ground that I came to wonder if it really had burned, if Louisa was sending me some sign. It was true that after Governor Shannon departed the territory, his second in command, the temporary governor, Woodson, a proslave fellow much admired by the Missourians, immediately declared Kansas Territory in a state of insurrection, which gave license to every Missourian to burn, hang, dismember, clear out, scalp, shoot, tar and feather, and do away with, or at least plan to, anyone not thoroughly sound on the goose question. There was much fear on the boat, some weeping, continuous prayers, and many long faces. Groundings and stoppages and alarms gave us something to do.

  All was different in Saint Louis. We arrived early in the morning, and I went straight across the levee and asked after the Mary Ida or the Ida Marie. The Ida Marie was going upriver that very day, and so I paid my ticket and walked about for an hour before going on board. I was unescorted and sunburned, my short hair stuck out from under my Kansas-style bonnet, my nankeen dress showed considerable wear and tear. Even so, it took me a while to realize that I was being stared at, and to recognize that I looked a strange being among the citizens of Saint Louis. For their part, they looked strange to me as well, neat, buttoned up, careful. Suspicious. Quiet. Mannerly. Men carried newspapers that talked about the war, but the business of the town showed no knowledge of it. Business, even the always booming business of the levee, went on at a deliberate, unfrenzied pace. And there was a singular absence of gunshots, of anyone even flourishing a weapon. When I asked a question, where I might find a bite to eat, it was my voice that was too loud, my manner that was too insistent, my request that seemed outlandish. Perhaps it was embarrassing, but, in fact, I was beyond embarrassment now. I suspected that I would never feel truly embarrassed again.

  After Papa, Lorna, Mr. Graves, Helen, after Louisa and Charles and Frank and Thomas, after Mrs. Bush and the Jenkinses and the Jameses and all the rest of them, it was calming to travel in what seemed to be a cell of anonymity. I sat in my stateroom or in the lounge. I even strolled on the deck, first of the Jack Smith and then of the Ida Marie. I read no books, having none, and did no needlework, having none of that, either, but kept my healing hands in my lap and looked out at the river, first the Missouri, then the Mississippi. I listened to the other women gossiping and talking to their children, shushing their infants and confiding in one another, ordering their slaves about, if they had them, or deploring those who ordered their slaves about, if they did not. I thought I would never really join that world again, that I could not, nor did I want to. I was a different animal now, a horse among cows, a duck among geese.

  My sisters had no knowledge of my homecoming, and so there was no one to greet me when the Ida Marie tied up at dawn on September i and I walked down the plank and onto the soil of Illinois. Quincy’s high bluff put the levee and, indeed, at this time of the day, most of the river into deep shadow. I felt the darkness. Had I gone so far, with such a struggle, and circled back to where I came from, with nothing at all to show for it? Less than nothing? I had indeed. On the other hand, that steep climb up Maine Street from the river was easy for me now.

  It was surely only six-thirty or so, and I stood outside Beatrice’s familiar green door for a few minutes before knocking. In former days, I would have walked in. But I knew that this time I might appear as a ghost and give everyone a fright—they needed a knock to know that it was a person outside. I waited and knocked again, then suddenly the door opened, and there, a joy absolute and unexpected in his very person, was my nephew Frank. He had a yellow shirt on, brown trousers, and a green cap pushed back on his head. He had an apple in his hand. He stared at me. I stared at him. We stood like that until Beatrice’s voice from the back of the house called out, "Is there someone at the door? Did someone answer the door? Frank? Where are you?" Then she said, "Well, land o’ mercy! I just yesterday sent that woman in the jail money for you! How did you get here? Lydia, I swear, I am displeased with you—you are nothing but trouble in two states and one territory!" And then she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

  Well, how simple it came to seem once we put it all together! Frank’s story was this: Exactly one day after I left Lawrence with Mr. Graves and Mr. Graves and the fair songstress Davida, a letter arrived for me from Harriet, insisting that Frank return to Quincy, as they had just heard of the sack of Lawrence. This letter was dated at the end of May but had been delayed in a bundle of confiscated mail in Leavenworth for over a month. The day after that, Frank himself turned up in Louisa’s shop, shoeless, hatless, seegarless, horseless, and hungry, looking for me and Thomas; and two days after that, brother Roland himself turned up, with a team of horses, three rifles, two pistols, a knife, two kegs of cornmeal, one of flour, and one of highly rectified whiskey, all of which he had purchased in Weston as a way of financing his search for Frank: upon receiving no reply to Harriet’s letter, he had resolved to take a look for himself He now sold these in Lawrence for a tidy profit, and returned to Westport with Frank in tow. At this point, everyone felt confident that I was on my way to Quincy. Meanwhile, what had happened to Frank was strange enough, even by K.T. standards. He had gotten in with a fellow named George Lambert, who had two brothers with him. With Frank and several other boys, they made up a band of some eight young men, George at twenty-five or so the eldest. The Lamberts said at first that they were Emigrant Aid Company folks and that they knew Old Brown and meant to find him down in Osawatomie and join his army. While they rode around for six weeks, they never met up with Brown (a good thing, because Brown got into a few deadly battles). After a while, it turned out that Lambert and his brothers were really Mormons and had spent the previous winter out in Utah Territory but had been kicked out for some reason, Frank thought for stealing some money. Guerrilla conditions were of the most basic sort—none of the boys knew how to hunt except Frank, and then the horses got into some sort of poisonous plant and three of them died
, including Frank’s mount. Of his companions, Frank only said, "They didn’t seem to know what to do with themselves. They never even looked around for anything to pick up to trade and sell. I don’t know. I was pretty disgusted, myself. When I had to walk back to Lawrence, I ate better than when we rode around takin’ stuff." He promised faithfully to attend school when he got back to Quincy. This was why he was presently with Beatrice, in town. Horace walked him to school and delivered him right into the hands of the schoolmaster every day and received him from those same hands every afternoon. Otherwise, Frank employed himself under Horace’s direction at his store. They did not talk about Kansas.

  The question of my whereabouts had come up in mid-August, some three weeks after I’d left the Missouri Rose, because it took until then for the captain of that boat to see Mr. Graves and tell him of my disappearance, for Mr. Graves to happen to run into Charles, for Charles to tell Louisa, for Louisa to write Harriet, and for Harriet to receive the letter. And then, even as they were wondering what had become of me, they received Mrs. Hopewell’s letter about my imminent hanging. Beatrice exclaimed, "And to tell you the truth, Lydia, I wasn’t a bit surprised."

  As it happened, there wasn’t a war in Kansas after all. The President sent in as governor a fellow named Geary, who’d already seen everything out in San Francisco in terms of big talk, big greed, and the consequences of that, and this Geary, whom Louisa wrote me about with such enthusiasm that she decided to throw out all her former notions and name her daughter Mildred Gearina Bisket, "faced down the bullies and brought them to heel, and now we only depend upon the election for our real apotheosis into a law-abiding state rather than a territory of human beasts." Other news was that Charles had bought another pair of mules and was planning to build a warehouse on Vermont Street. "Let them burn it down and us out; our little Mildred Gearina shows that we multiply and increase!"

  But of course, the presidential election did not then go the abolitionist way, and after that there was what some folks called peace for a little space, even in K.T. And after the election, in Illinois—never a slave state, but also never an anti-slave state—those two men Senator Douglas and Mr. Lincoln got very famous, more famous than anyone else in the whole country, which was a source of pride to many and a source of shame to others, since, as my sister Harriet said, "Why don’t folks realize that this trash just isn’t worth talking about? It ruins everything, but the strangest people start bringing it up, and then you’ve got to say something, so of course, you’ve got to make up your mind! I can’t abide that!"

  I thought that I might have someone to talk to in Frank, but at first there was never the occasion—he was kept mighty busy at school and at the store. Roland didn’t have to work as hard as he had to oversee Frank’s daredevil proclivities—the guerrilla business, especially the starvation and boredom, had dinned that sort of thing out of the boy for good and all, it seemed. Now he had his sights on a commercial future. There was this, too: Frank was no longer a chatty boy. His voice had deepened, and he walked like a man. He was taller, his hands were bigger, and he had assumed a man’s taciturnity. We seemed thoroughly divided by sex and experience from our old friendship. Perhaps he accepted the family view, subscribed to but rarely stated, that I had lost and abandoned him in K.T., owing to some sort of abolitionist brain fever. My irresponsibility concerning Frank as a helpless child adrift upon the prairie was so thoroughly disapproved of that my sisters were nearly speechless with it. It was only owing to Providential intercession that Frank had been restored to the family circle. As a result, Alice and Harriet became substantially more religious after our return.

  I did take the cars to Boston and met Thomas’s father and mother and brothers, as well as friends of theirs who shared their abolitionist views and on balance felt that events in Kansas would issue in a much-needed cleansing of the national soul with regard to that single blot on our pristine character, Negro servitude. Remarks were made to the effect that Geary had actually done every right-thinking citizen a disservice in averting all-out war. Many expressed that same view we used to have in Kansas, that conflict there would serve as a national sinkhole, going so deep and growing so vast that the whole nation would fall into it, from California to Boston, but with this distinction: whereas in Kansas we thought of this as the natural end of what we saw all around us, but all the same something sane men should avert, in Boston there was a great deal of talk about the necessity of it—of getting something done with at last, of expelling the pus of the infection (or cutting off the limb to save the life), or of revealing the wrath of the Lord once and for all to the southern sinner.

  Myself, I kept quiet after a few days of this. In my presence, these sorts of things were all they could talk about. Someone would ask me a question, and I would begin my answer, and at my second or third hesitant word, my interlocutor would exclaim, "Yes! Just as I thought!" and then go on and on about how he or she (many of the most ardent abolitionists were shes) deeply felt that his or her own views were fully borne out by my experiences and everything that I was saying, and then I would hear a full discourse on every aspect of the issue, more aspects of the issue than I’d ever thought existed. These men and women went away shaking their heads, of course, but also smiling. They made large, agreeable groups, and their opinions were much bolstered by one another. I got to be something of a celebrity for attempting to aid the escape of a slave, and they loved to have me talk about Lorna. Some even wept openly at her story, and one day, someone "very close to Mr. Thayer himself" asked me to give a series of lectures, or perhaps one lecture only, about her. Something, anything. How good this would be as a way of raising money for the cause of abolition in Kansas could not be expressed.

  I was disinclined to do this, and I pondered my disinclination at length. Did I owe it to Lorna to tell her story to the world? Was that my last gesture for her, to use her and what we had done together to raise money to buy guns and cannon to be sent to Kansas? Mr. Thayer’s friend candidly admitted one thing—Lorna herself would never benefit from my telling her story. There was no telling what had happened to her; she’d gotten sold south, just like someone out of Mrs. Stowe’s book, and if she was as obdurate as I made her out to be, well, not all masters were as forgiving as this Mr. Day seemed to be. There could be no hope for Lorna individually, but her cause could be helped through helping the cause of all of those in bondage, and money, money, money, that was the key. Every man who’d been to Washington, D.C., knew that as well as he knew his own mother’s name. Thomas’s mother herself appealed to me to give this lecture. She was a very old woman, bedridden most of the day. Thomas had indeed been her favorite of all the boys, and it was clear that his death was not supportable for her. She was very kind and loving to me, and she made up her mind that I must do this lecture for Thomas and his beliefs and what he died for. I couldn’t explain that I found myself increasingly unable to speak about any of these issues—that the very certainty of everyone around me drove all certainty out of me. She pleaded with me, and I agreed.

  The hall was the same size as, or larger than, Danake Hall in Quincy, the only other place of the sort that I’d ever entered. Even the stage was nearly the same size as the stage whereon I’d viewed those scenes from Macbeth and Dombey and Son more than a year before. And it was crowded. The title of my lecture, given it by Mr. Thayer’s friend, was "Latest News from the War in Kansas, with a FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of a foiled SLAVE ESCAPE in Missouri." Mr. Thayer himself was expected to attend but got delayed out of town, and I never met him.

  Standing on the stage, looking out at the audience, was daunting and horrifying, especially after the lights that lit them up were doused and I couldn’t see past the torches at my feet, which dazzled my eyes. I could hear them, though, shuffling and wheezing and coughing and sneezing and moving about, and even though I knew they were New Englanders and didn’t tote guns and shoot them off routinely, as westerners did, guns seemed to be out there, as we all knew what the funds would be
going for. I began to speak, and a voice or two shouted, "Louder!" and so I pressed more volume out of my lungs and voice box. It wasn’t easy, and the lecture, advertised for only an hour, seemed like a path up a very steep hill and I had to carry myself up on breath alone, which seemed akin to, and as impossible as, flying. I had no energy for it; perhaps that was what made every word about Lorna seem like a betrayal of her, every word about Papa and Helen a betrayal of myself. I mixed up my story, got a few things backwards, tried to straighten them out. It was confusing to me, and so I suppose it was many times more confusing to the audience. My lecture was not a success.

  But that made no difference. The audience acclaimed me. Here I was. There I had been. Giving testimony was more important than the testimony given. They clapped and applauded and shouted and passed the hat, until I was numbed by the whole experience and had to be led off the stage, a smile fixed to my face. Afterward, there was a reception with refreshments and much conversation. They were excited by everything I had to say, fortified for the conflict ahead, bright and eager, men, women, young, old. My lecture was a success.

  I asked Thomas’s mother not to require any more lectures of me, and she agreed, remarking that perhaps everything was just too fresh, and of course there was my grief for Thomas.

  There was, but that wasn’t it, though I allowed her to believe that it was. What it was was a revisitation, but far more strange and disturbing, to those feelings I had had that morning in Saint Louis, of being too big, too loud, too strange, of bringing tidings that were too unwelcome. No one could describe what was true in Kansas and Missouri. Hardly any Kansan or any Missourian, I thought, could describe what was true there to another Kansan or Missourian, even one supposedly on his or her side. To say what was true, you had to look into the eyes of your interlocutor and see something there that you recognized. I didn’t think you could do that about Kansas or Missouri. And when I looked into the eyes of my new friends in Boston, I didn’t see anything I recognized there, either. The more they embraced me and drew me in, the less I felt like one of them, like a woman, even like a human being. I felt like a new thing, hardly formed, wearing a corset and a dress and a shawl and a bonnet and a pair of ladies’ boots, carrying a parasol in my gloved hand, but inside that costume something else, which didn’t fit, something I felt myself to be but couldn’t name. By Christmas, I couldn’t tolerate Medford any longer, and I went back to Quincy for a while. At least there I was accustomed to feeling out of place.