The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  Now I recalled where I had heard Miss Crandall’s name before: from a painting of her exhibited in Boston, executed by Francis Alexander, who kept a studio there at the time. I had even met Mr. Alexander once at Mr. Spooner’s house. He was a great curiosity to me because he had begun his career as an itinerant artist in Connecticut, after studying with Robertson in New York City, moved to Boston for four years before setting out for a two-year sojourn in Europe, and returned to become an acclaimed artist who commanded upwards of one hundred dollars a portrait.

  I remembered that his portrait of Miss Crandall impressed me at the time. Her dress, if cut in the latest fashion, is simple indeed. A plain transparent silk shawl is draped around her shoulders and fastened to her bodice with common pins, none of the usual brooches, ribbons, and frills. And her hair—how plain and unusual, almost mannish in its neat (some might say severe) simplicity! Her wide-set blue eyes look at the viewer confidently, clearly, serenely. All this, I believed (and despite the obligatory pillar and swag) Alexander had captured truly. Yet had he quite caught her strength, her courage? I should like to examine that portrait again, I thought.

  As Sophy explained it, when the local Negro girl was admitted, cries of outrage began. Parents withdrew their daughters and the school had to close. That might have been the end of it, but for the “interference,” as Sophy described Timothy’s view of these events, of overzealous abolitionists, including the ubiquitous Mr. Garrison, whose support caused Miss Crandall to reopen her academy expressly for “New England’s young ladies of color.”

  The town entered a period of unprecedented uproar. Merchants refused to supply the academy. The students were jeered and taunted. Pupils and teachers out for walks had sticks, stones, eggs, pellets of manure, dead cats, chicken heads, and other missiles flung at them. The school was stoned, befouled by rotten eggs, set on fire, and beaten in the night with iron bars and bats. Its water supply was corrupted and its steps besmeared with animal feces.

  Sophy stood up and sang for me part of a song, composed by one of their teachers, that the colored schoolgirls used to sing.

  Sometimes when we have walked the streets

  Saluted we have been,

  By guns, and drums, and cow-bells too,

  And horns of polished tin.

  With warnings, threats, and words severe

  They visit us at times,

  And gladly would they send us off

  To Afric’s burning climes.

  She sat down again and explained that Miss Crandall was arrested, spent a night in jail because she refused on principle to post a bond of some few hundred dollars, and was later convicted of breaking the 1833 “Black Law.”

  “The Black Law,” Sophy added, “was the nefarious creation of our pigeon-hearted General Assembly in Hartford that year expressly because of the pressure received from our enraged … citizens.” Her emphasis on the final word “citizens” was heavy with sarcasm. “Her little black girls came from outside Connecticut, so they wrote the law forbidding the education of such outsiders. Of course a few of us in town believed Miss Crandall (or Mrs. Philleo as she soon became) and her girls should be free to pursue whatever education they wished, though we deplored the chaos her principles had engendered. Timothy, naturally, had to side with the majority and the merchants, even if he disagreed with some of their words and actions.”

  “I gather they were successful,” I said, “if not in keeping the woman in prison, then in forcing her to shut down.”

  “Oh yes. It came to such a violent pass in the end. She had wanted to go to jail for the sake of publicizing her scruples—indeed, when Reverend Mr. May offered to post her bond himself, she refused it, saying, ‘Oh no, I am only afraid they will not put me into jail.’

  “But her bond was finally posted by others, her Black Law conviction was overturned later, you see. Then a howling mob arose to attack the school. I don’t know that there was a single window left. You can imagine how the poor woman must have felt by then. And she was truly fearful for the life and limb of her students.”

  “My goodness, I should think so,” I said. “I remember now someone at an exhibition of her portrait saying that Miss Crandall had moved west.”

  “Yes. She finally gave it up. She and her new husband, Mr. Philleo, a minister from Ithaca, New York, sold the schoolhouse and left town. They removed to a remote area of New York to teach and farm; her family says almost nothing about her or the incidents at the school.”

  “It must have been difficult for you and Timothy too, in the first year of marriage, I mean: your differences over Miss Crandall’s project.”

  “Well, like many newlyweds we were still besotted with one another, I suppose. But he has always respected my right to my own opinions, provided I don’t make a public nuisance of myself. And he never supported the violence of the inflamed mob or the destruction of private property. He despised, however—and I don’t think ‘despised’ is too strong a word—the trouble Mrs. Philleo and her eccentric principles brought among us: the disorder, the divisions. ‘That Quaker Woman!’ he calls her. But he and I receded from the fray. Everyone against her, which was most of them, knew Timothy’s role in forwarding the Black Law, so his business went unmolested.

  “Still, he was correct in one thing: not only were the abolitionists exercised by these events, but the vulgar herd everywhere throughout New England, on the other side of the question, I mean. What an infection of anti-Negro sentiment she instigated across Connecticut. ‘The beast with many heads’ rose up in Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, Norwalk, New Canaan, and elsewhere to howl down their black neighbors. There was a lot of fear at the time too because newly released black people had always worked for very little pay, forcing white folks to go to the almshouse or the western wilds in search of new work.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have to tell you how glad we were to have all that behind us. And Mrs. Philleo well out of town! Timothy and I never speak of it to one another, or to others. And he allows me my anti-slavery attitudes because I keep them to myself for the most part, am not one of those fanatical abolitionists, and because he quietly agrees that slavery was as evil in the North as it is now in the South. However, Timothy believes deeply that we would all fall upon disastrous harder times—North as well as South—should slavery suddenly come to an end.” She snapped her fingers. “As these abolitionists would have it. I don’t doubt that he is correct on that particular point, yet it seems to me that Mrs. Philleo’s cause is just and human bondage an evil on the very face of it. All the more so in this Republic.”

  “However widespread slavery’s ancient stain upon mankind!”

  “Yes, Allegra. But it is the public disorder that ensues too strenuous an insistence upon one’s private principles that troubled Timothy, you see. Of course, as he was fond of saying at the time, ‘Why should we not expect a penchant for martyrdom coming from that recalcitrant Crandall line over in Westerly?’ He was referring to John Crandall, who was arrested in the 1650s and later sent packing from Boston for disputing some obscure principle … of baptism, I think it was.

  “And Mrs. Philleo is a woman capable of unarming directness. She brushed off the warnings of a clergyman’s wife that the school would not be sustained should a single colored girl attend. ‘Let it sink, then!’ she told the poor lady. Likewise, she upbraided Esquire Frost when he told her that such leveling principles led ultimately to intermarriage between blacks and whites. ‘Moses,’ she is said to have snapped back at him, ‘had a black wife.’”

  “I should like to meet that woman!” I said.

  “Perhaps some day you shall.” Sophy smiled.

  “No, I mean I would like to paint her portrait, Sophy. That’s what I wish to do. Some day, perhaps, as you say. Has she ever returned to visit her family?”

  Sophy looked away and said nothing. I remained silent as well.

  “Timothy actually knows more about it now than I do,” she finally said. “But don’t become in
volved with her, Allegra, while you’re here; it’ll stir things up.”

  “I would be very careful to do no such thing, Sophy. But I’m painting any who come to me. That’s how I earn my living. You say she has never returned, however?”

  Sophy looked away again. She stood up once more and began to pace the room.

  “She has returned, just recently,” she said grimly. “With her husband. Rumor has it that things are not well between them… .”

  “Then she is here, or nearby, even now?”

  “In North Society… . You know where that is, don’t you?”

  “Part of Canterbury. I know some of the Packville Baptist Church people.”

  “That’s it. But again, I would not meddle… .”

  “I’ll not meddle, Sophy. You can trust me that much, can’t you? Why don’t I simply tell Timothy I’d like to paint her portrait among the others who come to me, if he has no objection?”

  “And if he does?”

  “Then I’ll not do it. Not now, anyway. Not so long as we are in Canterbury with you.”

  She looked sternly at me. “I guess I can’t stop you from asking. But don’t act as if this portrait is anything exceptional, or an enthusiasm, or anything of the sort. If you arouse him on the matter, he’ll turn against it!”

  “Dear Sophy, I’ll be most matter-of-fact.”

  I said nothing more about Mrs. Philleo for some time.

  But never again while we stayed in Canterbury did I pass that old schoolhouse manse without a shudder of apprehension and sorrow. Yet to me and to Tom the people of Canterbury were kind and, many of them, grateful patrons. After a painfully slow start, people eventually started to arrive from surrounding communities as well. Word of mouth passed quickly, Tom posted more handbills, and I worked in my cottage studio from six to ten hours a day.

  My likenesses became commonplace enough for me to approach Timothy on the subject of Mrs. Philleo’s portrait. He was, of course, hesitant at first. But I answered his queries and he seemed to believe that I had not singled Mrs. Philleo out for any provocative purpose.

  “Any likeness my humble efforts might produce for family purposes,” I assured him, “shall never compete with the public portrait of such a fashionable and eminent painter as Mr. Alexander!”

  Secretly, however, I believed that here was a woman whose portrait I might be able to paint so as to supersede perdurably the currently revered likeness. Not that the earlier portrait was weak or unworthy of the attention it received, having long been hailed and touted at lectures and meetings of abolitionists. I believed, rather, given the full account I now had of Prudence Crandall’s disturbing history in Canterbury, that Mr. Alexander had missed something—some personal strength or force that his sitter had possessed and that I might now capture.

  The true difficulty would be that Mrs. Philleo herself was not fond of any kind of public display. I therefore approached her stepson Calvin first, when he was home between voyages to the West Indies. To be brief, I suggested to him that I might do a miniature of himself for his stepmother’s sake, he approved, and he soon grew comfortable in my company. I then discovered that he favored the idea of a likeness of his stepmother for family purposes, and would be happy to purchase one.

  I would have been willing to undertake my study of this remarkable woman without compensation, but to avoid arousing any suspicions I charged my usual fee. Mrs. Philleo eventually sat for me twice, but between these lengthy sittings I spent much more attention on her portrait than on any likeness I had ever done to that point. In the cosy privacy of my studio in our cot, I lavished my best efforts, everything I had learned, upon that single work.

  While she sat for me, I did not bring up that violent old affair in Canterbury. Still, I came to understand from our conversations something of her life, her labors and hopes, since the Philleos had been driven out of Canterbury and into the far reaches of New York—well above the canal route between Utica and Rome and into a twenty-acre farm in the settlement of Booneville, at the foot of the Adirondack mountains. As I understood her, it was during her time in Booneville that she discovered more than enough of her husband’s fallibilities; nursed him through his recovery from a seizure and fall into the fireplace (a terrible accident that left his flesh tremendously inflamed, his face disfigured, his left eye useless); and nursed a beloved stepdaughter through consumptive attacks that ultimately led to her death. If Mrs. Philleo’s life had been hard, she was still invincible, for she spoke of her desire to begin all over again in Illinois where family property was even then being improved by her brother Hezekiah. It was this invincibility, I say, this obdurate strength, that I hoped to capture in my portrait.

  As we spoke of her efforts to rebuild her life, it became clear to me that I had happened into Canterbury and was painting her portrait in that brief interval, when she was about forty years of age, between removals to the West. This was neither the first nor last time during my peripatetic years that I was struck by something fatal in the coincidence of my own travels and the peregrinations of others, often others whom we not only met, Tom and I, but whom I painted and who had some influence on my life and work. I was not then, nor have I ever been, a deeply religious woman, but in this instance, as in several others, I could not dismiss the impression of something almost preternatural in these conjunctions, some power—deity, angel, muse?—that guided my way. Such intuitions do not bear much thinking or talking about. Every reader will have instances of her own to recall and thereby understand me.

  My portrait of Mrs. Philleo catches her in a moment of full, womanly maturity. This time her dress was astonishingly simple. There were no imbecile sleeves padded out, nothing boyishly youthful about her unadorned face—as presented in Mr. Alexander’s likeness of seven years ago. No, her dress was stark and black, her hair natural, uncapped, unbonneted, cut straight around, and pulled back. And I added no conventionalisms of pillar or drapery. But here, as I say, was the face of a woman, with its early lines of character and experience and its firm glance of indominitability and self-sufficiency. No timorous paleness and no enigma teasing about the lips this time. It was the face of a woman who had seen much trouble, who lived amidst trouble still, but who had come through it, and would come through again and again. The face of a woman I admired. I would have given anything for Mr. Spooner to tell me whether my portrait of her were true and enduring. But I had to give it over into the family, as agreed; it was not to be exhibited.

  TOM, UNFORTUNATELY, had been growing more apprehensive with every week and month of our stay in Canterbury. We had no news of Mr. Dudley’s death or of any investigation into it. I could see that Tom was restless and dared not stay in one place for too long, fearing that somehow he had been found out and a manhunt—of which he would be completely ignorant—was afoot. He kept his plans to himself, however, but it could not escape me that he was carefully saving much of his portion of our earnings.

  By the fall, I believe it was in late September of 1841, Tom could no longer tolerate his ignorance of the Dudley affair, so he finally wrote a letter to Mr. Dana inquiring, merely, whether there might be even now a case against Mr. Dudley.

  By the return post Mr. Dana informed him that police investigators had discovered, through information offered by Matron at the Home for Fallen Women, that one Allegra Fullerton claimed to have been abducted by Mr. Joseph Dudley for immoral purposes; indeed, in past issues of Friend of Virtue Dudley had been included on a list of secret libertines holding the most respectable reputations in the eyes of the world. Since that time, Mr. Dana explained, investigators had been trying quietly to gather evidence against Dudley, but the efforts had ceased upon word of his death. Further, Mr. Dana himself had little choice when asked by the authorities but to tell them of my removal to the Newspirit Community and of Tom’s to the Lowell manufactories. Once our sudden disappearance had become clear to the investigators, they were, it is not too difficult to understand, most anxious for an interview.

 
; This intelligence unsettled us deeply. And yet another factor spurred our departure. The Lord knows how such things get started, but somehow a rumor went about Canterbury that I had fled Boston to save a scandalous reputation. I knew nothing of such gossip at first and only wondered why sitters no longer approached me and others suddenly shunned me in the street. But the malicious rumor finally reached Timothy and, through Sophy, me. Sophy denied whispers on all fronts, but Tom and I knew that by leaving quietly we would save my sister and brother-in-law more embarrassment, as much as ourselves, and further Tom’s wishes as well. Once again, therefore, we poised for flight and had only to decide on a safe destination.

  Mr. Dana also informed Tom that he had recently been in Hartford for his marriage to Miss Sarah Watson, and that he knew of Canterbury, from travels and associations in Connecticut. Tom, therefore, began to fear that the authorities would soon be closing in.

  “Why can’t you, Allegra, return in relative innocence—make a clean breast of it for yourself—and approach Mr. Dana. After all, you were Dudley’s victim, and my hands alone are stained with the man’s blood. Why should not his horrible crime come out after all? Your treatment at his hands and your desire to help your brother and companion would be understandable—a misjudgment alone that you now see more clearly. I’ll then flee on my own, and you won’t even know where I’ve gone. You wouldn’t be able to tell them anything of me. Surely your friend Mr. Dana would offer you his advice and protection once more.”

  Tom, however, was at a loss to decide upon a safe destination for himself, and, moreover, I felt again the complicity of my vengeful folly in Dudley’s death. So I could not agree to abandon him to such dangers as he now faced.

  FOURTEEN

  To Springfield and beyond Mr. Stock tells a curious tale

  Tom and I, therefore, discussed our opportunities and dangers, as they now appeared to us. I recalled to him what Mrs. Philleo, during her sittings, had said to me about her own flight from Connecticut to New York. She and her husband had chosen to leave New England itself and try their luck in the countryside, out by canal boat, to distant reaches beyond the Hudson.