Remember the Morning

by Thomas Fleming

  “They buy them exactly as you buy a dress or a horse or a plow,” Grandfather said. “They own them in the same way.”

  “Did her father buy me?” Clara said, looking at me for the first time with unfriendly eyes.

  “No. He bought your mother and your father from me. But under the law, you too became his property. When Catalyntie’s father and mother died, under the law you became her property.”

  “What kind of law is that?” Clara cried.

  “A bad law, my dear girl. But a law nonetheless. A law that men enforce with guns and whips and penalties.”

  “Then I must do Catalyntie’s bidding forever?” Clara said. “She has become my mother and father?”

  “The stupid law means nothing to me,” I said. “I’ll never order you to do anything. I love you. I’ll always love you.”

  “As soon as it can be arranged, I hope we can free you,” Grandfather said. “It can’t be done immediately. You must learn some trade, so you can support yourself. Otherwise you’ll starve. White men don’t share their food and clothing like Senecas.”

  “Why should I believe you?” Clara said. “Maybe it would be better if I ran away now. There is a warrior in Shining Creek who loves me and wants to marry me.”

  “Your father Joshua was my brother,” Grandfather said. “Together we went into the wilderness, long before you were born. We brought back the furs that began the New Netherlands Trading Company.” The old man’s voice grew thick with sorrow. “He was a great warrior, as brave as any Seneca. I promised him one day his children would be free.”

  Tears poured down Clara’s cheeks. She clung to Cornelius Van Vorst. Her orenda told her he had a truthful heart. “You shall be my father now,” she said.

  She embraced me too. “You will always be my sister,” she said.

  “Always,” I said.

  If either of us knew how much pain those words would cost us, would we have refused to speak them? Probably not.

  Looking out the windows of Grandfather’s house that evening, we saw two women standing on the corner wearing brightly colored clothes. Whenever a man walked by, they raised small tin lanterns to their faces, which were covered with red and white paint. We asked what they were doing.

  “They’re whores,” Grandfather said. “They’re trying to sell their love to those men.”

  I remembered Uncle Johannes using the word on the sloop. Neither Clara nor I could grasp the idea of a woman selling herself for money. “Without hope or interest in a husband?” I said.

  “Whores don’t marry,” Grandfather said. “They’re considered bad women by respectable people. But I’ve known a few in my time who were as good in their own way as any Christian in the pews of our best churches.”

  “Why are they considered bad women?” Clara asked. “If they haven’t married, they can’t be unfaithful to their husbands. Did they refuse to work in the cornfields? Did they neglect their children?”

  With a groan of exasperation, Grandfather called for his coach. Together we rumbled to a winding road called Pearl Street, which ran along the river on the eastern side of the city. On corners in the twilight stood dozens of these women with red and white paint on their faces. Grandfather said they took a different man into their beds each night for a silver Spanish dollar—perhaps two dollars if the woman was pretty. Clara and I could only exchange bewildered, appalled looks.

  So much to learn, so much to understand! Grandfather hired Harman Bogardus, a young Dutch divinity student with thin shanks, a solemn mouth, and cheerful eyes to help Clara and me shed our Indian identities. From the start, at my insistence, he treated us with complete equality. Clara had no interest in learning Dutch, however, while I spent extra hours struggling with that tongue as well as English. I also showed a surprising proficiency in arithmetic. Within a few weeks, I could look at a column of numbers and add them at a glance.

  At first we learned with a certain reluctance, determined to compare Seneca knowledge with white knowledge. That changed when Bogardus showed us a map. We had never seen one of these wondrous things, which enabled a man or woman to look down on the world with God’s eyes. Clara was especially fascinated. For her a map was a magical thing. She ran her finger along the wide line of the Hudson and followed it north to the Mohawk, retracing our journey from the shore of Lake Ontario. The lake was a great eye with our Seneca village a tiny dot on its lid.

  The map convinced us that white power was greater and wiser than Indian power. Somehow, the whites had entered the mind of the Master of Life and brought his knowledge down to earth and printed it on paper.

  But white politics, which the map was supposed to introduce, proved to be almost as difficult for us to understand as prostitution and slavery. When Bogardus said the province of New York was owned by the King of England, we asked to see a picture of him. We were astonished to discover he was a fat old man in a grey wig.

  “Was he a great warrior when he was young?” Clara asked. “Has he many scalps on his war belt?”

  Bogardus shook his head.

  “How did he become king?”

  “His father was king before him. The crown belongs to him by divine right. It’s God’s will.”

  I could see Bogardus did not believe a word of this.

  “Has the king ever come to America to claim his power over us?” Clara asked. “Has he led war parties against our enemies, the French and the Ottawas?”

  Bogardus shook his head.

  “Why do we owe him any allegiance?” I asked.

  “He’s the father of the country,” Bogardus said. “His navy, his army, his judges and governors, keep order here and in the other provinces of his empire, just as a father governs a family.”

  “A mother can govern a family far better than a father,” I said, speaking from my Seneca heritage.

  I thought even less of the king when my grandfather told us how a British fleet had seized New York from the Netherlands in 1664, when he was a boy of fourteen. “That was nothing but thievery!” I said.

  Grandfather explained that the two countries had been at war, which permitted such conquests. “Perhaps there’ll be another war and the Dutch will take it back,” Clara said.

  Grandfather shook his head. “Our power has declined while England’s never ceases to grow. Their merchants rule the trade of North America. If a man is Dutch or any other nationality, he must be careful not to offend them. They can ruin his business overnight.”

  “They’re tyrants, like the ancient Romans,” I said. We had just finished reading about these people in a history book Harman Bogardus gave us.

  Grandfather laughed and lit his pipe. “A good comparison,” he said. “The English talk more about liberty. They claim to be very proud of it. But they never had to fight for it the way the Dutch fought the Spanish.”

  He told us about the series of wars the Dutch had fought in Europe for almost a hundred years to drive the Spanish out of their country. “The Dutch are the real lovers of liberty. Never forget that.”

  The next day, I pursued another branch of this conversation. “What is a merchant?” I asked Grandfather.

  “A man or woman who buys goods in one place and sells them in another place for a profit.”

  “There are women merchants?”

  “It’s always been a tradition among the Dutch. My mother kept the books and managed our store on Pearl Street while my father was away on trading voyages. She made more money from the store than he ever did from his voyages and loaned it out at interest. No one got higher rates.”

  I found the idea of interest on money especially fascinating. “If it’s well sown and watched, money will grow like corn or squash,” Grandfather said. “It can be as fruitful as an apple tree or a cornfield.”

  “A Seneca woman is trained to do such things well,” I said. “But if I become a merchant, I’ll never bow down to the English!”

  “If I become one, I’ll never bow down to white people!” Clara said.

&nb
sp; Grandfather looked alarmed. He threw his big arms around us. “Let me tell you both the secret of making your way in the world. You have to bow down now and then to those who are richer and more powerful. But you must never bow down in your heart. That’s the great thing to avoid.”

  Clara disagreed with this advice. “I can never be false to what my heart speaks,” she said.

  “The world will break your heart, my dear, if you try to live that way.”

  I heard sorrow in Grandfather’s voice. Did he know that the world would probably break Clara’s heart, no matter what she did? Perhaps that was why he did not press the argument. Instead he returned to describing the merchant’s life. He said it was full of risks and anxiety. A merchant had to be prepared to make long dangerous journeys in search of new goods to sell; he had to fight rivals for a share of the market.

  “That’s why I sent your father into the Mohawk country,” he said to me. “To fight the Albany merchants for a fair share of the fur trade. They were on their way to creating a monopoly of it—always a bad thing in business. Now that I know from you the full story of what happened, I think the Senecas who raided the house that day were sent on purpose by men who were ready to commit murder to protect their profits.”

  “A Seneca would never kill for hire!” Clara said.

  “White men from Albany told them lies that persuaded them to do it for honor,” Cornelius said. “If my health improves, I hope we can journey to your village next summer and speak to warriors who were in that war party. Perhaps we can find out the names of these Albany murderers and bring them to justice.”

  Murder for profit. The words burned themselves into my heart, leaving ugly scars. I lay awake nights for a week, remembering the terrible day in the house on the Mohawk, grateful to Grandfather for removing the blame from the Senecas, hungering for revenge against the faceless merchants of Albany.

  Harman Bogardus had even more trouble explaining the Christian religion to us than he had had describing the British empire. As soon as we could read, he gave us the New Testament. We found Jesus a very confusing figure.

  “Sometimes he talks like a warrior, sometimes like a sachem,” I said. “Which was he?”

  “He was neither. We believe he was the Son of God,” Bogardus said. “The Great Spirit, the being Indians call the Manitou, the God above all gods, inhabited his flesh during his time on earth.”

  “We’re all sons and daughters of the Manitou,” Clara said. “Many times he enters our flesh and speaks with our tongues.”

  “No, no,” Bogardus said. “Only once in history has this happened. Without faith in Jesus as the only true Son of God, there is no salvation. If you lack faith in Him, you’ll go to hell.”

  The cheer vanished from Bogardus’s eyes. He meant every word of this pronouncement. Both greatly upset, Clara and I asked Grandfather what he thought of Jesus. He shut the doors to the parlor and made us promise we would never repeat what he was going to tell us. With great uneasiness he confessed he did not think Jesus was a god. He was a good man, a kind man, a wise man, who was betrayed by his enemies and died a painful death.

  “There are many in this city who would blacken my name if I admitted this in public,” Grandfather said. “Profit by my example and go to church now and then and pretend to believe what they preach from the pulpit. In your heart believe what you please.”

  I decided I did not believe in Jesus. I was not even sure I accepted a Manitou who permitted my parents to be murdered so brutally in front of my eyes. Clara, on the other hand, admired Jesus deeply, the more she read about him. She decided he was one of those rare spirits through whom the Master of Life spoke profound truths. She was especially moved by the passage in Luke where Jesus proclaimed the heart of his teaching.

  But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you. To him that smiteth thee on the one cheek, offer also the other; and from him that taketh away thy cloke, withhold not thy coat also. Give to everyone that asketh thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again. And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also them likewise.

  I could not begin to comprehend such advice. Jesus was telling us to forgive hatred and forgo revenge, to let people steal from you—and if they merely asked, to give them your property! Clara saw the beauty and power of it instantly. We did not have time to argue about it because neither she nor I could understand Schoolmaster Bogardus’s attempts to explain his next topic—the war between the Protestant and Catholic religions.

  Both faiths believed in Jesus, but Catholics thought their leader, the pope, who lived in Italy, was the only person able to speak in Jesus’s name, while Protestants believed Jesus spoke directly to each person who professed faith in him. If that was not confusing enough, there was also a political side to the quarrel.

  “The king of England does more than keep order in his empire,” Bogardus said. “He’s the great defender of the Protestant religion against the pope of Rome.”

  “As Senecas, we shall be neutral in this quarrel,” Clara said, with a smile.

  “No one can be neutral. You’ll be hated by both sides,” Bogardus said.

  We ignored this prophetic remark and groaned in protest when he made us study the history of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, in which English Protestants had hurled the Catholic king, James II, off the throne and replaced him with a Protestant. The Stuarts, father and son, had fled to France, where they began plotting to regain their power. France and Spain recognized James’s son, James Edward Stuart, as the true King of England.

  “As long as the Jacobites4 wait in France, the Protestant King of England sits uneasily on his throne,” my grandfather said.

  “It’s all so complicated!” I complained. Already I was more interested in talking about business and a merchant’s life than history and politics.

  “History is always complicated. That’s why it’s important to understand it,” Grandfather said. “Otherwise it explodes in your face with no warning.”

  To make his point, he invited two of his closest friends, Nathan Franks and William Laurens, to dinner to tell us how history had changed their lives. Franks was a small, lean man with the shrewd eyes of a sachem. He was Jewish. He told us his family had lived in Spain for many centuries, where they had prospered as merchants. But some Spaniards began preaching hatred against the Jews because they were not Christians. In 1492, the King of Spain expelled all the Jews from the kingdom. They became men and women without a country, wandering the world in search of refuge.

  “For us, New York is an earthly paradise,” Franks told us. “No one preaches hatred here.”

  “Only against Catholics. But that’s politics,” my grandfather said, gazing fondly at his old friend.

  William Laurens was a French Protestant. A swarthy man with a gold tooth, he told us about another explosion of religious hatred which drove his family from France. In 1572, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the French Catholics launched a general massacre of all Protestants. Before it ended, over six hundred thousand people died and the country was convulsed by civil war. Tens of thousands of French Protestants fled France to settle in England and the American colonies.

  “I begin to think the world is a terrible place,” I said. “The Evil Brother seems at work everywhere, sowing hatred and war.”

  “That’s as good an explanation as any,” Grandfather said.

  “I believe that in America, as it grows, we will see an end to such hatreds,” Nathan Franks said. “They are rooted in envy and greed more than anything else. Here, there will be abundance for all.”

  “Let us drink to that noble vision,” William Laurens said.

  The three old men raised their glasses to an America that existed only in their hopes. Clara and I would soon discover the real America was still far from their benevolent dreams.

  FIVE

  IN ABOUT THREE MONTHS, WHEN WE could express
ourselves in English, Grandfather summoned Madame Mercereau, New York’s best dressmaker, to outfit us. A tiny woman who talked rapidly in a heavy French accent, she tempted us with a half dozen fashion dolls wearing the latest Paris and London styles. We were dazzled by the profusion, the detail, the luxury of the dresses, with their rococo shell motifs, combined with flowers, feathers, ribbon bowknots, and every imaginable curve and curl. The range of fabrics—silks, satins, woolens of a dozen different textures—was equally incredible to us. Told we would have to tolerate corsets to wear them, we capitulated instantly.

  Grandfather gave us each an allowance of fifty pounds—two hundred and fifty Spanish dollars—to spend on our clothes.5 We both bought expensive dresses that dismayed the old man, who had urged us to be frugal and sensible. “These could only be worn at the King’s Birthday Ball,” he said.

  He mournfully added that there was very little chance of Clara being invited to such a ball. “In that case I won’t go either!” I said.

  Grandfather paid for the gowns and gave Madame Mercereau another fifty pounds for some everyday dresses. We paraded around the house in our ball gowns, learning to maneuver the hoops through doorways, curtsying to each other, posing in front of mirrors, reveling in our womanhood. The full-length mirrors in Grandfather’s house had almost as much influence as the maps in changing our Seneca identities. A mirror made us aware of ourselves in a new way. We saw ourselves in our beautiful gowns and felt reborn. We could believe we had become new women.

  Looking in the mirror, with rouge and lipstick on my white face and my hair crimped in the latest style, I convinced myself I was almost as attractive as Clara. I was a head taller, and my breasts were not as luxurious, but I had a long, graceful neck and a passable face. My nose was either sharp or fine, depending on your generosity, but my eyes were a bold blue. I told myself I was like a piece of fine filigreed ivory, while Clara’s beauty was a dark glowing opal. Men might love both kinds of women.