by Marge Piercy
“There are two of you in there?”
“We’re sisters. We were arrested together and we’ll be tried together. Obscenity, they call it,” the first voice said.
“My name is Freydeh. I make and sell condoms.”
“Is that a good business?” the second, more sensual voice asked. “I’m called Tennie. My sister’s Vickie.”
“Victoria,” the first voice corrected. “And tomorrow is Election Day. I was running for president when they stuck us in here. Who’s going to vote for someone in jail? I can’t even campaign.”
“What does that man say you did?”
“Wrote two articles about prominent men—one by me, and one by Tennie. Mine told the story of a famous preacher in Brooklyn, Henry Ward Beecher, and his real life and affairs.”
“I thought Christians always stuck up for their preachers.”
“I’m not a Christian,” Victoria said. “I believe in the spirits. They speak to me.”
“Where I grew up, there was a rabbi three towns over who said angels spoke to him. I was never convinced. I’m a Jew, but a freethinker too.”
“Ah, we’re all freethinkers,” Victoria said. “And that’s why we’re in here.”
The next day, Sammy found her. Visitors were freely allowed, so long as they tipped the guard. Sammy came with a lawyer, a Peter Rudyard, Esq. “Billyboy says this guy can help us,” Sammy said.
“You have the cash, I have the know-how. We’ll get you off, Mrs. Levin. That’s a promise.”
“Can you get me out of here now?”
“There’s bail. Can you go it?”
“Not if we have to pay you.”
“Well then, you have your boy here make you comfy and we’ll get to trial soon as we can.”
“Someone told me that the judge makes a difference.”
“He surely does, missus. I’ll see what I can do. That may turn out to cost a bit too, to get the right judge.”
“Sammy can pay you.”
This was going to wipe out the money she had been saving to move them all to a cleaner, safer place. She’d bet Mr. Comstock ginger whiskers didn’t live in a tenement. Well, she wasn’t going to exhaust their money getting out sooner. Sammy could manage the condom business in the meantime and he’d teach Sara and Debra what to do. So much for Sammy’s continued schooling. At least he’d had a few years. He was a good bright kid and he would pick up a lot on his own. In the meantime she would just have to sit tight. Sammy had brought her bread, cheese and apples, a blanket, a quilt, her own pillow, and a change of clothes, candles and matches. She would ask him to pick her up books in Yiddish or Russian so she had something to read. For a woman who liked to keep busy, this time was going to be hard.
The next day there was an execution, a man who had killed four women, marrying them for their money or property, then poisoning them. The gallows was set up between the inner and outer prisons and she could see the executioner, Monsieur New York, in his mask. “They say he was a butcher’s apprentice before he started hanging people,” the voice of Tennie said from the next cell. “The guard told me that there’s people all over the roofs and upper stories waiting to see the murderer swing.”
The other voice, Victoria, said, “Executions draw an enormous crowd. Some people sell places at their windows to watch over the wall.”
“Not me. I seen enough death.”
“You’re a good woman,” Victoria said. “Death shouldn’t be a spectacle.”
The guards were setting up chairs under a canopy for important visitors: officials, judges, wealthy men who wanted to watch. Freydeh did not. She sat down and read the German newspaper Sammy had brought her, a couple days old but better than nothing. She hoped that her sister’s family would manage without her. It was a dreadful time to have been carted away to jail. She knew that Sara would not be shocked by that, the way some people might be, because they were all accustomed to the czarist police locking up Jews on trumped-up charges in order to extort money. Just when she felt as if she had her nose an inch out of poverty and could see a little way ahead, this arrest had to happen, the sky turning dark and falling on her head. All she had to look forward to were Sammy’s visits every other day.
THIRTY-EIGHT
JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Victoria and Tennie were transferred to the Ludlow Street jail. In the Tombs they had enjoyed the invisible company of another of Comstock’s victims, but Ludlow was less unhealthy, being for federal prisoners and debtors. The walls were not as slimy as in the Tombs. They had a little more light and their lawyer saw that good chairs were brought in and a kerosene lamp to read by.
Victoria felt abandoned. No one from the woman’s rights movement had come to her defense publicly except Isabella, who under a pseudonym had written that others, and among them she named Elizabeth, knew of the Beecher-Tilton affair. She also aired some of the secrets of suffragists’ affairs that Victoria had considered writing about but never had. Victoria felt that she and her sister had been deserted by everyone who had previously admired and lauded them. They were outcasts again. Only Isabella remained, and she was futilely trying to get Henry to admit his guilt. Instead of confessing, Henry accused her of insanity, bringing in a doctor who said she was suffering from monomania induced by overexcitement and the influence of Mrs. Woodhull. Isabella was now threatened with being locked in an insane asylum. Victoria followed all this through letters and through the reporters who came by regularly, in hope of a story. Pearlo was also under attack and possible indictment. James was in the Tombs, in the men’s section.
Finally Elizabeth jumped into the fray, defending Isabella and Victoria, stating she had known about the affair. Then one of the best lawyers in New York, Howe of Howe and Hummell, volunteered to take over their defense, although Victoria had no idea how they were ever going to pay him. He was a flamboyant man who mostly defended criminals and members of the Tweed ring, but occasionally took free speech or censorship cases. He was an old foe of Comstock. Three hearings were convened and still they were in jail. Victoria demanded the right to testify in her own and her sister’s behalf, but Judge Blatchford refused, because she was a woman—thus unfit.
Victoria wept and wept. She began to refuse food. Why was she being punished? Why had the spirits deserted her, along with the women who had been her allies and her friends? She had been on the heights of money and fame, thousands had applauded her speeches, she had appeared before Congress, she had been a candidate for president. Her crime was that she had written the truth, and now she was cast down, alone except for Ten-nie, to rot. The newspapers said she would surely be convicted and shut up in Sing Sing for years. She was terrified. The visions she saw were not of high position but of herself grown old in a cell. She developed a deep hacking cough. Some of her hair fell out. She wondered if she was dying. Tennie kept up her spirits for a long time, always giving a cheerful funny outspoken interview to the reporters who still came by, but now she too was weak and dispirited. Instead of starving herself, Tennie ate heartily of the starchy prison food and whatever the reporters brought them, with no exercise. She was putting on weight in the enforced idleness. Sometimes when reporters came to interview them, she regained her energy. Victoria could scarcely bother. It all seemed no use. The only thing they brought that she ate were apples and oranges.
Once again they were carried off to court. Howe, wearing plaid pantaloons, a purple vest and a huge diamond on his satin scarf, asked if the Bible and Fielding and Shakespeare and Lord Byron were next to be censored. With pious vigor, he invoked freedom of the press. He poked fun at Comstock and got the audience laughing. He quoted the Bible, poetry, the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson. Comstock was livid with anger and humiliation, sitting on the edge of his seat with his back straight and his eyes fixed on Howe as if he could kill him by glaring.
Then help finally came, from Victoria’s sometime lover Benjamin Butler. The senator wrote an open letter to her—copies sent to all the papers and published in several—that sai
d the statute under which she had been arrested was misconstrued and did not apply to the Weekly, as it did not cover newspapers. Finally, they were released on $60,000 bail raised by selling just about everything they still owned.
They walked out into a mob of reporters. Tennie joked with them, but Victoria, leaning on her sister, said nothing. Her limbs felt flimsy. The months in jail had sapped her will. They were homeless. No hotel wanted them. They were broke. They had been turned out of their house and out of their offices. Finally they came to rest in a dingy boardinghouse where they shared a small room—containing an elderly bed, a washstand with a pitcher and basin—with each other, Zulu Maud and Byron.
At least they were free. Victoria began to eat again. The boarding-house was so depressing, she took long walks accompanied by her children. Her physical strength began to return, but she felt as if her will had been broken. What was to become of them all? She would not return to Ohio and the life of itinerant quacks and mediums, selling whatever concoctions Buck could cook up. The food in the boardinghouse was gristle and thin broth, porridges and pasty bread—jailhouse food revisited.
She was just beginning to think seriously about what they could do when a fresh warrant was served on her and Tennie. Comstock had persuaded Luther Challis, one of the debauchers of the young virgin at the masked ball, to sue them both for libel because of Tennie’s piece about him and his friend. They were once again hauled into court, with Howe defending them. At least they had a different judge.
But this time a woman came forward to defend the sisters—not one of the respectable women who had been Victoria’s fair-weather friends, but the keeper of the brothel where the virgin had been brought and detained. Molly de Ford, knowing full well that she would be put out of business for her testimony, marched into court and testified that every word Tennie had written was true. This judge permitted her to testify. The jury brought a not guilty verdict. The judge scolded them, but the jury freed the sisters at last. They walked out into a group of reporters cheering them.
Victoria felt stronger. Now they were vindicated, and articles about their harassment began to appear here and there. She received her first offer in months to speak. Haggling about price made her feel better. Perhaps she could recover from this disaster. She used the money to bring out an issue of the Weekly attacking Comstock and all he stood for. She called the Y “the Protestant Jesuits” and published a list of books Comstock had considered obscene, works by Byron, Cervantes, Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Virgil.
Comstock had a great deal of influence. He had pushed Congress into enacting legislation while they were shut up in the Ludlow Street jail that greatly extended his powers. She wished she could ask Benjamin Butler to explain exactly what the new laws—openly called the Comstock Laws— could mean to Tennie and her, but she did not have the money to take a train to Washington to see him. She was aware she still looked haggard. Her wardrobe had been sold off along with their artworks, their furniture, their linens, cutlery and fine china and books. All gone down the maw of Comstock’s savage hatred of them and all they stood for.
Comstock stirred some suits from the powerful members of Plymouth Church forcing Tennie and her to return to court—until she was interviewed by another member of that church who inquired if she possessed letters written by Henry Ward Beecher that bore upon the case. She answered that she did—actually she had no letters, but if Beecher thought she did, so much the better. Obviously there were incriminating letters floating around somewhere, and if he thought she might have them, so much the better for her. The next time she was hauled into court, the judge summarily dismissed the case, saying the 1872 statute did not apply to the Weekly and all charges should cease. Beecher’s influence over the courts was strong. Seven and a half months after the first arrest, the prosecution was vanquished and she was free—in poverty, stripped bare and in broken health. A few newspapers around the country began to defend her and connect her battle against Comstock and Beecher to freedom of the press. Late but not unwelcome.
She had an occasional lecture engagement. The National Woman Suffrage Association held a conference, but she was not invited. She was no longer respectable. The brokerage business was gone, the Weekly appeared only when she had a little money and something important she felt she must say. But she was too weak to push hard on anything. She attended a spiritualist convention with James where she was called upon publicly to defend her free love position. The man who had risen to confront her demanded to know if she had ever prostituted herself.
“Never,” she said. “I never had sexual intercourse with any man whom I am ashamed to stand side by side with before the world. I am not ashamed of any act of my life. At the time, it was the best I knew.” She said she considered herself free to have sexual intercourse with a hundred men if she chose, so long as her feelings were genuine. She demanded that everyone have the same familiarity with their sexual organs as any other part of their body, and that they not blush to discuss sex or their bodies. She stood before an audience and she could feel the dissension, alternating waves of hot and chill from the people before her. Murmurs, applause and boos. She nodded toward James, who was sitting on the platform. “This is my lover, but when I cease to love him, I will leave him.”
The country had plunged into depression while the sisters had been in jail and in court. Thousands of men and women stood in lines for a little soup and some bread. At least they were not yet reduced to that. She could still keep her family in food and keep a roof over their heads, even if it was a cheap boardinghouse. Banks were failing, businesses were closing their doors. The railroads and the mines were cutting wages, indifferent to how their workers would survive when in good times they were barely paid enough to starve on. On every corner, hordes of new streetwalkers called out to passing men, women thrown out of work, women whose husbands had lost their jobs or left them to look for work or better times out west.
Annie Wood, one of those still friendly, told Victoria that respectable young women begged her to let them work in her house. Victoria came frequently for coffee and breakfast, as much to feed herself as to enjoy Annie’s company. She was back with her family again—who else would have her? They had resumed their old trade in ointments and creams for the brothels. Annie said, “In times like these, ordinary working families are selling their daughters’ virginity not once but again and again if they can. There’s always toffs who want to buy a virgin. Some of them think it cures the clap. Poor girls. It sure does pass it on.”
“How do they fake virginity?”
“Alum to tighten the opening. Some animal’s blood inside.”
Victoria sighed. People were so demented. “Comstock has never bothered you?”
“The chief himself protects us. He has a couple of girls here he favors. Comstock likes to cause trouble to those who can’t defend themselves, but he doesn’t go against those who have more power than he does. He knows his place in the chain of command.”
“He’s capable of very personal vendettas.”
“Against you. And others. Many others.” Annie sighed. “If they ever replace the chief, we’ll be in trouble. I’ll just retire. I’ve put away a good nest egg… You were so canny with money, I’m surprised you didn’t.”
“My family eats up whatever I make. I spent for my campaign, I spent for my paper. I believed I was called to lead.”
“You’re not down forever. The next time you get your hands on some money, hold on.” Annie nodded at her mulatto servant for more rolls and café au lait. “Have you tried my quince jam?”
Victoria looked at her friend sadly. Age was beginning to show on Annie. She kept her hair blond but there were crinkles around her eyes. “You can believe I will hold on in future. This has taken years off my life. Byron doesn’t know what’s happening. It’s harder since his father died. Canning was the one other person who could communicate with him. But Zulu Maud knows everything that goes on, and she worries. At times, she’s like a
little old lady. She’s far more understanding and aware than my own mother.”
Annie sighed. “I’m glad I never had children. It’s a load on you.”
“But also comfort.” Victoria slipped a roll covertly into her carryall for Zulu.
TENNIE WOULD FOLLOW her wherever she led, for Tennie was loyal and ever willing, but the rest of her family had to be supported. They were a millstone around her neck—something that dragged her down and bent her spine. But they were her family and they were loyal in their ignorant, quarrelsome way. She must make money, clear their debts, enable them to live decently again. She tried out a speech at Cooper Union on socialism and the devastation that religion wrought, thinking that in the midst of a depression such a topic would rouse the audience, but people walked out. Audiences who came to lectures did not respond to Marxian analysis. They did not want to hear Christianity attacked. She must find a subject that would satisfy audiences.
She worked through the latter part of October into November on a new speech focused on sex, “Tried as by Fire or the True and False Socially.” Since people expected the worst of her, since she was notorious already, she might as well talk about what was forbidden to women and taboo in public. She would speak about the central importance of sexual expression in both men and women, and how repression distorted character and weakened the body. She connected the failure to develop and appreciate sexuality as one cause of unhealthy children. For the first time in her life, she spoke publicly about Byron and his condition, linking it to her own ignorance of her body, her marriage to a drunkard and an adulterer who at times beat her. She talked about female pleasure, insisting that women were at least as capable as men of experiencing pleasure and that orgasm was important for women. Much of women’s nervous troubles were due to repression of their sexuality, a repression that began in childhood.
This speech was a success. She went from town to city to town, crisscrossing the United States, accompanied by Tennie, her children and her mother. Roxanne insisted on coming with her, saying that Vickie’s health was bad and needed her support. Byron was nineteen, not bad-looking but a good-natured idiot. Zulu Maud was her darling. Victoria had taken her out of school because the other children were persecuting her for her family. Tennie and she educated Zulu Maud. Often on trains, they sat doing lessons with her. It passed the time, and Zulu was—as Victoria had been—a quick learner who enjoyed the lessons and the attention they brought her. Occasionally Victoria returned to New York City, where James was waiting, not doing much else besides sitting around with Pearlo and his other freethinker friends and writing an occasional piece for one of their journals.
