The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  Whatever she did surely excited her assailants more.

  A child of the Flint shows no fear. She never learned to defer to every white face. She would never submit. She had grown up and lived as an equal with red, colored, and white people, eating at the same table, sleeping under the same roof, speaking in her turn. Her Oberlin friends and classmates were mostly white. She worked hard and did well in school. Her classmates and the respected Keeps asked her opinion and listened. With satisfaction and a sense of worth, she must have radiated the self-absorbed poise, youthful beauty, and noble charm of any well-bred college coed.

  Her attackers meant to change that. They intended to humiliate, to punish, and to steal her sweetness. They meant to teach her that white people could not be her friends; she could not be their equal. They beat her like a poisonous snake.

  Sexual violence has been the coward’s main course against women since the beginning of time. Rape is a crime of power and humiliation so troubling its victims rarely make it known. It means to profoundly disgrace and traumatize forever. Legal recourse means relinquishing chaste reputation and reliving the horror, amplifying feelings of shame. A woman, even a white woman, had little hope of justice in 1862.

  The society that prized its righteous standing hid the rape of Edmonia Lewis. Never publicly alleged or confessed, it was not specified in any record – only hinted with comments about clothing torn away. In hindsight, who could doubt it? This was a gutless attack.

  Naked, violated, bruised, and bloodied, the young woman was left to die in the dark, a sorry silhouette spread-eagled on the frozen snow.

  Someone at Father Keep’s must have awaited her return. Missing her, they aroused the town. Someone tolled the bell in a general alarm. Her friends must have feared kidnapping. Others would have guessed she bolted across the frozen mud, hoping to cheat justice. Aided by oil lanterns, faculty, students, and townspeople peered into the cold winter night: around Keep’s large house, nearby buildings, and the roads.

  She could not get far without a horse. Check the stables! No horses were missing. Check the depot and the tracks! No train was scheduled. Check the south side of town where the colored people lived. No luck!

  Blending with the crowd, well-known faces in winter gear, her attackers must have been elated to see what trouble they caused, curious to see what would follow. Finally, perhaps led by one of them, eager to prolong his excitement and impatient for resolution – or troubled by remorse and intent on excusing his footprints in the snow – they found her “by the garden fence shockingly mangled & bruised,” according to a stranger’s diary. She was undoubtedly frozen, insensible, and bleeding from lacerations. Her eyes were swollen shut. Her pulse was slowed. Black welts on copper flesh overwhelmed her petite body. She shivered uncontrollably.

  Horrified, a local tradesman, a harness maker, rushed her inside. Revived by the warmth of the fire, the binding of her wounds, by prayers and soothing chatter, she was unable to describe her assailants. It was too dark. She was too upset and too much in pain from a broken collarbone. She could not remember. No one else saw or heard anything. Someone collected her clothing and jewelry by light of day.

  She must have begged, Why me? Who hates me so much? What did I do?

  Such questions would have haunted her. I was always good. I lived by the rules.

  No one could explain.

  No one investigated.

  No one filed a complaint.

  No one could be blamed.

  Like the three proverbial monkeys, town leaders closed their eyes and ears to the horror, saying nothing, doing nothing. As mysterious as her attackers, they became accomplices. The ever-pious leaders of Oberlin struggled to reconcile reality with its good name and lofty ideals. The episode was a tutorial in the degenerate realities of the times. Why pile trouble on trouble to prolong the bad news about Oberlin?

  Her color weighed against her. She had little choice. Pray, forgive, and let it go. Such was less than could have been provided by a loving family or an authority that sought justice on her behalf. Yet, forgiveness is a Gospel virtue not to be underestimated.

  The assault was an unexpected rite of passage, a dreadful unity with brothers and sisters of African blood who were born to the whip and the chain. Surely it left scars inside and out. Surely, it stirred questions in her mind and unease in her gut. Surely it seasoned the womanly grit that would take her past barriers and make her famous. No one at Oberlin had a clue about her real past – or her future. She grew up with ideas of never yielding. Only murder could put her down.

  Book One - Boston

  In the beginning, a young woman lived in the Sky World where she suffered the torments of a brutal husband. She dreamed of escaping him. One day she found a hole so deep it had no bottom. Some say her husband pushed her, and she floated down to the Earth. Others say she jumped.

  – Mohawk legend

  1. EAST IN 1863

  A New Day

  A man, even a fine gentleman, might have used earthy verbs to soothe the pain of dismissal. As a proper young lady in a plain day dress and bonnet, the Gospel phrase, “shake the dust off your feet,” should have crossed her mind. It rings of righteousness. Not welcome? So be it! After doggedly defending her name for a year, the words somehow could have justified her departure from Oberlin and eased her mind.

  Not so easy was shedding the frustration of relentless snubbing meant to sour her young life. She would never forget, but she must have prayed hard to rise above the awful girls, the cold Lady Principal, and the inability of the dithering patriarch to control her fate. Rev. Keep was the one who had forced colored students and an antislavery agenda upon the College decades earlier. Now past the age of eighty, he remained a friend of her people but had little say in management decisions.

  The scandal mongers still called her Mary, the name she had discarded two years before as she left childish things behind. They tormented her with no regard for the two-judge court, which had acquitted her of charges that she poisoned fellow boarders. New false accusations arose, enough to disrupt the fourth year of her education for good.[42] Oberlin College had suffered other scandals, mostly sexual, leading to a zero tolerance for bad behavior. Rather than renew the debate, its Lady Principal had simply shut her out between terms. She would not get her degree. Clara Hale, a freshman from Bath OH finishing the prep course, found great satisfaction in the fall of the colored senior.

  It was spring, a time for renewal. “Mary Lewis” – beaten and exiled – was a liability. She must sink into the past. As M. Edmonia Lewis, she headed for New York City. She could have stopped to see kin or old friends. They were on the way. Like precious salt, so often a treat, they would set her wounds on fire with questions that could pry out the chance that she was to blame. Our spare chronology and Edmonia’s remarkable focus suggest she took no time off.

  She surely pondered the great abolitionists, white and colored, that she encountered at Oberlin. All towering orators, each could move crowds to fresh ideas and action. The Word had a well-established place in the anti-slavery movement. Rev. Finney,[43] the charismatic, white president of the College, authored rhetorical thunder bolts that incited abolitionism as a holy war – for believers a true chance for Salvation. John Brown, the white martyr of the movement and a man of action, held a spiritual place as his final speech agitated the nation toward inevitable fury. John Mercer Langston, the first colored lawyer in Ohio, demanded more: equality as well as the end of slavery. She owed him her life. He was proud to take a stand and stand his ground. He had ignored pleas from the colored community to drop her case; he had risked his life to investigate her accusers. He had eloquently defended her innocence. Finally, Frederick Douglass, former slave and famous for his resonant notions of equality, had advised her to leave town.

  She needed to pick battles she could win. What could she, not so articulate, do to witness for change? Her talent as an artist had blossomed with clever drawings (see Figure 1) and a little portrait bust
of a bespectacled professor made from leftover putty that “ladies visiting the college … pronounced an excellent likeness.”[44] To do more with her art, Douglass told her, she needed “to seek the East and by study prepare herself for work and further study abroad.”[45]

  She sought to join the movement as an artist. Having started her fourth year at Oberlin, her degree had been in sight, but circumstances interfered. Moreover, the College was no art school and good artists need no diploma. At best, it gave young ladies lessons in art, piano, or voice, “to send out a set of pious, well educated and genteel (not fashionable) young ladies prepared to be useful in any circumstances.”[46] Unique in her ambition, Edmonia would become more than piously, politely, useful with her art.

  Figure 1. Urania, 1862

  She drew this portrait of the heavenly muse of astronomy and astrology as a wedding gift for her college friends. An easily recognizable rendition of an antique statue[47] with her faint signature, “Edmonia Lewis,” it marks her beginnings as the historic artist. A candle wax stain appears to the left of the head. 14 ½ x 12 inches. Photo courtesy: Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio.

  Shiloh

  Presumably at the suggestion of Douglass or Langston, she sought out Rev. Henry Highland Garnet for help. Garnet was known for his intelligence and his faith in the native ability of colored Americans. He ministered the Prince Street Church, later called Shiloh, long a leading center of activism in New York City and just a few blocks north of the railway terminal. New York City was second only to Philadelphia as home to large populations of blacks.

  Focusing on her story, Garnet likely asked opinions of church elders. They must have been incredulous. Someone surely huffed, There is a war on! Others could have pointed out that Boston or Italy would serve an aspiring artist much better. Apologizing for not being able to do more, he wrote a letter to introduce her to William Lloyd Garrison. Putting his hand on her head, he sent her to Boston with a sense of awe: “God bless you, my little one; it is better to fail grandly than to succeed in a little way!”[48]

  In the course of her visit, she could have heard of the Colored Orphan Asylum. Far uptown at the time, it occupied a large, four-story building at 43d street, north of the city reservoir. The idea of hundreds of homeless colored children crowded together was something to ponder. They were the innocent outcasts of society. White orphans went west by the trainload for easy adoption. Any colored children with them returned, unwanted. The place was a symbol of who she was. It cast a long shadow of who she might have been. Her concern for such orphans would guide many of her choices.

  Boston

  Boston of 1863 was called the “Athens” of America: literate, worldly, rich, and – for the New World – quite old. As a country girl, Edmonia could not imagine where all the crooked little cobbled streets went or why. “It seemed as if I never went out to go anywhere, but what I went round and round….”[49] They were nothing like the modern wooden ways of Oberlin, where all the streets were straight and the corners turned true right angels.

  Like its byways, Boston’s complexity posed a sharp contrast to the single-minded clarity that dominated her school. The ambitions of its economy had ruptured the conformist rigor of its founders. The result had modernized its ideas – but not its mores. Merchants more interested in profits than piety had rebelled against Calvinist self-denial. They embraced free will, free trade, tolerance, and reason while retaining a Puritan sense of decorum, hard work, and – for its Protestant majority – the rejection of most “popish” traditions. Members of the Episcopal Church (the former Church of England) flourished, overshadowing poor Irish and French Catholic neighbors. Spread via Harvard’s Divinity School throughout New England, Boston’s progressive theology questioned nearly every religious assumption. At the once-Puritan First Church, founded in 1630, liberal Unitarians doubted everything from the nature of God to ideas of human need and nature. An elite literary group calling themselves Transcendentalists preferred individuals’ intuitions to religious doctrines. Many admired old John Brown.

  Fine art in Boston was once as scarce as gold in a debtors’ prison. Puritan forefathers had rejected the rich trappings of the state churches and monarchies that had persecuted them. They feared signs of opulence as distractions from spiritual purity. As Boston prospered, the newly wealthy sought to enliven spaces kept blank by two hundred years of sober restraint. They also nurtured an anti-slavery faction as zealous as Oberlin’s.

  Yet, its call for the end of slavery in the South did not require equality at home. Boston lived by caste. At the top were the so-called Brahmins, wealthy families who traced themselves to the founders. At the low end: Edmonia Lewis. For room and board, colored newcomers were likely directed to the humble north slope of Beacon Hill, the side shaded from the winter sun and blocked from summer views of the public gardens. Known for its history of poverty, fugitive slaves, and brothels, locals called it “nigger hill.”

  2. EPIPHANY

  Franklin

  Edmonia was on an adventure, seeking the famous Garrison and his anti-slavery newspaper. She soon entered School Street – a path to Garrison’s office. The school that gave the street its name was gone. In its place was the construction site of the new City Hall.[50] Passing the old stone church on the corner, she stopped short, frozen in her tracks. A massive green statue loomed before her (Figure 2). She had never seen anything like it! Excited, she stood for a moment, pulse racing, but otherwise as petrified as the towering figure. She stared up. Benjamin Franklin stared back, immune to the silent drama unfolding in the morning sunlight.

  She would ever speak of the enchanted moment as lovers recall their first encounter. The feeling was intense, profound, the stirring of the inner child of her early years and the quenching of an aching thirst. The figure radiated unexpected power, and it became her personal hub. As she put it, “A certain fascination seemed always to direct my steps to that one spot, and I became almost crazy to make something like the thing which fascinated me.”[51]

  Overcoming their distaste for idolatry, Bostonians had rendered Franklin as a secular saint in modern dress – patriot, statesman, scientist, and printer. They installed the lifelike bronze statue in 1856, one of the first they erected for public viewing. It meant to remind the students at the Boston Latin School that he, too, was once a student there.

  For Edmonia, it must have resonated with the childhood magic of holy icons at the famous Jesuit mission of St. Francis Xavier du Sault at Kahnawake. Its imported crucifix, paintings, bas-reliefs, and statues of saints,[52] are awesome. Its sister landmark Church of Stone of the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawks is equally grand.

  As an adult, she had never seen a three-dimensional image so massive. There were none at McGraw, none at Oberlin. She inspected the larger-than-life detail, the dimensions, the balding head, the long hair, the baggy chin, the fur trim on the coat, the wrinkles of face and fabrics, and the intelligence of the eyes – all illusions drawn from inorganic bronze. The totality of it affirmed awesome possibilities. Confusion gave way to a new power that galvanized her sense of purpose and settled her future. Like a spark on gunpowder, the sight provided thrust to her life trajectory.

  Not far away, a bronze Daniel Webster (by Hiram Powers) had greeted visitors outside the State House since 1859. A marble George Washington (by Frances Chantrey), carved in 1827, rested inside. Once found, she surely added them to her routine.

  Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin, by Richard S. Greenough

  This eight-foot high bronze startled Edmonia in 1863. City fathers had unveiled it in 1856 with an elaborate ceremony. Courtesy: New York Public Library.

  Garrison

  Walking on air like a woman in love, she found the offices of the Boston Liberator around the corner. Barely a foot taller than Tom Thumb and flush with outrageous ambition, she must have seemed incredible to the elegant Maria Weston Chapman.

  Garrison’s chief aide bore herself with a deep sense of personal superiority. She was a desc
endent of Pilgrims and a founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. As a radical reformer, she once courageously marched through an angry mob. (Abolitionism was generally unpopular at first.) As a widow, she had relocated to Europe for her children’s education, and then returned, living in Weymouth. She could be imperious, dogmatic, and self-righteous. Her friends nicknamed her “Lady Macbeth.”

  Edmonia likely saw nothing of Mrs. Chapman’s ambition, only the considerable charm she beamed at her young visitor. According to her oft-told tale, she explained she wanted to be an artist, to make statues like the one on School Street. She added that Mr. Douglass and Rev. Garnet had sent her.

  Garrison, too, must have registered astonishment. People came seeking work, clothes, food, or a little money – not artistic training, not wishing to make statues. The mention of Douglass and Garnet in the same breath must have surprised him further. They differed on how to achieve their common goal, the elimination of slavery. Garnet, however, agreed with Douglass’s interest in Edmonia. His note asked Garrison to help her.

  Garrison thought of Edward A. Brackett.[53] He had made portrait busts of John Brown, orator Wendell Phillips, and himself. His studio was quite near. Asking her to follow, he headed for the door.

  With profuse thanks, Edmonia followed him. In his wake, she walked even taller. The warmth of that day would linger for years. She had met her destiny on School Street. The famous abolitionists of the Liberator had welcomed her. Mr. Garrison himself was leading her to someone who could help her. She would soon make a statue of her own.