The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis

by Harry Henderson

  In the analysis quoted by Stowe and others, an Athenæum critic noted the statue’s crossed legs and closed mouth to conclude the “secret-keeping dame” represented the African mystery. Yet Sojourner Truth was never about mystery, secrecy, or Africa. She was a charismatic American who happened to be born in New York State, colored, and a slave. Having escaped bondage as an adult, she had electrified audiences, preaching her gospel of freedom and feminism. She often cried, “Well children, I talk to God and God talks to me!” She could demonstrate a strength equal to most men and then ask, “Ain’t I a woman?”

  The mystery should have been why Story’s Sibyl was so gloomy. Where was the “triumphant” feeling and “overwhelming energy” that Stowe described? Story’s downward looking Sibyl was nothing like Stowe’s description: “stretching her scarred hands towards the glory to be revealed.”

  Story never confirmed Stowe’s claim in print. Obviously narcissistic, he was unlikely to share credit for his art. He called his Sibyl a prophet of ancient Greek myths. His description, below, tells us less about his subject than it does about him and his circle, an elite society that shared a romantic pride based upon insularity, shallowness, and confusion:

  She is looking out of her black eyes into futurity and sees the terrible fate of her race. This is the theme of the figure – Slavery on the horizon, and I made her head as melancholy and severe as possible, not at all shirking the real African type.[228]

  Then he shrugged off his racial intent: “On the contrary, it is thoroughly African – Libyan Africa of course, not Congo.”

  The woozy muddle between the living preacher and the mythical Sibyl was not surprising for an artist who framed his visions exclusively in white marble with a devotion to classical Greece. Story’s art was inseparable from the pecking order that put the black African at risk and out of sight. His instincts shared the essence of Child’s objections to the realism of The Freed Woman.

  An equal barrier existed between his idea and the facts of slavery present and past. An ancient Libyan vision of “slavery on the horizon” could more reasonably have pointed to the pirates who once sailed from Tripoli, Tunis, etc. – North Africa’s Barbary Coast. For hundreds of years, they kidnapped over a million white Europeans and sold them into slavery. The mythic prophet might have also foreseen U.S. Marines storming Libyan shores in 1804 – then bragging and singing about it. But then, for Story’s crowd, the Barbary pirates were out of fashion.

  Stowe’s article was widely read. The nickname ‘Libyan Sibyl’ still clings to Sojourner Truth.

  Figure 13. Sojourner Truth

  Sojourner Truth’s portrait appeared in the frontispiece of her Narrative, published in 1850. She exposed her breasts to women and said she had suckled “many a white babe” when anyone doubted her gender.[229]

  Figure 14. The Libyan Sibyl, by William Wetmore Story

  Marble, modeled 1861, carved 1868, 57 in. in height. Photo courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum, bequest of Henry Cabot Lodge through John Ellerton Lodge.

  The Africa reference helped make William Wetmore Story famous during the American Civil War. He considered the six-pointed pendant hanging from the Sibyl’s neck mystical, a “cabalistic sign of supreme rank” traceable to Egypt and a symbol of the Star of Bethlehem.[230]

  Story and Cushman

  For English and American artists in Rome, Story was the alpha dog of their habitat. His spoor seasoned their air as he took pains to despise them. He was, according to Anne Whitney, known as a snob.[231] He sniffed to an old friend, “For the most part, and with scarcely an exception among the American artists, art is (here) but a money-making trade, and I can have no sympathy with those who are artists merely to make a living. As for general culture there are none of our countrymen here who pretend to it….”[232]

  When he settled in Rome in 1856, he took offense that Charlotte Cushman failed to call on him. It was a critical sign of status. Hoping to impress her, he had visited her when she moved in several years earlier. He then claimed he helped her and Hosmer find their way. Forced by Cushman’s fame to eventually pay his respects, he never forgave her, squalling to anyone who would listen. Years later, he sniped in a letter, “Miss Cushman is mouthing it as usual, and has her little satellites revolving around her.”[233] Story’s wife, according to Anne Whitney, was fully engaged in the feud.[234]

  Although Story later became friendly with Harriet Hosmer (after she left Cushman’s building to move in next door), he once disparaged her along with the rest. He believed women artists were drones: “It is one thing to copy and another to create. [Hosmer] may or may not have inventive powers as an artist, but if she have will she not be the first woman?”[235] Such congealed biases mired gender equality in art for another hundred years in spite of ample evidence to the contrary.

  Story’s biographer, Henry James later turned bits of the rivalry into quotable phrases. He famously labeled Cushman’s circle, “that strange sisterhood of American ‘lady sculptors’ who at one time settled upon the seven hills in a white marmorean [“marble”] flock.”[236] Singling out Edmonia for special abuse, he ignored her name in favor of a sneering figure of speech, “One of the sisterhood, if I am not mistaken, was a negress, whose colour, picturesquely contrasting with that of her plastic material, was the pleading agent of her fame.” In James’s view, none of the “strange sisterhood” could achieve the immortality that he supposed was Story’s due.

  In spite of egalitarians in their midst, Story and his crowd epitomized the class custom that kept Edmonia’s people down. Their status depended more on a sustained pretense of entitlement – more like European aristocracies than post-revolutionary Americans. They reveled in catty snipes and customs as proof of their own worth. Story crowned his descriptions of popish Rome, for example, with gritty stereotypes of beggars as Jews – ghettoed, overtaxed, and stigmatized as a second-class race.[237] In spite of his friendships with Senator Sumner and other ardent abolitionists, he callously spun himself as a victim of slavery. James later excused him “as rather pitifully ground between the two millstones of the crudity of the ‘peculiar institution’ on the one side and the crudity of impatient agitation against it on the other.”[238]

  Oddly, Sumner never got a whiff of this, for in 1864, he announced to Story, “You will be happy to know that the fate of Slavery is settled. This will be a free country.”[239] Then, Sumner urged his friend, “Be its sculptor. Give us, mankind, a work which will typify or commemorate a redeemed nation. You are the artist for this immortal achievement.”

  The Story name had clouded Edmonia’s horizons long before she sailed. It was celebrated in his native Salem. Around greater Boston, he was a local blue blood. Mrs. Child cited his Libyan Sibyl when admiring Edmonia’s Shaw for the National Anti-Slavery Standard.[240]

  At the close of the Civil War, Story and his wife visited Boston and Newport for a few summer weeks. They hobnobbed with old friends at events public and private as Edmonia prepared to go to Italy. Pompous and hypercritical, they counted Stebbins’ new statue of Horace Mann and the Harvard graduation among many dislikes.[241]

  Ample opportunity existed for Edmonia’s backers to engage Story’s aid as they did Seward and others. If any such attempts were made, only rumors survive. More likely, he waved them off with unsubtle scorn.

  After Edmonia arrived in Rome, word of his disdain for other artists could have reached her via Hatty, Charlotte, and their friends. She must have judged him spoiled by a society of privilege, prejudice, and conceit.

  One day, as she worked on a portrait outside Boston, she would point to the affable curiosity of an infant belonging to a wealthy family, the Forbes. The baby studied their different skin colors for some time, putting her hand on Edmonia’s cheek. “Kiss me,” the baby told her. Delighted, she observed that the two-year old’s warmth toward her showed no natural bias against her dark skin.[242]

  Edmonia, raised to maintain a stoic dignity, was tested by ordeals at Oberlin, by ske
ptics in Boston, and competitors in Rome. She must have pondered Story’s fame. He existed outside her immediate circle, not a threat. Her time would come. She did not miss much, but she would not miss dinner at the Palazzo Barberini.

  Figure 15. William Wetmore Story, ca. 1870

  Unidentified photographer, Charles Scribner’s Sons Art Reference Dept. records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

  11. A SECOND EMANCIPATION GROUP – 1866 to 1867

  The Curse of the “Negro Wench”

  Soon enough, Edmonia learned The Freed Woman had failed. Funds for marble would not come. The turnabout must have been a shock, a scary step into space that had promised firm footing. For months Child, the Waterstons, Stevenson, Cheney, and others – not to mention the press and friends in Rome – had outdone each other with encouragement. The core of Mrs. Child’s rant, which reviled the woman’s figure, must have filtered through – perhaps interpreted by Hosmer, Peabody, or others wise in the ways of that society. In retrospect, it seems Edmonia surmised that this was where she had gone wrong.

  She had seen and met many colored women in Richmond and elsewhere. They were real, vital, and passionately expressive. Each had her own African look – body, hair, and face different from the Europeans that had populated the marble universe since the 4th century BC. The look was part of her own identity and inspiration. Fans who visited her studio or saw photos – even Mrs. Child at first – had cheered her on.

  Although a few Europeans had sculpted black African women,[243] no Yankee saw them idealized in white marble or suitably darker bronze. Story’s African women were “not Congo”[244] in spite of the widespread and continued, near hypnotic, confusion of his work with the fictional Cleopatra described as “Nubian” by Hawthorne in The Marble Faun (1860).

  Anne Whitney had used a white woman to model the semi-nude, larger-than-life Africa Awakening (ca. 1863-1864). After showing the remarkable work-in-progress in Boston (where Edmonia had seen it) and New York, she was unable to reconcile criticisms of its African facial features, and she destroyed it.[245]

  Following the Civil War, a few Americans started modeling black men largely in connection with (and subsidiary to) the late president: Ball in Florence, Hosmer in Rome, Henry Kirke Brown, and John Quincy Adams Ward, both in New York.[246] Some attempted, but none succeeded with images of black African-American women. Civic committees rejected designs for Lincoln memorials featuring a freedwoman proposed by Leonard Volk and Randolph Rogers.[247] Rogers’ modest female “Africa,” on a corner of the bronze Columbus Doors (1858) at the Capitol, did not represent an American slave, and it completed an international theme. He did not add the female figure representing Emancipation to The Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Detroit until 1881. Ward did not install his tribute to Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn NY, embellished with a freedwoman, until 1891.

  The early, radical Slave Auction (1859) of John Rogers was of painted plaster, not in a monument class. Even he wavered, saying he intended the colored woman to appear “more nearly white.”[248] Hosmer also skirted the subject, her African Sibyl (started 1868) being neither “Greek” nor “Congo.”[249]

  Not until the Great Migration and World War I turned over conventions hard-packed by habit was the depiction of African-American women in stone openly discussed and debated.[250] Not until the twentieth century could African Americans see their sculptors – such as Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, Augusta Savage, and Richmond Barthé – celebrate the beauty of their women.

  Why did Civil War-era sculptors memorialize freed men but not women? When slavery was still fresh in the American mind, a tacit rule haunted the social equation that guided monuments to cultural ideals. Like the far side of the Moon, colored women did not appear.

  The notoriety of the powerless female, who so recently stood naked on the auction block, flew in the face of Victorian aspirations like a gangsta rapper at the opera. Sexually ripe, desperate to survive, and not bound to any man, Edmonia’s Freed Woman bore no presumption of virtue. She was the “Negro wench,” an image belittled by Mrs. Child when used as an argument to create sexual fears of freed slaves.[251]

  The term (including “colored wench” and “mulatto wench,”) was common in speech, books, ads, letters, and legal documents for over one hundred years. Hinting lust and mixed-race babies, it was more than an insult. Slave women had no more right to virginity, respect, or even to their own offspring than a rabbit did. Emancipation had no effect on such attitudes.

  Ever complex, Child had no problem elevating the pulses of her readers with exotic sex that included intermarriage and her literary version of the wench, the “tragic mulatta.”[252] Yet, her objection to the “Negro wench” as a pro-slavery argument ignored the concerns of her peers.

  Black (or white), the “wench” was the nemesis of respectable womanhood: pure, pious, and bound to domestic bliss. For the abundance of Victorian ladies who competed for scarce, eligible bachelors (so many had gone west or died in the war), any glorification of the illicit option must have raised worries. To create a secular idol to the mistreated essence of Africa on a par with a Greek goddess or the Immaculate Virgin was not acceptable.

  As a colored artist, alone, at the mercy of, and advised by sympathetic female members of society, Edmonia must have realized her Freed Woman dredged up deep-seated qualms. She could hardly resolve them alone in the 1860s. Her art could not exist without money.

  In retrospect, it seems she decided to adjust her tactics to advance her mission and swallow her ample racial pride. Whether this was Child’s reasoned intent is not the issue. Edmonia got the message. She never again idealized a woman with African features.

  Mrs. Chapman’s Input

  Political news from America brimmed with promise. The nation had ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, extending Emancipation beyond the former Confederate states. By summer, the Reconstruction Congress had passed the Fourteenth. When ratified, it made citizens of former slaves, guaranteed them due process, and extended equal representation in Congress.

  This was the moment to honor the historic proclamation! Edmonia dug in and tried again. By the end of 1866, she wrote to the Freedmen’s Record – that is, to her friends at the Freedmen’s Bureau – and to Mrs. Child, enclosing a photo of a second Emancipation group. She called it Morning of Liberty.[253] She also wrote to Mrs. Chapman, who answered quickly with critical comments.

  Around this time, Harriet Hosmer had designed an elaborate memorial to Lincoln and Emancipation and sent a model to America.[254] Her Temple of Fame proposed to tell the freedmen’s history with a novelty: four statues of colored men in various costumes that traced the progress of their race during the Lincoln Administration – from auction block to laborer to aiding Union troops to uniformed soldier. Estimated cost? £50,000! Then came another new idea: financing was to come from freedmen! The fund boasted thousands already.

  Aha! Free colored people could be a source of money. Edmonia followed suit, responding to Mrs. Chapman’s comments at once with “new zeal.”[255] She promised changes and another photo. She then added her fund-raising proposal: “If every black man in the United States would give a penny each, I could very soon be able to do my part. I will not take anything for my labor. Mr. Garrison has given his whole life for my father’s people and I think I might give him a few month’s work.” She estimated the cost at $1,000 and asked for $500 to begin. Generously, she proposed applying $200 that two abolitionists[256] had given her. If she could get $500 by April, she could have the statue finished within the year.

  In New England anti-slavery circles, Garrison was surely as important as Lincoln, a latecomer. Garrison had led the movement from its infancy, undeterred by threats, jail, or proslavery thugs who once dragged him through the streets. With slavery done, he had published the final pages of the Liberator and shut it down.

  Chapman considered the penny-raising scheme but then lost interest. In the half-hearted solicitation she started, she omitted mention
of Garrison and any description of the work.[257] She never finished.

  Trapped in self-exile, Edmonia waited for word. She must have felt encouraged by Chapman’s critique and other reactions. Wary of another conflict, she must have pondered what to make of the silence that followed. Her model lay trapped under damp cloth for months. She had other needs: customers to serve, ideas to sketch, commissions to complete. Promising at first to be a very long year, 1867 was already quite busy.

  12. GROWING SUCCESS

  The English Factor

  About a year after the Athenæum article, an American writer gave further appreciation of their rising star. Not an art critic himself, he gushed, “I have heard several gentlemen say that there is not anything in Rome, of modern art, surpassing [Edmonia’s Hiawatha groups] for beauty of design, or excellence of execution in bringing out the peculiarities of Indian character.”[258]

  Meanwhile the beast of bigotry lurched mindlessly in Edmonia’s favor, the yin of America becoming the yang of the English-speaking colony in Rome. The English Catholics who came to Rome were prosperous and educated. Officially suppressed for generations until 1832, they instinctively sympathized with her low status among Americans – still resented for their Revolution. A Boston newspaper reported, “Miss Lewis is well received and hospitably entertained in Rome, and especially by the English who have shown her many kindnesses. I often see her driving on the Pincian [Hill] with the wife of a prominent English teacher belonging to the Catholic Church, who in this way is able not only to help an artist who needs assistance, but to show her hatred of Americans, which she omits no opportunity of displaying here in Rome, in common with many of her nation.”[259]