The Times reporter sought to explain why she refused to stay in America. After 1869, Edmonia did not publicize specific insults to her color, but for years she made no secret of her permanent return to Europe. She politely described the frustrations that kept her abroad:
“I was practically driven to Rome,” said Miss Lewis. “In order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.” With the little money she could raise, Miss Lewis set out for Rome, where at last she found herself in a real republic. Miss Hosmer became her fast friend and defender, and the American colony at Rome, having left their race prejudices at home, received her kindly. Her origin only served to give emphasis to her phenomenal powers. [King] Victor Emmanuel, the Marquis of Bute, sovereign and nobility, vied with each other in doing her honor. She has executed several busts of John Brown and other celebrities for European customers and has been received as an honored guest in the first circles. All this time she was cogitating her first great ideal work – the “Dying Cleopatra” – a work that in some sense typifies the attitudes of both the races she represents.[675]
Amplifying remarks reported years before in the Graphic, Edmonia said she did not wish to live in a society that could not help but isolate her: “They treat me very kindly here [in the United States] but it is with a kind of reservation.” Skipping the bumps, threats, insults, and denials of public service, she cited only comments and stares that she did not have to tolerate in Europe. Generations of colored artists followed her path abroad.
Her fans wished her god speed. They appreciated how she sought redemption peacefully, through her art. She made her own opportunities, confronting ignorance with dignity where she could. Nearly a century before tiny Rosa Parks[676] held her seat on a Montgomery bus, Edmonia endured hostile glares, threats, and other abuse as she stood with her work in space tacitly reserved for white male artists. Living proof that talent favors no race, no gender, no class, no religion, and no ethnic origin, she commemorated her heroes. She celebrated her heritage. She moved across the color line with grace.
Having realized a bittersweet version of the American dream, she bid farewell forever. Her ship sailed on the tide, south to clear the harbor, then eastward. She could not, would not, live with Jim Crow.
EPILOGUE – Post Scripts and Traces
And he said: “Behold, your grave-posts
Have no mark, no sign, nor symbol.”
– The Song of Hiawatha
1. ISHKOODAH’ and EDMONIA
Chippewa parents may wait before naming a child. They often start by naming a girl for a flower. Years later, a new name or nickname might signify some development. Based on the English form of her Indian name “Wild Fire,” linguist Basil H. Johnston suggested Edmonia’s mother called her Ishkoodah’ [ish-GOOD-day] for the Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis L.).[677] There is no Chippewa word for “wild,” he said.
It is a timely choice for a July baby. The summer bloom in the slender shape of a trumpet makes it a favorite of hummingbirds and butterflies. It also has powerful medical properties, containing both a sedative and a stimulant. Indians have used it to treat bronchial spasms, syphilis, intestinal worms – even as love medicine – and a variety of other ailments.[678] Parts of the plant are smoked, used to make tea, or placed nearby for effect. Abuse can cause great discomfort, coma, and loss of life.
We do not know for certain that she first bore the name Ishkoodah’. She met Canada’s “first anthropologist” in 1864 at the Boston gallery exhibiting Whitney’s Africa Awakening. By this time, she had not lived with the Indians for more than ten years. Her Indian name, probably an idle question for her friends, was of professional interest to him. “Her Indian name was Suhkuhegarequa, or Wildfire,” he recalled years later.[679] The Chippewa word [pronounced zuck-KUH-ig-GAY-kway] literally translates to “fire-lighter woman.”[680]
Rather than a literal, incendiary meaning, unlikely for the little girl who lived with Indians until she was eight years old, the name more likely meant to evoke the “People of the [fire-making] Flint” with whom she lived, played, and traveled as a child.[681] Presumably, she earned the Chippewa nickname by embracing Mohawk ways.
By 1882, Edmonia adopted “Ishkoodah’” as used by Longfellow in The Song of Hiawatha. We offer documentary evidence in her own hand (see Figure 47). Ishkoodah’ can also mean “fire” or “comet.” Perhaps she pondered Longfellow’s lines: “Filled with awe was Hiawatha / At the aspect of his father. / On the air about him wildly / Tossed and streamed his cloudy tresses, / Gleamed like drifting snow his tresses, / Glared like Ishkoodah, the comet, / Like the star with fiery tresses.”
As a source of awe, an exotic reference to Ishkoodah’ the comet could serve the ambition of such a highly motivated, competitive artist. In Longfellow’s imagery, it was powerful, fascinating, and free. Splendid comets, gleaming and glaring as bright as the moon, promised mystical powers.
“Comet-years” were famous for good vintages of wine and grand tragedies of national moment. A two-tailed comet, so magnificent it was recalled for decades, appeared in 1843, perhaps a signal of her conception. A smaller but brilliant comet took the skies in 1854, near her teen awakening. A giant followed in 1858, as she decided to apply to Oberlin. Marking her adulthood in 1861, at the age of seventeen, she asked to be called Edmonia.[682] The unusual radiance of the comet that year provoked theories about the Civil War and thoughts of fearsome events in Europe: the abdication of a Holy Roman Emperor, the London plague, the death of a Pope. This was another night-sky event everyone talked about for years.
Is there a further connection between comets and her name? “Edmonia” was rare north of the Mason-Dixon line. Fewer than 0.003 per cent of 11.3 million American females answered to it in 1850, the census source closest to her birth date. Of its 259 Edmonias, only three of potential relevance appear – all born the same decade – all clustered in upstate New York.[683] The others lived over a thousand miles away, to the south and west. Edmonia Highgate, the daughter of a colored barber, was born in Albany NY the same year as Edmonia. She achieved notability as a teacher. The Highgate and Lewis families could easily have had associates in common. Edmonia Jackson, also colored, was born 1849 in nearby Troy. A white girl named Edmonia Hopkins was born the next year in Steuben County. Were there links?
To say the name references Edmond Halley cannot be proved. But then, Halley’s was and is the most famous comet. In 1843 and 1861, his name was in the news.
Figure 47. Autograph souvenir of Edmonia Lewis, front and back
This photo carte de visite, autographed “Edmonia Lewis Roma May 20th 1882,” “Wild Fire,” and “Ishkoodah´,” came from the papers of her friend, Amelia Blandford Edwards. Courtesy: The Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford, England.
2. ROME AND LA DOLCE VITA
Denial or Denunciation
Public art in the City of Love embraced bare flesh and sensuality going back to pre-Christian times. While pious followers of the Reformation and popes from the time of Michelangelo demanded fig leaves, most Italians still considered robust breasts, buttocks, and male genitalia gifts of God – not Devil’s tools. No hint of shyness stopped the husband of a young model from pointing to an image of her raw beauty with spousal pride. Napoleon’s sister, Princess Borghese famously shed her clothes to pose for Canova at work on his Venus Victrix. Asked if she was comfortable, her memorable comment was, Why not? A stove kept me warm.
To some New Englanders, merely seeing nudity, even in stone, was somehow dirty. In his fiction, the prim Hawthorne explained, “An artist … cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances.”[684] Such frail Yankees must have shook with shame as they met banned truths in public gardens, museums, and piazzas. Yet they toured Rome and Florence
with exceptional enthusiasm.
Not to be outdone, William Story beat the shrill drum of prudery while exposing breasts in his own works. He felt Canova’s Venus was “detestable ... a lascivious courtesan.”[685] An American at his studio carped, “there is not one naked among them.”[686] Henry James, Story’s biographer and apologist, eventually explained that Victorians demanded drapery.
For artists and their buyers who love the human form, nude models are vital. Even a modestly dressed statue must begin with reliable anatomy. Thomas Ball and Hiram Powers argued poverty drove young women to shed their rags. Moreover, they claimed, the models had chaperones, lest anyone impute base motives.
A Witch Hunt in Rome
No less provocative were the young American women who roamed the city unsupervised. Given some knowledge of sin and a moral compass to guide them (rather than the protective shield of innocence), they shaped their lives with a measure of freedom not likely in New England. The Puritan reaction to such liberty was wonder, denial, or prudish reproof – yet curiosity about loose rules drew more than one moral reader to The Marble Faun.
Its author and his family, who lived in Italy from 1857 to 1859, did not immerse themselves in local culture. They preferred the company of other New Englanders, such as the sculptor Louisa Lander. Twenty-two years younger than the novelist, thirtyish, and unmarried, Louisa had arrived about two years earlier. Among things they had in common, they were all from Salem, MA – the village famous for dispatching witches in 1692 and 1693.
Nathaniel Hawthorne admired her breezy lifestyle and expressed broad gusto for her talent.[687] He sat for his portrait bust unaccompanied in her studio and without giving it a second thought.
Her affectionate portrayal depicted him bare-chested in the neoclassical style, youthful, and without the fearsome mustache he sported at various times. To romantic viewers, it might evoke a seductive essence.
He was so pleased with it he wrote to Boston in ecstatic praise. “Even Mrs. Hawthorne is delighted with it, and, as a work of art, it has received the highest praise from all the sculptors here, including [the dean of English sculptors, John] Gibson….”[688]
Bursting with pride, Louisa sped to America to solicit more commissions. She left local artisans to copy her work in marble.
In her absence, the art colony buzzed that she had lived “on uncommonly good terms with some man.”[689] Worse, someone claimed she shed all to pose like a local model.
When she returned in November, she found William Story (also a Salem native) mustering other American sculptors to confront and judge her. They demanded she answer allegations of impropriety.
She angrily refused to meet them.
The all-male panel responded by shredding her good name.
Nathaniel wilted at the possibility of lurid insinuations. Unable to meet her gaze, he ordered his servants to turn her away at the door. His wife Sophia, an artist herself, who once embraced her as a family friend, erased her name from his journals. Their teenage daughter Una lurched into a grave depression accented by malaria and typhus. Their son Julian later denied Lander’s portrait of him, claiming an unknown American redirected the Italian carvers while she was away.[690] It was an accusation as far-fetched as it was inventive in the context of cover-up.
Nathaniel never gave any hint of the scandal in The Marble Faun, which turned on sins of his imagination. Knowing his readers’ weakness, he went on to idealize daring American gals abroad. His characters evoke a fragile purity as they denounce nudity in flesh and stone. He matched the tainted blood of Miriam with sin and mortal shame. He granted Kenyon, the sculptor, a ripe creative gift and Hilda the capacity to make excellent copies while the Italian, Donatello, radiated earthy charm and Catholic guilt. Filtering out the realities of Rome’s artist colony, his cast included no naked models or mean gossips.
For Louisa, rejection by the dear Hawthornes must have been a particularly cruel surprise. Rather than stay and seek a more casual society, she abandoned Rome far more quickly than Edmonia fled Oberlin – then she moved again, deserting New England for Washington DC.
Shock waves of her rejection must have jolted her peers in Rome. Harriet Hosmer, whose name appears in Hawthorne’s preface, and others survived with the knowledge that they had not strayed so far from home that liberties were infinite. Tittle-tattle could still hurt them.[691]
Edmonia’s Sexuality
Edmonia had tolerated worse treatment at Oberlin. Scars of 1862 and 1863 – and gossip about Louisa – could remind her to beware. They surely honed her focus and forced her to set severe limits to her behavior, her image, and her work. She could not afford a repeat.
Even friendly mentors could not be trusted. Mrs. Child had turned on her. Charlotte Cushman had dropped her. Anne Whitney, jealous of her fame, was nosy and potentially spiteful. After blurting out her dismay at her brother living with a “squaw,” Edmonia shielded him with excuses meant to deflect the prying New Englander.
White women of means enjoyed the presumption of virtue. Vinnie Ream, who lived with her parents even in Rome, lamented “that ‘romantic love’ should ‘remain unknown’ to her”[692] while flaunting her sexuality to get what she wanted. An acute shortage of men and an abundance of platonic beliefs, public restraint, white lies, and outright denial united to shelter a range of options within upright Boston marriages. Consider Anne Whitney and Abby Manning, Hatty Hosmer and Louisa Ashburton, Charlotte Cushman with a parade of female lovers that ended with Emma Stebbins.[693] Consider the record of other upstanding celebrities – such as Frank Leslie with Mrs. Squier or Rev. Henry Ward Beecher with Mrs. Theodore Tilton (until exposed by public scandal) – who enjoyed odd arrangements under mantles of blue-nose propriety.
As a colored woman, Edmonia labored under different presumptions: popular notions of an animal nature and the curse of the Negro wench. William Story, for example, mocked the lusty Lord Byron by sketching him “‘as he might have been,’ showing a very pronounced negro type,” according to Julian Hawthorn.[694]
Respectable colored women compensated for such myths, by hewing to an opposite extreme.[695] Schooled in prim modesty during her years at Oberlin, Edmonia easily rose above scary stereotypes.
Of a ripe young age and rarely cited in the company of anyone, Edmonia had more to prove than anyone else did. Her vulnerability certainly led her to mass her own heavy clay for Laura Bullard’s eyes in 1871. When forced by market demand to hire male carvers, she followed Hatty’s lead and hired many.
Isolation also solved a practical question. Women aspiring to be professional artists had no business marrying, as Hatty pointed out (Her vow of celibacy covered her native lack of sexual interest in men).[696] A driven artist could not be obliged to follow and obey, all rights subordinated, and all expressions subject to control – unless she were, like Isabel Cholmeley, very rich, aggressive, and her husband oddly tolerant. Having children could add painful conflicts. Vinnie Ream turned her energy away from art by choice when she married in 1878 to become a mother and Washington hostess. She picked up her tools again late in life to model the Cherokee linguist, Sequoyah. Many other women also rejected marriage and children – but not necessarily lovers – to give themselves a career.
Few were as instantly famous as Edmonia. None represented two maligned races with hopes of changing the social order. Edmonia’s militant idealism required steely integrity and stainless purity. While adventuring socially and stoking controversy, she could not tinker with her public honor.
To be above suspicion, she would have needed to be without sin. Any hint of moral lapse, even false signs, such as nudity or hints of eroticism in her works, could thwart high goals. In short, she was not free in her studio, in Charlotte Cushman’s parlor, or even in her own bedchamber. It seems certain that, if she had ever strayed, some rival of her art or a foe of her message would have sniffed it out and aired awkward details with glee.
Mrs. John Jones of Chicago admired Edmonia as an ideal woman who did a
ll she could do – with neither the vote nor a man. That was, she said, her idea of suffrage.[697] Despite a single documented attack on her femininity (discussed below), no record has been found to suggest Edmonia was truly close to any woman or man – except her brother who lived thousands of miles away.[698]
Escape
If Edmonia had a failing, it was for spirits that could numb her pain. She dismissed the strict injunctions of McGraw and Oberlin after a year in Italy. Thanks perhaps to her fondness for alcohol, she survived a cholera epidemic during her second summer in Rome. The expatriate set had already fled summer’s heat and the perennial threat of malaria. Grim carts rumbled through the streets, stopping at each door to call, Bring out your dead! They collected six people next door, even one in her own building.
Altogether, six thousand people fell to a germ that spread literally from hand to mouth. Scientists had discovered the cause of the disease more than a dozen years earlier, but even sophisticated travelers remained ignorant of it. In city streets that doubled as sewers, visits to local fountains ran obstacle courses of filth, flies, and foul puddles. Drinking wine, brandy, or hot tea was safer than fresh water.
Edmonia dealt with the epidemic in her own way, focused on work and dreaming about her fans in New England. She quipped to Anne Whitney that she kept both Bible and brandy by her bedside. If one gave out, I can take up the other![699]
***
The American colony, dominated by Protestants, romanticized the kindly Pope Pius IX, calling him ‘Pio Nono.’ They blamed corruption, illiteracy, and most of all immorality on Cardinal Antonelli. Never a priest, he saw no need for the vow of celibacy – nor did many of Rome’s clergy. People joked, “if you wanted to go to a brothel you must go in the daytime, for at night they were full of priests.”[700]
The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis Page 29
