The Hope Chest

by Karen Schwabach

  “I wonder what they're arguing about?” she said.

  “Me, I expect,” said Myrtle.

  “Fine, don't listen to me.” Miss Dexter's voice was suddenly clear; she must have stormed out of the kitchen into the downstairs hall. “I'm only saying that this is exactly the sort of gesture that loses us sympathy in the South.”

  The front door of Cameron House slammed.

  Violet wondered if Myrtle could be right.

  One of the many things that Violet had heard several times during her virtuous years of silence at the dinner table was that colored people were different. Yet in the last twenty-four hours of traveling with Myrtle, Violet had noticed that colored people were really not that different at all. She didn't mention this to Myrtle, who presumably already knew it, but to Violet this was something of a revelation. It was the first time that she'd ever discovered, all by herself, that Mother and Father were wrong about some things.

  Chloe had discovered it a long time ago and told Violet about it, but that was Chloe. For Chloe to be right when Mother and Father were wrong wasn't that surprising. Violet had just never expected that she could be right too. Violet had always assumed that her own disagreements with Mother and Father were her fault and that Mother and Father (particularly Father) were bound to be right, just by virtue of being Mother and Father. Yet clearly they were wrong about colored people.

  Myrtle was no different from most of the girls Violet knew, except for the minor detail that when they started out their journey, Myrtle's hair had been straight, but after she'd washed it under the faucet in Louse Home Alley, it had turned crinkly. And except that Myrtle had been sent to a training institute instead of a school.

  Still, Myrtle was probably being too sensitive, Violet thought. Probably Miss Dexter was upset about something else.

  Violet lay awake for a long time, wondering how she was ever going to find Chloe. Maybe the National Woman's Party workers would take her to Tennessee with them. She rolled over to ask Myrtle if she wanted to go too. But Myrtle had gone to sleep.

  Heading to Nashville

  AN ALARMING SIGHT GREETED VIOLET AND Myrtle when they came down to breakfast in the morning. Mr. Martin, whom they had left at the settlement house in New York, was quietly sipping coffee at the kitchen table with his hat in his hand. Miss Dexter was at the table too. They both turned to look at Violet and Myrtle.

  “Good morning,” said Miss Dexter. She said it with a somewhat martyred air. She pushed a plate of toast toward the girls. “There's coffee on the stove.”

  “Good morning,” said Mr. Martin.

  “Good morning, Mr. Martin,” said Violet awkwardly. She'd thought that once they'd gotten away from Mr. Martin and his awkward questions about parents at the Henry Street Settlement House, that would be the end of him. That he would actually come after them hadn't occurred to her.

  “You followed us here, sir?” said Myrtle.

  “Not exactly,” said Mr. Martin. “I came here to make sure you were still in one piece, yes. But I took the train from Penn Station. I'm not really sure how you got here.”

  “We hopped two freight trains and a blind,” said Myrtle matter-of-factly.

  Violet looked down at her shoes, expecting to be scolded. It was her usual lot in life. But if Mr. Martin thought he was going to make her go home to Susquehanna, he could think again.

  Mr. Martin raised an eyebrow. “That's very dangerous, you know. Accidents happen to people jumping freight trains. I've seen people who have lost arms and legs.”

  Against her will, Violet found herself looking at Mr. Martin's hand with the missing fingers. She would have liked to have asked what had happened to them, but such a question was unthinkable.

  “And what about your families?” Mr. Martin went on. “Did you think to tell them where you are?”

  “I don't have a family,” said Myrtle.

  Mr. Martin turned his raised eyebrow on Myrtle, and Violet felt the need to back her up. “It's true, Mr. Martin, she doesn't.”

  “And what about your parents, Miss Mayhew?” Mr. Martin said. “I think they must be frantic by now, don't you?”

  “No,” said Violet. “They only care about my brother, Stephen. They think girls aren't good for much.”

  “They are your parents,” said Mr. Martin. “It doesn't matter whether you're a boy or a girl; they'll be worried. As soon as you've eaten, we will go out and send them a telegram.”

  “I'm not going back,” said Violet, starting to panic. “I want to go to Tennessee! I want to see Chloe.” She had planned on joining the ladies who were going to Tennessee, if they would let her.

  “Please sit down and eat, Violet,” Miss Dexter pleaded. The way she said it made Violet realize that she might be causing a scene, and so she immediately sat down and did as she was told.

  Myrtle sat down and reached for a piece of toast. She spread it with strawberry jam. “Don't you want to go to Tennessee, sir?”

  Unaccountably, Mr. Martin looked embarrassed again. “Why would I want to go to Tennessee, Miss Davies?”

  “Because history's going to be made,” Miss Dexter said enthusiastically. Two pink spots stood out on her cheeks. “I'm going! I wouldn't miss it for the world. If Tennessee becomes the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, and women get the vote, won't that be something, to say you were there and saw it?”

  “Yes!” said Myrtle.

  “I'd like to go too,” said Violet. She wasn't a suffragist, but Chloe was in Tennessee.

  “Well, so would I,” Mr. Martin admitted. He frowned at Violet. “But we're still going to wire your parents as soon as you're done eating.”

  Violet stared at him, unsure what he meant. He couldn't possibly mean that he was going to let Violet and Myrtle go to Tennessee and in fact go with them.

  “It's my duty, anyway, to see that you get there safely,” Mr. Martin added. He sounded like he was talking himself into something.

  Miss Burns swept into the kitchen, her red hair glowing in the morning light. Miss Dexter introduced her.

  “So, you're the Mr. Martin we've heard so much about!” said Miss Burns.

  Mr. Martin looked down at his coffee, coloring. “Nothing too bad, I hope.”

  “Very little at all bad,” said Miss Burns, amused. “I understand you taught Chloe to patch automobile tires.”

  Violet looked at Mr. Martin in surprise. She remembered that from Chloe's letters.

  “And now he wants to go off to Tennessee,” said Miss Dexter. “Along with …” She frowned at Myrtle again.

  “Well, we have space on the train,” said Miss Burns. “Why shouldn't they go and see history being made? And see a certain suffragist,” she added, looking shrewdly at Mr. Martin.

  The telegraph office was three blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. It had a strange smell of ink, old wood, and electricity. Mr. Martin got Violet a form. Violet stared at it, nibbling on the end of the fountain pen chained to the desk. Myrtle tried to look over her shoulder, but the desk was too high for her to see. Mr. Martin wanted to make Myrtle send a telegram too, but she was adamant that she had no one to send it to. Violet didn't tell Mr. Martin about the Girls' Training Institute, of course. That was Myrtle's business.

  You had to pay for a telegraph by the word—and a great deal, though Violet wasn't sure exactly how much. It was much cheaper than a long-distance phone call, which only very rich people could afford to make, but it was still expensive. Now, what could she write without letting her parents know where to find her?

  She dipped the pen into the inkwell set in the desk. I am fine, she wrote, printing each word carefully on the form. Then she saw a way to save a few cents and crossed out I am and wrote I'm. She tried to think of something else to say—How are you? But that was the sort of thing you wrote in a letter, when you weren't paying for every single word.

  “Well, that won't break the bank,” Mr. Martin said, looking over her shoulder. “But you can't use any punctuation mark
s, so contractions like ‘I'm’ are out. And up to the first ten words it's all the same price, forty cents.”

  Violet dipped the pen in ink again, crossed out what she'd written, and started over. Mother and Father I am fine. That was six words. She didn't want to tell them she was going to Tennessee—what if they notified the police to arrest her there? For the same reason, she couldn't mention woman suffrage. She had four words left. Hope you are too.

  “You'd better sign it,” Mr. Martin suggested. “The signature is free.”

  Violet wrote her first name.

  “You're a woman of few words,” said Mr. Martin. He took the form up to the counter, dropped a fifty-cent piece on it, and slid it under the brass bars to the clerk.

  “I can pay for it,” Violet said. She still had forty-two cents left.

  “Allow me. It was my idea, after all.” Mr. Martin smiled. “There's nothing wrong with going off to have adventures, you know, as long as you let your folks know you're all right.”

  This was not something Violet had ever heard a grownup suggest before. “You must have had a lot of adventures,” she said, and then winced at her forwardness.

  He touched his scar and smiled again. “Yes, a great many. When I was your age, I walked from Pennsylvania to Long Island with Mother Jones, on her Children's Crusade. But my parents knew I was going.”

  “What was the Children's Crusade?” Myrtle asked as they went out to the broad, busy street.

  “A march Mother Jones—she's a labor organizer, remarkable old lady—put together to draw attention to child labor. She took a bunch of us kids from the mines and mills, especially those of us with something to show for our work.” He held up his hand with the missing fingers. “She got all our parents' permission, and we were all outfitted with a tin plate and a spoon. We walked up through Pennsylvania to New York City and then out to Oyster Bay, Long Island, to call on President Roosevelt.”

  “What did President Roosevelt say?” Violet asked as they stopped to let a large open-sided sightseeing bus, shaped like an overgrown rowboat, pass.

  “He wouldn't see us,” said Mr. Martin. “So we walked back again.”

  “Then it didn't do any good?” said Myrtle.

  “Sure it did,” Mr. Martin said. “We kids got out of the mills for weeks. We had a lot of fun on that walk, playing and running around like other kids, sleeping in barns and eating what folks along the road gave us. Mother Jones and her helpers taught us to read too.”

  “But President Roosevelt wouldn't see you,” Violet reminded him.

  “No, but thousands of people did see us. You can never know what seeds your words and actions might plant. We may get children out of the mines and mills in this country yet—it's only been seventeen years since our march.” He smiled wryly. “Even when you don't win, you don't always lose. Remember that.”

  “Yes, Mr. Martin,” said Violet politely. “It's a shame a woman like Mother Jones can't vote to change the child labor laws.”

  “Mother Jones doesn't want to vote. She's an Anti.”

  Violet looked at him to see if he was joking. “Doesn't want to vote? Why not?”

  “That,” said Mr. Martin, “is a mystery.”

  Everyone was very busy at the National Woman's Party headquarters in Cameron House over the next two days. They were much too busy to worry about where Violet and Myrtle had come from; everybody took it for granted that in some way they belonged to Mr. Martin, who was going to Nashville either to support the suffrage cause or to seek out his lost love—there wasn't really time to discuss which. Violet and Myrtle helped in the preparations for the trip to Tennessee. This involved a lot of copying down of addresses, sorting notebooks and law books, and laying in supplies of postage stamps and telegraph forms.

  Miss Burns found a few adult dresses that could be cut down to size for Myrtle and Violet. She also found a frightful plaid school dress with a double row of fat black buttons down the front and a black patent leather belt three inches wide, which unfortunately fit Violet perfectly. Violet got a neck ache and a backache and felt like an old woman after twelve straight hours of sewing to make the dresses fit. She could tell from Myrtle's expression that she felt the same, but in the end they each had a pair of very serviceable dresses. Violet would still rather have had overalls, but the suffrage women had explained that you couldn't look strange when you were trying to bring people around to your point of view.

  “That just gives them an excuse not to listen to you,” Miss Dexter said. “You wait and wear overalls after we've won the vote.”

  She said this with a frown at Myrtle and then a side-long look at Miss Paul. Violet and Myrtle knew what this was all about. Miss Paul had no objection to Mr. Martin, Violet, and Myrtle going to Tennessee, but Miss Dexter had an objection—specifically to Myrtle. Violet had thought at first that Myrtle was overreacting in thinking this, but now she saw that it was true.

  “Don't you have people in Washington?” Miss Dexter had asked Myrtle, rather pointedly, at the dinner table the evening after they arrived. “Didn't you say you were from D.C. originally?”

  “They're all dead, ma'am,” said Myrtle. “Like I told you before. My mother died in the Influenza, and my father died digging the Panama Canal.”

  “Well, what about the people who sent you to school in New York?” Miss Dexter pressed, brushing past Myrtle's dead parents without comment.

  “The church ladies that packed me off to the Girls' Training Institute?” Myrtle retorted. “Oh, right. I'm so grateful to them, ma'am.”

  “Miss Dexter, tell the girls about New Hampshire, where you come from,” Miss Burns interceded desperately.

  The long oaken benches of the waiting room at Union Station seemed to disappear in the enormous, echoing arched chamber.

  “The waiting room is ninety feet high and was modeled after the Baths of Diocletian,” said Miss Dexter.

  “He must've been pretty dirty,” Myrtle muttered, and Violet laughed. The hall wasn't dirty, of course—it was spotless.

  “It is the largest railway waiting room in the world,” Miss Dexter pointed out.

  That perhaps explained why it seemed so empty, Violet thought. There were people in it, but they were dwarfed by the enormous arched ceiling. But most of the wooden benches were empty. Violet would have liked to get up and walk on them, turn at the curved seat at the end, and then walk back along the other side. But of course a young lady couldn't do that sort of thing.

  The suffragists had rented their own train car, called a tourist car, which made the tickets to Tennessee much cheaper. There were some spare seats, because a few people—including Miss Burns and Miss Alice Paul—had decided not to go. The suffragists had agreed to take Violet and Myrtle and Mr. Martin along, and Violet had the impression that Mr. Martin had given them some money.

  They were a jolly crowd boarding the train—even rowdy, Violet thought. Some wore sashes of green, white, and purple, or gold, white, and purple, or green and gold—all of these colors symbolized support for woman suffrage. Some of the women had badges and medals, and when Violet looked closely, she saw that some of the badges said that the women had gone to jail for the cause, and others said Hunger Striker. These were women who had picketed the White House in snowstorms, and been in jail, and starved themselves for woman suffrage. A group of them joined arms and sang:

  Oh, we troubled Woody Wood as we stood,

  as we stood.

  We troubled Woody Wood as we stood!

  We troubled Woody Wood,

  and we troubled him right good.

  We troubled Woody Wood as we stood!

  “Don't sing that song!” a woman protested. “It was Woodrow Wilson who asked Governor Roberts to call this special session in Tennessee.”

  “Only because we troubled him till he did!” another woman called out, laughing.

  The train rumbled to a stop, and the suffragists found their car and climbed aboard.

  The conductor came along checking ticket
s and stopped when he got to their party. He stood over Myrtle, looking down at her disapprovingly.

  “This won't do,” he said.

  Myrtle looked up at him, her face expressionless. The skirt of her blue dress was spread out on the red mohair seat, and her feet in their high-topped black shoes swung a few inches above the floor. He towered over her.

  “What won't do?” Mr. Martin demanded sharply. He and Miss Dexter were sitting on the seat opposite Violet and Myrtle.

  “The colored girl. She's going to have to ride in the colored car.”

  “That's not the law in Washington,” Mr. Martin said.

  “Mr. Martin, please,” Miss Dexter murmured.

  “Well, it's not!” said Mr. Martin.

  “Maybe not, but once we get moving, we'll only be in Washington for a few minutes,” said the conductor. “As soon as we cross the District border, the girl needs to go in the colored car and stay there.”

  “But she can't ride by herself. She's just a child,” Mr. Martin said.

  The conductor shrugged. “She'll be among her own people. I'm sure they'll look after her.”

  Mr. Martin got to his feet, his face twisting into an ugly scowl that made his scar look more menacing. He no longer looked like polite Mr. Martin—he looked like some dangerous thug in a moving-picture show. Violet felt a lurch in her stomach. She had never seen adults fight before, and she didn't want to.

  Violet looked at Myrtle and then at Miss Dexter. Miss Dexter was determinedly looking out the window. Violet looked back at Myrtle, who looked away.

  Violet was sure there was nothing Mr. Martin—let alone Violet herself—could do; rules were rules. But it seemed really unfair to Myrtle. She reached out and took Myrtle's hand and glared at the conductor.

  The conductor ignored her. “I'm sorry, sir,” he said to Mr. Martin, not sounding sorry at all. “You can keep her in here for a few minutes if you want, but once we cross the District line, we'll be under Virginia law. It's my responsibility to enforce the law.” He smiled thinly. “And to have anyone who doesn't comply arrested.”