The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He jerked his head in the direction of the planter's son, standing with half a dozen of his cronies around Bill Pullum. Pullum had a young slave woman with him, and by the sound of their voices, and the stony expression of the girl's face, there was bargaining going on. Nate's voice rose over the others: “Yeah, but will she breed, that's what I want to know.” He grabbed the front of the girl's yellow calico dress in both hands, pulled it open and down over her arms, to squeeze her breasts.

  “Yet what choice does a woman have in this country—or in any country?” went on Cash, not quite rhetorically, but with his usual habit of preaching to Mary about her rights. “‘Female seminaries'...‘young ladies' academies'...Faugh! Marriage-marts by another name!”

  Cash had recently expanded his interest in abolition into what he sometimes termed “the rational treatment of females”—something Mary Jane laughed gently over, because her husband still hadn't the faintest idea what it cost to run a household. “This country will remain in bondage until women as well as men free their slaves, make up their own beds, wash their own clothes, throw away their corsets....”

  “Why, Cash,” purred Mary, flipping open her fan and widening her eyes at him over its lacy brim, “I never dreamed you wore corsets.”

  Caught off-guard in mid-tirade, Cash burst into laughter, his eyes twinkling: “You, young lady, are a minx,” he said. “Now you tell me whether you don't think women should have the same rights to be educated as well as men—to hold property in their own names—even to vote!”

  “I'm not sure,” said Mary in a judicious tone, “that I'd sleep well at night knowing Arabella Richardson could vote for the President of the United States,” and Cash laughed again.

  “I don't sleep well knowing Nate Bodley can. You aren't going to marry him, are you, Molly?”

  Mary sighed, and turned her eyes away in sick distaste from the sight of Nate and his friends clustered around Bill Pullum and the slave girl in yellow. “He's rich,” she said. “And Betsey has been trying to push us together. When he comes to the house on Saturday evenings she always finds some reason to leave us alone in the parlor, and whenever I go to the theater or the Lyceum, it's ‘Why don't you send a note to Indian Branch?' I don't...” She hesitated, looking up at the man by her side, the eagle profile, the lively sparkle of his mad green eyes.

  There was a man, she thought, who was going somewhere, who was going to make something of himself.

  Maybe she wouldn't end up marrying the President, she reflected. But a man who wasn't in politics at all—who only followed what all his friends proclaimed—seemed to her not wholly a man. And though she knew that other men examined female slaves in the same fashion in the open markets, she also knew it wasn't the same.

  Then she tossed her head again, making the ribbons dance on her bonnet and her bronze curls bounce. “I can't imagine spending the rest of my life listening to Nate Bodley go on about his racehorses and his slaves....Not that there's anything the matter with his racehorses, of course.”

  But when Cash had conducted her back to where her father and Betsey stood on the Courthouse steps, and she asked—hesitantly—about going on with her education, her father frowned in puzzlement, and said, “Do you mean to be a schoolteacher, then?” in a voice of disappointment and disbelief.

  As if, thought Mary, she had expressed an interest in becoming a nun. A Presbyterian one, presumably...

  Levi and George snickered and nudged one another. George, at thirteen, had already been in half a dozen brawls at Court Days and politicalspeakings. Levi, four years older and living now in a boarding hotel, was drunk, though it was early in the afternoon.

  “I think it's an excellent idea.” There was something in Betsey's tone of a woman in a shop slapping down a coin to buy the last packet of pins before a rival's hand can touch it. “The Reverend Ward was telling me only the other day what an exemplary student Mary was when she attended the Academy, and how he would have loved to have her return for further study and to teach the younger children. Although really,” she added, with a titter of laughter and a sharp look at Mary under her bonnet-brim, “now that Frances has gotten engaged up in Illinois I bet it won't be long until you catch a husband—”

  “I didn't say I wanted to be a teacher,” Mary interrupted, feeling as if her stepmother had given her a shove toward the door of the house.

  “Then what did you say?” Betsey's glance was like steel. “Honestly, Mary, I'm only trying to help you....”

  “You're only trying to get me out of the house,” retorted Mary hotly, “so there'll be more room for your own children. Don't think I don't know that's why you've been shoving Nate Bodley at me like that purple fright of a hat you made for me—”

  “Mary!” exclaimed her father, with a fast look around to make sure none of his friends had heard this outburst. Mary clapped her hands over her mouth, tears of shame flooding her eyes.

  “I'm sorry,” she gasped in a stifled voice. She turned and, springing down from the Courthouse steps, darted into the crowd.

  “Mary, come back!” called out her father, and Betsey added her voice to his:

  “Come back here this minute!”

  She dodged around a gaggle of skinny cows, caught up her green-striped skirts, fled between a countrywoman hawking lettuces and a trader trying to sell a farmer a donkey, ran from the square down Main Street....

  And stopped, shocked, seeing behind the shelter of two drawn-up carriages a little knot of men beating another, savagely, with their canes. Two of the attackers held the victim's arms as a third struck him, over and over. Mary first saw the struggling shapes, almost without meaning: the figure bent under the blows, the glint of the brass cane-head, the white straw hat lying in the mud near the wheels of the Breckenridge carriage, the glint of broken spectacle-glass. A fourth man stood apart, his hands on the shoulders of a young black woman in a yellow dress.

  The silence was eerie, broken only by the thwack of the cane, the grunt of the wielder as he raised it above his golden-blond head.

  Nate. The man with the cane was Nate Bodley.

  And the man he and his friends were beating was Mr. Presby.

  They flung the tutor to the ground and Nate said, “Goddamn Yankee abolitionist, you keep out of my business after this, you hear?” He kicked him, then turned, grabbed the slave girl roughly by the arm, and thrust her ahead of him down the street, trailed by his friends. Presby lay in the dirt where he'd fallen, blood gleaming in his hair.

  Mary ran to him, fell on her knees beside him, turned him over. Panic filled her, blind terror.... He wasn't dead, he moved his hand, thank God, thank God. . . .

  And all the while she repeated, over and over in her mind, I must get out of this place. I must get out.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Bellevue Place, Batavia, Illinois May 20, 1875

  “A VERY SAD CASE.” DR. RICHARD PATTERSON LAID THE SLIM BUNDLE of papers on the worktable in John Wilamet's little cubicle off the sunny parlor of Bellevue House. John drew a clean folder from the drawer, scanned the top page of the bundle—a letter in his mentor's careful, tidy handwriting—for the new client's name, then raised his eyes to Dr. Patterson's in startled shock.

  Dr. Patterson nodded at the unspoken question—Yes, it really is who you think it is. “A most tragic case. And one which requires special consideration, of course.”

  “Of course,” John murmured, and let his body settle back in his chair again. His long fingers flicked through the correspondence and doctors' opinions that would make up the basis of the file. A letter from Robert Todd Lincoln dated April tenth: “. . . If you would meet with me and Drs. Jewell, Danforth, Isham, Smith, Davis and Johnson at my Chicago office on the twentieth . . .” A much longer letter from Dr. Patterson's younger brother DeWitt, also—like Patterson's son—a physician: “I treated Mrs. Lincoln during her husband's tenure of office as President of the United States, for weakness of the bladder and for head and back injuries resulting from a carriage a
ccident on the second of July 1863. I do not believe any permanent injury was sustained in the carriage accident, though for the remainder of her residence in Washington she complained of increased headaches. . . .” Several letters from Dr. Danforth, whom John had met now and then during the past two years, when he came to Bellevue Place to consult.

  He looked up at Patterson again. “Is she violent?” Thinking of that stout little black-clothed figure in the Army tent by the walls of Fort Barker years earlier, screaming imprecations at the ladies of the Freedmen's Relief Association.

  Thinking of his mother.

  “Good heavens, no.” Patterson sounded vaguely horrified at the idea, although even some of his own carefully selected patients had their moments. Through the open door of his cubbyhole, John could see Miss Judd and Mrs. Goodwin, two of the twenty or so well-to-do white ladies who were the only people Dr. Patterson would admit to Bellevue, both writing letters.

  Miss Judd, fragile and ethereal-looking in the shaft of sunlight from the wide windows, looked better than she had a few nights ago, when John had settled down to the tedious task of coaxing her to eat. She'd entered Bellevue at less than seventy pounds and there had been times John had feared she would die simply because her heart would not endure the deprivation that she seemed to so desperately crave. Mrs. Goodwin was thumbing through the notepaper in the box, looking for a sheet that was sufficiently clean not to repel her.

  That bore watching.

  “No,” Patterson repeated, and drew up another of the cane-bottomed chairs that furnished—barely—the stark little room off the parlor. “Nothing of that kind, dear boy. Mr. Lincoln—Mr. Robert Lincoln—is of the opinion that his mother's insanity dates to her husband's death. Scarcely surprising, given the terrible circumstances of her widowhood. And a woman's nervous system naturally suffers from the burden of modern civilization more than does that of a man. Greater noise, greater stimulation, the greater stresses engendered by a need for order and punctuality...” He shook his head.

  “In my opinion Mrs. Lincoln should have retired to some country retreat following her husband's assassination, and lived quietly, instead of choosing such over-stimulating venues as Chicago and Europe. Mr. Robert Lincoln concurs with me on that. Her mental powers, already dangerously overtaxed, seem to have been further irritated by the death of her youngest son four years ago. Again, she followed this bereavement not with the total rest that is the only possible amelioration of such a condition, but with further travel and stimulation that eventually deteriorated her nervous tissue. Her attachment to Spiritualist séances, and the excitation engendered by their rejection of the divine authority of Scripture, only hastened the inevitable.”

  In the parlor, Mrs. Goodwin finished her search through the small packet of notepaper at the rosewood desk, sat back, her narrow, rectangular face pursed with pent emotions. Then she leaned forward and began to thumb through again. Her movements were quicker now and she'd begun to rock a little in her chair. Bad signs.

  Dr. Patterson went on, “According to Drs. Danforth and Isham, Mrs. Lincoln suffers from a hysterical bladder and frequent urination, as well as from spinal irritation, and theomania. Of course all of this must be confirmed by observation. According to Mr. Lincoln there's no family history of insanity or alcoholism, certainly no syphilis or epilepsy involved. I'm afraid, if indeed her illness is of ten years' standing, that she may be with us for some time.”

  John held up a finger, caught Patterson's eye and nodded out the door to where Mrs. Goodwin had just sat back a second time, trembling now and looking restlessly around. Patterson smiled a little at John and said, “You go speak to her.” John got to his feet, crossed the parlor without appearance of hurry or deliberateness to the woman's side.

  “Maybe it's time for a little walk in the garden, ma'am?” he suggested, and she turned on him, her face contorted with anger.

  “Why can't this filthy place provide clean paper?” Mrs. Goodwin's gloved fists bunched together on the table's waxed and polished top. Unlike Miss Judd, who wore lace house-mitts of the kind wealthy ladies often did in company—and who was regarding the stout stockbroker's wife with more alarm than was usual in her lackluster blue eyes—Mrs. Goodwin had on kid gloves of the sort usually worn for visiting and outdoors. She took them off only to bathe. “Every single one of those pieces of paper is disgusting!”

  “Dr. Patterson does the best he can here, ma'am,” said John in his most reasonable voice. “Let's talk about this outside in the garden....” He had observed that Mrs. Goodwin generally calmed down and felt better after a few minutes among Mrs. Patterson's roses with the sun on her face. “When we come back, I'll help you find one that's clean.”

  Mrs. Goodwin got to her feet—John carefully moved her chair aside without touching her—and, he thought later, would have walked outside with him had not Dr. Patterson, who had been watching from the cubicle door, come over and said, “Now, Mrs. Goodwin, surely you know those notepapers are for everyone. We can't bring in paper specially to suit your tastes.”

  “They're dirty!” She whirled, her cheeks reddening and her eyes unnaturally bright. “I couldn't write to my children on those disgusting rags! There's a spot—look at it!” She jabbed a gloved forefinger at a nearly invisible speck on the small, clean buff sheets. “Every page is like that! Goodness knows what they'd catch!”

  “But no one here is sick,” pointed out Patterson in his deep, reasonable voice. “The papers are quite clean, you know....” He touched the top of the stack, at which Mrs. Goodwin drew back as if he'd spit on it. “And we can't make special cases for everyone.”

  “You can give your patients something that's clean enough to touch without giving them every disease from smallpox to cholera, and passing them along to their families!” And with that she turned and fled up the wide stairs in a storm of blue faille ruffles. Minnie Judd pressed a clenched fist to her mouth and burst into silent tears.

  “I suspect hydrotherapy is what she needs,” said Patterson to John. “You'd best tell Peter to prepare the tub. She's been progressively excited for the past two days. I've only been waiting for an outburst like this. But you did quite well,” he added. “We shall make an alienist of you yet.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said John. He wondered whether, if he had been allowed to take Mrs. Goodwin for a short stroll in the sunlight before bringing her back to the subject of the notepaper, the whole scene could have been avoided. As Dr. Patterson climbed the stairs after his recalcitrant patient, John went to reassure Minnie Judd, who was trembling like a whipped greyhound and weeping without a sound.

  JOHN HAD BEGUN CORRESPONDENCE WITH DR. PATTERSON THREE years earlier, when he'd written to him asking for copies of the proceedings of the Fox River Medical Association, of which Patterson was president. At the time John had been working as a secretary for the resident surgeon of the state asylum in Jacksonville. He read old journals, and the proceedings of medical associations, whenever he could lay hands on them in the offices. The overworked white men who ran the institution spoke approvingly of John's “desire to improve himself,” but it never seemed to cross anyone's mind to put him in a position of any responsibility. Those positions—or more probably the salaries that went with them—were the purview of white men.

  At times during those years at Jacksonville, John had wondered why he didn't simply become a carpenter, or work in a brewery, or shovel horse-shit in the streets—God knew Chicago's streets could use more full-time shovelers. Lionel Jones—whose family shared the rear cottage of a two-house lot on Maxwell Street with Cassy, Cassy's children, Lucy's children, John's wife, Clarice, and their daughter, and Phoebe—was a laborer at the Armour stockyards and made enough to pay his share of the rent and keep body and soul together, something John was not always able to do. Lionel lived day to day, ate and slept and walked out with his family along the shores of the lake on Sundays, and sometimes fought with his wife, Lulu, and sometimes loved her....

  Why, John wonde
red, did he want more?

  Why did anyone want more?

  Why this driving curiosity to learn what insanity was? To help the insane?

  As Cassy put it, “Don't you got enough to do lookin' after one insane lady?” with a sharp nod at their mother.

  John had no answer to that. For the first few years after the War's end he had worked for Dr. Brainert, under whom he'd served in the Army; the red-faced Army surgeon had resumed his private practice in Chicago, specializing increasingly in diseases of the nerves. Working as his assistant, John had studied the works of Greisinger, Charcot, and Johann Reil, trying to fathom the shadowy world of lunacy while at the same time trying to cope with his mother's intermittent hysterical rages, her long periods of silent refusal to get out of bed, to wash or dress herself—her increasing tendency to seek release from her inner demons in drunkenness or opium or “hop.”

  During those first few years in Chicago, immediately after the War, John had felt a good deal of hope. In spite of living in a rattletrap cottage “back of the yards,” and being refused service in all but “Negro” stores, he had a sense of being given a chance to prove what he could do.

  When Brainert had died, suddenly, of heart-failure—struck down as if smitten by lightning as he stepped from the trolley-car near his house—John had learned how illusory that sense of well-being actually was.

  That was in 1869; the first optimistic flush of Reconstruction was over. The sense of rebuilding a new nation, of educating and helping the freedmen to “take their places in American society,” had faded before the realization that those freedmen wanted the same jobs that white men held. By the common consensus of everybody but the former slaves themselves—who weren't asked—their “places in American society” seemed to be doing exactly the kind of jobs they'd been doing before the War: that is, anything that was too nasty, too backbreaking, or too time-consuming for anybody but slaves to undertake, and for not much more profit than they'd had as slaves. Less, in most cases, because at least slaveowners had to provide shelter and food, or their neighbors would talk.