Starting from Seneca Falls

by Karen Schwabach

  Mrs. Stanton looked incensed.

  “And I don’t want that to ever happen to anybody again,” said Bridie. “People ought to have the right to their own pay envelope no matter who they are.”

  “They certainly should!”

  “And think of Rose, she wants to be a scientist, but the schools—”

  Just then there came a knock at the door.

  Bridie went and opened it. It was a woman who had been at the convention; Bridie didn’t know her name.

  The woman and Mrs. Stanton went into the next room and sat on the sofa.

  “Elizabeth, you’ve got to take my name off that Declaration of yours!” said the woman.

  “But you signed—”

  “I made a mistake. People are laughing at us!”

  And Mrs. Stanton, with the fight newly awakened in her, proceeded to talk the woman out of taking her name off the Declaration.

  Bridie went back to reading to the boys. “ ‘U is for Upper Canada / Where the poor slave has found / Rest after all his wanderings / For it is British ground!’ ”

  * * *

  Mr. Stanton came home. Bridie was in the kitchen when he arrived. Nancy, the cook, had gone home to the Flats and Bridie was up to her elbows in dish suds.

  “Here we are, Lizzie, my love!” she heard him say, out in the parlor. “And how are you and the kiddies?”

  The boys came pouring down the stairs. “Papa!”

  Bridie felt a pang. The things she kept locked away inside her head crept out just for a minute, and she thought of her brothers as Mr. Stanton gave the boys a new ball he’d brought for them. She thought of her parents as he kissed Mrs. Stanton.

  She was alone in the world, and a long way from Ireland.

  “I’ve brought the most interesting newspaper from California—here, my love, I think you’ll find it amusing. These crazy rumors about gold…”

  Then he looked up and saw Bridie watching from the kitchen door. “And here’s something for you, Phoebe.”

  Bridie dried her hands on her apron and took the hair ribbon he handed her. Green, the color of Ireland. Bridie hadn’t expected to be remembered. She suddenly felt tearful.

  “And what have you been up to while I’ve been gone, my dear?” he asked Mrs. Stanton.

  “Oh, women’s rights,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  “And very sensible too,” said Mr. Stanton. “As long as you stay away from that nonsense of women voting. No one will listen to you if you keep harping on that; it makes the whole thing ridiculous.”

  Bridie went back to the dishes. She shaved some more soap into the water with a knife, then used a straw whisk to stir up more suds. Through the doorway she heard Mr. Stanton telling them about his journey, all the speeches he’d made for the Free Soil Party, how he’d be leaving again tomorrow to make more speeches and then head on to the party convention in Buffalo, where it was expected that they would nominate Martin Van Buren for president.

  “Not a choice I approve of,” Mr. Stanton said. “Van Buren has already been president, and one cannot forget that he wanted to hand the Amistad captives over to slave traders. But he is against slavery spreading to the new territories we’ve acquired from Mexico, so he’s the man we need right now, I suppose.”

  Bridie scraped at a bit of egg stuck to a plate. She heard no further mention of the women’s rights convention.

  “It stands to reason, though,” Mr. Stanton went on. “The country is divided over slavery, and getting more so every day. If we were ever to elect a real abolitionist president, it would end in civil war.”

  “Oh, surely not,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  “Papa, there are ladies in the washhouse,” said four-year-old Kit suddenly.

  “Doing the wash in the middle of the night, are they?” said Mr. Stanton, sounding amused.

  “They’re hiding,” said Kit.

  Bridie came to the kitchen door again to watch.

  Mr. Stanton turned to Mrs. Stanton. “Passengers? The washhouse is too visible. Why don’t you have them down in the cellar?”

  Bridie watched Mrs. Stanton take a deep breath. “They’re not passengers. It’s a woman and her child.”

  “But not Underground Railroad passengers?” Mr. Stanton looked perplexed, but still amused. “Tell me this riddle.”

  Mrs. Stanton explained. As she did, Mr. Stanton looked less and less amused.

  “You have gone too far, Lizzie,” he said, when she finished.

  “They feared for their lives,” said Mrs. Stanton, surprisingly mildly. “A woman and a child have a right not to be beaten.”

  “Nobody has the right to interfere between man and wife, Lizzie.”

  “If they were slaves running from a cruel master who had beaten them, you wouldn’t say I didn’t have the right to interfere,” said Mrs. Stanton.

  “It would be entirely a different matter. This woman chose her husband, freely, of her own will. Let no man put them asunder!”

  “Lavinia didn’t choose him,” Bridie heard herself say.

  Mr. Stanton looked at her. “I see the whole household is united on the matter. I’ll go and see the husband in the morning and—”

  “Henry, you cannot,” said Mrs. Stanton. “He’s a drunkard and a thoroughly unreasonable man.”

  “We should at least hear his side of it.”

  “Don’t you even want to hear their side of it first?” said Bridie. She knew she should be seen and not heard, but her bump of cautiousness hadn’t gotten any bigger.

  “They’re mean,” said six-year-old Neil. “But he’s mean too. I think he might be meaner.”

  Mr. Stanton sighed. “Well, do they at least have plans to move on? We can’t keep them here, not in defiance of the husband’s wishes.”

  “Mrs. Kigley has a sister in Rochester,” said Bridie.

  Mrs. Stanton shot Bridie a look, and Mr. Stanton did not look pleased. A sister in Rochester was still coming between man and wife.

  “I haven’t the strength to argue; I’ve been arguing for the last three weeks,” he said. “And I’ll get on a train and go off to argue some more tomorrow. We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

  He started up the stairs, with the little boys following him. Mrs. Stanton looked after him, then said under her breath, “It’s my house, after all.”

  By the time Mr. Stanton left for the station the next day, the decision had apparently been made that the Kigleys were to be taken to Rochester, and Mrs. Stanton would pay for their tickets herself.

  The boys had been sent to stay with their aunt. Mrs. Stanton was to take the train to Rochester with Lavinia and Mrs. Kigley. Mrs. Stanton had hired Solomon Butler, the teamster, to take them to the station in his wagon.

  Mr. Butler also worked with the Underground Railroad. Bridie had the impression that most of the people of color in Seneca Falls did.

  Now the trick was to get to the train station without Mr. Kigley finding out.

  Rose and Bridie were to act as scouts for the mission. They would walk some way ahead and behind, looking around for any sign of Mr. Kigley.

  Rose went in front. She hurried along Bayard Street fifty yards ahead of the wagon, keeping an eye out in all directions.

  Bridie ran just as far behind, turning every few seconds to see if Mr. Kigley was coming up the road from the lake.

  Rose reached the bridge and signaled that it was clear. Bridie signaled back that no one was following.

  They crossed the bridge, first Rose, then the wagon, then Bridie.

  From the bridge she could see up and down the river and the canal—no trace of Mr. Kigley. Just boats and barges and factories.

  Rose was up on Fall Street now, signaling down that all was still clear. Bridie signaled back—all clear here, too.

  Mr. Butler’s hors
es pulled the wagon up onto Fall Street. Rose had run ahead to scout out State Street. Bridie looked back the way they’d come—uh-oh.

  Was that Mr. Kigley on the bridge?

  Bridie froze, her heart thumping. She shaded her eyes against the sun and looked again. No, it was just someone who looked like him. Whew.

  By the time she started up State Street, past the house where Rose boarded, Rose was already signaling from the train station that it was safe.

  The wagon arrived at the station and everyone tumbled out. The metal-capped wooden rails were already singing with the vibrations of the approaching train.

  “It’s an express,” Mrs. Stanton was saying when Bridie arrived. “There are no more station stops before Rochester, and it goes nearly fifteen miles an hour! We’ll—”

  The rest of what she said Bridie couldn’t hear, as the train thundered into the station, smoke and sparks pouring from its smokestack. It gasped to a stop.

  The door of a passenger car swung open. “All aboard for Rochester!”

  Then several things happened very quickly.

  Mrs. Stanton picked up her valise, gathered her skirts, mounted the steps, and squeezed her impractical clothes through the door of the train car.

  Suddenly Mr. Kigley jumped out from behind a stack of barrels and made a grab at Mrs. Kigley, who leapt and scrambled into the train car.

  Lavinia ran the opposite way from her mother, fleeing toward State Street as the train started with a lurch.

  Mr. Kigley ran after Lavinia. Rose stuck a foot out and tripped him.

  Mr. Kigley hit the stone railroad platform with a sickening smack. Bridie heard this behind her, because she and Rose were already running too.

  Bridie and Rose caught up with Lavinia. They couldn’t hear any feet pursuing behind them yet.

  Rose grabbed Lavinia. “In here, quick!”

  She led both of them into Mr. Moody’s boarding house. She locked the door behind them. All three girls sat down on a bench and leaned back against the long dining table, out of breath.

  “They’ve gone to Rochester without me,” said Lavinia. “And he’s going to kill me.”

  Bridie didn’t want to sympathize, but it was hard not to. Lavinia looked really scared.

  “I bet he saw me come in here,” said Lavinia. “He has to have seen me come in here; it’s right down the street….Whose house is this anyway? Isn’t this where all those colored people live?”

  “Shut up,” Bridie suggested.

  “What am I going to do!”

  Rose and Bridie exchanged a glance. Neither of them liked Lavinia even a little bit. On the other hand, they could hardly let Mr. Kigley catch her. It was possible he really would kill her.

  “Maybe her mother will come back for her,” said Rose without much hope.

  “The train doesn’t stop before Rochester,” said Bridie. “And coming back would cost money she doesn’t have.”

  They sat and thought in silence while Lavinia wrung her hands.

  “Mr. Douglass did say I could come and stay with them in Rochester,” said Rose thoughtfully. “And go to school.”

  “We don’t have money to get to Rochester!” said Bridie.

  “There’s more than one way to get to Rochester,” said Rose.

  The three girls ran along the towpath of the Cayuga & Seneca Canal. Rose and Bridie had had to argue with Lavinia to get her to see sense: it was no good waiting around the train station now that her father knew she was there. They’d slipped out the back door of the boarding house, hurried through backyards and alleys to the Flats, and crossed the catwalk over the factories to get to the towpath of the Cayuga & Seneca Canal.

  Mr. Moody, Rose’s landlord, was a boatman, and he had just left on a voyage that morning, bound for the Erie Canal and Buffalo. The boat would pass right through Rochester.

  Rose thought they might be able to catch up with him, if they hurried. The boats only moved as fast as the mules pulling them could walk, and they had to stop to go through locks—and at one point for the mules to cross the canal on a towpath bridge.

  The girls dodged past slow-moving mule teams and their drivers, being careful not to get too close behind a mule so that they wouldn’t get kicked. Lavinia skidded in a mule plop and fell, sprawling. Rose and Bridie dragged her to her feet, and they ran on, past barges and boats and canoes.

  When they finally caught up with Mr. Moody’s barge, it had just entered a lock. The lockkeeper and his wife were using the long lever beams to shut the doors of the lock behind the barge. The barge’s towrope had been unhitched and the mule driver—called a hoggee, Bridie remembered—was leading the mules along to the other side of the lock to wait.

  “Mr. Moody!” Rose called.

  Mr. Moody stood on the bow of the boat. He waved to Rose as if she was just saying good morning.

  Rose waved both arms. “Mr. Moody, let us on, please!”

  He didn’t seem to understand. Probably he couldn’t hear them over the sound of the water rushing out as the lockkeepers slowly opened the gate ahead of them, lowering the water level in the lock.

  Bridie looked back frantically to see if Mr. Kigley was chasing them. But she couldn’t see past the mule teams coming along the path.

  Bridie and Rose seized the rope by which the barge was tied up, and tried to pull it toward them.

  Finally Mr. Moody seemed to get the point. He grabbed a plank, swung it across the gap between the boat and the lock wall, and held it while Rose hurried across.

  Bridie saw Rose urgently explaining something to him.

  “Go across,” Bridie told Lavinia.

  “I might fall in!”

  “I might push you in,” said Bridie, thoroughly fed up with the girl and her whining.

  Giving her a poisonous look, Lavinia got onto the plank and inched her way carefully across. Bridie followed, and then she dragged the plank back onto the boat—Rose and Mr. Moody were too busy arguing to help, and Lavinia was being Lavinia.

  The canal boat was seventy feet long, with an enclosed cabin stretching most of its length, so that the freight wouldn’t get wet. There was a deck at each end.

  “What good is this?” said Lavinia. “We’re stuck here now. This boat isn’t going anywhere.”

  “We have to wait till the water in the lock is down to the level of the next section of the canal,” said Bridie, trying to be patient. “That’s how canals work. You go through locks, so that it’s flat the whole way.”

  The water level had already dropped a few feet as the water rushed out of the gate ahead of them.

  “All the way to Rochester?” Mr. Moody was saying.

  “She has an aunt there,” said Rose.

  “And who’s paying for this?” But Bridie could see from Mr. Moody’s expression that he had already given in. “You’d better get inside,” he said to Lavinia.

  Lavinia seemed about to complain, then Mr. Moody held open the door to the cabin and gave Lavinia a look, and she went.

  The stone walls of the lock rose higher and higher on both sides as the water level went down. The smell of muddy water and algae rose. Now the barge was so far down in the lock that Bridie had to tilt her head back to see the top of the wall….There, she could see a man’s boots, far above her.

  She looked up farther. The boots contained Mr. Kigley, who was standing on the edge of the lock, looking down at her.

  As she stared in dismay, he turned and walked away.

  The water stopped rushing through the gate. The gate was fully open. The canal barges drifted forward to where the mules waited…and Mr. Kigley waited, too.

  Bridie exchanged a horrified glance with Rose.

  Meanwhile, the adults were talking. There were several other boatmen in the crew, as well as the cook, Mrs. Moggy. They were all in a huddle wit
h Ferris Moody, discussing the situation.

  “We might as well change mule teams here and deal with him right now.”

  “But this team’s only been on for a couple hours.”

  “Close enough.”

  The boatmen went to the stern of the boat. Bridie and Rose clambered up onto the cabin roof and ran along it to the rear deck, where the spare mules were kept in a stable. From there they watched as the men dragged out a wide, mule-strong gangplank. It looked much sturdier than the narrow board the girls had crossed.

  Bridie looked at Rose. Were the boatmen going to let Mr. Kigley onto the boat?

  “I told them…,” Rose murmured.

  But had they listened? Bridie remembered how Mrs. Stanton’s husband had sided with Mr. Kigley—or almost sided with him. Would the boatmen feel the same way?

  The girls watched and waited, nervous.

  Mr. Kigley eyed the gangplank, and the men on the boat eyed him. They did not lay the gangplank down.

  “That’s my daughter you got there. Bring her back, you kidnappers!” said Mr. Kigley.

  Lavinia was still hiding in the cabin.

  Mr. Moody looked up at the cabin roof. “Is either of you girls his daughter?”

  Rose and Bridie shook their heads emphatically.

  The second mule team—most canal boats had two—was being led out of the stable by the second hoggee.

  “That one’s mine too,” said Mr. Kigley, pointing at Bridie.

  “No, I’m not,” said Bridie, trying to keep her voice calm. She was both terrified and furious. “I was at your house and I left. It was my right to leave. You’ve got nothing to do with me.”

  “We’re going to put the gangplank across,” one of the boatmen called to the hoggee onshore.

  The hoggee onshore, standing beside his mules, nodded. He pursed his lips and waited just a second, as though thinking things through. Then he turned around and punched Mr. Kigley in the nose.

  Mr. Kigley tried to hit the hoggee, but the man ducked and kicked his feet out from under him. Mr. Kigley scrambled up again.