The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (16 page)

I entered the house with Mr. Perry, went immediately to my room, placed my essentials into a bag, and then wrapped several unfinished canvases carefully and strapped them to my easel. These I handed out my window down to Tom standing below, where he loaded them into the ox-cart. I wrote a note thanking Mr. and Mrs. Miles for their patience and protection, but, I added, I had decided firmly that it was time for me to leave and earn my way in the world once again. I wished no formal leave-taking or discussions of my decision, I said, so I thought it best for everyone and for my continued security that I simply leave without lengthy explanation. Although I'm sure they hardly expected me to disappear as I did, I doubt that my removal came as an utter surprise.

Eventually, when Mr. Perry took his leave, I went out again, wrapped in a shawl. A little way along the carriage path I met Mr. Perry in his ox-cart, climbed into the seat beside him, and in an effort to cheer Tom, who lay in back, whispered, “Once again, Brother, we make our escape under the moon in a farm wagon.”

THIRTEEN

A Canterbury tale from our retreat to Connecticut

A
t his farm, Mr. Perry squeezed us into a swift buggy and drove rapidly through the night to Boston. We took passage the next morning on the Boston-Providence railway. Tom and I then traveled by stage to Plainfield and on to Canterbury from Providence, or
Deo volente
, as people say. In Canterbury our sister Sophronia Sperrie, “Sophy,” whom we had not seen in years, had settled with her husband, Timothy.

Our hope was to live with the Sperries for a day or two while Tom and I found suitable lodgings and began to advertise our portrait services. Sophy's husband was a dry-goods merchant, and they lived with their only child, Abigail, five years of age, in comfortable quarters above the store.

He was a quiet, dignified little man, who held the unimpeachable respect of his community. But there was a kind of sadness about him that I could never fully fathom, especially considering sister Sophy's ebullience. She had always had the habit when among friends of expressing unconventional opinions in the most comical fashion. Perhaps the source of his sorrow was their ill fortune with having children. Poor Sophronia had suffered through a number of painful stillbirths. Their success with little Abigail cost them Sophy's ability ever to bear children again. This agony she had the resilience to overcome, at least in the face she turned to the world, but he, poor man, never quite overcame it. Whatever the source, this certain air of sadness gave a deep cast of sobriety to his person that, I imagine, in part accounted for the high regard with which other men of the world viewed him.

But now all three Sperries welcomed us into their family. Sophy found it a lark to have us bustling about our business. And Tom and I found ourselves able to adjust to our new circumstances. I painted Sophy, Abigail, and Timothy, and these specimens together with Tom's handbills brought people into the store asking after portraits. We had less luck in finding tolerable, inexpensive lodgings, so brother Timothy lent us the use of one of his rental properties—a snug cottage just out of town, beside the road to Plainfield, even while he continued to advertise for a suitable renter.

Canterbury was an active, pretty village above a river that flowed smoothly over a bed of white sand and pebbles and among level green meadows and sloping banks fringed with weeping willows. High hills of chestnut forest demarcated the formidable western terminus of the valley. But to the east the slope downward appeared gentle and fertile, filled with farmlands divided by intersecting walls and fences and dotted with white farmhouses, orchards, and walnut shade trees. In haying times, the air was redolent with new-mown hay, and that sweet scent is what I still recall about that countryside.

Our cottage sat beside a road, an important, dusty way on the stageline, bordered by rows of umbrageous maples, with occasional stately elms towering aloft, as did one such giant that sheltered our dwelling and shaded our dooryard.

Neither Tom nor I had met Timothy Sperrie. But I came to respect him—his calm dignity, his courtesy and generosity toward us, and his success as a businessman and leader in Windham County. He loved to discuss with Tom the latest developments in textile manufacturing and the spreading railroads of New England. Of course, we never told them of Mr. Dudley, only of our adventures on the road and in Boston. But what I found most intriguing about Sophy and Timothy was the love that held them together—perhaps deepened by their mutual suffering—despite the fundamental differences in their character.

Nothing illustrates this difference and this bond better than a story of public disorder that took place during the first year of their marriage, in 1834, when Timothy, though born and raised in Canterbury, was just establishing himself as a merchant.

I had heard townsfolk speaking in a disparaging fashion of a handsome house on Canterbury Green, known variously as the Luther Paine House, the Colored Academy, or other epithets of less civility. This is a two-story house in the proportionate turn-of-the-century style, with lovely fanlights at its center, elegant columnar cover boards, and delightful dentil frieze-work under the roof-cornice and above the arched doorway.

When I first asked Sophy and Timothy about the house, they politely declined to explain this disparaging attitude. But in a private moment, Sophy freely told me about it. Most people regretted the incident now, she explained, and felt more than a little shame, but seven or eight years ago blood ran hot in their veins.

The house was in fact infamous, having been from 1833 to 1834 the “Academy for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.” The headmistress and proprietor, a Quaker spinster named Prudence Crandall, had established the female academy at the request of citizens in 1832. But in the fall of that year, Sophy explained, Miss Crandall admitted a local Negro girl.

Now I recalled where I had heard Miss Crandall's name before: from a painting of her exhibited in Boston, executed by Francis Alexander, who kept a studio there at the time. I had even met Mr. Alexander once at Mr. Spooner's house. He was a great curiosity to me because he had begun his career as an itinerant artist in Connecticut, after studying with Robertson in New York City, moved to Boston for four years before setting out for a two-year sojourn in Europe, and returned to become an acclaimed artist who commanded upwards of one hundred dollars a portrait.

I remembered that his portrait of Miss Crandall impressed me at the time. Her dress, if cut in the latest fashion, is simple indeed. A plain transparent silk shawl is draped around her shoulders and fastened to her bodice with common pins, none of the usual brooches, ribbons, and frills. And her hair—how plain and unusual, almost mannish in its neat (some might say severe) simplicity! Her wide-set blue eyes look at the viewer confidently, clearly, serenely. All this, I believed (and despite the obligatory pillar and swag) Alexander had captured truly. Yet had he quite caught her strength, her courage? I should like to examine that portrait again, I thought.

As Sophy explained it, when the local Negro girl was admitted, cries of outrage began. Parents withdrew their daughters and the school had to close. That might have been the end of it, but for the “interference,” as Sophy described Timothy's view of these events, of overzealous abolitionists, including the ubiquitous Mr. Garrison, whose support caused Miss Crandall to reopen her academy expressly for “New England's young ladies of color.”

The town entered a period of unprecedented uproar. Merchants refused to supply the academy. The students were jeered and taunted. Pupils and teachers out for walks had sticks, stones, eggs, pellets of manure, dead cats, chicken heads, and other missiles flung at them. The school was stoned, befouled by rotten eggs, set on fire, and beaten in the night with iron bars and bats. Its water supply was corrupted and its steps besmeared with animal feces.

Sophy stood up and sang for me part of a song, composed by one of their teachers, that the colored schoolgirls used to sing.

Sometimes when we have walked the streets

Saluted we have been,

By guns, and drums, and cow-bells too,

And horns of polished tin.

With warnings, threats, and words severe

They visit us at times,

And gladly would they send us off

To Afric's burning climes.

She sat down again and explained that Miss Crandall was arrested, spent a night in jail because she refused on principle to post a bond of some few hundred dollars, and was later convicted of breaking the 1833 “Black Law.”

“The Black Law,” Sophy added, “was the nefarious creation of our pigeon-hearted General Assembly in Hartford that year expressly because of the pressure received from our enraged … citizens.” Her emphasis on the final word “citizens” was heavy with sarcasm. “Her little black girls came from outside Connecticut, so they wrote the law forbidding the education of such outsiders. Of course a few of us in town believed Miss Crandall (or Mrs. Philleo as she soon became) and her girls should be free to pursue whatever education they wished, though we deplored the chaos her principles had engendered. Timothy, naturally, had to side with the majority and the merchants, even if he disagreed with some of their words and actions.”

“I gather they were successful,” I said, “if not in keeping the woman in prison, then in forcing her to shut down.”

“Oh yes. It came to such a violent pass in the end. She had wanted to go to jail for the sake of publicizing her scruples—indeed, when Reverend Mr. May offered to post her bond himself, she refused it, saying, ‘Oh no, I am only afraid they will
not
put me into jail.'

“But her bond was finally posted by others, her Black Law conviction was overturned later, you see. Then a howling mob arose to attack the school. I don't know that there was a single window left. You can imagine how the poor woman must have felt by then. And she was truly fearful for the life and limb of her students.”

“My goodness, I should think so,” I said. “I remember now someone at an exhibition of her portrait saying that Miss Crandall had moved west.”

“Yes. She finally gave it up. She and her new husband, Mr. Philleo, a minister from Ithaca, New York, sold the schoolhouse and left town. They removed to a remote area of New York to teach and farm; her family says almost nothing about her or the incidents at the school.”

“It must have been difficult for you and Timothy too, in the first year of marriage, I mean: your differences over Miss Crandall's project.”

“Well, like many newlyweds we were still besotted with one another, I suppose. But he has always respected my right to my own opinions, provided I don't make a public nuisance of myself. And he never supported the violence of the inflamed mob or the destruction of private property. He despised, however—and I don't think ‘despised' is too strong a word—the trouble Mrs. Philleo and her eccentric principles brought among us: the disorder, the divisions. ‘That Quaker Woman!' he calls her. But he and I receded from the fray. Everyone against her, which was most of them, knew Timothy's role in forwarding the Black Law, so his business went unmolested.

“Still, he was correct in one thing: not only were the abolitionists exercised by these events, but the vulgar herd everywhere throughout New England, on the other side of the question, I mean. What an infection of anti-Negro sentiment she instigated across Connecticut. ‘The beast with many heads' rose up in Hartford, Middletown, New Haven, Norwalk, New Canaan, and elsewhere to howl down their black neighbors. There was a lot of fear at the time too because newly released black people had always worked for very little pay, forcing white folks to go to the almshouse or the western wilds in search of new work.”

She shook her head. “I don't have to tell you how glad we were to have all that behind us. And Mrs. Philleo well out of town! Timothy and I never speak of it to one another, or to others. And he allows me my anti-slavery attitudes because I keep them to myself for the most part, am not one of those fanatical abolitionists, and because he quietly agrees that slavery was as evil in the North as it is now in the South. However, Timothy believes deeply that we would all fall upon disastrous harder times—North as well as South—should slavery suddenly come to an end.” She snapped her fingers. “As these abolitionists would have it. I don't doubt that he is correct on that particular point, yet it seems to me that Mrs. Philleo's cause is just and human bondage an evil on the very face of it. All the more so in this Republic.”

“However widespread slavery's ancient stain upon mankind!”

“Yes, Allegra. But it is the public disorder that ensues too strenuous an insistence upon one's private principles that troubled Timothy, you see. Of course, as he was fond of saying at the time, ‘Why should we not expect a penchant for martyrdom coming from that recalcitrant Crandall line over in Westerly?' He was referring to John Crandall, who was arrested in the 1650s and later sent packing from Boston for disputing some obscure principle … of baptism, I think it was.

“And Mrs. Philleo is a woman capable of unarming directness. She brushed off the warnings of a clergyman's wife that the school would not be sustained should a single colored girl attend. ‘Let it sink, then!' she told the poor lady. Likewise, she upbraided Esquire Frost when he told her that such leveling principles led ultimately to intermarriage between blacks and whites. ‘Moses,' she is said to have snapped back at him, ‘had a black wife.'”

“I should like to meet that woman!” I said.

“Perhaps some day you shall.” Sophy smiled.

“No, I mean I would like to paint her portrait, Sophy. That's what I wish to do. Some day, perhaps, as you say. Has she ever returned to visit her family?”

Sophy looked away and said nothing. I remained silent as well.

“Timothy actually knows more about it now than I do,” she finally said. “But don't become involved with her, Allegra, while you're here; it'll stir things up.”

“I would be very careful to do no such thing, Sophy. But I'm painting any who come to me. That's how I earn my living. You say she has never returned, however?”

Sophy looked away again. She stood up once more and began to pace the room.

“She has returned, just recently,” she said grimly. “With her husband. Rumor has it that things are not well between them… .”

“Then she is here, or nearby, even now?”

“In North Society… . You know where that is, don't you?”

“Part of Canterbury. I know some of the Packville Baptist Church people.”

“That's it. But again, I would not meddle… .”

“I'll not meddle, Sophy. You can trust me that much, can't you? Why don't I simply tell Timothy I'd like to paint her portrait among the others who come to me, if he has no objection?”