The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (46 page)

Twenty years later, the
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
reported a testimonial benefit for the Asylum’s superintendent, Rev. William F. Johnson.
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Blind but not halted, Rev. Johnson took care of one hundred fifty children without government aid. To solicit donations, he visited churches near and far. A grateful community felt it was time for a show of gratitude. The large and elegant Bridge Street AME Church could easily seat twelve hundred people.

The high point of the evening was the unveiling of a marble bust of Rev. Johnson made by Edmonia in Rome. We found no record that she attended.

Rome was still a stop on the grand tour of Europe. Guides to Roman sculptors, such as
Murray’s Handbook,
however, ailed from lack of care. The 1888 edition listed Edmonia and a few other Americans – as well as two long dead.
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A weekly colored newspaper relayed a brave boast, saying she was “at work on a new piece of statuary at her studio in Rome, Italy, which bids fair to eclipse all her former efforts.”
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Details remain a mystery.

Edmonia was still at odds with highly competitive American sculptors in Rome. One declared, “All the women who attempted sculpture there have died,”
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even though Edmonia’s signature appeared by hers on William Story’s petitions. The
New York Times
printed the claim as fact.

Real estate development and urban renewal chased most artists from the Gardens of Sallust.
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Story moved his studio east to Via San Martino della Battaglia, past the railway terminal and far from the art districts. Edmonia moved hers in the other direction, down to the Via Babuino and later back up to the huge Piazza Barberini where Bernini’s pagan god still snubs mobs of tourists.

By 1887, Dr. Sarah Parker Remond lived in Rome. Formerly of Salem, MA, and born free, she had once flourished as a formidable anti-slavery speaker. She had moved to Florence to study medicine about the same time Edmonia arrived in Rome. She dwelled with her two sisters, a nephew, and his wife at a tourist hotel they operated. Palazzo Moroni was just outside the Vatican, at 165 Borgo Vecchio.

It was probably there that gray-bearded Frederick Douglass rediscovered Edmonia as he toured with his second wife, Helen.
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Their reunion must have had a grand dimension. He had cheered her on since meeting her at Oberlin. He had reprinted Laura Bullard’s 1871 interview, written an editorial about her in 1873, covered her New York reception in 1874, and surely applauded her in person at the Centennial.

She made herself useful as a guide, pointing out historic sites and landmarks. They went to Naples together where they toured art and artifacts from Pompeii. Before their departure, Douglass visited her flat. Following is his description of her and her room, taking barely half a page:

Jan. 26. Called to see Miss Edmonia Lewis who had loaned Helen some books – Found her in a large building near the very top in a very pleasant room with a commanding view, No. 4 Venti Settembre, Roma. Here she lives and here she plies her fingers in her art as a sculptor. She seems very cheerful and happy and successful. She made us obliged to her for kind offers to serve us in any way she could and she certainly seems able to serve us in many ways. She had resided in Rome twenty years and constantly speaking Italian has somewhat impaired her English.

Interestingly, the “commanding view” probably looked down on William Story’s palazzo apartments next door. Judging from the 1876 map of Rome (Figure 17), which showed a ball court
[sferisterio]
at the address, she occupied a new building.

Frederick Douglass’s sparse notes give us the last report on Edmonia by one who knew her history and understood who she was. Her street address and that of the Remonds were among the few he noted – signaling his wish to stay in contact or pass it on.

He did not record much of their conversation, which could have touched on the passing of John Jones and the 1883 Supreme Court decision that finally voided the Civil Rights Act of 1875. While many lost heart, Douglass held that the Act “was a banner on the outer wall of American liberty, a noble moral standard uplifted for the education of the American people.”
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Documents of later years offer only maddening traces, wisps and hints, rarely yielding much description or detail for our narrative. She registered at the U.S. consul in Rome some time after Dec. 3, 1889, and gave her address as number 46 on Via Ludovisi, a street created after 1876.
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The site is fashionable and high on a hill, a few steps from the gates of the Pincian Gardens. The latest guide books no longer listed her studio.

By January 1891, she moved down to Vicolo Alibert, probably to the economical and charming hotel at the foot of Via Margutta once favored by Liszt (who died in 1886; Princess Carolyne, who died the next year, had lived nearby on the Via del Babuino). Amelia Edwards had described it as “a quiet, cheerful nook — just the place in which to live a life of work and solitude; day repeating day, and year year, till the end should come.”
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The American tourist who placed her there added, “[she] continues her work, though I fancy of this she has little to execute as orders, but the habit of twenty-five years is too strong to be broke, and Rome holds her fast by its charm.”
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But not for long. She was in the process of leaving Italy.

Her friends, Sarah and Maritcha Remond, both decades older than she was, died in 1894 and 1895, respectively. Their third sister, Caroline Remond Putnam, had moved to England. The recently founded Society of the Divine Savior took over the property at 165 Borgo Vecchio, remodeling and making it their motherhouse.
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By 1893, Edmonia made Paris, France, her home. To what extent she enjoyed the wonders of visual arts and entertainment that made the era particularly memorable, we shall probably never know. Henry Ossawa Tanner and other Americans were there, but little mention of Edmonia in Paris has surfaced.

Only her brother, it seems, and a few others in America were aware of the move. The colored women of Allegheny County (which includes Pittsburgh) reached her there to order a bust of America’s first colored poet, Phillis Wheatley.

Proud to be summoned, Edmonia agreed to provide a life-size portrait in bronze at a heavily discounted price. As she requested engravings of her subject to guide her, she sighed, “This is indeed a little history and always to be remembered.”
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The Death of Cleopatra
remained in Chicago where the 1893 World’s Fair would honor Columbus’s landing. An archived photo suggests the Fair managers considered it.
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But they let her down.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who sought what was fresh, ran the show. The statue seemingly had three strikes against it. One: It had appeared at the Centennial and orphanage fund-raisers as well as the 1878 Chicago Expo, where it boasted headline rank. Strike two: It was dirty and damaged.
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Strike three: The Inter-State Exposition Building, about to be demolished or moved to make way for the Fair, suddenly needed to get rid of it.

A saloon on Clark Street took it away.
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Until recently, the street had been the hub of Chicago gambling, and the barkeep must have hoped that fine art might replace the glamour of Lady Luck. (Decades later, William Story’s
Cleopatra
would grace a New York restaurant, a favorite of tourists, in much the same way.)

The Fair’s backers tried to exclude women from participating, but they failed. They eventually allowed a “women’s building” where members of the fair sex could run their own show.

Female sculptors fiercely objected to the separation. The ever-bold Hosmer, who promoted her entry via newspapers years in advance, even got herself named to the otherwise all-male jury of acceptance. She also established a studio in Chicago where she spoke out for women’s rights.
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Her vision of
Queen Isabella of Spain
finally stood outside the California building, the result of a negotiated compromise. A plaster cast of Whitney’s
Roma
made it to the main show while her bust of
Lucy Stone
and a fountain appeared with women’s exhibits. The official catalog listed Vinnie Ream (now the domesticated Mrs. Hoxie, exiled to Arkansas, and retired as an artist) with three statues in the sex-segregated hall and Edmonia, vaguely, with “statuettes”
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sponsored by her admirers.

Having caved to women, the Fair stood its ground against colored applicants wanting to show their work – with racist intent almost as mean as the Centennial. Commission members wrote to Washington to head off appeals by Frederick Douglass and others.

Too late, Douglass and other leaders
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attacked deliberate exclusions. Many local colored people, embarrassed by the controversy, shunned the event entirely. They joked that Aunt Jemima, its most-remembered colored image, was a “slave in a box.”
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Twenty thousand copies of a pamphlet,
The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition
,
published well after the fair’s opening, had little impact outside the African-American community. A passage titled “The Art of Sculpture” by educator I. Garland Penn featured Edmonia:

Miss Edmonia Lewis, a young, ignorant girl, saw the statue of Benjamin Franklin on a first visit to Boston and exclaimed, “I can make a stone man!” Wm. Lloyd Garrison introduced her to a leading Boston sculptor, who gave her some clay and the model of a human foot, which she copied. From this beginning, Miss Lewis has now a studio of her own in Rome. Here she has executed work which has brought her the patronage of noted men and women. Her best works are busts of Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln, “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” “Forever Free,” “Hagar in the Wilderness,” and the “Madonna.”
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Notably, the summary skipped
The Death of Cleopatra,
which should have been well known to Chicago society, the art crowd, and beyond. Perhaps Penn felt uncomfortable with the saloon appearance. More interesting, he returned the immortal
Forever Free
from purgatory.

New York, which counted Edmonia as a native, was the only state to recruit a colored woman to its board of expo managers. Imogen Howard, a well-known educator, was the daughter of Edmonia’s Boston landlord. She borrowed a copy of
Hiawatha
to display in the library of the Woman’s Building.
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A month before the fair opened, news items also promised the companion bust,
Minnehaha.
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Edmonia made no effort at publicity or to appear with her work. Beyond the few notes cited here, we found no news about her.

That her most ambitious work lacked a fitting home or another expo display must have broken her heart. Nearly twenty years after the Centennial, young American museums still showed no interest.

A few years later, Republicans in Chicago automatically brought up Edmonia’s name when a group started to raise money for a monument to John Brown.
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By 1900, plans for a bronze portrayal with sword in one hand, a nude colored infant in the other (the latter recalling his march to the gallows), pondered a nice location in either Washington or Jackson Park.
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They mentioned Edmonia, however, no more.

In the countdown to the International and Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, publicity promised Edmonia’s
Charles Sumner
bust would be on loan from William Henry Johnson of Albany NY.
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Johnson, a newspaper man, knew how to produce publicity. He loved Sumner as a leading advocate of Negro rights. To white southerners, Sumner was the devil.

For a moment it was almost as if Edmonia were back, visiting editors and escorting her work. The momentum of the Union victory was long gone, and she probably would not have stood for the indignities of Jim Crow in Atlanta. Like southern railroads, neighborhoods, shops, and schools, the fair isolated colored entries in a “Negro Building.”

The
Christian Recorder
at first supported the fair. It then objected to the separation of races, “Will there be colored cotton and white cotton?”
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With a growing sense of outrage, it attacked the “monstrous inequity” as it described offensive accommodations: “We say let the colored people contribute their room rather than their company and make the occasion conspicuous for their absence”
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Before opening day, AME Church Bishop Henry McNeal Turner urged colored readers of the
Atlanta Constitution
to turn the event to their own interest: “[It] allows me an opportunity to show to the world that I can be clean, mannerly, cultured and refined and deserve better tradement [terms of trade or treatment], and it is the surest way to get it.”
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Turner had to overcome his hatred of Jim Crow to laud the new chance for people stalled in the South. The Great Migration northward would not begin for more than a decade. Colored support would also make the region appear benign to the outside world of investment and commerce and, he hoped, offer jobs.

Having lost the advantages of slave labor, the South sought to recapture some of its glory on the backs of former slaves who were not organized to demand high wages and decent conditions. After Jim Crowing, lynching, and terrorizing for thirty years, Southern industry now needed their help to put on a show of good will and racial harmony.