The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (5 page)

Rev. John Keep, the eighty-year-old patriarch of the College and head of the household where Edmonia (and the two girls) boarded, must have vouched for her. She had earned his trust and the town’s respect as his ward. Accused but not in custody, she remained at Keep’s house. All prayed the ailing victims would return to good health and withdraw their allegations.

Closeted bigots, sulking under Oberlin’s progressive regime, could not help expressing themselves periodically.
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They must have seen her as an alien who lacked proper respect. Her rank as an upperclassman, sharing the table and privy with white boarders, ordering newcomers about, and wearing jewelry as nice as anybody’s could have been more hateful to them than her presence at class. Innocent smiles could have riled rivals for the attention of some boy. She also could be outrageous, claiming to dress only in blankets before she ever attended school. “You see I had good opportunities for studying the nude,” she would quip to a judgmental journalist one day.
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They believed she deserved punishment. She was not a citizen. She lacked rights. She was a half-breed wench, the combination of two inferior races little better than barnyard animals. She was an “orphan” – often a euphemism for a child born of prostitution, alcoholism, or adultery. Coming from New York City, according to College catalogues, could only confirm their worst ideas of sin and illegitimacy. The forbidden aura of lust radiating from the sexual nature of the crime was to be expected. Colored people lacked morals. They were responsible for the Civil War and all the trouble it was causing. Signals of malice abounded. Racist sarcasm crept into the news coverage. The father of one of the victims took a shot at her attorney. Seeing her as alien, most of Oberlin’s colored townspeople were ready to pronounce her guilty.

In short, she vexed feelings already raw. Latent hatreds came boiling to the surface as she challenged her betters by not confessing her crime and embracing her fate. That she victimized nice white girls from proper Ohio families gave license to a furtive minority. They surely deployed cruel epithets to justify their disgust. She was vulnerable, from out of state with no local kin to defend her.

Edmonia’s freedom drew the eye of the Cyclops. She might escape the law at any moment. Who will defend the honor of the white race? Who will engage, teach a lesson, make an example? Who will send a message to the underclass before it runs amok? Given the values of Oberlin’s leaders, such questions could thrive only as back street whispers on a moonless night.

Keep’s boarders visited the outdoor privy each night in preparation for sleep. On the night of Jan. 31, four days after the girls went sick, someone silently grabbed Edmonia as she headed across the yard. Covering her mouth, pinning her arms, they easily carried her into the flat fields as deep as the fence allowed. Far enough that her cries could not be heard, they dropped her on the snow and chased her about. They made it a sport, taunting her, hooting, cursing and calling names, tormenting, hitting, kicking, punching, slapping. They snatched away her wrap. Piece by piece, they ripped off her jewelry and her clothing, teasing her and tossing each piece out of reach, laughing at her terror.

She was unable to resist. She could not escape. She was a featherweight, no taller than today’s average seven-year-old, and no match for grown men used to physical work. Trying to stand her ground, to fight back, she must have wished for her brother and her aunts who were hundreds of miles away. Silently, she called for her mother long dead and buried. She craved her father, barely remembered and equally departed. Where are my guardians? Why me? Why has everyone abandoned me? Why is this happening? Where is the fairness? Who are these people? What do they want? What can I do? Oh, please, please! Desperately, she prayed, making hasty promises to God, repenting sins, errors, unkind words and regrettable thoughts. She wished for anyone, anyone to come and save her.

Whatever she did surely excited her assailants more.

A child of the Flint shows no fear. She never learned to defer to every white face. She would never submit. She had grown up and lived as an equal with red, colored, and white people, eating at the same table, sleeping under the same roof, speaking in her turn. Her Oberlin friends and classmates were mostly white. She worked hard and did well in school. Her classmates and the respected Keeps asked her opinion and listened. With satisfaction and a sense of worth, she must have radiated the self-absorbed poise, youthful beauty, and noble charm of any well-bred college coed.

Her attackers meant to change that. They intended to humiliate, to punish, and to steal her sweetness. They meant to teach her that white people could not be her friends; she could not be their equal. They beat her like a poisonous snake.

Sexual violence has been the coward’s main course against women since the beginning of time. Rape is a crime of power and humiliation so troubling its victims rarely make it known. It means to profoundly disgrace and traumatize forever. Legal recourse means relinquishing chaste reputation and reliving the horror, amplifying feelings of shame. A woman, even a white woman, had little hope of justice in 1862.

The society that prized its righteous standing hid the rape of Edmonia Lewis. Never publicly alleged or confessed, it was not specified in any record – only hinted with comments about clothing torn away. In hindsight, who could doubt it? This was a gutless attack.

Naked, violated, bruised, and bloodied, the young woman was left to die in the dark, a sorry silhouette spread-eagled on the frozen snow.

Someone at Father Keep’s must have awaited her return. Missing her, they aroused the town. Someone tolled the bell in a general alarm. Her friends must have feared kidnapping. Others would have guessed she bolted across the frozen mud, hoping to cheat justice. Aided by oil lanterns, faculty, students, and townspeople peered into the cold winter night: around Keep’s large house, nearby buildings, and the roads.

She could not get far without a horse. Check the stables! No horses were missing. Check the depot and the tracks! No train was scheduled. Check the south side of town where the colored people lived. No luck!

Blending with the crowd, well-known faces in winter gear, her attackers must have been elated to see what trouble they caused, curious to see what would follow. Finally, perhaps led by one of them, eager to prolong his excitement and impatient for resolution – or troubled by remorse and intent on excusing his footprints in the snow – they found her “by the garden fence shockingly mangled & bruised,” according to a stranger’s diary. She was undoubtedly frozen, insensible, and bleeding from lacerations. Her eyes were swollen shut. Her pulse was slowed. Black welts on copper flesh overwhelmed her petite body. She shivered uncontrollably.

Horrified, a local tradesman, a harness maker, rushed her inside. Revived by the warmth of the fire, the binding of her wounds, by prayers and soothing chatter, she was unable to describe her assailants. It was too dark. She was too upset and too much in pain from a broken collarbone. She could not remember. No one else saw or heard anything. Someone collected her clothing and jewelry by light of day.

She must have begged, Why me? Who hates me so much? What did I do?

Such questions would have haunted her. I was always good. I lived by the rules.

No one could explain.

No one investigated.

No one filed a complaint.

No one could be blamed.

Like the three proverbial monkeys, town leaders closed their eyes and ears to the horror, saying nothing, doing nothing. As mysterious as her attackers, they became accomplices. The ever-pious leaders of Oberlin struggled to reconcile reality with its good name and lofty ideals. The episode was a tutorial in the degenerate realities of the times. Why pile trouble on trouble to prolong the bad news about Oberlin?

Her color weighed against her. She had little choice. Pray, forgive, and let it go. Such was less than could have been provided by a loving family or an authority that sought justice on her behalf. Yet, forgiveness is a Gospel virtue not to be underestimated.

The assault was an unexpected rite of passage, a dreadful unity with brothers and sisters of African blood who were born to the whip and the chain. Surely it left scars inside and out. Surely, it stirred questions in her mind and unease in her gut. Surely it seasoned the womanly grit that would take her past barriers and make her famous. No one at Oberlin had a clue about her real past – or her future. She grew up with ideas of never yielding. Only murder could put her down.

In the beginning, a young woman lived in the Sky World where she suffered the torments of a brutal husband. She dreamed of escaping him. One day she found a hole so deep it had no bottom. Some say her husband pushed her, and she floated down to the Earth. Others say she jumped.

– Mohawk legend

A man, even a fine gentleman, might have used earthy verbs to soothe the pain of dismissal. As a proper young lady in a plain day dress and bonnet, the Gospel phrase, “shake the dust off your feet,” should have crossed her mind. It rings of righteousness. Not welcome? So be it! After doggedly defending her name for a year, the words somehow could have justified her departure from Oberlin and eased her mind.

Not so easy was shedding the frustration of relentless snubbing meant to sour her young life. She would never forget, but she must have prayed hard to rise above the awful girls, the cold Lady Principal, and the inability of the dithering patriarch to control her fate. Rev. Keep was the one who had forced colored students and an antislavery agenda upon the College decades earlier. Now past the age of eighty, he remained a friend of her people but had little say in management decisions.

The scandal mongers still called her Mary, the name she had discarded two years before as she left childish things behind. They tormented her with no regard for the two-judge court, which had acquitted her of charges that she poisoned fellow boarders. New false accusations arose, enough to disrupt the fourth year of her education for good.
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Oberlin College had suffered other scandals, mostly sexual, leading to a zero tolerance for bad behavior. Rather than renew the debate, its Lady Principal had simply shut her out between terms. She would not get her degree. Clara Hale, a freshman from Bath OH finishing the prep course, found great satisfaction in the fall of the colored senior.

It was spring, a time for renewal. “Mary Lewis” – beaten and exiled – was a liability. She must sink into the past. As M. Edmonia Lewis, she headed for New York City. She could have stopped to see kin or old friends. They were on the way. Like precious salt, so often a treat, they would set her wounds on fire with questions that could pry out the chance that she was to blame. Our spare chronology and Edmonia’s remarkable focus suggest she took no time off.

She surely pondered the great abolitionists, white and colored, that she encountered at Oberlin. All towering orators, each could move crowds to fresh ideas and action. The Word had a well-established place in the anti-slavery movement. Rev. Finney,
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the charismatic, white president of the College, authored rhetorical thunder bolts that incited abolitionism as a holy war – for believers a true chance for Salvation. John Brown, the white martyr of the movement and a man of action, held a spiritual place as his final speech agitated the nation toward inevitable fury. John Mercer Langston, the first colored lawyer in Ohio, demanded more: equality as well as the end of slavery. She owed him her life. He was proud to take a stand and stand his ground. He had ignored pleas from the colored community to drop her case; he had risked his life to investigate her accusers. He had eloquently defended her innocence. Finally, Frederick Douglass, former slave and famous for his resonant notions of equality, had advised her to leave town.

She needed to pick battles she could win. What could she, not so articulate, do to witness for change? Her talent as an artist had blossomed with clever drawings (see Figure 1) and a little portrait bust of a bespectacled professor made from leftover putty that “ladies visiting the college … pronounced an excellent likeness.”
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To do more with her art, Douglass told her, she needed “to seek the East and by study prepare herself for work and further study abroad.”
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She sought to join the movement as an artist. Having started her fourth year at Oberlin, her degree had been in sight, but circumstances interfered. Moreover, the College was no art school and good artists need no diploma. At best, it gave young ladies lessons in art, piano, or voice, “to send out a set of
pious, well educated
and genteel (not fashionable) young ladies prepared to be useful in any circumstances.”
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Unique in her ambition, Edmonia would become more than piously, politely, useful with her art.