The President's Daughter (44 page)

The twins stood transfixed. They seemed to be having a conversation between themselves by reading each other's mind. I knew the twins could communicate without speaking, and I watched the expression on their faces change from awe to consternation.

As for me, I flushed with shame. I had broken one of the rules of our organization: giving out secret information to nonmembers. But I had named no names, except those truly in the public domain. I had cited no real conductor or collaborator. But perhaps I had gone too far. And now I had no one to turn to for advice. I couldn't very well tell Robert Purvis or Emily Gluck that I had informed on their network to my husband and my brother-in-law in exchange for a barn.

“The mayor claims that ninety-nine percent of Philadelphia's white citizens are opposed to abolition!” said Thor.

“Nevertheless, this city has always maintained its ascendancy in the movement, thanks to the Quakers,” I replied.

“The American Anti-Slavery Society has less than three hundred members,” responded Thor, “and even if a dreamy poet liberal like John Greenleaf Whittier has taken over the editorship of the
Pennsylvania Freedman
and has greatly improved its literary style, his political efforts at propaganda have brought disaster upon disaster to the Negro community.

“Harriet,” he continued, “antislavery is considered so subversive that any action taken against its proponents is considered legal, and that includes firebombing their houses, running them out of town, tarring and feathering them, beatings, burnings, and murder. Mobs see themselves as patriots, and the whole movement is seen as a conspiracy against the nation formented by British agents.”

“The alternative to slavery,” said Thance, “is either race war or miscegenation, and this last accusation can always be counted upon to stir up the brutality of the mob.”

“Do you expect me to do nothing and watch racial violence become a feature of American life?”

“It
is
a feature of American life, Harriet,” said Thor. “Houses are burned, people are injured, and attacks on Negroes are frequent and go unpunished. Look what happened to Boss when he was set upon by that Irish gang.”

“You're telling me, Theodore Wellington? I was the one who was awakened by Abraham's cries.”

“And don't forget how those fools who decided to reenact the Boston Tea
Party raided your offices, seized a warehouse full of antislavery pamphlets, and threw them into the river. Thank God the offices were closed. What if they hadn't been?”

“I …”

“And what happened to Pennsylvania Hall after the Anti-Slavery Convention of America met there, and blacks and whites paraded arm-in-arm? I'll tell you what happened. An out-of-control crowd burned the building to the ground!”

“Thor, I know all this. I'm neither a child nor an idiot.”

“I wonder just
what
you are, Harriet. This desire for … danger. This playing with your life and the lives of those you love,” said Thance.

“The burning of Pennsylvania Hall strengthened our cause,” I whispered. But I knew that ever since Mary Ferguson, I was intoxicated by danger … by playing with fire.

“Yes, and so would a mob pulling Mother out of her bed at three in the morning, looking for a way station,” he replied.

To her credit, my mother-in-law always held her tongue in connection with my abolitionism, remarking only once that since I had a house full of children to take up my time, she wondered if my early orphanhood was not the cause of my morbid interest in the welfare of black people.

Was I fighting a losing cause? I had counted on Thor's support, but he was even more terrified of my putting myself in danger than Thance was. How could they know that I had been in danger all my life? I tried a last ploy.

“How about here in the city? How about a hiding place under the laboratories, with a tunnel that would connect it to the barge depot on the Schuylkill Canal? It's been discussed. We have boat captains ready to take escapees from there. Abraham and Thenia could act as agents instead of me.”

“Harriet!”

“It's settled, Harriet. No station. Not now or ever. Not here or in Anamacora. Why, even Purvis would be against it.”

“Purvis's farm in Byberry
is
a station,” I said. “He and his brother have been carrying out their work for over fourteen years.”

“Harriet, Robert Purvis's devotion to this cause is, as we all know, almost suicidal, and I think we understand why. I also think he deems you worthy enough of his friendship not to have your own involvement go beyond the ladies' auxiliary.”

“Harriet, my dear,” said Thor, seconding his brother, “don't try to be a hero.”

My blood was boiling. It wasn't fair. Not only had I to convince Thance, but Thor, too. It was double indemnity, and that was unconstitutional. Only
cold-blooded logic would save me now. I remembered what Thor had said about verifying his scientific experiments: as proof of reaction, conduct the experiment in reverse.

“You speak,” I said, “only of the danger, the social stigma, the futility of it. What about justice? You know the Fugitive Slave Act is still being carried out in Pennsylvania despite the law. You know it's wrong to allow slave catchers on northern soil. What,” I said, suddenly inspired, “if it were Thance and not I who was convinced of the absolute necessity of this action? Enough to risk
his
reputation, his fortune, his good name? What if it were Thance whose honor had been converted to the cause, and I were the one who opposed him on the grounds of danger, indifference, unacceptability? Wouldn't you very soon find me and Mother Rachel standing outside
your
cellar door with lanterns in our hands?”

The twins almost spoke as one, so astonished were they. Because in all scientific logic, that's exactly what would have happened.

“Harriet,” said Thor, “you have a devious mind.”

“More like a steel trap,” said Thance.

“Where did you learn to argue like that?” The question hung in the air.

“In politics,” I said. I wasn't the President's daughter for nothing.

Before the year was out, I had my station. Not in Anamacora but on Front Street. Abraham dug a tunnel from an empty vat in the supply room of the laboratory to our cellar. From there to a barge on the Schuylkill was a few meters. A pilot sailed the fugitives to Terrytown, and then another conductor led them to the Purvises' farm at Byberry, where Jean Pierre Burr, the illegitimate mulatto son of Aaron Burr, dispatched his charges to Albany and the borders of Canada.

Thenia now lived in a separate world from me, divided by the color line. Philadelphia's blacks had developed a community life of their own, centered around their own needs. They supported nineteen churches, one hundred and six beneficial societies. They maintained their own insurance companies, cemetery association, undertakers, building and loan association, labor unions, and fraternal organizations such as the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and the Elks. They operated their own libraries, organized their own lectures and debates, a Philadelphia Library Company for Colored Persons, a Debating Society, and for women, the Edgeworth Literary Association. They were outlawed from voting, and of the 302 black families living in Moyamensing, where Thenia and Abraham lived, half of them owned personal wealth of only four dollars and forty-three cents per family. The rest owned nothing.

But the daily violence in Moyamensing turned it into a seething medieval ghetto. Philadelphia, it seemed, was a metropolis of such odious prejudice that there was probably no other city in the world which hated the Negro more.

“Colorphobia is more triumphant here than in pro-slavery, Negro-hunting New York,” retorted Robert Purvis when I told him of Thenia's complaint. “Complaint!” he continued. “There is not perhaps anywhere to be found a city in which prejudice against color is more rampant than in Philadelphia. It meets you at every step outside your home and not infrequently follows even there. The city has its white schools and its colored schools, its white churches and its colored churches, its white Christianity and its colored Christianity, its white concerts and its colored concerts, its white literary institutions and its colored literary institutions. The line is everywhere, tightly drawn between them. Colored persons, no matter how well dressed or how well behaved, ladies or gentlemen, rich or poor, are not even permitted to ride on the horse-drawn streetcars through our Christian city. Halls are rented with the express understanding that no person of color shall be allowed to enter, either to attend a concert or listen to a lecture. The whole aspect of this city's segregation at this point is mean, contemptible, and barbarous. Every black Philadelphian is considered by a white Philadelphian as a slave, an ex-slave, a potential slave, or a designated slave under God, and treated accordingly.”

What was it, I wondered, that made them fear and hate us so? It couldn't just be color—look at Purvis; look at me. It must have been something we
did
to them. Or, I thought suddenly, that they did to us. Our skin was merely the mirror of their own crime. If a man wrongs you, he also hates you because he's wronged you. We never forgive those whom we have wronged.

And despite my hatred of Martha, her death, coupled with that of my mother, made me feel even more alone and vulnerable. I was tormented with grief and tortured with guilt. I believed my mother had wanted to tell me something she would only have revealed at the moment of her death. She, like my grandmother before her, like all slave women since the beginning of time, had this secret they had to convey to their daughters, and I hadn't been there to hear. I hadn't even stood over her grave to grieve. Naked fear invaded me. With my mother and Martha dead, there was nothing to prevent my cousins from claiming me or blackmailing me. What if they had had Eston's wagon train followed to find me? Ellen, Cornelia, Samuel, and Peter had made no promises to my father to free me.

“Your wife's a fugitive slave. Our property … financial difficulties … a draft on your bank for … for … how much would Thance be willing to pay to save his wife? Or better still, to buy her back? Do I hear ten, fifty, do I hear a hundred thousand dollars? Do I hear all? Everything? A fortune? Financial ruin like my father? Or nothing? Everything I'd ever achieved, ever possessed in life, lost. Or worse, how much would my mother-in-law be willing to pay to protect her precious white grandchildren—slaves, all of them? I began to imagine I was being followed. I began to have my old nightmares about Sykes. Then, one day, I saw him on the streets of Philadelphia. At Sixteenth and Pine, almost in front of the conservatory. He wore a Stetson, a white collar, and a pistol with cartridges. After nineteen years, he was one of the few people I was sure would still recognize me anywhere. It
was
Sykes.

Deliberately, I turned my back and spoke to Mr. Perry, our warehouse accountant.

“Mr. Perry, you see that man over there? I want you to find out who he is.”

Yes, ma am.

Mr. Perry reported back. “Name's Horton. He's a bloody slave catcher from Virginia.”

But I knew it was Sykes. I was sure. I would never forget. Never. He was no Horton. He had changed his name, just as I had changed mine.

Soon after that, illogical and unfounded fears startled me awake in my bed. I took to getting up in the middle of the night to check on the children. Methodically, I would go from room to room, like a sleepwalker, counting them. Sinclair, Ellen, Jane, Beverly, Madison, James. Each night they were there, safe, white, asleep in their beds, fists closed, their breathing soft, scented. Regular, legitimate, legal, my heart would pound.

Once Thance caught me at four o'clock in the morning in the twins' room.

“You frightened me,” he whispered, so as not to wake them. “I woke up and you weren't there,” he complained.

“I thought I heard something or someone, a burglar …”

I had communicated my unspeakable fears to Thance. I gazed up at his smooth, handsome face, sleep-glazed and incredibly blank, like an oversized room, pale, immense, beloved, filling my life, monumental and all-encompassing, blocking out the shadows. I began to tremble. I had
seen
him, Sykes. He was right here in this city, stalking me.
Where are your papers, Snow White?
He was coming to get me. I felt a tremor of frigid cold as Thance took me in his arms.

“Harriet, what's the matter with you? You've been dreaming … a

But what is chance? Nothing happens in the world without a cause. If we know the cause, we do not call it chance; but if we do not know it, we say it was produced by chance. If we see a loaded die turn its lightest side up, we know the cause, and that is not an effect of chance, but whatever side an unloaded die turns up, not knowing the cause, we say it is the effect of chance.

Thomas Jefferson

Dr. Wilberforce's dream came true on August 1, 1838, the day slavery was abolished in the British West Indies. From that time on, all eyes were turned toward the United States. Eight hundred thousand slaves had achieved freedom. The day, and the date of this victory, became an annual celebration for the free black population in the northern states of America.

British abolitionists arrived in numbers to agitate in America. George Thomson, whom I had met in London with Dorcas Willowpole, came with his plan for gradual emancipation: first free the children, then the old, then the grateful slaves, and last of all the revengeful residue. Charles Stuart, whom I had met in Birmingham, also came. Both were superb orators and preachers, both had run afoul of the law, and both were attacked by the antiabolitionist mobs that had become the hallmark of the 1830s. The same year, Harriet Martineau attended the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society's convention and spoke from the platform. It was the most daring feat any woman had achieved, to address a mixed audience in public. She railed against the Protestant and Catholic churches' failure to take a stand against slavery:
all men were guilty—Baptist, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian. She stormed about the reluctance of the American Friends to cooperate in racially mixed antislavery societies. She denounced everything and everybody, then wrote about it. But she wasn't the only one.