The President's Daughter (53 page)

“Well, what if she's my . .. assistant? What if I cannot carry on my work without her? She carries my nursing bag. She rolls my bandages. She prepares my medicines,” I lied.

“If she's your
servant,
well, that's another thing, Mrs. Wellington. I'll put her down as your mammy, all right?”

I flushed with anger and despair. I couldn't meet Thenia's gaze. This was all the protection I could offer my own niece.

“What's her name?”

“Mrs. T. H. Boss,” said Thenia.

“Yes. But what's her first name?”

“I don't have a first name,” interjected Thenia.

The recruiter looked at me. “She telling the truth?”

“Of course.”

“If you vouch for her, she can stay.”

“And nurse?”

“Mrs. Wellington, I've already told you, colored women can
only
cook, clean, and launder—no nursing.”

“Is winning this war of any avail?”

“No, ma'am, not for niggers.”

“Thank you.”

“Why wouldn't you give your name?” I asked Thenia as soon as we were outside.

“Because if a white person knows your first name, they'll call you by it. I don't take to no total strangers calling me Thenia. I don't answer to ‘auntie' or ‘mammy,' either. If they don't know your name, they can't humiliate you with it. I'm Mrs. T. H. Boss to everybody who doesn't have the right to call me mother or wife ... or sweetheart, Mrs. Wellington.”

The recruiter approached, just as Thenia and I were leaving.

“I must say, madam, this war has accomplished several social miracles if you count black soldiers and women nurses,” whispered the recruiter as she
took me aside. “An ancient tradition has died,” she said. “It has always been supposed that army nursing was strictly a job for enlisted men or for trollops. But Nightingale and the Crimean War changed all that. Here we are a corps precisely like the wives, sisters, and mothers our soldiers have left behind. A female nurse may be the only woman in a camp of seven hundred men, but she is treated with all the respect, protection, and kindness which is any white woman's right.”

“But many colored ladies are highly skilled nurses by habit and training, yet you refuse them,” I interjected.

“The corps, dear lady, is lily-white for a good reason—we cannot have even the
suspicion
of the lax morals or prostitution so insidiously associated with colored women. Our reputation must never be brought under the least question by military or church authorities. Matron Dix bans young girls and beautiful women also, Mrs. Wellington. I wonder indeed how you got in yourself.” She smiled.

“There is no woman in America who has more moral rectitude than Mrs. Boss, and that includes Matron Dix.”

“Well, I'm sorry, but one wouldn't know it by her color, madam.”

“I've joined, too,” interjected poor Charlotte ingenuously, “but then my weight puts me out of the young girls' competition,” she said, and laughed.

The war made a lot of marriages. Beverly married his sweetheart, Lucinda Markus, days before leaving for the front, his commission as a medical doctor in hand. He had been posted to the Fifty-eighth Pennsylvania Regiment as an M.D.

“I feel so helpless,” he said, “like a blind man in a room with an elephant. I know that filth and primitive sanitary conditions breed disease and infection, but why? I know how blood poisoning invades the circulatory system, causing death, but how to control it? I know there's a connection between bad water and cholera, between filth and epidemics, between infected water and typhus ... I
know
bleeding, cupping, and leeching patients is barbaric and wrong, certainly for infectious diseases. I know mercury is a disinfectant agent when administered in the correct dosage—but what is the correct dosage? Oh, Mother, we are on the brink of momentous discoveries ... in Europe, Pasteur, Lister, Parmentier ... all too late for this war. God help us, twice as many soldiers die of disease as are killed in battle. A soldier is more likely to die of blood poisoning than from a shell dropped on his hospital. Country boys die like flies of smallpox, erysipelas, and diarrhea. Dysentery cuts through regiments like a scythe. Pneumonia kills more soldiers
in every war than sabers. I know there's a link between mosquitoes and malaria, just as I know that the distilled bark from the African yar tree can cure certain lung infections. I know there is a way to prevent gangrene from spreading without amputation.”

Beverly studied Thor, who sat with his head in his hands.

“I'm only a pharmacist. An apothecary, Beverly. Great doctors and surgeons are working on all these problems and more! I can only give you an apothecary's explanation for any of your worries. And even so, I have no way of imposing these ideas on the medical corps.”

“Beverly will, one day,” I said, smiling.

“Perhaps,” replied Thor. “I hear you've canceled several orders we should honor by contract, Harriet. Why?”

“I refuse to honor orders for medicine and drugs destined for below the Mason-Dixon line.”

“Ma, if they have a contract—” Beverly began.

“I don't
care
if they have a contract. There's a blockade on, and a rebellion.”

“Yes, but the government has said that we are entitled to honor contracts already signed.”

“Perhaps. But not I. Not one barrel of Wellington chloroform, not one vial of Wellington iodine, not one ounce of Wellington morphine gets sent south by me. Not one Wellington drug is going to assuage the sufferings of the South's sick or wounded. Let them bleed and let them die, let every drop of blood drawn by the lash be paid for in kind and in suffering—I don't care.”

“But these orders have been paid for, Harriet.”

“I've returned whatever payments we have received. I've refused certain British orders because they are transshipped to the Confederacy.”

“My God, Harriet.”

“I will fight you on this, Theodore Wellington. Not one drop of medicine from Wellington Drugs will ever, ever help the Confederacy.”

I suppressed a flicker of regret, but not remorse. I saw my father's aquamarine eyes, smelled the odor of laudanum and morphine that had hung over his deathbed. Were there cousins who would die because of what I was doing? My heart closed in childish logic. They could have changed all this once. They started this war, and now it was too late. Why hadn't they done something before it was too late?

“You're a hard woman, my dear, and not an honest one. We've promised these supplies; we've given our word.”

“Since when was one's word expected to be honored in relations with traitors to the United States? The South has no rights or privileges a northerner
is bound to honor . . . does that sound familiar?

“This is total war, Thor,” I continued. “War against the army. War against civilians. War against women and children. Why? Because
slavery
is war; against civilians, women, children. And what Lincoln will eventually do to destroy the South will make my little war efforts look like a game of dominoes. And I rejoice in it.”

“My God,” said Thor softly. “There is nothing so ferocious as a reformed southerner.”

“It's true,” I said. “My family sinned. And now they have to pay. Even the innocent.”

Thor left to take up his new post in Washington, and Beverly left for the front.

Harriet Tubman looked like an ordinary, tiny specimen of humanity. Like Frederick Douglass, she had also refused to follow John Brown to Harpers Ferry, to Brown's surprise and bitter disappointment. And now, with John Brown in his grave, she continued alone in the steps of his martyrdom, which seemed to shadow every word she said. For her courage and shrewd audacity, she was known as General Tubman. For bravado in securing her own family's freedom, she had no equal. I sat next to Emily in the large auditorium as her words pierced me.

“I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom.”

Where, I wondered, were my half brothers and sisters? Where were Thenia's mother and aunts? Where were Critta, Dolly, Bette, Edy, and the souls of my sisters Thenia and Harriet I? Where, in fact, were Eston and Madison? Was Thomas dead or alive? Was my brother Beverly on this continent or in South America? Where had all the runaways gone? How far? How long? How many oceans, rivers, lakes had my own flesh and blood crossed? How many were in their graves or grieving?

It was Emily who slipped her arm around me, guilty, perhaps, that she had involved me so deeply in this struggle, which had taken its toll in nervous exhaustion, but not for the reasons she supposed. It was because every face I saw could have been one of my kin, every face held a question to which I had no answer—why? when? and how long? I was sobbing now, and Emily led me from the hall. I stood with a glass of water in my hand, not drinking, furious at myself for my own weakness. I had almost succumbed to sentimentality and compromised my disguise for a speck of womankind who had reminded me of what I had forgotten, that I was not, would never be, alone.
I saw in Emily's eyes the question I had caught in Charlotte's eyes that day on the quay. They asked me the same eternal and unanswerable question: “Who are you, Harriet?”

When we reentered the hall, a new speaker held the crowd spellbound. It was the emblematic slave woman Isabella Van Wagener, better known as Sojourner Truth.

“Wait until you hear her,” whispered Emily. “I couldn't let you leave without this. Try not to get too excited, Harriet, and try to control your emotions, for she plays upon them like no one I know. Of all the women preachers, she's the best—better than Silpha Elow, better than Jarema See, better than all of them.”

“I know,” I whispered, “she's a protegee of my old London friend, George Thomson.”

“You'll be glad you stayed.”

Isabella Van Wagener was a coal black giant of a woman, rawboned, broad faced, with a husky masculine voice famous for expressing truths her fellow abolitionists and feminists dared not utter in public. Tonight was no exception. She had never learned to read or write, and so could not generate the books, letters, and poems that were necessary to fame, as Tubman and Wheatley had. Yet her ability as an unintimidated and articulate speaker powerfully reminded the world, and white feminists in particular, that black women were women too. She was about to begin her famous tirade. The first time she had roused an audience with it, she had bared her breasts to an auditorium of thousands because someone in the crowd had accused her of being a man. Her rough country voice, as full of deep thunder and as commanding as Frederick Douglass's, filled the hall.

“Men,” she began, “say that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches and to have the best seat, but nobody ever helped me into a carriage or over a mud puddle or gave me the best spot. And ain't I a woman?” The hall roared back the answer.

“Look at my arms. I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could head me, and ain't I a woman?”

Now there was stomping and shouting, whistles and clapping as she worked the crowd.

“I can work and eat as much as a man and bear the lash as well, and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most of them sold off to slavery and no one heard me grieve ‘cept Jesus, and ain't I a woman?”

This was not exactly true, Emily whispered to me. Isabella Van Wagener had five children, none of whom had ever been sold. But, Emily had added, it certainly sounded better. And what, I thought, was wrong with adding a
slave story of old, true a thousand times over, to one's own?

It was about this time that Charlotte introduced me to Sarah Hale, who had come to Philadelphia from Boston to edit
Godey‘s Lady's Book,
the most popular women's magazine in America. My first encounter with Sarah Jose-pha, as Charlotte called her, reminded me somehow of my meeting with Maria Cosway, except that Mrs. Hale was about twice the size of the late abbess. Yet, in a way, they were in the same business, educating and cultivating domestic manners in the wives and daughters of the middle class. They both had the wild aristocratic imaginations of adventuresses, which they also recognized in me. Their beauty was defined by this aura of double or triple lives with
rebondissements
and changes of routes and directions, new strategies, and new men which gave them, whether they were actually beautiful or not, a projected power, grace, and worldliness.

Sarah Hale wasn't beautiful, but the sensuality and magnetism she exuded attracted both men and women. Tall, with a large, leonine head set on wide shoulders, a high forehead, a full nose, she had a thin, determined mouth that turned up at the corners but promised a stubborn nature. Her temper was unladylike and her thirst for power translated itself into a hilarious sense of irony in private. Offsetting this were heartbreakingly beautiful violet eyes that shone with both radiant intelligence and provocative seduction. They were eyes that could start a war, it was said, and they disguised a ferocious ambition to be the best magazine editor in the business. And she was. She had set about her task by offering the most for her subscribers' money and outdistancing her rivals in number of pages, color engravings, and inserts, which included, to my delight, a piece of music separately printed. She paid the highest prices in America, which got her the best writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She paid one cent a word, or twelve dollars for a thousand-word page, and up to fifty dollars for a poem. A ten-page story by Edgar Allan Poe had been bought for the unheard-of price of $250. Sarah Hale also published more fiction by women writers (whom Hawthorne called “a damned mob of scribbling women”) than any other magazine, including the
Atlantic,
and she paid them at the same rate as men.