I Am Abraham (38 page)

36.

Emancipation Day

I
T
WAS
M
ARY
’
S
first official appearance since Willie had passed, and she wore a black bonnet and a dress of dark silk that New Year’s Day, but she didn’t waver once while we stood in the Blue Room and welcomed our guests, didn’t whisper in my ear about the spirit world. My white gloves were soiled after a solid hour of shaking hands, while Mary’s eyes commenced to wander. I could see that worrisome fork in the middle of her forehead, like a load of lightning under her skin, as we approached the anniversary of
our
little soldier’s fatal illness. She still communed with Willie most nights, and I tried not to listen when she wandered through the halls in her nightgown, looking like Ophelia in the candlelight, a child with a woman’s round lines, humming nursery songs to the little soldier, while her mouth puckered into a half-mad smile. And then the humming would stop, and she’d grip her own head in her little hands, as if she had plunged into an apoplectic fit. The
blinders
, which grew worse the nearer we got to Willie’s deathday, on the twentieth of February, could cripple Mother and contort her features into a swollen mask. But I didn’t feel a
blinder
coming on.

She started to chatter with a covey of my commanders and their wives. She relished the idea of playing Mrs. Commander-in-Chief.

“General Joe,” she chirped with icicles in her eyes, “don’t you think we should have crossed the Rappahannock
upriver
, where the bombardment wouldn’t have been so fierce, and the Rebels couldn’t have rained so much fire on our heads with such rapidity? Those devils came roaring right out of the fog, and our pontoon bridges swayed so hard, half our army could have drowned.”

And before the general could answer, she turned on the soft heels of her slippers and said to the general’s wife, “Mrs. Joe, will my husband sign his Proclamation, or will he leave it to rot under a pile of maps on his desk? How much are you willing to wager?”

I had to intervene, or there might have been a rebellion in the ranks: my commanders didn’t much care for that Proclamation, said it would sow discord among our troops.

“Mother, we wouldn’t want to saddle Mr. Hooker and his wife with such highfalutin matters on the first day of the year.”

She still had a river of ice in her eyes. “Father, I have a million things to ask Mrs. Joe.”

“
Mother
, you’ll have to ask her another time.”

She grew quiet, but I could feel the rage rise up in her against me and my generals. She’d have dashed off to the front if I’d allowed her to do so. And we stood in the reception line, while Mary bowed and I clutched more hands. The generals all sneaked out to some shindig on Lafayette Square. The White House gates were opened, and the
wild geese
, as Mary called them, flooded through. They weren’t wild at all. They were ordinary folks of the District, men in mechanic’s coats, with mud on their boots, and their wives decked out in brilliant-colored bonnets and shawls. Mary winced as they marched across the tiny hills that the corduroy sleeves had made in the carpets, but it was
their
Levee, and they didn’t want that much of me—a toast for the New Year, a touch of my hand, and a word with the Lady President.

The reception wasn’t over until well into the afternoon. I kissed Mary and climbed upstairs to my office. My Secretary of State arrived with his son Fred and a finished draft of my Proclamation in his pigskin portfolio. Fred was his Pa’s Assistant Secretary of State, and he carried that portfolio under his arm. No one else but Fred and his Pa had perused the final draft. He had black side-whiskers and dark bags under his eyes, like Seward himself.

“Mr. President,” he said, “this will be the most historic moment of the war.”

I could see how nervous he was. “Fred, hold your horses. I haven’t signed it yet. My generals consider me insane. They call that document the Great Rebel Backbone Breaker, and swear that it will only fire up the
Secesh
if I nick them of their slaves.”

Seward must have signaled to his son, because Fred was quiet after that. He unrolled the parchment for me, but my hand trembled, and I couldn’t seem to sign the document.

“Mr. Lincoln,” Seward asked, “is something wrong?”

Didn’t he know that a President could panic, like any other man? The Proclamation was a Bone Crusher, and that’s what I meant it to be.

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States . . .

“Fred, if my hand shivers, anyone who examines the document hereafter will say,
He hesitated
, and I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

So I waited a little while and then scratched my name on the parchment without a single shiver. Seward also signed, and Fred rolled up the parchment and returned to the State Department with his Pa and the pigskin case. And I snuck out the door, convinced I had made a failure in my first two years as President.

I strolled through the gates, and watched the lights of the Willard across the road, with a sea of carriages in front of the portico. Willard’s must have been at the
tail
end of its New Year Lunch—the roar from across the
Ave
was like a deafening bolt. But I looked again, and realized that the roar wasn’t coming from Willard’s. The front gate was surrounded by negroes who hadn’t been invited inside to the Levee. They weren’t decked out as fine as Mary’s
wild geese
, but they still had splendid bonnets and parasols and winter cloaks. They must have heard about the signing from one of my own butlers. A couple of White House guards wanted to brush them away with their bayonets.

“You
cain’t
bother the President.”

“Stop that now,” I said. “Nobody’s bothering me. These are my guests.”

One of the guards was a brazen fool. “Well, I didn’t see ’em at the Levee.”

“Son, we’re having our Levee right here.”

That still didn’t satisfy them. They’d have stuck to my skin like horseflies if I hadn’t sent them off to Willard’s on some wild chase.

The black men kneaded their soft hats against their chests. They could have been stevedores and mechanics, or ditchdiggers. The women did the same with their bonnets, crushing them against their winter coats. The men didn’t wear coats in January, but short jackets.

“Mr. Lincoln,” said one of the women, “could I
tech
your hand?”

I held her hand in mine, and it startled her—no, frightened her a little, because she hadn’t expected me to grip her like that. I felt like some two-legged horse in a stovepipe hat who happened to be President. I went among them, gripping hands. These mechanics had a firmer grip than mine. They didn’t ask questions like a lot of tricky Senators. I knew about their quarters, the
Nigger Hills
they inhabited, always at the edge of some neighborhood, or near some abandoned slave pen, or burnt-out market, where no one else would live, with hogs rooting at the side of the road, leaving long runnels of pigshit, and children playing with pieces of catgut. I’d noticed everything, and pretended not to notice at all.

“Bless you, Father Abraham.”

And then they dispersed—like some strange shot, as if they had apportioned their time with me, had parceled it out with a sugar spoon, and left in the blink of an eye, and I stood there alone, beside one of the old privies that served as a guardhouse, and couldn’t find a trace of them on the lawn.

They considered me their Great Captain, but it wasn’t true. I struggled over that Proclamation to expedite the war. As I scribbled to Horace Greeley: “If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” We could no longer win the war without black troops. So I was the poor man’s Machiavel, the grand manipulator. Jeff Davis threatened to hang captured negro troops and their white officers. And I warned Mr. Jeff that I would repay his barbarisms with some of my own. I’d rattled his feathers, robbed him of his greatest commodity—the South’s inexhaustible market of slaves—with one stroke of the pen. If my generals wouldn’t ride to Richmond, then I’d ride there with my
writs
.

37.

Blinders

N
O
ONE
KNEW
when Mary’s
blinders
would rip. A
blinder
might come when she was at breakfast. The first inkling of it would be the spoon that fell out of her fist, or the rattle of her egg cup. She could be in the middle of a conversation, and her right eye would twitch. Then her lips would purse, and there would be a confusion of speech. She never babbled, but she might whisper, “
Please
—
find
—
Keck-k-k-ly
.” And then she’d fall into a swoon that was close to an epileptic fit, and I’d have to rock her in my arms and watch her eyes flutter in some electric storm—as if the furies were locked inside and could never be expelled.

Elizabeth would glide down the attic stairs, clutching a candle, while her shadow crept up the wall and the candle’s eerie light licked at her cheeks and mouth until she looked like a spirit come to visit with us awhile. Mary had given her a
palatial
room—a doll’s closet—which had become her private quarters. Sometimes I’d listen to the patter of her feet as she wandered through that dollhouse-dungeon of hers after midnight, and wonder why she put up with the Lincolns. She had her own apartment near the Powder Magazine, her own little couturière’s shop, and clients far richer than the Lady President. Yet she moved all her operations into our attic, with spider webs and mice as her confreres.

She wore a nightgown, and it startled me how beautiful she was, as if she had bathed in silver. None of us could grasp the
pantomime
that went on between her and my wife. Mary’s eyes stopped fluttering the second she saw Elizabeth. Mother scratched at her like a petulant child and pointed to the ceiling.

“
Upstairs
—
Lizabeth
—
upstairs
.”

Elizabeth had to scold her. “Shame on you, Mrs. President. You’re much too weak to gallivant around. A body could lose herself in all the cobwebs, and Mr. Lincoln would have to call the militia.”

She mewled like a baby and continued to scratch. So Elizabeth wrapped her in a blanket, fed her a cup of water, and I carried my wife up the attic stairs, with Tad tight on my tail.

“
Paw
, are gonna move in with Yib?”

“Well, we may have to one of these days.”

The banisters creaked, and Tad held on to my pocket—I thought the stairs might collapse under our weight, and we’d tumble into the well, but we all landed in the attic alive. Elizabeth had installed a sewing machine in that maze of little rooms, and some kind of regal chair with sunken upholstery and crooked legs, where Mary could rule in the middle of a
blinder
. She’d take flight, disappear into this attic kingdom, with Yib as her accomplice and companion. She might sit with Yib during her
monthlies,
or descend into that basement boudoir known as The First Lady’s Confinement Room, a rathole with a miserable chair, its carpet covered with water buckets and cotton scraps—Tad called them
soljer’s bandages
on account of all the menstrual blood. Here she would hide when she had a headache or her cramps, though she preferred the attic.

Still, she couldn’t find much peace, not even in her little warren. Her head started to sway as she sat in the chair, one hand cupped over her eye.

“Lizabeth, be an angel and get my carriage. We’ll have a picnic on the Potomac. And if my husband’s soldiers stare at us, we’ll perform our own little tricks.”

“But that carriage bounces like the Devil. Wouldn’t you rather stay here, Mrs. President?”

Mother froze in her attic chair. “You’re a scavenger—you live under my roof without paying a penny, and I won’t tolerate your sass.”

Yib grew silent as Mary scolded her like some
lesser
sister.

“You dress me in rags and guard all the profits, grow rich on my miserable bounty. And you wag your tail at Mr. Lincoln. You’d poison me if you could and live with my husband in the attic.”

It was pitiful to see her cuss at Mrs. Keckly, as if she were ripping at herself and unraveling in front of Tad. Her ire would only get worse. Not even the ghost of Henry Clay could have reasoned with Molly during one of her storms. The
blinder
had come back, and she uttered a shriek that whistled in my ears and dug like a hammer’s hook between my eyes. I didn’t know what to do. I carried Mother down those treacherous stairs and into her bedroom, with Tad still on my tail.

The doctor had to be snuck in through the servants’ door, with his medical kit under his coat. Mary didn’t want her
blinders
advertised. So the tonic that the doctor prescribed would be in Keckly’s name; it was a white powder that permitted Mary to sleep while the
blinder
ripped. Often she had to bite into a stick, and her mouth bled from all the biting. Elizabeth would wipe the blood with the skirts of her nightgown. I was puzzled by her devotion to Mary, which seemed absolute—and irrevocable. She didn’t have to sleep in an attic. And yet she was upstairs almost every night. Mary couldn’t have paid her much more than a pittance—she was a prized couturière. And the District’s finest dowagers must have offered a princely sum to lure her to their mansions. Yet she stayed, this woman with her invisible White House address, who never used her cachet to capture other clients.

Mary hollered at her half the time, and it didn’t seem to bother her none. And once, after a wallop of a
blinder
, where she had spent a long vigil with my wife, I tried to offer her a pittance of my own. She wouldn’t take a nickel.