Silences (18 page)

Margret Howth: A Story of Today
began appearing serially, the lead piece in the October 1861
Atlantic.
Whether
it was this evidence of herself as a writer that helped, or not, Rebecca returned to writing—the most chilling and perfectly executed of her stories, “John Lamar.”

Set in the West Virginia hills in icy November, where Secesh Bushwhacker atrocities have been followed by Union Snakehunter reprisals, John Lamar, a Georgian slaveowner, is being held captive by Union forces under the command of his
closest friend since childhood, Captain Dorr. Lamar is planning escape, an escape completely dependent on his barefoot body slave, Ben, to whom the North secretly means freedom. (“At two, Ben, remember. We will be free to-night, old boy.” It is typical of Lamar’s obliviousness that he says “we” without irony.) Ben listens to the two friend-enemies talk. Dorr begins:

            
“This slave question
must be kept out of the war. It puts a false face on it.” . . .

                  
“There is Ben. What, in God’s name, will you do with him? Keep him a slave, and chatter about self-government? Pah! The country is paying in blood for the lie, to-day. . . .”

                  
. . . As for Ben, crouching there, if they talked of him like a clod, heedless [of his presence] . . . we all do the same,
you know. . . .

                  
“. . . Let the white Georgian come out of his sloth, and the black will rise with him. . . . When we have our Lowell, our New York . . . when we stand where New England does, Ben’s son will be ready for his freedom.”

Ben concludes that North
or
South, the “kind” intention is the same: to keep him (and his) always in slavery. An hour before the planned escape,
half frozen, “crushing down and out the old parasite affection for his master . . . [his] muddy blood heating, firing with the same heroic dream that bade Tell and Garibaldi lift up their hands to God, and cry aloud that they were men and free,” Ben kills the sleeping Lamar, then turns south, not north—he has “a past of cruelty and oppression, . . . a lost life, to avenge.” The “canting abolitionist”
Union soldier who had earlier called Ben “man and brother,” and at a camp prayer meeting, while Ben listened, had preached the Lord’s vengeance to the Babylon South—“As she hath done unto my people, be it done unto her”—is left to stand sentry over the dead man. “Humble, uncertain,” the words he has said earlier reiterate themselves: “The day of the Lord is nigh; it is at hand; and who can abide
it?”
And who can abide it?
^*

For months, invitations had been coming from the North, some from fabled names. The Fieldses, who had invited her from the beginning, stepped up the frequency of their urgings. Now Rebecca was desperate to go.

It was not only the need to get away from the war. The old sense of constriction, of longing for more than her life was, had roused up, intensified by the constant
presence of death. She wanted to be, for a while, with people to whom literature was life; she wanted responding flesh and blood confirmation of her reality as a thinking, writing being. Nothing in Wheeling, outside of herself, confirmed it. No one regarded her as the nation’s most significant new writer. She was still just Harding’s spinster daughter, devoted, quiet, queer in her unshared
interests. Within her family,
life went on as before—her writing fitted in, their needs prior. Proud as they probably were of the recognition given her, her very subject matter may have precluded any discussion of it.

When her father became ill, a breakdown—“strain of the war”—it was taken for granted (most of all by herself) that she would put her writing aside, as if it were china painting,
to devote herself to him. No one expected of her brothers that they should do the same.

Across the street, to take over the Western Department, came General Frémont, the “Pathfinder.” For a few hours now and then, when she could leave her father, she had occasional heady draughts, from Frémont, from his remarkable wife Jessie Benton, of what friends of range, culture, response, might mean to
her. But the Frémonts were not to be in Wheeling long.

Famed as a wilderness explorer, the man who had won the popular, if not the electoral, vote for the presidency in 1856, Frémont was being maneuvered out of the command. “The incarnation of the chivalric and noble side of Abolitionism”; “simple, high-bred, courteous; always at a white heat of purpose” (Rebecca’s words) he was suspect. The
fall before (1861) when in command of the Missouri Territory, he had ordered the slaves therein freed, the first and only such order of emancipation. The action was annulled by Lincoln.

Months before she had promised Annie Fields a photograph of herself. Now she had one taken, and a copy sent to her Philadelphia correspondent, Clarke Davis, as well. (She was coming to count on his letters more
and more in this drouth time.) The eyes look directly out of an ardent, compelling face, a strong intelligent face; the hair, carefully arranged, severely parted, falls in luxurious black curls onto plump beautiful shoulders that the dress is cut low enough to disclose. Was it at this time she copied out from Margaret Fuller:

            
With the intellect I always have, always shall overcome:
but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life, O my God shall the life never be sweet? Nature vindicates her right, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust.
^*

Money was on her mind. For what? Family needs? The journey? The sweet freedom of being able—for the first time in her life, without dependence—to buy something without asking, or give money away or save it? She asked
Fields for the advance of $100 refused earlier for the book publication of
Margret Howth.
He sent $200, and as the book was doing well (2,500 copies in three editions), another $200. She scribbled some stories for
Peterson’s.
That fitted in with her shredded time, as serious writing could not (and any one of them paid more than all of
Margret Howth
had brought her).

It was April, one year after
publication of
Life in the Iron Mills,
before she could write Annie that yes, she
would
come North, “as soon as her father’s health permitted.” But still she could not go—the “minor trouble of an escort.” No unmarried lady, not even a well-known author with earnings of her own to finance a journey, was free to travel by herself. “O Annie,” she wrote her Boston friend, “how good it must be to be
a man when you want to travel.”

The power of reticence again. The bitterness with which Rebecca felt this restriction is revealed by her obsessed fascination with Ellen, “a girl of the laboring classes,” who wandered penniless and freely through state after state, looking for a soldier brother who had disappeared. In later years, Rebecca wrote Ellen’s story not once, but twice, the second time
as fiction. The first was “Ellen” in
Peterson’s,
1863; the second in the
Atlantic,
July 1865.

In the uninterrupted hours that came sometimes now, free too of the worst of the weight of concern about her father, Rebecca returned to serious writing: another Civil War story,
David Gaunt,
published in 1862 in the
Atlantic.
The sense of torn loyalties, intermixed right-wrong, “hands wet with a brother’s
blood for the Right,” are in this too. A pacifist minister, after agonizing introspection—
must
murder be the way to justice, peace?—enlists in the war against slavery; is betrayed by his noble beliefs into killing his benefactor. A love theme (she Confederate, he Northern, of course) twines mawkishly through it all, and there is a distraught, watery, hasty quality to the writing.

The distraught
quality was not only in the story. Her schoolteacher brother, Wilson, needing to go to Boston anyway, had agreed to take her with him in early June. Now that the trip was
definite, its terrors and temerities overcame her. In the long ordeal-hours sitting by her father without the stay of her writing, it had come to seem odd and dreamlike that she was an established writer, let alone one thought
fit to be invited into the most select of companies. In her was something of Hugh Wolfe’s outsider feeling of “a mysterious class that shone down with glamour of another order of being.” She who was reticent, who had kept to herself, would be on display, expected to respond. She who was backwoods and self-taught and terribly conscious of the deficiencies of that; she who was lonely, opinionated,
defiantly so if necessary (for that was the other side of her reticence, a tart outspokenness), was going into the Temple of Athens, where perhaps she had no right, was an interloper. Frightening.

It was in this condition that she arrived at the Fieldses’. She had come to the right house. Annie Fields, that great “angel in the house” of literature, was so excited by the prospect of having her
admired Rebecca there that her joy was infectious. “You never knew, did you, Annie,” Rebecca wrote later, “how downrightedly scared and lonesome I felt that night, and how your greeting took it all away.” In the sun of this genuine love and delight in her company, Rebecca bloomed.

All through her Boston visit, she had the exhilarating experience of being her best self, without self-consciousness.
No one seemed put off by directness, or participation, or interest, or seriousness. She was feted, dined, entertained, honored,
appreciated,
by the Brahmins, the
Atlantic
circle, the Areopagites. They found her intellectually impressive, witty, captivating; in one recorded instance, shockingly full blooded and direct, for she observed that women too, not only men, feel physical desire.

Oliver
Wendell Holmes, “the Autocrat [of the Breakfast Table], to whom the whole country was paying homage,” was delighted to discover their mutual love for inscriptions in burying yards (“the strange bits of human history to be found or guessed at in them”) and took a day off to show her his favorite gravestones in Mount Auburn cemetery.
^*

At an evening reception, Rebecca went over to talk with

  
          
. . . a tall, thin young woman standing alone in a corner. She was plainly dressed, and had that watchful, defiant air with which the woman whose youth is slipping away is apt to face the world which has offered no place to her.

She had wanted so much to meet her, she told Rebecca, that she had walked all the way home to Concord for her one decent dress. “ ‘I’m very poor’. . . she had
once taken a place as a ‘second girl’ [maid].” It was Louisa May Alcott.
^*

            
Before I met her I had known many women and girls who were fighting with poverty and loneliness, wondering why God had sent them into a life where apparently there was no place for them . . . soon after [Louisa] wrote her “Hospital Sketches.” Then she found her work and place in the world.

There were rich hours
talking with Annie of books, of others, of themselves. Rebecca discovered that her friend, whose gifted, dedicated expenditure of self had already made the Fieldses’ house a center of inspiration and hospitality for writers, herself hid a painfully shy need to write.
^**

Concord was a different experience. Some profound, unrecorded hurt which she never forgave occurred to Rebecca there. It never
healed, indeed cankered with the years, and had
serious consequences to herself, her attitudes, her writing. The nature of it is implied in the way she writes more than forty years later of Bronson Alcott and of Emerson, in her guarded (and not necessarily reliable) reminiscences,
Bits of Gossip,
published in 1904:

            
. . . the first peculiarity which struck an outsider [was] . . . that
while they thought they were guiding the real world, they stood quite outside of it, and never would see it as it was. . . . Their views gave you the same sense of unreality, of having been taken, as Hawthorne said, at too long a range. . . . Something was lacking, some back-bone of fact. . . . To the eyes of an observer belonging to the commonplace world, they . . . walked and talked . . . always
apart from humanity.

She stayed with the Hawthornes at Wayside, Hawthorne who permitted almost no visitors now. “Here comes the Sage of Concord,” Hawthorne told her at breakfast early her very first morning. “He [Alcott] is anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills in Virginia.”

Emerson came shortly thereafter. Her tongue was “dry with awe” (“I went to Concord, a
young woman from the backwoods, firm in the belief that Emerson was the first of living men”). It loosened, after listening the entire morning, along with Emerson and Hawthorne,
^*
to Alcott’s “orotund” sentences, his “paeans to the war . . . the armed angel which was wakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.”

            
I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual
war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery in Union and Confederate camps; the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women, the chances in it, well improved on both sides, for brutish men to grow more brutish, and for honorable gentlemen to degenerate into
thieves and sots. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has
the personal habits of the slums.

Rebecca found herself tartly, though tremblingly, saying substantially the above.

            
This would-be seer who was talking of it, and the real seer who listened, knew no more of war as it was, than I had done [as a child] in my cherry-tree when I dreamed of bannered legions of crusaders debouching in the misty fields.