The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (3 page)

The struggle meant more to Edmonia than religious ideals and moral nobility. For a colored woman, the culture of bigotry threatened frightening, personal consequences. It underpinned massive denials of opportunity and civil rights as well as segregation, theft, mayhem, and shameless acts of public dishonor, rape, torture, and murder.

She was a stalwart with her own unique front of attack. Aided by pioneers and friends of the movement, she changed the world by carving statues in Rome and standing beside them in major American cities – race and gender for all to see. She iconized her heroes and idealized her heritage in expensive white stone and affordable plaster.

Her art was unusual and her strategy oblique. Placing herself in the path of crowds and critics, she let her work speak for the natural gifts of colored people. All she needed to do was show up with one or more of her statues. She shamed crude injustices with a quiet, gracious dignity while her legendary figures looked on. Then she did more with polite interviews, publicity, and charity.

As she boarded a steamship ten years after first sailing for Europe, the upcoming United States Centennial Exposition was in her sights. Large crowds, critics, and journalists from everywhere promised maximum exposure. Scheduled for the following year, it was her ultimate target – if she could just get there. She would have no second chance.

The Centennial banned colored people, even from its construction. Amazingly, she had obtained an invitation to exhibit, but she faced a desperately crushing debt. She needed no less than a miracle. Her political opportunity had nearly run out. As one admirer of hers put it:

The Sun of Emancipation which had risen in 1863, had seemingly reached its zenith in 1865 with the passage of the 13th amendment prohibiting slavery. But already it was being obscured by clouds. Already the sheriff’s hand-cuffs were taking the place of the former master’s chains; already the chain-gang stockade was supplanting the old slave pen. … The freedwoman was being told that it would be better for her children, even in the North, to go to “separate” schools; and that it would be better, “for a while, anyway,” for her people not to “thrust” themselves forward too much but to accept “separation” on pubic conveyances and in public places. She was being gravely assured that there was neither degradation nor detriment in all of this. “Of course,” she was being told with a cajoling smile, “your people will be more ‘comfortable’ to have churches and a social circle all your own: public sentiment, you see, is not yet ripe enough – you know you’ve got to begin at the bottom”: etc., etc.
[10]

This trip was her last hope. The elections of 1874 had dealt a mortal blow to Reconstruction. Provoked by a year-long economic slump, northerners had rejected President Grant and his program. In the Deep South, brutal acts of terror erupted to keep former slaves down.

English ship masters did not recognize her profession. When she first returned to America in 1869, a Cunard official insisted on writing “spinster” by her name on the passenger list. A spinster was originally a working woman who ran a spinning wheel. The term soon generalized to mean a woman who worked to live, an “old maid” who lacked a good man. Once, she let such snubs pass. Now she sailed with the French. One day she would not care. In 1875, she was a celebrity and the employer of twenty men. She was tiny, only four feet tall according to her passport application (Figure 8).

Speaking slowly, she engaged the agent of the
SS Ville de Paris.
He probably sat at a small table, making him eye to eye with her. Her small size belied a powerful determination and the wisdom to choose her battles well. She stated her particulars: Miss Edmonia Lewis, 31,
sculptor!
Capable of standing her ground against burly teamsters, she could cite her commercial cargo, her news clips, and her gold medal – if need be. She watched him unblinkingly as he took her measure.

The Frenchman must have noticed her chic garb and steady gaze. Of sixty-three passengers, she was one of twenty traveling second cabin and not the only artist aboard. The liner was elite in that it offered no steerage, the low-price fare favored by poor emigrants. He easily complied. His cursive “Sculptor” appears by her name.
[11]
Unlike clerks of many English ships, he rarely wrote “spinster,” preferring “none” or a blank if a passenger declared no occupation.

She must have relished her small victory as she prepared to disembark. Sweet to the spirit, savory to the soul, each taste of equality could soothe a gnawing hunger. Maybe the New York press would notice her return to America and print her name again.

Edmonia buried her troubles the way other women banish ex-lovers, never to speak of them again. Nor did she let any twinge of scandals at Oberlin or Boston give her pause as she sailed back to America. An innocent misstep in Boston had left her unable to boast about her first Emancipation works. Oberlin, Ohio, was far worse. It had become the gates of hell for her, an elaborate portal erected by idealists hooked on getting their own cheerless souls into heaven.

The only degree-granting institution to offer female and colored adults coeducation with white men was Oberlin College. Its founders conceived the College in the 1830s as part of a pure if not quite Puritan society. They promised a radical harbor of (nearly) equal education for women. Adding colored people to their formula was an unpopular but needed amendment. It served noble goals even as it drew enough new students to achieve financial security.

The town became a busy stop on the Underground Railroad and a magnet for free colored people who settled near the tracks on the south side of town.
[12]
Not content with its “hazardous experiment” in the social order, Oberlin called its school “God’s college.” It was led by the famous anti-slavery revivalist, Charles Grandison
Finney,
whose missionaries blazed with fiery protests aimed at ending slavery everywhere. Because other colleges shut out such radical doings, every avid anti-slavery student went to Oberlin. The year Edmonia arrived, its vigilantes tangled with fugitive slave hunters in what became famous as the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Oberlin still brags it was the town that started the Civil War.

To some Ohio neighbors, Oberlin’s radical tilt was unwelcome. They sent their young men and women to the College for the sake of ease and economy. Yet, they squirmed at the nearness of many colored freemen, radical politics, and a militant theology. Their clerics cried “heresy” from their pulpits. Ohio’s founders (it joined the Union in 1803) had prized Caucasian purity as if skin color assured harmony. Some of their first laws set out to deter free coloreds from settling. They banned slavery (which was allowed in neighboring Virginia and Kentucky), in effect forbidding a population of colored slaves. Years before, Federal troops led by “mad” Anthony Wayne had pushed out the Indians.

Edmonia attended the College from 1859 to early 1863.
[13]
Here, she found her talent as an artist. Here, she became an adult. And here, as a biracial child raised by American Indians, she bonded with her African ancestors and their people in America. Here the story of her indomitable spirit emerged with some clarity.

Accounts of Edmonia’s earlier years swirl in a muddle of contradictions. She lived at a time when official records and editorial fact checking were rare. Her interviewers often misspelled names of people and places. She also could be wily and devious, as fellow sculptor Anne Whitney, who liked her and helped her around 1864, confided to her best friend.
[14]
Her record is muddied by her interviewers, the vagueness of childhood memory, and her own white lies. It leaves conflicting tales of when her mother died (when she was three or nine or twelve?), her education (sometimes attending one or more schools before Oberlin College), her birth (anywhere from 1840 to 1865), and so on. Notably, ships’ passenger lists demonstrate a fashion of age-fluidity shared by her lady friends.

Most of her family tree remains a mystery. It is clear from her brother’s accounts that he and his family once lived in Newark, NJ.
[15]
The 1840 census offers but one colored family named Lewis with both parents and young children. The head of the household, Samuel Lewis, was born between 1804 and 1816. He worked in agriculture, and lived with a wife and three children under the age of 10: two boys and a girl. The city directory called him a “laborer” and put him at 43 Bridge St., hard by the Passaic River. Neighborhoods tended to cluster, Germans with Germans, Irish with Irish, and so on. Our sources suggest that the Lewis family lived apart from other colored people.

A
city directory reference to the widow Hannah Lewis, living at the same address as Samuel Lewis in 1835, stimulated more research, unfortunately, so far, only suggestive. According to the census, she claimed New Jersey birth between 1775 and 1783, making her at least a generation older than Samuel. Remarkably, she was illiterate but owned real estate. New Jersey was the last northern state to end slavery, passing a law in 1804 that aimed for a gradual riddance. Born decades before the law, she may have emerged from bondage with the unusual gratitude of a kind or blood-related master – or gained the property through hard work and good judgment. Hannah reappears in the 1861 city directory, but not thereafter, not even on any NJ death certificate. Edmonia and her Haitian-born brother left us no reference to Hannah or other relatives in Newark.
[16]

The appearance of Hannah Lewis together with English names, Mary Edmonia and Samuel Lewis, suggests Samuel was not a Haitian native but a young adventurer – inspired by word of the slave revolution and conditions more hospitable to his race – who stole off to the forbidden black republic
[17]
and smuggled himself back to Newark when he had a family. Before the Civil War, a careless reference to the activist state, which had promoted revolts against slavery elsewhere, could have been fatal. Many Americans dreaded and reviled it because of hellish stories and fears of new rebellions. They feared any black man who spoke of Haiti.

After 1840, Samuel Lewis lost his wife and children, all but a son born in 1832, and met Edmonia’s mother. Edmonia’s 1865 passport application, our sole sworn reference to her birth date, laid claim to “on or about” July 4, 1844 (Figure 8). The Massachusetts census taken May 1, 1865, which gives her age as 20, agrees. Her (half-)brother put the death of
his
mother the same year.

Never mentioning Haiti or Newark, Edmonia described her father as “a gentleman’s servant” and “a full blooded negro.”
[18]
She called her mother “a full blooded Chippewa,” and “a wild Indian, … born in Albany, of copper colour, and with straight, black hair.” Straight black hair and artistic talent were features she shared with her mother, a woman who crafted beaded souvenirs and sold them to tourists. Asked (at a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation) from which parent she inherited most, she coyly replied, “I don’t know. My mother used to say to my father, ‘your people have submitted to be slaves; mine never did.’ I like my mother’s people for that.”

She had little experience with her father or his people as a child. She had probably heard such comparisons time and again. Having died around 1847, according to her brother, their father lies in an undiscovered grave. So does her mother, who we estimate died two years later.

Edmonia honored her mother’s deathbed appeal to stay with the tribe three more years. In making the request, her mother followed a local custom. Unlike Europeans, this tribe honored women as its progenitors – matriarchs with the powers of property, legacy, and descent. Mothers lived with daughters, granddaughters and great-granddaughters. Women always married outside their clan and usually brought their mates back to the family fire. Exotic examples of women’s suffrage to Europeans, clan mothers had a vital place in tribal decisions. The local culture also prized steely integrity and curbs on emotional expression.

Staying with this tribe until the age of eight must have left lasting impressions. The Jesuit maxim seems appropriate here: Give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man (or, in this case, the woman).

In 1852, her twenty-year-old brother prepared to go west to seek his fortune. He boarded his eight-year-old sister with Captain S. R. Mills, and he paid her tuition at a day school (or dame school, where children were tutored in a private home) for four years. She described her first encounter with school as taking place in Albany after learning prayers from “black-robes” among the Indians. From 1856 to 1858, she went to New York Central College, a near-bankrupt Baptist prep school at McGraw, New York,
[19]
and then to Oberlin College.
School records confirm Mary E. Lewis at both. Both were supported by a common network of donors. Both were staunchly egalitarian and ardent members of the anti-slavery movement.

Many details of the accounts given by Edmonia and her brother evade confirmation. We could not find her, her brother, their parents, or Capt. S. R. Mills in the 1850, 1851, or 1855 censuses, or in any likely city directory or Catholic parish record. She said she lived and roamed with the tribe as they sold souvenirs, mentioning Canada and a variety of cities in upstate New York with repeated references to Albany. She said her brother was at “a school for Indian boys at the time of his mother’s death,” before he went to California.
[20]
(She was unaware or hid that they did not share a mother.) As she found fame, she preferred to claim herself as “wild” rather than as an exemplar of good conduct and proficient in arithmetic, Latin, French, grammar, and composition. Notably, she downplayed her high grades at McGraw, saying, “They could do nothing with me.”
[
21
]

Her brother gave details that serve to fill out her tales, but he omitted many references that would match hers: Albany, Greenbush, Canada, Indians, etc. It is likely he found the association with Indians – which drove her career – would not be helpful to his. He wrote only that he traveled from 1847 to the spring of 1852, working as a barber. Perhaps he roamed with the tribe, entertaining, shaving, and cutting hair as they peddled their crafts at local fairs. In his later years, he entertained at public events, singing and playing a banjo, harp, or guitar. Their tales begin to mesh only after 1852.