The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (4 page)

Sorting through published sources, archived letters, records, etc., led us to question many published claims, including some of our own. The wrong birth year of 1845, traceable to the
American Cyclopedia
(1883), can be corrected. Inferences drawn from Canadian records pointed to a colored grandfather named Lewis living with the Mississauga Chippewa in Ontario, Canada.
[22]
A later comparison with the 1851 Canadian census dispatched that notion as baseless.

More interestingly, we came to believe her brother hid his Haitian birth all his life as he did his teen years with the Indians.
[23]
Their father was too young to have experienced the bloody war – but not too young to have absorbed its militant message of
equality without exception,
passed it to his son, and cautioned him appropriately.

As an adult, Edmonia had her own secrets. One was her brother’s name. Her interviews and letters by her friends refer to him only as her “brother” or as “Sunrise” (his “Indian name”). Aside from his obituary, discovered in 1990 and quoted here, we found no descriptions or photos of him and no witness accounts of his visits with her in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. He lived as a frontier businessman and died an esteemed citizen of Bozeman, Montana. After his death, the mayor eulogized him as “very much of a white man … white in his entire make up – physically, socially, intellectually, morally.” Edmonia denied having white blood, but the mayor’s remarks suggest a “white lie” in her attempts to impress her blood-obsessed fans – or the mayor’s use of the word “white” as a metaphor of praise.

A secret of her young adulthood was her Roman Catholic childhood religion. Earnest Protestants, who controlled the communities where she lived from 1856 to 1865, rejected the Catholic Church. She claimed her mother was Chippewa, but the nearest Chippewa, who lived in Canada near Niagara Falls, were avid Wesleyan Methodists. Only long after she fully settled in Rome did she make clear she was not raised as a Protestant. In 1879, the
New York Times
reported, “her creed and blood did not harmonize with the precision and method of Oberlin.” The “black robes” from whom she had learned prayers with the tribe in Canada, used the Indian term popularized by Longfellow for French Jesuit missionaries.
[24]
As an adult in Italy, she took the baptismal name Maria Ignatia
[25]
– another Jesuit connection. St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. That she did not receive the sacrament as a child tells us her parents were not practicing Catholics.

The repeated Jesuit references point to the Mohawks living 250 miles north of Albany, on the Québec frontier with New York State. In the 1800s, they were the only Catholic tribe in the region still served by Jesuits.
[26]
They also had a remarkable tradition of adopting outsiders to fill their ranks – some captured, some refugees or wanderers – allowing for a displaced Chippewa woman and her family to settle in their midst and join local trade and customs. Notably, around 1864,
Edmonia said her Indian name was
Suhkuhegarequa,
[27]
a Chippewa word that literally means “fire-making-woman.” We take this as a poetic bow to her fitting in with local ways in her pre-teen years. The Mohawks still call themselves “People of the Flint,” flint symbolizing the key to making fire. Other tribes speaking Algonquin languages (which include Chippewa) called Mohawks the “fire-making” people.

French Jesuits set up many North American missions in the seventeenth century. Recalled and replaced as the French withdrew from Canada after 1763, a few remained to serve Mohawk fur traders in the St. Lawrence Valley. By the time of Edmonia’s childhood, they had well-established mission churches for the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, including Kahnawake (Caughnawaga), Québec, about 60 miles south of Montréal. After the War of Independence, the U. S. / Canadian frontier bisected the tribal area, giving the Mohawks free passage but creating a fertile field for administrative conflicts. In Canada, tension between the official Church of England and the Roman Catholic Jesuits afflicted the quality of education. South of the frontier, New York State built and furnished a secular school in 1847.
[28]
Possibly her brother took lessons there. He chose an Albany education for his young sister.

To earn a living, the tribe depended on tourists who bought crafts and river tours. In the summer, some members of the tribe traveled through the Mohawk Valley and Finger Lakes selling herbal remedies door-to-door and entertaining at county fairs.
[29]
Edmonia described similar activities of her mother and their people, peddling beaded moccasins, baskets, pincushions, etc. – naming Genesee Falls, Watkins’s Glen and Niagara Falls – then going to New York City to replenish supplies. The period of her parents’ deaths also approximates scourges of cholera, small pox, and typhus that decimated the St. Regis Mohawks.
[30]

That both Edmonia and her mother were born and lived in the Albany area also weighs against the idea she lived with the Chippewa tribe. The nearest Chippewa lived 300 miles to the west, near Niagara Falls in Canada – never around Albany. (Catholic Chippewa lived eight hundred miles from Albany NY in upper Michigan and Wisconsin where Longfellow set
The Song of Hiawatha.
) In 1869, Edmonia recounted a visit to her mother’s kin at Niagara Falls.
[31]

Niagara Falls is near Mississauga Chippewa settlements, but the reference proves nothing. It was the number one attraction for anyone on America’s grand tour, boasting forty thousand visitors a year by the late 1840s. In August 1869, St. Regis Mohawks were probably there selling souvenirs to tourists, side by side with local Tuscarora, Chippewa, and other Indians. Moreover, the Niagara peninsula also served as home to the Grand River First Nations, including Mohawks who came from Albany in 1784.

At the time, the Mohawk label could be almost as scary to some New Yorkers as Haiti was to slaveholders. Long before the American Revolution, the Mohawks prevailed around Albany. Their rivals called them man-eating cannibals. The Mohawks scared their neighbors with Dutch guns and impressed their allies with proverbs like: We are all of the race of the bear, and a bear never yields while one drop of blood is left. Stories circulated about their uncanny ability to withstand the most horrific tortures.

In colonial times, the Albany Mohawks had joined the Church of England and followed King George III during the Revolution. They took colonial scalps on his behalf. After losing, they fled to Ontario, Canada, where the King provided compensation. In the 1850s, the Mohawks retained infamy as the most bloodthirsty warriors in the world.
[32]
That the other Mohawks in upstate New York and Québec had not joined the English made little difference to colonial families harboring bitter grievances directed at one tribe or another. They had terrorized American soldiers in the War of 1812, a history that pleases them to this day.

Our narrative, below, shows how Edmonia repeatedly adjusted her story and her course, choosing her battles and avoiding the unwinnable. It would take only one or two unhappy incidents to convince her that the Mohawk brand was a liability.

At Oberlin, Edmonia was unlike most colored folk. She lacked full membership in any race, religion, class, or special society. The College eagerly embraced her, boarding her on the north side of town with one of its most respected families. The choice meant more as a model of its credo than any intent to make her a friend, companion, or bride. No Catholic service was available, and she quietly melted into the austerity of the College’s Calvinist rigor. As a student, she was ignored by the 1860 census. As an orphan, she lacked any other home. When most students retreated over winter recess, she stayed and studied extra courses in algebra, botany, composition, or rhetoric. To the world and in the looking glass, she bore the brand of Africa. That she showed no hint of colored ways and lived with whites (rather than with a colored family on the south side of town) put off Oberlin’s colored community.

She always spoke of her life with wild Indians living in the forest. To those who suspect this was a pose to separate her from southern field hands, we say she had no other past. For years, she would give observers impressions that she spoke and thought more like Chippewa than like colored Americans. Their comments (all post-Oberlin) tell us more about them than about her. An 1867 article called her “the youthful Indian girl.”
[33]
In 1871, Laura Curtis Bullard, noted, “if she has more of the African in her personal appearance, she has more of the Indian in her character.” The next year, a collector described her as “a Chippeway Indian sculptor” and noted her colorful gratitude, “the Good Spirit always sends me friends.” She cited the “Great Spirit” in an 1876 interview. A Bostonian in 1883, asked, “Why not [call her] the Indian sculptress?”

The Indian sculptress would earn no public honors among the Indians. The press rarely failed to trumpet her Chippewa past. Yet, we found no sign that any Indian ever returned her tribute. Her father was not a member of the tribe, thus she had no totem. Unlike Mohawks, Chippewa recognize no legacy through a mother.
[34]
By the same token, no Mohawk would notice a colored person calling herself Chippewa. Despite critics’ praise of her Hiawatha subjects as “authentic,” they were still fictional characters from the pen of a white poet. Aside from speaking of her “burden of two despised races,”
[35]
the record seems to say she took no occasion to remind anyone of important issues: broken treaties, the oppression of spreading European settlement, and the distress of Native sovereignties.

She would never revise her claim to the Chippewa brand. It was a key to her success. Notably, her muse, Longfellow, had applied the name of a Mohawk chief, Hiawatha, to the Chippewa myths he had adapted for his American epic.
[36]
No consumer or critic seemed to care.

Forced to be on her own at an early age, she could have shown a cynical desperation. Instead, she swallowed the angst that comes from life’s unfairness and did her best to adapt. Like Pip in Dickens’s
Great Expectations
(1861), she went all out to reach beyond her beginnings. She fit in gracefully, passing in a cocoon of Protestant, biracial, and Chippewa camouflage. Such secrets must have reined her in tighter than a whalebone corset. Combined with Oberlin’s puritanical dread of premarital sex, they gave her no chance of real closeness to anyone.

She sought instead to rouse respect from a distance by choosing an unexpected path. For Oberlin, art was a mere pastime and not held in high regard. Fostering purity through self-denial, its leaders rejected fashion and ornaments in favor of prayer and hard work. Beyond its “ladies” drawing class, Oberlin had little decoration, no sculpture, and a lack of interest in a career in the visual arts.

By 1862, the Civil War had become a death machine. Grief ground away at families torn by bloody battle and awful disease. Old rules lost their energy to chaos and uncertainty. The College bestowed degrees
in absentia
to students who had joined Company C of the Ohio Seventh Regiment Volunteer Infantry.
[37]
Many had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.

A local colored girl, Mary Jane Patterson, would soon earn Oberlin’s AB degree – an honor once reserved for men. She presented a serious challenge to doctrines of race. White women had ruptured the gender barrier twenty years before. The most progressive Oberlinites marveled at Mary Jane’s intelligence, courage, excellence, and self-esteem. To others, she was surely a source of anxiety, even embarrassment. Some warned an educated colored girl could not find a husband. Some thought colored people should just leave the country.

The Spirit of Change, the tacit release of apocalyptic times, was ripe. It drifted through student rooms beset by stress and worry. Edmonia surely prayed for a sign, a promise for the future. Fasting to focus the senses and incite a dream was a custom of her mother’s people, a duty for a young man, a choice for a woman. Dreaming could help, even sanction her coming of age. Absorbing the Spirit, she emerged as a complex adult seeking distinction as an artist – a novel bent she credited to memories of her mother.
[38]

She also consulted with her brother by mail. He again agreed to support her, thus fueling her odyssey across social and national frontiers. Turning seventeen in 1861, she signaled her adulthood by asking everyone to call her “Edmonia” instead of “Mary.”

As if stirred by the new name, the one-eyed monster of bigotry rose up eager to feed on her simple trust. A gothic nightmare followed, splitting the town in unmatched storms of treachery, gossip, and physical assault. Following is our theory of the crime.

In the wake of Oberlin’s religious settlers, others came seeking a simple education, opportunity, or kinship. By their variety, they sullied the tidy vision of the founders. A few felt the beacon of equality burned too brightly. Those who helped capture and return runaway slaves found themselves run out of town. Some rebelled against other elements of the founders’ Puritan-like preferences. In the 1850s, Episcopalians organized and opposed the “Oberlinism” of the first generation. Other groups introduced more exceptions to strict observance. The town outlawed the sale of alcohol in 1856, but a saloon and two drug stores would not abandon their most loyal trade. Students brought their biases with them as they sought a liberal education from abolitionists. Some said they would tolerate colored students but only if they did not have to kiss them or speak to them.

In the midst of harsh uncertainties, two mean Ohio girls, freshmen on holiday, accused Edmonia of overdosing them with the fabled sexual stimulant, Spanish fly.
[39]
She had served them mulled wine as they embarked on a sleigh-ride tryst on fresh snow with two sailors. As they reportedly teetered near death for a week or more, news of the vigil reached as far as Cleveland, thirty-five miles northeast. The father of one of the sailors, despite his lack of legal standing, bullied the justice system into action.