The President's Daughter (26 page)

“Let me escort you ladies to your hotel, if no one is meeting you at the docks. My man and carriage are here, and it would be a pleasure and an honor. I can't let you roam the streets of London in all this turmoil.”

We let ourselves be led toward an elegant dark green equipage upon which sat four coachmen in dark green livery. In less than a half hour we had turned under the soaring arch of London Bridge and were heading up Water Street toward the city, which was paralyzed by traffic. Shops were closed and it seemed as if everyone in London was out on the streets. There were hundreds of Napoleonic War veterans amongst the civilians who had swarmed into the city for the funeral. Soldiers in every kind of uniform imaginable occupied every free piece of ground. And around them and the noisy, rowdy population, rose what was surely the greatest city in the world majestically. Paris couldn't be greater, I thought. First of all, it was a stone-and-brick city. Even the poorest of habitations were timber, brick, and stucco. And it was a tall city, many of the buildings being four or five stories high. The mansions of Richmond were laughable, I thought, as we drove at a snail's pace past Carlton House, Burlington, St. Paul's Cathedral, and Westminster. It took us nearly three hours to cross the city.

Our rooms were as comfortable and beautiful as any I had ever seen. The walls were papered in buff-and-gilt fleur-de-lis-patterned wallpaper, and the furniture was an odd but pleasant mixture of French Empire and English. There were bookshelves, a palm tree, and an ottoman. To my delight and surprise, there was an upright piano with faded red silk fluting across the front, and in one corner stood a very fine harp. The carpet was red with a buff pattern over polished wooden floors. The beds in the two small adjoining rooms were four-posters with damask curtains that matched those at the large
sash windows. There was even a water closet and a real bathroom, which did not, however, have any plumbing.

Relieved and happy, we settled in. The next Monday we set out for the opening of the convention in a hired carriage.

When we arrived at the cavernous Oxborn Hall, which was still and somewhat appropriately draped in black, Mrs. Willowpole was told she could not be seated on the floor as a delegate because she was a woman. Women, the convention manager explained, were relegated to the spectators' gallery, in the very rafters of the hall. They had no right to vote, to speak, or to participate in the debates. Copies of the speeches were not distributed to the gallery. There were no ladies' toilets, and women were not allowed to eat at the men's buffet. There were no reserved or numbered seats for ladies, and they were not allowed to use the front door, but rather one side entrance and the fire staircase. If these rules were not complied with, one would be physically ejected from the hall.

For a few moments we stood there, disarmed.

“We have traveled thirty-five hundred miles,” began Mrs. Willowpole. “We have accreditation.”

“I can't help that, madam. In our program you are listed as a man.” He looked up sternly. “Dorcas,” he said, as if he were speaking to a child, “is a man's name. I never heard of any woman named Dorcas. And you didn't put ‘Mrs.' or ‘Miss' in front of it. Dorcas Willowpole is a
man's
name. You used subterfuge to accomplish your accreditation, madam.”

“That's because the organizers of the convention have never read Shakespeare. Dorcas is the name of a
shepherdess
in
The Winter's Tale!
”

“Well, madam, if I had been your father, I would have opposed such a name.”

“I demand to see my compatriots on the floor.”

“You'll have to wait for them to come out of the hall into the street or use the side entrance, the same as for tradesmen. Can't let you in the front door.”

“Now you know,” murmured Dorcas Willowpole, “what if feels like to be a Negro.”

We reached the spectators' gallery disheveled, winded, and apprehensive. Would we be allowed to remain here at least? Despite everything, we found the cream of female British abolitionists in high good humor. There was Hannah More, the poet, and Amelia Opie, wife of the London portrait painter and a writer of romantic novels. She had written a poem I had read called “The Negro Boy's Tale.” Hannah More, a friend of Dr. Wilberforce, moved in the fashionable circles of London, and as she did so, she carried with her
a print of Clarkson's drawing of a slave ship and its instruments of torture. She too had written several poems on the subject, the most famous of which had been published in Philadelphia.

Holding court in the cramped gallery was the formidable Elizabeth Heyrick, who had made the biggest stir of all among antislavery people on both sides of the Atlantic. She was a Quaker lady, residing in Leicester, a friend of all the prominent antislavery Friends: the Gurneys, the Buxtons, the Frys, the Hoares. Her pamphlet, entitled
Immediate, Not Gradual, Abolition,
called for emancipating the slaves at once as the shortest, safest, and most effective method.

“Well, Mrs. Willowpole, welcome to the slave deck.” She rose to shake hands with us like a man, then laughed good-naturedly as she handed each of us a copy of Thomas Clarkson's latest pamphlet,
Thoughts on the Necessity of Improving the Condition of the Slaves in the British Colonies, with a View to Their Ultimate Emancipation,
one of dozens that had been published on the occasion of the convention and the Parliamentary elections. One of her new arguments embraced the utter futility of trying to appeal to, or compromise with, slaveholders. Gradualism was the masterpiece of satanic policy, and did not materialize in anything. The only method was to take the high ground on the basis of justice, then enforce majority opinion against slaveholders.

“Those same men down there,” said Amelia Opie, “are discussing our future as well—whether we shall be allowed to go beyond writing from our homes to public meetings and public speaking. So far we have been allowed to organize ladies' auxiliary societies only; in that, you Americans are ahead of us. I am the president of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Birmingham.”

She smiled and held out her hand. She was young and very beautiful, with clear gray eyes and a wonderful English complexion. She had so many of the attributes of what was considered beautiful in a woman, she seemed almost a cliché. She was blond and small, vivacious, with a radiant smile, perfect teeth, delicate arms, hands, and neck, a generous bosom, and a refined air of distractedness and artlessness that had the same irresistible effect on men, women, and children. If I had not known where I was, I would have imagined I was sitting at a fashionable dressmaker's waiting for a fitting, rather than listening to a denunciation of the most violent brutalities in the world. Moreover, it was Amelia Opie's butler who hauled a picnic lunch up to the gallery for the ladies.

Down on the floor, the convention was being called to order, and the delegates asked to take their seats. I marveled at how easily I fell into thinking about other people's slaves, as if I were not part and parcel of that multitude.
I had suffered less, it was true, but perhaps I had been more wronged.

We were, after all, not talking about the three million American slaves, who were a minority in all the states except South Carolina; we were talking about the eight hundred thousand West Indian slaves who outnumbered the British planters almost ten to one. As Lorenzo had pointed out, it was inevitable that the blacks would sooner or later eradicate the whites in the West Indies. And it was just as mathematically sure that American slaves would never achieve their emancipation through the force of numbers. In America, with the tacit support of the North, the planter class in America was the ruling political class of the whole country. This stranglehold on power would have to be broken before anything else could be accomplished.

The new antislavery zeal in Britain was at its zenith, and Wilberforce was its pope, I was told by Dorcas Willowpole. The impassioned voice of Dr. Wilberforce rose with great power and seemed to sweep away the very walls of the hall, leaving his audience amidst the sheen and motion of the Atlantic Ocean, which rolled in with a mighty whorl of current and movement. And upon it sailed a slave ship of a hundred and twenty tons, fitted with planks for three hundred blacks, with two feet of headroom and a space six feet by two feet for each man chained between decks. There were ships, it seemed, that held as many as six hundred Negroes, a quarter of whom would die or commit suicide before the rest could be loaded. So smaller, faster boats were more economical. The unnamed slaver glided away from shore into the blank universe evoked by Dr. Wilberforce's hypnotic voice, headed for Africa, its hull filled with Liverpoolian trinkets and iron fetters for two hundred and fifty. It was a voyage for which I had no preparation. It was as if the small, frail man below were pulling me headlong into my own biography. This was no individual slave narrative, set in the familiar confines of a southern plantation. This was the mythic, cosmic legend of the Middle Passage, the triangular crisscrossing of the Atlantic between England, Africa, and America. This was the beginning of the indomitable, overwhelming voyage that had wrenched my great-grandmother from the place where she was born and inflicted on her unimaginable suffering. My throat tightened as the story's slaver dropped anchor at the mouth of the Gambia, ready to pick and choose and load the cargo for which it had made its hazardous journey; an ordinary slaver, on an ordinary errand, navigated by ordinary men.

I sensed a prayer forming within me:
Please don't let me hear this.
My lips pleaded with Dr. Wilberforce's voice. This was no slave tale of old; this was the Book, the Bible, the Passage. But there I sat, under the burning tropical sun, listening to the thunder of the sea, waiting for our cargo from the interior. Suddenly the column burst onto the beach, a long, undulating line
of fettered, bleeding, stunned, and stuttering humans, all naked, all wild-eyed with the hardship of the march. First there were ten, their heads forced upright by means of a common yoke; then there were fifty, bowed low, as still as stone, kneeling on the deck of the ship, being examined by the ship's doctor, jumping and dancing in a strange ritual visited upon them by the captain. Then came the bartering: brass kettles, cowrie shells, looking glasses, steel knives, cases of rum and brandy, bolts of vivid cloth, and penny necklaces of colored beads in exchange for men and women.

Dr. Wilberforce's incantation rose with the stench he described of burning flesh, “red-hot branding irons coming down on the shoulders, buttocks, backs of women, children, and warriors alike, writhing in pain, being held down by the sailors, the brazier glowing like the eye of God.” His voice had metamorphosed into the single cry of agony that issued from the living men on deck, exploding onto the sea's undulating surface into which I and the hall and London itself had disappeared, leaving only the heads and shoulders of the audience below, as if they bobbed in the surf, their sighs of protest quieting into a pious and awed silence. But Dr. Wilberforce would not be silenced. He continued on, describing the instruments of the trade: the funnels and pliers to wrench open the mouths of those who refused to eat; the shackles and yokes of all kinds for wrists, ankles, necks; instruments to pull teeth, pluck out eyes; alligator-hide whips that tore the skin off in little coils; branding irons; plugs for dysentery that sometimes caused slaves to vomit their own feces; and instruments of pure torture — clamps, thumbscrews, garrotes, spiked collars. These were the methods that served the logic of pure brutality: the rape of women, the forced feedings, the suicides, the revolts, and the jettisoning of living cargo overboard in the wake of pursuit by British slave patrols.

Wild, demented cries rose in a maelstrom around the voice and form of the diminutive Dr. Wilberforce. The slaves, stacked two feet apart, rolled helplessly on the unplaned planks, taking the skin off their backs and sides in the suffocating darkness. The floor of the hull became slippery with blood and mucus, and men went insane and tried to bite off their shackles and irons. Like a sleepwalker I moved through this infernal slaughterhouse, chest-high among the rough planks, my skirts trailing in indescribable muck, through the putrid slave hold where a candle would not burn. Dr. Wilberforce's saintly, intoxicating voice wound through the epidemics of smallpox and malaria and the bloody flux, outbreaks of insanity, and slave revolts. In panic, I glanced at Mrs. Willowpole, my mouth open, gasping for breath, fighting a rising nausea. There were tears standing in her eyes. She reached over and grasped my hand.

“Courage, my dear. I have heard Dr. Wilberforce's litany many times, but no matter how many times, one is always annihilated by the horrors of his narrative,” Mrs. Willowpole whispered next to me. I took a deep breath. I was trembling uncontrollably now, in the grip of shock over this inventory of absolute evil. The tiny man below still turned and spun like a weathercock in the turbulence of his own speech.

The ship had reached Cuba now, with one-third of its cargo still alive. I had heard of the Cuban slave markets, the scramble sales, the barter for sugar and rum, and the transfer of illegal slaves with false papers to the New England schooners, which in turn transported them to the Carolinas and Louisiana. This was how my great-grandfather had transported my great-grandmother. In this evil nightmare, my grandmother had been conceived. This was who I was—
what
I was. This Passage was my fingerprints.

I continued to stare into the swirling, impenetrable void surrounding the doctor's voice, from which issued the cries and screams of children being sold away from their mothers, men being manhandled in the scramble sale, women being raped on barn floors until the cries subsided into the faint, distant washing of waves on a beach, which I realized was applause from the spellbound audience. It was over.

I shifted away from the women seated in the gallery, repulsed and strangely remote from them, as if I had descended from another galaxy. The crash of the sea was still in my ears, and I felt intensely aware of my physical being, my lungs still breathing in the insupportable stench of the ships, my hands, my eyes, my shackled ankles. I drew myself back into consciousness from the depthless ocean, from the vast horror upon which I had been blown and tossed.