TransAtlantic (7 page)

He hoped his manner of holding the teacup did not appear crude. He shifted slightly in his seat. He could feel his hands grow clammy again.

Webb introduced him. Even in America, Douglass had seldom listened to the introductions that others made. They embarrassed him. Sometimes they made of him a caricature: the colored conquistador, the gentleman slave, the American Orpheus. In the course of the introductions they would remark, invariably, that his father was a white man. As if it could not be otherwise. How he was taken from his mother, his siblings, whisked away, brought for a spell under the guidance of white benevolence. Douglass found the descriptions monotonous. The words dissolved in his head. He did not listen. He scanned the faces of the men. He could sense their uncertainty, a little hint of confusion around their eyes as he watched them, watching him. A slave. In a Dublin drawing room. So remarkably well-kept.

He looked up to see that Webb had finished. A silence. The teacup shook in his hands. He allowed the quiet to edge up against the uncomfortable. He had found that being nervous made him tighter with his words, stronger, more careful.

Douglass brought the saucer up to the bottom of the cup.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery
would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace. Now, in the long curve of this journey, I find myself spinning a new strand and I appeal to you, gentlemen, to strive against the despotism, bigotry and tyranny of those who might refuse me entry to this very room
.

AT THE END
of his second week he wrote to Anna that he hadn’t been called a
nigger
on Irish soil, not once, not yet anyway. He was hailed most everywhere he went. He wasn’t yet sure what to make of it, it baffled him. There was something crystallizing inside him. He felt, for the first time ever maybe, that he could properly inhabit his skin. There was a chance that he was just a curio to them, but something in him felt aligned to those he met, and in all his twenty-seven years he hadn’t seen anything like it. He wished she could be there to witness it.

It was a cold gray country under a hat of rain, but he could take the middle of the footpath, or board a stagecoach, or hail a hansom without apology. There was poverty everywhere, yes, but still he would take the poverty of a free man. No whips. No chains. No branding marks.

He was of course traveling in high company, but even on the roughest streets he had not heard any vitriol. He attracted a ferocious stare or two, but perhaps it was also because of the rather high cut at the back of his coat: Webb had already told him that he could perhaps afford a tad more modesty.

THE BELL ON
the door sounded out long and lazy. The tailor looked up but the shop continued its business. That’s what surprised Douglass the most: the absence of alarm. No shock. No scurry. He walked
along the rack of coats. The tailor finally came from behind the counter and shook his hand: You’re welcome to my establishment, sir.

—Thank you.

—You’re the talk of the town, sir.

—I’m interested in a new jacket.

—Certainly.

—And a longer cut of coat, said Webb.

—I’m quite capable of dressing myself, said Douglass.

They glared at each other across the gulf of the room.

—Gentlemen, said the tailor. Come this way.

Webb stepped across but Douglass put his hand on his chest. The air froze. Webb lowered his eyes and gave the faint hint of a smile. He took out a wallet of morocco leather and rubbed the length of it, inserted it back in his jacket pocket.

—As you wish.

Douglass stepped, large and loud-footed, with the tailor towards a rear room. Scissors, needles, cutouts. Dusty ells and bolts of cloth spooled out across the tables. What fields did the cloth come from? What fingers had spun it out?

The tailor whisked a looking glass across the room. The mirror was on a stand, mounted with wheels.

He had never been measured by a white man before. The tailor stood behind him. Douglass flinched a moment when the tape was put around his neck.

—Sorry, sir, is the tape cold?

He closed his eyes. Allowed the measurements. His rib cage, his chest, his waist. Raised his arms in the air to see how deep the armpit of the waistcoat could go. Breathed in, breathed out. Allowed the tattered yellow tape along his inseam. The tailor scribbled the measurements down. His handwriting was fine and exact.

When he was finished, the tailor wrapped his fingers around Douglass’s shoulders, gripped him hard.

—You’re a fine broad man, sir, I’ll venture that.

—To tell the truth …

He glanced at Webb in the front of the shop. The Quaker was standing at the window, looking out, an overseer. The Liffey seemed to want to carry him away on its continuous sleeve of gray.

—I’d be rather grateful, said Douglass.

—Yes, sir?

He looked out at Webb again.

—If you’d also fit me for a camel’s-hair vest.

—A vest, sir?

—Yes, a waistcoat I believe you call it.

—Indeed, sir.

The tailor turned him around once more, busied himself with a measurement of Douglass’s rib cage, brought the ends of the tape together at his navel.

—You can put it on Mr. Webb’s bill.

—Yes, sir.

—He’s always been fond of a surprise.

THE CROWDS CAME
, eager, hatted, earnest. A balloon of perfume about them. They lined the front of the Methodist churches, the Quaker meeting halls, the front drawing rooms of mansions. He stretched up on his toes, put his thumbs in the pockets of his new waistcoat.

In the afternoons he took tea with the Dublin Anti-Slavery Society, the Hibernian Association, the Whigs, the Friends of Abolition. They were well-informed, clever, audacious in speech, generous with
their donations. They thought him so very young, handsome, debonair. He could hear the ruffle of dresses in the queue waiting to meet him. Webb said that he had never seen so many young ladies attend the events. Even one or two Catholics from good families. In the gardens of well-appointed houses the women spread their dresses on wooden benches and posed for portraits with him.

Douglass was careful to make sure that he mentioned his wife, his children at home in Lynn. It was odd, but at times the talk of Anna drew the women closer. They hovered. There were giggles and parasols and handkerchiefs. They wanted to know what fashions the free Negro women in America wore. He said that he had no clue, that one dress looked much like the other to him. They clapped their hands together in a delight he could not understand.

He was invited to dinner with the Lord Mayor. The chandeliers in the Mansion House sparkled. The ceilings were tall. The paintings majestic. The rooms led into one another like fabulous sentences.

He met with Father Mathew, joined forces with the temperance movement. The streets of Dublin were full of the demons of alcohol. He took the Pledge. It might, he thought, enamor him of a whole new audience. Besides, he never drank. He did not want to lose control. Too much of the master in it: its desire to sedate. He walked with the Pledge badge worn prominently on the lapel of his new coat. He felt himself to be taller somehow. He drew the gray Dublin air into his lungs. He was seldom left alone. There were always one or two who volunteered to accompany him. He found rhythm in the dips and swerves and repetitions of the Irish accent. He had a penchant for mimicry.
Grand day, y’r honor. For the love of God, wouldya ever gi’us sixpence, sir?
It delighted his hosts to hear his impersonations. There was a deeper intent there, too: he knew that something so simple could hook a crowd.
I am pleased to be in aul’ Ireland
.

He was five weeks in Dublin. His face appeared on printed bills
around the city. Newspaper reporters met him for high tea in the Gresham Hotel. He was
leonine
, they wrote,
feral, an elegant panther
. One paper dubbed him
the Dark Dandy
. He laughed and tore the paper up—did they expect him to dress in rags of American cotton? He was taken to the Four Courts, brought to the finest dining rooms, asked to sit under chandeliers where he could be properly seen. When he was guided into a room to speak, the applause often extended a full minute. He removed his hat and bowed.

Afterwards they lined up to buy his book. It amazed him to raise his gaze from his fountain pen and see the row of dresses awaiting him.

On certain days he grew tired, thought of himself as an elaborate poodle on a leash. He removed himself to his room, took out the barbells, worked himself into a frenzy.

One evening he found the bill for the waistcoat neatly folded on his bedside table. He had to laugh. They would eventually bill him for every thought he ever had. He wore the camel’s-hair to dinner that evening, casually slipping his thumbs into the pockets as he waited for dessert.

EVERY DAY HE
found another word: he wrote them in a small notebook he carried in his inside pocket.
Rapacity. Enmity. Phoenician
. Words he recognized from The Columbian Orator.
Assiduous. Declarative. Tendentious
.

When he had first found language, in his boyhood days, it had felt to him like carving open a tree. Now he had to be more careful. He did not want to slip up. He was, after all, being watched by Webb and the others: root, blossom, stem. It was essential to hold his nerve. To summon things into being by the mysterious alchemy of language. Atlantic. Atlas. Aloft. He was holding the image of his own people up: sometimes it was weight enough to stagger under.

IN RATHFARNHAM HE
thundered forth. He talked of woman-whippers, man-stealers, cradle-plunderers. Of fleshmongers and swine-drovers. Of sober drunkards, thievers of men. Of limitless indifference, fanatic hatred, thirsty evil. He was in Ireland, he said, to advance universal emancipation, to exact the standard of public morality, to hasten the day of freedom for his three million enslaved brethren. Three million, he said. He held his hands up, as if he cupped every single one of them there, in his palms. We have been despised and maligned long enough. Treated worse than the lowest of low animals. Shackled, burned, branded. Enough of this murderous traffic in blood and bone. Hear the doleful wail of the slave markets. Listen to the clanking chains. Hear them, he said. Come close. Listen. Three million voices!

After his speech, the Gentleman Usher from Dublin Castle took a hold of his arm and breathed whiskey and amazement into his ear. He had never heard such a speech, such fine words put together. For any man to speak in such a way! It was profound, he said, insightful, weighty beyond anything he had experienced before.

—You’re a credit to your race, sir. An absolute credit.

—Is that so?

—And you did not go to school, sir?

—No. I did not.

—And you took no formal lessons?

—No.

—And if you’ll forgive me …

—Yes?

—How do you possibly explain such eloquence?

A hard knot cramped Douglass’s chest.

—Such eloquence?

—Yes? How is it …

—You’ll excuse me?

—Sir?

—I have to run away.

Douglass crossed the room, his shoes clicking loudly on the wooden floor, a smile breaking out as he went.

IN THE AFTERNOONS
he caught sight of Lily when she cleaned the upstairs of the house. Just seventeen years old. Her sandy-colored hair. Her eyes ledged with freckles.

He closed his door, sat to write. He could still see her shape. On the stairs he allowed her to pass. A whiff of tobacco came from her. The world was made ordinary again. He walked quickly down to the drawing room where he sat to read the literary journals to which Webb subscribed, the reams of books, the journals. He could lose himself in them.

Lily’s footsteps sounded above him. He was glad when they ceased. He went back upstairs to write. His room had been made spotless and the barbells remained undisturbed.

IN THE BANK
on College Green they sent instructions back to Boston to lodge 225 pounds sterling in the accounts of the American Anti-Slavery Society. It amounted to 1,850 dollars. Douglass and Webb emerged in their crisp woolen coats and white linen shirts. There were gulls out over Dublin: as numerous as beggars. In the back of the chanting crowd he saw the young boy with the raw red welts along his neck and face. Hey, Mr. Douglass! the boy screamed, Mr. Douglass, sir!

He was sure, as the carriage turned the corner by the university, that the boy volleyed out his first name.

HE HEARD IN
the newspapers that O’Connell was due to speak to a giant crowd along the Dublin docks. The tribune of the people. Ireland’s truest son. He had spent his life agitating for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary rule, and had written on abolition, too. Brilliant essays, fervent, impassioned. O’Connell had adventured his life for proper freedom, was known for his speeches, his letters, his rule of law.

Douglass canceled a tea in Sandymount to get there on time. He arrived along the teeming docks. He could not believe the size of the crowd: as if the whole sponge of Dublin had been squeezed down into a sink. Such a riot of human cutlery. The police herded the crowds along. He lost Webb and pushed his way through, made his way to the stage as O’Connell emerged. The Great Liberator looked portly, tired, out of sorts: he had apparently been so since his release from jail. Still, a giant roar went up.
Men and women of Ireland!
The din was extraordinary. O’Connell held a speaking trumpet, and when he spoke into it the words shot up out of him, huge, fearsome, brimming. It astounded Douglass, the logic, the rhetoric, the humor.

O’Connell held the crowd in the well of his outstretched arms. He swayed forth. Slowed down. Pivoted on his heels. Paced the stage. Adjusted his wig. Allowed silences. The speech was relayed by others who stood on tall ladders and passed the word along the dockside.