Unexpected Gifts (28 page)

As the weeks ensued, we worked a good twenty hours a day, signing up volunteers and trudging over muddied back roads to make sure every woman and man had a viable means of getting to the ballot boxes on the designated day. I lived on coffee and my body felt old, but at last, all the votes were in and counted. Then it was announced. Miracle upon miracles, women were franchised in the great state of California!

We were soon back, comfortable in our Detroit beds. Back again to the endless rounds of discussions about the merits and yes, the problems within the Women's Movement and the fact that some of the Old Timers were possibly delaying significant advances for their cause by being compliant with the President-Elect Wilson's aversion to any real change once he took office, and how a newcomer, this Alice Paul from back East, was stirring things up a little too much.

Sometimes I couldn't sleep, my mind playing and replaying thoughts over and over like one of the assembly belts Papa had complained about so bitterly. When that happened, obtaining milk from the larder downstairs seemed the only solution. One night, I leaned into Sarah's study and watched her burning the midnight oil. She looked up and yawned, arching her back and stretching her arms out to the walls.

“Do you need anything? Can't sleep again?”

I nodded. “How is it that you are the one who's always writing, not Corlie?”

Sarah laughed and rubbed her nose, instantly depositing a black smear. “Yes, we are somewhat similar to the way Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Candy Stanton worked together.”

“Oh?”

“Well, Elizabeth wrote all the eloquent papers and petitions, and Susan, bless her heart, did the physical legwork, going out at all hours in incremental weather, gathering signatures, and spreading The Word.”

“Didn't Mrs. Stanton ever travel?”

“Not much. She had seven children, and as a matter of fact, supposedly when Susan would get frustrated and exhausted, Elizabeth would beckon her to come visit and feed pudding to her children so she would have the time and energy to traverse the country herself.”

“Ha!” I laughed. “Well, did Miss Anthony ever get married?”

“Heavens, no! Apparently, her famous quote was, ‘If I ever had had a husband and children, or opposition in my own home, I never could have done it.…’”

“I know exactly how she feels. I, myself am never going to get married!”

Sarah chuckled softly. “Well, you can do what Carrie Chapman Catt did with her pre-nuptial.”

My eyebrows shot up.

“Two months in the spring and two months in the fall devoted only to her suffrage work, not towards her husband.” She waved me away and closing the door behind me, I saw her resume a hunched-over position, her pen scribbling furiously.

Karina Woodcraft came into our midst as The Volunteer Extraordinaire. Eager, helpful, and with a constant need to please, she would make sure all completed pamphlets were packed and labeled, and the breakfast, lunch, or dinner table, reset with freshly laundered napkins folded in quarters, well before any of us entered the dining room. Sometimes late at night, when Sarah and Corlie thought they were safe from curious household ears, I could hear them referring to Karina as Miss Efficient, and how perhaps a higher position would be appropriate for her some day.

I disliked her instantly. Jealousy aside, I didn't believe a word she said. She reminded me of a court jester, someone who knew how to appease his masters while underneath his sunny exterior, a darker side smoldered patiently. Her anticipations of every wish, miraculous to everyone else, to me spelled clever manipulation, and her questions regarding Sarah's and Corlie's personal lives struck me as more than idle curiosity.

“Adriana?”

I looked up from my dinner plate and turned to Sarah's head of the table.

“Adriana, Corlie and I have decided to send you on your first major outing without us. After all, you're seasoned now.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” Sarah beamed. “You're going to go to a huge, organized parade in Washington D. C., scheduled on March 3
^rd
, the same day as President Wilson's Inaugural Parade. We want you to represent our center and take careful notes of all the events happening there.

“Why me?”

“Because, my dear, we know you can handle it and besides, that date happens to coincide with our major fundraiser for the Unwed Mother's program we're starting, remember?”

“I assume I shall have full instructions of where my lodgings and hosts are located?”

“Yes, of course. However, you won't be traveling alone.”

“I won't?”

“Karina has graciously volunteered to accompany you, just yesterday afternoon she offered, as a matter of fact.

What a coincidence, I seethed, managing to keep my face neutral.

March 3
^rd
was dry, almost brittle. Ropes had already been positioned along the parade route and when Karina and I arrived early to access a good spot, I noticed most of the spectators milling around were white men, talking about this or that, patting each other on the back, making sure their bowler hats and wool scarves were securely in place, a few even taking out their flasks to start the celebration early. Several men genteelly stepped aside for us and tipped their hats, murmuring ‘good morning,’ and it occurred to me how serene everything appeared.

Before long, we could hear drums pounding from several streets away.
Boom—boom—boom! Boom—boom—boom!
Suddenly, excitement replaced pastoral as the growing crowd pressed closer to see what would happen next.

“Look, there's the beginning of the parade,” one man shouted. We all surged forward an inch. “What the—?” he began.

I ducked under his armpit and leaned in towards the route. There, leading the procession was a magnificent looking woman, dressed all in white with a gold crown on her head, riding on top of a white horse; a vision I shall never forget. The crowd drew a collective breath.

“That's Inez Milholland,” Karina whispered. “She's an attorney, hand-picked by Alice.”

How did she know so much about Alice? I wondered. I stepped in further.

Inez, ramrod straight in her saddle, her magnificent steed's four-beat gait matching her own queenly appearance, was proceeded by a huge cloth banner stretched across the width of the avenue:
Forward out of Darkness; Forward into Light
it read in huge black letters. My heart instantly started pounding double time to the drums.

Ripples of disgust from the men were percolating all around me, but I didn't care; I was mesmerized. I forgot these ignorant He-men, these apes, and I even forgot Karina as divisions of women doctors, nurses, lawyers, business leaders, artists, and educators slowly drilled forward, their faces solemn and determined. Floats passed by with names like Red Cross, PTA, local social clubs, religious groups, and small town political parties printed on their sides.

At one point, there was an outburst from the man next to me. “Look at that nigger! What's
she
doing here?”

Karina nudged me softly. “That's Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Alice asked her to march with the other colored women at the back of the procession, but she refused. She insisted on being alongside her white suffragists from Chicago.”

“Good for her,” I murmured and concentrated on the colors. Yellow was predominant (yellow for courage, I later learned), on the marchers' sashes, mixed together with red, white, and blue on banners and signs as well as being displayed on yellow badges and buttons sold by makeshift vendors along the sidelines.

Suddenly, there was Alice Paul herself, surrounded by a group of female college graduates. How lovely she was! So pretty, so dainty; not at all what I had expected.

The crowd's grumbles were growing louder, harsher, almost bear-like. I was looking over at Karina, when all of a sudden, a group of young men, their flasks emptied, started to burble on about breaking the ropes to show these women just how unwelcome they were. Before I knew what was happening, two of them had pulled the ropes down and stepped over the hemp to leap up onto one of the passing floats.

All hell broke loose. Shouting insults and obscenities at the participants, many of the men followed the procession itself, pinching and spitting on any nearby woman. They tore off badges, climbed up onto floats and wagons, some of them even tried to touch exposed arms of the startled ladies.

Sickened, I approached a policeman standing idly by. “Why aren't you helping these poor women?” I shouted over the din.

“It's their own damn fault,” he barked. “If you women stayed home, none of this'd be happening!” Planted in a widespread stance, he cocked his head to one side and snorted.

Meanwhile, the parade had slowed to a crawl and with the crowd pressing in from either side, what was once a wide pathway for the women, now only a Model T could squeeze through, as the undeterred Inez bravely led her followers up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the White House.

A Boy Scout troop, present for the Inauguration, came to the rescue. Swinging at the worst offending men with the same sticks they had probably played stickball with just the day before, they attempted to pull the combatants off the floats, frantically calling out for assistance. No one stirred until a large group of college students wearing their campus hats and matching scarves suddenly appeared and locked arms in an all-out effort to clear a broader path for the participants.

Word had it the parade was supposed to last two hours at the very most, yet the clear spring sky had already rolled into a navy blue as Inez finally reached the front of the White House. With a large megaphone in her elegant hands, she stood up high in her stirrups and denounced the plight of all women, demanding that the new president battle side by side with them for a federal amendment just as the cavalry, called in by worried officials, charged in on their horses and shut everything down.

Two days later, there was a telegram from Sarah, urging me to return home and not get tempted by any radical elements in Washington, D.C. I understood exactly to whom she was referring. Alice Paul. But I was captivated, and seeing as Karina had promised an audience with this brilliant mobilizer the following evening, how could I resist?

From our very first encounter, the depth of Miss Paul's magnetic pull was too difficult to explain. Her aura, her quiet yet commanding presence, made me want to be physically close to her, and these thoughts, these yearnings, were both comforting and simultaneously, somewhat disconcerting.

She spent much of that evening explaining her staunch determination, her polestar: to galvanize the issuance of the 19
^th
Amendment. She recounted the very first time she had gotten arrested for picketing outside the White House and put into solitary confinement in the District Jail, how proud yet terrified she and her compatriots were at the time.

“When can I join your organization?”

She smiled, satisfied with her new recruitment. “Anytime, Adriana, anytime. But don't you have to let Sarah Braunstein know first?”

“How do you know about Sarah?”

“Why, Ka…” She paused.

“Karina?”

She looked off to one side at something. “No, um,
Karen
, a woman I knew from college had heard about Sarah and her center, that's all.”

Reflecting back on my naiveté, I can now see how being infatuated with someone clouds the brain as well as the heart, and if I had been a wiser, more mature person, not only would I have protected myself better, I would have surely understood how painful my telegram to Sarah and Corlie must have been. Thanking them both profusely, of course, but also informing them I could no longer be a party to their old-fashioned methods, I told them I had found my true calling as a militant for The Cause.

Karina and I moved into Alice's new lodgings (interestingly, Karina's allegiance to Sarah and Corlie vanished instantly). She was placed with two other devotees, while I was relegated to a broom closet of a room up on the top floor.

Our new home was a mansion Alice had rented, six blocks from the White House. Red bricked, Georgian columned, in winter its sparseness contrasted tremendously from the lush under-growth and cherry blossoms in the front yard that exploded each spring. There was no sleeping in, just a six o'clock leap out of bed, then a race down the stairs, two steps at a time, so I could get to the breakfast table in time to hear Alice instructing us on our scheduled tasks for the day. We mustn't ever slow down, she would warn. Don't end up like Carrie Chapman Catt and her followers, who were all so tepid whenever they met with President Wilson, their submissiveness explained why it was taking us so long to obtain our goals.

“I heard that Chapman Catt's husband and she signed a prenuptial that would allow her to do her own work four months out of the year with no matrimonial responsibilities.” I piped in.

Alice snorted. “She may have a prenuptial that says she can travel four months out of every year, but that's not nearly enough time. She is still married and therefore domesticated.”

“Down with husbands!” I acquiesced, hoping for Alice's smile.

She didn't even glance at me. “There are far too many women who are content to have a state-by-state vote for now, but the reality is, unless we get a full federal amendment, total enfranchisement for women is never going to happen.”