Charleston (28 page)

The Cincinnati coach carried Alex through white fields lying under dark December skies. She would never learn to like snow or the bitter Northern winters. In all her childhood she remembered only one overnight snowfall; it melted by noon the next day.

Alex hadn't seen Charleston since the day she sailed away. Letters from Ham kept her apprised of their mother's condition. Although Cassandra's health hadn't worsened, neither had it improved. She lived, in Ham's phrase, apart from the world. At Christmas, Alex and Ham and their mother would exchange gifts and greetings by mail, as usual.

Dayton's broad unpaved streets were largely deserted when they arrived at half past four. It was Alex's first trip to Ohio, but after three years of travel in the Northeast, new places were less daunting. She knew the kind of hostility she might face.

The coach bumped from Main Street onto First, then into a fenced yard where the driver handed down her carpetbag. Alex always kept her banjo case at her side. Other passengers greeted those meeting them. No one was waiting for her.

The winter dark induced a pang of loneliness. She longed for her comfortable rooms in Washington, where she'd settled after a year in Philadelphia. She supported herself by giving lessons in grammar, basic French, and piano. Her pupils were female, from prosperous homes; she never suggested they learn to play the banjo. She didn't live luxuriously, but neither did she starve. When she
traveled to speak for antislavery societies, her expenses were paid.

Although five years had passed since Henry's death, she still mourned him. She discouraged those occasional young men who might have qualified as beaux. At twenty-five she considered herself a spinster. Rather surprisingly, her friend and mentor, Angelina Grimké, had married. Angelina's husband, Theodore Dwight Weld, was a seminary graduate and the author of
American Slavery as It Is,
a widely read collection of graphic accounts of abuses under the system.

Two years ago Alex had met Weld in Boston. He introduced her to bald and bespectacled William Lloyd Garrison, editor and publisher of
The Liberator
. Garrison resembled a prim schoolmaster more than the fiery apostle of emancipation. Ham said Southerners thought him kin to the devil, and would hang him without a trial if he ever dared step into South Carolina. In the North, Alex had discovered to her sorrow, hatred of the abolitionists was nearly as virulent in some quarters.

Specks of snow whirled around her as she pulled her cloak tighter and retied her black bonnet. Bulky crinolines that stiffened a skirt were coming into fashion, but she still preferred a simple, straight dress of Quaker cut. Symbolism apart, it was more practical for travel.

She searched for some sign of her host. Wind rattled a broadsheet tacked to the board fence.

PROCLAIM LIBERTY!!

The Managers of the Dayton Auxiliary of THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY Invite, without Regard to Party or Sect, ANY & ALL Ready to Stand on LIBERTY'S SIDE in the GREAT STRUGGLE now upon us, to attend a Glorious

FREEDOM RALLY!

Thrill to the testimony of

- Fiery Immediatist -

The Rev. WM. DREW of Boston.

- Erudite Escaped SLAVE -

NICODEMUS BROWN.

- “Songstress of Freedom” -

Miss ALEXANDRA BELL of Charleston.

 

Listed last, Alex would be first to speak. She wasn't upset by an obscene word defacing the bottom of the poster; she'd seen them in plenty.

A fat man in a tall hat rushed out of the dark, breathless. “Miss Bell? I am Cletus Westerham of the committee. I am so sorry to be late. My carriage horse went lame. Have you waited long?”

“Only a short time.”

“Your hotel's just there, in the next block. Let's see you settled, so you can rest a bit. The program's at seven. Would you care for supper beforehand?”

“No, thank you,” she said as they crossed the frozen mud of the street. “Eating before a talk steals energy. Sarah Grimké taught me that.”

“The others on our committee will greet you at the hall. Of course we're all eager to hear your message. Like the Grimkés you come from the very heart of the slave culture. I have but one request.”

“Yes?”

“In your remarks, would you be so kind as to avoid the, ah, woman question? We find it antagonizes many influential men who might otherwise support us with contributions.”

“Mr. Westerham, I appreciate the invitation to address your meeting, but I must speak what's in my heart. How
can we care about the freedom of Negroes and ignore the bondage of women?”

Westerham sighed. “Oh, dear. Well, as you must.”

Alex wasn't angry; she heard the request frequently. Angelina and Sarah had introduced the issue of women's rights into the movement on their initial tour of Massachusetts in 1837. Sarah had declared, “By speaking out, we are only assuming the rights and duties of all moral beings. The Lord opened the way for us to address mixed audiences.”

In Boston the sisters had been the first to appear before an all-male state legislature. Yet even there, where Paul Revere and Sam and John Adams had set the torch of liberty afire, the notion that universal emancipation should include women outraged conservatives, especially many of those in the clergy. Garrison, on the other hand, enthusiastically filled his weekly with praise of the idea.

Alex signed the registry at the Swaynie House, then asked Westerham, “Do you expect disturbances at the meeting?”

“I would be untruthful if I said no. Our work is not popular with large segments of the population. We're only sixty miles from the Ohio River, and the Kentucky slave masters. I hope that doesn't alarm you.”

“Oh, no,” she said, not entirely honestly.

 

The New Light Meeting House on Main Street south of Fourth was packed. Satin banners hung from the rafters depicted the Liberty Bell and exhorted the audience to
PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND
.

Peeking from a holding room next to the stage, Alex decided the audience looked respectable, though at the back of the hall she noticed several rough-looking men. In the third row, on the aisle, a man wearing a shabby black suit glowered at the stage. The man's pinched, liverish face gave her pause. She'd encountered fanatics before.

As always, she fretted about the coming performance.
Was she suitably dressed? Was her banjo in tune? Her voice adequate? In the wings Westerham introduced her to committee members and the others on the program: Nicodemus Brown, a runaway from an Alabama cotton plantation, and Reverend William Drew, a thickset man of about thirty with a blunt jaw and abundant dark hair worn long. Reverend Drew had a deep, resonant voice and beautiful teeth he showed off to advantage whenever he smiled, which was often. He was shorter than Alex by several inches. She seldom met a man who wasn't.

“Bell, Bell—that's familiar,” he said as he shook her hand. “In Newport some years ago my late father met a gentleman from Charleston by that name.”

“If you're referring to Edgar Bell, it could have been my father, also deceased. Our family vacationed in Newport.”

“Edgar Bell. I believe that's it.” His smile charmed her. He didn't have the lugubrious air of many clerics, nor did he wear black or fusty brown. His frock coat was forest green with black velvet lapels. Pale gray trousers matched his vest. His black tie, more scarf than cravat, was full and flowing, as Byronic as his hair.

“I remember the occasion because I met your father briefly,” he continued. “I was on holiday between college and my first year at seminary. My father enjoyed his conversation with Mr. Bell, although I understand they quarreled rather sharply at the end. Father was a Unitarian preacher, as am I. That is, I was until I stepped down from my pulpit last year. Here's a thought. Perhaps we could take a little supper together after the program.” When Alex hesitated, he said, “Oh, have no fear, I'm a widower. My wife, Filomena, passed away three years ago.”

Alex offered her sympathies and was about to refuse the invitation when Westerham plucked her sleeve. “We are ready to begin.”

The other men on the committee took seats reserved on front benches. Westerham stepped onstage to applause and a few catcalls from the rear. William Drew leaned
close, his breath redolent of clove. “Some roughnecks out there.”

“It doesn't bother me. I've handled them before.”

“I thought you looked like a stalwart,” Drew said, flashing that marvelous smile.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Westerham announced, “it is my honor and privilege to present our first speaker, the nationally famous composer and balladeer, Miss Alexandra Bell of Charleston, South Carolina.”

Alex strode from the wings with her banjo. Her blond hair, worn to her waist, shimmered with reflections of the footlight lamps. Her height and her confident carriage gave her an air of authority. She bowed to acknowledge the applause, consciously wooing the audience with her eyes and her smile. From the back of the hall came the bleat of a tin horn.

“Friends of freedom,” she began, “your welcome warms me this wintry evening. I stand before you as a Southerner, exiled from the land of my birth by the sound of the lash and the piteous cry of the slave.” Alex spoke from memory. She'd written her speech before the first appearance she ever made, in a tiny hamlet in upstate New York. The speech had been changed and rearranged, added to and subtracted from, many times since.

“I stand before you as a repentant daughter of a family of slaveholders. I stand before you as a woman, and a moral being, feeling that I owe it to the suffering slave and
the deluded master, the oppressed wife and the tyrannical husband”—the liverish man in the third row scowled—“to do all that I can to overturn a complicated system of crimes built on the prostrate bodies and broken hearts of my brothers and sisters of both races. But let me speak to you in a different way.”

The tin horn blared again. She ignored it and slipped the embroidered strap over her head. Her new, fretless banjo was a beautiful instrument of lustrous gun-stock maple, from the Baltimore workrooms of William Boucher. All five strings had tuning pegs, four at the top of the neck and the fifth lower down. On the solid back of the rim, in contrasting marquetry, the maker had inlaid a North Star of freedom.

She tested the strings, adjusted a peg. “This song, set to a familiar patriotic air, comes from a Massachusetts antislavery hymnal.” She struck a chord.

She sang all six stanzas, her passion compensating for her untrained voice. Once more the roughneck tooted his horn. Another jingled sleigh bells. One of the committee members rose and cried, “Shame.” Others hissed until the rowdies quieted.

Alex sang a second hymn, then put the banjo aside and launched into an account of her awakening in Charleston. She spoke of the workhouse and the treadmill; Lydia's abusive ways and her harassment of Virtue that had led to her murder. She avoided names, but her descriptions were no less vivid.

She spoke of her friendship with Henry, intolerable to certain Charleston whites. “Parties unknown murdered and horribly mutilated my friend. He was not a slave but a free man whose only crime was his color. They threw his poor tortured body into Charleston Harbor.” An audible reaction ran through the hall.

“It was then I realized I couldn't stand by and see such cruelty and intolerance defended and perpetuated. I knew I must leave the South, raise my voice, do my part to bring the wonderful day of jubilee.”

She took up the banjo again, tested the strings, and sang “A Better, Brighter Morning.”

A few listeners began to clap with the beat, then more. Everyone knew the anthem; thousands of copies had been sold. She heard strangers whistling the tune wherever she went. She tapped her foot as she sang.

People rose to applaud, including a few courageous women. The horns and sleigh bells almost seemed part of the ovation. Alex bowed and returned the banjo to the chair, noting the furious face of the liverish man.

She stepped to the edge of the stage; clasped her hands. “Another form of bondage exists in our country and it, too, must be addressed. I speak of the bondage of women unjustly kept from a full life by chains of the law, and chains
of custom, fully as strong as the iron shackles of slaves, for all that they are invisible. We must—”

The liverish man jumped up. “Hold on, woman. Your nigger cant is bad enough, but we won't tolerate heresy.”

“Heresy, sir?” Alex began. Someone shouted for the man to sit down; he paid no attention.

“Yes, heresy. You and your scarlet sisters preach the devil's gospel. My wife listened to one of your kind and she left me.”

“Sir, I'm deeply sorry for your loss, but—”

He outshouted her. “Are you godless? Don't you read the Bible? You should obey St. Paul's charge to the Corinthians—‘Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak.'”

“Sir, conscience demands that I offer my message wherever and whenever I feel compelled. I'll be happy to debate the issue privately if you just let me continue.”

He pointed an accusing finger. “‘And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for women to speak.'”

Alex appealed to the crowd. “Can we not persuade this gentleman to be courteous enough to give me a hearing?”

“No hearing for a she-devil who destroys families.” The man's hand dived in his pocket; a rock flew, gashing Alex's forehead.

She reeled back. Blood dripped in her eyes and onto her dress. She staggered, lost her balance. She sat down on the stage with an unceremonious thump, humiliated.

The man threw a second rock that landed harmlessly behind her. Westerham and Reverend Drew rushed from the wings. Drew leapt off the stage, dragged the attacker into the aisle, and punched him twice. The man collapsed. Drew stepped on his neck. “Someone get this trash out of here.”

Two committeemen rushed to remove the offender. Alex struggled to her feet, pressed her handkerchief to her bleeding forehead. Nicodemus Brown, the ex-slave, steadied her while Westerham dithered: “Oh, I am so
sorry. The man is a deacon in his church but a known troublemaker.”

“We'd better help this lady 'stead of talking,” Brown said.

Drew climbed back onstage, his Byronic hair mussed. One of the committee members said, “You sure enough fixed his clock for him, Reverend.”

“Men who abuse women deserve no less. Christian forbearance has its limits.” He picked up the banjo and followed Brown and Alex to the holding room, where Alex slumped into a chair. While someone ran for a doctor, a committee member found a pint of whiskey. She took a sip gratefully.

The doctor arrived, examined her forehead, said it needed stitches. “My office is three blocks from here.”

Reverend Drew said, “I have a carriage outside. Mr. Brown, please address the meeting while we take care of the lady. Mr. Westerham, put this instrument in its case and guard it, she'll want it returned to the hotel undamaged. Miss Bell, can you stand?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then lean on me. I have your cloak.”

The ride through the December dark was mostly a blur. The doctor's wife came into the surgery to assist. The doctor gave Alex a wooden rod to bite while he sutured the gash. It hurt hellishly, but she didn't make a sound. Presently the doctor stood back, wiped his hands on his apron.

“There. Minnie, the mirror, please.”

When Alex saw the stitches, she groaned. “I look like a rag doll sewn back together.” She noticed that someone had cleaned the blood off her hands. She didn't remember. “What is your fee, Doctor?”

“Nothing, young lady. We should pay you. Dayton has treated you abominably.”

Reverend Drew drove her to the hotel. Her cloak hid her bloody dress. In the lobby he asked how she was feeling.

“Fine, but I'd very much like a glass of wine, if I may be bold enough to say that to a pastor.”

“Of course you may. Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Then let me renew my offer of supper. I hear the hotel has a decent dining room.”

Alex hesitated. He wasn't the handsomest man she'd ever met, but he had soulful brown eyes, a certain dash, and obvious courage. She felt she owed him something for his gallantry.

“I would like that, Reverend. First I must change my dress.”

He bowed. “I'll happily await your return. I have some observations about what transpired this evening.”

Curious to know what he meant, she went upstairs. She hoped Henry would forgive her disloyalty, wherever he was.