The Hope Chest (25 page)

Chloe, Violet realized, had just come to the end of a long battle. Violet had cared about women winning the vote for the last week or so—ever since she met the
woman waiting for her son's coffin in Chattanooga. And these last few days it had meant a great deal to her. But she hadn't fought for it like Chloe had. That Chloe would want to move on to something else now was normal, she supposed. That Mr. Martin should be the something else she wanted to move on to was … well, probably also normal. Only to be expected, really.

Mother and Father would be absolutely furious. Violet smiled. That was some consolation.
Furious
wasn't even the word for it. They had wanted Chloe to marry a Mr. R., not a one-eyed, seven-fingered Bolshevik who was on the run from the law and kept changing his name.

By the time she got back to the campsite, Chloe and Mr. Martin were standing side by side with their arms around each other, and Chloe's spare arm was around Myrtle.

“I've always wanted to go to Alaska too,” Myrtle was saying.

Violet decided to ignore all this. “There's a kitchen over there, with stoves,” she said. “You don't need to use the campfire.”

“But we have to have a campfire or we're not really camping!” Mr. Martin said enthusiastically. He disentangled himself from Chloe long enough to flip the bacon in the frying pan resting in the flames. “In Alaska we'll cook like this all the time! No stoves in Alaska.”

“It's very cold there,” Violet reminded him. “Most of the year it's all snow and ice.”

“And dogsleds!” Chloe said. “And mountains!” She patted Myrtle on the head. “We'll have to wrap Myrtle up in a caribou parka to keep her warm.”

Violet burned with jealousy.

She knew that she had a home to go back to—she didn't want to go back to it, but she could—and Myrtle didn't. She knew that Mr. Martin had to leave the country or go to jail. But it wasn't fair. She had brought all of them together, found Chloe for Mr. Martin. And for Myrtle. And Myrtle and Mr. Martin for Chloe. That the three of them should all go off to Alaska and leave her was completely unfair.

“I want to go to Alaska too,” Violet said.

The three of them looked at her. Their faces were all sad, as if they all knew she wasn't going to Alaska.

“Let's eat,” said Mr. Martin.

They ate off tin plates, which, like the tent, Chloe had because she'd done a lot of autocamping during her travels from state to state over the last year. Violet had to admit that the stuff Mr. Martin had cooked was good, whatever it was called. It certainly didn't look like any of the things he'd put into it.

“How did you two meet each other?” Myrtle asked.

Chloe looked at Mr. Martin adoringly. “He hit me on the head with a shovel,” she said.

“I did not!” Mr. Martin dropped his fork and tried to look annoyed but ruined it by looking adoring at the same time. “You walked into me. I was just carrying a shovel at the time.”

“Why were you carrying a shovel?” Myrtle asked.

Mr. Martin and Chloe both looked suddenly solemn.

“I know,” said Violet. “It was during the Influenza. She was coming home from seeing influenza patients, and he was coming home from … from digging graves for them.”

Suddenly Violet felt that she couldn't wait to be grown up and allowed to work, all day and into the night if she wanted, on something that mattered. Not taking care of sick people, necessarily, and definitely not digging graves, but some important work that needed doing. She wanted to feel again the way she'd felt this last week in Nashville: that what she was doing was going to make a difference to somebody. The way she'd felt when her class knitted blankets for French orphans.

She thought about what Chloe had said, that college armed you to fight the great battles. She thought she knew what battle she needed to be armed for. She wanted to fight against the laws that put Myrtle in a separate train car and kept her out of hotels and away from drugstore lunch counters. Remembering the flat expressions on the faces of the desk clerks and the conductor, she realized that was a battle that could last a lifetime.

And she knew, just as well as Chloe and Myrtle and Mr. Martin knew, that she wasn't going to Alaska.

A week later Violet sat alone on a fence in front of the autocamp. She was waiting for some of the National Woman's Party ladies from New York, who had driven a
big Packard motorcar to Tennessee. Violet was going to ride back with them, autocamping the whole way. Auto-camping was America's most popular new sport, but Mother and Father had always said that it was unsuitable for ladies and that one met entirely the Wrong Sort of People while autocamping. Violet hoped this was true. She expected she might like the Wrong Sort of People just fine. It would be an exciting trip, and Violet would be in charge of taking notes on the condition of the roads, which the ladies could then report to their automobile club and to the newspapers back home. The only bad thing about the trip was that there was a serious risk Violet might get back to Susquehanna in time to start school.

Mr. Martin/Hanover/Arpadfi and Chloe had gotten married under the name of Hanover, which Violet was a little worried about because she wasn't sure it counted. They had gotten a justice of the peace in another county to marry them, a county where Mr. Martin had not been in jail and wouldn't be recognized. Getting married seemed to be the one occasion in Tennessee when it was all right to have white and colored people in a room at the same time, and nobody tried to chase Myrtle out.

It had been a very brief ceremony, because when the judge asked Chloe if she promised to love, honor, and obey Mr. Martin, Chloe had said, “Obey him? What is that doing in there? I certainly don't.”

“Yes, really, that's a bit archaic,” Mr. Martin had said. “She's not my dog, you know. Don't you have a
more modern marriage ceremony in there that you could do?” He reached politely for the book the judge was holding.

“Do you two want to get married or not?” the judge demanded.

“Yes, of course,” said Chloe, and Mr. Martin said, “That's what we're here for.”

“Fine. I now pronounce you man and wife,” said the judge, slamming his book shut.

“Why not woman and husband?” said Chloe.

“I was already a man when I came in here,” said Mr. Martin.

But the judge was through with them.

The Antis had tried for several days to get the Tennessee House to overturn their ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, but instead the House voted and passed the amendment again. Then Governor Roberts signed the ratification and sent it by express to Secretary of State Colby in Washington, while the Antis kept sputtering and objecting and filing lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Chloe and Mr. Martin—Hanover—found someone who could give them and Myrtle a ride to Chicago. From there they would figure out a way to get to Seattle with Myrtle. Seattle was where ships for Alaska sailed from.

“But isn't that jumping bail?” Violet asked “Doesn't Mr. Mart—Hanover have a court date or something?”

“Please call me Theo,” said Mr.—well, all right,
Theo, Violet decided. “According to what my wife tells me, I'm not out on bail.”

“He's not?” said Violet to Chloe.

“Uh-uh,” said Chloe happily. “Myrtle introduced me to a gentleman named Mr. Ezekiel, who she said knew a lot about bribes. Well, not a gentleman, exactly, but a Suff legislator. He knew exactly how to go about it. But I had to sell the Hope Chest to pay the bribe, which means I did use the money Granny Mayhew left me to get married after all,” Chloe said with a sigh. “Just like Granny meant me to.”

“I doubt your granny meant for you to spend it on a bribe to get your fella out of jail,” said Theo comfortingly.

Chloe brightened. “That's true. And I did make a lot of miles in the Hope Chest.”

“You have an education to get, Violet,” Chloe had told her before they'd left for Chicago. “You need high school— but don't take the domestic science program. Take sciences or academic, whichever you prefer. And then college. Remember what I said. College arms you to fight the great battles.”

“And how am I supposed to get Father and Mother to agree to all that?” Violet said.

“Insist,” said Chloe. “It won't cost them anything. There's your hope chest money.”

Two weeks ago Violet would have replied that it was no good
insisting
with Father, who seldom even spoke to
her, or with Mother, who had no opinions except Father's. She would have said that the hope chest money might be hers in theory, but in reality it was tied up to a future she dreaded.

But now she knew what it was like to stand your ground. She knew what it was like to keep on when things seemed hopeless. And she knew that with patience and hard work, a radical, ridiculed idea—like women voting— could become as acceptable and ordinary as oatmeal.

Historical Notes
Real People

A
LTHOUGH
V
IOLET
, M
YRTLE
, C
HLOE, AND
M
R.
Martin are fictional, most of the characters who appear in
The Hope Chest
are real, including Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, Harry T. Burn, Joe Hanover, Hobie the Hobo, and Carrie Chapman Catt. The arguments used for and against women voting are all real too. In 1920 many Americans believed they were living at the dawn of a golden age, when war, alcohol, and poverty were about to vanish from the earth. Others believed that the United States was on the verge of a communist revolution.

A few characters, including Mr. Ezekiel, Mr. Blotz, and Mr. Credwell, are made-up people whose
stories really happened. History has been too polite to record the real people's names. You can read about them, and much more about the final showdown in Nashville, in
The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage
, by Carol Lynn Yellin and Janann Sherman.

Miss Dexter is invented, but her attitude is not. Some suffragists were racists. Some of them would have liked to get the vote only for white women, but most realized that this was unreasonable.

Woman Suffrage—Lost and Gained

A
MERICAN WOMEN REGAINED THE RIGHT TO VOTE
in 1920, 113 years after they lost it. Women could and did vote in several states in the early years of our nation. The last state to revoke the vote for women was New Jersey, in 1807.

Forty-one years later, in 1848, women began fighting to regain the vote at the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Among the speakers at the convention were three antislavery leaders: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Frederick Douglass. During these early years, the woman suffrage movement and the abolitionist movement worked closely together. Freeing both
women and African Americans seemed to be two parts of the same goal.

Alice Paul sewing a suffrage flag

After the Civil War, the states ratified the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, ending slavery and giving African American men full citizenship and the right to vote. Some suffragists reacted with resentment. The Fourteenth Amendment put the word
male
into the U.S. Constitution for the first time—before that, it had been the individual states, not the federal government, that denied women the right to vote.

Suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony wrote the amendment that eventually became the Nineteenth Amendment. It was first introduced into Congress in 1878 but was voted down. At the time of Anthony's death in 1906, only a handful of Western states and territories allowed women to vote.

Starting in the West and spreading to the Northeast, from Wyoming in 1869 to New York in 1917, the men in various states gradually agreed to let their sisters vote. No Southern state gave women full voting rights. The state-by-state fight for woman suffrage seemed slow and wasteful to Alice Paul, a Quaker suffragist from Pennsylvania. In 1916 Paul founded the National Woman's Party, with the goal of getting Congress and the states to pass the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. In this way, states where women were already voting could help bring the vote to states that might otherwise never let women vote.

Congress passed the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in 1919. When it became part of the Constitution in 1920, only one woman who had attended the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls was still alive—Charlotte Woodward Pierce.

People believed that woman suffrage would bring about great changes, such as an end to war, child labor, alcoholism, and corruption. It was expected that women would all vote the same way. They didn't. Some people say that women ended up voting “whichever way their husbands did,” but with the secret ballot, that's impossible to know.

As soon as the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, Alice Paul began working on an equal rights
amendment. She continued working on this until her death in 1977. Thirty-five states ratified it. It never became law.

Miss Maude Younger, legislative secretary of the National Woman's Party, working on her Ford with her dog, Sandy

Despite his good deed on the morning of August 18, Governor Cox lost to Warren G. Harding in the 1920 election. (By the summer of 1920, both Harding and Cox were Suffs, just in case.) Harding's administration was plagued by scandal, but he did pardon the “Bolsheviks” who were still in prison for having spoken out against the War.

The Influenza

T
HE GLOBAL INFLUENZA PANDEMIC WAS A FORM OF
bird flu. It started out as a fairly mild disease in the U.S. in the spring of 1918. By autumn it had traveled through Europe and Asia and back to the U.S., and had mutated into a deadly disease which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people worldwide. At the time, it was called the Spanish Influenza because Spain, a neutral country in World War I, reported a high death toll. The warring countries also had high death tolls but didn't report them because they didn't want to reveal any weakness to their enemies.

Demonstration at the Red Cross Emergency Ambulance Station in Washington, D.C., during the influenza pandemic of 1918

World War I

W
ORLD
W
AR
I
BEGAN IN
1914
WHEN THE GERMAN
army overran Belgium and invaded France. It officially ended on November 11, 1918, although sporadic fighting continued for many years. It was ultimately one of the root causes of World War II in 1939.

The United States entered the War in 1917 and began sending large numbers of drafted and volunteer American soldiers (many carrying influenza) overseas in 1918. The arrival of the strong American reinforcements, combined with a revolution in Germany, led to a German surrender.

Poster urging women to help the war effort, 1918

Jim Crow Laws

T
HE
T
HIRTEENTH
, F
OURTEENTH, AND
F
IFTEENTH
amendments to the U.S. Constitution ended slavery and made African Americans full citizens, but some states passed laws to keep blacks out of sight and out of public life. Public facilities were segregated throughout the South, and some states required “literacy tests” for voting. The tests were so complicated that nobody, black or white, could pass them, so the laws also contained a “grandfather clause.” The clause stated that you did not have to pass the test if your grandfather voted—that is, if you had a white grandfather. These laws were repealed in the 1960s as a result of the civil rights movement.

Civil rights march on Washington, D.C., 1963