The Widow's War

She returns to the Gilliss House feeling more hopeful than she has since William first arrived in Brazil and asked her to marry him. That night at dinner, she meets more emigrants headed for Kansas. One is a missionary named Samuel Adair who has come from Michigan to see about resettling his family near Osawatomie Creek and founding a Congregational church there. Reverend Adair sits next to Carrie, and as they eat, he engages her in conversation.

Adair helps himself to the mashed potatoes and passes the bowl to Carrie. “Florella, my wife, is reluctant to live so far from her family, but we both believe we are called by God to enter into the spiritual struggle against slavery.” He pauses, fork in hand. “My brother-in-law, John, is even more determined.”

Reverend Adair puts down his fork. “‘Supports,’ is putting it mildly. John believes he is the right hand of God sent to free the slaves and punish the masters for their sins.” Adair lowers his voice. “He has consecrated himself to the destruction of slavery. He says most New England abolitionists are all talk and no action. He speaks of insurrection. When I remind him violence is unchristian, he quotes scripture at me: Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel!”

Adair nods and goes back to his meal. If he wonders why termites ate their books, he doesn’t ask. In fact, he stops speaking to her altogether even though she hasn’t mentioned William. She finds this peculiar, but a few years later, when the name John Brown becomes a household word, she remembers this conversation and realizes Reverend Adair feared he had already said far too much about his brother-in-law.

The next morning, she meets another person who is destined to play an important role in her life. It’s Sunday, and in honor of the Sabbath, the New Englanders hold a church service in the lobby of the hotel, presided over by Reverend Adair who takes as the text of his sermon Isaiah 58:6: “Loose the bands of wickedness, undo the heavy burdens, and . . . let the oppressed go free.”

Except that it is given in a slave state in a hotel under siege, Reverend Adair’s sermon is not particularly memorable, but what is memorable is a brief speech given by a free black woman named Elizabeth Newberry who stands up at the end of the service just before the benediction. Mrs. Newberry is tall and thin with graying hair, piercing eyes, a square, stubborn jaw, and a voice that could fill a cathedral.

“I was a slave in Maryland,” she says, “and my mother was a slave before me, taken out of Africa and illegally smuggled into this country by slave traders who mocked the laws of the United States and cursed the federal government. When my master died, he freed me. As a condition of my freedom, I was forced to leave the state of Maryland immediately, thus abandoning my mother who had not been freed. When I told Mother I would give up my freedom in order to stay with her, she pleaded with me to leave, saying that no life was worse than that of a slave, and reminding me that a new master might sell me in which case she and I would never see each other again.

“In Michigan I met and married a good man and had three sons with him. My sons and I are now on our way to Kansas to do what we can to help ensure the territory enters the Union as a free state. We cannot vote in the plebiscite. That goes without saying. But we can help defend those who are able to vote. Yet because of the color of our skins, we cannot travel openly through Missouri without risking death or re-enslavement. Instead, we must pretend to be Mrs. Elijah Hulett’s slaves.

“Mrs. Hulett, who sits quietly among us today, is a Quaker. I do not want you to think this good woman is actually a slave-owner, so I stand before you to thank her for providing my sons and me with her protection, and to urge you to do everything in your power to make sure that in future years when my grandchildren are grown, they will not be forced to choose between being murdered or traveling around their own country in disguise.”

She gestures toward the back of the room. “Mrs. Hulett, will you please stand.” There is a protest and some whispered urging. Finally an old woman rises to her feet. She looks frail, but when she speaks her voice is surprisingly strong.

“I am doing nothing except what my conscience dictates,” she says. “All men and women are equal in the sight of God. I am sixty-three. My children tell me I should be putting up preserves and quilting, but I tell them I am going to Kansas to fight. Yes, fight. Do not delude yourselves that the slavers will let us settle peacefully. War it will be. I would call it a holy war but no war is holy, so instead I will simply say that if you are not ready to fight with me to bring Kansas into the Union free, than you should turn around and go back to New England.”

No one turns around or goes back, or at least if they do they slink off quietly in the middle of the night. The next morning just before dawn, the emigrants board wagons headed for Lawrence. In preparation for what is likely to be a hot day, the women put on sunbonnets with flapping blinders that make it impossible for them to see anything not directly in front of them. Carrie, who intends to enjoy the scenery, wears a straw hat with a wide brim, which earns her stares of disapproval.

When she climbs into her wagon, she is pleased to discover she will be sharing it with Mrs. Newberry, Mrs. Newberry’s sons and their wives, and several other members of the Newberry family, including three children under the age of seven.

“Biscuit, Miss Vinton?” Mrs. Newberry asks, opening a large carpetbag. “Or would you rather have cold ham?” Carrie looks into the bag and sees that Mrs. Newberry has brought enough food to outlast a siege.

Mrs. Newberry pulls out a cold biscuit, tears it in half, slathers it with butter, and puts a slab of salt-cured ham between top and bottom. Carrie is just finishing the last crumb, when the teamster slaps the reigns against the backs of the oxen.

As the oxen begin to plod toward Lawrence, the wagon moves through a thin mist that rises off the river. For a little over half an hour, trees, bushes, and grass all look as if they have been draped in gauze. Then they put the river behind them and roll into sunshine so intense it makes Carrie wish the brim of her hat were even broader.

Since the city of Lawrence was founded beside the Kaw River less than two months ago, only about five hundred emigrants have settled there, but the road is as wide and well-worn as a turnpike. After a while, the teamster sits back, drapes the reigns around the whip holder, and explains why.

“Yer on the famous Santa Fe Trail,” he tells Carrie and the others. “Where it meets up with the Oregon Trail, also known as the California Road, we’ll be turnin’ north toward Lawrence. ’Bout a million mules and oxen done stomped both trails hard as rock. Then you got your horses and your shoe leather packing them down even more. Number of pour souls walked all the way to California thinkin’ they was gonna get rich. I don’t hold with walkin’. Give me an ox team any day.”

He points to the two beasts that draw their wagon. “The big one there goes by the name of Brock and the smaller by Whitehorn. As fer me, I’m what they call a bullwhacker, seeing as how it’s my job to whack my team down this trail if they shows signs of lingerin’. But I hardly ever have to whip ‘em. Brock and Whitehorn is fast fer oxen. I reckon we’re gonna move at a good clip. Two and a half miles an hour or more unless it rains. Then all bets is off, and Betty bar the door!”

Carrie scans the sky for clouds, but it’s blue and clear for as far as she can see. They are moving west across a rolling, open prairie of tall grasses broken by small creeks lined with oaks of all varieties, tall white-barked sycamores, willows that sway in the wind, red cedars, honey locusts whose dangling pods look like giant peas, ash, dog-wood, hickories, black walnuts, pecans, and cottonwoods. This is the timber that will supply the materials for cabins and fences, and the Newberrys are relieved to see it.

The wagon strikes a rut, gives a lurch, and she slides off the bench in slow-motion and tumbles to the floorboards. Prosser and Toussaint, her two oldest sons, grab her under the arms and put her back on the bench again. They are identical twins who must once have been hard to tell apart, but who now must rarely be mistaken for each other. Prosser sports a scalded place on his cheek that suggests someone once threw a pan of hot water at him, and Toussaint is missing an earlobe. Except for these differences, they are both handsome, tall, healthy men in their early twenties with dark skin and curly black hair: broad shouldered, good-natured, and not above teasing their mother who they clearly adore.

Mrs. Newberry settles back on the bench, arranges her skirts, and looks at them the way she probably looked at them when they were four years old and pilfered cookies out of the cookie jar.

“Sons, you may be grown men with wives and children of your own, and I may be an old woman, but I can still tan your bottoms when you get too big for your britches.”

“Don’t whip ’em,” begs Spartacus, the youngest of the three, thirteen at most, with his mother’s high cheekbones and a chin already showing signs of stubbornness.

“I’ll spare ‘em this time,” Mrs. Newberry says. “You hear that, sons? Your baby brother has intervened for you.” She turns to Carrie. “Spare the rod and spoil the child. What do you think?”

“Wouldn’t do any good anyway. Like the time they told me they were going to go to California, strike gold, and become millionaires. You remember that, sons?”

“Yes, Mama,” Prosser and Toussaint say in chorus. Prosser’s wife, Eulie, laughs, and Toussaint’s five-year-old daughter giggles and buries her head in her mother’s apron.

“You said we’d have to cross to Missouri if we wanted to join a wagon train, and that Missouri was a slave state, and sure as God is in Heaven, we’d be captured and sold South.”

“And perhaps had a drink or two beyond what we should have,” Prosser continues. “And while we were walking back to the docks, wham! Something hit me on the head and something hit Toussaint, and the next thing we knew, we were chopping cotton on the plantation of Mr. Horace Labrie for one pair of pants a year, and a peck of cornmeal, a pinch of salt, and three dried fish a week, and those fish stunk to high heaven.”

“Oh, we had our papers on us all right,” Prosser says, running his finger over the scald mark on his cheek. “But when we tried to show them to our kidnappers, they weren’t impressed. In retrospect, I suspect they could not read. In any event, they didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the finer points of the laws governing free men of color.”

Mrs. Newberry sighs. “Fools or not, they were my baby boys, so what choice did I have? Not all Southerners are in favor of slavery. Some are abolitionists, although they have to tread mighty softly. I contacted some Quaker friends in Charleston. They told me rumor had it that a planter named Labrie had just bought two black men who’d been kidnapped off a boat headed for the Panama crossing. Labrie wasn’t satisfied with his purchase. He complained his new slaves were ‘overeducated’ and didn’t know their place. He said they were so ‘uppity’ they quoted Shakespeare at the drop of a hat. When I heard that, I knew I’d found my boys.

“I arranged for a rescue. I would have gone myself if I could have, but given their particular situation, I was more likely to end up chopping cotton next to them than setting them free if I did. In short, someone else picked their locks—I’m not naming any names here—nailed them into crates, drove them down to the Charleston docks in the dead of night, and loaded them on a clipper headed for Boston.”

“Yes.” She moves closer to Carrie. Putting her lips to Carrie’s ear, she says: “You might as well know it all, Miss Vinton, since it won’t be a secret in this party much longer. My boys and I are headed to Osawatomie Creek to establish a station for slaves fleeing from Missouri. Reverend Adair and his wife will soon settle there, too. The Adairs and Newberrys worked together in Michigan running slaves over the border to Canada, and in Ohio before that we helped fugitives from Kentucky move farther north. I’ve been South five times, usually accompanied by Mrs. Hulett, who pretends to be my mistress.”

“Brave, am I? Every time I go into a slave state, I’m scared witless. Helping slaves escape is a hanging offense for a white man. Can you imagine what they’d do to a black woman? Mrs. Hulett’s sixty-three and white, but I don’t doubt that they’d shoot her and throw her in some swamp if they discovered she was helping me.”

She sits back and glares at Prosser and Toussaint. “You show me a man so brave he doesn’t take account of human meanness, and I’ll show you a fool. Am I right, boys?”

Carrie wonders if she should ask Mrs. Newberry about William. Mrs. Newberry has just come from Michigan, which means she’s unlikely to know anyone living in Lawrence, but she’s an Underground Railroad conductor. She might have heard something. If I do ask her, Carrie thinks, I need to wait until we’re alone. Given that the slavers are offering a hundred-and-fifty-dollar reward for information about William, I’m probably going to have a lot of explaining to do before she’ll trust me.

At noon the wagons stop beside a creek. White linen tablecloths appear accompanied by elegant wicker picnic baskets. Some of the ladies carry chairs out of the wagons and arrange them in a circle. Jugs of lemonade and unfermented cider are passed around, and the liquids are poured into china teacups temporarily removed from the straw that protects them from breaking. A tall, nearsighted lady from Concord produces a small travel harp and plucks it as the men retreat to the shade of the wagons to smoke, the children play hide-and-seek, and the female emigrants wander arm in arm along the creek exclaiming over the clarity of the water and the size of the fish.

“Civilization has come to the prairies,” Carrie says to Mrs. Newberry. She is biding her time. Making small talk. They are still not out of earshot of Prosser’s and Toussaint’s wives and children, and it appears they are not likely to be any time soon.

Mrs. Newberry contemplates the settlers for a moment and shrugs. “They remind me of a flock of chickens waiting for the axe. I just hope they can shoot straight.”

“You can fight in a stovepipe hat just as easily as in a plainsman’s cap. Take Dr. Robinson for example, the man who picked out the site where Lawrence now stands. I’ve been told he also looks like a preacher, but he held off pro-slavers at gunpoint the very day Lawrence was founded. The newspapers say his motto is ‘suffer and grow strong.’”

They chat for a while longer. Then Carrie goes back to the wagon and retrieves her sketchbook and a small spade. Grabbing an apple and a hunk of cheese from the lunch that has been spread out for the travelers beneath a large oak, she walks through the forest, up a limestone bank, over the lip of the wash, and out onto the prairie. Here the grasses tower over her, seven feet high or more, their stems purple and red with hints of green. She cannot see more than a few feet in front of her, and as the wind blows the grasses bend and brush against her arms and cheeks as lightly as the tips of birds’ wings.

Making herself a nest of sorts, she sits down and watches a monarch butterfly drift from one purple thistle to another. Above her, a stand of sunflowers forms a golden ring. A meadowlark calls and is answered by another, and when she digs her fingers into the earth, she finds it so matted with roots it feels as if it’s been woven into a carpet.

Pulling out her sketchbook, she stands up again and draws a stem of bluestem grass, known to botanists as Andropogon gerardii. Bluestem is not a rare plant. It grows from Massachusetts to Missouri, but here it grows more luxuriantly than she has ever seen it grow: nine feet tall, with three dense flower clusters at the top that look like a turkey’s foot.

When she finishes sketching, she picks up the spade, kneels down, and starts to dig up the roots so she can send the entire specimen back to Professor Gray at Harvard. A quarter of an hour later, she is three feet down and still digging. Later she discovers that the roots of a single clump of Kansas bluestem can be more than fifteen feet long.

She digs for a while longer, and then gives up, chops off the roots, and stares at the result. How is she going to dry and press a plant this big? She will need a piece of mounting paper as long as a roll of wallpaper. And who would have wallpaper in the middle of the wilderness? Why the same people who have harps, crystal glasses, good china, and linen tablecloths.

Making her way back to the wagons, she buys a roll of wallpaper from Mrs. Arthur Crane of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The paper that was destined for the walls of Mrs. Crane’s cabin is decorated with large pink roses, and as Carrie breaks the stem of the grass into a zigzag pattern and folds it into the paper so it will unfold like an accordion, she hopes Professor Gray will be amused. She decides she will press the plant by putting it between two boards and sitting on it.

Lunch over, the wagons move on across the prairie, through the grasses, which form a high wall on either side of the trail. Overhead, hawks circle. Once they come upon a buffalo standing in the middle of the road chewing its cud. When the teamsters yell at it and crack their whips, the great beast lumbers off slowly, leaving a space in the grass a buffalo-width wide. Carrie has not expected buffalo to be so big. This one looked powerful enough to tip over their wagon.

In the late afternoon, they pass two graves set side by side, marked with marble stones. Carrie is surprised to see tombstones in so remote a place, but the teamster driving their wagon tells her that some emigrants to California carry their own grave markers with them.

“Farther west, the trail is lined with graves,” he says. “Children and women, mostly, but a good scattering of men, too. And such stuff as you wouldn’t believe: barrels, ploughs, pianos, trunks full of fancy suits and ball dresses, clocks, carpets, perambulators, tin bathtubs, fiddles, whole sets of china, more books than a fellah could read in a lifetime. There ain’t a thing known to man that ain’t scattered along the gold routes. Folks just give up and give out. Cholera takes ‘em, or the oxen die, or they just cain’t stand it no more, so they lighten up the wagon, throw things out. They starve, too. Crazy thing to starve when there’s buffalo to be had, but starve they do. And freeze and die of the heat. Not all as sets out for California gets there.”

This is a sobering thought, and as the graves disappear into the tall grass, Carrie finds herself wondering how many of her fellow passengers will be alive six months from now.

“Winter,” the teamster continues, “now that’s the worst. Blizzards come howling down from the north and the frost gets so thick you could use it as window glass. Take a breath and the inside of yer nose freezes. Go out to the necessary, and you can’t find your way back. Many a man’s frozen to death less than a hundred yards from his own cabin. Last time I was in Lawrence, they was still livin’ in tents. I don’t mean teepees like the Indians live in. Teepees’ll stand up to the wind. I mean little canvas tents not fit for hogs.” He pauses. “Say miss, I ain’t scaring you, am I?”