The Lady with the Alligator Purse

IT HAPPENED LONG AGO, the thing that started me on this path.

A fourth-grade play. We were to choose from a cast of historical figures and act as that person in our very own classroom production of Famous Abolitionists of New York State or Forward-Thinking People of the Americas or some such title. The first task was to select roles. The teacher lifted cardboard cutouts of various historical heads to show our options, until, one by one; we’d raised our hands to volunteer for a part. Frederick Douglass was snapped up in a second. As was Abraham Lincoln. Next went Harriet Tubman. Then Sojourner Truth. Even Dolly Madison was chosen before Susan B. Anthony—though how Dolly fitted into the play I fail to recall; perhaps the company that manufactured cardboard heads had sent our class an extra by mistake.

Who I played and how I managed to sneak past receipt of the pile of stiff fabric (crocheted shawl, wig, and lace collar) that was Susan B. escapes me. Was Vicky Marie Sweet, the girl who smelled of mothballs and pee, stuck being Susan? It’s likely. I remember only their cardboard heads, the way Dolly Madison’s name reminded me of fruit pies, and the tension seeping into the teacher’s voice as she held Susan’s unclaimed head: Well, boys and girls, someone will have to be Miss Anthony.

The view of Seneca Lake falls away as we eat but we talk easily, and the early passing of light is not such a loss. I’m getting to know this woman, a poet, and enjoying the dinner, not because of the food or the way the lake blackens before it disappears, but because of how her eyes rise from the twin circles of her glasses when I confess my interest in Susan B.

“Susan B. Anthony?” she says, and begins to describe one of the suffragist’s acts in the next town over before starting in on her crab cakes. I nod. Western New York was a hotbed of religious and social upheaval in the nineteenth century, inhabited by the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass in Rochester, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Amelia Bloomer in Seneca Falls. Even today the region produces unexpected progressive bubbles in the midst of cabbage farms and Amish outcrops, so I’m not surprised to learn that Susan B. did something important in Waterloo, New York.

“What I’m most interested in,” I say, “is whether the woman ever had any fun.”

The poet goes silent for a moment, looking thoughtful while she chews, so that I’m afraid she’s seen my comment as belittling of Susan B.’s lifetime of work on behalf of women. But no, she’s not offended. She simply thinks and offers the slyest of smiles before speaking.

“I assure you, she had some fun.” Her eyes rise above the glasses again as she sips water, “No need to worry about our Susan B.”

Our Susan B.? She makes it sound like Susan is a friend, as if she’s the woman walking into the restaurant this very moment to join us, waving and smoothing back blonde waves as she slips out of her coat. Every image I’ve ever seen of Susan B. floats before my eyes. All of them streaked gray. No hint the woman ever cracked a smile.

“How do you know?” I ask. “How can you possibly know?”

I like this woman for many reasons, her poetry and her humor, but most of all because my desperation to unearth the pleasures of a long-dead suffragist causes her no marked concern.

“Trust me,” she says while fishing into her purse for a square of holistic gum. “Miss Susan had herself some good times.”

Miss LuLu had a baby, she called him Tiny Tim,

She put him in the bathtub to see if he could swim.

“The Lady with the Alligator Purse”: a thing to sing while clapping hands and jumping rope. A song in the same vein as “Miss Mary Mack” and “Have You Ever, Ever, Ever in Your Long-Legged Life?”

He drank up all the water, he ate up all the soap,

He tried to eat the bathtub, but it wouldn’t go down his throat.

Call for the doctor, call for the nurse,

Call for the Lady with the Alligator Purse!

What child lights into a bathtub with his teeth? What mother lets him? Wholly nonsense. Holy nonsense. Such gobbledygook as only children can sing. I spent many hours inside the words of that song—my earliest memories involve listening as older girls sang and let their palms slap in quick rhythm, watching and waiting until I’d finally managed enough coordination of hand and mouth to join in.

So imagine my surprise, my utter surprise, to learn that Susan B. is the Lady with the Alligator Purse! The Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester even sells a replica of the oversized bag Anthony carried as she crisscrossed the country by wagon and train—a bag crammed with speeches and pamphlets and a copy of the transcript from the 1873 trial in which she was found guilty of the high crime of voting. She’d had it printed herself, that transcript, and insisted on showing it around.

In all the hundreds and thousands of miles she traveled speaking on behalf of women, even as the grown-ups shut her out, occasionally pelting her with harsh words and rotten fruit, children took note of her purposeful stride and that big old bag. Even if they had no inclination toward voting or the perusal of court transcripts, they noticed, and granted the woman in the high collar the honor of title role in their brilliant silliness.

It’s late November. Roses still bloom in Memphis, but the weather has begun to change and the trees have finally started to let go of their leaves; the slender offerings of willow oak mainly, but fan-shaped leaves too, from ginkgoes gone gold all over the city. Each step along the sidewalk has me crunching on acorns with flesh the color of Tibetan monks’ robes. And the smell of this walk, which rises from the combination of falling things and cool weather, reminds me of a man I once knew—something about the cherry tobacco from his pipe; more than the man himself, the inside of his mouth is something to remember. And I wonder as I trod upon scarlet magnolia seed and newly fallen leaves, did she ever know such things, Susan B., the taste of cherry smoke, the burning underside of autumn, the way such things can make a cathedral of the body?

Yes, the woman across from me says. Yes.

Back to the one eating crab cake while Seneca Lake fades from view. Yes, she says, winking as she says it, as if she understands the smoke and cathedrals folded into the question.

A well-known figure for most American schoolchildren, Susan B. Anthony was special where I grew up. Part of western New York State history, along with Douglass and his North Star and Tubman and the Underground Railroad with stations dotting the landscape—our own Lake Ontario, a crossing point to freedom. Such figures and their importance to the region were stamped into our heads. Names. Dates. Silhouettes.

But the things you said, Susan! The things you did!

If we were told of your chutzpah, I don’t remember it. With your shawl and tight bun of hair, local hero or not, you were every girl’s fear. And I think that you, dear Susan, or rather the image of you, the severe lines and hooded eyes, and the hair—my God, most of all the hair!—even as they held you out to us, you were made into a cautionary tale.

Voting itself is not the most riveting topic to fourth graders. Nor is it so riveting to adults perhaps, given the low turnout in elections. Who can say if we are rightly discouraged by the whole mess or whether we forget what it means to be denied the option. Even if the teacher had stirred us with impassioned testimony—the way the Nineteenth Amendment not only allowed women to vote but, in doing so, acknowledged them as human enough to be counted—even then, we still might have fought to be Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, leaving Susan B.’s head to hang heavy in her hands.

If only we’d known that she was the Lady with the Alligator Purse! If only we’d been told that she was the one we’d sung of since we first learned to sing, all the hand clapping and laughter, the rhyme itself becoming part of our bones, oh Susan, how the lot of us would have battled to be you.

“Perhaps it’s a matter of marketing,” I say to Sally, a friend with smart hair and smart thoughts, a woman, like me, who wants to not only admire but to cozy up to Susan B. Other friends—strong women, thoughtful women—admit to trying to relate to Ms. Anthony and finding themselves left cold.

I think of the Quakers, the group from which Susan sprung. Humanists and contemplatives, they are perhaps the most progressive of Christian sects, but are forever plagued by the image of the man on the side of the oatmeal box.

“Aren’t they sort of like Amish?” a colleague once asked after I’d confessed attendance at Quaker Meeting. While I’d noticed a certain proclivity for natural fabrics and sensible footwear, there was not a pilgrim hat nor buckle shoe among the bunch. The Quakers, like their famous daughter, have a bit of an image problem. No more laughing, no more fun—Quaker Meeting has begun.

“We should scan an image of Susan and use Photoshop to loosen her up.” I say to Sally. Erase that high collar. Unwind the bun, remove the fussy dress, and set her upon an oversized shell, like Aphrodite rising from the sea.

We laugh, imagining Susan B. in a white dress standing over a subway grate like Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch; or picturing her with earrings, a nose ring, and a Love Hurts tattoo. But the laughter goes only so far, no matter how we try to extend it, because we know what it means, the way we’d need to soften our best suffragist to make her a more popular American icon. As if the problem resided with the perfectly plain-faced Susan.

It’s not a stretch to imagine that Susan B. ate all her vegetables.

I’ve heard talk of a ragdoll in her possession as a child, but the truth is that the Anthonys did not allow their children the distraction of toys so that they might better tune into the inner light, the higher plane. They wanted good things: freedom for slaves, opportunities for women—and my God, look at how they succeeded.

Still, I wonder about the vegetables and know somehow that little Susan B. made herself swallow her portion of stewed spinach. And this is where she loses me—though even this may be unfair. Maybe she spat them out while the other Anthonys were pondering educational reform. Perhaps little Susan looked toward the window and said, “Have you ever seen such a sunset?” and they, so unused to interruption from the dutiful daughter, would have had no choice but turn to the window while the dark-haired girl ran, mouth full of spinach, to the back of the house, emptying it into a stand of Queen Anne’s lace.

“Tell me again how you like vegetables.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I just do.”

He really does. My husband begins to twitch when green things are not included on a plate at a restaurant or in the home of a friend.

“But what part of you loves the kale—the part that knows it’s good for you, or the spot on the tongue where flavor is sensed?”

“Both,” he says, and I look at him sideways. May as well poke yourself in the eye with a stick. To willingly turn from something great tasting for something bitter but good for you demonstrates an uprightness not of my world, so that I begin to wonder if this penchant for pleasure is more my problem than Susan B.’s—who admittedly cares little either way. So why do I? Did she fear pleasure, or do I fear its opposite? The tight bun? Mouthful of greens? All backbone and resolution? What becomes of women without pink skin and soft smiles? What happens when I stop seeking out the sweet in every last thing?

Seriousness was a kind of rudeness where I come from.

Clarity of purpose was odd, follow-through was suspect, and planning was for people in other neighborhoods—those on TV and characters from books. Laughter first and laughter always. Even a face full of tears beat the hell out of tedium. But then, despite the larger culture, we seemed to escape much of the strict Protestant influence. Idle hands are the devil’s workshop: I nearly choked the first time I heard that said. In the flickering lights of liberal Catholicism and the doctrine of poverty, there is no such thing as idle hands, no purpose greater than pleasure. To feel good is divine. Serious words come from others, those who think they know better. May as well go back to school for filmstrips on the metric system and the refrigeration plants of the Yucatán. No thanks and thank you very much. Pleasure first and pleasure last. Taste it now and taste it good, taste it all and taste it often, because life is nothing but one unpredictable surge—so use that mouth of yours to laugh and take wine and receive every last drop of every last thing because no one, and I mean no one, wants to suffer any of your straight talk.

Pleasure. The word itself is a sort of extravagance. The s and u coming together in a full-bodied rolling sound, the x in luxuriate, the oozing z of azure, the soul softening d in adieu. The Russians have a letter for this, the Ж, called zheh, the sound of lazy mornings an expanse of clean sheets, a sound with a certain je ne sais quoi as in the French je, but we of English tongue must make do, so that the sound becomes a combination of s and u and oh, what a word, rhyming with treasure—and if you say it the way the English do—even leisure. Swollen as the lushest sh as in hush and gush but deeper still, more resonant, as in resin, a sap of sorts, thick and viscous. Pleasure.

My feelings began to shift in sixth grade, in 1979, starting with the Susan B. Anthony dollar. They were smaller than the Kennedy coins my gambling grandmother had once won by the hundred and sent one per child back East, so that, to me, the Kennedy dollar was forever imbued with a kind of Vegas glitz. I’m not sure if Susan B. coins were ever placed in Vegas machines or whether such winnings would have been any less welcome by those cozied up to their slots, but even as a child I saw the way people disliked the Susan B. dollars. I’d never heard anyone talk about the faces on their money before and this dollar they spoke of as if someone had removed their wallets and replaced their coins with wafers of sawdust.

Despite the singsong slogan—Carry Three for Susan B.!—the Susan B. Anthony dollar was one of the most wildly unpopular coins in U.S. history.

Some took a rational approach to their dislike of the currency, complaining about its size and feel—too close to that of a quarter. But how much had to do with the face set into the metal? It was the first circulating American coin representing an actual woman and went largely unused. After sitting in treasury vaults by the millions, the Susan B. Anthony dollars finally found use in vending machines and mass transit fare boxes before being replaced by Sacagawea, whose Native face almost didn’t make the cut when a poll indicated that the public preferred the allegorical image of the Statue of Liberty to the actual woman’s face.

Still, I’m not sure that not wanting women on our money was the main problem. Evidence abounds to support the thought, of course, but I suspect that back in 1979, a Farrah Fawcett coin would have been more popular than Susan B.’s. Soft as a fawn, that Farrah, she might have become the most well-liked silver dollar in history. I could be wrong—a Farrah Fawcett dollar might have faltered as well. Money may be too serious for even the most pleasing of feminine forms. Perhaps we simply prefer our currency marked with a man’s face.

Every woman should have a purse of her own.

Fifty years before Virginia Woolf prescribed a room for women, articulating the need for the space and money with which to create, Susan B. prescribed another space, one held close to the body, a container in which to hold private objects, which implied that a woman must first have private objects to hold. In her time, a married woman did not have her own money, her own bank account, or property. The husband owned all, decided all. And so Susan wanted for women a purse and something to put in it. Why do Susan B.’s words, said half a century before Virginia’s, seem more difficult to swallow?

Money is power. Susan B. did not couch her speech behind niceties, and expected that others should do the same: Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place, think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.

She lobbied hard for the vote, pushed for reform that would enable women to keep their own pay, and campaigned for the admittance of women to the local university, but the leaving off of sugar in her words was perhaps Susan’s most radical act. For a woman to talk of power without at least offering up a tray of cinnamon rolls—even now, such a woman might clear a room of all but the most devoted few.

Our job is not to make young women grateful, she said. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody.

We do not take kindly to women who fail to modulate their tones, whose faces become misshapen through the firmness of their mouths, who risk unpleasantness. Which brings me to the Hillary Clinton nutcrackers for sale at Dulles Airport when she ran for president a few years back. How she was taken apart for the flat voice, the fixed mouth, the speaking plainly of her views. How groups fluttered around the nutcracker display, progressive-looking men and women strapped into mile-high heels. How fun it might be to buy a Hillary nutcracker for their friends.

What would she think of the Hillary nutcrackers, Susan B.? Once she got over the shock of air travel and prepackaged peanuts. Perhaps she’d sidle up to the bar, order a pint, and laugh over the Hillary nutcrackers as I could not.

But no. I don’t suppose Susan would make use of the airport bar.

She worked for temperance after all—and while those women with their sashes are often portrayed as a band of harridans, what other power did they have? Wives lacked the ability to leave husbands and had no source of income to feed their children. Such women as Susan were less opposed to alcohol than in support of keeping money in husbands’ pockets and preventing bruises that sometimes accompanied drunkenness as they came stumbling home. Most women of the era had to rely on prayers and hope, but those few who could afford to raised their voices and made themselves into beautiful nags.

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.

—BLACKSTONE’S LAW (1765)

And the way you did it, Susan. Striding into that barbershop and demanding to vote. Blackstone’s Law had come to the colonies from England and a century later, still governed American thought on relations between men and women. The way you made them uncomfortable, standing tall as a man, demanding to be counted—Blackstone himself might have caved. The way you requested cuffs when they came for you on Thanksgiving Day, not settling for a quiet apology, the polite explanation—not with so much at stake. You put your arms out and insisted on cuffs. And the sham of your trial, the way they tried to squelch your voice. But you spoke. You spoke. When no one wanted to hear, you went against the very grain of what a woman should do; you refused to back down—standing when asked to sit, using your voice, and making the whole of the room uncomfortable.

You knew that women were as intelligent and feeling as men, knew it so keenly it became part of your body, which remained straight as you spent your days traveling hard miles only to be received with foul language and mocked in the papers, even burned in effigy. You shook it off and kept going, standing before a podium saying, There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.

You were at war. The dialogue may have been polite, the prisoners in cages they couldn’t even see, but it was war nonetheless. Yes, I begin to see that such bearing as yours would have been the only possible thing.

“Help Me Make It through the Night”: the song I’d sing with Susan B. if she ever came calling. I’d let her have the first line before chiming in, both of us singing about ribbons and shadows and the letting down of hair. We’d sing the Gladys Knight version because I can’t imagine Susan would be much for the country-and-western original, which is fine because there’s no wrong way to sing that song. We’d sit together, me in my jeans, Susan in her black dress and red shawl (the fourth-grade teacher had it wrong with her pile of gray; Susan’s shawl was scarlet as the tip of a blackbird’s wing!). We’d sit together singing our Gladys Knight song good and slow, taking our time with the words, trading verses and reaching for the high notes, until something inside each of us came loose.

“Mumps!” said the doctor.

“Measles!” said the nurse.

“Vote!!” said the Lady with the Alligator Purse.

Miss LuLu seems to have been most in need of parenting classes. But since she’s a figure trapped in a hand-clapping song, let us sit back and watch as her baby locks onto a bathtub with a new row of nubby teeth. Let us listen as she calls in the medical professionals only to throw them out one at a time. Let us marvel that such a woman—when all is said and done—knew enough to trust you, Miss Susan.

Miss LuLu kicked the doctor;

Miss LuLu punched the nurse;

Miss LuLu paid the Lady with the Alligator Purse!

Gray hair, ashen face, ridiculed, and worse. But you, dear Susan, are the one for whom the song is named, yours is the song still sung by little girls, a playful chant, whose words we remember by heart.

My favorite place to walk is near you.

The Victorian cemetery at Mt. Hope. A pair of hydrangea trees grows nearby, whose flowers will have moved from cream to pink to rust by now. I pass the others too, Frederick Douglass and Adelaide Crapsey and the handful of markers I visit for the pleasure of seeing their names set in stone. There’s the giant basswood whose branches bend to the ground. How fine it feels to stand at the base and look up into the tumble of branches and leaves all light and shadow. But when I can delay no more, I go to you and stand for a minute by your stone, sometimes muttering a few words, leaving a wild violet or adding to the small pile of pebbles left by others who have come.

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

—SUSAN B. ANTHONY

No matter what use we make of our days, they end. That is the sad fact of life. Despite your determination, your forward thrust and ramrod back, not even you, Susan, could live another hundred years. You lived to be eighty-six—long enough to plant seeds in the hardest of soils, but not long enough to taste the fruit. Not long enough to enjoy the streamers and the marching bands, not long enough to cast a vote without arrest.

It has been one hundred years, and what would you think of this world? What would you make of Kardashians and sexting and the soft scatter of our lives?

And what a silly woman you might find me, all this time spent imagining the spitting up of perfectly good spinach, picturing you as Aphrodite and Marilyn, singing about ribbons falling from our hair. You’d be right about how foolish I am in some ways, except that I am capable of reform. At least that’s what I’d say once I talked you into my company, because I’d say anything to keep you near.

Come and settle into the seat at my side as we drive to Madison Street and your old house, then on to Mt. Hope to visit your people—your sisters and brothers and parents—and this is where, I’m sorry, Susan, but I’ll have to drive north and ask if maybe we could to go up to the lake for a frozen custard, though I somehow know a furrowed brow would be your only reply, no matter how I go on about the custard, the sweet chocolate, and salted almonds, the way the two are so perfect together. Until finally, I’d drive north, allowing you to point out where all the orchards used to grow and all that has changed until we’d park at Charlotte and I’d stop asking questions and we’d sit together without speaking, the skies clearing over the pier, the lake looking a new shade of blue in the light.

A moment of silence, a Quaker moment, in which we listen to the sound of gulls while considering the carousel horses locked in place for the season. A fortifying thing, such silence, so that I might work up the nerve to grab your hand and squeeze it before pointing the car back toward the city and the polling place, where we’d park and enter the booth together, Susan—you who understand better than anyone else how much all of this means.

Come now, and I’ll show you the wonder of the machines and the list with all our names. Though I’m greedy when it comes to such pleasures, I am a woman in progress—so come now, sweet Susan, and just this once, I’ll let you pull the lever and close the curtain around us.